the entrepreneurs radio show 045 yaro starak

THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW

Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur‟s Radio Show of 29

EPISODE #45: YARO STARAK

Diamonds in Your Own Backyard‟s episode 45 will have Yaro Stark as guest. Yaro is a blogging expert

who started in the business ahead of most other bloggers. He will be talking about his journey from his

humble beginnings to now making more than enough to support the lifestyle he wants.

Listen as Yaro discusses Magic: The Gathering, proofreading, product launches, software development

and a myriad other things to help you get to where you, like him, would also be able to live the lifestyle

you choose.

Yaro Starak – Monetizing your blog

Travis: Hey, it's Travis Lane Jenkins. Welcome to episode number 45 of "Diamonds in Your Own

Backyard: The Entrepreneurs Radio Show, Conversations with High-Level Entrepreneurs that Grow

Your Business.” Sandra, my co-host, is still in Sebring International Raceway, Florida. Sandra, we miss

you. Get back to us as soon as possible.

Now for all of our friends listening to the show, I want to ask you to be sure and stay with us until the

very end if you can. I‟d like to share a little inspiration with you, and I‟ll also reveal who I‟m going to

connect you within the next episode.

One quick reminder, if you enjoy these free podcast that we create for you, we‟d really appreciate it if

you‟d go to iTunes, post a comment and rate the show. This would help us reach, instruct and inspire

more great entrepreneurs like yourself with each and every guest that we bring on.

Before I introduce you to our guest today, I want to give our new friends that just started listening to us

some perspective for the Entrepreneurs Radio Show here at Diamonds in Your Own Backyard. Every

interview is basically a conversation between four friends. Even though we‟re talking with some of the

brightest high-level entrepreneurs and brilliant thought leaders around, this is still just as if we‟re sitting

at a table with each other.

Now as always, everyone that we're talking with has found success doing what they teach, and they

want to help you by sharing what they've discovered. Normally, the only way to get this level of

personal access to so many high-level entrepreneurs beyond having your own show is to join a high-

level Mastermind, go to seminars, events, and just build those relationships over several years and




spend an absolute fortune in the process. Now with this podcast and this platform, I get to share these

great people with you to fast-forward your success and your connections to grow your business.

Our guest today is Yaro Starak. Yaro is the founder of CrankyAds, which is an advertising network that

makes the process of finding advertisers and buying traffic from niche website more of a human

process. Yaro is also the founder of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. It‟s Entrepreneurs-Journey.com,

where he teaches entrepreneurs, really, a variety of things. Yaro has a great story of building his

business to a pretty impressive level while keeping things relaxed on his own terms. So we‟re going to

talk about a variety of things in this episode that will bring real value in helping you take your business

to that next level.

So without further ado, welcome to the show, Yaro.

Yaro: Thank you for having me, Travis.

Travis: Go ahead and correct me on the name.

Yaro: No, you know what? The last name was pretty good. I find my first name can be “yah-ro” or “yah-

ro,” depending on how you do your As. I‟ve always been a “yah-ro” kind of guy, but whatever your

accent is.

Travis: All right. Well, I‟ve definitely got that Southern accent working. We kind of drawl those as out a

little bit there.

Yaro: Yes.

Travis: Yes. Listen, I know you‟re a really busy guy, and I appreciate you taking the time out to come

visit with us. I know you have a lot of different things that you can talk about what it takes to grow

business, but before we get to that, do you mind giving us some of the back-story of how you found

your success and what it took to get there?

Yaro: Yes. That could be the whole interview, though, if you don‟t stop me.

Travis: I‟ll help guide you, but give us the 20,000-foot view.

Yaro: Yes. I started online actually in 1998 as part of my university studies. It was my first time to

access the Internet through dial-up accounts. I was just studying a business management degree,

http://www.crankyads.com/

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/




which sounds very relevant to what I do today but it really wasn‟t intended to be. It was just something

to do after university, but the real change was the access to the Internet. It was sort of the entry to the

dot-com boom timeframe as well. So I was learning a lot about the Internet and falling in love with it and

basically having my own websites, which at the very, very early days, I was actually using GeoCities.

Some of the old-timers might remember that service, which was a free website-building tool. I built a

site dedicated to a card game I used to play while I was in university in high school called “Magic: The

Gathering,” which was back in my super-geeky days.

Travis: Magic: The Gathering?

Yaro: Yes.

Travis: Okay.

Yaro: Collectible card game.

Travis: All right.

Yaro: It was my life for about five years from maybe 16 years old to about 20, 21. I played

competitively. I traveled a bit Seattle and to Asia. I eventually got tired of the game, but I had this

website that actually became very serious. I was making some money from it. It became the largest

Australian-focused site on the card game, including having a fairly act of trading marketplace. I had a

forum set up there, and people were buying and selling cards, sort of like an aftermarket. It‟s a very

collectible game, so like the baseball cards or your basketball cards.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: That was my first taste, I guess, of a successful website. I made about 500 dollars a month from

advertising on that site. I did a little bit of e-commerce as well, but I got hit by some pretty hefty credit

card fraud before I really knew what I was doing, so that ended that experience. Eventually, I did decide

to get out of it completely. I was no longer playing the game and looking to do something different

online, something a bit bigger, so I did sell that website.

I got into another business, a proofreading business--was my next sort of successful story. There‟s lots

of little stories in between that, or websites I started that didn‟t really go anywhere, but there‟s a lot of

learning going on, a lot of me just playing around. But the next success story was a proofreading

business, which has actually started after reading the Yahoo! print magazine, which certainly is no




longer in publication, but I saw it back in--I think it was about 2000, 2001. It was talking about this guy

during the dot-com boom who was doing essay editing from his dorm room in Harvard University. So

he‟s doing his business degree and running this essay-editing service, and it was really doing well. He

was hiring his family, hiring university professors and getting a lot of coverage because it was great

story of a kid in his dorm room doing a startup during the dot-com boom.

I took that idea, combined it with my own experience as a student working with international students

here in Australia and trying to combine their English with my English when we had to do group

assignments, group papers together. I was surprised that the quality of their English was terrible. Their

written English wasn‟t great. I was amazed they were getting through the university degrees. So I

thought why not start a service that connects academic people like professors and post-graduate

students with international students who are studying in Australia and provide an essay proofreading,

editing and critiquing service to help them improve their academic writing?

So I launched a company called BetterEdit and grew it. It was a bit of a slow start because I started with

family, and I left it for about a year while I finished my degree, and then I came back after I graduated

and took it on as my full-time project. It grew to be my main salary. It wasn‟t life-changing money, but I

was making average salary, which for a university graduate wasn‟t too bad, and it was a very great

learning experience and a very good automated business. I was really into lifestyle design, as I always

have been, and having something that runs without too many hours or too many moving parts or

requiring lots of employees was really my goal. I want to have a lot of free time so I could figure out

what I wanted to do. I still didn‟t really figure it out, but I had a business that was working. So that was

in the early 2000.

