Are you ready to turn your painful failures, especially as an entrepreneur online, into your next big success story? It is what we are talking about with James Abraham in our partner call.
Changing Painful Failures Into Success as an Entrepreneur Online with James Abraham!
If you are ready, you are going to love this conversation I had with partner James Abraham as he recounts his experience turning his big success, that became a big failure into his next success story.
You will love seeing him getting inspired and get an idea at the end of the video what he can do to build on everything he's already done into his next big opportunity.
This call was recorded as a part of the Jerry Banfield University at the partner membership level.
I trust if you want to be on calls with me, you will go to Jerrybanfield.com/university/ and join as a partner.
Thank you very much for watching this video or reading the post, I'm so excited to share this with you.
Partner call with James Abraham
Jerry:
Well, I'm interested to know what you have done.
You said you've had a lot of failures.
I saw a post on LinkedIn yesterday. It had some guy saying how successful he is. What he basically showed are 10 different things he'd tried over the last 10 years or so, and 70% of them were failures.
Like he had some kind of eCommerce business failure, 7 out of 10 things he'd done was a failure. But all those successes were pointing, coming from the three things that were successful.
I'm interested to know, James, what have you done before getting here?
James:
Well, I'll give you my resume of failures. How about that?
Jerry:
Yeah, that's great.
James:
It's easier to work backwards.
So last year, I started a digital marketing company and at the time I was living in Florida.
I moved back to Pennsylvania, you know, because basically I ran out of money and I couldn't make ends meet, so I had to move back in with my folks.
When I tried to start this digital marketing business, it was like pulling teeth, like you talk to the business owner, and there are two kinds of business owners.
You've got the business owners that are doing really well and they're set, they've got their marketing system in place. They don't really see the need or they don't trust someone like me who is brand new in the business, and they just don't want to give you a chance.
They say, "I'm doing pretty well. I don't need somebody to experiment my business."
It was really tough to get those kinds of business owners and you have other business owners who are barely making ends meet and they can't afford to risk money on marketing and testing, marketing ads and things like that.
It was really hard to find those people in the middle. I was able to help a couple of people out, then I realized while I was doing it that it was not just hard finding customers, but I actually didn't really enjoy it.
That was the main reason why I just stopped doing it because if I'm sucking at something, but I actually like doing it, I can persist. But that was not something I enjoyed doing.
I decided to put an end to that by the end of the year and that's when I decided to switch over to education.
I've been studying education now for the last few weeks and couple months actually, and putting together this online course, which I actually find to be really enjoyable.
Even if this course doesn't make me a bunch of money, which I'm not expecting it to, I'm okay with that because I'm actually having a lot of fun doing this.
I think that's really where the success can come from. When you're really enjoying what you're doing.
Before that, I was working on Amazon.
I was publishing content on Amazon and I think I told you the story before Jerry, but I was basically publishing book summaries and making a lot of money from them.
I was making something like between $10,000 and $20,000 a month on book summaries on Amazon, it was so highly lucrative and it was very easy.
I was able to save up a bunch of money from that. Amazon didn't have a problem with me doing that, but who had a problem with me doing that was the publishers, the big publishers.
It actually caught the attention of the publishers and I got a phone call from Wall Street Journal and they interviewed me about it, and the next thing I know, Amazon's coming in and telling me, "Hey listen, we don't like what you're doing, we're going to shut you down."
And just like that, within a couple of days all my revenues just stopped suddenly. I didn't have a backup plan and I wasn't really innovating.
There were a lot of mistakes there, I wasn't experimenting, I wasn't trying new things. I was just kind of comfortable with the same old. I paid the price for that, but it was a good run.
That's basically the window of the last three years for me, and anyway, I'm having fun.
Jerry:
That's a lot of valuable lessons learned. Do you still have those books? Summaries?
James:
Oh yeah, actually, I turned a failure into a success using those big book summaries. I didn't mention this in my story, but I actually took those book summaries… The book publishers didn't have a problem with me doing the book summaries because it's actually perfectly legal to write book summaries.
As long as you're not ripping off the whole book, as long as you're adding commentary and making it… I forgot the legal term for that.
Jerry:
Fair use
James:
Yeah, fair use.
I was operating under fair use and I talked to lawyers about this, and pretty much all lawyers I talked to, there was a consensus that what you're doing is definitely considered under fair use.
I mean the judge could rule otherwise if you ever get a lawsuit, but most likely it's fair use.
They didn't have a problem me doing the book summaries, they had a problem me making money from the book summaries. That's what they didn't like.
What I ended up doing was I took the book summaries and I put them on my blog, I turned them into blog posts.
Actually, I'm getting a decent amount of blog traffic from that. I haven't been able to monetize that yet, but it's okay because it was my first blog that actually got decent traffic and I'm learning how to build, I'm learning how to design a website.
It was a huge success as I took that exact content which was making me good money, and you can consider it a failure because it was kicked off of Amazon, but I used that to learn how to build a website and get organic traffic from Google.
Compared to you, it's probably nothing, but for me, I've never had a blog that had like consistent traffic every month.
I just broke a thousand visits a month on my website, which I've never had.
I'd never done that before, it's okay, I guess, but it's not $10,000 a month.
Anyways, I'm not focused on book summaries anymore.
I still enjoy reading and writing, writing book summaries for myself, which is a huge part of my business actually. It's a lesson that I took.
Here's another lesson.
I was doing these book summaries and as a result of doing book summaries, I learned how to basically read books really fast, and then summarize them really fast. As a result, I'm now using that skill to learn topics that I can then go and teach.
So now, instead of just creating book summaries, I'm creating courses that are customized, that are built on all the books that I've been reading.
Here's a lesson that I learned from one of my mentors. It's called emergence and success is an emergent.
What that means is, think of like a human body.
A human body is not just the body, it's made up of cells, and cells make up tissue, tissue makes up organs, organs then combined together to make a human body.
A successful person, success comes from emergence and it comes from the emergence of different skills at different levels.
So picking up all these little skills as you go, you might fail here and there, but you're taking these skills with you everywhere you go, and eventually you'll be able to combine them into something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I think that's really the biggest
Jerry:
I've got an idea for you.
I tested out doing a couple of book summaries on YouTube last year and some of those videos are doing outstanding in search results.
You might have the opportunity to put the book summaries you already have, just literally narrate them as YouTube videos. You could crank out a bunch of videos like that easily and for all the new ones you are doing, if you do book summaries on YouTube, that right there is a great niche.
The average watch time I did for Gabrielle Bernstein's Super Attractor is 13 minutes on the book summary I did for that, which is on a 30-minute video. That's one of the best performing videos.
I did that on Dave Asprey's book and it's the same thing on that book summary. The book summary game on YouTube is incredibly weak for some reason.
You'd think people would go for that, especially if you can hit a book that just got published and be one of the first summaries up there.
If you wanted to, you could make a membership site out of that where you could put the book summaries into a membership and charge monthly for that or have a lifetime like I do.
James:
Yeah, that's a great idea.
I'm the kind of person that takes advantage of good ideas. So you'll very likely see that content published.
Jerry:
Well, I'm glad I thought of it.
I'm glad you're here too, because what I love about the partner program with the lifetime membership is you bought the partner program right when you were coming off the Kindle and you had all that income, and now you can continue to work with us in definitely no matter what else happens in your business.
James:
Absolutely.
Huge, huge, huge benefit is being able to do these calls.
I haven't been on all the calls, but I definitely think you're making some big changes to the program and I think that's gonna make a huge difference and that'll probably cause me to be a lot more consistent.
You may want to read another post with James Abraham: "Going from 0 Subscribers to 1 on YouTube with James Abraham!"
Final words
Yes, you watched this whole video, thank you.
Imagine being able to watch all my videos with no ads, all organized into online courses that you can easily go through.
Imagine being able to get answers to every single question you have directly from me and fellow members of the community.
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You can do all that and more at https://jerrybanfield.com/university/.
You might think this will cost a fortune and the good news is, it's only $19.95 a month.
The video you just watched was a partner call, which means you can get access to that today for $2,416.
With the partner membership you get access to all the video calls I offer to partners, which then leads to videos like this, where I do anything I can to help partners build their following and help you know the partners I'm working with.
Note that the partner price goes up 3% every time someone buys it. That means if you see a higher price today, another person already bought it and it goes up 3% every single time.
This means you get the lowest price it will ever be bought today, and you know someone purchased it at a lower price and it's worth it.
If you want to get started with everything except the calls, you can get that in the monthly plan or the lifetime plan at https://jerrybanfield.com/university/.
Thank you very much for supporting all that I do each day to help you build an amazing business and life online.
I love you.
You’re awesome.
I will see you in the Jerry Banfield University
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/changing-painful-failures/