FFLTV: Scammy Internet Marketers and Bitcoin

Today we’re talking about scammy Internet marketers ramping up for Christmas sales, investing in cryptocurrencies, and we’ll look at a multi-million dollar sunglasses company.

So earlier this year I posted a video on the Capitalism.com channel about Internet marketers and what I would consider to be kind of an ethical dilemma in our little community because there are those who are really just in this to pad their own pockets and don’t really run real businesses, which I think is a shame. And I don’t think it’s a shame just because there are people out there who will say whatever it takes in order to make a sale. That’s always existed, it’s always going to exist. What I really feel is the shame in all of this is that there are very very talented people wasting their talents by just trying to line their pockets. Where in reality they could be way more successful and they could help a lot more people, and go much much bigger if they’d just put their talents to use to grow a real business.

I was inspired to talk about this today because of the case study that we’ll go into at the end of this episode. But I want to tip my cap to them right now because they are a perfect example of a company that actually is after a bigger mission. They’re doing something with the talent that they have. They developed that talent with a mission at the beginning, but they now have a multi-million dollar company that they use to make a really big impact. And it was something that they wanted to do their entire lives.

They just thought that it would take 30 years to get there. They actually got there in two, because they started a profitable business. This is why I say that the best way to make a difference in the world is to do it profitably. It’s not to wait for government. It’s not to wait for somebody else. It is to profitably identify our problem and build a business that solves that problem. That is how big companies are built. And the example that we’ll go through at the end of this episode is a perfect example of that.

But there are Internet marketers, there are good capitalists who are talented, who are wasting their time and energy just trying to figure out how to make the next buck. And it’s my opinion that that comes from some form of insecurity of not knowing where the next dollar is going to come from or not knowing, not feeling secure of where your life is going to be paid for. Because something magical happens when that gets satisfied.

All of a sudden the creativity of I don’t have to pay for my life anymore, the creativity is then freed up in order to build something substantial, to build something lasting. But the irony of it is you will get there so much faster if you just put your talents to solving a big problem, to serving a market from the get go. I have said very publicly when talking to e-commerce entrepreneurs, especially those who sell on Amazon.com, which is a large portion of my audience.

We have an incredible amount of success stories of people who have multi-million dollar businesses just selling on Amazon.com. But I like to remind, even those who are really successful in our community, that they are not running an Amazon business they’re running a business that takes their sales on Amazon. And the difference there, is you are selling to a person rather than selling a product on a channel. When all you think of is the money you see the customer as the obstacle to money. I got to get, I got to do this thing, I got to get through this customer so that I can get my money. Whereas, the opposite is to say, I am serving a community and the money flows in as a result.

Once again, the irony here is that when you do that much more money comes in. You get more customers that way. People resonate with you more. You solve bigger problems which allows you to reinvest for the long-term which is how you will grow a company the fastest.

So if you start with a problem and you build a business around that you will grow so much faster and you will make so much more money if you do that rather than just asking the question, what is going to make a buck? I don’t know if you can hear that and actually make that a reality or have to learn that the hard way. Because when I was an entrepreneur starting out all I thought about was the dollar. So maybe you have to go through that in order to learn it. But if I was talking to my younger self I would say, start with the challenge, start with the person first. Don’t waste your talent just trying to get the next sale. Build it into a real long-term business because you will be way more successful if you do that from the get go.

So let’s go into some questions about how we can build businesses and invest the profits.

Q: “How should he ramp up for Christmas sales?”

A: Ah, Christmas season. Every online sellers favorite time of the year. Unless you sell on Amazon, then it’s Prime Day. That is the best time of the year. Last year we did over a $100,000 in sales just on Prime Day. That was fun. But for Christmas, I want to say the most important thing to keep in mind here, before we talk about ramping up for Christmas, can we talk about ramping up for January. Here’s why. A lot of e-commerce entrepreneurs make the mistake of planning up to Christmas and they don’t plan through Christmas.

So what happens is they have a great holiday season, they run out of stock and they lose all the momentum that they would have had, had they planned through that. So bite the bullet, spend the money to have the inventory and have the marketing plan to carry you through the beginning of the year. Because you’re riding a big wave of momentum coming off the holidays. And what we have seen in teaching and training a bunch of e-commerce entrepreneurs is that if you do this right, if you play Christmas right, and actually play through Christmas, you can ride that momentum through the entire year and have a constant growth through that year. If you don’t do this then you’re kind of you’re just going to duplicate last year. You’re not going to have that month over month growth from year to year. But you can get an incredible amount of momentum if you play this well.

