Welcome to the Books, Brands, and Business podcast with your host, Chris O’Byrne, from JETLAUNCH.net.
My guest today is James Smiley. James is a very successful business coach with an impressive list of accomplishments including helping TeleNav IPO, working for AT&T and other huge companies, and working with people like Robert Herjavec and Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank.
James recently released a book he co-authored with Steve Larsen and Josh Forti, along with 26 other successful entrepreneurs, called Influence and Income Online. Not only was I one of the co-authors of that book, but my publishing company, JETLAUNCH, was the designer and publisher and helped launch it to an Amazon bestseller in five categories. We even reached 225 overall in the entire Amazon Kindle store, which is pretty awesome.
Chris: Hi, James, welcome to the podcast.
James: Hey, what is going on, my man? What’s up, Chris? What’s up, everybody out there? Hello, hello.
Chris: It is so good to have you on here. Let’s just jump right in and talk about your book.
James: Yeah.
Chris: Your latest published book is Influence and Income Online. Who’s that book for?
James: We really wrote that book for the digital entrepreneur, somebody out there who is either an entrepreneur now and trying to understand the digital world, or somebody who’s trying to get into digital entrepreneurship, and just really trying to provide an insight from a whole bunch of different angles into what that life is like, what it takes to be successful. It’s so interesting how there’s so many different ways to go about being successful online. It’s like one industry with 10,000 industries inside of it, or more, probably. You might even take something, just like lead generation, but there’s thousands of different ways to do that.
James: People get online and they try to do just traditional things that maybe your college or your MBS taught you, like find a niche or sub-niche. Even within that, you can go online when you try to, let’s say build your business, get leads, create automation, build your brand, whatever, there could be a thousand sub-niched ways to do that. It was a really cool different perspective of people just all around the country, and in the world, there’s a number of international people, men, women, just a really cool different way to look at it. Yeah, it was really awesome.
Chris: This is a coauthored book, your writing process was quite a bit different. How did you go about writing your part of the book?
James: What I did was I really looked for a different … I looked for a piece of content that I’d already put out that was really, really popular but that I was hoping to find something that we hadn’t published yet or wasn’t really published by that many people yet. There was an interview that I had done, I want to say it was almost two years ago, with a bunch of my inner circle people. They really wanted to know the behind the scenes, almost like the … I don’t know, people call it like the fireside chat, or whatever you want to call that.
James: The more intimate discussion around how we create leverage in our business, and I talked about leverage all the time. This awesome group of entrepreneurs, they just wanted to really get the behind the scenes, where it started, the different ways that I personally do it, stuff that I may not go into in-depth detail about, a lot of times just for time, or maybe there’s some stuff that’s a little bit sensitive or whatever. In this interview, I did that. I shared everything, I shared all the different ways that we go about making money. When I came to this book, I really thought this would be a great piece of content to put into the book, and then it was just trying to think of, “Okay, how do you take it from an audio file and formulate into a chapter?”
Chris: Right. It’s such a great way to write it. Is there anything that you’d do differently if you were to go back and start over on that one?
James: There’s always something, especially the pace that we do business, there’s always something that we would different. But if I were to do that chapter different, I think probably I might do a better job of creating a little bit stronger headlines in between. I think it’s one of the longer chapters, and so people generally, when they flip through, they look at bolded areas, it’s like headline to headline to headline reading. I think it was maybe something tactical like that, that I might change. I don’t know, I’ve gotten a lot of good reviews on the content. It’s a little bit raw, it’s not really as publisher-edited type of content. It was stuff that was spoken, obviously, a spoken word is totally different than a written word. We left a lot of jargon in there. Yeah, it reads like an interview.
Chris: Right, which could be very refreshing for people. It’s not just like textbook presentation. Your launch was pretty successful. It was a great launch. I believe you hit number one in five different categories on Amazon?
