069: Epic Evergreen Email Sequences with Allan Dib

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability. Like the stylish and efficient Camry. The Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra. All with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

Getting better at negotiation or financial analysis or company culture or whatever. They're all good things, but they'll often end up with an incremental result. Now if you want an exponential result, marketing's the place to really focus your effort. Because if you can get 5%, 10%, 20% better, that can have a massive result to your bottom line. So really focus your efforts on marketing. Give yourself permission to suck in the beginning and that's what's really going to help you grow your business fast.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello. Hello my friends. Oh boy, are you in for a treat. Today I have Alan Dibb all the way from Australia. Serial entrepreneur, rebellious marketer and number one best selling authority of the one page marketing plan. Get new customers, make more money and stand out from the crowd. Alan has started, grown and successfully exited multiple businesses in various industries. He's the founder of successwise. Com and he has a course and program called Mastering Marketing to fuel high growth business. I met Alan during five minutes on a call with other authors where he shared a tip that just blew my mind. So I can't wait to tell you what that is first. Alan, welcome to the show.

Hey Jenny, what a pleasure to be on.

I am so thrilled to have you in one of your newsletters after I read your book and joined your list. You say that all of us need to have a marketing oil well. You say like pumping oil from a well. Your marketing system is what generates leads and ultimately your revenue. The thing is if you don't have a system, you are the system. Oh, that one hurts because it's so true.

It is true. It is true. So, so many people find themselves on this treadmill. So it's very, very common that I'll encounter a client or someone in one of my programs and one of their major, major pain points is that business might be going very well or maybe it's plateaued or whatever it is, but they just find themselves as the chief rainmaker within the business. So if they're not out grinding revenue stops and that means that they are the system in their business, they are the revenue generator. And it's very, very common that there'll be a situation where they say, look, I've got a sales team, but I'm just the best at closing, I'm the one who makes the most revenue come in. And that's because they haven't built that marketing and sales system. They are the system. And so a large part of what I talk about with my clients and really everything that I do is how do we build marketing assets so things that can work without you. So this is incredibly important and a key part of growing and scaling a high growth business.

Well, you're a man after my own systems loving heart because that's so much what free time is about. But I have to say that marketing systems tend to be more of an Achilles heel for me other than content creation. The tip that absolutely blew my mind that you shared in these five minutes that then changed my life, you shared with us that you have created this what you call a long term evergreen sequence that you were saying if we all just treat our newsletters, which everybody knows if you run a business it's a good idea to have a newsletter and you recommend ideally sending weekly. But that what happens and what I've noticed because I've had a newsletter since 2010, so 11 years now. We work so hard week after week to create this newsletter and then it disappears and all the new people who join never get to see it. So you have been adding email by email to like a 60 email long evergreen sequence that when someone joins, they are getting regular messages from you for over 60 messages. And that even when you have a. Anyway, let me pause there and just say tell us please about this evergreen marketing sequence, how you came up with it and how it works.

