POWER OF FREE! #6: What’s Your Story in Intelligent Content Marketing: Winning It Back
2009 2010 I’m out of options. So I said to my son who’s living in Hong Kong, and I’m in Australia, I said to my sister, my son, we’re going back into the immigration business. He said, Oh, yeah, what’s this all about?
Are we do this then? I said, Well, you know why Tim? Oh, we need to do is rewrite the Hong Kong visa handbook. I can do that. It’s no big deal for me. But the Hong Kong visa handbook that I originally wrote in 1996, it just remains sort of a text thing. Because that’s was that was all that bandwidth and processing power and all that good stuff was available to you. So it was very, you know, wasn’t particularly feature rich. So I said in light, and I said, you know, everything that we need now to deliver feature rich contents available, and it’s dirt cheap, really, you know, it’s $5 a month for this at $10 a month for that. I said, you know, let’s assemble a business like we did around, you know, the Hong Kong visa handbook in 1996.
We just do it better this time. And we use all the capabilities of the modern internet. I said, you know, I’m in Australia, I can’t be in Hong Kong delivering the consultations, but I can do all the work remotely. I can organize the underground arrangements for running things around in Hong Kong, so why not? Okay, how are we going to do it? So we came up with this idea of having two websites, one called the Hong Kong visa Handbook, and the other called the Hong Kong Visa Center, in Hong Kong visa handbook is a completely ad free, no, no pressure to buy experience, that just gives you all the content that you need to solve your problem, like the Wikipedia of Hong Kong, immigration, and then recognizing that people who look at your content and have now they’ve been taught how to solve their problem, can make this make an informed decision about whether they need any help. And if they need some help, what level of help do they need?
And how can you deliver that help to them in a way that’s acceptable at the right price? So it just makes sense to actually, you know, seek that help in the first place? What does that business model look like? How can we use existing, existing available technologies to do that, what it was all their fax to email, Skype, payments by PayPal, so they’re dirt cheap. So we put that together. And it took us six weeks to get our first set of paid instructions. And then we effectively haven’t stopped selling since ever since. In the early days, we bought traffic. And I’m not quite sure how effective that was. But it it it got people to contact us. So people were certainly visiting the site. And we were trying our hardest playing the unnatural SEO game, with all these ridiculous exercises in manifesting various spam websites and spam piling and information through through certain sort of feeds and streams and just basically sending rubbish out on the internet, supposedly to improve your SEO.
So once we figured out that that was all nonsense, we decided that we had a missing piece, because if we were going to publish regularly, then I needed another website, because I needed a daily content update site. And by having that in place, then I had an opportunity to reach out to the people who have these problems, and then they would be unable to have their problem solved or they could seek a specific answer from me. And by availing of them them of a service where you get a reply, a podcast replies to the question that you asked within 48 hours, we’re able to keep our core Hong Kong visa handbook content, up to date with the ongoing realities of how immigration is being experienced day to day by people who’ve got problems in seeking our answers from it. So you can add that to the content mix. So it makes your content live and interesting. So we needed them to have a third website.
So that was going to be called the Hong Kong visa Giza website because it was the idea of Iris and using all the stuff that I’ve discussed in other sections are the top thus far, we incrementally built up a foundation of content of products and services that are all reflected in here in the purple cow fashion. And these are the three brands that we have manifested on the internet. And as I mentioned, this is the kind of performance that we’ve had. Since we started to do that, recognizing that we’ve got a tribe that is at least 50,000 strong. So during these years, what has happened is that the money came back. And the problems that I had, well started to get solved. And as we grew more and more in demand, as a business, it meant we had more readily available funds for investing. So we then invested in the video Chacha business, which is the content production business. And, and in order to sort of maintain the fusion of the content production business, and the immigration business, I realized that I needed to have another kind of irresistible offer a kind of a really generous proposition that I could give to people.
Where, essentially, I could promulgate my own visa geezer idea virus, but do it in a way that is So ultimately, so altruistic, genuine, and generous, that it really doesn’t matter, the fact that you’ve used it to promulgate you know, your own interests in that fashion. So I’ve come up with this program called the visa geezer interviews. And we’re interviewing 250 entrepreneurs over the next five years. And we’re going to create a record of modern social history as to what the entrepreneurial community is actually up to in this town during this really interesting time. You see, my proposition is that everything that I have achieved so far, it’s available to be achieved in every other niche by anybody at any point in time.
And for me, it’s just a question of when are people going to realize that all you have to do is this stuff and it’s fair is there for us this is, this is a surefire win. And it’s, it’s interesting for me, because it’s obvious to me what you need to do, but people haven’t cottoned on to it yet. And then watching people’s response to how we have achieved this makes it worthy of committing to record now, because I want to be able, at the end of these 250 interviews, to be able to look back at that and say, Well, really given now what’s up self evident to everybody? How evident was it to the people that were in business in Hong Kong in that time to them so.
This is really forged now our opportunity to continually give back to our community. And in exchange whenever there’s an opportunity for service need. We anticipate that the vast majority of people who’ve got relationships with will instruct us.
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