After crossing $7 million dollars in sales online for my clients I’m giving you the top 7 lessons I learned in that time frame. I hope this video from my YouTube channel gives you some different perspectives to think about for your own business or clients. Enjoy!
I was recently run the numbers and we just crossed $7 million in sales for my clients at the agency. And those were some pretty big numbers for us. So I was doing some reflecting on like, what have I learned in that timeframe? Because, you know, to be totally honest, like I got started in this whole online business, you know, learning in coffee shops from people that I haven’t met that taught me online, you know, cuz I didn’t have any really good prospects coming outta college. I was a bartender and so I would learn this stuff and I picked up some small clients and then I picked up some bigger ones and then I picked up some bigger ones and you know, now we’re hitting some pretty big numbers and that’s been really exciting, but it’s taken me a while to get here. And so I was kind of reflecting on just like, what have I learned?
How do I think about things differently? What’s changed in that timeframe. And so that’s this video right here and I hope you find this helpful. I hope this gives you some, maybe some different perspectives to think about what you can do for your own business and with your marketing or, you know, if you’re trying to get started online, how you can think about working with your clients or whatever that is. So check this out. I hope you find this helpful and uh, yeah. Have it going. So that’s what I wanna talk about in this video is seven really big lessons that I’ve learned over that time. So the first, really big lesson for me was that markets change and shift over time. They go in cycles. And so your timing becomes really important when you are entering a marketplace or you’re going to promote something few years ago when I was getting started, I paid for a consulting call from this entrepreneur that I really respected.
And I asked him, you know, what do you look for when you’re going into a new business? And I was expecting to say like the product, the team, if they have some kind of like differentiating strategy, all of that stuff. And I was really surprised because his answer was timing. Like that was the number one thing he looked for when he was going into new markets was timing. What I took away from that was like, if you got into CBD 10 years ago, you are crushing it right now because you were an early adopter. You were one of the first people to get in and start selling CBD. And you had the ability to be a part of that wave exploding. If you try to go start selling CBD right now, it’s gonna be really hard because there’s so much competition in that space that you’re gonna have to fight to carve out a very little piece where the people who are already there got to ride this exploding wave and just make a ton of money.
Another one I think is just as an example of, from my own personal experience, right, is running Facebook ads. Like if you were running Facebook ads in 2014, you crushed it. And if you are starting as like a freelancer and agency, you’re trying to run Facebook ads right now, there’s just massive competition. And the market sentiment has also changed a lot about Facebook ads. And so right now you see a lot of people who used to teach Facebook ads are starting to shift to YouTube ads and us as an agency, like we’re starting to shift way more into helping our clients run YouTube ads. Why? Because that’s what the market wants. One other example is I was talking to a, a business owner who runs a health offer. And so he promotes digital products to sell like a certain type of diet. And we were talking on the phone and he was, you know, telling me like, Hey, you know, my sales been really down.
I think it’s iOS 14 and the algorithm and all this stuff. And so I, I went away and I started doing some research. And what I realized, what I did found out with the research was like the, the actual type of diet that he promotes is just on the decline as far as popularity goes. So he approaches digital products. But if you look at the physical products in that space, people make like protein shakes and bars and all that stuff. All those companies are shrinking because the demand for that dietary supplement is just getting smaller. What I realized from this and what I learned through having this observation, it makes me think of a couple of things. It’s like one, it helps me decide what I want to get behind be before I go promote something. Because again, like if, if you’re trying to sell a, you know, how to do Amazon FBA product right now and get started with that, like there’s so much competition, it’s insane.
If you were doing that three years ago, you crushed it. But right now it would be really hard to get started in there. So it helps you decide like what products you wanna get behind and get started with. It also helps you realize that when you find something that’s working, you wanna smash that gas pedal because nothing lasts forever. Right? And especially, you don’t see a lot of digital product offers or like products in the digital marketing space that have lasted 30 years. And that’s because like markets change, people change the it’s a very dynamic market. That’s moves and evolves very quickly. And so that’s why you see people that have been around for a really long time, usually end up promoting different products over that time, because what was working 10 years ago, doesn’t work right now. And so you have to retire those things and, and, and do something else.