It was actually because of that site that I got into blogging. It was 2004, and I was running that

proofreading business and looking for new methods to market. A friend of mine told me about these

things called blogs. Now I didn‟t know what a blog was. I looked at some. It looked like websites. I didn‟t

really understand what made a blog different from a normal website. I thought, well, the only way to

figure this out would be to actually start a blog and see what the experience is like. So I installed some

blogging software and started a proofreading blog for my proofreading business. It was a logical thing

to do. I was under the impression that if you do this, you get lots of traffic from Google because blogs

are great for search engine rankings.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: So I tried to write a proofreading blog, but it was an extremely boring subject.

http://www.betteredit.com/




Travis: It sounds boring.

Yaro: Yes. I‟m not personally the editor or the proofreader. I was hiring people, contracting people to do

that.

Travis: Right, right.

Yaro: It was just a bit of struggle. I think I wrote sporadically, but I ended up writing more about the

running of a business than the actual proofreading advice, which I should‟ve been doing to get the kind

of clients I needed. It was a short-lived experiment--about three months. I realized, you know what? I

actually like talking about business and not about proofreading, so I‟m going to start another blog, just

as a hobby. I called it Entrepreneurs-Journey. I registered this terrible domain name called

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, thinking it would just be this fun thing I‟d do on the side for awhile, but it

started to actually get some audience. Within about six months, I noticed--I realized this is something

that I could keep doing potentially as a business. Within about 12 to 18 months, it was on par with my

proofreading business. I was doing more and more work on the blog than I was with proofreading

business because I just enjoyed blogging a lot more. I was learning about Internet marketing and e-mail

marketing and watching all these guys make tons of money selling information products and doing

product launches, and all these bloggers making tons of money with advertising and building huge

audiences.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: So I was much more influenced by that group of people. The proofreading business still was

running because it was a fairly automated business, but I‟ve eventually decided to get out of the

proofreading business as well and put all my energy into blogging because my passion was there, as

well as the money was good, and I just want to spend my time there. So I sell that proofreading

business as well. Actually, I don‟t tell this part of the story, but I had some websites that I invested in to.

I was putting some of my money into buying other websites.

Around 2007, I actually sold off all my portfolio as well. I sold my websites. I sold my proofreading

business. I just had my blog. I actually launched my first training program, then called Blog Mastermind,

which was how to make money from blogging. That went well. I took in my first group of students. Since

then, I‟ve basically been doing the combination of running the blog, doing my own podcasts, and some

videos now and then, launching products. I‟m always blogging, of course, creating content there and

connecting with people. I‟ve had a few more training products come and go. I‟ve done some talking on

stage to teach as well, but, really, I‟ve just been a person who trains people in Internet marketing and




blogging through my blog since then. It‟s been great. That‟s the last seven or eight years now since

2005 I‟ve had that blog. That catches you up to today.

Travis: Well, it doesn‟t seem like proofreading would be very scalable and doesn‟t seem like a

business that you could scale. Obviously, it is, but just from my perspective, it just seems like a very

labor-intensive-type thing, unless you just had a staff of people or a team of people that you outsourced

all of that to and then you were just the intermediary in between. Was that the case?

Yaro: Yes, it was. It was actually a really good business model. One of the other reasons I came up

with that business around the same time that I read that Yahoo! magazine article--I was reading the

book about eBay and how eBay got its start. That taught me a lot about what‟s called a many-to-many

business model, where you‟re connecting lots of people who buy things on auctions with lots of people

who sell things, and you‟re just acting as the intermediary there.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: I loved that. I thought this was brilliant. I can scale as big as I need to or want to, and I don‟t have

to do exponential amounts of work as a contractor or a freelancer or something like that. I just hire more

people when I get more work.

Travis: So you were--that was just the hub, so it was the many-to-many model then, huh?

Yaro: Yes, it was. That was very, very deliberate. I‟m not a proofreader. Even when we first started, we

started with my mom and her partner, who was an English teacher initially, but we hired someone

almost straight away as a contractor. That wasn‟t the hard part. Getting the clients‟ work was more

difficult, but we found ourselves a nice positioning that we had… I wouldn‟t call it premium, but it was

charging a little bit more than general proofreading because we‟re going for an academic audience, in

particular, international students who are usually quite--they have a lot of money from their parents and

their main goal here is to get good grades, to make their parents happy when they come to Australia.

Travis: Right. Sure.

Yaro: So it‟s not a huge market, but it was one where we‟d get 5 or 10 to 15 clients every year who

use us for every paper they wrote that year, so it was consistent. The hardest thing was reaching the

audiences because people don‟t search for academic proofreading, unless maybe you‟re finishing off

your thesis and you want a final polish. The average student doesn‟t even think to look for this service.




We had to get in front of them. We couldn‟t really buy traffic from Google. I got some traffic from Google

organic search, but most of the paying customers have come from posters I put up on campuses.

Travis: Yes, I was going to say post on boards and local boards in the school and stuff, right?

Yaro: That was my life for about three years. I went every week to my local campuses here in Brisbane

where I lived, and I also traveled a bit sometimes, like when I was visiting family in Canada. At one trip,

I actually stopped in Hawaii and did Hawaii University there, and then I did Vancouver, and then I did

Toronto, where my family is, and put up posters in each of those cities, as well as Sydney and

Melbourne here in Australia. Actually, it worked. It was a very slow method of marketing. You put up a

poster one semester, and you might sign up five or six people the following semester, slowly, and keep

a couple of them as regular clients. It wasn‟t ever going to get huge doing that method. I actually tried to

outsource postering as well. It was very hard to monitor. You just didn‟t know whether they actually put

the posters up or…

Travis: Threw them in the trashcan.

Yaro: Yes, exactly, especially if you want to go a global network. I think the biggest problem with that

business was marketing. Scale was certainly possible. I could have gotten it as big as I wanted to.

There‟s lots of proofreading companies. There‟s actually quite a bit of competition in that space. A lot of

people do a lot of different types of proofreading, too. Business proofreading and… But it is, I guess, a

very finite niche. You only have certain channels of marketing to reach people. To be honest, I wasn‟t

interested in scaling up because I wasn‟t interested in the subject. I was over it.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: I had a method that worked, and I kept doing that to keep the business paying my bills and how

to… At one stage, towards the last two or three years, when I hired an assistant to do all the e-mail

processing--I had an assistant doing the e-mail processing. I had a person putting up posters locally,

and I could watch that because it was local, and I had contract editors, so I actually wasn‟t doing

anything, pretty much. I have to check my e-mail once or twice a week just to make sure things were

working. But it became a 95% passive-income business, which is really desirable for a lot of people.

That‟s the dream income streams. So despite it not getting to a multimillion-dollar level, it was actually

great little lifestyle business that I think a lot of people would love to have.




Travis: Right. Is that where you‟ve taken the kind of lifestyle approach to business--come from with

you? Once you‟re locked in to that, you thought, “Well, this is how I want future businesses to be for

me.”

Yaro: Probably the cause and effect isn‟t quite the right way around there. I think it‟s more so my

personality. I always dictated to go for that kind of situation. I‟m terribly bad at doing anything for long

periods of time. I can do two hours. Like if we had to talk three hours, Travis, I‟d probably over this. I

wouldn‟t want to talk for longer with you. We can do an hour, and that‟s good. I like variety. I like to

switch between from exercise to cooking to working to socializing or whatever it is.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: I need the constant changes. That, for me--the eight-hour workday of a normal job, sitting in front

of the computer in an office, that‟s the nightmare because I have to be there on someone else‟s time

doing the same thing to make someone else more money for eight hours a day.