James: Yeah. I’ve never done a launch like that. I think it’s like official hardcover book. I think it was like our sixth or seventh over the years. A lot of them in my early years were just testing stuff, like putting something on and testing it to see how the process worked or whatever. We’ve tried to do a couple and tried to be successful, but this one was just not even close. This was like way, way, way more successful than we even thought we could do, to be honest with you. A bunch of top influencers getting together, even we didn’t think we could … We didn’t know what to expect to be honest with you. We would have just been happy with one minor category or something like that, but we ranked number one in five major business categories, like internet marketing, eCommerce, business networking. Those are huge, huge business categories.
James: That first week was just … It was amazing. It was like a comical but also it was serious, it is like you go search in a category like business networking or eCommerce or internet sales or something like that, and there’s like Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson, Gary Vaynerchuk in our book, and we were number one.
James: You know you’re not going to be … We’re not as big as those guys, and so we’re not. We don’t have millions and millions of fans. It was pretty cool to screenshot that and send it over and I sent it over to Russell. And I’m like, “Who’s Russell Brunson?”
Chris: That must have been a bit surreal to see your book ahead of people like that.
James: Yeah, yeah, you’d never think something like that could ever happen, let alone it was on there for days and days and days. Yeah, it was awesome, man. It was amazing and what was really cool was like, with your help and all the stuff that you guys did, we were in real business categories. We weren’t like in changing tires or something, something like random topic that there’s like 10 books out there anyway on that topic. We were in like a highly, highly, highly competitive, Even we’re number one in network marketing, which was like, “That’s a really competitive space.”
Chris: Yeah. What do you think was the biggest contributor to the success of the launch?
James: I think the way that we really … Marketing is so much what happens before the ad hits, and their little campaign launches, it’s all that pre-frame that’s going on and how you’re starting to drip it out there and just the whole sequence that you gave us of like, how to like … We’re putting it out there creating that FOMO like, “Dear you’re missing out.” “Oh man, I don’t want to miss the launch.” And we’re building this anticipation, and every day people are just like, “Dude, how can I get it? Where can I get it? How can I …” And all this. And by the time we said go, it was like flood Gates.
James: It was so fast. Our top influencer in the book was this year would’ve been Steve Larson. Steve Larson, for those who don’t know, he just had this massive uprising last year, but when he wrote the book, he would’ve probably just been like a middle of the pack guy. But when he wrote the chapter like a year ago, but when it launched, he was clearly the biggest, huge following, speaks on some of the biggest stages. We’re hoping he would push us over the edge. Well, he had some things go on in the morning where he couldn’t promote until like three, four o’clock in the afternoon. We had already started hitting bestseller in multiple categories by like nine, 10 o’clock. By the time he put the pedal to the metal, that just sent us way over the top.
James: I think we have that screenshot where we were like … I think we were like 210th most popular overall book on Kindle. It was like Epic stuff, stuff that you just … I just remember thinking like, “I don’t even know if you’ve ever seen that.” I don’t know anybody who has like a top two. You’re up there top 200 of all books. It’s like you’re going against any book pride and prejudice. You don’t know who you’re going up against that and you know every book. And so once Steve poured the gas on the fire, it was over. But yeah, we had so much momentum built up that, that morning it was like, there were hundreds of people just ready to go. They woke up going, “How do I buy this book?”
Chris: You had 225, I think overall in Kindle and people that don’t understand that ranking system, the closer to zero, you’re the closer one the better. And to be 225 in the entire store, not just a category. I have never seen that either. And I’ve seen a lot of book launches. That was super impressive and kudos to you and other people, Steve and Josh, the people you had helping with that. Now you also were super smart about how you did this and you had a great offer inside. Tell me a little bit about that offering, how well it did, and what that did for your business. Lead gen and all that.
James: Yeah, being a marketer, and just understanding marketing and business, you’ve got to be building assets for your business. Anything you do, if you’re not building multiple different assets, it can be tough to really turn ROI and have long longevity. The toughest part about Amazon is, you need sustained long term sales to really do well. I’ve helped a lot of people, done some Amazon stores myself, you need sustain long-term sales to really do something significant. And the issue is you can’t resell to the client, like somebody buys your stuff and you don’t get their contact info. You get the distribution of Amazon, which is great, but you don’t get the contact info. I’ve always been wondering like, “How do I break that? How do I be the one who breaks that code?”
