How STOPPING Perfection Can Speed Up Your SUCCESS

What if what you already know could change your life? You're waiting, but Michael Filsaime proves action beats perfect plans every time. If you don't move now, someone else will, and they'll profit from your passion. In this interview, he shows how combining what you love, what you're good at, and what people will pay for creates unstoppable success. He built Groove so anyone can start fast without wasting money. You don't need more time.

You need to start.

Special thanks to Jeff Hays for partnering with us to release this content exclusively on my YouTube channel. And if you make it to the end of the video, put a hashtag #believe in the comments below so we can feature you in a future video. Believe.

Before I interviewed Mike Filsaime, I have heard of him because he had such a great reputation in the entrepreneurial world. But once I got into the interview, I was mesmerized. His experience, his wisdom, his ability to articulate it was something I felt to be foundational for success for anybody who's looking to move into a side hustle, who's saying, I'm going to become responsible for an income that I'm going to create on my own. Let me tell you, listen to this interview, take notes, study it. It's a master class in and of itself on how to succeed in a side hustle. And I have to tell you, when I was done with this interview, I was overly enthusiastic, and you're about to see why. Let's jump in. Mike, thanks for taking this time. You're a person who provides tools for the, you know, the people that we want to serve in this audience. So I think this is going to be a very fruitful conversation. So, so I appreciate you being here.

My pleasure. Thank you.

So let's just start with your background. How did you get to be doing this kind of work and developing the type of tools you you have developed over your career?

You know, I was born in 1967, and I say that for a reason. My brother was born in 1965, so we were on the cusp of two different generations. My brother was kind of at the end of the baby boom, and I was starting, uh, the beginning of Generation X. So that means by the time he graduated in 1983, listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, the Commodore 64 had come out. And for somebody that was coming from an Intellivision and Atari, Here, there are these things like the Apple II and the Commodore 64. In order to play a game, you had to give it BASIC programming instructions. And by BASIC, I mean the BASIC programming language. And this really resonated with me. I realized that I could put in a code, line 10, type print Mike, line 20, go to 10, and watch my name go across the screen. I had an aha moment at that time, and I said, wow, I can make this thing do anything that I want. And I fell in love with computers at that time. I went to New York Institute of Technology. I studied computer science. I learned machine language, binary, Pascal, Fortran, all of these precursors to the internet. And I was actually a computer programmer. I sold my first software program to Lottery Players Magazine in 1985. For $22,000 with the help of my dad negotiating that deal.

And I think that was the day that I became an entrepreneur.

But while I was in school at New York Institute of Technology, I'm working at Pathmark making about $6 an hour part-time, so probably making $4,000 a year. I had gotten engaged and it was time for me to get, you know, get a real job. So, I had to drop out of school after 3 years and I got into the car business. And I spent 14 years in the car business from 1990 to 2004. And in those years, I ran the largest Toyota dealership in the Northeast region and the second largest Toyota dealership in the country. I was the general manager. And I worked my way up from sales to finance to finance director to sales manager, general sales manager, finally general manager. And from there, that's where I really learned salesmanship. But it was in 2002, I read a sales letter from a guy named Frank Kern. And it basically taught you how you could sell these new concept in 2002, digital products. And put something called a PayPal button on a website that would get you money instantly into your bank account without having to do any fulfillment and shipping, and it happened to be on the internet. Like, every single checkbox lit up for me right there. And from October 2002 to May 5th, 2004, just about a year and a half, I went from making no money online to about $75,000 a month online. I quit the car business. And then I took all of the information that I had from, uh, you know, my love for computer programming and I applied it to digital marketing by creating software.

Great story. And part of that, which I think is really important to see, is that, so you built this while you were still the general manager of the car dealership. It wasn't something that you didn't quit and go full-time right away.

No, I was one of these fortunate people that did crack a code very, very quickly. I stumbled across something at a website called Auto Response Plus. It said something that resonated with me because I wasn't having any success. It said you should focus on capturing a person's email address instead of making a sale because it takes a person 5 to 7 times to visit your website before they buy. That's what they said at the time, and for the most part, that could be very true. And so I flipped trying to sell anything online to giving away free information in order to get somebody's email address. And once I had your email address, I could offer you something today, in 30 days, in 6 months, in a year. And if I build a good relationship with you and I send you quality information that you can use, you're going to see me as a valuable friend in the industry. And if I'm not trying to pitch you something, but I'm trying to tell you the pros and cons of something, I can make sales over and over and over again And then when it's time for me to develop my product, you'll buy from me. So I immediately went in and started giving away things, and I built one of the largest lists early on in, in internet. We used to call it internet marketing before digital marketing. So I had one of the largest lists in internet marketing because I was giving products away for free, and then I was making offers after I got the email address.

Yeah, you know what's really interesting, and I wonder if this is relevant to, you know, anybody who's looking to create a side hustle right now is, you know, timing was one thing, you know, for you, and you even cited it as far as the difference between you and your brother. And then secondly, the fact that you had this programming background, but then you had a really strong sales background, you know, retail sales, at least in a car dealership, etc. And then you get, you know, kind of lightning struck when you got the Frank Kern letter. And, uh, you know, now you say, wait a minute, you know, if I could look at doing something on the internet, my programming background comes to play, my sales experience comes to play, I could put these things together and I can do something, you know, that's quite meaningful and profitable. Do you feel like what people should be looking at themselves when they're looking at trying to create a side hustle and say, what do I know about? What do I kind of have some expertise in or some passion around? Like what comes first? Do you look at the opportunity first or what your skills are first? How do you see it?

So I think the very first thing out of the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, He talks about something called the intersection of the three circles, and that's what creates your hedgehog concept. The hedgehog is good at one thing. It's being chased by the wily fox who is good at everything, and it has tactics and it's stealth. But the bottom line is the fox with all of its wit and everything can't ever compete or take over the hedgehog because the hedgehog knows one thing. When threatened, roll into a ball and put out my spikes. So that's one thing that works very, very well against something that could be a lot better in many ways. So for that metaphor, the intersection of the 3 circles, if you picture kind of like the links, the first 3 circles in the Olympic circle, you'd have circle number 1, circle number 2, and then circle number 3, and they're coinciding circles. The first circle, you want to make sure that you're putting in your passion. The second circle, you want to put in something that you have a deep expertise about. And then the third circle is understanding how the economics work in that marketplace. If you can put those three things together, you're guaranteed success. And I like to call that the Derek Jeter formula. You get to— Derek Jeter is a kid that dreamed of being a Yankee, and by some miracle, he actually made himself— he wanted to be shortstop for the New York Yankees. And even if you're the greatest baseball player prodigy in the world, that doesn't mean you're going to get picked by the New York Yankees. You could end up on the Seattle Mariners. But Derek Jeter was a highly paid athlete, and every single day he woke up and said, I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this. So that's what it means about putting your passion in that first circle. If you put your passion in the first circle, you'll never work a day in your life, and money is going to be a byproduct of helping people. But you take someone like me that came from the car business. I spent 14 years in the car business. I was very good in the car business. I ran the second largest Hyundai dealership in the country. The only thing is I couldn't stand it. I woke up every day and I cursed the world. So getting out of the car business and going online, the last thing that I wanted to do was create a product to teach people how to buy a car or how to not get taken over by a car dealership. I just wanted to get out of it. So, it is important to make sure you do those things. And the other thing is, just because you're passionate about something, if you're not an expert at something, you're going to look like a fraud. So, you definitely have to find something where both of those things match. But if you do, like I said, it's like finding gold at the end of the rainbow.

I've used the example relative to what you're saying is that I have a great passion for playing guitar. But, you know, and I said it's kind of a good thing that I'm, you know, I'm not that good at it because, you know, I probably would have been in for a life of struggle as a musician. But, you know, I just don't have, you know, the talent. You know, I go— I go to— I like to go watch, you know, Eric Clapton. You know, I saw him recently, actually, you know, and see what, you know, somebody who's really an expert at guitar is. But, but just because if you have a passion without real skill, make it a hobby, I guess, is kind of the, the idea.

You got to find a business.

Yeah. Find what your strengths are. So you then evolved in a sense that you're— so you're doing really well in your own business online as you described, but you now make tools to make it easy for guys like me who, you know, want to go and do some online business where these tools can help them accelerate their entry to the market, if you will. So describe the type of tools you make and why you decided to make these tools.

We make tools for digital marketers. To make it easy for them to run their online business. But we also want to make it affordable, and we want to make sure that if we're going to make a tool, if it stands alone, it's going to be the best in its industry. What we found— and by the way, every single company I'm going to mention is a rock star stud of a company, so please understand I'm not poking holes at any of these companies— but in order to have success online You need to have a few things. Number one, you need to have a brand website. Well, that's Wix and that's Squarespace or it's WordPress. And the truth is, I don't know anybody that's having any success with Wix or Squarespace. Wix or Squarespace lets you get a website up and running that looks good, but it's not meant for digital marketing. So that leaves you with WordPress, and I like to call it the dreaded WordPress. I'm one of the most technical guys that I know, But whenever I go to, to a place like ThemeForest and I find a theme and I'm like, oh, this looks great, and then I go to try to do it myself, it takes me 4 hours to figure out how to change the copyright in the bottom footer. So the next thing about WordPress is that it's kind of like a gateway to other paid applications. So people say it's free, but then you have to attach 13 different apps, uh, plugins they call it, to it to make it work. Many of them are paid. And as anybody knows with WordPress, you log into your WordPress panel and it says WordPress 5.739 update. And you say to yourself, I am so scared to click that upgrade button because the last time I did that, my webmaster told me I broke everything in the site. So that's WordPress. But then you need funnels. In order to do funnels, you need something like ClickFunnels. It's going to cost you—

What is a funnel? Can you explain what a funnel is for somebody might not know?

Sure. A marketing funnel, it goes in a different idea than a brand website. A brand website is like a brochure. You give people all the information. They have navigation up at the top, Contact Us, About Us, our mission, our vision, many different places for them to go. It's kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet, which is the worst thing you ever want to do for, uh, for direct marketing. For direct marketing, you want to have a simple linear message with one call to action. So a funnel brings somebody in with what we call micro-commitments, using a psychology called commitment and consistency. If we can get somebody to, to give us a small commitment, they're going to be more likely to give us bigger and larger commitments as they go through the funnel. So the first thing we want to do is we want to flip the script. Instead of trying to sell somebody something, we want to give them something for free, like a free audiobook or a free report or a free video or a free module. And by saying, enter your name and email address below, or on the form on the right of the page, I'm going to give you this free information, that person is going to select that they are part of that target audience by saying I'm going to give you my name and email address. If somebody's not interested, they bounce, and that's okay. And now we move them through a funnel, which is a series of pages. The next page might be maybe like a— what we would call a tripwire page. And a tripwire simply means it's a small way to get their credit card, maybe for $1 or $3 or $7. After that, we're going to have an upsell, and that upsell can be for, for any price. Sometimes it could be for $47 or Uh, sometimes it could be for $1,000. It all depends. And then you would have upsells and downsells, and eventually the customer would end up at a thank you page. And so a marketing funnel is a way for you to bring somebody, a targeted person, into your, your ecosystem and give them a clear, concise message, one message at a time, to ultimately sell your product. So that's what a funnel is. And to do that, you need something like ClickFunnels or LeadPages, and that's going to cost you about $99 to $299 a month. Then to sell your products, you're going to need something like Infusionsoft or SamCart. You'll need affiliate software like Post Affiliate Pro or Infusionsoft. You're going to need to be able to email your customers with marketing automation, and that's something called ActiveCampaign. You're good if you want to have a store to sell your merchandise, like I have my little Groove shirt on here. So you create a tribe or sell supplements or physical products, you're going to need a Shopify store. On top of that, you're going to need video hosting, professional video hosting, because you don't want to be using YouTube because then there'll be ads on your pages, sometimes even your competitors. So you have to pay for something like Wistia or Vimeo, and you want to be able to fulfill your product. And in order to do that, you'll need something like Kajabi or Thinkific or Teachable. Every one of those platforms are great. The only thing is they're gonna cost you $99 to $299 a month. And when you're just getting started, you must have these tools to get started and it's gonna cost you about $3,000 a month.

Mm-hmm.

And then you gotta figure out how to get all of those things to work together while you're trying to make your videos to sell your product. So you have to be not only a marketer, but now you have to be a technician, uh, or you have to hire somebody, yet another cost, uh, to do that and making it all work together. So what we did at Groove, is we created a platform that combines all of those things together and we give it away for free. And there is a paid component as your business grows, but 93% of our customers never pay us a dime and still get to run their business.

So, I'm kind of chuckling a little bit because I have used probably 80% of the things you just mentioned, you know, over the years, you know, that I've been in this type of business. And incidentally, just because terms— some people might be new to a lot of these terms, direct marketing, you know, why don't you give your definition of direct marketing so people know what you mean by that as compared to other forms of marketing?

Direct response marketing is a very particular type of marketing. The first way you can identify direct response marketing is every single person in the world will make a statement like, "Well, that doesn't work in my kind of industry." If you're ever going to say that, then you're the exact person that should be using direct response marketing. Dan Kennedy has proven that by bringing direct response marketing to, um, companies, uh, industries like lawyers and accountants that thought that you couldn't use direct response. So direct response focuses on understanding your avatar and using sales letters. Uh, back in the day and pre-internet, you actually did direct mail. You would get a list from a magazine, So if you wanted to sell a fishing rod, well then you would get a list from fishing magazines. Now you had the, the targeted customer and you would write a sales letter to them using what's known as sales copy. Uh, that has evolved when we got on the internet. We all used sales letters and we used to call them long-form sales letters.

Mm-hmm.

But sales copy can even come in the form of a short-form, uh, sales letter, which is what we would refer to as like an opt-in page where you give a a good headline, a subheadline, a couple of bullets, and a place for them to enter their email address or the start of a funnel. So, uh, sales letters now could also be in the form of webinars or what we call a VSL, which stands for a video sales letter. But the bottom line is, uh, that we're going away from the brochure website where people can come to a website and they're seeing all of these different things and we're using Sales copy and a linear funnel to move people through and establish a relationship with those people through know— we call it know, like, and trust— by building value and offering a special offer if they buy now. So these things are very, very simple. There's free information available everywhere on the internet. If you just look up direct response marketing, you'll get a lot more information.

Yeah, you know, I kind of got the first hint of this as a customer pre-internet from Jay Abraham. So I forget, I think I listened to an interview with him on cassette, you know, with Tony Robbins or something, and he made an offer for these, you know, these free tapes that he would send just to validate what you're talking about here. And literally I got this bag of tapes in the mail free, you know, I said I'm gonna go for this offer. I listened to them, they stimulated ideas, and literally the ideas that I got from the free tapes, and this is important because you want to give something of really good value up front, it literally generated millions of dollars in revenue for me. So to the point where I was like, I just wanted to buy something too. So there's some exchange because I got so much value out of the free stuff. And then I went back and, and it built all the things you talked about, especially trust. And I started to follow Jay and over time, you know, I actually got to know him. But the, the, I guess the point being here is that these principles are not principles that are just for the internet. The internet's just the tools, I guess, in the way that you apply them. But they're more generalized in the sense that they worked before there was ever such a thing as internet. Now you just need the tools to be able to apply these principles, you know, using digital marketing, if you will.

That's right. You know, digital marketing, even before the internet, we were exposed to it every single night with what we would call the late-night infomercial, right? There was the great Ron Popeil who passed away just about a year and a half ago, but He was the person with, you just said it and then the audience would go and forget it. And he did great presentations for like the Ronco rotisserie, but you also had the ShamWow guy and you had the other guy with the beard, you know, with all the different cleaning products. This has been going on, you know, for years. QVC is literally using direct response marketing every 6 minutes when they pitch something. They have a headline, they have a special offer, it's ending, there's a countdown timer. Sometimes it's gonna— they use something called— the countdown timer is called urgency. They use scarcity by saying there's only 200 left, only 140 left, and sometimes your mind is competing with the scarcity and the urgency because you might run out of inventory before you run out of time. And these things are conversion boosters. So you're seeing it in Home Shopping Network, in QVC, In 30s, when they take the 30-minute infomercial and they condense it down into a 1-minute, you know, ShamWow, uh, 60-second commercial, that is all direct response marketing. And taking those principles and bringing it online is a lot of fun, uh, and it's actually very, very easy. And when you believe in your product and you know that your product is putting good in the world, well then you have a responsibility to do everything you can to make sure that your customer exchanges that value for your product and their money, because they wouldn't give it to you if they didn't feel they were getting at least an equal or better end of the, of the bargain. So the first thing you want to do is get this idea out of your head that selling is bad. Selling is, uh, is providing value. And if I can give you the formula for success online It's really good because it didn't work up until about 15 years ago. The amount of money that you will make is directly proportionate to these two things: the amount of people that you— the amount of value that you can give and the amount of people that you could reach. So in the past, before the internet, you were able to reach your local community. That was your reach. Now you don't have to do that. You could reach a global audience. And you'd be surprised how many people right now are typing in something that you could help them with and they're paying someone else because you're not on the internet. And you could likely do it better than them. So, again, your income is on this side and it's proportionate to the amount of value that you provide multiplied by the amount of people that you can reach. And so, money is a byproduct of providing value.

I love the way you light up when you talk about this. You could tell this is genuinely like you like just brighten up up as you're presenting this. You're referred to— where'd you get the nickname, the Michael Jordan of digital marketing?

So here's the thing. I was at an event. We were in a green room and I was being introduced to someone and someone said, do you know Mike Filsaime? And he says, no, I'm kind of new to this stuff. And he goes, oh, he's kind of like the Michael Jordan of internet marketing. Once that thing was said, I tattooed that thing on like on my, on my right arm and I said, okay, if somebody else said it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take that. I don't wanna be a fraud by using it. I do feel that, you know, I'm one of the founding fathers of direct response marketing on the internet with people like Jeff Walker and Frank Kern and Ryan Dice and Perry Belcher. And we, we were all part of a mastermind with John Reese. John was the first person ever to do a million dollars in a day online. I was the second person to ever do a million-dollar launch. I had the largest list. I've created the, uh, third largest webinar platform in the world called WebinarJam, but I sold that company. Another company I sold is today the largest automated webinar platform in the world. I was the founder of EverWebinar. I sold that company as well. So, so, uh, automated webinars are one of the keys that work online, so I put a lot in there. So if I didn't feel I could live up to that name, it is strong because I do look up to Michael Jordan and I don't think there's anybody else after him. But it is something that I thought, hey, that'd be a cool phrase. Even if somebody doesn't know me, if they come to my website and they see that I'm the Michael Jordan of digital marketing, they're going to say, oh, maybe I should pay attention and they'll spend more time at my website and then I could maybe get them onto my list where I can provide value for them.

This is, I think, a pivotal time for people that are saying, this speaks to me in some way, everything that you're saying, your enthusiasm for it. I'm sort of stuck in the sense that I need to put food on the table. And it's a predicament for a lot of people. Inflation is really squeezing people right now in significant ways. It's sort of the crisis opportunity thing, the two sides of the same coin. We're saying, you know, maybe this is going to be an impetus to cause you to take an action that you wouldn't have if you were in a little bit of a comfort zone, and it actually creates a better future for you. There's opportunity here. And someone saying, I'm getting all this, I'm tracking, and the idea of it's pretty exciting, but I'm not sure what kind of a product I can create, what kind of service or product I could create that I can start to market. You know, I see now you've got a platform, I can get on that platform. Yeah, so I don't need to become technically adept to be able to, to do that. But I do need something to sell. And I'm not sure what it should be. How do you think of the best line of thinking is or processes for somebody to figure out what product they can create?

Well, great. I also want to talk to a couple of other things that you said there with, you know, crisis opportunity. We've gone through a lot. In the last few years with especially inflation, gas prices, and, you know, there's no end in sight. Interest rates are going up. That's eventually gonna have a long-term effect on things like layoffs and things like that. I've lived through this. I saw what it did in 2008, and I saw it bring a lot of people into our industry that we always like to ask people, what did you used to do in the real world, right? And then say, oh, before this, I was a so-and-so. And going from that mentality of working for someone else, where essentially you went to school to learn, um, an education to apply to a trade, or you went and learned a skill to apply to a craft— it doesn't matter. If you're not an entrepreneur, then somebody was buying you wholesale and selling you retail to someone else. And that's A terrible thing when you realize that you thought you had job security and you don't. There's nothing more liberating than being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur lives a life of a little bit more risk, but they understand that when there's a problem, it's easily solved. We can just go out and say, "Hey, I can go create another product. I can ask people for a joint venture." Just a little bit of math, you know, I once heard John Reese say this and it just that clicked in my head. He said, you know, to make $1 million, all you got to do is out of the 6 billion people on the planet, you got to get 1,000 people to buy a $1,000 product. And that's a lot easier than you may think. And in this case, with the Six Figure Side Hustle, we need just 100 people. And when you do 100, you'll figure out how to do 1,000. Now, the next thing is that recently AI has come about. AI is, uh, it's a calculator for words. As Steve Jobs referred to the computer as a bicycle for the mind, this is a rocket ship for the mind. This will allow you to take any part of you that is this creative and expand on it. So if you want to write a free report, if you want to write a book, if anything that you want to do now can be turbocharged, it's like getting into one of those mech suits where you're just a human and you step into one of those mechanical suits and, you know, you can go fight a war like you see in the movies. That is, that's essentially what AI is strapping onto your body. It's going to turbocharge your creativity and your sales. It'll come up with a good sales copy for you. It'll come up with the good headlines for you. So, uh, what I would recommend somebody does is either write an ebook on their passion and their expertise, or they create a little home study course where they They record themselves or they record their screen and they create a little course. Courses will usually sell for a little bit more money than an ebook. And then once you do that, you go and you create a funnel, either an automated webinar funnel or just a regular good old upsell funnel with a video sales letter. And then you start feeding it traffic.

Wow. So driving traffic, that's always a thing, right? Maybe some people are adept at, you know, maybe, you know, cold traffic. They know a little bit about social media and maybe can, you know, for a little bit of money, play some ads and try to drive some traffic. But what do you typically recommend for people say, I'm just getting started, I don't know how to get eyeballs, you know, once I set up what you set up, how do I start to get people to take a look at this?

So the first thing that you want to do when you're getting involved in digital marketing is embrace advertising. Go back 20 years before the internet. Imagine you had a little store on the side of the road that wasn't on the main part of the highway. The first thing that you would do is you would say, hey, I want to get in the Yankee Trader, or I want to get into the Newsday. These are things from Long Island, little names where I came from. And you would realize that without advertising, nobody's going to walk in your door. Now, you can definitely go down down the road, and there's— you want to be doing all of these things eventually. But when you're starting out, you want to be— get— remember the hedgehog concept. Get good at one thing. Some people like to use social media, or they like to go to LinkedIn, or they like to focus on SEO. Why? Because they say it's free. Well, I have something better than free. It's called paid traffic. When you can spend a dollar today to get $2 back, it's not only free, it's better than free. You're getting a return on investment. So many people start out their very first day of digital and they say, well, spending advertising is going to cost me money. Well, I don't think there's a person in the world that wants to spend advertising dollars to cost them money. They do it to get a return on investment. If you can tie that in, that when you spend money, you make money, that's going to do you good because many people start out and they immediately spend 2 years trying to do things for free. And I equate that to planting seeds and then walking all over the place like Johnny Appleseed. He planted seeds all over the place, but he never saw the apple trees grow because he wasn't there to do it. I'd rather just buy sod. I just bought a new house, I want grass today. That's buying traffic. I've got a green lawn in the front and the back while my neighbors are waiting to see if their, their grass is going to grow. And so if you're going to start advertising, the two easiest places to start would be Facebook and pay-per-click with Google. Starting with pay-per-click is probably the easiest concept to understand because you just tell Google, what is somebody searching for that's looking for my product? And then your ad will show up at the top of the search engine. And when they click on that ad, you pay Google a dollar, uh, or 70 cents or whatever the, whatever they're charging for your keywords. And when those people buy, you keep all of the money.

Yeah. And thank you for saying that. It's like, uh, you know, paid traffic is paying you money where, you know, free is not paying you anything. You know, that's— I think it's— how can I put it? It breaks somebody's limitations in their thinking that they might have when it comes to, you know, this sort of thing. And it's performance-based, you know. It's not like an ad you buy in a magazine where you hope somebody, you know, responds to it. It's literally every time you're paying, it's because somebody clicked.

Yeah, and it's measurable, unlike a billboard ad or an ad in a magazine. You, you literally know the performance of this keyword versus this keyword, and you could be like, well, this one didn't work and this one did, so let me stop spending here and put more money into this one.

A lot of people have the— this perspective, and it's kind of a, a defeatist perspective, is, oh, I, I think I missed the boat on this, you know. You know, when you go back to the early days of your mastermind group, and, you know, I know a lot— I'm surprised we haven't met before. I know a lot of people that you that you talked about that were in that group. And it was the heyday. And to some people, the opportunity was so much greater then, and that ship has kind of sailed. So it's not as easy to get in and actually make something of this. How do you feel about that? Do you think that that's misguided?

Very misguided. Here's how I want you to look at it. You're at the Super Bowl or the Daytona 500 or some mega Italian festival in New York City. If you see 7 stores at a food court, the last thing that you want to say is, well, somebody beat me to it, there's already 7 stores. No, you want to be like, dang, I want to be the 8th store, uh, because there's a crowd of people with a line going out the door for 20 minutes just to get a hot dog. Maybe you could sell them pizza. That's what the internet is right now. We went through the wild, wild west. We have all the arrows in our back. We figured this out for you. When I got started, we had to code websites by hand. We didn't even have WordPress. We were using Microsoft FrontPage. We had to use something called FTP software. All of these different things that are super complicated right now. Now you can get up and running with something like Groove in 24 hours all the tools that you need, and you can focus on getting your message out there. There are some things that you're going to need to learn, but it's not 2013 where Andy Jenkins and I had to create a product called Video Genesis. Now everybody kind of gets it. Influencers, there's YouTube, there's, there's companies out there like Elgato that give you lighting and cameras and microphones. These kits are super cheap. You know, they ask, um, Generation Z and Generation Alpha as well, uh, they ask these, these young people today, what would you rather be, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or an influencer? And 93% of kids say they'd rather be a YouTuber or an influencer. So this is the future. As the, as the crowd gets bigger, the food courts will get bigger. It's kind of like suburbs, right? There was a city first in Manhattan, and then they built out and they built out. And every single time the suburbs got a little bit bigger, it was a little rural for a while. But the next thing you know, a new shopping center came up and we repeated the process. A dry cleaner came up, the bagel store, the deli, the pizza place, the stationery store, the supermarket, the repair shop, over and over and over again. That's what we're seeing online. Just look at your opportunities to be able to get your store into the next shopping center. That's got to be what you want to do. Just get in the game. It's fun. Uh, there's a great industry. There's live events where we get to meet up. I do something called the Marketers Cruise where 500 people go on a cruise every year and talk about what we're doing right now. You really want to become part of this industry. And there's many Facebook groups where you could find people just like you, where you could ask questions and get solutions. And you're going to find it's a lot easier than you think. I'm going to leave this, this part of the conversation with this. When you walk around or drive around, success is all around you. Everywhere we go, As you drive by, there's an office building, there's a, there's a shopping center, and you look and that's an entrepreneur, that's an entrepreneur, and it just doesn't end. From car dealerships to service repair shops to restaurants, success is all around you. Online, every time you go into YouTube, there's somebody saying, hi, would you like to learn how to do this? Enter your name and email address. So they're doing this because by doing it, they have success. So what you want to ask yourself is, if you're struggling Don't say, what's wrong with me? Simply say, why not me? Why them? They're not any smarter than me. They don't have any other talents that I have. The only difference is they saw a video like this and got inspired and they took action. So if you do that, you're, you're gonna put yourself on the road to success.

Really inspiring. And I think accurate. Uh, and the, you know, you, you mentioned something earlier that I think is important. Um, that in 2008, necessity created a bunch more new entrepreneurs in the world, right? There's a big shift towards, you know, the big crash, big economic problems, and suddenly there's a bunch of new entrepreneurs. And it's startling how fast an economy can recover when entrepreneurs go to work. And, and I think we're facing some economic upheavals now. And most people think, you know, it's going to get worse. You know, we're going to have a pretty tough time coming up in a generic sense. But it's also again, that opportunity to say, if I'm going to do it, now's my time because things could get a little bit tough otherwise. This has been really brilliant. Any final thoughts you have for the people who are really thinking about jumping into this and creating a side hustle for themselves?

Yeah. So, my final thoughts are make sure to get involved with Six Figure Side Hustles. Any opportunity they present to you, make sure to get involved. It's going to put you on the right journey. The first thing that you want to do today is set a goal. You know, I remember hearing this from Tony Robbins back in 1993 when I bought his tapes, uh, and I thought, oh, here we go again, somebody with a goal. But if you don't have a target that you're aiming for, how are you ever going to hit anything that you want? The first thing to do is identify what you want. Next thing you do, brainstorm however you do it— pen and paper, Google Doc, and put down every single thing that is needed to make that goal work and brainstorm it in any order. If you were creating a digital product, you would say, well, I'm going to have to create the product. I'm going to need a domain name. I'm going to need to write sales copy. I'll probably need to figure out how to do support if people have a problem, and I'll need to get a merchant account. Just write down all of these different things. And then the secret to success is simply this. Putting that brainstorm list into list order. What, what do I do first, right? You don't want to buy the domain name the day before you go live, so you probably want to put that up at the top. Put it in order from start to finish and then go to work. It's that simple. When you check off every single item on that list, you're going to have a lot of money in your bank account.

Mike, that was great. Thank you for sharing so openly and delivering so much value to the people who are watching this series. And, uh, I admire the work that you've done. Uh, I think what you've built is fantastic. And yeah, why do I get the feeling you're just getting started?

Just getting started at 57.

I mean, anyway, uh, continued success for yourself, and, and thank you for contributing to the success of the people who are watching this series.

Good to be here.

I'm excited to introduce you to Stephen Gardner. Stephen is a guy that it seemed he would be unlikely to create a side hustle that didn't only succeed but blew up into a big business on YouTube. And when you hear how he did it and how he didn't follow the conventional rules yet became this unlikely star, I think you'll be not only motivated to do something like this yourself, but you're going to learn specific steps on how to get there. So enjoy my interview with Stephen Gardner. Steve, uh, I think you're the poster child for what we have to talk about here today. Your story is inspiring, and I think it's very relevant to what we want people to understand. So, before you became a YouTube phenomenon, what were you doing?

I did financial planning through insurance products for about 13 years. Before I did that, I did try to get into YouTube. So, My YouTube channel is actually older than my oldest child.

Really? Okay, I didn't know that.

But until I really took it serious and looked at it as an opportunity to make money, it was just something I was testing and trying. But before that, I was mainly focused on writing books, financial education, helping people safely prepare for retirement.

So, then COVID hits. And your YouTube channel at that point is not really doing much of anything, right? I mean, how often were you posting then?

I was about 1 time a week and I had 200 subscribers.

Okay, sorry, didn't mean to laugh. You're doing this for years, you're posting every week and you got 200 subscribers. So, but yet you kept— what kept you posting? You just enjoyed the process or?

I knew it was going to take some time. I had no idea what my path would be going forward. But I just knew I needed to create content. And I have this 3-step process for everything I do, which is action, traction, attraction, right? And I knew I needed to take massive amounts of action, and then something would start to stick. I would start to get some grip, but I just had to have that grit. And then eventually, I would start attracting people to me. And I've used that in multiple businesses. Over time. But when you only have 200 people and most of them are family and friends and you put out a video and it has 5 views and 4 of them are you checking if you got any more views, it can be very disheartening. But I have a personality that doesn't like to give up. And so I just kept putting out content, looking for patterns, and eventually found a pattern.

COVID hits and that's when things started to change, if I know the story properly, right? So what happened?

So, uh, all of a sudden I found myself in lockdown, uh, and my wife was very, very sick. I thought maybe she had COVID. I was trying to keep the kids away from her. I was trying to figure out my business. I went from making $8,000 to $10,000 a month to owing these insurance companies $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 because people were backing out. I was getting hit with back charges. People were like, Listen, I can't move forward, or can you scale back my retirement contributions? And suddenly I was like, honey, I got to go get a job. Like, I don't know what to do. I've got to switch careers. And so I just started making videos every day about emergency preparedness, how to survive COVID, just any topic I could think of until I noticed a pattern. And once I hit that pattern, then it was like, okay, maybe, maybe people want to know this. But ultimately, it was me doing the research I thought was interesting and then just sharing it online.

With how to get like— because there were, I guess, COVID checks, if you will, you know, people getting reimbursed, you know, who were put out of work or what have you. And because I remember I was watching these videos and, you know, you would hold up, I think, little cards and explain things really well and shepherd people through a process of how to get relief based on the lockdowns, what was going on. Is that pretty accurate?

Yeah, that's a great word, uh, shepherd, because, uh, the government wasn't putting out a lot of information, and the information they were putting out, you'd have to go on CNN or Fox News or MSNBC, and you'd have to watch 2 or 3 hours of the news cycle to get 5 minutes of information. And so for me, it was like, okay, the, the riches are in the niches. What's that niche that I can find? It's like, okay, people want information about the PPP program as a business owner. They need information about the stimulus checks. They need information about unemployment. And you had tens of millions of people panicking for information. I couldn't talk about COVID I couldn't talk about masks or anything. So it was literally just, okay, I'm in numbers and finance, I'll just stick to the money side. Of the COVID problem and that's when all of a sudden I had a video get like 1,000 views and I was like, wow, I'm on to something here and then I had another video and then I tried something else and nobody wanted to watch that one and I was like, okay, I can learn from these failures. These people are indicating to me what they want to see and so I just looked for the patterns of what they were wanting, when they that news cycle should release, the words that I should use. The funny thing is people are like, you know, how do you get views? You have the most ugly thumbnails on the planet because I didn't know how to make a thumbnail and I was literally making 3 videos a day, 7 days a week to keep up with the demand. So I would just hold up a piece of paper and smile, or if it was bad news, I would frown and they both seem to get views, you know, and so I just kept it really, really simple with information that people were basically desperate to have. And so that's when I started to see that increase in subscribers and views on a daily basis.

Yeah, it's— views are like votes, right? They're kind of voting on what they want. And this was all organic, right? I mean, you, to your point, like, it wasn't like, oh, you had a sophisticated marketing agency that was creating thumbnails for you and split testing things and, you know, kind of really building the site and driving traffic through paid. This was a completely organic process for you, correct?

Yeah. In fact, to this day, I have marketing agencies that will sit down with me and their first comment is, "We don't know why you're successful." And I'm like, "I don't either." At least we're on the same page, you know. And so, yeah, they'll look at me and they're like, "Okay." 'Your delivery's terrible.' You know, 'Your scripting looks really bad. Your thumbnail's really bad.' And so over time, I took that as feedback to improve. But at the end of the day, I just knew people wanted to be told the truth and have really good information. And as ugly as my content was, it met the need. And so I just stuck with that. But yeah, to this day, I still have people that are like, I don't know why you're successful, your stuff's terrible. And I'm like, well, you have 10,000 subscribers, so maybe I'm doing something right and you're doing something wrong. So quit taking the YouTube courses and just look for what's working, right? So, but yeah, that—

I mean, it's really quite a story. And you're able now to support yourself just on YouTube, right?

Yes, it's, it's my more than full-time job.

Yeah. And then COVID ends, right? And did you have this moment of, well, like maybe that party's over or, you know, how did you process that? Because some might say, yeah, you know, he kind of like there was a big disruption in the world. He filled a niche, you know, as you described. But when that's over, he's done because, you know, he doesn't do any of the things everybody else does on YouTube.

Yeah, I've always been good at pattern recognition. And so I was the first one. So all of a sudden, within this stimulus vertical, all these channels started popping up, most of them stealing my content and my ideas. And all of a sudden, my views started to go down because the topic got watered down. And we went from like 3 channels to 300 channels of people competing and using my content against me. And so, but the thing that I was good at was, okay, this check is done, I would skip to the next check. And so I started putting it out. People say, you're crazy, why are you talking about this? I'm like, I'm trying to stay ahead of the trend, right? So, I would say about 18 months into that, I realized, okay, there could be another check, there might not be. So, again, the best thing I could give people is the truth in consolidated information. And so I was on vacation in the Caribbean on my anniversary vacation and I said to my wife, I need to start testing new things within my videos and letting people give me feedback through their views on whether they liked it or not because otherwise I'm going to be a flash in the pan and then I'm out of business, right? And so When I came back, I started testing like humorous videos, like telling wild stories, and I would get views, you know, 40,000, 100,000. But I was like, this is not sustainable. And so I started into the political news and the current event news, which is a very, very competitive space. It's just massive going up against Fox News and CNN and these other behemoths. But again, I just felt like if I I could stick to the truth and give them the news in about 15 minutes or less. So I started mixing in about 25% regular news and then 75% government updates. And then eventually over time I switched those. And then there was just a day where I was like, okay, I don't believe there's going to be any more government assistance and I don't believe in lying. And so I just cold turkey stopped. And I saw other channels do this and their views just like dropped and mine did too and I was like, okay, I just need to be patient. I've built all this trust, familiarity, celebrity status.

What are your subscriber levels at this point?

At this point, I'm at about 700,000 and today I'm at 1.25 million.

Wow.

So I've almost doubled and so but I was willing to go through that pain to have integrity with myself and my channel until I found the next topic that could take me back to where I was or to new heights. Now it's at new heights. But I started going into the political and the current events, but I didn't pick sides. I tried very, very hard to be neutral. And people found that, I believe, refreshing. Because if you like Biden, you don't want Biden to be trashed every video. If you like Trump, you don't want Trump to be trashed watched every video. You just want to know what are these guys doing for the country as we head into the election? What's happening with the economy? Are we going to have a recession or not? Are they lying to us about having a recession or not?

So you became basically a news reporter.

I became a news reporter.

Yep.

And so I just slowly transitioned over time and then I started taking feedback. Okay, I do need to work. I need to have a more polished approach. I need to switch up my script. I do need to have a little bit better thumbnail. But these things came over time and they made marginal differences. At the end of the day, I still believe me just being truthful and consolidated with information is what made me successful.

So, I mean, very few people achieved what you just described. In other words, there's not many people even have like the, you stumble into success scenario like you had. But even very much smaller percentage that can actually transition from one theme of what you're there for to a completely— I would say completely different, still kind of news, but it was you had very niched or targeted news versus here's the current events. Here's what I suspect, and tell me if you agree with the statement. It's because of the trust you built with the audience that you brought with you that they stuck with you and still want to hear more from you. Is that Is that your read on it, or why do you think it worked?

Yeah, absolutely. When I was doing financial planning with people, I would move millions of dollars over the phone, never meeting any of these people. And I would, I would be a speaker, keynote speaker at conferences all over the country. And they would ask me all the time, like, how do you do this? What are you doing? How are you selling this? What's your approach? And I'd say, I only ever sell one thing: trust. That's it. It's the only thing I try to sell. I don't sell insurance. I don't sell retirement planning, mutual funds. I just sell trust. And so I do believe being that trusted voice where it's like, okay, he's going to delve into Democrat topics, he's going to delve into Republican topics, libertarian topics. But I try to be very fair from both sides. And again, just sharing, sharing that information. But at the end of the day, I knew that I was the linchpin. I can't be replaced. If I bring somebody else on my channel, it's going to take a long time to get the traction. And so I just had to be true to my viewers and be very, very consistent.

Do you enjoy it?

I do. Yeah, I do. I went through a time where it started to bog me down doing, you know, 3 videos a day, 7 days a week. I was, I was just burning the candle at you know, all 3.

Was that in the COVID times?

Yeah, that was during the COVID times. And then as the presidential election was going and people were still needing stimulus, I was doing 2 videos plus going live for an hour every night. And it did the live work.

Did people come to your live events?

Yeah, there were times I had 25,000 to 30,000 people watching me at once.

Live?

Yeah. It's like—

that's competing with some network news or, you know, cable news, right?

Yeah.

And it was very intimidating. I goof up a lot. And it was—

But maybe that's the refreshing part where they say, hey, the guy's real, right?

Yeah. I mean, there were times where I was like, okay, there's more people watching me than the Utah Jazz basketball stadium. That's intimidating for a guy who considers himself an introvert. But I was like, okay, some of these people are foes, most of them are friends. I'm just going to deliver the news like I always do. But yeah, going live was new for me and it was very intimidating. To this day, I haven't been live in probably 18 months because it's that intimidating.

Wow.

And you do this still from your house or do you have a studio?

What do you do? I still do this from my house.

Wow.

Created an office.

And you know all the good tax strategies for writing that off. Yes. So that's another benefit of this. But so you— and why I'm bringing that up is that you can build and work from home and be successful at it. You know, you don't have to go out and try to find space. So let's say now somebody's watching this. I want to give some like practical steps in there. And let me tease a few things out. Tell me if you agree or disagree and then maybe what advice you might have for them. So first off is that you actually said, I need to be able to talk about something that I have pretty good expertise in, that I feel confident that I can give good information here. Is that the first step? Figure out what, what, what you can— if somebody says, I want to start a YouTube channel, I, I'm willing to go through some time to figure out, you know, like you did, maybe not as many years, but go through some time because if I could set this up and make, you know, some side money and maybe grow it into a full-time business, that would be my dream. What is the first step? Let me ask you rather than put the words in your mouth.

Yeah, no, I would definitely say you have to— you don't have to be an expert at something, but you have to at least be passionate about it. And you have to know that there's at least 1,000 people that are, you know, interested in that. I know people on YouTube that make hundreds of thousands, if not a million dollars a year, and then they have a very small audience.

How?

Well, they have like coaching programs or they have something where the video is free and they are educating you, but then you come into their funnel and now you can make money with selling some kind of package, program, tool, software, whatever it is. And so, it becomes a lead mechanism versus that's you're making money from YouTube revenue or ads or sponsors. So, but I would say it has to be something that you're, you know, interested in, passionate about, knowledgeable about, and then be able to succinctly convey that information and educate people or entertain them. There's a lot of people making really big money on YouTube just being entertaining, right? I don't know that I'm entertaining but so—

Do they make the money from just YouTube from views or are they selling other stuff or?

I would say just from what I know, most people that are making good money on YouTube, it's most likely from sponsors or from selling something that they have ownership over. Whether that's a coaching package or a how-to program or something like that, something that they either control or somebody else doesn't want to build the channel but they want to use you to sell their product or their program. That's— most people aren't making their money from YouTube ad revenue. It's from just having that platform give you access to an audience you can sell things to.

And do you have sponsors for your show?

I do.

And so what percentage of your income would you say comes from sponsors versus YouTube ad revenue?

In the first year, YouTube was the majority of my income and then my financial practice. And then I would say in year 2, sponsorship and YouTube were very similar. In last year, I had more sponsors than I could handle.

Wow.

Sometimes 10 to 13 a month. And at that time, I had scaled back to doing 21 to 24 videos. So it was like every other video is exhausting.

Yeah.

But then now I've scaled it back enough that it's maybe 4 or 5 a month.

And do they come find you or do you find them?

I actually hired a brand manager in New York and he he and his team, they handle finding them, contracting, making sure I get paid. Did I hit my numbers? Did I fulfill my contract? So having somebody that can handle that was huge.

Yeah, because like I was listening to Tim Ferriss podcast this morning, for example, and there's like a whole bunch of sponsors he reads before he gets into the podcast. But I don't know that I remember seeing those in your videos. So where do the sponsors get— is it like kind of in between where it cuts the sponsor and then—

I do what's called subtle, really subtle marketing.

Yeah.

So, I'll take somebody through 5 or 6 minutes of news and then I'll say, "I'm going to tell you about a sponsor for a minute." And then for example, like this is a shoe company, Vessi Shoes.

Yeah. I like those.

Yeah, they're totally waterproof. I love them. They clean really easily. So, I'll do a 60-second commercial about that. And then I thank them and I say, let's get back to today's news.

Yes.

And then I flow right back out.

Just like the networks.

It goes really, really smooth. Yeah. And I've done certain things like I'll wear the same outfit so that it's even more, even more continuity, right through the whole thing. So I had to learn all of that. Yeah, I goofed up a lot. The sponsors were, were patient with me. Yeah, I didn't know how to edit. If I didn't know how to make a thumbnail, I didn't know how to edit, right? And so I had to learn— like, I learned so many skills.

Did you edit in the beginning?

I still don't edit.

Okay.

Yeah. So, okay.

Yeah. Unless it's like a short or something. But even like my big interviews that I do that get hundreds of thousands of views, for the most part, there's very, very little editing. It would make your team here crazy. But anyway, so now I would say the sponsors are maybe 25 to 30% of my income. And the other 70% is, is just YouTube.

Yeah, so it's still the majority is still coming from YouTube. It's good that you have the sponsors to kind of add to it, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So this is— and because the hard part is building an audience, and you know, that's a valuable thing for a sponsor, so I could see how that would, how that would happen. But now circling back to the, the guy or the gal, the person getting started, so they're gonna basically— what do I have a passion about? I think that's probably important because I have to imagine you have to especially if you're doing multiple videos a day for a period of time. Boy, if you're doing it on a topic that you had no passion around, that could be very tough. So find something you're passionate about. Okay, so now what's the next step, would you say, for them?

Then you need to start finding your own unique style. If you just copy other channels, then you're just like everybody else, right? So you have to find your own style. You have to get comfortable with presenting At the end of the day, everything you do is a, is a story. So you have to think about, you know, what's going to hook people? How am I going to entertain them? How am I going to educate them? So I would say, you know, find, find the thing that you feel comfortable talking about, start finding the audience, and then start putting out the content, long-form content, short-form content, and then also the Shorts, which is a new feature. In the last year where you can build an audience very quickly but they have a shorter attention span and so it's like how do I get— okay, so YouTube helped me get you, how do I now get you over to watch the long-form content that I can actually make more money? But there's entire channels of Gen Z kids out there that have millions of subscribers, they make me jealous but all of their content is shorts.

So So what is considered long, short, and then shorts?

Yeah, so I try to keep my videos under 15 minutes, my interviews under 45 minutes. That's a lot to ask of somebody to watch that long. I remember back in the day, Facebook was all the rage because they could keep people on their platform for 4 minutes. Well, it was like marketers' dreams, right? And some of my videos, I'm holding them anywhere from 6 to 15 minutes, which is incredible. And so those would be considered long. I'm helping build my wife's YouTube channel for her relationship coaching company, and we try to keep things under 7 minutes, typically 3 to 5 minutes.

But I look at like a Joe Rogan, you know, he's 2 and a half hours, 3 hours, or, you know, some of these other guys, they just—

so are they just breaking the rules, or, you Joe Rogan set the precedence for long-form content and it took him a long time. He said, you know, I think he said, I made hundreds of episodes before I got traction. Hundreds of episodes, right? But he wanted that to be his style so he had to find his unique style and now he has such raving fans that they're literally willing to spend 2 or 3 hours a day with him. I listen to him regularly, but on twice the speed. Yeah, just because I'm busy and incrementally. Yeah.

Like you don't do the whole thing at once, but you take a piece and.

Yeah.

And there's, there's interviews that I'm like, not interested in that one. Very interested in this one. And that's the one that gets my attention over maybe a 2 or 3 day period.

And then shorts are what, like just a minute or 60 seconds or less? That's, that's considered the shorts. Yeah, because I'm noticing that on YouTube, that's kind of a new phenomenon, right?

Yeah, they're trying to compete with TikTok, but at the same time, they just in like the last 60 days added a revenue component. It pays about a 10th of what a regular video pays. But if you get millions and millions of views. So for me, I use Shorts as a way of getting in front of new eyeballs, but then I try to push them over to my long-form content.

Right.

And I'm committed to my long-form content where, like I say, a lot of these younger people They're just doing the Shorts.

Are they posted in a different place than your normal channel, the Shorts, or are they posted like, you know, with everything else?

They're posted with everything else. I would say the best way to understand it is when you hit go, they go down different rabbit holes.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, so like my content, when I hit go, it'll go out to my people and then either hit the YouTube homepage or it'll start picking up people that are searching keywords where a short, most shorts, you don't know they're coming, they just give them to you and then you decide I like this or I don't like it, it's just swipe, swipe, you know, and so that's why I say it goes down a totally different rabbit hole, whole new set of eyeballs but then how do you convince somebody who's trained their brain to watch something for 60 seconds or less to now give you that 6 minutes and that's where I'm even still learning But I, but I've been able to do it to the point where now YouTube's paying me and now the sponsors are paying me.

Yeah. So and I guess this goes back to your pattern recognition abilities, right? You're seeing how people are reacting to Shorts and how it might best work for you. It sounds like it's a great audience builder. You know, for some, it gets my attention for a moment. They see what you do and they go subscribe.

And then if I was starting over today, I would start with Shorts. And then push to a long-form video.

Interesting.

But knowing that Shorts will be more dominant, but I'm going to make a tenth of the money.

Yeah.

So it has to be a blend.

Yeah.

But then you can throw in sponsors, right? It's a little bit harder to do a sponsor in 60 seconds.

Yeah. So how do you do a sponsor in a Short? That's got to be tough.

Yeah, it is.

So, all right, so now they found something they're passionate about, they're gonna start to launch. To this day, do you spend any money on driving traffic to your site or is it still all organic?

I do. I do now. So, I hired a group out of Miami to help me with my email list. I've been doing these giveaways of $5,000 to $10,000 for about 3 years now. And unbeknownst to me, I had an email list of about 400,000 people.

Wow.

I didn't know it. When you say giveaways, I mean, how are you giving away the So, I just let them know that, you know, I've been blessed by sponsors and income and I want to give back to people in the community. So, they will go sign up. I capture their email and then they're notified whether they were a winner or not.

Kind of a lottery?

Yeah, kind of a lottery similar to that where I just, you know, I was trying to help people financially during the lockdown. And now, I've gone to bigger numbers because of the the income increasing. But from that, I built this massive email list that I wasn't capitalizing on. So now, I don't really try to sell them anything but I'll use that to drive people to specific videos that I believe are important to them. So, I now pay a couple thousand dollars to have my email list pushing back to my own content.

Right. But they're already subscribers probably if they are— or if they were in the contest, right?

Correct.

Yes, correct. And you don't do any of those in-stream type of ads that might, you know, that you can pay for to drive people to your—

No. When I was doing the financial planning, I would do that. And it is a great way to build an audience and make money. I did make money doing financial planning that way. But as far as building my channel, my channel has been 100% organic.

That's— I mean, that's Yeah, really incredible. I speak to a lot of YouTube people. You're the only one I think that's gotten to the level you have in an organic fashion. It's pretty, pretty incredible.

Yeah, I just let the content speak for itself.

Yeah, the content everybody else says you're doing wrong. The people who are 10% of you tell you that, hey, you're not doing this right.

Yeah, I mean, I guess no guts, no glory. Yeah, the fact that The fact that I just go for it, I think has benefited me overall.

That's amazing. So now to set up the channel, I mean, it's really very low cost, right? So this fictitious person who said, I found my little niche. I've got excitement about baseball cards. I don't know, whatever it might be. And I think I could really build an audience here in this niche. And then it's just a matter of creating some videos and posting. You said starting out with some shorts. Anything they should know special about setting up their channel? Like, you know, there's a right or wrong way to do it, or do you just kind of like put up a banner, you know, fill in the blanks?

Yeah.

You know, so much of the learning comes from failing, so I would hate to rob somebody of that. But you do want to think through your name. Like, I have a friend, he's in Florida. He's built a channel to about 40,000 people. But nobody knows how to search him because his name's just Kevin. And so, like, having a clever name or being specific about your channel name is really important. Mine's just Steven Gardner.

Right.

And so that's my best search term to this day is just my own name. Right. But, you know, if it was mountain biking, you might want to be clever about that. But titling is very, very important. I think more important than thumbnails and then thumbnails would be number 2, your video description. What you're trying to do is you're trying to think through what metadata can I feed YouTube so that YouTube can do all the work for me, right? And if you're trying to do all of the work—

Can you just explain what metadata is in case somebody doesn't understand?

Yeah, so when you tell them what the video is about, keywords, tags, hashtags. YouTube is using all of this data like, for example, #JoeBiden, #DonaldTrump, right? Just as an example. Well, when people are searching for those, then they already know, hey, wait a minute, here's somebody who has classified their video as this topic or this keyword. I'm more likely to have YouTube connect me with those people than if I did nothing, right? And a lot of channels, they don't put any metadata or secondary data in there and so YouTube's kind of relying on their artificial intelligence which is still pretty new to figure out what is your video about. They don't know. When you launch, they have no idea what your video is about unless a human reviews it, right? Which doesn't happen anymore and so you have to I have to think through what data can I give YouTube so YouTube will do all the heavy lifting for me and I think that's one reason why I've grown is I've just said, okay, who's better at this, YouTube or Steven Gardner? YouTube. So I default to everything, every little trick I can think of to getting YouTube to connect me with the right people.

So basically as you said, you know, more important to thumbnails, good title, good video description and then I guess you're hashtagging You know, content.

Yeah, the hashtag. Just because people go on and you have to just think about the person on the other side of the computer. What are they typing in so that you can be found, right? And if you're just putting— like, I have another friend, he just puts up stuff and then he says, "Oh, you know, YouTube's racist," or "They don't like my content," or "They suppress me." And I'm like, "No, dude.

You're just—

your metadata is terrible. So having, having that metadata for YouTube to use to your advantage is really, really important, and most YouTubers miss that.

It's interesting when I think about the varying, you know, people who are putting so much different content out there, and then how, you know, how would they hashtag or, you know, how would they characterize that this is it and how it gets matched up. I know like a lot of people complain in different social media platforms, especially Twitter, you know, before and after Elon, to a point of, hey, I've got all these followers, but I think I'm being suppressed or I'm being shadow banned or whatever it might be. In YouTube, when you post a new video, are they automatically putting it into the feeds of all your subscribers or, you know, is there a way to enhance that?

They used to. They don't now. Nobody knows the algorithm and it changes regularly. And so you have to keep looking for those patterns. But so if I have 1.25 million people, they're going to, in the first hour, they're going to test that to a very small portion and see how they respond. If they respond really well, they open it up to more people. If those people respond really well, then they open it up. If a lot of old people and new people are responding really well, your video might go viral. And I've had that before. It doesn't happen that often. But again, you never really know what the algorithm is gonna do with the content. If you've said words that offend YouTube's, you know, people behind the scenes, or you've said things that people are searching, right? So I'll give you an example. Tucker Carlson is let go from Fox News, right? Every channel that was talking about Tucker Carlson was getting huge hits. It was this massive spike in data. And so if you talked about it, you had a thumbnail about it, or it was in your title, you had a great chance of picking up a lot of eyeballs. So you have to be conscious of things like that. Same thing, you know, let's say that you started a channel about soccer. You're going to want to hit on the names of the soccer teams. You're going to want to hit on the names of the hot players, right? I call this drafting where when I was in high school, I had a really piece of crap car. I would get behind semi-trucks and I would try to save on gas mileage and also effort going up Parley's Canyon where they were hitting all the wind and I was just kind of behind them, right? And so you can do the same thing on YouTube where you can use celebrities' names, big events, sporting events, whatever it is, and you draft off of those names and those searches in order to grow your channel. So like with the stimulus check thing, I had one video that got me 45,000 new subscribers. Wow, it's insane. It's absolutely— it would be like the entire football stadium of Ohio State suddenly saying, who's this Steven Gardner guy? It was because I hit the right words at the right time when all these millions of people were searching and they hit subscribe because they were like, I trust this guy's information, right? You can do the same thing with mountain biking or video editing or magic or card tricks or whatever it is that you want to do. You just have to always be conscious, don't put out what you want, put out what people are searching or what they're thinking about, and if you do that, it greatly increases your chances for success.

Yeah, it seems weird to me that if somebody literally says, hey, I want to subscribe to this guy's channel, so I want to know when he's putting out content, that, you know, I'm not automatically going to get it, you know. So I guess, do you communicate at all with your, you know, your audience saying, hey, 'Come to my page to see what I'm putting out because you might not see it otherwise,' or you just assume everybody understands to do that?

Never assume anyone understands YouTube.

Okay.

Most people are just consuming. Until you really understand behind the curtain, it's a whole different animal. Right. So it's very frustrating. Like I was saying to your guys here today, like, I don't know why they even have a subscribe button anymore because they don't push your content out to all of your subscribers. So frustrating that way, but I try— this is why the email list has become so important, is it's like, okay, yeah, they're subscribed to you and they're on your email, so why are you doing a notification? Because they may— they might not get that notification from YouTube, right? And so to have an insurance policy, I will hit them again. Then what I do is I just don't hit them too often, and so that way when I do, they're like, oh, this video must be be important and then boom, I have a good open rate, good click-through rate and so that's been really helpful. Then I'll do like community polls, I'll share pictures of my family.

On YouTube?

On YouTube. This is more— it's almost like a Facebook feature where you're just putting out like a static photo with a description or some kind of poll where people can interact and share information. Those things also pull people back in. They're also really great for collecting data.

Yeah.

And so once you have a large enough group, you can actually put things out and they'll tell you what content they want to see, maybe what their voting preference is or who they like or don't like or what they thought of an event. And you can use all of that to give them a better show. So, but at the end of the day, it might pull them in based off a poll and then they go, oh yeah, I haven't seen this guy's video in a couple of days. I'll go back and and watch it.

Do you get together with other YouTubers and sort of mastermind, you know, the, you know, strategies like where you guys say, hey, I've been doing this, this is working, that's not working? Are you kind of like in your own little universe?

I tried to, and most YouTubers are very stingy with sharing what's working on their channel, even when you're not a competitor. Yeah, it's like they spend so much time doing pattern recognition on their own channel that if they finally figure something out, they don't really want to share that with somebody else. I try to be really open. I remember years ago hearing MrBeast when he first started. He had 5 or 6 friends and they would, they would put out videos and then they would spend the rest of the day saying, hey, it might have been this color on this thumbnail or this wording or this logo or the fact that I started my video this way but ended it this way, the fact that I asked them to subscribe versus just hoping they would subscribe. And they would do this, I think, 5 days a week for like 5 hours a day.

Wow.

Just sharing what was working between the, the 5 or 6 of them. And then he said at the end of the year, every person in that group had over a million subscribers.

Wow.

And so I tried to put something like that together and it got like no traction. I'm like, I'm not even asking for money. I'm like, just will you share data with me? People are very private on YouTube about what's working and not working, but I try to be open. I mean, I don't maybe share everything, especially because a lot of the people I talk to are in the same vein, right, or niche as me.

Right.

But if they ask me, I'm usually very open. I believe title is one of the most important things. And I shared this with a couple of other YouTubers. I'll spend 15 to 30 minutes writing out dozens of titles and then I'll narrow it down and then I'll crumple it up and throw it away. And they're like, why do you do that? And I'm like, to get better at titles. And so then I'll share titles with them. I'm like, hey, that particular video, what if you had done this title? And they're like, oh my gosh, that's brilliant. And sometimes they'll use it and sometimes they don't.

There's no way to test it, I guess, right? You just pick it, you pick it and release it, and then you don't try.

If a video is not taking off within the first 60 minutes, sometimes I'll switch the title or the thumbnail or both. But usually once something goes out into the ether, it just has a mind of its own.

Yeah.

So like, I had a video yesterday, it started off really slow, and my thumbnail and research guy was like, should we switch this? And I was like, No, let's just let it go. I'm busy with family stuff. And then at nighttime, I don't know what happened. All of a sudden the video just took off.

Wow.

And I never know. Like, I brought on a new Army colonel to talk about the Russia-Ukraine war. Nobody had heard of him. It was my first time interviewing him. My other ones had done well. That video went to the moon. It was getting 100,000 views an hour.

Wow.

And then all of a sudden it like dropped off. Like someone at YouTube went, We don't want this video being seen, and the views just like dropped, and it was incredible.

And that's probably the most plausible explanation, right? They— somebody, somebody just said, uh, we want to either lower the heat here.

Yeah, either that, or like they like just hit so many eyeballs that they were like, whoa, we got to slow this down. Or everybody who normally watches me just watched it all in the first 2 hours versus the, the 24-hour period. Because most of my stuff after 24 hours, it kind of dies. The news cycle is new and they move on.

Do you repurpose any of your work, like meaning like, you know, distribute through podcast platforms where people can consume it in other ways, or do you just release on YouTube?

Right now I just release on YouTube, but my team and I, we're probably going to start taking that and moving it over to Rumble and maybe even to Facebook. But some, some of the stuff I talk about you couldn't talk about on those platforms. And so I just kind of stuck with YouTube. YouTube was a little bit more generous than other platforms during the lockdown. But yes, I am looking at possibly doing another language. I'm also looking at possibly hitting other platforms. So now it's just finding the right team.

Yeah.

And that, that's where things get a little bit scary because it's like, what's working that got me this big, I'm very comfortable with. I'm in control. But the same tools and tactics I use to get to a million are not at all the tools and tactics I need to get to 2 million. But it's scary to turn that over to somebody else. But I've been able to do that over the last about 11 months. And it has worked out in my favor. But there was— it was a learning curve.

And a trust curve. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, trust is your your primary value, right? So that's a, um, that's a tough thing because you're saying, hey, what I've done is working, but now you're at that fork in the road, right? Either you're going to just keep doing the same thing or you're going to try to grow. And I guess you're choosing to explore, you know, new strategies for growth.

Yes.

Yeah. And it's like any business, right? What got you from zero to a million, you know, let's say in revenue instead of viewers, um, you know, to get from, you know, 1 to 3 million Yeah, it's— you got to reorganize a bit and it's a different thing that's going to get you there. So, it's, you know, that's I guess the challenge and maybe the fun of it too. So, it's not the same old, same old. Yeah.

There's a great book by Roger Hamilton called Millionaire Master Plan.

Yeah.

He's in this series incidentally.

Oh, is he?

Okay.

Cool. I didn't know that. So, I read his book and he was the one that opened my eyes and made me realize, okay, what got me to half a million isn't what gets me to a million. What got me to a million isn't what gets me to 2 million. And so, but it's really hard when you're growing. You think, oh, it's easy, you just grow. But it's like, okay, new person, be me and be just as good, but you're brand new. And it's really scary to hand off the reins. And yet, if you don't do it, I can't stay in my creative flow, which is what I'm best at. And so So over time, you just have to train people to be what you need them to be, but at the same time, allow them to be themselves and trust that the way you mow the lawn is, is good. You know, the way you write a script is good enough and I can tweak it, you know, but it is hard to release that control, especially when you've been doing it by yourself, making really good money. Incidentally, I got to my first million subscribers on a broken iPhone.

Come on, that was your only camera?

That was my only camera. To this day, I still only use an iPhone and people make fun of me but I want your people to know that like you can make money on YouTube as a side hustle. You don't need all this expensive equipment. Yes, it makes it better and you know having all of those things but I literally had a number 6 iPhone with a crack in it and that's what I was filming on So don't let your resources hold you back as an excuse.

No excuses. Yeah, that's— thank you for sharing that because that's unbelievable.

I never told that to anybody. Also, you know, people ask me all the time like, why do you make such terrible thumbnails? Because I don't know how to make them. I just hold up a piece of paper. I got to a million subscribers holding a piece of paper. So, but now it's not the thing that will get me to 2 million, you know?

Right. Yeah. You know, there's an old adage, the founder strength is is the company's weakness, right? Yeah, so you were a founder and you grew it to a million, but now it's more of a company. So there's a new strategy there. Any final words of wisdom or encouragement for people who are saying, yeah, inflation has squeezed me. I can't really meet my bills, you know, in my current job 'cause inflation's way outpaced any increase in my salary. And now it's not even like a dream, but a necessity that I create some kind of a side hustle YouTube has always sort of spoken to me. Yeah, what would you say to them?

Some of the best advice I was given, I was about 25 years old, I just had my first child, money was tight. This was actually Jim Rohn. Yeah, I was listening to a tape and he said, you can work full-time on your job and part-time on your fortune. And that has always stuck with me 15 years later where people think their side hustle like has to replace their income or it's not really worth my time or whatever. But any additional action you can take that makes money is a good thing. And then you have to just be really good at prioritizing your time. And I do believe that eventually those two can switch where now you're working full-time on your passion and your fortune and maybe part-time on a job. And then eventually you can let that go, be an entrepreneur, self-employed. Something like that. So I would say just throw yourself into it. And another piece of really good advice came from Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs. He said, don't follow your passion, follow opportunity and bring your passion with you. And that's what I did. I don't want to talk about Joe Biden and Donald Trump and the Washington machine that takes our tax money and all of that. But there was an opportunity, I was good at it, and then I just brought my passion and my own unique personality. But I don't like talking about politics. I find them to be gross, and I could never be a politician. But there was an opportunity there. And so if you can blend opportunity and passion, then you're probably gonna, you know, have even more success than I did. But I would say go for it.

Yeah.

And just know that it takes lots of lots of hard work. I used to stay up till 1 in the morning answering people's comments because I continued to look at YouTube as a social media platform and not a video platform. And so my wife would say, you know, you got to come to bed, and I would tell her what was going on. But reading those comments fed me what people wanted to hear the next day. So anyone that's starting out, I would just say be patient with yourself. But know that there's tremendous amounts of money to be made on YouTube.

Yeah, that's great. Well, you're a real inspiration, Steve. I very much appreciate you openly sharing your— call them your YouTube secrets or YouTube journey, but it's definitely an inspiration. I thank you for taking the time with us.

Absolutely, thank you.

I'm excited right now. We're doing something for the very first time at Revealed Films that we've created many, many, many documentary series. And I get excited when we're doing something new that can enhance the experience for you. And this comes— I'll give you a little bit of a setup here, especially on this first one, so you kind of understand the value of this. So my partner at Revealed Films, the co-founder Jeff Hayes, a while back told me, hey, I'm hiring this guy named Elliot Roe. He's a hypnotherapist and he's got strategies to help people increase their performance or to achieve their goals, etc. And he's worked with amazing people, people who have won the World Series of Poker and MMA fighters and professional athletes and others who are looking to invest in greater success. Now, I'm going to tell you the numbers because Jeff said I could, but to hire Elliot himself, the guy you're going to be hearing from in a moment, you have to buy a package of 10 sessions, and those 10 sessions are $25,000. So I looked at Jeff and said, $25 grand, that's a pretty big check to write. Did you, you know, kind of vet the guy, what have you? He said, I feel very confident that this is going to work out for me. What's the epilogue to the story? Not only did Jeff do the first 10 sessions for $25,000, he did a second set of 10 sessions for another $25,000. So if my partner Jeff Hayes invested $50,000 because he saw a lot of value in Elliott Roe, How excited am I right now to say that throughout this entire series, at the end of each episode, Elliot Roe is gonna be there to work with you to use his techniques to solidify the information that you just learned and lock it in so it increases the probability of your success. I just think this is one of the best bonuses that we ever were able to offer as a part of our series when we put it out there in front of you. So thanks for being here, and I'm extremely excited for you to have your first experience right now with Elliot Roe.

Hey everyone, I'm a mindset and performance coach. I work with high performers in different industries from professional athletes, CEOs of businesses, Wall Street traders, professional gamblers, anyone trying to get the top level of performance. Especially in high-risk industries where that little bit of mindset power makes an enormous difference to the results and usually the money that they make. Today we're going to do a hypnotherapy exercise working on confidence, and we're going to be looking at how you can change your state and increase your confidence in just a few minutes. If you're looking to follow along with this exercise, please make sure that you're not driving or operating any machinery and you're somewhere where you can just sit and relax comfortably. So everyone, now if you'd like to just close your eyes and take a deep breath, and as you exhale, just allow yourself to relax. Take another deep breath now. Slowly exhale, releasing any stress, any tension from your body. With each breath that you take, sinking deeper, relaxed. Just focus your attention on the sound of my voice, all other sounds relaxing you further, relaxing you deeper. Notice the top of your head and use the power of your mind to relax and release any tension that's stored there. See that relaxation as a color. Or feel it as a warmth. Allow it to slowly spread down now through your forehead and eyelids and down through your cheeks, just smoothing the skin of your face as it goes, relaxing your mouth and jaw, your neck and shoulders, through your arms to the tips of your fingers and thumbs, relaxing your chest now. And as you relax your chest Allowing your breathing to slow, your heart rate to slow, down your back and spine, thighs and knees, through your shins to the tips of your toes. Your whole body just so comfortable, just so relaxed. And now start counting backwards in your mind from 300. After each number, repeating the word relax. 300, relax. 299, relax. 298, relax. Just keep counting these numbers down, each number that passes sinking heavier, sinking deeper, and then taking control role in slowing this count. And as you slow this count, your breathing can slow, your body can slow, ticking over like a perfectly maintained machine. So calm, relaxed, and tranquil that you can stop this count completely and enjoy this time that's just for you. Now I'm going to count you down from 10 to 0. With each number I count, just picture those numbers vividly in your mind's eye. I don't know what color or font they'll be, but the 10 will be enormous, each number getting smaller and smaller till the 0 is so tiny you can hardly see it at all. With each number that passes, you'll sink further Deeper relaxed. 10, so big, so bold. 9, 8, just seeing these numbers now. 7, 6, getting smaller and smaller. 5, 4, already focusing in now. 3, 2, Smaller still. 1 and 0. Totally relaxed and totally calm. Now just picture a door in your mind's eye. Just seeing a door in your mind's eye. And behind that door is the most beautiful beach you could ever imagine. The most beautiful beach in the entire world. I'd like you to step through that door and onto that beach. Feel the sand beneath your feet, the warmth of the sun on your skin. And I'd like you to make the decision to just relax there completely, enjoying this sensation, feeling as if you've been on vacation there for an entire week, just enjoying this sensation, just truly letting go. Giving your mind and body some time to replenish, to relax. And from this place, I'd like your mind to start to drift. I'd like your mind to drift now to the control room of your mind. And everyone's control room is different. Some have machines, Some have computers, but everyone has a control room in their mind where they can make adjustments, they can make changes. And I'd like you now to see that control room of your mind, and somewhere there's a dial or a screen and it gives you a number on your confidence from 1 to 10. And you can tell right now where your current confidence is, how confident you're feeling in yourself, how confident you're feeling about yourself in your business. And I'd like you to see that number now, and I'd like to see that you have a level of control that perhaps you didn't realize you had before. And I'd like you to make the decision, and I don't know how it will move in your mind, but maybe there's a or maybe there's a button to press to take that number up. And as you take that number up, I'd like to feel that confidence growing inside you. As you see that confidence growing, that number rises and rises until you reach that 10. And I like to think about what that confidence level 10 feels like to you. How do you feel that in your mind? How do you feel that in your your body. What does it feel like to accept you can have a level 10 confidence in your mind, a level 10 confidence in yourself and in your business? Just feeling it through every muscle, every cell of your body, just accepting this level of confidence and then locking that 10 in, locking in that 10, making that decision to feel this way, seeing that it's just a choice. And as you lock in that 10, I'd like you to picture now that most confident you, your best self. Just making that picture vivid, making it clear in your mind, seeing that most confident you, that best self. How are they standing? How are they dressed? Just picturing your best self, understanding who you can choose to be. And I'd like you to make the decision now to step into your best self. Stepping into that body and making the decision to live this way. Understanding how different your life can be. How much easier it is when you're so much more confident, when you're ready to do the things you know you can do. Just feeling that confidence through every muscle, every cell. And making that decision to bring this confidence back with you now as I count you up from 1 to 5 now. 1, 2, coming up now, 3, 4, and 5. Open your eyes, feeling great. So I hope all of you enjoyed that introduction to using hypnotherapy for a state change. If you're interested in finding out more, my app is called Primed Mind, and you can download it. And there are a large number of these types of audios so that you can get your mind in the right place to have an impact on the world. I'll talk to you soon.

This next interview isn't just with someone who's got great information, great content to present to you, but is also our partner in the launch and marketing of this series, Six Figure Side Hustles. And that's Michael Hearn. I've known Michael for years, and I have to tell you, I'm overly impressed with not only his abilities to do the kind of work he does, but also to be able to communicate it in ways that can help you succeed in the ways that you're looking to. So Michael's a gem. He's got great information. He delivers it very well. His own story, I think, is very compelling. Let's dive into this interview. Michael, we've known each other for a while.

Yeah.

You happen to be exceptionally skilled at what you do, but you got, you got an interesting story too. So let's just start with your history. What got you into being an entrepreneur? Yes.

So I was actually flying in a plane on my way back to do a second round as a government contractor in Iraq. And I picked up the book Rich Dad Poor Dad and I read it, landed in Holland, in Amsterdam, turned around and came back to start my own business.

No kidding. Just like that.

Just like that. I knew it was what I was going to do. That was a terrible choice. And it was really hard for many years as a result of being that flippant about it, but in the long run, I don't regret it at all.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's interesting though is that it wasn't a side hustle. You like, you didn't keep your job. No. You decided to bail and jump all in. Yeah. We're here to talk a little bit more about side hustles. So if you were to give advice to the younger you, would you have said, hey, keep your job and start something on the side? What would you have told yourself? Yes.

Yes.

That would have been brilliant. It probably would have. Saved me, definitely would have saved me years of heartache. Yeah, no, that's probably, you know, as far as just avoiding pain, I mean, if you're going to start a business, you know, do it in your spare time. It doesn't require, you know, full-time focus to get something going and to test the waters. I came back with this idea of, you know, I'm just going to do whatever. I didn't even know what kind of business I wanted to be in. It was very ill-advised. And I wound up actually having to go back into the job space, getting a job, but it wasn't really a positive thing at that point. It felt kind of like a defeat. It caused stress in my marriage, things like that. It probably contributed significantly to my divorce. But over time, kind of figured it out, but it just took a lot of years of of struggle and a lot of mistakes, really.

And well, our hope here is to help people prevent these mistakes. Exactly. That's why they're watching this. And it's interesting, you know, that book has influenced a lot of people. But in your case, it wasn't, I'm going to just go be a real estate investor. It was just an entrepreneur figuring out how to just work for yourself. So what was it, do you think, that spoke to you that said, I, you know, I, I, Did you hate your job? What was the circumstance?

No, I think I've always just kind of been a little bit rebellious. My mom and my teachers could attest to that. I joined the Marine Corps right out of high school and I lasted 3 years out of my 4-year enlistment because I just kept breaking all the rules. I was the proverbial young Marine who was always getting into trouble. No one knew what to do with me, and so I got out a year early. I didn't get a bad discharge or anything, but they had had enough of my junk. And what really spoke to me was the freedom and being in charge of your own life, your own time. And really up until that point, nobody had even told me that I could start a business, which it seems like maybe that would be a given. That people would know that.

No early mentors? Yeah. So, because through high school, you were institutionalized in your high school and then went to the Marine Corps. But I guess that kind of structure didn't speak to you, huh?

No, not at all. Not at all. And just the fact that there was a logical path to take to accumulate wealth, that really spoke to me. So, if you kind of fast forward through a lot of rough years. It was in 2006 or so whenever I kind of figured out that out of everything that I wanted to do as an entrepreneur, that key skill set really was, was marketing. That was like the driving force behind success in any of these things, whether you want to find a real estate deal, whether you want to, you know, sell services, you want to sell a product, you want to be an affiliate. All of those things are driven by the ability to attract customers. And to convert them to sales. And so I really became focused on direct response marketing and salesmanship, and that just led me down a path that ultimately I thought to myself, hey, if I master this skill, I'll be able to start any business I want, but I can also get paid to master this skill.

Right.

And so I started to provide direct response copywriting services to people. And then ultimately wound up doing marketing consulting, digital marketing consulting.

It's interesting that you found marketing to be a common denominator, right? No matter what the business. And that's sort of in part a creative thing. There's also a structure to it.

Yeah.

But it's a creative thing as compared to saying, yeah, there's operations, there's other things you could have looked at, but marketing seemed to attract you. Yeah. How did you go about to learn marketing?

Well, I went to the bookstore and came across an author called Dan Kennedy who I know that you are familiar with.

Yeah.

And I bought every single one of his books and I read them in about a month. Wow. And it was just so pragmatic. It was so straightforward. It was like, you know, I've always been the kind of guy who will argue with a fence post. And so, you know, I kind of naturally had some of these inclinations towards influencing people and persuading people. And then just the way he broke it down really made sense to me. And you look around and, you know, the fact is, is that probably, I don't know what the percentage is, I can make up a number, so we'll call it 90% of what people are doing is advertising and marketing. Is extremely ineffective and wasteful. And so this was a way to measure the results, you know, dollar in versus dollar out. That made sense to me. And really, that just set me off down a path. And actually, when I, when I, when I read the books, I realized that I had been persuaded to make purchases in the past using these exact techniques. And so it just all really clicked for me.

You know, it's interesting, most people who aren't in your world or in the entrepreneur world in general don't understand how important copy is and how scientific it can be, meaning, you know, the testing mechanisms for copy to see what's producing, etc. It's very much an objective approach toward business when you can say, here's this subject line and or this headline and compare it to this one, split test it, get the data, you know, and here you have the outcome and it becomes some, you know, very predictable based on how you can measure these things.

Yeah.

