Yanik Silver - Make More Money, Have More Fun, Give More Back
By: Ric Thompson
Yanik Silver is an online mastermind when it comes to setting up a business on autopilot to make millions of dollars. An established Internet marketing expert, he's been in business online since 1998 and has numerous Internet products to his name. He is a self-made millionaire and is recognized as one of the leading experts on web marketing, but considers himself a "techno dunce" because he still doesn't know how to put up his own web pages. With help only from his wife, he has grown his businesses from an initial investment of $1,800 to over $13 million in sales.
He is the author, co-author or publisher of several bestselling marketing books and tools, as well as a highly sought after speaker addressing groups ranging from the prestigious Wharton Business School to international audiences of 3,000-plus. He has traveled the world telling audiences how they too can make money online, sharing the stage with experts like Zig Ziglar, Dan Kennedy and Mark Victor Hansen.
Yanik, a self-described "adventure junkie," has even founded a company that combines business with thrill seeking called Maverick Business Adventures. One thing is for sure: Yanik has ambition and knows how to live life to its fullest.
YANIK SILVER: Hi, Ric. Thanks.
RIC THOMPSON: Yanik, you have been doing so many phenomenal things. I've been following you for a number of years and learning from your products and materials, which have been great. I've attended a couple of your underground seminars-which are famous, and sometimes infamous-in the Internet marketing arena for the level and high quality of great content and material.
However, I think today we should focus on your most current theme, which resonates with everybody out there as entrepreneurs. It's how to make more money, have more fun, and give more back to the world around us.
YANIK SILVER: Yes, absolutely. I call it my Maverick Manifesto or my Maverick Philosophy for entrepreneurs. Actually, if people want to learn about this, I always thought they were called three intersecting circles, but I've learned it's called the Venn diagram. If you draw three interconnecting circles, you have the first circle, which is 'make more money', another circle, which is 'have more fun', and another circle, which is 'give more back'.
Where they meet is what I call the Maverick Entrepreneur. I appreciate the glowing introduction. I've been doing this all along since, I think, I got started in 2000, but it's really become more and more concrete in my mind. I've really been able to share it in its entirety just recently. I hope a lot of people will get a lot out of it because it's not just about making money, buying things and doing things. It's truly about living a very full entrepreneurial life.
The one part, I guess, we should start with is 'make more'. This seems, Ric, to be where most people want to start. Before I get there, I want to give you a concept that I think is really intriguing. Everyone thinks to have more fun or to give more back-and we'll talk about each one of those-means, "Once I make $1 million, I'll go have a lot of fun," or "I'll start donating a lot to charity," or whatever the case is. "I'll start donating my time."
The truth is they're all interconnected, so I've found that as I had more fun I had bigger, better business ideas and made more money. I've met more high-level contacts. As I got more involved in giving back, I'd meet interesting people and more opportunities would come my way. I'd have incredible things happen, and it was all interconnected.
That's one thing I want you to think about as we talk about each of these aspects, so you don't turn off when we start talking about the other parts. They're incredibly interconnected. Let's start with 'make more'. I've been involved in the Internet for quite some time, like you mentioned, starting in a one-bedroom apartment with a little idea at 3:00 in the morning that made me my first $1 million. This was a product called Instant Sales Letters.
We're not going to talk so much about specifics today, but I really want to talk about the more important part, which is fundamentals. I really think more money amplifies who you are. If you're a great, generous person, the more money you have you're going to be even greater and more generous. If you're a jackass, you just have more money to become a bigger jackass and do more jackass-like things.
Let's talk about one of the key aspects to making more money, which are questions. Questions are incredibly important, and I think your questions dictate your answers. The bigger questions create bigger answers just using our typical question-words. For instance, I always found this example intriguing. Robert Kiyosaki was the first one I heard this from in Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
He always talked about his poor dad, who would look at something and say, "We can't afford that," but rich dad would look at something and say, "How can we afford that?" He was talking about a big tract of land, I think, on the beach in Hawaii. If you simply say, "I can't afford that," all of a sudden every single option that would or could have been open to you has completely shut down.
By posing an open-ended question like that, our brains function as the sort of mechanisms to which we pose the question. It might not be at that moment-like I said, I woke up at 3:00 in the morning with my first business idea for the Internet-because I posed a question like, "How can I create a fully automatic website that makes me money while I sleep, is an incredible value for people, and is not just an ebook?"
I literally woke up at 3:00 in the morning with that. By using questions like, "How can I..." or "What can I do to pay for…" or "Who can I contact who can help me…" or "Where can I go to find…" or "Why would I want to do…", you can literally start with one little legal pad and put the question at the top. For me, I have a ton of business ideas, so one of the questions I worked out recently was, "How can I get my business ideas implemented quickly and easily without my own direct day-to-day involvement?"
The first two, three, four or five answers you get are pretty typical and very standard; there's not much there. However, when you get beyond that, that's when you really start thinking creatively and start really creating some unusual answers that hold the key to greater success. Always have that question; always figure out questions. I pose questions to myself all the time. I'm always looking at someone doing something interesting in business. My wife and kids and I just got back from a great five-star hotel in Florida.
Every time I'm there I look at what they do to enhance the experience, to go above and beyond people's expectations and, essentially, to surprise and delight us. Instead of thinking, "They're a hotel and I can't apply any of this," I always think, "How can I apply that to my business or a project I'm working on?" Anytime I'm reading a book about somebody else in business, those are the kinds of questions I like to pose to myself, and that gets the answers you want.
RIC THOMPSON: That's fantastic. It's all about creating that powerful mindset of, as you said, an open mind, of looking at and exploring possibilities. I know people are really talking about that, but I think you're right; I think that's the very foundation, the very fundamental, of what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur.
YANIK SILVER: Absolutely. Another thing I think is a fundamental is value creation. I had something written in my planner when I first started on the track to be successful: "I get rich by enriching others 10 times to 100 times for anything they pay me for." That means if I sell an ebook for $17, I want to make sure somebody gets at least $170, if not $1,700, of value for what I'm providing them. I try to follow that all the way up to my $20,000-and-above products we sell.
Having that in mind, once again, it can be posed as a question. When you're thinking about your business idea, the product you want to sell, or the offer you want to put out there, you can ask yourself, "How can I make this worth 10 times to 100 times in value for my end user?" That's going to get that creativity going again for you. It's just a natural law that you have to be rewarded in proportion to the value you provide.
RIC THOMPSON: That's very powerful. Of course, for those of you who are thinking tactically, if you were truly able to follow that law and create 10 times more value than what you're charging, the marketing and selling of that product becomes a whole lot easier.
YANIK SILVER: Not only that, but you get excited customers who want to buy from you and spread your praise to other people, so everything becomes better that way. The next fundamental point of how to make more money, I've always found, is leverage. There are several things you can leverage. One is time. That's one of the big traps so many people get into; they get stuck trading time for money.
It seems like a simple concept, but even high-end performers, like a superstar basketball player, trade time for money, even though it's a whole lot of that. Hopefully, they're using that money, then, to do other stuff, or they have endorsement deals going on that don't require their direct time necessarily. That way, they can leverage their singular time put in. Even on the high end, think about an attorney who is doing incredibly well, maybe pulling in high six figures or low seven figures.
They're trading their time for money. You need to get away from that trap. Other things you can leverage are people, so I always talk about outsourcing what you suck at. Figure out pretty quickly what you're really, really good at and what gets you excited, what you're passionate about. There are a couple of really good profile tests for that: there's a Kolbe Profile, which is at, I think, www.Kolbe.com. There is a great book by the Strategic Coach Organization called Unique Ability.
There is, now, Discover Your Strengths. Get clear on what you're really good at, and then go find other people who are really good at the stuff you suck at. Go leverage that. Also, leverage assets. That's why I love being in the information business. We get to leverage our intellectual capital and do the work one time and get paid over and over again. That's something you should be asking yourself, once again, a question: How can I do this one time and get paid over and over again?
Even artists can do that. Even recording artists do that. They record a song once and they sell it as MP3s and iTunes. Artists do that. They create a piece of artwork and then, if they get smart about it, they could create a serigraph [indiscernible]. They can license their images for all sorts of things. Then it starts being applied to umbrellas and posters. You get creative about how to leverage your intellectual capital.
As information marketers, we could do an event. We do several events, typically, a year. I'll record each of those, and we'll sell the DVDs with that. The other thing is you have to think about how you're going to create product, because that goes back to not trading time for money. The last one is: What skills do you have that you can leverage and that let you multiply yourself?
One of the very first skills I learned, Ric, that really helped me propel myself to success was copywriting. Learn the ability of creating words on paper, words on a computer screen, words in an ad that will get people to buy from you. You can sell them without you being there face to face and interacting with them. That lets you leverage yourself, literally. We've had millions of people hit my websites, and I'm not physically there, obviously, selling to them.
RIC THOMPSON: Listeners, there are number of things here for you to walk away with, so I hope you've been taking notes. There are all the questions Yanik just posed to you about using leverage, using your skill set and using your knowledge. He made great comments about being an information marketer, and that's a big chunk of what I do as well, as you all know. What if you're in a retail shop? Yanik, we have clients who do everything from sell paper flowers to paintball shops to you name it.
Everyone, if you're telling yourself, "I'm not an information marketer; I can't leverage the information," or "I can't leverage my knowledge," go back to the very first lessons Yanik shared with you. Start asking those questions: How can I leverage my skill sets? How can I leverage my knowledge to create an information product? Information is infinite.
YANIK SILVER: Yes. Information is one of my favorite things to sell. Like that example you mentioned, Ric, paintball is easy. You create training videos and you create all sorts of secrets of killing people faster on the paintball field, or whatever the case is. You can pretty quickly get something out there that's making you money while you're sleeping. That's a great feeling to wake up and see people have given you money.
You look in your inbox and there are orders waiting there for you. Let's talk about another fundamental and, once again, it's a head thing. I don't know if you've ever read this book, Winning Through Intimidation, by Robert Ringer.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes.
YANIK SILVER: I don't really like the title that much. He should have re-titled it, To Be or Not to Be Intimidated. It's interesting; he has this theory in there called the Leapfrog Theory. In there, so many people are waiting for somebody to appoint them, anoint them, or knight them the expert. You make up your rules, and if you have the knowledge to back it up, you go out in the marketplace and start proclaiming yourself as the expert. Do the things that experts do.
Pretty quickly, if you don't have the chops, you're going to be knocked down to the mediocre majority. However, so many people are waiting for somebody to christen them and say, "Yes, go on. You are now officially an expert in this category," and that doesn't happen. I learned this a long time ago. One of my mentors is Earl Nightingale, and I learned from him that if you read for one hour a day on any subject, in three years you can become an expert there.
If you read for one hour a day for five years, you can become a world-class expert. I thought to myself, "What would happen if I read for two or three hours a day and studied that?" What I studied was direct response, and that's how I got, partially, to where I am today. Once again, stop waiting. Just go out there and do it.
RIC THOMPSON: That's great advice. You mean, Yanik, no one stepped up and personally anointed you Sir Yanik, Master of Marketing?
YANIK SILVER: I have that somewhere from a mail-order college I applied to, but no one did; not at all! There are two more sections for the 'make money' part, which I think people, hopefully, who are listening to this can get a lot out of. One is, of course, time management. When I think about time management I think about energy management. I learned this from a book called The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr. You want to know your body; think about when you're most productive.
If you're freshest in the morning, that's the time you need to be spending on the most proactive activities that can move you forward. Think about having something as simple as a Top Three for your day. I have a lot of things on my to-do list, but there are certain things that are much more important than others. For those of you who read Stephen Covey's great book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he calls it, I think, a 'quadrant two' activity, which is important but not urgent.
Once again, it goes back to those questions. What's the most important thing I can do today that will move me or my business forward? When you know your body, there are certain times of the day when you're fresher or when you're stronger. Those are the times you don't want to be piddling around with email, Twitter, Facebook, IM or whatever the case is. I have to tell people, "Stop screwing around on those things." It's fine; I love Twitter.
I find myself in email a lot, but the truth is when I'm focused and working on proactive activities-if I'm working on writing or if I'm working on a marketing campaign-I turn all those off. Don't turn them on and off. The other big thing with time management is that work expands to the time allotted for it. We've always found that if we're going away tomorrow, if we have a week's vacation tomorrow, Ric, aren't we more productive than ever?
RIC THOMPSON: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I do have a week's vacation starting tomorrow. I'm leaving on a trip.
YANIK SILVER: There you go! You've been getting a lot done today, I bet.
RIC THOMPSON: I am, and that includes, of course, this fantastic interview.
YANIK SILVER: Work expands to the time allotted, so the other thing you can do to trick yourself-and I'm going to talk about that next-is to create deadlines. Create deadlines that matter. That leads right into the five ways to motivate yourself and shatter excuses. I'll cover a couple of those. One of them is that must-hit deadline. One of my favorite things to do is to set a deadline, and then figure out how we're going to get there. Set a deadline so it's public and it's out there.
For this new company I started called Maverick Business Adventures, we take CEOs and entrepreneurs on these cool once-in-a-lifetime trips and combine it with business-building, teaching young entrepreneurs, and giving back. I decided I wanted to do that, and it's pretty different from anything else I've done before in publishing or information marketing. It was something I was really passionate and excited about, but I didn't really know the first thing about what we should do working with a travel outfitter and the types of insurance you need. We're essentially a business travel entity, and it's a weird morph.
I said, "January, 2008, we're going to hold our very first trip, and we're going to Baja, Mexico." I threw it out to my list of 100,000 subscribers, and I put it up on my blog. I said, "You can watch me build this thing on my blog. I'll let you peek over my shoulder, and this is my must-hit deadline." I had no idea if anybody was going to come. I had no idea how I was going to build the team to execute this.
By having that deadline in place and then by going public, it gave me that sense of embarrassment. "Yanik Silver is this big expert, and if he's going to put himself out there, he better make it happen." I had that extra oomph to do it by going public and having a must-hit deadline. That's why I love events. My very first seminar was just like that. I said, "We're going to do a seminar on this date." I'd never done a seminar before, but you make it happen.
It's almost like the universe conspires to work for you once you've made a hard decision that it's going to happen. There are a couple of other quick ways to motivate yourself and to shatter some of your excuses
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