Digital Marketer Discovers Tiny Little Ads - The DM Clips

Colorado was crazy. It was fun. And there's a lot of lessons that I learned there that I think helped me in business today. I remember when I was in high school, before I got to college, I had a coach in high school, and he would say, vince, you need to work harder in practice. I had really just got by on natural instincts. I was pretty fast, pretty athletic. I wasn't the fastest. I wasn't the biggest or strongest, but I was pretty smart. My dad and I would watch film a lot, even when I was playing Pop Warner, but I didn't have the, like, go hard every single time, bust my butt every single time. I really just relied on athletic ability, and I had coaches that would tell me that. And the first practice that I had in college, I recognized that I should have listened to those. Those coaches, because that is something that you can't turn on the first practice. I remember there was this kid, we were running sprints, and never before in sports had anyone ever just, like, beat me in sprints. You know, I had come close, and maybe someone beat me by nose, but this kid was, like, way out in front, and I was sprinting, and he looked like he was jogging. And that's when I knew that there was a different level. And to this day, in business, I always have the same mentality that no one is ever going to outwork me. Long story short, got injured in college, but I remember towards the end of my college career, when I knew that football wasn't going to be my thing, I started to think about what my life was going to be like. I was like, I don't want to go back home and be this athlete that's working at the gas station or the grocery store. And everyone was like, man, do you remember that kid? When he played sports? He was pretty good. So I started thinking about, you know, life after football. I started thinking about the conversations I would have with my dad where he would say, hey, you know, you don't have to have football to be successful. You know, you could use your brain to be successful. And at the time I would get mad, I would think he didn't think I was good enough to play at the next level. But he would say, I didn't play professional sports. I was a good athlete, and I made it in business, and so can you. And I started to have these conversations in my head, and I started thinking about, you know, what's next. So one night I'm laying there and I'm not playing football anymore. This is, like, right before graduation, and I see this, like, late night infomercial, and it's this guy named Don lapree.

The second way to make money that I stumbled onto was placing tiny classified ads in the newspaper. If you create and test one tiny classified ad in the newspaper, that makes just 30 to $40 profit in a week. It could make you a fortune.

Now, I don't know if you know who Don lapre is, but he had this little late night infomercial, and it was like, if you place these tiny little ads in newspapers, and if you put them in all these different newspapers and you sell stuff, you can make all this money. And this was the first time I was really exposed to, like, marketing or being an entrepreneur. I just knew that I wanted to make money and I wanted to be successful, and I didn't know how, so I bought that. That was like the first time I bought something and watched, like, a sales process and I got the package and I was so excited. I was like, I'm gonna be rich. And I was going through it, and it was the first time, like, I saw people, like, doing different up sales. I remember you had to call this number and this person had to sell me this other thing. I was a broke college kid. I didn't have enough money. But that was the first time I, like, learned or heard the idea of advertising. And. And I think, you know, even to this day, being that, you know, I wrote the book Internet Trafficking Leads, I know that, you know, had, you know, some type of impact on me. Even though Don LaPree ended up going to jail for defrauding people, in fact, sad news, he actually killed himself in jail. I do want to thank him because he taught me how to run some ads. But rest in peace. So my days at Colorado were coming to an end, and it was time for me to move back home. And my brother, God rest his soul, he passed away several years ago. He flew out to my graduation, and I drove back with him, and he basically said, hey, man, why don't you move with me and, you know, start your life? And I was like, all right, cool. So my brother flies out, I drive back from Colorado, back to California. He lived in Inglewood, and it's like going back from, you know, going to college, kind of going back to the hood. He lived in the hood. But the good hood, those of you who are from LA know what I'm talking about. You live kind of close to the stadium. So depending on those of you who know how Los Angeles is, you could go one block over and be in a rough neighborhood and go the other block over and be in the nicest neighborhood ever. So anyways, where he lived was kind of in the middle. But I remember when I moved back with him, there would be these like, these little gang member kids that like lived next door and they were like, who is this little square kid? So I would like in the beginning I'd go on interviews and I'd have like, you know, back then clothes were a lot baggier. So I'd have like this baggy pants on and like this like long sleeve button up shirt with this big old tie. And I'd go on these interviews and nobody would hire me and it was, it was pretty depressing.