Therapy Sessions 👥 Marketing Predictions & Lessons For 2019

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Float Shark podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. What's up, Yo?

We're back.

We're back.

And my voice sounds weird.

No, it doesn't sounds normal.

It's in your head, does it? It's all in my head. Just feeling a little sick, but it's all good.

Yeah, I think so. We're actually recording this the day after Christmas. Today is December 26th, and I know I'm feeling a little beat down a little bit. Not quite as high energy as I normally am because of holiday festivities. Ate like crap.

Yep.

Probably didn't get the best sleep over the last few days. We've had family in town, so.

Oh, yeah. And I'm watching a couple of foster boys and they are high energy. And luckily they're letting me sleep in, though, which is kind of cool. But I'm getting more sleep. I'm going to sleep earlier. That's a first. Before midnight. I'm kind of a really night owl. Late night owl. Yeah.

Oh, and by the way, you're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. I'm Matt Wolf and you're here with Joe Fear.

Yeah.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's continue on.

Now we're very official. Yeah, yeah. We're wrapping up 2018 at the time of this recording.

And, yeah, this actually, this recording is being released on New Year's Day. So if you're listening to this on the day it came out. Happy New Year. Happy new year. It's 2019.

Holy crap.

That went by F. Wow.

We're talking in the future.

We're talking in the future, which it's only five days from now.

Yeah. But, yeah, 2018 has been crazy. And we've kind of had some previous episodes where we, you know, we recapped the hundredth episode that Matt and I did, solo episode. We talked about our favorite podcast that we recorded with, you know, on our show here. And we did our first therapy session.

We're going to do more of those. That was actually pretty cool. Hopefully you like that. I'm interested in hearing feedback, you know, in the Facebook group or send us a message on Facebook or whatever. I'm curious what you thought of the therapy session, because that was one of the first episodes that we did in a long time where we didn't really just focus on business topics. We kind of focused on what was going on in our heads and some of the struggles both physically and mentally and personally and relationship wise that we've gone through over the last year. And it was very valuable for us to talk about. But I'm curious how valuable it was for our listeners to actually hear in on some of the behind the scenes of our brains and our business and that kind of thing.

Shoot us an email@infovergreenprofits.com cereal that works as well. You might get an appearance from us in your inbox too if you read us. And maybe we'll throw in a free shirt. Hustle and Flowchart shirt. Just coming up with stuff on the cuff. But you know what? There will be even a more likelihood to give you a shirt if you show to us that you subscribe to our podcast.

Yeah, we want to hook a lot of people up with the shirts.

Yeah. So that's a cool, neat thing.

If you just want a Hustle and Flowchart shirt. They're pretty sweet looking. Send us an email infoegergreenprofits.com we'll show you how to get them. We may even just send you one because sometimes we're nice, sometimes we're Scrooges. We'll see. We'll see what kind of mood we're in.

Tis the season, man.

Tis the season. Tis Scrooge.

You.

Give us a ride in there. We always love hearing about you, especially folks listening to the podcast. But yeah, so on the same vein. So wrapping up 2018, we talked about the favorite episodes. Last episode was that therapy session where we talked a lot about what we learned overall, I would say in 2018.

Wasn'T our last episode.

Well, last solo duet episode. Duet, yes. Sorry, TM.

And yeah, this one we were talking about, we're like, what are we going to talk about? We wanted to, we specifically, like, we wanted this to be the two of us again on this date to kind of kick off 2019. That sounds weird. And we're thinking it'd be best to really talk about the future of how we're shaping our business because it is slightly adjusting, but also the big trends that we see for 2019 and the direction that we see how engagement, how eyeballs and how behavior is kind of working online and how you can take advantage of that.

Yeah, yeah. This will, this will probably be a slightly shorter than normal episode because we're going to stay very kind of laser focused on. Here's what we see coming in 2019 and some of the business lessons that we learned in 2018. Because, you know, we already covered the sort of Mental, personal level questions. So this will be kind of, you know, here's some of the things that we learned in business. And then also here's what we see for 2019 is going to be the things that you should be focusing on. We could be wrong. These are predictions. These are, these are from our personal knowledge base and what we've seen this year where we think things are headed. So take it with a grain of salt. But we really feel strongly and we're kind of doubling down on the elements that we're going to be talking about here.

Yeah. So I mean, kicking it off, we can kind of start talking about how EGP my voice. Excuse me, Evergreen profits. Our company is kind of shaping for next year. We want to really stay along the lines of simplicity. So keeping it all simple, keeping it fun. Within our wheelhouse. We have a small team, seems to be growing like one person every month or two, you know, and usually that's. We just, we added Sarah, who is our customer service. She kind of oversees that. She also is kind of an assistant to Matt and myself and all sorts. It's just allowing us to really kind of communicate better. I would say she is. And then we have our apprentices. Jen M. Evergreenprofits.com.

You get a nice.

Little discount if you go through that link.

You do. Yeah. And we're really, I mean this is where we've really changed in 2018 is that it's more than just the two of us, Matt and I, and really leveraging ourselves in a greater way but still keeping it simple. Like not, not overwhelming. It's very cost efficient. But you know, we're very strategic with who we're bringing on.

