The Work From Anywhere Podcast: Recent Episodes
Christian Martin
Free training: https://p.theaientrepreneur.com/softwareceo
Imagine a world where your phone isn't just smart - it's genius. Where Hollywood-quality videos are made in your living room, and where the next big tech millionaire... could be you.
In this mind-bending episode, we dive deep into the AI revolution that's quietly reshaping our world:
- 🗣️ Meet your new AI best friend: always available, infinitely patient, and eerily in tune with your emotions
- 🎨 Discover how three simple tools are making professional designers sweat
- 🎬 Learn why Hollywood moguls are losing sleep over what's happening in average homes
- 💼 Explore the shift from human to AI capital (and why it might make you rich)
- 🔮 Peek into a future where PhD-level intelligence is at everyone's fingertips
But here's the kicker: this isn't about some far-off future. This is happening now, and it's accelerating faster than you think.
Are you ready to surf the AI wave, or will you be swept away by it? Tune in, and let's ride this revolution together.
Warning: This episode may seriously upgrade your view of the future... and your place in it.
In this episode, the host explains how to start a profitable chatbot agency that can generate recurring monthly income.Key Points:* Agency work allows you to make money quickly by getting clients, but requires ongoing work each month. * Chatbot agencies are a hybrid model - easier to get clients than a SaaS, but generate recurring revenue. * Offer free 2-week trials of your chatbot service in exchange for a testimonial. Charge $100/month after. * Use the www.Chatstorm.AI software to easily build and train chatbots for clients. * Install chatbot on client website and tweak based on feedback. Get video testimonial. * Charge $500 setup fee, keep $100/month recurring revenue per client. Compounds over time. * Learn the skills to run this business in 1 day. Rely on AI to do the heavy lifting. * Clients want you to handle the AI complexity. Easy passive income stream.
Key Quotes:"You can learn all the skills that you need to do it in one day, in 24 hours, and by tomorrow, you can have a new company that's up and running.""We just built a chatbot software just for you because you guys were saying, we want to make money faster.""If we start advertising, we start reinvesting into our business, into our marketing, and getting more and more people set up on our chatbots, we could be at $36,000 a month or more."Action Steps:* Sign up for www.Chatstorm.AI * Offer free trials for testimonials * Charge monthly fee * Scale with marketing
Could AI Be the Secret Weapon For Non-Designer Entrepreneurs?Learn how 3 mind-blowing new tools allow you to pump out professional logos, YouTube thumbnails, and product images in seconds - even if you flunked art class.Have a million-dollar business idea but no design skills? We reveal how AI is leveling the playing field so you can bring your vision to life visually - without waiting around for a designer.Tired of paying a fortune for freelancers and agencies? Now you can access endless on-demand graphic design capabilities instantly.Thought you had to choose between speed and quality? These futuristic AI tools deliver stunning visuals at warp speed. The days of compromising are over.You won't believe what's possible now. In minutes, you can have a world-class logo, social media graphics, and product images that look like you spent a fortune.Curious how non-designers are using AI create assets that convert browsers into buyers? We're pulling back the curtain on the fascinating technology making great design effortless.Join us as we explore how AI is empowering entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into reality overnight - without needing an art degree or hiring a team of designers.The future is here and it's leveling the playing field. Tune in to discover how these brilliant AI tools can help you bring your business vision to life, fast.Ready to wield the groundbreaking technology that's shaking up industries overnight? Dive into this eye-opening episode to unlock the power of AI for your business.
Why You’re Not Getting the Results You Want in Business (And What to Do About It)Have you tried everything to grow your business but it feels stuck? Are you endlessly seeking solutions but not seeing progress?I totally get it. I had a crazy health issue that I just couldn’t crack. For years I tried eliminating foods, purifying the air, anything I could think of. But nothing worked.It wasn’t until I got an unexpected diagnosis that I realized I’d been looking in all the wrong places.In this episode, I share my story and what it taught me about solving problems in business.You’ll discover:* Why you may not be able to see your own core issue * When to seek outside help (and what to look for) * How to find the courage to make big, necessary changes
I’ll teach you how to break through plateaus, get to the root of problems, and push past fear to get the results you want.This episode shares a simple framework that could transform your business. Don’t miss it!Hit play now to start learning how to diagnose issues and find real solutions. Let’s get you growing again!
Why You May Be CLOSE to a Business Breakthrough (And How to Push Through)Have you worked for years trying to grow your business without the BIG payoff? Do you feel like you’re doing everything right but not seeing major results?You’re not alone. In this episode, I share the perfect analogy to explain what’s going on (and how to finally get over the finish line).I explain:* Why progress is often slow and invisible at first * How close you may actually be to “melting the ice cube” * Why quitting right before the finish line is so tempting (and why you must resist) * How to infuse your unique personality to find your niche “podium”
This episode provides an empowering new perspective on the journey to business success. You’ll learn how to stick it out through the toughest part to finally reach your own medal stand.Are you ready to (finally) breakthrough? Hit play on this gamechanging episode now!
What if you could 10x your business growth without hiring a single new employee?It sounds impossible, but AI may hold the key. Listen in to uncover the mind-blowing business growth hack that top entrepreneurs are using to scale their companies faster than ever before.Do you constantly feel overwhelmed and buried under your workload? Have you tried hiring more people, only to find yourself bogged down managing them? You're not alone.In this episode, you'll discover a simple 5-step formula for identifying the biggest bottlenecks in your business. Fix just one weak area and you could see your revenue skyrocket exponentially.Curious what an AI-powered business looks like? We reveal the fascinating chatbots and automated tools that top CEOs are quietly integrating to liberate their schedules and 10x their company's growth.You won't believe how easy it can be to build an AI assistant that delivers 24/7 customer support and funnels happy buyers your way. The profits and freedom this creates might just blow your mind.Join us as we peek inside the playbooks of serial entrepreneurs who are leveraging artificial intelligence to build seven-figure empires...without the headaches of hiring and managing a huge team. This episode might just change the way you think about growing a business forever.Think outsourcing the busywork to an AI assistant sounds too good to be true? We're pulling back the curtain on how everyday entrepreneurs are using AI to crush their competition and achieve rapid growth. You won't want to miss the fascinating real-world examples and profitable growth strategies we reveal.Curious now? Tune in to uncover the secrets to unlocking AI's limitless business growth potential today. The future is here - let's discuss how you can use it to reach new heights of business freedom and profitability.
Have you ever wondered how to create a business hook so strong that it continues to attract new customers for years to come?
On this podcast, Christian shares a story about the Heart Attack Grill, a restaurant known for its ultra-unhealthy menu that could actually cause a heart attack.
Instead of denying or apologizing for this fact, the owner doubled down on it by renaming the restaurant and advertising that the food may kill you. They took an unpopular stance and created a "moral inversion" that grabbed people's attention.
Now people flock to the restaurant to experience the outrageous atmosphere of wearing hospital gowns and seeing their weight displayed on a scoreboard. If you're over 430 pounds, you even eat for free!
Christian explains that creating a unique moral inversion like this can set your business apart from the crowd and attract loads of interest.
Are you ready to flip the script on a popular stance and drive hordes of new customers to your offers? Tune in to hear Christian's strategies for crafting an attention-grabbing business hook using this technique.
What you're seeing isn't really there, what you're hearing never happened.
Ai is about to obliterate trust in society. What do you think will happen next?
if you want to ride the wave to the top instead of getting wiped out come check out moneytoaster.com
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👉Underground A.i. training to get clients and scale to 7-figures: https://christianmartin.org/ai-entrepreneur
👉Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realchristianmartin
👉Work with us - https://linktr.ee/christianmartin
👉Listen to the podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-work-from-anywhere-podcast/id1446197212
👉Free "work from anywhere" training - *The 3-Step Process I Used To Get Paid $9,000/Month For One Social Media Post With No Prior Experience http://bit.ly/2O8RL3Q
👉Free training - How I used "The Hollywood Method" to sell $5+ Million of online courses... even when I didn't know what course to create, what topic to choose or how to teach before I started - http://bit.ly/32JBk3k
👉Scaling to 7-Figures - The 3-Step Process I Used To Get 100 New Clients/Month For My Business Using A Simple One-Minute Youtube Ad - https://bit.ly/3bnXFvl
👉Join the Free Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/2jqAtmu
👉Want a two-week free trial to the software I use to make 10x as much in half the time? - http://bit.ly/2m7ZwHV
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👉GOD MODE Want us to build a $9,000/Month business for you? ---
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Ai is taking over the world. Here's how to prepare
Join the Ai Recipe Club >> https://airecipeclub.substack.com/p/how-to-clone-yourself
Watch the free Ai for Entrepreneurs training >> https://www.theaientrepreneur.com/free
Join the paid program >> https://www.theaientrepreneur.com
Check out the details on The Work From Anywhere CEO "WFA CEO" where we teach you how to remove yourself from the business and become a chilled out 7-figure CEO.
https://www.digitalnomad.com/ceo
Most businesses aren't that hard. But being a human is.
Here's why most people ACTUALLY don’t succeed in online business
8 steps to start a $4k-$8k/month lifestyle business even if you have no idea where to start
Wondering how you go from making 100k/yr to making $1m/yr?
Sometimes the answer is simpler than you think. In today's episode we'll talk about how to use "unlimited traffic" and funnel optimization to increase throughput and massively scale a business.
This episode is more on the advanced side.
For more basic level trainings, or to learn more about the concepts in this episode check out https://www.digitalnomad.com
Keep starting over in business? Or want to switch to a new business instead of working on the current one? I feel ya, and I've been there. We talk about the strategies I use to keep myself entertained while building businesses
What has Christian been up to for the past two years?
And where is he now? Get the answers plus 7 reasons why YOU should make this year your year to work remotely from anywhere in the world.
Travel isn't just about going on vacation. It will turn you in to a completely different person.
The purpose of being an entrepreneur is to build a system that makes you money, not to simply just make money. A lot of people get those two things confused.What happens if you build a business and start to find success? You grow as big as you possibly can, given the amount of time and energy that you have to devote. Then you start to hire for customer service, sales, etc., but not for the one thing you’re good at. All of a sudden, you have systems and processes for each part of your business, but you don’t have somebody to replace you. That’s going to become the bottleneck in your business.There’s a common myth in entrepreneurship that nobody can do what you do. It’s just not true. There’s plenty of people who, when trained properly and given the right systems, can do exactly what you do.Anything that depends on you is going to become a point of failure. You have to think about what tasks, if done repeatedly at a level of excellence, would grow your business.If you want to learn more about building a system, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
When I started my first SMMA, I worked with everybody you can think of. I had all sorts of clients, and my head was spinning trying to figure out marketing campaigns for each of them.The key to scaling an SMMA is keeping everything the exact same. When you go to add a new client and already have those campaigns dialed in, you already have testimonials that speak directly to your prospect. You already know exactly who to target.It’s like clockwork. Copy, paste, profit.When starting out, you have to do a lot of experimentation to find out what works. Try a lot of different industries to see which one you can get the best results for. Once you find where you want to be, just copy, paste, profit.If you want to learn more about scaling, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
Reading books is one of the best things you can possibly do with your time. But the thing is, knowledge is not power. Knowledge put into action is power. If you just burn through books, you’re not going to remember them or get much out of them. You’re just killing time.I read books in a certain way that allows me to put what I learn into action. I’m going to share three ways in this episode that will help you do the same thing.The first method I use is called the lightburst. I’ll read through the book, highlight things, and if something stands out that I really need to implement, I’ll pull that highlight out and put in in my notes for the year. I have a document with the most important passages from books that I need to implement, and I read through it every morning.Secondly, I’ll read the book in a book club. That social interaction around the book will help me ingrain the information into my brain. Being in a club also makes you take notes and discuss them.Finally, I like to teach the book to other people. When you teach something, you have to break it down into its most simple form; you’ll be forced to understand the principles at their most basic level. When you understand the fundamentals of something is when you truly understand it. If you want to learn more about implementing what you learn, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
So many entrepreneurs like go wake up at 5:00AM. They also like to go to bed at 8:00PM – that’s the part they don’t mention. I know this only from experience.I like waking up that early because there are no distractions. I can really focus on my work and create something better than my competition.You only have to wake up so early if doing so helps you create better products and services. There are other ways you can gain an edge, so listen to this short episode to find out what they are. If you want to learn more about getting a competitive advantage over your competition, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
A lot of people ask me “Christian, should I get a job or start a business?”I have the same answer every time. It doesn’t matter who’s asking or what they say after that. The answer is: get a job!In this quickfire episode, I’ll reveal my rationale behind my answer.If you want to learn more about starting a business, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
If you are wondering how to get a job right now, if people are even hiring, and how to beat out the competition, then this episode is for you.
If you are running a service-based business, you’re going out there and applying for jobs every day. Business owners make more than employees because they have multiple full-time jobs. The difference is that owners have systems in place to take care of those jobs. The process works the same whether it’s a 9-5 or a client-based business.
Businesses are always hiring. As an owner of multiple businesses, I will hire any time someone can make a proposal that will make or save me more money. Business owners are basically investment managers. They’re managing capital resources, time, and people. Their job is to use those resources in the most beneficial way. Your job is to create a strategy that will make more than you cost them.
If you don’t know how to create that for a company, you have unlimited resources at your fingertips, free and paid. Go out and find a course that will help you learn how to improve a business and utilize that knowledge. Make the effort to create value for the business.
As long as you can provide results, you can go out and get another job, then another. That’s how you become a millionaire. Become an expert in one area of business, create proposals, and get them out into the world.
If you want to learn more about creating value, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
You cannot change your life until you change something that you do every day. The reality of making real change, whether it’s starting a business, making more money, or getting in shape, is that most people fail. Take New Year’s resolutions. How many have you broken already? Today we are going to talk about the 1-minute rule to learn anything you want in life and get back on track.
A few years ago, I was going to Thailand for a few months and planned to learn Muay Thai kickboxing while I was there. It’s something I have done before and it is intense. I knew I would have to start conditioning my body ahead of time, so I started running. I am not a runner and it isn’t typically something I enjoy, so how did I motivate myself to start?
I started running for 1 minute a day. You can’t object to 1 minute a day. Then the next day, I ran for 2 minutes, the third day 3 minutes and so on up to 30 days. Now I was running for 30 minutes a day and, more than that, I wasn’t finding it painful and I was enjoying it.
It doesn’t have to be painful to make a change, whether it’s your career, your health or your relationships. Just start with 1 minute a day. Look for a course related to what you want to learn and just start with 1 minute a day dedicated to it. Before you know it, you’ve been doing it for a month and, not only are you doing more of it, but you will be enjoying it and it will be part of your daily routine.
If you want to learn more about making changes in your life, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
How can you sell an online course without being the expert? We’ve been talking a lot about creating digital assets that can work for you to generate passive income, but how do you create an asset without being an expert?
When I first started out, I didn’t think I was really the expert in anything. I didn’t think I could be the one to create an online course. Instead, I focused on learning marketing, which can be applied to any type business. I partnered with others and helped them sell, letting them be the expert. One of my mentors was making $1 million a month by partnering with people, letting them be the experts while he marketed their product.
For example, I purchased a book for $200 that cost probably $10 to produce. In it, the author interviewed industry experts and transcribed their talks. Why would the experts collaborate on this? It gets their name out there to more people. If you don’t think you can approach people to partner up because you have nothing to offer in exchange, you’re wrong. You can offer exposure, and it goes both ways.
I want to give you 3 tips to go out there and do this.
Tip number 1: Have a clear and visible outcome. Be specific about what your asset is offering.
Tip number 2: Attract the right clients. Market for who you are targeting.
Tip number 3: Work with the very best. Find out who is the expert in what you are selling and approach them. Provide more value than you take and make it a win/win for everyone.
If you want to learn more about selling your online course, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
We are once again going to talk about the ultimate morning routine for the entrepreneur who wants to be productive in this episode. However, today, we are going to throw it all out the window.Often when people talk about productivity, they are talking...
Today I’m going to talk to you about the 3 things I learned from getting my first 1000 subscribers on YouTube. If you have a YouTube channel, or you’re thinking of making one, here’s the mistakes I made so you don’t have to make them.
I watched a lot of YouTube videos to try to reach my first 1000 subscribers. I listened, but I didn’t implement what I heard properly. Looking back now, I can see exactly where I went wrong and what lessons I have learned.
The first lesson I learned was to focus on thumbnails. This might sound cliché, but I promise you that thumbnails make a huge difference. I used to design my thumbnails on my computer without taking into account what they looked tiny on mobile. Most of my traffic comes from mobile devices, so I changed my perspective on how to design them. The face should be close to the camera. You should use as few words as possible, and don’t put anything important in the bottom right-hand corner – that’s where the timestamp goes.
The second thing I learned is that more work does not mean more views. This goes for thumbnails and editing. It’s all about the subject matter; getting your viewer to buy in and care about where it’s going. Put production value second, because you don’t need fancy editing and graphics. One thing you do need though: good audio quality.
The third lesson I picked up from reaching my first 1000 subscribers is to let go of the results and focus on the process. Become outcome independent - don’t sit there refreshing your analytics. Concern yourself with content creation. Focus on what you do every day and have patience.
If you want to learn more about getting an online following, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
Today we are going to be breaking down why you need to be using credit cards as an entrepreneur. So many people are afraid of credit cards, but I’m here to tell you they can be one of your biggest assets.
One of the most important parts of financial literacy is understanding and using credit properly. We use credit in all parts of our lives: to buy consumer goods, to buy property, and for financial leverage. If you aren’t using credit cards right now, you need to realize you are missing out on 4 main benefits.
The number one benefit is you can get an interest free loan. Credit cards are notorious for high interest rates, but often you can get one that is interest free and with no payments for 18 months. Rich people know how to use OPM (other people’s money) to make money. Putting an asset on that card means you are using someone else’s money to make money.
The second benefit is credit history. If want to do anything in the business world you need a good credit history. The sooner you can prove that you are a worthy borrower, the easier it is to get loans in the future.
The third benefit is rewards points. If you are spending a lot of money on your card each month, you are getting some back every month. Travel points and cash back all add up.
The final benefit is insurance. If you are using your credit card, you have insurance on purchases. You have insurance that if something you bought with your card gets stolen, you will get your money back. You do not take the hit - the bank does.
If you want to learn more about paying for business expenses, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
Today I’m continuing the Digital Landlord series and I’m going to be talking about how you can create a mass market digital asset, reach more people and hit that $1 million goal.
A lot of people sell a few of their digital assets then see sales drop off. They say it’s because Facebook ads have dropped off or YouTube ads have declined or because they’ve run out of steam. It’s actually because what they are selling is a small market digital asset that only a few people want. So, how do you create an asset that more of the market wants?
There’s 2 ways to do it. The first way is called Lazy Messaging and the second is the Just Like Me technique.
First up is Lazy Messaging. If you are out there trying to sell what you do as a hobby or what you do for a living as a digital asset and it confuses your audience, they aren’t going to buy. You need to cut the jargon and make the information accessible to your buyer. Buyers don’t want to work to understand your product, they just want it to work.
The Just Like Me Technique is the story you are telling in your marketing. If you are telling your customers a story about you, you’re actually telling them a story about themselves. The customers you attract are going to, most likely, be just like you with the same beliefs and values as you. You have to go back and tell the beginning of your journey so your customer can bond and relate to you.
Go out there and tell your own story, find your audience and sell your asset.
If you want to learn more about telling your story, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
In this episode, I’m going to continue the Digital Landlord series of discussions by talking about creating passive income with zero dollars out of pocket. If you want passive income, you need an asset to generate it.
When I started creating my first digital asset, from day one when I had zero sales, I knew how many sales it would take to be financially free. I knew my target was 1000. I had a business at the time and I was putting everything back into it, so I had no money to be spending on creating things. I started by selling the asset, then moved on to creating things.
Look at Tesla. The pre-orders for the Cybertruck are already through the roof, and it’s not even been made yet. So, what can you learn from this? You can pre-sell your asset before it is finished or even created. I’ve done this for all sorts of things from apps to online courses. It’s not abnormal to pay for something up front. Think about university. You pay your tuition before you’ve ever taken a class.
It works for Tesla because there is hype surrounding what they do. It’s new, exciting and something we haven’t seen before. Humans greatly over value what is new, so to sell your digital asset you have to create something new about it. How? By warning your audience about something good or something bad. For example, if I’m selling an online course for snowboarding and present it as a new way to learn faster, people are going to take notice.
Create that new and different marketing hook, pre-sell and start building your digital assets.
If you want to learn more about selling digital assets, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
You only need one big idea that hits before you never have to worry about making it again. Your assets produce for you and you have your freedom. So, what should you create for your passive income source? Today we’re going to talk about the 4 ways to go...
Today we are going to talk about the truth behind online courses and gurus. Do they work? Are they a scam? Should you invest your money in them? I’ve been on both sides of the industry.
In the last 10 years I have made money in real estate, iPhone apps, magazines, ad revenue, marketing, online courses, and coaching. These are just some of the areas I’ve created revenue from. So, which of these have I paid for courses or coaching in over the last 10 years? The answer is all of them.
Every new skill I have developed is because I have invested in courses and mentorship to make sure I do it right. Many people think that online courses and coaching costs so much money and they don’t yield any results, but they aren’t thinking about the compound interest on education.
It usually goes like this: you enroll in one course initially. You get distracted by work, by family, and don’t see any results. The second course you see more progression, maybe you learn a new skill, make some friends to expand your network, but you still aren’t seeing the results. So, what’s next? You join a coaching program and see even more results.
Persistence is what gets you what you need. You continue to invest in yourself and every progression you make is another tap of the hammer into the stone. You start to see people in your field of interest making money and you realize there is no difference between them and you.
Everything is compounding results. That goes for everything in life, health, wealth, and relationships. Take the risk today to invest in yourself for tomorrow.
If you want to learn more about investing in yourself, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
We all dream of leaving the rat race behind; of having freedom and being extraordinary. How do you become the kind of person that can do that? In this episode, I’m going to share the 5 millionaire habits that changed my life and that can change yours too.
7 years ago, I was looking at a $1000 cheque for working 30 hours of overtime on top of my regular hours. Now, I have a 7-figure business netting over a million dollars in sales each year. Since the minimum wage days, I have implemented habits that have had a profound impact. You can do it too. You just need a simple set of daily disciplines and you can drastically improve your earning power and change your life forever.
The first habit is to figure out what a BIG problem is for people and solve it. Look at health, wealth, and relationships. Look for a problem so big people will pay you to solve it. Second, implement change in how you spend your free time. Spend it learning; spend it pursuing self-improvement.
Third, find something good to say, say it well, and say it often. Put it out there for people to see. Number four is to use leverage. Most people think financial leverage is the most important, but there are other types you can utilize. Look at technological leverage and look at human capital. Get a team so you can focus on your zone of mastery.
Finally, the fifth habit is to take 100% responsibility for yourself. Don’t come at life with a victim mindset or parse out blame to outside factors. Changing your financial future is amazing, but the real journey is becoming a person of value.
If you want to learn more about getting social media marketing clients, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
How many times have you said that you were going to start your own business, only for life to get in the way? The key is to keep trying. It’s not too late to get your business started. In this episode, I’m going to tell you about the 5 best business...
Why don’t most people have sources of passive income? It’s usually because they haven’t built anything first. You don’t just magically get passive income. First, you have to create something that generates it. Today I’m going to break down my 7 sources of passive income and tell you the biggest mistakes people make when building them.
Imagine that you own a house that you rent out. You’ll get rent cheques every month regardless of what you are doing. You don’t have to exchange your time to generate it, but it takes time to build these assets. You have to build it properly before you can see the dividends. So, which source of passive income is right for you?
First up there’s digital products. Take what you are already good at and sell it online.
The second source is software. You can create apps or browser extensions; you don’t need to be a developer. You can invest in hiring someone who can do it.
The third source is affiliate income. This is where you refer customers and receive a cut of what the customer pays your affiliate.
The fourth source is credit card rewards. Trust me, if you are spending thousands of dollars each month on marketing and recouping it from customers, the cash back rewards add up.
The fifth source is ad revenue. For example, if you have a YouTube channel, you get a mailbox cheque each month for ads they run on your site.
The sixth source is forced appreciation. Buying property low and selling high.
The final source is rental income. If you travel or have multiple properties, put them on Airbnb.
Remember that passive income takes time to build. Put the work in and see how you can grow your revenue.
If you want to learn more about getting social media marketing clients, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
I have some friends who say profit is all that matters, and they have no interest in the revenue numbers of a business.
There’s a big difference between profit and revenue, obviously. A company can have huge revenue numbers and very small profit. So, how do we know if revenue is important or not.
Let’s imagine there are two coaching businesses. Business #1 has $100,000 in monthly revenue, and Business #2 has $25,000 in monthly revenue. Which of those do you think is better off?
It’s hard to say for sure. Business #1 is most likely spending money on ads to bring in customers, paying salespeople commission, etc. It’s probably a business that doesn’t depend on one person to run. Let’s say this business is bringing in $20,000 of profit.
Business #2 is a solopreneur coaching business that’s also bringing in $20,000 of profit, but this business depends on one person to run. They might be working 80 hours a week, and as soon as they stop, no money is being made.
In my eyes, Business #1 is clearly superior. Any person that says revenue doesn’t matter is missing the whole point of a business. We need revenues to support the business and scale it.
Business #2 probably can’t scale very much at all next month, but Business #1 can probably double their revenue and profit. See the difference?
Revenue matters more than most people think. If you think that profit is all that matters, remember that the order matters. If you want a sustainable business, you need to reinvest your profits into the business.
If you want to learn more about getting your business to work for you, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
I don’t watch sports these days, but watching the highlights of somebody’s professional life is still compelling enough that it can almost bring me to tears. If you are a high performer in any area of life, I highly recommend you check out The Last Dance. This series covers Michael Jordan’s career, as well as a look into his competitors and what they think of him.
I’ve compiled ten things I learned from the series that I think will bring me more success in business.
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If you want to get to the top, you must have an unquenching desire to win.
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You have to be willing to lose.
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Not everyone will like you. A lot of Jordan’s teammates thought he was a bully and a lot of people feared him.
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Keep the main thing the main thing. Michael Jordan was living a humble life and was committed to basketball.
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Stay in your lane. Often times, we want to go into other industries even though we’re really good at one thing.
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You might be a star player, but you still need a star team.
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Make smart business decisions. Michael Jordan made an important business decision to become a star player when they were not common in basketball.
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It comes down to the very last shot. The difference between first and second is so small, so you need to have an edge.
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Victory comes from going to the extremes of human experience.
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Enjoy the ride. It’s great to win in business, but in the end, we’re all humans and we have to come to terms with that.
If you want to learn more about finding success in your business, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
Let’s talk about failure. In business, there’s two types of failure: temporary and permanent. The ultimate failure is never going back and trying again; never learning from how you failed. School teaches us never to get the wrong answer, but if you never fail, how can you learn to succeed?
Just like the stock market, you should diversify your risk portfolio in your life and business. Diversifying those everyday risks, big or small, is how you develop yourself as a person and as a product.
Venture Capital firms take money from their clients and invest it in startups. In a study of 2000 investments, 75% of them failed to give a return. What does this mean for you? It means that even the professionals fail 75% of the time. The difference is in where they win. VC firms understand that just one of their investments will return 1000 times over, but they can’t get that return without the other failures. They are professionals, but they can’t predict the future.
From their strategies, you can learn to make consistently good decisions over time. You have to step up to the plate and take a swing knowing that you might not always hit, but when you do, you’ll hit it out of the park.
I’m not talking about necessarily investing money, I’m talking about where you invest your time, energy and education. Make a habit of investing in yourself, but don’t forget to calculate the potential for return before you make that investment. Over time, your risk portfolio will balance out. When you fail, don’t tell yourself that you are bad. Remember that the professionals fail 7 times out of 10, all it takes is one good investment.
If you want to learn more about using failure to gain success, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
If there was only one skill in business that everyone needed in order to succeed, what would it be? What can you use to improve, grow and set yourself apart from the competition? The answer is copywriting, and today I’m going to tell you how to write copy that can persuade, influence and sell your products.
Copywriting is an art and a science. Just knowing the structure is not enough to create effective copy. You have to be able to hone in on your target audience, know your market and understand the consumer subconscious.
I know it sounds complicated, but there is a way to learn these skills that authors as far back as the 1800s have used. Authors would take their favorite books and copy, word for word, the contents. They weren’t doing this to plagiarize, they did this to train their brain to write a certain way. You can utilize this technique to learn how to write copy. In fact, it’s exactly what I did.
In the first 18 months of being in business I would look at the best sales letters for whatever industry I was working for and I would spend time each day hand copying them to help hone my thinking. This trains your brain to know what phrasing, words and style to use for whichever industry you are in. If you can’t communicate with your target audience in a way that doesn’t trigger their defense mechanism, you can’t succeed.
The main reason I see people fail in business is that they don’t know how to communicate. You have to be able to articulate your value to your audience.
If you want to learn more about copywriting, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
In life, we are looking for leaders. Someone that can show us the way to success and guide us through the obstacles. I’m asking you to step up and become that leader for others and in doing so explode your income.
There is a tendency for people to want the most money whilst doing the least work in online marketing. These are the people that will be broke forever. You need to realize you are not the person giving you the money. You have to find who has it and get them to give it to you.
Why would they give you the money? Because you offer them a net benefit. Look at becoming a leader in an area they want to progress in and lead them where they want to go.
Fear is one of the main factors stopping people from stepping into leadership roles. I often hear ‘I don’t know everything all the time.’ I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to know it all. Your responsibility is to be an advocate for your client and defend them when needed. If you don’t know the answer, admit it but tell them you will seek it out.
Approach your business with a team mindset. Change your language from ‘I’ to ‘we’. You are there to provide value to everyone, not just the customer. Money is a byproduct of leadership.
Make sure you spend time on vision. You need to be able to step back and evaluate the market and your competitors, as well as getting to know your customers. Look to the future and plan for where the next trends will be and where the industry is headed. Stay one step ahead.
If you want to learn more about becoming a leader, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
Friction is one of the number one success killers. Anyone that has achieved great things will tell you, it’s about pragmatism and consistency. If you start going to gym but it’s way out on the other side of town, eventually that distance becomes an...
Any time we want to improve our business, it’s better to break things down into a simple format rather than trying to juggle complex aspects. Simplicity is key. In this episode, I’m going through the 3 business levers that are going to grow your business and your income.
You have to prospect for customers; reach out to more people. You can’t do it once and expect permanent results, this needs to be a fundamental part of your business. Make sure it’s sustainable. Either hire someone to do it for you and pay them a commission, or learn advertising that will automate prospecting for you. Note, you have to get really good at advertising for it to be effective.
Charge more for services. This one freaks people out and they think they will be beat out by their competition or lose sales. Look at who you are offering your services to. Ideally, you want to have fewer, higher paying clients as opposed to a bunch of clients who are paying lower stipends. Work with clients who are already successful without you and offer them value.
If you have recurring clients, you’ll make more money in your business. Focus on client experience and ask if they recognize success when they see it. Make sure you define success to them and make sure you report the success to them on regular intervals. Always be solving problems and anticipating new ones.
If you want to learn more about growing your business, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
CEOs get paid so much because they make hundreds of decisions every day based on the survival of the company and making the company millions of dollars under pressure. How can you make better decisions?
There are probabilities in everything, just like gambling. If you want to win some bets, you have to play the game. It also can be based on the luck of the draw. Practice making small decisions first and get used to the possibility that you might make the wrong decision. A bad decision is better than no decision at all in business.
Try to play out a decision in your mind, like a movie. Think through the things that could go wrong before they happen and address them preemptively. This way, if a problem arises, you’ll already have a plan in place to deal with it, or you may avoid it altogether by having addressed it before it happened. You can also switch it up and think about things that would lead you to successful outcomes and desires.
Determining expected values is a way to evaluate projects. If you’re working on a project that could make your business $100,000 and you have a 50% of accomplishing that, the expected value of that project is $50 000. Look at the worst-case scenario or go with the project with the higher expected value and the least catastrophic result.
Look back on your decisions as a portfolio of risk and develop a pattern of making good decisions over time. This is going to set you ahead as you’re going to be able to move faster than your competitors.
If you want to learn more about creating a lifestyle you don’t need a vacation from, visit
https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
Today, we’re going to talk about 3 non-business-related activities that make me more money. Why is this important? You have to work on yourself first when you’re running a business. If you don’t, it’s kind of like being in a professional race car race without a pit crew.
Getting an edge in business can be weird and hard. All of the following steps have been crucial to the success that I have had in my business.
Meditation. Before you run away, picture a scenario. If you’re a weak person and you try to bench press a heavy weight in the gym with no experience and leave when you can’t do it, that would seem odd to other people. You have to practice it, the same as meditation. In today’s society, everyone is addicted to their phones and it’s important to strengthen your focus. After 6 weeks of consistent meditation, it’s scientifically proven to help your brain. Try it for even 1 minute a day and add 60 seconds each day.
Yoga changed my life. It’s similar to meditation on steroids, but it unites movement with your breathing. This exercise helps me to feel uncomfortable and breathe through discomfort. This can be a great asset for your business when you are stressed or dealing with uncomfortable situations.
CrossFit is strength training combined with aerobic activity. It helps with a lot of aspects: endorphins, exercise, being healthy and discipline. Exercise is going to give you energy and enthusiasm.
If you want to be happier and drive your business car faster, these have worked wonders for me in terms of being a more effective person in life and a better business leader.
If you want to learn more about making more money in your business, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
‘The Secret’ left everyone thinking they can sit back, do nothing and visualize what they want in life and it will happen. I’m here to tell you that it is not a passive process. Today, I will let you in on the three steps to utilizing positive...
People often think that by working in what you love, you are always excited about your business. Many find that isn’t the case. How often do you have to fight to stay motivated? Today I’m going to talk about the six basic human needs that have to be met in order to keep you motivated and loving what you do.
This doesn’t just apply to business; it applies to life and relationships as well. The six human needs are: Certainty, Variety and Uncertainty, Significance, Love and Connection, Growth, and Contribution.
The first two needs, Certainty as well as Variety and Uncertainty, may seem like they contradict each other. However, you need a balance of both. A reliable routine ensures that you avoid pain or fear and variety stops you from self-sabotaging to create drama and keeps things engaging.
The third and fourth needs, Significance and Love and Connection, are also closely tied together. As humans, we need to feel that what we are doing is important or impactful. We have to feel that we have achieved success or can be the hero in the customer’s eyes. This goes hand in hand with our need for tribe approval and community.
The final two needs can only be met if the first four are. Growth is not just about expanding your business, it’s about personal growth and achievement. Finally, Contribution. If you aren’t sure how to start making a contribution, look to where you can coach others and help to make a difference in their lives.
If you want to learn more about staying motivated, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
Building a brand is more than business cards, logos, and websites. That’s the image of your brand, but not the fundamentals. Today I’m going to tell you the three main ways to build the foundation of your brand, cut the chasing, and have sales come to...
Starting out in a new market can be scary. It’s natural to look around at the competition and be discouraged. What if I told you that you can outperform your competition as an underdog? All it takes is hard work and strategizing. You can niche down and...
Self-sabotage is an all too common obstacle in many of our day to day lives, whether it’s in our careers, relationships or health in general. What do you do when you start talking yourself out of success just as you reach the precipice?
To unravel why we self-sabotage, you first have to understand that humans are more often than not operating on autopilot. We learn behaviors that protect us from what we fear. To overcome this, you have to be open to asking questions about why we behave in this way.
Acknowledging and being conscious of when you are self-sabotaging is an incredibly useful tool that I employ. If you catch yourself in the sabotage spiral, tell someone how you are feeling. That alone can help to break habit patterns.
In order to reprogram these behavior habits, I believe you have to change your mindset by changing your inputs. Look for peers or role models that believe and think differently to you. Break the cycle of safe behaviors by being unsafe and taking those risks that you are afraid of.
Don’t take advice from someone who hasn’t done what you want to. Seek out those that have consistently proved they know how to achieve what you are after. Once you find your inspiration, put yourself in their shoes. Ask yourself what they would do in your situation.
Set your fear goals. Look at what you are afraid of and meet it head on. Remember that we create the circumstances that we fear the most, which means we can create the solution too.
If you want to learn more about getting social media marketing clients, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
Today I want to talk about ten strategies that keep me sane and productive during lockdown, or any other time I’m working from home day after day. If you’re new to remote work, want to spice up your routine, or just need to listen to something for ten minutes to entertain yourself, this is going to help you.
Get up at the same time every day. When you stop following a routine, things can get out of whack pretty easily.
Get dressed. There’s a mentality that goes along with being dressed versus having no pants at 5:00PM. It makes you take yourself more seriously.
Scheduling. If there’s no boundaries, you may not be disciplined with your time or you may overwork. Put everything on the calendar so you can maintain balance with work and free time.
Reach out to your friends and family. The world has slowed down and it’s a great opportunity to catch up with people.
Workouts are important. Don’t miss or neglect them, and hold yourself accountable.
Make time for your hobbies. Time block the things you want to do and maybe haven’t had the time to try out yet. It’s a bit easier to make time for them right now.
Schedule breaks. This is important as it’s easy to get caught up in your work which leads to burnout and ultimately, less productivity.
Don’t get interrupted. This is a big adjustment for most people as you’re not used to being around your significant other or family. Switching tasks can be detrimental.
Do a work challenge. Push yourself, because now is the time to be building and not pulling back.
If you want to learn more about creating a lifestyle you don’t need a vacation from, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast/
Sometimes I experience deafness when it comes to advice from people that are further ahead of me. The advice just doesn’t mean anything to me, and it’s not until I look back and see my struggles that I finally understand what they were saying. Without that perspective, it can be hard to understand the advice we get.
Each year, I look back and see what lessons I learned so I don’t make the same mistakes. Let’s walk through 19 things I learned last year.
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If you’re already having success, it’s not about how hard you work; it’s how much unique value you are bringing to the marketplace.
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There are ebbs and flows that are out of your control. Ride the wave instead of being mad that it exists.
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Don’t assume that growth will always be at the same pace.
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Education and mentorship are some of the most important activities in a business.
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Longevity is cooler than maximizing revenue and profits.
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There are only a few things that make a difference in a business.
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Read more. This goes along with taking the time to think.
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Personal growth translates to business growth, and the same goes for shortcomings.
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Find something to win at outside of business.
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Money doesn’t change your personal relationships. They require just as much effort.
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Money does reduce stress as long as you are building systems.
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There’s a cost to everything. Simplify your life.
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There’s no reason you can’t do the things you want to do right now. You just have to pay the price.
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Skills and leadership beat everything else, as always.
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Execution is so much more important and so much harder than ideas.
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We claim to understand more about ourselves than we actually know.
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Learn from all subjects and all industries.
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Do cool projects with cool people.
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The things that take the longest to do are the most rewarding.
These are the lessons I’ve learned, and I hope I can internalize these lessons moving forward.
If you want to learn more about growing your business, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
The great part about books is somebody spent years of their life figuring the content out. It’s a highly curated piece of content and a lot of thought has gone into it. Reading books is one of my favorite ways to figure out what’s next for my company....
Getting clients is very simple. There are two steps: find out where your clients are and get an irresistible offer in front of them. You need to understand your market and how to pitch your offer. It doesn’t matter how many clients you find if you don’t know how to pitch. You need to sell the outcome of what you do, not what you do.
The next thing you can do is show proof. For example, show screenshots of your results with other clients or get video testimonials from them. If you’re having a really hard time selling something, give it away for free. If you can’t give it away for free, you have bigger issues.
When getting an offer in front of a client, we need to have trust and desire. The desire isn’t hard if you know how to present an offer, but the trust can be a little bit harder. This is why I recommend turning to people who already trust you to be your first clients.
Another way to get leads is the retargeting offer. We can show clients that their potential customers are already searching for their services. The person who retargets and them and follows up automatically will get their business.
You can search in places with buyers who are already looking for marketing services. These can be on freelancing websites, or you can search for employers who are looking for an employee. Offer them your services as a freelancer.
Free content is a great way to build trust. If you don’t have an audience, though, it won’t be much help to you. You can give away content online or even hold free meetups.
My favorite method is to bring new clients in with advertising. Have a great hook and offer in your ads and they will come to you.
Your success depends on how many clients see your offers each day. Pick one method to find clients and get really good at it.
If you want to learn more about getting social media marketing clients, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
I read an article that said one in five CEOs are psychopaths. This is not a lesson in becoming a psychopath, but I did notice something that my competitors have in common with them. The top CEOs and my top competitors are absolutely shameless. Getting...
What does it really take to grow to $1,000,000 in sales? You would think that this would be really hard to do, but in the United States alone, there are 35,000 non-employer businesses that surpass this in net income. If other people can do it, you can do it too. Today, we’re going to talk about the four steps to get there. Before that, I’ll tell you about the foundation you need to build first.
Step one is to get results-based testimonials. The more the better. They show what the person’s life was like before working with you and what it’s like after. The most important part of your business is the outcome you provide; not how you get the outcome, not how many hours you work, and not the level of service. These things help you compete, but the most relevant aspect is the before and after.
Next, we must master lead generation on one channel. You don’t need to be on every single channel to scale to $1,000,000. Pick the one that you like which has your customers and get really, really good at it. This could be anything from running Facebook ads to knocking door-to-door. Determine how many leads you need to get to $1,000,000 and then get them.
Step three is to hire a salesperson. At my company, we only hire commission-based salespeople and they get paid at the end of the month. This means that everybody can afford a salesperson. If you have leads and a proof of concept, then this is a win-win-win relationship; value is being provided to everyone involved. The only people losing should be your competitors. Remember, a salesperson won’t save your business if you don’t have a solid foundation.
Finally, you must standardize delivery. Two times the clients should not mean two times the work for you. A lot of people don’t want to hire someone because they want to make all the profit, but that’s not a good way to scale. You need to put staff in place to fulfill the order.
To learn more about scaling to $1,000,000 a year, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
The current education system in the United States was developed during the industrial revolution. The whole structure was created to breed obedient factory workers and it hasn’t changed since. If your brain only seeks out the rewards given within the structure, you’re going to screw yourself. You’ll get the job you were trained to get, which is a cog in a large machine.
In school, we are led to believe that the authority figures know all. If we can make those authority figures happy, everything else in our life will work out. The real world doesn’t really work like this. You need to break out of seeking approval.
We’re trained to make the teachers happy as opposed to the students. In real life, making thirty of your peers happy versus one authority figure is going to create a much better outcome for you.
The cramming model teaches you to hit deadlines, which a good real-world skill, but it teaches you to puke information out onto paper. This is not very useful for people learning real-world skills. We only take in things as we need to apply them in life.
Cheating is one of the worst things you can do in school. However, in the real world, cheating is your greatest ally. You can find the smartest people in the area you are tackling and pay them to tell you what to do.
The need to be good at everything instead of one thing is taught in school. Being a jack-of-all-trades without any specialized knowledge is not going to get you far at all. You don’t need to get an A+ in every subject.
In school, the highest mark you can get is 100%, and the most you can get at a job is your max salary. If you’re an entrepreneur, there is no cap.
School teaches you to focus on perfecting things that might not matter at all. In business, you can perfectly execute ten projects and get no results. You need to worry about not taking opportunities when you should.
Your self-esteem gets destroyed from failure in school. It’s okay to fail over and over again in the real world. It only takes one passing grade to get where you need to go.
We’re always seeking the right answers in school. Some of these answers don’t mean anything, but if you can figure out the right questions to ask, you can get answers that will impact your life.
Everything that school trained you for might work when you’re a kid, but it’s not going to work in the real world.
To learn more about getting specialized marketing knowledge, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/
I’ve noticed that the people at the very top in business can be absolutely shameless. They do not care at all what people think about them and they’re willing to do pretty much anything publicly, despite the judgement that will come their way.
Not caring what people think and focusing on the task at hand works great, but most people are completely unwilling to do this. This is what stands between where they are now and where they want to go in life or in business.
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People think anyone different from them is an idiot. For example, this is pretty much how the internet functions.
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In the US, two thirds of adults are overweight. Also, the average annual income is $48,000. If you believe the things that everyone else believes, this is exactly where those beliefs will lead you.
3. People are this way because of their actions. If we believe that going in $200,000 of student debt is the right thing to do for our careers, we will do it.
4. Different results require different actions. If you want different results than average, you must act differently.
5. Taking different actions means you look like an idiot. People think doing this makes you crazy which, related to #1, is because you’re different.
6. Success means you look like an idiot. You act and believe differently from almost anyone around you.
7. Most people are unwilling to look stupid. This is because of biological survival mechanisms in our bodies.
8. If most people are unwilling to look stupid, that means most people will never succeed beyond what’s average.
9. To succeed, be willing to look stupid. It’s a practice. You have to make this decision very single day. The more that you do it, the easier it will get.
Do the thing you’re so afraid of, and your body will slowly realize that it doesn’t need to worry about them.
To learn more about being okay with looking stupid, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
5 Things Rich People Do That Poor People Don't On Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Get 3 Courses For The Price Of One: https://www.digitalnomad.com/bundle
There’s this disconnect between where we are now in life and where we want to be. There are two types of people in this world: the type of person that is pulled by that vision, and the type of person who is scared by how far there is to go. We hold both types of people in us, and we get to choose which one we want to be.
People will put in decades of their life towards a goal if authority tells them that it’s the right thing to do. But, if they’re on their own with this goal, they’re called a dreamer. They’re told to grow up, be responsible, and to get a real job. If we decide to become an entrepreneur, it’s harder to stay on that path because people will question what you’re doing.
Let’s take a look at the unbearable pain of not having arrived, how we can deal with it when going after big goals, and what it means for society.
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Descent into chaos. If we go after a non-mainstream goal, you will dissent into chaos. You are going to want to turn around and leave.
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Uncertainty in your approach. You’ll start to doubt if you’re doing the right thing and you might abandon your path.
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Low chance of success. About nine out of ten business fail. What is the probability of success for entrepreneurs that stay in business for ten years and get guidance along the way? A lot better than that.
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Identity vs. self. Eventually you’ll start to question yourself. You have to deal with your own personal identity and question what it really is.
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Practical implications. We still have to take care of our family and pay our bills, but you’ll be making less money for a while. It’s the opposite of what you’re going for.
Now, we’ve started to arrive. At this point, if you can start to make order out of chaos, you’ll have an identity reformation. Now you see problems and understand that you can take chaos and turn them into order. You understand that you can choose to play in society’s system or create your own.
If you’ve come this far, you understand that there’s not much that’s out of your reach.
To learn more about starting on your entrepreneurial path, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
I don’t teach just to sell courses, and I don’t teach just for fun. Teaching has become one of the most beneficial things in my life, even though I never thought I would become a teacher. I didn’t think I had a reason to. But now, there are eight reasons why I teach and why you should too.
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Mental blueprints. Teaching forces you to develop mental blueprints of material that is deeply ingrained in your mind. It gives you a system that you can implement over and over again which makes training people easier.
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Improves thinking and communication. Without being forced to teach, we may be taking things in, but we’re not really sorting through and making sense of them. Once you’re forced to teach, you really have to think about how to communicate that subject matter.
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Myelin. This is the great matter that forms when you learn something. When you see a musician perform, it seems almost effortless. The physical structure of their brain is built to perform like that. That’s myelin.
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Finding the 80/20. Teaching can help you figure out the 20% of your business activities that bring on 80% of the results. No matter what subject you’re teaching, you’ll find out what really works and what doesn’t.
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Teaching creates an evergreen asset. You create this knowledge once, and then you can rent it out on an ongoing basis. It’s like owning a house that you can rent out to thousands of people.
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To learn. Take out a single sheet of paper and write down the steps as if you’re going to teach someone a specific task. When you get stuck, you’ll realize what steps you don’t know, and you can learn them.
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Teaching is the fastest path to mastery. Mastery is the key to getting what you want, and teaching will make you a master thanks to all of these steps.
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Impact and transfer of knowledge. This doesn’t even have to be through a business. Teaching will help you transfer knowledge to your friends or anyone else you wish.
To learn more about becoming a finisher, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
What happens when you have a job and you don’t complete your project on time? Usually, you’ll get fired. At the very least, you’ll get written up or just look like an idiot in front of the rest of your team. There are direct consequences to not being a finisher in structured areas of our life. When we start our own business and no one is holding us accountable, what happens? We stop being finishers.
I had to force myself to become a finisher to start getting the results I wanted. Starting projects might be fun, but it doesn’t provide any value to anyone else. It just gets you pumped up. You need to become a finisher, and here are eight ways to do that.
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Stakes on the line. You have to create consequences, and a good way to do this is to get an accountability partner.
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Have mandated deadlines. Clearly outline your project and have hard deadlines just like you would during a semester in school.
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No exceptions. If you give yourself the opportunity to get out of something one time, you will keep giving yourself that opportunity.
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Have mid-range planning. It’s okay to have daily and weekly planning, but it needs to fit into a bigger picture.
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Pain vs. pleasure. You have to associate your goals with what the pain will be like if you don’t achieve them, and what the pleasure will be like if you do.
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Finish the first project. You’ll feel really good after it. The more you finish projects, the easier it will be to finish the next one.
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Detachment from outcome. Do not look at your results day-to-day. Complete your work regardless of what the results are.
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“Yoda” yourself across the finish line. Yoda said “do or do not do. There is no try.” You have to get it done no matter what.
If you want success in life, it’s not about starting projects. It’s about finishing them.
To learn more about becoming a finisher, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
There’s a cruel monster in the business world reaching out from the depths of the underground, dragging you down and holding you back from everything that you want. That monster is shiny object syndrome.
I’ve got eight ways that I finally beat shiny object syndrome. I still fall victim to it sometimes just like anyone, but I’ve overcome it enough to hit my initial goals in business and get out of that cycle of starting new things over and over again.
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Have a tangible goal. You may have a strong vision of what you want to accomplish, like “making an impact,” but that’s a very abstract thing. Add something tangible to your vision.
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Be willing to suck. Most people can’t tolerate not being good at things, so they’ll just walk away and try to find something that’s easier. That’s a huge mistake.
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Have short-term losses for long-term gains. You have to play a long game, and you’re not going to get there without any losses. Your goal is to level yourself up, not to become a millionaire on day one.
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Listen to the market. The market will tell you exactly what to do. Just tweak what you’re doing based on market feedback and data that you gather.
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Recruit support and encouragement. It blows my mind when people won’t spend any money on the education process. You can leverage the power of learning what everyone before you already has.
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Put yourself in work jail. I put myself in work jail for two years so that there was no getting out from my business idea. It forced me to suck it up when I felt like quitting.
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Money is just a number. Take the emotions out of money and stop tying it to your ego. It’s just a number. Your long-term fulfillment will come from helping people solve a problem.
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Have the next goal ready to go. As soon as I achieved my goal, I felt burnt out and like there was no point to continue. Make sure that you have the next goal you want to hit in mind.
To learn more about defeating shiny object syndrome, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
People reach out to me and they ask, “is this a good business idea?” If you’ve never been in business before, you might not understand how ridiculous that question is. The idea that I would know anything about your business is just silly because I don’t know anything about your market.
My friend recently had an idea for an app where you could buy a monthly subscription for a given industry. Then, you’d be able to go to many different providers in that industry. First off, I think the idea sounds great, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not. An idea is just motivation to start investigating your market.
A business is a series of systems that provides a solution to a painful problem. If we look at an app, it’s a tool to distribute this solution. An app is a silly way to test an idea because it’s very expensive. A better way is to see if there’s demand for what we offer and if we can supply it.
The first thing we could do is just ask friends if they would pay for your idea, and if they say yes, you ask if they’d be willing to write you a check if you could get it done right now. Don’t cash the checks yet. Then, we could walk into businesses in the industry and tell them how many people you have willing to pay to use the provider. Next, we could ask for a discount from the provider if we send them a certain amount of business.
If they say no, we have to rework our business model. If they say yes, you have two sides of the equation. You have customers who are willing to pay, and businesses who are willing to provide services. Now you have a business, but it’s still too early for an app. We need processes for attracting more people to the business.
You should first build your business in just one city. Once you have a business up and running at a certain size, then you can think about expansion. At this size, you might need a better distribution system, and that’s where an app could help.
If we start with an app, we’ll be dealing with development issues and bugs in the app. These are not the core problems of a business. The first step in business is to prove that you have a solution to a problem.
To learn more about creating your own bag of tricks, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
Today we’re talking about giving two people the same information, the same plan of action, the same strategy, the same execution, and them getting vastly different results. What causes the difference?
It’s a very simple answer: a long-term outlook. People come in, want to start a new business, and they just dip their toe in the water. They tell themselves that they’ll try something for a day and if it doesn’t work, they’ll go try something else. Do you think somebody is going to get extraordinary results with only a few days of effort?
You need to care more about the process than the result. People who only put up with the process because they want to get the result will fail very quickly. They just look at everything as a nuisance and struggle. Contrastingly, people who are all about the process know that the results are a by-product of the process. If you stick to the process, the results take care of themselves.
It’s common knowledge across all industries that you need to stick with something for five years. That five-year mark is when your business will really start to blow up because you’ve stuck with it long enough for mastery.
The big question is are you in this game just to get a result, or have you made a new lifestyle out of it? Stop being one foot in, one foot out. This isn’t going to reward you because you’re not doing anything for anyone. It’s not about the opportunity, it’s about you committing to mastery.
When you start, of course it’s going to be hard. However, you can become the master of your niche relatively quickly compared to other things in life. In five years, you can be making more money than 95% of the world.
Don’t chase the result. Chase the process.
To learn more about building a strong process, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
There’s this idea out there that you should only do what you’re good at doing. The people at the top in business often will just focus on their strengths. They’ll stay in what’s called their “zone of genius” where they are the best at doing something and are the only ones who can do it.
If you’re not running a thriving business, you’re not ready for that. If you don’t have a team surrounding you to fill in the gaps, you’re not ready for that. If you don’t know what your zone of genius is, you’re definitely not ready for that. Ignoring your weaknesses could be the worst possible thing that you can do.
In business, we have a bag of tricks. You might be good at copywriting but terrible at actually running Facebook ads, or you might be good at talking to clients but have no idea how to select proper images for ads. Once you have enough of these tricks, you’ll be getting pretty good at business.
So, what happens when we don’t focus on our weaknesses? We just never do the things that make us uncomfortable, so we default to doing what is easiest in the moment. When I know I need to master something in business, I have to put in the time and practice. My goal isn’t to get rid of my weakness or become great at it; I just make sure I put in the hours and see what happens.
For the longest time, I was avoiding running YouTube ads because I didn’t understand the interface. I was so used to Facebook ads that I would just completely stay away and pay someone to do the YouTube ones. I finally had to jump in, and I was so confused about the interface. It was not fun on the first day. All of a sudden, my second day of running YouTube ads was less scary. I thought “you know what? Maybe this isn’t my biggest weakness.” By the end of the first week, I loved running them.
If you’re avoiding business activities that make you uncomfortable, you’re probably avoiding everything that’s important.
To learn more about creating your own bag of tricks, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
One of the toughest things about operating a business is that you have to give up attachment to outcome. There are so many variables interacting with each other in a business that you don’t know what the combination of those different things will do. You just have to do your best and give up attachment to the outcome.
This week, something bad happened. My Facebook business manager got totally shut down. We have tons of data in there; all of our ads, algorithms, and more. We lost it all in one fell swoop and Facebook won’t give us any reasoning. I told my friend about it on the phone, who said that I seemed really calm about it. I was, because I didn’t know if this would be a good thing or a bad thing.
We don’t always know the implications of what happens in our lives or in business. With how much stuff that is thrown at you, it’s not good to make judgements whether it’s good or bad. Often, the difficult times in business will produce the absolute best results you’ve ever gotten. We get stuck in doing things a certain way, then things break, and people think it’s terrible. It’s better to just say “we’ll see."
This week, we relaunched our Facebook ads and a new business manager with none of our data. We got a three-to-one return on our ad spend, which is phenomenal. We weren’t getting that much before. A lot of the old stuff we were doing got cut; we were probably spending a little too much before.
Bad things happen in business that seem so stressful at the time they’re occurring. Whether something is good or not isn’t for us to decide. Life is going to happen, and that will set a motion of events that will change our course.
To learn more about getting a good return on your ad spend, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/podcast
Getting started in business can be really lonely. You have all these grand plans of getting rich and doing whatever you want. Thirty days later, you’re stuck inside with you and your computer talking to yourself in the same clothes you wore yesterday.
I’ve got my friend Trent with me today because we’re both in the same group coaching program. A lot of people call these masterminds. I have an informal group that meets every Wednesday, but this event we’re at in San Diego is a formal one. There’s about 150 of us here to talk about utilizing online marketing tools to grasp a target audience.
The cool thing about events like this is you get to make friends who have the same goal and you get to hear from people at all different levels. Thanks to events like these, you no longer have to be alone.
For the past eight years, Trent has been investing in real estate alone. He used to network a lot but moved away from that into his own little world. He wants to get back into networking, which is why he comes to these events. Every time he goes, he gets energy back and is excited to learn from everyone.
Whenever me and Trent sit down for a meal at this mastermind, it seems that we’re sitting across from someone who is doing the same type of investing that he is. He makes great contacts and learns from people who are already doing what he wants to do.
If you’re starting a business and feel a little worn out, you probably just need to get around people who are doing what you are. To get involved in a mastermind, my recommendation is to join a paid group. That will give you motivation to stick with it, and you’ll also be hanging out with people who have made the same commitment.
To learn more about growing a digital marketing business, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
A lot of people that are in business don’t understand that bringing on a client is a two-way street. Some people act like they owe everything to the client just because the client is paying them. You need to work with clients who treat you with respect and value what you do, or you’re going to have a terrible time in business and in life. You’ll probably burn out and hate your business.
If you’re in digital marketing, you need to select clients who have the budget to pay you, appreciate the value that you bring to the table, and have a growth mindset about their business.
Many beginners work with low-hanging fruit. These clients are already failing in their business and expect a marketer to come and save it. Once you add advertising to a business that doesn’t work, it’s just going to fail even faster. For a business that already works and has a product that people need, putting in marketing money will make it grow even faster.
You have to work with businesses that are already succeeding and are too busy to do the marketing themselves. They’ll value what you do for them, respect you, and will be more than willing to pay your fee because they want an expert in every piece of their business.
A couple of months ago, I brought on a client and thought everything was going great. I set very clear terms and expectations at the beginning. A couple of weeks into it, they were emailing me six times per day and making my life miserable. I was providing great results, but they were bringing in all these problems with their business structure. They also had an unrealistic expectation on what their return on ad spend should be.
If somebody is bugging you, taking up your time, and messing with your ability to grow your own business, it’s time to fire them. You want to be very respectful, leave things on good terms, and not burn too many bridges. Send a very clear email saying that it’s time to part ways.
Find the clients that are high performers. You can make their business even better.
To learn more about getting digital marketing clients, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
I got so sick at the gym this morning that I threw up. I was totally incapacitated, my whole body was shaking, and my legs were seizing up. Business is exactly the same way.
There’s no better metaphor for business than fitness. There’s no way to get quick and easy results. You have to be consistent. You have to go through the pain. You have to push yourself. And, if you have long-term commitment, the results are worth it. Anybody that’s gone through the process knows this.
Once you commit to doing something and make a habit of it, it gets easier. It becomes a lifestyle, and the immense pain you had at the beginning is something you enjoy because you know it’s going to pay off.
I get messages from people who are new to business saying that they’re frustrated, and they just want to give up. I tell them that I’m frustrated every day in my business. I hit walls all the time and I expect to. When it happens, I tell myself that this is what I signed up for.
For some reason, people think that making money shouldn’t be painful. If you go to the gym, you know it’s going to hurt, and you know you have to show up anyway. You know that you have to feel the pain and push yourself to your limits every day.
If you can take this same attitude over to your business, you will be successful.
To learn more about getting into a good business routine, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Money. The word has a lot of connotations. Some positive, some negative. It depends who you talk to.
Money is a means of value exchange, and in order to acquire a lot of money, you need to learn how to exchange a lot of value. For most people, this means learning skills that help other people. Small business owners who start from the ground up and become successful do so by helping people on a large scale.
On the other hand, you have people who are totally broke who complain about rich people. Most of the time, these people are broke because they don’t have skills to provide value. We don’t all start on a level playing field, but once you are conscious enough to realize that you can develop your skills, it’s your responsibility to do so.
First, you have to learn to take care of yourself. That’s the best thing you can do for society. The next best thing you can do is take care of your family so that nobody else has to worry about them. By learning skills, you can take these burdens off of society right away.
Next, once you start making real cash, you employ people. You give them jobs, purpose, meaning, skills, and pay. Then, you help your community by creating more tax revenue. In turn, you’ll create a healthier economy, and this impacts your customers.
Guess what else we have? Freedom to dedicate our lives to a cause or purpose that we care about. If we want to help the needy, we have a lot more to offer than a few hours of our time. We have financial resources, power, influence, and we’re creating value on a massive scale. That’s what you can do by getting rich.
You have to learn the skills to provide value to a large amount of people, and you have to go through so much pain to do this. It’s a lot easier just to stay broke, but it’s selfish to do that because you’re missing out on helping thousands of people.
To learn more about obtaining skills that provide value, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Are you one of those people who needs to be liked at all times, and if somebody doesn’t like you, it really bothers you? If that’s you, do you have the success you want in business? If you don’t, your need to be liked is stopping you from succeeding.
Thank about your favorite television show and your favorite actor. Think about how much you like them. Now, are there people in this world who don’t like that show and will trash talk it all day long? Are there people who hate everything about that actor? There are probably thousands of them.
Anything that people love, people also hate. There’s polarity in great things. If you ever want to do great things, you have to be okay with that polarity. You have to be okay with being hated in order to be loved.
For years, it was very hard for me to do things because of the threat of rejection. I didn’t want to take on clients unless I was positive that they were going to get amazing results. You can develop your skills over time to get better results, but it’s not possible to be 100% sure about anything in life
Clients that are in business and successful know that. They know that not everything works and that not everything needs to work. If you’re waiting to work with clients that will never be disappointed in you, you’re probably never going to get started. The only way to learn how to get results is to get out there and try.
I want to challenge you. You have to make it a goal to get your first hater. If you have zero haters right now, I know you’re not doing anything significant. I want somebody to be upset with you. I don’t mean you should be an asshole to people, but I want you to realize that the things you think are bad aren’t as bad as you think.
You’re never going to make everybody happy.
To learn more about getting your first hater, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
I talk a lot about struggles that beginners have in business and why they fail. It’s because I think about it constantly. Two people might have the same business opportunity. One person can crush it, and the second person can fail over and over again.
What’s happening in their minds and actions that cause these people to not succeed? I think it comes down to if they are performing their business activities or not. Some people think that just starting a business gets results. They don’t understand that what gets the results is doing their daily business activities.
These five functions have to happen every single day in your business, no matter its size.
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Lead generation. This is how many people you can get each day to say that they’re interested in what you offer. When most people start, this is about reaching out to local businesses.
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Nurturing leads. What do you say to a lead after they contact you and say they’re interested? Do you offer to get on a call with them? You have to nurture the lead to get them to the next stage.
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Conversion. This is when you convert a lead into a sale. It can involve having a conversation, figuring out what problem they’re having, and determining if you can help them. If you can, you make them an offer and they pay you.
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Delivery. This is actually delivering the product, and for a marketing business, it means running ad campaigns for your clients.
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Retention, resell, and upsell. This is how many months the client stays with your marketing business. Are you sending them updates to communicate the value that you’re bringing to their organization?
You have to learn the skills to perform these five business functions. If you can do that, you will have a business. Ask yourself if you have been performing them every day.
To learn more about improving your skills to accomplish these five tasks, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Most freelancers go from feast to famine. They work really hard to get new clients who keep them busy, so they stop prospecting. Eventually, the projects will finish, and the freelancer will have no clients left.
So, what do you actually have to do to get clients for an advertising agency?
You need to specialize not only in a market, but in a result. If you want to get clients and charge a lot of money, you have to be the expert. This means that you don’t ask your clients what they want, you tell them what they need based on the problems they’re describing.
Sell solutions, results, and outcomes. Not services. Your client doesn’t care how many backlinks you’re going to use or how many hours it’s going to take. After you give them the solution, maybe then they’ll want to hear about the method. Stop focusing on yourself and focus on solutions.
Use the case study method. Put together a case study of one of your past successes by laying out where a client was when you started working with them. Then, describe what results happened after you began helping them. What is that client’s life like now that you have provided a solution? You can then send this case study via email to other people in the market.
If you don’t have any results to use in a case study yet, you can use the springboard method. This is when you work for your first client for free, get them amazing results, and then ask for a case study, a testimonial, and referrals.
Prospecting needs to be an ongoing process. Commit a certain amount of time every day to it. That way, you’ll always have new clients in the pipeline, and you won’t have to work with clients you don’t want to.
To learn more about getting your first case study, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
If you hate money, you’re not going to make any. If you resent rich people, you’re never going to be rich. If you think it’s greedy to make a lot of money, you’re going to be broke forever.
A lot of people have serious hang-ups about money, but it’s not their fault. It’s called a money blueprint, and it’s the beliefs you have around money that were imprinted during your childhood. Some people were told growing up that there’s never enough money, money doesn’t grow on trees, that reach people are greedy, and so on.
Money is great. It’s an incentive to innovate, provide value to the world, and help other people. Most people who get rich through their business do so because they found a way to systematically help a large number of people. There are exceptions, but generally, people who build their own businesses have gone through great failure and persisted.
Can’t people just help one another without having to make money? No, because it’s extremely hard to run a business. You get shut down over and over again, and nobody else cares about your business. Money is what keeps you going. Without it coming into your business, you’ll have to stop and get a job. You must have a healthy cashflow in order to pursue a mission. Part of an entrepreneur’s job is to take on risk in exchange for financial incentive.
If you have false beliefs about money, like that every rich person is greedy and terrible, you might want to go talk to some rich people and then examine where these beliefs are coming from.
I love money because it produces far more good than bad in this world.
To learn more about making money by helping others, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
People in the beginning stage of their businesses that focus on details is a problem I see a lot. There’s a concept I teach: optimize wide first, fine tune later. When you look in entrepreneur groups, beginners will be wondering about which logo looks better, which software to use, etc. None of this matters, because they don’t have the big things figured out yet.
Business has an order, and if you go out of it, you don’t get very good results. Beginners see the people at the top focusing on details and think they should too. They haven’t figured out what market they serve, what problems the market has, or how to convey that they have the solution.
The fundamentals are some of the hardest things to get right. So, what do you have to do?
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Get the big things right. We covered this already. Who are you serving, what problem do you solve, how do you solve it, and what words do you use to convey that to the market? Regarding what words to use, you have to continually test until you start getting reactions.
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Get the big things right over and over again. When some people finally find what works, they suddenly feel like they should try something different. Keep doing what has brought you success.
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Once you get a significant amount of business, getting the details right will improve results. In your business, the first customers you’ll sell to are early adopters. They’re not worried about perfection; they’re worried about finding a solution. When you get to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per year, then you can focus on perfecting for the middle of the market.
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Optimization. The people who pick up things last, right at the end of the middle of the market, will want to see things very fine tuned. You will lose them if there are any sort of deficiencies in your business.
Go out there, get the fundamentals right, crush it, and you will succeed.
To learn more about getting the fundamentals right, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
A lot of people don’t understand what It means to get a job. They think they can just put their resume in a stack of other ones and that they stand a fighting chance. It’s just not true. They’re going to get destroyed because life is a competition. If...
I wanted to make $1,000,000 in sales in 1 year by my 30th birthday, but I failed. I was not even close. Bu here’s the thing: having this goal caused me to hit it less than 2 years later. In that time, I learned 10 things that made me $1,000,000 in sales in 12 months.
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The market doesn’t care how hard you work. Stop focusing on hard work and start focusing on leveraged activities that produce results.
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The market rewards excellence. In any market, the majority of the rewards go to the person at the very top. When you progress from an F player to an A player, you’ll see disproportionate rewards.
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Success is exponential. Your life in five years is based on what you are doing today. You have to be patient for the payoff.
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Focus is the hardest thing. You have to have faith that focusing on one thing will pay off even when you’re not sure if it will or not. It’s still something I struggle with and work on.
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Play to win instead of playing not to lose. A lot of people aren’t willing to take short-term losses for long-term gain. You have to take chances and invest in yourself.
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Think like you already have a $1,000,000 business. Think about someone who’s really good at the thing you want to accomplish and then ask yourself, “how would this person think?”
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Surround yourself with those on the same path as you. If everyone around you is already making $1,000,000 a year, you’re going to be pulled up to that same mindset.
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Stories sell. We have to package our marketing in stories. That’s how the human brain absorbs information.
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You need to master Facebook ads. If you can’t make money while you sleep, it’s going to be really hard to get past a certain level. You have to automate lead generation, and one of the best ways to do this is with Facebook ads.
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Marketing is the most important skill you can have as a business owner, at least for the first $1,000,000. Without marketing and sales, nothing else works.
To learn more about growing your business to $1,000,000 in annual revenue, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Advertising is a lot like music. You have to learn the basic structures to be able to play music, but once you do that, you have to start breaking the rules and doing things differently. Once you learn the basics of Facebook advertising, how do you then dominate your competition? Let’s cover 10 ways.
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Use testimonials in your ads. These work almost all the time. If you’re working with a client, you can copy one of their Yelp reviews and paste it into their ad.
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Use a curiosity gap in your ads. Open a question in the reader’s mind that they’ll be curious about getting the answer to. You want the first line of your ad to work the same way as a cliffhanger in a TV show.
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Tell a story. The human brain is hardwired to respond to stories, and we’ll remember them much more often than a purely informational ad.
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Human eyeballs. There better be eye contact, because we are wired to respond to it. It means we’re coming in contact with another living thing, so we need to pay attention.
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Ad scent. This means that the landing page matches the ad in look, feel, and what you’re offering. Put the same offer on the landing page as in the ad.
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Stop funnel hacking. It’s good to look at what your competitors are doing, but eventually, you have to break away from that. The best ads talk in a way that no one else does.
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Take a risk. Test meaningfully different angles. Test things that are weird, edgy, and uncomfortable. If you think that you shouldn’t publish an ad because it’s uncomfortable, you probably should.
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Start the ad with conflict. The human brain absolutely loves conflict. Movie stars do this all the time to get people talking about them.
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Be a stalker. Give your lead relevant information at every stage of the funnel by nurturing your prospects throughout the process.
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Stop being boring. Being too professional in marketing is the surest way to be ignored. Put your personality into what you’re doing.
Which of these 10 things do you do in your ads now, and which are you neglecting?
To learn more about generating sales leads through Facebook, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
The myth of no competition is this thing where newbies get into a new line of business, and as soon as they discover that there is competition, they immediately jump ship. These people never find anything that sticks and never have progress.
I’m not trying to be harsh, because I’ve been there too. When people do this, it’s like they’re searching for buried treasure. This cycle will repeat itself until they eventually realize that they need to stay in one place, do the hard work, and compete. That’s because life is a competition. The sooner you can accept that, the sooner you’re going to get results.
Competition is amazing because it means there are a lot of customers, and you just need to do something slightly different than your competition to scoop all their customers away from them. Some opportunities are thought to be easy because there is no competition, but then you realize that nobody is competing because there are no customers.
As soon as a new market forms where there is a lot of demand, people are going to jump in. All you have to do is stay one step to the side of your competitors. You can try to do what your competition is doing but better, but it’s a lot easier to just do it slightly differently. If you get in there and you’re not getting the results you want right away, just focus on the process.
Also, I was talking with my screenwriter friend recently about people who debate whether or not they should spend money on a course. We were saying that if you’re debating, you’ve already lost because there are always thousands of people who have bought the course and are now ten steps ahead.
Think about if you were competing at a professional level in sports and refused to get coaching. Instead, you decided that you’ll just watch a few YouTube videos for free. You would get annihilated.
To learn more about differentiating your business, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
The Work from Anywhere Accelerator funnel has done over a million dollars in top-line revenue, which is awesome. I want to break down how to actually make a million dollars because when we break it down, it becomes very simple.
It’s just about numbers. You don’t need to have some supernatural ability to generate a million dollars. Once you understand how this works, all you do is go to work every day and hit your number.
Here’s an example. Let’s say I move to a new town and want to make five new friends. Not everyone will want to be my friend, but let’s say that one in ten people I talk to do. I have to go out and talk to fifty people to get my five new friends. Easy, right? We’ve taken a goal from being outcome driven (“I want five new friends”) to being process driven (“I have to talk to fifty people”).
Results are the product of a process. Money is a by-product of providing value to a certain amount of people at a certain scale and magnitude. So, how do you make a million dollars? For starters, you need a business. Having a business means that you solve a specific problem for a specific group of people, and they pay you to do it.
If you have a digital marketing business that isn’t making a million dollars, the business can stay the same; you just have to do much higher volume. Whether you sell three packages a month, or thirty, or three hundred, it’s really about the volume of leads coming in the door once you have an offer that converts for your market.
You have to have systems in place to fulfill for those clients. You can’t service a million dollars worth of clients on your own without systems. You don’t have to manually have to go talk to, for example, fifty people a day. Your systems have to talk to fifty people a day.
To learn more about growing your business to a million dollars in revenue, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
“Your business is broken, and it always will be.” These are words that Alex Charfen said that hit me like a ton of bricks in a good way. It’s reassuring because I feel like if I could just get things to run perfectly in my business, then I would be okay. The thing is, business never evens out and there’s always something to push for.
Some of my friends that have been in business longer are much more laid back and have less urgency around their business than I do. I’m always pushing hard to get to the next level, which is fine, but in the long-term we need to pull back sometimes. If you’re new to business and you’re frustrated because things feel broken, understand that that’s normal. The more you can accept that, the more peaceful you’ll be with your business.
There are three things that you’re always going to be working on when you run a business. These functions are continuously occurring, and they break over and over again:
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Generating leads. Your business depends on how many new leads you can generate each day. Ideally, you constantly have new leads coming in. I’m always working on how I can get better and cheaper leads. You’re always going to be getting better at reaching out to your market and when you do find something that works, you’re going to run it until it doesn’t work anymore and then have to change it.
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Improving your product. Whether you sell a product or service, you will still always be looking to improve it. It’s never going to be perfect and the market will always be shifting.
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Building and improving your systems. This could be your funnels or automating different things. The bigger your business gets, the more repetitive tasks you’ll have. My funnels break pretty much on a weekly basis.
Don’t feel like you need to be perfect. Things will always feel broken. Just be consistent with never-ending improvement.
To learn more about improving your business, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
John Davie, founder of The Sales Gorilla, joins me in this episode. He teaches people how to get clients without being “salesy” by building relationships with clients. A lot of the people that resonate with The Sales Gorilla’s messaging don’t like the old-school type of closing; they prefer to niche down and find people who they want to work with.
John provides us with his three sales tactics that can get people to buy anything:
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Building rapid rapport. Through asking questions and listening to the answers, you can build authority and rapid rapport at the same time. If someone doesn’t feel like they are an expert, they will try to sell their product or service more because they feel like they need to prove something.
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Positive indifference. This is a stance you take in your sales conversation in that you are not attached to the outcome of the conversation. When people feel that you have positive indifference, they automatically become more attracted to you and the product. In general, people are repulsed by neediness. If you’re needy, you will push your prospects away very fast. In a situation where there is more demand than supply for your product, there is automatically positive indifference. Be aware that in the sales conversation you are actually diagnosing, not trying to sell.
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Value-based pricing. This will help you show the value of your service and make it easy to make an offer. A lot of people can do the sales conversation well and ask questions, but get tripped up when transitioning into the offer. Find out what a new client lead is worth to your client, figure out what their closing ratio is, then determine how many leads or new clients you think you can bring them. It’s ideal if you can give them a 10x ROI, but it depends on the industry. It completely re-frames you as coming in and helping their business rather than just being another expense.
If you are niche-specific and you are the expert in that niche, all of these can be done in a simple fifteen-minute conversation.
To learn more about getting clients to buy, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
A couple of years ago, I could never have imaged that my thirty-day revenue would hit $220k in one month. For the longest time, I had a dream to get to $100k and it took a lot of work to get there. I had so much frustration in feeling like I was working so hard for something, but it wasn’t happening. I just had to keep pushing and have faith that it was going to pay off. Momentum is a very powerful thing.
Let’s look back at what made this happen:
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Plant and harvest. There is a season for sowing and there is a season for reaping. Most people understand this but in the age of social media, we are forgetting this more and more. When it comes to building something meaningful, planting and harvesting is the key. The hard work comes before the rewards. The results of today are from the work that I did months ago.
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Order matters. There are different phases of business, and the most successful people are the most visible. Beginners come in, look at what the professionals are doing, and think they should do the same thing. That’s completely wrong, because there are certain foundations that need to be in place before you do what the most successful people do.
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Growth is about thinking properly about problems and relentless focus. You really need to look at what your most important tasks are that will move the needle. There are an infinite number of things you can do in your business, but most don’t matter at all. On the other hand, there are a few things that are usually uncomfortable to do but are going to make a difference for you.
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Protect the asset. As business owners, it’s easy to just obsess over getting results, but if you burn out, you’re done. I have to make sure that I take care of myself physically and mentally by doing things that are good for me. I also have to have a life outside of work.
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It’s all about volume. The people who are doing ten or a hundred times what you’re doing right now are likely getting the same conversion rate. They just have a lot more volume.
To learn more about how to grow this amount of revenue, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
I just got back from a two-week trip to Australia. I spent the second week in Port Douglas, and it’s one of the most treacherous places I have ever been. There are crocodiles in the ocean, so you’re not supposed to go near it at dawn or dusk because you could get eaten.
Port Douglas is at the Great Barrier Reef, so me and my sister decided to go scuba diving. Our guide taught us all the skills we needed, so we jumped in the water and used a breathing apparatus for the first time. We first had to demonstrate the skills we were taught, but the very first time I went under, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t used to it and got kind of panicked. I worried if I’d be able to go any deeper, but after slowly adjusting, I was fine. It was magical down there. Those skills that were very difficult the first time I had done them became totally natural to me.
The first time we practice skills, they seem really difficult and they can even be panic-inducing. That’s just because they’re new. If we learn these skills, they can give us entry to a whole new world. If you want to go into business, you need to develop these skills.
The first skill is copywriting. It’s not about being a good writer; it’s about speaking conversationally and understanding your market. You have to speak your customer’s language.
Skill number two is sales. That word scares some people off, but whether you know it or not, everything in life is about sales. Contrary to what some people think, this does not mean forcing someone to buy from you.
The third skill is funnels. They are a series of steps we take someone through that converts them from a stranger into a paying client. It’s about finding one thing that works for a specific group of people and doing that thing over and over again until you become the best in the world at it.
If you master these skills, you’re going to open up a whole new world and it’s going to be completely worth it.
To learn more about the skills you need to get clients, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
I’m currently in Byron Bay, Australia. It’s a really nice tourist town, but it wasn’t always like this. It started out as an industrial port town and was pretty dangerous a hundred years ago. It went through a transformation in a couple of different phases.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because when we set out to do something in our professional lives, the transformation that is ahead of us is something that we don’t yet understand. A lot of people get stuck when they try to understand the transformation before getting started. People want to know exactly what is going to happen, and that’s called analysis paralysis.
The path to success is stepping bravely into the unknown and accepting that you don’t know what’s going to happen. This is really hard for people because the schooling system that we’ve been brought up in taught us to think that getting the right answer was the path to success, which it’s not. It also taught us that making mistakes is bad, which it’s not.
We have all these bad habits to overcome in order to be successful in life. Whatever it is you’re doing, you have to overcome your bad habits through transformation.
In the 1960s, hippies started coming to Byron Bay because there is really good surfing here. They began to surf, hold music festivals, and so on, which caused the vibe of the town to change. At the time, I’m sure the town resisted this change; it couldn’t have been comfortable. The residents probably didn’t like the hippies at first, but as time went on, the residents got used to them and continued to evolve.
This is how transformation happens personally. When you start to change, you’re going to want to go back to the old you because you don’t want that old version of yourself to go away. The thing is, the influence of your old self will never disappear, just like the influence of the industrial town will never disappear.
You can only resist change for so long. In order to step into the next version of yourself, you’ve got to accept whatever it is you’re so resistant towards and just go for it.
To learn more about overcoming bad habits to influence change, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Sticky ideas are the key to building empires. Marie Kondo is an example of someone who used the principles of S.U.C.C.E.S. in her sticky idea to create her brand. She is a Japanese woman who teaches people to de-clutter their homes and has millions of followers. The surprising part about this to me is that she doesn’t even speak English, yet she has a show on American television. That says something about what she is doing.
The S.U.C.C.E.S. acronym is taken from the book Made to Stick. When I create an ad campaign, I look at this acronym and I try to figure out if my idea fits with all these principles:
· Simple. Marie Kondo picks up clutter and asks her clients if it sparks joy. This is a very simple idea, and it operates on emotion. If it does, the client keeps it. If it doesn’t, they throw it out. I use the same idea in an ad campaign.
· Unexpected. We see so many ads every day that we just tune them out. In order to get people’s attention, you need to give them something out of the ordinary.
· Concrete. Instead of describing sparking joy as a chemical release in the brain, Marie compares it to holding a puppy. Every one of us can understand what this feels like.
· Credible. If you can get a referral from one extremely reliable source, then your company becomes very credible.
· Emotional. As much as we like to think we are rational beings, humans operate on primal emotion. Marie appeals to emotion because she knows that logic is not enough for us to take action. You can do this in your company instead of just talking about features.
· Stories. They’re one of the best ways to appeal to emotions. You have to express previous pain in your life to customers who are experiencing that pain right now.
If you can apply all six of these principles, your business will stick in peoples minds and you’re going to get a lot more customers because of it.
To learn more about creating and implementing a sticky idea, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Made to Stick: https://www.amazon.ca/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287
If you have recently gone into business for yourself or if you have been an entrepreneur for a while, you might have noticed that it can be really difficult to decide what to work on. It’s not like a job where you go to work in the morning and as long as you complete your duties, the exact financial results that you expect will come. Entrepreneurship is a lot more exciting than that.
Doing the right things is a lot more important than getting things done. Some people are obsessive about getting things done efficiently and checking off their to-do list. In business, 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results. By dialing in on the hyper-effective tasks, actions, and outputs, we can create a power curve in our business and get vastly more output for not a lot more effort.
In the book 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall, we are given a chart of tasks. It starts at $10 per hour tasks and builds up to $10,000 per hour tasks. If you do one of the tasks in the $10,000 per hour column, you’re not going to make $10,000 today unless you already have a business. Most of the time, it’s about focusing on these $10,000 tasks over the long-term.
First, you need to do a time study over a two-week period to see where you are really spending your time. Your results will surprise you. After this, you need to cut out the unimportant tasks and focus on the $10,000 per hour ones. As for me, I do quarterly planning and come up with five big goals I want to accomplish.
Before I go to sleep, I make a very short list of what I’m going to do the next day and I try to focus on revenue-generating activities. I’ve found that I can really only do one $10,000 per hour task each day, and until that one thing is done, I don’t do anything else.
It’s really hard to do in the beginning because it feels like you’re wasting money. If you’re paying someone to bring you groceries because you’re busy working on more important things, you won’t see the payoff right away, but you’ll see the expense. This is why most people stay stuck. They don’t see the payoff from $10,000 per hour tasks instantly.
To learn more about focusing on $10,000 per hour tasks, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
80/20 Sales and Marketing: https://www.amazon.com/80-20-Sales-Marketing-Definitive-ebook/dp/B00CGNRVHE
Today I’ve got a very special guest with me: Kimberly Rich from The Bold Life Movement Podcast. We just got back from Funnel Hacking Live 2019 and some of the top minds in marketing were there. We learned so much that we wanted to come together and talk about our takeaways. One of the coolest things about live events for me is that they produce a real, physiological change in you.
Here are some of the key takeaways we have come up with:
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You only do things that you feel like doing. So, you have to ask yourself, “how do I make myself feel like doing the things I’m supposed to do?”
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Never stop offering people a way to work with you. Kimberly says that this a huge mistake that she has made, and she thinks a lot of other people are making it too. Every moment is an opportunity to create something of value and to put it out in the marketplace.
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Don’t take the fun out of buying. Sometimes people will think they’re bothering their customers by pitching to them, but if you really think you’re giving them such an amazing experience, it’s going to super fun for them.
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Where is the drama in your marketing? Just look at how humans consume content: they love drama. Things that are a little polarizing or taboo are what catch someone’s eye. As a buyer, you’re looking for a distraction.
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People buy things for status. They aren’t just buying a product or service, they’re buying a new them. For example, I help people stop being a nine-to-five worker.
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Advocate for your people. If you can be the loudest voice against the outside forces, everyone in your movement will see you as their leader.
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Stop saying “time is money.” Time is infinitely more valuable than money. Invest in yourself.
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Most people are too scared. They think that they’re going to fail, so they don’t take chances or risks.
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Do you have marketing stamina? If your ad flops, you have to tweak it and keep testing. If you have the stamina, results will come.
To learn more about getting sales through funnels, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Check out Kimberly at The Bold Life Movement: http://www.theboldlifemovement.com/
Get tickets for Funnel Hacking Live 2020: https://funnelhackinglive.com/fhl-2020-sales
There’s this woman that keeps reaching out to me, asking for a job. I very much applaud her persistence. Just from continually being in contact, I finally asked her what her rate is. I don’t have a position for her, but because she keeps reaching out, I know that she would be a hard worker.
She didn’t say that her rate was $45 an hour, but that the investment was $45 an hour. Somebody probably taught her to do this; to position her fee as an investment. At first glance, that’s a really good idea. You want a client’s money to be an investment in their business. However, I don’t want to invest in working with her, because what does that do for me? She didn’t tell me, for example, “here’s five things I can do to grow your business,” she just told me what her skills are.
Here’s something I want to make very clear: business owners invest in results. If you come to a business and you don’t know what you can do for them, they’ll still invest in you if they know what result they can get by putting you to work, but what they’re going to do is buy up your time.
If you come to a business with a strategy and a proven result, like telling them that you just got a very specific result with other businesses and asking this one if they’d like the same result, you’re going to be able to get a lot more money. You’re getting paid for the strategy and to know what to do. The woman who was reaching out to me didn’t know what to do. All she’s saying are “here are my skills, you can buy my time.”
Your job is to be a strategist. If you reach out to business to sell your time, you are a commodity and they can replace you with anyone else in the market. When you start charging by results, you’re going to get better clients and have a lot more fun in business.
To learn more about becoming a strategist, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Today we’re going to talk about a subject that is very important. It is the deadliest beginner trap you can have when starting a business: your own mind. I’m going to tell you, very specifically, how your mind gets in your way when you’re starting a business for the very first time.
I have a saying in my programs: “the map doesn’t appear until the car starts moving.” Most people approach business when they’re first starting out like a cross-country road trip. They plan their trip ahead of time, they print out directions, and they want to make sure everything is perfect before they get started. They then get in the driver seat and start thinking about what could go wrong along the way, like “what if there’s a traffic jam in Kansas? Shouldn’t we figure that out before we leave?” Their friend in the passenger seat, or rather, their friend who already has a business, says “what are you, crazy?”
Even though the driver has a map, they don’t know what the full journey is going to look like. Their mind can’t quiet down, and it’s not their fault; it’s just that they’ve never been through a process like this before. The process of entrepreneurship is one where the plan you started out with isn’t going to get you where you want to go. When you start, your mind will go crazy with “what ifs.” In business, you need to have faith that the outcome will happen if you put your foot on the accelerator and keep going.
To summarize:
1. Solve one problem at a time. Focus on the one right in front of you and don’t even worry about the other problems. You’re going to go insane if you try to solve future problems.
2. “What ifs” will paralyze you forever. Wait until “what ifs” happen, and then solve them.
If you want to be a successful entrepreneur (or take a road trip from New York to LA), you need to have faith. Some things will go wrong, some things will go right, and you just take it all as it comes.
To learn more about overcoming mental barriers in entrepreneurship, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
I had a conversation with a client this week about renegotiating my fee. I had gotten so busy that I didn’t have much time to service this client, so I had the difficult task of telling him I had to double my rates and do less work for him. He said that he’d rather not pay more, but that he will anyway.
So, how can you double your prices, cut your work in half, and have the client be okay with it?
Make yourself valuable. If you are priced at the bottom of the market, established business owners are going to think that you’re not going to have enough time to service them because you have too many other clients. It also shows that you don’t have enough confidence in yourself. You’re going to attract budget-conscious shoppers instead of results-oriented buyers.
The first step to positioning yourself this way is to become the very best in the world at what you do. That sounds hard, and yes, it is really hard to be the best in the world at one thing. If you want to be the best in the world at digital marketing, that will be extremely difficult. However, it’s not so hard to be the best at the intersection of two things. What about digital marketing for dog trainers? You’re going to have to work hard, but if you hustle and you’re committed, you can absolutely master a niche in a year or two.
Step two is to charge higher prices by price anchoring your services. When you’re talking to those dog trainers, don’t talk about all the steps that you’re going to do for them. Talk about the return on investment. Don’t show them costs, show them what your services will do for their business.
The third step is what my friend calls “positive indifference.” This means that when you are talking to a client, you are unattached to whether or not they decide to go with you. You act as their adviser, tell them what you think the best solution is, and act indifferent towards them working with you. The easiest way to do this is to have so much demand for your services that you can’t possibly take on all clients.
To learn more about becoming the best in the world in a niche, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
This is the final installment of the eighteen lessons that I learned in 2018. Let’s finish up so that we can keep doing the things that worked and stop doing the things that didn’t last year.
15. Mastery is everything. Most people never become masters, because mastery is kind of boring. Mastery is about repetition of the fundamentals every day; doing the easy stuff perfectly over and over again. A lot of the time in this internet marketing world, people are out there looking for the latest “hack” that’s going to make everything come together, but marketing is just about fundamentals.
16. Teaching is the best way to learn. If you can’t teach something to someone else, you probably don’t understand how it works. Form a weekly group and take turns teaching content to each other.
17. Stories are your best way to communicate. They are the best way to market and to form a relationship with somebody. That’s why sales webinars, ads, and more often use stories. One of the easiest ways to write copy for a Facebook ad is to just tell a story. Another lesson that this has taught me is that people love conflict. I’ve seen people in a market that is so saturated come out and be polarizing, and everyone just eats it up. People also love to pick sides and form a team.
18. People don’t care about your success. You have to be in it for you. Chances are your parents, spouse, etc. only care that you make enough money to pay your bills. If you’re trying to build an empire as an entrepreneur, no one’s going to care about it as much as you. Sooner or later, it will become more about your team and customers. Once you get to that point in entrepreneurship, it’s going to become much easier to keep pushing.
Those were the eighteen biggest lessons I learned in 2018. See you in the next episode.
To get a full hour-long training on how to conduct your own annual review, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Today I’m going to continue covering the eighteen lessons that I learned in 2018 that helped me grow a business to $100,000 per month in revenue.
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Most people are managers of their lives instead of CEOs. They worry only about the day-to-day instead of making strategic decisions. Some management duties in your life could include paying bills, going to work, buying groceries, and other day-to-day things that don’t have a huge impact on the direction that your life is heading in. Be the CEO and create a strategy for your life. Choose where to invest your time and resources and cut out unnecessary things.
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If you want a change in life, hire someone to produce it. This keeps you accountable and gets the job done. This previous year, I finally hired a personal trainer. I wanted to get in really good shape, and I knew that I couldn’t do it on my own because I had been going to the gym previously but wasn’t making much process. If your business isn’t growing, hire a business coach or join a course.
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Say yes to things, then figure out how to get the courage to get them done. If I’m scared of something, I’ll commit to it while putting my fear aside for a second, and then figure out how to get it done. If you’re scared to take on a new client because you don’t know if you can handle it, just say yes.
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Life is boring without community. If you want to accomplish great things in life, create a community around everything you’re passionate about or that you’re working towards. It’s a lot easier to give up if there’s nobody around.
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Giving up alcohol. This one is controversial, because people think I’m telling them they need to do it. I decided to give up alcohol to be healthier mentally and physically and to focus on long-term vision in my life.
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Growth is in the poles, or polar opposites. You need to attack what you are afraid of. If you’re not making progress in one area of your life, it’s probably because you’re scared of polarity in that area. You must surrender to what you’re afraid of.
Be sure to check out the next episode where I finish telling you the lessons I learned in 2018.
To learn more about growing an online business like I did last year, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
If you listened to the last episode, you know that I’m covering the eighteen lessons that I learned in 2018 than can help you grow your business in 2019. I covered one through four last time, so let’s pick up where we left off:
5. The difference between rich people and poor people is how they spend their free time. We touched on this last time, but you must spend the majority of your free time on production rather than consumption. Producers make money and consumers spend it.
6. People pleasing is the enemy of progress. The textbook of a leadership class I took said “agreeableness is not an indicator of success.” This is a scientific fact. If you rank high on agreeableness, you have a lower chance of success in life. It means you are more worried about what people think about you than getting what you want. Become okay with being disliked.
7. You have to resist the pull back to normal. Once you start to breakout and have some success, the people around you are going to pull you down in subtle ways. We’re biologically wired to want to be the same as the people around us. Pull yourself up instead of resisting that urge to be pulled back down.
8. It’s normal to feel like everything is going to fall apart, but no matter what, you cannot have a plan B; you have to burn the ships. This causes you to go all-in and commit to the outcome that you set out to achieve. The market only values excellence, so if you only half-ass something, nobody is going to give you any money.
That’s all for today. See you in the next episode when I continue the lessons I learned in 2018.
To learn more about growing an online business like I did last year, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
At the beginning of every year, I like to make a list of lessons I learned in the previous year. I go back, look at my goals from the previous year, see if I hit those goals or not, think about if I want to still go after the ones I didn’t hit, and set new goals for the year.
I also acknowledge the good things that happened in the previous year. It’s easy to look back at a year and feel like it just flew by, but once I actually review what happened throughout the year, the progress becomes really clear. I usually make a lot more progress than I thought.
In 2018, I worked a lot on my business, visited three countries outside the US, I took an acting class and performed two scenes, grew a new business from start-up that will generate over $1,000,000 this year, and more. I’ve also seen hundreds of people in my program start businesses, allowing me to see what works for people and what doesn’t.
I’m going to cover some of the eighteen lessons I learned in 2018 today, and more in the next episode. Let’s begin:
1. Growth is about leadership. If you’re looking to grow a business where you help people solve problems, your job is to become a leader.
2. Distractions are systematic. If you need to shift your attention to production instead of consumption, you have to remove anything that’s going to distract you.
3. Saying “this is what I signed up for.” For example, if I come up short and lose money on ads, I don’t get too stressed. I just say, “this is what I signed up for.” It makes me move past the difficulty and focus on the next step.
4. You are entitled to your work, not the spoils of your work. The world doesn’t owe you anything, your work doesn’t owe you anything, and you should do your work for work’s sake. That doesn’t mean to do busy work that doesn’t produce results, but it means do the things that produce results and have faith that they will pay off.
Tune in to the next episode to hear more of the lessons I learned in 2018!
To learn more about growing an online business like I did last year, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
One of the biggest mistakes beginners make in business is they think it’s all about their idea. They spend months building a product or service, launch, and nobody wants what they have to offer. The solution I have to that is you actually need to sell your thing before you create it.
Say that you have a Facebook ad agency. You don’t sell leads to clients, you sell solutions to problems. If you don’t understand what the problems of your market are, no one is going to listen to you. You need to offer what the market wants, not what you think you should give them.
The first thing to do is go to Google and search for information about your competitors. Chances are, they’ve already done a lot of research and know how to speak to the market. Write down the key phrases they use, figure out what offers they’re making, and see what’s going on in the niche.
Next, go to Amazon and look up books in your niche. Look at the reviews of these books and see what people are complaining about. You can figure out what the gaps are in the market by reading these comments. The next step is to go to Reddit and see if there is a conversation going on around your market. Then you can go to YouTube and see the comments there.
I create a Word document that has all the phrases that my market is using, their complaints about the market, and their desired outcome. By the time I’m done with it, I know enough to send an email to experts and ask them for an interview to learn more.
After these conversations, you’re going to start to notice trends. With all this knowledge, you can put together an offer that’s irresistible and gives the market exactly what it wants. You can put this together in an email, send it out to a big list of business owners in the market, and offer to have a phone call with them. They’re going to be interested in talking with you because you have what they want.
If this sounds like a lot of work, it not. You can deep dive into a niche within a couple of hours, and by the end of the week, you can be an expert in that niche.
If you want to learn to build a Facebook ad agency that you can run from anywhere in the world, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
This is the time of year when most people phone it in. They essentially take everything from the beginning of November until January 1 off from work. They might go into the office and do some work or work on their business a little bit, but they decide that because it’s the holidays they’re not going to go out and sell.
The thing is, the people who are crushing it are selling every single day. They don’t care about the holidays. They’re pushing even harder in these months to gear up for the next year. Let’s talk about how I made $4,688 on Christmas Day.
Reason #1 is because my lead generation systems are on 24/7/365. At all hours of every single day, I have offers to solve problems in exchange for money getting in front of my market. You need to figure out how to get people to come to your business, and just by doing that, you’re going to be able to make your product better. I compete on volume, and you should too.
Reason #2 is that I made it easy for people to give me money. So many people have businesses where if their customer wanted to give them money today, there would be no easy way for their customer to do that. If I look up your business and I don’t know how to either schedule a call with you or pay you money directly, you’re screwing yourself.
Reason #3 is that I did take off Christmas Day, but I didn’t take the holidays off. I have been working very hard all month because of momentum. Momentum is such a powerful force, and once you start to build momentum in your business, it’s like a snowball rolling downhill that gets bigger and bigger. If you stop working completely, it’s like you’re stopping that snowball and all of its momentum. If you need a break, it’s much easier to just cut way back on hours and keep pushing that snowball a little bit every single day.
The results we get in our business are largely the result of things we did a couple of weeks, months, or even years ago. Often, things don’t pay off right away. If you do these three things, you can make a lot of money on Christmas Day.
To learn more about making money every day of the year, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Most people, when they have a goal, they go out there and try to accomplish it and it starts to get hard. If you’re not used to pushing on something until it turns into the results that you want, then you might say “I chose the wrong opportunity.”
There are a million reasons that you can give yourself to change opportunities. Here’s what I want you to do instead: keep pushing and either have a breakdown or a breakthrough.
Think about trying to lift a certain amount of weight on the bench press at the gym. Your friend is yelling “you can do it” in your face. You’re going to fail and your friend’s going to spot you, or you’re going to lift more weight than you thought you could. You can see in this scenario that either outcome is fine.
The wrong move would be getting off the bench press. This is what most people do in business. They start pushing, say that it’s too heavy, and go to a different weight machine. They say “this weight machine looks great. I’m going to be successful at this, because the problem before was that it was the bench press.” The exact same thing will happen again, and they’ll keep moving to different machines until they have a breakdown and realize that the weight machines aren’t the problem, it’s the person.
I teach how to start digital marketing business to people who have to choose a niche and then become an expert in it. The same thing happens. They go into a niche but say that it’s too hard and switch. It happens again and again because they don’t realize that it’s not the market that’s the problem, it’s their attitude towards business. If you push through and solve the difficult problems in the market, you will be rewarded more than you ever imaged.
You’re not going to get anywhere extraordinary in life without having breakdowns. They show you that you need to push beyond your limits to achieve what you want in life. What you want is not attainable as a person who gives up when it’s too hard.
To learn more about strategizing for your life and business, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Routine usually keeps us productive, but when you break out of that routine, it can get a little harder. When you try do something new, like starting a business, it’s going to be even more difficult. You’re going to encounter much more resistance and you might find yourself putting off those things you promised yourself you would do.
Here’s what I do to solve this problem. At the end of every week on Sunday night, I have a goal-setting session with my friend. We have a shared spreadsheet with my name on one side and his on the other, and we list our tasks for the week. It’s really easy on Sunday nights to think about where you want to go in your business and the actions you have to take to get there.
The hard part about this is on Friday night when you still haven’t done what you said, it turns into doing it when you don’t want to do it anymore. It’s easy to write them down when we’re excited about the week, but after the week wears us down, we don’t want to do them anymore.
To overcome this, my friend and I put money on the line every week and the deadline is the end of Sunday. This week we put down about $120. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s enough to make it hurt. Since there’s a consequence for me not doing what I said I was going to do, it pushes me to complete that task.
These goals need to be specific, measurable, timely, and you should break them down into small pieces. This doesn’t let you cheat yourself if you didn’t complete every piece of it, lets you remember everything that you need to do, and you get satisfaction every time you mark a task as completed. Additionally, if you’re only focused on business, you’re going to burn yourself out. There are other things in life you need to do to take care of yourself that you also might have resistance to.
The difference between success and failure is what you do in those moments when you have a choice. When you think it will be inconsequential to put something off until next week, and do that over and over again throughout the years, it makes a really big difference.
If you’d like to learn more about how to get stuff done even when you’re travelling, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
If you’re just starting out in business, the #1 thing you need to focus on is skill development. Without the proper skills, you can never build a business that will fund your lifestyle. Let’s talk about what skills you need, how to learn them, and how you can use the Feynman Method to 4x your speed and have a lot more fun.
As a beginner, the skills you need to focus on are:
- Copywriting: learning how to communicate your business value proposition in words.
- Sales: can you convert someone who is interested in your business into a sale?
- Product development: creating a product that fits the market.
To use the Feynman Method, go through the first module of whatever or whatever you’re learning, or the first chapter of whatever book you’re reading, then write the name of the concept at the top of a black piece of paper. Next, explain that concept on the page using simple English and pretend you’re teaching it to someone else that is a new student of this concept. This will show you what you understand about the concept, but also what you don’t understand. Next, go back through the material and re-learn it. Then, teach it to an actual person; find someone who is interested in learning that concept, and go through a lesson with them.
When you go through the lesson with someone, they can ask you questions which will make you explain and fill in the gaps. Instead of just going through something yourself and not implanting it, you’re actually learning how to teach it to other people, internalizing it, and then implementing it in your business.
Try using the Feynman method so that you can realize what you know, what you don’t know, where you need to fill in the gaps, and you’re also going to have a lot of fun doing it.
If you’d like to learn more about developing your business skills, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Imposter syndrome is when you start to have some success at something, or you’re just trying something new, and you feel like a fake; you feel like you’re an imposter and that you shouldn’t be doing it. A lot of times, new business owners will start to have some success and then they sabotage themselves because deep down they feel like an imposter.
I’ve felt the same way and so have some of the most successful people that I know. It’s always going to be there a little bit, but the more you practice your craft, the less you’ll have to deal with imposter syndrome. You’re going to be bad at something when you first start. You need to accept that and be okay with being bad at something.
The first way to get past imposter syndrome is practice and preparation. Don’t try to do it on your own; find somebody who has been where you want to go and study what they’ve done. Study it over and over and over.
The second way is when you’re new at something, be honest about it. Work for free or guarantee your work to get clients. This lets you be straightforward about your situation and not provide risk to the client.
The third way to overcome imposter syndrome is to accept that you will never be perfect. You don’t know what’s going to happen with a new marketing campaign until you launch and see how the market reacts. You can do your preparation so it’s a calculated risk, but you’ll never know for sure what’s going to happen
The fourth way to deal with imposter syndrome is to feel the fear and do it anyway. A lot of people want to wait until they’re no longer afraid to try something. They think if they prepare and practice forever then eventually, they won’t be scared anymore and can move forward. Everybody is scared, but the more you do something, the less scared you’ll be.
Imposter syndrome is completely normal, and no matter how successful you become, you’ll probably always have imposter syndrome. If you learn how to manage it, you can realize your wildest dreams.
If you’d like to learn more about overcoming imposter syndrome, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
This episode of the podcast is about my guide to first-time travel. I’m going to run trough my guides for what to do before you leave, what to pack, how to take better photos, and how to preserve your memories.
The first thing I want to talk about is things to do before you go to make your trip better:
- Buy travel insurance. If I have medical or scheduling issues while abroad, this will cover it.
- Submit a travel notice for your credit cards and bank. Sometimes, they will cut off your cards if you don’t do this.
- Make sure you backup everything on your phone and laptop.
- I like to download some of my songs on Spotify so that they can be listened to offline while on the plane (I do this with movies on Netflix too).
- Load up your books on Kindle. I like to read books about where I’m going to visit.
- Check your passport and make sure it is valid for at least six months after your trip is over.
- Check your credit and debit card expirations and order new ones if you need to.
- Read the Wikipedia pages for the country you’re travelling in and the city you’re arriving in.
- Look into necessary immunizations.
- Look up directions from the airport to your accommodation and screenshot it.
- Rearrange a taxi from the airport beforehand or get an idea of how much it should cost.
- Have accommodations booked for at least the first night.
- Bring the right bag. It’s better to bring too little than too much.
- Build your travel wallet. The cards you carry should be a bit different than the ones you use at home.
- Email a friend or family member a copy of your passport, US embassy information, and details about where you’re staying.
- Walk with your hands in your pockets so you don’t get pickpocketed.
- Apps to download: Splitwise, an offline translator, a currency exchange calculator, an offline map, Agoda, Airbnb, Orbitz, and Hostelworld.
Now I’m going to jump into my packing list:
- For clothes: socks, underwear, boardshorts, workout shorts, tank tops, one pair of regular shorts, one pair of jeans, T-shirts, a sweatshirt, sandals, and one pair of shoes.
- A portable speaker, a GoPro, a Kindle, a backup phone charger, a travel adapter, and two sets of headphones.
- Medicine such as painkillers, stomach meds, bandages, etc.
- A rain jacket is nice to have.
- A refillable water bottle (if you’re in a country where the tap water is drinkable).
- Carabiners and zip ties.
- A combination lock.
- Earplugs and an eye mask to make it easy to sleeps on planes, trains, etc.
- A pen for filling our immigration documents.
- A clothespin to open up my SIM card.
- Laptop and charger, of course.
- A notebook.
- A mini flashlight.
- A second pair of sunglasses that you don’t mind losing can be handy for parties.
- Snacks for the plane.
- In most countries you can replace anything that you’re forgotten, so the pressure’s not too high.
Next, I want to talk about taking photos. There are three things you need to learn to make your travel photography much better:
- The rule of thirds. If you were to cut the picture up into thirds, don’t put the person in the middle section. This way, you get to see more of the landscape and get a better composition.
- Learn to tap your phone to get focus. That’s simple.
- Make sure to shoot your videos in widescreen, except when you plan to share them on Instagram or Snapchat.
Next, journaling is a way to organize memories in a way that you’ll really appreciate. Take ten minutes every day to write down what you did. Travel is going to bri
“How do I avoid saturation in my new marketing business?” This is a common objection, and I kind of chuckle when I hear it. Once we break down the reality of the situation, it’s kind of ridiculous. I’m going to give you three tactics to get around market saturation so that you don’t have to deal with as much competition.
Tactic #1 is to fish in another pond to find clients who will work with you. There are 28,000,000 small businesses in the United States alone. The fact is that every single business needs leads to survive. Every single month in the US, 543,000 new businesses start. You can go out there and grab this new business and you can also go after established businesses by offering them something new.
Tactic #2 is to use a different kind of bait to get clients. If you’re offering what everyone else is offering, the market might feel saturated to you. The key to getting around this is positioning yourself as meaningfully different and better in your offer.
Tactic #3 is to go fishing for a different kind of fish. Digital marketers who have no speciality are like the unpopular kid on the playground at school screaming “pay attention to me,” but no one is interested. You need to position yourself as in-demand and different.
There’s always going to be competition, and there’s always room for newcomers. Competition is a good thing: it means that there is demand. If you go into a market and there’s no competition, it means nobody wants what you have to offer.
If you want to learn more about how to become the king or queen of your niche, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/free
Today, I want to talk about the recipe that you need for success. There is a repeatable process that you can follow to get clients for your own business and get great results for your clients.
The first ingredient you need is the right mindset. The biggest challenge for the beginner entrepreneur is having proper work habits. The technical stuff, like how to reach out to clients and get results for them, is all stuff that you can figure out. But if you can’t put time into your business every day, it’s never going to happen. The biggest thing when it comes to your work habits is that consistency is more important than intensity.
The next ingredient is creating your offer. Most new digital marketers don’t know how to create an offer for their own business. The first step is to niche down to something very specific. The second thing is to create a curiosity gap with your offer, which means building curiosity with your message so that your prospect will really want to talk to you.
The third ingredient is the structure of the call that you have with your client. A lot of new people will have no format for this at all. They’ll get on the phone, let the client lead the call, not know what to say, and end the call without any business taking place.
Next up is knowing where to find clients. We need to determine which businesses are already spending money on marketing, not getting optimal results, and can easily be helped with your services.
Our fifth ingredient is knowing what kind of funnel to set up for the clients. We need to figure this out ahead of time so when we talk to our clients, we know what we’re going to offer them, and we can be confident on the phone.
The final ingredient is knowing how to run Facebook ads. It takes a competent marketer to do them right, and when you do, they’re a complete game changer. It will change everything because you have a funnel that works and traffic that never stops.
To learn more about the six ingredients you need for marketing success, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
When I was starting out as a marketer, I worked with all sorts of clients. Each time I got a new client, I was starting from scratch on their campaigns and funnels. It was a lot of work. At the time, I wished I could fire my worst clients and clone my best ones. I’m going to show you how to actually do this.
If you want to make more money with less work, you have to specialize in something. You need to pick one niche and become the best at getting results in your niche. If you have one client, then having five clients shouldn’t be fives times the work for you.
At the time I was figuring this out, I had clients in a bunch of different markets that each required a different approach. So, I fired all of my clients except the one that I was getting the absolute best results for. Then, I went out and found five more clients that looked the same; they had the same business model and same type of customer. I cloned the funnel from the one client I kept and sold it to these new clients.
What you’re essentially doing is franchising your funnel. If you’re a generalist, then you’re just a body for hire. Your clients will walk all over you because they know they can replace you in a second. However, if you own a niche, you can take the power back from your clients and be in control.
We can pick a niche and then write an email after we’ve gotten results for one business. We then make a contact list for all businesses that are similar and send an email sharing the results that we got for someone in their niche. Then we can ask them if they want to get the same results.
If you want to learn more about funnel cloning whether you’re starting from scratch or are already a consultant, check out https://www.christianmartin.org/free
When I was first getting started as a consultant, I was on the road, traveling full-time, and needed money, but I didn’t have any background in marketing, I had never worked with a paying client, and I didn’t know how to get somebody to say “yes.” That is, until I came up with what I call The Springboard Method.
If you’re brand new, what I want you to do is go out there, find clients, do the work for free for one client, and then turn that into a testimonial and referrals. That’s the Springboard Method. Any time after that when you get on a call with a potential client who asks if you have any previous results, you can say that you do and show them the results from your first client.
If you don’t know how to get your first client, I put together a script for you that you can use to post on Facebook right now. I’ve given this to tons of people and it works wonders. The first time I used this script, I ended up booking two clients at $1500 each per month. Click here to get it.
There’s another method I want to talk to you about when it comes to getting around not having credentials or experience. The misconception with new people is that it’s all about them. If you’re trying to get paying clients and you’re worried about yourself, you’re not focused on serving your client.
You need to focus on their pain. Assess the situation for the client and if you can help, you prescribe a solution just like a doctor does. When you can offer a solution, the business generally does not ask about your credentials or experience. By speaking directly to what they need, they say “yes, please help me.” Focus on who you’re serving, provide a result for them, and then turn that into more clients, testimonials, and referrals.
To learn more about how to get your first digital marketing client, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
If you’re out there and you’re wondering what online business to start to replace your income, I want to urge you to consider becoming a marketing consultant. Why? Because it’s one of the best businesses to start from scratch. There’s zero upfront capital needed, there’s almost no overhead, each client is worth a lot of money, you can work from anywhere, there are unlimited markets, and there’s no cap on your income.
You don’t need any formal education or credentials to get started in this business. After making business cards and other materials for a roofing company, I realized that all they really cared about was getting more leads and more sales. The more directly I could provide those things for them, the more I would get paid, the happier my client would be, and if I focused on those two things then I would actually have less work to do.
I did some research about three or four years ago and discovered that the best way to do it is with sales and marketing funnels. A funnel is a series of steps somebody goes through to go from a stranger to a paying customer. Some people think a funnel is a magical webpage, but it’s more about what you say in the funnel.
What we want to focus on are simple funnels; three-step funnels. Generally, this takes the form of clicking on an ad, being brought to a landing page, and being presented an offer. As a marketing consultant, your job is to set up these steps that a customer goes through. Building funnels is the best thing to offer because the businesses already need what you have to offer, it’s easy to justify your cost, and the return on investment for the business is obvious to the business.
The cool thing about selling funnels is that you can charge based on value, not hours. A roofing company pays a broker $2000 to bring them a sale whether it took them ten minutes or ten hours. What you make is not tied to how many hours you work, but the results that you produce.
If you want to learn more about becoming a marketing consultant, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Traditional, conventional knowledge says to go to school, get good grades, get a job, climb your way up the corporate ladder, and in twenty to forty years you’ll be able to retire and finally do the things that you really want to do. If you take conventional advice, you will get conventional results. Today, I want to talk to you about the three lies of the “9 to 5.”
Lie #1 is that travel is expensive. You don’t need to wait until you’re old and retired to travel. Some of the greatest cultural experiences I’ve had have been in low-cost countries. Last time I was in southeast Asia, a scooter rental was $4 a day, and to fill it with gas was $1.40 for the week. A full meal was $3.30. A villa with a master bedroom, suite, swimming pool, and daily maid service was $30 per night. It’s cheaper for me to be travelling than living in the United States.
Lie #2 is that you need a piece of paper giving you permission to do a certain type of work. The truth is that the powers that be want you to go into thirty years of debt so that you can be a cubical slave to make them more money. Putting you into massive debt as the first step in your adult life is going to ensure that you’re a good worker for the next thirty years. You don’t need a piece of paper to work as a marketer, you need the ability.
Lie #3 is that working for someone else is the safe, responsible thing to do. Oxford University says that over the next twenty-five years, 47% of jobs will disappear. That means if you’re in school right now, most likely the job you’re training for won’t even exist in a decade. To survive in today’s world, you need to be able to adapt to change.
In this podcast, we’re going to talk about how to use the power of marketing to be able to work from anywhere in the world. If you want a different life, one where you can redistribute your retirement over your entire life, then you need to take different action.
If you want to learn more about living your life differently and working from anywhere in the world, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
Have you ever wished that you could ditch the morning commute, smash the alarm clock and take off on a worldwide adventure without worrying about giving up your career? I've worked from 20+ countries over the last 5 years as a digital marketer. One of the questions I often get is "can I do this too?" Today, I'll tell you my story getting started, and talk about how you can use the power of marketing to get a life you don't need a vacation from.