Understanding Marketing Strategy Lifecycles with Rich Schefren

Not about necessarily running out and being like an opportunity seeker, like, trying, like a million different things. Right. There's certainly a balance to it, and the principles of marketing never change. Right. Like why someone buys, what gets them to buy, et cetera. But the field of marketing online is there's just a lot, you know, a lot, a lot. Right. And the idea is, is that I think most people kind of look at things a little bit in a skewed way from the standpoint that they don't recognize that the greatest opportunity is generally early on. This is digital market.

Hey, everyone, this is Mark DeGrasse, the president of Digital Marketer, and this is the podcast that keeps you up to date on everything you need to know when it comes to digital marketing, from the platforms you'd be focused on to the kind of tactics and tools that are working today. Today our guest is Risch Sheffrin, the owner and founder of Strategic Profits. And today we're going to be talking about strategic life cycle. So basically, you know, which strategies work into marketing and kind of how they reach their peak and then they start to decline, and the adoption of these strategies and the competition that you find within them online. Welcome, Rich.

Excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Mark.

All right, so I love the concept we kind of talked about before we got started, how you have a life cycle that goes into each strategy where the early adopters are able to do less effort but still make lots of money. Before everybody kind of catches on to the trend, then everybody starts doing it, it gets really competitive. I love that concept because a lot of times at digital market, we're always looking for evergreen, but it seems like you seem to be on the cutting edge of what's new and what can work. So how did you kind of come up with that concept?

Well, you know, it's kind of interesting. You know, I. When I was coaching, you know, when I started coaching online, like early 2000s, right, I coached a lot of people like Ryan Dice and a bunch of others. And one of the things that made us different, all of us, the people that became Internet marketing gurus of any sort of, versus a lot of other people, were that we got online with direct response experience. Like, we had studied Dan Kennedy, we had studied Jay Abraham, we studied Gary Halpert. And this phenomenon that we're talking about as far as life cycles of marketing strategies and tactics, actually it also exists offline as well. So this is not like a new thing. In fact, I was first kind of made aware of it, I guess you could say Offline, right? Like when the Magalog, which is, you know, just another format to put a sales letter in that kind of looks like a magazine. When that was first invented in like the 80s, there was a huge breakthrough in response rates like they doubled, tripled, quadrupled. And copywriters like Clayton Makepeace, Gary Bensivenga and those types had their best years because there was this new format that really allowed the advertiser, you could say, or the marketer to get a few extra seconds of attention. And that made all the difference. Right. And so, you know, offline it was Magalogs, it was infomercials, it was all of those types of things, or direct fax and you know, all these different types of formats had their heyday and if you got on early, you, you thrived. And I'd say that the, for me, the first time I actually physically experienced it myself, not just like being told stories of direct marketing past the was when I was online for a few years. I was coaching and I was doing well for my clients, but I wasn't doing as well as I'd liked to for myself. And at that time I wasn't doing anything different than really anybody else in the space was, you know, we had our blog, we had our, we had our email list, our autoresponders, etc. Right. And I had this 12. Well, I had this three month window. I had just finished a coaching program and like a group coaching program. And I had a three month window until I was taking on a project with Agora where I was going to be working super for quite a few months on some project with them. And so I had this three month window and I didn't have any coaching clients and I was hoping to get maybe like a dozen clients that could kind of bridge the gap of the three months. So I wrote a report, free PDF. You'd say it was like one of the first lead magnets and hoping to get like a dozen clients and it ended up going viral and I ended up getting thousands and thousands of clients. And that was the first time I personally experienced trying something new, having it far eclipse my expectations. And I think that when we were talking offline, I mentioned that, that almost every marketer I know has had the experience of having a strategy or tactic far exceed what they hoped for or were expecting. And that's a good kind of signal that you're actually leveraging a strategy or tactic early in its inception. So for me, the first time was with the report. The first report was called the Internet Business manifesto. And it worked so well that for the next 18 months, that's all I did was just write free reports. And during that time we were the first to also live stream from a live event. Well, something that we talked about first, before I jump into the next one, is that, you know, with like the free report, which is I think a good example, we had two years where like my business was on fire because of it. That doesn't mean that we don't have free reports today. In my business we do. Right. We just don't expect it anymore to be anything that will actually drive the business forward. It's more like filling a hole. Right. And so most, most online businesses, like you don't need very many cutting edge early in its inception strategies or tactics, but you need a few. Everything else can be what everyone else is doing, what everybody knows. So like today, if I were to write a report, I would not have the same expectations that I did back in 2006. And we were the first to live stream back in 2007 from a live event. And we had 10,000 people show up, no advertising, just because it was the first live stream. And today if I got on a live stream on Facebook Live, I don't know what the number would mean, but I'm certain it would not be 10,000 people showing up. It would be a lot less. Right.

