SNM009: Get Paid to Learn with Steve Blom

spk_0:   0:00
getting paid to learn with one of the world's most elite paper click experts. Stay Blonde. Today's episode is brought to you by a weber dot com. Start your free trial today at serve no master dot com Backslash a Weber Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams Now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now, here's your host. I'd love to know how you actually got into online marketing. I don't really know your origin story. So for me, that will be very interesting. Well, okay, so, um, basically, um, I started, actually, I had a company that sold stuff before they I guess it's before the internet of the Internet was around in the late nineties. I had a business. If you've ever seen guys that you've been walking through a shopping mall and you see guys demonstrating, you know, knives or sunglasses or skin stuff or, you know, super cool little Christmas gadgets. That was me. And I gave millions of dollars of of selling stuffy and shopping malls with crews of people that do you no direct sales like that. And, you know, at the time, you know, this is back in the nineties, you know, like, Yahoo is the most awesome sight. And Alta Vista was a search engine that people actually use. Nobody even remembers that anymore. And they thought that the Internet would actually get to be, like, 100 million pages back then. That was like a big deal, you know? But I kept hearing like, man, you know, like e commerce did a few $1,000,000 or $10 million or or $30 million I could see how it was growing. And I was in the physicals face of all these malls. And it's, um that's a huge, capital intensive, very hard business to be in. And but, you know, I e, uh, you know, just thousands and thousands of transactions. $20 here, $40 there. And I thought, Well, man, you know this internet is going to be the thing. You know, this this is awesome. So I was fortunate enough to be able to sell my company, too. Another company that was maybe 10 times my size that did the same thing. And I got a good price because, uh, they were just so angry with me. My my pr was so good that I was able to get into, um, some in that business when there's a grand opening of a brand new mall. There's not too many of them every year. I mean, this is, you know, it's a multi $1,000,000 thing to build a whole big shopping mall. And so so basically, in the year that they were like five new malls, big mega malls opening in the United States, I think I've got the contract for two of them, even though the other company was way, way bigger than me and they, they should have had all of them. But they didn't because I had a couple contacts that liked me and, you know, who knows? So bottom line is, I sold that company, and then I spent the next year and 1/2 you know, uh, kind of semi retired but trying to figure out the Internet. And I just failed and failed and failed. Um, and the first, the first actual business that I was able to start with was selling computers on eBay. And I had a connection. Thio where? And I'll bet you that this business is still going on. Lots of companies they just least computers from from from Dell and different companies for two And mostly, you know, I mean, sometimes one year, but most of them are two or three years, and at the end of the two or three year period, the the whole big company, Well, just take all of their computers and the lease is over, so they just they just dump him and l will give him, you know, the whole, you know, a whole bunch more. So, um, Dell doesn't want those computers back, and there's a whole secondary market for buying them. And so that's what I did is I bought. So, uh, um, desktop computers, actually not desktop, mostly laptop computers, because there was a good market like man. If you had a, uh, a laptop with a, you know, a 300 meg hard rise that was the big deal. So, um, that was the first actual business that I that worked on the internet. And then, um, I realized I needed thio some help in trying to, like, learn the internet, cause I didn't know anything. I mean, I really like. I I, uh, you know, learned howto mean I could like surf windows and and, uh, type some stuff I could barely use Excel. You know, I didn't really know anything, so I wanted to learn how to build Web pages, but it was really, um, complicated. And I'm so I decided I wanted to work for somebody for a while. Did, too, just to learn. But what ended up happening is nobody would hire me. So I had to start my own company and and that's always worked for me. It is. You know, if nobody will let you in the front door, you just start a company and, uh, and you jam. You know, you can always, like, hire somebody that has the skills that knows what you need if you can. If you can sell a little bit so that that really kind of, you know, saved me. But that was my first riel, uh, business that that that that work And I'd recommend that to anybody to start if you don't know anything about the whole Internet marketing thing. You know, when I started, everything was a lot more innocent. It was Everything was brand new. People didn't really like there wasn't even pay per click. There was no Google AdWords even know people thought that was ridiculous, You know, to actually pay for traffic back then. I mean, like, that's how inter innocent everything waas But so that's how that's a little bit about how I got started, You know, it was it wasn't like, uh, in overnight success, for sure.

spk_0:   7:43
How did you move from that into becoming like a riel paperclip expert with Google? Like, how did they transition and what was your journey?