So what does that look like? That looks like having a way to follow up with your customers that are going to come in on this holiday rush. It means playing social media right because you’re going to have a lot of interest coming in during this time. But to actually play Christmas well, you have to remember that your market is a little bit different for the next 30 days or so. Going up to Christmas you are not marketing to the user directly, you are marketing to the friend of the user, the parent of the user, the spouse of the end user. So keep that in mind as you are marketing that. One of the ways you can do this well is by presenting your product in bundles. So what are the complimentary products to one another? This is a very good time to highlight that.

Now, your end user is probably going to only buy the one product that they need in order to get the result that they want. But if you’re buying a gift for someone, then they’re probably going to look at multiple products. So if you present things as bundles, that is a great way to tip your cap to the person who is buying on behalf of whoever they’re going to be gifting it to. And then if you can position yourself to have some sort of follow up process with the person who’s going to be the end user, with inserts, with re-marketing practices, to get in front of those person come first of the year, you can start to grow that customer base and follow up with them and have that customer throughout the life cycle or at least the year cycle.

So you aren’t just having this big run up at Christmas and then it dies. You are taking that customer base and you are growing for the rest of the year.

Q: “Do you invest in cryptocurrency assets?”

A: Short answer; no. I don’t. I would hesitate any cryptocurrency an asset. We did a podcast on this with my friend Tom Kineshanko where he argues that Bitcoin is an asset because he says that it is a piece of technology rather than just a VoP currency. I look at it a little bit differently. Where I say cryptocurrencies aren’t backed by anything.

Now some would say, well name an asset that’s backed by something. And I would say, companies, real estate. Companies are backed by earnings. Real estate is backed by real estate. So these are things that I invest in. Cryptocurrencies have no cash flow and they’re not backed in anything. So you are purely speculating on the hope that they will up in value. That’s not investing to me. That’s gambling/speculating. Now if you want to have a piece of your portfolio reserved for either high risk, speculative trading, cause this really isn’t investing. If we’re hoping something’s going to go up in value, it’s not really investing. We’re speculating at that point.

Investing means you’re going to hold something for the long-term because you are going to have some cash flow from that. That’s how I look at it. Investing means cash flow. Speculating means you’re hoping that it goes up. Same thing with real estate by the way. I live here in Austin, Texas. I am apparently touching Indian’s coffee mugs but I am not touching Austin real estate. And the reason for that is because it doesn’t cash flow. People are buying hoping that it’s going to go up in value because the job market is hot here, because the population growth is booming here. So they might be totally right that housing prices are going to continue going up, but I won’t touch them because there’s no cash flow and that’s not investing to me unless there’s cash flow.

So, no cryptocurrency pays dividends. No cryptocurrency is profitable. It’s not spitting out cash flow. So you’re speculating. So if you want to have a small piece of your portfolio reserved for more risky investments. I do this. I do some options trading with a small piece of my portfolio. But I’m not investing in cryptocurrencies because they’re not backed by anything. There’s really no way to predict what is going to happen there. It’s my opinion that it’s mostly driven by buyer sentiment. So I won’t touch them. They’re completely speculative to me. There’s no cash flow so there’s no reason for me to be investing or buying crypto currencies. I have heard the argument that some people buy them as a hedge. In the same way that some will buy gold or silver.

I buy silver. I just buy the silver ETF. I don’t hold physical silver. I think that’s overblown and over-marketed and unnecessary. But there are those who buy cryptocurrencies for the same reason that people buy hard precious metals. Because in the event of hyperinflation those are the types of things that people will flock into and that will be a safe haven against inflation. Okay, I guess I could get behind that if that’s your reasoning. But don’t act like it’s investing. Don’t act like it’s a wise investment to have your, a large percentage of your portfolio in an asset that isn’t even real. You’re speculating by going into cryptocurrencies and that’s why I won’t touch them.

This is the part of the show where we look at one of our student’s businesses and today we’re looking at Eye Love, a multi-million dollar sunglasses company.

Today’s submission comes from Travis and Jenna Zigler, the owners of Eye Love. They are Backroom Mastermind members and they’re also members of our Tribe, which is our incubator for investors, audience leaders, and physical product owners. We bake them all together and cool things happen. So Eye Love is currently doing $200,000 per month in sales. Nice job Zigler family. And today we’re going to look at what they can do to increase profits and grow their business. So, Travis and Jenna, good to hear from you guys by the way. How’s it going?

So I’m looking at eyelove.com and I think you have two opportunities to really grow your business. The first one is, on the website itself there’s a couple things that you could highlight that I think you’re, are not being highlighted properly. The first one is the amount of mission and purpose that you have in your business. The fact that your story is that you’ve always wanted to have a pay what you can clinic to help those who can’t afford eye care.

