I hope you’re buckled in, because my guest this week is an online business expert who is renowned for “telling it like it is.” Ramit Sethi is a master communicator who pulls no punches. When it comes to sheer mental confidence, there's no one quite like him in the online marketing world.

As a result, he’s had massive success in developing products that get huge results for his clients. His secret to developing these products is just one of the things we discussed in our interview. Our conversation was a great mix of lessons on mindset and tactical product creation strategies.

You should really listen to the whole interview, because there's way too much to fit into a blog post. But here are some of the highlights:

Redefining a Rich Life

Ramit’s landmark book is called I Will Teach You To Be Rich. But the strategies he teaches in this book and elsewhere aren’t aimed exclusively at people who want to blow $5,000 on a weekend in Vegas (but if that's your jam, Ramit thinks it's great!). Ramit says that the rich life is different for each person. For many of us, a rich life simply means being able to work from home, take our kids to work with us, building a business where money is automated and we can focus more time on the things we love.

In other words, money is an important part of having a rich life, but money is not the whole picture.

No matter how you define a rich life, Ramit says it all comes down to just a few big “wins.” If you get just five or ten of these wins, you don’t have to sweat the small stuff, and you can focus more on the things you really love.

How Fear Will Hold You Back

Ramit talks candidly about the toxic influence of fear, which gets in the way of achieving these big wins. You’d never know it to hear him talk now, but Ramit himself struggled a lot with fear in the early days of starting his online brand.

"I had been writing my blog for about two or three years and I had never made a cent. I didn’t want people to think I started my blog just as a way to make money because that was never the intention.

I was absolutely petrified that people would not buy it or, even worse, that they would call me a sell out. You can see it in the sales copy that I wrote. The way I wrote that sales copy was so cowardly.

I literally said, 'Why should you pay for this? I know you can find a lot of stuff for free.' My self confidence was so low that anyone would buy it that … I literally tried to defend it before they even bought."

But people did buy it. And they thanked Ramit for putting his information out there. What’s more, those buyers ended up opening his emails, joined other courses he offered, and took action on the things he taught them.

"The real people, the people I actually wanted to focus on, were buying and they were delighted to pay."

In other words, Ramit had found his target market. (Want to listen to the entire interview? Click here now!)

Learn to Fail Well

If you read Ramit’s blog, you’ll find a tag in it labeled “Failures.” This is where Ramit keeps an ongoing log of the things he has tried that haven’t worked out. Believe it or not, even go-getters like Ramit crash and burn sometimes. He even told me about one occasion, not that long ago, where one of his courses had a flaw in it so bad that within an hour of releasing it online, he was getting refund requests from people who had just purchased it!

Ramit says he has trained himself to look at failures not as catastrophes, but as tests. Every failure reveals data, he says, and every bit of data you get is pointing you in the right direction.

In the situation above, if he’d simply decided his course didn’t work and then moved on to the next one, that would really have been a waste of time, effort and resources. Instead, he took it as a test of the course’s weak points, found the problem, fixed it, added some new material, remarketed it to a different group, and ended up building massive success.

"My belief is if I’m not adding multiple failures to that every month then I am probably not trying ambitiously enough. If you go talk to a successful person and ask them to tell you about their failures they ask you if you have all day, because they have 50 things they have had problems with."

The Making of “Zero to Launch”

Ramit’s latest course is one that he calls his most ambitious ever…which is saying something! In our interview, he gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of how this product was put together.

A luxury experience. Ramit’s products are carefully tailored to the client who buys them, for their expertise level and for their needs right at that moment. He compares the experience to visiting a great tailor or hairdresser, where you don’t even have to tell them what you want—you just sit down and let them work their magic. Similarly, Ramit’s clients can trust the material to guide them through every aspect of what they’re learning.
1 answer instead of 20. As with all his products, Ramit did thousands of hours of research while creating “Zero to Launch.” Clients, he says, don’t want to sift through the “Ten Best” or “Twenty Best” options—they trust him to curate the best one for their specific need. So Ramit vets all the best resources that are out there so he can choose the best one. Simple, easy, and a big relief for his clients.
Don’t always listen to conventional wisdom. Ramit’s sales emails are sometimes ten pages long…something nine out of ten marketers willl tell you is a big no-no. But Ramit has found that his market loves his long emails. They open them, they read them, and they follow them. That doesn’t mean you push yourself to write ten-page emails; instead, figure out what’s right for your market. To find this out, Ramit strongly encourages the use of surveys. Surveys are the surest way to find out what your audience wants from you, and how you can serve a niche that your competitors are overlooking.

EPISODE FREEBIE

Get the Free Marketing Resources from Ramit Sethi's "Zero To Launch" System

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Do I Need to Be Rich to Get Started?

A lot of people may wonder, after reading Ramit’s content, whether they have to be rich already to implement his strategies. Ramit says no…it’s all about starting from where you are now. After all, if you put all your money into a fancy email provider or a slick website design, you have nowhere to build to…and you might go broke before you have a chance to build your audience!

A lot of the strategies Ramit teaches are doable with less than a few hundred dollars. Setting up a website, creating surveys, and a lot of payment providers and technology out there are almost free. What really matters, he says, is your commitment to finding your clients and listening to them.

"Most people don’t need more money. They need to focus on following the right action steps, to listen to their customers, and create something their customers will pay for."

One More Thought

This was a quote from the interview that was so good, I had to share it:

"So many people right now believe they have something the world needs. But you created something the market doesn’t really want. So this is a huge problem. If you’ve created something they don’t want or if you are putting it in terms they don’t want, it doesn’t matter how fancy your design is or how cool your conversion technology is. If you are getting tepid reactions you are not getting a real pain point. But when we have created something that they desperately want they will do anything to get it. They say, “Tell me now, take my money, here you go.”

That’s when you know you have a winner.

To listen to my entire conversation with Ramit, click here now.