Travis: No, I think that‟s the common problem with a lot of business owners is--for me, it‟s 90 minutes.

90 minutes is my threshold, and then I need to get up and do something different.

Yaro: Yes. That‟s the driver.

Travis: Did you end up selling that business?

Yaro: Yes, I did. I sold that along with all the other websites I had in this period around 2006, 2007.

Travis: Okay, interesting. How old are you now?

Yaro: 33.

Travis: 33. Okay, so you‟re pretty on the ball for someone at 33 years old. Then you transitioned into…

How did you transition into CrankyAds?

Yaro: Well, that‟s more recent. Well, let‟s say, 2006 to about 2010, 2011, I was blogging and doing

information product marketing, which was great. It‟s still my favorite business model. Actually, I‟m still

doing it. I‟m building that up this year as well. I did launches. Actually, over that period of time, I made

over a million dollars in sales of my training products. It‟s been--I can‟t complain. It‟s a great lifestyle. I

love teaching. It‟s a very leveraged way of making money.





So I was just getting the most out of blogging that I could and still doing that. What happened was I

reached this point--a couple of things happened. So I traveled in 2008. I think, for me, the peak of my

success years in terms of information publishing, when I was really going hard and releasing a lot of

training, was around 2007 to 2009. In 2008, I traveled around the world for eight months. I brought my

business with me. I did a complete circle. I visited 26 different cities around the planet, in Europe and

Asia and America. Throughout that period, I was running my business. I did a launch in Toronto, and I

did a launch in Athens. I made more money than I spent while traveling, so it was fantastic. Really a

great example, too, of a new style of business you can have. I didn‟t have any full-time employees I had

a couple of contractors, so the margins are great. You can do multiple of six figures a year while living

anywhere in the planet with Internet access and a laptop. So I did that lifestyle for awhile.

Then I came back to Australia. I was at this point where I felt like I had lot of potential business

opportunities in front of me. I could‟ve become a person on stage selling more training. I have a lot of

people here who are colleagues of mine who do stage selling, and they can make a couple of million

dollars a year from two or three events a year. I was offered the opportunity to partner with some

people to do that and actually turned it down. I had all these possibilities of doing more training, more of

the same, I guess. I decided that, you know what, I‟m actually quite happy with the amount of money

I‟m making. More money won‟t change my life in the kind of places that I want to change it. I looked at

things and felt money was great. I‟m enjoying what I do to make the money. I don‟t want to increase my

workload just for the sake of making money in this area.

What I felt I was missing was actually two things: a social life and I want to date more people because I

broke up with a girlfriend after traveling. I wanted to expand the social part of my life. I felt like I didn‟t

have the kind of friends I wanted, like entrepreneurs and people doing similar things to me, people I just

enjoyed hanging out with, because after university, I really lost track of most of my friends. They went

on to normal jobs, careers, and families and kids, and things like that, while I was sitting here in my

underwear writing a blog or struggling to figure out what to do at home on my computer with no work

colleagues, very little social life. As good as the Internet business lifestyle can be, if you get the other

stuff out of whack--I was still miserable-- because you‟d come to Friday night, and you‟ve got nothing to

do.

Travis: Yes, it‟s a very lonely lifestyle, right?

Yaro: It can be, especially if you don‟t be proactive about socializing. One thing about having a job is

you are around people. So you don‟t have to be as proactive in socializing because you just do it

naturally, so I came back…




Travis: Hey, Yaro, real quick. I don‟t want to interrupt you, but real quick for those that don‟t know what

a launch is, tell them real quick what a launch is. I know what it is, but I want to make sure we don‟t lose

anybody.

Yaro: Sure. So like I said, I did a launch in Athens and one in Toronto, and even before that, I‟d done a

few in Brisbane here where I lived. It‟s basically a process you go through to release something online.

Actually, the best example that you could really give to people about an original launch or a traditional

launch is actually the release of a new movie in the cinemas because it‟s all about a short timeframe.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: A movie‟s not going to be on the cinemas for too long. There‟s a big buildup to the release of the

movie. You‟re showing little samples, snippets, and doing a little promotion and having the actors travel

around the world and talk about the movie. You‟re just building up excitement and anticipation. You‟re

getting a lot of people talking about it at once. So there is that sort of bent-up feeling of I want to really

go see this while it‟s still there.

You take a lot of those principles and apply it to, in my case, releasing an information training product,

some sort of course, online. When I did my first launch, I released a report called the Blog Profits

Blueprint, which is a free document that teaches people how to make money from a blog. My

catchphrase, my slogan is: “How to make $10,000 a month blogging two hours per day.” So I release

this report. This happens in a span of two weeks. I released the report. My affiliates, or my people who

are helping promote my product in exchange for commissions to any sales they make, will tell people

about the report, to go download it, and everyone who wants my report has to join my e-mail list. After

they get my report, I‟ll give them more information like, “Here‟s a video on how my blog makes money.”

I‟ll talk about how I can write my blog from cafes and what you need to make a blog work, and just build

up and say that my product‟s opening on these dates, and I‟ll have a special deal for the first week only

of—a discount price because it‟s my charter group. My new members get this special price only. Open

it up, you make a bunch of sales during that first week, and then you‟ll close it down or you‟ll increase

the price.

So it just creates a lot of bent-up demand. You combine that with scarcity in the sense that you only

have a special offer for a week or it‟s only open for a week or something like that, it‟s great marketing. It

convinces people to take action and to commit to buying your product. It‟s made famous by Jeff Walker.

He‟s been like the father of the Product Launch Formula.




Travis: Right.

Yaro: That‟s certainly in the online space. He‟s the father for it. Most people who are in the area of

Internet marketing and do any selling of information products will be familiar with that principle. You can

do it on a grand scale with hundreds of affiliates, even thousands of affiliates, and lots of great free

information you give out upfront and charging 2,000 dollars for a home-study course or something like

that, or you can just apply it to little things, like when you do a little opening special. You release a bit of

free information and give away some of your best advice, and then have a special bonus.

I‟ve done various types of launch techniques, probably about 15 times now, whether it‟s been an

opening sale or closing-down sale or a Christmas sale, or something like that. It‟s been the main driver

for my biggest source of income. I don‟t have long-term sources of income from things like advertising

and affiliate marketing, but if you want to make like 100 grand over a weekend, a launch is definitely

been the best for me.

Travis: That‟s not too bad.

Yaro: Yes, I‟ve done that probably five or six times over a course of--it takes more than weekends.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: You work for a few months leading up to it, then you do it all in two weeks. Then you got to

service your customers and give them great value. But, really, as a business launching tool or product

launching tool, it‟s fantastic. I definitely recommend people to study as much as they can in that area, if

you‟re just getting started, like as a launching platform. I wouldn‟t recommend it as an ongoing, forever

running your business like that, but it is good.

