We’ve actually asked the audience to give us a few topics that they wanted to hear about today based on what’s going on in their business. We’ve got five of them and we’ve got a couple that gets asked often and we’ve got one or two that basically tells us all this time, just getting asked again in a different way, and I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking about these. These are the five things.
The first one we’re going to talk about is driving traffic. The next one we’re going to talk about is building the right audience. The next one we’re talking about is how to take that first step, getting off your ass and taking that first step to start seeing some success and making progress, and then basically fuel further action. We’re going to talk about making time when time is extremely limited in your daily routine to do the online work that you got to do. Ultimately, we're going to talk about building a list and attracting customers with a lead magnet and where the best place to do that is.
I’m going to dive in first with driving traffic. Driving traffic is probably one of the most commonly asked questions. How do I drive traffic? How do I get traffic to my site? As always, I’m going to start this explanation by telling you that if you’re asking how do I drive traffic now, you probably already screwed up the process and you are thinking that traffic is an after-effect. It’s something you think of and figure out after you’ve created the funnel, after you’ve created the product, after you’ve already done a bunch of the work.
­The problem is usually that you’ve built something that you liked, what you thought was awesome, that you thought was great, and you spent all this time creating it, whether it’s a funnel, a lead magnet, a product, whatever, and now you find yourself in a situation where nobody knows your damn thing because unlike the Field of Dreams movie with Kevin Costner, in the online marketing space, just because you build it does not mean they’ll come. When you build it, absolutely nobody knows where it is. You’ve got to tell them. You’ve got to get them to come. You’ve got to drive the traffic.
What I’ll share with you now here is something that I’ve probably talked about 100 times or more. It’s a lot easier to create a product for the traffic than it is to create traffic for a product. If your question is, “How do I drive traffic, Omar?” The answer to that is easy. Identify an audience first. Find out what they need. Identify the audience, group them together, find out what they need, go get that thing, and then put it in front of them. If you can’t find that thing, go make it and then put it in front of them. That way you’ve gotten them together.
Think of it as a fish tank. Put all your fish in a barrel and now you got all this high concentration of fish there. And now you want to catch fish, go find the exact bait that they want and drop it in there. It’s a lot easier to bring the bait to the fish than it is to get fish to the bait.
How you do this, though? One of the ways to do it is to start with trending topics. Things that you’re interested in or things that you want to create a product in and then go and identify an audience about that. If you don’t know why, I have no idea what topic or what thing, periodicals are a great way to start. I heard this said once in the past when I was first starting online. If you’re not sure what niche to get in, go take a look at some of the magazines in the Barnes & Noble’s periodicals section. Go look at that because guaranteed that if there is enough of a market out there for a company to publish a magazine about it on a monthly basis or a weekly basis, there’s probably a big audience out there for those niches.
Now, you can start, basically based on a niche that you’ve picked at or researching. The other thing is, the more specific the niche or sub-niche, the more likely that you’re going to have a red-hot targeted audience. So, go in now, do some searches. The mother of all searches is Google. Search on Google, but then do some micro searches within platforms. Searches within social networks like YouTube, like Facebook, like Reddit, like Twitter, like Instagram.
The difference between building an online business now, today, than building an online business 15–20 years ago, when the internet itself that we know today was just in its infancy back then, connection speed was slower, technology just wasn’t there that exist today. I remember having to watch a video, I have to leave my computer downloading it overnight. You’d be on dial-up. You’d hope that you didn’t get a call waiting because then it breaks the connection.
My point is that today, it’s never been easier to find an audience because they’re gathered in all these websites that I’ve just mentioned, all these social websites. And there are hundreds of social websites. You don’t like Facebook? Okay, no problem. Go and do a search. I believe if you go to Wikipedia and look up social media or social media websites, you’re going to get an actual list with links to all these different sites and it actually says how many people are members of each one.
A lot of these sites, the majority of them are free to join, and within that site, the site lets you create your own little audience, whether it’s a group, a page, a channel—YouTube calls them channels—you can now assemble people based on interest. You’re putting your fish in your barrel based on an interest that you researched. It’s that easy. It’s just that easy. Does it sound too easy? Yeah, because it is.
You’re probably not using these tactics. You’re not using search. You’re not using it appropriately, anyway. You’re not going in there and doing proper searches. Do searches in subs. Don’t just look at the first three answers. Those first three results from the search are usually ads. Look at page 2, look at page 3, look at page 10, look at page 100, what’s on there. There are gems in there. This is how you find pockets of people that you can create a product and put it in front of them.
When you say, “Omar, how do I drive traffic to an existing product?” You’re going to have to reverse the process that I’ve just talked about, but it’s a lot harder. It’s a lot harder to get people and send them over to your thing than it is to find a group of people and put your thing in front of them.
Getting traffic really is about changing the way you think of traffic, changing the way you think of attracting an audience. When it comes down to being after the fact, I’ve already got the product, I’ve already got the thing, now traffic becomes tougher. It becomes a lot harder to get because you’re doing it after the fact.
Now, you’ve got to consider the three ways, which is buy, borrow, create. BBC. I can buy traffic. You can run an ad. Traffic wasn’t that easy to come by back then when I started. Now, you can have traffic in a matter of minutes if you pay for it. Pay for it you will. This is another misconception. Free traffic. There is no such thing as free traffic. You’re going to pay for your traffic.
The cool thing about it is you can choose the currency. You can pay with money or you’re going to pay with time. Those are two currencies and one of them is finite. One of them isn’t. You choose which one you want to pay for. You want to spend your precious, valuable time driving traffic or do you want to just buy it with money? Either way, everything. This is about life. It comes down to time or money.
You can actually invest money to buy traffic in the form of ads. You get solo ads, video ads. There are just so many different ad channels that you can use now, but it’s all about getting in front of people. So, when you run your ads, again, you want to put your ads in front of a targeted audience. You are still going to have to aggregate that audience whether it’s the target.
This is really the key; putting your product in front of the right group of people and excluding all the others. You don’t want to show a steak offered to vegetarians. It’s about assembling a targeted group of people and once you know where they are, there are the people, they’re going and getting the thing that you know they like, tofu, and put that in front of vegetarians.
The next thing is to borrow or create a joint venture. I’ll share my traffic with you, you share your traffic with me, ad exchanges, ad swaps, banner exchanges, called traffic fusion. That’s borrowing. And then creating. Creating your own traffic is basically just from scratch, assembling that group, creating that traffic yourself, getting that lead through any means possible, but assembling it in an autoresponder in some sort of a database, where you’re literally creating that traffic.
The cool thing about creating that traffic and harnessing the leads, harvesting the leads, and then keeping them in an autoresponder is that you can use them over and over again. Unlike an ad, like I was talking before buying traffic, when you buy the traffic, that ad gets you those clicks, but that’s it. Those clicks are gone. When you are harvesting those clicks, those leads and put them, you can market to them over and over again. Put something else in front of them next week. Put something else in front of them the week after that. So buy, borrow, create.
I know that’s a very top-level view of traffic you can go into the explanations of each one of those methods and things in a lot more detail, but as I said, just keep in mind with traffic, if you’re looking for it after the fact, it’s a lot harder. Ideally, find that audience, assemble them somewhere, learn from them, see what their needs are, and then go find that thing and put it in front of them, the thing that’s going to solve their problem.
With that, this lends really well to the next question, which is about building the right audience. How do I build the right audience for my product? Really, it’s about creating the right product for your audience, because again, when it comes to building the right audience, you’re doing it after the fact, if you’re building the audience after. How do I know that I have the right people? You have to have a good idea of what you want to do and this comes down to a business plan.
Do you have a business plan or are you just shooting from the hip? If you just drawback an arrow and shoot it in the air, what is the likelihood of you hitting something worthwhile? Very small. Now, if you have a target, you put it out there, and you’ve got something to aim at, what is the likelihood of you hitting something? There’s going to be factors. Your aim, your vision, your distance, the quality of your bow, but the chances of hitting something that you want are now a lot better.
What are the components here? We have to have a target. We have to have an idea. Building the right audience is about having that target. Having that target in business is about having a plan. What is your plan? It boggles my mind how many people I meet at events and even students that I talk to, whether it’s on Skype or on chat, and I say, “Okay, so what’s your plan? What’s your income goal for this quarter?” and like, “I don’t know. Let’s see how it goes.”
That’s not a plan. You’re almost guaranteed to miss that goal because it’s not going to go well. You’re shooting for nothing. You’re not aiming anything. You’re just shooting in the air, you’re hoping you hit something. That’s not going to work.
How do I find the right audience? I’m not just shooting in the air and hope I hit it. You have to have a plan and you have to say these are the type of people that I want to get. How do I know what type of people I want to get? Well, this is the type of product that I want to sell. Okay, so now I know what type of product I want to sell, I know what type of people I got to go after. Let me find those people, put them together.
Now, what can I give them in the middle to get them interested in this thing that I want to sell? And I’ve got to connect these dots. The product I want to sell, the audience, the type of people that will fit that, let me assemble them, and then what can I create in the middle to give them for free to connect these two things? To get them to go and take a look at that? If you just drop this other thing that you’re recommending somebody else or product in front of them, hit or miss. Creating that lead magnet, that thing in between, that’s the key. That’s how you connect the dots.
Building the right audience is about having a plan. You want to grow with a purpose. Growing without a purpose, that’s the ideology of a cancer cell. It’s growth for the purpose of growth, for no other purpose. It just ends up killing the host. It overtakes and kills the host. Growth for the purpose of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.
When you say to me, “Omar, I just want to build a list.” “Why?” “Well, because I have to have one. Build a list so that I can make money.” “How are you going to do that? Do you know how you’re going to make money?” Where you’re going to sell to it? What are you going to give it? How are you going to monetize it?” “Well, I’m going to grow my list first and then I’m going to find out.”
So you’re just growing for the purpose of growth because somebody told you, you need growth. Until when? How do you know when to stop? Do you see what I’m saying? It’s like we’re just shooting up in the air there. We know we got to shoot, we have to take shots, but we’re not aiming at anything. Taking a shot is important. You do need to take a shot. You’ve got to get off your ass, you’re going to take action, but at what? What are you aiming for? What are you shooting for?
It doesn’t mean that you have to have a freaking detailed prospectus of your income for all the different quarters and where you’re going to be. It doesn’t have to be. A business plan can be a very simple thing. It’s just write down a piece of paper five or six things that I want to do and when I want to do them by. How many leads do I want to get on my list? By when do I want to have them? Maybe one month, two months, three months, maybe a goal like that. Maybe I want to have, on top of my one month, two months, and three-month goal, maybe I want to have a goal I want to hit this year. Maybe this year, my goal is small. Maybe I just want to put an extra $10,000 into my savings account just from my online business. Just $10,000. That’s my goal for this year. Or $20,000 or whatever it is. And now, I’m going to reverse engineer that.
Well, if it’s $20,000 and I want to try to make $5000 each quarter, how am I going to do that? In order to make $5000, I’m going to need to launch a product, or I’m going to need to create a campaign, or I’m going to need to build an audience. You see now how we’re breaking it down into smaller goals? That is a big part of being able to build the right audience.
If you don’t have it that way, you’re just assembling a whole bunch of people. Basically, anybody, that will come to your party you’ll let them come. If you do that, what’s going to happen now is you’re going to have so diverse of a group, that you’re not going to have any one particular thing that you can put in front of them that’s going to convert well for that entire group. You’re just going to have a very deluded audience.
You want to have a targeted audience. Remember I said the more targeted the sub-niche is, the more nichefied it is. So, don’t just sell cameras. Sell specific types of cameras for a specific type of thing, with a specific type of lens. Maybe underwater cameras with a long-distance scope. Now you have a very fine-tuned audience. Scuba divers, snorkelers. You’ve got a very fine-tuned audience that you can monetize as opposed to anybody that uses cameras.
Anybody that uses cameras, that’s huge. Cameras are built into our phones now, so that means anybody that has a phone. It’s too broad of an audience. You’re trying to catch a fish in the ocean instead of a little pond and that is the key. It all comes down to building the right audience by having a plan.
I mention there a couple of things about having to take a shot and that leads us well into the next one, getting off your ass. Somebody said, “Omar, look. I just need to take my first step. Tell me how to get off my ass.” Well, there are a few things here that we have to consider. What really is precluding you from taking that first step? From actually taking that action?
Different things preclude different people from ever starting and a lot of it has to do with personality. Some people just procrastinate. They know what they got to do, they know they have to do it. They just don’t want to, or they don’t just care to, or they always get to it another time. Usually, this happens to people that are complacent, where it’s like, “Eh.” The nail doesn’t really hurt bad enough. They can get by and be alright without doing what they want to do, or what someone’s telling them because they can skimp off of it and still get by. So, the nail doesn’t hurt bad enough.
It’s like the story of the old man is on the porch, his dog is sitting on the steps, the dog is crying, a guy walks by and says, “Old man, why is your dog crying?” and the old man says, “Well, the dog sat on a nail and apparently it’s hurting him.” The guy says, “Well why doesn’t the dog get up?” The old man says, “Because the nail doesn’t hurt him bad enough.” When the nail hurts you bad enough, you’re going to get up, you’re going to move. And if your nail doesn’t hurt you bad enough, you’re going to keep procrastinating. You’re going to keep saying, “It’s all right. I’ll deal with the pain of the nail because it’s less effort. I can deal with it. It’s tolerable. Getting up and moving to another spot is just going to be worse for me.
There’s that. That’s the procrastination level and frankly, for people like that, unless you have something to drive you, unless you have something to motivate you, unless you have a reason to get up out of that nail, someone that’s counting on you, somebody that’s depending on you, a dream, a goal, something that motivates you.
You know what? Anger is the best motivator. Just you want something isn’t enough. When you get mad enough about not having it, when you get mad enough about settling, that’s what motivates you. It’s that anger is the thing that’s going to get you there and I think a lot of people lack that fire. They lack that thing because they’re just complacent in where they are.
Fame, family, freedom, and fortune. Those are the four things that usually are hot spots for people of all different types of personalities. We all either have maybe two of those or three of those, but I’ve seldom met anyone that wasn’t even a little bit motivated by one of them, and that is either family, fame, fortune, or freedom. The four F’s. What drives you?
You’re going to have to find that thing. If you’re from the type of person I find yourself procrastinating, what’s that thing that makes you get up in the morning, go to work? What’s that thing that makes you stay up late at night? What’s that thing? Is it providing you a better life for your children? Your spouse? Your family? Is it maybe getting that extra money to donate to a charity or to something that really, really means a lot to you and your heart that you want to be able to provide for? What’s that thing greater than you that makes it worth getting up for? For you, for yourself, for your own comfort, you really don’t care. You’re happy where you’re at. You’re willing to do, but for others, we usually are happy to do more. You got to find that thing if you’re the procrastination type.
There are a few types. I’ll cover a couple of them because I don’t know which one you fall in on, so telling you to get off your ass by doing this or get a dream or get a goal, that might not be the thing that motivates you.
Some people are not on their asses necessarily by choice and it’s not that they’re lacking, they’re taking the first step because they don’t want to or that they can’t, but rather they’re paralyzed. They’ve got paralysis from analysis. They’ve been analyzing so much and studying so much that they’ve built this thing up, that they wanted to do this huge insurmountable task in their mind. they’re the type of people that have to know every little piece, every little thing, every “I need to know how everything works. I’m not going to take the first step unless I know 365 steps after that exactly what I have to do and unless it’s going to be perfect, I’m not going to do it.”
Then I tried talking and reasoning with these, “Why can’t you start doing this so you could get something going while you’re...” “No, no, no, no, no. I got to understand it all. I’ve got to know how it works.” Are you that type of person that’s over-analytical?
I assume that you’ve never got on an airplane before. You’ve never flown on an airplane before, obviously, because based on your own admission, getting on an airplane would mean that you have to stop, go to the cockpit, learn everything about the plane. You have to learn everything about the pilot, know where he went to school, kind of grades he’s got, smell his breath. You need to check all the instruments, make sure that you better know exactly how a jet engine works, and how to fix it if you have to because how could you possibly get on a plane and be thrusted from one part of the country or the planet to another without knowing every little thing about how an airplane operates?
You see, some things like this we’re okay with. When our subconscious plays a trick on us and tells us we got to know everything, “Omar, it’s my life I’m talking about.” So, you’re not putting your life in the pilot’s hands and that plane’s hand when you get on?
You would walk into an office anywhere in any town USA and you let a man in a white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck put a needle in your arm and inject something in your arm without once asking what kind of grades he got in school, did he get left back? Has he had been sued? You won’t ask him any tough questions like that. You don’t need to know that, but you’ll go in there and you’ll just, “Yeah, go ahead. Why? Because this is the doctor my insurance pays. He’s got a lab coat, the name’s on the door, people in the lobby. What are you? I don’t care if you failed.” “What do you got?” “Headaches. I don’t care if this guy failed neurology or took them six tries to pass neurology.”
Now, things are changing a little bit because of the internet. People are more self-diagnosing and I’m sure you’ll understand my point. Paralysis analysis is something that really just hinders us, but when we really start looking at it that way, it’s just an excuse. Just fear that’s holding us back, and we’re using paralysis analysis as a way to exercise our fear and keep it from letting us do something, allow it to keep us from doing something, and we justify it by saying things like, “I got to know everything before I get started.”
You don’t have to know everything about an airplane before you get on it, but you got to know everything about the business before you start driving traffic. You’ll pay money to fly to an event, you pay money to get coaching about products, but you won’t pay $200 to drive clicks to your site, to see how bad it is, to see whether or not anybody buys or at least one person, two people buy. So, over-analyzing.
The other thing is a big one. I just spoke to someone about this recently. Narrowing down, conquering down, and closing off the distractions in order to take that step. For many of us, maybe even you watching this right now, you know what you have to do. You know what you have to do. However, you are reacting instead of pro-acting every day. You’re in a reactive business instead of a pro-active business because you feel that you’re going to miss something if you’re not subscribed to this one and looking at all of his emails if you’re not logging in every day to Facebook and doing all this.
Let me tell you something. When I started doing my business, when I started building this business, before Melinda even joined in, when it was just me, it was very, very important that I kept a really strict schedule and just work on what I had to do. Nowadays, not so much. I have people on my team. I’m more easily distracted now than I was 10–12 years ago.
What’s really, really important for you, being in a position that you’re just starting out, maybe in your first couple of years, it’s really, really important that you have a schedule to work on, that you adhere to that schedule, and that you don’t react to what’s in your inbox every day when you turn on your computer and you start working. Don’t just react to it and let it guide what you’re going to do today.
Here’s what I mean. You turn on your computer, you’re going to start doing some work, you have two hours that you can be on the computer today, and what happens in those two hours? The first thing you choose to do is check email. What happens in your email inbox? “Oh my God, there’s a launch going on today. Forgot all about this. Heard about this last week.” Now, you’ve got six emails from different marketers who you subscribe to; each has a bonus.
So, the next hour you spend evaluating bonus pages under the guise of, “Well, I’m learning. I’m learning the difference.” Again, you’re buying one of them. Then you’re going to buy through them and you’re not just going to buy that. Now, you study the sales page. Now you’re under the guise of, “Well, I’m studying the funnel.”
What you really are is being marketed to. That’s really you are. You are reacting to your inbox, you’re buying something else, you’re going to waste those two hours buying that thing, opening it, and looking at it. You’re not going to get any work done and you’re going to be 20, 30, 40—depending whether or not you bought the upsell—poorer than you were when you started today. And you’re going to be back in that situation again tomorrow and the next day. Maybe one or two other days this week, might be two hours will be spent doing something, but again, it’s going to be half-ass because I’m looking for traffic instead of creating a product for traffic that I’ve already found.
You get stuck in this cycle and a year goes by. A year goes by and you’ve spent more money than you’ve made, if you made any at all, and you’re wondering, “What the heck am I doing?” and you log on to one of my webinars and like, “Omar, so how do I send traffic? How do I act?” because you’re caught in this rut. It’s really up to you to break out of it.”
Those are the things that you need to do to take that first step. You need to close out the distractions, you need to realize that you need to become a marketer instead of being the marketed, and it’s likely you already know what you have to do. Find that thing that motivates you. Find that reason, put it up in front of you. Have a dream board. Have an accountability partner. That’s another big one. If somebody’s depending on you, you’re more likely to get your thing done. Someone’s going to check on you. You’re more likely to get your thing done because you don’t want to have to come up with an excuse.
Do you know what’s really a good example of an accountability partner? John and Dave, two of my friends put together this bet where whoever loses the most weight each week has to pay the other one. I forget the way that they do it, but it’s based on weight. They meet up and they have a weigh-in once a week to see who actually got closer to hit their goal and whoever loses. They’re constantly paying each other back and forth and competing about this.
But here’s the thing. It’s a little silly thing to help motivate you. Maybe you need an accountability partner. Maybe it’s somebody that you work with. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a business partner or somebody who’s in a similar boat and you share your goals with one another for a week, and then you guys help keep each other in check, and then maybe do call once a week and like, “Okay, what you do on your thing? Let me see the work. Show me.” “I did this. Here’s the page. Here’s the link. Here’s the video I did. Here is that. How about you? On your list, you had three things you’re going to do this week. You’re going to do this. Where’s this?” “I didn’t do it.” “Well, why didn’t you do it, man?” “I don’t know. I was watching House of Cards,” or, “The new Game of Thrones came out and I had to watch that,” or whatever. You found something else. These conversations can be motivators for you to help you. So, having an accountability partner is something that can also help you make that first step.
This one goes right hand in hand with the one that we just talked and that is making time. “How do I make time, Omar? How do I make time to do my internet business when I’ve got no time? Time is totally limited. How do I do it?”
Two things. Number one stops telling yourself that you have no time and that time is limited. You have the same exact amount of hours in your day that I have. Warren Buffet has the same exact amount of hours in his day that I have. All of our income levels are completely different. We each have 24 hours a day in our day. What is the difference? The difference is what Warren chooses to do with his 24 and I choose to do with my 24 and you choose to do with your 24. You’ve got to become better at choosing what you do in each hour. How do you become better at utilizing the 24 hours that you’re given because we’re all given the same exact 24 each day?
One of the things I can tell you that you have to if this is a problem for you, if you’re saying, “How do I make time,” one of the things I’m going to tell you is there is no way around it and you’re going to face it, realize it, hit it head-on, and do it or you’re not. That is a sacrifice. You’re going to have to sacrifice sleep. Do you want to get an extra hour a day for your business? Wake up an hour earlier. Do you want to get two extra hours per day for your business? Go to sleep an hour later.
“Omar, I already get only seven hours of sleep.” Get five. Sacrifice. “Omar, I’m all tired during the day.” Figure it out. Adjust your diet so you’re not tired during the day. Get used to it. Make it happen. Find away. Adapt, improvise, overcome, and accomplish. Without sacrifice, there is no victory. That’s a Witwicky motto. You have to be willing to sacrifice and it starts with you sacrificing. You.
Then you might say, “Well, Omar, I’m already unhealthy. I’m already this.” You are gonna have to find places in your life to find more time. It’s not about finding the time. It’s not about adding time. We all have 24 hours. You’re not spending yours. You’re not investing your 24 hours as effectively as you could be or as you want to be. You’re going to have to find ways to dual purpose. You’re going to have to find ways to leverage your time.
You know what? Are you learning or are you trying to learn this internet marketing thing? Do you have a commute? Do you have to drive to work? Do you have to ride? Analyze your day. Maybe you have to spend a week just analyzing it. Carry a little notebook and write down. Carry a diary and write down what you did from this time to that every day. Then, look it over at the end of the day or maybe at the end of the week. Look over what you wrote down on this book. Even the spots that you forgot to write down what you were doing or what you weren’t doing. Go back and look back at your diary for a week. Invest the time in doing this and see where your opportunities to do a purpose are.
“Look at that. I spent an hour driving. As a matter of fact, it looks like I spend 3 hours driving every week. Or I spent time on the train.” Maybe that time, you could’ve had headphones on and you could’ve been listening to a training video, or a podcast, or something about your business.
Maybe your time to sit down and work isn’t going to be consecutive. It’s not going to be three hours in a row. Maybe you can only put in there an hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon, an hour at night because you’ve got childcare to worry about, you got to put the kids to sleep. 
Maybe after you put the kids to sleep, you’ve got to put a pot of freaking Cuban coffee on because like that black espresso or whatever, take a shot of that, what do they call those espresso shots, and you’ll be up for three hours. Trust me. Yeah, the next day you’re going to be dragging a little bit. But you know what? You’ll get some stuff done.
The point is that, without sacrificing some things, without doing some things differently, if you’re not willing to look at your 24 hours, to keep a diary for maybe one week, just a little thing in your pocket, a little book, a little piece of paper, just put together, and then just evaluate like, “Where are my opportunities here in the week? Where can I do better? Where can I dual purpose? Where can I find an extra hour?” I’ll tell you what. Right away you’re going to get 10 extra hours of work week. Wake up one hour earlier, go to sleep one hour later. Cut two hours of sleep every night. Do you sleep six hours a night? Sleep four. That’s it. I don’t know what to tell you. Einstein trained himself to sleep three hours and that is in 15-minute increments during the day. It’s not impossible. Train yourself how to do it.
Here’s the cool thing about it. It’s temporary. Trust me. It’s temporary. I’m not telling you to do anything that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself. I already did it. I did it many times. I just went right to work. I got home from work. I got on the computer. In the morning when Melinda was getting up and leaving, I took a shower and I only had two hours. I knew I couldn’t lay down because you know what’s going to happen if you lay down when you haven’t slept all night and you lay down, “Yeah, I’ll just take a little nap for two hours.” No, you’re not. I’m going to miss work. I would just take a shower and sometimes I go to work early. That’s probably the only time I would go to work early. My point is that I had to lose sleep. I had to lose sleep and it was a sacrifice. It was uncomfortable for me.
Do you want to know the thing I had to do? And this is a really tough one. I had to sacrifice time with my wife. You might have to sacrifice time with your family and it’s important to have that very critical conversation with your spouse, maybe with your kid, involve them somehow, and let them know, “Hey, daddy or mommy is working on something here that’s going to be really, really great because when mommy’s done or when daddy’s done, I’ll be able to have more time with you and maybe even stay home from work. The first step is I have to do this and this.” Now you’re sharing this with your spouse, with your kid, and that helps keep you accountable, too, because every once in a while, they’re going to check.
Do what I did with Melinda. I created little goals. She was talking about it this weekend, where it’s like, “Hey, we're going to go to the ice cream parlor. We’re going to get some ice cream sundaes if I get this site built by this day. We would spend an hour and she loves that. We would go and grab an ice cream sundae and we’d sit right outside the ice cream place and we just eat our ice cream. Sometimes, we’d bring our dog and they give you a little pretzel and the ice cream for the dog.
It was a great time. It was just an hour, but it was something we look forward to. And because I told her and I put it on my whiteboard, “Ice cream on Friday at 7:00 PM if I get this done,” or “Movies on Saturday if I get that done.” She would come in a couple of times and only, “Hey, where are you on your thing? Show me. How’s your site coming? Oh, okay. Look, you got pretty far. You think you’ll be done?”
It also got her a little bit involved and interested in what I was doing. So, little things like that are proactive steps and measures to get you off your ass and to help you make the time, to better use the 24 hours that you’re getting.
The last thing that someone asked tonight on this open session was, “What is the best channel to present your lead magnet in order to attract customers and grow a list?” Well, the first thing is congratulations on realizing how important it is to grow a list. That’s super-duper important. Keep in mind the things I’ve talked about at the beginning of this presentation about growth for the purpose of growth. You want to have a reason that you’re growing them.
If you’ve got a lead magnet, I suspect you’ve already got something that you’re going to lead them to with that magnet. You’re not just going to attract the lead with a magnet, but you’ve already got some sort of a plan or something in place, some emails that they’re going to get, or something in the back.
Now the question just becomes, “Where can you assemble that audience? What is the best place?” Well, it depends on what it is you’re selling and it depends on who is it you’re looking for. Are you looking for kids or are you looking for baby boomers? Are you looking for teenagers? Are you looking for people in the process of having a middle-age crisis? What type of people is the demographic, that are interested in getting your thing or is that in your niche? And, wherever those people frequent?
It’s funny because, by age range, the youngest users are on Snapchat. They say that Facebook is like the X generation or the little bit older people in their 30s and 40s. Instagram and Twitter are a little bit more of the younger, the 20s crowd, what they call that Generation Z or whatever. My point is that, depending on age range, gender, who is looking? What type of product are you selling? Who is looking for that product and you go find that platform.
There is no best channel. It’s completely dependent on what you’re trying to do, what you’re trying to sell. I’ll give you an example. If you’re selling feminine hygiene products, what type of customers do you want? Females. Those are the ones that are going to need that. What kind of groups, what kinds of sites are predominantly females? Pinterest. Pinterest is a predominantly female demographic.
What you’re selling plays a role. If you’re saying, “I’m not selling feminine products, Omar, it’s digital products.” “Okay, what’s the niche? What’s the topic? Is it car mechanics? Is it basket weaving?” because again, gender plays a role there. If you said to me, “Well, car mechanics, I want to do a digital product on how to fix transmissions,” I’d say, “Okay, maybe a YouTube channel. Maybe some videos about how different tools that you can use and how-to videos and DFY transmission fixer-upper videos or something like that.” If you said, “Well, it’s basket weaving,” basket weaving might also do well on YouTube because it’s got a huge audience, but I’d also say Pinterest where I wouldn’t say Pinterest, particularly, for the auto-mechanic thing.
These are all variables. What’s the best channel? What’s the best place? I would have to say do some research and find that audience. Where are they? Where do they congregate? Where do they meet? If I wanted to market Christian books and I want to find where Christians are, what's the one place I could look? Church. There are churches. When should I look for them? Sundays. Churches usually meet on Sundays.
I know that’s an extreme example, but there are all kinds of things like that. If I was looking for car enthusiasts, if I have some sort of a car product, there’s a place in a town over from me that meets once a month and they have cars and coffee thing in the parking lot of a Walmart. That’s a time and a place that I can meet car enthusiasts.
My point is that the product that you’re ultimately trying to sell, not necessarily where the lead magnet is but you’re ultimately trying to sell, that is going to attract or appeal to a particular type of person. Learn about them. Become a serial killer profile. Know everything about them. What is the average type of person in that demographic? How old are they? Where do they congregate? How much money do they make per year? That kind of thing.
When you know that stuff about your target audience, you now know places that they’re going to be, and now you know where you can find them, attract them, put your lead magnet in front of them so that you could build a relationship with them through email and sell them your thing. That is my opinion on how to find the best channel for your particular niche.
I hope that these five things have, in one way or another, helped you or at least gotten you thinking, gotten the wheels turning a little bit to get you to the next step and the next level in your business.