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- Oct 2, 2018
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I'm happy to be able to make this post and hopefully share some inspiration and motivation to you guys.
First off, I found MJ DeMarco while driving for Uber. I'd work 12+ hours a day so listening to music became annoying after a while so Audible became my best friend. I read Millionaire Fastlane and Unscripted audiobooks about 3 times each along with a ton of other books that really helped me push through the shitty time I'm about to briefly cover in a second. So, first MJ if you're reading this, THANK YOU because your books rank at the top as far as ones that woke me TF up. I related to your story of your limo days, that night in the snowstorm. I had many of those nights out there working for Uber. IT SUCKED. Your book came at the right time because hearing your story as a limo driver really gave me a lot of hope to keep going on numerous days where I felt like I wanted to just disappear off the face of the earth.
I'm gonna be 32 on July 30th. I've been doing internet marketing for about 10 years now... not very successfully but still, I've learned a few things. My first success way back when was with CPA marketing. My first sale was a $2 CPA offer for Free Diapers. That was cool but I went on for a few years trying a bunch of things and failing. I eventually started learning Facebook Ads back in 2014. Then, I found a website called Teespring. It was blowing up at the time and several of the people in my I.M. circle were doing well. I had been studying FB ads for a while so I tried it. And this was my real first success w/ Internet Marketing. The next 4 years, I lived a very average I.M. lifestyle by selling t-shirts w/ Teespring and selling little $47 info-products based around teaching FB ads or selling t-shirts. For the time being, this was great. Looking back, I now realize how little money I was making. I was working 100% as an internet marketer but I was only making enough to pay my bills and have all the basic necessities I wanted/needed. Every once in a while, I'd hit a big Teespring campaign or have a nice product launch and be able to save up more money than I'd ever seen before growing up. At one point, I had $18k saved. Problem was, I wasn't building a business at all and there were way too many times where I'd go forever without a winning t-shirt OR a good product launch. I had no idea what to do with $18k so it just became my source of income when things were slow. Well, that $18k eventually dwindled down to $0.
I was burnt out selling t-shirts and products about t-shirts. It was way too much up and down and after 4 years I ended up with basically nothing to show for it. About 3 months after I had moved into a new house, EVERYTHING started going wrong. Nothing was working. Nothing was selling. For a while, I was only down to selling FB ads courses and helping a couple small businesses run their FB ads. This stuff kept my lights on for a while but at this point EVERYTHING collapsed. Problem was, I was now in a house paying $1,500 a month in rent and I didn't have ANY income coming in. This is when Uber came into the picture. I had to do something FAST, so I applied for Uber, hoping to get in, pay up some bills and save up some money to invest in a business idea I had brewing in my head for a while.
Well, two years passed and I was still doing Uber and I was in the WORST position I have ever been in. I was doing Uber and a couple Internet things here and there to keep my head above water but IT WASN'T WORKING. Now, I know you're probably wondering how the hell can someone get $9,000 behind on rent? The answer: I don't know lol. Maybe I had an angel as a landlord but he was extremely cool and worked with me because I communicated with him the entire time. I told him the truth about everything. Don't get me wrong, he got pretty pissed by the time I started approaching $9k. During this time, Coronavirus was just hitting the U.S. He gave me one last chance to catch up and told me I had to pay $1k every week PLUS be on time w/ rent for the next two months or he would be filing for eviction.
I guess this was my back against the wall moment that I needed to kick my a$$ into action. I have 3 daughters. 2018 - 2020 doing Uber was one of the hardest times of my life. I was soooo broke, not living paycheck to paycheck but living daily payout to daily payout. I had my water and lights turned off multiple times. I messed up my credit. All while working long hours with Uber/Lyft and getting nowhere. So like I said MJ's book and other Audible treasures kept me hopeful enough that this wouldn't be forever...and it wasn't
So about that business idea I said I had brewing in my head for a while. It was time to go balls to the wall with it and there was no more excuses. I had two months to pay back $9,000 in rent to make sure I had a place for my family to stay. Up until that time I had let fear of failure/success stop me from doing many things, but at this point the fear of losing EVERYTHING outweighed fear of success by a long shot. I didn't care about a pandemic, riots, recession or anything... it was time to stop bullshitting.
So, I'll just put it out there. I know people want to know. I sell tea. Herbal tea. My wife experienced health issues many years ago. After she suffered with this condition for over a year, we eventually put together the right pieces of information and she was able to heal herself with mindset exercises and changes in diet, including the use of specific herbs. So that was that, she recovered completely and we went on struggling financially for the next few years.
One day, I saw an interview with a lady named Greta, CEO and Founder or SkinnyMeTea.com. Great interview btw, she's a beast and gives out tons of knowledge related to eCom/Shopify. After I watched the interview, I ran to get my wife and we watched it again together. At the end of it, we both knew what we were going to do. She was already drinking the same tea that she used to recover years before and at this point, my knowledge in Facebook Ads was quite proficient. I had the product. I had the knowledge to market it. I just needed a budget and some balls. For the two years of me doing Uber, these two important "B's" eluded me and my idea sat dormant.
Fast forward back to my landlord's final, mission impossible payment arrangement. So he gave me a week to get things together. I was about to make a partial payment of $1,000 to bring my balance down to $8k, but since he gave me until the following Monday to start with the arrangement, I decided to risk it all and spend $1,000 on Facebook Ads. Side Note: Before this, we did sell a few bags of tea w/ FB ads but it didn't make any profit. We had sold maybe 10 bags of tea of the course of a year before this last ditch effort. So it's important to note that while that didn't make any profit, it DID get us a couple great reviews, which would come into play later on.
So it was time to get cracking. I knew I needed a better creative if I was going to throw $1,000 at ads in a one week span. I had never scaled that high before, I used to run a lot of punk $5 adsets and rarely ever surpassed a total of $50 in adspend a day. The current photo ad I was using only had gotten me 10 sales for negative ROI so I knew I wasn't going to spend my money on that creative. So, one day, my wife and I went out to the park and shot a video promoting the tea. All she did was basically look badass and work out at a natural trail, I wrote a script telling her story. We recorded it separately and I put them together with some cool music and voila. At that park, we were in the worst position ever but after shooting the last scene and looking over the footage, I felt something. I knew this was going to be it.
I posted the video May 11th, 2020 and started running ads right away. I didn't come to play. The first day, I launched a few ads at $50 per day each, so I would be spending $150. This was a huge risk to me at this time, as I said I had never surpassed $50/day in adspend so this was a big jump for me. It was scary, but I've believed in our product for a long time and this was the time to show and prove.
Here was the results:
$340.87!!
I damn near sh*t myself. I had made almost $200 profit. It would literally have taken me 14 - 16 hours driving all over my city to make that much profit w/ Uber. That first day, I knew it was time for my life to change. I was done having a limited mindset, fearing failure, procrastinating, I was going to drop everything else and focus 100% of my time on this business. I quit Uber that day.
Well, long story short. It's currently 9:17 EST on July 19th, 2020. It's been the best couple of months of my freaking life. Today, I'm sitting at $1,347 in sales. I had my biggest day a couple days ago hitting $1,800 in sales in single day.
For the past 3+ years, I have obsessed over the number $25k per month. I wrote it probably a million times. It WAS my password for everything. Well, now it's time to set my eyes on a much higher goal because I'm here. Here's our numbers in the past 30 days:
$34,437.57!!!!!!!!
We're on course to do $50k in the next month and I want to hit $100k/mo in the next two months. Of course, I say this not to brag at all. I know people doing $50k a day! I dream of reaching that level, too! One thing I learned for sure is that only YOU set your own limits in your mind.
Here's some tips from the top of my head and I'm also open to questions.
1. Find something that solves a real problem. My wife's health issues + learning about Greta's story opened my eyes to the fact that we had a solution to a HUGE problem sitting under our noses the entire time. Look closely at the problems you or your loved ones are going through or have gone through. If there's a big enough problem, your ticket to freedom is in finding that solution(and marketing it correctly).
2. When you find something that solves a real problem, if you believe in it, FOCUS ON IT. Give it your 100%. I had a bunch of little stupid Internet Marketing things I was trying to do and I had to drop it all to focus on building a real brand. I highly recommend niche stores where you build a brand around a product that either solves a huge problem or has a great story behind it or preferably BOTH.
3. Creatives and copy are the kings. The change from photo ads to a video ad was the best thing I could have ever done. People nowadays love to SEE and HEAR about the product. We focused on writing a captivating script that people could relate to and shot a simple but clean video. It changed everything by gaining trust far beyond what any static image could do.
4. It takes money to make money. Sure, old tired saying but damn is it true in my circumstance. I was always scared to spend a lot on testing. I held myself back a lot, for many years. On May 11th, I made a leap and spent $150. The next day I spent $250. I dropped my fear because that was my only option. Don't let yourself get $9k behind on rent before having that wake tf up moment. (Though, I don't know if your landlord is as cool as mine so I wouldn't try this at home)
5. Use very targeted audiences when testing on Facebook. 100k to 1.5M audience size is good. Being really tight in targeting will train the pixel a lot faster.
6. Lookalike audiences are everything. I used to hear this all the time but never got into Lookalikes. Dumb mistake. The Facebook machine is incredibly, freakishly good at finding customers who are more likely to purchase(Always optimize for purchase). The more data you give it, the better it performs. Right now, I'm using only Lookalike audience and ads with absolutely no targeting or lookalikes.
7. NEVER. GIVE. UP.
I'm gonna grab some dinner now...
Any questions?
First off, I found MJ DeMarco while driving for Uber. I'd work 12+ hours a day so listening to music became annoying after a while so Audible became my best friend. I read Millionaire Fastlane and Unscripted audiobooks about 3 times each along with a ton of other books that really helped me push through the shitty time I'm about to briefly cover in a second. So, first MJ if you're reading this, THANK YOU because your books rank at the top as far as ones that woke me TF up. I related to your story of your limo days, that night in the snowstorm. I had many of those nights out there working for Uber. IT SUCKED. Your book came at the right time because hearing your story as a limo driver really gave me a lot of hope to keep going on numerous days where I felt like I wanted to just disappear off the face of the earth.
I'm gonna be 32 on July 30th. I've been doing internet marketing for about 10 years now... not very successfully but still, I've learned a few things. My first success way back when was with CPA marketing. My first sale was a $2 CPA offer for Free Diapers. That was cool but I went on for a few years trying a bunch of things and failing. I eventually started learning Facebook Ads back in 2014. Then, I found a website called Teespring. It was blowing up at the time and several of the people in my I.M. circle were doing well. I had been studying FB ads for a while so I tried it. And this was my real first success w/ Internet Marketing. The next 4 years, I lived a very average I.M. lifestyle by selling t-shirts w/ Teespring and selling little $47 info-products based around teaching FB ads or selling t-shirts. For the time being, this was great. Looking back, I now realize how little money I was making. I was working 100% as an internet marketer but I was only making enough to pay my bills and have all the basic necessities I wanted/needed. Every once in a while, I'd hit a big Teespring campaign or have a nice product launch and be able to save up more money than I'd ever seen before growing up. At one point, I had $18k saved. Problem was, I wasn't building a business at all and there were way too many times where I'd go forever without a winning t-shirt OR a good product launch. I had no idea what to do with $18k so it just became my source of income when things were slow. Well, that $18k eventually dwindled down to $0.
I was burnt out selling t-shirts and products about t-shirts. It was way too much up and down and after 4 years I ended up with basically nothing to show for it. About 3 months after I had moved into a new house, EVERYTHING started going wrong. Nothing was working. Nothing was selling. For a while, I was only down to selling FB ads courses and helping a couple small businesses run their FB ads. This stuff kept my lights on for a while but at this point EVERYTHING collapsed. Problem was, I was now in a house paying $1,500 a month in rent and I didn't have ANY income coming in. This is when Uber came into the picture. I had to do something FAST, so I applied for Uber, hoping to get in, pay up some bills and save up some money to invest in a business idea I had brewing in my head for a while.
Well, two years passed and I was still doing Uber and I was in the WORST position I have ever been in. I was doing Uber and a couple Internet things here and there to keep my head above water but IT WASN'T WORKING. Now, I know you're probably wondering how the hell can someone get $9,000 behind on rent? The answer: I don't know lol. Maybe I had an angel as a landlord but he was extremely cool and worked with me because I communicated with him the entire time. I told him the truth about everything. Don't get me wrong, he got pretty pissed by the time I started approaching $9k. During this time, Coronavirus was just hitting the U.S. He gave me one last chance to catch up and told me I had to pay $1k every week PLUS be on time w/ rent for the next two months or he would be filing for eviction.
I guess this was my back against the wall moment that I needed to kick my a$$ into action. I have 3 daughters. 2018 - 2020 doing Uber was one of the hardest times of my life. I was soooo broke, not living paycheck to paycheck but living daily payout to daily payout. I had my water and lights turned off multiple times. I messed up my credit. All while working long hours with Uber/Lyft and getting nowhere. So like I said MJ's book and other Audible treasures kept me hopeful enough that this wouldn't be forever...and it wasn't
So about that business idea I said I had brewing in my head for a while. It was time to go balls to the wall with it and there was no more excuses. I had two months to pay back $9,000 in rent to make sure I had a place for my family to stay. Up until that time I had let fear of failure/success stop me from doing many things, but at this point the fear of losing EVERYTHING outweighed fear of success by a long shot. I didn't care about a pandemic, riots, recession or anything... it was time to stop bullshitting.
So, I'll just put it out there. I know people want to know. I sell tea. Herbal tea. My wife experienced health issues many years ago. After she suffered with this condition for over a year, we eventually put together the right pieces of information and she was able to heal herself with mindset exercises and changes in diet, including the use of specific herbs. So that was that, she recovered completely and we went on struggling financially for the next few years.
One day, I saw an interview with a lady named Greta, CEO and Founder or SkinnyMeTea.com. Great interview btw, she's a beast and gives out tons of knowledge related to eCom/Shopify. After I watched the interview, I ran to get my wife and we watched it again together. At the end of it, we both knew what we were going to do. She was already drinking the same tea that she used to recover years before and at this point, my knowledge in Facebook Ads was quite proficient. I had the product. I had the knowledge to market it. I just needed a budget and some balls. For the two years of me doing Uber, these two important "B's" eluded me and my idea sat dormant.
Fast forward back to my landlord's final, mission impossible payment arrangement. So he gave me a week to get things together. I was about to make a partial payment of $1,000 to bring my balance down to $8k, but since he gave me until the following Monday to start with the arrangement, I decided to risk it all and spend $1,000 on Facebook Ads. Side Note: Before this, we did sell a few bags of tea w/ FB ads but it didn't make any profit. We had sold maybe 10 bags of tea of the course of a year before this last ditch effort. So it's important to note that while that didn't make any profit, it DID get us a couple great reviews, which would come into play later on.
So it was time to get cracking. I knew I needed a better creative if I was going to throw $1,000 at ads in a one week span. I had never scaled that high before, I used to run a lot of punk $5 adsets and rarely ever surpassed a total of $50 in adspend a day. The current photo ad I was using only had gotten me 10 sales for negative ROI so I knew I wasn't going to spend my money on that creative. So, one day, my wife and I went out to the park and shot a video promoting the tea. All she did was basically look badass and work out at a natural trail, I wrote a script telling her story. We recorded it separately and I put them together with some cool music and voila. At that park, we were in the worst position ever but after shooting the last scene and looking over the footage, I felt something. I knew this was going to be it.
I posted the video May 11th, 2020 and started running ads right away. I didn't come to play. The first day, I launched a few ads at $50 per day each, so I would be spending $150. This was a huge risk to me at this time, as I said I had never surpassed $50/day in adspend so this was a big jump for me. It was scary, but I've believed in our product for a long time and this was the time to show and prove.
Here was the results:
$340.87!!
I damn near sh*t myself. I had made almost $200 profit. It would literally have taken me 14 - 16 hours driving all over my city to make that much profit w/ Uber. That first day, I knew it was time for my life to change. I was done having a limited mindset, fearing failure, procrastinating, I was going to drop everything else and focus 100% of my time on this business. I quit Uber that day.
Well, long story short. It's currently 9:17 EST on July 19th, 2020. It's been the best couple of months of my freaking life. Today, I'm sitting at $1,347 in sales. I had my biggest day a couple days ago hitting $1,800 in sales in single day.
For the past 3+ years, I have obsessed over the number $25k per month. I wrote it probably a million times. It WAS my password for everything. Well, now it's time to set my eyes on a much higher goal because I'm here. Here's our numbers in the past 30 days:
$34,437.57!!!!!!!!
We're on course to do $50k in the next month and I want to hit $100k/mo in the next two months. Of course, I say this not to brag at all. I know people doing $50k a day! I dream of reaching that level, too! One thing I learned for sure is that only YOU set your own limits in your mind.
Here's some tips from the top of my head and I'm also open to questions.
1. Find something that solves a real problem. My wife's health issues + learning about Greta's story opened my eyes to the fact that we had a solution to a HUGE problem sitting under our noses the entire time. Look closely at the problems you or your loved ones are going through or have gone through. If there's a big enough problem, your ticket to freedom is in finding that solution(and marketing it correctly).
2. When you find something that solves a real problem, if you believe in it, FOCUS ON IT. Give it your 100%. I had a bunch of little stupid Internet Marketing things I was trying to do and I had to drop it all to focus on building a real brand. I highly recommend niche stores where you build a brand around a product that either solves a huge problem or has a great story behind it or preferably BOTH.
3. Creatives and copy are the kings. The change from photo ads to a video ad was the best thing I could have ever done. People nowadays love to SEE and HEAR about the product. We focused on writing a captivating script that people could relate to and shot a simple but clean video. It changed everything by gaining trust far beyond what any static image could do.
4. It takes money to make money. Sure, old tired saying but damn is it true in my circumstance. I was always scared to spend a lot on testing. I held myself back a lot, for many years. On May 11th, I made a leap and spent $150. The next day I spent $250. I dropped my fear because that was my only option. Don't let yourself get $9k behind on rent before having that wake tf up moment. (Though, I don't know if your landlord is as cool as mine so I wouldn't try this at home)
5. Use very targeted audiences when testing on Facebook. 100k to 1.5M audience size is good. Being really tight in targeting will train the pixel a lot faster.
6. Lookalike audiences are everything. I used to hear this all the time but never got into Lookalikes. Dumb mistake. The Facebook machine is incredibly, freakishly good at finding customers who are more likely to purchase(Always optimize for purchase). The more data you give it, the better it performs. Right now, I'm using only Lookalike audience and ads with absolutely no targeting or lookalikes.
7. NEVER. GIVE. UP.
I'm gonna grab some dinner now...
Any questions?
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