In this training, we're gonna talk about the evolution of online marketing over a 15 year period. We're gonna talk about the period going from 2010 to 2025. Now, I don't know when you are watching this, but we've built our business over the last 17 years. And we're gonna talk about the last 15 years. 'cause For the last 15 years, we've been full-time internet markets. When I say we, I'm talking about my wife and I, and our business has grown to a seven figure business, and we now have multiple companies. But there's been so many things that we've seen happen. 


So many things that we've seen come and go, certain trends that kind of repeat themselves. And one of the things that we're seeing now is that technology is actually outpacing education. And I'm gonna get into what exactly that means and, and, and how this can help you in building your business and making sure that you take steps right now that will ensure that you are building a business that's gonna last and survive the test of time.


Because I'll tell you that the majority of people that were doing internet marketing 15 years ago, I can confidently say they are not around anymore. There's a handful of people that have survived the test of time in the internet marketing space. Now, I want to talk to you about things that you can do to make sure that you survive the test of time and that your business survives. So first, let's talk about what the internet marketing landscape was like back in 2010. It was literally a different world, right? It was like the wild, wild west of internet marketing. Things looked a lot different back then, because if, if, if you remember, if you were around back in the day, the internet was still in its infancy. There was not a lot of people that were on high speed internet at the time.


Some people had cable modes, but there were still people on dial up internet. Now, today's kids, they don't, they don't even know what that was like, right? Waiting to sign into America online and waiting to be able to get on and get a connection and then getting knocked off once you finally were on. Well, back then, you know, there was very little that could be done with video just because connection speeds were slow. Bandwidth was just not available, and the processor speeds on your computer. They just, they just didn't have the power to stream all of the data fast enough. 


Everything that, that all those bits and bytes of data that made up a video file. It was so much that your computer couldn't handle it. So it would stream a little bit, and then it would start buffering and you would see that little spinning wheel of death.Well, it's changed throughout the years. Video formats have changed. So many things have changed throughout the years, and that has changed the way we do business online. So, as the tools evolved, as the technology involved evolved, the things that we were able to do with the technology changed the way that we marketed, changed the way that we did things, websites and videos, the manual time consuming process of creating content back in 2010, it was totally, totally, totally different. 


I can tell you that just sitting down in front of a screen to type content and get it up into a file that could be digitally downloadable, even that was challenging. Now, it's so easy, right? You got Google Suite, right? So you go in, you start a Google Doc, you, you know, just type away and you just export A PDF when you're done.


It's that easy. Whoa, back in the day, finding a tool, a word processor that could export in a PDF format was almost impossible. As a matter of fact, I remember open Office being one of the first ones. It was a, it was a, a tool called Open Office. 'cause Even Microsoft Word, you couldn't, you couldn't download. You could download text file, you could, it didn't have the ability to download a PDF, but a PDF file is really what you needed to create an ebook. So it was tough to do certain things because we just didn't have the text. You literally would have to create a file you know, using a Word document or a you know, a, a text document. And then you'd have to go into a con, use a converter tool that would convert that file into a PDF.


And in that conversion process, it would screw up the alignment and the margins and the padding that there were just so many challenges that we had to deal with back then. So even just typing, creating content and turning it into a digital file that could be downloading you know, by, by someone on the other end of the internet that you sold it to you know, it was tough. And, and talking about reaching people on the other end of the internet, the challenges of reaching an audience before social media were huge. I mean, I, I don't wanna say that there wasn't social media back then, but there was, I mean, it's like, like Facebook and Twitter, they existed, but they weren't anything, anything like what they are now at all. Like, you couldn't, there were no groups, there was no, like, even Facebook, right?


Like, you couldn't, you couldn't follow people, you know? Like, you couldn't just find people and become their friend unless you were connected by, you both knew the same person, you couldn't follow that person or send 'em a friend. It was so, so different. Facebook groups didn't exist. Facebook pages didn't exist. Live streaming and going live. I mean, back then, you know, nowadays we take for granted that we, we all carry these HD cameras on in our pocket, right? Back then, if you wanted to stream live across the, the, the planet, you know, to another country, you needed a, a news van outside your house with a big satellite dish, that was the only way to do it. The challenges of reaching an audience before social media were huge, huge, huge, huge. And I think we take that for granted a lot nowadays.


Now, over the last 15 years, websites have changed drastically, drastically. Now the actual code that makes up the websites in general hasn't, the internet has changed. There's a lot of iterations of the internet. Browsers have changed, you know, but the, the, you know, the websites are still built in html. But back then, you actually, if you wanted to put a website up, you had two options. You either were gonna learn HTML, or you were gonna hire somebody that knew HTML. That was it. That was the only way to put up your own websites. Now we started internet marketing a little more than we started about 17 years ago. I'm recording this, but I'm only talking about the 15 year period. Wordpress was around, but it was just for blogging. Yeah. So yeah, you could, you could put up a WordPress blog and install a theme.


And that was relatively simple, but there was no such thing as Dragon Drop page builders, or like all inclusive funnel hosting programs like you have now where, you know, ClickFunnels or Groove, or like, there's so many of them where it's like you pay one fee. It includes your hosting, it includes your email marketing, it includes webinars, and you can like, pick any nice pretty template and boom, there you go. You got a website, click another button. Boom, you got an upsell page. It's already been laid out for you. All you gotta do is go and change the headline and, and the download link color. And, you know, it's, it's just so easy. 


I gotta be honest. Like, like, it's just so easy nowadays. Back then when we started, you had to use Front Page or Microsoft Expression Web to literally create a website using HTML. And if you didn't know HTML, you had to hire somebody to, and good luck finding them. 'cause There was no Fiverr, there was no Upwork. We did have a website called freelancer.com that you could go to, and eventually that evolved. But my point is that it was a different landscape. Like you, you had to build your websites with code, and there were so many things that you just couldn't do because the technology didn't exist to support it. And betting video on your website, that was such a challenge. The length of the videos, the size of the videos, it just was not easy to do. Back in the day, we were dealing with this thing called Flash Player. We'll talk about that in a minute. But you know, technology has really, really evolved. And, and therefore, it kind of changed the marketing in several ways.


