by Dennis Yu | Jan 14, 2020 | Advertising, advice, Business, Communication, systems
You know that anything based upon mere MOTIVATION will fail.
You might start out strong, but motivation can’t last forever, no matter how much Gary and Tony you consume– or how hard you try.
What’s different this time is that you’ve learned from the past– and now you’re about SYSTEMS.
- SYSTEMS of people— your team, mentors, and collaborators to keep your projects running, even on those inevitable days that you’re not at 100%.
- SYSTEMS of process— where you’ve documented what you’ve done before, so other people can follow them for repeatable excellence, freeing up your time.
- SYSTEMS of platforms— automation via tools that eliminate your busy work, like FancyHands, Boomerang for Gmail, Infusionsoft, automated rules in Facebook ads, our Agency Management Platform, and other means to eliminate waste from repetitive tasks.
Your SYSTEMS of people, process, and platform are 1,000% stronger than just you– even on your best day or most well-intentioned resolutions.
Your SYSTEMS will continue to produce for you– even when colleagues rip you off blind, friends let you down, and objects hit you from behind.
You will succeed in 2020 because this is not yet another New Year’s Resolution. It’s a permanent and on-going investment in your health, wealth, and happiness.
And I’m here to help you build these systems, sharing openly what has worked for me and our network of successful friends.
by Dennis Yu | Dec 11, 2019 | Advertising, Business, Communication, Strategy
“No, you cannot pick my brain for free,” is what I told him.
You wouldn’t ask a restaurant owner to give you free meals or a doctor to give you free surgery.
But somehow in marketing, especially digital, charging for your expertise is rude.
Sure, give them a minute (make sure it’s actually just a minute), answer a quick question. Link them to an article you wrote.
If you want to be taken seriously, charge appropriately for your time– for the years of hard-fought experience you’ve gained, not the minutes of consulting.
The magic phrase here is “You know I do this for a living, right?”
I’ve had people hit me up saying that I’m just hanging out on social media, totally available, not doing anything.
Like my time is just like leftovers sitting around, with them doing me a favor by helping take it off my hands. Jealously guard your time– it’s super expensive and once used, you cannot get it back.
But give your knowledge away freely– put it into blog posts, videos, social media, or whatever, so anyone can consume it.
That’s the irony of digital marketing– that your time is a finite asset, but what you publish can serve everyone, especially the folks who cannot afford or do not wish to pay for one-on-one consulting.
Here is what Grant Cardone does to make sure that there is a fair exchange for information and time.
by Dennis Yu | Dec 6, 2019 | Advertising, search engine optimization
He’s better!
I first met Brian via Alex Houg, doing local online marketing projects in Minneapolis. Like most agency folks, he had a mix of awesome and headache clients. You know what that’s like if you’re a consultant or agency owner. One of these clients was so mean that not only didn’t pay, but stole the work and berated Alex and Brian.
There are few people as true and reliable as Brian.
by Dennis Yu | Oct 7, 2019 | Advertising, advice, Awesome People, Branding, Business, Conferences, content marketing, Digital Marketing, Entrepreneurship, ethics, fraud, local advertising, marketing ethics, mentorship, Networking, personal branding, promoting yourself
Know how to instantly tell an expert from an amateur?
The expert spends 90% of their time practicing the fundamentals and only 10% of their time doing “pro” stuff.
The amateur spends 90% of their time trying to do the “pro” stuff, while ignoring the fundamentals.
- The amateur marketer chases tricks and hacks.
- The amateur golfer wants to hit from the black tees.
- The amateur health nut focuses on fad diets and pills.
The amateur author/speaker/coach dreams of speaking on the big stage, instead of quietly honing their craft.
Their attention is seeking out celebrities to snap “validation” pictures with celebrities, instead of letting the experts testify to their competence.
- A true expert has massive depth– like an iceberg with 90% below the water, unseen.
- A true expert publishes because they are compelled to serve and share, with publicity as a necessary evil.
- A true expert has a loyal following with demonstrated proof of their published how-to process.
Are you focusing on merely how you look or on truly improving who are you?
The fundamentals of digital marketing are getting your GCT (goals, content, targeting) right. That’s what we teach and what I spend most of my time working on.
It’s not flashy, but highly profitable.
I’ve taught over 500 workshops in the last 20 years.
And nearly every time, the ones we list as “expert” with the “latest” tricks and secret algorithmic updates are the ones that pack the room.
But when we actually deliver that material, we lose the audience and they are unhappy– especially the ones who represent themselves as pro (a clear sign that they are not).
Yet when we teach the fundamentals, people say their minds are blown, largely because these are pieces they’ve been missing all along. And then this drives results.
Drive for show, putt for dough, as the golfers like to say.
I am enamored with folks like Ryan Deiss, Michael Stelzner, and Shawn Collins who teach based on their own execution.
