Everything You Need To Know For Cracking The Code To Effective Marketing

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest is going to help all of us take our businesses to the next level. But before I talk to our guests, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host, Six Sigma. You know him, you love him. Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com and most importantly, if you're not automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings, go to postingdomination.com thelandgeek Scott Todd. How are you?

Mark? I'm great. How are you?

Pulse is normal, respiration is fine. Not drinking the best cup of coffee I've ever had, but it's okay.

Is that Panera Bread by chance?

I don't talk about.

Looks like it could be Panera Bread. I'm not sure though.

It's not. Look, look, I have standards, Scott. Not drinking Panera Bread coffee.

Okay, Let me, let me tell you, I get a lot of flack over this whole Panera Bread thing and I have to do a lot of unwinding and convince people that I don't really go to Panera Bread. And for that purpose, though, I think, Mark, because of how, like, how much we talk about Panera Bread, I'm just waiting for them to sponsor this podcast and maybe our guests could give us some tips on marketing to them.

I think that's a great segue into our guest, Fazeel moussa from the leveragedvantage.com if you don't know about Fazil, he is a CEO, cereal entrepreneur, marketer and trainer. He is the accounts and brand director of the Leverage Group and he addresses audiences internationally. In fact, right now he's international. Fazil, where are you located right now?

Today I am in Singapore, but I've only spent like four days in Singapore this month. I've been all over the place. Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Bali over the last month or so.

I think these are all really good places to hang out. Maybe not Kuala Lumpur, but the rest of them sound amazing. But anyways, expertise is to help companies design, develop and deploy strategies to take their businesses or companies to the next level. Fazeel, welcome to the podcast. Let's just kind of rewind the tape and tell us how you became serial entrepreneur and this, this marketing genius.

That's a really great question. I don't. Well, I kind of decided very, very early on in life. Like When I was 17, I started my first business. That was a long time ago. And what I did was I made custom audio CDs. In a time where you couldn't customize your music experience. Right. So basically, back then, if you wanted to buy. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to buy either an album where you heard like 13 songs from the same artist, or a compilation where you had absolutely no control over what you could listen to. So I created a superior product and I sold it. And I was still in high school and I was making 30, 40, sometimes $50 a day.

Wow. Wow. So from that experience, you then did what?

Right now I'm 35 this year. Right. So I've been in business 17, 18 years now. And the thing is, I didn't get the opportunity to learn about business from my parents. They're both employees. So it took me maybe 10 years, almost a decade to learn by trial and error exactly what I needed to do to build a profitable business. I mean, my businesses were always profitable. I always started with $0 down. That's what I learned from reading Rich Dad, Poor Debt. But I never really got to crack six figures until maybe five years ago. Five years ago. And that's when I actually hired a mentor. And he showed me all the blind spots I had. And he showed me exactly what I was doing wrong, exactly what I needed to do what? To crack six figures. And then we went on to do seven, you know, to do more than a million dollars a year together.

So, Scott, Todd, are you thinking what I'm thinking?

I'm thinking he's going to tell us what the blind spots were.

Exactly. So what were the blind spots? Because I'm sure your blind spots are probably the same blind spot I have.

Well, so here's the thing. I'll tell you a story. When I met my mentor, you know, he wanted to come to Asia. He was already very established. His name is Christopher Duncan. You can go and. You can go and search him. Christophermduncan.com Right. And I met him. He was huge in Australia. He was huge in New Zealand, and he wanted to come to Singapore. So many people wanted to partner up with him, but he chose to partner up with me. And I was so grateful. Now, in two and a half weeks, we put on an event and we filled it up with people. There were exactly 42 people in our event. And we walked away at the end of the day with $46,000. Now, before that, I hadn't made $46,000 in one day or two and a half weeks, right? And he showed me exactly what I needed to do online to fill a room. And he showed me exactly what I needed to say to these people to get them to take action. Now, the things that he taught me back then was he was really holding my hand every step of the way. But as I was learning that, it got me understanding the concepts and the structure, especially communication structure, in order to get people to take action or to do what you want them to do. Really? I mean, have you ever wished that you could say the right words in the right sequence in the right way to get people to do anything you want them to do?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I asked Scott Todd for relationship advice all the time with my wife. So, you know, and he's like, dude, I don't know. He's like, you know, he's a pilot. So he's like, I just flew my wife to lunch. That seemed to really help. But, like, I don't have that. So what, you know, so is, is there a structure that we can use that would make us super persuasive for the clients and relationships in our lives that we can help get our way, so to speak?