Well, you're right, you've described it well. The origin is really me learning that income comes from assets. And here's what I mean. So if you own a house, you can get rental income. If you own stocks, you would get dividend income. And so the exact same thing is true for marketing. If we build marketing assets, they will generate new leads, new prospects, new clients and ultimately new revenue without you having to do anything. I mean, I can rent a house out and I'll get rental income whether I work hard or not. It'll just come. I mean, there is of course maintenance. You might have to whatever, fix a roof or whatever it is from time to time. But generally speaking, once you own an asset, it continues to generate new income. And so that's the exact same kind of philosophy that I have with marketing is how can we generate new income and new leads and new prospects without having to do more work? Because if you're the system, if you are the rainmaker and you have to generate all of the new income, well, if you want to double your revenue, well, you're going to have to double the hours that you work. And for most people that's not even possible and it's certainly not attractive. So really thinking in terms of your marketing, is what I'm doing going to build an asset that is going to deliver new customers new prospects in the future. So I'll give you a few examples. So I'll talk about the autoresponder approach in a moment. But thinking that through, in a business like yours or mine, for example, a book is an asset that generates revenue, it generates readers, it generates an audience. And so the book that you've written, the book that you're launching, that's going to be an asset in your business that's going to generate new audience, new revenue, new people on a long term basis. So it's a great return on effort. And so when I was doing email marketing, one of the things that really frustrated me was that I could write a killer email to my list and it performed really well and people loved it and things like that. But if someone subscribed to my list tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or anytime in the future, they would never see that awesome email. And it felt like very much a wasted effort. And so the strategy that I came up with was to build a long term maintenance sequence. So rather than just sending a broadcast to the list, which was once and done and took a lot of effort by the way, because you've got to do this on a regular basis, at least weekly. And in fact we mail our list three times a week, so it's quite labor intensive. And then this effort is kind of once and done. And I thought a much more powerful approach would be could I use this to build an asset, an evergreen maintenance sequence. So rather than doing a broadcast to the list, I started adding new emails to this long term maintenance sequence. And as you said, I think we're probably well over a hundred emails into that long term maintenance, nurturing sequence. So people opting in today might get an email that was written years ago or months ago. And as long as it's still relevant and as long as it's something that is evergreen, so a lot of what I do is evergreen, then that's going to be totally fine because I'm talking about things that are going to be relevant in one year, two years, three years, five years. And so that's something that meant that any effort that I put into writing emails or that my team puts into writing emails is just going to continue building this asset and making the asset bigger and better and longer term. So. So that's my thinking. I don't know if I've explained that well, if that makes sense.

It's epic. It's so good. And by the way, evergreen, I actually looked this up preparing for this interview that it does in fact refer to trees that keep their leaves green throughout the year. So we have a lot of leafless trees here in New York in the winter. But evergreen trees are ones that stay green. So this is like creating content. And I encourage everybody listening to sign up for Alan's newsletter sequence. We'll put all the links to his stuff in the show, notes that they are evergreen in the sense that they're not time sensitive, they're not mentioning hot topics, at least the ones in this nurture sequence. And what I also love that you described is it creates a sense of spaciousness in your business that if you did need to step away for a week, two weeks, a month at least, you know that the new people, they're taken care of for at least 100 weeks.

Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. So I look at the processes we have in our business and sometimes it's unavoidable to have a process that is kind of like you do it once and you get paid once, or you do it once and it has a result once. But more than anything, I want processes where we build something once and it generates revenue over and over again, or it generates a recurring benefit in the business, that's how we're going to scale and that's what's going to make the business more valuable. Really. When someone looks at potentially acquiring your business and you don't have to ever want to sell, a lot of people are like, hey, I really love what I do, I never want to sell, and that's totally fine. But a business that's attractive to someone who's potentially wanting to acquire you will be a business that's attractive to you because it means you can step away, it means you can go away for holidays and everything's not just going to grind to a halt.

I just love the way your mind works and thinking about assets in your business. And then I love how you were problem solving and you were saying what is going on with this email area of the business that it doesn't seem like a very efficient use of the content. There's so much starting friction to just write an email, think about it, edit it, revise it, program it, schedule it. And I love how you were just saying these are just disappearing into the void. There's no asset here. This is very time heavy. So in practical terms, what I've been doing since you told me this, five minutes, five minutes, it wasn't even one on one. You just shared it with a group and then bam, I was off to the races. Now when I send a weekly newsletter, I made it a verb, I evergreen it and then I put it into the welcome sequence. I probably have 10 by now just because I only started. One of my nightmares is that somewhere in those hundred emails that you have, do you ever worry that links are broken or things are falling apart and it's just so detail oriented to have to go back and review the all and fix them? Like do you worry about that or you just let it go?

