Can’t wait ? Above is the full interview. Click Play Arrow.
You Can also read Part of the Interview BELOW
Editor:
This time, I am thrilled to be chatting to Shane Nathan, who is a serial entrepreneur and founder of SNG Unlimited, which is a thriving digital marketing consulting firm, but that’s not all, he’s also been running businesses online since 2007, and in that time has amassed a huge amount of knowledge. Oh, and there is one other thing, Shane is also the General Manager of WarriorPlus, the well-known and well-loved online platform. Shane, it’s lovely to meet you.
Shane Nathan:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
Editor:
Well, it’s great to have you here. Let’s start though in time-honoured tradition by asking a little bit more about you and your background.
Shane Nathan:
So my background is actually in music education. I come from a long line of orchestra conductors and musicians and composers. And so after graduating from school, I was a private teacher, so I was teaching musicians on piano and the string bass and classical guitar.
And as an entrepreneur at heart and a teacher at heart at the same time, I was trying to think about how I could scale up my business, and you could only teach so many students. I had scaled up already the type of student, so I was, at this point, teaching college level students and they would pay the most, so to speak. But you can’t teach a thousand students in a week, right? You can only teach so many.
So, to scale up my business, I thought I should bring this online. This was at a time when doing that was a little bit unorthodox, like 2006 or so.
People were still a little bit wary of even using their credit card online all the time. It wasn’t full of all the membership type of sites and courses that we have today.
But I thought if I could sell my music education, if I could pre-record some lessons and write some eBooks, I can reach millions of students across the world, and then that’s an easy way for me to scale up and teach more people. And so that’s what I did.
I wrote some eBooks on how to play the piano, and then I ended up venturing out and doing guitar and bass and stuff like that. And what I did was, I didn’t know anything about marketing, so I didn’t know how to reach people, the students who wanted to learn, so what I did was I ended up finding internet marketers via the Warrior Forum.
Shane Nathan:
Yeah, so in 2012, I had already been selling my music courses with resell rights and then coaching students and writing various eBooks on marketing and all of that kind
of stuff. And I decided that a corporation made sense, not only for tax purposes, but for legal purposes and just professional reasons.
At the time, I was still doing several things in order to have multiple streams of income. So I was doing all those things I mentioned online, but occasionally I still had a music student, or a music student that was with me for many years that I was hard to let go of or they needed occasional help. I’ve had my real estate licence for many years.
So it made sense for me to have a corporation so that all the payments I was receiving wasn’t just coming to my name and it was, it’s confusing for tax purposes here for the IRS and the government, it’s confusing for them when a bunch of stuff comes to your name. So I incorporated, and that’s SNG Unlimited. So SNG is my initials. Nathan is actually my middle name.
Editor:
Oh, really? Okay.
Shane Nathan:
Yeah. And when I first started online in ’05, ’06, like I said, putting your credit card online was a little bit wary. People were sceptical.
When I started on the Warrior Forum, I didn’t really know how safe it was, so I was afraid of someone stealing my identity or copying me or scamming me or whatever, so I had used my middle name and as a result, after building a reputation, I couldn’t really change back to my other name because then people would be like, who is this guy?
So many people knew me as Shane Nathan, that it just stuck. And my last name, honestly, I got made fun of for a long time when I was a kid. So that was another reason, just to be honest.
But anyway, so SNG are my initials. SNG Unlimited, it’s unlimited because it’s a sort of an umbrella corporation that covers all the different activities that I do. And it also means that there’s all the liability is on me unlimited as opposed to a limited liability corporation. And so that’s the story of SNG.
Editor:
In terms of the businesses that you’ve built up, obviously you’ve been online now for many years, almost,
what’s that, 17, 18 years.
You must have enjoyed many successes along the way, but also have you had any bumps in the road, any
setbacks that you’ve encountered?
Shane Nathan:
Definitely. Man, there’s too many to list, but I mean, I’ve definitely had a lot of bumps. I’ve had failed launches that you think it’s going to sell like a blockbuster and then launch time comes and there’s not enough affiliate support.
And because the numbers coming out the gate don’t look fantastic, it’s hard to get additional affiliate support. So yeah, I’ve had failed launches. Let’s see, I’ve had clients in the past, so when I first started, I also was into SEO. I was consulting for some major hotels down here, I live in South Florida, so some hotels in Miami and Hollywood had hired me to consult them on both SEO and pay-per-click marketing. So at the time, a lot of these hotels were just starting to put themselves on Expedia and TripAdvisor, and they didn’t know how to optimise their campaigns or even put themselves on there on those sites.
Note from the editor:
Above is the full interview. Click Play Arrow. Enjoy!
To return to Making Web Money Click Here