Digital Marketing 101 - A Complete Beginner's Guide to Marketing (Explainer Video) | Stephen Johnson & Stephen Blackburn

If you're afraid to put yourself out there, you need to start doing it anyway because this is how you make money. Like it can level up everything that you do. Yeah. If you post content regularly, it helps everything else that you're doing. It helps your webinars convert better, helps your challenges convert better, and it's not difficult. Facebook has 52,000 data points on every single profile. Like how? It's crazy. Facebook makes so much money because they've made it easy. If there was one thing that we could teach a business owner that could help them make the most money and excel and grow their business the most from our experience, it was what up well builders today. You know, I am trying to figure out digital marketing and be the best. And so I keep bringing in people who are killing it. These guys, I mean, they're both names are Steven. They don't look the same, but they dress the same. And you know, they are, they are going to be talking about building list funnels. All these different things you can do with challenges and more. What's up, boys? Good to see you going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, we love your operation. We love, we can't because we came to WealthCon in January and it was insane. Insane. Thank you. The level at which you are operating is inspirational, bro. So definitely wanted to say that. Yeah. No, I appreciate it, guys. I always love bringing in either people from our community, people I meet at our events and everything else. And I know you've been on a couple of other shows, like you were with Justin and the wealthy creator podcast. And so I was like, all right, let's talk to these guys about funnels and marketing and building a list and everything. Because for me, for anyone who's been following me, I took over my marketing department pretty much after Thanksgiving last year. So I'm now basically three months into running it ourselves for the first time. And, you know, you guys are kind of anti-agency, even though used to be an agency. Right. And I'm kind of like leaning that way now too, where I'm like, you know, what guys? Like people just need to learn how to do this. Yes. Definitely. It's huge. I mean, we've literally, it came from being on thousands of calls with clients that are hitting us up just with horror stories about these agencies that were either just not doing good work. Stealing their pixel data, stealing their ad accounts, holding them hostage. Holding them hostage. I mean, giving them access to their ad accounts, like literally shutting everything down. You know, that's the thing. Some of these, not all agencies, but some of these agencies get very bitter when you fire them. Yeah. And they're like, fine, I'll take, I'll take the pixel data. I'll take all of this stuff. I'll take all your data, your leads. So they're spending five K, 10 K, 15 K a month. They're not getting great results. And then, you know, three months goes by, six months goes by. They don't know what they're doing. They didn't get any results. And then they're feeling like, and that's, that's a big situation for a small business owner. You know, so anyway, we used to be an agency and we got great results for our clients. But it really wasn't fulfilling like that. So we transitioned and we started kind of coaching a few people. And we're like, man, what if we just taught people how to do this? I wonder if people could get it, you know? And we tested it out with a few people. And one of our first students was a lady named Sheree. She was, what was she making? 900 bucks a month. 900 a month selling clothes. We trained her for like, I don't know the exact, what, a month? It was about two months of training. And then after two, three months, she ended up doing 50, 60 K a month. Mm. Yeah. Just selling her clothes. Just selling her clothes online because she figured out her own ads. And she learned how to do it themselves. So yeah, well, we did was we taught her how to run ads like an agency would run ads. Right. Right. So that kind of eliminates the middleman and allows you to be more profitable within your business. Yeah. Well, the thing I found out too, it's not even for me anyways. It wasn't about the retainer, right? Because I've paid agencies five grand, ten grand, 20 grand a month, right? And that's not ad spend or anything. It's just the retainer based on, you know, all the stuff they're going to do for you. And it's like, well, I could for sure bring that all in house for the same price, if not less. You know, right now I brought it in house. It is about the same price. I'm spending about 20 grand a month for salaries and everything on my own marketing team. Mm-hmm. And that's not counting my content team. I'm just talking the paid marketing team, funnels, all that stuff. Right. Right. Right. Right. Based on me, you know, they're right here in my office. We have creative control. We're building it our way, the way we want to do it. It's just a thing. It's way easier. Nobody cares about your marketing like you do, right? So when you hire an agency for five kids, you got to understand they're just going to do the bare minimum, just to not get fired. Yeah. And my whole thing is, and this is what I try to tell people, if you're on the phone with an agency and you're trying to decide if you should work with them or not, and you've never been trained, how do you even know if they've been good or not? Yeah. You have no idea. That was me for a long time. You know, and people will pull the wool over your eyes. They'll tell you whatever they want to hear. But at the end of the day, the only way they'll really know is if you ask them technical questions right on the spot. Yeah. They ask them some hard questions to see if they can answer it. And if they can't, hang the phone up. And now you just saved yourself months of pain, tens of thousands of dollars. And I think the biggest pushback we always get is that marketing's hard to learn. It's like difficult to overwhelm. Let me tell you. I'm telling you. I'm telling you. This is funny. You say that's because I build all our businesses off the back of organic marketing. I just created good content. And so it was just like, bro, we get leads. Like that's not the problem. I don't need to run ads. So I build our business to, you know, I think the first year I did content, we did, and this is just the education space. We went from basically zero to 700 grand organically. And then the next year we did three and a half million. All organic. We never spent a dollar in ads. And I was like, yeah, I mean, like just, and then you realize there's a cap to like organic growth and everything, even though you make a ton of money. And I just was like, all right, we'll start hiring agencies. And like I would hear them talk about pixels. People right now are listening to pixel and they're like, what the heck is a pixel? Yeah. Exactly. I would hear row ads and all this stuff. And I'm like, dude, this is just, I don't even want to learn it. It sounds like it sounds like a lot. Yeah. And I did that for years. And finally, I took it over at the end of the year because I had capacity. I had enough understanding after interviewing them, a bunch of people like you. And then we started doing it. I'm like, this is not that hard. It's not that hard. It's honestly fun. Like when you get into it, like we love talking about pixels, like talk about pixels we love it. And we love. Explain what a pixel is just so people know. Like I do want this to be a very, a master class. Absolutely. That's not marketing. Cool. So there is this little piece of code that you can plug on, plug in onto a website, right? And the pixel is in charge of tracking data, tracking the actions that people perform on your website. So for instance, if someone comes to your website, they add a product to cart, the pixel will track that action as an add to cart. Someone purchases the pixel will track that action as a purchase. Now you might be listening and you might be thinking like, okay, what's the big deal about that? The big deal is that it doesn't just track the actions, it stores the data as well. And that allows you to create something called a custom audience. So a custom audience is a segmented group of people that have performed a specific action on your website or somewhere. It's just a segmented group of people, right? And I love to look on people's faces when I tell them that although they might not have a pixel on their website, they still have the ability to capture data that the pixel would collect via Instagram. Okay. Because the pixel is natively integrated on Instagram and a lot of people didn't know that. So if you're listening right now and you have, you know, a hundred thousand followers or something like that, you can literally track all of those actions from your Instagram and create the same custom audience, right? And this is where it gets good, right? Let's just say that you have a custom audience of 100 people that have purchased from you, like in the past, right? And you agree that those 100 people that have purchased from you are really interested in your products and services and everything that you have to offer. For sure. Yep. So you have this list of 100 people that bought from you. Now what you can do, and this is like Facebook superpower. Now what you can do is you can take that list of 100 people and you can say, "Hey, your Facebook, you see this list of 100 people that love me? I want you to go out there and create a look-alike audience similar to these people that have already performed those actions on my website." So Facebook says, "Okay, cool. I'll go ahead and create a duplicate audience, but different people." Yep. Right? So these are people that are the same in certain ways. They might spend the same type of money. They might be interested in the same type of things, but they are the audience of people that Facebook is going to find. But Facebook does you one better. Facebook says, "Okay, you got that list of 100 people. I'm going to create a look-alike audience off of that list, but this audience is going to be millions of people." It's crazy. It's super hacked. It's literally like performance-enhancing drugs like in the 90s when the wire and all and boys were hitting them home runs. That's what Facebook has. But then it's like, "Well, now it's not all the Instagram influencers, but the performance