And you can literally take the same product with really good copy that does well and mediocre copy and it doesn't move. And, and I've always been mystified in a sense, saying that, hey, you know, it's just about here, you know, here's what the benefits are, here's what I can do, and etc. But if the copy isn't done right, you know, the best of products will fail. And sadly, some very mediocre products that have great copy succeed when the product probably shouldn't succeed. Is that accurate?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I find that, and I talk to people about this kind of frequently, because, you know, you were really one of the— you and Jeff were really key in introducing me to this concept of having, like, such a great product that the copy didn't have to do everything. Whereas in the worlds where I've played in the past as a freelancer and a consultant, a lot of times they focus 80% on the copy and maybe 20% of the effort goes into the actual product to the point where they sometimes don't even care about the product because, you know, they'll know how to sell it. And that makes the cash register ring. And, you know, it does result in some bad products getting out there and it puts a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths and gives them a bad customer experience. Fortunately, you know, having learned from great guys like you and Jeff, you know, you can do both. Yeah, you really can.

It's probably— to me, it's a mandate. I mean, yeah, it's, it's, you know, the— if you want to have any kind of longevity, you know, you got to put out good product. Or to me, not even good product, but great product.

Yes.

To your point, also, I've noticed that especially in social media, you know, putting in feeds, there's a lot of companies, some of them are even foreign companies, they, you know, they do a really great job on like a little sizzle reel on a product and maybe a page that looks good, but the product is total crap.

Yeah.

And, and I think what they do, I mean, it's— they, they go out, they sell a bunch of stuff kind of in a burst, and they kind of just fold shop and go away so they don't have to deal with all the refunds because they'd get a lot of refunds, which is, which is scammy, you know. Yes, it's unfortunate and scammy. So we're here to talk about side hustle, right? How do you define side hustle?

So side hustle would be something that you're able to do part-time, but that's able to generate a full-time income.

That's an interesting caveat, you know, because sometimes it's like some people look up, make a little extra cash, right? But you would want to frame it saying you're going to work part-time while you keep a job. That's why it's on the side, right? Yeah. But you want to create a full-time income from that part-time effort. That's actually a really great goal. You're the first person I've ever heard say that, but keep going. I like this. Go ahead.

That was really my, my goal, um, was with, um, for many years there I was looking to just work as little as possible while maximizing my income. And so there were, you know, after I got through the, the years of learning the ropes and making all the mistakes and where I was working anywhere from 5 hours on a slow week to 20 hours on a busy week and making mid-six figures. And I would take a month or two off at a time sometimes and just do whatever I wanted to. I went camping a lot. I love being out in the wilderness. So I was able to create that type of income because of the value of the skill that I created. And so that's where I kind of, you know, maybe the, the key to that really is, you know, we were taught in a lot of ways to value our time in terms of dollars. But really what people are buying from you is a result, right? So they don't care if it took you 2 hours or 2,000 hours to create a sales letter that makes them $1 million. They want a sales letter that makes them $1 million. So if I could do that in 5 hours a week, what does it matter to them? And so that's sort of disassociating the amount of time put into something with the amount of value that it creates. It was a critical mindset shift.

You know, I've noticed, you know, we hired contract copywriters, you know, quite often, and it is always a project-based fee. It's not, you know, paying by the hour and you get an invoice based on that. It's like saying, if you're doing, you know, a product launch of some variety, yeah, here's how much it's gonna cost for us to do all the written assets for that launch. And I'll tell you that from the entrepreneurial masterminds I've been in and so on, you know, the highest paid people, contractors out there, are the good copywriters. You know, they're worth their weight in gold because they also not only take a fee but they ask for a percentage of the sales. And the good ones can do that. If they say, I want 2 or 3% of the gross sales, well, if their copywriting is gonna make you 30% more revenue, you're happy to give them the few points on it also. And incidentally, it's a good incentive because now they're gonna maybe spend that extra time to take it up a little bit more, a little bit more, 'cause they're gonna benefit from the upside. Lines up the chariots in the same direction as far as everybody doing well when the launch goes well. Yeah. So I think that as a side hustle, copywriting is, you know, if somebody has an inclination, is a really good one. Talk about how hard it is to learn this or how hard or easier. But what's the process of saying, okay, I have a feeling— well, no college education. I have a feeling you probably weren't getting straight A's in English. In English composition and so on.

Yeah, no, that's definitely the case.

So, so how did you learn to become a copywriter? I know you read books. Yeah. Kind of give you context, but then how do you learn to actually do it?

I was a kid who slept in English class, but the teacher would then read all my papers to the class because, you know, I was just naturally gifted as a writer.

Okay.

So I think that that definitely helps. And it, it was more important in the past than it is today. Because of artificial intelligence.

Yeah, I want to get to that in a minute.

So, but, but for me, having that natural talent was key. And I think that's important for someone looking at a side hustle because, you know, don't try to force yourself into something that, that's not natural for you. But, but for me, writing came very naturally, and I wound up, you know, begging, stealing, borrowing, scratching, doing whatever I could to get my hands on good copywriting courses. And there's some great courses out there. And from those, I just learned, you know, different formulas. So there's different formulas for writing copy. I think some of the more common ones are like attention, interest, desire, action. So you capture someone's attention, you build interest, you create desire, and then you have a call to action. Another one is problem, agitate, solution, where you talk to someone about a problem, you build that problem up, you agitate it, and then you come in with a solution, which is your product. So there are formulas like that, and then there are certain principles that always apply, like, you know, focusing on a big problem is always something that's big, you know, turning features into benefits. Not just saying, you know, this water bottle has a cap on it. No, this water bottle has a cap on it so that the water doesn't spill all over the place. So turning it into something that kind of is a benefit and so it doesn't spill on your new suit and ruin your wedding. It's like kind of expanding on that. So there's things like that. And I really just, I was motivated to get my own education. I bought training courses online. And then, you know, all that was great, but I think the key to me really becoming— I don't know what some people might consider me, a master of the craft. I don't know if I'm there yet.

I would consider you a master. I mean, I've seen your copy.

Then, um, so actually it was networking. Networking with the right people and finding the right people who valued the service was critical. So I was really struggling for 5 or 6 years. Like, there was a long dry spell where we were making less than $20 grand a year, and it was terrible. Life was very stressful. And then I started going to this networking group for internet marketers in Austin, Texas, and I started connecting with people who, you know, had online products. I met some of the guys whose products I'd bought. And once I got over, like, you know, the, the starry eyes and, you know, the, the, that sort of shock of being in that crowd, I realized, wait a second, I can go try to sell this to someone who has a corner store and has no idea what good copy is or why it matters, or I can go to the people who really value this and I can sell it to them. As a result of that, I wound up writing for some of the biggest and best products and brands and people, gurus in the, in the online marketing space, the online and health products space, and even in, you know, financial publishing as well.

So it's kind of interesting because it's one thing to say, okay, I got the skill, but now you got to market yourself before you can market for other people, right?

Yeah.

And, um, and that's hard hard, I guess, in the beginning because you're an unknown quantity, right? So did you like do any like sample write-ups or take somebody's product, say, hey, here's how I would write this up, and show it to them? Or how did you win the trust of somebody to want to hire you?

Yeah, that's, that's a good question. Um, and I think there's a little bit of, um, art in that because I never, I never wrote anything what they would say on spec where you write it for the chance to maybe get the job and/or get the gig and make some money off of it. I always got paid, and I think you demonstrate your ability to sell by the process of selling. So I definitely can attribute a lot of it to being in the right groups, in the right rooms with the right people, and then building rapport and trust on a personal level first, not being pushy or needy because that's very repulsive to people. And then, you know, what I did do though was I gave people, you know, great deals. So I definitely charged a lot less early on, and I did that so that I could write for some really good people, right, who would mentor me and take my craft to the next level. And that's, that's really the answer to your earlier question, how I got great at it was I got out there and I did it. Yeah, because there's nothing that's gonna replace, you know, that 10,000 hours of experience to becoming an expert in anything.

So something I think you said earlier is important when considering side hustle is that rather than just look at, oh, here the best opportunities in copywriting, or it's in sales, or it's in whatever it might be, the first question is, what am I good at, right? Yes. Like, what are my strengths? So as you said, You might have slept through English class, but, but you still were getting your papers read because your people liked your writing. So yeah, but if you maybe didn't have that fundamental, let's call it innate nature to be able to write, this might not have been the right choice for you. Because in this particular series, we're trying to do is show, you know, here's a bunch of different things. And I think there's probably two aspects of that. One is Maybe you're even good at writing, but if you hate writing, it's still not going to work. Exactly right. So, so say what's a strength? And it doesn't have to be like a superpower yet, but just something that you're— you have, you know, a decent amount of ability for.

Yeah.

That you can turn into a superpower. And then, you know, what are you passionate about? Because especially if you're side hustling and tell me if you agree with this, but if you're side hustling, you want to be doing something that you know, you can look forward to doing, because you're not going to do much of it if you've already got a full-time job. You're not going to be doing much of it, uh, you know, on the side if you just don't like doing it.

Absolutely. Yeah, I do think it has to line up with your, your passions to a degree, your natural talents to another degree. So, you know, there are people who the thought of working at a desk makes them, you know, want to jump off a a tall building or something, you know, so they just want to be outside. So, you know, looking at some of the ways you're naturally wired definitely plays a role. You know, what do people ask for your help with? You know, there's people who make a 6-figure income helping people organize their closets. You know, there are people that make 6 figures walking dogs, mowing lawns. There's so many paths to to doing this. And so I think there is a bit of a discovery. And then within that, because I've been thinking about this in prep for this conversation, is, you know, what is sort of the secret? Well, if you go out there, and I'll just use my writing as an example. So if I go out there and I'm a writer, everybody's a writer, you know, everybody, like everybody writes something. So what, what is special about that? Like, how can you niche down? How can you narrow your focus into something that's higher value? So, you know, with the example of a landscaper, right, being a general landscaper is one thing. But if you were to focus, say, on aquaculture, now you're a specialist, right? So by kind of finding something that aligns with things you enjoy, and then your talents as well, and then kind of focusing that down to just a razor's edge. I think that's one of the best ways to start to get an idea of what a side hustle could be for you. But I want to, I want to go all the way back to the beginning. And it all— and I'll say something that you'll recognize from Napoleon Hill, who says it all starts with a desire.

Right.

So if you don't have that desire to go out and improve your life financially, to reclaim your time, to work smarter and not harder, then you don't have that natural curiosity to go out and figure it out. And that is required because there is some, you know, trial and error early on to getting it right.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. As we're having this conversation, inflation is a big deal. I've got a son that works at a bank in New York City, and his salary didn't go up anywhere close to proportional of the inflation. And it's putting a squeeze on people. And so I'm able to see it firsthand in my own kid, but I see it in the world in general. And there's a lot of people right now who are considering side hustle that never considered it before, and he's doing it. You know, it's like, I'm not making his life easy. It's like, hey, you got to go get this figured out. You know, that's good for you. You know, it's, it's, it's hard as a parent, you know, but at the same time, it's necessary. That's, you know, I did it, you know, I mean, you know, and, and I'm better because of it. And I think context or psychology matters a lot. You said desire, and I think, you know, your frame of reference can can either generate, you know, desire or it can squash it. Because one way to look at this is, geez, inflation is so high and now, God, I got to go out and I got to figure out more money. And so in other ways, wow, this has forced me toward an opportunity I might not have considered before. Maybe I was a little comfortable and now I'm going to get uncomfortable, but it's going to create a better future for me.

Yeah.

And I think working on, 'cause to me, your psychology and your energy generates the actions that are gonna create the outcomes. It's kind of like the first domino that falls. And so what I'm hearing in what you're talking about also is that just because there's a need, don't maybe look at that need as being a negative thing.

Right.

You know, look at it as something that's going to cause you to go out and learn a new skill and generate income that you wouldn't have generated otherwise. And maybe you're going to work harder. But because I can remember going through school, you know, because, you know, you're a college student and probably a lot of college students watching this, you know, if you're going to school full-time and you're working like I did, you know, that's a side hustle too. You know, your full-time gig is school. Yeah. And then you got to go make money. And I worked worked as a waiter in restaurants and I did varying things, but mostly I waited tables. But I actually looked forward to going to work every day. I was really into food and wine. I love studying it. I love serving it and so on. So rather than say, oh, geez, I didn't get born to rich parents that could afford to put me through school, I have to pay for all this. But now I look back and say, wow, it's a really good thing that I had to go through that experience. So, when you have someone who approaches you, I don't know if you're mentoring some people or just in passing or maybe at masterminds, younger guys who are looking to try to figure out what you figured out, how do you frame them up psychologically to enter the idea of a side hustle?