For example, there was a shift from long form sales letters to live webinar presentations as the technology for webinars became available, as the technology for, for like, you know, live streaming. And, as the technology for video embedding became more prevalent, well, now we could do the same thing that we were doing with the sales copy in the form of a long letter. We could do that now in a video, in the form of a video sales letter. And then eventually, when the technology even got better, we were able to do more on-camera stuff. And, we didn't have to worry about streaming issues. Affiliate marketing also shifted, you know there were a lot of things happening as the technology emerged for live streaming. And as rather for, for, for streaming video webinars and, and on demand webinar platforms and automated webinar simulation platforms started to, to, you know, started to pop up all over the place.


I remember one of the first ones that we used to use, well, there was gottowebinar. It was like the very first webinar streaming platform. But then there was, you know, webinar Jam and, and before Webinar Jam even, there was this, there was this tool called Evergreen Business Systems. And that enabled you to take a webinar recording that you did with GoToWebinar live, because you could have attendees live with GoToWebinar. Now, you could actually record it and run a simulated live event. So it was an evergreen webinar that could run every day, so you could record your best webinar and then just have it run every single day making you money. What started happening now is affiliate marketing shifted because now people started promoting webinars more, it shifted to funnel models and, and tribal messaging where now you are creating groups and, and audiences and, and you were creating a following and putting people into a funnel and then selling them over time.


So you get people to opt in for something for free, then in, you know, develop trust with them and start marketing to them in, in a funnel, and showing them different offers and different things through email, bringing them back to pages in the funnel. And all of this changed as technology changed. The rise of high ticket offers really is something that happened once the technology was available to do webinars. Because selling a thousand dollar thing, or a $2,000 thing, or a $3,000 thing on a long form sales page was very, very, very difficult. As a matter of fact, because of that sales rooms were, you know, selling on the phone was a big thing. 


So 15 years ago, if you were able to sell somebody something for a hundred bucks with a sales letter on a website where, you know, they, they went, they saw a picture of you say, Hey, hi, welcome. My name is so and so. And then you did, you know, you went through your sales copy. You, you, you know, presented the problem. You, you made them imagine a place without the problem. You told 'em about the solution. You found, you presented the product that you were selling to them. Then you, you know, gave them a call to action. You showed testimonials. You went through your whole sales copy process and then at the bottom, you, you, you know, you would say, Hey, click here to pay. 


Well, you could really only sell so much that way because you didn't really have enough time to build that rapport with people. What was happening is a lot of people would just bounce from the page that the, you know, the bounce rate was huge. People would land on there, they'd see this long letter. It was all pattern interrupt marketing, right? You're hitting people in their inbox and they're clicking on it. They, now, they go to your sales page like, oh, I gotta read this whole thing. Oh, I'm not gonna do that right now. Right? So you, you're the, the, the conversion rates on these sales letters were very, very low. 


I mean, if you had a three or 4% conversion rate on a sales letter, that was absolutely amazing. But what started happening now with live events, with webinars is people could schedule time to be there. So you could send somebody an email inviting them to a live event, and you could say, Hey, listen, block out these 90 minutes. And now you weren't, it wasn't pattern interrupt anymore. 'cause You were telling them, Hey, set aside time. So then I could pitch you for 90 minutes, and now you're gonna go through that period of building trust and, and presenting the problem, and then introducing a solution.


And you could do that over a 90 per period, 90 minute time period. And now you could actually ask for much higher ticket items. You could sell things for a thousand dollars. That way you could sell things for $2,000 that way. It was very, very difficult to do anything like that for a long time. It's very tough, even with a VSL on a sales page, to sell something that's more than a thousand dollars. It's usually reserved for that, that time where you have the undivided attention of the audience on some sort of a webinar video. We gotta talk about video because it's probably one of the areas that I've personally seen the most growth and the most tools developed around over the course of the last 15 years. I mean, there was a period there of about five years where everything that was coming out, every product that was being launched had something to do with video, some kind of video thing, a green screen thing, a video production thing.


I mean, it was, I remember the video boss and Andy Jenkins launching this product about how to create video. And as, as video evolved, so did you know, the, the, the training courses that taught you how to do things with video. We went from a variety of flash based video formats to MP four as the standard. And, and that was huge, because for a long time, even when video was available to put on your website, there were so many different formats. There was a VI, there was like a bunch of 'em FFL. What was the flash one? I don't remember. There were, like, a whole bunch of different formats and different people did it differently. There wasn't really a standard. And it was, it was complicated. But then what happened was the MP four standard came out and, and now we were able to do things that we couldn't do before.


We, we, we were able to now stream in ways that we couldn't do before. And you still couldn't just take an MP four link and put it in a video, like put it in a website on a browser. Now browsers have MP four technology built in where you could put an MP four link right in a browser, and it'll play the video. So back then, even the browsers weren't advanced enough to just play MP fours by themselves. Video stream was even, again, even though you did have MP fours, it was still confusing. Some people were still using Flash. Some, you know, some weren't. If you had Flash video on your site and somebody visited your site, but they didn't have Flash installed on their computer, then that video wouldn't play, and they would have to download Adobe Flash player.


And it was confusing, and it was just, it was just a pain in the butt. Now, what started happening though is as processor speeds grew, and now you had MP fours, we started to see the rise of CDNs content distribution networks, right? And back then, one of the challenges that you had, even though you could get video playing, it's that your, your, your prospect or your visitor would be watching the video, but they couldn't watch the whole thing without it being interrupted and buffering. So it was almost like your computer had to take some time to load the video data, then play the little bit of video that it was able to load. Then it had to pause, load some more video data and play it back. So these, these things made it really difficult to use video powerfully, because imagine you're doing a sales presentation, but you get interrupted every five minutes or every, every minute or every 15 seconds, right?