Essentially we hired a second me in Shannon, our operations manager. She's very, very focused on like the follow through and the analysis of the business and keeping the numbers on track and very much the technical side. And with Sarah, I feel like we recently hired another Joe who's sort of more of this outer facing customer service, talk to people, get to know the customers that side of the business. So I feel like we've kind of hired sort of second us's for the business. Really?

I haven't thought of it that way. It is and it's really cool. It's freeing because we can do more of this for one podcasting and stuff and actually focus. But it allows us to see the bigger vision and also architect how that looks like. That's ironically. What was the name of the test, Matt, that we both just took? Personality.

Oh yeah. It was for evo Evo, which is like a new journal that came out, but they.

It's called Project EVO.

ProjectEVO.org is their site. But I'm trying to remember what they call the test. It was some sort of like personality trait test.

It's cool because if you listen to, you know, the previous duet episode that Matt and I did, you'll hear that we really have harped on heavily on like knowing her personality. That's how we hired Shannon through great assistant Tim Francis episode. Definitely go listen to that and check it out. But like just understanding yourself has been. Yeah. Then like, and then understanding your business partner or whoever else you're working with, it allows just so much more freedom to happen in what kind of tasks that you focus on in the business. And then this Project Evo thing, Matt did it last night. Our buddy Brad Spencer, shout out to be rad.

He shared this and it's really cool. He was the one that introduced us to the disc assessment D I, S C.

And basically went on this whole path of personal understanding. And then this diary literally is created to your specific personality. So it's like you take this quiz, 10 questions and it pairs you up with this specific diary that fits you and what? Or a journal, I guess not diary. Same idea. Same idea. Yeah. But it's like, it's not. It's literally made for your personality type. It's super cool.

Well, I mean, just from a marketing standpoint, it was pretty brilliant. And this is kind of where we're going with this episode. We really want to talk about what we think is going to be the most important thing that you start doing in your business. If you're not doing it right now. But what this quiz did was it asks you these 10 questions and by the end of the 10 questions it tells you, okay, you're an architect. I think Joe was an explorer. I was an architect. I think there was an alchemist and then there was observer or something. I don't remember what the fourth one was. So you've got these four personality types and basically it's how you operate your business. Very kind of similar to a Colby or a disc type assessment, but not nearly as in depth.

Right.

There's only 10 questions and it's not super in a super in depth quiz, but the brilliance behind it was by the time you get to the end of this 10 question quiz, it says, here's your personality type. And we've developed a journal, a daily planner tool app that's designed for your personality type. And Joe and I Literally went and compared the different journals and they are legit. Like different questions inside the journal on a daily basis based on your personality type. Like the questions that were in my version of the journal, which is, you know, an architect, were different than the questions that were in the version of the journal that Joe's getting, which is the explorer's journal. So it's basically asking you questions on a daily basis that you journal on based on your personality type. And it was just brilliant because we went through the quiz, it says, here's your personality type. And I went, well, shit, now I have to get this journal because this journal was designed fricking for me. Right?

Yeah. No, it's. It's so freaking brilliant. If you can do your marketing in a very personalized way where you're using the dirty S word. What's the S word?

Segmentation.

That's the one.

That's a clean word.

S word. It's a beautiful S word. It's the best S word ever. That's really. I think, we think the theme of 2019 is that using the S word.

Stop saying S word.

Segmentation. Yeah, but it's segmenting.

You're segmenting all of your users in this really creative, fun way, really harping on understanding yourself. But in this specific example, I thought it was freaking genius because Matt and I, I think on that last duet episode, we were talking about how journaling, you have to make it your own, and it's through trial and error. And is morning pages using handwriting great for me? No. My hand fucking hurts. I can't get past two pages without wanting to break my pencil or whatever. And.

But.

And then digital is cool, but, you know, maybe you don't want to always have a computer in front of you and you're out. I don't know. Whatever. But this thing literally takes your personality and pairs it with this perfect product. Yeah. That's so freaking awesome. I mean, it doesn't sound revolutionary, but when you start to really think about all what's happening, you're like, what Matt just said, I have to buy this fricking journal. It's made for me. Yeah.

No, and that's really one of our biggest lessons, I wouldn't say of 2018, but I'd say over the last few years, is the importance of segmentation. And so that's kind of our sort of lesson number one, but also future prediction. So let's talk about doom and gloom here for a second and all the shitty stuff that's happening right now. Right. When it comes to Facebook ads. You're starting to see people on Facebook going, man, they're running out of inventory. And Facebook is just getting too expensive.

Too many rules.

There's more and more rules, and Facebook is just getting harder and harder for people these days.

Facebook's under government scrutiny.

Yeah, it's too expensive. And Google is way too expensive. I can't use Google is too expensive, and SEO is too hard. And when I mail my list, my list, it sucks. You don't get a good response from your list anymore. Email marketing is dying, right? This is all.

Your bots are dying now because they're sending to. No, not really.

So this is all the doom and gloom that you hear all the time.

These are all just. These are all just, you know, very emotional things anyway. They're not really the hard stats, obviously.

