Kevin Wilke has more than 70 profitable websites making up to $500,000 in a month and has clients paying him as much as $250,000 a year for his knowledge and expertise. In 2001, Kevin founded Nitro Marketing, a company that pioneers effective direct marketing on the Internet with its unique, innovative and effective approach to marketing and business.
RIC THOMPSON: I'm looking I think the best place to start is this. I mentioned a little bit about your background, but it's such a great story. All the hype is that people jump on the Internet, they succeed the next day, and they're millionaires three days later. Your background is a bit more realistic. You had some pitfalls and, of course, you're now helping people get past those pitfalls. Give us some more of your background. How did you get started? How did you become successful?
KEVIN WILKE: I'd say my story actually began where I grew up. I grew up on a farm in small-town Iowa. Back in those days, in the '80s, farming was not a good profession to be in, and my parents really struggled financially. I saw what it was like for them to live a life of constant financial struggle. They were always arguing about the lack of money. We kids grew up knowing that there were all these things that everybody else, all of our friends, had that we could never afford ourselves.
We always wanted stuff that we knew we couldn't have. Eventually, my parents got divorced and lost the farm. I knew at a very young age that wasn't the life I wanted for myself and my family when I got older. I made a commitment to myself that I was going to do whatever it took to not experience that as an adult. I got it in my head that the way to do it was to have my own business and be in control of my own destiny.
I actually started my first business when I was 13 years old, selling used golf balls out of the backyard of our farm. I proceeded to make a little over $2,000 for the next couple of summers doing that, which was a pretty cool experience. Then when it came time to go to college, I bought into that traditional thing. What everybody tells you is, "Now it's time to get a good education and a good job."
Even though I knew I was meant to be an entrepreneur and have my own business, all these things we hear all the time take over. It's so powerful, what other people say. I went to college to get a degree in accounting. Fortunately for myself, my sophomore year I realized that if I was an accountant for the rest of my life, I was going to be miserable, so I'd better figure something else out. That was in 1996. Fortunately, the Internet was just starting out.
I saw this fad called the Internet and thought, "I think this thing is going to stick around. I can see a way to start an online business using this Internet thing." Like you said, my first three sites that I started failed miserably. I made zero dollars with all of them and actually lost money, but I was committed to doing whatever it took to be successful. Through a lot of trial and error, and unfortunately a lot more on the error side, I started to learn what worked and what didn't.
I started to make a few hundreds of dollars. Then I had my first $1,000 in a month. Then in 2000, I launched my first product in a little niche market and was making $1,000. I eventually had my best month, which was $10,000. Around 2000, I launched a brand new site in another niche market. It took me about two weeks to put all the pieces together. I wrote an opt-in or squeeze page and a sales letter, set up the shopping cart, merchant account, and affiliate program, and did all these little things.
I put it all together and launched it. In the first six weeks, I did over $102,000. At that point, I knew that I'd finally figured out the system to follow to be successful online. I saw my past successes followed the same system. This one had the same system. Everything I did moving forward I followed the same step-by-step system to have success. I've never looked back since. I've done millions and millions of dollars of online business.
We do in the mid-six figures every single month, and we're growing dramatically quickly. I'm having the most growth I've ever experienced in my business life right now. An interesting thing happened in 2005. One of my best friends was miserable in his job. He was a cable repairman. He'd go into people's houses and repair the cable, and he knew that there was a better life out there for him than what he was having right now. He just didn't know what.
He started asking me about this Internet business thing I was doing, and he started to learn a little bit more about it. I started teaching him what I just naturally did myself. He caught the vision of this online business thing. It took him about two months to put together his very first website. He knew nothing about the Internet before. Literally, the only thing he did was use it to send email and check the Utah Jazz scores. It was a big learning curve for him.
In two months, he put it all together and launched his product. Over the first six months, he did over $100,000. It completely changed his life. He was able to quit his job. His wife was able to quit her job. Now they're able to work from home. They've had two little kids, so now he can take his kids to school in the morning, pick them up in the afternoon after they're done, and attend all their functions.
Both he and his wife have an amazing family life together, where before he was constantly stressed out and frustrated, always worrying about money, unhappy with what he was doing in life, and missing out on raising his family. That was a very eye-opening experience that I could help somebody change their life around, and it really meant a lot to me. Then formally I started doing that for people here and there, kind of on a one-off basis.
People kept asking me, "Kevin, what do you do?" There were more and more people asking me how I sell all this and make millions of dollars selling information online. In 2007, I put it all together into a step-by-step training program that was called the Nitro Blueprint System. I launched that in December of 2007. Several thousand people purchased that training program, and hundreds and hundreds of people used it to create a full-time income. Most of them had never had any success online before.
In fact, they had tried a bunch of stuff and failed. This was the first thing that walked them step by step through how to be successful in life. Again, that was extremely rewarding for me, and I started to realize that I have this natural inner drive, passion, and ability to take my life experience and these really complicated things, like online business, and drill them down into simple step-by-step systems that people can follow.
I can help them overcome the challenges that they have and get the outcomes that they want in life. That created my mission in life, which is to inspire, teach, support, and empower people to transform their lives. I see the best way I can do it right now is to take all the vast knowledge that I've gained over the past decade of online business and start teaching, helping, and training people to have the same success in their lives.
Really, what I'm committed to now is awakening the potential that is inside everybody who's listening to this call and who will listen to it in the future. I want to awaken that potential in you that this online business thing is possible for you, to show you the steps to take to make it happen, and to provide some support to you. It will eventually happen for you. Right now, we're in 2010, and we're going into a new decade.
At the beginning of every year I spend several days mapping out what I want this year to be about. What are my goals and objectives that I'm going to go on and accomplish? Before I got started, I realized this isn't the beginning of a new year. It's also the beginning of a new decade. What do I want the next 10 years to be about in my life and for my business?
