Welcome to this video. I'm Tom Koster, and currently I'm in France, in the South of France. It's the last day of our vacation, and there are some palm trees here near the beach. And today I want to talk to you about what it takes to build a business in digital marketing, IT, and web, starting from scratch. And how long it will take.

So, the question is how long will it take to build a business in digital marketing, IT, and Web? And if you hear some noises from the background, there are some people here standing with their caravans. Moms and dads with little children. But let's get back to the topic, how long will it take? And the honest answer is it depends. It depends on the expertise you have. It depends on your network. It depends on the amount of action that you take. And it can take a year, it can take two years, three years. In my opinion it takes at least two to three years to build a solid business if you start from scratch.

Now, if you already have a network, if you already...

Welcome to this video. This week, we are going to talk about a book called The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch and the subtitle is The Secrets to Success by Achieving More with Less. And I can remember when I first learned about the 80/20 rule, also called the Law of Pareto, when I was in high school way back then and my teacher taught me in school. In economics class. The Italian mathematician, Alfredo Pareto figured out that 80% of the profits came from 20% of the customers. Also, from 20% of the articles that people were selling and also that the 80/20 principle is also applying to nature.

And I've studied it a little bit more and a few years ago, I found this book, The 80/20 Principle, and I started using the principles in my business. So, I asked myself and you may ask yourself also what 20% of effort can I take that gets me 80% of my results. Or what are the 20% of my customers who bring me 80% of my sales and profits? And when you look at that from an economic standpoint,...

Welcome to this video. This is Tom Koster, and this week I want to talk about the subject of not pissing off your clients. And with that I mean not billing your clients too much and go for a long term relationship with your clients.

It's not that difficult to sell once, but it's much more difficult to sell over and over and over again. And if you have the best interests of your clients in mind. Then it's your obligation to build the relationship with your clients. And and more value to the clients than you ask money in return.

Because when you ask too much money for your clients and your clients do you not see you at enough value sooner or later, and I can guarantee you, it will be sooner, they will leave you for someone else who is offering more value for the money.

So the suggestion of this week is be very careful with your billing to your clients and build long term relationships.

That's it for now. Bye, bye.

Welcome to this video, I'm Tom Koster and today we're going to talk a little bit about reflection. With reflection, I mean looking back at what you are doing. I'm currently in a hotel room in Amsterdam at the Schiphol airport at the Ibis Hotel. This is a place where I come to a couple of times a year, just to reflect. For me, this is a great way to step out of my comfort zone, out of my office, out of my home, just to reflect on what's been going on.

It's important for me as an entrepreneur, it might be the same for you as an entrepreneur to take time off and reflect and see what you are doing. Now in these kinds of sessions, I look back from the past couple of months and I'm asking myself a couple of questions. Number one is have I achieved the goals that I set out to achieve? Question number two, what went right? And question number three, what went wrong and can do better. What can I do better in the future to reach my goals faster or reach my goals at all and what has gone well...

Welcome to this information session, I'm Tom Koster, and today we're going to talk about a topic which is very active in the media at this moment, and that's the Facebook security topic. 

And if we take a look at what's going on in the news media, then there's a lot of attention about privacy in Facebook. And a few days ago I read that Mr. Elon Musk deleted the Facebook pages of Tesla and SpaceX. And there's a lot of stir in the media whether business people and private people should delete their Facebook profile. 

And I have been thinking about that a lot, whether or not I should delete my Facebook information, and I've decided not to do it. And in this short information session I'm going to explain why I don't.

And the reason why I do not delete my Facebook and my Facebook pages and my Facebook profile is the reason that I basically use Facebook as a medium to communicate with my clients and with my prospects. And also I'm using it for my clients purposes, marketing...

Welcome to this video, I'm Tom Koster, and today we're going to talk about one of the most boring topics of doing business. And the boring topic is called bookkeeping. And bookkeeping is also one of the most important topics in business, because with bookkeeping you know whether or not you are making a profit, and to be in business is all about making profits.

And in doing bookkeeping, you have two choices, choice one is to have someone else do the books for you and pay that person, and have that person tell you whether or not you are doing a good job. And the other one, my preference, as you may know, is do it yourself. And the reason is that I'm doing my books myself since a few years now, and my wife used to do the books for me, and she did an excellent job, the only challenge was that my wife told me how my business was doing. And what she told me was sometimes in contrast with the feeling I had of how my business was doing.

So the books were actually telling that the business...

Welcome to this week's video. I'm Tom Koster and today we are going to talk about time management for our kind of people. Our kind of people, we are people who work in digital marketing, in web and in IT. What we do is we help end user customers, which are small business owners with their marketing, with their websites, and with small IT projects.

Time management for our kind of people is something else than time management for other entrepreneurs or for people who work for other people. The way I advise people in our industry to do time management is to work in blocks of uninterrupted time. You see, when I'm with a client, and my client is asking me questions then my client deserve my undivided attention. It's not respectful for me to my clients that I get interrupted by phone on every occasion that someone else thinks he or she needs me.

That's what I also share with my clients. I share that whenever I'm with you, you get my undivided attention. Most of the time my phone is on...

Hey, it's Tom and welcome to this video.

Today we are going to talk about Facebook, a book from Facebook, and also a book from Google. These two books, they came in the mail last week. I ordered these books from a Dutch service called Bol.com. This book, the Google AdWords book, The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords is the fifth edition, written by Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes, and Bryan Todd. And the Facebook book here, it's the third edition, also written by Perry Marshall, Keith Krance, and Thomas Meloche.
                      
The reason why I show you these books is that number one, I'm a student of good information, and Perry Marshall has excellent books on Google AdWords and Facebook. But that's not the first version. I actually just saw it's the fifth edition. Let me show you some other books, too, here. I not only have the fifth edition, I also have the fourth edition, and the third edition, and also the second...

Hey, it's Tom, and welcome to this video. In my teachings, I teach a five-step process to grow your business, called The Pattern. The first step is infrastructure, second step is marketing, the third step is sales, the fourth step is evaluation, and the fifth step is optimization. In the second step, marketing, that's what I want to talk about with you today.

Two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco for a sales seminar, and there I met a very nice lady and during lunch, we started talking, and it appears that she has a wellness center. She had two wellness centers, and she was not satisfied with the results with her sales and with her marketing. In talking to her, I asked her a question, "Okay, can you tell me how do you spend your marketing dollars at this moment?" And she told me that she only advertised on radio, so I asked her, "Do you use Facebook?" "Yes, I use Facebook." "Do you use Facebook Advertising?" "No, not at this moment," she told me.

I started talking with her and...

Hey, it's Tom. Today we are going to talk about infrastructure, and basically your websites. More specifically, HTTPS.

I recently read that Google Chrome browser is about to make some changes in the way they display non-HTTPS websites. An HTTPS website is a so called secure website. People with HTTPS websites have invested in an SSL certificate. That's very important, because that gives certainty that the website is safe for people who visit the website.

Now, not all websites have HTTPS, and maybe that's the case for your website too. My advice is that you check your website in order to see if you already have an HTTPS certificate, and if not, then I advise you to go to your internet person, to your web guy or girl and talk about HTTPS to be added to your website.

It's not only for you and for your visitors, but also for Google. Within a few months Google Chrome is about to tell the visitors that non-HTTPS websites are not secure anymore.

If you only have HTTP and you do not have...