Actually, that leads me to my next point. So I spent those years doing launches, and then I came back

from traveling, and I wanted to socialize more, so I decided to do no new business commitments. I still

did a few closing-down sales. I decided to shut down my training courses because they‟re getting a bit

dated. So over the kind of years of 2009, 2010, while I was busy out there making new friends and

going on a dates and things like that, I was also closing down my training courses and doing special

deals as well to keep the business going and making money. That came up to about 2010, 2011, and I

actually succeeded at my social goals. I had a whole new social circle. I was hosting parties at my

house. Actually, it‟s kind of funny. I‟ve got a lot of local friends, but I think the Internet also changed it

because things like Facebook and Skype and MeetUp groups, networking events, there‟s just so much

more going on today.




Travis: What do you mean?

Yaro: Well, when I was starting in 2000--well, 1999, 2000, 2001, all the way up to 2003, 2004, 2005--

there wasn‟t as many opportunities to connect with people like you so easily. It was hard to find people.

Travis: Oh, yes.

Yaro: Today, I got so many friends who I will chat to regularly on a Skype call or something like that,

that I don‟t actually see face to face, but we‟re all doing similar things. The market‟s bigger. The

industry is bigger. Brisbane is not a super-large city. We‟ve got a million people living here, but we still

have at least one or two networking events a week that I can go to that will get me in touch with other

people who are similar to me. Maybe I didn‟t realize these things were going on back then or I didn‟t

think to look for them but nowadays…

Travis: No, I agree with you. The world has gotten smaller, not just neighborhood or cities or states or

countries. I‟m speaking with you in Australia, and there‟s no lag. It really does--we were kidding when

we started this, it sounds like you‟re right next door, right?

Yaro: Exactly.

Travis: So the maturity of everything--it‟s easy to bring likeminded people. I agree with you. Ten years

ago, it would be tough to find, to connect with other entrepreneurs that are going through the same

thing that you‟re going through, and I think that‟s your point you‟re making.

Yaro: Exactly, yes. It‟s finding likeminded people and also having events to go to and opportunities. I

guess it‟s the combination. I made the choice to start looking, and then I also found what was available,

which was a lot more than it used to be.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: So that worked for that part of my life, but I did reach this cycle with my business where I was

like, “Well, I‟m not sure right now I want to do another training course,” where I‟m thinking of… I want to

do a startup. I want an actual business that could really scale big.

I had this idea years ago, actually. I was probably--even when I got started blogging, actually, because I

was making money from advertising. I wanted a tool that would allow me to do certain things with the




way I sold advertising on my blog. It‟s actually been the longest format of income I‟ve had online

because I‟ve been selling ads since I had that Magic site back in the early 2000s, so I understand the

consistency of it. One of the things I did, specifically, was make it quite automated. I wanted advertising

to be an income stream that was basically passive. As long as I kept my site growing, the money would

keep coming. To that, you just need a site that has an audience. That‟s the obvious thing. That‟s the

hard part. But then I wanted the platform that sells my advertising to kind of do it for me. I wanted the

potential advertiser to come to my site, see how much it costs, be able to click the “Buy” button, upload

their advertising media, make payment straight to my PayPal account. Now all I have to do is click the

“Approve” button or, even better, my assistant clicks the “Approve” button so it‟s a 100% hands off for

me.

There are a lot of advertising rotation tools out there. I had used a few different ones over the years.

They fall into two categories. There are the extremely powerful, very robust scripts and services that do

a hell of a lot, way more than I needed, and consequently, because they did so much, I usually find

myself quite confused at the implementation. I only needed to use 5% of the capabilities of the service,

but there was a lot of technical challenges to get it set up. Then the other side of the fence was the

simplest scripts. They weren‟t really massive robust companies behind these scripts. They were just

made by individuals, and they often just created it, and then sort of let them go, and didn‟t really do

much ongoing work, and they‟re a bit buggy. They weren‟t always the easiest to navigate either. They

might only do one or two things, but they weren‟t--they weren‟t designed for a simple implementation, to

do a simple few things.

Basically, I wanted to build something that will do what I wanted to do, which was rotate my ads, handle

all the different types of ads that I use, which are banner ads, text link ads and video ads, and put that

into interface that was very easy to set up and, most importantly, had a couple of clever things that

made the ads sell for you, so you don‟t have to do the work quite as much, things like having a page on

your blog that lists your advertising availability automatically. It‟s created for you by the plug-in, by the

script. It‟s got default advertising options that help you sell your ads--just these little things that you

don‟t find easily in scripts because it was so custom to what I‟ve been doing over the previous years.

I thought--this was the plan anyway--was build a script but also take all the people who used the script

and sell advertising and put their advertising into a marketplace and then help them to find advertisers

and sell ads, and if we do that, take a share of the revenue raised from that, and have a business, have

something you can really scale behind that.

So in 2011, I think, was the first time, right at the end of that year, where I hired a programmer, spent

some money. It didn‟t get even close to what I wanted. It was very difficult. I‟d never done software




before. I‟m not a programmer. I have the idea in my head, and I hired the development team here in

Brisbane. They‟ve built something, but it was so far from what I needed it to be, and I already put in like

25,000 dollars, so I was thinking, “Okay, I got to cut my losses here because I can‟t pour 100,000

dollars into something that I don‟t whether it will work or not.” I actually stopped there and partnered

with somebody. It was quite strange, actually--I don‟t know why I didn‟t think of it from the start--but I

have some friends who are quite well established developers. They know what they‟re doing. They‟re

very good at it. So I partnered with a friend of mine named Walter, and said, “Listen, I‟ve got this idea.

Some of it has been built, but it‟s not really ready to go. I fit in the partnership. You develop, I‟ll market,

and away we go. That was late--I think that was maybe late 2011, as well as early 2012. We worked on

it pretty hard in the first year and then we--This is the problem I‟ve learned from software development:

you have massive ideas about what you want your software to do and then you realize you can‟t

actually do it all.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: You have to scale it down and down and down and down and down because you‟d only get so

much development done on a given week.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: So we developed an initial beta, and then we have to fix bugs. We, actually--to cut a very long

story short, we have a working platform right now, but it‟s taken 18 months to get to the point where I

thought we‟d be at after six months. It‟s a slower development curve. It‟s not like me just writing a

course. That‟s quite linear.

Travis: Yes. I‟ve been through the similar process and what looks like it‟s going to be a simple--maybe

not a simple, but a 20,000-dollar commitment turns into a 40, you know… You still don‟t even have a

model that work in the way that you want. I‟ve been there. I‟ve been there.

Yaro: Exactly.

Travis: Interesting story. So you‟re still refining the CrankyAds things then?

Yaro: Yes, we are. We actually are about to roll out pretty much the final features I wanted in my initial

vision. We‟ve got almost all the basics done, and they‟re just opening up the service. We‟ve been a

WordPress plugin for the life of the company so far. We‟ve only been able to allow WordPress people

to use us. This next couple of months, we‟ll have an open version, so anyone, whether you‟re





WordPress or not, can now take use of CrankyAds and use it to rotate ads on your site, and also an

affiliate program, which I hope will encourage growth because I‟d like to see people talking about it and

making a commission if they either refer a new blogger or website owner to use the tool, or anyone who

actually goes and buys an ad from a marketplace or an ad on any of the sites, then you get a share of

the commission, too. Those are two features coming out later this year as we talk.

