Why Most Internet Marketers Get Stuck With Their Income

Alright, so today I want to talk about why most internet marketers get stuck at a certain phase. So first, I think it's really important to define what internet marketers are. So internet— you have internet marketers, you have growth marketers, you have digital marketers. To me, an internet marketer— and by the way, I've grown up learning from the best internet marketers, affiliate marketers, growth hackers, whatever you want to call it. I've kind of played in the internet marketing world. I've looked at what black hat SEOs do. I've looked at— I've worked in tech, right? So I know how the tech marketers, the growth marketers behave. And so you have this spectrum, right? So I guess it's good for us to define first. So an internet marketer, to me, a lot of these— a lot of internet marketers are usually, they're pushing info products. They're— and I kind of put them in the same basket as affiliate marketers as well, where they're looking at pushing a lot of different offers and their job is to drive as much performance as possible, and they're not too worried about brand as much. So if you think— if you look at the spectrum over here, if there's a brand spectrum and there is a performance spectrum, they're almost all over on the performance side of things, right? They just want to drive conversions, and if they're able to drive conversions, they get paid. And, you know, that's how a lot of these, these marketers work. And so typically what happens is in the internet marketing world, people are much more money-focused. They're very money-hungry, and some of the best you know, marketing books that I've read, these people are very money hungry. And that is— that's the KPI that they go for. Now, I think what ends up happening is I see a lot of people that, you know, they start out very strong and what happens is their business caps out because they've focused so much on making money that they haven't thought beyond that, right? They haven't thought beyond what it takes to scale a business, the other elements of a business, not just around being really good around marketing. Sure, you can be really good at that, but how do you go beyond that, right? I think when you think about growth marketers, when I think about the tech marketers that I know, a lot are really good at demand generation. And when I think about demand generation, usually that means they're good at paid advertising, right? So they know how to run ads, and sometimes they might have other skills, but what ends up happening is they need to hire a bunch of other specialists. So imagine there's a marketer working at Salesforce, you know, then there's like an entire team that's dedicated to that. And they might not necessarily know all the the tactics and the strategies that, you know, internet marketers are testing. Because internet marketers, by the way, because you're trying to drive performance, you are testing cutting-edge stuff, right? You're testing also at the same time, you don't care too much about the user experience, right? You don't— you're not incentivized to care about that. All you care about is, hey, if I need to have a bunch of pop-ups, if I need to have, you know, order flow bumps and all these things, right, I'm gonna take it as aggressive as I can and, you know, we'll see what happens. Now, on the other side of things, if you're a brand marketer, you don't do those things, right? Your performance is gonna suffer quite a bit, but you're focused on— you might— your perception might be, hey, because I'm doing brand marketing, I'm gonna focus on the long term. And because I am focused on the long term, again, my ads are not gonna be too aggressive. I'm not gonna try all these other, you know, order form bumps or one-time offers or all these other things. I'm just gonna play on that side, right? Now, I actually think you know, order form bumps, you know, exit pop-ups, those types of things. I think there is a time and place for those. I think you might want to have maybe a healthy balance of them, but what I'm talking about right now is, again, why is it that a lot of internet marketers end up capping out? They stay doing what they're doing, they're pushing, you know, affiliate things, they're always looking for the next offer. And by the way, some affiliates make a ton of money, right? Now, the other thing too is, they're selling info products. Info products will tend to, you know, cap out at a certain point. Or if they try to create software, what ends up happening is the software usually doesn't go that well. Their churn rates are too high. And so what I'm getting at right now is that if you think more like the best CEOs in the world, the number one thing the best CEOs all obsess over is culture. Why do they obsess over culture? It's because the things that that make a good company great, it's the people. And so, if you're constantly harping about money, right, what ends up happening is you are incentivized to, well, not think about, hey, let's invest more in people. Let's— because if you're thinking too much about money and profits going into your pocket, it's like, I don't want to pay top dollar, okay? I am not trying to recruit too many people, which is fine. If you want to optimize for money, that's fine, right? But if you want to go even beyond, instead of going you want to go beyond 7 figures or so, 8 figures or so, you have to obsess over culture, right? Because you understand that culture is the operating system and people make a company go. And so, you know, the, the biggest companies are gonna invest in the best people. They don't mind paying top dollar, okay? They don't mind paying the recruiting fees as well because they know once they get the— it's all about the team at the end of the day. It's not about one marketer knowing all the tactics. That caps out very quickly. How do you build leverage? One of the highest leverage things you can do is in a company is to hire amazing people, right? So, you know, if you are, right now you're wondering, hey, like, why am I capping out right now? It's like, do you have a great culture? Do you have great people? Would you rehire a good amount of the people on your staff? You look at every single person on your staff right now, would you rehire each and every one of them? Are they following all the— the things that you think might be, that I used to think were rah-rah, like culture, core values, people, recruiting, and all these things. Like, I just wanna do marketing, you know, I'm gonna be able to, you know, build a good lifestyle for myself. You can totally do that. But if you're wondering why a lot of people cap out, that's the thing. They don't think about— oftentimes it's short-term rewards that sacrifice the long-term gain, right? You look at Jeff Bezos, Amazon. What happened? Well, over the years, people were like, you know, this is not a real business, it doesn't drive that much profit, blah blah blah. Jeff Bezos kept repumping everything back into the business. When after the dot-com bust, when the books the his when Amazon as a books business because that's the majority of what they sold when that was in jeopardy, Jeff Bezos was like okay let's invest into AWS let's build the Kindle. Most people are looking at him like what are you doing right? But to be able to take these shots you have to again you have to think about the long term long term vision right? You think about the people you think about recruiting and then you're able to build a very substantial business at that point because. If you don't think about all that, then you aren't gonna build the right foundation. You're just gonna have this foundation where you're good at marketing, but that's all you're good at. And again, people might come to you for some consulting work or whatever, or maybe you might get a good deal here and there, and you know, I think you'll make some good money, but if you optimize for the long term, if you optimize for the impact instead of, hey, I want money, the money will flow. It's just a side thing that happens, right? It's just a— it's a result of the work that you put in trying to make an impact. Look at Jeff Bezos right now. You think he cares a lot about making money? If all he cared about was making money, he would have stayed at— I believe he was working at a hedge fund before he decided to go out and start Amazon. But look, he keeps— he's got— does he need to do a space company? Does he need to have AWS? Does he need to have Amazon Prime? Does he need to have third-party sales? Does he need to have Alexa? All these things. This is all to make a bigger impact on the world and everything else falls into place, right? And you just continue to play the game, you enjoy the journey, and that's what it is. But I can guarantee, at least for me, for me, so I'm guaranteeing for me I guess, back in the day when I was like, oh, I just need to, you know, I was focused on money. I was just like, hey, like how do I make the most for myself? The problem with that is just like the days when I used to play a lot of poker, you're focused on yourself. And that caps out at a certain point, it changes your behavior to me for the worse, right? Because you're, again, you're focused on the short term, you're not focused on long term. So, it's much easier for you to just flip your mindset and be like, hey, I'm gonna focus on impact, I'm gonna focus on the long term, and that will drive the correct behaviors. Charlie Munger said this, show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome, right? So, if your incentive is all about money, that's your outcome, okay? Your outcome's not gonna be the best, okay? Maybe it could be, go work for Wall Street, maybe. If your incentive is to make as big of an impact that you can make, look at the outcome, right? Outcome is you're probably gonna have more money as a result of doing that, all right? So anyway, I don't wanna keep beating a dead horse here, but if you enjoyed this, don't forget to hit the subscribe and the like button, 'cause it helps us grow, all right? And if you're coming from podcast, leave a review, leave a comment as well. And we will see you later. Bye.