Is that the right term, eye care? Does anyone know? Eye care, eye health care. Eye doctors. Yes? Thanks guys.

The fact that that is your mission and your purpose, I want to get behind that. I want to be a part of that. I believe in that. When you talk about it it resonates, it emanates from you. And that doesn’t smack me in the face when I visit eyelove.com. So, one of the things that I think you could do is you could release more videos of the trips that you take, the service trips that you take. I think you can highlight that in social media and you can put it on your site.

Also, I think you need pictures of the people that you help. Tom’s Shoes does a really good job of this. Tom’s Shoes, the first thing you think of is the fact that when you buy a pair you’re helping someone in need. If you can represent that in your brand right now, even if it is just that you have a purpose that is bigger than selling eyeglasses and you highlight that on your website, I think that will go a long way. Quest does this well. And I know this because I’m a super fan of Quest. I will buy anything from Quest because I automatically just assume it’s healthy. Not necessarily because of the ingredient profile, the macro nutrient profile, but because I know what the mission of the company is.

They could, they could put Cheez-It’s in a, just rebrand it as Quest Cheez-It’s and not change anything about it. Oh it’s Quest, must be healthy because their mission is to end metabolic disease.

So what is your mission? What’s the mission that you are really driving home? And if you can drive that home publicly, I think that will go a long way. The other piece that I think is missing is there’s no high-end product in the line. So, if I’m looking at your Amazon store and your website there’s, there’s a high margin product missing. I don’t know of any sunglasses companies or eye care companies that exist without being premium. They might exist, I just don’t know what they are.

When you think of an eye glasses company or if you even think about proper eye health I don’t think of that, I don’t think of doing that on the cheap. You think of paying a premium for that. And right now your products are all sub $50. So what’s the product that we can release that you really believe in that’s at that over $50 mark. If we could be over $70 that’s even better.

So, it might be a premium sun glass. It might be, I know you’re rolling out supplements right now, so it might be some premium supplement that’s an alternative to prescription medication. So, what can we do there at the high price point? Because I don’t know of any companies that have really gone bigger than where you are right now, I mean you’re a multi-million dollar company. Great job. I don’t know of any companies that have grown beyond that without having some sort of a high-end piece. So I think that needs to be your focus right now. You need to be looking at how do we drive the mission home? How do we do that very publicly via social media and our website? And be looking at what are the high margin products that we can release to our existing customer base that will set us up to be perceived as a premium company and allow us to increase those profit margins?

Even if you only sell a few of those high-end products it will still shift the perception of your brand to being a premium company. And that will boost the conversions of your lower end products. Your baseline products. So I recommend someone that’s at your level to always be looking at how can we set prices higher so that the rest of our baseline has a bump because now the entire brand has been seen as having an elevated image now simply for the fact that we have one or two higher priced products. But for you, I think you are going to sell a good amount of those products because other brands have proven that premium sunglasses have viability in the marketplace. So how can you do that, and I’d work that into your business. And I think that is going to be what is going to take you from that $2-$3 million mark to $5 million and up.

I want to give public congratulations to Travis and Jenna. Doing $200,000 a month. That is a huge milestone. Congratulations guys. We have well over a hundred stories similar to that of people who have hit the million dollar mark or up. So we have all kinds of crazy success stories from our trainings, or from the Tribe, or from our workshops. So if you have a physical product or you want to be an entrepreneur our trainings, our Brand Builder Bootcamp will give you the 12 month plan to following the same processes that we have used to launch many many different million dollar physical products brands. That is at fredoomfastlane.com/bootcamp.

If you have a physical product that is doing well, we take our most successful students and we put them into the Tribe. We partner them together. We create advanced trainings for them. We have a summit every year of our most successful people. We bring in investors who want to infuse brands with capital. We partner audience leaders with brand builders and investors inside of our Tribe. And you can apply for that at freedomfastlane.com/tribe.

Hey, if you have a question that you want to see answered on the show head over to freedomfastlane.com/ask and we might just answer your question on the next episode of Freedom Fast Lane TV. So to sum up, I believe the path to financial freedom is to build a business and invest the profits. And altogether it’s a fairly simple plan. And that anybody who is not following that strategy is wasting their talent and they should allocate their talent and their energy toward building a business and investing the profits if financial freedom is their goal. You should not invest however in cryptocurrencies. But that’s my opinion and some people disagree with me. So thanks for watching Freedom Fast Lane TV, we’ll see ya on the next show.