James: And so, just thinking through it and thinking through and thinking through it. I was like, “What if we do this?” I was like, “What if in our headline of our book and then in the description of our book, we promote like, “Hey, get this book and we will give you a $500 online course for free. It sounds crazy, but yeah, we’ll give you a legitimate home study course on how to do something significant on the internet like, build a business or start a business or get leads or do consulting or whatever. And I will give it to you for free.”
James: And so we just put it in there and we … I didn’t even know this would work. It’s like I was asking you like, “Hey, do you think this is work?” We’re both Like, “I don’t know, it sounds we’d just try it.” Long story short, in that first week, I’ll just use round numbers just to give people an example. If for every hundred books we sold, we’re getting over 60 of those people to opt in to our free course, which means we’re capturing 60% of contact information, which sometimes there’s like 60 to 68%. 60 something percent opt in rate is an unbelievable rate. But we would’ve been happy if we had 10%, 20% lead capture, but we actually got 60 something percent. By the time the whole thing … Months later, we were still at 39, 42%, just depends on the week.
James: I was able to share that data with some of the authors and stuff and they went out and were able to resell thousands of dollars coaching packages or event tickets or whatever. And that’s really what having a strategic business is all about. Is like, how do you maximize lifetime value of a lead, of a client. Somebody asked me, they’re like, “Why aren’t you afraid of people passing that link around and getting your course for free.” I was like, “No. In fact, I hope they pass it around. I hope they post it on the internet.” Because that’s helpful. That’s just more leads from me. And I know that that is somebody who’s interested in what we have. Why would you log into that course if you’re not interested? It was awesome. This is like a breakthrough, everyone’s trying to figure out, “How do you capture leads on Amazon?” And that was an incredibly effective way to do it.
Chris: Well yeah, super impressive because what is the typical conversion rate really. Two, 3% people say that’s a great conversion rate if you think about anything. And to be in the 60s, it’s unheard of. And the smart thing that you did as well is you put that offer right there on Amazon in the book description. Many times I see people though, they write just a brief paragraph. This is what the book is about, boring, you fall asleep. And yours is like, boom, copyrighting heaven. You’ve got this huge offer right there, big bold letters right at the very beginning. Nobody can miss it all, which I think just increases the value even more now. What are your recommendations for using a book to build your personal brand?
James: Well, in terms of like, should people? Or how to?
Chris: I’d say, just any tips or strategies or techniques, because clearly a book is going to build your personal brand if people know about it. But most people don’t find out.
James: Yeah. I think one of those interesting and sad stats is like, most people’s book doesn’t sell a hundred copies ever. And that just tells me that people don’t … They know their stuff, but they don’t know marketing. If you’re a marketer listening to this, you should follow up on that. That’s like a little gold mine for you. But I think some of the most helpful things you can do is let people know you have your book, you’d be surprised how many people I see doing Facebook lives, doing content, doing photos, doing recorded video, doing stuff on Instagram. And you don’t even know these people have a book, you have no idea. And whether they want to place on the shelf behind them or talk about it and mention it, put it on their website, put it on their Facebook page, do free giveaways in their book, any of those things.
James: People don’t want to do giveaways of the book because they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to spend four bucks on my book.” It’s like, come on, that’s the cheapest lead you’re going to get, trust me. Somebody sends you their contact info, you send them a book. That’s a pretty darn cheaply. And also it’s a super high quality lead. What’s actually is more important, I don’t care if the shipping on that book was 10 bucks for you. That lead is proven to be a hotter lead than just somebody who ops in, into like an eBook online or something like that. Somebody who has a connection with you, saw your content, said, “Hey, yeah, I’m interested in that, send me one.” They’re going to build a personal connection with you, you sign in, that kind of stuff.
James: I just think in general, I don’t know if it’s people … I’ve actually heard from authors that they get a little gun shy about their content because they don’t become a multimillionaire and then for some reason they think they were going to. When that doesn’t happen, they get gun shy about their content, they second guess themselves. I’ve heard that, and usually that is not the case. Usually people, they just need to keep promoting. You need to always be promoting your stuff. And nobody knows what you got unless you say it. Your mom, your grandma, your cousins, your competitors, no one’s going to say it, you’ve got to say it.
