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Here are my eight (yes, 8!!!) core takeaways from this interview:

1. The Secret to Creating Great Content

We need to put out content every day. That is the currency of today’s day and age. Content that compels people to take action, that compels people to improve their lives, that gives them what they need to get on the path to happiness, essentially, fulfillment. That’s what every human being actually wants. Secret of life right there.

When we create content that gets people into action, they’re going to love us. If your content is just like, oh, okay, they just regurgitated that other blog posts that everybody else is parroting, it just falls flat, but when it gets people to change, to shift, three years later you’re going to look back and this will be the turning point for them.

Put out the kind of content that gets people to say F it. I’m going to do that 90-day challenge. I’m going to do it. I’m going to break through. I’m going to do the work because I’m tired of being stuck preparing all the time. I realize now, clearly, that I just have to start taking steps, doing my iterations.

2.How to Gain Trust and Close Sales

The goal of our lead magnet, which is one of the main KPIs in my business, is to give them an experience with our content.

Because when the mum puts on the earbuds and presses play and sits there for 20 minutes and all of the stress of the commute, getting cut off, the road-rage incident, the boss, the office cubicle she doesn’t like—when all of that washes away, and then the kids show up after that and she’s present and she’s grounded with them, and the whole evening is a totally different experience because of that one thing she did in between that came from a free thing we offered her from a pop-up on our blog. Boom, we’ve won.

I don’t look at the win for us as I made a sale. I look at the win when she has that experience and feels something shift in her life. The transformation moment.

If we put barriers to transformation, if we’re like, okay, I can help the world, but I’m only going to transform those who give this guy money, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Because most people are gonna look at your sales page and be like, I don’t trust you. There’s scammers all over. Like I don’t trust you. I don’t believe it’s going to work. I don’t believe it’ll work for me. I don’t think I can trust you with my credit card. I don’t trust any of it, and so they don’t buy.

Whereas, when you move the minor transformation, that little step in the direction of their goals, when you move that before the transaction, the trust factor changes. The rest of the numbers from that point on change significantly. There’s plenty of data to prove all of this.

Demonstrate your ability to help them get the results they desire before asking for a sale and surprise, surprise, you’ll get a lot more people lining up with credit cards in hand saying that was great. Where can I get more?

3. Bullet-Proof Your Marketing Strategy

If you have a one-legged table, sure you can balance something on it, but that’s it, right? If you’re falling on Facebook organic and Facebook changes their algorithm and there it goes, your whole table goes down, right?

But if you’ve got a four-legged table and one of those legs come off, that table can stand on its own.

If you’ve got an eight-legged table and you’re getting massive traffic from Pinterest, from Facebook ads, from Instagram, from YouTube, from Google, and all of those places are bringing you traffic, and you’ve got your own email list, and all of that’s working for you, then you can totally lose an entire leg, if you had to, and you would be unaffected.

4. The Right Mindset for Creating Passive Income

I think the whole fake-guru world, the Instagram look at me on my hammock making “passive” income, which is a total lie, it’s got a false mindset installed in people and all they’re focusing on is that last big domino.

You’ve got fake gurus selling webinar pitches of I’m gonna teach you how to knock over this gigantic, big, end domino that’s a $10K/month business, and everyone’s neglecting the 19 other dominos required to make that effortless.

It’s a three-to-five-year journey to build out all of those dominoes, and delaying gratification is not an ingrained, innate response that we humans have. We want to believe there’s a shortcut.

I was trying scam after scam after scam and MLM, network marketing, all kinds of things just to get rich quick. I’m a recovering opportunity seeker. I’m okay with that now. The shortcut was doing the work for three years straight.

5. Make Content Creation Easy on Yourself

My wife enjoys crafting content through the written word. She likes brainstorming ideas. She often has three or four different blog posts at different phases of completion.

Me? Oh, copy editing and punctuation. I don’t like it. It is not for me, but for the first few years I tried to force myself to blog, and surprise, surprise, I didn’t follow through.