spk_1:   7:52
Well, we had a few different things that happened before we had paper clip. We had email and email. Marketing was huge, and I started with with Laura Bed early and two other people company back in the early two thousands. Um, that was it was a database consulting company, But we did a lot of email and because Laura back then had she had started a company called P C D J, which was the first duel MP three app for DJs so that they could mix, you know, uh, regular, like vinyl records. They could mix MP three's like vinyl records. And so that was a real big deal of that at the time. And that company failed because too many investors got involved, and, uh and it kind of got a little bit crazy, like around that, that this is the first dot com rush. But Laura did realize something kind of interesting about it. They got a lot of people that signed up and used their software and learned a lot of stuff about how do you, uh, how to make that business work. But she noticed that most of the actual money that they made didn't really come from software came from their mailing list. They had an email list of about a 1,000,000 people that were, like, you know, musicians, DJs, people that really interested in in music and technology. And so, um, we worked out a deal with another company in that company. You see, the J just kind of went, went bust and she she lost all of her stock in the company or not all of it. This doctor's became worthless and eventually be long story. But But she realized that you know this email. There's a lot of power in email, and if you can send an email to a 1,000,000 people in a day, you know you could make a lot of money, and this is before the can spam act and and all that stuff. But that's kind of what we did, is we? We had a big database, and we, uh, we had a bunch of different commission based often, you know, email lists of different things. And we charged clients to send an email, thio whatever, you know, couple under 1000 people, a 1,000,000 people, Um, lots of people. Lots of companies are still doing that to this day. They were just adding Maur bits to their database. So it's not just now, like cares John with his email address. And here's where he signed up to be part of this email list. Now they know a lot more about you so they can charge more for a little more targeted, uh, list. But we have that company going for two or three years and then when the cans fam axed are coming down Um, it was like a perfect storm of a few things because Google had just started AdWords And about a year before that o. R. Two years before that, the overture guy started, which was the go to sir changing? You probably don't even your this all before your time, I think. But actually the guy who actually started paper click His name is Bill Gross. And he has a company called Idealab. And he started this search engine called Go To and he he was a really far thinking guy. He he worked out a deal with Yahoo to buy all their clicks for 10 cents, just every clique and he guaranteed I'm gonna pay you 10 cents for every click. And then he opened up go to search engine at the same time so people could bid because he felt that the market would come and people would realize the value of buying Web visitors to come to their site. And hopefully that was gonna happen before he went bankrupt. And that's what he did. And, you know ah, lot of keywords stayed at 10 cents and he didn't make any money off of those. But keywords like mortgages and loans and stuff like that started to get up to a dollar or two back then. And and that model was what Google was looking at at the time around the time because they I couldn't figure out how to monetize their search engine. It was a great search engine, but they didn't make any money. And they tried to sell their search engine to Yahoo for a 1,000,000 1/2 dollars and Yahoo past, believe it or not. And yeah, this all happened in, like, you know, a little little bit earlier. 99 2000 you know, around maybe even earlier 98 something like that. So, um, yeah, pretty pretty crazy. Anyway, fast forward to around 2003 and all of a sudden, more people on the Internet e mail went from like a really friendly. You've got Mayo Thio people being, you know, inundated with too many, uh, marketing messages. And spam started becoming a big problem. And then the cans fan Max started Thio come down. So I kind of saw the writing on the wall. Um, in just one other little thing. Part of my journey also was in around 2001 I started. I actually got somebody toe hire me working for an S e o company. And I've learned all the top CEO, uh, things techniques of the day, you know, leaks, meta tags and and and all that. And so for a few months, I worked for for that guy also to try to learn how to bring traffic toe website. So that was that was in there, too. But now I had a few partners and we were good at this whole email thing going, and I could see that the writing on the wall was it is one thing that's weird about the Internet, like in a heartbeat. Things can change, and you have to be able to move, change your old business model. Um, if you're going to keep going, We had already had some trouble here and there with if somebody complained on one of our lists or whatever we we had admin is that would take down one of our servers or just, like, take one of our domains off off line. And we didn't have any recourse even if the people were crazy, you know? So we hadn't. We'd have to change servers, change hosts sometimes, which is like rebuilding your business overnight, you know? And we always took the people off the list if they complained or whatever. Um, but, hey, it's email. You know, it's like people can opt in for a list and they don't know exactly what they're opting in for, and then they don't remember that they opted it in. And now they say that you spam them when you didn't, you know, welcome to the Internet, you know. So anyway, I saw the writing on the wall like legislations coming along. People toe like spam, Uh, at all. They don't like a lot of commercial messages. I have to find a legal way to bring traffic to my website. And, um, that's when I got interested in the Edwards program. I saw the writing on the wall and then I just went. We had our whole company doing all this other stuff. We had about 20 people working for us like a riel. You know, real people that worked in cubicles and stuff and not just outsourcing. Thio people in the Philippines or whatever. And although we did outsourced some people in India also, which gave us, we probably had about 50 people counting all those people. Um and so that business was while it was running. I just went on my own and then just took every guru that I could find That was the best. AdWords learned everything I could about it and and did some experiments and worked first with our own company generating leads. And I totally freaked out the sales people because, um, the first I don't know, I I got, like, maybe $500 to spend on a few key words and the 1st $500 that we spent. We brought in several big deals that was maybe $10,000 worth of income. And all of a sudden, the sale of the game over the guy one of the partners who was head of sales, came overto What are you doing? I said, Well, you know, I'm doing this in AdWords thing and, you know, buying some of these key words. You know, people looking for this, he's like, you got to do more, you know? So, um, we were really successful in generating leads for company using that. And then, you know, I just I kept on I kept on with it really, ever since. But the same way that I realized, Hey, you know, the writing is on the wall for email the way it's been done, and pay per click is the new thing. Um, I've always I always kind of keep my eye on the future, and and I'm always looking for new traffic sources as new platforms kind of come come out. So I'm testing like all the new stuff. You know, I was really into Facebook, but Laura, my partner, it ended up being way better than me in Facebook. So way let her do that. But I'm testing, you know, Twitter ads, and I've been re marketing for over five years before all the Internet marketing gurus started talking about it. Andi, I've tried almost every platform there is to try toe, you know, by traffic, cause you know you don't want all your eggs in one basket with traffic, no matter how how great it is. So I'm not just in AdWords guy. I became a paid traffic guy because I could kind of see that that was how the Internet was gonna go. You know, there's no other way toe monetize, everything being free unless there's ads and there has to be advertisers. So our whole innocent beginning Internet is gone just about. But paid traffic will never go away. So it's a skill that, you know, businesses are always gonna need. The platforms might change, you know, like Facebook is really hot right now. It's got a lot of a lot of great features people are doing really well with. It kind of reminds me of how AdWords was around 2000 and three, you know, But every platform evolves and the costs go up because more advertisers go in it and and and then you have a first mover advantage to people that first start with the platform and stay with it through the whole cycle. Um, and then there is an advantage. If you're the first mover in a platform that is new and hot, you know. So anyway, that's I guess, uh, maybe that's more information than you wanted to know, you know?