Right. But here's the. Here's the solution to every single problem we just said right there.

What is it?

Segmentation.

S word.

The segmentation. So here's what we've been doing in our business, and we've been doing this for a good, you know, year and a half, two years now, but we've really doubled down on it and gotten more serious and gotten more strategic and systematized with it. But what we're doing with our site, we've talked about this in the past, is if you view a piece of content on our site, you're going to get retargeted based on the content you saw. So, for example, if you go to one of our podcast episodes or blog posts where we're teaching traffic strategies, you are now going to see ads from us for our traffic course. If you go to one of our articles or podcasts around something like copywriting, there's a good chance you'll start seeing offers from us that sell a copywriting course. Or if you go to a blog post or podcast about webinars, there's a good chance you're going to start seeing promotions for software around webinars from us. So we're basically looking at the content that you viewed on our site so we can get an idea of what interests you. And then we're putting offers in front of you based on the things that have interested you in the past.

Right?

That's really what segmentation is, and that's how you solve the problem with Facebook. Most marketers, well, any of those problems that I said earlier, but most marketers, when it comes to, say, Facebook, the typical way of doing things is they'll. Let's. Let's just say you have a course on affiliate marketing, right. You go and you create an ad on Facebook and you target fans of Frank Kern and Ryan Deiss and what's another marketer, Mike Phil Same and Mike Phil Same.

Right.

You target, you target fans of those three people and you link them over to your course on affiliate marketing. Here's the problem. So is everybody else. Every other marketer that's trying to sell a course around marketing is going after those exact same audiences that you were going after.

And you're going to run those ads for about seven days and you're going to like, man, I spent $500 and didn't make any money. Yep, boo hoo. And then you're going to quit your ads.

Now the flip side of the coin is let's say you have a course on affiliate marketing and, and you have a blog that teaches various affiliate marketing strategies but also other things in marketing, maybe like traffic and webinars and copywriting and things like that. And what if you just, just targeted the people that read content about affiliate marketing to your affiliate marketing course? These are people that have specifically said I'm interested in affiliate marketing. Cause I just read your blog post about affiliate marketing. Those are the people that should see your course. Yeah, right. Just because somebody follows a Frank Kern or a Ryan Deiss or a Mike Philsaim, that means they probably have interest in marketing in general. But you don't know where they're at in the process. You don't know if they have any interest in affiliate marketing. You have no clue about that customer. But if you can target them based on content that they viewed to the specific offer, now you're creating your own audiences. You're not targeting people like Frank Kern. You're targeting people that said, hey, I'm interested in affiliate marketing and I already know who you are because I read some of your content.

That's true. And going back, I didn't mean to make you feel bad if you are the type that started your ads for like a week and we wasted 500 bucks. But that is how you've kind of been taught. That's how.

Well, that's the common wisdom. That's what most people go and do is they just go and they target sort of this broad audience that they think is where their ideal customer lives. And yes, there is some of your ideal customer in there, but there's also a shit ton of not your ideal customer in there.

It goes back to just understanding behavior online. This is a big thing that we've talked about a lot is is step Back before you start making a campaign and listen to Gary Vee, how he's just like Ah, toss $100 and see what, think about it a little bit before you just toss some cash out the window. You know, actually think about like giving value and actually understanding what people are interested in based off of what they do on your website. Yeah. And then what email they opt in for some cool bribe that you put out there.

That's kind of the next phase too is think about your email list. When people go to a blog post about affiliate marketing and let's say you have like an exit intense pop up or like a slide in or something to collect their email on that page, tag them with the content that they were on when they opted in. So if somebody is on a blog post about traffic and they opt in, make sure you're giving them a tag in Drip or activecampaign or Aweber or whatever you use.

Drip's cool, right? Because it has that scoring they all do. They all do. Oh no.

Oh yeah. Drip has scoring.

Yeah. So they all have. The higher the score the better the subscriber is.

Yeah, that's not really, that's not really the type of segmenting we're talking about.

That's true. It's more quality.

Yeah, that's more like the quality of the lead based on like how in depth they are with you. I mean it's another way to segment segmenting based on who's the top customers. But if you're segmenting based on the content they viewed, you don't only have to do it on Facebook and Google, you can do it in your email list too. So when they opt in, let's say they view a blog post about traffic and then they opt into your little freebie after reading that post, you know that person's interested in traffic. Tag them on your email autoresponder as somebody who's interested in traffic. And the next time you're promoting a traffic course, only mail the people that are interested in traffic and mail them to that course. Now people will go, well I'm putting it in front of a lot less people. Don't I want the volume. Well you have the same problem with email marketing as you essentially have with Facebook ads is if so I don't want to get too into the weeds with the technicalities of how email works. But if a shit ton of people don't open your email, then less people see your emails.

Yes.

Now if you're segmenting and putting the right offer in front of the right People at the right time, through email, through Facebook ads, through whatever platform you're going to get it in front of probably all the people because you're going to a smaller group and they're a really targeted group. And now when, let's say you're promoting a traffic course, if you promote it to let's say 10,000 people, but only 100 people read that email because it's untargeted and Google decided not to deliver it to everybody or something like that, you're probably going to get a way lower response rate than if you mailed 100 people to your traffic course. That 100% of them all said, I'm interested in learning about traffic.

Right. And this is the whole reason why we built the perpetual audience growth course. Our traffic course is that it is a longer term play. You know, it's all purely about segmentation and leading people through with content and value, but tagging folks along the way based off of what they're doing. Yeah. And, and from there you could just have, you know, maybe you have a thousand person email list, let's say to be easy, but maybe a hundred are tagged in affiliate marketing.

Yeah.

Or maybe some specific, sorry, some software tool that you're interested in and you are the one promoting that tool as an affiliate. Even if you only have 100 folks on there, you know, they're ultra interested in whatever that tool is or that topic.

Yeah.

And then from there you could just give any targeted messages you want, maybe a little promo or a bonus package around that thing and you know, end it after a specific time. Something. But like those hundred people, that could be all you really need. It's kind of like what Tim Ferriss was saying or someone else's. But a thousand true fans.

Yeah, that's Kevin Kelly.

Kevin Kelly, Yeah, he had him in Tribe of Mentors or something or Tools of Titan. Sorry, too many damn books over there on the bookshelf. But yeah, if you have like a thousand true fans, those people are true to whatever you have going on. And if you have those quality true people that you have access to, you know, it's segmented folks, but you're sending them targeted messages. You can make the, you know, whatever kind of business you want with a very segmented, small core group of people.

Yeah. So, you know, getting into 2019 here, that is kind of lesson number one. That's kind of where we're really kind of doubling down going into 2019 is we're going to focus more and more on making sure everybody who's Viewing our content is super hyper segmented into as many segments as we can think of because we want to put the right offers at the right time in front of the right people based on what they've raised their hand and said they're interested in. And the more ways we can segment them, the better. So we can segment them on our email list, on our Google Ads, on our Facebook ads, on our mini chat broadcast. The more segmenting that, the more places we can segment the, the more effective it becomes and the less you care about things like ad costs.

Right.

Like if I was to go and send out an ad to a very, very large audience, let's just go back to the original audience of people interested in Frank Kern or Mike Filsaime or Ryan Deiss. That's probably like, I don't know, a million person audience or something. Let's call it. Now if I market to all those people and let's say I'm getting like a dollar per click because it's a pretty wide audience, but I'm only, you know, I only make like a 1% conversion because it's not a hyper targeted audience. Now if I go after an audience that's like a thousand people that have raised their hand because they viewed my content and they said they like this thing about traffic and I go after those thousand people, but I get like a 10% conversion rate on that traffic because these are all people that said, hey, I am interested in this topic. Now maybe I'm getting like a $4 cost per click instead of a $1 cost per click. But if 10 times as many people are buying, it's way more valuable to me.

Totally. And that's, and it's simpler too. It's, it's less people you have to manage. It's less wondering, you know, is this promo going to fit this audience? It's a, it's, it's like it just simplifies everything really. Yeah. It's obviously not simple. If you build out a million audiences and you want to do all this crazy targeting that can get very complicated. So maybe just start off, do the whole 8020, you know, figure out the 20% of your audience that's going to move 80%.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, connected to what offers you have available to you right now. Obviously. Like right now we, we promote, you know, some software tools and we've got our traffic course and so we've got, you know, we've got a bucket of like four or five tools that we're pulling from when we promote Stuff, meaning we've got four or five segmentation buckets, but we're going to go even wider with them and we're going to get into more niches. You know, we got our homebrew niche and we're getting into the craft brew homebrew niche. And, and we've got other things in the pipeline that are in other niches. Health space and things like that that we're going to be experimenting and diving even deeper with.

But yeah, going down that vein really quick, he said the homebrew side of ours, that is one where Brad, Matt and myself just invested pretty good chunk of change into an app that we are now getting developed. It's actually almost done for the beer space, craft beer space. And the thing is, we're working with a company that their technology essentially is all made to segment an audience in this just so many different ways based off of interest, their actions, different things that they're sharing, liking, commenting on, posting. It's basically creating all of these different ways that they can engage with a community, rewarding them. That's a huge piece. So in your segmentation, I mean, these, we're saying these examples to kind of give you some ideas of how to segment. You can actually gamify the segmentation. So, you know, it could be like a contest, for instance. You know, you reward them with some free bonus or a discount or a giveaway. And, you know, people who maybe share something, like in a contest, for instance, you could tag all of them. That's easy. We've done that before. We did that for the Homebrew website recently.

Yeah, well, the cool thing about this app is with the app that we're developing, as soon as you sign up and you register for the app, there's an onboarding sequence and it basically says, hey, are you interested in craft beer? Are you interested in homebrew? Are you interested in X, Y, Z? And it asks you these interests and you check them off, right? And then it says, okay, well, what kind of beers do you like? Do you like IPAs? Do you like pilsners? Do you like lagers? Do you like stouts? Do you like porters? And it tags all that information. Are you a male or female? It tags that information. You know, what city are you located in? It tags that information. And then with that app, we can now broadcast out promotions, broadcast out offers, broadcast new content, broadcast out to all these people based on the segments they did. So maybe, for example, we read a new blog post on our Homebrew site about how to brew the Perfect ipa. Well, we can now go into our app and say, hey, homebrewers who are interested in IPAs, here's a new blog post specifically written for you. And only the people who said I like home brewing and I like IPAs are gonna see that, that message and it's going to be hyper relevant to those people because they essentially raised their hand and said, this is who I am, this is what I like. So that's actually kind of crossing over into two sort of predictions for 2019 segmentation. As we've already discussed once, that software app on mobile is going to help us segment our customers and our readers a lot better. But also sort of lesson two thing too, that I think is really important to focus on in 2019. And I feel like we've been saying this for a couple years now, but I think in 2019 is where it's going to hit its tipping point, is you really have to focus your business on fucking mobile. You have to have mobile presence for your business.

Yeah, and that was a big reason why we even got into that app space partially. There is, there's a lot of, like, if you are thinking about growing a business that you want to exit, I mean, there's some really interesting valuations based off of engagement and based off of segmentation that that is where a lot of investor money lives. Or if you're trying to just raise capital for a bigger play. I would definitely explore what it means to really grow a user base in any kind of software experience. And that's monthly active users. Is that KPI.

At least in the mobile space, in any kind of community space. If you're looking for evaluation, it's monthly active users. And like what you said, Matt, you can send messages to very targeted segments of these users and have different messages for all, but the goal is to get them back to use the app or your software more times in a month. Obviously, the more of those per month that you can get in there on an active basis or an ongoing basis, your valuation, the value of your app goes higher and higher and higher.

Yeah, no, I think, I think all.

These companies are selling for crazy or raising a lot of capital. And you're like, what? They're not even making any money.

Yeah. When it comes to, when it comes to like exiting a company now, active users are almost more valuable than cash flow, which, you know, to me is a bizarre concept, but that's what we're seeing is like active users have more value than actual cash flow. A company that's making $10,000 a month of recurring revenue is not nearly as valuable as a company that has 1,000 active users per month with zero revenue. Which is fucking bizarre. But it's true.

And there's obviously a lot of factors, but yeah, that's like kind of the baseline valuation metric that we've understood.

If we had a software platform with a thousand monthly active users but zero revenue right now, we could probably sell that for a seven figure exit. Yeah, if we had a company that was generating.

$30,000 a month in recurring revenue, I don't think we'd get seven figures when we sold that business.

It's crazy. In my mind, I like to buy cash flow, but big, big, big, big companies, they like to buy active users and data.

As marketers, we're all good at gathering a community, gathering an audience, you know, leveraging maybe a platform like Facebook, Google or your own blog to then capture them into something. And Matt and I have said before, owned audiences, that's what we. Whenever you can capture someone into a system of a platform that you control and then send out communications whenever you want, that's an audience that you own. And then with that, and we're just basically applying that, we see this as a pretty damn cool opportunity. It's like, okay, well if we can own an audience within an app and we know that we could segment a mofo in there to make, you know, money or maybe there's other revenue opportunities there. But the valuation man, like that's kind of our, this is, this is really just our experiment. Yeah, we'll report it along the way and see how it goes.

Yeah, it's gonna be interesting because that's.

One of our 2019 things that we're working on.

Yeah, the mobile app is going to be big. And this is our sort of, We've, you know, we've experimented in the mobile app space before, but this is like our first like large level raise capital, you know, go for a seven figure exit kind of play here. So we're going to, we're going to see how that plays out. But I feel like a lot of the people that kind of pigeonhole themselves into the I'm an Internet marketer crowd are very short minded about exiting and valuations of companies. They're just, they're very interested, like I just said, very interested. Like I've always been in just cash flow. How can I increase my cash flow? Nobody's ever really thinking about exiting a company or raising capital or doing things like that. And so we're kind of trying to bridge some gaps There apply our Internet marketing knowledge, but also raise capital and shoot for that large exit. So that's something really exciting to keep an eye on. But also just in that mobile space, I feel like more and more people are doing things just from mobile in general. Like, less and less people are typing in Google on their desktop and doing searches, and more and more people are going, hey, Siri, how do I do X? Hey, Siri, give me a recipe. I'm actually trying to be quiet so Siri doesn't fire up and start answering my questions for me.

I was looking around the room, I was like, is she gonna pop up?

Yeah. But you can say like, hey, Siri, how do I do X? Hey, Siri, what's the capital of this? Hey, Siri, how do I learn how to homebrew or whatever? And they're gonna bring up sites for you or hey, Alexa. Or same thing. Hey, Cortana.

Hey.

Like, more and more people are using their voice to get to help find the solutions to their problems and more. And, you know, that's mostly a mobile thing. You don't really do that at your computer.

Yeah.

And so I think you're going to see more and more of that sort of thing. So I just think being really cognizant of if your business isn't focused on mobile, you're falling behind. And I think 2019 is the year where some people probably have already been saying this. This is the year that mobile's first. You got to put mobile first in your business. I feel like.

Yeah. And look at Messenger. Messenger's just getting. Excuse me, just getting bigger and bigger. And that's mainly a mobile type thing. Yes, it's on desktop and all that, but mobile users are huge on those things. And any experience you can build on a mobile play there using, say, chatbots.

Yeah.

Like, that's a very big mobile present. You know, a software that every one of us here can tap into. There's a free freaking version of Minichat. And then the tiers above that are super cheap.

You know, it'd be really cool.

That's a great way to just get in.

It'd be really cool if there was some way where you can, like, have conversations with people through audio and then put it in other people's ears, wherever they are at any time.

Earballs.

Oh, that's called podcasting.

Ah, yes.

And podcasting is a mobile first. Media people listen to podcasts on mobile. And yes, our business is mobile first right now, whether the people listening to it right now realize it or not. We are a mobile first business. The first way that most people discover us is through mobile, not through desktop.

That is very true.

Eventually we bring you to desktop, you're going to get on our list, you're going to see our retargeting ads on Facebook and Google. We're going to bring you to our desktop stuff. But 90% of the people that discover us, discover us on mobile first. Because of this little audio platform that we're talking on right now.

Yeah, this little audio platform that's still feeling its infancy stages. Yeah, but. But is definitely getting more popular. But go get on it. If you're not on it yet. Don't overdo it.

You don't have to do a podcast. You just have to have a big mobile play in your business.

Some kind of play play like that. Leveraging anything mobile, anything tied to mobile. Do some research.

And for our homebrew site, we're doing it with apps. If it works out really well with the apps, we're probably going to port over the apps into this business as well.

Sure.

So we're going down that route. The third thing, this isn't really something that's like a prediction, but one thing that we're really getting into in 2019 is we're going to get more into the software route. We're going to kind of go down this path where we're going to create software to do a lot of the things that we're talking about right now on this episode. We're going to try to make it easier for people to do and make it more effortless and make it just a simpler process. Because the segmentation thing, I think the reason most people don't do a lot of the segmentation, it's hard.

It's hard. It's a shit ton of work. And it's monotonous too, because a lot of it is repetitive. Once you maybe set it up once.

It'S something you'd have to do for each audience. That comes through my voice changing.

Yeah. I mean, with the segmentation right now. So the sort of concept that I explained earlier, where if somebody goes to a blog post about traffic and then gets retargeted with traffic, the way to set that up now is I write a blog post about traffic. I go to Facebook and I create an audience in Facebook of anybody who's visited that blog post, I copy and paste the URL in and I say, anybody who's visited this website, put them in this audience. And then I create an ad and then I go and say, okay, Anybody who's in this audience that I just created a minute ago, show this ad to them, right? And then let's say next week I go make another blog post about traffic. And the way I have to go and make sure my segmentation is on par is I need to go back into Facebook, go to the audience manager, go and edit that audience that I created last week and add the new URL in as well. Right? And Facebook lets you add up to like 10 URLs. So if you have 30 posts about traffic, you have to create three different audiences essentially, right? So you create three different audiences. So, so now you have traffic audience one, traffic audience two, traffic audience three. And let's say you hit 31 traffic posts. Well, now you're going to create traffic audience for copy. And it's just a major pain in the ass. Every time you make new content, you have to go and do this. And if you're retargeting on Google or Twitter, you have to do it in all of these different places.

And let's be honest, there's no like, yeah, you don't want to do that all the time or you'll forget things. And you don't want to hire a bunch of people on your team to do it.

So it's just a pain in the butt. So, you know, we're going to try to make segmentation easy. We're going to try to bring segmentation to the masses in this at the same level that we're doing segmentation in our business the hard way. We want to make a really, really simple way for anybody to do it.

And we're going to start selling green hats because that's money. And they're going to say make segmentation great again.

Make segmentation great again.

That's like what's going on?

What the fuck are you talking about?

What are you talking about? Any segmentation's fucking key. So let's, let's like literally make it easy and make it where it's a no brainer for any business to do. Because I think that's the big problem. A lot of people know that this might be a thing that is very, you know, it's good to do, it makes sense. But hey, how do I do this with a limited budget or limited time or a limited team, whatever it might be, all these constraints that we put on ourselves or what about that stops us from doing this whole segmentation thing that we know is the right thing to do?

Yeah, no, I mean.

Basically we're developing software to make that Simpler. Not necessarily for you. It's because I think it's a pain in the ass when I do it.

You're being selfish.

I want to make it for myself. And maybe I'll sell it to you because I like to make. Make money.

Don't sell it to me.

No, I'll sell it to you. I'm pointing at my microphone right now, just so you know. But we'll sell it to you so you can make segmentation great again as well.

Ooh, yeah.

Are we gonna make hats? We should make hats.

I'm telling you.

They have to be really ugly hats, though.

Green, but same Trump font. You know all that. Yeah.

But our big goal is to. Is to create suites of software that make that segmentation stuff much, much easier for people. And I couldn't be more excited because we're getting into the software game finally. We've done some software in the past.

And our big thing is to get out of info. And this is. We've said this in the past. This is actually in 2018, was our big thing was to really do our best to make everything accessible to everyone. Our best content accessible. That's why this podcast has become more than our biggest thing thing in our business. This is why we've upped it to two episodes per week. Because we want to release a lot of valuable free content to the world. And we've been told things by Dan Ryan, our buddy, that I don't know if I want to, basically that we're like to brain rape people sometimes on episodes and mean that in the most lovingly way. But the whole thing is like, that's the goal of these podcasts, is to make content free, extract the best material from experts or ourselves, give it to you for free. And if you choose to go any further, to really go down the rabbit hole for us. We wanted to give you something. This really was brought from the audience, is our traffic course. But in 2019, our goal is to make things even more accessible and to leverage things like software in a bigger way where we can create a bigger impact. And essentially the info side not being so forefront, that's not the thing that we always. That's not our first. The thing that we're pushing folks to kind of take the next step with us.

Yeah, we don't want to be purely info sellers for the long term. Not that there's anything wrong with selling info. I think info is more and more abundant every day with YouTube and easy access on Google and Google's algorithms getting better and better every single day. It's easier and easier to find the info you want out there for free. And it was never, like Joe said, it was never really our intention to ever sell info again. The reason we have a traffic course was because of the demand for us to create a traffic course. And so we went, okay, if you want it, we'll sell it to you. But it was never really like a huge goal of ours to get back into selling info. And so here we are again, circling back around a year from when we stopped selling our newsletter. I think like a year and a month ago is when we stopped selling our newsletter. And we're telling you, hey, that info business that we fired back up again, there's a good chance that's going to phase back out again because we never really totally wanted to get into info in the first place. We were just, we were trying to make our customers and our followers happy with some of our training.

We don't stop teaching though, don't worry, because that is who we are.

Oh no, we'll never stop teaching. We just will probably stop putting paywalls in front of a lot of our training. Coming into the future because our main income streams are right now is coming from affiliate marketing and in the future is going to come from affiliate marketing and selling our software. And of course we've got our homebrew and our niche sites and some of our other little affiliate things that we got floating around the Internet.

But that traffic course ain't going away. So don't worry if you're thinking about still getting in there, it's not going away at all. Nothing is actually flourishing more than ever. And we're adding stuff in there all the freaking time. It's actually popping off right now, so for sure.

Yeah. I don't want to give the impression that we're not going to be selling that traffic course. We're still, we're still definitely putting all of our best traffic training inside of there. And a lot of guest experts have been contributing lately, which has been awesome. So super, super exciting.

Last thing or another thing is that we're toying with the idea of a potential traffic related event.

That's true.

In person event.

I would say there it's about 75% chance that in 2019 there's going to be a live in person event.

I would call that, what, in the first quarter, second quarter maybe, probably second quarter of 2019.

Yeah, I was thinking summertime.

Yeah, second quarter mostly. Well, it will be in San Diego because we're not leaving San Diego. Let's be honest, it's freaking beautiful in the summer and always, but we have a lot of great, smart, brilliant marketing minds here in San Diego that are all about traffic. We know just a ton of traffic guys and their own expertises, but also guys doing stuff in pr. Andrew o' Brien's one of those guys. Hint, hint, Andrew, if you're hearing this, expect an invite soon. But there's, there's just so many cool things and we want to bring that into an environment where, you know, a small group of committed folks will want to spend time with these people and us and then walk away with some freaking, you know, cutting edge material strategies to really implement.

Yeah, I really think businesses, when it comes to selling info, that's probably more the route we're going to take. Instead of selling online courses, we're going to let you come.

In person and we'll do more like intensive, hands on. Give us the opportunity to show you our traffic strategies in real time, but then also kind of look over your shoulders as you try to set them up and help you troubleshoot and help you get past your roadblocks. And, you know, much more of a, of an interactive experience because when we're creating online training and putting it in a members site, like, we see the sales come through and we're really excited that we have a lot of customers and that people are digging the training and they're getting good results. But we never really get that closed loop of.

Really seeing all of the success stories. We get a handful from the people that feel good enough to shoot us an email and say, hey, this is how this course changed our life. And we do get those. But when we're standing over somebody in person saying, here, click this link, press this button, type it like this, use this image, go do this in this way. And then seeing you get results in real time as we're standing with you, there's nothing that's going to come close to that, that we can sell digitally.

That is, that is literally what lights Matt and I both up. And it's tough in this podcast because, you know, we don't hear from most of you guys. That's what I'm saying. Write us.

Yeah.

Infobergreenprofits.com it's not like we need more friends, but we'd like to hear from you. But it's that. And even in the course, like you said, Matt, we have a ton of people who've joined and we have a members area with a forum, private forum community in there. It's great. It's active, but still there's all these open loops. We're like, man, there are a lot of people in this course that we've never seen in the forum. They've never reached out to us. And it's great to know that people are interested and we're hoping that they consume the content. But yeah, in person, there's nothing like it when you can look someone in the eye or if you can hear their story, hear what business is and niche they're in and what specific struggles they've had in the past. And we're like, cool, well, let's solve that. It's actually not as hard as it sounds like, but, you know, let's spend an hour together or so here, like now in this workshop, and let's solve this for you. So in the future you'll never have this problem. Yeah, and I think that is, it's totally life changing because again, like Matt and I, it's like if you can control eyeballs and if you can just understand a handful of things to do, you don't need to understand everything. But maybe it's just one thing. Understand one thing really fricking well and do it well over and over, rinse and repeat. You can literally sell anything you want if you know how to control the behavior of someone on that platform and then you have this little ecosystem to pull them into.

Yeah, for sure.

And that's what we want to really accomplish at these events. Obviously, in our training, our podcast, all this stuff, it's all related. So more of. And our SaaS too. You know, the software. Yeah. So in 2019, it's gonna be a combo of all that stuff playing together. Really nice.

Yeah, I think just kind of wrapping it up and putting a neat little bow on it. Just a quick recap. So 2019 for us means more segmentation because more segmentation means we're gonna be more effective with Facebook ads and Google Ads and mailing our list and mini chat. Every single piece of marketing that we do, the more segmented we get and the more tighter the audiences we create, the more effective our marketing is going to be. Mobile first. Focus on mobile first. How do you get people to engage with your business on a mobile phone in some way? That's number two. Number three, we were talking about developing a SaaS. We're going down this path of developing software to make segmentation easier because we feel that content is a little too abundant and too freely available, that it's going to be harder and harder of a business model to sell info that's sort of our personal opinion on that. Four, we're going to be doing live events so that's something to look forward to in 2019 from us. And then a fifth thing, if anything is branding. I mean we're going to put a big focus on branding and PR and just doing more to be seen in more places. We're going to be speaking at PodFest this year.

That's right. About that. We're going to do a lot more PR in general, actually a lot more.

Pr, maybe a handful of speaking gigs throughout the year. Putting on our own event. We're just going to get in front of more eyeballs and more earballs and grow the podcast and, and, and just really, really try to expand our reach.

And, and one, one thing I want to seed. We won't go into it because we'll let it develop. This is still an initial thing but we're.

Plus your wife is texting me that you gotta get home, so.

Oh really? I didn't even know that.

Yeah, I forgot my phone at home so it's why my wife's texting Matt. This challenge. So we wanna, we're developing a challenge around affiliate marketing which is a big income source of ours and it seems like something that's very interesting to a lot of folks listening. And we actually have a lot of people who have even bought our traffic course.

Because we do have an opportunity to actually buy our affiliate marketing course. We don't really talk about it much, but most people actually end up buying it or if they don't, they email us later and be like, can I join that? Because this is like it seems perfect because either they hate the business or it's like destroying their body. If they're a contractor, which is a very common thing and they want to basically do affiliate marketing instead or they're starting a brand new business and they think that's the fastest way to make money or it's a bolt on for a business. Like there's a lot of reasons to use affiliate marketing in your business because it's just a great way to supplement your income in some way. Yeah. So this challenge is going to essentially walk you through how we do it step by step for about maybe 14 days or so.

Yeah, I think we should just leave it right there. I think we should open that loop and we'll.

It's open.

Probably do another episode more specific towards affiliate marketing and get a little bit deeper diver into our 14 day challenge because we're still mapping it out and you can bet your Bottom dollar that we're gonna segment the hell out of you if you go through our 14 day challenge.

Not the top dollar.

Not the top dollar, bottom dollar, that top dollar. You know what? Screw you, Joe. Don't make fun of me.

What I do now.

And if you haven't checked out that traffic course, it's wide open and ready for it because it does a lot of what we're talking about.

Evergreenprofits.com traffic to get the traffic course. Actually, if you plug in the coupon code shirt. S H, I R T. We both know how to spell shirt. Yay. We'll actually hook you up with a free Hustle and Flowchart podcast shirt.

You have multiple options to choose from too, so it's even cooler.

That's how we know that you heard about our course by listening to our podcast. If you use that coupon code shirt, then we can segment you as somebody who's a podcast listener and get you onto the course.

Exposing all of our secrets. We gotta stop talking now.

You realize all we do on our podcast is expose our secrets.

I know, it's great because. Yeah, this is the great thing about exposing secrets is you usually make more money for some reason.

Hey, Joe.

People are really scared of doing that, so I think everybody should expose themselves more. Huh?

Expose. Put your pants on, dude. Zip. Jesus.

Bye now. Thank you for listening.

Happy New Year 2019.

Love you.

Today is New Year's Day, you know.

Is it really? Yeah.

Happy New Year's, man.

I gotta drink some coffee to stay up all night. All right, bye.

New Year's Day.

Oh, crap.

You're staying up. You're gonna drink. Do it all over, all the way up till January 2nd.

I TiVo'd it, so it's cool. I'm just gonna rewatch.

Okay.

All right.

Well, happy New Year, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for all the support so far. I think we're at about two years in now on this damn show.

Yeah, 2019 is going to be the best 2019 year ever.

I'll have to figure out anniversary because our anniversary is somewhere in January of 2017. So we're at. We're at about the two year mark and we're going to. I'm going to call it out on that episode. Hopefully it's not this one.

Are you going to buy me something nice? No. For our anniversary.

Don't I buy you something nice every day?

Most days, yeah.

Okay, bye.

Bye.