It is Febuary 2010 as I write this post and America is in the middle of a massive change. Many people are losing their jobs although they are more than qualified for the positions.

Others have been laid off for more than a year and have no hope for the future.

If that is you or you know someone that is looking for a job right now, then have them go through this
interview I did with Dan Miller who is author of the book 48 Days To The Work You Love.

David: This interview was taken from the book I authored called Internet Empires. Enjoy the interview!

I was completely honored when Dan Miller agreed to be interviewed for my book. Dan helps people find the work they love as well as find ways to make creative income. I told Dan the biggest reason for me wanting him in my book is because I want you, the reader, to take action and start an online business. Please do not just let this book sit on the shelf. Take Dan Miller’s advice in the interview and take action. I believe you can do it and so does Dan.

Dan Miller

David: Alright, Dan, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to do the interview, I’m really excited about it. I don’t know how long I’ve been on the newsletter but, I told you this the other day that I probably subscribe to probably fifty newsletter, but I probably read about five to ten that I read religiously. You have such good content in helping people find the work they love and teaching people how to make the extreme come from their passions.

I’m going to give some background, so people if, I’m from Nashville so I’ve heard about you for a long time through Dave Ramsey, but I’m going to go ahead and give some background for people who may not know who you are yet. You are the owner of 48 days dot com. I don’t even know where to start as far as your credentials. On the Internet, you write articles for the Christian broadcasting network. Your articles from there, Wife Way, the huge Baptist bookstore, I know you write articles for Sovim.

You are Dave Ramsey’s career expert and that’s how I heard of you for the first time. The www.crosswalk.com is one of the to Christian websites on the entire Internet, and some of your articles are posted there a couple of times a month and as far as, you’ve been in several magazines including new man magazine and the Baptist press. Also, television, Chris Matthew’s hardball, you’ve been really busy over the past couple of years, so just go ahead and get started.

Let’s talk about the change you talk about in 48 days to the work you love. Also, talk about 48 days and your creative income you talk about because it’s just a different model nowadays. I’m twenty-seven and the people fifty years ago, right out of high school. Then, you actually go and get a job, and you work somewhere for forty fifty years. You get your gold watch and talk about how that has actually changed and where we are at today.

Dan: Sure, it’s changed dramatically that model you just described is pretty obsolete; the average job length for someone in their twenties right now is one point one year. Thirteen months, so that is pretty radical if we looked overall. Your standard job length is about three point two years in length, so even using that as a guideline and looking at the mathematics of a working lifetime, someone can expect to have fourteen to sixteen different jobs.

That’s changed dramatically, so that means you have to really understand what it is that you do well. So, you have clear set of areas of competence, and you can continue on a positive career path even as you go from company to company or rather than start in the company. We used to hear the old stories, if I could just get into this company, then eventually, I’ll be CEO. It doesn’t happen anymore.

David: No.

Dan: People, if they need an upper-level position are likely to go out of the company and bring somebody in as promote somebody from internal who’s already been there. Than declare what your skills are ready at any given time to put the skills to the test in terms of finding out what your market ability really is by encouraging people rather than having the old employee mentality to keep self-employed as the person chooses to have one customer.If they are working for one company that’s okay, but as soon as you really understand that you have to be in the driver’s seat, you have to take responsibility as we see the demise of pension plans, medical care benefits, and all of those things going away, just coming back to the individual.

Anyway, now once you understand all of this, then it’s not a quant leap to even look at the new work model, so to go from being a employee to being a consultant or even a contractor or contingent or whatever you want to call it. You have to realize there’s a whole lot of opportunities out here, but the new work models may not even look different from what we were used to for the previous generation.

David: Absolutely. What type of information do you have as far as people really despising their job? Their boss? I’ve read in your newsletter before you talk about the quote where you were talking about heart attack, 20% higher on Mondays.

Dan: 33% increase in heart attack in Monday morning between eight and ten o’clock and it’s clearly related to people going to jobs they hate. We hear various stories and statistics.

David: Sure.

Dan: You want to usually hear somewhere in the area of 70% of people say they’d change their job if they could.

David: Wow.

Dan: That’s pretty startling. Pretty alarming. In the greatest country in the world with more opportunities than we’ve ever had with that many people, still, feeling like work is some kind of a bitter pill that we just have to tolerate. Rather than being our greatest sense of joy and pleasure in what we do.