spk_0:   20:24
No, it's so interesting because I love hearing people's journeys. What? I wonder is you started off working for yourself. It sounds like every time you want to learn something, you there start your own company or trying to get hired by another company. Now, as a big paper clip guy, I know that you have a lot of big clients. You kind of do an agency. How do you deal with, like, client management and kind of making sure that people know you're not their employees when you're kind of interfacing, cause when I used to do client management's L S C O myself many, many years ago, that was my biggest struggle. Starting out was that people start to think I was an employee of theirs, even though I was just a consultant. How do you kind of manage that balance and make it clear that you're your own boss?

spk_1:   21:04
Well, you know, that's that's tough because, you know, also, the market has really changed from even from 3 4016 or so back in 2007. 2008 you could do some really crazy Spock stuff with just buying some length and you could get ranked. You could get any side ranked to the to the top pretty, pretty easy. And we got a lot of leads coming in from just from S e O. Even we didn't even almost need to do paper click. Um, and now you know, largely there's a lot of factors. You know. One of the factors is you know, Laura, my wife made a course called Mobile Local Fusion that basically taught people how to make their own agency and do it and we had Oh, I know, I can remember At least 35,000 people bought that course, so we unleashed upon mostly the U. S. But but in the U. K and Australia to we unleashed tens of thousands of new agencies upon the world. And, you know, she kind of basically gave everything away of, like exactly how we do it and how we manage the stuff. And and so as a result of that at now, Ah, lot of there's a lot more competition with agencies, and people are cold, calling all kinds of small businesses to try to get the business, and it's grown up and it's more professional. And there's really sales teams and really good presentations and lots more tools to uh, t give really professional reports to clients and stuff like that. Um, but if you're first starting out, how do you you know, I don't know. I mean, for us, we have a much different like mindset then a lot of people do about business. We found in our first, actually almost every company that we've been part of from the from the database management to our other, much bigger agency that we had that did pay per click and email, marketing and stuff to ya. Gotta marketing, which we had for the last a few years. We've actually, instead of getting bigger, we've gotten smaller. And and we found that we we'd much rather be a boutique agency and not be for everybody into just trying to do Maur. Maura, Maura. Bigger, bigger, bigger. Um, by being smaller, we focus more on quality and we focus more on being able to work with the people that we want to. And one of the things that that I found is it's really easy to sell. I mean, if you know at all what you're doing with whatever it is you're doing with her, it's s e g o p p. C or, you know, even site design. If you talk to almost anybody at a barbecue or, you know, or or at a bar or a friend of a friend, whatever. You start talking about this stuff, and people are like, Whoa, that's man, that's great. You know, like, how do I get that? You know, I've got this, Uh, I've got this veterinary practice. I've got this dental practice. I need some help. It's really easy. People want it, you know, they it's easy to sell it, but, um, the So for us, it's always been Ethan himself. It's always been easy to get the clients, but the thing that crushes you is the delivery if you can't deliver or if the person that is the client is the wrong type of person, that that brings you down or makes you not happy, you're, you know, treat you like an employee or or um, is not thankful about the results that you get or or whatever. Um, if you have 10 really good clients and one really crappy one, that one really crapping, one will crush you and crush your employees. If you're outsourcing and it will ruin your whole company. It'll just go from Your old company will go from making lots of money and everybody's happy. It's good toe like there's all these problems and, you know, they the bad people will suck. Resource is that should be used for delivering to the other good people. So so for us, the getting the client and and getting people in the door, the sales part is no hard. It's the delivery. That's hard. But you really have to keep in mind. Not everybody gets lead into the door. You know what I mean? Not everybody. You're not gonna let everybody work with you. Um, And it's not just that you're playing the game like, uh, what's the great Bernie made off? He was the king of this, right? It's like he had this fund and everybody could invest in it, but, oh, no, it's a closed fund. No, you can't get in, right? You know, I'm I'm sorry. I would know we were not taking any new clients now, and he would kind of play that game of, like, the reverse on Ben, that wit, and he would not sell you, you know? And then that would make people want to come to him any more. It's like, No, we're not playing that game. But we're just, uh We just know that if the wrong people get lead on to the servicing area, then it it just won't work because it's easier to sell and not easy to deliver to deliver. That means there's a lot of work that has to be done and a lot of research and a lot of stuff behind the scenes that, you know, uh, an average client that runs, Ah, business, especially a small business. They're not gonna have any idea what it ISS. So some someone's a sorry aren't even explain like, why what you're doing is valuable, you know. But they do know when the phone rings and, um, so s so that's our kind of, um, that's our philosophy. We don't if you have the right people. It's not so much of ah, a problem. You know, if you have the right client, it's it's it's not so much of ah, big deal having them treating you. Uh, not right. You know what I mean. And we have fired client. That's before, and we're not hesitant to fire them. You know, it's, uh you know what's funny? Me? I mean, I remember one, uh, one client, you know, we're like, Okay, you know what? Guess what? You're fired. You know, here's your stuff. You know? Well, uh, here's your domains. You know, your way just can't work with, you know, And he came back a year later and he said, You know what I mean. I've been through, like, two or three people. You guys were the best. Now I realize that. You know what? Will you please take me back? You know, and and and And we did give him another chance. And, you know, I mean, overall, they've been a client for just years and years, you know, and no problem with him for, like, the last three years. So, uh, it's you have to not be, um, to not be hesitant about getting your needs. Met in the in the in the relationship, you know?

spk_0:   29:25
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate you, uh, spending so much time with me today. I know you're super busy with so many things going on, so it really means a lot to me. and I know my listeners. We're really excited to hear from one of the great kings of paper Click.

spk_1:   29:41
So I guess you know, I'll leave you with one other concept here, um, which is, no matter what you're doing, whether you're a coder or whether you're a graphic Scott or or whatever. You know, if you look at the Olympics and you and you look at the top cyclists or the top, uh, boxers or the top runners, you know the top three guys, the only thing that separates the those guys who are from, you know that that that our number one or number two, it's like 1/10 of a second, You know what I mean? And the difference between the guy who's number one and the guy who's number 30 or 70 might only be 20 seconds her 10 seconds. It's not that big, so you don't have to be that much better than everybody else. But if you could do that extra little bit to be, you know, 1/10 of a second better one. If one out of 100 people one more person clicks on your ad than somebody else that makes a whole cascading thing of, uh, uh of things that all work to your advantage. So whatever people are gonna learn, I just encourage them to, like, go the extra mile and, you know, be the very best that you could be, because it will definitely pay off.

spk_0:   31:23
Wonderful. Thank you so much for giving us so much information sharing so much of your time with us.

spk_1:   31:29
Okay, You got it, Jonathan.

spk_0:   31:31
All right. Thank you so much,

spk_1:   31:32
buddy. All right, We'll see you soon, man. Okay, bye. The way

spk_0:   31:40
to celebrate the launch of this podcast I'm giving away some epic prizes. You could

spk_1:   31:45
win an

spk_0:   31:45
Amazon tap and have meet personally turn you into a best selling author to win your part of over $20,000 in prizes. Go to serve No master dot com backslash contest. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve. No, master. Make sure you subscribe. So you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Hit over to serve no master dot com. Forward slash podcasts. Now, for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow.