October 11, 2024 • 49 mins
Is it possible to transform the way you think about marketing expenses? Explore innovative strategies with us as we challenge the misconception that effective marketing for small businesses must break the bank. Promising you a new perspective, we discuss the benefits of acquiring marketing skills independently versus outsourcing to experts. With practical examples, such as assessing podcast production costs, we illustrate how to view marketing as an investment with potential high returns rather than a burdensome expense.
Discover how service providers, like chiropractors, can reclaim their time and maintain income through unconventional strategies. We introduce the concept of "selling your sawdust," a creative approach that involves monetizing unique knowledge and systems developed over time. This strategy not only offers additional revenue streams but also provides a pathway to achieving a sustainable work-life balance, liberating professionals from the constraints of a packed schedule without sacrificing their financial stability.
Authenticity can build a community, and we explain how documenting your genuine experiences can foster a supportive tribe on social media. By sharing personal stories and insights, you can cultivate an engaged audience that backs your business ventures. We stress the importance of maintaining sales and revenue, especially during tough economic periods, and offer strategies to maximize advertising investments to stand out in a crowded market. Learn how prioritizing proactive sales efforts and leveraging personal authenticity can help your business thrive, even in challenging times.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, welcome everyone to this week's episode
of Paid to Create.
I'm AJ Roberts and my co-host,sarah, is not here today.
She is off jet-setting aroundthe world enjoying herself.
So we have a couple of style ofepisodes we do.
We sometimes have the two of usand we'll talk about current
topics and go through that.
(00:20):
Sometimes we'll do an interviewwith a guest and sometimes we
do Q&A.
This episode is going to be aQ&A episode and Ryan, who's
behind the camera, is going toask the questions.
And you know, if you haven'tyou know subscribed to the
podcast, make sure to do that.
You can do that on yourfavorite podcast platform or go
to paidtocreatecom.
You subscribe there so that wayyou don't miss any of these
(00:42):
episodes.
So, anyway, ryan, what's thatfirst question we got today?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
all right.
Hey, aj.
I'm sarah from portland, oregon.
I run a small business and I'vebeen struggling to figure out
the right marketing strategy.
I've researched social mediaexperts, email marketing
specialists and advertisingexperts, but everything seems
expensive and I'm not sure whereto start.
How can I move forward withoutbreaking the bank?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Man, you did not sound like Sarah.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
You could have put some more effort into that?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Anyway, that's a great question.
So, basically, I need to expandthe business.
I'm looking at differentmarketing avenues and they're
expensive.
And what should I do?
So the truth is, in thesesituations, you have two choices
, right?
Choice number one is you learnit and do it yourself, and for
most people, that's the routethey decide to go, and it's good
(01:32):
, in a sense, that if you don'tknow how to do something, it's
sometimes hard to hire someoneand know if what they're doing
is going to work.
And so oftentimes, if you'rehiring blind to the the job that
they're going to be whetherit's an agency, whether it's an
employee, whether it's anoutsource person for projects if
you don't know what needs to bedone, sometimes you're going to
(01:53):
go through a lot of differentpeople until you find someone
that's going to work right,always talks about this hire
quick, fire, faster, right.
And that is a path that youwould have to take if you
decided you know you're notgoing to learn about it, you're
just going to outsource it.
Obviously, the way around thatis to understand what it is you
(02:15):
need to get done, and in doingso, I think it will shift your
perspective in terms of like itbeing expensive, because this
idea of it being expensive,expensive, it's a wrong mindset,
and the reason I share that isbecause the truth is is, if it's
your business, it's aninvestment that is supposed to
(02:36):
bring you a return on thatinvestment.
So the question is is how muchare you willing to spend in
order to get an ROI right?
And so, anybody you hire, thereshould be a number, a budget
that they have or a timeframethey have.
(02:56):
If they're going to be creatinglet's say, they're doing your
social media and you're payingthem, you should have a time
frame, whether it's 60 days, 90days, six months, whatever.
That is that you're willing toinvest.
And then, if there's no ROI,you're going to pull out right.
And so when you look at thesethings, oftentimes the prices
sometimes seem expensive.
(03:17):
But let me give you an example.
We're recording the podcastright now.
The time it takes to do thepodcast is only a fraction of
the time it takes to produce,edit, publish, promote the
podcast.
So if we were going to rent outthe studio for other people and
they said, well, how much is it?
And we said, oh, it's 10,000 aday, and that includes all
(03:42):
post-production, all clips,everything like that that come
with it.
Most people are going to belike that's expensive, 10 grand
a day.
Because the positioning intheir mind is I'm only going to
be in the podcast, I'm going tobe in the podcast studio for
maybe two, three hours for 10grand.
But they don't understandeverything else that goes into
that right and that's somethingthat most business owners don't
(04:03):
get.
They say they want a webinar,someone to write a webinar for
them, and they don't understandwhat goes into creating a
webinar that converts.
Right?
You could go to ChatGDP, ask itto create you a webinar.
You could even upload, you know, a webinar script, the perfect
webinar script, or anotherscript that you can get
available.
Is it going to work?
(04:23):
Maybe Do you know why it'sgoing to work, why it's not
going to work?
Probably not.
Whereas if you're hiring someone, the assumption is they do know
right, and so a lot of peoplenow adding guarantees because
they believe in what they'redoing.
But that's something to youknow.
If you are nervous, if you areworried about the investment not
returning money to you, you cansee what those guarantees are.
(04:47):
Is someone willing to do that?
Because there's also the valuethat that person is providing to
you that you're not taking intoaccount.
If I'm paying them just for thehours they work, fantastic.
But if I'm paying them for thetransformation they bring in
terms of a bunch of money that'scoming in, you know, if you pay
$25,000 for someone to writeyou a webinar and you go do that
(05:13):
webinar and you sell $150,000worth of stuff, that's a pretty
good return on investment.
Now the problem is is, if youhave the webinar but you don't
have the audience, well, nowit's a different issue.
Now we need the right audience,so now we need the traffic.
So again, you have to understand, first of all, who you're
hiring.
You have to understand whatthey're going to do and what the
(05:34):
actual work is, not what itseems like the work is.
And then, beyond that, you haveto understand are you actually
hiring for an entire marketingcampaign or you're just hiring
for a segment?
Because if you're hiring for asegment let's say you're hiring
for someone to write your emails, or you're hiring for someone
to run your ads, or you'rehiring someone to write a
webinar for you or any otherpromotion do you have the other
(05:55):
pieces of that that matter,right?
If you want to get leads andsomeone's like I can give you
all the leads that you want, butyou don't have a follow-up
system to close those leads,meaning you don't have email
automations in place, you don'thave sales reps that are going
to call those people to setsales calls.
(06:15):
If you don't have theseprocesses in place, well, you're
going to think, oh, these arebad leads because you don't
really have any way to convertthem.
Maybe you have a landing pageor like a sales page, or you
know not even that maybe it's ane-com store.
So you have a product or acouple of products and you're
like oh, they're not buying it.
Well, that's trying to getsomeone to go from completely
(06:36):
cold to sold.
You know, without effort.
That's not how marketing works,that's not how sales work,
that's not how conversions work.
So you have to understand theprocess.
So my advice would be tounderstand what it is you're
hiring for in terms of what thatactually means.
Right, like, if you say youwant a new website, they're
going to want.
Okay, can you provide the aboutpage and the copy for the about
(06:57):
page?
They don't know who you are.
Well, if you want someone elseto do that, they're going to
have to interview you andthey're going to have to write
that.
So there's processes that gointo these, what seem like to
most people very, very simplethings.
And so, as a business owner orthe marketing director or
whoever is responsible,oftentimes if you've not done it
(07:20):
yourself, you don't understandwhat goes into it.
And when you don't understandwhat goes into it, it seems like
it's a cost, not an investment,because you don't understand
the potential that it could getyou.
Sure, if you want to hiresomeone to post on your social
media so you have a presence,fantastic.
But if you want to hire someonethat's going to turn social
media followers into clients,that's going to cost you,
because that level of skill,that level of knowledge has cost
(07:41):
them.
And so you're not paying forthem to just do the task.
You're paying for theirexperience and their know-how on
how to actually get you theresults you want.
And again, the problem isthere's a bunch of people out
there who cannot get yourresults.
There is a bunch of people outthere who don't even try to get
your results right.
They just take your money.
So you have to do good duediligence.
(08:02):
But I go back to what I saidearlier about Gary V and his
sentiments on hiring people Hirepeople fast, but make sure that
they're qualified, they meetall the things, but fire them
faster, because if you know, assoon as you see a red flag, as
soon as you see something nothappening and that could be as
(08:22):
simple as this they say we'regoing to do research for the
first week, right Week rollsaround and maybe you don't get
an email from them.
That's the first red flag.
They missed their firstdeadline.
So you can set benchmarks andyou can even pay based on those
benchmarks.
If you have a cash flow issue,a lot of people will work with
you, but you have to understandthat someone who's really,
(08:52):
really good, they're not therisk.
They know what needs to happento help you.
You're the risk because theydon't know what you're going to
provide them right, and so a lotof people's prices are based on
what they know needs to be done, not on what you think needs to
be done or what you want to bedone.
They're going to deliver what'sgoing to get you results,
because otherwise they'reprobably not going to be in
business very long.
And again, unfortunately,there's a bunch of people out
(09:13):
there who aren't like that, andso sometimes you have to kind of
weed through.
You know the charlatans and thepeople who are not qualified
that are able to presentthemselves like that because of
the time we live in, with socialmedia and things like that.
But trust me, it is worthfiguring this out because at the
(09:33):
end of the day, you are alwaysgoing to be a bottleneck if
you're always taking things ongood stuff, man fired up, all
right.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Question two comes comes from Jason in Austin, a
successful chiropractor, but I'mfeeling overwhelmed working
around the clock.
How can I take what I know andmonetize it in a way that frees
up my time?
What's the best way to buy backmy time while still serving my
clients?
Speaker 1 (09:58):
That's a fantastic question.
I think most service providersend up in this situation.
Whether you're a chiropractic,whether you're a fitness trainer
, whether you're a dentistanybody that essentially is the
expert themselves.
If you're good at what you do,you're going to end up having a
schedule where you're full right, and then you're trading hours
(10:20):
for dollars.
The simple way out of that, ifyou didn't want to change
anything of your business model,is obviously to hire other
people to replace you, right, sothat's an opportunity right
there.
