Marketing Is Changing - Adapt or Go Broke

There is an opportunity for all of us to change the way we're thinking. If it, you know, if it fits in your business, if none of this is relevant, then lucky you. Yeah, I doubt it, though. So if you have an online business and like, yeah, you're relying on any one of these things or want to grow your biz and brand and all that, the way we're doing it is a little different now.

Yeah.

So we're going to do more of a hybrid approach between kind of like what we have been doing in direct response and Internet marketing compared to more the branding and creator play. This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float. Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey. We are here.

We are.

This is a big show.

It is.

Episode.

It is.

We have a big show, too.

They're all big episodes. I love every episode equally. Actually, that's a lie. There's a lot of episodes I like better than others.

I don't believe you.

In fact, even with interviews, there's some guests I like better than others.

They're not all my babies. So who you don't like the most? No, don't say it. Nope, nope, nope. You're not gonna.

You're still waiting for me to answer.

I'm kind of. But that's up to you.

Yeah, no, I don't throw people under the bus.

You shouldn't. I don't think that's Anybody who's been.

Listening to our show for a long time probably knows our more favorite and.

Lesser favorite episodes should be obvious. Yeah. Read the comments or read the. Or check out the ratings. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. They're in the ether, but don't worry about it. This is a great episode, though. I think this is. This is an episode that has been long coming since 2013.

Yes, yes. In fact, you know, we were talking to. We did a live stream as of the day of this recording. We did a live Stream with Matt McWilliams earlier today, and he said that he missed the kind of more therapy session episodes where we're talking about, like, what we're doing in the business and the struggles and the wins and all that kind of stuff. And I think this episode's gonna have quite a few elements of that.

Well, Matt McWilliams, this episode's for you. Thank you, sir.

So this episode is gonna be all about, like, what. Where we see a lot of the marketing that we've been doing, where we see it going, some of the sort of Negative things that are happening in the marketing world where the landscape is changing. The landscape of marketing is changing. And so we're gonna talk about the changing landscape and some of the things that we're gonna do differently and some of the ways that, you know, going back to your comment about 2013, we're finally kind of fulfilling on some of the stuff that we've said we've wanted to fulfill on for 2013, and we're gonna stop being little wussies about it. And we're going all in. We're going all in. And we're taking notes on this. We're taking notes on this episode.

Yeah, that was good. Yeah, we did not practice that one.

We didn't.

But we should get that move down.

Let's try again.

Whoa. Yeah, I like it. You know, like the. So Matt and I have this little. We should bring it back, actually, more often. But, you know, the Top Gun high five that we always do.

Yeah, we used to be good at it. It'd be really hard right here.

We can't do it right now. We're gonna, like, choke ourselves with each.

Freaking cord, and we're gonna unplug. Shit.

Let's not do that. But, you know, the Top Gun high five. Clap, clap. Come on, man. We gotta get a little B roll of that. Later on.

We'll get something. Yeah, but, yeah, get the notes for this episode. If you go over to flowchartgroup.com you can join the group. And that's our Facebook group. If I didn't make that clear. We hang out there. We answer questions there. We pose questions there. We share videos and tips and live streams. We do a lot of stuff in that group.

We do all sorts of interesting things.

But by joining that group, that's also how you can get the action guide to this episode.

You should get those. Because sue is just working her tail off to make these action guides or flow notes, potentially. We're rebranding.

Her tail's fully gone. I don't know if you've noticed. It's gone. It's completely gone.

Just put it all into the notes. So, sue, you rock. Thank you. So you definitely want to see where she is pouring all of her energy into. It's@flowchartgroup.com she takes all these cliff Notes, basically, of these episodes. They're free for two weeks with this episode going live. And make sure to plug in your email address. That's where we'll send it to you. That's how you type? That's how I type.

That's how you type.

Actually, you know what's funny? My stepdad, Kev, you don't listen. But when he did type a lot for work, I heard he typed with his fingers like this. I'm like, that's not that effective. I could teach you.

Are you flipping off the camera?

No, no, no. I'm typing.

Okay. Okay.

Yeah. But middle fingers, middle finger type. That's all he would use. So don't do that. You'll be there a while. Because we'd have to pause for a while. But flowchartgroup.com get the notes. You'll like them, you'll love them, and you'll hear more from us. It's yes.

And also, we do have a killer sponsor.

Who dat? Oh, I knew who it is. You wanna find out?

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All right, so we're back. We're back.

That was a great sponsor.

That was an amazing sponsor. Read it went just to plan perfect plan execution.

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That's what we do. Spotless execution. Spotless. I don't know. Dirty execution.

I don't know.

We just get crazy with this. So this episode like we said, it's been a long time coming this week, as we've been recording, we've had some.

We've had some mind opening, you know, just like perspective shifts, I'd say. And I gotta give a shout out to our boy Angelo Sisco over at Alpha Hippie. We've mentioned him a lot lately.

He was on a recent episode. Check it out if you haven't.

Yeah, we're going through like, we're legit going through his, I mean, long coaching. I mean it doesn't. It's not long, but it's multi week coaching. He's been pointing out a couple things where we've been a little bit blinded to. We'll say, but it's a lot of, I think just the cool stuff we've been doing and what we're capable of doing when we focus in the right directions and see ourselves as that. It's like kind of this. You know, we've talked about imposter syndrome in the past. I think that has slowed us down in our progress to build towards this vision that we've had since 2013. And so I know for me it was like a big shift on Monday today. Just mentally thinking different. I was like, wow. And then our conversation. I think he had a call with him as well on Monday.

Yes.

And that day. And then carrying over into the day after that. Tuesday. Usually it's Tuesday after Monday most weeks. Not next week though. What's happening next week? Tuesday is going on vacation. So.

But the whole thing is like we're friggin. I feel like it was just like such a little, you know, it's almost like, oh, we're legit. Or we have all the assets, like. Cause there's been that little thing in the back of our heads. We've talked about it before in here.

Yeah, well, I think we tend to. Other people seem to think we're bigger than we think we are. And I think I actually posted on Facebook the other day about they're really tall. Yeah, I actually posted on Facebook the other day about this.

This, this thought that I had about like, we're not sharing the wind enough. Right? Like, we're not. We're not telling people about all the cool stuff that's happening. We're not, we're not like celebrating going, yeah, man, we finally got this person on the show. We've been trying to get them on for years. And we like, we need to share more of that stuff. And I think a lot of that has manifested from this kind of imposter syndrome. And literally the day that we're recording this, which, you know, is. I don't know, a few days before it's going live, we're sitting in the office, and two deliveries came.

Oh, man, I should have had the props with us.

Darn it. But you could go get them if you want. So two deliveries came, and I think they were kind of telling. One of them was a book. The first delivery was two copies of Robert Cialdini's new book. If you're not familiar with Influence, we got two copies of his new version of Influence because he's coming on the.

Show, signed by the man of.

And they're signed. And like, an hour later, another delivery arrived, and it was two copies of Geno Wickman's new book, which I don't think is even out yet. Is it?

I don't believe so. It's called the Entrepreneurial Leap, and we're gonna have him on the podcast soon as well. Yeah, they came the same day within, like, I don't know, 15 minutes of each other.

And we were just sitting here going, this is kind of telling, right, that we have two of the people that, like, we've read their books. They've been a big influence on our life. See what I did there?

See what I did there?

They've really helped us get a lot of traction in business.

Dang. Really? Keep going.

Keep going. And we're really, really ready to make a big leap in business right now.

And we're gonna just, like. We're gonna burn it like rocket fuel.

We're gonna fuel rocket fuel.

We'll blow this brand up, dude. All in.

But anyway.

Ow. The point being in my hand.

I know that was a rough one. The point being.

Solid one. That these.

That, like, we're sitting here and we have people like Robert Cialdini and Gino Wickman sending us stuff to our studio, writing us letters, and we're still going. Are we legit? Like, are we like. Do people actually, like, pay attention to what we're saying? Wake up.

Wake up.

Are we actually doing good stuff and we still question ourselves?

Well, not anymore. Yes. But that is essentially. Yeah. And this. I don't know if this isn't telling, too. Yeah, you're right, man. It's like this. Well, we're not gonna go down that route of talking about that part so much, but that has held us back. And. And with. So this week also, we've had some chats with our team members. A lot of team members. A lot of team members. The core team that we have, but we chat with a ton of people all the time and we're seeing trends happening in the landscape of marketing and technology. And you're probably aware of things like the Apple changes and privacy and Google and all these pixels and things are being affected in our business and likely in yours. You just might not notice it yet or you will notice them later. So the goal of this is show off a little bit of what we're seeing, but also like, hey, there's ways that we're now finally gonna double down because we've kind of unlocked this little switch.

Yeah.

And I think we've had enough social proof and all this other people, all these people saying, yeah, no, that's the right move or you're ready for that move.

Yeah, yeah.

Not like we need permission, but our.

Brains, but validation always helps.

Validation certainly helps. So yeah, where do we go, Matt?

Yeah. So let's start by talking about like some of the changing landscape that we're seeing. Right. So some of the things that we're see. We're really big on affiliate marketing. We've done episodes about affiliate marketing. We still consider ourselves unapologetic affiliate marketers. We still will be unapologetic affiliate marketers and continue to promote products as an affiliate, but we're seeing that landscape change. It's getting a little bit harder for us to be really effective at affiliate marketing. With Apple, was it 14.5? I think that was when the update rolled out where they were stopped letting. They weren't allowing third party cookies to be passed along between websites anymore and Safari and.

Yeah, yeah, everything. All the apps basically.

Yeah. And then, and then Chrome is also rolling out something similar. I think you said 2023 is when it's going to be fully rolled out. We've actually already seen some issues in Chrome where we would check one of our checking links and the cookie was like getting dropped. So like we're already.

We don't get paid.

Yeah. So if we, if we promote to an affiliate product and the cookie gets dropped before you make it to that link, we don't earn the commission on it. Right. So we're still driving the same amount of traffic, but we're seeing our commissions go down because a lot of the tracking issues are happening if somebody's clicking on our link from like a Facebook ad.

Right.

Well, that third party cookie isn't transferring over to the affiliate site and we might lose that commission. Right. So we're starting to run into these issues that are making the affiliate marketing stuff quite a bit More difficult. We're also seeing just from an email standpoint, like our deliverability is good, but the engagement's high. The open rates are good, deliverability is good, open rates are good. Clicks are, you know, leave a little bit to be desired. But we're just seeing a lot less results from email marketing. And I don't know if that's just like a problem with the sort of bigger picture that's going on in direct response marketing right now with the cookie tracking or if that's just like our emails just aren't hitting with our audience. I don't know. Probably a blend of both, to be honest.

I think it is, yeah. Based off our conversations this week, we'll get into that.

But yeah, but we're struggling a lot more with like the emails actually being real effective when we mail our list. So we're so, you know, we drive traffic to affiliate offers through Google and Facebook and that's becoming less effective because of all the cookie stuff. We drive traffic through our email that's becoming less effective just because of the response rate from these emails is sort of going down. And probably some of the cookie tracking.

Stuff also on the email front, the open rate numbers, that's because of the cookie tracking and the lack of them. Those numbers can probably start getting skewed pretty soon as more of these things are going to just block the pixels and all that stuff that reports that number.

That number is not probably going to be as accurate as it ever was before.

Well, Apple is doing something. This was something that Joe Kearns was telling us about the other day. I have not done a ton of research into this, so I don't know all of the details and I could be misspeaking on some of this, but he was essentially telling us that Apple has this thing now where you can go and create like a fake email address with Apple.

Is it Apple or.

I thought he said it was something to do with icloud.

Okay, maybe it was.

But basically one of the bigger email providers is doing a thing now where you can anonymize an email where you can go and opt into a list to get whatever benefit of opting into that list is. And then that email is just an anonymous email that you can delete and you got the thing that you opted in for. So, like there's this big push for privacy across all these tech companies, all of the GAFA companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. Right. There's this big privacy push. And it's not like we're trying to get data like our game isn't to get data from people.

We just want to give more of what people ask for.

We just want to be able to track. We want to know if we sent. If somebody clicked on a link. We want to know that it's like tracking all the way through and that that traffic came from us or that referral came from us. Like, I don't care about personal names and emails and various identifiable things. We're not trying to get the data, but we're getting the. We're getting the splash from the big companies, the GAFA companies. We're getting the splash of those companies basically battling each other. In fact, there was a good analogy that Joe Kern, or maybe it was Mike Alvarez, one of those guys, gave us the other day. And it's kind of like in the Godzilla versus King Kong, like movies, Right? Like, Godzilla and King Kong are like fighting against each other, and all the civilians down below are just kind of getting stepped on while these companies fight it out. And that's kind of how I'm seeing, like, a lot of the digital marketing going right now is these big. The big four, the gaffer, they're all sort of battling it out right now over things like privacy and. And the various ad platforms and the various methods of advertising. They're all fighting. And all of the smaller companies that are just trying to, like, play by the rules are the ones that are actually getting squashed in the mix.

Yeah, no, it's that. That's all of us listening, most likely. I doubt you own Google or Facebook. Hey, Mark. But, you know, thanks, Mark. How about you give us a little leeway here on that? Seeing restrictions on Google or on what Facebook groups as well? We've seen some things on that.

That's another thing.

Yeah. When it comes to sometimes the AI, it seems like, is flagging some posts that might go to maybe a page, a sales page, an offer page within our own group. Yeah, it's completely relevant and it's being.

Posted by a moderator. I've had stuff that I posted. I'm the original admin, the original creator of the group, and I will post links into our group and Facebook will flag it and say, you can't link to this cause it looks too promotional and stuff like that.

All this is just. This is the one thing I take from. Not one thing, but I take some stuff from my marketing degree in college. But is the SWOT analysis, you know, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and like, these are all different things we should be aware of. The landscape is changing, so there's different threats that exist now that could totally wipe out businesses or make them at least decrease and force them to change, ideally sooner than later, and start to work with some of these threats because there's opportunities, great opportunities that exist out there as long as you know your strengths and weaknesses. And I feel like that's now it's kind of like all coming together for us in a way here. So all the way from the mental knowing, like, oh, okay, we are able to pivot and we have all the assets and people and systems to do so. And we're aware and helping. You know, it helps us that we're talking with a lot of smart people through the podcast here, but also just different chats that we're always on. That's why we wanted to report back to you with this. But like, there is an opportunity for all of us to change the way we're thinking. If it, you know, if it fits in your business, if none of this is relevant, then lucky you, I doubt it though. So if you have an online business and like, yeah, relying on any one of these things or want to grow your biz and brand and all that, the way we're doing it is a little different now. Yeah. So we're going to do more of a hybrid approach between kind of like what we have been doing in direct response and Internet marketing compared to more the branding and creator play, which we mentioned a little bit here.

Yeah, I mean we're big fans of Dan Kennedy. We used to be members of gkic. We went to a bunch of the conferences and I feel like when I was following those guys a lot, it was sort of pounded into my head. Direct response. Direct response. Branding is a waste of money. Branding is a waste of time. Put all the focus on direct response. Like they had a very like anti branding stance and a very pro. Everything should be direct response marketing and for, you know, what they, what they're doing. I agree they do a lot of direct mail and I think direct mail is probably something you should be paying attention to because when digital media start to not be as effective, the old school media has kind of come back around. Just saying. But anyway, like I think it was beating into our head that like branding is bad. Put the focus on the direct response. And I think we've had a little bit of a 180 in thinking recently and now I think it's a good time to rewind back to 2013.

Yeah.

And let's talk about like what we talked about back in 2013.

We mapped out what we what we thought would be our ideal media business. Yeah. And I don't remember all the specifics, but I know it.

What did it end with? I know you know that part.

Well, we know that part collectively, and we hate those guys now. It was buying the San Diego Chargers football team.

There was no influence from Gary Vaynerchuk in the 90s.

None at all. Yeah. With him and the jets were like, you know what? I like that. North Star. I think we were even calling it that.

Yeah. The North Star used to buy the Chargers.

We're gonna buy the San Diego Chargers because we grew up watching them and we love them and all of our. You know, there's a lot of childhood heroes and stuff. And then they moved to la. Dean Spanos, looking at you.

If you're watching this, you're not welcome on our show.

Get out of here.

You can't even listen. Turn it off.

We don't want you here, Dean. Or your people.

Spanos.

Jerk. So, LA Chargers. We're not fans.

No.

That means that we don't have a North Star to buy a sports team anymore. Yeah, maybe we'll find another one. But that's not really. That's not the point, though.

Sorry, Jamar. We saw your Chargers license plate.

Hey, you know what, Jamar? Props to you. I don't care. That's cool. Good for you. I'd probably be a fan, too, but there's history.

Yeah.

But, yeah. Ever since What? That was 2013. That's when we officially opened Evergreen Profits, our company.

2013.

Yeah, 2013. Got the name. We bought the domain for a couple K or whatever it was at the time. And that was like a crap ton of money for us. We're like, this is a cool name, though. Gonna go big. Big media company. Massive.

That got derailed a little bit because we needed some cash.

Yeah.

And we didn't quite know what a.

Media brand was a little bit. It's gotten derailed, like, once a year ever since.

And I think a lot of that goes back to up here, the mental state and not knowing our true value or worth or abilities, knowing the people around us to support us and the network and all of that stuff, which now is greater than it ever was than back then. But, yeah, 2013, we definitely had the mindset of, like, hey, if we do all this stuff, I could see that growing up pretty big. Leveraging platforms to growing. Not just us trying to run traffic, to everything and do it ourselves. I don't think we're in the do it ourselves camp ever. We've always like, we gotta leverage. We just don't know how. We didn't know how to put the pieces together back then.

Yeah. So when we were sort of mapping this out on the board in 2013, it was the media brand and it was like, grow it big enough where we can afford to buy the chargers. Right. That was kind of the big picture. But, like, the thing that we were specifically talking about too was like, let's build, like, content brands like video content, podcast content. Let's build like blog content, email newsletter content. Let's build all these sort of like, content.

Silos on various different media channels. I don't know how you want to call them, but let's build up all of this content to a point where the content is so influential that if we talk about a book, that book sells out on Amazon.

It was the Tim Ferriss effect.

We were calling it the Tim Ferriss effect. And it was like when somebody came on the Tim Ferriss podcast and talked about their brand of mushroom coffee, that mushroom coffee was sold out on Amazon.

The next day for Sigmatic.

Yeah, it's good stuff.

Exactly.

And so like, that was like the. That was like the sort of early vision is like, build up all this content to a point where that we can. We can talk about a product. And that product just crushes and like, it's that influential that people would come to us and basically beg to talk about their products because of the. Let's call it the Hustle and Flowchart effect now. But let's, you know, because of the Hustle and Flowchart evergreen profits effect, we can sell out products and then we would be in demand. We'd get bigger creators to join us. We would get bigger and bigger name guests to join us because they want to be a part of that. We would get bigger brand deals because brand deals would see the reach that we have. And this was literally what we mapped out. I probably even still have a screenshot of the whiteboard where we mapped this out. If I can see.

It's in your Evernote, man.

We will overlay it.

It's gotta be in your Evernote.

Yeah. I've been hardcore about Evernote for a decade plus, so it should be in there.

So I think, like the big sticking point for us, and this is where I want to speak to you listening, is you probably have some sticking point or something that has always brought you back to, like, what feels safe. Like, you know, and it could be just a safety for mentor, or it could just be like, I need the Cash. I don't know any other way. Or, you know, a quick hit of the cash, and then it turns into a new business, and you're like, oh, wait, that was five years of my life.

Yeah.

I didn't plan on starting an agency. Why didn't I start an agency? We did that. That was literally what Evergreen Profits became, is like the media thing. We're like, cool. That's a great plan. We get money. In the meantime, we have some clients over here that want us to do this stuff, and we're gonna do that stuff. We're gonna start. I think, in that era, we actually had, like, two different podcasts. Right. Or at least one.

We had the online income podcast, and then we also did Evergreen Wisdom for a while.

I think the Wisdom show was right around then. Yeah.

And that was the one that lasted. Had a little bit of a lifespan.

14 episodes.

Online income po. I think we recorded, like, two.

Yeah. Yeah. And that was the very first one.

That was 2010.

10. Yeah. So that was before we didn't know what the hell we were doing. And let's be honest, 2013 didn't know what the hell we're doing now. Do we know what we're doing right now? No. Damn right.

We know where we're going. We just don't know how to get there yet.

Exactly. But, you know, back then with that map that you're explaining, I heard you, and this was our thinking back then is like, you or. We got to build everything. Yeah. You and me.

Yeah.

Everything.

We were like, let's break this out. You build this page, I'll build this page. You write that copy. All right. These emails, run those ads. And that was just like.

Yeah, we don't do that anymore.

No.

So that's a big level thing or a way of thinking that shifted. Is where the content machines. We're the brand, like evangelists, primarily, but we have systems teams and cool people all around us supporting us.

Yeah.

And. And for growth. Like, there's platforms now. We're thinking of all these different ways to leverage and monetize that aren't controlled by us. And that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we just gotta get.

We gotta stop getting sucked in by the allure of selling courses we all do.

Well, back to the point of, like, just thinking about, like, think of where you're at right now, the listener, and, like, maybe there's. Is there a vision that you have right now that you've. Or maybe have you had, like, five, 10 years ago that you're like, oh, wow, Yeah, I really wish I pursued that thing. Well, maybe your business right now has the things in it, the mechanisms, or you have the network and all these things to support you. That's what, like in this episode, we just wanted to give you a little insight of our doings, you know, like what we're going to be planning on doing, but also, like, think about how you can do it yourself, because I think all of us can kind of think in this new way where you're leveraging platforms and media. Even if you don't see yourself as a media brand, like, even if you're like a chiropractor, like, you know, someone's gonna have a chiropractor, like an awesome podcast, a YouTube video. Actually, I subscribe to a cool chiropractor on YouTube. It's like he just cracks like, it's like, it's like crazy. Kind of scares me. But like, someone's gonna do all this stuff. It doesn't mean, like, you need to just market to get clients. Like, that's cool. That engine can continue. But why not leverage other types of media and thinking to bring more awareness to yourself, your brand? And maybe there's other ways to generate income that's not just doing the work, you know, services.

Yeah, and I did mention, like, you know, we, we keep getting sucked into doing courses and I want to qualify that. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with like, courses and being an info business. It's. For us, it was never our vision.

Right.

Our vision was to build the media brand and to just be the best fricking affiliate marketers on the planet. And like, those were the two things we wanted to focus on. But the courses kept on the allure of, like, let's put together some training and sell it kept that. That was really enticing. And it was a way to bring in money to fund these other things. The problem was we started putting all of our focus on the, the course and maintaining the customers and adding to the course and adding value and, and all that kind of stuff that we took our eye off the ball of the two sort of core things we really wanted to focus on. And then also, I think, you know, just kind of jumping back a little bit to like, the changing landscape. I think we're going to see info businesses change quite a bit over the years as well.

We're making moves there too.

Yeah, I think what you're going to see is less and less people just trying to build it all themselves. Going and getting, you know, a membership platform And a checkout platform and an email autoresponder platform and buying all these tools and making all these tools work together and then, you know, selling the membership, I think that kind of thing is going to die. I think you're going to see a consolidation of courses into places like Skillshare, into Udemy Masterclass, Lynda.com there's, there's like big name, sort of like trusted brands, LinkedIn learning where people trust these brands. It's like the Amazon of like online courses. Your, your card details are just saved in Amazon because you trust them. You go on buy now, it's at my house two days later.

It's also the growth ability of them because you know, you can. There's that whole like built in thing of like actually getting in front of new audiences that we would have never been able to. When you're on other platforms and the trust, like you said, is huge. Yeah, but like the whole thing is like you're integrating in platforms rather than trying to do all this stuff yourself.

Well, if you're trying to build everything yourself into a membership, what, what happens is now you've got this membership and you've got to figure out how to get as many people over to this membership as possible. So you buy ads you do, you get affiliates, you do SEO, you do everything you can to get people over to this membership to buy it. If you go and take a course and you put it on Skillshare or Udemy or Lynda.com or one of these, or LinkedIn learning one of these places now, yes, you still drive traffic to it to grow the course, but they're also contributing. This is where people who consume courses are already hanging out. So why go and try to build something and bring people over to it? When people who consume courses like the ones you probably can are people who consume courses like the ones you're trying to create are already hanging out in a place where they consume courses like that. Why not just put it in front of them there? Because now you're going to get easy new students and you can still drive people to it the same way you would this other thing. Right. So I really think you're going to see that consolidation of courses. And so our thinking on courses is we're still probably going to make some courses and teach what we do and teach the systems we do and stuff, but it's probably going to live somewhere else where that company does most of the marketing for us.

Well, we're thinking of different models where we're exploring Things around licensing and royalties and like, how can we. This was an aha. Actually, it wasn't as far back as 2013, but when we had an agency, the way that we built ourselves into deals is becoming a line item in someone's agency, you know, deliverables. And we just happened to be able to charge like 4k a month or 5k, whatever it is. But the. Let's say the whole retainer was like 20k to that client. And all we had to do is just kind of get in with the provider and the one that had the distribution or the clients. Well, you could do the same thing for info products. So this is just more of an idea right now, but we're thinking about going down the route of possibly licensing and we can probably talk to our main man, Bob Serling, about that. Yeah, I would say.

Yeah.

Licensing master.

I think the whole course thing, I think, you know, that's probably a whole episode. Like, we could probably like, really deep dive into, like, our feelings on courses and where we see it going and what we're going to do and licensing and all that stuff. So I think that's something that we should probably dedicate a whole episode to and like, dive in deeper on at some point.

Yeah. So there's, there's. Yeah, we're all. We have a bunch of assets in the business. We're just kind of rearranging the pieces and figuring out what's the best way forward with the changing, you know, technologies and stuff around us. Because, yeah, it's not like we're just kind of like, oh, that's done now. It's like, I think back in the day we probably would have. Or like, oh, we don't really feel that, oh, it's not working. Oh, it's too hard. Let's try this new thing. And it's like, no, we can actually pivot all this stuff because there's a lot of opportunity and platforms out there that will support or people that would be more than happy to sell that as a line item, as a bigger package to their services or whatever.

Yeah.

For a license or a royalty. Tons of businesses do this. So, yeah, you know, we're shifting that thinking.

Yeah. So a lot of what we've talked about so far has been kind of like, these are some of the changes that we've seen that are negative. But this isn't meant to be a pessimistic episode. This is meant to be an episode where we see opportunities. Like, we're not pessimistic about where marketing is going we're pessimistic about a few of the marketing tactics that we've used over the years, but we're absolutely super optimistic about where everything's going. I think it just requires a change in thinking and a change of approach to marketing.

And that's the key. And do it now rather than later. I think it's the key as well. And, you know, so for us, I guess one of the big pivots and we've kind of alluded to this, is going more on the brand side. You know, our previous episode, what came out last Tuesday. Yeah. Is was all about the power of brands and psychology and, like, how people connect to brands. Well, there's, you know, you're just seeing it on YouTube. Like, we watch so many creators and we're talking about how, like, all the trends and indications point to people want to follow people, you know, not like big companies. Big brands that are kind of like, have no Persona attached or personality. But that's where the beauty of having a brand and a personality really shine. But got to have a system around it, too, and a business. But for us. So, like, we're going to do more of a hybrid approach.

Yeah, well, if you look at, like.

You know, it's direct marketing compared or, you know, blended with the branding approach.

Yeah, well, if you look at, like, this is something that was interesting that we're talking about earlier. Like, Niral did a podcast on Noah Kagan's show, right. And he was talking about, like, trying to push more copies of his books. And he was saying that he went on, like, the Today show or the morning show or whatever it was and talked about his book on the show. And he was like, barely a blip. Didn't even really notice any spike in sales as a result of being on this, like, nationally televised media platform. And he was like, I went on a few podcasts and that moved the needle.

Lots of blips.

Lots of blips. And what that is kind of saying is that, like, we're moving into this era of the. The personal brands and the small brands have way more influence and way more power to drive sales and to drive eyeballs and awareness than a lot of the traditional media channels that so many people have been used to leveraging throughout the years. And so I think now is a great time to put some focus on a personal brand or kind of like a small brand like Hustle and Flowchart, what we're building. Because if we can build up that influence, there's the potential to have more influence than Fricking the morning shows, you know.

Yeah. And that's the thing. That's why we've talked about it where like if you have a podcast or any really bonded community, you don't need a ton of people in there. You just need the people connected to you, you know, and trust your recommendations and what to do next with that, whatever you're telling them. So that's where our model of like we're still going to do a lot of direct marketing. Yeah. Because that's just, that's just what we've done, you know, in Internet marketing. But paired up with a lot of these other things that don't. That aren't so trackable, you know, we can't really figure out what the. What the. Like we're willing to invest a ton in like upcoming. We'll just. Yeah, this is on the list next. Haha. So like Traffic and Conversion in San Diego. Traffic Conversion Summit put on by digital marketer and that whole crew. That's a big deal for us because a lot of people come to San Diego and that's basically our target market. Most of our friends are in there in business and it's kind of like a coming together moment. And that's where we've been going to a mall. But we realized, oh, we have a booth. We have a big brewery event that we put on called Overtime. We also are thinking about having a mastermind in our studio here. So those are some big points where we can blow up the brand in very strategic ways. This is an example of just what we're gonna do next month. So if you come to San Diego for Traffic and Convers, definitely go find us.

Yep.

We're gonna have a booth in the podcast section also go to Overtime. That's our brewery event, I think on Tuesday of that week. That'll be in the evening. It's free. Just buy some beer and hang out. And the Mastermind, you'll probably see some videos. Unless we invite you or something like that.

Yeah, yeah. But the all but here, pay your way in.

Grease the wheels.

And what I love about all this stuff too, that like over at Traffic and Conversion we're gonna do the booth. We've got some really cool ideas. We're gonna. You're going to want to come to the booth because we're going to be giving away cool stuff. We're going to be like doing some contests and you could. You'll actually have the opportunity to like be on our podcast. We're actually going to like. Should I give too many details? I don't want to give too many.

Details, but just we're going to make it worth your while and we'll probably give you some money too.

There might be money involved for people.

That stop by and also be style. Yeah, we're going to have stacks on stacks of.

But what I like about all this is we're going to have this booth, we're going to have this big overtime event. We're going to do a mastermind here in our studio. And all of this, we're gonna film the behind the scenes, like just as part of the bigger media brand. Part of the media we're gonna start putting out is what kind of goes on behind the scenes to grow a media brand. Right. So it's this very like meta thing. It's very modeled after like barstool sports. But I think they're a perfect company to model. It's like they create all these content, like these media like shows, right. Like they create podcasts and YouTube shows and all these various like media things. But then what they also do is they shoot a whole bunch of behind the scenes of like what goes into.

Creating all these behind the scenes, the story behind the thing. Like they document all that stuff themselves and publish it, not other people.

And we get the opportunity to do that next. Well, I mean, we're starting to do it now. If you're following us on Instagram, you're probably seeing us kind of show more behind the scenes of the studio and do kind of stuff like that. We are gonna put some of that kind of stuff on YouTube. But when we do this TNC thing, we're gonna have a cameraman following us around and hanging out at the booth and going to the overtime event and coming to our mastermind. And we're just going to turn this into so much content that's going to raise awareness on the brand. So that's going to be really, really exciting. But that's also like an example of just like really sort of thinking outside the box from what all the other podcasters are doing and what all the other direct response marketers are doing. Like, neither side of the aisle is really doing the two things that we're doing.

Not at all. Yeah. And there is let the folks know about Noah Kagan. Didn't he have some predictions too? Like yet another marketing predictions of 2021. Yeah, and they all landed exactly in the line of what I think he gave like five. Well, what are the top three?

So he was saying that like these are the top. His top marketing strategies for 2021. It was a short episode, but three of them were. One of them was run a email newsletter, a weekly email newsletter, kind of like the Hustle or the Click or Morning Brew. Morning Brew, like that kind of thing. The other one was.

To focus on YouTube. I think that was his, like, number one strategy was like, really, really focus on YouTube.

Keep getting the second one, though.

And then the other one was, oh, leverage other people's platforms to put your content on.

Okay, Right.

Because he has AppSumo. So he wants software developers to come to AppSumo, leverage his platform instead of trying to sell it by itself.

That's right.

He's got a platform where audiences already exist. So take your software and just put it in front of the audience. I already created, but I extrapolated that and looked at, like, skillshare and Udemy and some of these places when it comes to info products, same idea. Audiences already hanging out there that we know like to consume this type. Of course, let's just put it in front of them instead of trying to drag people over to this platform over here.

Yeah, I mean, that's. So it's pretty cool to see. I guess that's the external validation that we're like, oh, that's kind of cool. You know, like, we're gonna do it anyway. But it's interesting to see more people talk about it. But again, it's. Yeah, I don't think a lot of people are thinking this way. Like, we've been starting to share our vision a little bit more on some of these live streams we've been on. And. And it's usually met with kind of like, wait, what kind of like, interesting. That's different. And it is. You know, it's kind of like we were like, you know, if we have the attention. Well, there's a lot of sponsorship opportunities and brand deals that would love to be a part of that attention and show up. So at least in the model that we have and where you'll see us taking this thing, it's. I mean, there's a lot of fallback options to pivot if it doesn't work out. But it's almost like we're. I don't see a big downside if we invest into the growth and build a great audience and we're going to do all sorts of different things. Yeah, we're talking about that later.

Arbitrage attention.

Arbitrage attention. And then, you know, there's a lot of sponsorships, and, I mean, we haven't even barely scratched that surface. But you know, we've had sponsorships on the show. That's pretty sweet because it covers a ton of the costs of our, of our efforts here in terms of like keeping the production running and systems and tools and stuff.

Sponsors pay the rent here.

Yeah, I mean, so shoot. I mean, you know, you go. I mean, you can see it on our Pod Hacker page. Shameless. Plug to Pod Hacker. But if you scroll down, there's a video of Roland Frazier talk about how he closed $60,000 in sponsorship deals with his podcast. And I think he bundled some other stuff. I mean, he learned that stuff from us, at least to an extent. He's a very smart guy, but he's ran with that and like you could just hear it if you go to business lunch and listen to how he's doing his podcast. Like, he has, he has sponsors. It's because he's grown his show and he has platforms to then also, you know, put price points on. People want access. So our job now is to build. Yeah. The engagement and then create access for the right sponsorships, partners. Maybe our own offers. Could be skillshare to a Pod Hacker type course or something like that. Could be to our main offer. Yeah, but it's, it's really exciting because this is the vision we've had for almost 10 years now. And it's insane that. Yeah, well, look, finally at this point.

We'Re like, if we can get like, let's. I'm just making up random numbers. This is not based on anything statistical at all. But let's say we were to invest $10,000 to grow our show and we got our show to like, let's say we added another hundred thousand downloads a month to our show and we spent $10,000 to get there. We're definitely going to make more than $10,000 probably per month.

I don't know how you want it.

Off of those hundred thousand downloads.

Right.

So that's how we're, that's how we're like arbitraging attention is we can go and spend money to grow a big audience, but then we'll actually make more off of that audience than we grew, than we actually spent to grow it. And that's the whole goal is we're looking for interesting ways to grow the audience, but at a rate that's less than what we can charge to, you know, put sponsorships and brand deals and stuff like that in front of the audience.

That's right. So yeah, it's going to be a lot of building right now for us because, you know, like, yeah, we've actually, I don't know if we brought this up, but you wanted to of how like our podcast, we were go, go, go for a long time, but a lot. And I think we got in our heads more than anything is we stopped talking a lot about it, about our wins and the shares. I know you mentioned that, but it's like that kind of, I think that really had effects to the numbers where things have kind of more plateaued. There's growth, but we're, we're paying for that growth. We'll have some pops with certain episodes, but, you know, it's not like the consistent growth as it was before. Yeah. So that's where, you know, we've been kind of like eyeing all this stuff. We're like, wait, hold on. We know where this correlation is.

Yeah. Listen for the Brian Bogart episode in a couple weeks, because we're going to be talking about a lot of this with him.

That's right. So I guess now, like, let's just wrap this puppy up. We're almost out of time, putting time limits on ourselves sometimes. So talking to you, the listener, definitely do an audit. You're listening right now. Do an audit on what you're doing right now. And again, like, just go back and maybe you had a vision from before that you want to take things bigger, maybe you didn't and you're just like, oh, I could see some opportunities in my niche here or the way that I'm putting out content, I bet I can shift it a little slightly, you know, out this way. Maybe bring some sponsors. I could do this kind of thing and, oh, I can open up this revenue stream. I can generate more leads, I can push more to my offers and services, whatever it might be. Start to kind of really audit yourself with this lens. I think this is kind of a. We're going to talk a lot more about this, that's for sure. And more specifics as we work through our building phase.

Yeah, I feel like this episode was kind of like the grand overview, but almost like every little thing that we talked about could be its own episode as well. Right. Like, we could talk about where we're going with courses, where we're going with.

YouTube and we will talk about, you.

Know, like, where we're going with the behind the scenes footage. Like those will probably all be individual episodes over the next few months. So if you really, really want to see like, behind the scenes and like the actual things that we're experimenting with to grow a big media brand, that's pretty much we're going to be doing on these Tuesday episodes. So that's also. We're going to be probably picking brains about it with our guests as well.

For sure. Yeah. I mean, we got some GS coming on the show here.

Do you think Robert Cialdini will have some ideas on how to be more influential? Influential?

I think so. And Gino, come on, speaks for himself as well. So follow along with us if you aren't already subscribe to this podcast. But even better, help us out on the YouTube front.

Yes, that would be the best legit.

So just to let you know, like, we feel like, what the hell, we haven't even reached our thousand people, like subscribed on YouTube yet.

Like, and 4,000 watch hours.

Yeah, we need both. So help us out. Spread the word. Just go to HustleandFlowchart TV. HustleandFluidchart TV. Hit the red subscribe button and start watching some stuff.

And if you are at TNC and you are already subscribed on our YouTube.

Channel, you can have some money.

There's a chance there might be a little.

For you. So make sure you subscribe one big one. Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel, HustonFlowchart TV.

We'll wanna see your phone and prove it. Either way, pop over to our booth.

And let us and show off that you're subscribed and we might make it worth your while.

We will make it worth your while, especially Matt. So make sure.

But yeah, I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I don't either, but it could go in dirty direction.

I had to say it. I don't know why, but yeah. Go to traffic and conversion summit in San Diego. It's mid September next month. And if you can make it out, obviously if travel's an issue, we get it. But seek us out because that's like the thing that we've been looking forward to all year. It got canceled last year. That sucks.

We want to meet people that are listening too. We want to know you. We want to shout you out on actual episodes. Notice how we shout out people's names once we get to know them? Like, we want to shout you out. We want to know the people listening.

It helps when people send us burritos though. Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan.

See, he gets like. He's had three shout outs.

Those are the burritos that keep on giving. Ryan.

Keep them coming. But not Ryan. You don't have to.

Yeah, we're good on burritos. We literally had Burritos again today.

So we did.

Yeah.

Those are Chipotle though. It's not.

Yeah, it's Chipotle.

That's true. So, all right. Hustle, Vulture and yeah, leave us a review. I want to hear what you're, what you're doing, what you're talking about, what you think about these episodes. We're changing the format a bit. I think it's getting more fun and we're having some cool peeps coming up here. And let's shout out easy webinar.

Let's do that.

They are supporting this, this ride, this wild ride they've been on. They've been supporting us for years, man.

Yeah, they've been a long running sponsor and we really, really appreciate them. And their software is amazing. It does live webinars and hybrid webinars and automated webinars and builds the landing pages for you, helps you collect the emails, has the excavation, helps with all the follow. Oh my God. It basically handles emails for you. So make sure you go to easywebinar.com hustle because they're hooking you up with a discount for being a Hustle and flowchart listener. So easywebinar.com hustle if you see pictures.

Of us, you're in the right place.

That's the one.

All right, Podhacker. We mentioned it, but that is our baby. That is the singular offer that we just. It's like our business in a box. Exactly. And there's a lot going on in there. But check out the website and check out some of these testimonials like I mentioned. Roland, there's some other cool people on there that you probably have heard of that are doing some cool stuff and, and if you want to join and learn a little bit more of how we're structuring our business even further, we're definitely going to be putting more content into there. That's going to explain kind of some of these newer things we're working on.

Yep.

So it's not just podcasting, it's more like media business. You'll see, you'll see some cool stuff in there.

Yeah.

And obviously the live sessions, we'll probably be chatting about that in much greater detail because we do those twice a month on there as well.

We do.

If you're a member. That is so podhacker.com be there and.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel. I just want to remind you. Hustleandflowchart TV so needy, Matt. So needy. I want the subscribe on YouTube he wants.

Matt gets what Matt wants.

Well, now they're not gonna do it out of spite.

Give Matt what Matt wants.

Give me what he want. He wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

I gotta go. See ya.

I'll be like, Mr. Beast. Subscribe or I'll delete your Minecraft account.

Oh, like.

Like our audience has Minecraft accounts.

Like, what's Minecraft? Give it to. I don't know much about it either. All right, gotta go.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode.

Of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for.

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