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Editor:
Today, I’m going to be chatting with a former commercial banker, who decided to leave the corporate world behind to become a full-time internet entrepreneur.
In early 2008, he set up GainMindshare, which provides consultancy to marketing professionals who want to have their own book, but who don’t have the time to write it themselves.
Then, in 2015, he started another company, which has become something of a calling card in its own right.
And ever since, The PLR Show has created rebrandable marketing training and technical content for online marketers. We really are just scratching the surface here. So let’s meet the man behind all of that. Charles T. Harper, welcome to the show.
Charles T Harper:
Hi.
Editor:
Now, you’ve been around the internet for many, many years, but when did your journey start?
Charles T Harper:
I really started in 2007. Both my wife and I, we were working at a boarding school. What we were doing at that time is we had just finished actually a doctoral programme in instructional technology and we’d done everything except the dissertation.
We really were focused in on, well, how do we use this in ways that would not necessarily be directed toward children, but how could we’d be using our own light.
We really started our first blog and all that other stuff around about 2006, and we really just took to it and dived in at that point. So, it was really all around based on the fact that we were doing educational programme that was directed toward teaching people how to use technology, and that’s where we got immersed.
Editor:
Wow. I mean, so did you have an idea that the internet was going to be a great way to reach people, or was that something that you stumbled upon?
Charles T Harper:
It was all intuitive because we just liked it. I wouldn’t even classify myself as a big picture person in that way. We just liked doing this stuff.
It was more of a hobby than it was doing anything else, but it really was part of our educational process. So it was sort of like we were forced into having to focus on it and then having to do something with it in order to do what we were doing in education.
Editor:
Wow. Okay. And then in 2008, you set up GainMindshare. Can you maybe just tell us a little bit about that and how you decided that that was the direction for you and your wife?
Charles T Harper:
Well, sort of interesting, I was saying we were working at a boarding school and we were in the process of getting fired for the boarding school. It was kind of like we’d been working there for 13 years and it really had come to a head. We wanted to homeschool. We wanted to do all these things. They wanted us to be more involved and we just had nothing left to give. And so, when that time came, we were really heavily invested in the boarding school.
We had really decided, “Hey, this is where we’re going to retire.” Round by the end of 2008 and into 2009, they were saying, “Well, if you don’t do it this way, we don’t really want you to be here.” And so, we took what little severance that we had, and we just had to get involved in whatever you call, whether you call it information marketing, internet marketing, and we had to make it work.
I have to say, at the beginning, I don’t know if it worked all that well. So the name, which I thought we was really clever, GainMindshare, that was really the genesis.
Really, at that point, GainMindshare was just a way to capture, I’ll do just about anything I have to that that involves internet business to make it work.
So really, it was what I thought was a clever name, but it was really just we had to get out and make something work because we were no longer working full time.
Editor:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Did you find that the first thing that you did, Charles, was that a success, or did it take a few attempts for you to find the thing that really worked for GainMindshare?
Charles T Harper:
Well, for GainMindshare, I would say it worked. It didn’t work phenomenally well. I knew I could write. Looking back on that, I’m not really sure if I was a great writer, but I could do it, and my wife was good at proofreading.
And so, we were able to get people to give us money per se to write, and it was the easiest thing to do.
There were people who wanted to write books. We had the ability to write. We were not getting rich by any stretch of the imagination, but it was paying bills. And so, can I say it worked well?
It worked well enough to be at survival mode.
Editor:
Fair enough. I guess with everything, there’s always that ramp-up process, isn’t there, where you start to do something, you start to see some success, and then you reinvest in that success. When did you have the biggest breakthrough, would you say, with what you were doing?
Charles T Harper:
Yeah, I would say it really does come back to training, right? And that’s been a theme in my life, in the theme that we’ve been doing ever since we’ve been on the internet. We were working with another marketer, or I was working with another marketer.
He was doing what people call offline marketing. Basically, what I did is I ran a technical side of his membership. And so, at that point in time, I started training the members on technical aspects of what it is they were trying to do, how to do things with the membership, how to do things with creating content.
It was really at that point, I can’t really say that the breakthrough came income-wise, but it was a breakthrough that people wanted what we had and we could deliver. And so, that was really the biggest breakthroughs.
Right around about 2011, I was really focused in on this membership, but I recognised that I had something that I could bring to the table, and that was really the genesis of starting to create content that other people could use.
Editor:
As I mentioned in the introduction, GainMindshare was really set up to try and help professionals have their own book, but they didn’t have the time to write it. Could you just walk us through that process and how you struck upon that idea and how successful was that when you first launched it.
Charles T Harper:
Again, it was all survival mode. We tried a number of different things. I mean, we tried network marketing. We tried local marketing. Unfortunately, I am not a cold caller, right? I don’t really know how to call on people very well. And so, doing a book for someone was something that we struck upon that. I mean, they were multilevel marketers that we were in contact with. These guys had a lot of money, but…
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