I wouldn't say I worry about it, but I mean, I've got a big enough list where if there's a broken link or something's gone wrong, we'll know pretty quickly. So you know, we'll get a flood of emails in saying hey, the link didn't work or whatever. But having said that is like any asset, you do want to maintain it, right? So I would put in a quarterly process where you may go and review some of your maintenance emails, where you would go in and see is this still relevant? Is this still timely? Is this still part of my messaging? Because your messaging can and should evolve over time. So you would do maybe a quarterly review, maybe you do a review every six months of your long term maintenance sequence and see is everything still relevant? Is this still my voice? Is this how I want to communicate to my audience all of those sorts of things. So while you're building an asset, it's not necessarily just set and forget forever, but you, you do want to maintain that asset. Kind of like, you know, if you own a car or a house or whatever, you would do maintenance, right? So you know, if the tap leaks, you'll get someone out to come and fix it. If the car needs an oil change, you go and change the oil. So exactly the same with assets that you build in your business, and particularly when it comes to your marketing.

Before we hit record, I was asking you, how do you decide which emails go into the evergreen sequence? And on my end, because mine is so early in the process, I'm just throwing everything over there. But you, of course, have a more methodical take. How do you decide what gets tacked on to the end of that sequence?

Yeah, so we look at what were some of our best performing emails, and we look at a few metrics. So we look at things like open rates, although that's getting much harder to judge with different spam filters and things that are blocking open reporting. So we look at things like metrics, like open rates. We look at how many people replied to an email because that's often a call to action. So we'll say, hey, hit reply to this email and tell me your biggest challenge or whatever else if an email is related to a promotion. So we look at did people click? Did people buy all of those sorts of things? So we look at various performance metrics to see what are the best performing ones. And the ones that perform really, really well, we leave them in the maintenance sequence. The ones that maybe fell flat or didn't connect with the audience or whatever, we'll pull them out. So that way we're kind of having our best stuff for our audience all the time. So marketing, like anything that you're going to be good at, involves a lot of testing and measuring. So it's never something that you just set and forget. And you know, it's very rare to have just a hit on your first go. So really what you want to do in your marketing process is test and measure and really kind of the scientific method. So we have a hypothesis. We think this is going to work. We think this is going to land with our audience. We test it in maybe to a segment of the audience or to the whole audience, either way. And then we see was our hypothesis true or not? And so that's exactly what we do from a marketing approach.

I love how direct you are in the book. You're saying if you're not testing and measuring, your marketing, just stop.

You know, you're either just throwing spaghetti at the wall, but there's certainly no way you can improve if you just are just flinging money around. And then if you are testing and measuring, you can get to the point where it will make sense to just pour money onto it. Because you actually have a measurable loop of something that works.

Totally. Totally. It's like, if we can get a system where we can put a dollar in and get more than a dollar back out, well, then we're going to pour gasoline on that fire and scale that up. But if we're putting a dollar in getting less than a dollar out, then something's broken in the system. And of course, I mean, that's not always possible from day one. And that's where testing and measuring comes in. You might say, look, I'm going to test with a $5,000 budget or a $10,000 budget, and I'm going to test different headlines, I'm going to test different offers, I'm going to test different audiences or whatever's relevant in your business. And so we want to figure out really, the name of the game, and really the name of the game when it comes to business is how do we multiply capital? You know, how do we take capital that we've either put into the business or borrowed or had investor money in or whatever else, or even just sweat equity. Maybe you've just started bootstrapping. Either way, how do we multiply capital? And so marketing is such an efficient way to do this and test this, because you can put in $1,000, $5,000, whatever, into a campaign, and you can test every leg of that campaign to see what's working or what's not working.

Yeah, you say that the biggest leverage point in any business is marketing. And I also love, on the Amazon page, you say, and this is so good, this is so meta, because it's you showing by example the very first sentence of the description. If I had to summarize the essence of this book in one sentence, it would be the fastest path to the money. Yes, there you are. You're living the message because you've distilled it down into one crisp message that has all of us saying, yes, that is what I want.

