To find out more about how information marketing works in practice, I got in touch with one of the undisputed kings of the industry, Mark Anastasi. Mark is the New York Times best-selling author of The Laptop Millionaire, a book that I strongly recommend for anyone looking to make money and give themselves a more positive mindset. When I talked to him he was in Slovakia, and getting ready to head to the Maldives for his honeymoon – “you have to go and see them before they sink into the ocean,” he noted.
As with many of the entrepreneurs I’ve talked to, outsourcing and leveraging other people’s time is a big thing for Mark. Although he still writes his own mass emails – “I enjoy it, and it doesn’t take much time,” he says – he has a team of seven outsourced workers that focus on content creation, dissemination, and on driving traffic to his sites. “We have our own very automated process for creating content and sharing it across the web,” he tells me, “called the Compound Growth 7 process, or CG7.” I don’t have the space to go into it here, but you can hear us discuss it in the full interview with Mark on my Work Less, Earn More membership site.
Ultimately, Mark says, the key to being a great information marketer is a desire to make a real difference in other people’s lives through personal development. “We work hard – there are some fakers and ‘get rich quick’ schemes out there, but most of us emphasize hard work – to provide an alternative to being dependant on the government or listening to the corporate media. Money is really nothing but the measure of the value you provide to other people – if you create good content, money will come to you. And if you can get that content, that value, out to thousands of people, the money multiplies.”
Freedom Business Fact File
Name: Mark Anastasi
Location: London/Cyprus
Where will you be in 5 years?: I want to go from a seven figure business to an eight figure one, so I’m hiring a Director of Operations to help with that. Ultimately, I want to have the kind of place that Robert Kiyosaki currently has in popular culture – it’s gonna be a lot of work!
Software: I use www.getresponse.com, a great autoresponder; GoToWebinar for my webinars; and subliminal power software, which flashes messages and affirmations on your screen so quickly that they only register in your unconscious mind – in 2005 I set it to say ‘make $40,000 per month’, and by early 2006 I was doing it.
Gadgets: I’m not really a gadget person, but I do have a little something called Pzizz on my iPhone, which is great – it helps you to relax and get to sleep much more quickly, and a 20 minute nap with this thing feels as refreshing as a two hour sleep.
Where can we find more info?: I have a blog and a mailing list at www.laptopmillionaire.tv, a free seminar DVD available at www.freemillionairemakerdvd.com, and if you check out www.freewebsitesinminutes.com we’re giving away a tool to make – well, free websites in a few minutes, obviously. But join the list, there’s always great stuff going on and you’ll get to hear all about it.