You got 100 people. Right.

Good. Yeah. So, you know, so live streaming also not a thing now, early in its inception, but probably the, the biggest experience I had with it myself was automated webinars, which I can talk to about in a second. But that was for me. But then for another company, for a client, it was Agora Publishing. And that was in 2007. John Benson invented the, the video sales letter VSL in 2006. He shared it with me in 2007 and I brought it to Agora. And Agora at that time was about $150,200,000,000 business. And the VSL, which at that time was just black type on a white slide. Right, that's it. There was no professional production that got agora. A 400% increase in conversion rates in the US, a 300% increase in conversion rates in France, a 250% increase in conversion rates in Germany. And so very quickly all the sales letters were copied and pasted into PowerPoint slides and done. And so Agora grew from 150 to 200 million to well past a billion that year, insanely enough. And in 2017, that style of VSL no longer brought any increase in response. Didn't decrease it either. But it was now just even with sales letters. Right. So from 2007 to 2017, you had this like explosive growth. I mean, it went down over time, but you know, and even when I brought it to Agora, if you think about it, Agora was one of the big giants even back then. They had great copywriters, they had great marketers, they had the best of the best and lots of roles. But it actually took this marketing strategy or tactic that was invented by some guy to share it with some other guy to then share it with them that like 5x the business practically overnight. And with the VSL, John taught about 15 copywriters that strategy back at Boardroom in 2009. And then he released the very first course on VSLs in 2010 and it was 3x VSL. I had a similar experience. Not with those kind of numbers, unfortunately, but when we reinvented the automated webinar in 2008 and I wrote a report on it, shared it with my clients. And back then, because it was new and most people assumed it was live, right, the registration rates were like 75, 80%. The show up rates were 80%, which now you're like, you're a home run king if you can get 50%. And the conversion rate was really high. And for years that also, I'd say for about four years, it gave us a huge advantage. We went from selling a couple backends a month to a couple a day and then even more per day. And so I kind of have had two lives online. I had a, from like 2000 till 2012 or 13, where I was coaching a lot. And a lot of the products that I had were on strategy and systems and more the business side of growing a business online. And then after the success of actually the automated webinar, I had like a midlife crisis because I had achieved everything I wanted to and now I wasn't happy. And so I went on this five year trek to find myself and. And I did. And when I came back and wanted to get back involved in online marketing, I ended up selling half my business to Agora and then worked inside the company for a couple years. And we actually launched this product, Steal Our Winners when I was in Agora and then I bought the company back. But the reason I did that is that I think that it's like something that most people are just not that familiar with, that there really is a time and moment where you can get explosive results, like asymmetric results from a strategy or tactic. And generally it's because. Not always, but generally it's because it buys you a few extra seconds of attention. And by buying you, you know, so anytime, like someone's surfing online and it gets. And something gets your attention, you should pay careful attention to that because that might be actually a signal that this is something new that actually is doing exactly that. And by exactly that, I mean outperforming to a significant degree what you're accustomed to because of this new strategy, this new tactic, this new way of kind of putting something together, right? And so we had at Agora, for example, Agora primarily in the finance, financial markets, right? And so, you know, there may be like 20 or 30 ways to make money and stock in this in the markets, right? And then that's it. Like, you're selling stock, you're buying stock, you're buying options, you're selling options, you're selling options, you don't own. You're. You know, there's just so many different ways, right? Well, at Agora, right? Like if you're sending out five offers a day, you're very quickly going to get to a prospect who has seen everything, right? And so one of the ways that copy is written at Agora is so that you kind of. It's either indirect or story lead so that the prospect can't mentally opt out by saying, this doesn't apply to me. Right? Like, that's kind of the idea behind the big idea and all the things that are like Agora type thing. So I've often been curious because I do believe that that's one of the hardest things to overcome. It's the reason I can look at my girlfriend's magazine and I can flip through the pages in about 30 seconds because none of the ads apply to me. And I know that. And so it's very. Like, I can just quickly. So getting past that is actually incredibly important, right? Like, getting a prospect kind of sucked in. So one of the strategies that I came up with based on that was. And it was actually based on a bunch of conversations I had with Jay Abraham. And I want to circle back to Jay because Jay has a great question that I think everyone can learn a lot from that I want to share, but Jay and I used to talk about, I wonder what kind of response we'd get if we sent an email to our list saying, with the subject line, do you trust me? And we asked them to just send us money and how many would send us money? And so we used to go back and Forth on that. We never did it, but I did it as an upsell on a live stream that we were selling. And it was the first upsell, and we called it the Mystery Box. And it was just me standing in front of the video with a box with a question mark asking people if they trusted me. And that in this box I had something easily worth a thousand dollars, but that I wanted to charge them $30. And that the whole purpose of this was to get people who trust me to be richly rewarded and those that don't trust me to regret not trusting me. And that when you get the box, you have 90 days to decide if I was telling you the truth. And if it wasn't worth $1,000, then just call and you'll get your money back. And like that we closed that converted 78% on a $30 product. Right. So it boosted AOV quite a bit, like 20. Some odd dollars, $23. But like, we've used that. We've used that. And I've seen a lot of my clients use that in all different formats as like an easy slack adjuster. And so that's like kind of something that's like a hybrid of kind of what we're talking about. It's not. That's a new. That's a. It's still novel. Most people haven't seen it. It's actually kind of a stupid question to ask people, which is why it's so effective, because they've already bought something, so of course they trust me. Like, it's a stupid question to ask that. Yeah. Then we already passed that. Right. Like, so, so, so of course it works, but that's not going to necessarily blow up a business. Like, you know, but it is something that will work really well until it doesn't. And it's kind of like hybrid in the sense that, yeah, it's not powerful enough to drive a whole business, but it certainly can take a loser, like a losing funnel that you might have to turn off and turn it into something that is better than a winner so that you can actually scale. Right. And so these kind of strategies work on a global level and on a small level.

