Today I want to share with you a story of not only how I was able to turn failure into business success, but how this turnaround can bring you success, too. The system I used has since been refined and is now used to double – or even triple – the results for my clients’ businesses.

Sometimes when you experience a failure in your business – or your business model seems to fail entirely – it may be easy to just give up. Sadly, this is often the way of new entrepreneurs. And I completely understand. I’ve been there myself and it wasn’t a nice feeling.

My first attempt at my own business failed… and the second attempt seemed doomed too. But not only was I able to save my business, the lesson I learnt actually lead to my discovering the key to a successful business.

I'm Jason Buckner, the founder of Automation Made Easy, and I've experienced firsthand the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. My early story is one that many can relate to—a journey that included initial gut-wrenching failure. But failure can be the gateway to greatness.

The lesson I learnt early on in my business lead to the very formula I use today, within my own business and also for my clients.

Watch the video below now to discover how I was able to turn failure into business success… and how it applies to you, too:

In the beginning there was World Internet Summit:

In about 2006, I started working for World Internet Summit. Now, World Internet Summit was the largest internet business training seminar in the world. And we used to do events in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the UK, Asia and Canada every single year.

We'd rotate around the world running these events in initially teaching people how to make money online. But then from there, teaching people how to use the internet as a tool to run their businesses.

All of these experts – there were 12, 13, 14 experts at every single 4-day event. So at every single event there were all of these experts teaching all of these things.

I took it all in, but I didn't do anything about it. And by year two or year three, I was feeling a bit guilty because I had all of this at my fingertips and I actually wasn't doing anything with it.

My first attempt:

So then what I decided to do was actually get involved. And so I decided to get involved with one speaker. I'm not going to tell you who that was because it was a failure. It wasn't a failure because of that speaker, but it was a failure because of what I did. Or what I didn't do inside there.

But I'm going to tell you about it anyway, because it makes a lot of sense. So I chose this one speaker. It was it was based on affiliate marketing. And I did everything I needed to in the setup.

There was about two days of things. I had to sign up for this account, I had to do this, and I had to do that and put my words in here and do this there. And then I sent it all off and this whole affiliate marketing site was made for me.

The result?

I didn't make a single sale. I didn't even get any traffic in there. And so then I was a bit despondent.

Everything they did was perfect. Everything they did was good.

But the difference with this was I didn't own it. Well, I did own it financially, but I didn't own it mentally. Does that make sense?

So everything that was set up was good, but I didn't drive it.

I didn't drive traffic to it.

And I didn't make sure that it was search engine optimised.

I didn't do all of the things that I needed to do in my business to make sure this would work.

Basically, I thought it was going to be like, I'm going to pay for this. I'm going to get a click and I'm going to start making money.

Well, it doesn't work like that, does it?

We've got to own this business and drive it.

Take 2:

So anyway, I was a bit despondent because I chose one. It didn't work.

I've got no results, and I was pretty despondent.

And I went for another couple of years coming along to these events, actually sitting at the back of the room feeling even worse about myself.

You know, I was there, I was running this event and I was helping Brett McFall and Tom Hua make millions. But I'm sitting at the back of the room and I can't even make a single dollar for myself. And there was a bit of shame in that.

But then, I had previously run a chain of retail stores in Sydney. My old boss, Pat Jacobs, came along and said to me one day:

“Jason, retail is dying. I need to do something better with my life and something better with my business, and I want to do something online. I want to do it with you because we work really well together.”

I'm the technical person, she's the ideas kind of person. And we did work very well together. So we decided on working with a fellow called Mark Ling.

The training we followed... kind of:

Now, Mark Ling was also an affiliate marketing teacher. And the structure he taught was basically to set up an affiliate site that was search engine optimised, a little like the original one that I did. 

He taught you how to research the sites and the niches first, and then to set up the site so it's search engine optimised. So you're getting hits on Google, people are coming through and then you have all of these affiliate products on the site.

So you get traffic and then people buy, okay? And so we did half of what he said. We thought, like most people do, we think:

“I'm just going to do this bit here and I'm going to do this bit there. I'm not going to do this ‘cos it looks like a whole load of work. Or I'm not ready to engage in that yet, so I'm just going to put that on the back burner for now.”

What happened the second time?

And so what happened was we did half of what he said. We did the websites, they was search engine optimised. We were on the front page of Google. You'd think being on the front page of Google, having these sites with all of these affiliate products on there, you would make a cent, wouldn't you? You would think that… mm-hmm.

Not a single sale came through! 

We got a lot of traffic to the site. But not a single sale because we didn't follow the entire formula.

We just did what we thought was right.

How many times have we done that in our business and just take a little piece and think, “I'll do it like that. I'll do this, but I'm going to do this my way.”

So what did we do next?

We were almost going to throw it all away. Okay, second failure.

But then we thought, you know what… the reason why we didn't do this follow up was because it was a year's worth of emails to put into a system. But we thought, you know what, we haven't given this a good go. And now we're responsible to each other. We're not just responsible to ourselves. We're responsible to each other.

How we were able to turn failure into business success:

So what we did was we sat down, and it took us about two and a half to three weeks to go through for one site and follow Mark Ling’s formula. And that formula was to do this email, this email, this one goes to content, this one goes to content, this one you sell something.

There was this formula of all these different permutations of content… content… sell. Content… content… content… sell… and all these different things.

Literally three emails per week, every week for 52 weeks.

You do the math there. It's A LOT of writing. It's a lot of content creation… a lot of work to do that. But we did it in two and a half to three weeks. We put it in place. And I still remember the day where we had our first person opt-In.

We put an opt-in on the page and it was a pop-up, an exit pop up, and in line and all of those things you do.

The formula worked!

I remember the day. It was about four days after we set it all live. We had our first opt-in and we were both so excited. We hadn't even made a single cent yet, but we were both so excited that someone wanted what we had… someone wanted the information.

It was literally less than seven days later that someone bought something. That original opt-in bought something.

Then it just started to grow. It literally grew and it grew and it grew to a point where it was paying for itself.

So that was on the first site. We just did one site to start with, and then we repeated the formula.

We literally followed the entire formula again across the second site and the third site so that we could start getting some results there. And we did. We literally exactly followed the formula and got the results now.

So then what we thought was, this is really good. Okay, let's get some more traffic into there. Then we put some more traffic in. And basically what happened was we, once we started making some money, we got a bit lazy with it. We shouldn't have; we should have been pushing it forward. But when we got lazy, it still paid for itself.

It paid for the course that we bought from Mark Ling. It paid for all of the website costs. And it paid for all of our marketing costs, and it broke even. But what happened as a result of this was such a huge learning.

The lessons… and the formula:

Number one, you've got to commit to something. If a formula's put in front of you, you've got to commit to it.

But number two, the other thing that I learned in this was all about the follow up. This is where it all sprung from. And I didn't realise this until much, much later in my business.

You know, we got in there and I'm very competitive and so I saw this working. I thought, “Well, how can we make this work better?”

So I went through what emails were working, what emails weren't, what formula of content before selling worked, and assessed this and changed it a little and we got some more sales out of it as well. It became more efficient. And this is where the Follow Up Formula started growing inside my brain.

If you'd like to understand more about the Follow Up Formula and how it can work in your business, we'd love to offer you a free consultation. Simply book a free, no obligation call with us today.