Tommie Powers - Why You Fail At YouTube Ads (And How To Solve It)

The ninja button pushing and all of that kind of stuff. Like, them days are pretty much over with, you know what I'm saying? It really comes down to two things, right? Can you create a great. Do you have a great offer and can you say the right thing to the right people? And creative is, is, you know, it's creative and it's offer. If you got a great offer, you can produce great creative, great messaging. Right. Because that's what your creative is. That's how you're going to win because you just plug it in and the machines can really figure out most of it. Right. You know, pretty much the rest of that.

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

Hi there.

Hey. We're still in quarantine.

Yeah, I have a feeling it's going to be a little bit.

Yeah, I have a feeling this is going to be the new normal for podcasts for a little bit where it's like we're not in the same location recording.

Yeah, it's kind of cool. I mean, this will be the hashtag quarantine series podcast. I don't know. I named it in Perry's episode when we were recording that. In the quarantine series.

Yeah. Do you think. Do you think like our listeners are going to specifically seek out the quarantine episodes?

Probably not, but they can if they wish. I'm giving them an option if they want to hashtag things. Cool. Have fun with that. Probably won't do much with it, but.

Yeah. In case you're wondering what the hell we're talking about, um, then you're not from planet Earth. Um, so there be accurate. Yeah.

When the world is on lockdown, I'm pretty sure that you should get the clue that Matt and I are not together right now, which is rare in podcast days. But that's cool because that's just rare in general.

I mean, we're just.

Yeah, that's true.

I'm pretty sure, like the public perception of us is that we just kind of like live in the same house and like share a house. We just live the same life because like anybody who sees us, like at conferences and stuff, we're always together. So it's like the percept is like we're just like a unit, but a unit.

No, it's. Yeah, I can't get rid of you.

But no, we actually, we have separate little known fact. We actually live in separate houses. And when we're in lockdown, we can't be in the same place.

Yeah, maybe this. I don't know. We'll see what this does to our relationship, Matt.

Yeah. Will it improve it or make it worse? I don't know.

The time, Will. That's the drumming sound.

It really can't get much worse, can it?

I don't think it can. It's pretty bad already as I just spit everywhere. Good thing you're not here.

Yeah, no, you would have just given me the Corona.

Oh, God. All right.

Would be the first time you gave me a Corona.

I used to give you a lot of Coronas, but we don't drink Coronas anymore because. Wait, does Corona want to be a sponsor? No, we would not allow them because we don't like Coronas.

Yeah, Corona's laying on a hot day. Corona's laying low right now, I think.

Dude, I don't know what they're going to do. All right, and we should probably get to our guest guest, Tommy Traffic.

Dude, Tommy Traffic.

Both of his names, because he has two names. Tommy Traffic and Tommy Powers.

Yeah, I mean, Tommy Powers is already a badass name enough, but he goes by Tommy Traffic also.

I mean, hey, good for him. I thought our names are cool, but I think he topped. He has two cool names. What the hell?

Yeah. Not fair.

All right, well, Tommy is a badass. He actually hung out with us a week ago because we had some Internet troubles and we said, sorry, Tommy Traffic, his traffic's got to move to next week and chat about it then. So that's what we did. So this is round two, but really round one for you.

So this. This episode started with Joe and I in person and ended with us not in person because we had to redo it.

Yeah, that is weird, but true. So Tommy, I mean, he's got. You'll hear we have a bunch of mutual connections and he's. He's just such a cool guy, but he is so, well, like, versed in data traffic, trend spotting, pattern spotting, and all of this jives together perfectly, you know, and. And you'll hear in this episode the way he thinks and his backstory of how it even started back in a school with NASA, you know, and he was on a test and he didn't realize how important that would actually figure into his life. Later on, he went through some stuff, too. Big health issues that. And, you know, almost his wife left him.

Yeah.

For a period of time. He'll say how long and why. But don't worry, they're still together. Happy.

But it's close that loop let him close the loop.

No, but just it's the in between that's interesting. That's the mystery, it's the gap. So that's. It's a different type of loop. Hybrid loop. I don't know. We can make it hybrid. Yeah. Not hyperloop.

Not a hyperloop. That's totally different thing.

Yeah, totally. So, yeah, Tommy.

What were some high points for you?

Yeah, so, you know, I, I tend to get more granular and tactical and this is one of those more tactical podcasts. We really dug in on YouTube ads mostly. You know, he started with Google Ads and then, you know, learned Facebook ads and then he's actually kind of the OG of YouTube ads. Right. He's been doing YouTube ads since 2012.

And I mean a long time, man.

YouTube, I didn't even know YouTube ads were around yet in 2012. That's like, you know. So he's been doing the YouTube ad stuff for a while and he's just gone deep, deep, deep down that rab hole and you know, he's got some amazing insights on how to make YouTube ads work. YouTube ads, we've said it in the past. It's something that sort of eluded us. We, we do test YouTube ads. We're currently running YouTube ads, but for whatever reason, they're not one of our big winners for us. And we want them to be. We really want YouTube to work for us. And he gave us some great insights to how to actually do that.

Like told us exactly what we're doing wrong and what almost every single person, including these massive companies he consults with, I think he told us off air. But Silicon Valley companies that have raised over $50 million, who are proficient on all these other medium, you know, like Facebook and Google, but for some reason break down on the YouTube side. And he lines out exactly what they're missing in this episode. I mean what we were missing, it just applies to pretty much every single business. So yeah, that's interesting. He also gave like a, he gave like a perfect formula for the most effective ads on YouTube as well. And that was what like a four part formula that he broke down. And this is what his team. Because he has an agency. So he. Tommy Tummy Traffic Agency tommy traffic.com. you know, his team lives be within this kind of this box. Even though he gets some, lets him get creative. But it's a proven formula that he's put together that he gives us on here.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean that's a good reason to grab the notes for this episode because, you know, I need to listen back to the episode. I need to read the notes to get like his formula again. I couldn't even, like, you know, feed him back to you right now. So I even read the notes on this one. But if you go to, if you go to hustleandflowchart.com hustleandflowchart.com we will hook you up with the notes for this episode. If you grab them within two weeks of this episode going live, they're yours for the taking. Or you can text the word comp to 38470 and we'll hook you up with the notes that way as well. And you're going to want them on this one because he gets tactical. And the tactical episodes are the ones where the notes really shine.

Oh, yeah. Sue, our fabulous note taker gets very detailed with these tactical ones and they become like a playbook, which is really cool. So hustleflowchart.com comp or the texting thing that I can never remember.

38470 comp.

That's the one. Yeah. And then lastly, let's give a quick little shout out to our sponsor partner, Ahrefs.

You know what, actually Ahrefs is really, really relevant to this episode because you can actually use Ahrefs for SEO analysis for YouTube as well. It's not just for Google. YouTube is one of the things that you can go and do deep dive research on like various keywords and you know what other YouTube videos are running for certain keywords and things like, like pretty much anything you can do with Google keyword research, you can do with YouTube keyword research with Ahrefs. So amazing, amazing tool. We probably should have asked Tommy if he's using it if I had to guess. I bet he is.

Yeah, I bet he is. Yeah. Cause you can search basically. You know, they have a whole keyword explorer you could do like rank tracking through there. There's even like, there's all these other little widgets. We won't even go through them all. But basically it's like a massive dashboard with all your traffic data that you can kind of mine spot opportunities or improve things you're already doing. So seven day trial for seven bones. It's only seven bones. That's nothing. So you can get a full, full access try of this thing if you go to a H r e f s.com a hrefs.com.com or just hrefs.

Don't forget the A.

All right. Don't forget the A in the dot. Com. Yeah. Or the things in between the A and the dot. Com.

Just don't forget any of it.

Okay, So A, H, R, E, F, S dot com. There you go. Just to be clear.

All right, you know, let's go talk to Tommy. Traffic. Tommy.

Tommy. How you doing, man?

Great.

Better.

Doing best we can right now with what we got, huh?

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, we. Well, we. Well, we tried to do this recording last week, and then, you know, it's craziness in the world. And then the Internet just started to, you know, freaking implode on itself.

Yeah.

We got about seven minutes into a conversation, and then Internet went out. And then the next day, we got information saying that we have to lock down and we're not allowed to leave our houses anymore. And here we are a week later doing part two or redo.

Redo. Re over.

Yeah. This is actually, I think, the first time Matt and I are doing a remote kind of podcast like this, too. We're always. Usually together, but Nice do. This whole social distancing thing.

Seems to be working out. Enough about that crap. Let's talk about you, man. And while you're here. Yeah, you're sure? Here's an ads master. What I'm trying to remember who introduced Matt. You, actually.

Yeah. So we're all in a Facebook group that's put on by Stephen Renton, Right. And I think Stephen shared an interview that you were on on YouTube. I went and watched the interview. I'm like, dude, this guy shares some really good. Let's bring him on our podcast. And so I commented on that thread over on. On Facebook, and then Jenny deros jumped in, who we used to share an office with, and Jenny's like, tommy's legit. You got to talk to him. And that's how this came together.

Yeah.

Jenny's my girl, man. I come out to San Diego quite a few times. I go hang out with her and her husband and Dan and all of them, and. Yup, yup. Been known for a while. We worked together for quite a number of years together. Working on the organifi deal together, so.

That's right. And Dan's always the lurking listener of Hustle and Blue charts, so we always have to give Dan a shout out.

Man, what's up, Dan?

Definitely listening. Dad loves getting shout outs on the show, so.

Oh, that's what's up. There you go.

Yeah, man.

And.

And we were talking about how. Because you're. You're a data guy, you know. Yeah. And so I want to get into that whole story because that relates to, you know, Jenny. You were just talking about her. She's, you know, a scientist in a previous lifetime, and she got, you know, she saw the. The power of AdWords and, well, for her Facebook. But, you know, same idea, all the numbers and experiments. You're like, holy shit. I could do experiments like now and get results.

So talk.

Talk about that, man. What got you all into this? And. And then we'll dive deeper, man.

Like I said, I think when we was talking about it before, it's just kind of, you know, I always had this idea of, you know, the Internet, you know, being the future way back, you know, when I was young and.

You know, I ended up getting sick in 2007, I had heart failure. And that put me in a position where I. I didn't. I had just switched to a new job. Like, literally my 90 days wasn't even up. So I ended up being an ICU for, like, 10 days. And it took me about six months to get back up on my feet. So basically, you know, I didn't have a job and I needed to make money. And I knew I had always knew the Internet, and we could get into the backstory of that later, but I always knew, like, the Internet was the future. And it was kind of like, now never. It was like, I know this thing is like, I gotta do something. I didn't have a lot of. A lot of options, but I knew that the Internet could be the wave and what was the wave, and I wanted to be a part of that. And I just had to make a decision that, you know, I can accept the situation that I am, or I can try to create, you know, some new outcome based on, you know, mostly people thinking that I'm crazy. But in my mind, I believed that it was possible. And I kind of just went all in on it. And that's kind of how I stumbled into affiliate marketing, from one thing to another. Then I ended up doing Google Ads because I'm trying to get, you know, traffic to my links. And I would say, warrior Forum, I want to say I was, you know, on there, and it's like, hey, you can buy ads on Google and send your links to, you know, drive traffic through your links, you know, whatever. And, you know, the goal is if you can get, you know, more money from the ads that you buy, you keep the difference. I'm like, I think I could. I could do that, you know, and got a Google account and logged in, and I was like, this look interesting. And after I put my first campaign up I never forget this. The first time I logged in, and I saw, like, you know, money being spent and numbers and everything, I was just like, I'm. It's over for me. I. I don't want to do anything else. And I told my wife. I was like, I'm about to, like. And my wife was looking at me sideways like, yeah, whatever. But I was like, I'm telling you, I found. I found my. My, My, my. You know, what is it that you're looking for in life? Right? Like, I found my calling, you know? And she was. She thought I was crazy because it was like, you know, I just started doing it, but I just. It was just something about Google Ads. When I logged in that day, man, I just couldn't tell. I just knew. I just had a feeling that I knew, like, this is it, you know, and, you know, there's been 13 years now. Yep.

Yeah. And I think. I think you're telling us last time, before we got cut off, that your ambition in the early days kind of got you in some hot water.

Yeah, Yeah. I think I might have been telling y' all about. My wife almost left me. Well, my wife actually left me for about two days. Because at first, you know, again, I had been sick. I didn't have an income. We were living off of hers. So 2007, my whole year, I made about five grand. And that was only because of the money that I made at the beginning of the year, up until February 19, before I got sick, because I was in a management role or whatever. So I had a decent little salary, maybe 35, 40 grand a year, something like that. And I didn't have any other income that year. So we living off of savings and what my wife. And obviously, the savings was just pretty much depleted. So the last couple grand, three, $4,000 we had, I was buying. Trying to buy these ads and telling my wife, don't worry about it. I got this. I'm a reverse engineer. This.

I'm just.

You just got to trust me. And I remember getting my first conversion, and I told my wife, you know, I went to her, and I was so excited, and the commission was like, $33. But I had probably spent like three, three grand or something like that. And I was just like, I told you it worked. I'm about to reverse engineer. I'm about to kill this, you know? And she was looking at me like, I think my. I think, you know, she basically is like, I think you lost your mind. She was calling my mom and my family and was like, this guy has lost it, you know? Cause her thing was like, you tell me you, meaning, tell me you spent $3,000 and you made $30 and I'm supposed to be okay with that. And I was like, but you don'.

Understand.

You don't understand. And she was like, I can't do this no more. And she left. She took the kids and she left. And I had to go to her and be like, yo, you just gotta trust me. Like, I'm giving you an ultimatum. Either you're gonna come back home, we're gonna work it out, or you're gonna stay gone and it's gonna be over, and we'll figure it out. But I know what I know. And if you just gotta believe me, and if you're not willing to do that, I don't really know what else to tell you right now. I don't got nothing else to go on. This is my last hope, really, for. You know, Obviously I can go back and work or whatever, but, like, I. I just. I just. I just. I have to pursue this, and I just need you to understand that. And she ended up coming back, but, yeah, she was, like, pretty much out of here. Cause it's like this dude is out of his mind. He's. He done lost, man. You know?

So what. What turned it around?

What?

Was there, like, a specific offer that just hit for you? Did you finally figure out the ads? Like, what was it that got it all coming together?

That's what it was, man. Just testing a bunch of different offers, man. And I ended up hitting on this Water for gas. This product, water for gas. So this early 2008, gas prices like, four, five dollars a gallon, and, you know, people were reeling from that. And it was just one of those things. I'm on ClickBank and I'm looking at different offers, and I see this thing, Water for gas. I'm like, water for gas. And I click through and I'm looking at it and I'm like, I don't know if I would do this, but I bet you other people would. You know what I mean? I did some research on it, and it. The concept was legit because what they were selling were plans on how to build the thing or whatever. And it seemed like a legitimate concept. And I'm like, with the gas prices being what it is, this makes sense. This is probably something people would, you know, me not understanding an offer and all of these things, it was just like the climate that we're in right now, this seems like it makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah. You found. Found a need in the. In the marketplace right now. And basically it's like, all right, well, I got the traffic part, I think.

Yeah, it made some super ugly banners. Because at this time, banner ads were like, no one were really doing display banner ads, you know what I'm saying? So I made like some super ugly, you know, banner ads. I think I used. What's this tool I used to use back in the day? It was paint.netms.

Paint back in the.

I made some banners with paint that net. Super ugly banners. But man, them things converted and I hit on that one probably out of the gate. I want to say I might have spent like $200 and got a conversion. And probably by the time I was at a thousand bucks on that one, I was making money. So. So I finally hit on that one. I ended up doing a lot more of them, you know, stacking on later. But that was the one that I hit on. It just kind of turned everything around. I want to say that was probably like March of that year or so. And then. No, that was probably like, it's probably like April, because March I think I got a conversion on them. I forget the offer that it was, but I just kept testing different offers, you know, email, zip, submits, all kinds of stuff. And then that one I end up hitting on. And I kind of ran with it. And probably like by that mark, by like April, May, like that summer, I was like, $15,000. And clickbank would mail you checks back then. So I was getting checks in the mail, like 9,000, 15,000, 12,000, 8,000, you know, and after probably like the third, by the time I got that $15,000 check, I'm walking out the door, going to the bank, and my wife was like, where you going? And I was like, I'm going to the bank. I'll be back. And she was like, by the time I go out the door to try to close it, she's swinging the door open behind me with her purse on. I'm like, where you going? She was like, I'm going with you.

I've been waiting.

I was like, oh, so now you believe? Oh, now you believe? She's like, yep, I sure do. Now get your ass in. Excuse my language. Come in the car and let's go. We about to go catch this check. Cause you finna give me some of that.

And we went ahead on and it kind of took off, but the water for gas really set it off. That's funny.

I remember I used to get checks from Clickbank and I used to get checks from Aweber and I remember when they finally had the option to direct deposit, they're like, do you want us to turn on direct deposit? I'm like, hell no, I want those checks.

Is that mailbox money?

I love getting that money in the mailbox and taking it down and depositing it. I don't know why, but like, there was something so satisfying about that.

Yeah.

So I'm curious though. Were you. Were you driving like direct to the affiliate links or were you building like landing pages in between just straight up links?

I did all of it, but the most success I had was straight direct linking. And really, when I look back on it, a lot of it, because I never developed email marketing skills. Like, it was like what I realized looking back on it now, the guys that really did well with driving and building the list were guys who would mail the list. They were very, you know, they were into the email list building mentality. And for me, I was getting the list, probably just didn't know what to do with it. And that's probably why it didn't work. Right. So the direct linking and probably, you know, a lot of other things, you know, you got something working, I got complacent, you know, all of this kind of stuff too. And it was just like, hey, if it's not broke, don't fix it. So I kind of just stayed with that, you know.

Yeah.

So I know you what, you started evolving a little bit more into YouTube stuff later on, right? I mean, that's probably jumping ahead, what, like four years or so?

Yeah, 2012. Probably like five. Five years.

Okay. Yeah.

I mean, that's still pretty early compared to when most people started talking about YouTube.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So, so what, why the change to YouTube and how do you apply, like, what you took from these early days over there?

I mean, it was a lot of things, right? So if you go all the way back, like initially when we got on y' all saw my 49ers thing, you asked me about that. So what, you know, 93.

My buddy John Henderson, who's married to Jerry Rice's niece even to this day, he had a bright idea back then that we could sell, he could sell Jerry Rice memorabilia on the Internet. I'm like, man, nobody gonna buy that. You know, Long story short, he figured out how to load it up. He found his message board, scanned the image, uploaded it, the whole nine, and somebody actually ended up sending. I remember the first time he got money was from a guy from Ireland, mailed him a western Union money order, man.

Wow.

First time he showed me that, it blew me away. So that, that kind of planted the seed, you know, on the Internet for me. Then obviously I ended up being a computer engineer. I was, you know, I learned code in high school. So a lot of these things were just, you know, after the. After the success with the affiliate stuff, Google ended up shutting me down. And that is how I ended up getting into the agency game. I don't know if you guys know John Shuger. I might have mentioned his name to you guys before. We know the name, but we don't know the name. So John and I ended up meeting around the time when I was doing the affiliate stuff. And what we hit it off was because he was doing affiliate marketing with Google Display, but he had built this software keyword rockstar that would automate the campaign building and the banners and the whole nine or whatever. And that really helped me kind of catapult my income. I was maybe doing like 10 grand a month, and I was starting to doing 40, $50,000 a month from that. But I end up getting shut down because I was direct linking in the whole nine. And I remember telling him one time, you know, I was talking to him and I was like, man, like, all my money's gone. I don't know what I'm gonna do. You know, I'm trying to figure out a way to make some money, blah, blah, blah. And he called me back later after that, maybe a few days later, maybe a week later or something. He was like, man, I got these guys that want someone to run their ads for him. And I know you're good at it. I don't know, because he's really like, I'm really a software architect. I'm not. People know me because of paid ads, but that's not really, you know, it's like, but I know you're good at it. And I figured, you know, you. You might want to talk to them. And I'm like, but what am I going to talk to them about? Like, what, what is it that they want? And he was like, I want you to run their ads. And I'm like, but run the ass. Like, what? What benefit is. He was like, they pay. They paid. If I was like, they pay money. So people pay money for me to do this. Sign me up. And that's how I got in the agency space. Yeah, so that was like, that happened. And so. So if you like go all the way back to 93 and then there was an ebay thing that I ended up doing. So I was always in this mindset of what's next, where this thing is going. But earlier in my career I was usually too early. You know, I'm saying I could always see things, you know, for whatever reason I could see things before they happened and kind of had a feeling about, especially when I'm really involved in it. So I'm knee deep into the ads at this point and I did not. And because of the Google situation, I did not want to get complacent anymore. I didn't want to repeat the failures that I had. And so I was just trying to figure out where is this thing is going. So I was doing a lot of research and studying and reading and probably for like a year or two, just really on a deep level trying to like figure out where this thing is going.

Right.

And I never forget one night I was, I was reading an article about TV being on the Internet or the Internet being the, the mechanism to distribute, you know, digital TV content. Yeah, they wouldn't even like video was kind of like this whole TV is gonna be on the Internet mindset and that thing. Just when I thought about that, I was like, I gotta get out in front of this. My idea wasn't I'm gonna make a killing. It's just like I'm gonna get out in front of this. And by the time this becomes a thing, I'll already have some skills so I'll be in a good position. And that's kind of how I went about it. But it was like a lot of things that kind of triggered that moment because it really just put me in that space of I'm trying to stay ahead of the curve. Where's this thing going? This is the thing that I know I can see myself doing for a long time. Can take me where I want to go. Legacy, wealth, the whole thing. And that's kind of what how it happened, you know, and just that, that, that aha moment, like TV is going to be on the Internet. And so I started messing around with YouTube ads in 2012.

Yeah, no, I mean that's, it's such a valuable skill, man. The trend spotting and I mean I'd imagine even right now there's so many opportunities you're probably starting to spot, you know, and all these just lets. I mean there's some. What kind of stuff do you look for? Like when you are looking for opportunities? I'm just kind of curious, like do you have any indicators or data you're looking for?

No, I don't, I don't look for opportunities, I look for patterns. That's really my skill set. It's what I learned. And I really. It took me years to really connect the dots on this, but in high school, I was in the NASA space grant program my junior and my senior year and my freshman year in college. And one of the things that.

What happened with that was I ended up getting recommendation from my physics teacher my junior year. And I remember the guy he sent me out there to see, Dr. Koenig, Dr. Keith Koenig. He was like a world leading aerospace engineer. And he happened to be at the university, Mississippi State University. So where I'm from is a college town. Mississippi State University, the largest university in the state of Mississippi. I literally grew up in Starkville. That's everything in that town revolves around that university.

Yeah.

So he ended up recommending me. And the guy tested me. And I never forget he tested me and he'd give me like this one thing he had. It just had like a red button on it and they would put these things across the screen and he just told me when I recognized something out of order to click that button. I never really thought about it much after that, but I remember us having a conversation when I was in that program about pattern recognition and him saying something to the effect that, you know, he felt, he was like I was one of the most gifted people that he, you know, had ever been around with this. But I never really put any, you know, it wasn't until, gosh, man, probably four or five years ago that I kind of connected, connected the dots on the, on that part. But that's really what it is, is like that's why I love the numbers and the patterns and the data and all of this kind of stuff. Because I'm just looking for patterns and then I try to make sense of them. So I'm never like an opportunity, you know, thing. It's just, yeah, what are the patterns? What do they mean? And try to make the best decision based off of the data provided to you about what that means. And that's kind of how I approach pretty much everything, really, even people. It's really like a whole part of my life, in so many facets of my life, right. I pay attention, I look for the patterns, you know what I'm saying? Like, that's just explained that here's sort.

Of a timely question. Kind of since we're all sort of in lockdown and everybody's quarantined and all this stuff going on right now, I feel like it's a good time for digital businesses. Like if digital businesses that get it right right now are going to, are going to thrive through this time. Are you seeing any sort of patterns emerge or any sort of trends that are happening right now or things that listeners can kind of capitalize in these sort of uncertain times at the moment?

CPMs are down more dramatically on Facebook than YouTube right now. Based on what I'm seeing. I do have people that I work with in the business opportunity space, particularly on YouTube. Most of the Facebook stuff that I do, I don't really run a lot of Facebook ads anymore. I have people that I work with that do that. I'm more of a, I'm more of a, a mastermind, if you will, in that zone. Because I don't, I'm not really, I've never really been the best Facebook guy anyway. And then a lot of the people that I do work in that space with is like direct consumer, e commerce, physical products. So you know, but like with YouTube we do, we do a lot of different things from, from Legion to webinar funnels to.

We're not doing much on the, we're not doing as much on the direct to consumer lane on YouTube currently. I've done a lot in that in the past, but I'm doing more like online education.

Membership type, you know, webinar funnel. All of them aren't webinar funnels, but a lot in the digital product space. And I mean there's a major uptick right now on, particularly in the business opportunity space. I'm seeing better, you know, conversions. Like I literally was looking at a campaign before this call. Normally we had been paying something like eight or nine dollars per registration, which is kind of high compared to what we wanted to do. But, but this particular campaign has been performing so well, we kind of allow it to run higher like that. But literally today it's like at $4, $3, which is like crazy.

Yeah.

And that's kind of this stuff that I'm seeing right now in the last couple like two weeks.

Yeah, like it's a lot of people online, they're looking for ways to either extend what they're currently doing with this, this home bound situation or some people are looking to pivot from whatever they were doing in case this, you know, it's kind of what I'm seeing. So. But on Facebook, the CPMs.

Over probably like five or six accounts, about anywhere from a 20 to 40 drop in CPMs in the last like two weeks, which is, yeah, astronomical. Wow. Like literally I Got one. These one, these guys that I work with.

They'Re in Hispanic market. They're basically Hispanic version of organifi really.

Is what they are.

Which is why when they came to me, I'm looking at that and I'm like, I did that before.

Yeah, Like I don't really.

They've not done anything different. And I'm, I hit them up and I'm like, why is there your return on ad spend, you know, so much higher? Like, you know, what have you guys executed that we've been talking about? And it was like we haven't done anything, you know. And so I was like, okay. So I went back to check the CPM. They had a 40 reduction. They went from like a three row ass to a four and a half from last week to this week with nothing. They didn't do anything different? No. Nothing externally, Nothing inside the platform on Facebook. Because we kind of have this in platform and external platform kind of way that we think about things. These are things that we control outside of Facebook and then only the things that we can control by clicking buttons inside of Facebook. And they didn't do any of either. And they just got a gotta, gotta, gotta jump. Which is. Yeah, it's very interesting. So I'm like wonder why.

I just wonder why too because it's not like it doesn't seem like people are gonna be using Facebook ads less. I guess businesses are just getting scared and going, okay, let's pull down. Which is the last thing you want to do, right? The last thing you want to do is be like, sucks, let's pull off our marketing.

There's an interesting thing I actually read last night on Reddit, but it was. Someone was quoting David Ogilvy and he wrote some book, you know, he's ad genius and he was talking about in recession specifically. That is the most common thing that people or business owners do is just pull the ad spend. But that's the worst thing you should be doing right now.

You should be doing. I'm telling my people to do the opposite. Matter of fact, I got a email this morning from, from one of them. They almost had a 10k day yesterday.

Yeah.

Because they crank the ads up and they almost about to like a 10k day would be a first for them. They've never hit. I think they top has been like 6k in a day. But yesterday, you know, they just been cranking their ass up the last couple days. I'm like, spend the money.

Yeah.

Are you guys afraid of spending money? And you know, he's like, man, we almost hit $10,000. We're gonna keep trying, but it's like, you know, they're just like super excited. Yeah. Spending more money.

Yeah, yeah. Like spending more. Figure out how to get to profit faster. I feel like if you can combine both of those, but don't be like the masses where you pull out. I mean, the thing that David was saying, Ogilvy, was it's like if you spend the money now, the brand is also going to grow in the future when people come back. I mean, they're already going to be attached to you now you're going to be top of mind, not them, the people that pulled out and got scared.

Well, just thinking it through, I, I'm, I'm assuming what's probably happening is there's so many e comm businesses that are getting burned by supp supply chain issues and those people are having to back off the budget because of the supply chain issues.

Great point. Because one of the reasons why I'm telling the one company I was just talking about that almost did 10k to spend more, they own their moles and they do their manufacturing here in America. Matter of fact, they based here in Atlanta and they control their own manufacturing and supply chain in the whole nine. So for them it's like, y' all ain't got these problems. Most of your competition, it's probably selling cheap chalk and china knockoffs and things like that. They have a patent on their, on their product, they own their molds and they do majority of their manufacturing. And it's like you guys need to be spending spin, spin, spin. I'm just telling like, just spend the money and see what happens. Just crank it up and see what happens. And I get an email and they're like, yesterday. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. But that's the key reason why. That was a key reason why I told them that. That because they don't have any supply chain issues because they're in control of it.

Yeah.

Now's not the time to be a AliExpress drop ship company.

Well, cool.

Let's. Let's jump into YouTube a bit because YouTube is one of those platforms that we, we've experimented with YouTube often on. I think we actually have some ads running on YouTube right now. But we, for whatever reason have never actually managed to be really profitable with YouTube. Most of our revenue comes through Google search and through Facebook ads. Right. Those are the two platforms that we do really well on. But YouTube, so many people have told us like, YouTube is where it's at right now. You've got to be doing stuff on YouTube. Cheapest clicks, cheapest cost per sale, cheapest cost per leads. All that kind of stuff is coming out of YouTube right now. But for whatever reason, we haven't been able to see those results with what we're doing. So let's dive into that. I guess my first question there is, what do you do differently with YouTube that, you know, most other marketers are probably doing wrong?

That's a good question. I really don't know what a lot of other marketers are doing because a lot of times when I talk to people, they're not doing it. I'm just like, why? You know, it's like crazy, right? So. So we made a decision in the last year to focus specifically as an agency purely on YouTube advertising. Because I see the writing on the wall, right?

The way that we do it. Here's what I understand.

The machines. The machines are smart, right? Like the ninja button pushing and all of that kind of stuff. Like, them days are pretty much over with, you know what I'm saying? It really comes down to two things, right? Can you create a great. Do you have a great offer and can you say the right thing to the right people? And creative is. Is, you know, it's creative and it's offer. If you got a great offer, you can produce great creative, great messaging, right? Because that's what your creative is. That's how you're gonna win because you just plug it in and the machines can really figure out most of it, right? You know, pretty much all the rest of that. So I wouldn't say that I'm doing anything different than other. I mean, I really don't know what other people are doing, but.

People probably aren't doing what I. Here's what I know about most of the people that work with that come to work with us, they're not producing enough creative. The question that I always ask, right, Because a lot of the people that I work with, typically what we want to do as an agency, if we're going to run your ads, we want to know that your offer is already proven. So that means you already been spending money, cold traffic, 90% of the time, they're already running Facebook ads successfully and they want to diversify, you know, and do and come over. Usually the question that I ask is, how many creatives are you running on Facebook? Most of the time, the people that I'm talking to about this, at least 50, you know, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands.

Wow.

And then when I ask Them about what have they done on YouTube and why they can't make it work. How many creatives have you tested it? Most of the time the answer is one or maybe two. Never more than three.

There's the problem. Or one of them.

I think you just also described us. I think we've tried like three different videos and go, nah, this didn't work. Let's go back to Facebook.

But how many Facebook creatives are you guys test running right now at any given time?

Well, if you, if you include dynamic creatives, I mean, hundreds. Definitely hundreds.

Yeah. So that's the problem. Yeah, so. So when we're talking about creatives in on, let's say YouTube, you know, since Facebook creatives, a lot of people obviously doing that. But YouTube, like, do you have go to creatives or styles that you say are just required to at least start?

Nah, it's more of a messaging thing, man. It's about, it's about what are you saying and who you send it to. I talk about this with my team a lot. We're, you know, I really harp on this. It's like that's. I was actually having this conversation with my team yesterday and I'm telling them, like, you know, because I'm having these different conversations with people and I'm like, geez, like, media planning is a lost art in these digital streets. You know what I'm saying? Like, if you look back at the Ogilvies and all of these guys, like, media planning was a very vital component to what they do. But in this online environment, people don't. No one's teaching it. People aren't doing it. And you know, it was a challenge in my own company because I. A lot of what I used to do was up here and then trying to build a team. I had to start. And so I remember last year talking about, you know, the media plan and this, that and the third. And some of them is like, I don't really understand what you, what you mean by it. So I'm like, man, I gotta like, teach them the media plan process and we really gotta develop that out. But a lot of people aren't doing that. So what happens when you're planning? You're looking at who you wanna talk to based on the media plan is typically, who am I gonna put my ads in front of? That is what then dictates what your creative is supposed to be. Because different buckets of traffic will, you know, different audiences will respond differently based on a message. You could have five or six avatars that would Buy your thing. But they're different people in their different mindset. There's different conversations going on in the head. And so that's really kind of what it is. It's not about, like, to me, we don't, like, there's a lot of styles that work. Talking head.

You know, on site, we run animations, we run motion graphics, B roll type stuff.

PowerPoint, basic, like super basic, like PowerPoint. Like, there's a lot of ways to kind of bring the message to life. But what I found is the message is more important, and it's just from a lot of testing. The message itself is way more important than the visual. Because typically what we're trying to do is we want to prove the message before we invest too heavily on the visual component of it. So that's really what it is. But a lot of that is dictated by the media plan. Like, what's the plan of what campaigns are we're gonna run, what audiences we're gonna hit. We're doing all of that first and then that's gonna dictate, okay, what type of creatives we need to produce to be able to effectively communicate this, offer to this, to these different set of people. And then we develop messages according to that. And that's really the key to it.

I really think that could be where a lot of people's barrier to entry is. And I think our barrier to entry is the amount of creatives, because you look at like Facebook, now that they have the dynamic creative, right, I can go write four headlines, four descriptions, put 10 images in there, put four different calls to actions on there. And now I just got, I've got a hundred variations that just got deployed all in like a 20 minute period. With YouTube, it's like you have to make a new video, a new video, a new video, a new video if you want to have all these different creatives.

So, you know, not necessarily, not necessarily. You can actually, you can actually. A lot of times we'll make two or three kind of meat and potatoes creatives is what we'll call them. And then there's a lot of ways to recut them in different ways to come up with different. You know, I could take one video and make five or seven variations from it. I got three meat and potatoes videos. And typically we're not trying to do all of that at first, right? It's like we'll, we'll have three messages that we're trying to hit and then the one that catches, we can go back and recut that in. So Many different ways to make different variations of that. Where we're not going out and say, you know, we got three of them and now we're going back and making five more and we're creating five completely new. A lot of times it's like if we get a winner, we'll recut that on a lot of different ways and kind of repurpose it, if you will. So we could take that one winner and make five, seven, sometimes even ten variations on that. Shorter, different alternate intros is what we call it. Right. So we can change the beginning. It's just a lot of different, like, things you can do now, you do have to. The barrier to entry on that is you need to have an editor or someone who knows how to manage editors, or either you need to have an editor who understands the process, you know, for understanding, like, how to do that. But a lot of times it's just, you know, we get our editor and it's like, hey, this, you know, we want to do this, this, this, this and this. And he'll spit back 7, 8, 10 different variations on that. Then boom, we got 10 new creatives to test. And we've already invested whatever that front end money was to make the meat and potatoes version.

I mean, that, that makes sense is like, figure out your core audience, probably your best avatar first, build out the meat and potatoes core creative. You know, that can then get spun out into all these different creators for different avatars. Changing the intro, that's like the lead in the hook, the big idea, whatever you want to call it. And then, yeah, the middle part's probably more or less the same. And then the call to action is probably, you know, gonna solve that particular problem and lead them to the next thing.

Yep, you got it pretty much. That's pretty much it. You know, in the grand, you know, grand scheme of things, that's pretty much it.

Sweet.

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, going back to the question about what you do differently, I think. I think you sort of explained it when you were talking about the media planning thing. I really think that is like the. The big difference between what you do and what.

What.

What a lot of other marketers don't do. Right? Like the, it's the whole. What is it? The Abraham Lincoln quote. I don't know if it was actually Abraham Lincoln or not, but the whole like sharpening the axe, you're going to cut down a tree, you spend the first five hours sharpening the axe, in the last hour chopping it down or whatever. But I really think I think that's probably it. So many people, I think, just want to make a video real quick, slap it up and go, okay, that didn't work. Make another video. That didn't work. Okay. YouTube's a bust, you know?

Yep. Yeah, I mean, you, you, you know, running an agency, man, we can't operate like that. I mean, I wouldn't have no clients, you know, we wouldn't make no money. You know what I mean? Like, you have to have systems, you know, And I think that's what a lot of people, you know, they. If they claim it don't work, they probably just haven't given it, you know, the right effort and maybe because they don't know, you know what I'm saying, these things. But typically, you know, that's why people, you know, hire us, because we have these capabilities. We actually, you know, again, I talked about the. The writings on the wall with the future. You know, I've really went in this creative direction, you know, out of necessity more than anything, because I don't want to become a dinosaur. You know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, people call me the OG, a YouTube ass and all of this kind of stuff, but I don't want to be a has man. I don't want to be the OG who used to be hot type of thing. You know what I mean? Like, you still getting shows because you was hot 10 years ago off of a couple hits that you had. I don't want to be that dude. You know what I'm saying?

So depressing. Yeah, y.

You know, so I want to be. I want to be innovative, you know, I want to be ahead of the head of the pack. In order to stay that way. I just, like 2017, I kind of started writing on the wall and I was like, I got to really get with this, this creative thing. Because one thing about the Organifi project, working with those guys mean. I mean, they were pretty much whatever I wanted. They was putting them out. I mean, we tested probably a thousand videos, and the two. Almost three years that we was running the YouTube ads, I mean, it was, you know, we, we, we. We had a lot. I had a lot of creative at my disposal, and that made my job easier to make it happen. Like, just straight up, like, I can click all the buttons that I want. If I wouldn't have had a great offer first and foremost, and a lot of creatives, I don't think I would have been that successful with that. And so, so I kind of started writing on the wall and was like, Like, I was looking for companies that could do this work, but I realized in that process and wasted a lot of energy and money, people don't know how to produce videos that convert with YouTube. And the really, the true thing, even further from that is most of the time the stuff you produce at first probably isn't going to convert, is really the process of how do you follow that up? Right? Like, what is your process for testing and iterating? Because most of the time, it doesn't always work that great at first. I mean, every now and then you'll get. Because we had one of these situations happen, like January, where, you know, it kind of like hit out of the gate. And I'm telling them, like, you know, because everybody is, like, happy and excited, but I'm like, this is not the norm. You know what I'm saying? Like.

And then like, last month we had one that's like, completely bombed out of the gate. And it's like, everybody's sad, and I'm like, this is normal. You know what I'm saying? I'm not mad. We're just gonna keep working our process. And so it took us for this last one, it took us like two other iterations to finally hit something, but most people would have threw the towel in. So most of the time that's what it is. And so then what I realized, I mean, this is a recent example, but probably 2017, going through this, because that was at a time where I kind of had. I shut my agency down. I was on the back end of working with Organifi. That really blew up. And I was just really in this state of mind that I wanted to own my own assets and invest in companies and all this kind of stuff.

Yeah.

So I started doing these different deals, and then I started having people and we're working on projects, and I needed. I needed people to help me with these things. And that's how I started looking for these companies. But I never could find anyone that was. And I'm just like, gosh, no one knows how to make YouTube ads that convert, you know, And I had to figure out how to do it myself. But even when I started doing them, it was like, most of it wasn't working. And what I learned, that it wasn't about making a video that worked. It's about having a creative process. And that's when I was like, all right, this is what I gotta do. If I want to be successful, I gotta really go all in on the creative thing. And that's basically what I did. And so we're. We're. We're all the way down the rabbit hole on that front.

Well, it seems like you're. You're doing it smart because I'm sure most of the competition out there, the other advertisers, just give up right at that first video going down. Scrap the whole thing, maybe try a different offer. Just don't go back to YouTube. I know we were scared away for a long time because we just didn't go deep enough. But, you know, here you are. You probably know the competition bails out, you know, at this point.

I mean, here's the thing too, though, man. It's like I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. Like, I'm leveraging my experience. I study the market, I look what other people are running. There's no real software tool out there that can give you that. You can spy on where people are running. I started on that path and, and, you know, about 10 grand in. I'm kind of like, I don't know if this is the best use of my money right now.

But somebody I hope out there one day will develop a really solid tool for that. But, you know, a lot of what we do, we have a manual process that we go through to really find who's operating in the space that we're in. We build swipes of other people's successful ads. We got a freaking catalog of them. We take them, we'll take their video, we'll run it through. Through a transcription, like a TM T E M I Timmy. It's like 25 cent a minute or something.

Automated transcription thing.

We'll run it through there. You know, we pull that out, we. We reverse engineer this, you know, what the video is saying. And now we can take those elements into our scripting process. When we're doing ideation, you know, we're coming up with hook concepts. You know, sometimes you can see a hook concept in a totally different thing that you can re situate to make it work for the lane that you're in. So we just started building like a catalog of these things. So it's not like we just reinventing the wheel. A lot of it is going and looking and taking the time. I've even have trained virtual assistants who their job is to kind of, you know, have different YouTube accounts that they can log in to different incognito windows, and then they can go watch videos and particularly, you know, and kind of see what's out there. And we'll build, you know, a swipe file of you know, know, 5 or 10 or 15, depending on the market. Like some markets, a lot of advertisers in some of them, not so much. Which is usually a sign.

Right.

Because if they go out and we ain't seeing a lot happening in this market, no one's buying ads, there probably ain't no money there. You know what I mean? Yeah, somebody's probably there if there's some. But we just, you know, evaluate other people are doing in turn and on top of our, our experience because people are constantly innovating, you know, so we're taking from those things as well. So it's not about reinventing the wheel. You ain't got to try to, you know, I tell people that a lot is like, you know, you're just not doing enough market research. You're not studying your market well enough to find out what's going on out there so that you can use that and to help you develop a strong strategy. You know, you still gotta test and you gotta tweak and iterate and all of that stuff. But you know, again, it's sharpening the, you know, sharpening the thing six hours before. That whole thing is kind of like the same idea, same concept.

So do you, do you find with your videos that there's any sort of specific elements that kind of have to be in every video? Because, you know, I know with YouTube, like if you're doing a pre roll ad, right, you got like what, five seconds before they can skip the ad and then it's like what, 30 seconds before you actually pay for it. Or I don't remember, I don't know exactly how it works, but it's something like that. Right. So you obviously have to grab the attention within the first five seconds. What, what sort of elements do you pretty much always put inside of a video ad?

So, you know, we run. So let me preface this by saying when, you know, the early days of YouTube, you know, I started running 2012, we spent a million. By 2014, we were running like 80, 90%. They call it discovery ads now.

Yeah, that's gonna be the next question.

Yeah, yeah, Back then they were called in display. Yeah, we wasn't really running a lot of in stream back then, but the in stream was now where you got to wait five seconds to skip. We're running 80% in stream. And the reason why is because of target cpa. So the algorithm will, you know, you can basically they have a maximized conversion bid type and they also have a target CPA where you can say this is how much I want to pay for that action. Total game changer, man. That changed the game. That literally was the one thing that pushed us to that 80% in the in stream lane. Because I mean, it was. The algorithm is amazing.

Feed the machine, right?

So we run majority in stream. And so mostly the elements of those are pretty standard. You know, you have a hook, you want to engage them, you want to connect them, you want to give them a call to action. So we kind of look at it like, like.

I would say like we're trying to qualify and disqualify, you know, in our hook. So the hook isn't just to get their attention. I see so many people get that wrong. They'd be like, hey, hey, hey. Before you click the da da, da da, it's like they're gonna skip or if they watch, like that's the wrong person. Like you want to qualify and disqualify with your hook. Because I want the right people watching my video, right? So that's a key thing. And then the whole engage thing is kind of like, what's in it for them? Because people don't care until they know you care. Like, they don't. I mean, we're selfish. It's just human, natural, you know what I mean? So you, you're trying to qualify, disqualified the wrong people. Qualify the right people. And then immediately we trying to kind of give them some concept around. And there's a lot of ways to do this, right, because some of our ads are more story driven, some of them are more direct. But we want to try to engage them, which is kind of like I say, like, what's in it for them? Because that kind of gets people to be like, okay, you know, I want to keep paying attention. And then we want to connect with them.

Story sometimes even more direct. We're more about features, benefits, you know, that sort of stuff. And then call to action, you know, tell them what to do and show them what to do, you know, where to click, you know, click below this button, whatever the case may be. And then we want to try to set them up for the expectation of what happens after the click. I see a lot of people miss that in their creatives because a lot of times people will click through and then if they, if. If what in their mind doesn't match where they land, you're going to have high bounce rates and all of this kind of stuff.

So you're kind of like, yeah, pre qual or, you know, pre setting them up for the next phase.

Yeah, exactly. So, so Those are like the core elements that they all have to have. And then outside of that creativity, you know, we're just trying to be as creative we can and sprinkle on top of that, of that framework, basically. Yeah, there's a crap ton of ways to do that because I'm not like the mo. Like I have ideas, but I'm not like the creative. The part of my brain doesn't function as much.

You're more the framework it sounds like. Right.

Framework, strategic data numbers, you know what I'm saying? But having creative people on my team, like they be coming up with stuff that I could have never came up with.

Well, this is perfect because you have the constraints you're giving them. You're like, you got to. Because then, I mean, it's proven. You've proven it. Many people have, you know, and now you have the creatives just go to town. You're like, all right, work within the box.

Yep. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I let them work outside the box though. Cause sometimes, you know, I want to try. That's why we have, you know, our, our deals and side projects and things that we work on in companies that I got deals with and all this kind of stuff. Well, we have like full creative freedom. You know, when you're working with clients, you know, there's other stipulations that go along with, you know, having full creative control, right? Like, you know, they have different things with their brand or whatever, or no ad restrictions and things they can and can't say and you know, legal things. And they have attorneys that want to evaluate the scripts and, and look at the videos and all of this kind of stuff, right? But when we have like full creative control things that we work on, sometimes I just let them go do their thing because I've gotten the breakthroughs that way, right? I've gotten big breakthroughs by saying, you know, I trust that you guys know the process now, but don't be constrained by anything. Go do whatever you want to do. And if you feel good about it, we're going to put some money behind it. And it might not be but 200, $500 or a thousand dollar test or something like that, which, you know, you know, we are able to do that now. So I've gotten breakthroughs like that.

But that's a good size test still, right? YouTube, that's like a really substantial test.

Well, it depends on the product, right? Because I tell people, like, if you're selling a thousand dollar thing, you need a lot of create, you need a lot of Conversions to really dictate whether that, that creative is working for you or not. Because I can see plenty of times where I have a video with a 35% view rate and one with the 20% view rate. The cost per click is, you know, 75 cent. The other one is $2. Right. All of the other metrics are better. Yet the lower, higher click cost, one would outperform it like hands down. So you can't always make decisions purely on, you know, view rates and click through rates and all of this kind of stuff. Although we look at those numbers, you can't make decisions purely on that because our holistic approach is money in, money out at the end of the day.

Sure.

So when you selling a thousand dollar thing, if you're not spending three grand on a creative, you don't really know, you know what I'm saying, versus you selling a twenty, thirty dollar thing, you know, I could spend a thousand dollars is a huge, you know, test. Like that's a great test. Like I don't even think we probably need to spend that. We could probably spend 500 in that situation and know whether or not that creative is good. Maybe not even that much. Maybe we even spent 302 or 300. But when you sell them a thousand dollar thing, I can't spend a thousand dollars. And like I can make a decision, but that's, I'm guessing more than I am leaning on the data telling me the truth. And I would rather have statistical significance and make a decision off of that than me saying I feel like this one ain't gonna work. Right. Like I try to avoid those things. So that is the challenge with like the webinar funnels where they're selling the high priced, you know, thousand dollar, two thousand course type thing or whatever. Because that's the downside of it. You need so much money, more money on your creatives to really dictate. If you just looking at your registration cost. I got ads that are rent, like I was telling y', all, like when that was like nine bucks, when everything else is like five. And that's just like killing everything else. But traditional wisdom would be the $9 $1. Most people would be like, that's too high.

Right.

You know. Well, I mean in the grand scheme of things that may be true. But like when you're looking at a money in, money out and you got enough data to really make that decision, $9, I don't care because I'm making, I'm making way more money even though I'm paying way More, I guess that. And really, it's like that audience is just probably a really strong audience, and there's probably just a segment of the people in that audience that connect with their message, but when they connect with it, they, they are really, really about it. You know what I mean? So, so it'd be like this, it.

Sounds like this, this goes back to your very first transaction, the $33 or whatever it was, and you, I mean, you had to invest what you said something was like 3k or maybe it's more than that, but like, there you go. You would have never gotten to that point unless he invested that.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

So I'm curious about, about targeting one of the things. So we had Tom Breeze on maybe a year ago. I'm sure you're familiar with him. He, he, he was talking about, like, now that there's target CPA that you could just not put any targeting in there, set your target CPA and let YouTube just figure out who to put it in front of. Is that kind of your approach to targeting these days?

I have, I have ads running right now like that, just freaking wide open and the algorithm will find them.

Do you recommend sort of like newbies to YouTube testing that kind of thing, or is that sort of more of an advanced thing?

It really depends. I think if you have a low ticket or a legion.

Type of situation, you can play that game because, you know, it's, it's you, you have to have a healthy budget, in my opinion, to be able to play that game. But I wouldn't say it has to be healthy, really, because it's like, let's example, right? You got a 20 front end thing, right? I could go wide, I could go wide with something like that and know within a couple hundred bucks whether or not the algorithm gonna do the thing for me, you know what I'm saying, and shut that off like, so I could test, you know, 10, 10 or 20 different.

Audiences like that at five grand, you know what I'm saying? I, you know, if the offer is strong enough, we could probably find some, some bucket of, you know, some opportunity that would convert, whether it's a demographic level, a state level.

A DMA level, agenda, income, you know what I'm saying? Because you got all of these other kind of buckets within an audience too, right? Because I might be hitting like the beauty market, you know, but then there's like, you know, younger demographic or older demographic, you know, like these things like that, so I can know within, you know, not a whole lot of money. If that's gonna actually work for me, even if I don't have a large budget. But typically it's a large budget play, if you ask me. People who have the, I would say.

Confidence around what they're, you know what I mean? Like, it's like a lot of it is building your confidence up. And I think a lot of times people are, they're, they're afraid to do it because they don't have the, you know, which is kind of one of the things, you know, like working with people, like, like, it's like giving them like, me passing my confidence on to them. It's like, well, Tommy said it let me do that. But I think that's kind of where it is. I think it's one of those things where if you don't have a big budget and you, or you're a newbie or you're starting out or whatever the case may be, you know, it's, it's really rooted in, you know, your, your confidence in terms of what you're willing to do. And I think it's a game that they could play if they have the, the sort of risk tolerance level to kind of go at it that way, because more than likely you're gonna fail more doing that. Yeah, but.

You know, the, the game is, the game really at that level is, you know, I don't have to win as much because the upsides and the wins are so much greater than the downside and the losses. So if I had, let's say, you know, five grand and I bust that down to $250 times 20, and I got 20 opportunities, I mean, you know, if I hit four out of 20, the upside on those four versus the downside on the, on the 16.

Sure.

You know what I'm saying?

Right.

It's gonna be life changing.

Yeah.

Most people wouldn't be willing to lose 16 out of 20 times to find the home run in that. You know what I mean? So, yeah, it's you, you definitely got to have a level of, you know, it's a mindset thing, because I wouldn always like that. You know what I'm saying? It's definitely a master thing, but you just have to understand that I'm gonna fail less. But I'm looking for the upside that's unlimited and that's really, with that broad reach like that, when you get, when they hit, that thing can live for. I mean, you guys probably know if you've done this type of stuff, sure. Those are market, those are ads that can run Three, four, six months. Even at a time where you really ain't got to do that much to the them versus the ones where you're doing the little, you know, this and that and this and that, it's like a lot of management involved in that. But if you can go broader, you can manage a lot less. There's a lot less managers associated with the broad stuff. So that's one of the reasons why I like it too, because, you know, as, as a company running an agency and having people and expenses and things like that is like, you know, broad targeting stuff. It doesn't take us nearly as much to manage those accounts as it do the ones where we're managing. We're in there tweaking and plucking and pruning every single day because you have to be, we call it ROI driven because it's like this growth end of the spectrum and then there's like super ROI end of the spectrum. And the more we're at the end of the spectrum, the more management we're doing, the farther we are to the growth end of the spectrum, the less management we're doing. And so we try to find a healthy balance in there, but I think everybody, at the end of the day, they want to make money. Yeah, so we get that because we want to do that too. But the more growth focused they are, it gives us more capability to try things like that. It allows us to not have to be investing so much time and energy in managing of that. And the more people we got like that, the fewer people we need to hit our numbers and we can spend more time working on, in giving more, you know, attention to the people. Because I don't really want hundreds of clients or whatever the thing may be, you know, give me, you know, we want to get to like 20 really good, you know, kind of fit the mold of where we want to be at. And we can do really significant numbers like this. So, yeah, we're not there. We're working there, but that's kind of like. That's kind of like the broad angle of it. If I can. I like to play there, but it's not always the best, but you definitely got to have some risk tolerance.

Yeah. Have some balls.

I wanted to say big nuts and cojones, but.

So I'll say big nuts and Kahones.

That's right. Well, dude, talk about. We'll wrap this thing up since we're almost at the hour, but tell us a little about, about the agency, how people can find you and explore more.

Yeah, Right now, Tommy Traffic. So my name, Tommy with an ie. Traffic Calm. That's. Everything is kind of housed under that. We're in the process of rebranding. Re. Actually not even rebranding, really. It's like this creative thing is kind of taking a life of his own. So we're looking. We're. We're. We're establishing all of our stuff as we speak right now. And we're gonna be. We're gonna be rolling out this. Because I'm trying to kind of. I want to use the Tommy Traffic kind of personal thing, but eventually, I'm trying to transition. I want to build. You know, I'm trying to build a real organization, a company or actual. You know, and so we're gonna. We're gonna develop. We're gonna put all of that under the. Under the brand, the advertising agency, the creative agency. We're gonna house that under that. That umbrella. And so we're not there yet. But for now, Tommy Traffic is how you find me.

That's a cool name. You got one of Traffic. And I know Douglas, man.

I don't know if you guys know Run. We do, we do.

We don't have much. We haven't had him on the podcast yet, though.

We gotta get him on, man. Yeah, you're Run. Run, man. It's probably what, 20, 13, 14.

He called me that, and he said he got the idea from Johnny Football.

Running all over the sec.

Yeah.

You know, and I think we was talking about that, and he was talking crap. He was like, yeah, Texas A and M just came in sec. Running all over y'.

All.

Johnny Football. And then I knew him one time, he said the Tommy Traffic thing, and that's where you see he kind of got that idea from. And I was speaking at a conference, and I. I talked about. It was probably like three or 400 people. And I sit and I said this. That name. And people was like, oh, that's amazing. And I was like, well, damn, I guess I gotta go with that. So I kind of just ran with it. Love it.

Toby traffic. Remember traffic.com, man. Hey, man, let's wrap it up with, like, do you have a book or some kind of resource you just go back to often or you refer to other people?

The biggest one recent is the big leap, Hendricks. We end up developing a.

Genius zone exercise that I make all the people on my team actually go through. From that book. It was kind of from that book where we basically kind of finding the things that you're great at that you're really Passionate about that that you love. And then you're trying to, you know, put those in the. It's like a quadrant. Right. So you kind of got like, you know, x axis or Y axis. And on one end is like, love and hate, and on another end is strong and weak. And what we do is we have to write down all of the things that we do and then on the line, by every item or task that you do in a day, you have to determine do you love it or hate it. And you have to determine if you're good, good if you're weak or strong at it. And then you organize them into the proper quadrant. And anything that is in your Zen genius zone are the things that I'm trying to have them do. And anything that is the opposite of your genius on are the things that we're not. You're not doing.

Yeah.

And then everything else is a toss up between, you know, if you're strong at it but you don't like it, it's typically something you're good at teaching and training others. If you're weak at it but love it, that's probably an area where you can work on development, you know, personal development, skill development, and anything that you hate that you're weak at, you're not doing that. We don't need to be doing that at all. So that's been, like, huge for. It was, like, huge for me. And I was able to kind of bring it over to my team and even some companies that I consult with and whatnot. And it's been like. It's been a big, big deal. But I got that idea from that book, the Biggest leap.

Dude, I love that. It's such an easy exercise right there.

Easy exercise, man.

Yeah.

Really, really valuable exercise.

Thank you, man. Yeah, Big leave. It's a solid book, too. Yeah. Because it just, like takes your. You can just bust through a bunch of barriers that you thought you had.

But yeah, oldie but goodie is good to great. This is another one of my favorites. Just that whole flywheel concept.

Yeah, we were just talking about that a lot. Matt and I were. The flywheel, it's like spin that flywheel. It takes a while to. To push, but once that momentum's going, man, it's on.

And then the whole get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus quickly, that's been. That's been something that stuck in my mind all the time from. From that book.

So I gotta reread that one, man. Yeah.

And I probably got, you know, All Ogilvy. You kept talking about Ogilvy. I got some Ogilvy. I actually got some Ogilvy books.

There you go.

Some more Ogilvy books that I literally just.

Just got in the Amazon packaging.

All still King of Medicine Avenue. Ogilvy on advertising, but I got some more Ogilvy books over there as well, too. So.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I kind of, like, went down the ogre rabbit hole some years ago and kind of. I guess he kind of got off my radar for whatever reason. And my cousin is actually my creative director now. He works with me, and he got to talking, and I knew he did some stuff in the ad space or whatever, but he's a more tech creative type, you know, and so that's kind of how we ended up. I kind of ended up getting him to come on and working with me, and he was like, david Ogilvy. David. I was like, man, what you know about Ogilvy? He was like, what? And we went on there, like, this whole hour conversation about him.

Yeah.

And I was. You know, and that's what prompted me. He was like, man, you ain't got such and such and such, and you start rattling off all of his books. I was like, dude, I didn't even know you was into the. To that type of stuff. He was like, oh, man. Yeah. So I was like, yeah, I gotta go get them, too. I think I already ordered them, but I didn't. So I went and. So I went and bought them.

But I gotta brush up on some of that, too. It's that old wisdom, man. It's the time tested, you know, Like, I mentioned the whole thing. I think he was referencing six previous recessions and what to do in recess. It was Ogilvy on advertising. It's one of those books he got right there. So check that out. You'll see exactly what I was reading. It's good stuff.

Yeah, that's what's up.

Well, what works to sell people now is the same thing that works to sell people a hundred years ago, just different mediums. That's it. That's the only difference is the medium.

All right, Tommy, man, I appreciate you for doing this. Round two last time, but this one, right?

Hey, man, I'm excited. Like I told y' all before, I've been seeing y' all stuff for a while. I've. I've seen you guys around for a while, man. We just probably never crossed paths for whatever reason.

It's bad. Yeah. It's bound to happen, man. Yeah.

Tommytrapping.com. everybody go check it out.

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir. All right, man. See it.

All right, thanks.

Thanks so much for tuning into that episode. I hope you dug it. I know Joe and I dug it. I actually kicked Joe out of the room. He's not here right now. Because I wanted to tell you about a tool that I really, really dig. We use it in our business. We recommend it all the time. It's called Easy Webinar. And it's a tool that lets you do live webinars, automated webinars, hybrid webinars, and pretty much any other kind of webinar, if there are other kinds of webinars. But anyway, this tool is kind of like your all in one, do it all tool for anything webinar related. It's Easy Webinar. It's put out by a dude named Casey Zman. He's been on the podcast. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's a killer episode. He's a really smart dude, but his software is amazing. It does everything. It's, you know, the title tells you exactly what it does. It's an easy webinar platform, and we use this in our business to run automated webinars all the time. We don't do a lot of, of live webinars these days. We like to do the kind of automated webinars where somebody can register and then it, you know, they can either watch it like 15 minutes later or they can watch it the next day, but it's just kind of always running. And it's a system that helps us make autopilot sales off of our webinars. Super cool tool. If you haven't tried it yet, you know, it's, it's, it's an amazing tool, and Casey is actually hooking you up. He said for listeners of Hustle and Flowchart, I can't believe he's doing this, but he said for listeners of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, he's giving 25% off of the membership. To use Easy Webinar. It's already super, super inexpensive for what it does and all the cool features it has. But he's hooking you up with 25% off because you're a listener of Hustle and flowchart. Go to easywebinar.com hustle. That's where you can get that 25% off discount. That's easywebinar.com hustole. It's a awesome tool. You're gonna dig it. So just go grab it, check it out. Easywebinar.com hustle See ya. No, not see ya. You'll hear me in the next show. I don't know. I don't know how to close these things. Go get Easy Webinar. Talk to you later.

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