How to sell online by cultivating your personal brand – The Timothy Sykes Interview
on Aug 13, 2008 - 2:32 PM PSTThe full program
This is an audio program. Listen and/or download here.
A few lessons from this program
Timothy Sykes says he took about $12,000 in bar mitzvah money and turned it into about $2 million. That’s obviously impressive, but the list of people who’ve made fortunes is long and growing daily. What I’m more impressed and curious about is how he’s building his personal brand online, developing a cult following around it and profiting from it all.
In my interview with him (download it below), I asked him a little about his stock trades and investing philosophy, but I focused on how he’s making a name for himself. Here are some of my notes from the conversation.
Howard Stern Marketing 101 -Timothy is deliberate about getting your attention, like when he went on CNBC and used beautiful women to show stock charts.
Use new media – He told me that going on Fox Business didn’t get his site extra hits and generate sales. But a blog on Black Cards that he appeared in some time ago, still sends him consistent traffic.
Sell, baby, sell – His site is now up to $45,000 in monthly revenue. It got there because he’s selling premium services, instead of just running ads.
Kill quickly – I’ve been hearing this a lot in my interviews. Entrepreneurs try something and if it doesn’t work, they kill it quickly and try something else. He told me about TIMBUCKS, a program where he was trying to bribe his readers to write for him. It didn’t work. Now it’s on the copping blog.
Give ‘em meat – He says we’re all going to get tired of this new fascination of watching people’s everyday lives unfold on Facebook, twitter, micro-blogging, etc. You have to give people meat–substantive ideas and tools that they could use–to build a real business.
View Comments to “How to sell online by cultivating your personal brand – The Timothy Sykes Interview”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
[...] ‘m still workin’ 16-18 hour days…and lovin’ every second of it. Check out THIS awesome near-hourlong podcast interview I did with Mixergy.com, a site that interviews “web [...]
August 21st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
[...] is a link to the interview with Tim Sykes by [...]
October 17th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Don’t Buy into any of Timothy Sykes BULL**** without reading this shocking expose first! Don’t waste your money!
http://www.timothysykesexposed.com
October 20th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I’m leaving that “Timothy Sykes Exposed” comment up even though it’s an ad because it’s an interesting example of Tim’s brand building. (I don’t have any confirmation that it’s his site, but come on, who else would do that?)
I think his marketing experiments are interesting.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
i had that thought when i saw the “timothy sykes exposed”
controversy = hits
March 12th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I'm a big fan of Tim's showmanship. I think there's a lot to learn from him. This program is one of my favorites.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:51 am
congrats on the press today, timothysykesexposed isnt me, just an aggressive affiliate of mine…i was pissed the 1st time i heard about him, then he brought me sales so i like him :)
April 9th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Thanks Tim.
I'm cool with it either way.
By the way, your man Adarsh D Pallian is redoing Mixergy. I'd be nuts not to
learn from you.
May 10th, 2009 at 12:59 am
You said he turned $12k into 12M. Is it 2m or 12m?
Below is what you wrote.
“Timothy Sykes says he took about $12,000 in bar mitzvah money and turned it into about $2 million”
May 10th, 2009 at 4:59 am
You said he turned $12k into 12M. Is it 2m or 12m?
Below is what you wrote.
“Timothy Sykes says he took about $12,000 in bar mitzvah money and turned it into about $2 million”
January 31st, 2010 at 12:05 pm
[...] [VIDEO INTERVIEW] Posted by Timothy Sykes on Sun 31st of Jan, 2010 02:00:52 PM ShareI first did an interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy back in August 2008…since then he’s become the Larry King of the online world interviewing startups and web [...]
February 20th, 2010 at 9:31 am
[...] Ron Paul, for example, used his appearances on televised debates to build his online audience. We heard this in my interview with Timothy Sykes too. He grow his online audience by being on reality [...]