So, with your story, you looked forward to going and serving You were into wine and food and you're great with people and you see in that the seeds of your success today. Kind of going back to that, what are you naturally good at? So I'll try to find out what someone wants and a lot of times that can lead to some too specific situations, but what I try to do and what I did early on, I'm actually just remembering this now, I really would sit and I would think about, you know, what does an ideal day look like to me? What do I want my life to look like? And I still, I still have that habit today. Like, I think about what my life's going to be like in 6 months, you know, or in 5 years when I've achieved some more of my goals. And for me, that's, that's how I wound up picking the, you know, the, the writer lifestyle, where it's like I pictured my days having a lot of free time. So, you know, starting with of where do you want to get to? Like, what's the outcome that you want to get to? And then you can back up from that and say like, okay, you know, maybe what they're already doing is on that path. They're working towards that. They can achieve that goal of what they're doing right now. If so, then, you know, it becomes focused on how do you do that more intelligently, more efficiently? How do you accelerate it? Things like that. But if not, then you have to have that moment of realization where you admit to yourself, what I'm doing right now is never going to get me to where I want to be. And if you don't, then—

So I guess the first step is figure out where you want to be, as you said, right? Because if you don't know, then you can end up anywhere, right? Absolutely. And you had, I think, mentioned in your own story, and I think this is kind of important, that There's a lot of years of struggle. So what prevented you from giving up?

I don't know. I don't know because there were plenty of opportunities. I know that I mentioned I got divorced. I remarried an amazing lady, Victoria, and she was always behind me. So having her say like, "No, you're not giving up," in my darker moments where I was like, "I need to just give up," "Quit. I can go get a job. Forget this. Like, I'm never going to be successful." She was like, "Shut up. You're not going to do that. It'll kill you inside if you do that." So having her there—

That is a great wife.

Oh, she's amazing. Best gift God ever gave me. But, you know, at the same time, I don't— you know, she was there to encourage me. I don't know that I had it in me to quit. But I know that that's really a huge differentiator between the people who succeed and the people who fall short of what they want. Because life will give you plenty of opportunities to quit. And you think that you've arrived someday, like, no, you've never arrived. There's always something else that you're gonna wanna do. And there's always gonna be reasons obstacles, and life's gonna gut-check you, and it's, you know, there's always reasons to quit. But ultimately, knowing that you fail when you quit— you don't fail when you fail, you fail when you fail and then quit, right? And that's just something that just made perfect sense to me. And, you know, I just wanted it. Like, maybe goes back to that desire— I wanted it too bad.

Yeah, well, I think it's kind of important, right? Yeah. So now let's talk about AI. This is a game changer in many respects. I mean, I'm spending a lot of time just thinking about what are the implications, and certainly significant implications in copywriting. I mean, you know, we're using AI in our teams in that way. And I'm, you know, in the middle of writing another book right now, and I'm like, well, let me check this thing out. I go in and I said, you know, and there's a chapter I'm doing on identity And I'm like, let's write me the difference. Or it was ChatGPT 4 that I was using. And I basically said, tell me the difference between people who think that identity is innate versus acquired and cite some experts, etc. And in seconds, the thing wrote me a book chapter. Now I'm not cutting and pasting a chapter because it's— it doesn't say I have to take that and give context to it. It's more like a research assistant for me at this point.

Yeah.

Where I have to then go from that. But I've been seeing, you know, I will code web pages. So like a lot of you say on the side, I can, I could do coding. I'm like, maybe think about that because I don't think many humans are going to be doing that kind of coding in in the near future, but somebody's got to still direct the AI. And I think that's important. But I'm just recognizing this is just released in its infancy right now in the public forum. And where's this going to be in just a year or two? So talk about your perceptions of AI, what you think the implications are for somebody considering side hustle. And how it's influenced, you know, your, your particular area, which is copywriting.

Yeah, so AI is, is a game changer for side hustles. Um, people can now provide services that used to take years to learn, to master, a lot of specialized skill and education. Now they can provide those just by speaking to an artificial intelligence bot, right? So that in its itself is a game changer. So for example, you know, there's a tool out there called Jasper AI. It's a content writing system. It's based on ChatGPT as its backend NLP source. And what you can do is you can go in and you can say, write me a, it's got recipes formula, say, say a blog post recipe, and you put in the title of your blog post and you tell it to generate an outline, and then you can tweak and adjust the outline, and then it'll take the outline and write a paragraph or two on each of the bullets in your outline. Wow. And then it'll write a conclusion at the end of it. So, um, for, for a service provider— and that's just one— so like DALL-E, D-A-L-L- Dash E is a graphic design, word-prompted graphic design AI. So you can go in and say, you know, make me a space cowboy on Mars, a picture of that, and it'll do it.

Wow.

And it'll do it in seconds. It'll not just do it once. It'll give you several options to pick from. You know, same thing for like you were talking about coding. So with these technologies, I actually see it as a very unique window of opportunity that exists right now, similar to whenever internet— and the internet was young and you could just throw up a web page and write golf club, golf club, golf club 1,000 times and you'd rank at the top of search engines, right? Get all the traffic and sell a bunch of golf clubs. Right now, people who are willing to go out there and play with this AI can provide these services that again used to take serious education and skill to acquire, and they can sell them at a scale that you would normally have had to have like a team of 10 employees to, to put out that much work product. So for example, content writers. If you, um, whether you're a good writer or not, you can become a content writing service provider, and you can use a tool like Jasper.ai to provide blog posts for someone in the health and wellness space, for someone in finance, for someone— and you pick the topic. And you can sell those blog articles, you know, for— you know, some people sell them by the word. Some people sell them, you know, $10, $20, $50 an article. All of those things can be serviced and provided. And you can find clients for that on sites like, you know, Upwork, which used to be eLance, You know, you'll find 'em on Craigslist. There's all kinds of places where people are looking for that work for, you know, same thing for coding, same thing for graphic design. You don't have to know how to use a graphic design program anymore to create people graphics.

So now I guess the idea is you have to learn how to manage AI. AI, yeah. What they call a prompt engineer or somebody who knows how to prompt properly. Very much so. If you were starting today, let's say like, you know, now let's roll the clock back. But say rather than the time when you read Rich Dad Poor Dad, read all the Dan Kennedy books, etc., and you really developed your skills and went out into the marketplace.

Yeah.

Let's say that you're saying, okay, I need to create side hustle today. How would you approach it given what you're given that AI is on the scene?

Wow, that's a good question because there's so many opportunities. I think I would probably look for a market that I felt I could, you know, find and access easily. So example, like, you know, Upwork. I would go on Upwork, I would see what jobs there are available there that I could fulfill with AI, you know, and then I would become an expert at that particular AI, prompting it to generate the outputs that I wanted for that service. And there's so many things out there that, you know, it's everything from video editing, audio, you know, scripting, research, graphic design. They're all out there. So I would probably start by looking where there's demand and where I could kind of use AI as a hack to fill mass volume on that demand.

Because what's interesting is that you said the idea has been— we talked about it— what's your strength? But now, you can let the AI be your strength.

Exactly.

Now, what's your passion? That's what it boils down to and we're in this awkward phase, meaning that we're in the transition to AI where, you know, companies, everybody's moving toward it, right? So I think for the person's considering side hustle, they have to consider, you know, how AI would play the role in whatever this side hustle might be. And again, AI is not going to cut a lawn yet. You know, we're not— the robots aren't there yet. AI is not going to do certain and things like that. But the first question I guess as you're considering a particular side hustle is, does AI or can AI play a role in this? And if it can, to what extent? And because today, it's in transition, I would see, but it's 2 years from now, the adoption rate for whatever you might be doing could be very different.

Yeah.

So how, how has it affected you as, you know, as a copywriter, you know, if you're serving clients, etc.? Have you restructured anything, or do you just use it? People still just hire you and you just use it?

Yeah. So, um, so pretty much these days I write copy for myself. Um, so, and, and I have not yet, um, found that AI can write at the same level that I can. Much like what you were saying, I use it as a research assistant. So, you know, I can put together a list of, you know, what are some of the negative emotions people feel when they can't lose weight.

So if you're writing for a weight loss product, right?

If I'm writing for weight loss product, getting the research, get some of that research done. And not— and some of it you kind of intuitively intuitively know because I've lost weight and remember, you know, what I felt like before that. But, you know, it'll help you kind of enumerate things and expand on some of your ideas and can be a prompt. So it's like a brainstorming partner for me there. And then, you know, helping me to, you know, list the reasons why someone might want to start a side hustle. You know, like, what are some of the reasons they might feel like they're not able to do it? What are some of the psychological hurdles they're gonna have to overcome to do that? And that helps me kind of handle objections and copy or things like that and just understand who I'm talking to. But what I've found in some of my— and I also do content writing these days for my own stuff as well— and if you're just like doing some real basic you know, educational stuff and you're not really doing thought leadership stuff, it's really powerful. What it hasn't gotten to yet is the ability to do what we're great at, which is putting different pieces together and being like a thought leader, meaning like, okay, these are the ways everybody else has done it, but what's the new and innovative idea that takes it to the next level?

And I can't do that. It can only, it really lives in the past. It doesn't create a future. It doesn't, it's not something that assembles new ideas basically. That's right. Can you just, in case somebody doesn't understand, the difference between content copy versus marketing copy?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, marketing copy would bring someone closer to the point where they're making a purchase decision. So if I were to send an email out that gets someone to click over to a video that gets them to make a purchase purchase decision, that email would be marketing copy and the video would be sales copy. So, you know, whenever people talk about copywriting, it's usually, you know, either, you know, marketing copy, whether it's social media, email, a brochure, or sales copy where they're actually trying to get someone to make a purchase decision.

So the job of marketing copy is to get them to the sales copy, basically. Yes. Sales copy's job —get them to purchase.

Yes, yeah, a little bit of pre-framing in there. And there's a lot we could go into on copywriting, and it's fun to nerd out on that stuff, but that's— those are the broad strokes. And then content marketing would be something like an educational piece, like a blog post that doesn't really have a selling objective. It might be to establish the authority of the person who is who is writing the content. So if you want to let people know that you're an expert on XYZ, there's nothing better than demonstrating your expertise on that topic with a great thought piece of content.

Yeah. So yeah, you're not trying to drive them to any sale. You're just basically trying to educate them. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. So one of the things I think people may be— AI is creating hesitation, I think, for some people saying, geez, I don't know what to do now. Because this new thing is happening. But tell me if you'd agree with this particular thought. My advice for people would be just get in and get started and start learning whatever the thing is that you need to learn, that you're going to learn, your craft. And over time, once you start becoming more expert, you'll know how AI fits in and what to do. If you try to sit here and you get paralyzed by not making a decision or moving in a direction because you're just unsure what's going to happen with AI, I don't think any action you take is a waste. It just is a— it's like the guided missile thing. It never goes straight to the target. It's always going back and forth till it hits a target. And I think AI is exciting and threatening all at the same time, right? But don't let it feel threatening. I'd say go out there and start generating something. And yet to me, the first victory is that first dollar you earn, right? It's like, okay, money came in. Yeah, wow, that's pretty exciting. And then you start building on that. So do you have any kind of summary thoughts about somebody who right now is either struggling with side hustle, it's not working, or for the first time trying to say, I want to get started in this direction?

Yeah, I would say that Um, while we are kind of in desperate economic times right now, um, like you said, that's definitely— it can be seen as a positive because it's going to push you out of your comfort zone, and that's where growth happens. At the same time, we're really in a position as a society to have side hustles. I mean, very— a lot of people are now working from home. As a result of the lockdowns. And, you know, while there were a lot of negatives that came out of that, that is one positive where people have more, more time freedom, more autonomy as a result of that. So there's never really been a better time in history to start a side hustle. And this has really just been an evolution that's been growing for the last few decades. It's kind of the gig economy thing that they were talking about in the early 2000s. It's just a continuation of that. And it doesn't have to be, you know, anything broad or grand. I think, you know, there'll be a lot of people in this series who have a lot of really accessible ways to get started. And the key is just get out there and do it. You know, give it a try. You know, If you have the desire to improve your financial life, you know, there's never been a better time and there's never been more tools and resources or opportunity. There's a global market out there because of the internet. There are sites where you can go and you can find people who are literally asking for the thing you're trying to sell. They'll post jobs on sites like Upwork. I keep going back to that one. They should give me a sponsorship. Yeah, yeah, so there's, there's that. And then, you know, one of the things that happened to me as I was out there selling copywriting services is I branched off into marketing consulting because I found that as I was giving copywriting services, I was setting up to sell my services, I had to tell people what they needed because they didn't even know what they needed. And then I realized, wait a second, that's a huge value to people. And I wound up working with some of the biggest publishing companies out there as a result, companies doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year and bringing them this very same thing that I've been giving away for free for years. So I would look at that, like, what are you currently giving away for free that people would pay you to do? Yeah. And maybe that's a great place to wrap up.

It is. So Michael, it's, uh, it's been, I think, really informative to to know your journey and kind of see where it went from high school to an early departure from the Marines to a turnaround play. It's a pretty engaging story as far as saying, wow, and how this led to success. I mean, I'm on the inside of kind of this entrepreneurial world and I know you're highly regarded, very highly regarded as a marketer. A copywriter. And yes, I know where you came from to land there. I think any of you should say that, hey, oh, anybody can do this, but people who have a commitment to do it, I think anybody can figure it out if they just have the commitment to figure it out. And that's, that's really, I think, where it lands. So I appreciate you openly sharing your story and also sharing your current expertise.

You're very welcome. Thank you, Patrick. For some more incredible six-figure side hustle episodes, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

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