The Open Source Marketer

Can being a Love Kung Fu artist help you increase your customer base and make you more efficient too? Well, I can guarantee anything, but it has certainly worked for Mark Berry of LoveKungFu.com.

Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark and he told me about several creative ideas he’s used to build up his online life coaching business. Using word of mouth advertising, teleconferencing tools, and his own organizational skills he has increased his customer conversions and freed himself to focus on the success of his clients.

In the interview, Mark shares with us how he increased his conversions by screening prospects in just 20 minutes and how he used the self publishing of his own book to open up new opportunities. All throughout the interview he offers some extremely creative insight that I know you will find valuable.

I hope you enjoy the interview.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read the full Love Kung Fu interview transcript

Charles McKeever: Hi, welcome back to another edition of the Open Source Marketer Podcast. I am Charles McKeever and I am the Open Source Marketer. And today I am here with Mark Berry. Mark Berry runs and operates Little Love Coach, and he is going to be sharing with us today a little bit about how he does his business online and offline.

Just to give you a little background on Mark, he is 5′3″ and he is known as “the little love coach.” He has coaching clients all around the world. And in 2002 he started Love Kung Fu, which is a life coaching company that’s dedicated to helping people improve their dating and relationships. Mark, thank you for being on the show here with us.

Mark Berry: Thanks, Charles.

Charles: Well, let’s just — let’s just jump right into it, because I am really interested in what you’ve got going on here. I have been to your website, I have been to littlelovecoach.com and then I have also been to Kung Fu Love. And I have to tell you that you’re doing a great job of working things online and offline. So tell us a little bit about…what is Love Kung Fu, and how did you come up with that concept?

Mark: Well, it’s the name of my company and I called it Love Kung Fu because, Kung Fu means skilled. And a friend of mine and I were brainstorming on what we were going to call this thing, because before the company started, I was just giving love advice, and I started charging for it and people started paying for it. So once I was giving this love advice out and selling it, then I had to come up with the company name.

And we looked around and we brainstormed and lovekungfu.com was one of the only ones not taken of everything we came up with. So — and what’s funny is, the further I got into the company and the further I got into helping people find love and help them in dating and relationships, the more Kung Fu started to apply, because Kung Fu, as you know, it means work, and sometimes it means struggle, and love is hard, love is work. So that’s the basis behind Love Kung Fu.

Charles: So you say that you were giving out free — I guess giving out free advice in the beginning?

Mark: Well, I’ve been giving free advice my whole life. [laughs]

Charles: OK, yes, welcome to the world.

Mark: Right. But around 2002 was when I started charging people and I just said, “Hey, I’m offering this program where I work with you one-on-one, week after week for a five-week period, four to five weeks, and we help you accomplish very specific goals.”

Case in point, my first client ever, her name was Grace, and she wanted to meet some new guys. She wanted to meet guys that were at her financial worth. And she kept finding losers. So she started talking to me, we started working every week and I helped her to find better places to find these guys. I helped her brainstorm and seek out places that these guys could be at her level.

And sure enough, by the end of those five weeks, she was going on all these different dates with guys that were really up to par, like really at the level she wanted.

Charles: Was it obvious then that there was a market? I mean, beyond this one person, did you know that there was a market for you to do this?

Mark: No, I didn’t know there was a bigger market when I — back when I started that, I had not even heard of life coaching at all, which is basically what I do. All I knew is that people kept asking for it, and so I kept offering it. And now over the last six years or so, I have started to discover there actually is the really big market for people who want life coaches and that market is only just beginning.

Charles: Really. So there wasn’t like a — did you do any kind of research, or, I mean, was there a place where you could go to find out that this was happening, or you just paid attention?

Mark: No, I just followed demand. And you know, as a business coach as well, that’s really what I recommend to people too, like, listen to the demand. And as a result of listening to the demand, I’ve coached people in their — I’ve written their online dating profiles for them, I’ve given dating advice, I’ve given sex advice, I’ve helped people write their first book.

And I’ve done all of that because I kept listening for what they wanted. And only much, much later, circumstantially did I find that there actually is a market. But yes, everything I found… all of my business I found, I found just through listening to people and listening to what they wanted.

Charles: So was this your first online business, then, or your first business at all, or what’s the story there?

Mark: I got into real estate investing in about 2000-2001, and started this right after that — just coincided with it. My first client was first my real estate investor mentor, and then she thought, “Oh, your advice is good,” and she hired me. So, it’s my second business. But it’s really the first time I have ever built anything online because real estate investing is not online at all. You know, it’s not anything I did that wasn’t –

Charles: So you didn’t start out with a website then, I guess you just added that later?