The trouble with that is isoftentimes that those people
they're not necessarily asskilled or qualified as you.
(10:41):
You fall into the trap,potentially like, instead of
stepping back and buying backyour time, you just fill their
schedule too.
So now you both have a fullschedule.
Granted, now you're going to bemaking more money as a business
, but you're still overwhelmed.
And now they're overwhelmed,and so you, just now you're in a
game of how many people can wehire, and that includes then how
(11:05):
do we manage these people?
Then there's issues of HR,there's issues of leadership and
, depending on your skill set, Idon't know from the question
how confident you are to do that.
A lot of people.
They don't want to build a team, a lot of people.
They like what they have andthey want to be the expert, and
so, obviously, you can raiseyour rates.
That's a simple way to continueto bring in more money without
(11:28):
giving up anything or changinganything.
The problem again is you'restill going to be overwhelmed.
You're still going to beworking 40 hours plus a week,
and that's if you're working inthe business.
How many hours are you workingon the business?
I'm not really sure.
So these are things that you'vegot to take into consideration.
One of the things that I believeis a big opportunity for so
(11:51):
many people that I wouldconsider experts or masters at
their craft is something that Iheard this saying.
I know Ian didn't create thisfrom Ian Stanley.
It is sell your sawdust, andthe concept of this is is if you
have a successful business, Iwould guess that you have a
system or a process or you havesome something unique that you
(12:14):
created right, and it's going tobe different for everybody.
For some people, it might bemarketing campaigns that they
run right, and a lot of peopleoutsource that.
So that might not be it.
For some people, it might bethe sales process that they take
the patient client through inorder to become a paying client.
For others, it might be theactual practice of the craft,
(12:36):
right.
So it might be the way youprogram if you're a trainer, the
way you do your chiropractic ifyou're a chiropractor, the way
you massage if you're a massagetherapist.
You may have.
Obviously, in all thesesituations you've learned from
other people, but if you'vetaken what you've learned and
created kind of your own system,you have some IP there.
(12:57):
It might be the way you onboardyour clients.
It may be the customerexperience that you give them
and what you do throughout theyear to retain those members.
My point is, if you've beensuccessful, there is a high
chance that there isintellectual property that you
own in your mind.
Maybe you have some stuff onpaper, some standard operating
(13:19):
procedures, things like that,but you can take that and
package it in a way that you canthen sell to other
professionals in your industryto help them have the success
you have.
Because, just like you wereprobably 10, 20 years ago, there
is people just beginning theirjourney.
There's people just startingthat don't know what you know,
(13:40):
that don't have the 20 yearsexperience, who have not tried
the 17 different ways to get achiropractic lead that you have
and you know the three that workevery single time, right?
So you have to think of it likethat.
You know we record this podcasthere and we know the whole
process of it, our sort ofmoment on could.
(14:03):
We could take how to create andproduce and publish a podcast
and turn that into a product,because we're doing it every
single day, right?
So this concept of selling yoursawdust what is it that you have
that if you packaged up andsold, would bring extra revenue,
then would allow you tobasically buy back your time,
(14:24):
because most of the reason,because most of the time when
people ask this question, youcan buy back your time by just
giving up clients, but you loseincome and so you're probably
living in a lifestyle that youdon't want to change.
You don't want to lose theincome Packaging up your
knowledge and then selling it toagain other professionals, or
(14:45):
it could even be to end users,like if you have a low back
solution that is unique, so itdoesn't have necessarily be to
other professionals, but itcould be what you're doing.
Could you sell it to the masses?
And now you can go and you canand put it up and you can sell
it and again you're going tohave additional revenue.
That additional revenue can nowsupplement revenue and you can
(15:05):
kind of back off the clientsBecause I guarantee, like in
your client base you probablyhave some clients you don't
necessarily want but also youcould raise your prices.
You're going to lose someclients.
You'll keep the money, workless hours, but now you're
supplementing that.
Or you have this other businessthat you could essentially grow
and it doesn't take your time,the way that your practice does.
(15:28):
So hopefully that helps and ifyou end up packaging your
sawdust and selling it, let usknow.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
That's brilliant.
Selling your sawdust is so good.
All right.
Question three this is an emailfrom Mike from Detroit.
In the current economy, a lotof businesses are struggling to
stay afloat.
If you could recommend one areato focus on right now, where
should business owners beputting their energy to ensure
they survive and thrive?
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think people have beenlooking at this for the last few
years.
You know, we're kind of we'rein a recession, but we're not
because of subsidies and allthese different things.
So I think and I'm just goingto speak in generalities I think
most business owners the truthis is most business owners don't
(16:14):
focus on the right thingsanyway.
Right, and some of that comesas you grow.
There's more things that youhave to worry about.
So your mind comes off of howmuch traffic are we getting?
What is our conversion rate?
How many sales are we getting?
How do we improve that?
Because, depending on how youwant to run your business, right
(16:38):
, you can be a capitalist, youcan be a conscious capitalist.
You know you could be forprofit whatever of nonprofit,
all these different things.
But the truth is, without cashflow, no business survives.
Right, and even if you borrowmoney like, there's businesses
out there that when they run outof money, they just go raise
money.
(16:58):
Right, because they have anincredible idea and other people
believe in it and there's atipping point in everyone's mind
that if they just cross thisthreshold, the money's going to
come back to everybody.
So there's ways that people doget money, even when they run
out of money.
But if they don't solve thecash flow issue, they run out of
that money.
And then they got to do anotherround and eventually nobody
wants to give them money anymorebecause it's either so diluted
(17:20):
that there's not enough meat onthe bone to get involved, or
they just look at it and theysay they have not figured out a
model to monetize right.
And so a lot of these companies, these unicorns, even if they
sell for a billion dollars, yeah, the owner gets rich, but then
to continue the business, whathappens Immediately?
They have to figure out revenue.
Right, immediately, they haveto figure out revenue.
(17:41):
So what I would say insituations like this is you need
to be focused daily on therevenue that is coming in and
you need to understand what'sgoing to increase that revenue,
right, sales, money collectedall of that is a byproduct of
everything you do, so you can'treally just hope to get more
(18:04):
sales.
You have to do something to getmore sales, more sales than
equals more money, right.
And so in these situations,people are kind of they freeze
and they just kind of wait andthey hope to ride it out.
And the problem with that is is, while you're waiting to ride
it out, you end up goingbackwards because the
marketplace and the people whoare looking for a solution,
(18:25):
you're not showing up in frontof them.
They're going to yourcompetitors who are willing to
take a risk during this economicdownturn and for them and
you'll hear this a lot ofbusiness owners I'm not having
no problems with economicdownturn because they're not
operating their business from aplace of scarcity, they're not
operating on a day-to-day basisthat they have to hold money.
(18:47):
They're going out and sayingwell, ads are cheaper right now
because the competition isbacked off of running ads.
I'm going to go deeper with adsand I'm going to go harder and
I'm going to figure this out.
And so we're human.
Fear is a very natural statethat we tend to go in multiple
times a day, even if we don'trecognize it.
(19:08):
The reality is that worst casescenario recession or no
recession, worst case scenarioyou fail, the business fails,
you claim, claim bankruptcy, andthen you're at zero and you
start again.
In that situation, what did youactually lose?
Well, you lost the business youhad.
(19:29):
You didn't lose the skills, theknowledge, the experience
you've acquired along the way.
So actually not in a bad place.
You're just having to figureout how to take what you have
and actually monetize it,because maybe you didn't do a
good job with your own businessand we see people think of it
like this.
Collegiate coaches in footballoften go up to the NFL to coach
(19:53):
and they don't do very well andthey go back to collegiate
football.
In fact, the winningestcollegiate football coach, nick
Saban, has done this.
When he went to the NFL, hesucked as an NFL coach.
Now, a lot of that wasn't him.
It was to do with the attitudeof the players, the respect they
gave him and the differencebetween college kids and their
commitment to a program versusan NFL athlete as a paid
(20:17):
professional's.
Commitment to their team right,and so he struggled.
So he went back to commitmentto their team right, and so he
struggled.
So he went back to thecollegiate level right, you
could say, well, he failed.
He sucks as a coach.
He wasn't able to coach at thehighest level.
Or you can look at it for whatit is he is the winningest.
I believe he is, if not thewinner, one of the greatest
(20:40):
college coaches ever to coachthe game.
And you may not be a greatbusiness owner and you may fail,
but you may be really good atsomething that you can then go
and do either that as a businessor go into someone else's
business.
So the reason I'm trying topaint the picture here is most
(21:02):
of the reason we don't goforward in these situations is
the fear of failure, right, butthe truth is is you're probably
not going to end up homeless ona corner like begging for change
, because you have an energyabout you.
You have something in you thatis driven to succeed.
So just because the world is inchaos doesn't mean you need to
(21:27):
be in chaos, right, doesn't meanyour business needs to be in
chaos.
And so ignore all of the stuffthat people think makes a great
business and just focus on whatmatters most, right.
And if you have a big businessand you have people who are
doing that well, you still wantto make sure they're focusing on
it.
Because I was just talking to amember of a marketing team today
(21:49):
and I asked how things weregoing and the response was like,
well, I think they're goingokay.
We don't really get muchfeedback.
And I was like wait, you guysaren't looking at the traffic
and sales together as a group?
And she said, no, right.
And so you, as a CEO, if youhave a company and you have
other people responsible forrevenue, other people
responsible for marketing, otherpeople responsible for sales,
(22:12):
they might not be passing orsharing the information with the
reps or with the agents or withthe team members, and so if
you're the CEO, maybe you're notgetting that information shared
with you either.
So you've got to have yourfinger on the pulse of the stuff
that's going to keep thebusiness alive.
Everything else, that's whatyou want to put other people in
(22:35):
charge of, because you probablydon't want to deal with HR, you
probably don't want to deal withoperations, you probably don't
want to deal with payroll andthings like that.
And so what got you the initialsuccess?
Kind of staying lean, beingscrappy, you know, focusing on
sales.
That is where I think you needto go in these times.
(22:56):
That is the mistake I believepeople make in these times is
they start worrying about thingsthat make no difference, like
right now.
If you're struggling inbusiness, creating a standard
operating procedure isabsolutely useless unless you're
planning on hiring someone elseto come in and you need the SOP
in order for them to learn howto do the job.
(23:18):
But you can do that by hiringthem, teaching them and
recording you training them,because then you learn how to do
the job.