Exactly. Exactly. Look, I've been through all sorts of discussions with other business owners, with mentors, with my team, and I never really connected with the whole thing of having a vision and a mission and all of this sort of stuff. And that's not to say I don't have a vision or a mission or whatever, but I think people spend way, way too much time, especially in the beginning, on this stuff and not enough time on the stuff that's going to make it sustainable. And so a lot of people talk about following their passion and everything like that. And I think there's A small percentage of people who, you know, they just know what they were put on earth to do. You know, they're a musician, they're a writer, they're whatever. And they know what their passion is. They know what they're going to do. But I think for the rest of us, it's a journey and we're going to have to find that out while running our businesses or while being an employee or whatever and trying different things. And you need to do that in a sustainable way where you don't burn out. And so really, for me, my passion is figuring out how can I turn $1 into $2. And then on the way, I start to get passionate. When something works really, really well, I'm like, wow, this is awesome. I'm getting passionate about this. I'm working more hours and feeling like time is just flying by. And conversely, when something doesn't work, when something's failing, I'm like, this sucks. I don't want to be doing this right. So a lot of times success doesn't necessarily follow passion. It's more like passion follows success. So find something that you can be good at, find something that you can sustainably create good revenue with, and then often passion will follow after that.

I love it, and I love my passion is turning $1 into two. That's a good passion to have. I like it.

It is. It is.

And it strikes me too that not enough in this conversation particular, nobody talks about the fact that it really helps to get passionate about business building itself, regardless of the subject matter of your business. And I don't ever hear anyone talking about that, like in this way. But why don't you get passionate about systems? Get passionate about creating assets. Like, these are all things that I think for a lot of practitioners or technicians, in e myth parlance, if you can't enjoy the business building process, that's going to get in the way because it's such a huge part of all of this is what happens behind the scenes.

Totally, totally. And I think a large part of it as well is there seems to be a lot of shame around money and shame around saying, hey, I'm in business to make money, right? And I'm not saying only focus on the money or whatever, but if you're not generating good cash flow from your business, you're not going to be able to do your mission or vision or values for very long. You're going to really burn out of energy and burn out of cash and not be able to sustain this. So the reason that a lot of entrepreneurs are able to do philanthropy, able to kind of follow a mission, is because they've got the cash flow that's coming in that can help support that. And I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, hey, I'm in this to make some money, have some fun and help some people along the way. You know, I don't think every business needs to come up with some crazy mission to save the world or, you know, make a dent in the universe or whatever. And if that's your thing, then awesome, go for it. But I don't think there's anything wrong with just saying, look, I'm doing this to make some money, have some fun and help some people along the way. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all.

I love it. Yes. Make a dent in the bank account. A positive dent.

Exactly. Exactly.

We'll be right back just after this.

This holiday season, there's no better place to get cozy holiday gifts for all your people than Aerie. From soft sweaters to everyday intimates and activewear, Aerie has the comfiest pieces made for the real you. And don't forget to treat yourself too, while you're at it. You've earned it. Find your nearest aerie store or shop online@aerie.com Give Love Real.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter Spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sippin season and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.