David: I was talking to you the other day about doing this call, and I don’t think people realize how many times they go around one time. I told you what the purpose of this book is, I hate the fact that people settle in life. I talked to a guy the other day. He’s been working on lawnmowers and tractors for like eighteen years, and I’m telling you Dan; I said, his name’s Ricky, an expert. He did not even see himself like that. He’s just kind of stuck in this type of mindset. I said, “you could capitalize on what you know, whether it’s in writing, CD, putting a CD together, a book together, just various different situations. So we understand that there is a problem.

Okay, so obviously the heart attack problem and people not liking their job, therefore, let’s go with talking about you have a checker in your forty-eight years of creative income called seizing opportunity. Let’s talk about some of the opportunities out there as far as people have to make money. This obviously is an online, and the book is really about online opportunities. What are some making money online concepts? Obviously, you have a really good success stories as well that we’ll get to later, but talk about seizing opportunity.

Dan: One of the easiest models to just get into is the eBay model. You don’t have to get merchant card, credit card approval status. You don’t have to open up accounts anywhere. You don’t have to do anything to start a business. You don’t have to rent a building, buy inventory, hire employees; you could be in business this afternoon, legitimately in business. You can even have the appearance of being a big business if you position yourself right. There have been thousands and thousands of people that simply decided; I’m going to specialize in baseball cards, or I’m going to specialize and gift item web store, home decorating item, or cookie, etc.

There is no limit to what you can choose. I encourage people to become a specialist in something, don’t be a generalist. I know you can do that one day, and it’s a good way to learn too. You are going to have to be a specialist in something, when you do and if you do it right, you can be very successful in online business. I like not even dealing with physical products, but just dealing with information. Absolutely where the sky is the limit, because if you created a eBook on “how to” or have an audio product that’s uploaded as an mp3 file, you can have one person buy it or ten thousand people buy it and it makes no difference. You don’t have to scramble to go find more. Why? It’s inexhaustible because of the technology that you use to deliver it.

David: You’ve created it well, you talk about what an eBook is, so what are some of the people in work? You probably have a thousand stories, but what if you talked about some of the people that you’ve come across over the past several years that have seized opportunity and have made money from their passing, “cause I know you’re a big believer in actually taken your passion and make money from it.” Therefore, what are some of the stories that you’ve heard?

Dan: It’s interesting the way you phrase that question because people, a lot of times, assume that if they really move towards their passion and what they really enjoy—they are going to see a reduced income. Where it’s so ironic that we look at it like that, I ask all this all the time: do you think it’s easier to make money making something you love or something you hate? Yet, people with that old idea about what work is just something we have to tolerate. There’s still the assumption that if you enjoy it, surely you can’t make money. When we have people move into, what they truly do enjoy, and what their passion is, etc. Not only is there a sense of relief in terms of accomplishment, fulfillment, and peace to know what they are doing, sometimes the money just breaks in on them. They were surprised!

David: Wow.

Dan: I know a young guy who is a painter. He is actually a pastor trying to make that work and starting off what pastor’s typically do, he was working at a holyday during the weeknights to try and keep the lights on. As I started to work with him, it was clear that his passion was painting, and he had never done anything to generate income. I helped transition him into that by first doing coat finishes, for four years. He did coat finishes on people’s walls. It had a dramatic effect, and it gave him the freedom to do the grand painting that he does today.

Today, he doesn’t do coat finishes anymore, for he does his paintings. His average painting sells for about eight thousand dollars, and he’s making just multiple income that he’s ever dreamed of making as a pastor. I have a lot of stories about people who moved into what they really love and have seen the fruit explode their success in multiple areas of their life. But if we are talking about how to make money, he has a very active website. He has two scenes in his artwork. His art is in the finest galleries all across the country, in Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, etc.

David: That’s a niche. I mean, so he’s narrowed it down

Dan: Very narrow. You’ve been hearing in Nashville when somebody talks about his art, he’s the guy.

David: Wow.

Dan: This guy is amazing. He’s going to find restaurants around town. He’s already been there, so he’s done very well. Also, he has a strong Internet presence because once people recognize his name, and they can go directly to his website and get additional pieces, so he sells a lot, direct from his website.

David: Awesome, he doesn’t understand what it means like where to start.

Dan: You do that because people who are creative, who have really good technical or artistic skills, a lot of times don’t understand the marketing that’s required.

David: I’m glad you brought that up, yeah, that’s so huge.