Well, there are some basic principles that we've got to keep in mind. I think a lot of people, when they're communicating, they're always thinking about themselves. They're always thinking about, what can I get from this person? And this is not new. I think a lot of people know that the most interesting radio station for most people is what's in it for me, right? Wwifm. And so that's the first thing you want to. That's the first thing you want to keep in mind when we're talking to somebody else. What is in it for them? And here's the thing. Let's talk about businesses for a while. A lot of businesses are talking about how great their solution is, how great their product is. And they don't realize that nobody really cares how great your product or service is until they know what problem it solves and that they have that problem. So the first thing that we always do in effective marketing is it's always about making your target market aware that they have a problem, because if they don't have a problem, they don't need you. So we're always going about educating people what their problem is. Once they know they have a problem, they're going to look for a solution. So the next thing we do is, I don't tell them that I'm their solution. And this is the really trippy part. I love this part because it's so hypnotic. What I do next is I teach them how to select the right product. So I tell them what an ideal solution looks like and I tell them this is what you need to look out for in an ideal solution. And only then later on I tell them what my solution is and coincidentally, it looks exactly like what I told them they need to look out for. That's so trippy. And it works so well.

Interesting. Scott, Todd, thoughts?

Okay, so look, we sell land, right? Like that's our deal. And you know, I always say that there's four reasons why people buy land. One, they need a place to live.

Today.

They want a homestead there, they want to live there. Eventually they want it for recreation or they want it for a long term investment.

Okay?

So it really goes back to not necessarily the problem that they have. It's more of like want. Most people that are buying my product don't necessarily have a problem. They have wants. So how do I tell them, hey, you actually have this one and I can fulfill you, help you fulfill it.

But perhaps what we can do is we can reframe that into a problem, right? So the people that are buying land say for investment purposes, the problem they want to solve is extra cash flow, whether it's for retirement. In marketing, right, the first thing we want to do is we always want to be extreme. We want to be specific, very specific about our target market. If you look at all the people that bought land from you, right, and you look at the demographics, who, which of them carries the biggest proportion? Are they primarily young professionals, primarily mid career professionals, are they primarily retirees? And then we want to focus on that and find more of them. Because the people that are buying land as young professionals and the people that are buying land as retirees are doing it for completely different reasons. So probably the young professionals looking for a piece of land which he could potentially build, build a house on, build a home on, and maybe the retiree could be looking to build a home, but they're probably also looking for some kind of investment, right? So what I would do is I think every want can be reframed into a problem that you can solve. Because here's the thing, I feel if you want to get somebody to take action, I'll give you an example, right? Do you normally buy painkillers or do you buy vitamins or which one has more urgency?

Painkillers.

Painkillers, right? Because you're feeling the pain, you want to resolve that fast. And so if they're not feeling the Pain. If we can't make them feel a future pain now, then we can't get them to take action. So even though we look at it as they have wants, like they want a piece of land or they want an investment, that want is there to fulfill a specific purpose or to fill a specific void or to solve a very specific problem. Okay. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Good. What is some of the worst advice you see or hear given your area of expertise?