And so again, that’s like when something’s working, you smash that gas pedal because it’s working and you want to really like capitalize on anything you can with that. It also helps you realize that like when something stops working and you’ve done everything you can to make it work, you know, like sometimes it’s okay to just let it go and just go do something else or, or figure out how to adjust it and change it and evolve it because you can’t just create one thing one time and expect that that’s gonna last forever because it just, it doesn’t work that way. And so that was one of my big realizations. When I saw this over like years of being in this marketing, I was like, oh, these markets change. And they go in cycles and they evolve over time. It makes you have a different perspective on what you wanna promote, what you wanna do when something’s working and what you wanna do when something stops working.
And you’ve tried almost everything to get it going again. So the next, really big realization that I had over working on a lot of projects with a lot of different companies is the audience and the offer matter pretty much more than anything else when it comes to marketing and advertising. And what I mean by that is if you have a really great product and you are promoting to an audience that has a need of solving the problem that that product sells, and they have the financial capability of purchasing that product, you’re in a really good spot. And you can basically just run ads that say like, Hey, buy my stuff and it’ll work, you know, because you just have something that people really want. And you have a, a group of people who are capable of buying it on the flip side, let’s say you have a really awesome product for yoga teachers.
And you wanna get, you know, people who are yoga teachers to buy your $10,000 thing. And one of the problems you will probably run into is that one, I don’t even know how many yoga teachers there are. And two, I don’t know how many of them have $10,000, you know? So like if you’re trying to promote to an audience who is, you know, especially if you’re like going after like new yoga teachers, right. If you’re promoting to an audience that inevitably doesn’t have a lot of money, you will have a hard time extracting money from them. On the flip side, if you have an audience that is in, you know, has a problem that they desperately wanna solve, but you’re just making them an offer that they don’t want. Then it’s going to be really difficult to sell that thing to them because they just don’t want it.
And so the reason I say this is because when I first got started doing marketing, we would work with, you know, anyone who wanted to give us money. And we worked with local businesses. And I mean, you know, I would work with anyone who gave us money. We would work with, I would work with local businesses. I would work with all kinds of digital products and all kinds of stuff. And now one of the things that I have, the biggest insights I have today is like, I don’t work with most of the companies that wanna do marketing with me because I just look at their audience and their offer and their timing and their economics and all this stuff. And I just say like, man, I think it’d be really hard to get you the results that you’re looking for using the strategies that I have, you know, my tool belt.
Whereas I see companies that come to us and they have a really good offer and they’ve got a really good audience that is financially well off and has the ability to, to pay for stuff and has a desperate need for what this product solves. Then all I have to do is come in and do a few things that I’m really good at, and we can get insane results for those people. And that’s been like the, the best thing that I can do for me and for my clients is like, you know, I just say yes to people who kind of make it really easy for me to do what I do best because it already takes a lot of work to do marketing. It’s already like, it keeps you busy enough. You know, business is hard enough as it is. And marketing changes enough as it is.
So you’ve got a lot of work to do there. Just make it really easy by having a really good offer and an audience that has the financial capability of paying you money and you will make your life 10 times easier. The next realization that I have had over doing this for a really long time is that people buy based on emotion. And that might sound really obvious, but me not having any marketing experience, I had to learn this. And I’m also very logical brained person. So I just would think like, oh, emotional people buy on emotions and logical people buy on logic, but I’ve just seen it time and time again. And after taking lots of sales calls after listening to a lot of sales calls and after being a part of a lot of teams, you have to get some kind of emotion in your marketing and you have to get people to, to get excited about what you’re doing or shift emotions from wherever they’re at, into some different emotional state.
If you are going to actually convert a lot of people into becoming customers, especially online, that made me really think differently about how we would do a lot of our marketing, because me inevitably, again, being like a logical person, I would just try to logic people into converting, you know, like on sales calls, I would try to logic them into sales calls while you use a lot of logic on sales calls and when write a copy or looking at stuff, you know, we would try to add a lot of logic in there. And while there is a place to like justify with logic, you’ve gotta figure out a way to get emotion into what you’re doing. And oftentimes that can be like through your video scripts, your video creatives, that can be through your copy, that can be through your messaging, but you’ve gotta figure out how to get like at the core emotion of, of what people are buying and why they’re buying it and help them realize what they will feel when they get to the other side of it.
Because that’s the way that people make purchasing decisions at the end of the day, it’s like they decide on based on emotion and then they justify with logic. So you gotta give ’em that logic to justify it. But again, that was a big realization for me because being a logical brain person, I just wanted to like logic everybody into it. And also too, one of the things that inevitably came out of it was like, you know, if we were promoting a really good offer, people would just say like, well, we just have such a good offer. Like people should just see that and, and buy it. And, you know, after realizing this and, and seeing it over and over again, it’s like, you can have the best offer in the world. You still gotta get people excited about it. And that means you still have to do marketing, you know?
And so I think that’s a really important, that was a big realization for me. And that kind of changed the way that I look at how we can just keep people excited, basically along the journey of marketing, you know, as people come into our world and as we nurture people through our content and all of that stuff, how do we just keep people excited about what’s coming next? The next big realization that I had, and this was actually just helpful for me internally to like understand was no business is really what it looks like on the surface. And I say this because if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re online and you’re looking at all these people making content and all of this stuff, it seems like everybody’s got all their together and you’re just slacking, you know, that’s, that’s what it always looks like, cuz you’re like, wow, all these people have such great, perfect things going on.
And I just don’t and, or like I’m not there where I wanna be or whatever it is, or my business is difficult and theirs looks easy. And you know, at this point I’ve been inside of almost, you know, probably a hundred different businesses and actually probably through our consulting and, and the people I talk with definitely, you know, over a hundred different businesses over the years that we’ve like worked with consulted with done something with, and a lot of them look amazing on the outside, but every time you get on the inside, like businesses just naturally have a lot of chaos, a lot of moving pieces, you know, a lot of people go online and they don’t post all the terrible stuff that’s happening. They just post the really good stuff. I’ve definitely seen a few businesses where that are like really smooth operating machines and I’ve always admired those people cuz I’m like, wow, these guys really have their, their together.
And that’s super cool, but that’s not how it works in most of the businesses that I’ve seen. Everyone struggles with something at some point, every business owner has a lot going on and there’s always a thing that they’re trying to fix. So that was just helpful for me realizing like even when I worked with really big companies that really would seem to have their together and you would think like, wow, I bet if once I start, like I bet once I, like, I start working with these guys and we start working on this project, these guys are gonna be so dialed in and it’s gonna be so smooth and they’re really gonna know what they’re doing, cuz these guys are really experts at it too. But at the end of the day, like everyone’s still trying to figure something out, you know, like no one has it all together completely like part of the entrepreneurship and business game is you’re just solving problems and trying to figure stuff out.
And when you solve one problem it inevitably creates another problem that you have to go solve. That was just helpful for me to know because also it wanted, it gave me some peace of mind that I knew that I wasn’t the only one trying to deal with stuff like this. And two, it gave me clarity on like what I would to expect when going to any business, you know, like I, I oftentimes just think of myself as like a professional problem solver because I just realize that all businesses have issues that they need to get solved. And I think two, once you can think about it that way you just one, you realize what you’re gonna be going into. And two, you get really good at just dealing with whatever’s going on and that helps you just be a more valuable person, bring more value to companies.
And the more value you can bring to a company inevitably that’s, you know, better for you and better for them. So the next one that I have on my list here is that like markets are constantly dynamic and evolving. Marketing is dynamic and constantly evolving and it is a dynamic creative process. You cannot just templatize marketing. And what that means is once you like, again, it kind of seems obvious, but once you realize it, it means that marketing is constantly changing. What’s working right now will not work the exact same in four years, like three years ago, webinars were the thing. Everybody just crushed webinars and now they still work, but you don’t see as many in working as well. And they work in different contexts, but like a lot of people don’t just run cold ads to a webinar anymore, like cold traffic, new people that never heard ’em to a webinar and sell stuff like crazy when they’re just getting started because that just doesn’t work as well as it did a few years ago.
And in four years whatever’s working now probably won’t work nearly as well. And when you realize that, that means as a marketer or as a business owner, you constantly have to stay on top of it for forever. And I think that’s just a good frame of mind to have when you’re going into this. Because if you are someone that likes stability and you like stuff to not change much, you should be very intentional about what markets you get into because you know, there are definitely static markets, you know, like people will train dogs in 10 years the same way they train dogs now and people will train, you know, people will probably like get into relationships in 10 years similar to the way they do now. And so there are ways to kind of add some more stability to what you’re doing, but inevitably like the channels we’re using will change.
You know, who knows if maybe in five years we’re all advertising and, and, and creating content and the metaverse and people are using, you know, other platforms less or whatever that is. But for again, I think one of the things I’ve just seen over time is like, man, when I first got started, we did, you know, back when I first got started, we did SEO, but we would like do article spinning and we would create back links and like spammy back links. And that worked for a long time until one day it just didn’t work anymore. And then people started moving like that. I worked with started moving way more into like, you know, creating good white hat content and that’s way better. And I’m not saying that the black hat stuff was good at all, but it worked for a while. And then with paid ads, like man, we cranked webinars for like three years.
There was probably like a really good run where we just were able to get our hands on pretty much any good webinar and everybody made a lot of money and that just doesn’t work the same anymore. And so now we’re evolving and we’re looking at different platforms and we’re doing all this stuff. And in my head, I just have this picture like, cool. I’m probably gonna have to rebuild a lot of our services and, and kind of reinvent how we help our customers get value every couple of years, you know, like every two to four years, we’ll probably just reinvent that. But knowing that helps me realize like, cool, we’re not Facebook advertisers, we’re marketers. Like we help people generate more sales. You know, that’s what we do. And if we have to change from paid advertising to organic marketing, if we have to go into the metaverse, whatever that is, we’ll just do that because our job is not to be really good at Facebook ads.
Our job is to be really good at making people money and, and in marketing, it’s really good at helping people get attention and attract new customers. And so knowing that it is this dynamic creative process that really helps just set the frame of mind for what’s coming up. And I just, you know, I think that’s been really helpful for me. And I think any business owner that I have seen do really well, especially after Iowa was 14. And all of these changes, the business owners that I’ve seen do really well are the ones that have been adaptable to change. Like the people that I saw fall off just had the same offer to the same funnel and they didn’t wanna change anything. And I’ve seen a lot of them just literally stop advertising and, you know, try to go find some other way to grow their business, cuz they just can’t afford the, the cost of advertising where the businesses that I saw do really well, they were throwing up new funnels, changing out their offers, changing out the way that they were attracting customers on the front end, trying out new ad platforms, all of this stuff because marketing is dynamic and it’s a creative process.
So it needs you can’t just templatize it assigned to somebody through an SOP. Like it needs a smart, strategic creative team back there figuring out what’s gonna work, try new stuff. And when it stops working, changing it up, figuring out how to be different, all of that good stuff. So the next one that I have here on my list, and this has been a big one, just running a lot of ads and, and being in the advertising world for many years is it’s a lot easier to, to win on business economics versus platform economics. And again, what, what I mean here by this is like over time, I’ve, I’ve met a lot of people who set up an ad campaign and they’re obsessed with like the cheapest clicks and the cheapest leads and they just want to constantly figure out how do they get the ad cost down as low as possible?
How do they get the cost per lead down as cheap as possible? And while definitely you wanna maintain your, you know, your platform KPIs and, and make sure you keep your cost down. That’s great. But it is way easier to look at the entire business as a whole and figure out how can we improve the improve the conversion rates on our funnel? How can we improve our nurturing system? How can we increase the lifetime value of our customers? So that inevitably what is happening is we are able to make more money from the leads that we’re getting. We’re able to convert more of the leads that we’re getting from our paid advertising campaigns and our paid efforts and organic efforts and all of that stuff. How can we have a better nurturing system and all of that? So that what ends up happening is you get better results from everything, instead of just trying to figure out how do I just ignore everything else and just make my cost really cheaper, or my cost per click cheaper, or get a better click through rate on my ad or something.
So when you start to look at the entire business and the entire business economics as a whole, that is a way easier way to optimize your business than to just try to get the cheapest clicks. Because again, sometimes the best way to make your ads more profitable is to just increase your prices. You know, like that, that happens a lot. I’ve seen that many, many times where it’s just like, dude, you’re not gonna get your, your CPA down to $400. You know, cuz that’s what you need with this price point. But if you just increase the price of your program, you can afford to spend $600 to acquire a customer and still be profitable, whatever that is. So that’s a big one. And then the, the very last one here, I’m pretty sure this is number seven. If I counted my list correctly is like, you gotta figure out what works for your business.
That’s, that’s the biggest thing. Every business is different. There really is no template to marketing. It’s like, again, it’s a creative process it’s constantly changing and you gotta find what works for you. So especially two being online for such a long time, one of the downsides to a lot of the content marketing and all the stuff that goes on is like, if you read a blog post from four years ago, telling you about a strategy that works, that probably doesn’t work as well as it used to four years ago, it’s just the inevitable way that things change and how things go. It’s just, you know, things change very quickly in the online space and things change very quickly in the marketing world and economies change and people change. And you know, the world is a very different place after COVID than it was before and going into this recession versus without it, you know, and all this stuff.
So it’s like if you’re just reading stuff online or listening to somebody and, and inevitably too, also like everyone’s trying to, you know, most people are trying to sell something. Everyone’s trying to sell something. That’s just the reality, you know? So let’s be honest about it. so it’s like when someone’s like, Hey man, you know, like the only thing you need to do is Facebook groups. You know, like that’s every, it works for everybody and that’s the only thing you need to do. Cool. It works for a lot of people. And maybe if that’s your style of doing things and you like to build communities and all that stuff, like you can make Facebook at groups work and all of that. That’s awesome. But that’s not to say that Facebook groups are the only thing that work. And it’s not to say that Facebook groups were gonna work for your business, maybe because of who you are and how you are as a person.
What kind of resources you have, what kind of team you have, what you’re interested in, maybe, maybe something else is better for you. Maybe you should be making TikTok videos or maybe you should be doing more organic content or maybe you should be doing partnerships or whatever that is. However you wanna get customers for your business. I don’t know, but you gotta find what works for you. And inevitably what that means is you gotta try some stuff that’s not gonna work. You know? And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve seen a lot of successful business owners do over the years and, and something that’s been like helpful for us is like figuring out what works for us and just trying to do more of that and trying to do less of stuff that doesn’t work for us just because someone said, we need to do it.
Or like, that’s the thing that’s working. And I can definitely say that again, all the business that we worked with, none of them have used the exact same cook or Cutty strategy messaging and all that stuff. So when you see like the, you know, Hey, grab our template, headline templates and our ad templates and our funnel templates and all that stuff, and just plug it into your business and make a bunch of money might not work as well as you think it is because that’s just not how marketing and creative strategies work. And if everyone’s using that template, it automatically stops working because everyone in the market is seeing it basically, you know, happened with a lot of strategies over the last few years. So you gotta find what works for you. And then again, going back to the other one point, I was like, you gotta find what works for you and, and that’ll work for a while until it stops working, then you gotta change and find something else.
So those are my seven tips and I hope this was valuable. This is kind of just like a reflection on some things that I have learned over the years because I have been doing this for a while and I hope this is helpful for you. And you can kind of see how I’ve learned to think about things a little bit differently. If you have any questions or you got any insight on this, please just drop a comment down below also. Yeah. If you, if you don’t know me at this point, my name is Brice. I run a marketing agency where we work with business owners who have digital products and high ticket programs. And we help them acquire customers online, mostly through paid ads, but also doing some other stuff that goes along with that as well. So if you would like to get in touch or, or watch more of my videos, you can just hit the subscribe. Well, yeah, if you wanna hit the subscribe button, that’s a great way to, to see what else we’re up to. And I hope to catch another video, have a great day and I’ll see you in the next one.
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