of Facebook." Right. My self-included. But anyway, but so then people are like, "All right, but how do we really know that those people are like really like those people?" Right. And this is where you have to understand how much data Facebook has on its users. It has 52,000 data points on every single profile. Think about that for a second. How? Like how? It's crazy. Bro, I don't even know 52 things about myself. It would take me a while to think about it. Yeah, they know more about you than you. Oh, thank you. And so what is a data point? A data point is, "Okay, what time do I open up my Facebook app in the morning?" What type of videos do I look at? How long do I typically look at them? And it just goes on and on and on. So 52,000 data points on every profile. What poster are you commenting on? How do you. Everything. What kind of poster do you make? Yes. So when we say, like, these look-alike audiences are the cheat code, it literally is. So this is how we go off. We go off and we find people who are literally loving and liking the products that we already sell. Yeah. And new strange cold audiences. We use look-alikes every day. We teach about this stuff. So it's. And you know what's amazing about Facebook marketing? And look, for anyone who's listening to this, the Facebook algorithm and the YouTube algorithm, they all work the same way, right? It's like, yeah, you're not paying for it, which is why I'm an advocate of, you know, content marketing. Yeah. Because if I make a video right now, this podcast, YouTube knows that, hey, I'm going to serve this up to people who like digital marketing, who are into ads. And they're going to already feed it to those people because they're going to know that a lot of my real estate people aren't going to necessarily care as much about this. Even though they should, because right now, I'm running Facebook ads with look-alike audiences to buy houses nationwide. And we're crushing it. There you go. So, and it's cheaper than I've ever done. And it's crazy because now that I run my own marketing team, I was able to see these things. And I'm like, wait a minute. You know, I've done traditional marketing in real estate for a long, long time. Direct mail, you know, TV commercials, billboards, all this stuff. And though some can be targeted like direct mail, I know who I want to talk to. I don't know who's seeing it. Like everybody is seeing it, right? That's the big part. And I got to pay the same amount regardless of who's seeing it. Facebook's like, no, dude, we only want you to pay for the right people to see your thing. Exactly. And the amount of metrics that you have on the back end. Once you start learning the metrics part, it gets super fun. Wealthbuilders, you might have recently heard that we launched Wealthy University, which has access to all of our courses. You get weekly calls with me and our team. You also get access to special trainings, many of which have been done by people who are on this podcast, as well as recordings of WealthCon and other workshops and events that we've done. But even though that was good, I actually want to make it risk-free for you to try for yourself. I'm giving all of the podcast listeners a 14 day free trial by simply going to WealthyUniversity.com/podcast. So if you go check out that link, you'll be able to get access to your 14 day free trial right now. You'll be able to go check out the course. You'll be able to go check out calls, trainings, and everything else. And then see if it's a fit for you. There's literally no risk to doing it. So go to WealthyUniversity.com/podcast and go get your free 14 day trial of WealthyUniversity today. What are some metrics that people will need to know? And by the way, the reason why you need to know these metrics is because I want you guys to think about what he said earlier, right? The pixels on your website and his track and the data. But also the next thing that it does is it sends that data back over to Facebook. So now you can go inside of the back into Facebook, the ads manager, and you can tell which ads are making you money and which ones are wasting your money. So you can strategically turn ones on and off. How do you get a pixel just so people know like, where do you find this pixel? It's in the business manager. So if you go to business.facebook.com and you go to settings and then you go down to data sets, you can create a pixel. It'll give you a piece of code. And then you can either put that code on your website or you can just integrate a lot. There's a lot of integrations. And by the way, people get confused now because here's the thing. If you're a Facebook marketer, you know that Facebook is always changing. So the way that your ad account looks today might not be the way that it looks a month from now because they're always changing and trying to find ways to make the platform better. So the pixel thing, actually the Facebook pixel is no longer called a pixel. It's actually called a data set. Oh, so when he talks about, you know, I've heard that. Yeah. And when you go to your settings now, there's a section that says pixels, but when you click there, you won't see a pixel there. You can't create it. So you got to go one below to data sets and that's where you would create the pixel. Interesting. Okay. So anyway, all this data is now coming into your ad account. And I want people to think about this data like a language. It's literally a language that's telling you what's working, what's not working. But if like with any language, if you don't understand it, you have no idea what it's telling you to do. So you got to understand the language. And once you understand this language, it's like all the overwhelm turns to clarity and you're like, oh, you had the epiphany moment like you did. This isn't even that hard. You know, so there's a couple metrics that are probably the most important that we tell people about. One is called CTR. It stands for click through rate and your CTR, and I'll prove to you how easy this is right now, right? CTR stands for click through rate. And all it's telling you is how well is my ad creative performing? How is it resonating with my audience? The higher the click through rate, the better your creative or your video or your image is performing. Just so everyone's clear to what he's talking about is the content itself. Right. So, you know, on YouTube, we have click through rate. And we look at that through the thumbnail. That's how we judge the thumbnail of a YouTube video, right? Because if you're on YouTube and you're just browsing what to watch, you can't see the video. You're just looking at the title and the thumbnail. And so YouTube looks at that and they say, oh, your click through rate was 5%. That means 5% of the time when they saw it, they clicked it. Exactly. Right? And so clearly, we want people to have, we want to hire click through rate. We want people to say, oh, you know what? That looks interesting. Let me watch that. Exactly. So, that's all creative at that point. That has nothing to do with your audience or anything. It's like, bro, how good was this ad? How good was it? So, what we want to do is we want to, okay, I know my click through rate is telling me how well my creative is performing. So we need benchmarks to tell me, okay, is it performing good or bad? So our benchmark is 1% or higher when it comes to a conversion ad, right? So that means if you go into your ad account and you see your, your CTR is less than 1%, all that's telling you is, hey, your creative is not really resonating with your audience. You probably need to switch your creative out. Right. Which means just switch or not do another video. I can do it. So, that means that you don't have necessarily a bottleneck at that stage. And remember, we like to look at ads and we're looking at our metrics like we're doctors, like we're trying to like diagnose, where's the problem, right? How can I make this perform better? So that's what these metrics allow us to do. So that's one. Yeah. And one thing I want to say too is 1% or above for a conversion campaign. So meaning that you're optimizing to get people to buy from you essentially a sales campaign. So when we talk about a traffic conversion, it's a little bit different because you could be listening right now and running a traffic campaign and your click through it could be 2. What's a traffic campaign? So a traffic campaign is essentially a campaign where you're telling Facebook, hey, Facebook, I want you to run this ad and my main objective is to get as much traffic as possible to my website or the link that you're sending them to. That's a traffic campaign. And Facebook knows more about people than they know about themselves. Exactly. So they know if you are one of those people who just like to click on links. Exactly. And they're going to target those people. They're going to target the link clickers. Now here's the issue with the link clickers though. The link clickers are not always the buyers. The link clickers are like window shoppers, right? Yeah. So like when you're out here and you're doing a traffic campaign because it might be a little bit cheaper, you got to understand too that you're also bringing in a lower quality audience. And that's why traffic campaigns are cheaper. You're bringing in the peasants. Exactly. But when you run a conversion campaign, Facebook's going to target the people that are more likely to buy from. Yeah. And since we're talking about this, this is very fitting. You should never, ever, ever, ever, ever boost your posts. Mm hmm. You should never boost your posts. I said, um, we have this saying and what I say is boosting your posts is the devil. That's what I say. Right. And the reason why is because on the back end, like if you try and boost your posts, you're very limited with the things that you can do targeting wise, audience wise, look a like audience wise, you're very limited. There's not much you can do. But Facebook always makes this seem like it's, it's this easy like you wave this magic one. What is easier? It's easier. Yeah. It's just not as effective. And most, I've seen maybe two people out of the thousands of people that we've coached that have been successful boosting posts. Yeah. I'll add to that. I call them ads, but they're not. You know, it'll be just a normal piece of content that's valuable and good. And at the very end, I'll be like DM me, uh, flip. If you want to learn how to flip houses, right? So you know, 90% of the