When that‟s in place, we‟ve got a plug-in and a script that does what it‟s supposed to do with some

fairly cool technology, still very simple, but it really does allow you to control all the different types of

advertising video ads with YouTube, text link ads and banner ads, rotate all those things, place your

own advertisements into the system. You can use it to have AdSense running. If you haven‟t sold ads

and just want to use Google AdSense, you can tick a box and put it in your AdSense code, and it will

run that. It‟s all quite easy to control under one control panel. I use it in my own blog. It‟s actually the

only tool that will do all those things. It‟s actually impossible to get another tool that‟s not like a very,

very complex script that will require some very technical people to set it up for you. So, yes, we‟re pretty

happy with it. Now it‟s just the case of getting more people to use it and making it a profitable business.

Travis: So that‟s a many-to-many model again, right?

Yaro: For sure, yes. I mean, I think as a startup, I always look for that. I think we‟re going through a bit

of a second dot-com boom. I mean, you guys know over in the States.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: Just a little bit of a smarter one. I‟m just going to close my window for a second, Travis. I got a

leaf blower outside. Hold on. I‟m back.

Travis: I figured you were getting back to me, getting back for the train noise I had going on earlier.

Yaro: I give you one little look of what …

Travis: Yes, right, right. Is this tool something that people that have--can any business use this to bring

more traffic? Say that I‟m a Main Street business and I want to bring more people to my website, could I

use this tool to bring more people to my website locally?

Yaro: If you have a budget, for sure. I mean, that‟s like the two sides of the coin here. There‟s the

actual service that allows the website owner to sell ads and manage that process, and then there‟s the

marketplace. We have this thing called the CrankyMart at crankymart.com, and that lists all the


http://crankymart.com/




available ad inventory on all the sites that use our service. You can go on there and search by keyword

and, hopefully, especially as we get bigger and bigger, as our network grows, you will find a variety of

sites that are making advertising available. Then you can either pick and choose or advertise on just

one site, and see how it goes.

It depends on what you‟re selling. I don‟t know if people have tried banner advertising or text links ads

or video advertising before, but if you can find the right targeted website to put these ads on, then you

can get some results. Especially, it‟s often a very clear-cut form of advertising. For example, you‟ll pay

25 dollars a month, one time, flat fee, for a banner in a certain spot on the sites. There‟s no ambiguity

about how many impressions you‟re going to get or how many clicks. You just pay this fee. If you get an

ROI or return of investment that works for you, you keep doing it and buy more. If not, you try

somewhere else.

Travis: If you don‟t, you don‟t. Okay, that all makes sense. Let‟s go back in the direction of some of the

things that you teach now. Is your programs are back--are you back to releasing these programs, or

have you taken those off the market?

Yaro: As we talk now, I‟ve pretty much got nothing on the market. I„ve had a small e-book for awhile,

but it‟s not really something I‟ve been promoting heavily. All my courses came offline over the last two

years.

But this year, 2013, I‟ve been getting everything ready to go again. I guess the best way of putting it:

I‟m actually looking to create quite a lot of resources a bit more than I used to have because I want

available not just a course but also an introductory e-book on mindsets and one on buying and selling

blogs because I‟ve done that, as well as my foundation materials on how to make money with a blog.

Also, I have a course on how to make money with membership sites because that‟s the next level. So I

am building a product suite, a training suite that will be--I think by the end of the year, the first five

products will all be out the door and available to people.

Of course, on this, my blog is full of stuff that‟s all free, as well as my free reports.

Travis: Yes, right.

Yaro: So there‟s no reason why anyone who‟s interested in making money with blogging or making

money with having your own membership site, buying and selling websites and blogs for profits, or just

general entrepreneurship, I‟ve got--there‟s so much in my blog. It‟s eight years old now, and I‟ve got a




lot of free reports there, so you can join my newsletter and get a ton of training there. If you do decide,

when I release my training courses, you will certainly know about it if you‟re on my newsletter.

Travis: Well, let‟s dig deep into--let‟s provide some value for business owners. Because the people that

listen to our show are established business owners, for the most part. They‟re wanting to take their

business to the next level. What do you feel are some of the most common issues or the lowest-

hanging fruit that would help people take their business to that next level? Because so many of the

business owners struggle when it comes to marketing and having a constant flow of new customers.

Yaro: For me, the thing that works the best is--I‟m a content guy. It‟s not for everyone. Especially if you

have little budget, being a content producer is free, besides the labor required. So, obviously, my

number one recommendation is to start a blog. Since that‟s what I do, I‟ve seen what it can do for a

small businesses or individuals who are experts or coaches or teachers. But even if you sell some sort

of widget or a tool, a product, or a range of products, having a blog that talks about those products, it

gives away free information like--this is a funny example, but it‟s usually the one that will give people.

You might be a plumber in a city and, obviously, your goal is to rank for all the “fix a toilet Brisbane” or

“fix a toilet Houston,” wherever you are, or all of the different phrases around that, “leaky tap,” “burst

pipe.”

Travis: “New hot water heater.”

Yaro: Yes, and people--this is what phrases people type in to search. It gets local, too. That‟s what

people do--is local search. Now Google is great at telling people where to go find local suppliers of

things, but if you‟re not just a brochure--I guess most people have a website that just says, “This is what

I do. Here‟s my phone number, get in touch so I can help you.” But if you‟re a website owner with a blog

of some sort of content site that does that, as well as has a range of training on, “Here‟s how to fix a

toilet,” “Here‟s how to fix a leaking tap,” or, “What you need to think about before buying a new hot

water system,” or all the different things you go through that people search for, you‟re providing two

things. You‟re getting actual training to people, so information that educates and helps them answer

their problem, but that also helps you demonstrate your expertise at this. So not only are you teaching,

but you‟re demonstrating credibility, which then makes you more likely to be the person they‟d choose

to buy from. Because I‟d buy from the person who actually teaches me how to do something because it

shows they know how to do it. So I think teaching is one of the best marketing tools, the best-selling

tools we‟ve got available to us, and a blog just happens to be a fantastic platform to base your teaching

on.




It‟s also very ongoing. Today, it‟s such a social world, and everything is social. I think a lot of small

business owners are a little bit turned off by maintaining a Twitter profile and doing a Facebook fan

page and all those sorts of things where… You understand what it‟s like to have a website, and if you

have a blog, you just treat that as a place to have a dialogue with your customers.

I actually did some private coaching early this year, and one of the clients I had was an architect. It‟s

actually a small boutique firm that does very unusual sort of architecture in the sense that they‟re very

hands on. It‟s almost like a holistic counseling process that they take a client through before they build

something for you. They have you do the surveys and questions and try to really extract what you want

from them. They‟re not just throwing you pictures of buildings, “You can have this.” It‟s like, “Why are

you doing this? Why are you coming to us?” Because of that, they don‟t really do a lot of clients every

year. It‟s not a big business. It‟s a couple of employees. It‟s doing well, but they have something that‟s

quite unique. When I was coaching this person, I was saying, “Well, you‟ve got so many great stories.

Every client you have is actually a story because you learn about what that client wants, and then you

then interpreted what they want. You gave them certain things. That, in itself, is content that you really

should be sharing because if I‟m your future client, your prospect, I‟d love to watch a video of what

happened before and after, and why you built this, because that will connect me so strongly with you as

an architect, and also me as the client, knowing my needs and then seeing that you could actually take

me on this journey because you took this other client on the journey. I‟m excited to go through that with

you, and I can see that there‟s some insights here that I can‟t figure out myself. So you‟re the architect

for me.”

So using a blog and video content and audio content or whatever you choose to use is a great way to

just have more of a conversation with the people who are likely to buy from you. That‟s what blogging is

all about, I believe. So that‟s that one.

Travis: Well, I think--and to illustrate the point of what you‟re saying or to drive it a little deeper--is, like

you said, it positions you as an expert. So imagine if they chronicled that story, maybe even had the

client just tell their story real quick on a video, that would position them as a firm that deeply cares--

because obviously they do. They take the time to get to know their prospect—and then that would allow

them to charge a whole lot more for their services. That‟s the key takeaway. Beyond just great

marketing piece, it‟s that expert positioning. I think that‟s the other thing, the other point that you were

making there also, right?

Yaro: For sure. The stuff will get the potential for viral distribution of content like that if we go beyond

just asking for a testimonial but it‟s an actual showcase of what you‟ve just created for someone with




some interview content, with some behind-the-scenes content, with maybe some nice production, just

take a couple of extra steps beyond just sitting in front of the camera.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: That can actually go viral within an architecture, and building and design, and home renovation

community. It really can open up your brand and your name and your expert credibility to lots of people

all around the world. This is how you become someone who gets invited to speak at events and really

become a large company with a well-known founder or some sort of expertise because your stuff is

good, and enough people find out about it, thanks to the Internet. It‟s as simple as that.

Travis: Yes, exactly. Exactly. I didn‟t want to measure flow up there, but I just thought that was a point

worth really driving home there.

Yaro: For sure, yes. To make things very practical behind all this, I still think, and this has been my

biggest lesson--is having the e-mail newsletter, the e-mail marketing behind all of this. I started as a

blogger, purely as a blogger, so I just wrote my blog, and I didn‟t have an e-mail newsletter. I was

thinking I‟ll make money from advertising and put AdSense ads on my sites. I did all that, and I made

like a dollar a day. It wasn‟t really a life-changing amount of money. I was also fortunate enough to be

studying direct-response Internet marketing from people who were using e-mail lists who make a lot of

money, which seems like--it was like blogging but less effort, less frequent, yet more money. I was like,

“So you guys write one e-mail, and then you got 30,000 dollars in affiliate sales coming back to you?

This is just a plain text e-mail that you write once every two weeks?”

Travis: Right, right.

Yaro: I‟m sitting here trying to cover every single piece of news released everyday on my blog with…

Travis: Exactly, everyday.

Yaro: …with minimum one piece of content, and I‟m not making money from it. I was like, “Something

is not right here.” So I was one of the first bloggers who actually went Internet marketing and combined

the two tools. The blog is the front end that gets people onto the list, but the list is still--it‟s a content-

distribution machine, but it‟s all a direct-response mechanism. It‟s the one thing it‟s got over blogging--is

that people have to choose the common read-your-blog content, where everyday they‟re reading their

e-mail. So if you have access to their e-mail inbox, you‟ve got a much higher attention from them than

you will from the blog. It‟s, I guess, the difference between a push and pull technology.




Travis: Definitely.

Yaro: It‟s great to have both. I think e-mail doesn‟t work if you don‟t have a relationship behind the

reason why they got on to your newsletter, but it does trigger their attention when it goes out there. So if

the blog is both the relationship and then the content from the e-mail is also building the relationship,

plus you‟ve got a selling mechanism, you got a really good one-two punch there.

If we go back to the architect‟s example, if they‟re doing a lot of work producing content to educate their

market on what they can do, and they‟re also saying, “Join our newsletter to get more behind-the-

scenes videos or to get a five-step questionnaire to figure out what you really want from your

renovation,” or something like that that provides value, and then they keep a dialogue going through

both the blog and the newsletter--but they reach a point. Let‟s say, it‟s coming up to a slow period in

their business or maybe it‟s a holiday period or something like that where they‟ve got excess capacity,

send an e-mail to the list, saying, “Listen, we‟ve got a special deal. We‟ve got three openings available

to do a brand-new outdoor or patio or something like that, but it‟s first in, best dressed, and it‟s only

because we‟ve got this space of a month available to you.”

Travis: Right.

Yaro: It‟s like that launch techniques that we‟re talking about there. You‟ve got this ability to open the

door to a potential client, use some scarcity, use some launch techniques to make money. That will

immediately deliver sales, where if you didn‟t build a list, it‟s hard to do that.

Travis: Right. Hey, Yaro, one thing that you said early on that I wanted to go deeper on and have you

give us a minute or two on is: tell us the difference between a blog and a website.

Yaro: Yes, that‟s a common one. Okay, it‟s not nearly as tricky as you might think it is. It really is a case

of a few things that blogging brought to the table that enhanced the normal website.

We got to go back in time a bit, though. Nowadays, I think if you‟re browsing the Internet, you‟re

probably reading a lot of blogs, and you don‟t realize it. But when it first came out, which was the early

2000s--I mean, there were blogs before that, but it really went mainstream around 2005--what

happened is before that, you had brochure content, so it was like a website with static articles on it that

really didn‟t change. You might have a new article added to it every now and then, but it was really what

you‟d call a broadcast mechanism. Here‟s a website. Whoever comes and reads it can read it, and

that‟s it.




With the blog, a few key features were added to it. First of all, just to clarify, blog is short for web log,

which is basically an online journal. That‟s where the origin of blogging came from. It‟s a person who

wants to maintain an online journal. It just grew to cover way more than just writing about what you did

that day, if you‟re breaking up with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, or what you had for breakfast. It

became a tool that people used to talk about any subject they‟re interested in. But what was really great

about it is really great about blogging, is the tool—it did a few things well. It added comments, which

opened up a two-way line of communication. It was the writer producing content and then the person

leaving a comment, interacting with them. So it‟s no longer static. It was now a dynamic. There was a

two-way conversation.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: It‟s made people produce more content because it was a journal format where you‟ve got the

most recent piece of content at the top. As you scroll down the page, you get the content that was

written in days prior. You can do that with most blogs. You can keep going back in time by going back

through the articles and see whether you were before that. That‟s really good because it encouraged

people to be regular content producers. Prior to that, a small business might write ten sales pieces of

information on their website and then set and forget. That‟s it. Website exists, doesn‟t do anything else.

It‟s a brochure.

Travis: Right.

Yaro: With the blogging platform, it encouraged people to do updates on a regular basis and make it

more fresh and current which immediately helped with search rankings and getting more traffic from

Google. So blogs really appear like this magical tools that get more traffic, but it‟s really because they

encourage people to do two things: to write more content and produce more value.

Also, one of the other things, which isn‟t as strong as it used to be, but back in the day, linking to other

blogs and other websites in your own blog was huge. A big part of blogging to begin with was that

shared environment where a lot of the content you would write would be in response to what another

blogger would write. Blogs just interlink each other constantly.