Oh, my God. One of the things that really, really irks me when it comes to marketing businesses, especially small and medium enterprises like you, fnb, mom and pop shops. And there's so many of these marketing experts and gurus, they just go to them and they say, here's how you're gonna solve your problem. Right? How you're gonna solve your problem is we're gonna run Facebook ads for you that's gonna get traffic and that's gonna get people into your shop. Or they go to them and say, here, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do some search engine marketing, we're gonna pay Google some money and we're gonna get traffic. People are gonna see your shop and then they're gonna come in or they say, go and do some search with. That is all this is very tactical and it only solves one problem. That problem is traffic. Right now, when we go to companies, we take a very strategic view to it, and traffic is just one part of the solution. And the worst advice is that all they need is traffic. Because what that then does is you're just giving them a steering wheel or you're just giving them an axle. You're just giving them a wheel and you're not building them the whole car. And just the wheel, just the steering wheel, just the axle is not going to do anything for them. And that's also the reason why so many small and medium enterprises that engage these fly by night marketers, they say, oh, you know what? Online marketing doesn't work. You know why online marketing doesn't work for you? Because you engage somebody who doesn't know how to work online marketing.

Yeah, that, that does make sense. Because they're ignoring the fundamentals, which is what you alluded to before, which is what is your target market? What is the pain? How do you solve that pain? You could have all the traffic in the world, but if you're not addressing those fundamental issues, well, you're just wasting your money.

Exactly.

Yeah. So what do you believe is normal or wise or cool that other people think is just crazy.

Here's the thing that I do that everybody thinks is so weird, right? Every client, every single client that we take on, the first thing, regardless of what they get from us after that, the first thing we always tell them to do is go and do market research. We will do your market research for you. And we don't. And we don't interview 500 people. 200 people, 100 people, 20, 30 people, actually, we only interview five people because all we're looking for is our language patterns, and that's all we use. The only thing we use from the target market interviews are the language patterns. Because here's the thing, a lot of people don't, and it's only five people, and every single one of them has to do it. The craziest thing that I see is that almost every company that we speak to haven't done their market research. And I'm even talking about multimillion dollar companies. They're grinding. They're pushing it by sheer force of will. They're making a million dollars, $2 million a year, but they haven't done their market research. And so they're completely clueless as to how to scale their business further. Wow.

But only five people, Scott. Todd, what do you think of that?

So am I recording these sessions? Am I to get the language pattern? Am I, what am I, what am I doing? Like, I get. I get five people in a room, I get five people individually. What does that look like?

All right, so I'm gonna break it down for you. You guys can use this for yourself. Your listeners can use it as well. So what we do is obviously we build what is known as a target avatar. And we only need five people to do this, right? There are very specific set of questions that we ask, but very, very specifically, here's what we're looking for. We want to know what their one biggest fear is. So when somebody's buying land, you need to know what their biggest fear is. And then the next thing we need is we need to know what their three biggest frustrations are, right? And then we need to know what their one biggest aspiration is and their three unmet needs. Okay, so those, those, that's, that's really a lot of the psychography also, what is their self identity, meaning what do they say after they say I am? And then of course, we need to know what their demographic is, their names, I mean, their gender, their age, what their, their jobs are, and how much money they make every year. And just interviewing these five people, what we're Looking for is not statistical significance. What we're looking for are language patterns. What are some of the phrases that these five people use that overlap? Right. And from there, that's what we use to build our marketing copy. Their biggest fear, their three biggest frustrations, their one aspiration, their three unmet needs, and their self and their identity. Their self identity.

Genius. Genius. I love it. I love it. And you know, if you're, you know, if you're looking at like beginning copywriting courses, a lot of this is not addressed, right? They'll, they'll kind of skim the surface of this, but this is really getting to the heart of the matter. And then from there, the copy kind of just writes itself in a way. But if you talk to any advanced copywriter, they'll tell you 85% of their job is what physio just mentioned is the research. That's it. Scott, Todd, what are your thoughts?

I think that's why copywriters make so much money.

So, you know, a good copywriter writes good copy, but a great copywriter writes copy. That sounds like you.

Exactly. And you know what, A lot of the marketing that we do, like a lot of the work that we do just comes from that, just comes from that one document. Like you said, the copyrights itself. If you can find five people and you can find the patterns among them, if you can get them to answer those questions, you can find other people that are just like them.

All right, fantastic. So, Fazil, I'm going to put your business back to zero. Okay. I'm going to start over again. And what would then be your very first step in going from zero to a million? What's the very first thing that you would take action on?