Dan: Good question. It’s just like I work a lot of writers. People who want to write a book and the process. You make a lot of money writing books, and you continue, but I tell people, here’s the formula. You want to make money, regularly, okay, write your book. Now, you’re ten percent finished, ninety percent. How you going to position it? How you going to promote it?

David: Yes.

Dan: Where are you going to market this? Who’s going to buy it? Without that, you make nothing, so it’s not just the matter of having the talent. You also have to understand how this is going to transfer into a business, but then if you do that, I don’t care if you are introverted and shy, you can be extremely successful because of what technology allows us to do today. The Internet opens doors unavailable to people ten years ago in any form or fashion.

David: Absolutely, one of the stories I just got through an interview with a guy, John Nelson, interviewed him on Saturday. If there’s anything that might be obscure that you could make money from, this would probably almost classify. He makes about a hundred thousand dollars gross on juggling supplies. Juggling! How many jugglers you know out there in the world? The Internet creates the world as your market place. It really is true. It’s not just in Nashville, Tennessee, or Cincinnati, Ohio, you open up to the world. So, there might only be twenty thousand people that want to juggle in the entire world, but all twenty thousand people are going to know about juggling: www.jugglenow.com.

Dan: I have a client who wanted to stay at home. She’s a registered nurse. She wanted to be primarily available for her children, but still saw the responsibility to contribute to the family income. So it’s the way I work, looking at what kind of life do you want. First, we can find plenty of opportunities to create income; it just depends on what you want to have in place. Therefore, we are looking at those characteristics and seeing what she enjoys, and she likes quilting.

I thought, “oh my gosh, that’s something any mother would want to do.” I was blown away from the popularity of quilting, now if she was to open a little shop on the queen street on the plain front of Tennessee, a logical kind of thing to do, she would really have her work cut out for her. She would have to find those few people in a five-mile radius who were going to be willing to walk into her store. Then, she has to be there on weekends and evenings. This is when her kids are home, so what we designed for her personal life. So, she has a site called www.realwomenquilt.com. She probably has ten different methods of churning the income.

David: Wow.

Dan: She has the electronic product, and she’s a distributor for multiple books. Therefore, she can spend two hours a day on her website, doing something she absolutely loves with ladies all over the world through the Internet. See, she has an obscure hobby area, and she’s absolutely knocking it out of the park.

David: It’s interesting about this kind of a niche—you become an expert. You are viewed as an expert, and you are going to make more money; even though, you are limiting the people you are selling to. They see you as the go-to person. There’s nobody else, so it’s kind of him versus these other websites. Then, you can see they are desperate to make money because they have every product known to man, and there’s no theme to the website.

Dan: Yeah, they don’t like to be too transparent. They just try the hot products.

David: Exactly and I hate to say it, but you see, they mean well, but at the same time, they are not helping. You really have to give something with quality, and at the same time, believe that you are doing it. You give, in your book, the five predictors to success, let’s go through each one of those five and talk about them. The reason why I put this structure together is because people are so blocked by fear, and they are not an expert and feel like they can’t find the passion. After reading this book, people realize and discuss that you actually put this into a forty-day plan, so we are going to get into that here in a little bit. Let’s go back to your five predictors of success: number one, you talk about passion, let’s elaborate.

Dan: Okay, people often have the worst system for business were the trends make the hot thing and those have nothing to do with what you use to start looking for a business. You start with what are you already interested in. You start with what you already know about. You start with what you find is a recurring theme. Then, if it’s growing dandelions and if it’s growing dandelions, then make that your niche. In contrast, you have opportunities in computer science. Why don’t you do that? Go were your heart is and let’s see that play out. You’re just like the guy who’s juggling. It doesn’t interest me, but that’s his passion, there are plenty of opportunities to find what it is that your heart is already telling you.

David: That’s good, let’s talk about determination, number two.

Dan: It takes a plan. It takes more than just flirting with an idea. I tell people: everybody has wishes and dreams, but to turn it into reality by making it into a goal. Then, you got it! If you want to do something, tell me your time line, you want to drive an M3 BWM? Then tell me how much it costs? What date you want to have it, and we can break it down. I can tell you what you need to do today to make that a reality, so it’s that kind of thing, determination. It means you got to have a plan from the list of desirables. You need a plan.

David: Gotcha, so we are still talking about determination, about the get rich quick mentality and you see that online.

Dan: Plenty, I see people who get domains, and they put them up based on one product, and they are just chasing a quick hit with their product. Then, they are gone, and they reappear somewhere else. It’s so bland when I see that because it’s so transparent, and you can see that people stay away from this kind of activity, even the Bible say that a quick success can become a failure essentially. It doesn’t work, there’s no point.