I didn’t stick with it consistently for the three years needed to really gain momentum because I would do it a few times and I’d have a little willpower and then finally I’m like this sucks. I don’t like it.

It wasn’t until I tried video that I was like, wow. I got the idea out. It didn’t take a terrible amount of time. It was relatively coherent. I did it all on my cell phone. The YouTube app allows me to plug in a microphone, record it, cut the front, cut the end, I don’t edit anything, and I just upload the whole thing. It got done.

I did it the next day and it got done, and I did it the next day and it got done: 120 videos in 120 days. By the end of that, I got through the learning curves and I was in motion. I was in traction.

Blogging is where I want to be, but sometimes it’s not in the DNA. When you find that format that works for you, run with it. Go all in, and then build systems and teammates to get the other pieces of organic content out.

6. Why SEO Pays Off in the Long Run

Blog, the podcast, and video. Those are the big ones. Social is absolutely secondary to me.

It took me about a year and a half to get all three of those firing. Maybe there’s some superhuman individuals that can do all three at once and hit it out of the gates. For most people, it’s way better to go through one learning curve, get to competence, and then look at how do I add on the next learning curve?

I did nothing but videos for six months, about 150. I switched to three videos per week, which was a really good pace for me. Then I put out my first lead magnet, and it sucked. It took three iterations to find a lead magnet that was actually enticing to my people.

At a year is when I did my first blog. Even for me, it took 18 months to get all three of those firing. Now that they’re all firing consistently for longer periods of time, the power of compounding takes over, and that’s why I prefer search over social.

Social you can get short-term benefits. Something goes viral. Boom! But the search, I have videos from 2016 that are still bringing in hundreds of subscribers per month to my channel, not to mention everything I’ve done since then.

That’s the power you get in search that you just don’t get in social.

7. SEO Success Depends on One Thing

How do I write a coherent post that actually keeps people’s attention? How do I deliver value? How do I write a title and a meta that might get clicked?

How do I do this in a way that Google’s going to like it without compromising the human experience? You have two audiences: there’s the algorithm and then the human. Each one of those is a separate learning curve.

Everybody’s like, how long is it going to take? I don’t know. How good are you? How smart are you? Are you good writer?

I like to think of that iteration. First blog post up. There’s an iteration. Do another one. How can you improve? There’s all those little things to improve upon.

The SEO path is effort-driven. I don’t have to spend a lot of money. My wife and I built her site—started at $95.40. Hosting and a domain: $7.95/month for the year. I still remember it. It was all we could afford, and I’ve brought in millions of dollars at this point in time, and mostly because of effort.

The school of hard knocks is the absolute best school. Trial and error is absolutely the best teacher. The one thing you have to do to get on that path is to start.

8. Make More Money Niching Down

The way the world’s going now is we need to find the Venn diagram: the overlap of this-for-that type situation. Those are the wide open ones.

My wife and I, we do angel meditation, so it ain’t just normal meditations. We’re really far down the spiritual rabbit hole, and they’re like, wow, you’re doing that much volume, that much traffic, that much revenue on that? Like, whoa.

Home girl, her and her husband, they’re trying to be like “online gym”. What if she loves horses? Then they were like, what if we did fitness for a specific type of horseback riding? Crushing it. They are crushing it.

In four years, they’ve blown the top off their revenue compared to being the big person up top because they got super-specific down to this super-focused group of people.

They share their passions. They’re creating content. Their audiences just loves the fact that she actually has horses on her property. It’s just such a win-win-win-win-win.

They didn’t start there. They actually started with a clothing company many, many, many, many moons before, but the path evolves.

Everybody wants to know what’s that right thing for me to go do? I want to know the right one before I start. We only see one or two steps ahead of us.

It’s like plugging in a GPS. It ain’t going to tell you the whole path. It tells you one turn. You just follow the next turn and the next step and the next step and they keep coming; they keep showing up in front of you.