Mark Anastasi is an internet entrepreneur, an international speaker who was present in 116 countries and had 16,000 people attend his seminars, and the author of New York Times best-seller and Wall Street best-seller "The Laptop Millionaire".
Cindy: In this episode number 9, I interview Mark Anastasi. He is an internet entrepreneur, an international speaker, and the author of New York Times best-seller and Wall Street best-seller Laptop Millionaire, well The Laptop Millionaire. He’s been doing some incredible things with webinars including how he is spending $2,000 in solo ads that he got. He had 800 registrations on his webinar and then he pushed them to 2,200 webinar registrations, and he generated over $200,000 in sales in 19 minutes. This guy here is he has a whole lot to share about webinars and I appreciate you being here Mark. I know that you have a lot more to share than just that. Today Mark is going to be sharing a whole lot of things about how to benefit, how to change it from webinars versus stage, how to press the webinar, how to sequence it, how to ... all sorts of things. Mark I’m really, really happy for you to be here today. Thanks for joining us.
Mark: Thank you very much
Cindy. Thank you for this opportunity to share with you and with your audience. It’s great to catch up with you again. I don’t know if a lot of people know that you used to live in Cyprus, in the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.
Cindy: Yes just around the corner.
Mark: Absolutely, and so we all missed you out in Cyprus, out here in Europe.
Cindy: I miss you guys and congratulations on your cute little babies, your twins.
Mark: Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.
Cindy: Let’s talk a little bit about how, because you are mostly known for your stage presence, you are able to pack in people. You’ve spoken in 116 countries [inaudible 00:01:50] also have managed to transfer that stage presence into online webinars, what is the difference? Maybe you can start by that and why did you choose to do webinars? What's the difference between stage presentation and webinars? How did you make the transition?
Mark: Well, for me it started out back in 2003 when I was broke and homeless and I was just depressed. I attended a personal development seminar in London and it just completely transformed my life. I won’t say overnight but very quickly. It just changed every aspect of my life, my feelings about myself and later on I applied this also to starting a new business. Thanks to attending a business seminar that also changed my life financially speaking. From there early on I wanted to kind of give back and pay it back and I wanted to become a speaker so that I could share with people the transformation that I had experienced in my own life by transforming my mindset.
I changed my mindset and then boom, everything changed in my life. I started out by writing e-books and I published the e-books and that went very well. I used the income I was generating from e-books and of my online ventures to set up a seminar company. I’ve had 16,000 people attend my seminars. My marketing has always been very, very average and kind of home spun, not very elaborate or sophisticated. It has just been me putting on a video or writing a sales page saying, “Listen, you’ve got to come to this seminar. It’s awesome. You are going to learn about this, this, and this. It’s going to change your life.” Because I really wanted to convey that, I genuinely wanted people to attend the seminar and to transform their lives, to touch their lives I feel that why ... I think on some level, on some organic heart to heart level, people were feeling that the that’s why they were showing up at my events.
Like I said my marketing was very basic, very unsophisticated. Back in 2010, 2009 rather the Australian speaker Steven Essa, I flew him over to the UK, he spoke at my event, the speed cash seminar and he explained to us, back in 2009, how he was using webinars. He was getting his clients to create amazing businesses thanks webinars but I wasn’t using webinars yet, it actually took over a year to get around to doing my first webinar. I did the first webinar in May 2010. I’ll get to that but to answer your question to whether I’m using e-books or seminars or webinars or it’s a book or is a teleseminar or an interview, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all the same thing. It’s just me sharing value, sharing information, sharing what I’m passionate about with my audience, with people out there. I don’t really view it as, oh I was doing seminars and now I’m doing webinars or I’m doing ... Why I’m I doing webinars? Why am I doing seminars? It all comes from the same place of wanting to reach as large of people as possible.