Vince Reed paid $2,000 to join a direct-sales opportunity, then lost $1,000 on his first Google Ads campaign. A $49/month mentorship taught him the difference between shopping keywords and buying keywords, the foundation of his later success.
$1,000
$2,000
$49/month
$1,000
December 24, 2022
So in the last episode, I shared with you how I found my very first mentor. And I realized I never shared with you his name. His name was actually. And the reason I joined him was because I saw his ads everywhere and, you know, I was clicking on them and didn't matter what direct sales company I looked up on Google. He was there getting these big awards, making a lot of money. And he promised me if I got started with him that he would teach me Google Ads. And he did. He taught me the basics, the very, very minimal basics. And that was find keywords that people are searching for. Basically put some money into a Google AdWords account and when people click on your ad, they'll go to your page and you'll make money. Come to find out, it wasn't that easy. I went to bed thinking I was going to wake up rich and said I woke up $1,000 poorer. So having to go share that story to my girlfriend, now my wife, wasn't fun. I had to tell her that I not only had invested $2,000 with this complete stranger where I had to send him the money, now I was down another thousand dollars that I didn't have. So I called him back and I asked him for help. I said, hey, you know, this didn't work. Ran these ads, the money's gone, what should I do? And that's where he then proceeded to share with me a story about an individual who'd made well over, at the time, over $20 million. I think by the time it was all said and done, he had made well over 50 to $100 million in digital marketing. So his system would allow you to build these landing pages. And a landing page is a one page website. Sometimes it has a video on it, sometimes it's just copy. And essentially it's designed to filter out people who aren't interested. So the end user puts their name and email in and you're able to build your list. And at the time when I had spent the $2,000 with joining this direct sales company, the way typically people would teach you to grow these companies was to talk to friends and family. And going back to my days at my very first apartment, I didn't like those people trying to get me to these hotel meetings. So the idea of learning how to run ads and, and build my own list and generate leads, it was important to me. Now, this new mentor that had this system, not only did the system allow you to build these pages, it had training inside of the system that was worth literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the cost of this entire system, it wasn't $2,000, it wasn't $1,000. It was literally $49 a month. And for me, I was like, man, what credit card can I get right now to sign up? I was so excited because I was broke at the time and there was no way he would have said this thing was 2,000 or 5,000. I would have been able to afford it. I got into this system and there were many nights that I would fall asleep at my computer just going through training. I mean, he had all types of marketing training. And this is before social media. So, you know, it was Google Ads, it was Yahoo ads, it was YouTube ads. And then back then, what was popular was these article sites where you could write articles and people would curate these articles on these, these sites. There was form marketing and forms are like when you go into little marketing forms and people asking questions, they would. He would teach you how to go into these forms and leave your link. And it was just all of these old strategies. There was a little bit of SEO type training on there. But the thing that I learned the most in that system was how wrong everybody else was when it came to advertising. What was cool was I was able to immediately see why the campaign where I lost $1,000 only lost me $1,000. Because had I had any other money in there, I would have lost that too. I was doomed and set up to fail from the very beginning. And this is an example of you really don't know what you don't know. So he taught me this concept that I still teach people today when it comes to marketing. And it's understanding the difference between shopping keywords and buying keywords. All right, so I want to explain this to you because if you're out there and you're trying to run ads online and you aren't seeing your funnel work and you're losing money and you feel like I did back then, it's likely because of what I'm going to share with you right now. What I'm going to share with you right now is it's priceless. When I joined and I joined that direct sales company, we were selling these $2,000 essentially like self help personal development CDs, right. Way overpriced. That's typically how these direct sales companies are. And people would pay 2,000, I would get a $1,000 commission. What you typically think about when you start marketing is how can I set up some ads and like drive traffic to people looking for ways to make money online or Internet marketing or build a business from home. These are what I call shopping keywords. It's what a person is searching for when they immediately start thinking about ways to make money. Now, if you really just think about it, it makes sense, right? Like, it's like, I have this thing that can help other people make money. Why not just put an ad in front of those people? Well, when you do that, you're getting other people that have no idea about the market. They're curious. Everything to them is probably a scam. And they probably aren't as crazy as me to send $2,000 to a stranger. So you lose. And that's exactly what I did. So I went in there, I went into Google and the company that give you this website. And there's another lesson in this. I drove traffic to the company website, which was just a generic website. When was the last time you just went to a generic website that you didn't know and just bought from it? Right. Typically doesn't happen unless someone told you about a product or service. So I was doing everything wrong. And I always think to myself, sometimes life is about luck because you can't really choose your. Your mentor. I fell into this mentor. I got lucky. I went online, found one person, he led me to the next guy. And it just so happened that this guy knew what he was doing. What if I would have found a mentor that would have taught me how to spam everyone or how to use illegal bots on the Internet and do some kind of scammy thing? That would have been what I knew. That would have been what I taught. So sometimes it's not about what you're doing, it's how you do.