Let's shift gears a little bit. Your book has been extremely successful. It's no surprise why. And just distilling down to a one page marketing plan genius. One of the real successes has been you have over 5,000 reviews on Amazon. Knowing you, I know there must be a system behind this that you probably have an asset that you've created that helps you generate reviews. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah. So reviews are obviously they are a function of the number of books that you sell. So we do sell a lot of books. But having said that, one of the best ways to get what you want in life is to ask. And very few people I find ask. And so one of the things that we do to get a lot of reviews is we ask, you know, we ask our audience. And part of our opt in sequence is hey, so glad you enjoyed the book. Or here are the Book resources or whatever. By the way, would you mind leaving us a review? And we literally have a link directly to where they can go and leave a review on Amazon. So we make it as easy as possible. So we don't just leave them to their own devices trying to find the button on Amazon or whatever because most people won't. So we serve it up on a silver platter. We make it really easy for someone to be able to leave a review. We also have a process where we reply to all emails and that creates massive, massive goodwill. So a lot of people treat their email list like a broadcast medium, meaning it's a one way channel. So it's me sending a message to my audience and that's it. And the mistake they often make is not thinking of it as a two way channel. So you'll see so many times someone sending emails to their list and it's coming from no reply at or sales at or info at. And then they're creating emails that are very rich in terms of visuals. So a lot of graphics, a lot of branding, all of that sort of stuff. What I try to achieve with the emails that we send out is to make it feel personal, even though it's going to maybe tens, thousands of people to make it feel like it's a one to one email. Like this email was written personally to you. So if you think of a personal email that someone would send you, let's say you know, I sent you a personal email and said congratulations on your new book Jenny or whatever, you wouldn't expect it to have a lot of branding, you wouldn't expect it to have a lot of graphics, you wouldn't expect it to come from no reply at or sales at. You would expect it to come from Alan. Right. And to be reasonably plain text email. And so that's exactly what we do with our list. I send an email from my actual email address, it's very plainly formatted, doesn't have our logo, doesn't our company name, doesn't have any of that sort of stuff. Just feels like a dude who sent an email to another person. Right. And one of the things that we often encourage in our emails is for someone to reply to those emails. So a lot of times the emails will be along the lines of what's the challenge you have with XYZ or whatever? Hit reply to this email. So we do that and that generates so much goodwill with our audience because we're literally answering questions that they've got. Sometimes it's a question about something in the Book. Sometimes it's a question about whatever's the content of the email is. And so when we do that, a lot of times people will say, wow, that's so awesome, thank you so much, or they'll have a nice comment, or whatever. And we will reply with, hey, thank you so much for that very kind comment. Would you mind just copying and pasting that on Amazon reviews? It really helps us out. And people are like, yeah, of course I will. We've already generated so much goodwill. We've answered a question. We've gone way above what most people do. And so most people are like, of course, that's the least I can do. I'd be happy to do that. And so that generates a lot of goodwill and a lot of reviews as well.

And when you say we, are you responding? Do you have a team that's responding and how involved is the response? Because some people do reply to every email, but it's like, yeah, thanks so much, and that's it. So how do you train your team or the people who are helping with this?

Yeah, so it's both. Sometimes I will respond, but again, like, I want to build systems, so I want to be able to be sane, to run my business, to be able to go on holidays and things like that. So it's really a team that manages and triages my inbox so they will mark things that I need to reply to. A lot of the questions that come through are very common. So we look for recurring patterns, and in which case that's something that my team can respond to with I won't say templates, but I'll say guidelines. So a lot of times we might start with like a templated response, but customize it to that person. Which means it's very easy to send a reasonably detailed, good response without having to kind of create original work for every single email. So it's a combination of both. So I have someone who'll triage the inbox. Things that I need to respond to. I do respond to other things. Will get pushed into our help desk and get responded that way. But it always feels like. And it's not that it just feels like that. It is. It's always a personal response. So someone is always taking care of responding to the audience. And I think of it like manning a store. You know, if I had a physical store, I would man that store, right? I would have someone who's in there. So when someone walks in, we say, how can I assist you? Have you been to this store before? What are you looking for or whatever it is you would engage with them. And the exact same thing is true when it comes to email marketing or when it comes to running a digital business. A lot of people kind of have gone crazy with automation. And I love automation more than anyone. But having a customized personalized approach creates massive goodwill with your audience and it definitely leads to sales and revenue. And so that's something that I want to cultivate and lead by example. So that's something that we recommend to our clients and people that we work with is, hey, how can we use digital media but still keep a personal connection, a personal approach with our audience? Because more and more things are becoming very much automated. People feel like a number. And I think we can use technology to do automation, but I would rather figure out how can we do augmentation, Meaning, hey, yes, we use technology, yes, we use autoresponders, yes, we do all of those things. But when someone engages with us or a piece of our content or whatever, then it moves to a personal approach and a personal kind of response.