But you can do that by hiringthem, teaching them and
recording you training them,because then you only have to do
it one time and you kill twobirds with one stone.
So my point is make sure you'refocused on the things that keep
the business alive, which, in myopinion, for 90% of businesses
out there sales and marketing isthe area that most makes a
(23:39):
difference, customer experiencebeing the third, you know, leg
of the stool, you know, if youwant long-term success, right,
marketing and sales is front-end.
Customer experience is back-endselling.
You have those three pillars.
You focus on those three things.
Everything else you can thenpay somebody else to worry about
.
Because the truth is, if youdon't know how to make money,
(24:02):
then what business are youreally in?
Because the purpose of abusiness is to generate money to
then do something with.
And again, even if you're anonprofit organization, without
money you can't do yournonprofit that you are committed
to.
So the more money you have as acharity, the more money you can
give, right.
(24:22):
And so I heard this said aboutMother Teresa once she never had
a meeting, a lunch, she neverinteracted with anyone without
trying to get a check for them,for her organization, and that
is why what made her one of themost successful, like giving
people to ever, ever live.
(24:43):
So my point is as a businessowner, sometimes you have to get
scrappy, roll up your sleeves,get in the weeds on the things
that matter most, which, in myopinion, are marketing, sales
and customer experience.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's nice dude.
I had no idea Mother Teresa wasa G like that.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Final question.
This comes from Nicole.
Here in San Diego, I've heardyou talk about the importance of
creating a tribe or a loyalcommunity around your brand.
How do I go about building thattype of following from scratch
when I'm just starting out witha small audience?
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Whew, this could be a whole episode.
We have to maybe have this asan episode, but short answer is
this People follow people whoare unafraid to be themselves,
who demonstrate a life ordedication commitment that they
(25:44):
wish they had.
So what I mean by that is thereason a lot of celebrities you
follow don't just post about thework they do.
They post about their food,their diet, where they're going,
et cetera, et cetera, et ceterais to show you.
It's like reality TV, right,it's to show you like the life
(26:07):
that they're living and theyhope to inspire you, to motivate
you or to get you toessentially consume whatever it
is that they are promoting,whether it's a movie, whether
it's a fragrance, you know,beauty line, whatever it is.
And so when you're firststarting out and you don't have
(26:30):
many resources and you're makingposts and things like that,
like just document and again,this is Gary Vee's language but
just document your life throughsocial, because so many people
are afraid to do it Just bydoing it you actually set
yourself apart, right?
I don't know the numbers, butmost people are terrified of
(26:52):
public speaking.
So the fact that you can turn acamera on and speak immediately
separates you from most peoplebut immediately also makes
people look at you as a leader,look at you as someone to follow
, right.
And the reason that you want tobuild a tribe and you want it
to be around who you truly areis because obviously you don't
want to attract people who thinkyou're one thing and then
(27:14):
you're not right.
Then there's going to be inyour mind this like I'm a fraud
mentality, right, I could getfound out.
So you want to limit that asmuch as possible.
You limit it by as much aspossible by not creating a false
sense of reality, and you'llprobably can look at the people
that you follow, who have thebiggest following, and you can
(27:37):
kind of start to identify thatthe majority of their posts are
not about the thing they'retrying to monetize.
The majority of their posts arejust them sharing their life in
some way, shape or form.
And you can manufacture thattowards what it is.
You're selling.
Case in point, one of my friendsand I'll get him back on the
(27:58):
podcast Simon Lovell.
He's been on before but he gotsuper into pickleball and then
turn that into his business.
So, like everything he doespromotes the business.
But him playing pickleball isnot him trying to sell someone
on buying his product.
It's just a part of his everyday, right, and and sharing,
like when he does his networkinggroups, he's sharing that, them
(28:21):
playing pickleball.
He's not trying to sell youinto the networking group.
Now you might get FOMO, youmight want to go to that, you
might be like, well, that'sreally cool, I want to do that
in my hometown, but he doesn'thave to say that, right, and so
he is doing this consistently.
Uh, same with people who go tothe gym and record themselves
(28:42):
working out and post clips andtalk through their workouts and
things like that.
Again, they build followingsand you don't need millions of
followers to have a powerfultribe.
Really, about 10,000 people andyou can make so much money that
you're know, you're content,you're happy, you can live the
(29:03):
life of your dreams.
So, again, a lot of peoplethink 100,000, 200,000.
What you need is 10,000 engagedfollowers and you don't do that
by trying to, you know, blanketget tons of people who are not
relevant to you to follow you.
So, you know, stay true to whoyou are.
Talk about the things thatyou're interested in, Share your
actual opinions.
Don't be afraid to hold back,because polarization is
(29:26):
something that people areattracted to.
You know people don't like to.
It's hard to follow someonewho's just in the middle right.
It's hard to follow someone whogoes back and forth and is kind
of blasé fait.
You need someone who's willingto stand for something right,
because they have those beliefsin them, they have those desires
, those wants.
(29:46):
All of the things that youportray is an example to them of
what's possible, right.
And even if you don't have itall figured out and you're on
your journey, one of the thingsthat I wish I had had when I was
training at Westside Barbell tobecome a, you know, as a
professional powerlifter, to tobecome the world record holder,
(30:07):
I wish I had documented thewhole thing, not only for myself
but for other people, to seethe actual progress I went
through, to see the battles, tosee the challenges, to see how
many mornings I didn't want toget out of bed because I
couldn't stand up straightbecause my back was so jacked
from squatting a thousand pounds.
Right, these things would beawesome to have had and to have
shared.
(30:27):
Social media wasn't even therearound at that time.
Facebook was, but I don't thinkeven video was was around.
Youtube YouTube came out Ican't remember what year.
It was um, but, but it wasn'tlike me.
I didn't really know how toshoot videos and stuff like that
, and people weren't reallyYouTubers or anything like that.
But my point is is now in ourpocket we have a camera and we
(30:52):
can film at any point in time,and even I should do a better
job of documenting stuff.
I should do a better job ofdocumenting stuff.
But if you want to build a tribe, and once you have the tribe,
they'll pretty much follow youwhatever direction you go and
whatever you decide to do,they'll get behind right, and
you see this with differentpeople who they'll have a
(31:15):
clothing brand, and then theyalso will have a supplement line
, and then they'll have a youknow um, a beauty line, and then
they'll have a product or acourse.
So the, the tribe, is what'simportant, not the thing that
you you necessarily going topromote or sell, um.
But you know, it's whyinfluencers have become 60 of
(31:36):
the sales force for products andpeople listen to influencers
more than they watch ads orpurchase from magazine ads or TV
ads or things like that.
They're purchasing more andmore from influencers.
But it's not because theperson's an influencer, it's
because they have a tribe offans that follow them, who
interact with them, who engagewith them, who are, in essence,
(32:04):
the influencer, has become apart of their day-to-day life.
So, when it comes to influence,when it comes to opinions, when
it comes to news topics, likethey want to hear that from the
person they follow, the personthey look up to the most, the
person they admire, the personthat they kind of want to
(32:25):
assimilate and become.
They want to become their ownversion, but they like what you
have or what you're doing, andthey often want to have that
kind of result for themselves ora similar result, right?
So, starting out, just documenteverything.
Don't be afraid to, you know,overshare, just share.
(32:48):
Just put your life out there.
Again, you don't have to put it.
You can keep things private.
It's not like you have to puteverything out there, like a lot
of people aren't putting theirfamily on there and their wives
and their children and all thosedifferent things.
So it's not like you have toconstantly share every single
moment, but you have enough on aday-to-day basis where you can
(33:12):
make, like, several stories, youcan make a post.
There's no reason you can't dothat.
And look, the biggest secretthat nobody ever wants to tell
anybody, because nobody's goingto pay for this information.
The biggest secret is that it'sa game of time, and so you know
(33:32):
, expect to do this for 10 yearsto get the payoff that you
think you're going to getquicker, right, and so if you do
this for the next 10 years, youwill have everything you want.
But nobody likes to think interms of that long.
They want it in the next sixmonths, the next year.
And look, some people have theability to do that.
(33:54):
Some people are A plus studentsin school and they never even
study, and other people studyevery single day, have a tutor,
their parents pay all this moneyto try to get them to
understand a certain topicbetter and they still get C's,
d's, e's and F's right.
That's life.
So, yeah, there is people who,in one year, start a YouTube
(34:19):
channel or start an Instagram orstart a TikTok and blow up
because they have charisma, theyhave experience.
Usually those people have 20years experience.
They've just not transferred it.
When you're brand new, like,you're going to struggle, you're
going to face adversity, you'regoing to have moments of things
that you weren't prepared for,like online haters and criticism
(34:42):
and all these different things,and the truth is is that you go
through all of that and youkeep going and eventually it's
all going to come and pay off.
But it's like the book ThreeFeet from Gold, like people will
dig and dig and dig and dig andthey get closer and closer and
closer to the gold.
But it's so hard and it's sodifficult and they want to quit.
(35:05):
And a lot of people quit, right, when they should go even
deeper, right, and if they justgone a couple more steps and
just dug a little bit deeper,then the payoff would have been
there.
And so just know, going into it, that you know, don't expect a
hundred thousand views, amillion views when you first get
(35:27):
started, right.
But if you go from one view andI have a, a client who we
started doing a lot more videowith, and when he first started
posting he got zero views andnow he'll get 400 views, 200
views, sometimes he'll get oneor two views He'll have a video
that you know, zero views,probably posted at the wrong
(35:50):
time algorithm didn't pick it up, whatever but he's playing the
game and by playing the gamehe's getting feedback.
By getting feedback he canimprove his content and he can
see what worked?
What didn't work?
Why did this take off?
What was the hook?
What was the information?
So playing the game is whereyou're going to learn, is where
you're going to improve.
(36:10):
Standing on the sidelineswatching everybody else doing it
, waiting for the right moment,it's not going to happen.
So, in terms of building yourtribe, you build your tribe by
putting yourself out there,allowing people to like-minded
people to follow you, and I'veseen people build tribes in
crochet.
(36:31):
My wife's a crocheter and shefollows different people on
Instagram and she'll send mestuff because it's hilarious you
know what someone can make outof crochet and she'll send cute
stuff to me, either to laugh or,you know, maybe I should make
this for the kids.
And I'll sometimes click andlook at the profile and the
(36:52):
person has like 250,000followers, right?
