SkyQuestCom's Personal Development Blog

You’ve heard the stories: rags to riches success, phenomenal achievements that change lives. Now, get the secrets from one of the world’s leading authorities in Internet Marketing and discover how it all started. Former car salesman Mike Filsaime is one of the world’s leading authorities in Internet Marketing today. He is the creator of “Butterfly Marketing”, one of the most successful online marketing training programmes in the history of the Internet. In this article, SkyQuestCom speaks with Mike Filsaime about success, making money online and the pursuit of dreams.

(The following conversation is an excerpt from SkyQuestCom’s interview with Mike Filsaime.)

SkyQuestCom: Today, SkyQuestCom is privileged to have with us Mike Filsaime. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Mike: I'm 39 years old currently, I'll turn 40 this year. I live in New York , in the United States . I live on Long Island . I'm born raised there on Long Island . Previously, to the online marketing that I'm doing now, I was in the automotive business. In 1990, I got into the car business and worked my way up to management. In the last few years that I was in the business, I was a General Manager of a Toyota dealership; we were one of the largest Toyota dealerships in the world. While I was doing that, I started looking into some online marketing opportunities. From there, I started having some success that was trumping what I was doing as a General Manager in the automobile business.

October of 2002 was when I first started marketing online. In August of 2004, I gave my notice in the car business and ventured full-time online. At this time, October of 2004, I was doing about fifteen to twenty thousand dollars per month while juggling between two jobs. When I went full-time, I immediately went up to $50,000 per month and I never stopped from there; it always increased from there. Last year, we did about $4.5 million in sales and we do $350,000 a month in online sales.

SkyQuestCom: So you had a very successful job and now you’ve gone into Internet Marketing. Can you tell us how you made the transition from working 9-to-5 for someone else, to now living the lifestyle of your dreams?

Mike: Yes, I chuckle to the 9-to-5 (Smiles)! The car business in United States is, they call them “bell-to-bells” and I worked a lot of 9-to-9s. I worked 28 days a month, 75 hours a week in a very, very competitive business. We were geared to always be #1 in the region. And I was spending some time online; I was doing a lot of training for the sales staff and started to spend some time online while I was gathering some closing materials on overcoming objections. I was getting email solicitations to start an online business and I would delete it every single day. One day I said, "Oh, let me read the sales letter." It was by a guy named Frank Kern who happens to be a very good friend of mine now and he's one of the top internet marketers out there as well. But that was the sales letter I read. It had the typical headline - Scarcity, Urgency, Bonuses, Order Now. I'm glad I made that purchase and from there, I started creating my own websites.

The transition from the car business came at a point when I just had to face the facts that there was so much opportunity for growth in my online business that it was time for me to move forward from there. One of the things I liked that I took from the automotive sales industry into online marketing is the understanding of why people buy- the psychology of the buyer. And that has really, really helped me to create effective marketing campaigns online.

SkyQuestCom: There are probably a lot of other people listening also who are also stuck in a job somewhere and they would also like to make the same transition. What advice would you give to them?

Mike: My advice would be: when you make that decision to take a leap, you always want to do that out of a position of cash flow. I would never recommend just selling the farm; to go into something that you have high hopes for that's not currently generating any income. Or if you're brutally honest with yourself, it's not going to generate the sufficient income that you have.

We have to understand while you have a full-time job, let's just say you're making $5,000 a month and you have an online job that you're growing that's making $500, $1,000, $2,000 a month. So now we have combined resources; we're making $7,000 a month. We have to understand that the online dream is a supplement to the income. And we want to know what our monthly minimum is, what is the cost to run our bills, to pay my mortgage, to pay my car, pay my health insurance or whatever it is. And to know what we need to survive and provide for our kids and food on the table, everything like that. If we know that that's $3,000 per month, we have to say to ourselves, "Well, then maybe it's not time to give up the $5,000 per month and the $2,000 I have here just to go for the $2,000."

So make sure you can save some money and you're in a position of cash flow. I recommend saving at least 3 months' salary when you're ready to take the plunge. And it's ok to go backwards a little bit because you're making this much here and a little less here. You take the plunge here, you have the opportunity to really leverage that and have some explosive growth. But you definitely don't ever want to be in a position where you didn't plan properly! And the next thing you find is you gave up a good job and you have to go back and maybe you can't get that job because it's not available.

It will crush you to leave something to pursue something that doesn't work out and a few months later, find that you have to go back into the real world. So I think the important thing is to save some money, and have at least 3 months' salary. Make sure there's enough cash flow coming in when you start to pursue your dreams.

To listen to the rest of the conversation, watch a clip of Mike Filsaime's recorded interview at http://learning.skyquestcom.com.

With over 200,000 subscribers around the world, SkyQuestCom is Asia's largest multimedia e-learning company. SkyQuestCom offers online video seminars of the world's best personal development experts and business gurus including Anthony Robbins (Unleash The Power Within), Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad), Brian Tracy (The Psychology of Selling), T. Harv Eker (Secrets of the Millionaire Mind), John Gray (Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus), Jay Abraham (Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Warren Buffett (Forbes' "Richest Person in the World") and many more. To learn more about SkyQuestCom, visit http://learning.skyquestcom.com.

Labels: butterfly marketing, how to make money online, Information Technology, Internet Marketing, Interview, mike filsaime, Online Education, self help, Success Blog, success secrets, the butterfly effect

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