Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 4 - State Of The Union 2021 (Part 1)
Synopsis:
In this 2021 mid-year State of the Union (Part 1), Mike Shreeve focuses on two seismic shifts in the help industry (coaches, freelancers, agencies, pros): (1) a flood of new providers sparked by remote work and layoffs, which overloads the market with copy-paste promises and commoditized services; and (2) rising traffic costs as organic reach withers across platforms.
Mike lays out how to build market power—becoming a “market of one” by differentiating your messaging, delivery, and especially your outcomes (faster, easier, more certain results; bundling outcomes; non-commoditized offers) to avoid racing to the bottom on price.
On the acquisition side, he explains why traditional lead magnets/webinars force you to “eat” ad costs—and why acquisition funnels (low-ticket front ends that break even or profit day one) are now essential for offsetting ads, filtering higher-quality buyers, and sending better signals to ad platforms (even post-iOS14). If you want to stay profitable while competition surges and CPMs climb, this episode is your blueprint.
Transcript:
State Of The Union 2021 (Part 1)
[00:00:00] Hello my friend. Hope you're doing well. Welcome to this very special episode, state of the Union of the Help Industry for the summer of 2021. So if you know me from any of the other stuff I've done in any of my other podcasts or any of my other stuff, you know that about midway through every year, I like to do a State of the Union for whatever it is I'm talking about, whether I'm doing it for the freelancers or whatever it is that we're talking about.
Today. What I'd like to do is take a look back on the last six months or the last year, and I like to look at what is occurring now that might not be obvious, so to help point some things out to you, some trends that you may not have even [00:00:30] recognized as trends or worse, recognize them as trends, but didn't recognize what that actually meant for you and your business.
And then I wanna also talk a little bit about, give some predictions. Now I'm not an Oracle, so I'm not gonna give you predictions for the next five years or 10 years. I'm talking about predictions on current trends. So we know there's going to be an outcome. The outcome is pending. If we can give you a couple of months of warning give you some time to adjust, to retool, to do whatever you need to do to stay just slightly ahead of any major changes.
That's what we're trying to do here. Now, [00:01:00] specifically, we're gonna be talking about the help industry. The help industry. If you are not familiar with us. It is a term that we've coined simply for anyone who is a freelancer, a service provider, a professional if you. In your business, work with human beings to get them a result of some kind.
You belong to the help industry course creators, coaches, et cetera. Real estate agents, dentists, people who serve patients, personal trainers, anybody who helps a human being. So this is not e-commerce, this is [00:01:30] not the publishing industry. This is not, any of that kind of stuff. This is just people who help other people.
And that's important because trends in this business are in fact, unique. We have a very different. Dynamic that controls how our business is affected. Okay. And I'll give you one very small example. If cash tightens up and and this is totally, this is just a random example. I'm not saying cash is tightening up, but just I want to point out that why the help industry is so different than say, [00:02:00] e-commerce or something.
If cash tighten up and people stop spending on. E-commerce items, right? Maybe you, somebody you know has an e-commerce store and you sell very expensive bags of some kind. Then you could say we look at the economy and we say, oh it's 'cause people don't have a lot of money and so they're not going to be spending on our particular thing.
Because what we sell isn't a need. Almost all of us in the help industry do something that people need. If you help people lose weight, they need that. It's their health. It's the most precious thing they have. If you help people get sales and marketing in their business, [00:02:30] businesses need, that's how the business stays alive and et cetera, et cetera.
So we operate under a very different set of demands, but we also operate. Under a very different transaction. Many of us in the help industry aren't just selling a productized way of helping someone. So yes, we may have courses, which is the most productized version of the help industry, but the problem with the course is that you're not just asking somebody to spend money.
You're asking them to spend money and to [00:03:00] work. So even a course, I'm gonna sell you this course, I'm going to sell it for a hundred dollars. You have to gimme a hundred dollars, and then you have to also do the course. So we have very different, we have an additional dynamic to consider when we're looking at world events, local events, et cetera, to understand that it's not just money in the pocket that affects us.
It's also things like people's interest or availability, their motivation, their outlook, their et cetera, all those things that you know. You learn about an econ [00:03:30] 1 0 1, 0 1 0 2 about motivation and behavioral economics and things like that. Those definitely affect us in the help industry. And that's very important I think for all of us to think about.
