Terry: Hi, you’re listening to Terry Telford from TheBusinessProfessional.com. This audio is copyrighted by Bridgeport Communications and The Business Professional. All of the material you’re about to hear is for informational purposes only. The results you here are not a guarantee. Any results you achieve are based on your own individual efforts. We’re lucky to have Marc Goldman from GoldBar.net on the call today. Marc is a joint venture expert. He’s going to tell us exactly how to work a successful joint venture. So, I’d like to start off by saying thank you very much for being on the call, Marc. Marc: Thanks for having me, Terry. I’m excited to be here today and share information with your listeners. Terry: Thank you so much. I think the first thing you could do is tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and whatnot. Marc: Sure thing. I’m 32 years old. I was born and raised in New York. One thing that I think people might find interesting, but maybe I’m wrong, is that I was never really interested in business growing up. My father is in the commercial finance business and is a deal maker extraordinaire. As a rebellious young teenager, as many young teenagers are, I was interested in doing anything possible to avoid being in business and being in the corporate world. I majored in psychology and philosophy in college, so I have both of those on my resume. I ended up working in the psychology field for a while and decided that it really wasn’t towards me. So, I steered myself towards computers, knowing that I was getting dangerously close to the business world, but still thinking, in my rebellious 20’s, that I could stay clear of that. In college, I had met my future wife, Terri, who works in the business and is a full partner in the business. While we were dating, we talked many times about working together. We realized that the only way we’d be able to do that, since we were both majoring in psychology, was to open up a practice together, but both of us decided we weren’t Love What You Do And You’ll Never Work Another Day In Your Life interested in psychology after we both got degrees in it. The only other way was to start a business. So, I had to shift this motto that I had for 20 years and start thinking about business. We got interested in the mail order business, and like many people who were interested in starting, we tried a bunch of different things and lost money. We invented a toy and lost $15,000. Finally, we hit on something that worked, which was selling a book through direct mail. This was a particular book and book distributor program that we had gotten a hold of, and we were fairly successful selling it offline, which is how we started our business. That’s different from a lot of people online because they just jump in and get into the online world. We actually sold a product through two-step advertising, which is where you place and ad and somebody calls who is interested and asks for more information. You send them a sales letter. We were successful at this model. The cost of direct mail is very high. They’re dropping now, and it’s something that we have in combination with our online marketing mix. It used to be cost prohibited, and at that time, we had to have full- time jobs to run this part-time. We realized our dreams, so we got into online marketing where we thought the cost would be low. That was around 1995. We studied, and then 1995 was really the infancy of online marketing. There weren’t very many people online, and there weren’t many people teaching about marketing online. There have been people marketing since the 80’s using CompuServe and AOL, there really wasn’t anybody who compiled that information and taught you how to do it. The Internet changes at such a rapid pace, so what was out there was just a random marketing idea. We used to try everything; we tried to get noticed on the search engine, FFAs, classified ads, press releases, and everything under the sun. We finally found out about five or ten different things that worked including writing articles, search engines, and a couple of other things at that time. You could submit to free classifieds and it paid $10 for an AOL classified. It could do fairly well. We’ll talk about this a little later in the interview, but it wasn’t until much later on until we realized that joint ventures were really the most powerful marketing technique we could use. That was the one we decided to focus on. I’d really like to share some things with your listeners later on about focusing on just one marketing technique.

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