I don't know a single otherperson that crochets in our
friend group other than my wife.
But there is a girl onInstagram with quarter of a
million people who are payingattention to her, buying her
patterns that she's creating,liking, commenting on her posts.
So again, you just have to giveit time, you have to allow
(37:17):
people to find you andeventually it's all going to pay
off.
But I would say you got to giveit long enough to do that.
You can set that time.
Maybe you're not willing to doit for 10 years, I don't know.
But I can tell you masterycomes over time and there's very
few ways you can shortcut it.
Most overnight success issomeone who has been banging
(37:37):
their head against the wall fora decade or more who suddenly
figures out just a tweak, just aturn that allows them to come
out and people say, wow, how didyou do that?
And so I've been trying to doit for the last decade and you
know, we finally figured it out.
So give yourself time, giveyourself patience, give yourself
grace, you know, because it'snot going to be easy and you're
(37:58):
going to make mistakes.
But being in the game, being aplayer, is way better than
standing on the sidelineswondering and look if you're
going to make mistakes.
But being in the game, being aplayer, is way better than
standing on the sidelineswondering and look if you're
lost when it comes to what youshould actually do.
Use ChatGTP and tell it what youwant to do and ask it to give
you a plan.
It's not going to be the verybest plan you could possibly
(38:20):
come up with, but followingsomething is better than
shooting from the hip.
So you know there's tools andthere's other things out there
that do that too.
But you know, leverage thetools that are available to you
to at least start to learn.
You know, go to youtube, lookon videos like constantly.
You know, learn, learn, learn,learn when you have the money,
(38:44):
invest, because it's a quickerway to learn, because it's, you
know, curated and it's where youare right now.
Invest in things.
They're going to help you moveto that next step.
But at the end of the day,you're not going to learn the
game unless you start beautifulstuff.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Can I ask a quick follow-up question?
Yep I was looking at nicole'sprofile while you were speaking
there.
I can't say that she's beendoing this for 10 years, but she
seems to have been relativelyconsistent, documenting her life
and all that.
Would it be useful for her todo any advertising or like
promotion of her content tospend some money?
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Yeah.
So two things there.
One of the things like I'm adirect response marketer, so I
don't like to do anything unlessthere's a reason to do it.
Okay, like to build a tribe.
To build a tribe doesn't makesense to me.
So the first thing if you don'thave it already is you have to
have a way to move them fromsocial media to the medium that
(39:41):
you want in order to be able tocommunicate with them.
Right now, social media hasthings like a Facebook group,
has things like a subscriptionon an Instagram.
I don't know if you can have itfree, free subscription but you
can have a private group onthose.
Or you can move them off intoyour email.
You could move them off intotext message, depending on how
you want to communicate.
Move them off into text message, depending on how you want to
(40:04):
communicate.
So that's the first thing ishaving a reason for them to give
you to join.
Whatever it is you want them totake that next step with you.
That's the first thing that youshould have in place, because
if you're going to runadvertising, you don't want to
just run advertising to increaseyour following count, right?
You want to run advertising toI'm guessing, to help you sell
something, whether something,whether it's your stuff maybe
you're an affiliate sellingother people's stuff, I'm not
(40:27):
sure.
But what I would look at if youhave been doing it is what are
your most popular videos, right?
What are the most popularvideos you've done?
And then just run like fivebucks a day of traffic to it for
video views and see and setyourself a budget, right?
I think the biggest mistakepeople make when they run
advertising is they again goingback to what I said earlier
about cost versus investment.
(40:49):
When they run ads, they think,oh, you know, like it's going to
cost me this much.
Hopefully I make money.
No, no, no, you should look atit like I'm willing to invest
500 bucks, right?
So if you're going to do fivebucks a day, that's a hundred
days Well, you could do 500bucks in one day.
They'll spend the money if theycan.
The beauty of doing it over timeis that you can kind of adjust.
(41:10):
You have tools like Hotjar orCrazy Egg that you can put on
your website or wherever you'redriving the traffic to and you
can pay attention to whatthey're doing if they're
purchasing, if they're notpurchasing, if they're opting in
, if it's an opt-in so you cansee what's happening.
You can tweak it as you go, butlet's say you do $5 a day or
$10 a day, whatever you want todo, you know that's 50 to 100
(41:32):
days of running traffic.
That will give you feedback andyou'll be able to see what
happens, right, you'll be ableto see how many leads you
actually got for that, how manynew subscribers you got, how
many profile views you got did,did video views?
Did that change?
(41:52):
How many opt-ins, how manypeople click your profile link.
So you have to be willing to toessentially run a campaign and
then see what the results areand what you could tweak.
For case in point, let's say youyou want to spend 500 bucks and
you're going to do 10 bucks aday.
So 50 days we're going're goingto run this and at the end of
it we spent 500, we made $400,right.
Technically we've lost ahundred bucks, right.
But let's say those $400 camefrom two sales.
(42:16):
We have two $200 sales andthat's what our product is.
It's 200 bucks and that's whatour product is.
It's 200 bucks, 197, 199,whatever, but it's essentially
200 bucks.
That's awesome.
But you're going to see it as afailure.
I lost money, but it wasn't.
It's feedback, and the feedbackis well, what would our
(42:40):
conversions need to be?
So what could we potentiallychange?
And again, if you have aconversion tracking software on
and you're paying attention towhat people are doing, you might
already know the five thingsyou could improve in order to
increase conversions.
So that's on the simplest level.
But what if we didn't increaseconversions?
What if we just increased theamount of money they gave us?
If the value of the customerwas $250 instead of $200, we
(43:00):
would have broken even right.
If it was $300 value percustomer, we would have broken
even right.
If it was 300 value percustomer, we would have made
$100 profit.
So can you add an upsell inthere, right?
Or can you increase the priceof your product and keep the
conversions the same?
What if you had a payment planto your model?
Because right now you only haveone option it's $200.
(43:21):
So you have to look at it andtake the feedback from the
campaigns and then assess andthen test again and really, if
you look at it in, here's mybudget how much money I have to
spend on this.
I'm going to run a series oftests.
Each test is going to give mefeedback, providing I make the
changes and it improves theprocess.
(43:42):
By the end of this, I'm goingto have a profitable funnel that
I can then pour money intoright.
Because the reality is is mostpeople fail because they run ads
to get traffic.
They get traffic.
It doesn't convert the way theythink it should.
They say the traffic's bad, sothey go well, that didn't work.
(44:02):
Well, the traffic's notnecessarily bad.
It might not be targetedcorrectly, it might not be to
the people specifically youwanted.
But here's what happens withadvertising.
If you do it right.
Let's say you have a leadmagnet and you're driving
traffic to it from an ad and youdrive 500 people, you get 100
(44:27):
opt-ins, right.
So 20% conversion.
That's pretty good for coldtraffic.
So you get 20% conversionFantastic, all right.
But you don't have anything onthe back end.
You've just proven concept,right.
So now you've got to sell.
So you have 100 people you wantto sell something to.
So now you've got to sell.
So you have 100 people you wantto sell something to.
Well, what if you didn't havethe opt-in in place of the sales
(44:47):
page and you just drove trafficstraight to the sales page?
Now you have 500 views versus100 views, because you went
through the gate right, and sothere's so many ways to look at
it, there's so many ways to lookat it, there's so many ways to
assess it, and the biggest thingto understand is what's the end
goal.
And then work backwards and say, okay, everything is just
(45:13):
information.
And so if you understand what agood conversion rate is, if I'm
getting 20% in an opt-in, Iprobably aren't going to worry
too much about trying to tweakthat opt-in.
If then, out of the 100 peoplethat actually opted in, only one
person purchased, so it's a 1%conversion, let's say I thought
I should be getting a 5%conversion, well, there's a lot
more opportunity there to focusthan there is on the opt-in,
(45:36):
right.
And so then we go okay, how dowe look at that?
And, like I said, maybe weremove the opt-in, we get 500
people.
So we test that.
Nope, didn't make a difference,we still got the one sale.
Okay, there's a disconnectbetween the ad, the opt-in and
then the sales page.
So we need more pre-framing,more pre-selling.
What do we do?
Right?
And that's how you have tothink of things.
(45:56):
You have to think of things andbreak it down in segments and
in paths and say that's goodenough.
What's the thing that's notgood enough?
Where's the biggestopportunities?
What can we tweak?
Because sometimes all it takesis one tweak and you have a
profitable campaign, but so manypeople give up before that.
So running ads absolutely To me,that's the fastest way to get
(46:17):
exposure right, because insteadof having to hope for a video to
go viral or something like that, you can literally tell the
platforms hey matter.
I want people this age who areinterested in this, and so they
should put it in front of thosepeople, versus you hoping that
it ends up in front of thosepeople.
And you know.
And then as you grow, you caneither keep the ads or a lot of
(46:38):
people get to a point where theydon't need to run ads anymore
because the organic is bringingenough traffic, enough sales,
that the the advertising becomesan expensive sale.
You know because you're buyingthe ads and there's costs
associated to it.
So I get it.
But honestly, in the beginning,you know time is, people trade
their time.
(46:58):
But if you're creating tons ofcontent and nobody's seeing it,
you'd have been better offcreating one piece of content
and driving traffic to it.
So just keep that in mind andunderstand that you don't have
to spend a lot of money onadvertising to get started, but,
like if you're spending fivebucks a day for 100 days, I
would almost guarantee that it'sgoing to help in some way shape
or form, not to mention thevideo views as they go up.
(47:23):
The video views as they go upand and if people are engaged
and people are liking thembecause hopefully your content
is good, like, you're going topick up organic traffic from
that too, because the thealgorithm will will say, oh,
people enjoying this video, thewatch time is going up, um,
therefore, we want to share thiswith other people for free.
So even when you run ads, youcan benefit from organic there.
So hopefully that gives yousome starting point.
Didn't confuse you too much,but it's definitely something I
(47:46):
would throw in, especially,especially if you've been doing
this for a while and you justnot seem to be getting more
views.
The algorithms, the platformsit's a constant battle and for
some reason sometimes it's.
You know your content doesn'teven get showed to your own
followers.
So I would definitely sayexplore that, you know again,
(48:08):
set a budget, how much are youwilling to invest, and then from
there you can figure out if itdoes work or not work for you,
and then what you would do next.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Nice Thanks, man.