thing was just pure normal content. And then at the end, it's just a soft called action. Right. So you know what you're getting there, basically. You know why you're doing it. You already have the call to action there. Everything's done. And in that case, you'll boost. Yeah. Well, not even now, now that I know what you know, but before I would just boost it, because like I would organically get a bunch of DMs, which are leads. And then I was like, you know what? If that was a great organic real, because like I'll get something to get a hundred thousand, organically. And you're like, dang, dude, if that did that organically, it's going to be great as an ad. So I would boost it. And it would get more and more sad. And it was just like easy. But I agree with you. That same thing I should just take and then go put it in ads manager and then be able to use all the data. Well, yeah. That's what I was going to ask you. What would you say now? Now that you've been. Yeah, I put it in Facebook manager. Okay. And that's the thing, right? Like that's what we try to teach people because like when we started our e-commerce brand, we spent $5,000 boosting posts running ads the wrong way before we realized that it was the wrong way. And this was like seven years ago or so. And and after that, we decided, yo, enough is enough. We can't keep doing things the wrong way. Let's find a mentor to actually guide us and teach us the process. Yeah. Know what I'm saying? But I just don't want you want your listeners to go through that same thing. Yeah. You know, so crazy. The reason I think boost exists is because it is super easy. So like literally you press boost and, you know, you get leads and Facebook really sells it too. They're like, put $20 and reach out 20,000 people. Yeah. I don't blame them because it's like, it does take more work to be like, oh, well, I'm going to, of course, I got to go move this and like the manager's different and all this crap. Like, I get anything that's worth doing is harder. Yeah. And that's the whole thing is people got to understand that, like do it the right way. So you can get the right results. All the magic is in the back and the has management. You guys learn how to do that. It's like, it's the, okay. So we talked about click through array. We talked about, um, what else do we talk about? So, so CTR is one. Yep. Another one that you can look at is one called CPMs, which stands for a cost per thousand impressions essentially. And again, all the sounds like gibberish until you can put it into layms terms and simplicity. All that's all the CPM is telling you is, hey, how much money is it costing me for this ad to be seen a thousand times? Mm. That's it. Yeah. So you'll see a number pop up and maybe it'll be 20 bucks, 30 bucks. Whatever that number is, it's just telling you that's how much money it's costing you for a thousand people to see. Yeah. Actually, not a thousand people. Actually, for it to just be seen a thousand times. Yeah. Right. Because the same person can see something more than once. Right. Right. So with your cost per thousand impressions, you want to keep that as low as possible. Yeah. Because we want our cost as low as possible. Yeah. Right. And that has changed over the, over the course of the years now. Like when we first started running, we were getting like $5 CPMs. Like it was crazy. Yeah. But now it's getting more expensive. And our goal right now is about 20 to $25 or less is our goal with CPMs. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's all just understanding the benchmarks. And if our CPMs start to rise, then what that's telling us is that our audience is too competitive. Remember, like Facebook ads is, it's all an auction that's happening. Like you and us, we're running ads and we're targeting the same people. Yeah. And we're trying to win. Yeah. Yeah. Even though we have different offers, they're, it's like, well, should I get in a real state or should I run my own ads? But even it's even before that, it's like what's happening is basically, it's auctioning to see, okay, who's actually, whose ads are actually going to be shown, right? So if we have a higher price or whatever it might be, but ultimately you want to win that auction. But if you have a bunch of people that are targeting the same exact audience at the same exact time, your CPMs will rise and they'll get more expensive. So you want to kind of pay attention to these few numbers because that'll tell you what to do. Yeah. You know what I mean? I can say this to somebody who spends six figures plus a month on ads, sometimes multiple six figures and everything like, they change a lot with scale too. Yeah. So it might be a good price for a little bit and then you start really ramping that thing and it's like, whoa, we just double expensive. Are you guys using different ad accounts for different budgets and scaling that way? No. So that's one thing that you can try. Okay. Because sometimes with ad accounts, if you start to go, if you train a pixel, let's see the other thing about the pixel is that it's like a creature that learns the AI picture. It literally learns the more money you spend it, it learns who your target audience. It learns the type of budget you like to spend. Like, so it knows all these things. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, if you start increasing your budget like crazy, well, the pixel wasn't trained for that. And as you start to scale, it starts to get wonky results start to kind of diminish. Yeah. But it's that. But then it's also ad accounts have their own personality too. So you could try this. Like you could try creating another ad account. Use a different time zone. God. Right. Because you got to think, I don't know if you've noticed this in your ads. There's certain times of the day where it just goes crazy. Like there's certain pockets and it's kind of unpredictable, but you'll see it like on a daily basis, like there's a certain pocket of the day where you just, you get more leads for whatever reason. And that has to do with your ad account as well. So one test that you could do is you could create another ad account with a different budget, change the time zone. If you're Pacific, change the time zone to Eastern and try running ads that way using a different pixel. Got it. You know, those are just different scaling techniques that we can use. You can just a scaling ad account. That's really there for just, you know, high budgets. And you start right out of the rip start with a high, like if you already know you have an audience that's killing it, you got to create it that's killing. It's already improving the work. Move it over to a different ad account. And then start scaling with a high budget right off the rip. That way it's been trained to do that and it can, it can, it can certainly, so it's something to test. It doesn't always work. You got to, with everything like, you know, anything that's not a test is a guest the best. Yeah. So you got to test it. I'm sure you've heard by now that wealthcon is coming back to Las Vegas, April 18 to the 20th here at the Caesars Palace. Now, here's the thing. Many people listening to this podcast have not been to Wealthcon. Maybe you haven't found the time. Maybe the logistics didn't work out and you have no idea how amazing it is. Well, I'm going to actually give you something completely for free so you can get a taste of what we've got going on. I'm going to give you the recordings of our last Wealthcon back in January for the two full day experience. You're going to get access to all of the speakers and all of their presentations and everything else right now completely for free by going to Wealthcon.org. Now, I don't know how long I keep this up on the website. It's a special thing that I'm trying out. I want to give people a ton of value and I want to let you get a taste of what we're going to be doing in April. So go check it out Wealthcon.org, go get the free recording and maybe I'll see you at the next one. Have you guys gotten into manual bidding at all? No. Oh, dude. Tell me about that. Manual bidding is nuts. So you got like two different types of bidding. You have automatic and manual. Automatic is saying, hey, Facebook, put my stuff wherever you feel is best. And make sure that I win as many auctions as I can. Manual bidding is saying, bully the market. I'm willing to pay this much and I want to knock everybody out of competition. And you only do that. It's very dangerous. It's crazy, but it's like a double edge sword. You only do that when you have a proven offer. No, it's working. And you can just set your threshold and tell Facebook, I'm willing to pay this much. And I want you to knock everybody out of competition, out of the auction. And eventually, initially, it's really expensive, but eventually all your competitors see their CPMs rising and what do they do? They cut their ads off. And now you have a blue ocean. Essentially, the way it works is you're going to, you're guaranteed to win any auction. Because here's the thing, when you're running ads, automatic bidding, Facebook is pretty much doing the bidding for you. It's bidding against itself. Right. It's bidding against others, but it's going to, it's going to keep your costs lower, you know. But when you manual bid, you say, hey, Facebook, I'm willing to spend $100 to get somebody to see my, to see my ad. Now all of a sudden, anyone who's automatic bidding, Facebook's not going to bid that high because they don't want to run through people's money. So you're going to win all of the auctions and it's going to force your content to be seen by more people. Did your team know about this? Dude, probably not. I mean, you might need to have a chat. Yeah. So manual bidding to just conquer a certain audience. conquer a market. Yeah. And your bully, it's like the bully method. That's what we call it. I am a bully. Yeah, you are a bully. Yeah. So you might as well be a bully on Facebook. I mean, I'll be a bully anywhere. I don't care. I come to rip throats and stomp. The manual bidding is for you then, bro. That's your personality. It'll just knock everybody out. Everybody's like, oh my god, this is too expensive. Cut them off, try a different audience. And then meanwhile, now your cost per result starts to kind of decrease. It'll be really expensive at the first. So when you do manual bidding, is it like, okay, if I bid a hundred, I'm paying a hundred. Or will it, it doesn't go down to whatever the best would have been? No, it's not going to spend your $100 like off the rip. It's basically just telling Facebook, hey, Facebook, I'm willing to put up this amount of money. Yeah, exactly. So if the win is 50, I pay 50. Yeah. It's like how eBay is when you want to put your, your max bid. Yep. Yep. Exactly. It's like that. But you know, we're talking Facebook ads and Facebook ads is great. It's very competitive though, right? In like five, six years ago when we were running ads, it's pretty cheap. Yeah, it's pretty cheap to get wins. But now there's this other platform that started doing ads and that's TikTok ads. Have you done any TikTok ads? You know, when I had an agency, they, I think they messed around with it. But I mean, as I've like been building ours out, I'm just like one thing at a time. No, that's, that's good to do. Stick with Facebook. TikTok is another option though because it's cheaper, right? Yeah. You get way lower CPMs. And the reason why is just because there's not as many people advertising on that platform. It's also a new algorithm. Yep. As you said earlier, all algorithms are kind of designed the same. When if anytime a new platform opens up, it's going to be cheaper. It's going to be wide open. And then it closes its door slowly but surely. So we're seeing that already on TikTok. But right now it's still on kind of that infancy state. Yeah. So, you know, the CPMs are super low. So you get way more traffic. Yeah. And that could be something now conversion wise, I'd still say Facebook is, it's better. The better one. But you can say conversion wise. Are you saying converting like cost per lead or just pure row? Whatever you're, whatever your conversion event. Yeah. It's a lead or a sale. Okay. It's like cost per lead can be cheaper on TikTok, but the quality of lead isn't as good as it is on Facebook. So at the end of the day, we're going to just be talking pure row as return on ads. Yeah. So in that case, return on ads. But Facebook is where you want to be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy because I have had to, you know, so I've never really advertised too much on TikTok. But I've had many people tell me like, yeah, dude, no, I saw you on TikTok and that's I, you know, got into the world. And then, yeah. You know, like my COO hobby, he tells that story all the time. He's like, yeah, I saw Ryan on TikTok and then I bought, you know, the coaching and then, you know, I was in the coaching for a couple of years. Then he hired me and that's, you know, here we are. No, that's the thing, man. Like with the social media platforms, a couple of years ago, TikTok literally took everyone's market share and it became the most downloaded app in the world. Yeah. And Instagram got wind of that and Instagram was like, hold up, we can't be left behind. So now that's why they created Instagram Reels is because they, they, it's, they, it's essentially want the same type of ecosystem that TikTok has. And, and that's why like now you can have a pot like one of our students, for instance, he's like 58 years old, never created 50 years old, never created content in his life. Hmm. Comes through some of our trainings. The size, yo, let me create this TikTok page. Three posts into his TikTok page. He has a viral video that does 2.4 million in about two or three weeks. Like 800 leads, does all of this stuff. But TikTok gives you the ability to do that because the way TikTok's algorithm is designed is, is designed to essentially like attract people that aren't even following you. Yeah. So you could, you could be new to TikTok. You could do a video and like superstar or see your video pop up on the algorithm. And obviously you know that because you, you were big in TikTok a couple of years ago, but that's the beauty of TikTok organic as well as just continuing to put content out there. But it always comes down to like this idea of create content. Yes, it's great. But don't just create content just to get some likes. Mm-hmm. Cause likes don't pay bills. Yeah. Right? Amateurs create content to grow their likes. Yeah. Professionals create content to grow their list. Hmm. Get data. Yeah. Right. Get people off of these platforms. Yeah. Let's talk about that, right? Yeah. Because for me, I, uh, I never really cared about a list. I cared more about a following. No, it wasn't necessarily about likes or anything, but it's just like, yo, I let's just grow my social media, my brand, all that. Yeah. And so, you know, majority of ourselves were direct from social media. Now I'm just strictly talking like my other business. Real estate was never social media is great for real estate. I've gotten a ton of investors. I have gotten deals. I'm not saying that. But I use social media for every other business I've ever started. And, um, what I realized was over time these, these agencies were like, bro, how's your list so small? And I'm like, what, what list? They're like, you know, your email list are you mailing anyone? I'm like, no. Yeah. Like, why do I need email? I'm just freaking make a post. And over time, I realized town port. It wasn't until I met Cardone that he was like, yeah, you know, we got four million on the email list and we're always getting people unsubscribe and scrubbing it and everything. And, but yeah, he was just like, bro, I can make one email right now and go bank. It's everything. You know, I think six figures. Right now, yes, with the click of any, I was like, yeah, that seems pretty valuable. Yeah. That's super crazy. And I like to like, you know, going off of the real estate example, ownership is everything. Yeah. So you think about it like this. Social media is great. But you got to remember, you don't own that platform. So you don't own that audience. Yeah. You're renting that audience, right? So you can grow your TikTok followers and all that. And that's great. Don't get me wrong. There's power in that. But you got to remember that anytime. What happens if Instagram kicks you off? Yeah. And if TikTok gets banned in the US, right, whatever happens, if that happens, that means all your audience has gone overnight. If you don't have an audience, you don't have a business. Yeah. Period. So what you want to do is you want to start getting those people off of social media onto a list that you own. Yeah. Because now that's ownership. Yeah. And if TikTok does get banned or you, you know, you get shut down, you can just send everybody a text message and say, hey, guys, like, you know, I got shut down yesterday. It's cool. I'm over here. Come check. And your audience can move with you and it's like security. Yeah. Very, very important. Anybody does that. If you look at the biggest businesses in the world, they're all doing the same thing. Like, like, I don't know how many businesses you're subscribed to, but I know for me, Fashion Nova be hitting me up every, every week. They hit me up with a new offer. Yeah. You know, and I know a lot of people out there, they think to themselves, well, I don't want to be annoying. Like, I'll grow my list, but I don't want to be annoying and keep marketing to these people. But you have to understand if you have a product that can change lives in some type of way, whether it's just to make them happy, whether it's to bring more revenue into their pocket, whatever it is. If you have a product that's going to make someone's life better, then it's your duty to actually take that product and promote it to people as much as possible. Because when you start thinking like that, it takes away the icky feeling of sales. How some people think about sales. It takes away that icky feeling because you're like, yo, no, I'm trying to make your life better. So I'm going to promote to you as much as possible to show you, hey, I can help you in some way. Yeah. So, if you're doing this business and the world are doing it, you look around. All of these businesses are hyper focused on messaging you. And like you said, you shoot off an email, you make 100K. Shoot off a text message. Text message marketing is absolutely crazy. Like, I was reading this stat and it said for every dollar businesses are spending on text marketing on average, they're making back 71 from text marketing. It's crazy. And it's been, and I would agree with that because if you jump on our list, you're getting marketed to at least twice a week. We do free trainings. We do out types of cool stuff. And it helps to make money too because people are always, I don't even know where my phone is, but they always have it on them at all times. Yeah. So, it is. Data is the most valuable resource in the world. It's the past oil, right? And it's, and again, that's why I wear the hat. Success Leaves Clues. Look at some of these huge companies. Like, for instance, Facebook bought WhatsApp. What was this like six, seven years ago? It bought WhatsApp for 19 billion. I think it is. Yep. 19 billion dollars. Yep. And those developers in the world, they could have just developed another WhatsApp. Yeah. Why didn't they? Because of the data that WhatsApp had. Yeah. So, if these companies like Facebook, these conglomerates are doing it, they're collecting data, these small business owners need to be doing the same thing. Right. Like, Success Leaves Clues. If they're doing it, they're only doing it for one reason. It's because it works. You know, so you need to be hyper focused on collecting your data and monetizing that data as much as you possibly can. Because it'll change the game for your business. It'll use it the right way. Yeah. So, that's what we're really big on, man. But, you talk about it. Talk to us about like, what was your thought process as to why you didn't value the email list and the phone list? Like, why did you think that way? Well, because everything was organic, right? So, I would just make content. People would, you know, opt in. And I had obviously the data. It's not like I didn't have the data, right? So, they opt in. For forever, we didn't even have an opt in page, right? It was always like just book a call and like, yeah, if you book to call, you opt it in. But like, there was never an opt in page to then get the VSL or whatever, right? So long story short, we were just, like I said, we were making great money without doing it. So, I'm just like, you know, yeah, these guys run ads and whatever. That's cool. Like, I'll just keep cash and checks myself. And it's all good. And we never did email marketing. I never did anything with it. So, I never saw an ROI with it. And then one day, this is actually how it started to happen. My friend Ryan Saplin, great email marketer. He's here in Vegas. We first met because he bought a golf with Ryan Day. And he was like, hey, I want to like pick your brain about, you know, this journey I'm on. And he actually might have bought a one-on-one first and then I can't remember. But anyways, he bought a couple of things. And he was an email marketer. So he's one of these behind the scenes guys that nobody ever sees. And he was running email lists at eight figures, right? Just doing offers and affiliates. Some of the powerful ones are. Yeah, just crushing it, right? And he was like, dude, I'm thinking about doing content, doing a personal brand, all the stuff. And, you know, we just talked about and stuff and it's fine. Then after like a year of knowing each other, he was like, dude, let me at least run your emails for you. And he helped sell me on the idea because he was like, dude, think of emails is just another form of content. Like they're just content. You post on TikTok, you post on Facebook, you post on Instagram, like emails just content again. He's like, all right, the emails, I'll do the stuff. And then, you know, pay me a retainer and a profit split on what the email sell. I'm like, all right, whatever. And then, you know, sure enough, I do start to see revenue come in through it. And I'm like, okay, like I guess since I've built this thing up, like we might as well use it. So he did that for me for about a year. And you know, now we have all everything in house, but like, you know, it just made me realize like, okay, like you're building it anyway. But I do agree with your point that if I ever got banned or something, what do I do? Right. But even if you don't get banned, imagine coupling the two. And being a great content creator and having all of these, these followers, but then using your content and at the end of your content, having a call to action to get people off of social media, use that link in your bio as a bridge to get them into your world and then begin email marketing to them and text marketing to them. Yeah. Now you're making money from social media and you're making money off of social media. And that'll, that'll explode. That's a good part of content creation too is having a call to action. Yeah. As many of those videos as you can, because the thing is, and I'm sure you know this, you never know what video is going to go viral. Yeah. You never know. Yeah. You know, we have called actions and everything. Everything. Yeah. You know what we're actually doing now is a text hotline. So I just launched this this week actually. Nice. So I learned this from Andy Elliott. They've generated so many leads from Andy just being like, every YouTube video he says, dude, text me guys. Yes. You know, whatever you need, I might answer it. My team might answer it. We'll help you out. We'll send you free stuff. We'll send you, you know, you want to talk about the different programs we got you. Yeah. I just changed my CTAs to that. So by the way, if anyone wants to text me, the number is super easy. 725, 444, 5244. So I like went through the Twilio. I'm like, pick that number. That's a good one. That's a good one. Easy, right? Yeah. I can remember that. So yesterday I launched it. I said, hey guys, I'm giving away a Contractor's Guide. 40 pages. The exact schemes and everything we use on every house, slip. Just text me to get it. Yes. Right? Literally text, like instantly all these people text them, right? And then, you know, it's like, hey, what do you got going on? And it turns into a sales call, but they also still get value in everything else. So like they sent them the guide. They're like, dude, this is great. Like what else you got? Right? Any business needs to do this too. I'm here. What you do? Yeah, leave with value. Here's the guide. Yeah. Yeah. And if you want more, right? Because we'll get people that text us. They'll be like, hey, can I get the Contractor's Guide? And we'll be like, sure, like what are you doing right now, flip wise? And they're like, oh, I've never done a deal. It's like, well, what is this Contractor's Guide going to do for you? You don't have a deal. Exactly. And they're like, oh, yeah. And you're like, so you got a different offer for that. Well, yeah, like do you want to learn how to find deals to actually use the guide? Do you want to learn how to buy houses without using your own money? Yeah. Well, yeah, because this guide's useless to you right now, unless you do those. But then we'll get people like, no, do it on flipping houses. Like this guide's going to be about, oh, awesome, dude. Yes. Here's the guide. We can help you with that. Yeah. And that's why it's so important to have multiple offers, you know, because an offer you don't make is an offer you can't take, right? And that's what our mentor, Myron, always says. And it's very important because there's some people that might come into your pipeline that need different things. So if you only have one offer to give someone, you're in trouble. But that's, that goes into the importance of having a lead magnet, right? And for new business owners out here, or even established business owners, you'd be surprised. A lot of them don't have lead magnet set up. And one of the biggest mistakes that business owners make when creating a lead magnet or giving away a free offer is that they go very skimpy on the offer, right? Like they don't give away their best stuff. Like they hold back. They're like, no, I got this right here. This is going to be a banger. But I'll just give them my little throwaway stuff for free. And a lot of businesses do that. They give away the non-valuable stuff. But they're not taking into account that first impressions are everything. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like, dude, this contractor's guide, I could sell for 500 bucks. That's a thing. Yeah. You can't sell it for a good amount. You shouldn't be giving it away. Bro, it's 40 pages. I literally have flipped. I call it my 100 million dollar guide because I have flipped over 100 million dollars of homes with this guide. Crazy. Tell me what guide is more proven. Yeah. Then what I'm about to give you that literally you would hand it to your contractor. And they would be able to look at the lights that you want to use, the paint color, the flooring. Wow. It's that good. That's super detailed. I might need it. Yes. I might need it. It's 40 pages. I'm going to text you right now. Yeah. 75445244. Okay. Yeah. No. And that's very important for the business owners listening to the pod today. You have to lead with value. You have to give away your best stuff because what happens is people are always going to have more questions. Yep. But if you give away like the non-valuable stuff, they're going to download it. They're not going to get any value and then they're going to erase anything having to do with you and they're not even they're not going to anyone. You want to know easy way to know if you have a good offer or not. We have a natural built-in compass inside of us. Yeah. And it's our intuition. Yeah. And basically it's like this. If it don't make you nervous, it's not going to make them excited. Yeah. That's an easy way to think about it. Right. If you're thinking about giving away this thing and it doesn't make you get that feeling of like, oh, damn. Should I really give this away? Then that's not good enough. Because if you give away something, janky like a t-shirt or a pen, like nobody wants that. I have too many shirts already. Yeah. Right. But if you give away free clothes for a whole entire year, wait a minute. That's kind of crazy. I might need it. Or, hey, I'm going to make you a custom shirt, which your logo on it. Exactly. Whoa. Exactly. Something that's like, this is borderline crazy for me to give away. I guarantee if you do that, your conversions will go through the roof. Yeah. Select the data. Now you're doing what big businesses do. Yeah. You know? Yeah. We're about to launch a ton of low ticket funnels. So once again, low ticket, some I never did. Everything was 10 grand minimum. And now we're launching, you know, things like that contractor's guy are free. Yeah. Right? But then guess what? If you download it, you know, we'll have an upsell for 20 bucks. And you can get this freaking course I used to sell for a thousand. Like, you know, just crazy things like that, where it's like, dude, this is crazy. How much value I'm getting for $20. Exactly. Like, there are other stuff got to be crazy. Yep. That's the mindset right there. Exactly. Because if it's like, if he's giving me this for 20, I can only imagine what is 10 grand thing. But here's what I learned from Cardone and this guy, Wojo, who had on. So when you do do that, right? There's right now run ads for, you know, just people they can learn about WealthCon or Book of Call or whatever, right? And so you're always in the hole until you sell. With the low ticket funnel, you could potentially get all leads for free. Yeah, you bring it even. Yeah. Yeah. Like, dude, if I have great enough products and, you know, we test things, it's like, bro, I might spend a hundred grand, but we'll sell a hundred grand worth of. Yep. Well, whatever the thing is offering. Yeah. And then I'm like, all those leads were free. Yeah. That's how you build a list for free. Look at any, but you know what I was thinking the other day as, as we were talking about this because we, we did our part and we were talking about the Super Bowl. It hit me and I was like, yo, the Super Bowl halftime show, that's the world's biggest lead magnet. If you really think about it, yeah, because artists don't get paid. They pay. They pay to exactly they pay on the front end. The artist has to pay, well, they do it for free. Plus they have to pay for all the stuff. Yep. Yeah. They're gonna pay like six million dollars or something or Dr. Dre for a couple of years ago. They paid like six to 10 million dollars to produce that. That's everybody. The show. They didn't get paid a dollar. That's what they get paid with something even better. Oh, well, yeah. No, for sure, if they don't do it out of the goodness of their heart, they're getting paid. That's the world's biggest lead magnet because they're doing it for free. They might, they might take an L on the front end. Oh, for sure, but they're going to kill it. They understand on the back end. Like I was looking at this graph and it's like, you know, artists have doubled their, their album sales the next week following the, the Super Bowl, you know, but that's how businesses need to start thinking about sales. Absolutely. I'm projecting that usher. This is going to be usher's biggest album. Really? You think that? I think it's going to trump confession. What? Because he's not in the front of an audience. That's for a time. You guys used to be musicians. Yes. Yes. So that's your world. Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The space suit junkies that you guys been together for 15 years. Yes. 15 years. Rock and roll. Starting off as the space suit junkies. That's how we got into to marketing in general, man. We're just, you know, we were up in Atlanta and we're typical broke music artists. Did you know TI? No, no, TI. We saw TI. That was my favorite guy. We saw TI at a restaurant. It's funny. I'll never forget this. We saw him at a restaurant and he was walking by and TI said to him, Yo, bro, you look like Steph Curry, bro. So that was pretty funny. He was like, what up Steph? Exactly what he meant. I was like, what up, bro? That's played with it. He gets a lighter skin stuff. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, our whole thing was, man, we were broke music artists and we just wanted to be able to fund our career. Yeah. Because we were just tankin. So we're like, hey, let's just start an e-commerce store. It's fun to our video shoots and all this kind of stuff. So we're not going in the hole. And long story after he told, you know, what we happened ended up happening is we ended up doing a quarter million in sales in about seven months on our first dropshipping store. Yeah. And we're like, wait a minute, bro, we're pretty good at this. Yeah. Let's keep going. So we ended up selling that store on Shopify exchange as well. Yep. Got into other things and now it's just been. But it's funny though, even when we were a music artist, once we discovered ads, we started using that in our music. We actually, we, we, we were unknown in Atlanta, by the way. And our style of music was like R&B hip hop EDM vibe. Yeah. That's not big in Atlanta. That's not a big audience for that. But EDM stuff ain't EDM stuff ain't the R&B hip hop. Yes. But what we ended up doing was we're like, yo, let's just throw our own event. Let's test this out. And let's just really see if this Facebook ad thing can work for like other industries. Right. So we throw this event, a private event, and we end up selling over a hundred tickets. All from ads. And that's what really made me a believer that, yo, this can really work for any industry. As long as you're not doing something like cannabis or certain x-rated things like other than that, you can run ad if you have the right strategy. Yeah, you can win. You can go crazy. Yeah. What's your guys' thoughts on having good organic content though with ads today? I think it's huge. I think it's a great compliment, right? You gotta have content. There's actually a lot of amazing reasons why you should post free content. And I just learned this actually from Alex from Ozze's book, a hundred million dollar leads. I think it was. He brought up a good point when even like so your free content will actually help your paid content as well. And what I mean by that is people who buy your high ticket stuff, yes, they consume your high ticket stuff, but they also consume your free stuff. Yes. So when they go off and they'll watch your courses and all that stuff, but they're also following you on social media. So if you're giving some job and some game on social media and then for free, they go off and run that play. Well, they're going to attribute that success to being a part of your mentorship program. And that was a huge lipo for me. I was like, because I always kind of struggle with that question. I'm glad you asked that because why am I posting all this content? Sometimes it's hard to really see. Yeah. And that's one of the things we say is it's hard to track, but it's easy to see. Yeah. When it comes to posting content, it's hard to track which video actually made people push the button, which one pushed them over the edge. But it's easy to see. It helps your webinars convert better, helps your challenges convert better. It helps your email marketing. It helps. The reason I ask is because I've had so many ads guys come on and they all have come to the same conclusion like in today's world, you know, ads are tough. It's way different than they were five years ago. Absolutely. And they're all basically like, yeah, you have to have some kind of content to point them to because if you're just like a ghost, yeah. You try to run ads and then you're going to have it. Don't worry man. There's something called the seven hour rule. Have you read the book? I think might have been Daniel Presley oversubscribed. I haven't read it over. But I believe in the seven hour rule. Okay. And that's what I was getting at is like, you know, for those of you all listening, it takes at least seven hours of someone consuming your content for them to make a buying decision. Yeah. And here's the thing. Someone might consume an hour of your content and want more. But if you're not creating content enough content for them to consume the seven hours, they're going to go to someone else to consume the other six hours necessary for them to actually buy something. Yeah, because they're going to watch something about ads. And then they're like, all right, well, what else these guys know? Right. Oh, there's they don't have anything else. All right. Well, where can I still got to learn ads? Yeah. Who am I going to learn it from? Exactly. You might be the lead in and somebody else will capitalize. Yes. Yes. I had that realization after being, this is my fifth year going into my fifth year doing content. And it occurred to me as I watched the algorithms. I was like, okay, the platforms are incentivized by watch time. That's like literally they just want to keep you on the platform. So what's the best way to get more watch time? Have longer videos. Right. And so as I started to just really grow this podcast, they started becoming longer and longer because I got to get more in depth in the conversation, but also it's good for the algorithm. They like more watch time. And it helps get that seven hours because man, dude, I can't tell you how many people like tell me like, bro, I saw that episode, this episode, that episode, this episode. And I look at the data, you know, last year we had 1.2 million hours of watch time. Geez. You think about that, right? Like, okay, so let's take 1.2 million divided by seven hours. Like that'll tell me, you know, potentially how many buyers there are, right? That's 170,000, you know, buyers. If that's the, you know what I'm saying? But in terms of years, this is how I do it. You know, okay, 1.2 million. There's 24 hours in a day divided by 365. That's 140 years. She's of content consumed. Wow. That says something though, because because you're making a lot of money, you're operating at a high level. And that just goes to show you that if you're afraid to put yourself out there, you need to, you need to start doing it anyway, because this is how you make money. Like some of our biggest students, one of our students, her name is Krista. She did two million, a little over 2 million last year. And one of the biggest driving forces for her, well, a couple of driving forces, Facebook ads. She's also live selling. Yeah. Right? So, so the thing with lives, the reason why we love doing lives is because it literally removes that barrier of distrust that people have naturally when they first get introduced to you, whether it's from an ad or whether they see a piece of content. It removes that barrier of distrust because what you're doing now is you're showcasing your personality, which is going to repel certain people and it's going to attract certain people. Yeah. You're also showcasing your knowledge. Yeah. Right? And teaching people and educating people on whatever you're good at. The combination of those things, in my opinion, can propel any business if you do it more consistent. Yeah, but a lot of people, they're really nervous about going live, right? A lot of people are insecure about getting in front of the camera. Yes. That even matter if it's live. It doesn't, though. Literally just in front of the camera at all. Yeah. And I always tell people, like, if that's the case, then you're, that's a clear indication you're focusing on the wrong person. Yeah. Right? If we only have so much energy to give to the world, like you only have so much. So if you're focusing all your attention on yourself, then you have no more energy to give back to your audience. Right. And remember, your content is not for you. You already know this stuff. Yeah. It's for your audience. I'm on a journey of self-discovery. I'm just, but it's cool, but like, but if you flip that, though, and say, okay, well, if you just focus all your attention on just serving your audience, giving them as much as you possibly can, well, guess what? You have no more attention to give back to your insecurity. You facts. Yeah. So anyone who's listening, I think most people, and I agree with you, most people that are very insecure. I mean, the only way you could be insecure is if you're worried about yourself. Yes. Just thinking, what is everyone thinking about me? It's a selfish mindset, whether you realize it or not. Right? But yeah, when you get away from yourself, you're like, I don't really care what people think about me. I'm going to go out and do what I do and help people and whatever. Then yeah, you stop caring. And here's the thing, people aren't worried about what you're wearing in those cases. They're not worried about what they're wearing. Exactly. Yeah. They're not worried about themselves and you know, exactly, exactly. And I think that's just a big misconception that can honestly frighten the heck out of you is if you're like, oh my gosh, what do I look like? You know, they're saying. More importantly, it's blocking your blessings. Yes. Blocking your family's blessings. Yeah. Because you're not putting yourself out there and you're not reaching your full potential because you're so worried about what someone thinks that doesn't even know who you are, ain't paying your bills. It's just, it's so stupid on so many fronts, but we've got to learn how to get out of our own way. It's a big mistake. I agree. What did you do, man? Because you've rocked a big