When we, I think this year especially, there was a lot of political stuff going on and almost everything was politicized. It was like something blows in the wind and people are taking sides, the problem with that isn't the issue itself. So we're gonna be talking about the pandemic and we're gonna be talking about the political stuff, and we're gonna be talking about potential inflation and all that kinda stuff.
In today's episode, what I don't want you to get hung up on is the event [00:04:00] itself, okay? Because you're gonna live a long time. This is not the first event you've gone through. It's not the last event you're gonna go through. This is the human experience. But what's important, what is important is to understand that the people who keep your business afloat, AKA, your clients, your customers.
They had internal shifts, belief changes in motivation, changes in prioritization shifts that occurred in them, in reaction to these events. That's why when everybody is, on [00:04:30] the internet arguing back and forth, politically, I'm less interested in the issue they're arguing about and more interested in watching the reactions.
I want to know is when these people are talking and thinking about this issue, how is it changing their outlook? How is it changing their attitude? How is it changing the zeitgeist of the market that keeps my lights on? That's more important to me than whatever the particular issue of the day trend of the day happens to be.
Okay, so we're gonna talk a little lot about that, but I wanted to give you some [00:05:00] pretext and context. Okay. So there are four major changes, major trends going on right now that I want to give you some warnings, some advice, and some to-dos. The first is that there is a massive flood of new providers, okay?
And I, it. I don't even need to know the specifics of what you do. I can promise you that right now there is a huge flood of new people, probably now more than ever in the history of the help industry. Now what is that? What is sparking that [00:05:30] and what can we do about it? The biggest spark, the biggest the tinder for the fire of this flood of new providers in the health industry has been a complete rethink of how work gets done.
I can promise you that one of the side effects, again, I'm not talking specifically about the issue. I'm talking about the side effects and how people are reacting to it. One of the side effects of the massive unemployment numbers brought about by whatever you think, that mechanism, whatever you, again, I don't [00:06:00] care.
I don't care what your political leanings are. I don't care how you interpret the data. I'm talking about the reactions, the massive unemployment combined with an entire workforce going remote. Now, it doesn't mean everybody went remote, but everybody knew somebody who went remote. You can see how schools going remote has re-sparked and revived the homeschooling industry.
I read a report, I dunno, maybe two or three months ago that [00:06:30] homeschool products are, I think it's two, two and a half times more. I total sales. And I think about half the time, so it's like a, I think over a six month period there were two and a half times more total product sales of homeschooling than in the previous total year combined pre pandemic.
So everyone in some way has been touched by this shift in work. You have a lot of people who had been on the precipice thinking about whether it was time to take the leap. You have a lot of people who had the time and access to examining, [00:07:00] reexamining, going on YouTube, looking up stuff, trying to figure out how to start their own business and et cetera, which means, by the way, if you're in the how to start a business market, you probably saw an uptick in sales.
If you didn't, it's probably because. You need help with your marketing and sales. Otherwise, if you have your marketing and sales dialed in for how to start your own business, you're probably raking in, right? Right now, you probably think you're a genius. Lemme put it that way. In what's actually happening is the market is shifting in reaction to this world event, and you are experiencing what Eugene Schwartz would call a surge of market [00:07:30] awareness.
But this idea of. People rethinking how they work is sparking a lot of side hustles and a lot of new vendors in the world of freelancing agencies, consulting, coaching, et cetera. It's fo it's forcing and pushing people into what they call the new economy, which is working for yourself and et cetera, et cetera.
I like to do is go to LinkedIn. You'll see people's, in mass people's profiles changing. They're starting to use it, et cetera. But what does this mean for us? A new flood of providers. This certainly isn't the first time. Again, 2008, when I very [00:08:00] first started, I started in 2007. In the 2008, 2009, there was a big flood as well.
So what you have to understand about these big floods is one, they don't last forever, okay? The old axiom of most businesses that start end up failing is still true, right? There are an obscene number of people who started business and then for one reason or another, can't make it happen. So understand that this is not a permanent shift.