Yeah, I was looking at Nicole'sstuff and it's interesting that
she said in her question thatshe's starting from scratch,
when by all appearances she'sbeen working pretty hard at this
for a little while.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
So I thought that there might be another tactical
step, and I imagine people saythey're starting from scratch
when they don't have a bigfollowing or they're not
necessarily monetizing yet.
Right, so it makes total sense.
But hopefully today's episodewill help a few of you guys out.
As always, we appreciate youbeing here.
Give today's episode.
It will help a few of you guysout.
As always, we appreciate youbeing here.
Give us a like, subscribe,leave a review if you feel so
inclined.
We'd love to see that.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
And we'll see you next time on Paid to Create.
Bye guys.
All right, welcome everyone to this week's episode
of Paid to Create.
I'm AJ Roberts and my co-host,sarah, is not here today.
She is off jet-setting aroundthe world enjoying herself.
So we have a couple of style ofepisodes we do.
We sometimes have the two of usand we'll talk about current
topics and go through that.
(00:20):
Sometimes we'll do an interviewwith a guest and sometimes we
do Q&A.
This episode is going to be aQ&A episode and Ryan, who's
behind the camera, is going toask the questions.
And you know, if you haven'tyou know subscribed to the
podcast, make sure to do that.
You can do that on yourfavorite podcast platform or go
to paidtocreatecom.
You subscribe there so that wayyou don't miss any of these
(00:42):
episodes.
So, anyway, ryan, what's thatfirst question we got today?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
all right.
Hey, aj.
I'm sarah from portland, oregon.
I run a small business and I'vebeen struggling to figure out
the right marketing strategy.
I've researched social mediaexperts, email marketing
specialists and advertisingexperts, but everything seems
expensive and I'm not sure whereto start.
How can I move forward withoutbreaking the bank?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Man, you did not sound like Sarah.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
You could have put some more effort into that?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Anyway, that's a great question.
So, basically, I need to expandthe business.
I'm looking at differentmarketing avenues and they're
expensive.
And what should I do?
So the truth is, in thesesituations, you have two choices
, right?
Choice number one is you learnit and do it yourself, and for
most people, that's the routethey decide to go, and it's good
(01:32):
, in a sense, that if you don'tknow how to do something, it's
sometimes hard to hire someoneand know if what they're doing
is going to work.
And so oftentimes, if you'rehiring blind to the the job that
they're going to be whetherit's an agency, whether it's an
employee, whether it's anoutsource person for projects if
you don't know what needs to bedone, sometimes you're going to
(01:53):
go through a lot of differentpeople until you find someone
that's going to work right,always talks about this hire
quick, fire, faster, right.
And that is a path that youwould have to take if you
decided you know you're notgoing to learn about it, you're
just going to outsource it.
Obviously, the way around thatis to understand what it is you
(02:15):
need to get done, and in doingso, I think it will shift your
perspective in terms of like itbeing expensive, because this
idea of it being expensive,expensive, it's a wrong mindset,
and the reason I share that isbecause the truth is is, if it's
your business, it's aninvestment that is supposed to
(02:36):
bring you a return on thatinvestment.
So the question is is how muchare you willing to spend in
order to get an ROI right?
And so, anybody you hire, thereshould be a number, a budget
that they have or a timeframethey have.
(02:56):
If they're going to be creatinglet's say, they're doing your
social media and you're payingthem, you should have a time
frame, whether it's 60 days, 90days, six months, whatever.
That is that you're willing toinvest.
And then, if there's no ROI,you're going to pull out right.
And so when you look at thesethings, oftentimes the prices
sometimes seem expensive.
(03:17):
But let me give you an example.
We're recording the podcastright now.
The time it takes to do thepodcast is only a fraction of
the time it takes to produce,edit, publish, promote the
podcast.
So if we were going to rent outthe studio for other people and
they said, well, how much is it?
And we said, oh, it's 10,000 aday, and that includes all
(03:42):
post-production, all clips,everything like that that come
with it.
Most people are going to belike that's expensive, 10 grand
a day.
Because the positioning intheir mind is I'm only going to
be in the podcast, I'm going tobe in the podcast studio for
maybe two, three hours for 10grand.
But they don't understandeverything else that goes into
that right and that's somethingthat most business owners don't
(04:03):
get.
They say they want a webinar,someone to write a webinar for
them, and they don't understandwhat goes into creating a
webinar that converts.
Right?
You could go to ChatGDP, ask itto create you a webinar.
You could even upload, you know, a webinar script, the perfect
webinar script, or anotherscript that you can get
available.
Is it going to work?
(04:23):
Maybe Do you know why it'sgoing to work, why it's not
going to work?
Probably not.
Whereas if you're hiring someone, the assumption is they do know
right, and so a lot of peoplenow adding guarantees because
they believe in what they'redoing.
But that's something to youknow.
If you are nervous, if you areworried about the investment not
returning money to you, you cansee what those guarantees are.
(04:47):
Is someone willing to do that?
Because there's also the valuethat that person is providing to
you that you're not taking intoaccount.
If I'm paying them just for thehours they work, fantastic.
But if I'm paying them for thetransformation they bring in
terms of a bunch of money that'scoming in, you know, if you pay
$25,000 for someone to writeyou a webinar and you go do that
(05:13):
webinar and you sell $150,000worth of stuff, that's a pretty
good return on investment.
Now the problem is is, if youhave the webinar but you don't
have the audience, well, nowit's a different issue.
Now we need the right audience,so now we need the traffic.
So again, you have to understand, first of all, who you're
hiring.
You have to understand whatthey're going to do and what the
(05:34):
actual work is, not what itseems like the work is.
And then, beyond that, you haveto understand are you actually
hiring for an entire marketingcampaign or you're just hiring
for a segment?
Because if you're hiring for asegment let's say you're hiring
for someone to write your emails, or you're hiring for someone
to run your ads, or you'rehiring someone to write a
webinar for you or any otherpromotion do you have the other
(05:55):
pieces of that that matter,right?
If you want to get leads andsomeone's like I can give you
all the leads that you want, butyou don't have a follow-up
system to close those leads,meaning you don't have email
automations in place, you don'thave sales reps that are going
to call those people to setsales calls.
(06:15):
If you don't have theseprocesses in place, well, you're
going to think, oh, these arebad leads because you don't
really have any way to convertthem.
Maybe you have a landing pageor like a sales page, or you
know not even that maybe it's ane-com store.
So you have a product or acouple of products and you're
like oh, they're not buying it.
Well, that's trying to getsomeone to go from completely
(06:36):
cold to sold.
You know, without effort.
That's not how marketing works,that's not how sales work,
that's not how conversions work.
So you have to understand theprocess.
So my advice would be tounderstand what it is you're
hiring for in terms of what thatactually means.
Right, like, if you say youwant a new website, they're
going to want.
Okay, can you provide the aboutpage and the copy for the about
(06:57):
page?
They don't know who you are.
Well, if you want someone elseto do that, they're going to
have to interview you andthey're going to have to write
that.
So there's processes that gointo these, what seem like to
most people very, very simplethings.
And so, as a business owner orthe marketing director or
whoever is responsible,oftentimes if you've not done it
(07:20):
yourself, you don't understandwhat goes into it.
And when you don't understandwhat goes into it, it seems like
it's a cost, not an investment,because you don't understand
the potential that it could getyou.
Sure, if you want to hiresomeone to post on your social
media so you have a presence,fantastic.
But if you want to hire someonethat's going to turn social
media followers into clients,that's going to cost you,
because that level of skill,that level of knowledge has cost
(07:41):
them.
And so you're not paying forthem to just do the task.
You're paying for theirexperience and their know-how on
how to actually get you theresults you want.
And again, the problem isthere's a bunch of people out
there who cannot get yourresults.
There is a bunch of people outthere who don't even try to get
your results right.
They just take your money.
So you have to do good duediligence.
(08:02):
But I go back to what I saidearlier about Gary V and his
sentiments on hiring people Hirepeople fast, but make sure that
they're qualified, they meetall the things, but fire them
faster, because if you know, assoon as you see a red flag, as
soon as you see something nothappening and that could be as
(08:22):
simple as this they say we'regoing to do research for the
first week, right Week rollsaround and maybe you don't get
an email from them.
That's the first red flag.
They missed their firstdeadline.
So you can set benchmarks andyou can even pay based on those
benchmarks.
If you have a cash flow issue,a lot of people will work with
you, but you have to understandthat someone who's really,
(08:52):
really good, they're not therisk.
They know what needs to happento help you.
You're the risk because theydon't know what you're going to
provide them right, and so a lotof people's prices are based on
what they know needs to be done, not on what you think needs to
be done or what you want to bedone.
They're going to deliver what'sgoing to get you results,
because otherwise they'reprobably not going to be in
business very long.
And again, unfortunately,there's a bunch of people out
(09:13):
there who aren't like that, andso sometimes you have to kind of
weed through.
You know the charlatans and thepeople who are not qualified
that are able to presentthemselves like that because of
the time we live in, with socialmedia and things like that.
But trust me, it is worthfiguring this out because at the
(09:33):
end of the day, you are alwaysgoing to be a bottleneck if
you're always taking things ongood stuff, man fired up, all
right.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Question two comes comes from Jason in Austin, a
successful chiropractor, but I'mfeeling overwhelmed working
around the clock.
How can I take what I know andmonetize it in a way that frees
up my time?
What's the best way to buy backmy time while still serving my
clients?
Speaker 1 (09:58):
That's a fantastic question.
I think most service providersend up in this situation.
Whether you're a chiropractic,whether you're a fitness trainer
, whether you're a dentistanybody that essentially is the
expert themselves.
If you're good at what you do,you're going to end up having a
schedule where you're full right, and then you're trading hours
(10:20):
for dollars.
The simple way out of that, ifyou didn't want to change
anything of your business model,is obviously to hire other
people to replace you, right, sothat's an opportunity right
there.
The trouble with that is isoftentimes that those people
they're not necessarily asskilled or qualified as you.
(10:41):
You fall into the trap,potentially like, instead of
stepping back and buying backyour time, you just fill their
schedule too.
So now you both have a fullschedule.
Granted, now you're going to bemaking more money as a business
, but you're still overwhelmed.
And now they're overwhelmed,and so you, just now you're in a
game of how many people can wehire, and that includes then how
(11:05):
do we manage these people?
Then there's issues of HR,there's issues of leadership and
, depending on your skill set, Idon't know from the question
how confident you are to do that.
A lot of people.
