How To Create Evergreen Profits with Matt Wolfe and Joe Fier

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrap Business. This is your host, Brad Costanzo, where we bring you sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Today. I've got a couple of buddies of mine on the show and we've actually been talking for about an hour and a half prior to this conversation and hopefully we haven't run out of material, but I guarantee that we haven't because these are two of the brightest marketers out there. They're here in San Diego and we share a lot of commonalities between each other. That's why we've been able to talk for the past hour and a half on this stuff before we shared the best stuff with you. I'd like to introduce you in just a moment to Matt Wolf and Joe Fear from Evergreen Profits. Before I do that, I want to let you know that this is actually a video podcast. If you're listening on itunes, the audio version only top put a link in the show notes so that you can click there and actually watch the video both on YouTube and on the blog. But if you're watching the video now, no need to do that. I will encourage you to subscribe to the show if you like what you hear. If you're not already a subscriber and let me know what you think. And at any time you want to reach me, you can send an email to askbradaconrappedbusiness.com and that being said, let's get to it. So today's guests, I do not have an official bio, but I will tell you what I know about them. Matt and Joe all are here in San Diego and they are really brilliant strategists when it comes to marketing, especially digital marketing and online offer creation, traffic conversion and really, you name it. They're kind of a jack of all trades, much like myself, and they know a lot about a lot. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to have them on my show especially. I was on their show recently and we really hit it off and shared a lot of cool, cool stuff that's working. They are famous for some of their really, really astounding and ninja tactics that Work to help you grow your business in a multitude of ways. And they're, you know, just like myself, always searching out new cool ideas and sharing it with their fans on their. On their podcast as well, which I believe is Hustle and Help me out, guys.

Hustle and flow.

Chart.

Hustle and Flow. I was gonna say it's not Hustle.

And Grow, is it Hustle and Flowchart.

Hustle and Flow Chart Flowchart. I love it. All right, so now the video should be going back and forth to us. So, guys, say hi to bacon wrap business.

Hi there. How are you?

So have you had guests before where there's two guests on the other end like this, or is this the first one?

They may have been, but we were doing audio and I don't know, have.

You ever had a guest sitting on a pillow as a booster seat? So I don't look short next to my business partner?

I was going to say, you guys could have sat on each other's laps and that would have made.

Well, I'm sharing a shoe. I really didn't like that.

At least you're not under the desk.

Oh, man.

And we're starting it out that way. All right, cool.

We are going that way. So, guys, welcome to the show. As I said, you guys are just a few miles away, but we were going to. We were thinking about doing this in person and we should do some shows. I think actually the three of us could have our own show and do like some guest three way action. That would be really entertaining.

Okay. Yeah, my head just went somewhere else again. But no, here we go. I honestly, you know, we were chatting for the last hour and a half, and by the time we got done chatting, we're like, all of this should have been a podcast.

I feel like that's always our conversations. I was like, why don't we just record everything Gary Vee style? You know, we could have.

We may have needed a couple of.

Edits in there to blur some things out or whatever.

A couple things out. That's all right. So the hard part about interviewing you guys, as we talked about, is what exactly should we talk about? Because there's so many directions we can go. But a couple of the directions I want to set up for my audience and for you guys is that, number one, you've recently revamped your entire business model. And we'll talk about kind of the two prong barbell approach to the business model that you're taking now, as well as some of the stuff that's really working now, because as you said, you've got a lot of fun ninja tactics, and you guys have done some stuff from closing consulting clients with Facebook messaging, and doing some really cool, unique SEO strategies. And I think I first started paying attention to you guys when you were really talking about content marketing and ways to do that. That doesn't drive you crazy, because content marketing is one of those things super important, but it can just seem like such a mountain to climb when you're like, okay, crap, what do I do now? So that's kind of the directions I want to go. And that being said, especially for my audience, when we may not get to.

Any of those places, that's possible, we'll just have to do round two, three, and four.

So, Smurfly. So give me a quick background about how you guys got started in the business, how you kind of met, and bring us up to speed of where we're at right now, because you guys didn't just start doing this six months ago.

No, we've been doing online marketing stuff since about 2007. So it's been about 11 years that we've been doing this stuff. And in 2007, we started by blogging, so. So we had a blog called no, not I Will Teach youh Be Rich. How I will be Rich. Very similar to Ramit Sethi's blog, I Will Teach youh to Be Rich. Uh, but it was all about personal finance and very similar niche to what Ramit teaches. Um, all about how to build your wealth and investments. And I was a finance major in college at the time, so I was studying a lot of personal finance and reading balance sheets and income statements and stuff like that. So we talked about that kind of stuff on the blog. We started making little trickles of money from AdSense and selling links, and advertising on the site went, let's do this in a different niche. So we built another blog about health and fitness called Be Healthy and Relax, which is actually still live to this day and still generates revenue for us. That one we built in probably 2008, like a year after we started. The other one, started making money with that one. And then at that point, I think Joe and I kind of split past for a while. The blogs were still running, but I went and decided, I'm going to teach this stuff. I love this blogging stuff. I'm making good money, but I feel like I can make even more money if I teach how I'm doing this stuff. So I went and created a course called the WordPress Classroom and taught how to set up your WordPress blog, how to drive traffic, how to put content on there, what plugins to put on it, all that kind of stuff. Ran that for a couple years. Then I had a partner named Bradley Will come in and say, hey, I love what you're doing. I've got a product in a similar niche. Maybe we should merge. So we merged my product with his product called Free Blog Factory at the time and created learn2blog.com so we had learn2blog, ramped that up and eventually I sold that to Brad. So he bought me out of that company. And then it was around that time that Joe and I reconnected and said, hey, let's start teaching the stuff that we've done over the last few years. And while I was off doing that, Joe was off doing his own thing.

Well, I took kind of the more podcast name. It kind of describes exactly like how our personalities are. So I was always more the hustler. So I work with a lot of clients. Had a whole animation video agency where we help people create VSLs, you know, video sales letters, promo videos for startup. A lot of startup companies in Silicon Valley and around the world. The city of Istanbul hired me for, for something at one time. I'm like, that's weird. But did a lot of that through outsourcing. I never animated anything, but I always really had a good time talking with people. Kind of like you, Brad, closing deals, getting creative with stuff and kind of created. I mean that's seven years. That's kind of what I did until we re merged again for like the 15th time. It feels like our careers kind of.

Like went like this.

You guys were like an on and off again light switch relationships pretty much.

Exactly, exactly. So we reconvened maybe two years ago and started up an agency because I like, I like getting in the weeds. I like doing the technical stuff, building the sites, doing the SEO, you know, traffic, all that kind of stuff. That's, that's my wheelhouse. I love that stuff. Joe was a sales guy. He liked to go out and get clients and stuff. So we said, hey, let's, let's start an agency. I'll go out and get the sales. Matt, you go make the shit for people. Wait, can we cuss on here?

Yes, you can.

We are now.

Yeah, you can.

Is it going to be bleeped? Okay, yeah, so Joe was going to go out and sell. Sell it. I was going to go out. We did that for a good, I don't know, we did it for a couple years.

That was yeah, it was about a couple years.

Yeah, we did it for a few years. And we got sick of dealing with clients in that capacity. We got sick of the. The website looks great, but can you move the image 30 pixels up or.

Can you make the logo bigger?

The logo's not big enough. You know, like, all that kind of crap. We just got sick of it.

Well, really, actually, what we got sick of was that stupid clients not really following through because we started to learn, hey, we got to cherry pick these clients who we're working with. Yeah. But the bigger thing was we kind of capped out on our earning potential. Like, we do really fucking good work. And some people we've had equity deals, but a lot of these, you know, we're a newer agency, so we had to prove ourselves. We're getting paid a lot on the retainer every month, but we're like, God damn it. Like, we're making them great results, and we're just like, we hit a ceiling.

That was. That was sort of a big mindset shift for us was. So we had a few clients that were paying us, you know, somewhere around like, five grand a month on retainer to just build stuff for them and consistently create content for them. But we realized we can do a lot to make their business grow, grow, grow. And no matter what, we're always going to be stuck at this $5,000 retainer. So what we decided to do instead was let's do the exact same stuff we're doing for these clients, but let's do it and promote affiliate products instead of. So we went and started building out websites and content blogs and things like that to do the exact same thing we were doing as an agency. But instead of helping agency make money, we were promoting affiliate products. And that just made the income skyrocket. And as soon as we saw the affiliate income coming in from the same stuff we were doing, we went and fired all of our clients and said, we're done doing agency work. Everybody go away.

It was a good day.

Yeah, I've never been a big fan. I mean, I have a consulting company, and I have clients, and I have client partners and stuff. And I've never wanted to build a big agency for a lot of those same reasons. And, you know, the interesting thing about agency work and even consulting, especially just consulting for fees, is that if the client does. If the client doesn't do what you tell them to do. Right. Cause you can do some stuff for them, but a lot of times they need to actually provide something as well. If they don't do what you tell them to do. They don't make money, and they're just paying you a fee and you look like an expense to them. And they blame you.

Right.

Sometimes they take the blame, but they quit and they lose a client. You lose a client and an income source because they didn't do what they were supposed to do.

Right.

But if they do what you're supposed to do, they make a lot of money. And you're in like, your percentage of that goes way down. Because if you are charging 5,000amonth and you do something that makes them 50,000amonth, great, you made 10%. But if that made them 100,000, you're only 5%.

And the affiliate world that we work in, most affiliates pay out between, you know, on the low end, 30%, on the high end, 75%, but average is probably around 40 or 50%. So I mean, you know, we can, we can help some of these affiliates just skyrocket their traffic, make a lot of money, and take a 50% cut for ourselves.

So that's how we looked at is that. Yeah, percentage of that business or those sales shit, that's a bigger bang for our buck. We're on bosses. At the end of the day, we're working with people, affiliate partners that we know and trust. Typically, that's who we work with.

Well, I love how on some of the affiliate products that you guys have done, you've said, look, your site looks good, and your webinars and everything else, we think we can sell it better. So you create your own landing page. And this is not like for anybody's followed affiliate marketing. This is not total, total rocket science. But the way you guys have done it is really high quality, is we're gonna pre sell the hell out of this our own way, the way that we would do it if we owned it. And then you're still gonna get the sales, but we get to now test a lot more things without having to be in your back end messing with.

Your website or doing customer service or any of that kind of dealing with refunds, chargebacks, all that bullshit.

Yeah, I mean, you still get refunds on affiliate products, but we don't actually have to go back and forth with the customer that's incorporated somebody else's plate. So, I mean, that was a big mindset shift for us. And there's also that element of it's really easy to fire a client. Right. If an affiliate product's not working out for us or the product creator isn't treating us right. Or paying us fast enough. All right, we're just going to move on to something else. Sorry. Bye. Bye. And we don't even have to talk to them. We just stop doing it. There was that element. And so what we also decided to do around the same time we switched into the affiliate stuff was we created a print newsletter called the EGP Letter, the Evergreen Profits Letter. And that was a monthly newsletter. It was 99 bucks a month. And we essentially every month just taught the various tactics that we were using to build up these affiliate sites and to do the stuff we did in our agency. And we ran that newsletter for about 13 months. And then as you alluded to earlier last month, about six weeks ago, we decided, all right, we're going to turn off this income stream. So we grew that to where we had about 300 subscribers. And we just decided one day, you know what, we don't want to sell this information. We don't want to. We don't want to be marketers that are selling marketing information to people who want to be marketers.

Right, right.

We just. We didn't want to be in that world anymore. So we said, let's turn off this newsletter and let's just completely teach this stuff for free. We'll probably get a bigger bang for a buck. We'll get more traffic to our website. We'll get more, more, more people will respect our philosophies and tactics because it's. We're casting a bigger net of who gets to see this stuff. And so we turned that off and replaced it with sort of kind of consulting.

Yep, sort of, kind of.

Okay. Well, that just teed me up for a bit.

It did, I bet.

What is sort of kind of consulting?

That's a good question, because I don't even know. What is that?

So you want to go.

Actually, let's. Before that, really quick, I want to talk about that whole bloodbath thing. We kind of alluded to that, and I think on our podcast we were talking about it. So Tim Ferriss had this podcast or not podcast. It was an article on his blog.

Yeah, actually, I'll link to it so folks can see the Tim Ferriss.

Right on. Yeah. And he basically said, you know, if you're a product owner selling a product within 20 to 100 bucks, you're basically in the bloodbath zone. That's where the majority of the people are trying to compete on price, you know, for any kind of product you're dealing with, like, usually the bottom of the barrel customers. Not saying all of Them, but a lot of them. You're going to get a lot of refunds, chargebacks, excuses, customer service. And it's just the highest maintenance, super, super high maintenance, higher ad costs, all this stuff. You can't profit as easily. Let's be honest. Let's. We're all in the game of profit and easily. Yeah. Or easier at least. And, and scaling. But. So we basically deliberately decided let's get the hell out of the middle zone and play on the far edges. So let's go free, which is a tough place to be in. But if you're backed by affiliate revenue. We looked at like 80% of our business was the income was coming from affiliate revenue. Not our EGP letter, not all this other products that we were selling. We're really fucking good at selling affiliate stuff. So we're like, cool, well that's riding on the wall, 80, 20 rule. Let's focus on the affiliate stuff. That's the free. But then the far end is very ultra expensive or at least higher priced, starting usually around four or five grand for high end art, high touch consulting, be it road mapping sessions together, virtually, maybe in person events that we're holding in San Diego and beyond. That's what we're all doing on that higher end spectrum.

Yeah. So you kind of mentioned the sort of barbell. We don't operate anywhere in the middle. We don't have any products that are $1 to even like $500 or $1,000. The cheapest product we sell now is a minimum $2,000. Right. So we operate on, we put out a ton of shit for free or you can pay us for that extra hand holding. We don't operate anywhere in the middle anymore.

That's exactly how you know those who know me. That's exactly how I've been operating. And my podcast is my, is my method for putting out the content, whether it's my own or whether it's sharing, you know, stuff that you guys are sharing. People ask me all the time, where can I buy your course? I'm like, I don't have a course. I do not want to just create a course. I do not want to support like a hundred dollar two hundred course. But I work with clients at a very high level, very deeply ingrained in their business, whether I'm consulting them or purchasing them or partnering with them or something like that. And that's the exact same area that I like to work in as well. So I think when you made that shift, you probably also, there was probably a good degree of.

Relief off your shoulders. Because it is different when you have to produce content that, you know, people have paid for. And you know at any moment if you, if you slip up on your content, they're gonna cancel on you. Right? Because, I mean, that happens to me. I've got several things that I pay for monthly and I'm. I got one newsletter recently from somebody else and I was like, yeah, it's not as good as last month. I started to rethink my, like, maybe I could use that $97 a month, maybe I'll cancel it. So I know the mindset of a customer and I'm not a pain in the ass customer, but I was like immediately thrown into that scenario. So I think that's probably taking a lot of stress off your back.

I will qualify it with saying that a newsletter, a subscription newsletter that you physically mail to somebody's house has some of the best retention rates we've ever seen. So I don't want to deter people who, if they love to create content, that's. I think it's a brilliant business model. We just looked at the sort of 80, 20 of things and most of our money came from affiliate stuff or selling high ticket consulting type stuff that was just kind of an extra thing in the mix that probably took up 70 plus percent of our time, but generated less than 20% of our revenue.

Yeah, it's the opposite of the 80, 20 rule, right? Yeah, you're doing the 80 that produces the 20 and it's like, wait a.

Minute, what are we doing here?

Speaking of that, I think, I think I heard about this strategy from Dan Kennedy originally, which was if you're going to do. He goes, this is one of the best ways to market, especially if you're doing any kind of direct mail or physical newsletter. He says, find your customers, right? And you can rent lists, mailing lists, etc. This is expensive, by the way, but if you know who it is.

And.

He says, just start sending them your newsletter, like your big newsletter. And it's not a sales letter, it is quite literally a newsletter. Start sending it to them and do it two or three times. Put a price on there, like up top, you know, this $97 month newsletter or whatever it is. They just start getting it now. If it's your target market, they're not gonna, they're gonna be confused as hell, but they're gonna be interested. He goes after maybe three. Three, two or three or whatever issues you could send them. Hey, these three were free. If you'd like to continue your Subscription call here or you put a phone number on there. Because a lot of times people will call and go, hey, what is this? I didn.

Did you. Did you like it? Do you want it? I just thought that was brilliant. Now granted, that takes some capital.

Yeah. Our very first issue, we did something not on probably this, the scale that Dan Kennedy does, but we literally sent our newsletter to people that we saw as large influencers in our niche, hoping that some of them would go and be like, oh, I got this thing in the mail from Matt and Joe. This thing is phenomenal. And like post on Instagram or something, you know, and we did. We got a few people to go and do that. A few sort of influencers in the quote unquote Internet marketing niche to go and post about the newsletter and talk about how cool.

That's great. Yeah. Especially you send it out to the. Yeah. To the influencers and just blow them away with that stuff. Doing those things to go the extra mile. They make a lot. It's highly leveraged activities, that's all. Speaking of that. So now we know enough about you guys. Boring ass story.

That's right.

We know about that. Let's get into some of the bacon bits, the sizzling hot business ideas in it. The fun.

You're making me hungry.

I know, right? So you talked a little bit about. And this was in. Previously, you talked about what.

You know, kind of like being everywhere.

Right.

Like you've got a whole model for like, wow, like omnipresent.

Pretty much.

You're all over the place. I want to talk first about that strategy and tell me how it works, how you employed it and kind of what's involved with it. Because it's really a powerful, powerful strategy.

Well, we stole this concept totally from Scott Oldford.

I was just. That's why I use the word omnipresent, because he actually talks a lot.

Yeah, well, he said something. I don't know which podcast it was. It may even been. I think he was on your podcast. Right. But he mentioned to somebody at some point that he considers his business like herpes. Once you get it, you never get rid of him.

The herpes of Internet.

Right. So once you've seen him once, like, he's everywhere. Right. So that's kind of been our philosophy. If you check out our blog at Evergreen Profits and you view one piece of content, you can't get rid of us from that point on.

The magic of retargeting, right?

Oh, yes.

Magic of retargeting. We're going to hit you with With Google display network ads, we're going to hit you with YouTube retargeting ads. Facebook retargeting ads. We're going to try to get you on your list so we could on our list so we can email you. We're trying to get you on our chatbot through Facebook so we can send you Facebook messenger messages. So pretty much once you land on our site, you're now on our retarget list to just see us everywhere.

Question. YouTube retargeting on that. Are you guys doing a quick, like, what's your Strategy on the YouTube retargeting? So if I go land on your site, which I'm actually going to go there right now.

So YouTube retargeting we're doing with some of our affiliate sites right now. We don't actually have one set up right now for Evergreen profits, but if you were to go to, like, our thrive cart sales page, you'll all of.

A sudden start seeing getthrivecart. Com.

By the way, guys, if you are listening and watching this, I'll put this in the show notes as well. Getthrivecart.com is one of their affiliate pages where they describe the benefits of ThriveCart. And you can not only see the way that Matt and Joe are doing some of their affiliate marketing, which is just a great way to learn, but you can also learn about thrivecart. I am cookie. Yay.

So now that you've been to git thrivecart, you're gonna see a YouTube video, probably on YouTube, where we're giving you a walkthrough of the various templates and themes and stuff that are available on ThriveCart. You're going to start seeing one of two ads from us on Facebook. We have an ad that goes to you if you've just landed on the page and browsed away. We have a different ad that goes to you if you've actually made it to checkout cart.

So the checkout is where it gets kind of funky. This was like a hairbrained idea we just wanted to test. But this is where manychat and chatbots. It was kind of like all the rage at TNC last, what, January, February. And we're like, all right, how do we use this creatively? So we're like, why don't we use it for like a retargeting ad? So we know they landed on the money page or checkout page. Let's drop a pixel there, Facebook retargeting pixel, and follow them with an ad basically on Facebook that says, hey, do you have any questions? We saw you're about to pull the trigger on this. Just click this button and start a message with us.

Yeah. So they click the ad on Facebook, the little messenger pops up and they start a discussion with our support lady who helps us close sales of ThriveCart.

And we pay her 10%. So she's doing our support, but at the same time cutting her a little check on each commission she closes.

Yeah. So now. So you're going to be get retargeted on YouTube. You're going to see those two Facebook ads, depending on how far you got into the ThriveCart funnel.

You'Re going to see Google Display network ads. So you'll be visiting random blogs and websites here and all of a sudden start seeing banners for ThriveCart. And we do a very similar process with our own blog. If you view our own content, the only part we haven't rolled in yet is YouTube ads with that. So with our own evergreen profits blog, if you do land there, you are going to see Google Display network ads and various Facebook ads from us. And every new podcast release you're going to get a retarget about. Hey, this new episode just went live. Check it out. So you're going to start seeing us everywhere just by visiting one of our two sites. I love that. And it's not that expensive too, because you're only targeting the people that hit your site. We're not going after a mass scale of a million people at a time. At any given time, there's 20 or 30,000 people in that target audience and that's it.

Well, the other thing is it doesn't take a lot of tech to set up either or maintenance. I mean really, the support you need.

To know the basic. You need to know the. You can hire people to do this, but you need to know the basics of Google display. Basics of YouTube. Yeah, basics of Facebook, obviously email, once they're on there. And chatbots are something I've been having a lot of fun with.

Dude, you can get so. And now with Manychat, it's. I mean it's free or it's like 10 bucks a month. It's stupid. It's.

Every person should be using it.

Have you noticed that? They used to have. I just noticed this the other day that some of the things that I started off with Manychat and did a $10 a month subscription for because I wanted the ability to have comments on, like trigger it with a comment that's now free.

Oh, really?

I Didn't know that.

Yeah, like go in there and then go to the growth tools. Because I was using this and going through, I was like, wait, I think I can maybe cancel some of my premium connections there. Probably because I don't need it. Because I don't need the JSON version. I don't need this.

You can get really ninja with Minichat with Zapier now, too. We've got our Zapier. We use Drip for our email marketing, and we have mini chat synced to Drip using zapier, which is a tool that sort of connects various tools together. Now, when people start messaging us, one of the first things we ask is, hey, can we get your email address real quick? So if we can't get back to you quick enough, we'll make sure to email you. Well, now we just added you to our ManyChat list as well.

I did that.

The day that ManyChat sent out the email saying Zapier is set up, I went in there and I noticed it and I set that exact same thing up automatically. So.

The strategy used for one of my clients was, hey, I've got this really cool thing. Would you like it? And then they comment on the Facebook ad and it triggers a manychat and says, hey, you said you wanted that. Right? Which, anybody who knows about manychat and the way it works and Chatbots, you have to kind of get them to respond to something. You don't just want to give them a link because that subscribes them to your chatbot. And then it's.

Then it's like, yeah, hey, great, I'll send it to you. What's your email? And boom, now I got them on both. And I love that. It was quite literally game changing, especially because not only that, you guys may have realized this, not only the ability to pull them in, but to, if they take an action, if they buy the product, if they actually go and opt in to something. And I've got them now I want to segment them out of my ManyChat general broadcast list. So I know we're getting down into the weeds on some of the technical stuff. And for people who haven't done Chatbots and manychat, you can contact Joe and Matt or contact me and we'll, you know, probably charge you a hell of a lot of money.

Yeah, we will. But really, I mean, like, if you just want to start, just get manychat, the free version, dick around in the growth tools area. Because just looking at those growth tools, you're just like, holy, Crap, I could do so much. So like another thing, we kick off with thrivecart, for instance, we friggin put exit intent chatbot messages. So when people are trying to leave, blam, there goes a mini chat pop up. There's a live chat window on the bottom, right. I mean, you really can't get rid of us.

Yeah, it was funny. We were talking to somebody who helps manage our ads and she went and looked on our site and she's like, holy crap, you're getting me everywhere now. Because when you land on one of the sites, literally a little olark chat pops up, which our support lady manages. And then when you try to leave, it's like, hey, don't leave. Did you have questions about ThriveCart before you bought? And a little mini chat pop up, pops up. And then once you leave. Now you're seeing the YouTube videos, the Google display, the Facebook. We're just everywhere now. So that's kind of been the method and that's some of the biggest feedback we've gotten from people is you guys are just everywhere now. And it just gives that perception of like we've built this massive, massive brand and everybody knows about us. And it looks like we're spending a million dollars on advertising per month to anybody who lands on our site. But that's obviously not reality.

Absolutely. And you know, that was one of the things that, you know, you mentioned Scott Oldford, and I'll put a link to his post in here because that's one of his whole things is you don't necessarily need to get your message out to every single person.

Yeah. As many people as possible. But just go after the most targeted people. But just be like herpes.

Just be freaking.

It's all about effective messaging.

Yeah.

Be herpes.

Be herpes.

That should be a. Post it on your monitor here, Matt.

Be herpes.

Yeah, some cool ones. Like.

Sure. I want to invite that message into my life. Too much.

The universe.

Law of attraction.

Yeah.

Love it.

I do have little post it notes on here.

Honey, how did you have. How do you have herpes?

Did you cheat? Like.

No, I just manifested that.

Podcast.

I got it from Brad Costanzo.

Jeez.

Sorry, Mrs. Wolf, she could probably hear you. By the way, I think what we should do is give him a PDF you. If it's like a roadmap thing, it shows high level of what we're talking about, how we're herpes of the Internet.

Would you like to do that via Chatbot or via.

Oh, we can get a little creative. How about you Just drop a link and we'll give you a link, whatever.

That is in the show notes.

The show notes that is.

You know what we can do, actually, if we want to be really cool, we could share the flowchart of how this all fits together. Because we do have a flowchart that shows Google and Manychat and Facebook ads. But we've also made a series of videos about how we actually set up mini chat. And it was a course that we used to sell, but as you know, we stopped selling info products.

So it's a free for all ladies.

Give it away for free.

So we do have actually a mini video course. Well, mini. It's like a two hour course.

Pretty big actually. All right, so yeah, it'll probably be a chatbot link and then we'll. We'll get you suited up with it for free.

Nice.

I love that. Show notes. So we'll hook that up. Another thing we like to do on our blog is, is we've been trying to make unique sort of opt ins for pretty much every piece of content now so that depending on what, what content you land on, you might see a different opt in. And we've just like skyrocketed our opt in rates from our blog by doing that.

Yeah. So those content upgrades, as a lot of people call them, what. What's your secret on creating? Because that can be like, oh man, I got to create a new piece of content for everything. So what are some of your hacks for doing those quick.

So there's a couple of things that we do for podcast episodes. Simply giving away the transcripts is a really, really easy one. And a lot of people surprisingly opt in for the transcripts of podcasts.

Yeah, I started doing that early on and I stopped because I didn't get as many people opting in as I thought. And every time I did one, it was like 60 bucks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like, not to sound too cheap, but I was like, it's not really working and I don't know if people are actually reading through them, but.

So here's what we found. This is what I found. I found that the more technical discussions tend to get a much better opt in rate than the ones where we're talking more like mindset y type stuff.

So step by step.

Yeah, if we're walking, because a lot of our podcasts are about walking people through a process. So we get a guest on and we say, what sort of step by step process can you walk our audience through? And those processes actually get. They get opted in for really well with the transcripts, when we are just kind of having a general conversation and there's a lot of like philosophy and mindset type stuff, we don't tend to get a lot of opt ins on that. So I think the type of content makes a difference as well. The other thing that we do that seems to work really well is we use a tool called Designer by Paul Clifford, which I think you're familiar with. And what that does it.

I don't use it. But you like it?

We do, yeah. You basically plug in a URL to a blog post and it'll spit out a PDF version of that blog post and it's really nice, really clean looking. And so a lot of times if we've got nothing better, we'll just, we'll say hey, download. And this is the wording we use. Download a printable PDF version. For some reason people like to print out the blog posts and read them away from a computer as well. So adding in the terminology downloadable PDF seems to work the best.

Beautiful.

Yeah.

Let me share one that I've done on this side and with.

What do you call it?

Facebook messenger bots. Oh yeah, and ads. And I don't know if we shared, if I shared this with you guys. I think I did. I shared this with you, with you guys before. But I'll share it with the peoples, the watching peoples and the listening peoples that did a Facebook ad with a really, really rich content rich Facebook ad. Like a ton, not only a video but just a ton like a thousand word article. Basically semi technical too on a Facebook ad. The thing is a Facebook ad or a Facebook post is a very inconvenient way to, to consume something and especially if you really like it, like Facebook gives you the ability to save it, but it's inconvenient. So what I've done is I've taken a very technical kind of like blog post as an ad and then I said, I know this is long. If you'd like a printable PDF of this, just leave a comment below and let me know and I'll send it to you. So then they leave a comment, the chatbot fires up and it says, hey, by the way, you don't have to use a chatbot. You can send them to a, you can send them to a page that is just an opt in page to download what they just read.

Right?

Right. So a lot of people think that you have to get their email before you give them the bride. But if you just give it to them in a more Convenient form that they want like that it works on the ads too. And I got like 400 comments with a very little ad spend which is almost 400 opt ins as well. So it's just kind of realizing that yeah, you don't have to create something new if you put it in a different modality.

Yeah, no, I agree.

Brilliant.

Yeah. We've got so many different opt ins and we're really experimenting with what works our actual best. Converting one right now is actually just a digital download of our. So we've got this book, Evergreen Wisdom and we offer a PDF like free digital download. That's one of our opt ins. That's sort of one of our. We have a few sort of default downloads. If we don't have anything better for it, we'll throw one of our default ones at the post.

Another one is the we have a 10 tools that basically it's like our marketing stack. And of course most of these are affiliate links, not all of them, but they are legitimately all the tools we use. So we break it down for like 10 plus days. Here's the tool, here's how we use it, how you can use it. Some cool hacks go get it if you want.

I love that.

I mean it's just like a very actionable email sequence. I think it's like 15 days long.

Yeah. So on day one you basically get a list of all the tools and then day by day after that for the next. Well we give them some bonus tools after the 10 days but we send them an email every single day with a description of how we use each one of these tools. So day one you get the whole list and then every day you get a deeper dive into each individual tool.

And ninja tricked, I mean we kind of just started this out, it's already going really well. But if you think you can optimize each one of those pages now because each one of those tools has its own page, like ThriveCart for instance. You put a separate retargeting pixel there to start following around with ads specific to that product now or maybe that pain that it's trying to solve. So you can do that with that designer drip, you know, email, all that stuff. And so you just like, if you really just go bazonkers, I mean start you know, kind of at a high level, test the whole thing, then start dialing in. And that's really how we built this pretty sweet little, you know, kind of system here.

I think that's brilliant. So now if.

You'Re.

I want to switch over to content marketing because I know that this is kind of where I first started seeing some of the content you were putting out. I know you've got this still out there, like how to kind of create content fast, especially if you're not the expert or whatever. What are some of your, what are some of your best strategies on just good, good, consistent content marketing?

So one of my favorite ways to create really good in depth content is actually to go to. So are you familiar with jobs.problogger.com basically the ProBlogger jobs board? If you go there, it used to be 50 bucks. I think they bumped it up to 70 bucks. You can post a job listing there saying, hey, I'm looking for a content writer on X topic. And you'll get a hundred emails from different bloggers, writers that all want to write for your blog, like immediately, like immediately, like within 24 hours. You'll go to bed that night, you'll wake up, your Inbox will have 75 to 100 emails in there from content writers and little examples of content pieces they've written. So we'll go and do that once every six months or so. I'll take all the names that come through, put them in a spreadsheet. I'm actually a super big spreadsheet nerd. So I put all these names.

Have you used Airtable yet?

I have not used Airtable yet. It's mostly Google sheets.

It'll change your life, but keep going.

So we'll put all these names and emails into a Google sheet and then their price, the turnaround time, and then after they've written from us, I give them a rating on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how good they think they are. So I'll put this all into a spreadsheet so we know who to kind of come back to over time.

But you'll have them write what? You'll have them write a piece for you?

Yeah, well, not all of them. You know, based on, based on. I'll weed people out pretty quickly. You know, you do all the same old tricks you do when hiring people, like, hey, in your response to me, make sure you use this keyword in your email when you reply to me and make sure you send me three, three examples of your work. And anybody who doesn't follow the instructions to the letter, get rid of them immediately. Right? So that's already a red flag. And as our friend Dan Ryan says, red flags never travel alone.

So yeah, you see one, you're like.

You see one red flag. That's enough red flags. So, you know, if they didn't follow every instruction on that, just get rid of them and just work with the people that followed your instructions. But what we like to do is we like to get very inexpensive writers. So maybe not always English is their first language, always written in the US Kind of stuff. And we'll have. We'll give them our concept, they'll write it up for us. They might write like a 3,000 word article, a really in depth article for us for like 40 bucks. We'll take that article, and that's our rough draft. We'll use that as our starting point. And then either myself or Joe or Patty, our support lady, will go in and basically revamp it in our voice. But we're not starting from scratch. We're not starting from a blank page. So that's kind of our favorite way to write long form content is to get it inexpensively written to start with. That's the rough draft. And then basically all we're doing at that point is coming in, being an editor and adding our own voice into it, adding some images to it, and then we take over that manual work from that point.

I love it. You know, that brings up a strategy that I learned from Richard Lindemann over.

One of the head guys over at Digital Marketer. And he was sharing me and he used this with a lot of stuff, but the context was around copywriting. And it was his 10, 80, 10 rule. And we're all familiar with the 80, 20 rule, right? Can be 20%, get 80% of the results.

This is similar.

But he said, I'll do the first 10%. Like if it's a piece of copy, I'll think of a few headlines and the hook and the angle and what the offer is. Right. I'm gonna give you the basic structural where I want this to go. Then he'll hire a copywriter to do 80% of the work. But then obviously you give it back to him to finish up the final 10%. It's like when I started really thinking like that, and with that framework, it made a big difference. And I've started to use that in my business as well. Not as much as I need to. I need to do that more. So this year is a big focus for 2018 for me is better delegation.

Yeah, Well, I think because we get guilty of the same thing is just doing too much. And we're like, well, we're capable. We want it done now. We have this idea, maybe it's Monday. We should get this Done by Friday. It's like, all right.

Always takes longer.

Yeah, totally. And I think what it comes down. I know what it comes down to is some forethought, some planning. Plan the next month, two, three, the whole year. But get specific on maybe the quarter. And what are your goals? What kind of content's gonna fit inside that whole roadmap there that you wanna achieve? And then let's delegate some shit, because let's be honest, that's the only way to do it.

That's another big secret to the success of our content is we usually spend one day a year where we map out our content plan for the entire year. So we did this. We're actually doing this again on Monday. We're recording this on Thursday. So in a few days, we're doing this for the year of 2018, where we're going to lock ourselves in a room and map out our entire, like, roadmap for the year of what we're going to release. We did it last year. We actually traveled to San Francisco and got a co working space up there and got a private whiteboard and mapped it all out.

Just go to San Francisco, just kind of get out of the.

Just to get out of our normal environment, our normal space, you know, just be. Be somewhere else, you know, no distractions, out of our normal sort of bubble that we're in. And so we're actually. We're just going up to Encinitas this time, but we're doing it on Monday, where we map out our whole year. And that really, really helps. There's no question about what content's coming up. I can. I'll be able to tell you six months from now on, you know, that's not six months from now. On June. June 13th, this piece, this blog post is going live. You know, we get that granular with it once we map it out. So that's another big trick.

How about podcasts? We could talk about that whole thing.

Yeah. So before I go there, I want to give you another tactic for, like, written content. Are you familiar with fancyhands.com I am.

I used to subscribe. I canceled my subscription because I had, like, 400 rollover.

Yep, yep. So with Fancy Hands, we hire them to do a lot of research for us. So we have a. We have a blog post that's coming out tomorrow, actually. Well, I don't know when this podcast is getting released, but we have a blog post that's coming out that's all about the top, like, 25 mobile apps you can use to make money with so things like Uber and Lyft and TaskRabbit and there's one called Gigwalk and user testing. Yeah, all these mobile apps that you can use to make a little bit of side income. We have that blog post coming out. We actually went and hired somebody on Fancy Hands to basically go do all the research and Fancy Hands, their lowest plan is 29 bucks a month.

I had no clue that was even like that was something they can do. Yeah.

How much? 29 bucks a month. That gets you five tasks a month. Bigger articles. They're going to say like we need you to use more task credits. I think that one cost to two task credits. But they went and they researched the 2025 mobile apps that you can use. They gave us the name of the app, they gave us the URL of the app. They gave us a quick like three sentence description of what the app did. And I think they linked us to like an image, like a screenshot of the app's logo. And that was all within our 29 bucks a month. I used two tasks on it and we got a list of 25 mobile apps that you can make money with with the link and description and everything. And then what we did was we actually hired a writer from that point to take those, that list of 25 things and just turn it into a cohesive article that you can read.

Ah, that's brilliant.

So but again takes planning because that took like two weeks to complete that one article. Like if we wanted that done tomorrow we would have been like shit, you know. But before thought little bit, a little bit of work from other people because they fancy had probably did like 60% of the work. I would say the writers still had to do a good amount.

But yeah, that's always been the hardest part for me is to take one step back so you can take two steps forward, which is like slow down to speed up idea. Because I like being in momentum and moving at the seat of my pants so much that I'm just. And sometimes if I'm not in that state, I'm either like, I'm either stop or go. I'm sorry, I'm either faster or nothing.

Stopped.

Yeah.

Moving slow is really hard for me and it's almost like being in a. You know when you're in a traffic jam on the, on the freeway and it's moving like five miles an hour and I, I'm the type of person who, I will take an off ramp and go. It might take me twice as long to get there, but at least I'm moving at 30 miles an hour.

I'm identical. I think a lot. We had this good conversation last yesterday because we did our big podcast chunk and we'll get into how we do our podcasting just super fast if you want. And it was like, I think it's like a trait in most entrepreneurs is you love that startup phase that start things up. Let's brainstorm. Let's just go and throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. But when it comes to, like, maintenance.

Yeah.

Like the systems and like the day to day grind, it's like you got a little bit of bored, you know, like, maybe it's time to sell the business or just get the whole out of there and focus on something else. Yeah.

I mean, our sweet spot is coming up with the ideas for the business, building the businesses, creating systems to make sure the businesses keep going. But then once that system's there and the business is kind of running itself, we get bored really quickly. So that's when we start thinking, should we sell this business? Should we wrap up this business? Should we, like, what should we do next? Should we completely outsource it so somebody else is running it?

You know, so it's exactly how I know. I feel the exact same way. And I think a lot of the listeners and viewers do as well. Yeah. A little bit more on the podcast because obviously I've got some very personal, selfish reasons to, of course, you know, learn a little bit about, you know, podcast efficiency and how you guys are doing it.

So podcasting, I mean, we literally podcast out of this room. If you're watching the video, you know, it's not like a crazy studio or anything. It's. Yet it's on the vision board.

It's on my vision board. I do have a podcast studio on my vision board.

But the fact of the matter is it's not required. I know, Brad, you don't have some crazy fancy studio. Like, it's cool. Like it's the handheld microphone. It's a hundred bucks. I mean, it's nice. But the whole thing is podcasting can be daunting. And if you, if you're not consistent with it, you see a lot of drop off in your, in your listeners. I mean, we're all guilty. We've all been there, you know, so if you batch record, which we do. So we do one day per month, we'll batch record everybody for the entire month, that one day. And so far, energy hasn't dropped off at that last call. So it's been good, but.

Well, that's only, what, four episodes for the month?

It's four to five. Yeah, four to five. And we'll do it. Yeah, and we'll do it all that day. It gets dropped live every Wednesday of every month. And we've been doing this for a year now.

Literally our yesterday. Yeah.

And it works. We have a. We have an outsourced guy, that podcast editor. He does the podcast editing, show notes, all that stuff. Matt just drops it into a Dropbox. He has a procedure list and literally just follows, what, 15 lines and publishes that sucker every Wednesday. Just makes sure it looks good.

Yeah. I basically wrote in a Google Doc a process that he needs to follow. I think it's about 15 steps. So what we do is we record. Just like we're recording now. At the end, we get an audio file. I take that audio file, put it in Dropbox, and then our editor literally just goes through the 15 steps on that doc and we do nothing else at that point. He's going to put it on Libsyn, the podcast hosting. He's going to build our show notes, he's going to do any sort of editing that needs to be done on the podcast. Everything is out of our hands from that point. So we spend one day a month recording four to five episodes and then putting them in Dropbox. And then Joe even will tell me, like, oh, shit, I didn't even realize that podcast was live yet.

Like, oh, yeah.

I'll be like, dude, that podcast went live three weeks ago. Like, the podcast just happened after that.

Well, we forget we even have one because we're like, one day.

What do you do on the promotion aspect of it? So obviously you have a list and you have your social media things that you can post to and say, hey, guys, I released it. Here's my list. Do you do anything else as far as promoting the podcast goes?

Yeah. So I've got this whole, like. So all of our content marketing is all on a trello board. So every time a piece of content goes live, I'm moving it along the board for, like, what steps happen next. And we actually did make a blog post about our whole content marketing, like, promotional strategy that we do once it goes live. So there's a blog post with a YouTube video that explains all that.

Just remind us. We'll give you the link.

I think I saw it, but I don't know if I went through the entire thing or not.

Yeah, I mean, it's a hefty video. It's like a 25 minute video that shows the whole process. But essentially we mail our list every time a new blog post goes live. We have a Facebook community that's a fairly active community, so we promote it in that community. We put the podcast on Facebook, our Facebook fan page. We boost the post. We always just boost it to friends and friends of friends, fans of fans and friends of fans is the best target we found so far. And we've tested a ton of targets. That's the one that gets the most engagement, the most clicks, for whatever reason is the one that Facebook puts on there by default, which is fans and friends of fans. So we boost that.

Was it like $5 or something? We're boosting.

We boost $10 a week, so it's 10 bucks. We boost that, it's $10 over seven days. So there's always a podcast in circulation.

We use a tool. I think you use this tool too, but I can't think of the name. It's the YouTube one. Repurpose. Yeah, Repurpose. That automatically takes the audio, puts it on YouTube. So it goes to YouTube. We use push Crew, which is a browser push notification. So every time a new episode goes live, it's fed by our RSS feed, and the new episode just goes live out to the Push Crew. Surprisingly, Push Crew is our number five largest traffic source.

It's insane.

And you can get free.

I was just gonna ask you that because I've had mixed results with it. But it's amazing.

For us, it's in our top five. So our number one traffic source is our email list. Number two is Google SEO. Number three is Facebook ads. Number four, I think, was Instagram. And number five was Push Crew, which.

Instagram we don't do shit on.

We haven't done shit on Instagram. I don't know why you.

How is Instagram so. So what do you mean? Do you guys have a.

We have an Instagram account with images, but we haven't posted a new image in four months.

Like, we are.

How the hell is that doing so well?

No clue.

That's over. Figuring out one of our great.

What's the Instagram account name? I'm gonna go.

That's evergreen profits instagram.com evergreenprofits okay, so we gotta.

Yeah, we've been digging into the numbers so much lately. In the last, like, months since doing the shift over. Now we're like, okay, we're all about platform building, getting more traffic inputs, inputs, inputs. And then we're like, what the hell is Instagram doing on this top list we use.

I'm just kind of throwing out every single thing we do. When a podcast goes live, we use Meet Edgar, which is it posts it to. We only use it on Twitter. We actually don't use Meet Edgar on Facebook because we find when we use tools like that, they get zero engagement on Facebook, but on Twitter, it still works. So what Meet Edgar does is it posts your post to Twitter, then it refreshes the post every so often, so you have a big library of posts, and once or twice a day, it posts something to Twitter for you, but it will continually recycle posts. So old podcasts that we recorded six, seven, eight, nine months ago still get tweeted out from time to time using Meet Edgar. That's crazy. We use Steemit, which is a sort of new platform on the blockchain. We use Steemit to write a blog post around every podcast episode. And we embed the YouTube video. So the YouTube video goes on Steemit. And then we always put a little byline that says, this was originally posted here. Link back to the show notes. And what else do we do?

It's a lot of shit.

SEO the hell out of it using Yoast. SEO? Yeah. So we always SEO it for the guest's name.

We have retargeting, obviously, always going.

So like, the other day, we had. We had a guest on our podcast. This was back in the beginning probably nine months ago, named Christine McDaniel, which, you know, mutual acquaintance. Right. She was on our podcast along nine months ago, towards the beginning. And just recently, she was mentioned by Richard Branson on Richard Branson's Virgin blog because she went and donated $100,000 to his charity. And when Richard Branson mentioned her on his blog, the search for her name just skyrocketed in Google, and we were sitting right there in the number one spot for Christine McDaniel. So our podcast, like, overnight saw a spike of, like, 300 downloads because people searched for Christine's name. So now we're in the habit of every single podcast. We're trying to SEO the hell out of our guest's name. So if anybody goes and searches that person's name, we're what you find for them.

And you got to think people's names are usually pretty low. You know, they're low on.

Unless they're. Unless they're real famous or something.

Richard Branson. Yeah.

Brad Costanzo. I mean.

I mean, he's really.

You guys aren't even on page one.

Hell, yeah, man. So there's probably more to the podcast. But, I mean, let's be honest. That's gonna give you more.

I mean, a lot of this stuff is either automated systems, things like Push Crew and Meet Edgar and stuff like that. That's in the. The YouTube that just kind of automatically happens. We don't think about it. We just set it up once, and that's just kind of rolling every time we make a new post. A handful of things I do manually or we have it sort of outsourced and somebody else does manually, like the reposting it to steam it. And I don't. I don't have anything automatically post to Facebook anymore. I used to have it. Whenever a new post went live, it would automatically post to our group. It would automatically post to our page. No engagement. Zero engagement. When I just go and post it manually, I just, you know, copy and paste the link in and write a little thing around it for whatever reason that gets, you know, 10 times the engagement, as if an automated tool was posting for me.

Wow.

Facebook knows. So I don't know.

Yeah, that is true. That is true. It's getting harder and harder.

So we stopped using any sort of API source into Facebook because we found that's when it just doesn't work.

Yeah, I don't think I'm using any of those as well currently, come to think of it. I think I did in the very beginning, but I stopped for probably a lot of the same reasons.

You just have to create a nice calendar. I mean, that's why we run everything. Without a calendar, we would have failed this whole podcast, the content, all this stuff, until we finally sat down and we're like, okay, need a content calendar, a process. The Trello thing's been game changer. Our buddy David Sinek, he runs Paleo Bags. He's just a SEO badass. He runs this massive content company, and that was basically swiped from him. We just kind of optimized it or just tweaked it to ourselves, you know.

Beautiful. Beautiful.

Yeah.

So.

What are some of the nuts you guys are trying to crack right now in your business? And obviously, by that, I mean, you've heard me ask this question before, but that, I mean, you know, whether it's people you're trying to meet, whether it's a strategy you're trying to master, somebody you're trying to hire or fire or money you're trying to raise, just anything there that's kind of like, all right, if we can figure this out, things will be better.

Okay, so this is something we were having a discussion on Yesterday.

And we're going to think of where you're going.

This, this might get into a deep conversation here. I don't know. But. So there's this concept that we have of like the North Star project. And I don't know, I don't, I've never heard anybody else call it that as something that we've just been kind of calling it internally. But you look at someone like, like Gary Vaynerchuk, right? His big goal is to own the New York jets one day, right?

I have a better one. How about Elon Musk? Come on, he wants to make a frickin Mars colony. Mars? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I'm trying to, I'm trying to.

What is your moonshot?

And then Bill Gates, you know, he wants to eradicate polio off the face of the Earth. Our problem is we don't have that sort of North Star main sort of project that we're aiming for. We just, we have our business that we're sort of kind of running every day and it's making us money, but we don't have that sort of North Star big vision thing that we're trying to point our business towards that this is why we do it. All right? Other than right now, it's supporting our families and, you know, paying for our houses and stuff like that. We are trying to figure out what that sort of North Star is for our business.

And to be honest, it's. You got to think about it. It's. I've been watching a mix of Elon Musk videos and Casey Neist did videos in the morning, like while I had breakfast. So it's like a little bit of crazy, little bit of genius when you decide who's who. But the whole thing is, it's like Elon says something, he's like, typical people, we just wake up and we're just solving problems, small little problems. It doesn't matter, like, oh, I have this task list and I'm just going to go about my day, commute in traffic every day. Not really super stoked to wake up every single day to solve that task list. So let's build a fricking task list or whatever roadmap to get to this point where you're just like every day, like, I'm gonna figure something out. That's massive.

Yeah.

And I've literally dealt with the same frustration as well, because it's also not something you can fake. You can't fake this passionate moonshot project. Like, I want to put somebody on Mars. Well, I really don't.

I can tell myself that till I'm blue in the face.

Yeah, well.

But it doesn't mean it means anything. So it's like trying to find something that motivates that big. Motivating that North Star, but that, you know, you really deeply care about because you know that it's going to be hard as hell. So what is that thing that forces you to go through the.

Yeah.

Hurdles.

It sort of opens up all these like existentialism questions between us where we start having these discussions of like, why are we doing this? Like, we're getting up every day and we're building this stuff and we're making money. And then, you know, you hit a point in your career where you make enough money to pay the bills. You could pretty much, for the most part, buy anything you want. Like, we could all probably get any car we wanted. We live in frickin San Diego.

You can especially get one if you want an Audi R8.

I know somebody, I wonder who you know.

But you get to this point where it's like the bills are paid. I can do what I want, I can travel, I can create the experiences. You know, what's the point of continuing to create more money? What's the point of building upon it? Building upon it, building upon it. Why? Why are we doing this day in and day out? You know? So I think the answer to that question is you have some sort of North Star that you're always going towards. Like, what happens when Gary Vaynerchuk finally buys the jets? I almost guarantee he's gonna fall into like a deep depression because he's shot for this thing his entire life and now he's got it. Now what?

Well, we were talking about what astronauts, whoever walks on the moon. It's this effect. It's like, what now? Yeah, what do I do now?

That's being a child star, right?

Yeah, that's right. There's a legitimate thing that they call like the moonwalk effect or something like that, where pretty much every astronaut that's ever walked on the moon came back and then fell into a deep, deep depression for a long time because Olympic athletes, same thing. Once you've walked on the moon, what else is there? Like, what else can you accomplish in your life that's bigger than that?

Well, and I think it's like having. There's one thing between.

I thought a lot about this too. So there's one thing like having the North Star, where it's a singular North Star. That's like, I want to put people on Mars and. Or I want to do this. And then if you accomplish it, what now versus just always setting, just realizing that you do need to reset your goals and to have maybe you have multiple north stars out there that drive you. My client Jesse Itzler, who has set huge goals and many times, he's the author of a book called Living with a Seal, if you guys haven't heard about it, but billionaire, multiple serial, multiple entrepreneur and he talks about this a lot and he says, you know.

In reference to the NBA because he owns the Atlanta Hawks and he says.

One of the issues that a lot of basketball players like in high school and college, they have this dream of making the NBA and then they make the NBA and they forget to reset their goals. And he goes, you know who doesn't? LeBron, Kobe, Jordan. Damn right. You know, Curry, all the people who are the best of the best, they realize that okay, now I'm in the NBA. The next North Star is. I want to be the MVP and I want a ring and I want all this other stuff. So it's, yeah, it's, it's. Remembering to reset those goals is a real big thing. But I have a hard time doing that dream real big because I also, I do not get motivated by having the biggest house, the most cars. I don't get motivated the same way Grant Cardone gets motivated by just having more. Do I want it? Yes. But is there that deep visceral motivation that's going to make me walk through fire to get it? Quite honestly, no.

And that's where. Because I was thinking about this this morning again. Yeah. Because it is, it's been in my head like. Like what? How do you get to that point? Like how do you figure out your North Star? And maybe it's just literally and I don't know, a good answer. Maybe you have some ideas, but maybe it's just.

I do have some ideas, but keep going.

Good. Yeah, no, I want to know. But just mind, you know, mind dumping or brain dumping everything on a piece of, of paper at least gets ideas of tangible things. You might. I want a frickin yacht. Cool. Put it on the paper. I want a helicopter. Cool. Sounds big and bad, but at the same time we know people who have that not really out of touch, you.

Know, those are the types of things that once you get there, you get there and you're kind of like meh, I've been there, done that.

You know. So what are your ideas? Because I'm curious.

So first of all, also along these lines, the you know what's funny, by the way, just to interject for all my listeners, before the hour and a half that we talked before this, we were talking about how a lot of the episodes that get the most downloads and the most feedback are the ones that talk about mindset and business. And now here we are talking about.

And now we've shifted into that, but.

Everybody'S gonna have tuned out already on all the other.

The funny thing is you ask what nut we have to crack. And I think most of the nuts in our business that we have to crack are not related to anything technical in the mental stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. So, number one, I hate the. I've always hated this question. What would you do if money was no object? Guess what, motherfucker? Money is an object.

Right?

Like it is, it literally is an object. And most of us cannot even fathom because number one, if all of us came into millions and millions of dollars, right, let's just say we exit our company and we have 20 million, 50 million, $100 million each one of us is going to travel, party and have a bunch of fun until it gets really boring. All of us, I don't care who you are unless you've got your North Star. But we're going to do that for a little while because that's ultimately what like that's blowing off all this pent up steam. And I don't think any of us really know what it's like to have money no object. Like money no object is a very, very, very big thing. And it's now you, like, you kind of want to focus on being significant rather than just being like I've used this concept before is like, would I rather be significantly successful or successfully significant in my life? And that significance is thing. Like I want to be significant to myself, to the, to my family and the people who look up to me and all two of them. But the, the thing is, I've tried to break it down like this, okay, like, what do I like? I take a look at life, the life I'm living now. I call this like life A, which is what am I currently doing? Or it's not too far out of my realm, like marketing, consulting, E comm. Business, et cetera. How could that get better? So that's one version. But then I start to think, okay, well what would I do if that part is over? Maybe it's through an exit, maybe I couldn't do it anymore, but it's off the table. What would I do? And it might have something to do with kind of making an impact or.

It might have something to do with just something more fun and fulfilling and just something enjoyable. It's not necessarily this deep humanity based.

Thing. But I think, okay, well what would I do if that life was over? So I literally couldn't consult another marketing thing. I couldn't start another E comm business or whatever. What would it be? And then the third one is now what would I do if.

Money or image was no concern? So what I've done is I've kind of. And by the way, I don't have an answer to this. This is something I'm currently working on. But what I by bridging that gap between where my current reality and what would I do if money was no concern? I put money or image as well. Because a lot of us would just maybe we'd be Casey Neistat beyond, you know, do crazy YouTube videos. But then we worried, well, what would people think in my business? What if money or image was no concern? But I've sandwiched it in between. Well that third one. So I found that it allows me to just think much more laterally. Like maybe I'd make movies and maybe I do this, you know, whatever. But.

I don't know. The bigger part is like I have a hard time thinking about a goal in terms of my role for humanity.

Sure.

Like I don't, I don't have. I do. And by the way, I, it annoys the hell out of me when I see these. A lot of entrepreneurs and gurus who go, I want to create a million millionaires.

Yeah.

I want to impact a million people.

I feel like it's a cop out.

Like it's just total cop out bullshit.

Yep. I agree. Because I know some people that we know together collectively. We won't name any names. So I'm like, it sounds great on paper, it sounds great on your website as a vision for the company, but is that really motivating you?

Yeah, half the time I feel like that vision is part of their marketing tactic.

That's how I feel as well. And it also, I personally, I would rather know that I've helped five people turn their lives around and have deep impacts on them. Then I've kind of inspired 5 million people with my podcast. Like, I'd much rather know that the five people that I've worked with have had dramatically different lives because that will ripple out. That's bigger leverage points. And maybe this comes back full circle to both of our business models, which is very similar of why we are not trying to sell products to the masses. Why we're trying to go much, much deeper, work, roll our sleeves up and work hand in hand with some real game changers. Why I like to invite people for a VIP day to spend eight to 10 hours with me, sometimes more in a room with a whiteboard. And we just go deep.

Yeah.

And I know you guys are doing that as well, to figure out how can we really change your world? So that's the kind of stuff that motivates me. But, yeah, as far as North Stars go, shoot.

But I mean, maybe that's a north, or maybe that's leading to a North Star is helping people go deep. But maybe it's qualifying which people or businesses or non profits, whatever, maybe there is something they're working on that you can help them then go deep. And it could be humanity. It could be just making people rich, or it could be cool.

We did an interview with somebody on our podcast yesterday who in his career has put on these massive concerts in New York, right? He's had Jay Z, he's had the Rolling Stones, the Foo Fighters, all these people. He's. He's gotten them on stage and he's gotten. He's put on these events that had 60,000 people at it, and all of it was for charity. And with this charity that he helped build, they raised $1.2 billion to help alleviate world poverty. And what he actually realized after doing this for years and years and years, that he was actually much more fulfilled by working with people individually and actually seeing the impact on A1, on one basis with a much smaller group of people. Because it's almost like. It's almost like an MLM scheme for good, Right? If he can change somebody's mindset to help better the world, and that person can change two people's mindsets to help better the world, he actually started to look at his business more on that level on, if I can help a handful of people change their mindset and change their game to help better the world, those people will each go out and help a handful of people. And then you just have a giant pyramid scheme of everybody out there bettering the world. And he felt that that was much, much, much more impactful than putting on these events that literally raised $1.2 billion for his charity.

Right.

Well.

And, you know, I. I've read.

I don't know, thousand books in my life. Guessing I've read hundreds of books. I know that. And listen to a lot of podcasts, watched a lot of motivational YouTube videos, and met A lot of people, real briefly or whatever who've inspired me in one way or another. But there have been so few books like non personal interactions. There's been so few that I can count them on one hand that have changed the trajectory of my life. So it is so rare for somebody putting out content. Even Gary Vee, and he's inspiring. Whatever. But to where? But I've had mentors, I've had personal coaches, mentors, etc. Who have. Who have made like they've said one thing or they spent an hour with me and gave me one magical insight that was custom for me that completely changed the course of my career in my life. And yeah, so I look at it like that. I'd much rather be that person and go deep than go be a laser revving in a floodlight for sure. Interesting nuts you guys got the crack.

Yeah. Good nuts over here.

Interesting. Interesting nuts you've got on.

I think that's just the biggest one that's been on our mind lately. I'm sure we've got plenty of other nuts that didn't come out right. Yeah.

Now I love.

Any. Anything you guys want to plug, anything you want to leave people if they want to get more information from you, obviously subscribe to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Yeah, check it out.

Flowchart. Or I thought it was Hustle and Flow.

Hustle and Flowchart. Hustle and Flow was a movie from like the 1990s.

That's right.

We're piggybacking. But just check out evergreen profits dot com. You're gonna see everything there. Podcast is there, all the content.

You'll see it forever.

You'll never get rid of us. Do you want herpes? Good.

Evergreen Profits.

Unless of course, you clear your cookies. But don't do that.

Never clear your cookies.

Why? Why would you.

Yeah, hopefully you're not one of those savages browsing the Internet with an ad blocker, right?

Evil.

No, ad blockers actually block. Freaking. Oh, man, I hate that. They block like any sort of pixels now.

So like, yeah, retargeting pixels, all that stuff.

Well, it blocks our conversion pixels too. So if somebody actually opts into our site, it actually doesn't show the conversion in Facebook anymore either. So that's. That's really annoying.

But disrupting the industry.

Yeah. No, Evergreen Profits.com has links out to everything we do. The Hustle and Flowchart podcast. If you want to hire us to build a custom game plan for you, if you want to read some of our content, it's all there.

Get thrivecart.com had pretty much. It's like the best place to see everything in action.

I love that.

Yeah, it's just a cool case study I'll call it.

And then we'll also give you a link to where you can get our sort of flowchart of how all these pieces fit together. And then we'll throw in those training videos of how we actually use mini chat in our business as well in the show notes. I don't have a link URL for you yet, but I'll get you one that you can throw in the show notes.

Yeah, we'll create this now. I mean, you guys have a little bit of time. This comes out in February of 2019.

Oh, Jesus.

Sounds like you a little behind there. No, just kidding.

But it's the next episode. I'm just not releasing anything.

You're on a one a year schedule now.

Yes.

That's cool.

That's cool.

You gotta pay close attention.

I envy that.

Right? That'd be great. All right, gentlemen, thank you for joining me on the podcast bacon Rant business and for anybody still with us on this marathon episode which has been chock full of awesome. I do not apologizing at all to anybody for how long and great this has been. May have to. There's a lot of chunks out here that can be like actually split up as really good micro content, which I love. When we're able to do. Subscribe to the show, tell your friends, tag me, tag the boys here in social media when you share this. I didn't say if. I said when you share this on social, let us know. And if you have questions, concerns, if you have ideas or if you are kind of up against a nut you're trying to crack and you don't know how to get unstuck, shoot me an email. Ask bradakenraptbusiness.com There is a better than average chance I will not hit delete, but I will actually read it and reply to you. I do appreciate all of my listeners and if there's anything I can do to help you, please let me know. Gentlemen, we got to get a beer sometime soon.

We will.

We are close and let's make it happen.

Thank you, man. This has been fun, guys. See you.

See you on that next episode.