Mark: Yes, we had a website, but it was mostly just kind of a motivation, it was like a business card, which kind of put us out there. But it certainly was not really a marketing tool, especially the way you see websites as marketing tools today. It was more to create a brand for us and a motivation. But all of my first business was all word of mouth and people I met in person who wanted to hire me.

Charles: Do you find yourself doing more online business today, or more offline business?

Mark: Well, you know, the online business that… the sales are almost always online because that’s the only way that I take a credit card is over the computer. But what I use is, I use the online websites like LinkedIn and Facebook, and I connect with people. And then through those connections online, people I never would have met, email lists, however I meet people online.

Then I funnel all those people into one-on-one conversations on the phone. And from those phone conversations they get excited, they get interested, they want to hire me, and then I redirect them to the website and have them sign up where we’re talking.

Charles: You use the model of a funnel, where you have a large general population and then as the prospects get more and more refined, they get closer and closer to the buying process?

Mark: Yes, and the funnel that I have created is a 20-minute strategy call, and I actually modeled that from Laurel Ingmar’s Live Out Loud program. And what I do is, if you’re interested, then you get a taste test of the coaching. What — how can I help you in 20 minutes? And if that helps you enough that you like what you hear, from there you sign up for the five-week program, four weekly calls.

Charles: That’s pretty sharp. I like that, because most people will be willing to give up 20 minutes, you know, to find out if something is going to work for them or not.

Mark: Well, yeah, and I found that because this is a relationship-oriented business, like any service business, about 50 percent of your investment is in the relationship itself. So what I found is that there was no way for me to sell myself without actually having a conversation.

Charles: [laughs]

Mark: Yes, right. So when I first started I had 45 minutes, like they got a full call to try me out. What I found was I was helping people so much, so fast, that I actually was giving them more than they could even handle in the first 45-minute call, and they would be all full and all done, and then not hiring me.

So I found that in a 20-minute call, I could actually help them enough so that we formed a relationship, but not so much that they’re all full up and ready to go.

Charles: That’s pretty sharp. I guess you just noticed that over time, is that it?

Mark: Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Everything I notice is the hard way, yeah.

[laughter]

Charles: That’s good though, because a lot of times I think people kind of get a certain result and then they feel maybe discouraged. They don’t think to refine what they’re doing, and see what else works. So that sounds like that’s what you’ve done, you’ve just over time tried different things until you got the result that you wanted.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, I’ve had to try a million times, it’s a never ending process of experimentation and refinement and personal growth.

Charles: So you said you’ve built relationships, you have to have the conversations with them and things like that. Have you in your marketing efforts… I mean, have you tried buying traffic or cross-promoting between sites, or do you rely any on search engine traffic, or anything like that?

Mark: I’ve done quite a bit of experimenting with online search engine traffic, online advertising to the general public. The service I have provided with life coaching, I’ve found, is still so new and so cutting-edge, the ads are not targeted enough that I am able to pick up anybody.

I am really not able to pick up any clients with any sort of positive return from those marketing ventures. Couple that with the fact that it’s a service job, and it’s really a personality-matching kind of business, and what happens is they never actually come through. So I have actually found that search engine marketing, and even a lot of online advertising is not working for me.

Now, the one thing I have not done yet is online advertising specifically on dating sites, which is a gold mine, I hope. I trust that will actually work, since I am a love coach, and that will complement those businesses. So, that’s really the next online advertising venture that I’ll try, is just focus on those dating companies.

Charles: Now, do you consider your business to be strictly an Internet marketing venture? I mean, you have an offline component, right?

Mark: It’s a real blend, it’s a real blend. Again, because it’s a relationship business, I’ve found that I’ve had to blend. All of the coaching I do is on the phone, so I don’t meet with anybody in person.

Charles: How interesting.

Mark: So most of my clients are actually not in Dallas where I live: they’re in New York and Toronto and San Francisco. I’m on various newsletters, various email lists, and forums. Sometimes when I travel I go to classes all over the country, and I’ll meet different people through various networking events and educational classes, and then from there they’ll hire me, or they’ll tell a friend and the friend will hire me.

So, most of my business comes from networking, but that networking is probably split about half offline and about half online. For example, one woman in New York was on an email list with me, a Yahoo! Group, and she saw what I was doing and got to know me better and better. We had met once before, but really we knew each other through the Yahoo! Group.