stage. You went from baseball to creating content. How was that, Trans? Yeah, bro. Well, I went from baseball to real estate then creating content. But yeah, well, dude, I think baseball and content go hand in hand. They're both entertainment. So I've played in front of 10,000 people live, face to face, not very true. I can't not see the people viewing me. So yeah, like rocking a stage of 1,000's, whatever. Yeah. So I was already kind of like primed for it. Same thing with us, like being on stage performing. Yeah. You're used to people watching you and booing and I get booed. You know, like, right, you suck. You just made an error. You struck out. You cost us the game. Yeah. They're invested in it. If my video sucks, people just tell me, dude, your video sucks. But if I play for the team that you are rooting for and I cost us the game, you're like, I hate you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, but honestly, that's like the worst thing that could happen. And this is what what I tell content creators. Oh, yeah. But then they're also like, dude, we love you. You're the best. Exactly. Yeah. You know, that's, that's like the worst thing that could happen. And that's why like we tell people, yo, put yourself out there. Don't be afraid to do it because the worst thing that could happen is if it fails, you might get embarrassed, right? Yeah. But if you think about how it was thousands of years ago, we were worried about getting chased by bears and you know what I'm saying? Like one of the wrong decision could end your life. Yeah. Right. If you make a wrong decision now and create the wrong type of content, the worst that's going to happen. You're embarrassed for a minute. And that's it. That's how soft society is becoming, right? Yeah. Yeah. Getting soft. Oh, well, I could go all day about being soft. You know what's funny is I, I've never told this story. So this was in 2012. Well, I was playing for the Stockton ports. By the way, Stockton is a scary place. Where is Stockton? It's in NorCal. Okay. It's one of the top, let's say three most dangerous cities in America. Yikes. We got robbed multiple times. I'm dead serious. So anyways, we're in Stockton and you know, I'm in the Oakland Ace Farm System. So Ricky Henderson is coaching us for a series. So for those of you who know Ricky Henderson is like, he's the greatest base stealer of all time. Dude's a hall of fame. He was also known for just being very over the top and care. He's like big personality. And you know, I made an air that game and then I had a fan like yelling. They're like, you suck. I could have fielded that ball. Freakin, whatever. Dude, why is this guy on the field? I could do what this guy's doing. Whatever, right? Ricky gets out of the dugout, dude. And yells and he airs out this dude. He's like, oh, yeah. And why'd you pay for a ticket to watch him? Right. If you're so good, we'd be paying you, but you pay to be here. And I was like, all right. Bertam. I like that. Bertam. Oh, and you know, it's funny. Is the next day he apologized. So the fan came up to me during like batting practice like, bro, I just want to say I'm sorry. Wow. And I've never told that story before. But it made me think of it. Yeah. Like internet. Like that's the equivalent of like a troll on the internet. What you always get. Yeah. I'm sure the bigger you get. And somebody calls you out for being a troll face to face. You ain't a troll. Oh, you ain't a troll. They're e, we call it eat sugary, right? Like they're on the internet. Eat sugary. They're on the internet and they're like talking all this smack. And then you get in front of them. And it's just, it's a whole different like number. That wasn't me, man. Yeah. That wasn't me. That was the, that was the Facebook me. Like I'll talk smack to you all day on Facebook. You got to have them though. I honestly, you should lean into it. You know, if you don't have haters, you're not doing nothing. Yeah. Period. No, it just comes with it, right? It comes with it. Or if you ain't on the team. Yeah. You know, so like that, that's okay. Yeah. I want to talk about challenges, but you mentioned, you know, like that, that student, what is, what's your guys' community called? Rich from anywhere. So we're going to people find that. You go to Instagram at Rich from anywhere. You can find us there. That's where you can get information on everything. Rich from anywhere. Learn how to run your ads and everything else. Yeah. We do live trainings weekly. It might be Facebook ads. It might be how to grow your list. Can you guys just go live on IG? No, we do webinars. Okay. All right. So they sign up for a webinar, then you'll do a live training every week. Okay. Every week. So you text, yeah. I'm fine. And we just melt your face off for like an hour. Got it. Yeah. So with these trainings and stuff, I've heard you talk about running challenges to grow your list. So like, what is that all about? So yeah, man, like, so our challenge is called the Grow Your List Challenge. Yeah. Right. And the whole goal, because we've been talking about growing your list and how important it is. The whole goal is to take a business owner who might have the old mindset that you had, where our lists are an important not focused on social media. They might have that mindset. The whole goal is to get you in to essentially build you out an entire system that's going to generate you massive amounts of leads. Yeah. Right. And we do it with you. So I know some people here, the term lead magnet and they get intimidated. Like, oh, that includes a landing page and I got to come up with a product and all this stuff. So what we do is we teach you how to do it the right way because psychologically, there's certain words that you should say and shouldn't say there's certain ways that you can attract more leads psychologically. So if you don't know that first and foremost, you're going to struggle with collecting leads. But on top of that, you have to have a landing page set up to actually generate the leads and get them in and you have to have certain words on the landing page. And you know, there's all these different things that go into actually creating a list. So during these three days, what we do is we take you from ground zero to by the end of the challenge, having a solid lead generating machine able to start generating you leads. And like I said, we help you the whole time. I think one of the challenge paid free. How much is paid? It's 97 for three days. So I'm saying, yeah, that's a great deal. It's the ridiculous amount of value in three days. It is. We've been doing this now for seven, eight years, learning all this stuff. And we're basically just disseminating and packing down everything into three days. Yeah. And the reason why we came up with it is we were sitting down one day and we were talking like, if there was one thing that we could teach a business owner, just one thing. And I'll actually ask you this question too, that could help them make the most money and excel and grow their business the most. We realized at least from our experience, it was growing a list. Because if we had that list, it's super charged as everything that you do. Yeah. If you want to go live, you want to have a physical event, you want to promote products, having a list can help you blow up all those things. Yes. So why don't we just stop worrying about all this crap that's not important. And let's focus all our energy on the most important things, the needle moving activities. Yeah. And so that people can grow their business and do, we've done like 16, 17 challenges at this point. And the transitions and the transformations we're seeing. Yeah. And it wasn't always like that because this is again, like in the game of marketing and in the game being an entrepreneur, you're not always going to get it right the first time. So the first time that we actually did our challenge, it was completely different. And we did two of those and we realized, yo, like this is getting a transformation, but it's very broad. We were doing as we were doing a bunch of different things on the challenge. So we realized, let's hone it in. And like he said, we had that conversation and realize, yo, lead generation is the driver of everything. It's like the lifeblood of your business. If you don't have the leads, then it's hard for you to make money. It's going to be very hard for you to make money. But once you have them, it's literally a matter of what you're at either. It doesn't matter if you're a beginner or if you're doing a quarter million a month, it doesn't matter. Yeah. You know, yeah, you need leads. And you need more leads, you need more automated ways to do it. That's the thing is you're going to level up. Like you might have a decent way of getting leads right now, but trust me, there's always a better way. Yeah, absolutely. And you got to seek counsel to learn those ways. But the idea is probably not just going to get downloaded into your brain most likely. Yeah. Surround yourself. People who already have the strategies. If you want to do it the smart way, yeah, fast way. So if people want to sign up for that, where do they go? You can go to rich from anywhere.com. We've got slash GYLC, GYLC. Yeah. Grow your list challenge. Yeah. Very less channel. Very less GYLC. Absolutely, man. Yeah, man. It's insane. It's insane. It's like, when you go to the page, you can see a bunch of testimonials on the page from people that have attended. And there's people literally saying, yo, y'all blew my face off. Like this is crazy. Like, literally like that. You know, so it's a great way to get in. And one thing that I like about us is that we really do care about our students. Yeah. So we're in there with you. Like, it's not just, it's two hours a day, but it's not just two hours a day. We're inside of the Facebook group helping you share and screen like hands on. Yeah, and I'll tell you like, obviously I haven't been inside your challenges or, you know, your program or anything. But like, for me anyways, when I have guys on the podcast, I don't just let anyone come on. Like, I've seen you guys around. I've seen you guys showing up to things like WealthCon, helping people. Like good vibes. And so, you know, at the end of the day, right? Like, for me, it's like, hey, for 97 bucks, hard to lose. Like just, just go see what's up. And we have a money bag guarantee. Oh, well, there you go. You can't like literally. Well, there you can. If you look at the three days and you didn't learn anything and it wasn't worth it, dude, just email us. We'll give you your money back. There you go. So we like to make it risk free, free for people. You know, we understand how it is. Like, there's a lot of people out here that are teaching things and doing all these things, but you got to check receipts. Yeah. People are talking about, you know, they're helping people do this and that. Dude, go check receipts. Yeah. Because a lot of these people are lying. And then if they aren't lying, they're all the people lying. And I'm just kidding. Let's go into it. You can turn into cat Williams. Yeah. I call them people out. You liar lying. We hired our first mentor. He told us the right way to run ads. Yeah. So he didn't really go into this, but we spent five grand on ads made zero sales. Three months of running ads. We hired a coach, told us the right way to do it. And we made a sale in eight hours. That changed the game for us. So what we learned, you should just got him from the jump. Exactly. You know to say five grand. Yeah. But you don't know, because in the beginning, you don't know what you don't know. You know, like, we always think it's the cheap way. Like, let's go to the cheap way. But what I'll say is, I do think people should learn how to run their own ads. I did not think it was a skill worth learning for a long time. I mean, for me, mainly because I was already at a high level having made millions without it. And I'm like, I'll do this guy's going to do it for five grand. I'll just pass it off. And now I'm back. You know, many millions later realizing I need to learn how to do this. A lot of high level entrepreneurs like yourself don't realize how much money they're actually leaving on the table. Trust me. That's why I'm interviewing all these guys. Yeah. No, that goes to show you. You're a high level entrepreneur making millions and millions of dollars. But you still understand the value in Facebook ads and you're making money with Facebook ads. So would you say you're making more money this year because of ads than you did last year without running ads? Well, I'm still new to it. So the results still remain to be seen. I've only been doing it for a couple of months now. Okay. So yeah, you know, and we're like I said, we're switching everything. So I've switched CRMs. We're switching how we sell product. Like I'm literally revamping all of it. I've changed the sales teams. But I do. The results, you know, and like what I'm seeing, I believe it's going to be huge. But, you know, and what about for WealthCon? So you're the teams running the ads for WealthCon as well. And this is going to be the biggest WealthCon to date. Mm-hmm. Yep. And that's all from ads that you that's you're running. Not an agency. Correct. Like you're doing it. Yeah. We got our best row as last WealthCon ever with me running them. So I like where our results will be the next one. That's the thing. When you find, when you, if you have the right system to run ads, like it doesn't matter where you're at in your business, it can level up everything that you do to make you a lot more money. That's not hard. And it's not difficult. Anyone who's listening, it's not difficult. The only way. No, I will test it out. I thought it was much harder than it actually is. It's Facebook makes so much money because they've made it easy. Yes. Yeah. As long as you have a system, you got to, you got to, and you have some guidance too. I think that's important. Yeah. Right. As you're running them, you want to have someone looking over your shoulder and say, hey, this is kind of going the other way. You need to switch this. Yeah. Right there is invaluable. It will save you so much time and so much money. But the subject matter is not difficult. People's problem is the studying method is wrong. They're studying by watching 100,000 YouTube videos. Yeah. And try to piece information together. Yeah, I'll say, thankfully for me, I've got this podcast. And so I've literally had the best in the world. Yeah. Just come train, like literally train my team. Because I still know, because you're like, hey, you not doing manual bids, I'm already going to say, hey, let's take a walk. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like we're going to go tell them about that. But, you know, it's just like, that's exactly how I train still to this day. Right. I'm like, bring, I'll just bring, I'm lucky in that I can just bring the best to me. Right. And then, well, not everyone's Ryan. Exactly. No, but I'm just saying, even today, I still do it. Yeah. Right? Do I go watch 100 YouTube videos to figure this thing out? No, I'm like, no. No. I'm a call up. The best people I know, I'm going to bring him here. I'm going to give them a ton of value. I'm going to give them exposure. I'm going to go, you know, do all these things. And I'm going to learn also. Right. And it's going to be great. Because you understand that time is infinitely more valuable than money. Oh, yeah. Right? And that's one of our mentors told us this is like, if you want to scale your brand, never, ever spend time trying to save money. You always spend money so you can save time. Back. Yeah. Always. And if you do, you don't pick up the pennies. Right. Or more money just picking up the penny, more energy to energy, more energy time, money, at all, it all is related because time is infinitely valuable and money is valuable, but it's way lower. Yeah. So it's like, why would I ever trade this for this? Yeah. That's like trading a million dollars to get a hundred dollars back. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. But the thing is, it's unfortunate, but you don't really get to, you don't really understand that until you're at a certain level. Because when you're certain, when you're first starting your business, it's always about how can I just save money, save money? Yeah. And I understand that grind, but if I could ever impart wisdom back on myself, I would do it. I would say, I would spend way less time and I would just pay people to teach. But you know what it is, too. People, people have an ease of remembering and difficulty imagining. So a lot of times like, and this is human nature, by the way, there's been studies on this. A lot of times, human beings are so married to their past. They're so married to their past habits. They're so married to their ways of thinking. They're married to all of the past, their past selves, but it's very difficult for them to imagine themselves in the position of Orion Pineda. It's very difficult. And because of that, they're married to their cheap ways. They don't want to invest in mentorships. They don't want to do these things. And in turn, their old way turns into the new way and it continues to happen year after year after year because they're stubborn and they're not willing to grow. Not what you're. It's very important to get around high level entrepreneurs who are doing it at a high level so that you can understand. I'll tell you what, like when we attended WealthCon in January, I imparted so many things within our business. We were like, yo, internally, there's things that we need to change in our business. Because just looking at the way that you saw me doing it. Yes, yes, yes. And that was just off of hearing you talk and you know, hearing your team talking, seeing how you have your operations set up. Like on the back end, like we have some things that we want to do better at. Like as far as our internal team, our rich from anywhere to do that if you're not in the room. Exactly. Yeah. You got to get around the people. Yeah. Because you are the average of the five people you hang around and your birds of a feather flock together. All these things that you hear, they're cliches but they're true. Yep. And it's like dude, like that's the biggest hack if I could ever give someone one piece of advice. It's find an environment of people who are already doing the things that you want to do and just get around them. Yeah. Do anything you can. If you got to barter your services, do that. If you got to pay, do that. Yeah. Because trust me, if you get around those people, right, it's like the law of attraction, right? Your frequency and your energy is going to naturally raise up to those people, even without even trying. Yeah. Bro, I'll tell you what, man, like it changed for us last year and this is speaking to what he just said, right? Last year, we had our first 100k day. We made $100,000 in a day, right? From the challenge model. Yeah. And a year prior to that, if you would have told me we would have made that type of money that like, we would have been like, yeah, what? How? Like, what did y'all do? Right. But the thing that we did was we got around other high level entrepreneurs who were doing, you know, somebody had a seven million dollar day, five million dollar day, nine million dollar day. But then seeing them do that made it real in our head. Although we hadn't seen that for ourselves, we see, okay, they did it and they know better than me. Yeah, because you all have this idea of like when we see people that are like celebrities and stuff, like we think that they're like superheroes. They're all illustrious. They're all the proof armor and the promo zone that we don't have. Yeah. And when you get in the room, you're like, oh, the normal people. They're regular dudes, just like me. Yeah. And that gives you the confidence to like go out there and do it yourself. And I think that's why like communities are big. Like, their circles are big because you can now see these people and understand, oh, they talk just like me. They have the same internal conflicts and things. So that gives me the confidence that I can do it. I love it. You know, and make sure you guys let people know I'm still super hero though. No, but guys, hey, it's been a blast having you on. I appreciate you guys coming out, man. I appreciate you. I'm sharing some wisdom on. I don't think we've ever done like truly how to do an ad from start to finish. I think super valuable today for anybody and mulling to all you guys stuff down below. Is that everyone else? Make sure you're subscribed and we'll catch you on the next one. Pussed to me to show it to an extra 50,000 people that don't follow me. That's what I'm paying for. Because it's already being shown and shared amongst the people that do. And I pick up a little bit of here and there, but if I were to pay for it, well, then I'm going to go out and be exposed to a new audience.