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Here are my eight (yes, 8!!!) core takeaways from this interview:
1. The Secret to Creating Great Content
We need to put out content every day. That is the currency of today’s day and age. Content that compels people to take action, that compels people to improve their lives, that gives them what they need to get on the path to happiness, essentially, fulfillment. That’s what every human being actually wants. Secret of life right there.
When we create content that gets people into action, they’re going to love us. If your content is just like, oh, okay, they just regurgitated that other blog posts that everybody else is parroting, it just falls flat, but when it gets people to change, to shift, three years later you’re going to look back and this will be the turning point for them.
Put out the kind of content that gets people to say F it. I’m going to do that 90-day challenge. I’m going to do it. I’m going to break through. I’m going to do the work because I’m tired of being stuck preparing all the time. I realize now, clearly, that I just have to start taking steps, doing my iterations.
2. How to Gain Trust and Close Sales
The goal of our lead magnet, which is one of the main KPIs in my business, is to give them an experience with our content.
Because when the mum puts on the earbuds and presses play and sits there for 20 minutes and all of the stress of the commute, getting cut off, the road-rage incident, the boss, the office cubicle she doesn’t like—when all of that washes away, and then the kids show up after that and she’s present and she’s grounded with them, and the whole evening is a totally different experience because of that one thing she did in between that came from a free thing we offered her from a pop-up on our blog. Boom, we’ve won.
I don’t look at the win for us as I made a sale. I look at the win when she has that experience and feels something shift in her life. The transformation moment.
If we put barriers to transformation, if we’re like, okay, I can help the world, but I’m only going to transform those who give this guy money, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Because most people are gonna look at your sales page and be like, I don’t trust you. There’s scammers all over. Like I don’t trust you. I don’t believe it’s going to work. I don’t believe it’ll work for me. I don’t think I can trust you with my credit card. I don’t trust any of it, and so they don’t buy.
Whereas, when you move the minor transformation, that little step in the direction of their goals, when you move that before the transaction, the trust factor changes. The rest of the numbers from that point on change significantly. There’s plenty of data to prove all of this.
Demonstrate your ability to help them get the results they desire before asking for a sale and surprise, surprise, you’ll get a lot more people lining up with credit cards in hand saying that was great. Where can I get more?
3. Bullet-Proof Your Marketing Strategy
If you have a one-legged table, sure you can balance something on it, but that’s it, right? If you’re falling on Facebook organic and Facebook changes their algorithm and there it goes, your whole table goes down, right?
But if you’ve got a four-legged table and one of those legs come off, that table can stand on its own.
If you’ve got an eight-legged table and you’re getting massive traffic from Pinterest, from Facebook ads, from Instagram, from YouTube, from Google, and all of those places are bringing you traffic, and you’ve got your own email list, and all of that’s working for you, then you can totally lose an entire leg, if you had to, and you would be unaffected.
4. The Right Mindset for Creating Passive Income
I think the whole fake-guru world, the Instagram look at me on my hammock making “passive” income, which is a total lie, it’s got a false mindset installed in people and all they’re focusing on is that last big domino.
You’ve got fake gurus selling webinar pitches of I’m gonna teach you how to knock over this gigantic, big, end domino that’s a $10K/month business, and everyone’s neglecting the 19 other dominos required to make that effortless.
It’s a three-to-five-year journey to build out all of those dominoes, and delaying gratification is not an ingrained, innate response that we humans have. We want to believe there’s a shortcut.
I was trying scam after scam after scam and MLM, network marketing, all kinds of things just to get rich quick. I’m a recovering opportunity seeker. I’m okay with that now. The shortcut was doing the work for three years straight.
5. Make Content Creation Easy on Yourself
My wife enjoys crafting content through the written word. She likes brainstorming ideas. She often has three or four different blog posts at different phases of completion.
Me? Oh, copy editing and punctuation. I don’t like it. It is not for me, but for the first few years I tried to force myself to blog, and surprise, surprise, I didn’t follow through.
I didn’t stick with it consistently for the three years needed to really gain momentum because I would do it a few times and I’d have a little willpower and then finally I’m like this sucks. I don’t like it.
It wasn’t until I tried video that I was like, wow. I got the idea out. It didn’t take a terrible amount of time. It was relatively coherent. I did it all on my cell phone. The YouTube app allows me to plug in a microphone, record it, cut the front, cut the end, I don’t edit anything, and I just upload the whole thing. It got done.
I did it the next day and it got done, and I did it the next day and it got done: 120 videos in 120 days. By the end of that, I got through the learning curves and I was in motion. I was in traction.
Blogging is where I want to be, but sometimes it’s not in the DNA. When you find that format that works for you, run with it. Go all in, and then build systems and teammates to get the other pieces of organic content out.
6. Why SEO Pays Off in the Long Run
Blog, the podcast, and video. Those are the big ones. Social is absolutely secondary to me.
It took me about a year and a half to get all three of those firing. Maybe there’s some superhuman individuals that can do all three at once and hit it out of the gates. For most people, it’s way better to go through one learning curve, get to competence, and then look at how do I add on the next learning curve?
I did nothing but videos for six months, about 150. I switched to three videos per week, which was a really good pace for me. Then I put out my first lead magnet, and it sucked. It took three iterations to find a lead magnet that was actually enticing to my people.
At a year is when I did my first blog. Even for me, it took 18 months to get all three of those firing. Now that they’re all firing consistently for longer periods of time, the power of compounding takes over, and that’s why I prefer search over social.
Social you can get short-term benefits. Something goes viral. Boom! But the search, I have videos from 2016 that are still bringing in hundreds of subscribers per month to my channel, not to mention everything I’ve done since then.
That’s the power you get in search that you just don’t get in social.
7. SEO Success Depends on One Thing
How do I write a coherent post that actually keeps people’s attention? How do I deliver value? How do I write a title and a meta that might get clicked?
How do I do this in a way that Google’s going to like it without compromising the human experience? You have two audiences: there’s the algorithm and then the human. Each one of those is a separate learning curve.
Everybody’s like, how long is it going to take? I don’t know. How good are you? How smart are you? Are you good writer?
I like to think of that iteration. First blog post up. There’s an iteration. Do another one. How can you improve? There’s all those little things to improve upon.
The SEO path is effort-driven. I don’t have to spend a lot of money. My wife and I built her site—started at $95.40. Hosting and a domain: $7.95/month for the year. I still remember it. It was all we could afford, and I’ve brought in millions of dollars at this point in time, and mostly because of effort.