While it might not be permanent. There are second order consequences for you and I. Number one is as [00:08:30] more people flood the market, lower level promises and marketing. Okay. And services and we'll talk a little bit what we mean by lower level becomes saturated. Okay, so you may have heard the term, Hey, the market's saturated.
I, I think that's a misnomer because within every market there are layers of markets. So there is within the world of, let's say, for example, fitness, there are layers of. Sophistication within the market, which is to say there are multiple markets within a [00:09:00] market. Some people are very advanced, have been bodybuilding for a very long time, and they're a completely different market.
Are they technically in the fitness market? Yeah. But in, in the real world, day-to-day application, what you have to look at are micro markets, not the macro market. Okay. So in our. World, the lower level rungs of less sophisticated markets will be saturated. What does that look like? What does that mean?
It means that the easy to make claims will be overrun with people [00:09:30] making those claims. The easy to deliver outcomes. The low creativity, low strategic thought marketing messages will be repeated and recycled. I'll give you some examples. If you are a Facebook ads agency and your offer is, I will run your Facebook ads for $2,500 a month, and we help people get leads in sales, that is going to be saturated.
Why? Because the outcome is very low. It's not a great promise. It's a [00:10:00] common promise. It's a promise that all the gurus tell you to make. It's the promise that's easy to deliver. It's a promise that every Facebook ad agency and their friend is currently making. And so you can see that when you get a flood of new people.
What you end up with is a bunch of people offering the same service, making the same promises, and using the same messaging because that's just human nature. When you're new, you just look at what everybody else is doing and you just do that exact same thing. So that is that's the what's gonna happen.
It's happening now. It has always happened. [00:10:30] It's going to happen a lot more in the next, probably six months to a year in that compressed timeframe than it likely has happened in the previous two or three years combined. Okay. As people are forced to come back from remote work and they realize I could probably go make more money doing this for someone else because I took a course and the course told me I could be a bazillionaire and I'm gonna go do that.
And for, for a variety of other reasons, people second guessing a loyalty to their company, there's a whole list of reasons. Again I'm most interested [00:11:00] in the reaction. So how do we combat this? How do we react to this? What can we do now to get ahead of what is certainly guaranteed to happen in a surge in the next six to 12 months?
And then it is just a natural part of business, like competition will always increase. So getting strategies today that can help you five to 10 years from now, that's never a bad idea. Number one is understanding that, the name of our company is Peaceful Profits. There's a reason for that. And we believe that there [00:11:30] are things you can do in business to reduce the unknowns, and by reducing unknowns you create peace.
So things like predictable sales and marketing, predictable outcomes for clients predictable, et cetera. One of the ways. That you can bring peace to your business is to create market power. Now, market power is not the same thing as say, market dominance or market position. What is market power?
Market power is a confidence that comes from knowing [00:12:00] that you in fact, are different enough. To stand out in the crowded marketplace. In other words, market power is another way of saying you have an ability to cut through the noise, because if you can cut through the noise and I'll give you some practical solutions here.
This isn't just, like marketing vocab tossed around on stage. This is, we'll talk a little bit here about some practical solutions, but when we're talking about cutting through the noise, what we really mean is that. You can launch new offers, you can create new products.
You can [00:12:30] do whatever marketing you decide to do, and it will work at a high level. The high level being, you'll get significantly better results than the people who are just in copycat mode. The peace of mind that comes from that is knowing that you are untouchable. That the market can't and doesn't actually affect you because you are in essence, your own market.
So this comes from I think the first place I heard it was Dan [00:13:00] Kennedy. I don't even know if it's Dan Kennedy's original idea. I've heard it repeated many other times. But it's this concept of being, becoming a market of one. The way to become a market of one hinges on difference. Which is to say how different are you than everybody else?
And there's really only a few ways to actually be different. And here comes the practical stuff. Now to start taking a look at your business and thinking about what it is you do, number one, how different is your marketing message? [00:13:30] Are you simply rehashing what other people are saying? Are you simply rehashing what other people are doing?
Are you simply copycatting? Because that seems like what the good idea is at the time. If that's the case, you don't have market power, okay? You may be making some decent money now, but the pressures of a crowded market will squeeze your business in ways that you may actually be feeling right now.
If you actually sat down and thought about it for a second, have things gotten harder for you? If yes, it's likely [00:14:00] because you're experiencing a squeeze because you have adopted a copycat strategy. Which again copycat strategy is how a lot of businesses start, but it's not how businesses grow and it's certainly not how they survive.
Floods of vendors and suppliers. Okay. So that is the first bit is that you can change your marketing messaging. The second thing that you can do is to stand out in your delivery. So if you offer just another group coaching program, or just another course or another service that's the same as everybody else.
Again [00:14:30] you will find that you have accidentally commoditized yourself, which is to say, if you go to the grocery store and you go to the section where all the milk is, you can do this experiment. Do it. Next time you go to the grocery store, take a couple steps back from the milk section, squint your eyes so you can't read the labels and figure out a way to tell the difference between all the white jugs of milk that look exactly the same.
And you can't it's difficult to it's not clear as to the difference [00:15:00] between the many options that you have. This is what it's like to be a buyer in a crowded marketplace, okay? If you offer the same offer as everybody else is offering in the same way that you deliver and help people, it's like looking at a bunch of milk containers and trying to pick one and somebody breathing down your neck and saying, you have to pick the right one.
I don't know. They all look the same. When that is the option in front of a buyer, when there are no other distinguishing characteristics to [00:15:30] separate offers or things to buy, the buyer's only tool of measurement, the only way that they can actually tell a difference will be price. This is why in commoditized markets where everybody looks the same, it's a race to the bottom.
It's not 'cause buyers are evil. Okay. It's not 'cause buyers are horrible people and they need to be trashed and we hate them. No, buyers are what keep our lights on. Buyers is how we bought the farm buyers is how we have our car buyers, is how we put food in our kids' mouth and safer college, et cetera.
[00:16:00] Buyers aren't stupid. What happens though, is sometimes we as business owners create environments where the buyer makes dumb decisions. And in this case, in a commoditized market, what do you think happens? How else is the buyer supposed to distinguish between A and B if they all look the same, sound the same, say the same thing, and deliver the same service, you go off price.
Yeah. No one in a commoditized market has given them any other indication of any other way to measure value than price, and frankly, it's smart of the buyer. If everything is the same and you pay more for it, [00:16:30] you're an idiot. Why would you do that? You're smart to go for the lower price. If everything is the same.
So one of the ways that we cannot get our business caught in that trap is to not try and be, and look and sound and offer the same thing that everybody else is offering. So marketing message and offer, those are important and they're impactful, but nothing is as impactful as the outcome that you offer.
We've talked about the stuff [00:17:00] you say to people. We've talked about the package that you give to people. But what's more important than probably all of those is the outcome that you deliver. And this is where you have a distinct advantage over the flood of new providers, because people who are new don't have the experience to know what the commoditized version of what they do is.
You do. If you've been selling your thing for a while, you know already, even if you currently run a commoditized business, [00:17:30] probably just by me saying, this is what's going on in your business. You're like, oh, I'm running a commoditized business Shoot. You know now what that looks like. So you have experience.
The thing that will differentiate you is to determine what outcome do you actually deliver? Do you really deliver just leads and sales as a Facebook marketer? Do you just deliver 10 pounds of weight loss as a fitness person? Do you just deliver repaired relationships? [00:18:00] Because that's generic. It's boring and not boring.
'cause it's not interesting to the person who experiences it. It's boring from a marketing stand, everybody can say, like everybody in your industry already says that. Coming up with, what else do you deliver in outcome? I'll give you an example. We and the peaceful profits have a core program that we run against, probably one of the most jaded and like oversaturated markets.
There is, which is helping people and help [00:18:30] business, right? Helping freelancers and consultants and et cetera to grow and scale their business. So you could say we help people grow and scale their business. Alright, that's what everybody does. That's what everybody in this industry does or says that they do anyways.
Our outcomes are a little bit different though because our outcomes are driven by this idea of Peaceful Profits. So our outcomes aren't just, we're gonna give you an awesome marketing system. Our outcome is that we're going to change every fundamental part of your business so that it can work and function without you.
So we're gonna help you to create an [00:19:00] offer that functions without you. We're gonna help you to create a marketing system that functions without you, and then we're going to fire you from the day to day of your business so that you can have an asset rather than a job. So our outcome when measured against a very saturated market of we will help you grow and scale your business, gives you more sales and leads, da, help you write a book and all that.
That is a very saturated, but we have put a little twist. It's not a great twist. And again, I'm showing you our example because. I think sometimes we say you have to be different [00:19:30] and we assume, I don't know. It has to be something no one's ever heard of before. I is what we offer something that no one's ever heard of before, firing themselves from their business, A marketing system that it works without and on.
No, it's like there's definitely other providers that do that, but it is significantly less common. It is an uncommon outcome. Another way that we've helped ourselves to stand out is we've combined outcomes. So a lot of people will just charge you a bunch of money to do a [00:20:00] marketing funnel. For us marketing funnel is just part one of four things that we do in our central program.
So there's lots of different ways to have a different outcome, to have a bigger, better outcome. One of the mistakes that people make is to assume that outcome has to equal more in terms of volume. This is a really good example that I've used for many years, and it seems to help a lot of people when I say this, would you rather learn how to make a [00:20:30] hundred thousand dollars a day by coming to my office and working with me for the next 10 years and slaving away as an apprentice 40 hours a day and doing everything I say, and at the end of 10 years, you'll learn how to make a hundred thousand dollars in a day, or would you like me to show you how to make a hundred thousand dollars a day in the next hour and a half?
The answer is, I'd like to know in the next hour and a half, right? Not 10 years down the road. Now what are we actually talking about here? We're talking about delivering the outcome exactly what the person wants [00:21:00] faster with less hurdles, with less obstacles, with fewer things, stopping them from getting what they want.
That is an exercise worth doing in your business right now to look at, okay, I've got some experience offering this service. I know a little bit about it. I know there's gonna be a ton of people coming into this market. They already are. I need to change my outcome. Can I make this better, easier, faster?
Let's start there. How can I improve what I do for people so that when they look at me versus when they look at someone else, they [00:21:30] buy me, they buy my stuff just because it's easier for them. If that's all you did was made your stuff easier, again, of course, program, service, professional, whatever. If you just sat down and spent like two days thinking through, how can I make this easier?
What are the common complaints? What are the issues, et cetera, et cetera, you will have made a step in the right direction to create that power in the marketplace to set yourself apart so that you can thrive through competition. Because one of the things that's gonna happen, and it already has happened.
I [00:22:00] probably have seen it really over the past three years. It's, I think it's started to pick up in frequency. I can't tell you how many times, and this is this is true, a lot of internet marketers say, I get asked this all the time and nobody's ever asked of them. I dunno why people do that ego thing maybe.
But from our sales team, I get reports from our sales team probably about once or twice a week where they forward some message from somebody who says, this was the most pleasant buying experience I've ever been through. I've, I've, i've gone through so and so's hardcore closing process, and I felt literally sick afterwards because they were [00:22:30] just so aggressive and so gross and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, so what is, what are we actually talking about here? What we're talking about is that there is a growing skepticism in every major market. Okay, so let's now go back to the macro in health, in relationships, in wealth, in business, and make money online, there is a growing skepticism. Why is that?
Because there's so many providers entering these markets. You, even if you're in the health field or you're a real estate agent or whatever you do, you know that there are so many [00:23:00] providers these days that just don't do a good job. And the more people that enter the market, the more people there are that don't do a good job, make promises, don't deliver scam people, screw people, take advantage of people, et cetera.
And. It. It's so interesting to me that this massive opportunity is missed by so many people. But if you think about it, the more people enter an industry, the more competition you have and the seedier [00:23:30] they become as in reaction to not understanding how to actually survive and thrive in an overcrowded marketplace.
The more these other companies are creating jaded market participants. Okay, AKA, buyers, prospects, et cetera. Now, this is a massive opportunity in my opinion, because it means that if you are willing to shift focus on, I just have to have the right headline and start focusing on changing your [00:24:00] outcomes, making things easier for people, and then market yourself knowing that people are jaded, knowing that people are becoming more skeptical and becoming the go-to person for.
That set of individuals to buy from. Then what ends up happening is that your competition actually creates customers and clients for you. So instead of them becoming competition, they [00:24:30] now work for you. Now let me toss some clarity on this. The first thing that I wanna be clear about is, I'm not saying that you go purposefully market yourself to cranky people.
Okay. I'm not saying that you need to go out and only throw rocks in your marketing. As Russell b Brunson says, throw rocks at your competition. What I'm saying is, if you spend time getting better at delivering what you promise, that in and of itself creates power through [00:25:00] difference. It's not just about making the promise of the outcome, it's delivering the promise of the outcome that can set you up as a.
Not just an alternative, but the provider of your industry. Now, I don't have time right now on this particular podcast to go into all the details of how you do that. We, when we work with our clients, we go in depth to ensure that who they're working with, how they're working with them, et cetera, the offer they've created, the outcome is a [00:25:30] different, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
All of that stuff is set up so that you have a much higher likelihood of delivering. But what I am suggesting is that one way to combat a flooded marketplace is to spend less time on marketing and replace that time that you were gonna spend on marketing. With improving the outcomes and the successful, let's say, call it completion of the outcome, figuring out ways to deliver better results for your clients and customers.
It's not [00:26:00] about trying to market better. It's about being better. It's the advantage that you have over people coming into the market for the first time. And if you don't recognize and use that advantage. You are throwing away the competitive advantage that you have in what, in, in, in what is undeniably a major shift happening right now.
So some things to think about there. [00:26:30] And it looks like we're about 30 minutes into this podcast. So I think I'm gonna actually make this a two-parter here. Okay? But let's get onto the second one here. The second thing that I am seeing going on in the world right now. In the world of doing stuff online and selling your expertise and being a helper and all that kinda good stuff is that traffic costs are going up.
It is getting more expensive to get eyeballs on your offers. Now, let's first dispel a myth that I think a lot of people jump to immediately. When I say this, I say I'm not using paid ads. And I would say [00:27:00] in that case, if you're using only what, what's known as organic? Posting on social media, et cetera that your costs are increasing the fastest.
And by the, I would say they are increasing at the, so not only the fastest rate, but they're going through the biggest jumps both in how much is costing you per say, result, but also how often you're having to make adjustments. Let me see if I can flesh this out here. It's very important for you to understand.
If you ever wanna grow and scale your business, you have to understand time. Cost is a real thing. Okay, time cost [00:27:30] is real. If you're trying to make a hundred dollars an hour in your business and you spend an hour a day doing social media, you are not spending an hour a day. You're spending a hundred dollars an hour, one hour per day.
So you're spending a hundred dollars a day to do your social media stuff. Now, I don't have to tell you, you already know this, but let's get on the same page here. Social media platforms are not what they used to be. Okay. LinkedIn recently, just put a cap on how many [00:28:00] outreach messages you can send Facebook Organic reach continues to just get worse and worse.
A lot of people that I've been following for some time who used their own personal profile for, they tried to do the work around 'cause since Facebook pages weren't really getting the organic reach they did the Facebook personal profile, that reach is down. Organic is down. Okay. It's not coming back.
That's the thing that you have to take a moment sometimes and ask yourself, are you [00:28:30] hanging onto a sinking ship? Thinking somehow it's not actually happening, right? So imagine the absurdity of being in the middle of the ocean, holding onto a sinking ship. And ignoring the fact that you're about to be in big trouble and there's a lifeboat over there, but you're like, no, I'm not gonna get in the lifeboat because I'm pretty sure this ship is gonna correct itself.
I'm pretty sure somehow I don't really know how, but I'm gonna keep holding onto this ship and somehow it's gonna [00:29:00] fill it back up with, the water's gonna go and it's gonna be all correct, and whatever caused it to sink in the first place is gonna somehow be repaired and we're gonna be back to where it was.
When I see people grasping on dying organic methods, that is what I see. Okay. This is my perspective. I, if that is a helpful way to look at it for you. Great. Organic is wonderful. Organic is awesome. Organic makes up a portion of what we do. However, we also know that the organic ship is going down.
[00:29:30] Okay. There are not a lot of alternatives either. Now, why is that? It's because the cowboy days of organic are never coming back. What do I mean by cowboy days? Back in 2011, 2012, I remember I started a side business selling t-shirts on Facebook back in 2011, 2012, and was making like four or five grand a week just doing organic social posting.
I would start like a theme, like this page if you are into science fiction, and then a bunch of people would like it, and [00:30:00] then I could do science fiction posts and, a hundred plus thousand new likes a week. And, it was easy back then those days. Are over for Facebook, but they're not going to pop up somewhere else.
Now, you may say what about TikTok? Yeah, TikTok, when it first started, offered that same kind of reach. Pinterest used to offer that same kind of reach. Instagram used to offer that same kind of reach. But when I say the cowboy days are over, what I mean is that each platform is learning from the mistakes of the platform that preceded it.[00:30:30]
So TikTok is already dying in reach. We're talking about, that thing only lasted like six months in terms of what we would call like cowboy reach. And when I say cowboy 'cause of Wild West, right? And so what I'm talking about here is platforms are getting savvy to the methods of marketers. So again, it's not like there's gonna be all of a sudden a new platform that opens up and, oh my gosh, this is, 10 times better.
And it was built for marketers. No platform is gonna be built for marketers. That's not why these things exist. Okay? [00:31:00] Not organically. Now platforms are going to continue opening up that marketers can use, but it's gonna cost money, which is why, in my opinion, now, this is not advice I would've given you five years ago, 10 years ago.
Now, if you're not doing paid traffic, you need to get your stuff together. You need to figure out how are you going to make paid traffic work? Now, here's what I recommend as traffic costs increase. [00:31:30] Any traffic, any paid traffic model, which requires you to eat the cost before you get to selling your core thing is an unnecessary risk.
In 2021 example, a webinar, A-A-V-S-L, A lead magnet where you pump a bunch of money into getting people into something and then crossing your fingers and saying, gosh, I hope they buy something. Is what I mean by having to eat the cost upfront. You pay [00:32:00] first and then see later if it's gonna turn into money.
One of the things that we help people with, our personal clients, et cetera, et cetera, is we help them either write a book or make a very small course, put that in a very specific funnel, put it in a very specific marketing engine. You put a dollar in, you get at least a dollar back, sometimes more.
That builds up an email list of customers for which you paid Net zero. You can still use your webinars to sell, you can still use your VSLs, you can still run people through email sequences and automate all the stuff you had on your lead magnet. Still works. [00:32:30] Just offset the traffic cost. When you offset the traffic cost, a couple of things are happening.
One, you now have the ability to outspend everybody. So I can tell you the difference between you and me is that when traffic costs go up. Yeah. My business is completely unaffected in the sense that there's no discussions that are occurring where [00:33:00] we're like, oh, shoot, we need to change something.
It is simply a, are the traffic costs still within our goal of break even? And the answer is yes. 'cause right now we're actually making profit off of the front end, even though we don't have to. Because we're building lists of customers, then we're selling things to those customers. If you're listening to this podcast, you are one of the customers that came through one of our frontend, what we call acquisition funnel.
It costs me zero to get you to listen to this podcast. In fact, I made money [00:33:30] and you're listening to this podcast. Some of you listening to this podcast will then go on to buy our core programs, things ranging from five to $45,000 to $25,000 a year and more the answer to traffic costs increasing is not a marketing answer.
It's an economics answer. Specifically, it has to do with the offers you have in your business. So this is why, sometimes clients come to us and they say, my business was doing really good. We [00:34:00] were getting lots of sales. We were making lots of money and we were doing, a lead magnet or we were doing a VSL or doing a webinar.
We're doing whatever it is that we're doing. And all of a sudden Facebook got expensive or all of a sudden the Facebook, here's another one that's happening a lot. The traffic quality went down. That's because for a long time there platforms like Facebook were running out of ad inventory 'cause everyone kept saying how awesome Facebook ads are.
Big companies started running multimillion per month campaigns and all the ad [00:34:30] inventory was getting eaten up. And so Facebook was giving, regular small businesses like you and me the lower end of the ad inventory quality. They were literally giving us the leftovers. If you're running a model where you send free traffic to webinar, that means you've got what's going on is that you're sending low quality, not likely to convert traffic to a mechanism of set of selling, which requires you to eat the cost up front.
So you're eating the cost up front, you conversion rates are going down, is becoming significantly more expensive to sell with an [00:35:00] acquisition offer. Even if Facebook sends us junk traffic, it doesn't matter. Because the economics are there to where the fact that we basically gate entrance into our business by requiring a payment.
So you have to buy something from us to get on our email list. The fact that we put a paywall on the first page that comes from the platform to our business means that we are filtering whatever junk traffic, Facebook or YouTube [00:35:30] or Google sends us. Which again means we're not as susceptible to the ups and downs of the platform because a customer is not junk traffic.
So we're not filling our email list up with bad people and then sending signals back to Facebook that says, Hey, we asked you to optimize for leads. You're getting us tons of leads. Keep sending us this kind of stuff. That's not how it works in our business. The signals we're sending back to platforms is we want customers optimize for that, and it's on the first page, so you don't need to wait seven days.
You don't need to wait 21 days. Transactions occur on the same day. [00:36:00] So the data you're sending back to the platforms is also significantly faster, significantly better, and et cetera. But the really, the thing is, look, traffic costs are going up. iOS 14 is messing everybody up. A little side note here on iOS 14, it's not messing us up for a couple of reasons.
One is we figured out how to send even better data back to the platforms using Zapier more complete data than the platforms themselves had ever given us. We've actually seen an increase in quality of our traffic. But the other thing is that [00:36:30] iOS 14 isn't Apple being altruistic. The mega corporation, the mega company called Apple.
Isn't out there fighting for our privacy. Have you ever seen the contract you have to sign to turn your iPhone on? So don't get it twisted. Again, this is one of the things, if you wanna be a business owner, you have to look. You can't take things on face value. You gotta look a little bit deeper. Apple is not doing this for your privacy.
They're not doing it for your rights. They're [00:37:00] doing it because two weeks after they announced it, they announced they're revamping their what? Their own ad network. You just go research it yourself. You can go find it yourself. This isn't a conspiracy. Apple is rolling out iOS 14, which stops pixel tracking, and they're gonna be rolling out iOS 15, which makes it more difficult to track on email.
Why go check out their other press releases about what they're doing with their ad networks. They're doing it for profit. Now, what does this mean for you and me? It means that more and more ad platforms are going to pop up in reaction [00:37:30] to what's going on with Facebook. YouTube is getting some love right now.
Google AdWords. Has been, always been rock solid, but it's getting some love. Now there's gonna be LinkedIn experts and Pinterest experts and all these kinds of, sorts of things. For us, in our business, none of that matters because we know how to offset the cost of all of them. I don't, it doesn't matter to me if it's on, if tomorrow, LinkedIn is the only thing.
It doesn't matter to me if YouTube is the only thing. It doesn't matter in our business because we don't pay upfront. We get paid upfront, [00:38:00] and then we run our business off the back of those campaigns. So we're talking about the State of the Union. If you are not running an offset campaign, also known as an acquisitions campaign or acquisition funnel, if you're not running something that offsets the cost of your traffic and I were in your shoes, I would be doing everything I could to correct that mistake before the flood of new people and the diminishing returns of organic essentially put you outta business.
Or at least make it unbelievably [00:38:30] stressful to stay in business. The requirement for unrealistic and unattainable and certainly unsustainable amounts of hustle to stay doing what you want to do. Okay, so those are the first two flood of new and traffic costs. I'm gonna wrap this up. This is almost an hour sometimes.
These state of the unions do end up going quite a long quite a long. They end up being very long sessions. I'm gonna go ahead and do the next two in the next episode. The next two are significantly, probably [00:39:00] even more important and more critical than the two that we've covered now. So that's it for this episode, my dear friends, if you'd like us to help you prepare for any of this, if you want us to help you.
Any of this going in your business. If you need to talk to somebody to see if any of this is the kind of stuff that you need to get going, please go to peaceful profits.com/call, book a call with my team, or you can hit reply to any of our emails, and one of my team members will also answer you There. We have customer advisors and team advisors and all sorts of people on our on our team that can help guide you [00:39:30] through this process.
Don't wait, don't hesitate. The longer you wait, the harder it's going to be. Do something to address these issues, and I'll see you in the next episode.