Greg Cassar.com

We started with the barter system, then moved onto precious metals, then coins and notes, followed closely by credit cards.  The next evolution is using your smart phone as your wallet (credit card).

Google has recently launched ‘Google Wallet’ – an app that makes your phone your wallet—with Citi, MasterCard, Sprint and First Data. With Google Wallet, you can tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC).

If you don’t have a Citi MasterCard and you want to use Google Wallet you can use the Google Prepaid Card. The Google Prepaid Card is a virtual card that you can fund with any of your existing credit cards.

The business implications of this technology are far reaching too:

Gift cards: Google Wallet can store gift cards for participating merchants. When you tap to pay at a merchant, Google Wallet transmits your gift card information to the terminal. This is very clever.

Offers & Loyalty: Google Offers are deals on products and services at local or online businesses. Whenever you buy or save a Google Offer, it automatically syncs to your Google Wallet so your offers are always with you. Google Wallet can also store loyalty cards for participating merchants.  The world of the coffee loyalty card will never be the same again.

Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple, was a unique visionary and his influence, as a technology innovator will be sorely missed.

World leaders, tech giants, and countless ordinary people have paid tribute to Steve Jobs after his death, marvelling at how the Apple visionary made modern life more user-friendly.

US President Barack Obama said Jobs, who died from cancer on the 5th of October, had “transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Founder and CEO posted on Facebook “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”

After founding Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, he was eventually ousted by the very CEO he had hired to run the company. Without him, Apple struggled and flirted with bankruptcy. With him, Apple flourished and will always be recognised as the greatest turnaround in corporate history, as Apple has become the largest company in the world by market cap.

Apple’s Mac Computer range have unparalleled industrial design while proving that computers can be irresistible as their users ultimately become raving fans.

Apple re-defined the MP3 player market with the iPod and the iTunes Music store set the standard for digital distribution of music and content.

The iPhone not only raised, but really smashed the Smartphone bar and changed the mobile device world forever with the now-ubiquitous touch screen and shot down the idea that technical specifications were all consumers cared about. Rather, ease of use and an integrated user experience trumped everything else.

The newest market that is still unfolding under Apple’s influence is the tablet market, whose standards have been set incredibly high by the iPad and now the iPad 2.

During his absence from Apple, jobs also acquired and created Pixar. Starting with the original Toy Story they redefined the standard of computer generated movies for years to come.

Jobs list of accomplishments are many and far reaching. So what business and marketing lessons can we take from them:

11 Business and Marketing Lessons from Steve Jobs

1. Design trumps function
All the devices Apple made had one crucial thing in common: people fell in love with them. They felt passionately about them, in a way the world had never seen before.

Design, as he explained in 2000, wasn’t about how it looked. It was about how it worked. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Apple products are just plain cool. They’re sleek, attractive, enticing and they work well. While other products may work just as well, people want something that looks good too. Steve Jobs was well aware of the importance of good-looking designs

2. Turn Your Customers into Raving Fans
Apple has become a popular culture icon and adored by its customers on a level that most other brands can only dream of.

They have done this with their sleek cool design and by creating insanely great brand experiences. They have turned their customers into Raving Fans.

Most people are either Windows People of Mac People. From my experience once someone has changed from the dark side over to the light side and embraced the Mac there is no going back . They even become evangelists to try and get others to try it too.

3. Be a visionary leader, not a follower of the Pack
Visionaries are always called crazy in the beginning. Be confident. You might be right, even though nobody listens to you. Jobs showed the world that thinking differently is acceptable. Do not be afraid to implement your ideas.

4. Improve on what is Currently Offered in the Market Place
Apple is known as a highly innovative company that has completely transformed the way we think about entertainment and communication.

But in reality, the business has built its success on improving what went before. It made the MP3 player better with the iPod. The mobile phone was improved with the iPhone.

The story goes that the iPhone came about after Apple execs complained to each other about what irritated them about their mobiles. Jobs focused on what wasn’t working in current trends and overhauled it.

5. Keep a Strict Focus
Jobs once said: “Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before… it means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

6. Demand the Best
Jobs may have a favourable image in the media, but those who have worked under him describe a hard man obsessed with perfection. As well as thinking big, Jobs liked to be across the detail too.

“My job is not to be easy on people,” he once stated. “My job is to make them better.”

7. Work Hard
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day. He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures.

8. Turn a problem into an opportunity.
Jobs got fired from the company he built, but came back to build the most valuable technology company in the world. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Do not give up when facing obstacles. It might just be another hurdle you need to clear before arriving at your destination.

9. Simplicity
One of the largest and most widespread early arguments for switching to Macs was that they’re easy to use. People raved about how simple Mac computers were and felt no sympathy for whiny PC users who couldn’t find the files they stored or the ‘print’ command in Word. Bringing things down to a consumer level can be hard to do, but Jobs made the computer accessible for everyone.

The same can be said for Apple’s other devices as we have a 3-year-old son who can work the iPhone and iPad to play Angry Birds. The same could not be said for many if any other mobile device brands.

10. Make it Easy to Buy
iTunes is the most perfect ecommerce store online. It has an incredibly smart design where they capture your credit card details once and then store it and all your details with your unique ‘Apple ID’ so that next time you are ready to buy you can buy with just one click. Having 200 to 300 million customers setup to buy with 1 click buy has no doubt largely helped the profitability of Apple in recent years.

11. Do What You Love
Steve Jobs said: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Do what you love. Seek out a business that gives you a sense of meaning, direction and satisfaction in life. Having a sense of purpose and striving towards goals gives life meaning, direction and satisfaction. It not only contributes to health and longevity, but also makes you feel better in hard times.

Lets finish with Jobs’s parting advice to the Stanford graduates of 2005 in his Commencement Speech – “Stay hungry,” he said. “Stay foolish.”

I’ve been working in IT ever since university, and dabbling in my own online entrepreneurial projects since 2003, but I’ve only been a full time internet marketer for 3 years now.

Towards the end of 2003 I went to a positive cashflow property seminar. I met a fellow property enthusiast there and we started talking about that maybe we should publish and sell some property content of our own.

Within a matter of weeks we formed a JV (Joint Venture) and started writing an eBook each. We then built our first website. As I was a geek in IT I did everything the hard way, right down to getting a developer to code our own shopping cart from scratch.

As you can imagine the whole process was very time consuming and it took us over 6 months before we were online and made our first sale.

Back then traffic was cheap. I was able to buy targeted traffic from Google Adwords for 15 cents a click and if we got a 1% conversion rate to sale we still made $15 on a $30 book.

We then started sourcing books from distributers and found that they sold better.

We very quickly learned that we were never going to get rich driving traffic directly to a $30 product.

I sourced a product that sold for $97 that was a printed manual that was in high demand. This started selling well and before we knew it we were turning over $3k a month.

I learned about up-sells and put a second printed manual as an up-sell before the customer went through the checkout and quickly found that 33% of people took the up-sell to the new two manuals offer for $120. This made the business more profitable almost instantly and we were now turning over $5k a month, but not all of it was profit as roughly 50% of it was costs.

This whole process took a year or two. We split up the JV as we were moving in different directions and sold the business for $10k.

With the benefit of hindsight staying in that property niche and building a big list rather than just focussing on one-off sales would have been much smarter, but we live and we learn.

Fast forward on to 2008 and a combination of both successful and unsuccessful niches and techniques tested over the following years.

I was working for a major corporate IT company in Sydney. I was what you call an IT Infrastructure architect. It meant that I designed computer systems on either a national or global scale for large corporations like banks and insurance companies.