I'm so with you and I love how you just put that augmentation, not just automation. And that's why I'm so passionate about automation as well. Because if we can free up team members from doing the really routine stuff, oh, email comes in, add this there, that's for Zapier. That means they are free to do this, responding and just to share. My team and I use Help Scout and we have an example of exactly what you're describing. That for anyone who pre ordered the book, they got early access to the audiobook. And this involves us adding their email to a database, it's manual. Because the software that we use is not connected to Zapier. Okay. But for as long as we can swing it. And this may stop if the demand is too much, but I'm having a team member actually check in with the person and say, were you able to get access to the audiobook? How's it going? Do you need any help? And it might not be sustainable forever, but these are the early adopters, these are the people who are buying the books early. And I'm so grateful if any of you listening, probably many of you listening, have done this that I want to apply our team's time and resources to checking in. Because all of you listening, it's like you're our VIPs, you're the ones that got the book first and early. And that warrants a really personal touch and thank you and make sure you have it set up. Okay. And I Think that's what the rest of the automation is for, is freeing up that time and energy.

Absolutely. And a lot of people think about scaling too early. In the beginning, you really need to be validating, you need to be speaking to your audience on a very regular basis, making those connections. A very clever guy in Silicon Valley, Paul Graham, he's the guy who started Y Combinator, which is one of the big accelerators in Silicon Valley. He talks about, particularly in the beginning, to do things that don't scale. So speak actually personally onboard. Some of your early customers go see what they're doing. And he gives the example, like the guys who started Airbnb. In the beginning, they actually visited every Airbnb. They would talk to the owner, they would help them with the photographs, making sure it's doing that. I mean, that's not scalable. But in the beginning, you've got to do things that don't scale. And the reason is because you're going to figure out what are the biggest obstacles that your client is having, what part of the process or the system isn't really working that you imagined would work, what are the things that they actually want? So a lot of times the things that we think they want is not really in reality the thing that they want, but it's something maybe slightly adjacent or different. So particularly in the beginning, but as long as you can sustain it, do things that don't scale and think about scale down the track.

To put a bow on our Amazon review process that you designed, you also had mentioned leveraging a tool called videoask.com, it's by Typeform. How do videos and video asks for testimonials like, how do you leverage that tool and at what point in the process is it for Amazon or is it for other products that you're creating?

Yeah, it's part of our long term maintenance sequence. So one of the emails that goes out and I'll back up a little bit here, because video testimonials I think are very, very powerful. You know, we all want our clients and prospects on videos saying, wow, I read the book or I did the course or whatever, it was so awesome, I got the X, Y, Z result. Now the logistics of doing that, kind of a little bit complex and technical because someone has to figure out, okay, I record on my iPhone, then I've got to upload the file to Dropbox and email it or whatever. And most people kind of get stuck in the logistics and they're like, I don't know what to say or I Don't know how to upload it to Dropbox, I don't know how to transfer it from my iPhone or whatever, or I look weird on camera, all of this sort of stuff. So traditionally, very, very difficult to get someone to send you a video testimonial. I came across this tool called videoask and it's by the people who make Typeform. And I think there are now some other competing solutions where it makes it so easy to collect video testimonials. Someone within their web browser can just answer a question or click record and then it connects to their webcam. When they stop the recording, then they can review it and if they like it, they just hit send and it automatically sends it through to you. So there's no messing around with files or Dropbox or whatever. And I found that it's a very, very smooth system. So I added that to our long term maintenance sequence where I say, hey, if you've enjoyed the book or one of our courses or any of our programs, I'd really, really appreciate it if you left us a little testimonial. And you know, not everyone does. In fact, only a small percentage of people do. But because it's part of our long term maintenance sequence, every now and then we'll have someone who sends us a video testimonial. And again, it's not something that now we have to go hunt for and ask people and cajole and request. It's part of our long term maintenance sequence. And so every so often, like in fact, today I opened my email inbox and a few people had left a video ask video testimonial. We'll review that and then we'll just publish that to our webpage or keep on file for whenever we need video testimonials. So that way we kind of have a steady stream of video testimonials that we really didn't have to go through a lot of pain to try and acquire.

I love that. Yeah, I was going to ask where you put them. So those would go on your website, not necessarily the Amazon page?

No, no, they don't go on the Amazon page. They go on our website or they go into any sort of promotional material like a sales page or we might embed it on a sales page or in a promotional video or wherever we might need a video testimonial.

Awesome. Oh, there's so much good stuff I want to ask you. I just love hearing your philosophy on everything. I have a comment and then a couple to wrap up questions. The comment is quoting you in your book, you say one is the most dangerous number in your business. It makes business brittle. Does your business only have one source of leads? One major supplier, one major customer, one type of media, one type of product? So good. So you're saying having one is a single point of failure. And I just wanted to just say that out loud so it's on the record. It's such a good little rule of thumb.

Totally, totally. One is the most dangerous number. So as you said, one supplier, one major customer, one source of leads, and it just makes your business fragile. And I mean, we've seen this recently with the whole supply chain. Things with people kind of reliant on their manufacturer in China. Suddenly shipping costs are blowing out, delays at ports, and all of those sorts of things. Same with one key person in your business who can do some very specialized functional tasks. So you want to be looking at ways that you can kind of really diversify your risk. So you don't want to be single source dependent for pretty much anything in your business, but particularly in a marketing space where I often see that is someone has figured out Facebook ads or whatever, and they're doing really, really well. They're getting lots of lead flow, they're getting good return on investment, which is fantastic. Absolutely do that. But then they kind of neglect all the other marketing channels. They're like, hey, we're getting all our leads from Facebook. Then one day Facebook decides they don't like those type of ads or the cost to acquire a customer through that channel skyrockets and it's no longer profitable. And then you're in a very, very vulnerable situation.

Yes. And not to mention all the free marketing that Facebook got from all those companies back in the day, they were like, give us a like on Facebook. Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. And then the algorithm changes and boom, they've marketed Facebook the last five years and now they're left high and dry.

Exactly, exactly. And you don't have to be doing anything weird or controversial. Like, I think recently Pinterest banned weight loss ads. So if you were reliant on Pinterest for your weight loss ads, that's it, you're out of luck. They suddenly decided they don't like weight loss ads. You don't have to be doing anything crazy. You don't have to be very divisive or doing anything political. Sometimes there's a change of policy. Some middle manager at one of these platforms decided, hey, we don't want to do this anymore. And that's it. You're out of luck.

The Last gem that I want to read before we wrap up. You say the 30 seconds that follow the question what do you do? Is one of the most commonly wasted marketing opportunities. The response is almost always self focused, unclear and nonsensical. So much so that I notice on your website if you click on about about us is crossed off and it says about you, we prefer to keep it real. We recognize it's about you, not us. And I'm just thinking back through all the times I've introduced myself or you hear someone else on a podcast or it's like, who are you? What do you do? And the I, I, I, I just give us your rant on this of why that is a bad response.

Yeah, so so often you'll speak to someone and you meet someone or whatever and hey, what do you do? I'm an accountant, I'm a lawyer, I'm a doctor or whatever, and that's fine. But I think it's powerful to have your message really sorted out so that you tell people what problem you solve for them and be able to succinctly communicate that. And so the framework I have for that is, you know, when problem, well, what I do is solution, in fact, proof. And it's kind of a little bit of an elevator pitch format. And you know, you may never even in real life use that because it can come across a little bit weird to kind of have a long winded explanation of what you do in three paragraphs. But it's really going to help you in a succinct way crystallize your own messaging, which I think is powerful. So then when you're writing your about page, when you're writing your email, when you're launching a new product, you're very, very clear on the problem you solve the solution you've got and then proof that you can actually deliver that. And I think that becomes really, really powerful and really kind of zooming out a little bit. Every piece of your messaging on your website, on your emails, on your webpage, on wherever needs to be about your client and their problem. You know, so many times it's like, you know, we founded the business in 1982 and my grandfather started it and we are so awesome because, and so on and so forth and really no one really cares. People want to know, is this person trustworthy? Can they help me with the problem that I've actually got? And you've got seconds to kind of communicate what you do, solve the problem for them and potentially even show the proof that that's possible.

I've seen this when I'm tracking certain book launches. And you know, you and I both know it's a very complex, involved, dedicated process. But I'll notice sometimes someone's launching a book and the launch emails are like, this is how hard I've worked. I've been working for years. I've poured everything I have into this. And actually that's just so irrelevant. It's like, here's a little bit about you, here's what you are struggling with, and I have something for you. Here's the book. It's secondary, but these emails around the launch so often are centering the author and their process. And I'm thinking, yes, on some level it's interesting to follow an author's journey and know what goes into something. But it strikes me that that kind of gets it wrong in the sense of like actually getting people to buy the book.

Well, it's like when you maybe you go to an event or a party or something like that, and you're talking to the guy who just spends the whole night talking about himself, right? That gets old very, very quickly, right? And exactly the same is true in marketing. The people who are just talking about themselves, how awesome they are, how awesome their product is, all of that, that gets old very, very quickly. You want to very, very quickly and succinctly communicate, hey, this is the problem we solve. This is what I want you to do next. And this is some proof that we can actually deliver. So being able to communicate that is so important and really always thinking from the perspective of your audience, how they're going to process that. And so being so self focused is a massive mistake. I see in marketing all the time where they're talking about the product, the features, all of those sorts of things.

Unless you're an influencer, which is the riz on debt of an influencer in life. Last question. If you could give business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

Look, I think you just need permission to suck, right? I mean, I think it's highly relevant to you. And I. Jenny, I heard Seth Godin say there's no such thing as writer's block. You know, like plumbers don't have plumber's block, right? You know, you come out and you do the plumbing. And so I think about that when it comes to writing. I heard another guy say, ask a writer, hey, do you write only when you've got inspiration? And he goes, yeah, I only write when I get inspiration, but luckily I get inspiration at 9am every day. Right. And so exactly the same is true when it comes to marketing. The stuff that you're going to do is going to suck in the beginning. It's not going to work. And that's just what it is. Most people won't opt into your website, most people won't open your emails, most people won't click on the link. And that's just the fact of life and marketing. And so the way to do good work and the way to do good marketing and the way to build a good business is to start at the bottom and to kind of suck in the beginning and it's not going to work and you're going to be frustrated. But to really know that working on marketing is something that's going to have the potential to geometrically build your business. It's something that can create that fire, that exponential result. Whereas a lot of other things we'd work on in business get us any incremental results. Getting better at negotiation or financial analysis or company culture or whatever. They're all good things, but they'll often end up with an incremental result. Now if you want an exponential result, marketing's the place to really focus your effort. Because if you can get 5%, 10%, 20% better, that can have a massive result to your bottom line. A mentor used to tell me the best marketer wins every time and that's certainly been my experience. So really focus your efforts on marketing, give yourself permission to suck in the beginning and that's what's really going to help you grow your business fast.

So good. As our mutual friend Chandler Bolt said. I don't know if he originated this. They call it a best selling book, not a best written book.

Exactly, exactly.

So it doesn't count. We can't all just stick our noses up at marketing and sales. It is the central activity actually to generate business. I just love your take on building assets, that income comes from assets and really building so many systems upfront so that it reduces some of the effort involved later on. Thank you so much, Alan. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Jenny, it was a pleasure being on my book is the one page marketing plan. It's on Amazon, it's very popular on Audible as well if you prefer to listen. And my website is successwise.com where you can of course opt into my list and see my long term maintenance sequence or any of the other stuff that we do.

So good. Yes, I'm still enjoying mine. Probably from your past self of years. Ago.

Awesome.

Thank you so much Alan. Thank you everybody for listening and we'll put all of these links in the show notes.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful, and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit it's freetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun and build with love.

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. And Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price.

So that means half day.

Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan.

Equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra.

See mint mobile.com.