James: And you don’t have to be overly salesy or anything like that. But letting somebody know that something exists is super helpful. And that’s the essence of content marketing by the way. But some really like tactical ways people could do it. I think one of the most clever things I’ve ever heard is in something that we used to do in the B2B space a lot was, we would get the physical address if somebody were trying to market to, and we would get their business address and then we would go on to our account in the Amazon, the KDP. It’s called KDP now, it used to be called CreateSpace, but back then we just go to CreateSpace.
Chris: You’re right.
James: Back then we used to call it the CreateSpace, but now it’s called KDP. And we had just go in there and … Actually to be honest, we didn’t even go in there, we just went public. We just went to the public page, bought our own book with our own credit card, and type in the shipping address as this person’s business address and check the box to make it a gift, which is really cool. It adds a couple of bucks to your order, but it they’ll put it in a box, they’ll wrap it, and you can put a little note on the book, “Hey Sarah or Hey Jeff I know you have more time I call, but I just wanted to make sure you read chapter seven in here because this is how we’ve been transforming business like yours. I can’t wait to talk to you.” Or you could say, “Hey, I made a custom video for you. It’s at this link right here. And I just wanted to introduce myself. It’s only the 22nd video. I hope you enjoy the book.”
James: But one thing I can tell you is like, we had executives at Verizon, Charter Communications, or Rackspace, big executives that you could never get into. They would never open your email. But we had them call us back or text us back or respond to us because of something like that. The deal we ended doing with Rackspace was like $80 million deal. Isn’t $80 million seven year contract? It started with a book.
Chris: Wow.
James: Yeah. It works. I’m not going to tell everybody this is like gold at the end of the rainbow and you’re going to get a hundred percent response. But I can promise you this, if you send 10 bucks, you’re going to get some responses. You’re going to get two, three, four people, five people responding. It’s just any executive … I’ve had it happen to me. You get something like that and you just sit down and you go, “Man, what a creative person.” You know what I mean? You’re just impressed. You’re just like, “This person seriously tried.” You know what I mean? You’ve instantly separated yourself from every other person who’s knocking on the door. And so you go, “I don’t even know this is … look, I got to give him a chance.”
James: You know what I mean? Just that sense of reciprocity, you see somebody hustling … It’s almost like, you might be driving down the road and you’re super, super busy and you’re late somewhere, but you see somebody pushing their car with the door open and they’re drive steering and pushing. You just have the sense of like, “Dude, I better get out and help that guy.” That’s how it is. I had an executive one time, I think it was an executive for Vonage and they said something like … It was a one-line text message. They text directly to my phone and they said, “Never seen something like this, I thought I’d at least give you a chance.” He said, “Call this number, book a meeting, I’ll give you 10 minutes that.”
James: That’d be a $4 million deal. We went in there, 10 minutes became 45 minutes and it was 45 minute meeting. And two or three minutes later, we inked a big deal with them. And that works, whether you’re trying to … I would challenge people to do it if they want to speak at an event if they want to speak at a college, if they want to … Anything, anywhere you’re trying to go, getting the book published nowadays, especially using people like you guys, there’s no reason why somebody can’t get a book done. There’s no reason anymore. It used to be 10 years ago or whatever it was. I was like, “Yeah, I don’t want to have like 5,000 books sitting in my living room.”
James: That’s what you just have to do or somebody like, “Yeah, I don’t have $40,000 above the bucks.” Or you know what I mean? There’s no excuse now. People are like, “Oh, I don’t know how to write.” No excuse, no. It’s technology, it’s just different.
Chris: For those people who are listening right now, I just want to point out that James is a … He’s not just a marketer, he’s a super marketer and he gets results that are amazing. The last five minutes that you just listened to is pure gold. And James, most authors, they put their book up on Amazon and then do nothing. They hope and pray. Like you said, they don’t even mention it. You don’t have to be pushy and salesy. You just have to mention it so that people are aware of it. And then the results come.