The school of hard knocks is the absolute best school. Trial and error is absolutely the best teacher. The one thing you have to do to get on that path is to start.
8. Make More Money Niching Down
The way the world’s going now is we need to find the Venn diagram: the overlap of this-for-that type situation. Those are the wide open ones.
My wife and I, we do angel meditation, so it ain’t just normal meditations. We’re really far down the spiritual rabbit hole, and they’re like, wow, you’re doing that much volume, that much traffic, that much revenue on that? Like, whoa.
Home girl, her and her husband, they’re trying to be like “online gym”. What if she loves horses? Then they were like, what if we did fitness for a specific type of horseback riding? Crushing it. They are crushing it.
In four years, they’ve blown the top off their revenue compared to being the big person up top because they got super-specific down to this super-focused group of people.
They share their passions. They’re creating content. Their audiences just loves the fact that she actually has horses on her property. It’s just such a win-win-win-win-win.
They didn’t start there. They actually started with a clothing company many, many, many, many moons before, but the path evolves.
Everybody wants to know what’s that right thing for me to go do? I want to know the right one before I start. We only see one or two steps ahead of us.
It’s like plugging in a GPS. It ain’t going to tell you the whole path. It tells you one turn. You just follow the next turn and the next step and the next step and they keep coming; they keep showing up in front of you.
Transcript:
Note: This transcript of the episode was machine-generated and has not been edited for correctness. It’s provided for your convenience when searching. Please excuse any errors.
Brendan Hufford – 55 miles beckler seo for the rest of us
Brendan Hufford: [00:00:00] Cord. Awesome. Um, and then I think I mentioned this previously too. Like, I want to repurpose this for a couple of things. I want to use like video on YouTube, but I also want to use the long form of this in the next season of the entrepreneurs and coffee podcast. And then I also want to put like some parts of it in my a hundred days of SEO podcasts.
[00:00:21] Miles: [00:00:21] Is that hell yeah.
[00:00:23] Brendan Hufford: [00:00:23] I want to get as much out of it as we can.
[00:00:25] Miles: [00:00:25] 100%. Jay Abraham would be proud.
[00:00:27] Brendan Hufford: [00:00:27] Yeah, for sure. I, uh, so yeah, man, um, Myles, thanks for joining us on the
[00:00:34] Miles: [00:00:34] podcast, dude. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. And I’m happy to be here with you, man.
[00:00:38] Brendan Hufford: [00:00:38] Yeah, for sure. So, uh, I want to start out, I want to go way back on a time, travel back.
[00:00:43] Uh, when I was in high school, I went to a high school that was very fortunate. We had a radio station and, uh, I heard you talking about like you working at a radio station and like you had a station manager and like a program director or something. And I’m like, I know these words, like we have is so interesting.
[00:01:00] Um, and I also thought to myself,
[00:01:02] Miles: [00:01:02] He’s got a voice
[00:01:03] Brendan Hufford: [00:01:03] for radio like that. I feel like you have like the radio voice, uh, which is a compliment.
[00:01:08] Miles: [00:01:08] Believe it or not,
[00:01:11] Brendan Hufford: [00:01:11] the obvious joke is obvious. Right. Um, so tell me about like, so you’re working like a lot of this started, this is where I see the beginning of the story.
[00:01:21] Do you think anything started before they’re like ERs was at the radio station, like kind of the first intro to things.
[00:01:28] Miles: [00:01:28] So, so it was a connection with my program director. He, he taught me essentially how I’ll be perfectly honest, how to spam my space with affiliate offers and earn income. So that was when I got my first check in the mail.
[00:01:38] That was when it was like real, really real. Like, and then I put the check in my bank account and they were like, cool, here’s your money? And I was like, If it’s real, like internet money is real. Um, before that, so I grew up in the East Bay area, um, kind of Silicon Valley. So I was around tech, all of my life, sort of fiddling around with building websites back in the night, in the late nineties, um, and doing, um, Independent movie type stuff with the motorcycle street, stunt gang, doing wheelies and crazy stuff all over the Bay area streets.
[00:02:09] So there were all these different things, right. It was trying to do, but then none of those ever made money, right? None of those ever paid. And then when the first checks came in, specifically being in the.com era, that was like 2002. I graduated high school in 99, which was the.com boom run up. So like all, I would have to say, like the astrology, if you will, everything was aligned for me to get absolutely infatuated by this.
[00:02:32] Um, all the money came crashing down when they turned off my links and they were like, dude, you’re spam or you’re, you’re done here. And it took me like seven years of trial and error to find something else that worked, uh, when my wife and I co-founded our main site. Yeah. That was kind of, I don’t know. A few pieces of the puzzle.
[00:02:46] Brendan Hufford: [00:02:46] Yeah. And I think that’s a part, a lot of people skip, I graduated high school in 2002. So we’re like roughly the same age. Yep. And I think that’s part of that’s where a lot of people skip over. It’s like, yeah. Here’s where I see it started. And then yada, yada, yada,
[00:03:00] Miles: [00:03:00] we’re doing great
[00:03:01] Brendan Hufford: [00:03:01] now. Like things are cool.
[00:03:03] So I want to tap into that. Like what are, what was like the, the biggest takeaway you had or like the hardest moment maybe around. Like those seven years, like that in-between time. The learning for me, this was like, I was a teacher and I was just trying to figure it out. And I was trying to grow my teaching career.
[00:03:19] I became an assistant principal. That’s a terrible, the idea doing the thing. And then being the manager of the people, doing the thing, they’re totally different jobs, uh, who knew. So like, I feel like I literally feel like nobody told me that at any point and I didn’t figure it out for myself until I was there.
[00:03:34] And I was like, I don’t want this,
[00:03:35] but that in-between
[00:03:35] time. I learned a lot of stuff and I couldn’t be where I am now. Without that, like, when you, you can really only see it looking back though. So when you look back, like, what was your biggest takeaway during that time
[00:03:47] that you’re like, I
[00:03:49] wouldn’t trade that away because I learned this and that’s like the main, one of the main things that got me here.
[00:03:54] Miles: [00:03:54] Yeah. Like learning the wrong way. Right. So I was direct linking from a social media network to affiliate offers. I wasn’t adding value. I wasn’t building a list. I wasn’t, there, there was nothing unique about what I was doing. Um, but I was earning income off of it and it became real. So after that went down, I was in this.
[00:04:12] Okay. What’s my next scheme. What’s my next. Seeing how, how am I going to get really? That was, I think that’s the mindset is I was in, okay, how do I get money now? I was getting money from the internet over here, you know, doing this thing. And that fell apart. How do I get money now? And I’ve tried real estate investing.
[00:04:25] I tried this, that the other, the big shift was. How do I give? And my wife and I, when we met, it was at real estate school. Cause I was flipping houses with other people’s money, living in the dorms, literally living in the dorms, getting my bachelor’s degree. Um, so we met at real estate school and I really did not like my life up until that point.
[00:04:43] Uh, she had just finished college. She played basketball for college, which was an insane grind, like D one basketball. Um, so that’s a major, major grind and she wasn’t really satisfied with. What kind of post-collegiate and it turns out we were both meditating, like two, three hours a day, every day. Cause it’s like the only thing that felt good and we co-founded a website about that.
[00:05:02] And the shift really was in that whole, like, instead of like, how can I get from the world? So I’m going through all this shit and drama in my life that I’m not enjoying. Uh, so his wifey, current wife, she doesn’t work for them. And we both felt better when we meditated. And like, maybe we should just share this.
[00:05:18] Maybe this would help other people. And we started sharing our ideas and this, that. Um, I knew keyword research. I knew the basics of content marketing at this point in time. So we did it in a way that traffic started to show up. Comments started to show up. People were like, wow, this is great. And we learned like, how do we make meditations?
[00:05:33] And like this whole new world, but all of that new world was focused on how do we give, how do we help other people versus how does miles get some in this world? And that one shift, right. Everything has changed in my life since then. And now we’re 10 years in that website’s reach, you know, uh, 35, uh, 20 million humans, uh, 35 plus million visits at this point in time, mostly from organic.
[00:05:54] Um, her meditations have reached, had been downloaded over a million times and we really feel like we’re, we’re helping the world. Right. We’re helping moms with kids who are stressed out and they’re freaked out. And like, they go from like shut up little Timmy to like, okay, Everything’s okay. And like, there’s, there’s a fulfillment level in the feedback from, from that kind of value exchange.
[00:06:14] And, um, it’s quite lucrative to, I’ll be perfectly honest, but, um, yeah. So I think that’s kind of the shift.
[00:06:19] Brendan Hufford: [00:06:19] Yeah, absolutely. So learn it. So I think like if, if I’m hearing you, right, the mindset shift is like, and I think this gets peddled a lot to people of like, well, just like just add value and people like, okay, miles, what does that mean?
[00:06:34] Like what is like, just add value and I think you nailed it on the head of like, Like actually giving people a transformation. This is something I heard recently is like, we’re in this like really, you know, with social media and everything, we’re more connected, but we’re also more lonely than ever. And what people are seeking is really like
[00:06:49] some sort of
[00:06:50] transformation.
[00:06:50] And
[00:06:50] when you can show them
[00:06:52] transformation, like show them, Hey, like. Before you downloaded this meditation, you were here and you did it and now you’re here. And like, you can talk about that. You give them that transformation. And I think that’s like what we really mean when we talk about like adding value, would you say
[00:07:06] a hundred percent?
[00:07:06] And so every business that’s different, right? But I like to look at it and we’re getting into the world of lead magnets now. So our lead magnet,
[00:07:13] Miles: [00:07:13] the goal of our lead magnet, which is one of the main KPIs in my business is to give them an experience with our content.
[00:07:19] Brendan Hufford: [00:07:19] With our stuff,
[00:07:20] Miles: [00:07:20] because when,
[00:07:20] Brendan Hufford: [00:07:20] when
[00:07:21] Miles: [00:07:21] the mum
[00:07:21] Brendan Hufford: [00:07:21] proverbial mum
[00:07:22] Miles: [00:07:22] puts on the earbuds and presses play and sits there for 20 minutes and all of the stress of the commute, getting cut off the road-rage incident, the boss,
[00:07:31] Brendan Hufford: [00:07:31] the,
[00:07:31] Miles: [00:07:31] the office cubicle, she doesn’t like—when all of that washes away.
[00:07:34] And then the kids show up after that and she’s present and she’s grounded with them. And the whole evening is a totally different experience because of that one thing she did in between. That came from a free thing. We offered her from a pop-up on our blog.
[00:07:47] Brendan Hufford: [00:07:47] Cause he, she searched something, you know, and
[00:07:49] Miles: [00:07:49] boom, we’ve won
[00:07:50] Brendan Hufford: [00:07:50] in that moment.
[00:07:51] We’ve won and
[00:07:52] Miles: [00:07:52] I don’t look at the win for us. As I made a sale. I look at the win when she has that experience and feels something shift in her life. The transformation moment.
[00:08:01] Brendan Hufford: [00:08:01] And uh,
[00:08:02] Miles: [00:08:02] if we put barriers to transformation, if we’re like, okay, I can help the world, but I’m only going to transform those who give this guy money.
[00:08:10] Brendan Hufford: [00:08:10] Uh, you’re just,
[00:08:10] Miles: [00:08:10] you’re shooting yourself in the foot,
[00:08:12] Brendan Hufford: [00:08:12] right?
[00:08:12] Miles: [00:08:12] Because most people are gonna look at your sales page and be like, I don’t trust you. There’s scammers all over
[00:08:17] Brendan Hufford: [00:08:17] there.
[00:08:17] Miles: [00:08:17] Like I don’t trust you. I don’t believe it’s going to work. I don’t believe it’ll work for me. I don’t think I can trust you with my credit card.
[00:08:22] I don’t trust any of it. And so they don’t buy. Whereas when you move
[00:08:26] Brendan Hufford: [00:08:26] the, the first transformation, the
[00:08:28] Miles: [00:08:28] the minor transformation, that little step in the direction of their goals. When you move that before the transaction,
[00:08:34] Brendan Hufford: [00:08:34] right?
[00:08:34] Miles: [00:08:34] The trust factor changes,
[00:08:36] Brendan Hufford: [00:08:36] like though
[00:08:36] Miles: [00:08:36] the rest of the numbers from that point on change significantly.
[00:08:40] Brendan Hufford: [00:08:40] And
[00:08:40] Miles: [00:08:40] there’s plenty of data to prove all of this.
[00:08:42] Brendan Hufford: [00:08:42] Um, and, and that was a major focus is like, okay, give value first, Jay Abraham, right? Preeminence the strategy of preeminence. Go
[00:08:50] Miles: [00:08:50] demonstrate your ability to help them get the results they desire before asking for a sale and surprise, surprise. You’ll get a lot more people lining up with credit cards in hand saying that was great.