So do I have, do I have my knowledge or do I start from complete zero?

You have your knowledge, but you're, you've got to start over. What's the first thing you're going to do?

Geez, the first, the first thing I'm going to do is I wouldn't go into consulting. You know, I wouldn't go into building a huge company. And. Well, that's not what I would do at the start, right? So the first thing I would do is I would find 10 people, 10 people who run businesses that are making anywhere between a million to $2 million, that want to grow to 5 or 10 million. Right. And I will take them on as one on one clients. So these people would ideally have their own marketing team. Right. And so all I would do with them is I would do strategy I would coach them on strategy. I coach them and show them exactly what their marketing team needs to do. And I would charge them anywhere between 10 or $15,000 a month, right? And they have 24 hour access to me. I do that for a year. Then I would have, after expenses in taxes, maybe about a million, $2 million, a million or so. And then I start over from there.

Scott Todd, not a bad strategy.

And look, living in Bali or wherever you are, man, it's like cheaper living over there, right? I mean, compared to, for Pete's sake, Mark, he missed the best part, which is I'm gonna move the Bali first.

Ex.

So it's unfair. It's just unfair. That's phenomenal.

We could get one day.

It's easy. It's easy. Guys like, well, you know, I live in Singapore, at least that's where my mailing address is. And Singapore, you know, is probably one of the most expensive places in the world to live right outside of, say, London, New York, Tokyo, Sydney. But I'm so fortunate that I'm surrounded by these, by these beautiful paradise cities and beaches all, you know, all over Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, just all within two hours. So if I'm in the information business, it's easy, it's great, it's great.

Fazeel, what are some of your most gifted or recommended books?

I have a very specific set of books that I, that I give to any one of my students, right. So I always tell them the first book you're going to need to read and you read it in two days or one, right. Is Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Especially if they have zero experience in business, zero experience in personal development. I tell them the first book you're going to read is Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I know a lot of people say, you know, you've got to read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I love that book, but it didn't have that much of an impact on me. And then so the second book I always get them to read is how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Right. And you could just change the title and call it Life and it would still apply. How to Influence and Influence People. There's a reason why that's one of the best selling books in history. The third book I get them to read is Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. The fourth book I get them to.

Read would be T Harv Eker.

T Harve Ecker. T Harv Eker, exactly. That's the one. And that book also changed my life. And from that book, I attended his programs, I did quite a number of his seminars. I met a lot of amazing people. It got me started on this personal development journey. The fourth book would be Jack Canfield's 25 Success Principles Just so you get your head straight. And the fifth book would be how to Talk to Anyone by Leal Loans. And just these five books would form like the core of your non formal education. If you want to get like bonus credits, you go read Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and then that'll get you through Middle School of Personal development.

All right, Fantastic. Fantastic. Scott. Todd, any other questions for Fazil before we go to the tip of the week?

No, I don't think so.

All right, well, Fazil, now we're going to put you on the spot and ask you for your tip of the week website or resource, maybe even another book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives. What do you got?

My tip of the week is whatever you want to do, you got to find your point B. Right? If you want to be a superstar investor, then go and find a superstar investor and do whatever it takes. Whether it's begging, whether it's working, whether it's paying, do whatever it takes to get them to mentor you. Because, you know, I don't want to belabor the point, but I think this is really important, right? If you want to get to the other end of the woods and it's pitch black, it's completely dark, there's no moonlight, right? There are two ways to do it. The first way is you're going to walk around by trial and error. You could fall into a snake pit, you could step on a bear trap, you could hit your head on a hornet's nest and it'll take you a long time to get to the other side. The other way is to find somebody who's already taken that path multiple times and get them to hold your hand and say, hey, step to the left, there's a bear trap on there. There's a bear trap to your right. You know, step to your right, there's a snake pit on your left. You know, bend down a little bit, there's a hornet's nest above you and you get over to the other side much faster. So you know, if you want to be kick ass investor, you know your point B or your the person that will mentor you may not necessarily be Warren Buffett or George Soros. It should be somebody who's successful in that field that you have access to or is close to the fringes of access. So you can. So you do whatever it takes to get there. That's. That's my biggest tip.