James: This is something that I talk about at bigger conferences. I did this thing at AT&T Stadium with Robert Herjavec one time and I was talking about how in this day and age, technology pitfalls into people’s hands so fast. Like you have capabilities because of what’s on your phone or even working with people like you guys. You have these capabilities that you didn’t have two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, you couldn’t do this. But whenever there’s a positive, there’s a negative, right? It’s like … I don’t know if you want to call it a ying and a yang or whatever people want to call it, but there’s like a vacuum effect.
James: The party you need to protect yourself against is something like Amazon seems so easy and it is, but yet because you haven’t done the work and put in the time and the hustle and spent 40 grand and put in three years of work, like you used to have to. I remember growing up and being a teenager meeting business people and they’re like, “I’ve got a book.” And I’m like, “Really?” They’re like, “Yeah, I got a book.” I’m like, “I’d love to see it.” I go over to their house and it’s a bunch of papers in a box, eight and a half by 11s. And I’m like, “This is your book?” They’re like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Well, where’s the binding?” And I’m like, “Why does it eight and half by 11?”
James: And they’re like, “Oh, well, I haven’t published it yet.” I’m like, “Okay.” And I’m thinking, “Why?” And they’re like, “They can’t, they don’t know how.” The world was just different. But if you went out and spent 40 grand or more to publish your book, you would have so much more respect for what you’re doing and so much more like focus. You’re like, “Man, I got to make my 40 grand back today. I got to talk about, I got to push it, I got to hustle, I got to …” But when it’s all free or you’re not even spending 10 grand. Sometimes you’re not even spending five grand. When you’re doing it at such a low barrier of entry, I think the respect and the focus in the … You’re just being conscious that it’s even out there anymore.
James: It just goes by the wayside. One of the downsides of our technology is like, people get this stuff thrown into their hands and then they can publish a book now so easily. You hear that like, “Man, if you put it on Amazon and you have a potential of reaching millions and millions and hundreds of millions of people.” Well yeah, you could put a commercial out there and it says reaches 400 million homes. It doesn’t mean 400 million people are going to watch it. You know what I mean? You might have that quote like ability to have beyond that distribution channel. It doesn’t mean that 400 million people are going to see your book. And so you’ve got to go out there and talk about it, but because of the investment of your time and your money isn’t there, like it used to be.
James: Now that’s where we’re at. There’s more books but less people focusing on their book. And so, I think the positive side of this is, if you just take some time every day, like if you just took 10 minutes a day in promoted your book, you would be surprised how you would literally beat 90% of people in your niche just by doing that. Literally 90% of them you could be and be a top 10 in the category or better top 1% of the category probably, just by taking a few minutes, five days a week.
Chris: All right. Most people are unfortunately pretty lazy.
James: Yeah.
Chris: Which is great for those of us who aren’t because it that much easier.
James: Right, right. Imagine if everybody would put their book out there when hustled, it would be-
Chris: Oh yeah. Then we would just have to out hustle them. What’s your next book going to be about?
James: Wow. I don’t know. I’m thinking about writing a really gutsy one.
Chris: Cool.
James: One that doesn’t deal with the entrepreneurship at all. But I’m actually thinking about writing one about … That’s in the religion category.
Chris: Oh, nice.
James: Yeah. I’m thinking about writing a book about … I’ve actually have most of this book written. I remember writing a book called The Church Bubble. And so, it takes after tech bubbles and it basically says that in the Christian American church based on my executive analysis of mega churches, not just any church but mega churches specifically that if you actually measure it by real data, there’s a perceived value that’s happening, but actual impact in the way people live, the way they treat their families, anything from treat their families to things they do in their moral or personal life.
James: The way that they run their business, and maybe even like … Anything votes how they spend their money. Those things are not in anywhere near aligned with the way that these churches would say, “We’re changing the world.” If you graphed it, it would be like the perceived value is a spike going through the roof. It’s like a hockey stick going straight up, but the actual value is flat or dropping. It has actually a lot of data that shows that religious organizations, church organizations like pastors, I’m sorry but I’m trying to say this is a sad thing that pastors used to be the number one in like in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. They were the number one person in the community that people would go to when they were in a serious trial or serious trouble.