They focus on the step-by-step HOW TO, like expert chefs that have time-tested recipes for the most requested meals.
by Dennis Yu | Aug 23, 2019 | Advertising, Analytics, Boosting, Facebook Advertising, facebook analytics, facebook marketing and advertising, local advertising
5 years ago, Facebook had an auto-boost feature where they would automatically boost your posts. But they killed it because not many people were using it and because the system was boosting posts about site outages, sales that had already expired, and other things.
So this new version gives you a bit more control:
You can choose the default boost amounts (how long and how much to spend each day), the audience (from your list of saved audiences), and if you want to auto-approve:
Some things I don’t like about this re-released product:
- Only one post gets boosted at a time– I like to be able to put more money on winners, even to have them live forever. As a business grows, we would want to have a growing number of posts boosted evergreen (forever) as part of our Greatest Hits that live forever.
- The 60% threshold for “top posts” is arbitrary. Instead of getting 60% more engagement than our average post, it should take the top 10% of posts by engagement or all posts that meet a particular fixed engagement threshold (like 10% engagement/impressions or 10+ second average watch times on videos).
- It’s buggy– I’m not able to switch the audiences. And the reported engagement figures don’t make sense– how do I have no engagement, yet 144 engagements?
Have you had a chance to play?
by Dennis Yu | Aug 19, 2019 | Advertising, Digital Marketing, Entrepreneurship, ethics, Facebook Advertising, facebook marketing and advertising, fraud, internet marketing training, local advertising, marketing ethics, Online marketing, promoting yourself
I think I’m going to throw up.
The number of people selling courses on how to sell a course is mind-boggling.
And I’ve forced myself to go through about 20 of the most popular ones to see what they’re doing.
Here’s what I’ve learned, if you’re curious:
+ 95% of this is hype designed to make you salivate– like dangling a steak in front of a stray dog that hasn’t eaten a full meal in weeks.
+ The endless Lambos, exotic travel vids, and “freedom” is a total lie– yes, there is a lot of money to be made, but you still have to work and invest, like any other real business.
+ The people selling the courses don’t have experience in producing actual results other than claims of how much money they’ve made in getting people to buy their course on how to sell a course.
+ I could offer a course on how to make $1,000,000….. Interested? The price is $1,000,000, of course, lol.
+ I’ve sat through the 90 minute “live” webinars, waiting patiently though the “struggle”, “lifestyle breakthrough to riches”, mindset motivation (I’m an ordinary guy who did it, so you can, too)… to eventually get to real value. But alas– it never comes.
+ There is a shred of truth to the “$375 million a day of online revenue being made per day– claim your slice” argument. But this is just another flavor of the “make money online” bizopp. Same clown, different circus– sucker born every minute.
+ The reason you only hear from the sole figurehead and nobody else is because their students aren’t winning. I’ve Googled to find their reviews and it’s not pretty.
+ But if I get you excited enough, you’ll not do the due diligence– since you’re panting about what you’d do with that extra $57,383 a month. You need to buy TODAY to get the 3 bonuses and 50% off the price. Would you buy heart surgery from the self-proclaimed surgeon offering it at 50% off, today only?
+ Yes, imposter syndrome is real– that the pros feel they aren’t really experts. But for the 99% of people who feel they don’t know enough to be competently able to dispense advice– you’re right! You could watch as many “motivational” videos to pump yourself up as a newly minted surgeon– but that extra confidence won’t stop you from killing your patients.
+ Would you trust someone who says they can teach you how to start a heart surgery business in just 6 modules you watch over the weekend– so you can start operating tomorrow? $2,000 is a great price if you can make $500,000 or even $700,000 a month, while actually healing patients.
+ And when you look over the course outline, what you find is 90% of the content is more “mindset” and teaching you how to sell the very same way you were just sold– instead of actually teaching you the practice. This is called a PONZI scheme. And many of these folks will go to jail– you watch.
Thus, they’re just repackaging our Facebook ads course + PLF + perfect webinar for their particular niche– 5,000 people all selling the same thing– hope.
So why not skip past all that expensive, heart-breaking fluff to get to the actual meat– to go to the source?
You don’t have to drop $2,500 to attend yet another seminar (unless you enjoy feeling perpetually “motivated”), since the information is already online and almost all of it free.
I want to see YOU actually win, so I provide most of our methods free– in the same way you can go to the library to read medical textbooks and journals.
The surgeons aren’t gasping at HEART SURGERY SECRETS taught only at midnight in a medical school.
I want to teach you the fundamentals from my 23 years and 70,000 hours of digital marketing experience– and I was running million dollar a day teams before these children were even born.
The folks who actually are making money online– we all know one another and we have actual teams, processes, customers, overhead, and stuff you’d find in any type of real business– online or not.
Does any of this resonate with you?