It was a high paying, rewarding job for a great company, so in theory I had nothing to complain about, but it was also highly stressful. Can you imagine the kind of pressures that came with working as the architect on a $4 billion dollar contract? There were times I got sick from the pressure of it all.

I had a sales component to my job also. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when one of my customers came to me for a $200,000 job, but by outlining their strategic requirements I was able to do a $1.1 million up sell and turn it into a $1.3 million job.

So how was I rewarded by my employer for boosting its coffers by over a million dollars? With a $250 Myer shopping gift voucher, that’s how.

That was the day I decided I was over working for ‘the man’. So I started ramping up my online businesses with a vision to very quickly get out of the day job.

I was a constant student of marketing through all this time and people within the marketing community as well as other business owners started asking me if I could I build sites, Adwords campaigns and podcasts etc for them. I started doing this part time by using a casual web development contractor who was a young guy from the local university to help me build the sites while I balanced the day job and my new found consulting clients.

Within 3 short months I was happy to make the call to my boss to give him notice. The boss wasn’t so happy about it, but I knew I was doing the right thing, even though my wife was due to give birth to our third child in two months time. As you can imagine everyone was telling us we were crazy, but we stuck at it.

My quality of life is so much better these days now that I’m out of the rat-race. My wife and young family and I averaged five days a week at the beach during the summer of 2009/2010 and a similar amount in 2010/2011. It was the most time I had spent at the beach since I was a back packer in my younger days.

I’m often lying on my back floating in the water in the middle of what would traditionally be a working day just because it was too hot. When it cooled down a bit I’d go and catch up on work. That’s the freedom of the passive income you get with online businesses.

Now our business is structured so that we have the consulting business as well as various products and services that we sell online to multiple target niches. The affiliate cheques keep flowing in from other peoples products and services that we promote and we now partner with successful businesses to promote them as JV’s and affiliates for additional income streams.

So if you look back at my story I’d love to be able to say that I was one of those guys that got online and found it all to be very simple and started making money from day 1, but the reality is that that was just not the case.

At times it felt like 2 steps forward and 1 step back, and then at other times all our ducks lined up and we made good money online. We are now at the point where we consistently back winners and are on the fast track, but that has come about because we persevered, we kept investing in our education and never gave up. We also diversified our income streams so that we had multiple sources.

Think about this for yourself now. If you are in the day job still can you become a master at web development or Adwords etc and start picking up some consulting clients to supplement your income while you build your other online businesses?

The sky is the limit… just never give up, back your winners long and cut your losers short.

Something pretty crazy here.  This is a ‘The Force Trainer’ developed by Richard Bandler (Co-Creator of NLP) for George Lucas from Star Wars.

Check out this video where I use only my thought processes to lift and spin the ball in the tube.

I went to an amazing event this week called ‘Rapid Success Technologies’ with Darren Stephens and Spike Humer. You can see in this video Darren is talking me through it.

Also notice when they make me laugh I can no longer hold the ball in the air.

Will Smith is an amazing Actor – no one doubts that. But when you look at what comes out of his mouth at interviews he says some really cool wise stuff that applies to us as business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers.

An inspiring read from a guy called Richard Glover from http://richardglover.com.au.

It’s nothing to do with Internet Marketing, but there is some very true stuff in here about business and about people and life’s lessons in general.

Sorry its a bit hard to read. Print it, it’s good enough to use a tree on.

A cool day yesterday in the Cassar household.

An important part of business growth is to celebrate your wins.  After an amazing year of 300% business growth online we celebrated a major win by yesterday picking up our first ever brand new car.

We got a 7 seater top of the range Santa Fe Elite. We got pretty lucky in that it was a demo model with 1500kms on it, so the luxury model ended up being the same price as the base model.  The luxury is nice in that it has leather and electric everything and it even comes with a fridge between the driver and the passenger seats. I’m not sure what that is exactly for, as I can’t imagine its for keeping my beers cool as I drive down the freeway.

Jules and the kids seem pretty happy as well.