Back when I first started, I would want an article, and it would often get 10 to 15 to 20 incoming links

from another blog or other blogs within 24 hours after publishing because everyone would watch

everyone else. We‟d all talk about each other. That‟s huge for search rankings. So you have this perfect

combination of lots of fresh content and lots of new incoming links, so suddenly blogs are just getting all




the traffic. That‟s continued, like I said, not quite the same world as way more blogs, and people don‟t

link out quite the same way that they used to because it‟s just gotten so competitive and so large a

world.

Essentially, that‟s it. It‟s comments. Its people producing more content, the content in chronological

order, and people linking to each other. That‟s what made blogging and started the world of social

media. Like from there, we went to Facebook and before that, to MySpace. YouTube was after that,

and all of these tools that we take for granted now of two-way communication. It all started, thanks to--

well, probably forums, really, and bulletin boards were the first place. But that was tagged on to

blogging as a two-way conversation piece.

Travis: Right. Yes, good explanation. You know this stuff cold, like the back of your hand.

Yaro: I‟ve been doing it for a while.

Travis: We‟re getting close on time. We‟ve got four, five minutes left. I have a couple of other things

that I want to cover with you on. I sent you three questions. We like to have just kind of an organic

conversation back and forth and get to know you in some of the strategies that you teach. Are you

ready for the lightning round of the three questions that I sent over to you?

Yaro: I‟m not, but I can.

Travis: You can be ready, right?

Yaro: Yes.

Travis: Why stall, as you get your piece of paper.

Yaro: I‟ll go find that e-mail and just read the three questions.

Travis: Yes. Well, that‟s fine. If you can just pull them off the top of your head, that‟s fine also.

Yaro: I‟m more… This is spontaneous.

Travis: Okay, cool. Now what book or program made an impact on you related to your business that

you would recommend and why?




Yaro: Only one? That‟s hard.

Travis: Well, you can say--most people say two or three books. Very few people can ever say just one

book or mention one book.

Yaro: Yes, I mean, because my business is to change--I really have to go back and look at eBay, like

that book I mentioned earlier, which was--I can‟t remember the exact title. It‟s the story of Pierre

Omidyar, who was the founder of eBay. That book was very influential on everything I‟ve done since

then, because of the many-to-many model. So look for that one.

I also read a lot of other books about big start-ups at the time back then. I read about PayPal. These

are all basically your typical biography books about the company and the people that started them. So

eBay, PayPal. I obviously read “The Google Story.” I read about Napster. That was a really compelling

one during that time because it was still the early wars of copyright protection.

So all of the start-up stories for tech companies were very compelling for me because I saw that there

were certain things that made these companies successful--the way they forced massive amount of

audience to what they did. Sometimes it was completely organic, like with eBay. I love this story

because he created an auction site because he wanted to help his girlfriend sell something. That was

his motivation and then suddenly other people are using it and suddenly it‟s much bigger than he could

ever imagine it becoming.

Travis: Yes, you started it like on an Easter weekend or something. You had a long weekend.

Yaro: No, it‟s nuts, how big it became. That‟s a case of, “Wow. My monster--I didn‟t expect this to

happen at all.” Then like PayPal, which was actually fighting against eBay for most of their early days

before finally eBay gave in and bought them, but they had to… PayPal almost died so many times and

they really had to force people to use it and push. What I loved seeing, though, is the way every site

that‟s become massively successful has this period of growth that‟s ridiculous. I actually have never

experienced this in any of my businesses because my numbers are small compared to these people.

Yes, I‟ve got--I had as much as 100,000 people on my newsletter which, as an individual, that‟s

massive, and I can do a lot with it, but really on the scale of things, that‟s tiny.

Travis: Right.

http://amzn.to/YkXAvG



http://amzn.to/144oknQ



http://amzn.to/WAhIL1

http://amzn.to/148kuKM






Yaro: These guys signed up 100,000 people in 10 minutes sometimes when they‟re going through their

growth phases. It‟s like, “Wow!” So I found that very inspiring and very motivational, as a young guy

who hadn‟t really had so many big successes.

Then more recently, I really just studied more specific stuff about my industry. I went through a period in

2004, 2005 where I just went crazy with things like Jeff Walker‟s Product Launch Formula. John Reese

had Traffic Secrets. Mike Filsaime had Butterfly Marketing. There was--I love everything that Eben

Pagan does, and I love everything that Rich Schefren does. I took 5,000-worth coaching program with

Rich Schefren, his Business Growth System. These guys, I‟ve learned a lot from by watching what they

did, though, more so than actually what they taught, seeing how they released training, and how they

even formatted it. Just joining a course and seeing what information is released, how it‟s released, how

it‟s formatted, what software they used to deliver it, how they sell it, what the sales page looks like, all

those things. It‟s one of the best ways to learn is to go buy someone else‟s stuff and be constructive.

Travis: Model it, yes. Yes, exactly, model it. I do a lot of that myself. Hey, what‟s one of your favorite

tools or pieces of technology that you‟ve recently discovered, if any, that you would recommend to

other business owners and why?

Yaro: Well, I just made a switch from AWeber to OfficeAutoPilot. This is not for every business owner

to do something like this, and probably if you‟re somewhat sophisticated, you already have an e-mail

newsletter system. I always recommend AWeber as the great entry point because it‟s 20 bucks a

month, and it‟s great. It allows you to control multiple lists and do follow-up sequences and broadcasts.

That‟s not a recent discovery, though. That‟s seven years out of my time.

Travis: Well, I mean it‟s recent to you.

Yaro: OfficeAutoPilot is my recent discovery. So AWeber is the tool I‟ve been using for seven years.

I‟ve now just literally made a switch away from them to OfficeAutoPilot, which is also an e-mail

newsletter system, but it‟s a lot more than that, too. It‟s also got the shopping cart component. It‟s got

the affiliate network component. It‟s got tagging, which is the main reason I think I switched. Obviously,

there‟s plenty of software tools that do this, but the main difference here is I‟ve switched from what you

might call a list-based newsletter system to a database-driven system, which just means it‟s more like a

customer relationship management tool where you can control all aspects of an individual contact point

you have, and see what they‟re doing based on the contact rather than the list. So it‟s lovely and

integrated. It‟s not an entry-level tool. It‟s 300 dollars a month. It‟s simple but does quite a lot, too. So

for me, it was a natural time for me to make the switch because I‟m about to build a sales funnel

properly for the first time ever, actually. I‟ve been a launched-based information marketer for most of

http://aweber.com/?411348

http://officeautopilot.com/







my blogging years. I‟m now looking to not be launched based but actually have a defined sales funnel,

which means I have entry-level products and backend products, and I have an e-mail funnel and a

content funnel that people learn from and go through that helps me to identify who wants what products

and really give the right stuff to the right people at the right time. So to build all that requires a tool that‟s

a bit more robust than what I was getting with AWeber, right? I need something more integrated, a bit

more granular level control. So OfficeAutoPilot, the one I chose. Some people use Infusionsoft.

Travis: I figured you were going to tell me you were an Infusionsoft guy considering you‟re a geek.

Yaro: No. See, that‟s the thing. I‟ve been turned off by a lot--to be fair, I never gave Infusionsoft a go,

so I really can‟t comment, but I‟ve had so many of my peers use them and then pull away from them,

going, “This too hard. This is too confusing.” I recently interviewed a friend of mine name Andre

Chaperon, who is a massive e-mail marketer. It‟s his entire business. He does e-mail marketing.