So she hired me, and as a result of her, three friends of her hired me, and then three friends of a friend of one of those friends hired me. They’re all doctors in New York, female doctors in New York, researchers and doctors in New York. I’ve never met anyone except the one girl, the first girl.

Charles: Oh, that’s fantastic, yeah! That’s a stronger piece of marketing for you then anything that you could pay for really. I mean because you’re piggybacking a little bit — well, a lot really, on their personal recommendations.

Mark: That’s right, that’s right. They’re all single women in their late 50s, and so finding love is on a ticking clock, and they were very, very interested in me. What I was able to provide with the coaching helped, because it helped the first girl and then they just kept telling people because it kept helping.

Even though I never met any of them, I was able to provide a lot of value just through phone conversation. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t been providing value to people on the Yahoo! Group as well, which is where we really got to know each other.

Charles: Right. So yeah, that’s not a “set it and forget it” kind of thing then. It’s more of an interactive, always on, always looking to be of value to other people.

Mark: Yeah, it’s definitely a business that requires my presence, it’s not a product. At the same time, I like that, because it’s more valuable to me. I can actually see the results, as I talk to people, I know it is working.

Charles: So, things like Facebook and all the different social networks and stuff, those must be a pretty good place for you to hang out.

Mark: They are, and I’ve learned a lot about networking over the years. The big thing about networking, I used to go to networking events, and then if I got 10 business cards, I would be so mad at myself if I didn’t follow up with all 10 of those people, right?

What I found about networking online and offline is, that there is only 10% of those people that are really, really going to turn into a great relationship. Well, multiply that times all of your friends on MySpace and Facebook, right? All of a sudden if you tried to follow up with everybody that you meet on there, mostly you’re wasting your time, right?

Charles: [laughs]

Mark: I mean it’s like, too much!

Charles: Sure.

Mark: If you follow that 10% rule and you say, “10% of these people are going to be interested in somehow partnering with me or hiring me,” if you get good at figuring out which those 10% are, then you can really take advantage of sites like that, and that’s a skill I’m still mastering. You know, we met on the Internet.

Charles: Yeah.

Mark: I mean, that’s the only way we’ve known each other, is exactly through all those networking sites.

Charles: Yeah, exactly. We connected online, and then I went and looked at what you were doing. You did a very good job of presenting yourself and what you did, and from there it was just like, “OK, I want to talk to this guy. I want to find out what he’s doing now. I want to pick his brain and see what kind of experience that you’ve had.”

I know that everybody has a story, and yours was one that was compelling. I mean, you did a good job of laying it out. So yeah, I can just imagine that would be the same net effect over and over again, as you interact with more and more people.

Now tell me, talk about interacting with people. Tell me, how often do you speak at events? Because I notice that you talk about your speaking engagements.

Mark: Yeah, right now it’s about once a month. I’ve only just started getting really serious about being a speaker, and it feels like a big open frontier for me, there are all these opportunities. I’m kind of sorting through them and just now starting to really speak.

I’m a writer, and as a writer I have more ideas than I have time in the day to write them down. So, as a speaker, one of the first challenges I was facing was what do I think about because there’s way too much in my brain to actually say it all at once. [laughs]

So I created this speech called “The Four Arts of Love.” It’s based on a concept I created early on in the creation of Love Kung Fu. And what “The Four Arts of Love” is about is, it’s the idea of that any skill you are trying to learn, any goal you have, can be achieved by learning a sequence of skills. And that sequence of skills usually falls in one of four arts of love.

The four arts of love are the art of being single, the art of dating, the art of relationships, and the art of teamwork. So, in the speech now, what I do is I talk about those four arts of love, and I start to help people really identify what they’re learning and how those four arts of love can help facilitate them learning the right skills in the right order.

Charles: Is there a circuit for this kind of thing? Or I mean, do you set these events up yourself, or is there something that you can sort of piggyback on an event that needs speakers?

Mark: Well, I was doing a singles event, a monthly singles event, and then we morphed that into a book club. And now we are actually going to focus entirely on getting it out into these singles groups that already exist. So, there is a circuit for love. There’s a circuit for singles groups, and those sometimes bring speakers in, and then really anybody who is interested in hearing someone speak about love, it’s a really interesting topic.

And as we all grow as people and in society, we’re starting to have more people wanting to learn about love. You know, love has been always seen as this kind of “have or have not” view in life that’s kind of like — oh, well, he’s just got lucky, that’s why he found someone. Or she was just born pretty. But more and more people are starting to approach love the same way they approach money or business, it’s actually a series of skills that you can learn over time.

As people start to figure that out, they’ve started actually wondering, “Well, who is the expert, how do we learn about learning about love?” And that’s where I’ve started to come in and speak to those groups. Then those ideas affect you, you know, for the rest of the week you will be thinking about everything we talked about, and if I did my job right it will affect how you interact with people, how you talk to singles, how you act in a Starbucks or a bar or a club or a networking event.

Charles: Yes, it’s hard not to be affected by ideas. So, tell me how — you told us a little bit about the coaching services and how you got into it — you know, kind of one person at a time and things like that, but tell me more about the life coaching part of what you do. I mean is that something that you do in groups, or something that you do on an individual basis? You talked about doing phone calls, I mean, how do you normally do that?

Mark: Well, the life coaching is set up almost exactly like a personal trainer, except it’s on the phone. And just like a personal trainer, you set a goal of what you want to accomplish. So, all of my programs are five weeks long, with the exception of couples coaching, which is 10 weeks. But pretty much in increments of five weeks, we set a goal.

And the first — the goal-setting call, the strategy session, is the free 20-minute session. If you don’t have your goal in mind already, that’s what that call is for, is to really figure out what your goal is. So, I’ve had clients who have goals like, “I want to meet more girls.” I have some clients who say, “I want to find true love by the end of the year. I want to be married by Valentine’s Day next year.”

Charles: Oh, wow.

Mark: Yeah, you know, I mean, people have goals in their love lives. I had one client who wanted to have his first book written and published in 15 weeks, and he accomplished that goal.

Charles: Oh, wow.

Mark Berry: Yeah. So, whatever that goal is, that’s the first requirement. And as a life coach, for me, that’s — sometimes I see a lot of people in different industries, either coaching or counseling, who don’t clarify the goal before they start. And to me, I have found that if they don’t have that goal really set in stone, that I might as well just give them their money back and coach them for free, because the goal is everything.

Once you set that goal, then you can look for ways to measure it. Like, you can measure true love by measuring the number of dates that someone goes on, because if they don’t go on any dates, zero times infinity is still zero. [laughs] So they have to go on dates, right, in order to find somebody. So, that’s a way to measure it. So, then over the five weeks you measure the number of dates they’re going on.

And then, “Well, I’m not finding anybody.” Well that’s what the coach is for. That’s what I’m for, is to help you figure out how to find the right people, in the right places in the right situations, in the right time in order to accomplish your goal.

I’ve had couples who were arguing about sex issues, which is a huge issue, money and sex, right? So, they would have a goal that they wanted this resolved, that they wanted this issue to be — they wanted peace of mind around this issue. That’s a goal, because you can measure that. You can count the number of fights, for example.

So, then what they do with me is once they set that goal, then we talk every week and I shed insight on their issue. Because having an outside observer, having an expert on the topic, look at what you’re doing, and look at what you’re saying and actually shed some insight on the issue, is going to help a whole lot more than all the bad advice from all your friends and family.

Because, you know, most of us are not doing it right. And I wasn’t, you know, I had to learn the hard way and I did a lot of reading and a lot of research in order to become an expert on this topic. But when I started, heck no, I was doing it all wrong. And most of the advice that people give out or people get is bad, is really bad advice. There is a lot of research to back that up.

Charles: So, we tend to turn our friends into guinea pigs. We give them advice, and then they’re the ones who have to go off and live with whether or not it works or not.

Mark: Right. [laughs] You know, there’s actually a lot of data and research and statistics that will back up almost anything that anybody says or does in a relationship. So, why not rely on the expert to guide you?

So then, what I do on these calls is just like a personal trainer, that I motivate, you know, one part cheerleader, one part, you know, football coach, and one part expert. So, each week we talk about where you’re at and the progress you’re making. And then I give you homework based on those conversations that will actually propel you forward.

So, for example, with Grace, she was meeting all these crappy guys, but that’s because she wasn’t going anywhere that rich people go. So, with Grace, her first assignment was to spend the weekend and list out 20 places that wealthy guys and powerful guys go and hang out. Where do they hang? And make that list and then go to one of those places this week. That was her homework.

For the guy writing his book, his homework was to — well, his first homework was to write, because when you are writing a book, your first job is just, you write the first book, get the first draft done, right? [laughs] So, that was his homework for five weeks.

But you know, whatever your goal is, there is homework that will have you in action. And that’s the other reason why I like the name “Love Kung Fu,” because Kung Fu really implies action. Kung Fu your love life.