They don't want to build a team, a lot of people.
They like what they have andthey want to be the expert, and
so, obviously, you can raiseyour rates.
That's a simple way to continueto bring in more money without
(11:28):
giving up anything or changinganything.
The problem again is you'restill going to be overwhelmed.
You're still going to beworking 40 hours plus a week,
and that's if you're working inthe business.
How many hours are you workingon the business?
I'm not really sure.
So these are things that you'vegot to take into consideration.
One of the things that I believeis a big opportunity for so
(11:51):
many people that I wouldconsider experts or masters at
their craft is something that Iheard this saying.
I know Ian didn't create thisfrom Ian Stanley.
It is sell your sawdust, andthe concept of this is is if you
have a successful business, Iwould guess that you have a
system or a process or you havesome something unique that you
(12:14):
created right, and it's going tobe different for everybody.
For some people, it might bemarketing campaigns that they
run right, and a lot of peopleoutsource that.
So that might not be it.
For some people, it might bethe sales process that they take
the patient client through inorder to become a paying client.
For others, it might be theactual practice of the craft,
(12:36):
right.
So it might be the way youprogram if you're a trainer, the
way you do your chiropractic ifyou're a chiropractor, the way
you massage if you're a massagetherapist.
You may have.
Obviously, in all thesesituations you've learned from
other people, but if you'vetaken what you've learned and
created kind of your own system,you have some IP there.
(12:57):
It might be the way you onboardyour clients.
It may be the customerexperience that you give them
and what you do throughout theyear to retain those members.
My point is, if you've beensuccessful, there is a high
chance that there isintellectual property that you
own in your mind.
Maybe you have some stuff onpaper, some standard operating
(13:19):
procedures, things like that,but you can take that and
package it in a way that you canthen sell to other
professionals in your industryto help them have the success
you have.
Because, just like you wereprobably 10, 20 years ago, there
is people just beginning theirjourney.
There's people just startingthat don't know what you know,
(13:40):
that don't have the 20 yearsexperience, who have not tried
the 17 different ways to get achiropractic lead that you have
and you know the three that workevery single time, right?
So you have to think of it likethat.
You know we record this podcasthere and we know the whole
process of it, our sort ofmoment on could.
(14:03):
We could take how to create andproduce and publish a podcast
and turn that into a product,because we're doing it every
single day, right?
So this concept of selling yoursawdust what is it that you have
that if you packaged up andsold, would bring extra revenue,
then would allow you tobasically buy back your time,
(14:24):
because most of the reason,because most of the time when
people ask this question, youcan buy back your time by just
giving up clients, but you loseincome and so you're probably
living in a lifestyle that youdon't want to change.
You don't want to lose theincome Packaging up your
knowledge and then selling it toagain other professionals, or
(14:45):
it could even be to end users,like if you have a low back
solution that is unique, so itdoesn't have necessarily be to
other professionals, but itcould be what you're doing.
Could you sell it to the masses?
And now you can go and you canand put it up and you can sell
it and again you're going tohave additional revenue.
That additional revenue can nowsupplement revenue and you can
(15:05):
kind of back off the clientsBecause I guarantee, like in
your client base you probablyhave some clients you don't
necessarily want but also youcould raise your prices.
You're going to lose someclients.
You'll keep the money, workless hours, but now you're
supplementing that.
Or you have this other businessthat you could essentially grow
and it doesn't take your time,the way that your practice does.
(15:28):
So hopefully that helps and ifyou end up packaging your
sawdust and selling it, let usknow.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
That's brilliant.
Selling your sawdust is so good.
All right.
Question three this is an emailfrom Mike from Detroit.
In the current economy, a lotof businesses are struggling to
stay afloat.
If you could recommend one areato focus on right now, where
should business owners beputting their energy to ensure
they survive and thrive?
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think people have beenlooking at this for the last few
years.
You know, we're kind of we'rein a recession, but we're not
because of subsidies and allthese different things.
So I think and I'm just goingto speak in generalities I think
most business owners the truthis is most business owners don't
(16:14):
focus on the right thingsanyway.
Right, and some of that comesas you grow.
There's more things that youhave to worry about.
So your mind comes off of howmuch traffic are we getting?
What is our conversion rate?
How many sales are we getting?
How do we improve that?
Because, depending on how youwant to run your business, right
(16:38):
, you can be a capitalist, youcan be a conscious capitalist.
You know you could be forprofit whatever of nonprofit,
all these different things.
But the truth is, without cashflow, no business survives.
Right, and even if you borrowmoney like, there's businesses
out there that when they run outof money, they just go raise
money.
(16:58):
Right, because they have anincredible idea and other people
believe in it and there's atipping point in everyone's mind
that if they just cross thisthreshold, the money's going to
come back to everybody.
So there's ways that people doget money, even when they run
out of money.
But if they don't solve thecash flow issue, they run out of
that money.
And then they got to do anotherround and eventually nobody
wants to give them money anymorebecause it's either so diluted
(17:20):
that there's not enough meat onthe bone to get involved, or
they just look at it and theysay they have not figured out a
model to monetize right.
And so a lot of these companies, these unicorns, even if they
sell for a billion dollars, yeah, the owner gets rich, but then
to continue the business, whathappens Immediately?
They have to figure out revenue.
Right, immediately, they haveto figure out revenue.
(17:41):
So what I would say insituations like this is you need
to be focused daily on therevenue that is coming in and
you need to understand what'sgoing to increase that revenue,
right, sales, money collectedall of that is a byproduct of
everything you do, so you can'treally just hope to get more
(18:04):
sales.
You have to do something to getmore sales, more sales than
equals more money, right.
And so in these situations,people are kind of they freeze
and they just kind of wait andthey hope to ride it out.
And the problem with that is is, while you're waiting to ride
it out, you end up goingbackwards because the
marketplace and the people whoare looking for a solution,
(18:25):
you're not showing up in frontof them.
They're going to yourcompetitors who are willing to
take a risk during this economicdownturn and for them and
you'll hear this a lot ofbusiness owners I'm not having
no problems with economicdownturn because they're not
operating their business from aplace of scarcity, they're not
operating on a day-to-day basisthat they have to hold money.
(18:47):
They're going out and sayingwell, ads are cheaper right now
because the competition isbacked off of running ads.
I'm going to go deeper with adsand I'm going to go harder and
I'm going to figure this out.
And so we're human.
Fear is a very natural statethat we tend to go in multiple
times a day, even if we don'trecognize it.
(19:08):
The reality is that worst casescenario recession or no
recession, worst case scenarioyou fail, the business fails,
you claim, claim bankruptcy, andthen you're at zero and you
start again.
In that situation, what did youactually lose?
Well, you lost the business youhad.
(19:29):
You didn't lose the skills, theknowledge, the experience
you've acquired along the way.
So actually not in a bad place.
You're just having to figureout how to take what you have
and actually monetize it,because maybe you didn't do a
good job with your own businessand we see people think of it
like this.
Collegiate coaches in footballoften go up to the NFL to coach
(19:53):
and they don't do very well andthey go back to collegiate
football.
In fact, the winningestcollegiate football coach, nick
Saban, has done this.
When he went to the NFL, hesucked as an NFL coach.
Now, a lot of that wasn't him.
It was to do with the attitudeof the players, the respect they
gave him and the differencebetween college kids and their
commitment to a program versusan NFL athlete as a paid
(20:17):
professional's.
Commitment to their team right,and so he struggled.
So he went back to commitmentto their team right, and so he
struggled.
So he went back to thecollegiate level right, you
could say, well, he failed.
He sucks as a coach.
He wasn't able to coach at thehighest level.
Or you can look at it for whatit is he is the winningest.
I believe he is, if not thewinner, one of the greatest
(20:40):
college coaches ever to coachthe game.
And you may not be a greatbusiness owner and you may fail,
but you may be really good atsomething that you can then go
and do either that as a businessor go into someone else's
business.
So the reason I'm trying topaint the picture here is most
(21:02):
of the reason we don't goforward in these situations is
the fear of failure, right, butthe truth is is you're probably
not going to end up homeless ona corner like begging for change
, because you have an energyabout you.
You have something in you thatis driven to succeed.
So just because the world is inchaos doesn't mean you need to
(21:27):
be in chaos, right, doesn't meanyour business needs to be in
chaos.
And so ignore all of the stuffthat people think makes a great
business and just focus on whatmatters most, right.
And if you have a big businessand you have people who are
doing that well, you still wantto make sure they're focusing on
it.
Because I was just talking to amember of a marketing team today
(21:49):
and I asked how things weregoing and the response was like,
well, I think they're goingokay.
We don't really get muchfeedback.
And I was like wait, you guysaren't looking at the traffic
and sales together as a group?
And she said, no, right.
And so you, as a CEO, if youhave a company and you have
other people responsible forrevenue, other people
responsible for marketing, otherpeople responsible for sales,
(22:12):
they might not be passing orsharing the information with the
reps or with the agents or withthe team members, and so if
you're the CEO, maybe you're notgetting that information shared
with you either.
So you've got to have yourfinger on the pulse of the stuff
that's going to keep thebusiness alive.
Everything else, that's whatyou want to put other people in
(22:35):
charge of, because you probablydon't want to deal with HR, you
probably don't want to deal withoperations, you probably don't
want to deal with payroll andthings like that.
And so what got you the initialsuccess?
Kind of staying lean, beingscrappy, you know, focusing on
sales.
That is where I think you needto go in these times.
(22:56):
That is the mistake I believepeople make in these times is
they start worrying about thingsthat make no difference, like
right now.
If you're struggling inbusiness, creating a standard
operating procedure isabsolutely useless unless you're
planning on hiring someone elseto come in and you need the SOP
in order for them to learn howto do the job.
(23:18):
But you can do that by hiringthem, teaching them and
recording you training them,because then you learn how to do
the job.
But you can do that by hiringthem, teaching them and
recording you training them,because then you only have to do
it one time and you kill twobirds with one stone.
So my point is make sure you'refocused on the things that keep
the business alive, which, in myopinion, for 90% of businesses
out there sales and marketing isthe area that most makes a
(23:39):
difference, customer experiencebeing the third, you know, leg
of the stool, you know, if youwant long-term success, right,
marketing and sales is front-end.
Customer experience is back-endselling.
You have those three pillars.
You focus on those three things.
Everything else you can thenpay somebody else to worry about
.
Because the truth is, if youdon't know how to make money,
(24:02):
then what business are youreally in?
Because the purpose of abusiness is to generate money to
then do something with.
And again, even if you're anonprofit organization, without
money you can't do yournonprofit that you are committed
to.
So the more money you have as acharity, the more money you can
give, right.
(24:22):
And so I heard this said aboutMother Teresa once she never had
a meeting, a lunch, she neverinteracted with anyone without
trying to get a check for them,for her organization, and that
is why what made her one of themost successful, like giving
people to ever, ever live.
(24:43):
So my point is as a businessowner, sometimes you have to get
scrappy, roll up your sleeves,get in the weeds on the things
that matter most, which, in myopinion, are marketing, sales
and customer experience.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's nice dude.
I had no idea Mother Teresa wasa G like that.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Final question.
This comes from Nicole.
Here in San Diego, I've heardyou talk about the importance of
creating a tribe or a loyalcommunity around your brand.
How do I go about building thattype of following from scratch
when I'm just starting out witha small audience?
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Whew, this could be a whole episode.
We have to maybe have this asan episode, but short answer is
this People follow people whoare unafraid to be themselves,
who demonstrate a life ordedication commitment that they
(25:44):
wish they had.
So what I mean by that is thereason a lot of celebrities you
follow don't just post about thework they do.
They post about their food,their diet, where they're going,
et cetera, et cetera, et ceterais to show you.
It's like reality TV, right,it's to show you like the life
(26:07):
that they're living and theyhope to inspire you, to motivate
you or to get you toessentially consume whatever it
is that they are promoting,whether it's a movie, whether
it's a fragrance, you know,beauty line, whatever it is.
And so when you're firststarting out and you don't have
(26:30):
many resources and you're makingposts and things like that,
like just document and again,this is Gary Vee's language but
just document your life throughsocial, because so many people
are afraid to do it Just bydoing it you actually set
yourself apart, right?
I don't know the numbers, butmost people are terrified of
(26:52):
public speaking.
So the fact that you can turn acamera on and speak immediately
separates you from most peoplebut immediately also makes
people look at you as a leader,look at you as someone to follow
, right.
And the reason that you want tobuild a tribe and you want it
to be around who you truly areis because obviously you don't
want to attract people who thinkyou're one thing and then
(27:14):
you're not right.
Then there's going to be inyour mind this like I'm a fraud
mentality, right, I could getfound out.
So you want to limit that asmuch as possible.
You limit it by as much aspossible by not creating a false
sense of reality, and you'llprobably can look at the people
that you follow, who have thebiggest following, and you can
(27:37):
kind of start to identify thatthe majority of their posts are
not about the thing they'retrying to monetize.
The majority of their posts arejust them sharing their life in
some way, shape or form.
And you can manufacture thattowards what it is.
You're selling.
Case in point, one of my friendsand I'll get him back on the
(27:58):
podcast Simon Lovell.
He's been on before but he gotsuper into pickleball and then
turn that into his business.
So, like everything he doespromotes the business.
But him playing pickleball isnot him trying to sell someone
on buying his product.
It's just a part of his everyday, right, and and sharing,
like when he does his networkinggroups, he's sharing that, them
(28:21):
playing pickleball.
He's not trying to sell youinto the networking group.
Now you might get FOMO, youmight want to go to that, you
might be like, well, that'sreally cool, I want to do that
in my hometown, but he doesn'thave to say that, right, and so
he is doing this consistently.
Uh, same with people who go tothe gym and record themselves
(28:42):
working out and post clips andtalk through their workouts and
things like that.
Again, they build followingsand you don't need millions of
followers to have a powerfultribe.
Really, about 10,000 people andyou can make so much money that
you're know, you're content,you're happy, you can live the
(29:03):
life of your dreams.
So, again, a lot of peoplethink 100,000, 200,000.
What you need is 10,000 engagedfollowers and you don't do that
by trying to, you know, blanketget tons of people who are not
relevant to you to follow you.
So, you know, stay true to whoyou are.
Talk about the things thatyou're interested in, Share your
actual opinions.
Don't be afraid to hold back,because polarization is
(29:26):
something that people areattracted to.
You know people don't like to.
It's hard to follow someonewho's just in the middle right.
It's hard to follow someone whogoes back and forth and is kind
of blasé fait.
You need someone who's willingto stand for something right,
because they have those beliefsin them, they have those desires
, those wants.
(29:46):
All of the things that youportray is an example to them of
what's possible, right.
And even if you don't have itall figured out and you're on
your journey, one of the thingsthat I wish I had had when I was
training at Westside Barbell tobecome a, you know, as a
professional powerlifter, to tobecome the world record holder,
(30:07):
I wish I had documented thewhole thing, not only for myself
but for other people, to seethe actual progress I went
through, to see the battles, tosee the challenges, to see how
many mornings I didn't want toget out of bed because I
couldn't stand up straightbecause my back was so jacked
from squatting a thousand pounds.
Right, these things would beawesome to have had and to have
shared.
(30:27):
Social media wasn't even therearound at that time.
Facebook was, but I don't thinkeven video was was around.
Youtube YouTube came out Ican't remember what year.
It was um, but, but it wasn'tlike me.
I didn't really know how toshoot videos and stuff like that
, and people weren't reallyYouTubers or anything like that.
But my point is is now in ourpocket we have a camera and we
(30:52):
can film at any point in time,and even I should do a better
job of documenting stuff.
I should do a better job ofdocumenting stuff.
But if you want to build a tribe, and once you have the tribe,
they'll pretty much follow youwhatever direction you go and
whatever you decide to do,they'll get behind right, and
you see this with differentpeople who they'll have a
(31:15):
clothing brand, and then theyalso will have a supplement line
, and then they'll have a youknow um, a beauty line, and then
they'll have a product or acourse.
So the, the tribe, is what'simportant, not the thing that
you you necessarily going topromote or sell, um.
But you know, it's whyinfluencers have become 60 of
(31:36):
the sales force for products andpeople listen to influencers
more than they watch ads orpurchase from magazine ads or TV
ads or things like that.
They're purchasing more andmore from influencers.
But it's not because theperson's an influencer, it's
because they have a tribe offans that follow them, who
interact with them, who engagewith them, who are, in essence,
(32:04):
the influencer, has become apart of their day-to-day life.
So, when it comes to influence,when it comes to opinions, when
it comes to news topics, likethey want to hear that from the
person they follow, the personthey look up to the most, the
person they admire, the personthat they kind of want to
(32:25):
assimilate and become.
They want to become their ownversion, but they like what you
have or what you're doing, andthey often want to have that
kind of result for themselves ora similar result, right?
So, starting out, just documenteverything.
Don't be afraid to, you know,overshare, just share.
(32:48):
Just put your life out there.
Again, you don't have to put it.
You can keep things private.
It's not like you have to puteverything out there, like a lot
of people aren't putting theirfamily on there and their wives
and their children and all thosedifferent things.
So it's not like you have toconstantly share every single
moment, but you have enough on aday-to-day basis where you can
(33:12):
make, like, several stories, youcan make a post.
There's no reason you can't dothat.
And look, the biggest secretthat nobody ever wants to tell
anybody, because nobody's goingto pay for this information.
The biggest secret is that it'sa game of time, and so you know
(33:32):
, expect to do this for 10 yearsto get the payoff that you
think you're going to getquicker, right, and so if you do
this for the next 10 years, youwill have everything you want.
But nobody likes to think interms of that long.
They want it in the next sixmonths, the next year.
And look, some people have theability to do that.
(33:54):
Some people are A plus studentsin school and they never even
study, and other people studyevery single day, have a tutor,
their parents pay all this moneyto try to get them to
understand a certain topicbetter and they still get C's,
d's, e's and F's right.
That's life.
So, yeah, there is people who,in one year, start a YouTube
(34:19):
channel or start an Instagram orstart a TikTok and blow up
because they have charisma, theyhave experience.
Usually those people have 20years experience.
They've just not transferred it.
When you're brand new, like,you're going to struggle, you're
going to face adversity, you'regoing to have moments of things
that you weren't prepared for,like online haters and criticism
(34:42):
and all these different things,and the truth is is that you go
through all of that and youkeep going and eventually it's
all going to come and pay off.
But it's like the book ThreeFeet from Gold, like people will
dig and dig and dig and dig andthey get closer and closer and
closer to the gold.
But it's so hard and it's sodifficult and they want to quit.
(35:05):
And a lot of people quit, right, when they should go even
deeper, right, and if they justgone a couple more steps and
just dug a little bit deeper,then the payoff would have been
there.
And so just know, going into it, that you know, don't expect a
hundred thousand views, amillion views when you first get
(35:27):
started, right.
But if you go from one view andI have a, a client who we
started doing a lot more videowith, and when he first started
posting he got zero views andnow he'll get 400 views, 200
views, sometimes he'll get oneor two views He'll have a video
that you know, zero views,probably posted at the wrong
(35:50):
time algorithm didn't pick it up, whatever but he's playing the
game and by playing the gamehe's getting feedback.
By getting feedback he canimprove his content and he can
see what worked?
What didn't work?
Why did this take off?
What was the hook?
What was the information?
So playing the game is whereyou're going to learn, is where
you're going to improve.
(36:10):
Standing on the sidelineswatching everybody else doing it
, waiting for the right moment,it's not going to happen.
So, in terms of building yourtribe, you build your tribe by
putting yourself out there,allowing people to like-minded
people to follow you, and I'veseen people build tribes in
crochet.
(36:31):
My wife's a crocheter and shefollows different people on
Instagram and she'll send mestuff because it's hilarious you
know what someone can make outof crochet and she'll send cute
stuff to me, either to laugh or,you know, maybe I should make
this for the kids.
And I'll sometimes click andlook at the profile and the
(36:52):
person has like 250,000followers, right?
I don't know a single otherperson that crochets in our
friend group other than my wife.
But there is a girl onInstagram with quarter of a
million people who are payingattention to her, buying her
patterns that she's creating,liking, commenting on her posts.
So again, you just have to giveit time, you have to allow
(37:17):
people to find you andeventually it's all going to pay
off.
But I would say you got to giveit long enough to do that.
You can set that time.
Maybe you're not willing to doit for 10 years, I don't know.
But I can tell you masterycomes over time and there's very
few ways you can shortcut it.
Most overnight success issomeone who has been banging
(37:37):
their head against the wall fora decade or more who suddenly
figures out just a tweak, just aturn that allows them to come
out and people say, wow, how didyou do that?
And so I've been trying to doit for the last decade and you
know, we finally figured it out.
So give yourself time, giveyourself patience, give yourself
grace, you know, because it'snot going to be easy and you're
(37:58):
going to make mistakes.
But being in the game, being aplayer, is way better than
standing on the sidelineswondering and look if you're
going to make mistakes.
But being in the game, being aplayer, is way better than
standing on the sidelineswondering and look if you're
lost when it comes to what youshould actually do.
Use ChatGTP and tell it what youwant to do and ask it to give
you a plan.
It's not going to be the verybest plan you could possibly
(38:20):
come up with, but followingsomething is better than
shooting from the hip.
So you know there's tools andthere's other things out there
that do that too.
But you know, leverage thetools that are available to you
to at least start to learn.
You know, go to youtube, lookon videos like constantly.
You know, learn, learn, learn,learn when you have the money,
(38:44):
invest, because it's a quickerway to learn, because it's, you
know, curated and it's where youare right now.
Invest in things.
They're going to help you moveto that next step.
But at the end of the day,you're not going to learn the
game unless you start beautifulstuff.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Can I ask a quick follow-up question?
Yep I was looking at nicole'sprofile while you were speaking
there.
I can't say that she's beendoing this for 10 years, but she
seems to have been relativelyconsistent, documenting her life
and all that.
Would it be useful for her todo any advertising or like
promotion of her content tospend some money?
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Yeah.
So two things there.
One of the things like I'm adirect response marketer, so I
don't like to do anything unlessthere's a reason to do it.
Okay, like to build a tribe.
To build a tribe doesn't makesense to me.
So the first thing if you don'thave it already is you have to
have a way to move them fromsocial media to the medium that
(39:41):
you want in order to be able tocommunicate with them.
Right now, social media hasthings like a Facebook group,
has things like a subscriptionon an Instagram.
I don't know if you can have itfree, free subscription but you
can have a private group onthose.
Or you can move them off intoyour email.
You could move them off intotext message, depending on how
you want to communicate.
Move them off into text message, depending on how you want to
(40:04):
communicate.
So that's the first thing ishaving a reason for them to give
you to join.
Whatever it is you want them totake that next step with you.
That's the first thing that youshould have in place, because
if you're going to runadvertising, you don't want to
just run advertising to increaseyour following count, right?
You want to run advertising toI'm guessing, to help you sell
something, whether something,whether it's your stuff maybe
you're an affiliate sellingother people's stuff, I'm not
(40:27):
sure.
But what I would look at if youhave been doing it is what are
your most popular videos, right?
What are the most popularvideos you've done?
And then just run like fivebucks a day of traffic to it for
video views and see and setyourself a budget, right?
I think the biggest mistakepeople make when they run
advertising is they again goingback to what I said earlier
about cost versus investment.
(40:49):
When they run ads, they think,oh, you know, like it's going to
cost me this much.
Hopefully I make money.
No, no, no, you should look atit like I'm willing to invest
500 bucks, right?
So if you're going to do fivebucks a day, that's a hundred
days Well, you could do 500bucks in one day.
They'll spend the money if theycan.
The beauty of doing it over timeis that you can kind of adjust.
(41:10):
You have tools like Hotjar orCrazy Egg that you can put on
your website or wherever you'redriving the traffic to and you
can pay attention to whatthey're doing if they're
purchasing, if they're notpurchasing, if they're opting in
, if it's an opt-in so you cansee what's happening.
You can tweak it as you go, butlet's say you do $5 a day or
$10 a day, whatever you want todo, you know that's 50 to 100
(41:32):
days of running traffic.
That will give you feedback andyou'll be able to see what
happens, right, you'll be ableto see how many leads you
actually got for that, how manynew subscribers you got, how
many profile views you got did,did video views?
Did that change?
(41:52):
How many opt-ins, how manypeople click your profile link.
So you have to be willing to toessentially run a campaign and
then see what the results areand what you could tweak.
For case in point, let's say youyou want to spend 500 bucks and
you're going to do 10 bucks aday.
So 50 days we're going're goingto run this and at the end of
it we spent 500, we made $400,right.
Technically we've lost ahundred bucks, right.
But let's say those $400 camefrom two sales.
(42:16):
We have two $200 sales andthat's what our product is.
It's 200 bucks and that's whatour product is.
It's 200 bucks, 197, 199,whatever, but it's essentially
200 bucks.
That's awesome.
But you're going to see it as afailure.
I lost money, but it wasn't.
It's feedback, and the feedbackis well, what would our
(42:40):
conversions need to be?
So what could we potentiallychange?
And again, if you have aconversion tracking software on
and you're paying attention towhat people are doing, you might
already know the five thingsyou could improve in order to
increase conversions.
So that's on the simplest level.
But what if we didn't increaseconversions?
What if we just increased theamount of money they gave us?
If the value of the customerwas $250 instead of $200, we
(43:00):
would have broken even right.
If it was $300 value percustomer, we would have broken
even right.
If it was 300 value percustomer, we would have made
$100 profit.
So can you add an upsell inthere, right?
Or can you increase the priceof your product and keep the
conversions the same?
What if you had a payment planto your model?
Because right now you only haveone option it's $200.
(43:21):
So you have to look at it andtake the feedback from the
campaigns and then assess andthen test again and really, if
you look at it in, here's mybudget how much money I have to
spend on this.
I'm going to run a series oftests.
Each test is going to give mefeedback, providing I make the
changes and it improves theprocess.
(43:42):
By the end of this, I'm goingto have a profitable funnel that
I can then pour money intoright.
Because the reality is is mostpeople fail because they run ads
to get traffic.
They get traffic.
It doesn't convert the way theythink it should.
They say the traffic's bad, sothey go well, that didn't work.
(44:02):
Well, the traffic's notnecessarily bad.
It might not be targetedcorrectly, it might not be to
the people specifically youwanted.
But here's what happens withadvertising.
If you do it right.
Let's say you have a leadmagnet and you're driving
traffic to it from an ad and youdrive 500 people, you get 100
(44:27):
opt-ins, right.
So 20% conversion.
That's pretty good for coldtraffic.
So you get 20% conversionFantastic, all right.
But you don't have anything onthe back end.
You've just proven concept,right.
So now you've got to sell.
So you have 100 people you wantto sell something to.
So now you've got to sell.
So you have 100 people you wantto sell something to.
Well, what if you didn't havethe opt-in in place of the sales
(44:47):
page and you just drove trafficstraight to the sales page?
Now you have 500 views versus100 views, because you went
through the gate right, and sothere's so many ways to look at
it, there's so many ways to lookat it, there's so many ways to
assess it, and the biggest thingto understand is what's the end
goal.
And then work backwards and say, okay, everything is just
(45:13):
information.
And so if you understand what agood conversion rate is, if I'm
getting 20% in an opt-in, Iprobably aren't going to worry
too much about trying to tweakthat opt-in.
If then, out of the 100 peoplethat actually opted in, only one
person purchased, so it's a 1%conversion, let's say I thought
I should be getting a 5%conversion, well, there's a lot
more opportunity there to focusthan there is on the opt-in,
(45:36):
right.
And so then we go okay, how dowe look at that?
And, like I said, maybe weremove the opt-in, we get 500
people.
So we test that.
Nope, didn't make a difference,we still got the one sale.
Okay, there's a disconnectbetween the ad, the opt-in and
then the sales page.
So we need more pre-framing,more pre-selling.
What do we do?
Right?
And that's how you have tothink of things.
(45:56):
You have to think of things andbreak it down in segments and
in paths and say that's goodenough.
What's the thing that's notgood enough?
Where's the biggestopportunities?
What can we tweak?
Because sometimes all it takesis one tweak and you have a
profitable campaign, but so manypeople give up before that.
So running ads absolutely To me,that's the fastest way to get
(46:17):
exposure right, because insteadof having to hope for a video to
go viral or something like that, you can literally tell the
platforms hey matter.
I want people this age who areinterested in this, and so they
should put it in front of thosepeople, versus you hoping that
it ends up in front of thosepeople.
And you know.
And then as you grow, you caneither keep the ads or a lot of
(46:38):
people get to a point where theydon't need to run ads anymore
because the organic is bringingenough traffic, enough sales,
that the the advertising becomesan expensive sale.
You know because you're buyingthe ads and there's costs
associated to it.
So I get it.
But honestly, in the beginning,you know time is, people trade
their time.
(46:58):
But if you're creating tons ofcontent and nobody's seeing it,
you'd have been better offcreating one piece of content
and driving traffic to it.
So just keep that in mind andunderstand that you don't have
to spend a lot of money onadvertising to get started, but,
like if you're spending fivebucks a day for 100 days, I
would almost guarantee that it'sgoing to help in some way shape
or form, not to mention thevideo views as they go up.
(47:23):
The video views as they go upand and if people are engaged
and people are liking thembecause hopefully your content
is good, like, you're going topick up organic traffic from
that too, because the thealgorithm will will say, oh,
people enjoying this video, thewatch time is going up, um,
therefore, we want to share thiswith other people for free.
So even when you run ads, youcan benefit from organic there.
So hopefully that gives yousome starting point.
Didn't confuse you too much,but it's definitely something I
(47:46):
would throw in, especially,especially if you've been doing
this for a while and you justnot seem to be getting more
views.
The algorithms, the platformsit's a constant battle and for
some reason sometimes it's.
You know your content doesn'teven get showed to your own
followers.
So I would definitely sayexplore that, you know again,
(48:08):
set a budget, how much are youwilling to invest, and then from
there you can figure out if itdoes work or not work for you,
and then what you would do next.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Nice Thanks, man.
Yeah, I was looking at Nicole'sstuff and it's interesting that
she said in her question thatshe's starting from scratch,
when by all appearances she'sbeen working pretty hard at this
for a little while.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
So I thought that there might be another tactical
step, and I imagine people saythey're starting from scratch
when they don't have a bigfollowing or they're not
necessarily monetizing yet.
Right, so it makes total sense.
But hopefully today's episodewill help a few of you guys out.
As always, we appreciate youbeing here.
Give today's episode.
It will help a few of you guysout.
As always, we appreciate youbeing here.
Give us a like, subscribe,leave a review if you feel so
inclined.
We'd love to see that.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
And we'll see you next time on Paid to Create.
Bye guys.
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