Travis: His system is brilliant.

Yaro: Right. He‟s been on AWeber for the entire time, except for a brief swap over the Infusionsoft

because he knows how much better tagging can be with e-mail marketing, but he had to go back to

AWeber after six months because he just couldn‟t get to do what he needed to do. It was too hard.

When I saw James--you mentioned James Schramko before we got on to this call--that he actually is

one of the main people who convinced me to swap to OfficeAutoPilot because I saw him do it. I

watched the video of him showing how he uses OfficeAutoPilot, and I was like, “I get this.” I‟ve been

setting it all up and going, “You know what, I‟m not confused yet. So far, so good,” so I‟m quite happy.

Travis: “I‟m okay, so far.”

Yaro: Yes, that was the case of building the empire.

Travis: All right. Interesting. Okay, let me ask you: what famous quote would best summarize your

belief or attitude in business?

Yaro: Let me just get it off the wall. Hold on. I keep this one on the wall. It‟s probably the most

applicable quote for everything I do. It‟s pretty famous because Buddha came up with it so it‟s right at

the top there.

Travis: Got to be right.



https://crm.infusionsoft.com/go/infsrp/atxglobal/







Yaro: It goes, “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what

you are doing, you will be successful”—Buddha. Which to me has always been very poignant because

I‟ve had plenty of businesses that made good money. I‟ve had plenty of businesses that required a little

work, but almost all the time, there‟s been something that has made me miserable throughout the

process. It wasn‟t until I came across blogging and teaching and being a content producer, and getting

satisfied at all levels. I got satisfied on the amount of money I made. I got satisfied on how much work I

had to do to make the money. I got satisfied on how I impacted to people and what kind of life I led in

terms of what I stand for and what I am. It ticked all the boxes, where all my other businesses, I might

have made good money but I didn‟t like the process, or I had all this spare time but I didn‟t know what

to do with it.

Tim Ferriss actually talks about this in 4-Hour Workweek. If you are lucky enough to build, as he calls it,

a muse, or a business that succeeds--let‟s just call it that--some sort of income stream, that allows you

to break free of a job and actually grants you some freedom, too. Let‟s say, you got that kind of holy

grail business that doesn‟t require 15-hour days every day without collapsing--so you get something

that makes money and gives you time freedom--you reach this phase where you might do a bunch of

fun stuff, like traveling around and whatever it is you‟ve always thought you‟ve wanted to do but your

job got on the way of doing it. You do it for a while. You sit on the beach with your drink and reading a

book, but after awhile, you kind of go, “Wow, I am really bored,” and now I have to sort of ask this big

question: what really gives me meaning? Because what gave me meaning prior to this was just getting

away from what I hated about my life. Now I‟ve gotten away from what I hate, I got to figure out what I

like. That can be a bigger question than the other one. Unfortunately, in our world, most people never

get to ask that question. They spend their time doing what they hate and just live for the weekends, but

if you‟re one of the lucky few entrepreneurs who can break away from that and reach the point where

they can ask the question what I actually want to do--that is a big question. That‟s why the Buddha

quotes are an important one to me. Whatever you do--“You‟re successful because you‟re happy, not

happy because you‟re successful.”‟

Travis: I love that quote. How do people connect with you, Yaro?

Yaro: I‟d say Google my name. Y-A-R-O, that‟s the--I‟m going for Madonna or Oprah. Single name:

Yaro, Y-A-R-O. You‟ll definitely find me at the top of the search results. My blog is there. My Twitter is

there. My Facebook is there. My newsletter is there.

Travis: Even though you put a dash in your name?




Yaro: Well, my blog, unfortunately, is, like I said, it was a name chosen when I didn‟t know it will

become what it became.

Travis: I know. I‟m making fun of you.

Yaro: That‟s right. People can‟t spell entrepreneur. That‟s one of the hardest words to spell.

Travis: I have a hard time with it.

Yaro: Yes, so Y-A-R-O. Remember that. That‟s all I can ask.

Travis: Excellent. I‟m going to look up the other links on you and put them on the site. You‟ve been an

excellent guest. I appreciate you spending time with us. Can you hang out a couple of minutes longer?

Yaro: Yes, no problem.

End of Interview

Travis: Okay, great. Listen, I want to remind you, I‟m going--we have the show note section where you

can go basically under Yaro‟s--the description of the show, and I‟ll place the… I‟m going to look up the

name of the books, and I‟ll have all of those there prepared for you so that you can just go straight to

them.

Let‟s see, I want to remind you to go to diyob.com and enter your names. The D-I-Y-O-B stands for--

Instead of typing in “Diamonds in Your Own Backyard,” we decided to abbreviate it to diyob.com. Enter

your name, and we'll send you the “2013 Business Owner‟s Guide: From Frustration to 70 Million

Dollars.” It's a candid behind-the-scenes look at what you need to know to grow your business to

incredible levels of success no matter where you're at in your business or really even what size you

want to build your business to. What I tell you in the guide, the items that I cover are critical to your

success that no one is talking about because it's not in their best interest financially, which is extremely

frustrating to me. When you opt in, you‟ll also become member of the Authentic Entrepreneur Nation,

which is a network of people, tools and resources that you can trust to grow your business. This is our

private rolodex that we use and recommend that you‟ll have access as soon as we go live with it.




In the next episode, I'm going to connect you with Nichole Kelly of Social Media Explorer. That call or

that conversation really could go in any direction because she‟s absolutely brilliant. So it goes without

saying, you‟ll definitely want to join us for that episode.

Today, I want to close this show with quote from one of my favorites, Thomas Jefferson, and the quote

read, “Do you want to know who you are? Don‟t ask. Act. Action will delineate and define you.”

This is Travis Lane Jenkins signing off for now. I want to remind you that what you‟re contributing as an

entrepreneur and a leader matters. To your success, may you inspire those around you to take action

and go after their dreams too. Take care.




How We Can Help You

We know that finding someone that you can trust online today is hard and that so many “so called

gurus” are self-‐appointed and have never really even done what they teach you to do. That‟s exactly

why we created the Double Your Profits Business Accelerator. This is an exclusive offer for our fans at

a fraction of its normal cost.

Here's what to expect. We'll Schedule a 'One on One' private session, where we'll take the time to dive

deep into your business and tell you what is missing, so that you can have your best year ever!

We'll do this by performing a S.W.O.T. Analysis. This tells us your Strengths, Weaknesses,

Opportunities and Threats within your business.

This will be an eye opener for YOU, for several reasons, however some of the most common reasons

are.

As the 'Business Owner' it‟s difficult to see the big picture of your own business because you‟re in the

middle of a daily management.

And you are too emotionally involved to completely impartial.

This is a common problem for EVERY business owner. It doesn‟t matter if you are a one-man army, or

an army of 150, the problem is still the same.

Travis Lane Jenkins

Business Mentor-Turn Around Specialist

Radio Host of The Entrepreneurs Radio Show

“Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs That Grow Your Business"

http://www.rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com/biz-accelerator

http://theentrepreneursradioshow.com/

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