Success By 18—Why Limits Are All In The Mindset, Not Your Age

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land Geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and before we talk to today's guest, whom I'm really excited to talk about because he is truly a young aspiring. You get to. You'll get to. When you listen to this podcast, you're like, well, I knew him when kind of story. Um, I'm very excited about it. Our first teenage podcast guest. But before we talk to Mark Ghiberti, I do want to plug away and just remind everybody that today's podcast is sponsored by loangeek IO. I remember when I'd spent Sundays mainly putting into my spreadsheets and trying to figure out my amortization all my notes. But now it is all automated notifications, amortizations. Want to make a prepayment? No problem. You can always make more money. You can't get more time. Learn more at Loan Geek IO the simplest way to get paid. Also, if you haven't downloaded our passive income blueprint, go do that@thelandgeek.com get our ebook how to avoid the three fatal land buying Mistakes. And of course, get this always interesting and engaging podcast delivered each week to your email inbox. And unfortunately, Scott Todd is unavailable for today's podcast. He had a personal issue. But I get to talk to Mark Ghiberti all by myself. Mark Ghiberty, welcome to the Art of Passive Income podcast. If you don't know who Mark is, he's a teenage entrepreneur, digital marketing expert and author. Mark publishes multiple blog posts every week on his digital marketing blog, tweets every 15 minutes to over 275,000 Twitter followers, and publishes two YouTube videos every week. Mark writes one book every month, and those books can be about getting more Kindle sales, social media, blogging, or something else. Don't let his youth fool you. Mark Emeriti, how are you?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on the show.

Mark, the word I'm looking for is prolific. So tell me like how you got started and you became like this prolific superhero. What's your origin story?

Well, I got started as an 11 year old and I didn't really think about where this would all lead. I just did this for a hobby, which was to write a blog about the Boston Reds because I don't know how much you know about baseball, but being a Red Sox fan in New York, very near the Bronx, that's a lot of. It's very interesting to be in that situation. So the web was My way of connecting with other Red Sox fans, because I couldn't do that in New York, so I got more comfortable with writing content. I developed a love for it, and that love for writing content resulted in me pursuing social media, learning how to do that. And. And then I just thought, I want to empower people with the knowledge so that they can get better results on social media. They can get more blog traffic, all these things. So that's basically my origin story. It all started with a blog about the Boston Red Sox.

Unbelievable. So what are your. What do your parents think about all this? Because I assume you're in school.

Yep, I'm still in school. They're very impressed by it. They've supported me throughout the entire journey. So very appreciative of everything that they've been able to do. I mean, without them, a lot of my journey is not even possible. So I'm just very appreciative of all that support.

What do your parents do?

My mom is a nutritionist, and my dad works at a critical place that produces a lot of food. He's not an entrepreneur now, but he did have an entrepreneurial background, selling hot dogs, and he had a good business with that.

Okay, so there's entrepreneurial.

Now.

How about the grandparents?

The grandparents, they also did a lot of work, and they had the entrepreneurial flair as well. My grandma started a company, so there's definitely a lot of entrepreneurial background in this family. We're not afraid to, like, if we have a dream, to go after it with all of our intensity.

So, you know, to be this prolific.

Right.

Takes a lot of time management skills because, you know, kind of walk us through your day.

All right, so do you want me to walk through a weekend or a school day? Because those are two very different things.

Let's walk through the day that you're going to be writing on your blog. You're going to be making YouTube video, you're going to be tweeting. You're going to be, you know, producing content.

So the first thing I do is I assess all the things that I have to do. So on weekdays, that would be school and practice on weekdays. I mean, on weekends, it would just be practices. So I identify all those types of things I have to do, and then the night before each day starts. Like my day. Like today, for instance, started the night before because I write down everything I have to do the following day, and I identify when I'm going to do it, and then I wake up tomorrow knowing exactly what I must do. So I Identify how many blog posts I have to write, which YouTube videos I have to get started on, which of my books needs more attention. So by identifying all these types of things in advance, it makes it easier for me to delegate my time towards those activities. And in the case of, like, other things that are in my business, there are some things that we do that they're necessary for the business, but we really don't want to do them. They're more like maintenance type of work. I'll outsource that work to my freelancers and that makes it easier for me to focus on the work that is my best work. And this is all based on. Have you heard of Pareto's principle?

I love Pareto's principle, absolutely.

All right, you've heard this a lot. For first time listeners, I'm honored to say it. 80% of your results are going to come from 20% of your work. But the other side of the coin is one that doesn't really get talked about. It's that 20% of your results are going to come from 80% of your work. So most of your work is only producing 20% of the results. So that's the type of work that I outsource. So I could focus more on that small amount of work that's going to yield the greatest results in terms of sales and brand reach.

Now, how did you identify that?

Basically what I did was I looked at all the work that I do. I looked at everything from scheduling tweets to how books and training courses were performing. And after I looked at everything I did, I basically looked for important areas so sales, subscribers, traffic. And if something was doing really good for me and I really enjoyed doing the work, I continued that route. If something it was necessary for me to do for the survival of my business, but it didn't really get massive results and I didn't enjoy doing it. That's what I slowly started to outsource. So, like creating pictures. I mean, sometimes I enjoy creating pictures for my blogs, but most of the time I just rather be given the pictures. I just feel like that's easier for me and I enjoy writing the content more than I enjoy like the polishing up phase where you've got to add pictures and do all that other stuff.

Now from a passive income, you know, look at this. Now I'll make an argument. Nothing's really passive, right? But books can be passive because once you write the book and you put it on your marketing channels, Amazon probably being the top one, right? You're probably getting this Recurring income every single day. How does that. I mean, is that how that works, or do you think about it like that? Like, how do you think about the passive income piece of this?

I really think that passive income, like, you're still putting in the work to make it happen. It's just that after you put in this work and you get it in front of enough people, you can actually make money in your sleep. That's the whole idea. Because, I mean, there is nothing better than. I mean, there are probably things better, but, like, waking up realizing you made more money while you were sleeping, it's a really cool feeling. But with the Kindle books, it's like, when you finish one, you got to immediately start writing the next one. And even when you've published a book, there are going to be some moments when you have to update that book. So think about Facebook ads and how much that can change in just a month. If you have a book from 2013 on Facebook ads, it could have been a best seller three years ago, but now it's completely out of date. So you have to either update that exact file or you have to come out with a second edition. So it's not like you put the book on Amazon and then you forget about it forever. There's still, like you said, to do the marketing on your own, and you may have to occasionally update it to get more sales.

Now to have 275,000 Twitter followers, right. I assume these aren't all, like, high school girls.

No, no wishes. But at the same time, I know my target audience, and I'm very happy that they enjoy my content.

I mean, that's a lot of Twitter followers. So if we're gonna break down your marketing channels, break them down for me and let me know, you know, where the majority like. From the Pareto principle perspective, where is your best marketing channel and why?

My best marketing channel, without question, is Twitter, because I decided very early that that was going to be the social network I just focused all of my time and effort on. And the reason I did that was because I created all these social media accounts, but I was very mediocre at a bunch of different social networks as compared to being a master at one of them. So I decided to focus my time on Twitter, and you can see that because I have a large amount of Twitter followers. But I think my second closest social network to that total is Pinterest, where I have, like 40,000 followers. So there's a big gap in between, but that's just a reflection of how much time I focused on Twitter in comparison to all the other platforms out there. I'm sure that if I focus my time on another platform, I would say that that platform is my best one. It's just that I chose to invest more time in Twitter than in any other social network.

Makes sense. Makes sense. Are you doing any kind of paid advertising?

I slowly tested that out with Facebook. I got a lot of likes from it. So I'm happy in terms of like page growth in 2017, I'm going to jump more into the lead generation because, I mean, we're all Facebook users and we. I'm pretty sure we've seen the ad from someone with a free ebook or free video. So that really entices me and I've heard a lot of great promise about it. And my brother's trying to get me to do Facebook ads so much. But yeah, so that's what I'm going to start doing in 2017. I don't really do much paid social advertising right now, but it's going to change very soon.

So being so young and so precocious as an entrepreneur. Right. How has that helped you and how has that hurt you and what types of things have you done to, you know, conquer the objection of, hey, why should I listen to a 11 year old or a 14 year old or now an almost 19 year old?

Well, at the beginning it was like that where I was sort of like I was just an 8th grader or a 9th grader or whatever I was when I was like first started me and I was 11, but I still got this going into like 8th and 9th grade. And they were like, oh, he's just this. He's just that I didn't really care about what people thought because I was more focused on creating my destiny as compared to having someone write the script for me. So it was more of a mindset thing and I just focused on creating a lot of valuable content. And as I continued to create valuable content more consistently, I continued to share it. People are thinking, wow, this team's got some value, he's got something to offer. And that's when people started to visit my blog more. And I gradually grew my brand to what it is now.

You know what's so interesting about that, Mark, is that what you said really resonates with me. And I think for a lot of people, it's something that it's hard to wrap your arms around when you first get started is you didn't care about the results. You just cared about putting stuff out there and Creating valuable content. That's what your focus was, was the effort of creating an amazing, you know, blog or, you know, an amazing ebook or whatever it was that you were producing, you could care less how the market reacted to you or what they thought.

Right, Exactly. I mean, I was focused on creating the content, and I'm not going to act like I was the best writer. If you look at my first blog post, a lot of them are really bad because I was just getting used to the phase of writing all these blog posts, and I had to change my niche, actually, because I actually. I'm not sure how many people know this about me, but I actually had a Yu Gi oh blog that was getting like 300 daily visitors. And I shifted from that to entrepreneurship, digital marketing, which is what people know from me now. So it was a niche shift and continuing to write content. So they were bad in the beginning, but by writing every single day, and there was a point where I was writing two blog posts per day, that's when I got really good at writing content and providing the value that my audience wants.

So, you know, I remember being kind of a precocious kid and I loved business. I had, you know, like a lemonade stand, a cookie business, and, you know, I'd go door to door and I was, you know, and do all these things. And then, you know, I started, you know, I was the corsage guy in high school, if you wanted to corsage, like, I had 80% of that business. Right. So was there something about, you know, what. What was the motivation? Like, you know, a lot of people say, like, one of my favorite Simon Sinek talks is start with why, right? And then everything kind of goes from there. Like, so, Mark, what's your why? Like, what motivates you to continue creating all this content?

The motivation for me to continue what I do. It's a combination of different things. First off, I developed a love for doing what I do, and I saw that people were benefiting from what I offered. So it was a mix of me finding my true passion and people benefiting and getting a lot of value from what I actually offered. So when you're able to do something you enjoy and part of that job description, I mean, I feel kind of awkward calling it a job, but, like, job description is, like, to help others. That's something that, I mean, that's all the motivation you really need. That desire to just continue to create content is going to eventually come automatic as you do it every day while keeping those other thoughts in your mind.

Can you tell me a story about how you help somebody with what you do.

A lot of it is more specifically like comments I'll get and people who mention me on Twitter saying, thank you for sharing that content. So I don't have a specific story right from my head, but there's just a lot of instances where people will thank me for sharing content and thank me for providing this great value.

So what have you really taken away? Like, what have been some of the lessons you've learned through your entrepreneurial journey?

I believe the biggest one is that there are no limits to success, not even age. And a lot of people say that it's never too late to start. I like to also say it's never too early to start. And all the limits that we create for ourselves, like, oh, I can't be successful because of X, Y and Z. They're all really self imposed limits. Every limit is nothing more than a self imposed limit. And I know some people may be listening to this thinking, oh, but you don't understand what I'm dealing with. I got to do all these different things. But in the reality, like complaining about it isn't going to make it better. And, and no matter what obstacles in front of you, your ability to overcome or get overtaken is dependent on how you view that obstacle. Yeah.

And Mark, you are busy. I mean, it's not like, like I've got three kids and a mortgage, right? Like, I've got real stress. But it's not like you don't have that in a way. I mean, you have, you have parental pressure of having to get good grades. You got to be at school on time, you got to do homework, and then somehow you got probably outside activities besides just your business managing a lot of things. I would say the argument of, well, okay, he's young, he doesn't have the kind of pressure I have. I would actually say you do have a lot of pressure. I mean, do you, do you feel that or am I saying you too much? What do you think?

I don't actually, to be honest, feel the pressure. But like when I write down all the things I do, I'll be like, oh my goodness, that's a lot. Because it's basically everything you mentioned. But I also run for my college team, so I do cross country and track and field. So there are a lot of different things that I do as part of, like when I'm in college and then my business. And there are a lot of things I do in that as well. So I feel like if you constructed A list of everything that I do. And it's not just for me. It's for everyone. Like, it's easy to stress when you look at this giant list of everything that you have to do. But the stress is, like, whether you stress or not, it's all based on how you view the work. I love all the work that I do. I enjoy running, I enjoy interacting my friends. I enjoy every part of the entrepreneurial process that I've been a part of. So when you really enjoy your life and enjoy what you're doing, you can't really view it as a stressful situation, because even though it's a lot of work thrown at you, you enjoy doing all of it.

Yeah. Now, you got a podcast, is that right, Mark?

Yes, I do. The Breakthrough Success Podcast.

The Breakthrough Success Podcast. How's that going?

That's going pretty good for me. Basically, that one's just about people who've been successful and how they reach that level of success. I've had a lot of great guests share their wisdom, and it's great for the listeners because they learn from the guests. That's like your listeners are now. But it's great for me as the interviewer, because you learn a lot of things from interviewing all these different people. So it's a win, win, win for me, the guests, and for the audience.

No, absolutely. I mean, I tell this to everybody. This, you know, my podcast is my most selfish endeavor. Like, I would do this no matter what. Like, I'm just endlessly curious about other people and how they go about their lives and their businesses and what they do. Who's been your favorite guest so far.

Hands down, has to be Seth Godin, because he was a critical role model for me throughout my entrepreneurial journey. So one of the companies he created was called skwidoo, and it basically allowed you to create free websites and get paid from them as an affiliate and do Google AdSense. And that was my first moment of making revenue. And I just got really thrilled by Seth Godin. I read his content, like, every day at a certain point, and I've read, like, six or seven of his books. I don't know the exact number I've read, but basically, I admired him before I even interviewed him. And the fact that he agreed to do the interview is really awesome.

Yeah, I mean, he's a really hard guy to get, and I think that that says a lot. Right? Like, he probably went on your Twitter page. He's like, holy cow, it's got a real following, which is. It's amazing. I would love to get Seth Godin on this podcast. And I could almost guarantee unless I did something just absolutely nutty, there's no way he would come on my podcast. Just because he's just, you know, he's so big and so busy that unless I was like, a Mark Gooberdi With 275,000 Twitter followers, it's just not worth his time. Right. And the two of you have a lot in common as far as being an author. So I'm sure that I have to listen to that podcast. I'm sure it was amazing. How was he? Was he like, holy cow. Did he know how young you were?

Yeah, he knew. We actually met earlier at an event, so that was part of it. He knew who I was going into it. But during the interview, he says things that, like, you really have to take some time and, like, about what he's saying, because he's saying some really profound stuff that it isn't communicated in the same way that most people communicate it. And then it's just like, when you, like, realize it, you're like, oh, my gosh, that was insane. I mean, like, I'm gonna have to listen to the episode a few times because he said some really insightful stuff that. I mean, it's very hard to find that level of insight in, like, a typical blog post or a video or anything of that nature. I mean, you know, you probably looked at a lot of his work.

No, he's one of my favorites. Absolutely. I've got his books. He's phenomenal. So, Mark, I know you're a big reader, right? And I was just looking at one of your blog posts, like how to 10x reading your books and how you read, you know, 10 plus books every month, you know. So what books are you reading right now? What's really resonating with you?

Well, I haven't read it for a while, but I feel like every time like some conversation like this gets brought up, you always have to mention think and grow Rich. Because I feel like that's a true classic. And even though it was written so long ago, it's still relevant today. But in terms of what books I've read recently, because for basically 90% of my Christmas list consisted of books. So I read Seth Godin's book what to Do when it's yous Turn, and it's Always yous Turn, I read that one Recently. I've also been reading more books about, like, specific areas I'm trying to master. So I read two books about getting more Kindle Sales. I have a book that I'm reading next about content marketing. So my advice for the books is to only read the books that provide knowledge about that particular area in your life that you're trying to master. Next.

I love it. I love it. All right, Mark, well, I'm going to put you on the spot now and I'm going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

Okay, so my resource that I'm going to mention is hootsuite and it's basically a well known tool that allows you to schedule a bunch of social media posts. I like to use hootsuite Pro because they give you the bulk upload option. So if you put all of your tweets in a CSV file, they're pre written, of course you can schedule them in just six clicks. So that's how I'm able to send out over a hundred tweets each day. I don't manually schedule them because then I'd have no time to do anything else. But by using hootsuite Pro and in particular the bulk upload, that is much easier for me. And also hootsuite has a dashboard that makes it very easy for you to be productive on social media. There's no trending topics, nothing to get really distracted about. And you can filter the dashboard so that you only see the type of content that you want to see, like people asking you questions, people engaging with you, instead of just random stuff that happens on social media.

I love it. I love it. Now hootsuite's expensive though, isn't it?

The way that like I use it for like 9.99amonth because I mean $9.99 a month, not like 999. But I believe they moved it up recently to $15 a month for Hootsuite Pro. They recently changed their price there, but I feel like it's a very affordable investment. And if you take social media and scheduling posts seriously, hootsuite Pro is going to be your best resource.

Alright, fantastic. I'm using Meet Edgar. Maybe I should revisit hootsuite.

Yeah, I like hootsuite a lot. There are a lot of great ones. The key is just to find the one that you're the most comfortable with. And for me, hootsuite has a special place in my heart so that's why I continue using it. And it's a great tool.

I love it. I love it. So my tip of the week is going to be learn more about mark guberti@markgooberti.com I'll have a link to his site and other things like that, his Twitter and his podcast and everything like that. So, Mark, are we good? You are by far the youngest podcast and I've had some young, some young people on, like in their 20s. Like I think that's young. But you're by far the only teenager so far to come on the podcast. And I've got three podcasts and you're the first, so very, very impressive. Are we good?

Yeah, we're good.

Is there anything that I should have asked you? I didn't ask.

No, you did a really great job. It was a pleasure to be here.

Alright, well, I want to thank you. I want to thank all the listeners and learn more about Mark Mark. And please do me a favor, right? The only way, the only way I'm going to get the quality of guests like Amarc Guberdi to come on this podcast is if you just take three seconds and subscribe, rate and review the podcast. Send me a screenshot of the review. I'm gonna send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit free. So please do that. Go to thelandgeek.com don't forget about loangeek IO and again, I want to thank all of you and I want to thank Mark Ghiberti. All right, let freedom ring. Thanks, everybody.