Tim Ikels

Tim Ikels

Creator, Publisher, Marketer. Freedom advocate.

Internet Business Manifesto By Rich Schefren

Welcome to my personal notes on The Internet Business Manifesto by the author Rich Schefren.

It’s no understatement to say that this short report from 2006 had a tremendous influence on the internet marketing industry as a whole.

Internet Business Manifesto By Rich Schefren

Most of the concepts in this report are still valid today, if not even more important than ever before!

I like to give credit where it’s due:

Rich Schefren clearly had a huge influence on me, in particular how I’m going about my online business today. He changed my thinking through his published works.

Now, let’s dive in.

Fact Sheet

Key Concepts & Ideas

As an (online) business owner, you want to

  • re-engineer your strategy and
  • systemize your (business) processes

so you could multiply your profits while slashing the number of hours you work.

You want to follow a proven system that allows you to eliminate wasted effort, and put the best possible version of your business on autopilot.

In short: You want professional efficiency.

The Reason Why Most Internet Marketers Struggle

The primary cause for struggles and time wasting:

A lack of fundamental business building knowledge.

Or in different words:

A misunderstanding of how successful businesses are built.

It’s the reason why the overwhelming majority of people new to the Internet will fail in achieving their dreams even if they buy lots of products, study them religiously, and work extremely hard.

You should build a business that works so well, where you have enough products it makes competing with you undesirable.

Sophisticated competitors will understand that you could take your front end products and give them away free, or with a 100% affiliate commission, and it wouldn’t affect your income because you would still have back-ends, cross-sells and upsells.

You should be focused on building a real business.

Obstacles To Achieving Your Business Success

By exposing and eliminating these problems, you’ll be able to grow your business faster (and easier) than you ever thought possible.

Let’s take a look at one fundamental problem most Internet marketers’ experience:

  • Symptoms: Buying anything that looks like it’ll make you money, getting no results.
  • Cause: Opportunistic thinking
  • Internet Business Problem: Lack of Strategy

There are two different diametrically opposing ways of thinking when it comes to building a business and making money online:

There’s opportunistic thinking and strategic thinking.

Opportunistic vs. Strategic Thinking

Opportunistic: An opportunity arises and you grab it. Most business owners who struggle, are busy with the day to day of their business and take action on what’s appealing.

Strategic: You have an end in mind, a vision. Successful entrepreneurs know their vision, develop different alternatives for its accomplishments, and choose the approach they think is more probable. They Continually ask “what are my best opportunities to achieve my vision?”

Opportunity seekers think opportunistically and entrepreneurs think strategically.
- Rich Schefren

An opportunity seeker is always looking for the big opportunity to make lots of money from the hot opportunity of the moment.

Their only criteria is:

“Can I make money from this?”

So today it’s Adsense, tomorrow it something else, and yesterday it was some other hot concept already forgotten.

Opportunity seekers buy lots of products, and they use only a few of them, and the ones they do use get abandoned when the next so-called “easy” way to make money comes by.

The question they ask themselves is:

“What’s the easiest way for me to make money right now?”

The True Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur has a clear vision of what they want the business to become.

Because they have a vision they can analyze their own strengths, their competitor strengths, the marketplace preferences and devise different strategies for achieving their vision.

After reviewing the pros and cons of each strategic alternative they pick the one strategy most certain to successfully achieve their vision.

The entrepreneur knows that their biggest opportunity is always inside their business, following their ideal strategy and not the hot product that everyone is mailing for this week.

The Truth About Why You See So Many Garbage Products Being Sold

And the truth about why so many empty, BS promises being made:

It’s about 100 times easier to sell to an opportunity seeker than it is to sell to an entrepreneur.

Why?

Because the opportunity seeker has no criteria - if you can convince him or her that they can make money with it, you’ve made your sale.

An entrepreneur, on the other hand, has to compare what you are offering to their current plans - will it make it easier for them to achieve their vision?

Is this something that fits into their current approach and if it does is it superior to what they are currently doing?

The overwhelming majority of Internet marketers are nothing more than digital opportunity seekers.
- Rich Schefren

They have no strategy, they hop from one approach to another, and while they may have some arbitrary income goal they have no vision of the business they would need to create in order to achieve it.

And since they don’t have a clear vision they cannot follow any sort of detailed plan to accomplish it.

So they end up buying anything and everything that comes with a big promise of easy money with the hope that this is going to be it - this is their big chance to make it big.

They especially love (and fall victim to) the “Business in a Box” products where the promises are huge rewards with little to no effort.

Poor Business Design That Results In You Doing All The Work

I was frustrated, overwhelmed and exhausted.

I was truly acting like an opportunist mistakenly believing I was being strategic.

Sure, I made good money (although it was less than I had been making in my offline businesses) but I was working much harder than I ever had.

When I finally realized the error of my ways it was like waking up from a two year fog, and immediately my business and my life began to change for the better.
- Rich Schefren

I then spent the next six months documenting and refining everything that needed to be done to strategize, streamline and systemize a business.

The reason you are not making the kind of money in your business or working the amount of hours you want is that you have not made it a point to continually increase the worth of your time.

All time has value; and the way you think about time and think about yourself will affect everything that happens to you inside and outside your business for the rest of your life.

In short: You have to value your time before anyone else will.

How To Increase The Value Of Your Time

If you don’t know what your time is worth and what it needs to be worth, then you can not make effective decisions on what activities you should be spending your time on and what activities you should have others do for you.

So what is productive time?

Productive time is doing nothing else but working exclusively on profit building activities.

Productive time = time spent on/directly connected to generating income

==> Income Producing Activities

  • Non-Productive Time:
    • Talking to friends
    • Surfing the internet
    • Checking & reading emails
    • Answering your phone(s)
    • Studying & learning time
    • Checking website stats
    • Organizing your desk
    • Cleaning your office
  • Productive Time:
    • Creating products
    • Marketing products
    • Managing $$$ projects
    • Creating scale
  • Super Productive-Time:
    • Creating systems that create products
    • Creating systems that market products
    • Creating systems that build scale

Productive time doesn’t appear like magic - you have to be focused and disciplined.

Reading an e-Book, even if it reveals the most powerful secrets on making money that have ever been discovered, is not productive time.
- Rich Schefren

It only gets productive time if you actually do the work, or you leverage someone else to do it.

This is a very important distinction because so many opportunity seekers confuse learning with earning.

New knowledge has no worth to your business unless it’s implemented and acted upon.

A Simple But Working Tip From Alex Mandossian

“Get a kitchen timer and set it for 60 minutes and then just work on building profit during those 60 minutes - nothing else.”

Rich Schefren on trying it out for the first time:

Let me tell you, at first it wasn’t easy - I got thirsty and wanted to get some water, I had the urge to go online and check my stats, I had to go to the bathroom, and there were all these little interruptions.

But eventually I was able to go a complete full hour full throttle on nothing but profit building activities.

And that my friend is what productive time is all about.

Because It’s So Important: What Is Productive Time?

Productive time is time spent creating products, marketing products, improving your marketing process, managing money making projects, setting up joint venture deals, and creating scalability in your business.

Super-productive time is when you create a system around any of your money making activities.

Examples of super-productive time would be:

Creating systems that create products and creating systems that market products.

What’s The Ultimate Goal?

You need to build a scalable business that provides you, the business owner, with the maximum amount leverage possible.

Is your business currently set up to help you achieve and then surpass your financial goals?

Anything that makes your current business activities more profitable without more work is increasing your leverage.

If you are getting this, you should see that you want the work you do in your business to serve you in as many ways as possible.

You do this by sticking to one niche, developing a full funnel of products, and instituting cross-sells, upsells, and back-ends to your audience.

By continually working in that one niche - every successive product you rollout becomes more and more profitable.

This means that your leverage continues to get bigger and bigger.

Recap Of Online Business Building Principles

  • There is still time for you to carve out your niche online, to build a business around it and get very wealthy, but it’s not going to last that much longer.
  • In order to have a real business you must have a vision and create a strategy to achieve that vision. And if you do this you’ll leave the opportunity seeker world and enter the world of the entrepreneur.
  • Stop going around collecting tactics and only buy products and services that will support your strategy in achieving your vision.
  • Realize that your time is all you have therefore you need to know its current value and have a plan to increase it.
  • Always remember you need to build a business around scalability and leverage.
  • Know the difference between out-tasking and outsourcing and build a network of relationships, so you have access to talented freelancers whenever you need them.
  • Study and use project management methodologies to grow your business.
  • Process map your way of doing things and seek to continually improve your processes.
  • Attempt to reduce every activity and relationship down to a core metric that makes it easy for you to gauge performance.

Remember:

Opportunity Seekers Fail… Strategic Entrepreneurs Succeed!

Closing Thoughts

This concludes my notes on The Internet Business Manifesto by Rich Schefren.

If you like what you read, make sure to read the original works and follow Rich’s activities on FB. (all links in the fact sheet above)

Thank you for reading and stay awesome,

Tim for Online Business Dude

PS: Start & Grow Your Own, Profitable Affiliate Marketing Online Business!

==> Download Your Free (PDF) Copy Of The Online Business Blueprint Here!