Even in having an electronic newsletter. It’s so tempting to spam people, and then somehow claim to have a big mailing list, yet you are spamming people, which is so negative. It’ll just come back to haunt you. I started with fifty-seven people on a mailing list, and I wanted it to grow. I wanted it to grow so badly. But, we just went over 71,000 people, and every single person had to request to be on there.

That gives me a whole lot more power with what I’m able to do with world subscribers rather than if I had somehow tried to jam people on there. So, quick is not the best option; however, you can get to that level today, so much quicker today, with the use of technology. If I open a bookstore in the town where I live, it takes a long time for the word to spread. But if I put that on the Internet, even if I get a tiny, tiny portion of people interested in my particular topic, I still can knock it out of the park. The numbers change so dramatically when you have an online presence.

David: You can literally come out with your own product within a day, so and maybe making money by the next day. Therefore, do like joint ventures with other website owners and various other options. I’m going to tell them about myself because I want people to think about my mistakes and actually to say David, “he realized he made a mistake.” I might go down that route. I did a website about all the ways that people are searching about on the Internet. You find a hot market, and then you give them what they want. Some searching found all these people putting car videos in their vans and SUVs and Yukon.

I was like wow, let me see, so I searched and I’m never going to own a DVD player in my car. But I put up a website, and I got people to write articles. Then, I put an ad hire for people for web design. After about a month, a month and a half, I just stopped. The reason why I stopped, I could care less about car radio. I could care less. I was all in it for the money and that was just the wrong. You cannot start like that, so it’s the word. You cannot do that because you are not going to want to work. When you write your newsletter, on Mondays or something, it takes two hours or something; you do it because you enjoy it, because you actually enjoy helping people. You found work you love, so it’s not really work anymore.

Dan: That’s right, that’s when you turn the corner where it’s not worth, it’s an old sales print to follow. If you’re trying to sell Mercedes, but you drive a Chevy truck, you’re going to have a problem. You can’t sell something well that you don’t totally believe in yourself. It’s not just the mechanics of selling, but it becomes true selling, sharing enthusiasm. If you go to a great movie, if you tell twenty of your friends, and you tell the people you see that’s the most authentic form of selling. Everyday, we manipulating the economy. Even if it’s online, you can’t do that well. For you to tell, it’s so much easier with everything, if you just do something you really enjoy and build from there.

David: Awesome. Moving on, step three of the predictors of success, talent. Just elaborate on that a little bit.

Dan: Well, just like that guy I mentioned who does these beautiful artwork. He never had an art class or went to art school or anything.

David: Wow.

Dan: He had just a God given talent. Recognition! Where does your talent lie? What is it that you know about and build from that.

David: Gotcha. Self-Discipline.

Dan: Self-Discipline is really what makes all the others work. Without that, the best ideas don’t persist. You have to believe in something that comes from a true interest of your own already, without that you don’t have enough steam to carry you through this period. Self-Discipline is just what it means. It’s a person that needs to be micro-managed needs to have someone to tell them when to get out, when to be at work and take a break midway through the morning.

They are probably not even capable of this kind of business that we are talking about. You have to be someone who is self-motivated and who is encouraged by the prospect of what is going to happen. The thrill of taking an idea and putting it together. Without that, just finding the best application is what you can do in a traditional job, don’t do this.

David: You have an interesting number five that some people just leave out. I don’t see how people do—because it’s so crucial to face.

Dan: Yeah, no matter how well intentioned and designed the plan is, there comes that point where it really takes a step of faith. I don’t mean whether it’s in the spiritual sense or in the regular sense of what faith is, it’s making that step: “Oh, I don’t know what’s up ahead step.” There’s a wonderful scene in a Harrison Ford movie where he and his Dad were searching for this special treasure, and they had done all these things right, gone through the gauntlet, and boom, they come to this canyon.

There’s no earthly way you can get across, if steps off the edge. Then, he’s going to drop to his death. It’s clear, and yet he’s so confident that somehow he’s on the right path because all the acts that preceded getting up to that point and that the beautiful point where he just puts his foot out and then boom the path appears. Because he came across under his foot and supported him under his path and the next step. People do the kind of thing that we are talking about, entrepreneurial leaps, for we deal with people all the time.

David: Okay, Yeah.

Dan: That’s what keeps us going and gives us the juice that keep going, but that’s what stays and somebody not able to pull that trigger at that point, is going to have a harder time doing it. I’m a big believe in a careful plan and a clear sense of where your going—then do it. If you can see everything that was going to come, then it be easier. It separates you from the pack, once you can say, boom, this is one. We are getting to launch a new website.

You could say, a coaching network that connects coaches around the country to help them not in the profession of coaching, but in the business of coaching. Now, we are building an all technology-driven infrastructure. We have personal landing pages for people, and some technology that is brand new. Just awesome, just on the cutting edge, all in place, and got a team of people working on that, requires more of an investment from me than anything I’ve ever done in my life.

David: Wow.

Dan: Now, I wouldn’t do that unless I had some background knowledge of what of the future predictions. My vision.

David: That’s good, yeah.

Dan: Because of my experience and what I’ve done already, I am totally convinced for the need and very confident of the response that we are going to get. Now if we don’t get the response that I want. I will have boo-booed. But, I’m willing to risk, and do what it takes and what we are going to do and get my toe in the water. We’re going to launch this, with the most sophisticated features and website that I’ve ever seen in my life. Better than what we are doing now, with our website, which is very profitable for us. It’s done extremely well, but I would consider that presence about a three.

David: Wow.

Dan: We’re getting ready to launch a ten!

David: My goodness, and as anyone that I know that has been to www.48days.com, there’s tons of resources, not to mention the newsletter signup. Therefore, you do have a coaching program, but we’re going to get into that in a second with 48 days. I’ve talked to Joe Elliott the other day, mister fired dot com, and he was steered or stopped me because I was terrified of HTML. I thought, the code that you use to make websites, and I didn’t do anything.

I kept reading and had to buy another book, and all it comes down to a need to build a website, and then I finally did it. I got that, made some money, and I put out my own CD and then it took me another two years to put this book out that I’m putting together right now. I should have done this two years ago because I didn’t need anything else. Fear was stopping me, but luckily I’m passionately passionate about what I’m doing, so that’s carrying me back through it. Also, I have a plan, but it definitely starts with a passion. You have determination.

Dan: Well, I am very much a novice when it comes to how the technology works, but there are people that understand that much better working for me. So if I have the idea, I can get people and make it work. I don’t have a clue about how some of the technically features work, but I’ve surrounded myself with people who bring their skills to the table. They go to places that I could never reach on my own. We do talent seminars that’s another application of technology, totally electronic. It’s promoted electronically, people register, auto responders, sign up, when the time comes on the day of the teleseminar—the people will get a downloadable PDF.

David: Now what is a teleseminar? What is that?

Dan: A teleseminar is where we simply have a topic, and I’m going to talk about that topic on the telephone.

David: Wow.

Dan: We are going to register for a class, but they are simply going to put on their headset. The last one we did was on starting your own business, something that is very hot on the Internet, starting your own business with people from Singapour, Seattle, Australia, England. Next, we didn’t have 3000 people—we had 246 people. On that telephone seminar!

David: This is on the phone together?

Dan: On the phone, but we didn’t promote in that we are going to do this in the renaissance hotel, in Nashville, Tennessee. You have to arrange and all they had to do was pick up their phone for seventy minutes and participate. To allow, again, a small group of people from a broad geographic to participate, but it was a hundred and thirty nine dollars and if you got the MP3 file and the transcript, You can do it for an extra ten dollars. For a hundred forty nine, which virtually everyone did. Over thirty thousand dollars, I’ve never done that in a live seminar.

David: My gosh! I’m going to stop you real quick because you said something really profound. In this conversation, you don’t get anything out of it, at least get this—what you are saying about it right here is hundreds of thousands of dollars, an idea, a topic. Overall, your passion, and you rented a phone line, a bridge line, or whatever it is that you can actually have people call in on the same number and be on the same line.

They used to call them the party line or something like that it was a long time ago. I’ve heard about it, anyways. People actually paid you to be on the phone, with you, a hundred and thirty nine dollars and then the MP3 was just a downloadable audio version of the phone call as well as the PDF adobe, which you just got for a hundred thirty nine dollars. So, you got a product right there that you can sell over and over and over again, and you can do that on any topic known to man.

Dan: So, it’s not only the immediate registration fees, you’re right, we created an instant product, which is then available, again, electronically.

David: Yes.

Dan: We don’t have to create a physical product at all. I did one recently called right to the bank: how to turn writing into income. We had about two hundred fifty people involved, and you can work on the numbers. Then, the product on the website on the day we had it on the website, but it was an all electronic product. People downloaded sixty three copies.

David: My gosh, again people still don’t understand the technology. There’s hardly any cost in this right, maybe credit card processing, which is a little bit different than pay by hits.

Dan: Yeah, and they’re like the bridge line. I use bridge lines so much that I pay a flat fee. Now, it’s like five hundred dollars that covers us no matter what. We use them for whatever.

David: Also, people are starting out and get the mortgage payment and the grocery and put shoes on their kids feet, etc. Their just broke, so you can go to free conference dot com and will get you started. You can also be the Marlin Sanders, the huge marketer, and he said that the other day, there’s this thing called Isle River. You can go out and get yourself Isle River for a hundred twenty bucks.

Then, you attach this device to your cell phone, and it records almost with the quality of being in a studio. You can say, he has literally sat at a Starbucks, just him and a buddy or assistant, made a product, a marketing product at their favorite shop, Starbucks in Houston, Texas, and he did it from his cell phone. He’ll send that up on his computer and sell that for a downloadable file for like thirty bucks and so. You can get started with your own product for a hundred and twenty buck, if you want to go that way.

Dan: Absolutely.

David: It does not take a lot of money at all.

Dan: I’ve done those from fancy studios, and I’ve discontinued that because there’s really no difference in doing that than on my own home phone.

David: Stick at that, this is what we are doing.

Dan: I use my own home phone. I just put the headset on. It’s just as good as anything else we’ve done so far.

David: If you’re a fan of quilting, if you’re a fan of juggling, if you’re a fan of painting, all these different venues, people will pay you for your information. Don’t think that you can’t make money from your passion. You know Dan. We’re talking about stories that you’ve actually helped, but you have a story. We’re going to go and transition into now, which is forty eight days dot com, and you have forty eight days to the work, which is a book.

Now on page, like, seventy-three, I don’t know if you have a copy in front of you, but on page seventy-three of your creative income, you tell a story about how you actually started your own online business. I’d like to start talking about that you actually came up with the forty eight days to the work. You started that in Sunday school. Let’s talk about that a little if you don’t mind.

Dan: Okay, I love sales, and I had a sale training company and was doing fine with that, but I agreed to be part of a group at our church. Well, actually, I was just teaching at Sunday school class on career, white planning, and we started to have so many people. Some people from other churches came, and I realized that how much of a vacuum there was for this kind of material.

It’s something I love because I love career and business ideas. Since I was a little kid, I liked a sport that makes sense and have fun doing it. So, we moved the Sunday school from Sunday afternoon to Monday night, so we could have two uninterrupted hours and allow people in the community to come. I did that for almost ten years. It was during that period of time and using that group that I had a wonderful format for just testing ideas and developing the material that turned into the initial group.

Initially, I didn’t have anything to hand out, and I may take in weekly notes and hand them out, but people would say how can I get what you are talking about and give it to my uncle Harry. I have a brother-in-law that needs to hear this. It was out of those repeated requests that I finally just put it together and literally did on our own printer, hard cover that we ran through the cover and took to Kinko’s and had them spiral bound. It was unsophisticated, and then I went to a friend’s house one Saturday morning and this was years ago, and we hung a blanket on either side to block out the sound’s of his kid’s playing, and I did the first cassette tape.

David: No way.

Dan: Then, made it into a spiral bound book and cassette—one cassette was my first product.

David: This is a long time ago, but was there a fear factor. Were you scared in this new territory?

Dan: It was scary, but I had so many requests for it. I was always, and my business developed. I was behind the curve for what people were already asking me for. That kind of removes the fear and again is the best way to start a business. A lot of times, people are being asked for their advice on a topic or for a product or service that they provide beyond their ability to produce or deliver.

Then, it’s just a great way to find a business and frankly that what we did. I was spending thirty or forty hours a week just meeting with people and helping them through the career transition and business ideas in my life. I said look, you are helping all these other people do this, if there’s that much demand for it, why don’t you make that your business rather than just a ministry area.

David: Wow.

Dan: It really kind of surprised me when I got to the point. When I did—it was like a dam broke. Next, I started charging for services instead of just giving it away. People were lined-up at my door. They thought it had more value at a critical point because there’s a real connection between cost and perceived value and sometimes when it’s free, people will assume that it’s not worth much. If it costs them, then it’s worth more, and I saw that immediately going out, so my work has really evolved from doing volunteer work.

I was doing initially at my church, but once we opened the door for making money, then it was a concept process of developing and trying to leverage my time. At one point, I was seeing clients to help them with these kinds of issues. I was doing the coach thing six days of the week. I could keep myself booked as much as I wanted to. Today, I see people one day a week. Because I’ve come up with so many other ways to leverage my time, so I can spend two hours doing something that has the potential to help thousands of people rather than one.

I hope that doesn’t sound snobbish, I’m hard to get to, and I struggle with that because we get hundreds and hundreds of requests for my personal coaching. At this point, we have a network of coaches, and I refer those out, so we have a system in place to handle that. I just have some overrides on everything that happens there. Lots of coaches doing coaching—I can override them in what they’re doing, but I’ve built in systems. Therefore, we have multiple streams of income or helping people get through to the kind of information. Most of it driven through my technology.

David: Wow, speaking of that, let’s talk about how you drive traffic to your website. You have your electronic newsletter. The newsletter grows, right now, it grows at about a hundred and fifty subscribers a day and only with people sharing it with other people. Now do want some things to nurture?

Dan: We don’t do anything that costs money, hard for some people to understand, but you got to pay for search engines and pay for ads. Now, I don’t do any of that. I’ve never paid a penny for any of that. But, as you mentioned earlier, I write articles and submit them to our supply CBM, Crosswalk, Lifeway, lots of others. I write for magazines, and a lot of those I’m actually pay. Now, that’s not my focus, because what I want is the constant exposure that comes from the article. The exposure costs me nothing and drives thousands of people to our website.

David: For the listener and for the readers, what you just said is a million dollar strategy. Another guy that I know in the book is Willie Crawford, just one of his websites makes fifty thousand dollars a year selling a cookbook. His name marketing strategy over the past eight to ten years has literally been writing articles and submitting them at: you got articles dot com and article directory dot com, places like that that are free. Also, the search engines pick them up, and he says, he probably has three hundred articles written. Now, he couldn’t even turn the faucet off as far as visitors if he tried. He could stop right now. He gets visitors, hundreds of thousands, just from ten years ago.

Dan: That’s why I laugh because we get messages like that all the time. We get somebody referring to an offering on the software, and oh my gosh that was ten years ago. Where are they seeing that? As much as I try to turn those things off, it’s an incremental event, once you start, it just multiplies itself. Truly what we call viral marketing. Where it’s not traditional by billboard. I don’t do any of that, in the yellow pages, frankly I’m not even sure I’m even listed there.

David: Yep.

Dan: Now, I depend totally on that kind of viral marketing. Another point, people are obsessed with how they come up on the search engines, and again I’m not very sophisticated in my understanding of how that works. But, I’ll tell you what I do know. If you put in career coaching into Google, coaching you come up with over fifteen million, I’m probably in there somewhere, but I have no earthly idea where, but if you put in forty eight days, any day of the week. I’m going to own it in seven of the first ten to connect, no matter what.

See, don’t just be a landscaping guy, don’t just be an interior decorator, come up with something that brands you something that sets you apart and gives you a unique selling position. You have the top without spending money on the search engines. The key is not to force your way in using generic terms, and come up with something where people know what they are talking about.

Forty-eight days has worked extremely well for us. Present a proposal by my publisher now because of the success of forty-eight days to the work—you love, which is now on hard back. Then, we’ve got a workbook with CDs to accompany that we’ve got a DVD coming out. We’ve also got a proposal for six more forty-eight days to titles, which speaks volumes about what they see happening with those products in the mass media.

David: You build a brand.

Dan: They want everything I write to be forty-eight days.

David: Okay, someone says, I’m not Dan Miller. I don’t have publishers calling me, but you didn’t either. You didn’t either when you first started. You started out with Sunday school. You worked with what you got. Then, you started selling it up to the ten to sixty thousands copies amount, and then after several years, somebody started calling you, like a publisher called Haltman, started calling to talk about that success. What happened there?

Dan: A lot of people, look for traditional paths, they really don’t need because there are so many ways to visualize an exciting and creative path. This gentlemen has been trying to call me or writing me by email. I want to write a book: how can I get it in Barnes and Noble? If that is your only method of marketing that you have in mind, I encourage you not to write a book. Because that happens so far down the path and to make that happen is not even something that I can help out. What I do know and told him, I sold over two million dollars worth with of “Forty-Eight Days to the Work You Love,” without ever selling to a bookstore or through a bookstore.

David: Wow.

Dan: I was just selling them myself, and what happens then is just what you described, once you do that, you better believe it, you get people’s attention. I got publishes knocking at my door walking over each other because it’s like that old ironic getting a loan at the bank. They loan you the money if you don’t need it. If you really need, they don’t want to loan it to you. Publishers are the same way, if you don’t have a track record of success, they don’t want to talk to you. They don’t want a list on you. You already have the expense to show. Overall, what we are doing right now is electronic publishing because the margins are so incredible.

David: Absolutely.

Dan: Even at this point, with the success we’ve had with Costcos and Barnes and Nobles, and commercially published products, I still make way more money on what I sell myself. Way more, the publishing is nice for image, but that’s not where money comes from, and the way I make money, the very non-traditional way, behind the scenes. We don’t have a storefront, no place to drive up to. I have one employee. You know when I talk about having a team and all, thus I have lots and lots of independent contractors. People whose service I use. I don’t have a company, meetings in the morning, and incidentally that one employee is my daughter.

David: Wow.

Dan: Two sons and a daughter, and they all work for me full time.

David: Man, that’s just a blessing

Dan: It is.

David: This business provides for your family too? You get to do things that you love?

Dan: My son, just had his fifth baby yesterday, they live in Divide, Colorado. I live in Nashville, Tennessee. They love the snow. Snowboard and skis and all these things. I don’t find that appealing. The cool thing is we work together. We work together on every project. He’s my marketing director, but because of technology, he’s able to on the other side of the country, and it has no impact on our ability to work together.

David: Putting this book together, there’s a lot of things that I don’t know how to do, and I farm out. I go to rent a code dot com or e-alliance dot com, and I’ve got people, actually two people right now in Romania transcribing for me. I’ve got a lady. I’ve got a lady transcribing two audios because I don’t transcribe, so I just paid somebody twenty bucks to transcribe my audios, so you don’t have to do this. I can get graphic designs done, software design done, which is all-coming together from an idea. You distill the idea, and then you can get it done. You don’t have to know everything.

Dan: Correct, the pieces are easy to pull in together. I’ve got a company in Hong Kong to do the printing on a series of inspirational quotation book we are going to have. Forty-eight days to hook back into life, and forty-eight days to outstanding people skills, forty-eight days to future vitality, and so on, all being made into books. I found them through an online source. I’ve gotten quotes from them. I’m seen their product samples, and we are ready to go.

David: My goodness. It’s awesome, this phone call is huge. This only interview is worth an entire chapter for the entire book because I know the stuff works because I’ve done it, and you’ve done it. A lot of people in my book have done it, so I’m interviewing them all a bunch of time. Therefore, just to wrap up what is something that you would like to leave with the audience as far as for the newbie that’s starting a line, or the person that doesn’t even know that this stuff exists. My transcriber, one of my transcribers is saying, I had no idea that this thing even existed.

Dan: In one of the magazines that I got from the store, just got a note from one of the editors. I write for a magazine, and I have a great relationship with him. I got a note about a month ago that he would be leaving, within the next two weeks. I certainly congratulate you on moving forward in a positive direction, if that’s what it is for you. I enjoyed working with you, but I’m going to tell you that it’s been a pleasure reading your material. Overall, I’ve made the right choice and moved on.

David: So what happens when they read the material and move on? They don’t do the same work for you anymore.

Dan: A couple of things, one thing is, I tell people, as a conclusion, I tell people you can become an expert on anything if you read three books on one topic it doesn’t take much to set yourself apart from the rest of the pack. If you do that, just read three books, on many streams of income on the Internet, you are going to know more than ninety-nine percent of the Internet. What everybody knows about this kind of business, so there’s people asking a lot about forty-eight days. Why forty-eight days because I talked to so many people that say, “geez, some day, I want to do this. Some day, I want a better job, some day I want to start my own business” and I see them two years later, and they haven’t done anything. They are exactly at the same place.

David: Yep.

Dan: It breaks my heart, and I’ve identified forty-eight days as ample time to take a fresh look at where I’m at now and where I want to be in the future. Get the advice from a number of other people, look at multiple options, narrow it down, choose the best one and act. Be strong with that model, take forty-eight days, make a plan and act on it, and you will be amazed at the window of opportunities that will open up.

David: Wow, awesome, well thanks again Dan for taking the time to do the interview, this is a thousand dollar call right here with the information you gave. Thanks again and God bless.

Dan: All right, thank you Dave.