James: Statistically they said they would turn to a pastor. They would literally just walk up to a church, they’d never gone to the church. They don’t need to be in the domination. They just go and knock on the door and say, “Hey, I have a problem I was wondering if I can talk to a pastor.” Nowadays you go and knock on the door be like … Number one, you’re lucky if you even see a pastor. Number two, you got to get on the calendar, which is going to be three months out or whatever. And then it’s like, if you’re not a part of the church and you’re not tithing, they don’t lock you up, they keep all the records and they’re like, “Well, this person … The chances of you getting more than 10, 20, 30 minutes is very, very minimal in most churches.
James: It’s an interesting … It’s not meant to be like this anti church book, but it’s meant to be like an awakening of like there’s a problem with … The question becomes, why are they doing this and is it more of a business move? Then I go into like, well, isn’t it interesting that almost 95% of mega churches are planted. They’re founded in a major financially rich city. They don’t plan them in the ghettos. They plan them in rich neighborhoods and they do that for a reason so they can build big building, put a $60 million campus up and then you hear the message like, “Hey, we got to help the poor. We got … It’s like nobody been down there in a while.
James: I just want to call it a lie, like some of those things. And I think it’s a very dangerous thing to do because pastors are … Anytime you go off to religious leaders, it’s considered like a bad omen anyway. So-
Chris: Right.
James: But I just know with social and all the things that I have behind me, I don’t think no one will be able to … I know the data is so solid, and I’ve been tracking this now for seven or eight years. It’s not just something I just came up with in the whim, but I’ve literally had versions of this for years now. It’s just been something where I brought it up to dozens and dozens of pastors over the year, dozens. And I have never had one person be able to tell me I’m wrong. They either get frustrated and just don’t want to talk about it or surprisingly like more than half of them in minute, they go, “You’re right, that is a problem.” And they’re just like, “I’m just the guy following the rules.” You’re like, “What do you want me to do? If I wave my flag, guess what happens to me? I’m fired.”
Chris: Right, absolutely.
James: I don’t blame them, but yeah. It’s an interesting concept because I care about the church but also I think whether somebody’s religious or not, a lot of data shows the stronger and more sincere religions are civilizations do better, the more that they have a belief in God in many, many, many different levels. It’s not just socially but also business financial, it’s a proven thing, which is actually pretty staggering stats when you really look at the data there. But yeah, it’s interesting. It’s very interesting. There’s other things mega churches have, what I call the Walmart effect, which is like, if you plant a mega church in Tucson, Arizona, you’re going to suck up every small church within a 20 mile radius is going to be gone.
James: Every small church will shut down or go down to minimal staff. And basically everyone goes in the mega church or they stop going to church. The smaller churches can’t fund themselves, the bigger show in town. And so it’s at that Walmart effect, if you’re a retailer and you sell shoes and you Walmart goes up two miles from you, man, you might as well move.
Chris: Right? Yeah. Come up with something extremely serious to, you know, make yourself different.
James: Yeah, yeah. Like sell custom shoes. You can’t sell any brand name or any brand that they’re going to carry because they’ll crush you. But yeah, there’s a lot of interesting things. I don’t know, I’ve thought about that one, it’s something I’m really passionate about. I don’t know, we’ll see.
Chris: I’m looking forward to reading that when that comes out.
James: Yeah. I would say I already know all the networks and people I’m going to push it through. It’s like it would go … I have YouTubers and people who have multiple millions of followers and they have told me, “Man, if you publish that book, we will interview you.” This is huge.
James: I don’t want to be like the anti-God your person or the anti-church person or the rebellion person, but also this is a part of who I am, I’m a disruptor, all I’ve ever done is disruptive technology. So-
Chris: You’ve gotten good at it. This next question is a fun one for me to ask. If you could co-authored a book with anyone dead or alive, who would it be and why?