Charles: [laughs] Yes, do you make them — do you require that they make noises when they do that. They have to do — [makes kung fu noise]

Mark: [laughs] Only if it helps.

Charles: You don’t try to make sure of that?

Mark: Right, no.

Charles: On Kung Fu Love, you talk about a Hottie Boot Camp. So, what is a Hottie Boot Camp, because it sounds interesting?

Mark: Well, Hottie Boot Camp is one of the programs that I offer, and you know you’ve got your five-week program, right, and right now it’s $250 for five weeks. But, then, within that five-week program, there are a whole lot of different options you can take.

So Hottie Boot Camp is one name that we use, and it did refer to an in-person Hottie Boot Camp we did, but now it actually refers to an individual five-week program that you can take. So, what people that take the Hottie Boot Camp love is that it actually — the goal of Hottie Boot Camp is to make you hot, inside and out.

So, we spend those five weeks looking at your wardrobe, looking at what clothes make you feel hot, and you go through your wardrobe, and you throw some stuff away. And then from there, you start to look in the mirror, and every day you start to see something different about yourself that you think is hot.

One of the premises of Love Kung Fu is that if you can figure out what to learn and what to do, you can really, really change how you feel and what you can accomplish. So the Hottie Boot Camp is one of the five-week coaching programs over the phone, just like everything else, it’s one-on-one with me, and you learn how to be hot! How to see yourself as hot.

Charles: So, a little bit of self-image self-exploration, where you can then have the confidence to go out and connect with the people who you want to connect with.

Mark: Yeah. One of my top Hottie Boot Camp clients, he was so down on his looks that he absolutely could not even — he’s gay and he wouldn’t ask any guys out. Even though — I’d met the guy, and the guy’s hot. And that’s the funny thing about Hottie Boot Camp, that actually a lot of hotties take Hottie Boot Camp, because they don’t see themselves as attractive as everybody else does. So, at the end of that five weeks, he started to see it.

You know, there’s a lot of things that we do in the program that have you really open up to that. A lot of it is introspective, but I believe the best introspective comes from life experience, and the best life experience comes from someone holding you accountable to actually do it.

Charles: Yeah, and a lot of times we tell ourselves things and then we wind up acting out those thoughts, don’t we?

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Charles: And then we need somebody else to help us break that pattern.

Mark: Yes.

Charles: All right. Well then, tell me more about the social club, and the forum and the meet-ups and stuff like that. I know you talked about those on lovekungfu.com, so… tell me about the social club, first of all.

Mark: Well, the social club right now is a book club, and it’s a weekly book club. We’re putting it on hold for the holidays, but it’s a weekly book club in which people can get educated. And because there’s so many networking sites out there on the web and stuff, the social club also extends out to meeting people on all of the online communities that we’re all part of, and that the Love Kung Fu team is a part of.

So, the YouTube page, the Facebook page, the MySpace page, so that people can start to really chat. The online forum is just waiting to take off. [laughs] You know, it’s just kind of hanging out for a while, because nobody gets on there. You know, a bunch of people kind of gel on there…I don’t know if you’ve ever tried starting a forum before, but until there’s some sort of critical mass, it just kind of hems and haws along, so…

Charles: Yeah, I’ve actually been involved in the starting of a forum, and you’re absolutely right, it’s one of those things that you constantly… it’s like a newborn child. I mean, you really have to watch it night and day, or you know, it falls face-first on the carpet and suffocates. [laughs] It’s not something that you just turn on and it goes.

Mark: Yeah, and what’s funny about forums is that I have a set of college buddies, and there’s probably 10 of us, but it started out with maybe about six of them who created this online forum just for catching up. And that forum is more active than forums I’ve seen with hundreds of members. And there’s only 10 of them.

Because it’s pretty much a place that they go where they know the people, because they went to school with those people. And so even though it’s only 10 people, it’s a huge forum with thousands and thousands of posts. So, again, that ties the online world to the offline world, because I know for a fact that the only reason that forum is so strong and works so well is because all those people know each other in person. They know each other offline.

Charles: Right. I would venture to bet that even on the huge forums, the really active, large, thousands of people forums, I mean, those are just a collection of very small cells of people. You know, it’s hard to have more than 20 people, having a conversation with 10 to 20 people that you really know. Otherwise it’s a surface-level conversation, it’s just sort of a hit and run. And it seems like that’s another part of managing the forum, which seems to be, you know, how to keep the thing from imploding. [laughter]

Mark: Right, right.

Charles: But what about the meetups? I mean, Meetup, of course, meetup.com, does local group meetings. So the idea there was, at least according to their website, to get people off their computers and into coffee houses and real-life settings. So how has that worked out for you?

Mark: Meetup is great, I love Meetup, and I’ve even heard there are several other sites like Meetup. I’m not sure, but I would wager Meetup is probably the biggest, and it’s continuing to get bigger and bigger every day.

And what happens with Meetup is that all the people in Meetup, not all, but a lot of, like… the meetup I did was called Smart Singles, and of course the idea, as we said, was to have singles meet up for more than just drinking, but actually to learn something. And I created the meetup and discovered this whole world of singles who were really connected both through the Meetup website and through these events. As a matter of fact, one of these girls, she was going to six to eight Meetup events a week.

Charles: Wow.

Mark: I was convinced for the longest time that she worked for Meetup.

Charles: [laughs]

Mark: Because she was a shameless promoter of not just one but dozens of meetups that she belonged to, all serving their own groups and having their own missions and goals and everything and she was just everywhere.

So Meetup has really been really neat. As for our own meetup, I’ve met so many people through Meetup and some of those people have become clients. So, they see the website, they come to the event because they like the idea, and from there became clients. I actually have several clients from Meetup.

But it wasn’t just that they saw me online. I think part of the problem with advertising online is that if you’re not already known, then you’re not real, you’re not a real face, you’re not a real person. Which is why video helps a lot with advertising: people start to feel like they actually know you when they see a video of you.

So in Meetup, they met me, and that’s when they bought. Nobody found me through Meetup and bought without first talking to me on the phone or meeting me.

Charles: Now, have you done any video?

Mark: Yeah. I have a YouTube profile. All my profiles are MarkBerry555, so that’s a great way to find me all over the place. [laughs] And I have done a lot of YouTube videos, and I have experimented with YouTube a lot. And the videos are great when they add to your website. When they are embedded in your website, and the whole purpose of the video is for that page.

Like, I have an Action Dating kit, it’s a $67, two-CD workbook guide to dating, to finding love in 28 days. And I put a video on YouTube and then I embedded that YouTube video on my website, and it really helped. It really helped the believability of the product. Because they felt like they were buying it from a person, not a generic web page.

Charles: Right. That’s an interesting point to make there, that just doing one thing can improve, you know, the sales or the conversions or whatever it is you’re trying to do on your side. But, you know, it’s not always that obvious to people that that one thing needs to be done. And I think that’s a good example of it.

So, when did you decide to create the books and the audio materials, then? I mean, what was — I mean, you went from doing the, you know, getting into the coaching end of it and things like that. When did you say “Hey, I need to turn these into something that I can sell?”

Mark: Well, it was — it became a personal journey, and a lot of it, my author coaching clients, my writing coaching clients, it’s the same way. It becomes personal. Like, just to be able to say that you are a published author is one of the most proudest moments of my life. You know, I don’t have kids, so those books are my kids.

And so, being able to say I’m an author was…slowly over time, that kind of crept on me, became very personal. And I had these ideas, these concepts in my head since years. So I have so many — I actually wrote an entire book proposal to propose it as a self-help book and sent it out, didn’t get any response.

But that book proposal writing process in into itself was incredibly enriching and complicated, actually. It’s as hard as writing a book. And once I wrote that book proposal, then I started to see another opportunity to really use book writing as a marketing tool for the coaching.

And since I had all these concepts just lying around in my head gathering dust, that’s when I decided to go ahead and just write and self-publish the first book rather than trying to find a publisher. So that first book was “Splatter Dating.” And I read splatterdating.com and…

Charles: Did you come up with that name?

Mark: Yes.

Charles: Wow. That’s…I mean, it just sounds like it will get your attention immediately.

Mark: Well then, and I — I seem to keep attracting names that get attention. [laughs] So that’s good, you know, it’s good. It wakes people up.

And the concept behind splatter dating is that you want to just throw yourself out there. You just want to, you know, don’t be so picky, don’t be so stressed out about a date. Just go, get a lot of coffee dates and just throw it all out there, just throw yourself out there, just splat, right? And so then “Splatter Dating” was born out of that idea.

And so that book led me to realize how much I loved writing. And so I wrote the second book, which is the workbook that belongs inside the Action Dating kit, and that’s the workbook and CD kit. So then I wrote that book as more of a fiction self-help blend. So you actually follow these three students as they learn about dating, and they actually have their own little boot camp with this Chinese guru guy and learn about love on the journey, and then meanwhile you’re actually learning concepts along the way.

And now, my next project, I think it’s actually going to be a hybrid of Hottie Boot Camp combined with a script I wrote like 10 years ago called “The Beautiful People,” about a model who gets sucked into this world of beautiful people, except that as he gets to know the more beautiful people, then all the unattractive people in his life start vanishing. And so that’s going to track a concept I have called “The Seven Stages of Hotness,” which is a presentation I do, one of my speeches about how to be hotter, how to be more attractive.

Charles: Well, you know, I want to kind of bring back around one of the things that you said there that I thought was interesting, was that you did self-publishing on your first book. And there’s a certain element of credibility that goes along with being a published author, you know, being able to say that you’re a published author, whether it’s in a magazine or, you know, picked up by a publisher, or if it’s self-published.

Because once people feel like there’s something that you had to say that’s been printed, then there’s this credibility that goes along with it. So, sounds like that was kind of a great way for you to get your ideas down and get that credibility, was by doing self-publishing.

Mark: Yeah. And self-publishing is now something that you can do… I have self-published each of my books for less than $1,000 after all costs. And I did that with some decent creativity. But self-publishing now is so affordable that it’s really worth it. And you said that it lends credibility. And although it did not put a lot of money directly into my pocket, which is, of course what I expected, but that didn’t happen.

But what it did do is it did open a lot of doors. I would pick up the phone and call my local coffee shop and say, “You know, I’d like to do a seminar there,” or something like that, and they kind of go, “That’s nice, who are you? No, I’m not interested.” Once I was published, I recall, if I went and said, “I want to do a book signing at your coffee shop,” and they would jump all over it.

Charles: [laughs] Now, that’s interesting.

Mark: Yes. And that happened in a lot of different forms and fashions. People that were never paying attention to me, immediately would perk up and start paying attention when they knew I was an author.

Charles: Huh.

Mark: Yeah. So self-publishing was one of the best, most personally rewarding experiences I have ever had. It was really powerful.

Charles: That’s pretty smart. I would never have thought to set up my own book signing, you know. I mean –

Mark: Yeah. [laughing]

Charles: We all get ideas, I guess of, you know, that’s what the publicist does. There is something that somebody else takes care of when you reach that point, you know. But yes, it makes complete sense that you could do that.

So what, did you just show up with a table and a bunch of books and — I mean, how did you pull that off?

Mark: A table, a bunch of books, and balloons, and you know, a pen, and name tags, maybe. And really what we did is we just had fun. We had fun. If I had to do it again, which I plan to, because I plan to write more books, I would do a whole lot of them, and all over the city, and just cram them into like a two- or three- or four-week period.

Charles: Yeah.

Mark: And just run the gamut. Because, you know, because my business is still growing and still developing. So a lot of the marketing, it’s still relationship marketing. It’s still people I know or friends of friends. So if you have 20 book signings that they can pick from, then really, nobody can really say no, unless they’re really not interested.

Charles: [laughs]

Mark: Right?

So then you send out the glass… The other thing I have seen Michael Piore and Elizabeth Marshall do — they are some great marketers. They create a list of people that will email, all on the same day, an announcement about the book. This is actually how a lot of really successful authors got pushed up on Amazon, was that they had… Everybody would buy their book all on the same day.

So then Amazon records that as a record number of sales, and it pushes you way up. So you get like number one in self-help for this day. So you’re number one for a day. Well, that gets you notoriety, that gets you something you can put on the book or on wherever. And they did that by building up a list of people who were interested in emailing it out all on the same day — a launch, if you will.

Charles: So, that’s a very good strategy. I like the aspect of that because it’s smart. It’s just a smart way of doing it.

Mark: Yeah. Book sales is its own universe.

[laughter]

Charles: Yeah, I can imagine… Well, you know I have this picture in my head. I don’t know if it is the way that it happened or not, but I have this picture in my head of it being something that would be a great conversation starter. You would probably pick up new relationships and new prospects out of that alone.

Mark: Yeah.

Charles: Sounds like a great way to go into the market.

Mark: Well, yeah. My last writing coaching client, he wanted to publish a book and he went to me because I was an author. [laughs]

Charles: [laughs] There you go. It builds on it. It builds on itself.

Mark: Well, that’s right. Ivan Misner, founder of BNI International…it’s the largest networking company in the world and they have hundreds of chapters in every major city, and he told me that he…What did he say? That he started the largest international networking company in the world, but nobody would put him on TV until he had written a book. Yes, and he wrote a book, and now they will put him on TV.

Charles: Wow.

Mark: So, the power — yes, the power of being an author, it’s great.

Charles: Yes. That’s very fascinating. I have to try that out to see what kind of… I know there are bloggers within the blogosphere there that have published their own books, whether it be just a downloadable PDF or an actual physical product. And that’s been a big marketing piece for them, just to be able to say that they’re a published author. Even though their blog is what they do.

Mark: Right, yeah.

Charles: They’re writing every day, but it’s not the same as saying, “I wrote a book.”

Mark: Yeah, right. Writing feels like childbirth. It’s a process, and it really does change you. There is a reason why people respect authors so much, and that’s because writing a book is really hard. It’s a very big challenge and it’s something that really takes a lot of personal fortitude to achieve.

Charles: Yes, sometimes putting together a grocery list is hard.

Mark: Right. [laughs]

Charles: So, where do you think that — you probably didn’t expect to be where you are today, so where do you see your business going in a year? Where do you see the future for you?

Mark: Well, it’s funny, because the probably the biggest expectation I had — I certainly didn’t expect to be a love coach, but once I did start to give love advice, I expected to be a millionaire from this thing. And in fact, it’s grown a lot more organically. It’s grown slower, and along the way I’ve learned so, so, so much. So, where do I see myself headed?

Really, the next goal is to master the art of sales and marketing and really develop a larger marketing campaign, above and beyond guerrilla marketing. The trick for Love Kung Fu, and for life coaching as an industry, has been, how do we overcome the lack of understanding about what the heck this industry is.

So, that’s one of the first hurdles I really see, is learning how to speak about coaching so that the everyday average person who has never heard of it before understands it, and immediately sees the value. Much like the personal trainer industry or the massage therapy industry must have built itself 20 years ago.

Now, people that have personal trainers love personal trainers, and there is a whole segment of people and a whole group of millionaires and billionaires that developed themselves… they got rich off of those developing industries. So that’s really where I see myself, is becoming one of those icons of the life coaching industry and developing myself accordingly.

Charles: Yes, definitely I think that people instantly identify with the term “personal trainer,” whether we get an idea of someone in the gym, a physical personal trainer, or we get the sort of mental image of, like, Tony Robbins or something like that. It’s a connecting point where you say, “This is my personal trainer,” most people will go, “Oh, OK.” Yes, life coaches may be so new or so little defined that people aren’t clear as to what that really means.

Mark: Exactly, and 20 years ago when you would say to someone, “I’m a personal trainer,” they would say, “What? What is that? What do you do?” So, that industry has really taken some leaps and bounds, and that’s really where the coaching industry is headed, is through those same hoops and into those same leaps and bounds.

Charles: Well, excellent, excellent. Well, it sounds like you’re definitely on track to do all that, and you are having your goal set. Everything that you have going on, like I said, it was blindingly apparent to me when I went upside that you are organized and that you have plenty of things to offer people, no matter what level they were at — whether they wanted to do something one-on-one, or whether they wanted to pick up some materials and do something self-paced.

It really seemed like you were working all angles of it. So, kudos to you, definitely. So now, where — we talked about lovekungfu.com, and we talked about Little Love Coach, but tell me, if I have listened to this entire program, where can I find more information about you and what you do?

Mark: Well, the best thing, if they want to hire me as their coach or if they’re even considering it, is to get into a strategy session with me, get into an action strategy call, which is that 20-minute call. My phone number and my email are spattered all over the Internet. They can go to littlelovecoach.com and sign up for the newsletter, or they can go to lovekungfu.com, track down my phone number, and just call me.

To get that phone call started, scheduled this week, scheduled today, because the thing I care about most is that people take action, that they do something about their love life, and they do something about that book they always wanted to write. If that’s something that they’re interested in, they need to get a hold of me. My cell is 972 — can I give my cell out?

[laughter]

Charles: Your cell phone — you go ahead, my friend.

Mark: All right. 972-365-8084. The people I’m looking for are people that are not going to mess around, people that are serious about what they want to accomplish. And that’s who I work with.

Charles: Well, all right, Mark. It’s Mark Berry from Love Kung Fu, and thanks for being on the call with us. It has been really informative. I have enjoyed it, just to talk.

Mark: Thank you, Charles. You were great. Thank you.

Contact Mark Berry at Love Kung Fu today!