Advice from Scarface - By: Luke Hawthorne

Before Tony Montana (or "Scarface" to his colleagues because of a small scar on his face that he got when he fell off of his bicycle at the age of 7) became a famous wholesale-distributor of pharmaceutical products in Florida during the late 1980's, he was a quiet peace-loving man who ran an internet marketing business out of his bedroom at his mom's house.

He is famously misquoted as saying:

"First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman!" but in fact, what he really said was "First you get the traffic, then you get the conversion, then you get the money!"

His mother wouldn't let him date until he was 21 anyway, so, as you can see, there's no way he would have been talking about getting a woman.

So, let's study Tony's axiom and see what he really meant, but let's do it in reverse order, because in Mr. Montana's own words "after all, if you want to get somewhere, you pretty much need to know where you want to be first, right?" Who am I to argue with the dear-departed?

"………then you get the money!" Okay, he's saying that if you want money, you need to do something first. What is that exactly? Well, you need to "………. get the conversion…….." Sure, you absolutely MUST know how to convert the visitors to your website into buying customers.

Tony also famously said "you're just a filthy cockroach" to his mentor. By this he meant that people can indeed be converted; in this case, Tony was using this as a metaphor for how you can take somebody who is simply "looking" and convert them into somebody who wants to buy the products that you are offering.
(Tony did this on a grand scale during his time as a distributor in sunny Miami, at one point his sales reaching several million dollars!). Tony did eventually turn his mentor into a cadaver which is proof enough that he knew how to convert people.

So, realizing that visitors can be converted, you must first think about the beginning of Tony Montana's lesson "First you get the Traffic…….." Without traffic, i.e. visitors to your website, you cannot possibly have a business.

Tony himself relocated from a pleasant island just off the coast of Miami to Florida simply because he knew that he needed more people (or "Traffic") to convert into customers. He knew that if he converted only 0.1% of the people in the Dade county area into customers, he would be doing very well, whereas, if he stayed in his native Cuba, there simply weren't enough people to make him successful.

Traffic is the beginning of your business. If Tony Montana couldn't make his business work in his own country because he didn't have enough people to potentially convert into buyers, then he was, as he would often say "……..dead in the water".

So first you need to get the visitors to your site first and THEN offer them your products. Without visitors, you simply don't stand a chance of making your internet business a success. Give yourself the best chance. Learn how to get people to come and look at your website and then over time, when they learn to trust you, you can offer them products which they will willingly buy from you.

Tony Montana had respect from his competitors and also from his employees. You can have the same, but first you need to study. On his deathbed (which was actually his office desk) Tony's last words were a variation of his most famous quote. His last words were:

"First you get to study, then you get the traffic, then you get the conversion, then you get the……………." Alas though, we'll never know what his last word was going to be, because he died of injuries sustained in an accidental shooting incident that very same day.

About the Author

Luke Hawthorne has been writing for over 13 years. His interests include making money, flying airplanes, skiing, scuba-diving and paragliding. http://www.lukehawthorne.com

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