So, no, I love the whole concept because I think this kind of evolutionary risk taking, like, that's kind of where I see it, because a lot of marketers, or especially new marketers, they don't understand that you don't hit it out of the ballpark, like your first up to bat, you know.

Right.

What you, what you need is, you know, kind of consistent, proven practices. To keep you in business. While you could take some of these risks to say, like, okay, this is working, but we're kind of stagnant, so let's go ahead and inject something new and see if it works or not. Hey everyone. I wanted to quickly interrupt the podcast for a special announcement. If you're listening to this podcast because you want to become a better marketer, then I want to share with you what I believe to be the most comprehensive digital marketing program on the market today. It's called the Digital Marketing Mastery Certification. You'll learn to leverage the tools and channels to predictably and profitably drive awareness, leads, sales and referrals. Everything you need to know to become a true master of digital marketing. We'll take an in depth look at the core digital marketing competencies, including content, email, social media, community, digital advertising, data and optimization, and more. After earning your digital marketing Strategist certificate, you'll have the tools to effectively reach your target audience through a full scope marketing strategy. Get started today@digitalmarketing.com strategysert. Have you found kind of a formula of kind of testing these concepts of say, the VSL or the live webinar? When you did did it, I'm sure it wasn't part of your normal practice, but then you decided like, hey, we're going to give this a shot.

Yeah. I mean, we were always testing different ideas, different strategies. Right. Like with the automated webinars, webinars already existed and we saw that those were doing well. Right. And so it was like, if we could have this run every hour, this would be a very good thing. Right. So, you know, from that standpoint. But I do agree with what you're saying overall too, because it's not about necessarily running out and being like an opportunity seeker, like trying like a million different things. Right. There's certainly a balance to it and the principles of marketing never change. Right. Like why someone buys, what gets them to buy, etc. But the field of marketing online is there's just a lot, a lot, a lot. And the idea is that I think most people kind of look at things a little bit in a skewed way from the standpoint that they don't recognize that the greatest opportunity is generally early on. So it's like someone right now might be on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, but they haven't yet gotten on TikTok. Right. Not recognizing that the only. Well, YouTube's a little bit of an anomaly, but like the likelihood of blowing up on Facebook and Instagram are way over at this point, like you're generally not going to go viral and blow up on those platforms. That was five or seven years ago. Right. And that the only places that you have a chance to blow up doesn't mean you shouldn't be on Instagram and Facebook. You should, right? But you recognize that it's the past, it's now past its peak point. So you're never going to like explode like maybe someone else in your industry did six years ago on Facebook, right? That's just not going to happen. But what you do need to understand is that if it's going to happen, you have a much higher chance of it happening right now on TikTok. Right. And that, that it's not about like getting on TikTok after it's all proven out and there's lots of courses, although there are lots of courses already now. But like the time to get on these platforms is early. And not like we were talking about like, not like an opportunity seeker where you're like, you're ignoring your business or the standard strategies or everything else, but you're looking for that one thing that just immediately produces. You know, a mentor of mine once said, and excuse me for cursing because he said it that way, never had anything shitty turn out to be a home run, right? Like, and there's a lot of truth to that, right? Like if you do a test and it's shit like, you know, you're not going to split test your way into a huge success off it, right? And, and I think a lot of people struggle online because they don't have, like, especially entrepreneurs, they don't have a strong enough advantage. And generally if you're not VC funded, right, then your advantage has to either come from your messaging or your marketing. And at the end of the day, some get it right with messaging, but that's, that's actually even more challenging, right? Versus, you know, leveraging a strategy or tactic at the right time. And you know, that is, that's the, that's what I've seen over the last 20 odd years, that, that's what it really provides some hyper growth. And then either the business owner doubles down and kind of kind of scales out their company by leveraging that advantage, or they don't and they just put a lot of money in their pocket because their business is all of a sudden a lot more profitable. But I was going to say that. So I've worked with Jay Abraham for about 20 years. He's like a surrogate dad to me. I learned marketing from him 30 years ago. So Jay and I are really close. And one thing that he does that I just think is really interesting and I think it's valuable for anyone, is that a lot of times when he calls, he doesn't say, how are you doing? Doesn't start out that way. He starts out with what's working? And if I'm having a bad day and I'm like, nothing's working, Jay. That's my day. Nothing's working. Right. He'll be like, who do you know that does have something working and what is it? And if you think about it, if you think about having a day where you talk to 20 or 30 entrepreneurs and you ask each person what's working, at the end of the day, you might know something that you didn't know at the beginning of the day, and it might be one of these strategies or tactics that's actually currently crushing it. Right? And so I just think that that's a really. That first question is wasted on most people anyway, right? Like, most people are just like, how's it going?

How are you doing?

Yeah. Nobody really. So what's working is just a great question to ask people, because if you're talking to a lot of digital marketers, generally most have something working, and generally people are excited to talk about it, because, you know, I certainly am much more excited to talk about what's working than what's not working.

Well, it's funny because before we started, I said, like, hey, what's. What's the hot topic for you? And I specifically asked that because I'm looking for. Actually, I don't even care if it's positive, and sometimes it's better if it's negative because I'm just trying to get a feel for the entire marketplace. So I just want to know what's interesting to you right now, mainly because you'll be passionate when you talk about it, but also because it shows some of those negative things that happen are like, well, guess what? I just talked to 20 people, and they're dealing with the same thing. How do you feel about it now then? You know, it's. It's all helpful. But I love that question. You know, what's working for you right now? Because a lot of people, you know, they want to prep. And. And the reason I don't prep you is specifically because I want to know the truth.

But.

But I love the entire concept because I think the quick question just on the process of this kind of, like, evolutionary identification of things that work, when you do have that big win, do you have a process of saying, okay, this thing crushed. It just blew everything out 10 times what we usually do on the same type of tactic. Do you have a process for actually scaling that tactic so you don't overuse it, or do you just go crazy on it and just try to implement as much as possible?

More the latter than the former? But, you know, it's funny because I remember. So, yeah, so Jay Abraham and Mark Ford, who is also goes by Michael Masterson, one of the co founders of Agora. These two guys have been my primary mentors in my life and almost both like surrogate dads, because I wasn't close with my own dad. So I think, like, as a young guy, I was looking for father figures to kind of take the place, right? Like, not necessarily consciously, but kind of unconsciously. And I remember when I brought the VSL to Mark, right? That's how I brought it to Agora. And that preceded me just educating him a lot about online marketing in general. So I remember, like, using. I think it was called Clicktale or Gazillion years ago. It's like lucky orange. Like, you could see videos of people actually on the screen. You could watch, like, your users, right? You're. You could actually, like, you could watch a video of each user and how they're interacting with your web page, right? And so I'd show him that because he was like, you know, if you've never seen that and you came from a direct offline, direct world, right? Seeing someone interact with the sales order is kind of interesting. How they scroll all the way to the bottom. They look at the price, they scroll up, then they stop at, like, testimonials. And they're kind of a very jagged experience, right? And so when I brought him the vsl, he was like, oh, this is gonna work, right? It was already working. We knew it was working anyway. But he was like, this is gonna work. He's like, because now we can take back control of the sales message, right? Because he was watching people scroll up and down and not linear go through the sales message. He's like, this will work because now we can take back control and bring people through a linear process. And he said this. We didn't follow it, but I, you know, but I think it was true. And I thought it was really smart. He said, what we really should do is we should start putting out content this way, too, so that the prospect never knows when they start watching this. Is it going to end in a sale or is it just content so that we keep them Longer. And I bet you hadn't we done that, it would have lasted a lot longer, you know. And, you know, I guess also the, the other thing that people ask me a lot is like, well, since we have this service where, you know, we publish two, two episodes a week, right, which kind of relies on a lot of people, right? Because, you know, obviously, no, no one person is going, is hitting winners, you know, unique winners and that often not even. Right? Yeah, but so why would people want to share it? And it's a good question. Because if you're in some small little niche that nobody knows, maybe you don't. But for me, for example, when we did the automated webinar, I wrote a report on it immediately because it's like a secret. Like that ain't going to last very long. So I might as well get the credit 10 years later or now 15 years later that I wrote that report. People saw that report, they know that I'm actually the guy that did it. You know, there's, you know, nothing ever lasts forever. And so you might as well get the street cred for sharing it, right? And, and so that's part of why.

You know, there's a whole nother altruistic side of it. You know, for me, on digital marketers, I'm like, man, yeah. I mean, for you, you're in a specific niche and, you know, you could help Joe down the street, which is like not, you know, doesn't have anything to do with your business, but you could super benefit from this. And so the altruistic side is that you could a lot more people, if you share this tactic before it reaches that kind of, you know, saturation stage of the tactic, and now everybody does and it's just kind of normal. And then the flip side, I love the, the career building aspect because if you do do something neat and you are able to produce a case study saying, hey, I produced this, here's how it worked, that's exactly what we try to do at, at our mastermind right now. It's called M3, but it was formerly War Room and then Boardroom and so and so forth. But yeah, it's all of that because if you're a professional marketer, you have something successful, then why not share it with more people so they could also benefit from it and now credit you as the person that taught them.

And so, and the idea just get better, you know, like I remember with us, the automated webinars, like, I shared it with Glenn Ledwell of Mind Valley. I'm not mindvalley mind something, but they were doing a lot of. I mean, I shared it with like, you know, Russell Brunson and Kern and a bunch of those guys. But I specifically remember when we shared it with Glenn, he did a ridiculous amount of testing. And so, you know, he was testing a lot of stuff that never even occurred to us. And then he was sharing that testing with us. So it made our process better. Right. And then when Mike Filsane. When I shared it with Mike Filsane, he really played with the registration page and was able to boost performance on the registration page by using a bunch of like, kind of web pages from like the CPA world, you know, the cost per acquisition, like, you know, world. And that made a difference. And so, yeah, you also get the benefit of other people taking your idea further and showing you like new flavors of it, new tweaks of it, et cetera. And I think that that's kind of critical. And I remember I did a, you know, it was funny, I'd say like, this is a long time ago, like maybe around 2007 as well. I remember I was like, there was this group of called the Financial Publishers Roundtable, and members were the street.com, motley Fool, Agora boardroom, et cetera. And they got together once a month. And generally they'd have someone like me come and talk for 15 minutes of the one hour. They got together like quarterly, in person, and like an hour a month, like on a, on a web, on a zoom call or something. And I remember I did one and we went from the standard 15 minutes. They decided to make the whole hour just strategies that because I was sharing a bunch of strategies, this is a long time ago. And I ended it with them by saying the reason they wanted to extend it is because I showed them strategy after strategy that they should be doing that if they were doing, they'd be making a lot more money. And it was stuff that was common as dirt in the Internet marketing world at that time. Right? Like, and I said at the end, I'm like, look guys, I honored that you extended my time and I hope I delivered you guys value, But I'm not hireable. I'm not looking for a job. So when I say this, I'm not saying it to invite any of you to contact me for it, but everything I've shared here is like, common as dirt in my industry. And one like 50,000 or $100,000 employee who lives and breathes this stuff like I do, right? As many people do, could be feeding your Team these kinds of strategies on a very continuous basis and it would mean an extra millions and millions of dollars for each and every one of you. And I'm kind of surprised that you don't have that already. Right. And I think it's about for today, like for entrepreneurs and marketers to just pay very careful attention to who they think are at like the cutting edge, who they see, whose campaigns they see scaling at a very large level. Right. Like when you first asked me like what I was excited about when we first got on, you know, before we started recording, I was telling you that I'm interviewing Peter Kell later today. And like that's something that I came across first, then I heard about it and was, have been fascinated about it ever since. Especially like when I looked at Vidtail, which is a competitive intelligence tool for YouTube because Mindvalley has used the sales letters written by Peter Kel. So they're video sales letters, but they're very different than the video sales letters like I brought to Agora, which, you know, were very low production. This is actually the opposite. This is very, very high production. You think you're watching a documentary for the first 30 minutes of a 40 minute video and the whole VSL, which looks like a documentary is actually on YouTube. So you're not running an ad bringing people to a website to watch a vsl, but the VSL is such high quality that you're actually just advertising that on YouTube. And one of them, like the Science of Luck I saw was advertised. They spent over $2 million over a period of few months on it and with over 40 million views. And they're a direct response advertiser. So they wouldn't be spending that money if it wasn't actually generating income. Right. And it ends with a price stack, a special offer look in the description for the link to the order page. And so that's something that I came across first, heard about it, saw how successful it was. Right. And now I want to learn more about it. It's not necessarily one that my company would use per se, but we might. And the only reason we wouldn't is that it's just really costly. Right. These are high productive ones. But that's an example that right now is just working really well. And you can see it, you can see it in the numbers. And that will work for some period of time until it doesn't. Right. Just like everything else.

You know, it's funny and it totally goes into that lifecycle that you're talking about because what we've seen over the last few years and when you were talking about the, you know, kind of original VSLs and all it was was the PowerPoint and blah blah, blah. Probably prior to that was more of this docu pitch type series where it was super produced and super over the top and you know, very professional and then it went into something. So I think that is just a cycle and what we see is kind of this downgrading like okay, well if it's kind of crummy production, then it's obviously authentic because it's just some guy or some, you know, gal that made this, this stuff, this VSL versus now where I think since we have had this evolution of tools where video editing is going to become child's play because of, you know, the AI tools that are coming out and even graphics and all these different elements that used to take a lot of time, a lot of effort are now going to be standard. Now you're going to see a return of this super high quality, professional grade, you know, pitches where if that's not the case then now people are going to start to say like, ah, well this is obviously a small company or obviously somebody who's not successful enough to make this level of production. So I think it's just like you're saying, it's just a cycle that goes back and forth and if you can stay up to date on the trends by talking to these people who are actually, you know, making the effort and trying lots of things and are scientifically testing and coming out with the case studies that you described, I think that's fantastic. And it's, it's part of the process and it's a good part of the process because sometimes you get kind of tired of poorly produced videos.

Well, it's amazing when you come across something that works right and all of a sudden like you see explosive like huge increases that you just would never expect, you know. And I'd say that on the like, on the side of video production that you're talking about, we've been playing a lot. Like my company's been playing around a lot with that. And what we found so far is that I'm friendly with the founder of the company. Hey, Gen is probably the best for video avatars right now. So they were Moviola, but now they're hey gen.com I think. And so we have like a video avatar of me that, that you know, speaks like me, looks like me, isn't me, but you know, all the above. And right now like the team uses it but they use it in like they'll cut to me for three seconds, then like either cut closer, cut somewhere else, cut somewhere else. So it's always moving, right? Because right now it's me, but like I'm not moving my hands. I'm just standing there like this, right? And so if it's just, you know, if it's this too long, a little bit weird, right? But I say we're like, probably. I'd say companies like, hey, gen are probably like six months away from having the whole thing just really dialed where you don't have to cut away. And that's pretty game changer. Oh yeah. Because it means that you can be creating video, creating offers, creating, et cetera, at scale with no friction, right? And that's pretty insane. And that's where it's all going, right? We just spent some time inside my company with a gentleman by the name of Sam woods, who's one of the leading AI guys out there. And he walked through in about an hour and a half how my team could create an automated process that really handles the work of about three people right now in our business, you know, because I do these episodes and from those episodes, right, there's obviously a transcript, there's a summary, but we also do like an action guide that's like step by step by step on how to do it, right. And we also create thumbnails, you know, for our platform, for the video. Right. And then we also are creating ads and emails and everything else and a trailer, et cetera. And so Sam walked us through basically how to have that all done 10 minutes after every interview is done. It's pretty amazing the leaps and bounds that are happening right now. And I guess with AI and stuff, I've been playing around with AI for a long time. I don't consider myself an AI expert by any stretch, but I also don't consider anyone who just learned about three months ago and now is a AI expert. It's a little bit sus. So I think people have to be educated consumers on like, who they're getting their knowledge from. Because, yeah, someone who's just selling a bunch of prompts, who's been selling AI stuff for a couple months, I'd kind of steer clear of those people and I'd look for people who are more substantial, at least to learn from. But yeah, I mean, AI is going to be a true game changer. I haven't gotten anyone yet to talk about this thing that I'm about to mention, but I look forward to the time when I can. In Israel, they're doing something called liquid funnels, which pull any unique identification from the visitor based on their device type, IP address, what have you, and actually build the funnel on the fly based on, you know, so we're talking about hyper personalization, different for every person based on pulling data about the visitor from wherever they're coming from. Yeah, that's, I mean the technology is already there for that. It's just a question of someone like figuring out, you know, certain parts of the elements of what's going to actually matter or not. Right.

And I think that's completely the future. You know, it's this kind of generative, hyper custom everything. Not just a video, not just a letter, not just an email, but the entire process is custom to an individual. And I think that's, that's inevitable. You know, the only reason we haven't done it to date because all marketers have always dreamed of having a custom funnel for every single user that comes on, is because programming was super expensive and the process would have been super cumbersome to put together and probably would cost million dollars to execute. Now with AI, not just the AI is doing a lot of generation, but the actual coding is going to be so much cheaper and the program is going to be so much cheaper that you can put something like that together. So. And I love the name liquid funnels, that thing that's fire right there.

And if you, if you think about the evolution of the Internet, it makes a lot of sense because I remember talking 20 years ago about the Internet people and getting them to get their head straight about the impact and how marketing is going to change and stuff. And one of the big things I used to talk about back then was when you write these reports about what's going to happen online, you think a lot about this kind of stuff, as I used to. And one of the big shifts that the Internet provided was like for the consumer was a shift from proximity to relevancy. So I'm 53 and I got really into biohacking, I guess about five years ago as my mortality became more real. And now I want to try and be my lifespan to be, or my health span to be as long as possible. And the, you know, if I'm like, you know, let's say I wanted to pick up boxing. If I wanted to pick up boxing like pre Internet, I'd have to go to my local like sporting goods store, buy whatever boxing gloves that they had available. Right. Versus like now I could go online and I could buy like boxing gloves for a 53 year old amateur who's never boxed, who doesn't know how to box, who has no rhythm, who will never professionally box. Right. Like there's probably special gloves for someone like me so that I don't hurt myself and it's much more relevant to who I am. And I'm not no longer constrained by proximity of just being able to go like only what's close by. And if you kind of think about that like the ultimate relevancy, right. Or something like a liquid funnel that is totally adapting to who you are. Right. And most people aren't aware of this. Right. But like your every ad that you come across on a website is kind of like a tracking device. It's one way of thinking about it. You know, the only way that retargeting works is that there's a call out that we have this visitor on this page, what's your bid? Right. And this visitor is usually a unique identifier, but there's a lot of data associated with that unique identifier for different companies like Google or Facebook or even some independent identity graphs. And so that data can be used to create those funnels. But there's a continual drive towards relevancy like what is most relevant to me as a consumer. And that's not going to change. And I think AI will be picking up more and more of the slack. But I would say that like there's still a need for artistry, greater need than ever. What I've seen so far, like right now at least none of the tools are good enough to make someone bad good, but can certainly make someone good great.

That's a great way to say it because I think, well, and who you talk to and the more information you intake and I think we'll definitely have to have you back on because you just have too much information for one episode. And it's been fantastic because I love this evolutionary process of marketing and, and we didn't talk about this and we don't really have time right now, but I think the cycle is getting faster because like you were saying, like, you know, that video tactic actually worked for 10 years before it kind of saturated the market, just kind of standard. But I think now it's going to be faster. It's going to be two years and that's going to be one year and there might be six months. So if you don't stay on top of it, you know you're going to be out of the game. Which leads to my next question. You have the. Would you say it was Steal Our Winners newsletter. Could you tell us about that? And kind of where people could stay.

On top of taxesprofits.com we published two new strategies or tactics each and every week. We have about 250 contributors. Kind of looks like Netflix and the goal of the platform is to share. Like there's a big difference between something that has worked versus something that's working right now and that we want to have a platform where we have the strategies that are working right now and delivered in a way that takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, as opposed to like when I go to Netflix, like, I get upset every time I see that. It's like part of like a four episode or five episode thing because now it's like a much bigger time commitment than just like one episode, right? So, you know, ours are like 30 to 60 minutes and it's basically okay, this was the challenge or this was the opportunity. This is what we did. Here are the results and now here are the steps to do exactly that. And yeah, and so that puts me in touch with people who are excited about what's currently working, like in their business right now. And you know, I did a presentation on AI about five or six years ago, and one of the things that stuck out for me. Well, there were two things that stuck out for me from that presentation because I do a lot of research when I'm present, you know, when I'm putting a presentation together. And one thing is, is that if you look at the changes of different eras, like different kind of hinges of history, where the technology of the era radically changed, whether it's like the Industrial revolution or the computing revolution or the Internet revolution, et cetera. If you look at the Industrial Revolution, Carnegie, Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, these weren't the guys that were building machines or experts in machines. They just knew how to build businesses that leveraged that new technology. And if you look at like the computer age, right, with gates and jobs, like they're, yeah, they had businesses that built computers, but they were not really computer builders. They really leveraged computing technology. And if you look at the people that got richest over the Internet, you know, Bezos and Zuckerberg and all these guys, they also did not build the Internet. So when you think about AI, it's great to learn the technology, but you should also be thinking about what businesses will be able to leverage this and how can I build a business that leverages this more than maybe someone else? That's where the real wealth comes from and stuff like that, as opposed to just mastering the technology and thinking that's the thing for sure. And there's no doubt that everything is accelerating and that proprietary data, which kind of got, I guess that was like the thing everyone was talking about. And then ChatGPT came on board and now everyone seems to have forgotten about that. But proprietary data is what drives AI. And so whoever has the better data actually will long term be at an advantage because if you have no data then you're just going to rely on the data of others and you won't have anything proprietary. So the idea is like where could proprietary knowledge be very valuable? To the point where maybe you develop your own GPT that has your own language model that has its own specific answers that no one else has? No, that's.

I actually made up a term for it. I call it organizational knowledge interface or oki, which is, you know, a single organizational database that drives your own AI that is proprietary to your company. So people have to come to you versus going to, you know, ChatGPT or Google or whatever. Yeah, but we could definitely talk a whole episode on AI. So we'll have to do that. But yeah, we'll, we'll have you back. I think this has been fantastic. I love what you're doing in terms of sharing, you know, these, these big hitters that, you know, like you said, like people think that since we're in marketing, everybody knows about this, but the more I kind of get out to other industries, the more I realize like, yeah, only 14% of Americans have used AI at all. Like the stuff that we're doing at marketing is actually way advanced and we are on the cutting edge and if we take advantage of that right now, then you could be the next big guys, you know, because it's not about the inventors. Because I always go back to Nikola Tesla where it's like, oh, he invented WI Fi and he did all this crazy advances that we're using today. But he wasn't a businessman and so that's why he wasn't, you know, the, you know, big business people that we talk about, the Carnegie's and you know, Rockefellers and all that stuff. It's no, he didn't know how to leverage it as a business and as a marketer because all the people you mentioned, I consider marketers because they don't know how to do anything. But that's fantastic. Good to have you back on the show if you're interested. And where could people find out more about you in the meantime?

Yeah, best to go to probably either strategicprofits.com I have my own website, but it's kind of just a placeholder with some information. And that's richsheffrin.com. yeah, that's pretty much the two places you can opt onto our list. I think we have trial programs of Steal Our Winners if people want to try it out. And yeah, I'd love to come back though. I mean, I think of my job these days. I work generally Mondays and Fridays on Steal our Winners, which allows me to just stand in my office here and talk to people who are excited because they just discovered something that's working really well for them and they're teaching it to me. So, like, I love Mondays and Fridays because it's like, it's awesome. And then on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, generally I'm working with my private clients. And more often than not, I'm leveraging everything I've learned about what works to help my private clients grow. And so I created CLR Winners kind of as a resource for other people, but also for myself to kind of can always stay plugged in into what's working. And I'd be happy to come back anytime and where we could just talk about what were some of the best episodes of the last quarter for me, like, you know, because there are some that as soon as they're done, like, I'm not waiting because, you know, we're generally published like a couple of weeks out. But as soon as they're done, I'm sending it to some of my peers because I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. You should watch this. This is intense. And so, yeah, I would imagine those would be the ones that I'd probably be most excited to share here and I'd be glad to do it.

Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, Quarterly kind of update on the top. That'd be fantastic. Because, you know, here at Digital Marketer, we're trying to leverage kind of these evergreen strategies so that especially new marketers could come on and they could get a leg up before they have to realize how hard marketing is. But what you're talking about is that next level. How do you stay on top of the biggest trends and how do you get on board sooner than everybody else so you could get your clients or your businesses that advantage. And I think you do a fantastic job putting that information together. So thank you so much for coming on.

My pleasure. This is digital marketing.

Get ready for the two easiest ways for you to generate product photos for your e commerce store. I'm Lauren Petrulo Founder and CEO of Mongoose Media and Digital Marketer Academy Faculty member I've managed over 50,000 SKUs for over 100 different e commerce sites and I cannot tell you the importance of quality product photos. Not only are they important for your website, but they're great to be repurposed in your email marketing campaigns, your paid ad initiatives and your organic social media content. It's imperative that you have great photos because great photos sell your products and start conversations with with your consumers. There are two great solutions when seeking out quality product photos for your e commerce site.1. UGC we know that native user generated content wins all day on social when you can get your customers to share back their use of your products in their voice in their personal applications, you will see dividends when that is repurposed in your paid ads and organic social feeds. Secondly, don't have customers or UGC yet. Not a problem. There are cost effective solutions in which you can outsource that photography. This and so much more is covered in my modules in our ecommerce cert with Digital Marketer.