James: … Wow. I don’t know, in the business sense, my first reaction goes to … I would probably want to co-author a book somewhere around the word influence. And I would love to get a perspective of authors that hate each other.
Chris: Oh, you are a disruptor!
James: Yeah. The biggest church pastor and someone who runs the biggest cult, Tai Lopez and Tony Robbins, you know what I mean? Totally different points of view. But if you really looked at it strategically and tactically, I think you would find a lot of similarities. It’d be very interesting.
Chris: It’d be fascinating.
James: Yeah. That’s an interesting question. Man, I never thought about that until you just said that, “I don’t like.” That’s the first thing came to my mind is like getting polar opposites would be really cool. In fact, that would be a really cool angle for you guys to take. If you really want a coauthor book to blow up, get all the people that don’t like you to write.
Chris: Oh my goodness. Yeah. Polarizing? The last big question I have for you is, what do you want to be remembered for?
James: Man, it’s always a tough question. I think when I’ve asked that question to people or when somebody asked me that, and instantly like your mind goes to what you do now because it’s almost like you want to justify what you do. Then you start formulating your answer based on what you currently do. But I would have to say if I had to pick, I would say I want to be known as somebody who had a unique in real relationship with God. And I’m not saying that in a religious sense. I’m saying that in a sense of like, I realized what I was put on earth for. And so everything that I do, whether it’s build a website, influence people, help people coach, people get on podcasts, whatever is based around that. And it all comes from an inner desire that I personally believe God put in my life. That’s why I do what I do.
James: When I say that and I reconcile it with what I do, do, like anybody, I started immediately to think about the things that I do that may not align with that right now. You know what I mean? It’s-
Chris: A gap.
James: They’re like, get yourself aligned with just doing something because the money’s there and they’re not necessarily like bad or unethical. I’m not saying something like that. I’m just saying, like you see a pile of cash sitting there and no one’s picking it up and you’re like, “Nah, we can do that.” And I don’t think sometimes like, “Is that my ultimate place in the world is to start dabbling in that?” I think that if I had to really choose my ultimate thing that I would want people to remember me for, it’s like, “Man, this guy had a unique relationship with God and whatever he felt he was supposed to do, he did.”
James: And what I’m saying there’s … Not that I’m against it, but has nothing to do with stepping into a church.
Chris: Right. It’s about a personal relationship?
James: Yeah.
Chris: That’s powerful. Well, where can people find you? I’m building to your book and we’ll have that in the show notes as well, but where would you like to send people to learn more about you?
James: They can go to jamessmiley.org or jamessmiley.com, either ones because it’s the same spot. A bunch of really cool free stuff on there. We’re always pumping free stuff. We fully realize most people, they can’t do 10, 30,000 businesses to 200,000, they can’t do it. So we just try to put as much as we can for free and just to help people. And the reality is, we know we’re helping people in that respect, but also there’s a small subset of people that over time they’ll do well and they’ll maybe they’ll come back and we’ll be able serve them. We try to just overdo it on stuff that we give out for free.
James: There’s a lot of cool stuff there. And if you just want to follow what’s going on, we’re really big on Facebook. Just always have stuff going on there. We have a Facebook group, get into my Facebook group and there’s stuff going on there every single day. We’re mentoring and helping people, people asking questions and stuff like that. I really try … Because I grew up poor and didn’t have any connections or … My dad wasn’t an executive or anything like that. I just made my way and hustled. And then just leverage friends and stuff like that on the way. But I really try to help people who are starting, that’s a big passion of mine and something that I’m known for a little bit. I have a heart for people who are sincerely trying to start, trying to get something going. Those are the ways to get in touch with me if anybody needs anything.
Chris: I love it. I’ll make sure that all of those links are in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time out today to talk with me. Super, appreciate it.
James: Yeah, this was super fun, man. Awesome.
Chris: Thanks.
Thanks for coming along for the ride. If you want to be part of a tight-knit community of people learning how to make money with their books, join my FB group at jetlaunch.link/group. That’s the best place to ask me questions and get fast answers.
More about James Smiley
Websites: jamessmiley.org or jamessmiley.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheRealJamesSmiley
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejamessmiley/