Pinterest Ad Spend: How Ezra Firestone of Smart Marketer Generated $41k in Sales from $775

We were not the people to invent content marketing. Johnson Johnson and Dove created soap operas to engage when the first mass media besides newspaper came out, which was television, to engage housewives and sell them home products. I mean, you know, using content as a medium to engage someone and then make an offer is one of the oldest ways of selling, and we've just transitioned it to online sales. Do you want to impact the world and still turn a profit?

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Here's your host, Eric Siu. Hey everyone, just a quick heads up that we're giving away an ebook called 29 Growth Hacking Quick Wins. We co-authored this book with Matan Griffel of One Month, and it'll give you a solid base on where you can create growth ideas from. So all you need to do is text QUICKTIPS to 33444. That's the word quick, Q-U-I-C-K, and tips, T-I-P-S as in sugar, to All right, everyone. Today we have Ezra Firestone, who is the founder/creative director of Smart Marketer, which is an information hub for do-it-yourself entrepreneurs. He's also a partner in Boom by Cindy Joseph and the company's head of digital marketing. Ezra, how are you doing today?

Hey, man. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm happy to be here.

Thanks for being here. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your background to start us off?

You know, I guess, are we talking personal or professional?

Let's go a little personal and jump right into how it leads into professional.

Sure, sure. So I have a bit of an interesting story in that I grew up in an alternative lifestyle experiment, sort of a communal living type of situation, and my parents and this group that I grew up with teach courses on things like jealousy, money, possessions, communication, sensuality, all these things that come up when you're relating with other people, and so their sort of focus of their information is on how to have winning and profitable relationships both across the gender line and just in general. And so that was a really interesting— and I went to public school and I wrestled and I had the whole completely normal life except for other than when I went home, I didn't go home to like, you know, 2 parents and a white picket fence. I went home to like a group of people. It was just an interesting place to grow up.

Uh-huh.

And so I had this background of information on how to be successful at Communication essentially, and since I've been marketing now online for about 10 years, and essentially what I've discovered is that marketing is communication at the end of the day, and if you are able to communicate effectively, you can sell more and you can engage people and you can move them to make decisions, you know, towards your brand and product. So that's been kind of a cool little tie-in.

Got it. So, I mean, let's talk a little bit about your success because, you know, I know you're known for your ecommerce. My friends talk about you, you know, you speak a lot. So can you tell us about your success in ecommerce and any other, you know, type of online marketing success?

Sure. So right now I have sort of a permaculture business model in that I have this information blog, smartmarketer.com, and what we do there is we document what we're doing in our ecommerce businesses. So I've got a team of 20 folks, we're all virtual, and that's designers, developers, conversion rate optimization specialists, ads managers, customer support, strategy officers, the whole thing, and every one of those people I have personally brought up. They were not online before. They weren't people who worked in the industry. They were like friends and family and cousins. We can get into a whole other conversation about whether or not you should hire your friends and family, but I've built this team and we do ecommerce. That's my background. I started selling Halloween wigs back in 2006. I was the number 1 retailer of mullet wigs one year in America, which was kind of cool. And so I've seen ecommerce evolve from the dropshipping days, from the faceless ecommerce store days, to all the folks heading over to Amazon, you know, selling private label products, to people coming up with their own brands, from the SEO days to the PPC. And I've just sort of been in the industry long enough to see these ebbs and flows. And we kind of— I call it luck or timing or whatever you want to call it, but our first ecommerce brand, which I've now sold, did really, really well. And it was basically mostly search engine optimization and Google AdWords. Back then it was really easy to generate visibility using those 2 mediums, and so those were very successful, and now we have— we do over $1 million a month in our ecommerce businesses, and Smart Marketer, the information publishing brand, does a couple million a year, so we've got several very successful businesses, and we have the— we're fortunate enough to engage with other entrepreneurs and business owners and share what's working for us and get to see what's going on in their businesses, so we've got a A nice level of sort of insight into what's happening in our industry through folks in our mastermind. We've got people in our mastermind who are 7-figure, 8-figure retailers, so we kind of get to see the spectrum of what's happening in ecommerce and information marketing, you know, yeah, so there you go.

Yeah, so it sounds like, I mean, you know, obviously there's a ton of internet marketing content out there, but the fact is, you know, you guys are out there actually implementing You guys are sharing the actual templates on how to get this stuff done, right?

Yeah, well what we do is we're an information-only company on the Smart Marketer side. We don't do anything for anyone, we're not a services agency, and what we do is we document what's working for us and then we share it. So we've got courses on how to do Pinterest advertising that include landing page templates, or courses on how to build a Shopify store that include a theme that's based on all of our split tests, or Facebook advertising courses, or, you know, customer retention and re-engagement Automation sequences or just whatever we're doing in our business, courses on how to set up and sell on Amazon because we also have Amazon brands as well. So we sort of just document what's working for us and we share information, checklists, and templates with the community of folks who are interested.

Got it, and how much do your courses, I mean, what is it, what does the pricing structure look like?

You know, we are the good to better brand, so you don't come to us if you want to get started. That's not what we're good at. I can't help you pick a product. I, you know, that's like, I'm good at if you want to scale, if you want to understand structure and systems and how to build a team and how to leverage, you know, how to, how to no longer be a sole operator and how to do large-scale direct response advertising and media buys. We spend several hundred thousand dollars a month across Google, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram. So we are the good to better. So all of our stuff, we have a whole bunch of free stuff on the blog.

Yeah.

You know, free videos and free courses and stuff like that, and then once you engage with our paid courses, it's $1,000 or more. So we've got, you know, $1,500 courses and $4,000 courses, and we've got subscriptions, and we are now moving into software as a service, and we've got some recurring softwares that integrate with ecommerce stores and do different marketing things for them. So it's kind of our model.

Awesome. What do revenues and number of customers look like today?

For what?

For Smart Marketer.

For Smart Marketer, we will— we just hit $2 million for 2015 in revenue. The cool thing about the information business is it's all profit, right? Like the profit— not all profit, but the profit margins are very high. So on $2 million in revenue, that's somewhere around $800,000 in profit. Now, again, a business comes down to the value that you provide, and so we have high-dollar courses because they're worth that, and we also want to filter out people who are just getting started. That's not our specialty, whereas if you look at like our e-commerce business, we'll do $1 million in a month in revenue and have about $150,000 in profit, so in order to get to that same $800,000 in profit, then we need $6 million, $7 million in revenue. So the information business is much more profitable. The problem with an information business is that it's inherently not an asset, meaning it's built on me essentially. It's built on my brand. And so if I stop working in it, I can't sell it to anyone, number one. And if I stop working it, then it stops making money, which is why we're moving it to more of a software as a service model so that we can have it be more of a recurring model and not as launch-based, etc., whereas the ecommerce business is mainly not kick off as much cash flow, but they're, you know, you could sell them to people. They're inherently valuable as a brand.

Got it. Okay, that makes sense. So it sounds like you guys are switching from the launch-based model, which, you know, a lot of info product marketers will do, and you guys are switching more to like a Lynda or Treehouse type of recurring model?

Well, you know, I would say of our $2 million in revenue, $500,000 comes from recurring subscriptions. So it's about maybe a little bit less, like $480,000. So, so we have a level of subscription revenue that covers, you know, team salary and stuff like that. But most— but you say 75% of our revenue comes from launches. And so what we're looking to do on the information side is have it be more of a sustainable model. And as far as I'm concerned, subscription revenue is sustainable. When you look at the multiples that a software as a service business, like my friend Clay Collins over at LeadPages, I've watched him build this thing from the ground up. They're now at 170 employees with $20 million a year in recurring and $40 million in VC funding, and that business will get a 10 to 15 multiple because of that built-in monthly recurring customer base, whereas you look at a traditional ecommerce store and you're getting a 3 multiple, right, or you're looking at an information business like Smart Marketer and you're getting a 0. multiple, you know, because there's no built-in, you know, like the revenue is— I'm counting on my relationship with my subscribers to generate that revenue, which is why we're moving it more towards a subscription model so that it's less sort of, you know, built on shaky ground.

Got it. Makes sense. And for those of you that have not listened to the Clay Collins interview yet, that's just a few episodes back. He talks—

shares a lot of great conversion rate Yeah, and if I'm missing the numbers, my bad, Clay. Sorry. I thought— I think those are his numbers. I don't know.

You're actually right on the numbers, so it's all good. Okay, so, you know, you are— I mean, my friends, my friend who does a couple million a year with his ecommerce store, you know, he actually signed up for— I believe he signed up for your mastermind. Can you explain how that works?

Well, I think what he did actually was a one-on-one day with me.

You're right. Yeah.

Where I sat down, like what I'll do from time to time, we used to do a lot more of this and then it became sort of less and less worth it essentially, but I like to do it every now and again because it's fun to really get in there and work with someone and build a plan for their business and I'll just like take a look at all their analytics and their store and where all their traffic is coming from and their pre-purchase sales funnels and their post-purchase sales funnels and their customer re-engagement sequences and their conversion rate optimization and their ad models and just everything and then sit down with them for a day and say, okay, look, here, you know, Here's what we should be doing, and sort of map out a plan of action for their business. And that's like a sort of a consulting thing. And generally what we'll do now if we're doing that is I have a partner who is a he is a he's on the board of these. He might be a great interview for you actually. He's a really really smart guy, and he's got his own blog. It's called nerdmarketing.com. He just rebranded it from his name, and he's he's like on the bench of these private equity firms. So they like pay him to sit on. the bench and when they acquire an ecommerce business, they bring him in to sort of, you know, turn it around and then he brings me in to like, you know, help with that.

Interesting.

And so he, he, you know, he does a lot of this type of, type of consulting on a retainer for much larger companies and that's sort of the model that we've kind of transitioned into, pivoted if you want to use the parlance of our time.

Okay, cool. All right, so one thing I really wanted to touch upon, I mean, you know, I think last year at Traffic and Conversion Conference, I think you touched upon Pinterest ads. So one thing, one headline that really caught my eye was how you generated $41,000 in ecommerce sales from off of $775 in Pinterest ad spend. So can you talk a little bit about that?

You know, yes, okay, that did happen, but I don't want to create unrealistic expectations for people, right? Pinterest ads had just launched. I mean, I had waited like a year and a half. It just launched to the general public. Public, right? They had let some Fortune 500 brands in to leverage that advertising source. And the beautiful thing about Pinterest advertising for a physical product retailer is that it combines contextual targeting with query-based targeting. So traditional targeting and traffic generation for physical products was all query-based. Someone types in a query on Google and you rank organically or you buy ads for it. I mean, that was the original source. And then there was Yahoo and Bing, and then there was comparison shopping engines like PriceGrabber and TheFind. And NextTag and Google Shopping and now there's Amazon and those are all query-based traffic and it's fantastic traffic because people are like in the buying process, they know what they want, they're looking for it, you can just show them the product and you don't have to do a whole lot to make that sale. Pinterest combines query-based with what we now do mostly, I'd say 80% of our traffic is now contextual and contextual is where you're targeting people based on context and what Facebook opened up for us, they were the first group about 7 years ago to have multi-data point contextual targeting. It used to be you could target someone based on context, but you only knew one piece of context about them, which is the website they were visiting. Hey, they're visiting a website about cats, you can show them an ad related to cats. Well, now we know how old they are, what gender they are, what device they're on, and sort of all these different data points that we can leverage to put a relevant message in front of a user who's not actually in a search. Well, on Pinterest, we're combining contextual traffic in that we know their age— sorry, we know their gender, we know their device, and things like that, and we know what queries they typed in. And Pinterest has a really fantastic user base of like 80% of them— 80% women. A very large percentage has over $100,000 a year in income. And so it's just a really great traffic source. Right now there's about 180 million people on Pinterest for folks who sell products geared towards women, which we do. So we had the perfect market in that we sell cosmetics, and we hit Pinterest at the perfect time because what happens with these ad sources when they launch is they're cheap to start. As they're rolling out the self-serve ad system, which is the advertising system that you get to use as a user— it's not like you're not using it through API or through a third-party service, you're actually engaging with their advertising system and building out ads yourself— and they don't have a lot of the sophisticated targeting tools like negative matching, you know, getting rid of keywords that don't work, which they did just build in, conversion tracking even they didn't have, retargeting, and the, you know, bulk editing and all these kind of things. And so they make the traffic really cheap and then as they give you more and more abilities to hone in on your targeting, they raise the price of the traffic because you're able to convert better because of your more— you have more control over your targeting essentially and so, you know, even this has already started. Pinterest is twice as expensive as it was 9 months ago, 10 months ago and so yeah, I mean we had a very amazing sales funnel That I'll tell you about, which is the only sales funnel that we use now, which was talked about at Traffic and Conversions Summit. We've been doing it for a couple of years now, and what that is, is when you're driving— tell me if I'm just rambling here.

No, let's keep going. Okay, cool.

So when you drive query-based traffic, you don't have to do a whole lot. You're like, yeah, here's my product, you know, buy it. Here's a picture of it, here's a description of it, you were looking for it anyways. When you're driving contextual traffic, it requires more than that. You have to move someone from looking at a picture of their friend to making a buying decision, and the way that we do that is we send people to what's called a presale engagement page, an article that engages them in a conversation about a topic or a problem that they're interested in that alludes to a solution that is our product. And so what happens is instead of us being like, hey, buy my stuff, we're like, hey, check out this article. And then in the article there's a transition into the conversation about a product. So it's like, hey, I had this experience, I had diabetes and I started eating well and it was amazing and I feel so much better and I use this particular supplement and then they They click the link for that supplement and now they're chasing the offer and then they go to the sales page. So that was— we don't actually sell any supplements. I'm not into consumables. I don't really think most of the supplements that are being sold are any kind of good. I know it's the biggest market online. Everyone's selling supplements, but if you don't know what's in your stuff, then you shouldn't be selling it, first of all, but that's a whole other conversation. So what we do is we've got like 5 beauty tips for women over 40, and then it's like, oh, by the way, here's this cosmetic line that's amazing. So then they click through and they go to our ecommerce store, and so we're driving all of our traffic to these presale engagement articles, and then if someone doesn't click through on the article, if they just, you know, consume the content but don't make it to the offer, then we retarget them on both Facebook and Google using more content, a different article. Now if they make it through to the sales offer, then we retarget them with more aggressive sort of sales material because they were interested enough to click through and check out the offer.

Yeah, this is really interesting because I actually, you know, the people from Digital Marketer talk about this all the time, but I actually was looking at LinkedIn the other day and there's a sponsored ad from Braintree, the payments company that was acquired by PayPal, but they were driving traffic to a sponsored update on startups.co. So it was like a neutral website, not their property, right? And it was like, you know, 3 mistakes startups need to avoid. And it was literally just a post that kept talking about, well, you know, this startup did well because they started using Braintree. And literally all the links in there were Braintree.

Right.

Like, holy crap, that's what they're doing, and obviously if they're spending on LinkedIn, they're spending a lot and it's worth it.

Yeah, it's expensive on LinkedIn, totally, and like, you know, I like to be a little less aggressive than that, like for example, software as a service, basically all you do is you market case studies, hey, this is amazing, look what happened to this business, they used our software and they, you know, like that sounds like just not even a case study, right, and with no specifics, no statistics, nothing, so case studies as presale articles work really, really well for software It's like the best kind of presale engagement article that you can have is this person did social proof, right? This person did amazing, try this. Now the best kind of article that you can have for a product-based business is some person's experience. Hey, I'm Jane, I'm a makeup artist, I tried this thing on, you know, blah blah blah, like some person's personal experience and recommendation, you know, before and after type thing or the story of how I, you know, this is what happened to me and this is how I got here. Personal experience-based articles, you know, even personal experience before and after, personal experience tips articles, anything that's like a person's actual story is what works really, really well for product-based businesses.

So what about those people that say, and you know, there's always going to be the devil's advocate that says, you know, why should I spend money on content when, you know, it's going to drive the costs up and things like that?

I mean, what is it going to drive the cost up? Because I'll bet you that if you don't have a super niche product, if you're not like selling English bulldog collars and only targeting English Bulldog owners, that's the only way you can use contextual traffic to go straight to a sales offer is if you have the most niche-iest little thing there is. If you want to do any kind of scale, you have to get beyond query-based targeting. You can't scale query-based targeting. Google AdWords is too expensive for most people. Google Shopping requires you to have, you know, 50 or 100 SKUs to make it work at any kind of volume. So what if you're just some guy like me who's got 8 SKUs? And you want to be able to use direct response advertising to generate visibility for your offer, you've got to be able to— and you don't want to have all your business be on Amazon where you don't have— you don't even own the customers. It's just cash flow. It's like my Smart Marketer business. It's not a real asset. It's just a, you know, you're just making money off of Amazon's customers. They can shut you down at any time. You've got to be able to drive contextual traffic and buy visibility, buy leads in a contextual setting, Facebook or Pinterest or Instagram, and turn them into customers. And in order to do that, you've got to have some kind of a sales funnel, and this is the best sales funnel we found. I mean, we were not the people to invent content marketing. Johnson Johnson and Dove created soap operas to engage when the first mass media besides newspaper came out, which was television, to engage housewives and sell them home products. I mean, you know, using content as a medium to engage someone and then make an offer is one of the oldest ways of selling, and we've just transitioned it to online.

And it makes sense, right, because the fact is you're building a relationship with somebody that doesn't even know who you are, right?

That's right, and you're able to engage someone in a conversation about something that they're interested in. And I have a whole course on this actually, it's called Pin Commerce and it teaches how we did it on Pinterest, but what it teaches more and more in-depth is the sales funnel, right. It's like I call it the chocolate-covered carrot, my wife hates that analogy, but essentially the chocolate is Pinterest advertising, that's what people buy it for, but then I feed them the vegetables of, look, I'm going to teach you a direct response sales funnel that you can use to sell anything that you ever sell, from a local business to services to physical products to information to software. I mean, like, if you can get this, like for example, take Boom, right, which is my cosmetic line. If you get one good article, if it costs you $100,000 and 2 years of your time in testing and tweaking to get one good presale article, it's worth it because one article can be worth $15 or $20 million a year to you depending on how broad, I mean, maybe more, well that's just our scale. You know, depending on how— what kind of broad market offer. I like really broad market offers. I like offers that I can go out and target the entire United States of a certain gender and a certain age range. I mean, that's the kind of stuff I like to sell, and I'm, you know, I'm also into sustainable and organic and, you know, made in America and stuff that's like high quality and good that has some kind of a service to the world beyond just selling some crap. Like all of my businesses have messaging that is positive. That like for example, our cosmetic line is pro-age instead of anti-age. Everything out there is anti-age, anti-wrinkle, you know, women after 35, you need to quick fix this problem that's happening to you. You're losing value. Inject yourself with some bullshit. Like no, we're about celebrating you as you are now. All of our cosmetics are sheer. You can see right through them. So So I mean, I like to do that kind of stuff, but whatever your model is, this is a fantastic way to sell.

Okay, great. So I want to dive into a little nitty-gritty around the content, paying for traffic coming to your content. So if somebody had, let's just say, a $20,000 a month marketing budget, what percentage of that should be allocated towards promoting content? I know this is super general.

Well, I only—

It's—

if you have a— how much did you say was your marketing budget?

Let's just say it's $20K.

What, what else are you going to promote? How else are you going to generate sales for your product, right? I'd say take that $20,000 a month and put all of it towards direct response advertising, right? Generating leads and sales. And if you figure I've got to generate leads and sales for my product, how can I do that? Well, maybe my product is relevant for query-based traffic on Google Shopping and Google AdWords, and if I can get profitable traffic there, then I'm going to spend my whole $20,000 there. Very likely that I can't get profitable traffic there, that Google AdWords is going to cost me $2 a click, that Google Shopping is not going to give me the kind of scale that I need, that the rest of the comparison shopping engines— PriceGrabber, NextTag, TheFind, all that stuff— is not going to give me the kind of scale that I need, that Amazon is going to be basically breakeven on ads. So I might take $5,000 and slap it towards query-based advertising, and I take the other $15,000 and I'd figure out a way to make a sales funnel work, even if that's not content amplification. Although I think the sales funnel that's probably going to work is going to be some form of content amplification, but if you can figure out a different sales funnel like enter your email address for a recipe ebook that then has an autoresponder sequence that upsells your juice or whatever, then fine.

Got it, okay. Now I just want to— I just want people to get an idea of what Ezra's, you know, percentage breakdown of traffic looks like, you know, what percent—

We spend several hundred thousand dollars a month on advertising. Advertising, and all of it, 95%, 98% of it is content amplification. The other 2% or 5%, let's say, is retargeting, but we're retargeting content, and a very, very, very small fraction is query-based advertising, unless you're considering Pinterest, which I mean is technically a query-based advertising source, in which case I'd say 15% of our spend is there.

Okay, that makes sense. Now I just want to set expectations for our audience too. Yeah, let's do all this content amplification, but sometimes it takes, you know, a long time to get it.

It will take you a very long time. This is not easy, and the reason why no one teaches it or sells courses on it is because it's not an easy win, but it's, you know, it's like we're running a marathon here. Who cares how long it takes? We're not trying to sprint to the finish. We're trying to show up and put slow and steady pressure on every day with a positive attitude and have a good time and not overwork ourselves and burn ourselves into the ground and come out with something that is profitable and sustainable, and the way to do that is to build a sales funnel, and I think the sales funnel that's going to work the best for you is going to be amplifying a piece of content that then leads to a sales page, and so like I said, if that costs you $20,000, $50,000, $100,000 in a year or 2 of your life, then it's worth it. It's not a sprint, and you know, you probably won't be successful on the first time out, but—

Right, and it's a couple of months sometimes in some cases, right?

Actually, it could be. It could be immediately, it could be a year, I mean it depends on how much money you have, how good you are at copywriting, or if you have a copywriter, your ability to run a split test, the traffic source that you're using, the market that you're in, I mean there's so many variables, I can't tell you how long it's going to take for you, that's not the right question. The right question is not— it's a misguided question, the question is what am I willing to bring to this on a daily basis, and how much do I, you know, and is this Is everything riding on this for me? If this doesn't work, am I screwed or is this coming from a place of surplus or what can I afford to invest and can I give myself a year to succeed? That's the right question.

Makes sense. Okay, so just going back a little bit, getting back on a tactical side, let's say we're running Facebook traffic to content, are we bidding on a CPC basis? Per click, how are we bidding on that?

We do, you know, we let Facebook do the bidding for us and it's all on a cost-per-click basis. It's auction-based bidding and Facebook, you know, tries to get us the most clicks to our website. We just do clicks to website and we drive traffic. One of our best placements right now is iPad only, really fantastic placement. I would never run the right rail on Facebook, those ads suck. We're getting killed in every market on the right rail, so we do desktop newsfeed, mobile Mobile newsfeed on the iPhones and mobile newsfeed on the iPad, and we also do Instagram mobile newsfeed iPad and iPhone.

Makes sense. And I mean, you know, the cost per click can really range sometimes depending on the niche that you're in, right? I don't want people to just kind of shy away just because the cost per click is too high. It really depends, right?

Yeah, well, it depends on the, you know, your profit margin, your conversion rate, your lifetime customer value, your average order value. It's a science, you know, direct response advertising is a really in-depth thing. I just launched this thing that I call the Train Your Traffic Guy Bootcamp because I think that you really can't make it relying on outsourcers to run your traffic or relying on agencies because they've got 50 other people that they're trying to please and they can't really put the attention on your campaigns, and so they're hiring some intern who's never done this before, and so what you really ought to do is either yourself become an expert at driving visibility through paid mediums or hire someone who's going to be on your team and do that and I have a mastermind of a bunch of 6 and 7 and 8-figure ecommerce business owners who all are like, look, we just, we, you know, we need the ability to have traffic in-house, so how do you do it? And so I was creating training for my mastermind group, and so I ended up launching a boot camp where you come down and hang out with us for 3 days, and we train you, or you and your traffic person, to the process of generating Creating visibility and optimizing direct response campaigns on Pinterest, Google, and Facebook. And essentially it's not the platform, it's the process that you use of optimization of when do you switch out your ad creative and how do you build your targeting groups and what kind of sales funnels do you use and how do you track and tweak and all that kind of stuff.

Got it. Okay. Well, I have a few rapid-fire questions for you and I think it makes sense to maybe perhaps have you on another day and we can just keep talking about this stuff because I can go on forever. But what's one piece of advice you'd give to your 25-year-old self?

Let's see, well, I'm 29 now, so that's just 4 years.

Same age.

Thank you, awesome. Well, I think at my 25-year-old self, what would I give advice to that person? Man, I'm pretty happy with how things have gone. My philosophy, I've always chosen Uh-huh. Lifestyle over money. And my number one priority in my life has always been my relationship with my wife. We got together when we— when I was 21 and she was 20. And we've always had it that like, you know, what we're chasing is intimacy and connection and a pleasurable life together. And that includes money or it doesn't. But like, I think most people are chasing success and they think success looks like how much money they have. And then they make a bunch of money and they're still miserable because I actually released a post that will come out this Monday. It's called Rich and Miserable, and I think it's worth watching because it's on this topic of like, how do you define success? And I think what actually brings fulfillment is intimacy and connection and communication and relationship with other people. And so that's always what I've been optimizing for. And I think what I would have done at 25 is what I would have told myself— now I have an answer to that. I was kind of stalling.

Uh-huh.

But I, I like what I was saying when I was stalling, is I would have had— I would have learned how to delegate and build a team around me sooner because that's what's allowed me to scale. As a sole operator, I believe you can get to a couple hundred grand a year without killing yourself, but that's sort of, I feel like, the ceiling for most single-person operators, and if you would like to get to 7 and 8 figures, you're going to need to learn how to buy help effectively.

Got it, that makes sense, and all the stuff that you're talking about, the courses and all that, we're going to make sure to link to it in the show notes, but I want to talk about your team for a second. So how is your team organized? So they're all remote, are they full-timers, you know, what does the structure look like, all that type of stuff?

Yeah, I have 2 posts on my blog about the Smart Marketer team where I go through what each person does and my viewpoints on how to build a team and how I talk about investing in people, so I think those are worth watching. But yeah, everyone's virtual and we have biweekly team meetings, so twice a week, I don't know if that's biweekly, twice a week we have team meetings where everyone's on. And each person has a specialty or a thing that they do that they have really invested in and trained on and gone through courses on and has autonomy and freedom within their positions. And we don't use task management. We've tried a bunch of different task management tools and we found that we just ended up— every time I would Skype with someone, they'd have a bullet list and that's— everyone used it, everyone used TextEdit and a bullet list. So we use now Google Keep. And Google Keep is essentially lists, to-do lists, and I can see everyone's list and you just cross things off when you're done. Them, and so everyone essentially has a list. We use Slack to communicate in between meetings, and, you know, I think that most people buy help and then they're like, oh, the help wasn't good, and it's like, no, you didn't invest in that person. You didn't spend 1, 2, 3 hours a week training them on what they need to be doing, talking to them about the philosophy that goes behind their particular position, getting them courses. Like, you've got to invest in people and bring them up so that they understand what's going on on the level that you understand what's going They're more of an expert in their particular field of conversion rate optimization or copywriting or ads management or customer service or whatever, video editing, than you are, content syndication. And so, you know, I've got some posts on how to buy help.

Okay, yeah, I think we'll reach out to you and we'll put those in the show notes as well. A lot of great resources here. Okay, what's one must-read book you'd recommend to everyone?

Willpower. There's a book called Willpower and it's really, really amazing, such a fantastic fantastic book about essentially your ability to do things. You know, the skill set that you want to develop as a person is the skill set of mastery, which is simply the ability to put your attention in one area consistently over time. And that, you know, you pick up an instrument for 30 minutes a day, you're gonna get better at that. And so this book Willpower is about that topic. They did these tests and they, they, they thought that there's 2 things that predict your success in life. One of them is your intelligence and the other one is your willpower. And up until recently Originally they didn't believe that either one could be improved upon. They figured you were just kind of— you were born with what you got. Now they have discovered that willpower can be improved upon, and I think that is like just a must-read for every person who's interested in self-improvement in any area of life.

Is that required reading for your team?

Yeah, everyone's read that.

That's what I felt. Okay. All right. Now let's say it's an ideal day. I know there's stuff that flies around all the time, but in an ideal day for Ezra, how would that look?

My job is to hold the vision behind what we are doing and to hold people accountable for doing the things that they should be doing. I don't really do much operations anymore. I just figure out what needs to be done and then tell people to do it and then check in on how they're doing and to keep people inspired and motivated. I am— I, you know, it's interesting when you get out of the role of operations, and I've been out of it for some time now, you start to feel like, what am I even doing? You're not doing anything, but you are. You're holding the most important role which is the vision and the, you know, you are the logs on the fire, you're keeping things burning and the fire is what's actually making stuff happen. So, you know, and for Smart Marketer I do a lot, I obviously create the content because it's me and I run the, you know, I write the sales webinars and so I do a lot of content creation these days and then general strategy with individual team members, like I'll talk to my ads manager every night about what we're doing on the ad side. Hey, why don't we test this? Or, well, what happened here? So I'm doing a lot of being the person that is bounced off of for strategic decision-making in any given role. What split test should we be running next? Oh, why do you think we should do that? You know, devil's advocate style, and that's really not where most people are. You know, you got— I've got a team of 20 people, so that, you know, like, you may not be there, and that's okay. But what I would recommend doing is picking an area of focus and becoming the best in the world at it. I would recommend starting with the ability to buy traffic, and that could be Facebook ads or whatever you want, but become the best at something. I think that would be my suggestion for folks who are just getting in the game or who have, you know, maybe a 6-figure business and want to go to 7 figures.

Got it. You know, I can't wait to buy Ezra's book on management. It sounds like it would be a good one.

Thanks, man. Oh dude, I actually have an outline for a book. Maybe I should include some topics on management in there. It's more about sort of the— I have a podcast called Think Act Get. What you think determines how you act, which results in what you get. And that's— it's all about mindset and sort of what's behind how, you know, how you operate in the world. And the book is more in that vein, although it does also include a specific—

Yeah.

You know, strategy for growth in business because that's what sells, right? It's a chocolate-covered carrot. Again, people want to buy how to grow their business, but what you actually have to teach them is how to be a better person, and then that is what ultimately allows them to grow their business. And then what I mean by better person is more deliberate person, not like they're a bad person and they can become a good person. But anyways.

Yeah, well said. I think, you know, well, there's just so much, so much knowledge that's been dropped here. I can't wait to link to all this. But Ezra, what's the best way for people to find you online?

You can find me at smartmarketer.com. That's my blog. You can check out thinkactget.com. Those would be the 2 places to get in touch.

Awesome. Great. Everyone, this is Ezra Firestone. Make sure you check out all his stuff. We'll drop it in the show notes like I said, but thanks again, Ezra.

Thank you. Happy to be here. Thanks for listening.

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