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Charles Manuel from Berkshire SEO tells us the story of how we went from selling a speed reading course, to helping online businesses make money. Charles uses SEO, PPC, influencer marketing, and social media tactics to generate lots of new leads (and keep existing customers) for local businesses. He shares not only lots of common sense advice, but tells us\xa0about some creative ways he's used the internet to boost sales.\n\nDisplay TranscriptRobert Plank: Our guest today is Charles Manuel. He is a pretty cool guy who knows about online marketing, search engine optimization, and he works mostly with small business owners to help them build effective marketing plans. We're going to talk about all kinds of cool 4-Hour Work Week type of stuff. Charles, welcome to the show.\n\nCharles Manuel: Robert, thanks for having me.\n\nRobert Plank: Awesome. Right before we started recording, you were telling me about how, I guess in college, you discovered The 4-Hour Work Week, and this whole internet marketing thing.\n\nCharles Manuel: That's exactly right, yeah. I picked up a copy of the book. I always like to study different business methods, because I did go to college for accounting, and wanted to be a financial advisor. I actually was for a few years. In college, I started playing around with starting small online businesses, and doing them primarily online in my spare time. The first thing I did was a speed reading course, and I developed the course myself by kind of taking the best parts of a bunch of courses I had taken, and decided to make one for college students. It sold horribly. I realized, "Oh, there's a lot more to online marketing than just looking up some keywords that you think will do well, throwing $1,000 at paper click advertising, and hoping it all works out." It takes a lot of planning, and research, and everything.\n\nI started digging into it little by little over the years, and I made another business, and had some success, and made another one. Eventually, I realized I could make a lot of money just helping out small business owners to do the same thing. To just use the internet to help them market themselves. I know so many plumbers, and contractors, and restaurateurs, and folks like that just in my area that still put an ad in the newspaper, and yet don't use their Facebook page. It just seemed really strange to me that they'd rather spend $300 or $400 a month instead of use something that's free. That's what I do. I help folks leverage a lot of stuff that's generally free, and oftentimes better than conventional methods.\n\nRobert Plank: Interesting. I'm glad that you brought up and you started with the SEO, the search engine optimization kind of stuff, because I think that a lot of people kind of try to tell you, "Well, just build it and they will come," or, "Just put up a website, and just get some keywords, and put up some meta tags, and people will just magically find you." It seems like that's a good place to start I guess, but that's not all the traffic methods, and then I guess as you found from your early adventure with the speed reading courses, that even if you do have traffic, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will buy it. Do you know of a marketer named Onyx Singal?\n\nCharles Manuel: Not familiar with the name.\n\nRobert Plank: I forget what his website is, but early on, I think his first product was something about how to get better grades. In the same kind of vein as what you were selling. What's always stuck with me, years and years later, is that he did the same thing, put out a website, tried to get some buyers, and he noticed that, number one, that college kids and high school kids don't have any money and aren't willing to put money into buying this course, and the majority of his customers were the parents of kids. There would be, like, a parent of a kid with bad grades. They would buy this book as a last ditch kind of effort. It still wouldn't work, but I think there definitely is something to that...