Business Success Using Business Success Tools

With any business success or successful business it always helps to stack the deck in your favor.  It is often said that in order to implement a business success plan it is easier to follow a well worn path than it is to blaze a new trail.  At My Success Gateway the founder (Jim) author of this article was not getting the business success in his life so I started to seek out the business success tools from other successful people and then record those conversations in podcast format to share with the rest of the free world.

Needless to say my business success plan did not deliver the business success I was really looking for but a few positive things happened along the journey.  I started acquiring business success tools by interviewing people.  I also started acquired business success skills in developing the web site.  Some of the success skills were things like affiliate marketing, SEO, public relations and how to get in the press and search engine optimization.

Moving into the unknown was actually becoming a lot of fun.  One of the other side benefits was I started making a lot of new friends and developing new business contacts.  It is amazing the connection and bond that you can create by helping someone by interviewing them and giving them more visibility to their business.  As Zig Ziglar says, help enough people get what they want and you’ll get what you want just by helping them….I believe he is accurate in this statement.

So what we did was start to interview people who helped entrepreneurs.  We felt there was enough business success tools in the marketplace and successful marketing entrepreneurs who could help others start businesses the right way. We also thought that they were good at spreading the message, NOT.  That was not the perfect plan.  It did not deliver the results or business success we were seeking. And we think we know why.

First off, we did not research our business as well as we could have. I wished I had used Glenn Livingston’s “ultimate research tool box.”  Second we could have niched the business and focused on a smaller niche i.e. solo entrepreneurs or college students seeking their own business, or work at home mom’s – all probably would have done better than building a huge site focused on anything and everything marketing and personal development related. But hey, along the way very marketable skills were being developed.

So luckily for you the reader or the viewer you can go to the podcasts section of MySuccessGateway.com and browse all of the interviews and you will learn some great business success tools that you can use today.  If you want to go deeper into the subject matter you can always contact the guru I interviewed, some are easier to reach than others.  I have so many favorites I can’t recommend one over the other but I plan on doing some sort of audio/video review of each interview.  But eventually it will be like iTunes, too many to do that so we will have to look at doing a much better job of categorizing and tagging the interviews in the site.

After realizing and being in denial for too long we did not have a business model to sustain two people or one person for that matter we had to go back to work and “get real jobs.”  My partner was fortunate enough to be able to land a job in finance with a big company.  I (Jim) on the other hand had a much harder time of it.  I found that getting a job as a “salaried sales professional” was not something that I wanted to do but found that the market in my world didn’t want another “sales professional” who was a pure breed entrepreneur.  I guess my entrepreneurial business roots came through in the interviews, often I was told why don’t you keep doing what you are doing because it sounds like you know what you are doing?  The answer to that is yes, I do know what I was doing but I was not making money, and this was the problem….a very big problem.

I became an internet marketing consultant and started a consulting practice SpeechRep Consulting helping other companies get what they want.  I focused on a “niche” or a skill that I knew I was good at, and that is bringing companies to market, or in some cases bringing products to market, getting them noticed in front of large companies and large audiences, or in most cases getting them noticed in front of their niches.

I played around (consulted) in the workers compensation, mobile, ad network and SEO spaces. Moving from one space to the next was actually easy.  I found I was able to provide a fair amount of value being well traveled.  None of these “full time consulting gigs” got the traction that I wanted however.  But when I was with the Ad network I met Bernie Grohsman over at Treatment Centers and he had a niche and a business success plan helping treatment centers and he was significantly helping them improve their presence on the internet.   He also is highly skilled at SEO, so I jumped on his coat tails and went along for the ride in the drug and alcohol rehab industry.

OK so it is not as sexy as the media and marketing space but the people are a lot of fun and it was a niche, as I learned from Glenn Livingston, niches are very profitable.  So I stopped trying to be all things to all people and master this niche and see where it went….the story is not finished and I’m still doing it.  But I’m also picking up other projects in other niches.  I even picked up a MLM on the side and that is going well, and I’m not surprised because I am open to new ideas where before I would have been closed to it.

But back to the treatment center business, I found a guy who is a former IBM’er who is really good at online video syndication.  We have formed a loose partnership for now and we are marketing that business as a Viral On Video. Helping treatment centers get qualified leads or phone calls from video optimization.  It is still a work in progress but we are expecting great things from this business , again because we have a skill and are focused on a niche.  Hope this helps in some small way.

Google Jim Peake and you’ll find me.