I love it. I love it.

And we didn't even pay him for that tip.

I know. I mean, we are the land investing Sherpas. And oftentimes people, for whatever reason, they're afraid of having us as a mentor. I'm not sure why necessarily, but I think it just. What's the saying? When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears.

When the student is ready, the master. Here's the thing, right? I think the reason why people are afraid to perhaps approach you guys as mentors is because they think in their minds, it's more painful to come to you and get you to mentor them. Whether it's because there are fees involved, it's because there was work involved. But then here's a bonus tip, right? You either you pay with your time or you pay with your money, but it's never free. You want to do it yourself. You. Maybe you don't have to pay money for a mentor, but you're gonna pay with your time. And to me, time is so much more valuable than money. When your time is gone, you can't buy it back. When your money's gone, you can earn it back. So I'd rather. And here's the thing I learned for rich people is this. If they have the choice between spending their money and spending their time, they'd spend their money any day. So that's what. If anybody wants to learn, if anybody wants to get to where they want to be faster, spend that money, get a mentor, and save your time.

Yeah, I mean, you're definitely, you know, preaching to the choir here, because I say the exact same things all the time. Like, I've gotten to the point now with my time, like, I won't even looking for a parking spot. I will valet instead of looking for a spot for five minutes.

Exactly.

I mean, it's crazy. So, Scott, Todd, your tip of the week. Mark.

I have a quote today, and I think it. Hopefully it hits home with everybody, okay. Because here it is. Don't compare your beginning to someone else's middle. You know, the problem is that a lot of people are like, they're not at the same pace. Like, they're not at the same pace as where you are or where I am or if you. Where everybody else is, right. And they want to look. And like, I was talking to someone the other day, and they said, oh, Man, I don't feel like I'm doing well because I heard on a Mastermind call that so. And so did five properties in one day. Sold five properties in one day. And I'm like, well, that's cool for him, but what he's not telling you is that he may have gone through a period where he didn't sell anything. So, you know, like, you're looking at the snapshot. You're not looking at, like, the whole story. So don't judge your success by other people. And you always say, like, you know, comparisons is the thief of happiness. The reality is, is that, you know, you could be just in the beginning stages of something great. So don't worry about anybody else. Just stay your. Stay in your lane, stay in your pace.

No, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it kind of takes the joy out of the journey when you're constantly comparing yourself to somebody else. Right. I used to joke when it was like, 2010 and I was going through a hard time and, you know, 50% of my income went down, and I would say to my wife, I'm like, we need to get poorer friends because, you know, you know, my friends are, you know, doctors or lawyers, and, you know, they were affected, but they weren't affected like I was. And so I would. I would, you know, I joked her, like, you know, I'll feel better about myself if we can just do that. But ultimately, it's an internal metric that you've got to work for and focus on. And I think that's one of the great things about your flight school, Scott, is that it's a group activity, and you make it like, here's your accountability. We're doing this together. We're all starting in the same place. And if you just follow this recipe, you're gonna. You're gonna make this beautiful passive income cake. So just do it. And then. Then you make them do it. And the accountability piece and the execution pieces is really, I think, priceless. So I, you know, that's. It's. It's. It's a tremendous gift. So my tip of the week is gonna be learn more about Fazil and how he can take your business to the next level. Go to the leverageadvantage.com theleverageadvantage.com and his mentorship. This podcast has been tremendous, but there's always more to learn. Go to theleverageadvantage.com and we'll have a link to his site as well. I want to remind the listeners that the only way, the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like a physio Musa is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got a rate, and you got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of the review to support@thelantic.com we are going to send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit course for free. So please do that. And I might even throw a book in there as well. What do you think about that, Scott Todd, the dirt rich book?

I think you have a dirt rich book that you can give away.

I should just give it away. I'll give it away. So leave us a review. Get the book fair deal. There you go. I want to thank all the listeners and just remind everybody, let.

Freedom ring.

There it is. Let freedom ring. Thanks, everybody.