Internet Marketing Secrets

Charles Byrd is the CEO and founder of Pure JV. He is an experienced networker, internet marketing expert, and what you really need to know about Charles is his proven record of helping people create profitable joint venture partnerships. Not only is he one of the most connected people online, but he knows how to help you set up lucrative promotional deals that have his clients and students booking hundreds of thousands of dollars literally. He knows how to get you qualified leads without you having to do paid advertising and I’m sure a lot of people are interested in that. You might’ve seen him on Forbes or ABC News and he has a book called Internet Marketing Secrets that’s an Amazon bestseller.

Working to your bio, we met through an introduction. You literally are someone who walks their talk. I’ve been extremely impressed with your integrity, your passion, your commitment to delivering for people who you work with, and that has not something that people find easily and all the time. Before we get down there a little bit, I would like to ask you your own story of origin. I know you’ve got a brother that’s in business with you. You can take us back to as far back as you want, childhood, school, whatever your days where you were like, “This internet thing might be something,” or did you start from a, “I’m going to be somebody who really knows about relationships.”

I grew up in Canada and then Central and Southern California. I went to school in England for a year, finished school in Northern California, where I reside near the Napa Valley, and I did what my dad recommended. Get a degree. Get a job. I worked for a software company for fifteen years, ended up being a director at a billion-dollar software company, and it had its amazing moments like running my own department or launching something I made called IT TV, making IT not boring. I wanted more. I wanted to impact more than the 6,000 employees I was doing trainings and creating marketing content for. I wanted a taste of that entrepreneurial freedom. I read about it in books. I also was a little too comfortable to make moves on that, those nice cushy, corporate salaries.

One day I was working at Starbucks by my house. My mom called and she had that serious tone in her voice. She was an OB nurse. She taught at College of the Sequoias and ran a hospital. Since she had that serious tone in her voice, I was thinking maybe one of the kids that she adopted from Sierra Leone was having trouble in school. Actually, my sister’s visiting right now, but it wasn’t that. She said she’d been in a minor car accident the day before. She thought she was pressing the brake but wasn’t, and hit the car in front of her. That day, she was reaching for a fork and physically kept missing it by six inches. They took her to the hospital and found she had two stage four brain tumors. I could barely walk into my house to tell the family that I felt like I got a truck ran over me.

We went down to be with her going into brain surgery and basically moved down there for a year to take care of her. My mom lived one year to the day from when I got that call. For me, it was like, “When else are you going to make moves in your life? This is your shot.” That gave me that confidence and courage to say, “I’m going to figure this out and I’m committing to it.” I had this piece of wood made that says, “I can. I will. End of story.” This is burning the boats. Figure it out. I created my first product. It was a low-cost productivity course, but I had no one to sell it to because it was brand new to the space.

I was at some in-person events, my first ones in the industry, and there’s a guy sitting across the table getting 90,000 hits on his blog a month and another friend, a new friend at the time. It’s actually Michael Roderick in our group program. He was curating groups of people, entrepreneurs, and the guy next to me made $23 million a year. I’m like, “This is crazy. If these people can do this, why don’t I just go connect and make friends with the people who already have my ideal audience?” I did that. I started lining up joint venture promotions, which all of that was new to me. I’d always had a social network, but I wasn’t actively growing it in the past. I figured out the fastest way to grow your business is building great relationships. I’ve systematized connecting with ideal partners and clients. At this point, I booked 2 to 6 joint venture webinars per week. You end up with a very amazing network and we’ve systematized the whole process. That’s what I help folks with as well, as you know.

The takeaway from the story of your mom dying is when you’re talking about a hero’s journey and their story, there’s always some wake-up call that gets people out of the comfort zone or the golden handcuffs in a corporate job. I experienced that myself with a career in sales. Life is short and this concept of, “If not now, when am I going to take my shot?” again taps into why Hamilton was so successful. There’s literally a song about that. I’m not going to miss my shot. There’s a lot of similarities. I don’t know if you’ve seen Hamilton or not but if you haven’t, you can watch it on Disney+. I highly recommend it because you will relate to this. They talk about you need to be in the room where it happens, where decisions are being made, in this case, politics.

What you do, Charles, is you help people get into the Zoom where it happens, in terms of virtual webinars and masterclasses. How you earn the right to ask to partner with someone is really your secret sauce potentially. You have this amazing skill and productivity. You obviously are a savvy IT guy that can put systems onto something, but what I see as your unique skill is you are able to combine that left-brain analytical look at something with a right-brain emotional relationship, listening, empathy skillset. Most of us are one or the other dominant at least. To be able to toggle back and forth allows you a unique lane of, “It’s not just I’m going to teach you how to build relationships with people warm and fuzzy so that people want to partner with you.” There’s a structure to doing that.

I think part of the reason you and I click so much is I also like structure, believe it or not. I don’t like to create it, but I like to follow it. Certainly, stories have a good structure. When people are telling stories without a structure, they meander. They don’t have a point. There’s no resolution. The same thing is true with what you’re doing. If you just willy nilly and try to change your presentation story that you tell people about what it’s like to partner with you and you don’t have a structure, then you’re losing a lot of potential partners. I think that’s really what I’ve been most impressed with being one of your students taking this Pure JV. There’s value to having structure on how you build a relationship, an offer, and all these other things.

You’ve done it so much. It’s like the 10,000 hours. Each of us has a niche. We can all say, “Here’s where your story could be better.” That’s my thing. You’re like, “John, here’s your missing link. You need to tweak this offer to make it a little more irresistible. The content is good. It’s just not being presented in such a way.” You think, “John, why do you need that help? Aren’t you an expert in selling and storytelling?” Everyone needs someone outside their label to look at it. I needed an editor for my book. I’m sure you did as well. Charles, what is the biggest problem you see people making when they’re trying to set up a joint venture, also known as, affiliate partnership with people? Is it they’ve jumped the gun too fast asking to work together or is it that they are too scared to even start?

It’s more of the second one. A very common thing which I created a name for, I call it the reciprocation trap. People have these preconceived stories in their head that hold them back from actually trying. A few examples of that would be, and I’m just making this up, maybe your email list is 5,000 people or 3,000. Who knows? There’s someone you think might be a good partner and theirs is 40,000. In your head, you’re like, “There’s such a gap here. I’m not to the point I can talk to them yet.” Other traps would be, “I’m not going to do joint ventures because if they promote me, then I have to promote them. None of these things are true at all.”

Part of the process, let’s say, it’s that list disparity. People value different things and they have different goals. Simply by creating a framework for connecting with them, asking what they’re doing, who they’re serving, what they’re working on that has them excited, they’re going to give you between 1 and 20 ways to help them outside of some direct promotion. It’s a systematic approach of connecting with folks, truly listening to what they’re trying to do, and then helping them shortcut their path to success. Usually through an introduction, recommending a tool, introducing them to some audience or platform they should be aware of.

Even before we hit record here, you were talking about a particular systematized product, which if I were about to launch a podcast, that would be hugely valuable to me. There are so many ways to provide value outside of this mythical direct exact exchange. That’s the number one thing holding people back is they don’t get started because they don’t have a framework to do so. When you do have a framework, it makes light work out of connecting, providing value, and lining up deals. I would say the second thing would be people’s approach. There are so many nuances to this. For one, if someone just pings me and they go, “Charles, let’s cross-promote each other.” It’s like, “How about not?”

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