Doberman Dan ([00:00]):
In this video, I’m going to share three lessons that should, number one, help you feel better, and number two, help you make more money. So let’s get right into it. I think I would call this segment, don’t be a dumb ass like Doberman Dan. Here’s what I’m talking about. The video, the brand new video I released the other day for this new YouTube channel, and now this video, I encountered so much resistance just doing these. It’s insane. It was all resistance that I created. I had all kinds of excuses not to do it. I even told my girlfriend like, yeah, YouTube is a channel for young, good looking people. I’m neither of those things. I don’t look good anymore. I felt like I looked much better prior to May 22nd. I’ve been training like a semipro athlete for a year and a half, and I had achieved 172 pounds of muscle mass on a very small five foot six frame, 10% body fat, six pack abs.
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All that stuff looked better than I did in high school. Was leaner than I even was in high school, and had achieved something that most guys never achieve, period. Certainly hardly any 59-year-old guys achieve it. And even the young muscle heads in the gym, the guys in their thirties would say, Hey Dan, it looks like you’re down to single digit body fat now. I’m like, nah, I’m just at 10%. But I was pretty happy with the way I looked. And then I had a widow maker heart attack. They call it the widow maker because it’s the heart attack that the person has no idea whatsoever that they’re sick or they have any kind of heart disease. The first sign that there’s heart disease is the widow maker heart attack, which kills you instantly. And as one cardiologist said, you could be hooked up to an EKG, be in the cardiac ICU, be surrounded by doctors and nurses, have a widow maker heart attack, and you still going to die.
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And that’s the heart attack I had May 22nd in the gym, and I’m not sure if you know it or not, but I didn’t die. I survived it somehow that nobody understands, but I lost my physique, so that was a big excuse. I don’t want to go on camera, not looking good. People don’t want to hear from me. They don’t want to hear from an old person. Everything I talk about is irrelevant anymore. People will want to hear about sexy, new, exciting, online marketing stuff. They don’t want to hear about old school, the tried and true old school stuff, the persuasion stuff, the copywriting stuff, and they certainly don’t want to hear about the offline stuff. All kinds of excuses, every single excuse I could think of. And it stopped me.
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And then finally I decided, you know what? I’m just going to ready, fire, aim this, and I just did it. And I want these videos to be good. I want ’em to be better. I know there are audio issues. I know they don’t look good. I know I’m not good on camera. That’s why I’m a writer. I’m not a speaker. I want ’em to be good. I want the editing to be good. I want cool stuff to be happening. I want it to be entertaining and funny. I’m none of those things, but it’s the ready, fire, aim approach. Every single project I’ve started in business or otherwise, I’ve started with that approach because I don’t know any other approach. Maybe there are other ones, but I just know about getting started. Everything with that first video I did was wrong. Probably everything I’m doing with this one is all wrong.
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I don’t know how to do anything. I don’t know how to do keywords. I don’t know how to name the videos correctly. The audio needs to be improved. I understand all that stuff. But everything that I’ve ever done that just got started was started with the ready, fire, aim approach, throw a bunch of mud against the wall and see what sticks. And you know what? A lot of those led to failures, but you know what? Some of them succeeded to a certain extent. And of those, a few succeeded in a big way. It’s the only way I know to get started. And here’s the interesting thing, once you start that way, you just feel better and it’s instantaneous because you did something. And it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong, keep doing it too. Keep doing it all wrong as a matter of fact. And that leads to figuring out how to do it right.
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So that’s lesson number one. Lesson number two, in 2004, I started a nutritional supplement business under great financial Duress. Won’t bore you with the details, but a gig I had with Gary Halbert, which was supposed to be a long-term thing, and that was supposed to be my income fell apart. And so here I was in Miami and a brand new place, no income. So I identified a really hot product in the bodybuilding market at the time, found a supplier, started selling it. It was successful, initially launched it, this is back in the day, launched it online with Overture. This is the Google AdWords. Wasn’t even around over at your PPC. And then later when Google AdWords was an option, I started using Google AdWords and the business grew and I started and I used other media. I used what I call a fusion approach. I was using online and offline media.
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So I had ads in the magazines, in the bodybuilding magazines. I was doing Google AdWord and i’s doing some other online advertising. But one day I looked at the numbers, I looked at Google A Words, and I realized like, oh man, my ROI on Google A words is the highest. I’m getting an immediate ROI. I’m making money on the front end. That’s a whole nother topic for another time. You don’t want to make money on the front end, but whatever. Again, this is don’t be a dumb ass like Doberman Dan. So I thought, okay, so I got all these other channels that I’m getting a lesser ROI from. First of all, it’s a miracle that I was making money on the front end, but I didn’t know any better. So I think, oh, I’m getting a lesser ROI from these other channels, so I’m going to stop running them and I’m going to take all that money and just channel it into Google Web words, getting the highest RO, I guess that kind of makes sense in a way.
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But it was stupid. It was stupid on steroids because what I did is I took a multi-channel business and turned it into a one channel business and a one-legged stool is like the most unstable thing there is. And that’s exactly what I had. I was too much of a dumb ass to know it at the time. But I learned the lesson the hard way. And what happened is, I don’t remember the details of it, but everybody remembers Google Slap. That’s what happened. Google just all of a sudden just started canceling accounts of small players. We’ll address that in third lesson. So all of a sudden, my only channel for customer acquisition was taken away overnight. Stupid, stupid, stupid. For all intents and purposes, I was out of business at that point. I had taken a multi-channel business, turned it into a single channel business, and then that one channel was taken away.
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What I should have done when it was multi-channel is average out all those channels. Okay? My ROI from Google, is this my ROI from the magazines? Is this my ROI from this other online channel? Is this averages out and okay, on average, I’m paying X cost per acquisition per customer. It all averages out and keep running them all. Then if I really wanted to be smart, I should have expanded into other channels and average them all out. And I should have expanded into channels where actually I was at break even on customer acquisition and then expanded even further to channels where I was going negative, where I was paying in one channel. Perhaps I had to pay $80 cost per acquisition to get a $40 sale. Why would I do that? Well, the other channels that I was actually getting an immediate ROI on, which by the way is damn near impossible to do nowadays.
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It would average it all out. So I’d have all these different channels equal stability, but no, I was a dumbass. And that leads to my third lesson. In this third lesson, you’re going to find out that most online marketers are today dumb asses. Like I was actually what? Be much kinder to yourself than I’ve been to myself in the past, or I say in the past, just in the present, calling myself a dumb ass in the present. You know what? Don’t do that. Let’s reframe that, right? Let’s say you don’t know what you don’t know. So you’re making some decisions that are probably not smart for your business simply because you don’t know. Here’s what I’m talking about. Most market, I think we can say, most marketers these days, and many business owners are one channel. One channel marketers. They’ve allowed their business to become dependent upon one channel, and that is the internet.
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Alright, let’s look at the internet as one channel. Granted, there are a lot of advertising channels available. There’s a lot of different media choices online, but when it comes down to it, it’s just one single channel. And now let me tell you what happens with media. And we’ve got tons of historical precedence. This always happens. It’s happened in every offline, medium, radio, TV, magazine, space ads. When there’s a new medium, it’s open to everybody. It’s open to us little guys, small business owners, medium business owners, and the big players. But what eventually happens is essence, the small and medium business owners get shoved out in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. But mostly it’s because it’s much more profitable for the advertising channel just to accept business from the big players, from the Fortune 500. So it happens time and time again. It is happening right now with the internet. That is why so many small business owners and medium business owners are having so many challenges is because we are getting shoved out. We are either shoved out and you just don’t realize it yet, or you’re soon to be shoved out by the big guys. And here’s what happens. Initially, they welcome us, right? Let’s take Google
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AdWords for example. They welcome us and we’ve got opportunities to advertise affordably. And what happens is we track results. We need an ROI. We don’t have a big budget to work with. We got a bootstrap budget to work with. Hell, we might have no budget to work with. We’re putting this on our visa with the hope that we can pay this off pretty soon. And they welcome us. And the big guys come in and the big guys are corporate money and or VC capital. And so they’re spending somebody else’s money. They’re not an entrepreneur. It’s some corporate employee spending somebody else’s money. That’s a very easy check to write when you’re spending somebody else’s money. Just ask the government. It’s easy for them to spend money. It ain’t their money. So they have a budget and it’s usually a multimillion dollar budget and they have to use all of that budget.
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If they don’t use it next year, they’re going to get a smaller budget. So they have to use every single cent of that. So next year they get the same budget or probably more. And like I said, it ain’t their money. It’s some corporate employee writing the check. So Google AdWords, I’m just using Google. Google Ads as an example. It’s not AdWords anymore. It’s Google Ads. They’re happy to take their business. And those guys, they don’t track anything. It is just they got to spend that money. So they’re going to dedicate a certain amount of it to Google Ads. But us, the small and medium business owners, we track results. We got to have an ROI. Well, the big guys coming in, first of all, they jack up the advertising costs. It keeps going up and up and up and up and up and up.
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They can afford it, right? Us, we track result. We are a pain in the butt to Google ads. So it only makes sense. Change the compliance. So when we’re now non-compliant with their regulations or do whatever or scale back our results or dial back our results to drive us out because we’re taking up ad inventory and we’re a pain in the butt. We want an ROI and all that stuff and the Fortune 500, they don’t want any of that. They just want to throw money at it. So it makes perfect sense. Do whatever it takes to drive us out. Use compliance as the excuse or whatever. You can’t sell anything why you’re using a headline. You can’t use direct response copy. You shouldn’t be selling anything in this to drive us out because that frees up more ad inventory for the less hassle money, which is the big,
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This plays out time and time and time again. It was the same deal with radio, it was the same deal with tv. It was the same deal with magazine space ads. We eventually get driven out. We are either right now, you are either driven out through various means through non-compliance. They make it impossible for you to be compliant. They drive up the ad rates, so it’s now not even economically feasible for you to stay in that channel or whatever. So you are either at this point, totally driven out or you in the process of being driven out by the big money, by the big players. So you’ve allowed your business to be a one channel business, the internet, and you’re either driven out of it right now or gradually. You’re soon to be driven out. That’s the way it goes, right? That’s how this always plays out with every media.
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Is this all bad news? No. There are still opportunities. There’s still opportunities. There’s opportunities offline. I rarely talk about ’em anymore because they’re not sexy and online marketers don’t seem to want to hear about ’em. But I think a lot of online marketers are going to be forced to listen to them very, very soon. And there aren’t many marketers and copywriters still alive today or still working today that know how to make those channels work. I know how to make ’em work. So I’ll probably, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I’ll start talking about ’em. There’s some exciting stuff that can be done with direct mail lists. It’s like Facebook like audiences, but it’s on steroids, man. The stuff you can do, nobody knows about it. Well, it’s even more exciting. Not only can you get the snail mail address, you can get a lot of the people’s email addresses.
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So you can be emailing them and sending them direct mail promotions simultaneously, and nobody knows how to do that stuff anymore. We let, we, as online marketers, we let that channel die because we did, like I did with Google Ads back in the day with my supplement business, we thought we’re going to throw all our money into this channel, the best return on investment, and then we let those other channels die. Much to our detriment channels that we as online marketers are going to need badly right now to stay in business. If it’s, hopefully it’s good news to your ears, that channel hasn’t totally died. Me and maybe a couple other people know how to access that stuff and make it work. So maybe I’ll talk about that on a future video if anybody wants to hear about it. Hope you found this valuable. Talk to you soon.