When I started thinking that long out, I realized it had nothing to do with me but the difference that we can go out and make in this world. The commitment that I made to myself, my company, all of our team members, and our customers is that I want to help 50,000 people reach that level of having a full-time online income. By doing that, collectively, all the people who go through our programs will be able to generate an extra $10 billion-that's billion with a B-of online revenue.
As I thought about that, 50,000 people is an entire football stadium of people who have their lives completely transformed. These are people like my friend Mike and a ton of other people who now get to work from home doing something they love and are passionate about. They're making more money, not having to worry about their finances, and living a life of freedom and passion that we all want to have. In a summary, that's my story.
RIC THOMPSON: Wow. That's incredible, Kevin. Of course, congratulations on all the success you've had. We've now shared with everybody what, over the past decade and more, you've done and all the success that you've had. The focus of this series is on what's working today. You and I both know that some of the stuff that worked back in 2001 doesn't work the same way anymore.
I think the biggest question for you right now is a big focus of your company, Nitro Marketing. It's teaching people how to do online marketing for offline businesses. It's kind of ironic for me, actually, blending the online and offline worlds is a hot thing. You feel that this is the biggest online opportunity available to people right now, right?
KEVIN WILKE: Absolutely. I've been fortunate to have such a long history of experience online that I can really start to see these trends as they develop. This is, by far, the biggest opportunity I've ever seen online. I'm not saying that as hype. It's just what I completely believe. There are so many factors that are coming together in this amazing synergy. Right now, over the past year or 18 months, the country has gone through this recession.
The people who that has hit hardest by far are local business owners. These are people like plumbers, contractors, landscapers, and people who do business offline in local markets. Their business right now is done 20%, 30%, or 50%. Most of them are completely freaked out because of that. To make it even worse, they're used to getting new business in through traditional offline marketing like the Yellow Pages, newspapers, and things like that.
Those methods are quickly dying, if they're not already dead. People don't use the Yellow Pages to find a local business anymore. They go online and search online to find them. With everything that I do anymore, when I need to find something locally, I'll go on Google and do a search on there.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, I do the same thing. Like for restaurants, if you're going to eat out or whatever, I don't reach for the Yellow Pages. I go hit the search engines.
KEVIN WILKE: Yes. As you think in your life, that's probably what you do, as well. It's funny that a couple of weeks ago, they dropped off the Yellow Pages on my front doorstep. What did I do? I grabbed the yellow plastic bag it was in, lifted it up, walked down to the recycling bin, and dropped it in there. It never even came into my house. I have no need for it.
That's all they know as the way to get business, so they spend $20,000, $30,000, or for some of them, even $100,000 a year to advertise in the Yellow Pages. They're not seeing any return from it anymore, but they have no idea what else to do. Actually, they do know that the Internet is the future. They know that's where they need to be, but they have no idea how to actually put it to use, because their expertise is being a plumber, landscaper, or chiropractor.
They don't know anything about the Internet. Even if they did know what to do, they don't want to do it themselves. What they really want is for somebody to do it for them. When you combine the factors that their business is already down and really hit hard from their recession, their entire way of getting new customers in has completely transitioned to the online world, and they don't know how to take advantage of that, that creates a huge opportunity for people like us.
We just know how to do some simple online marketing for them, and we get paid anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 every single month as their marketing consultant or expert when we partner with them. They pay us a lot of money because they make a lot more money in return. It's an amazing complement. That's what I teach people how to do, and I will cover some of the most important concepts on our training call today to help people get off to a quick start and see the same opportunity that I see.
It is an incredibly huge opportunity. To give you a couple of stats to open your eyes, one out of three of every single online search is a local search. Those are people looking for a local business. One out of three is over 2.6 billion local searches that are performed every single month. That's 2.6 billion with a 'B'. Then 81% of people first search online before making a purchase instead of using things like the Yellow Pages. There's a lot of opportunity out there right now.
To make it even better, 63% of the US economy comes from local businesses. There's something like-let me see if I can pull up this exact number-4.2 billion local or small businesses in the $500 to $20 million range. There's a huge amount of business to be had. It's way more than myself or anybody listening to this call can tap into. That's why I see this as a huge opportunity that I want to empower not only myself to take advantage of, as well as the person I learned all this from, but also the people on this call and everybody else I can spread the word to.
It will change your life as well as the lives of everybody you take on as clients. I've seen this so many times with the people we work with. When you help them tap into the Internet and start generating all that new business coming in, their business completely transforms. They go from losing money to, now, making money. They go from shrinking to growing.
Their life is a lot easier. They're now able to bring on and hire more people instead of firing people. You're changing around their business and the local economy, and you're helping people become employed. You're part of the solution in this world instead of being part of the problem. I love every aspect of this. It's a huge win for everybody involved. That's what gets me excited.
RIC THOMPSON: It does get you thinking. You were saying some stats about how so many people are going online to look for this information. I work online just like you do, Kevin, so I'm thinking I'm a little bit odd. For instance, the house we live in here had some leaks, so we went online to look for a plumber. We didn't think to go to the Yellow Pages.
We do that with restaurants. I'm thinking I'm kind of weird, and then I'm hearing from you that no, that's now everybody. I'd imagine that trend is probably even increasing more and more. People are growing up now with computers and everything else connected to the web.
KEVIN WILKE: The number of local searches online is growing over 50% a year.
RIC THOMPSON: It's growing by 50% a year. Holy moly. That's just massive. Now I want to get back to some numbers, because I believe you mentioned that you could make $1,000 to $5,000 a month per client. If that's the case, then obviously it's only going to take a couple of clients to make a full-time income, depending on what you want to make. Were those numbers accurate? How is that possible?
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