It's very hard to sell that way because people get frustrated once that, once that thing starts buffering and, and they'd leave the site. So, you know, even though we had this technology, we still didn't have the power to, to to actually use it to our advantage. And then along comes AWS Amazon and, and their Amazon web storage. And, and now it was affordable and practical to host video and media in general in a way that it was gonna be served from the closest server to the person that's consuming the data. So what that meant is that, like, if you have a video and it's hosted in your data center in Atlanta, and somebody in in the UK in London is trying to watch your video, they're, they don't have to wait for that data to be transferred across the, you know, the, the, the ocean all the way over to their computer from Atlanta.


Instead, there was a server that had a mirrored copy of that file in this cloud network, in this CDN. And, and what would happen now is that the media file was being served to that viewer from the nearest server that had that. So this was a game changer for us. And even though it was awesome, and it wasn't the only, you know, cloud media storage out there, you know, there were others. But what this enabled us to do is use tools like Easy Video Player and Easy Video Suite, because with Easy Video player, I could actually just take my, my, my link from my Amazon and drop it in my easy video player. And boom, now I had embed code for video. I didn't have to have all of these plugins and these tools and these files, these flash files and things installed on my website in order to be able to play video.


It now became a lot easier. We had a website that we could log into, we can connect to our storage on Amazon, and now we could produce video code to embed on a website. Now, around this same time, YouTube started becoming prevalent. The problem with YouTube and free video is that it was just a huge traffic leak. Youtube was designed to go viral. Youtube wants people on YouTube. To this day, if you're using YouTube on your website to stream your sales video, it's tough. Because what happens is, not only does YouTube owe the content but the other thing that happens is that now people are going to be able to click that little YouTube logo, even if you, there's ways to hide it, but even at the end of the video, it'll, it'll recommend other videos and things like that. So YouTube was just a big traffic leak.


And now, throughout time, there's ways around that now. But one thing that did happen with YouTube is it, it really became a social network of its own, right? Because you could create YouTube channels, and now you could put your content in there. So it became more of a place to build an audience than it, than it became for internet marketers. Like a tool to serve your videos with. And the cool thing about it as well is that it was one of the first places that you could run video ads with. And that kind of changed the game, because up until then, ads were mostly about running Google ads and PPC ads, and then Facebook ads. But, you know, YouTube gave you a great alternative as a place to get traffic from. And that was what was huge, that was much bigger for internet marketers than anything that, YouTube, you know, the actual embedding of video with YouTube technology now evolved to support high production live streams HD video, things that you could broadcast worldwide without delay or interruption.
Now, as time passed, you know, we had the connection speeds. People were on, on high speed internet. We had, you know, modern, advanced processors in our machines, in our devices. And then, I mean, you, you go through today and now AI and automation tools have, have completely simplified video creation. You can, you can actually have AI avatars now talking in your voice or in some other generated voice, reading a script that you used AI to create for you. So like, we've gone from not even being able to stream video online to the computers making the videos for us now. So it's absolutely huge. And now it, it, something, something new has, has completely emerged over the last five or six years. And that's the, the short form videos you know, platforms like Instagram and TikTok, you know, these were all given rise by the fact that mobile devices, so mobile devices, now we've got a handheld device that we tend to hold vertically in our, in the palm of our hand.


And, you know, having those widescreen videos on it didn't really take advantage of all this screen space on a vertical device. So what happens when we started seeing the rise of vertical videos, and we started re seeing the rise of short form videos and, and things like reels, shorts on YouTube, TikTok that's, that's just a, a craze in its own that we could talk about for an hour, right? But now we have become a swipe culture, right? And we'll talk a little bit about that in a little bit. Now, I, I, we've been talking about technology, right? And, and what I really wanna talk about now is the evolution of the marketing strategies. And, and I gotta say the psychology of selling online, of marketing, of getting people to know, like, and trust you and buy from you. It remains exactly the same.


Only the modalities have changed. So the places and the tools that we use to build that, those relationships, and to make those sales, yeah, those have changed. But the things it takes to get people to buy are the same. It's still the same psychological triggers because you're still selling to humans. And yeah, technology has evolved quite a bit in the last 15 years. But humans haven't, as a matter of fact, some might say that humans have devolved or regressed in that time period. But, the thing is, the factors of impulse, the fear of loss, the indifference, the greed, the social proof, the sense of urgency, the fomo, all of that used to work really, really, really well in long form sales letters. Even before the internet, when those long form sales letters were literally letters that you received in the mail, in, in your post box, where you would go and take it out, and it's a letter selling you something nowadays, you don't get as many of those.


I mean, I get like the political parties trying to get me to donate and vote for me or vote for me or whatever. And those tend to be a lot of long form sales that as you open that up, it's like a three page letter asking you with a little envelope asking you, saying, send money. But back in the day before the internet, that was the only way to sell direct response. And, and, and things have changed, but the, the triggers that get people to buy things like fear of loss, things like urgency the, the, the copy tactics, the copywriting tactics that we used to use back then, now we just use them using different tools with different tools. It's still all value based, but it's shifted more to the free content model. Now, as far as I can remember, there's always been on the internet, a little bit of a difference from brick and mortar and from offline selling on the internet, it's always been about providing value first.


It's always been that way. Like, you know, 15 years ago, 17 years ago, even people that I know that have been doing this for 20 years, there, it was always about like, Hey, I'm gonna give you this free if you give me your email, and then we're gonna build a relationship through email, and then I'm gonna send you a sales letter and I want you to, to buy. And that free thing could be some sort of a download. Now, the way that we offer it, the way that we deliver that free thing, whether it's a PDF or, or whatever it might be, those modalities have changed the tools that we use to make them have changed. But the concept of giving somebody value first before, before you expect anything from them, giving, offering them value first has been something that has been around since I started this.


But now it's shifted a lot more that way. The, the, the audiences now, they really just expect quite a bit for free. We've become this culture where you get 30 free trials, 30 day free trials of every streaming service where you, you download an app and it's, it's usually free to start, and then they start building you, it's a free plus kind of model. So it's free for, for the first, you know, seven days, and then they're gonna start building you. So it's, we've kind of shifted more that way for building brands and building communities. And one of the biggest, biggest shifts in, in, in the evolution has been mobile devices. Mobile wasn't really, really, really big 15 years ago, because again, like I said, we, you know, there wasn't even Android yet. You know, you could get an iPhone, but you know, it just, it just wasn't what it is.


A lot of people were still on, some people were still on flip phones. Some people didn't even have a big screen on their phone, you know? Back then some people were still on blackberries, and, and it just, you know, you just didn't have a need to, to develop websites that were mobile responsive, that looked good on, on vertical screens that stack the elements. So nothing would get cut off. That would resize things so that they would fit properly on, on a screen instead of having a headline, taking up the whole screen and, and then having your regular text look microscopic where somebody has to pinch and zoom, right? So all of these kinds of things, we didn't have to worry about that 15 years ago, right? But what happened is as mobile devices grew now the demand for a new way of delivering your content arose.


And, and you had to be able to make sure that you, your, your sites were downloadable and, you know, your, your content was downloadable and accessible on mobile devices and, and devices. And that's also when apps were born, right? So now all of a sudden, there's an app for everything, right? As a matter of fact, I remember for a little while there was a, a, a joke like, Hey, there's an app for that. There's an app for that. Everything had its own app. And now you, you, we've, we've got an entire marketplace of apps, right? You have the app store where there's like thousands and hundreds of thousands, probably millions of apps in there. We live now because of mobile devices, because of the evolution of mobile devices and video and the things that I've talked about. Apps, we live in a swipe culture.


We no longer know, and, and I've got data to prove this, this isn't me speculating, this isn't conjecture. This is, you know, I, I can go to my server and literally see the amount of mobile devices that are connecting to my websites. And it's far out. I mean, it is. So it's like night and day. It's like 75% or more of the visitors that are coming to my websites are coming on a mobile device. So you just can't ignore it. In today's day and age to be creating websites and not be mindful of what they look like or how they behave on mobile it's, you know, you're getting left in the stone age. You have to have to have to do it. And, and the other thing is that now all of these apps, apps that were designed for, for mobile phones apps like Instagram apps, like TikTok YouTube, these apps are, are designed so that you could quickly swipe with your thumb.


So you're moving from content to content with your thumb. It's, you know, you, you think, you used to have a big bounce rate on your website when people used to have to go to the website, look at it, then find the little x close the tab. Now, they don't even have to do that. It's just a flick of the thumb, flick of the thumb. It's like, snap in your finger, slap snap, that's it. Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce. You just snap in your finger and it's, and, and you're just sliding up to the next piece of it. We are, we're a swipe culture. You're swiping from content to content, to content to content that changes marketing and messaging in your marketing, because it's so easy for people just to move away. Now it used to be said that you had six seconds to grab somebody's attention.


You've got about a second to three seconds now to grab their attention because they're swiping, they're swiping away. If you don't got 'em in the first three seconds, boop, they make a decision about whether or not they're gonna watch you, you got, you got 'em for three seconds, now you got 'em for another six, you got 'em for another six. You might get 'em for 10 or 15 seconds, you got 'em for 10 or 15 seconds. You might have 'em for 30, but there's absolutely no way this person's gonna keep watching without swiping longer than a minute. So your messaging now has to become much more concise, much more succinct. Thi this now becomes more about repetition than it does about good copy and, and long form copy and, and, and selling over, over time in one message. Now you need a lot of messages over and over and over again to appeal to that swipe culture.


The other things that have changed, a lot of things have changed in, in privacy laws and, and how they've impacted tracking and advertising over the years. You know, back in the day, I remember how excited we were with Hotmail and, and Hotmail was free and everybody Hot Hotmail account, even initially it was with invites, and then it was like, you know, share this with, with other people. And then, you know, at the bottom of each email it said, this would get your own Hotmail account, you know, and, and everybody had Hotmail, and it went viral. And, and, and we were using Hotmail. And, and, you know, then, then Gmail came out, I was like, oh my God, it's so much better. You could have all these tools and look at how you can organize your emails, and, and it connects with Google Suite, and, and oh my God, it's got a chat feature.


There were like all these things that you can get for free. But there, they came at a cost. All of those companies were collecting data, they were evaluating things. They were, they were seeing per, you know, behaviors and things like that. And, they, they, they got really good at identifying what is a marketing message. And, and what started happening now is you're, you're, you now had to contest with, you know, the spam filter and getting, getting, you know, taken outta the inbox and, and, and all kinds of legal stuff started happening, you know, canned spam and, and laws about what you could and couldn't do in email. And, and then there was privacy and tracking and cookies, right? And, and there was for, for, for a time period. The rage was like, oh my God, they're tracking me. We started seeing things like retargeting.


So what that meant is that you would be on, on a website and all of a sudden there was an ad for, for something that you had just talked about yesterday, and you're like, oh my goodness. And what was happening, like in Gmail, if somebody sent you a, an email that said, Hey, I just bought a new Honda, you gotta come, you know, one of your friends says, Hey, I just bought the new Honda Civic and, and I'd love for you to come over and check it out. Like, now, before you even open that email, Gmail has read it. Gmail knows what's in the content. They know that a Honda Civic was mentioned. So what's the ad running on the sidebar of Gmail? It's an ad for the new Honda Civic. And, and, and when you go online and you go to Google, what's, what's the ads that you're seeing up on the top ads for Honda Civic?


And you're wondering like, oh my God, what's going on? Well, cookies were creating this situation where people can be remarketed, people can be retargeted people. Now, could you, you know, go, you, you could go from site to site and you could see that, that you're actively being followed, so to speak, by other websites that you've visited in the past. And, all kinds of privacy things started happening. Privacy concerns with data and, and security breaches and things like that. And we started seeing the evolution of email clients and, and the way that you could get into the inbox. And in the, in, in recent years, it's gotten even stricter and harder because of all the knowledge about email marketing and about because of all the content that these emails clients have read and everything that they've learned, they're very good now at identifying an email that's trying to sell something or an email that's marketing something.


And they're very good at putting that in a separate folder. Maybe not spam, but they'll just put it in a marketing folder. So yeah, maybe you're not getting, you know, called spam, but you are, you know, being segmented nonetheless. So a lot of those things have happened. So back in the wild, wild west of internet marketing, we didn't have to deal with a lot of that stuff. Another thing that we had to contend with is the filter bubble. You know, the filter bubble and social impacts were huge because what the filter bubble means, is that now as people are surfing online the, the, the, the big, the big companies are creating a profile. So, like, Google has a profile on you. They know what you've clicked on. They know what you like, they know where you live based on your IP ads.


They know a lot about you. So if you search for a certain term, they're gonna give you a set of results that's tailored to you based on the history, the profile that they've made, made about you. So you're, if you, if you type Honda Civic into your browser right now, you're gonna get a totally different set of results than somebody that types it in on the other side of the country or in another country. They're gonna get ads for local dealerships that are around there, you know, because what sense would it make for you if you're in New Jersey to do a search for a Honda Civic, and then the Honda dealership that comes up in the first place is in California? That makes no sense, right? So we started seeing results that are tailored for the individual that's called the filter bubble.


And this is tough, right? Because as a marketer, how do you penetrate that filter bubble and get in front of everybody that you wanna get in front of, not just in front of the people that Google thinks that want to see your stuff, right? So there was a lot of stuff like that to contend with that we didn't have to deal with back, you know 10, 15 years ago, right? And then most recently, I gotta say the rise of AI and automation and digital marketing, this is absolutely a game changer. So what, what happened, I I, I gotta be honest, the biggest thing in, in, in, in my career in the last 17 years online, I've seen the biggest technological changes in video. And what we are seeing now is making video pale by comparison. And that is ai. You know, we went from fake AI to real AI to real quick.


And what I mean, what I mean by fake AI is a lot of, a lot of people would call their, their websites, like they would have if then kind of statements and, and, you know, websites where like, if, if you answer this way, you're gonna be taken here. And if you answer that way, you're gonna, and, you know, it was basically not, it was not ai, but people would, would use the term ai, like, oh, we have an artificially intelligent website. No, just because you've pre-programmed responses, that's not artificial intelligence. 

Nowadays, we have real AI learning models that are actually getting better and better and evolving and, and that opens up a whole new can of worms to deal with. But something absolutely game changing happened in 2022 specifically for the internet marketing space, and that was chat GPT. So in 2022, chat, GPT you know, became this, this, again, free open ai free model that you could use, and you could basically create an account and start talking to it, like start typing and start asking questions about absolutely anything and asking it to do things for you content related, obviously.


So over the years, we learned that content is absolutely king, especially when we realized like, oh, wow. So they're expecting free stuff. We have to constantly be supplying them with content. Now, we went from the model of long form sales letters to these swipe, you know, cultures where we need to constantly be providing them. It's about repetition now. It's not about one big, long, cohesive message. It's about a whole bunch of little messages to get through to them, right? And that means we need constant, constant content. And content truly is king. And creating that content, whoever is best at creating content and fastest at creating content is gonna win the game is gonna get in front of, of the audience that they want to get in front of. Chad. GBT changed dramatically the speed at which you, and, and it's funny because like, that was the first one that I remember learning about, and then like, almost right after, like the next month, there were like three new ones.


It was like, oh my god, wow, what's going on here? There's, there's Claude, there's, there's Gemini, there's, there's so many of them, what was it, Jarvis? And then there's you know, there's Otter AI and, and like these other, and then all of a sudden there's like image AI and mid journey and, and, and then video airs, and it was like boom, boom, boom. It was like, like every month there was, you couldn't keep up, you couldn't keep up how fast they were coming out. And we've reached a point now in history where technology is outpacing education. 

You know, nowadays, I hate to say it, but going to college for a computer type of industry computer science, it's not, it's not a smart move nowadays. You just, technology is outpacing education. You signed up for a four year degree in computer science today, the technology has completely changed by the time you graduate. The stuff you learned is obsolete from four years ago. It's obsolete. It's changing by semester, you know, and the, the, the, the schools and the instructors, the education just cannot keep up with the technology. 

And this is why kids graduate with a four year degree, and then they, they're driving Uber or they're baristas at Starbucks. You know it, it's, you know, YouTube has become like the, the best university, like quite literally nowadays. I would recommend a trade school. I would recommend YouTube University. I would recommend, you know, getting that side hustle, learning a skill online and, and doing that. And, and, and, and trust me, I've got a graduate degree. I'm not saying this because I'm naive or because I'm ignorant to what you can learn in college and, and the value of, of college. But what I'm saying is, what, what I've learned over the last 15 years of doing business online is I wouldn't advise my kid to go to college today.


I think the best advice is for him to learn a skill that, that, that that's not gonna get outpaced by education, that learn it at a trade school, or to, to learn something in an industry that is going, that they know is gonna change. And, and that ultimately is probably the, the root message that I want you to take away from this is it's about change. 

The reason that my wife and I are still here is because we were willing to change. We were willing to adapt to the person who is not willing to adapt, who freaks out every time there's a change in like, okay, that tool for building websites, yeah, that's not what's working anymore. The internet has evolved around it. That tool is old now. That's so last year you need to move on to this. And if you are not able to adapt quickly to changing tools, changing technologies, changing modalities, you're not going to survive the long term.


You're not gonna do well long term. We're seeing this now at a pace that I've never experienced before. 

The way that that is coming out now and the tools that are coming out and the speed. I mean, just in the last two years alone, I remember two years ago for the first time seeing one of these AI generated avatars, and I was like, oh, wow, that's cool. But it looks like a robot, and it sounds like a robot. And now, I mean, just last week I saw, and again, well, now for me, at the, I don't know when you were watching this time, you know, but I just recently saw one, it was completely indiscernible from a human. Like there's, now you can like, record yourself, make an avatar of yourself, record your own voice, reading a script, and the AI from now on Will, will do all of your videos for you in your voice with your mannerisms, with your, your, it's absolutely incredible what's happened.


A lot of the things that used to hold people back from making videos, you know, 10 years ago, I didn't wanna be on camera. Oh, I don't wanna, I don't wanna use my voice. Okay, well, that's gone now that, you know, we're, we're removing barriers. Technology is removing barriers. A lot of people think like, oh, it's, it sucks that it keeps changing and I, and I've gotta learn new platforms and I gotta learn new things. Yeah, you could look at it that way, or you could think of it like, oh my God, this is absolutely amazing. Look at all of the barriers that are being removed. You know, you no longer have to be on camera, whether you're having a bad hair day or not. You could still, you know, you, you could even have AI write the script for you, make a couple of tweaks.


You can teach AI to sound like you, like in, in coming up, you know, to write like you to use words that you use. You, it's, it's absolutely amazing. And you could create chat bots that respond to customers in your stead. Like you're not there, but they're talking to you. Like if you were there because you've uploaded a whole bunch of predefined responses, and now this chat bot can have a conversation with your customer. This is, you know, in, in the past there were chatbots, you know, many years ago, but there were very, very limited. Like, you, you could only have you, you, you had very little that you, that you could, you know, put program it to do, you had certain questions and it was like multiple choice. So you had multiple choice chat bot, like, you know, they would pop up a little chat on your, on, on this, on your website.


And if, if you weren't, if it wasn't there live, if you weren't there live to talk with them, they had the option of like, okay, ask this, and you can ask these three questions, or you could click here, and if you click here, it like, opens a little window to send them an email. So it's not really a chat message, but nowadays, people can have complete conversation with your AI chat bot on your website, which is absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing. And now there's AI generated content. This is probably, I don't know, I, I think we're, we're, we're still in the learning curve of this one AI generated content is, we're still at a point in history at the time that I recorded this, where you can tell it, it doesn't really take that highly skilled or, or trained of an eye to, to re recognize, like, oh, that's, that's AI generated content.
Even, even text content depending on how lazy the person that created it was, you can identify, there's certain earmarks about the way that chat. G PT writes something about the way that clattered, like you can see some of the, the texts, like the long slashes or the chat GT is obsessed with, with emojis. It puts emojis and likes all the content. And, if the person prompting Cha GT hasn't prompted those habits, you can see that in the writing. I can see an email right away. I know if it's been written by Cha GT or by an AI right away. There's even tools out there now to help you recognize it. Even the, the, the one that's tougher college professors are using, they have to use these tools now to identify the content that's being submitted.


'Cause, Because you got, you got college students writing their thesis with you know, with, with, with Chachi PT and, and, and writing essays with Chachi pt. So, you know, the, the technology has basically created a situation now where we need to create counter technology to, to, to tell us when technology is being used on us. The other thing that we're seeing now is smart automation. You can do things now with AI automation, that is, oh my God, it's just absolutely crazy what you can do with AI driven analytics and, and, and, and then business optimization. I just watched a video where the way that AI is being used in the trading markets is insane. And it's not illegal, and I don't know how it isn't. But let's say you're, you're, you're a stock, a stockbroker and, and you're trying to buy a certain amount of shares, right?


And, and you're buying blocks of shares, and you, you, you're, you're, you start placing that order for four shares or, or 20 shares. And what starts happening is the moment that you start buying it, like, it, it, this happens in a millisecond, right? But it buys the first share, then the second share, and the third share and the fourth share. There's AI out there that can see what's happening, intercept in the millisecond between the purchase of the first share and the second share. You hit one button to buy four shares, but between the purchase of the first share and the second share, AI has captured that you're about to buy four. It goes out, buys them before you, and now the price of the second set of shares for you, shares number three and number four, they're, they're already higher because, because they've driven up the price of the shares.


Because between the time it took that millisecond that it took for that batch of shares to get bought on a stock, the AI went out, bought that stock, drove up the price, and now is making money off it. It's absolutely insane what you can do with AI driven analytics and, and, you know, optimize, you know, email campaigns, think of what am what, what you can do now with email campaigns and ai you can write entire email campaigns, not just the, the AI generation, but tracking things, tracking the opens, tracking the, you know, AI can literally tell you what to do. Now, what works, you know, you don't have to sit there. And, and, and this is one of the things that I like, I absolutely hate doing advertising. When you do, when you run ads, especially like any kind of PPC ad, whether it's Facebook or Google or whatever, like you can't just, you know, write some good copy and get a nice image and, and then run the ad and expect results.


Like, it just doesn't work that way. You have to write 12 ads, 12 images, you've gotta compare them, you've gotta, you know, scale the ones that worked. You gotta, you gotta remove the ones that didn't. And, and you gotta constantly be split testing, and you're like a day trader. You're constantly looking at charts and seeing which one performed, which one didn't perform, and, and getting, you know, doing all kinds of things, right? And this is why AI is huge when it comes to optimizing, because AI can do all of that for you. Now, AI can do all of that optimization, all of that analy, you know, analyzing data. All of that stuff can be done by AI now, and this is absolutely, talk about removing barriers, right? And, and here's the thing. I I don't want to just say it's all good, all good, all good, all good.


There are pros and there are cons of using AI tools. And as we're seeing it right now in the internet marketing space, one of the things that I'm seeing is a whole big segment of internet marketing for a very, very long time has been private label rights content. There are literally authors and product creators out there that just create content for the purpose of selling it so others can reuse it. And private label rights content was huge for people like myself that I, you know, I wanna put out content out there. I have an audience that demands fresh new stuff and, and their demands outpace my ability and, and the time that I have to create that content. So I would use PLR content, modify it, and, and use that to supply the demand. And unfortunately now with ai, well, you know, you can create your own content super fast without having to go and buy, you know, PLR.


So there's, there's shifts happening, there's shifts happening. The other thing that you're seeing now is all of a sudden, everybody's a PLR seller, right? Because now you don't even have to be a really good author. You could just go and, and knock a bunch of these things out, you know, eBooks and things with, with chat GBT the, the, the downfall of the, or, or the downside of this rather, is that when you're using AI to generate content, you gotta remember it's been trained by reading content on the internet that other people have produced. Like, at one point or another, the AI model had to be trained. It had to be exposed to content, exposed to information for it to learn, so that when it's asked questions, it can give those answers. And there's already been lawsuits like infringement on copyrights, where, you know, somebody says, no, look, I used AI to create this.


I copied the results of the ai, I published it. I thought it was unique because I made it for myself. But it turns out that AI was just basically curating stuff that it was taught. And now you've got it on your website thinking it's original. AI created this for me and the author of that original segment, it might not be the whole thing word for word, but they, they find it, or they come across your content, they're like, wait a second, that's mine. I wrote that, I created that, I did that. And now you have an issue on your hands. So, you know, we're still not a hundred percent there, where like, it's, it's coming up with the content and we could say, Hey, it's, it's 100% original. We're getting there. We're getting better and better and better. But, but, you know, we still have that issue.
And there are some of the con the other thing is like, you know, whenever you have this immense paradigm shift you need, you're always gonna have people that refuse to shift with the paradigm. You're always gonna have people that refuse to grow, that refuse to go in the direction of progress and direction of technology. And they're just gonna complain. And you say, oh, well, yeah, AI was replacing me. And, and, well, what are you gonna do when the robots take your job? What are you gonna do? You, you, you have to be able to, you know, if chat GBT is now outpacing you and doing what you used to do, well, you need to become a prompt engineer. And you need to become better at using chat GPT to do what you do. And, and you need to shift your priorities and what you are doing.


You need to adapt to the industry. This is probably the biggest challenge that people face in creating a business that lasts and, and passes the test of time. Challenges in growing pains in the online changes. The biggest change is the biggest challenge. If you take one thing away from this entire thing in that I've learned in the last 17 years of being online and the 15 years that we're talking about in this presentation I would say that, you know, being willing to change and being willing to accept that new technologies will replace what you're doing right now, and your ability to survive is literally gonna depend on whether or not you're willing and able to use that new technology and introduce it into your business. Don't be so rigid, so firm, so stubborn that you won't evolve with the technology. Because right now, I, I mentioned earlier, technology is just outpacing education.


The other thing is like an algorithm change. Google, Facebook, YouTube, that is, they're constantly changing. Just when you think, okay, I've got something, I've got a system, it works, I'm ranking, I'm getting, you know, I'm going viral. Boom. That's gone. You, you know, they've changed things nobody really, really, really knows. They claim to know, but nobody really knows the algorithm for Facebook what, what, you know, they penalize you for and, and what they don't, what they reward you for. Same with Google, same with YouTube. Nobody really, really knows. They have some ideas. But then what happens as soon as like, you know, people are taking advantage of it because they realize, oh, this is working. I'm posting three times a day, or I'm posting six times a day and this interval, or I'm doing this, or I'm doing that and that's how I'm getting my content shown more.


And that's how I'm going viral. As soon as they, they, they realize that that's everybody's doing that. They change it. And, and you're constantly, you know, changing this goalpost that's moving, it's being moved on. Your algorithm changes are disrupting things all the time. And the same exact thing happens with, you know changes in upgrades, in, in Firefox, upgrades in Chrome, your plugin developer or a software developer, you gotta constantly be keeping up with the technology. You've gotta be constant, if, if you were a, a video platform, and the, the ones that I mentioned here, they were revolutionary, easy video player and easy video suite. I mean, that was the thing, man. Like, it was an absolute game changer. It came out, they're not even in business anymore. They're not even in business anymore because they were the rage for a few years.
And, then the technology just outpaced them. Then along came MP fours, and then along came browsers that could play MP fours riding the browser. And then along came these Dragon drop page builders that could leverage the technology of Web3 0.0. Now, Chrome and Firefox and Internet Explorer, or Edge or whatever it's called nowadays, you know, they can play MP fours right? In the browser. So now these page builders were saying, Hey, no problem. We'll, we'll, you know, you don't need a video player anymore. Just popular MP four link right here, and we'll play the video on the page for you. You know, so you no longer needed services like EVS and EVP and those, those other things. But for a while that was all you could use, and it was all the rage, right? So again, it just becomes about being willing to change with things.


Another thing that has changed and, and, and we have to deal with now, is the battle for trust. The battle for trust has, you know, man, I, I, I remember when, if you, you were a prevalent internet marketer back in the day, and you had like, just amazing equipment, you could, you could put together beautiful videos and it would cost, you know, thousands of dollars to have like a D-L-S-R or DSL, whatever it is, one of 'em, fancy schmancy cameras that you, your videos would just look absolutely amazing. And, and you were doing 10 DP videos before anybody else, and it was just absolutely amazing to watch this person. But now everybody's got an HD camera in their pocket, right? And it, it, it becomes so much easier for people now to create videos that look great. Now, there's so much, so much technology that you can't just look at someone's video and be like, wow, that dude's a pro.


'Cause Now, you know, anybody can make videos that look absolutely pro with the apps that are out there with the AI tools that are out there. You know, the, the, the, the battle for trust now is tough. 'cause You don't know, like, okay, is this a real successful guy or is he just using all these tools to make it look like he's successful? Misinformation is huge. Like, there's so much out there about any given topic. I'm not talking about politics or, or, you know vaccinations or anything like that. I'm just talking about anything in general. You don't know because they've, the technology has gotten to a point where it's so easy for people to fake it now to, to, to fake how good, you know, I, their, their thing is, or, or how good their courses or their training is. It makes it harder to, to actually trust, and it makes it difficult for us as good vendors to gain that trust for people because of misinformation.


The other thing is AI. AI makes it possible for anybody to pretend to be anyone nowadays. I have the example of the Biden lizard tongue back when Joe Biden was in, in, in the president, and he was or I think he was running for president, I don't remember. There was, there was a video that someone used AI to take a picture of President Biden or a you know, like a, a video of, of President Biden, and they added a lizard tongue. So it seemed like when he was talking, the tongue was coming out. And, and the funny thing about it is, like we talked earlier about how some people might say that we're actually regressing as a people, as a culture, as a civilization. 

Facebook actually had to put a fact check, like a warning on the video, telling people that President Biden isn't really a lizard, because there were, believe it or not, there was actually people out there that said, oh my God, is that real? Does he really, is that really his tongue? And it's like, are are, have we gotten that dumb? Ha Has technology made us that dumb? That, that now, you know, people are, we have to tell people, Hey, by the way, the president doesn't, he's not really a lizard. Like, that's just, that's just absolutely crazy to me. But, it is welcome to where we live. Now, welcome to today's society. Swipe culture is probably another one of the biggest things that I want you to take, take away from this. Because swipe culture and short form videos are shrinking the attention spans of your prospects. You can't, you know, expect your people to watch a five minute video anymore, period, end of story. They just, they're just not because they're used to watching, you know, 62nd, 32nd, 15 second Tiktoks.


And if you're, you're asking them to watch something longer than that, you better have scheduled that time with them on a webinar. So now that personalization and that connection with your audience, it's gonna rely on repetition. Instead of getting through to them in a five minute video, you gotta get through to them in 10, you know, one, you know, 32nd videos and, and, and do that over time and, and, and have them running and, and constantly, constantly be in the algorithm, right? Here's what I predict for the next 15 years. Couldn't wrap it up without telling you what I think is gonna happen. Look I'm not a fortune teller, but I've been around long enough to see trends. One of the things that I've learned is that, you know, the more things change, the more things stay the same.


It seems like every year and a half to two years, somebody starts complaining about PayPal again. Oh my God, PayPal closed my account. Oh my God. And for a month, the rage on the internet is all about how, you know, PayPal is the enemy. And, you know, there's these cycles where we kind of see the same, same arguments happening online about, you know, an internet marketing space, like, oh my God, minimum requirements on, on sales contests and, and, and things like that. You, oh my God, using your own link to promote a product. Like, there's just these arguments that just, they, they resurface every few years, I guess when the, with the new guard, the changing of the old guard, and, and, and the new guard coming in, the new batch of newbie marketers that, that are hot shots. And, and it's like we're repeating the same things over and over again every few years.

What I think is gonna happen over the next 15 years is obviously those cycles will continue but as AI becomes more prevalent, customers are gonna start yearning for a one-on-one or more personal connection. I think we're almost at this point, I think right now we're kind of at the point where people are starting to be able to recognize AI content and it's, it's to the point where when something looks so good or sounds so good, oh, that must be AI content, right? So it's, it's almost like they're questioning how good it is, and they're going to crave one-on-one interaction. They're gonna crave more personal connection before they part with their money. And the funny thing about it is that we are going to, as marketers, I believe we're gonna adapt to that because we kinda saw this with video, we're gonna adapt to that demand, and we are going to find the easiest, fastest, quickest way to create a personal connection.
So, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna go to AI and we're gonna ask it, Hey, how do I create a personal connection, right? And, and now what's gonna happen is we're gonna use anti artificial positioning, right? So you're gonna start seeing people, marketers, and products saying not ai. So right now the rage is, Hey, this is AI doing this. Hey, this is AI. Eventually it's gonna come to the point where it's gonna become the rage to not be ai, but you can't argue with the benefits of ai. So what'll happen is people will still be using AI to do things, but we're now going to be asking AI to be more human. Their vibe is growing AI further and further and further, the anti anti, you know, artificial positioning is actually gonna become more prevalent. And we're gonna go to AI and, and use, you know, that's what marketers are gonna do.


They're gonna use AI to create anti AI positioning, the dominance of short form video that's not going away that's gonna actually keep pace with technology and with devices that, that, that play them. So as devices change, that's gonna be what kind of guides the direction of how video goes as, as, and, and there's a lot, a lot happening in devices right now. Okay? So I think iPhone and Apple seem to kind of be stuck, and they're just kind of relaunching the same phone every year,  But what's gonna start to happen is we're gonna start moving over more into virtual environments like headsets. And believe it or not, yes, I know I'm, it might sound crazy depending on when you're watching this, we're gonna start seeing holographic simulations. So we're already seeing how 360 videos are. You can have 360 videos if you have an Oculus headset.


There's, there's channels for 360 videos. It hasn't quite taken off but I believe that it will, I believe that 3D video headset environments and even holographic environments are gonna be the rage once AI meets that. And, and those two things start, you know, growing in parallel. We're gonna see absolutely, absolutely huge changes in the types of devices that we are using. And that just like we've seen in the past when we saw mobile getting introduced and, and, and, and requiring it, and now when, when we had these mobile devices, the demand for video that would work on mobile change. So the way we marketed changed we're gonna see that same exact thing. We're gonna see that exact shift when we see these, these different environments and communication methods changing, you know, holographic and, and virtual environments and things like that.


One thing that will hold true is building audiences in digital stadiums. I believe that this is a concept I've been teaching for the entire 15 years and I believe that this is something that is only gonna become even more and more important as that demand for personal one-on-one. And you know creation and, and connection grows in, in the, you know, in the heat of ai. I believe that building a community, a digital stadium, a place where you can gather your people and you can step to a podium and speak to them, and they can get an individual connection with you,


I believe that they're gonna become even more and more important, more and more prevalent as these things you know, as technology moves on. This is what my predictions are for the next 15 years. And, and, and like I said, if you're gonna take anything away from this, take away that there are some cycles. There are some things that are gonna just repeat themselves, but the number one most important thing that you have to be able to do, if your business, your online business, is going to survive the next 10 years, the next 15 years, if you're gonna be the one that takes it to six figures, and then to, you know, to six figures per year, and then to six figures per month. If you're gonna do that, you have to be willing and, and to adapt to change, as a matter of fact, you have to embrace change.


You have to want change. You have to be able to embrace change. And that change is happening faster and faster and faster. It used to be every few years, then used to be every year and every few months. And now with ai, we're seeing technology outpace what we're doing in, in, in our businesses in a matter of a month. So as long as you're willing to embrace that change, and you're willing to grow with the technology, and you have an eye for these things, you're looking for them, you're looking for the way that you, you know, you're websites looking on mobile, and you're, you're checking, how are people accessing my content? And you're staying on top of that stuff, then you too will be able to survive the test of time. I hope that you've gotten a lot from this presentation 'cause it was, you know, 17 years in the making. And I hope that you use what you've learned here to help you grow your business and, and, you know, survive the test of time. 

I'll see your business online very, very soon. Take care.