[00:09:00] Where can I get more?
[00:09:01] Brendan Hufford: [00:09:01] You know,
[00:09:02] Yeah. And you also build your moat right around the castle and you have this like free content and you’ve done it in a way that people talk about like creating content for search engines or for humans. The search engines are in service of humans. Their number one goal is to get better at giving people what they actually want.
[00:09:19] So, yeah, I don’t think those are mutually exclusive, but I think that’s the thing is like with, and I’ve seen you do it with YouTube and search and also like Facebook ads and stuff like that. Like you’re leveraging these technology platforms. So build a really solid system and mode that like, if something were to happen somewhere or like with one of them, or even within one, like you still have all of this content that is addressing the needs that people have, what they’re searching
[00:09:42] Miles: [00:09:42] for.
[00:09:43] Absolutely. And, and the moat, I like that. I use a table kind of a approach. Like if you have a one-legged table, like sure you can balance something on it, but, but. That’s it right? That one leg goes away. If you’re falling on Facebook, organic and Facebook changes their algorithm and there it goes, your whole table goes down, right.
[00:09:58] But if you’ve got a four-legged table and one of those tables, one of those legs come off that table can stand on its own. If you’ve got an eight-legged table and you’re getting massive traffic from Pinterest, from Facebook ads, from Instagram, from YouTube, from Google, and all of those places are bringing you traffic and you’ve got your own email list and write, and all of that’s working for you.
[00:10:16] Then you can totally lose an entire leg if you had to. And, and you would be unaffected. So it was like we went all in on blogging content. First we built our audience starting, um, through content marketing, keyword research and the basics of optimization to make sure the people who are searching for specific things that are right in alignment with what we do, they’re finding the helpful content they want.
[00:10:38] They’re finding the answers they’re searching for. Um, and then once that momentum was, was going, uh, One of my jobs in the business has been okay, how do we reinvest? What’s working and how do we expand out into other markets or on other marketplaces, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and wifey is just kind of keeping the content coming out.
[00:10:57] So it’s on brand. We’re not outsourcing the content. We’re not, you know, 1500 words and write the articles and blah, blah, blah. Like, like there’s no soul in that, in our niche. Like that can probably work in some spaces. Um, but like she writes everything and when it’s like time to go. Rework reword and Rian, semis and old posts from the old 500 words proposed day she’s in there, grinding it out because like that, that is the first experience with our stuff, with our funnel, if you will, is when they land on our page.
[00:11:24] And if they don’t feel that resonance, then in that moment, they’re not going to consider the free thing. They’re not going to consider like none of the dominoes in that row will fall over. If that first domino doesn’t connect.
[00:11:36] Brendan Hufford: [00:11:36] Definitely. I think it’s a really great analogy, right? That whole, like, I don’t know what that is.
[00:11:40] I should know this analogy better, but like, if you start with a really small domino within like 20 Domino’s, you can pretty much topple like a skyscraper or something
[00:11:47] Miles: [00:11:47] and everybody see, and this is one of the confusing things. And I think the whole fake-guru world, the Instagram look at me on my hammock making passive income, which is a total lie.
[00:11:55] Um, it’s, it’s. Got a false mindset installed in people and all they’re focused on focusing on is that last big domino. And you’ve got fake gurus selling webinar pitches of I’m gonna teach you how to knock over this gigantic big, end domino. That’s a $10K/month business and everyone’s neglecting the the 19 other dominos required to make that.
[00:12:15] Effortless, right. Literally effortless. If you get those first ones, if you build the right systems and the right processes in place, and you know, it’s a three-to-five-year journey to build out all of those dominoes. And we humans like delaying gratification is not a, uh, you know, an ingrained, innate response that we humans have.
[00:12:33] So a lot of people just, we We want to believe there’s a shortcut. Um, and that was that seven year period. I was trying scam after scam, after scam and MLM network marketing. All kinds of things just to get rich quick. I was, I’m an, I’m a recovering opportunity seeker. I’m okay with that now. Um, and the shortcut was doing the work for three years straight, which is the goofy part.
[00:12:52] Brendan Hufford: [00:12:52] Yeah, of course I, so one of the things I want to touch on, uh, you said you like prioritize blog content first. If there was a beginner. Kind of starting today. That’s what I, I mean, um, but I also wonder, like, do I believe in SEO cause it works or does SEO work? Cause I believe in it, like, it kind of is a weird thing.
[00:13:10] So my recommendation is almost always like
[00:13:12] start with blog content.
[00:13:13] Like let’s figure that out, but that isn’t true for every business and it isn’t true for everybody. What is your recommended for most beginners that are looking to create something like not in the digital marketing
[00:13:22] space, which is why I love
[00:13:24] like you are your main business, not teaching digital marketing to digital
[00:13:27] marketers.
[00:13:28] Yeah. Based on the success of your digital marketing
[00:13:30] blog,
[00:13:31] like I like that you have a success in other areas is why I love so like I do a ton of client work because I need, I need that for my own credibility. Does the thing that I’m teaching work outside of like helping bloggers get more blue host affiliate money or whatever, like
[00:13:45] thing, right?
[00:13:46] Yeah. Yeah. I G Oh, like, Oh,
[00:13:50] like, I want to prove that it works. If you’re a dry cleaner, I want to prove that it works. If you’re a, whatever, a fitness blogger, like, I
[00:13:58] Miles: [00:13:58] don’t know, quilting lady or quilting lady, who’s dominating with her quilting box of the month and she’s on, we got her on Pinterest and she’s just crushing it on Pinterest.
[00:14:05] And I totally know what you mean in the variety. So, um, and, and sorry for seminary says, I’m just going to run with this for a second. Um, wife and I started a co-founder to website in 2009. And in 2016, I hit a point. I’d been going to digital marketing conferences. I bought a couple of $2,000 courses in a row that were rubbish.
[00:14:22] Like they had great promises, they had great webinars. They made me think I was going to learn something big and I went into it and I was like, really? This is $2,000 worth of content refund. And then they’re like running me through the ringer, trying to save the sale, get me, forcing me to get on the phone with somebody.
[00:14:36] And I’m like, this is a cesspool of fake gurus, regurgitating headlines. They heard once from a. It’s somebody else’s webinar and nobody knows what they’re talking about. So out of that frustration, um, I decided to start teaching what I knew because I had, you know, 13 years of experience making money online.
[00:14:53] At that point in time, I’d been full-time online for six years. Um, And to your point, what’s the best platform to start on this. We’re on point here. Um, I went with YouTube and in the first several years, my wife enjoys crafting content through the written word. She, she likes, uh, brainstorming ideas. She often has three or four different blog posts at different phases of completion.
[00:15:14] And then she goes back in and she, she copy-edits them and refines them me. Oh, copy editing and and punctuation. And like, I don’t like it. I don’t, I, it is not for me, but for the first few years I tried to force myself to blog and surprise, surprise. I didn’t follow through. I didn’t stick with it consistently for the three years needed to really gain momentum because I would do it a few times and I’d have a little willpower and then finally I’m like this sucks.
[00:15:38] I don’t like it. And it wasn’t until I tried video that I was like, Wow. Like that was like, I got the idea out. My first ones were awkward for sure. But it was like, I got the idea out. It didn’t take a terrible amount of time. It was relatively coherent. I I did it all on my cell phone. Literally the, the YouTube app allows me to plug in a microphone, record it, cut the front, cut the end.
[00:16:00] I don’t edit anything. And I just upload the whole thing and it got done. And then I did it the next day and it got done and I did it the next day and it got done 120 videos in 120 days. And by the end of that, I got through the learning curves and I was in motion. I was in traction, um, after a year of doing nothing but videos.
[00:16:18] I now have a team of people who take my ideas that are in my videos and we reverse engineer that. And to get them on my blog in the written format in a way that’s beautiful. And I’m essentially reinvesting profits that I’m earning from, from the front end video stuff from affiliate marketing on the videos.
[00:16:33] Um, I’m reinvesting that back in content. My personal blog in 2016, when I started YouTube was getting approximately 1.5 human beings per day. It was like 40 or something visits per month. This month I’m probably, uh, 55,000 visits. So probably like 30,000 people roughly give or take, um, And I haven’t really published any of the blogs.
[00:16:54] So I think that blogging as a medium and search engine marketing, I’m in a very difficult space with some very skilled competitors. I highly don’t recommend anybody to go into this space. If they have a choice, uh, quilting ladies dominating because you don’t need to skill up that far over them. But the fact that I was able to reverse engineer my way onto the first page of Google for many target keywords and drive so much traffic blogging is where I want.
[00:17:20] To be, but sometimes it’s not in the DNA and when it’s not in your DNA, maybe interviewing, maybe doing podcasts, maybe like videos, I don’t want to get ready. I don’t want to do my hair and my makeup every time I do it, I get you do podcasts, right? Podcasts are exploding right now. And you can get the content out the ideas out in a different format.
[00:17:38] So when you find that format that works for you, run with it, go all in and then build systems and teammates, reinvest in systems and teammates to get the other pieces of organic content out.
[00:17:50] Brendan Hufford: [00:17:50] Yeah, I love so a couple of things I wanted to touch on. Number one, I think the thing that people don’t take into account enough, I remember when BMW said that they were doing something with their website, because most of their traffic to their website comes from Google.
[00:18:03] So they’re going to make it more search optimized, and they’re going to do all these other things. And I’m like, you guys know that’s like a hundred percent branded search, right? That’s literally people Googling. BMW. Right. You guys are not they’re like we are an SEO website. Nope, no, you’re not. Yeah, but brand matters.
[00:18:18] I think, I mean, these numbers could be off. I have no idea real numbers, but like HRF says 1700 people a month. Google your name like that brand. And I want to say that too, so that people understand like the majority of your traffic coming in is not people Googling you, but also you have a brand that’s established, like I think 20 people.
[00:18:37] Yeah. Google my name. Like it’s very different in that brand. I think matters. I do think that’s a big rank dot
[00:18:43] Miles: [00:18:43] signal. Oh, it is now more now, more than ever in Google, for sure. I mean, it helps me personally at a brand level, but like Google is like how many people are actually searching for you, you and the thing, right?
[00:18:53] Everybody knows, uh, learn SEO or how to build a funnel. Like those are great keyword phrases, but when it’s like miles Beckler, how to build a funnel and that gets a ton of search volume. Google is like, okay, who is this miles Becker guy? Obviously it doesn’t think like that, but there’s, I think more and more, this is the direction that that SEO is going.
[00:19:10] Brendan Hufford: [00:19:10] Oh a hundred percent. I think so too. And I also want to put a pin in the fact that you did 120 videos in 120 days. I, my project was originally called a hundred days of SEO and I was like, all right, cool. Gonna follow it, which is so funny. Cause I didn’t find you until I was in it, but then hearing your story and stuff, like my goal was to make a hundred blog posts, turn the, or a hundred, sorry, a hundred videos.
[00:19:33] Turn those videos into audio. So a hundred podcast episodes and then a hundred blog posts. I work with a pod Reacher Potter, reacher.com. They turn everything into blog posts, not just show notes. Um, cause show notes don’t actually work
[00:19:46] really
[00:19:46] well because it’s the intent is like I’m it’s people Googling to find those show notes.
[00:19:50] Um, So I think that’s really interesting and I love that. Like I joked with somebody the other day. Like, unless you’re miles and you can just do like 27 minutes. One take no edit, looking into the camera the whole time. Like,
[00:20:04] but I
[00:20:05] think that you’re at the point now where I watch a video of yours or I want to learn something and I see you have a video on it and I watch it.
[00:20:10] And you literally are like
[00:20:11] looking, you don’t break eye contact. You’re not reading notes. You’re not like cutting. There’s no like 27 jump cuts or anything like that. Like. But that comes from doing 120 videos and a hundred petitions. In,
[00:20:26] Miles: [00:20:26] in three years, I did something like 550 videos and the math on it, looking back at the end of three years was a video every 1.9 days on average for three years straight, which is a ridiculous, uh, feat.
[00:20:37] Like I’m crazy like that though. Right? I’m one of those person who like, I just, I love, I love the process because again, I’m giving value. My goal with this brand is be the most helpful marketer in the world. I feel like every time someone finds one of my videos that teach you how to build a funnel without just trying to sell you rubbish funnels.net, right?
[00:20:56] Because I’m going to get a commission. Instead, I show you I’ll do it on WordPress for like 90% discount. I feel like I’m pulling the rug out from under another fake guru. And, and like that mission is so powerful for me to keep going. Um, I want to commend you for trying to do all three pillars. I call that the three pillar content strategy, right?
[00:21:13] The blog, the podcast and video. Those are the big ones. Social is absolutely secondary to me. Um, it took me about a year and a half to get all three of those firing. And again, I had 13 years of experience, of digital marketing. When I came making money online, uh, I had. Six years of experience full-time as a digital marketer when I started.
[00:21:33] So I brought a lot of skills to the plate, but the learning curves and so people listening, uh, maybe there’s some superhuman individuals that can do all three at once and hit it out of the Gates for most people. It’s way better to go through one learning curve. Get rude. Get to competence and then, then look at, how do I add on the next learning curve?
[00:21:52] Get to competence. It’s like, it’s like the spinning plates gig or the, the old vaudeville act, right? Uh, you got to get one plate spinning before we get the next one. So I did nothing but videos. For six months, um, about 150, I switched to three videos per week, which was a really good pace for me. Then I put out my first lead magnet my first, often, and it sucked, it converted terribly, uh, It took three iterations to find a a lead magnet that was actually enticing to my people.
[00:22:19] Um, and then at a year is when I did my first blog. When I really went in and I used, uh, like auto.ai or temi.com to describe my video. And then, okay, then you got this ugly transcription. Like what you’re talking about, what I wrote down pod reshare.co I’m. Like, I’m going to take a look at them because then you got this ugly block of human spoken text and you got to try to craft it into something.
[00:22:38] Um, So that was a year. And then about a year, three year, four months, I got my virtual assistant taking the MP3s and passing it off. So, so even for me, it took, uh, you know, uh, 15, 16, 18 months to get all three of those firing. And now that they’re all firing consistently for longer periods of time. The power of compounding takes over.
[00:22:56] And that’s why I prefer search over social social. You can get short-term benefits, right? Something goes viral. Boom. You can get that a little bit on YouTube, but the search, I mean, I have videos from 2016. that are still bringing in hundreds of subscribers per month to my channel, not to mention everything I’ve done since then.
[00:23:13] And that’s the power you get in search that you just don’t get in social.
[00:23:16] Brendan Hufford: [00:23:16] Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that’s again, like. I want to keep, I’m going to keep, like putting pins in these things of like, uh, you know, two failed lead magnets before you figured out the one that worked for your audience, like
[00:23:28] Miles: [00:23:28] not, you mentioned 12 different headlines tested for each of the ones.
[00:23:31] Right. I put up the lead magnet and that was Ooh, oops. That headline the problem. Headline headline, bullets, headline. Okay. Try something new. So there were iterations within each of those three.
[00:23:40] Brendan Hufford: [00:23:40] Okay. I love that, but that’s the process, right? And people just think like, well, it’s not working. I’m failing it’s whatever.
[00:23:47] And I think the thing is like, you just have to like, keep what’s cool is you get to learn in public, right?
[00:23:51] Like you’re, you’re,
[00:23:52] you’re tweaking, you’re iterating, you’re reading another, like, you know, you’re reading Eugene Schwartz and you’re like, Oh I can, I understand what I’m doing wrong in this headline.
[00:23:59] Now I understand this. Like, I’m hitting the wrong level of
[00:24:01] awareness and whatever else, like
[00:24:03] you’re doing all these different things I wanted to ask you too. I’ve been wondering this whole time, like I have had the really bad $500,000 course experience. Um, I got sold. I’ve talked about it publicly a bunch, but like, uh, I got, I went to an event where they sold business coaching and I hired them and it was all the, it was all the bad things, man.
[00:24:26] Yeah. I’m glad, I’m glad I’m not alone in this
[00:24:28] Miles: [00:24:28] cause grand a month, five grand a month for nothing. And
[00:24:32] Brendan Hufford: [00:24:32] I literally, yeah, the first month I was like, so I get to talk to the head business coach once a year. For like a day. And then I get to talk like the other business coaches, one guy told me I should do more Twitter.
[00:24:42] And one lady asked me why my website was not fast. And I’m like, I paid 1500 bucks for that for you to tell me to do Twitter. So anyways, got out of it. Um, but like, I want to ask you, has there been anything I want to start big and we’ll, I’ll ask a follow-up that smaller? Have you bought any like expensive courses or anything like that that have been worth it?
[00:25:03] Like where you’d be like. Yeah, that was like really helpful.
[00:25:08] Miles: [00:25:08] Yeah. Like there are, there are silver lines linings in, in the cloudy skies ahead. Um, the problem is just how many, we, I had to go through to find the one or two that really worked. Um, and, and most of them, even some really big name people that I’ve gotten into recently, it’s just like, wow, this, this is the bar.
[00:25:26] I feel like we’re in, um, In the world of finance we’re in an easy money environment. Um, interest rates are low, like credit is readily available for people we’re in a good economy, stock market at all time high, uh, most people who have bought houses feel like they have equity in their houses. So the, the global, the macro kind of feeling from people is comfort around spending money.
[00:25:47] Like we don’t, but I feel. When things shift, I have a hopeful maybe that, that the fake gurus are just going to disappear because people are gonna be like, there’s no way I’m spend two grand on that. Um, but yeah, I don’t know if you want me to name them. I generally don’t name them, uh, one side or the other, because all the fake gurus who are currently scamming people today are going to be gone eventually because they’re burning their reputation.
[00:26:08] And boy, the reputation is everything like you were talking about before the miles Beckler search phrase. Like I honor that in every video I put out, I’m like, is this moving that brand forward? Am I. I get a lot of offers to promote a lot of things. And I say no to like 90% of them, because I just don’t feel like it’s on brand on point.
[00:26:24] So there’s gonna be a whole new crew of fake gurus next year, because the old fake gurus are doing other things. Um, and then, yeah, it’s, it’s a mess in that world. I don’t know how to treat it. I’ve seen you on Twitter and I love it. You’re like, yo, this dude’s still this dude’s video word for word, like how, and you,
[00:26:42] Brendan Hufford: [00:26:42] you look up the next 10 that that guy did and he’s stealing them from Alec.
[00:26:45] Every video is a word for word. It was crazy to me. I was like,
[00:26:49] Miles: [00:26:49] he’s one of the biggest sellers on, uh, on ClickBank, right? He’s he’s one of the, like, he’s just, just, how did he was promoting the one MLM that got shut down by the FTC? Like literally the government came in and said, this is way too scammy. We have to shut it down.
[00:27:02] And he was selling a ClickBank product that essentially upsold people on this MLM that got shit, like everything about it is, is insanely scammy. And it somehow sells tens of thousands of courses. It’s like, I don’t get it.
[00:27:14] Brendan Hufford: [00:27:14] But I think, I think that there’s definitely a. There’s definitely. I always like to look at, like, I Google somebody and then I look at what the auto-fills, if the auto-fill is like net-worth scam refund, you know, like Google knows Google has the data, they know who these people are.
[00:27:30] Um, so it’s interesting, I guess, like, let’s talk about like maybe a little more slow instead of like, Hey, what are the great $2,000 courses like those are, or like memberships or coaching. Like those aren’t really
[00:27:40] accessible
[00:27:41] to a lot of people, even me most days. Um, I don’t charge that much right now. Like.
[00:27:46] What is something you mentioned like Jay Abraham, but like, what are, uh, I think books, I love, there’s like a Seth Godin quote that I’ll butcher, but like a book for less than $20 can change your life. If you ever want to buy a book, buy it right now. Cause like, even if you don’t read it, the chance that you do read it and it changes your life is pretty reasonable.
[00:28:04] Like what are some other, like really low budget courses? Or like really like some books that you’re just like, This is the book. Like I don’t care what industry you’re in, where you’re
[00:28:13] Miles: [00:28:13] at. I listen to a lot of books, man. I’ve got audible every morning when I’m making coffee or tea in the morning, I’m listening to audible before I touch anything.
[00:28:20] When I’m cleaning the house, when I’m doing bits and pieces out in the garage or whatever, I’m always listening to books. Uh, Seth Godin, right? Like this is marketing. His newest book is brilliant. It lays it out the whole path. Um, uh, Steven Pressfield’s, the war of art hit me like a ton of bricks. And also he’s got the, uh, turning pro, which was a section for more of our, that he made into a complete book.
[00:28:41] Uh, Elizabeth Gilbert’s big magic is, has been very impressive to me. Um, and, and what it is a lot of these people who who’ve created massive success in certain areas. And they looked like overnight successes, but yet you get to hear the backstory, the 15 years of struggle, the grind, and even like the, the, how do I put out another hit after my last hit?
[00:29:01] And it’s all for me, it’s a lot of that perspective because there, there is no shortcut beyond doing the work for three years because there’s learning curve after learning curve. If you’re doing the blogging, it’s like, okay, how do I re what’s keyword research? What does that mean? That’s like, how do I write a coherent post that actually like.
[00:29:16] Keeps people’s attention mens. Like how do I deliver value? And then, you know, how do I write a title and a meta that might get clicked? Right. And how do I do this in a way that Google’s going to like it without compromising the human experience and how, you know, there’s, you’re, you’re always, you have two audiences, right?
[00:29:31] There’s the algorithm and and then the human. And so like each one of those is a separate learning curve. And it’s, it’s the engagement. And for most people, like I love the 90 day challenge idea, which is something I teach is just start, write a blog post every day for 90 days. If you can’t do a 90 day challenge, you can’t do something everyday.
[00:29:46] Do a 90 week challenge commit to three a week every week for 90 weeks. That’s almost two years because the truth. So you got Malcolm Gladwell, right? The 10,000 hours idea. And I think that’s wrong because if you do 10,000 inefficient hours, You’re you’re not actually going to skill up, but I think it’s something to the tune of like a thousand iterations is the answer people want.
[00:30:05] Cause everybody’s like, how long is it going to take? I don’t know. How good are you? How smart are you? Are You good writer? Like, do you have a brain? Like, you know, and I think a thousand solid iterations. So when I got going, my first videos were some of those iterations. My first opt-ins my headlines, my split tests.
[00:30:20] There were some iterations by about. Month 18. So at this point I kind of got my podcast up and running. I got my blog posts, kind of firing. I got an email list that’s going, and I’ve done about 200, 300 videos. So I’m maybe 500 iterations into it. At that point in time, things really started to click. My competence was there because I just, I had got through the learning curve on all of those different.
[00:30:43] Things. And I compressed it down as much as I could really important. I kept my business. My wife’s business is still growing at a remarkable rate through all of this activity. So this was my side hustle. I didn’t quit something to go do something new. I was doing this nights and weekends just like everybody else starts like my wife and I started when we started our first website as well.
[00:31:01] But I I like to think of that iteration. Right? How many times can you like, okay, first blog post up there’s an iteration. You got one, right? Do another one. How can you improve? And there’s all those little things to improve upon and. I think the on-demand potential information from YouTube offers from people like you.
[00:31:18] I think that’s it. That’s all people need people confuse research with doing the work. And that’s where the war of art is brilliant. Right? It’s resistance. We, we think that going through this course, that the put me in reaction from watching a webinar, getting hyped up, thinking there’s a secret to buying the, the physical chemical change that happens in the brain makes us feel like we solved the problem, but we didn’t.
[00:31:45] We just got a course. Now you have to, you have an opportunity costs. Now you can spend some of these courses have ridiculous 60 hours to go through the content. That’s 60 hours. You could have been. Keyword research, writing blog posts, creating things for your audience, testing new things in the marketplace.
[00:32:01] If you don’t want to go that path, there’s there’s Facebook ads and opt-ins and lead magnets and funnels. And if you do a thousand iterations of different Facebook ads, different audiences, you’re testing, different landing pages, different emails, then you get an email marketing. You said broadcast.
[00:32:16] Thousand iterations. Uh, the SEO path is effort-driven I can, I don’t have to spend a lot of money. My wife and I built her site—started at $95.40 hosting and a domain $7.95/month for the year. I still remember it. It was all we could afford. Um, and I’ve brought in millions of dollars at this point in time.
[00:32:33] And mostly because of effort Um, if you got. Six seven, eight, 10 grand that you can give to Zuckerberg, uh, for testing purposes, you probably could build a list and figure out those things, because that’s what it would probably take to get your a thousand iterations if you were going hardcore funnels and that side of it.
[00:32:50] But it’s, it’s just man, like, like The school of hard knocks is the absolute best school trial and error is absolutely the best teacher. And, and we have to, the one thing you have to do to get on that path is to start.
[00:33:03] Brendan Hufford: [00:33:03] Yeah, I remember I heard recently, somebody said. The, for the, for the price of watching a few hundred Grammarly commercials, like you can really learn anything on monday.com or whatever you’re being served.
[00:33:15] Those are the two that like, are the
[00:33:16] Miles: [00:33:16] wicks ones, like
[00:33:17] Brendan Hufford: [00:33:17] yeah. A wax every time, like, but for the price of watching those things
[00:33:22] or five
[00:33:23] seconds of those things over and over again, you can learn pretty much anything on YouTube. And I remember there’s a SC private SEO community called traffic think tank that I’m a member of.
[00:33:32] And somebody connected, like sent me an email
[00:33:34] and. They were like,
[00:33:35] Hey, just wanted to I’m over in this skirt slacker with you just want to connect via email too. And I was like, Oh, cool. Like what made you? It was like a reply to my, uh, they signed up for my email list and I asked the first email I was asked, like, how’d you find me?
[00:33:47] I want to know. Um, it’s really interesting stuff. And like, what are you working on and everything. And it was a great, and I reply to everyone. Uh, but he said that he was told that I was one of the, he said that people that I look up to told him that I’m one of the few people that learned SEO just by brute force.
[00:34:03] Just by like doing things and figuring it out. I had, I started like a little, my, like my story is I just, I was kind of frustrated teaching. I was doing a lot of Brazilian jujitsu at the time. I had everybody on the forums asking me when I come to Chicago, where do I train? And I would tell people, go to this gym and go to this gym.
[00:34:20] I’ve been here. These are my friends. And, you know, are you staying on the North side? Or, you know what, blah, blah, blah. And eventually I was like, why don’t I just make a website about this? So I figured out,
[00:34:28] I start on wordpress.com. Like
[00:34:29] everybody else bought my domain through them. And. Created Juju like BJJ in Chicago, Brazilian jujitsu in Chicago.
[00:34:36] Some guy sent me some free shorts if I would write about it. And this is like in 2009 before influencer marketing. So
[00:34:42] then I started a review website,
[00:34:44] all about jiu-jitsu apparel
[00:34:45] realized
[00:34:46] I was making people a ton
[00:34:47] of money,
[00:34:48] reviewing their stuff, and it costs them about 25 bucks. And then I would make them 10 grand.
[00:34:53] And I was like, there’s something different going on here. So then I learned importing and exporting and started my own like apparel company and that, and eventually sold them both to separate people, the reviewed website and the apparel company. And not for like, not Zuckerberg money. Like I didn’t buy a baby giraffe or anything, a little golden baby giraffe, but like, you know, we put like new tile in the bathroom floor, but I sold them because.
[00:35:15] I, I didn’t, I saw the writing on the wall that it wouldn’t be a full-time thing. And I would just continue teaching and toiling at this. And that’s where it became like about other things. But it was that whole time. I was just, I couldn’t afford any courses. I was just listening to podcasts and watching videos and figuring it out.
[00:35:30] And those, I think that’s where I got the beginning of those thousand iterations and I would still argue I’m I’m sure you feel similar. I’ve learned more in the last six months than I have. I feel like I’m just
[00:35:42] accelerating
[00:35:42] so much. Like I’m learning more and more and you’re like, yeah, I definitely learned a lot back then, but I feel like it definitely compounds right.
[00:35:50] Miles: [00:35:50] A hundred percent. Yeah. And a lot of people try it, so, so, okay. I’m going to start, right. That’s it. Okay. You got me convinced miles, you know, Brendan I’m, I’m going to start and it’s like, well, what, what niche do I choose? Boom. There they go right down the rabbit hole. And I got to choose the right one. And this one.
[00:36:02] Yeah. That one. And you’re a perfect example of this. Like you just started with something that like, okay, well that kind of work. I like it. This is interesting. It probably wasn’t, you know, like arduous for you to go review some gloves or some shorts or this cause you love it. Like jujitsu is one of those, um, Irrationally passionate audiences there.
[00:36:20] So, so you’re just kind of involved in it and you’re like, Oh, I’m giving value to the community and people are buying the wrong head gear so I can kind of help them out. And you build all of the foundational skills you got on exit, whatever that was. That’s great. And then you were able to look, Hey, what do I.
[00:36:34] How do okay. Now that I got, where do I want to go from here? And it really is this staged tiered kind of level of like, okay, so I’ve learned all doing this and what do I want to go work on from here? And for people getting started, I think it’s just like, what are you interested enough in to talk about for the next couple of years?
[00:36:50] For the first few hundred iterations? I like fountain pens. I dunno why I like fountain pens. I don’t really like expensive fountain pens, but they’re messy. I get ink on me sometimes. I just think they’re cool. It’s like old
[00:37:00] Brendan Hufford: [00:37:00] specific. I love it.
[00:37:01] Miles: [00:37:01] It is. And I could literally go a review site on fountain pens.
[00:37:04] Cause I’ll be honest, there’s more belong. You can spend a thousand bucks on a pen. This was like $19. And then you got the inks and the, this, um, you know, little everyday carry knives. There’s people, nice people are absolutely freaks right in there. Irrationally passionate. No, not to get my wording. Correct.
[00:37:20] Brendan Hufford: [00:37:20] I think when you’re into it, you take that as a compliment.
[00:37:23] Miles: [00:37:23] Yeah. There you go. Right. They do like little I’m looking at my desk and it’s pretty cluttered. There are like dozens of opportunities around everyone. And when you start to, when you start to know the game, yeah. I realized now I know less now than I thought I knew three years ago.
[00:37:37] Like, it really is. As we learn more, it gets open, but I’m finding new niches, new sub-niches I have students who are finding niches. Wide open, uh, home girl her and her husband or in, um, The The way the world’s going now is we need to find the Venn diagram, the overlap of this-for-that type situation Those are the wide open ones.
[00:37:57] So she was a fitness instructor. He played professional rugby there out of New Zealand. And they had like this online gym, this fitness, they meet my wife and I, we do angel meditation. So it ain’t just normal meditations. We’re really far down the, the spiritual rabbit hole. Um, and they’re like, wow, you’re doing that much volume, that much traffic, that much revenue on, on that.
[00:38:13] Like, Whoa. So they’re trying to be like, Online gym now, what if she loves horses? And then they were like, well, what if we did fitness for. A specific type of horseback riding crushing it. They are crushing it. In four years. They’ve they’ve blown the top off their revenue compared to being the big person up top because they got super-specific down to this super-focused group of people.
[00:38:36] She loves horses. They both are two of the Fittest people. I know like professional rugby player, this dude is a bricks, not house for sure. And like, it’s so cool to see them to get, to live their passions. They share their passions. They’re creating content. Their audiences just loves the fact that she actually has horses on her property.
[00:38:53] It’s just such a win-win-win-win-win they didn’t start there. They actually started with a clothing company, uh, many, many, many, many moons before, but the path evolves and everybody wants to know like, what’s that right thing for me to go. Do I want to know the right one before I start? And that’s one of the the jokes of the universe, I guess, is that we only see one or two steps ahead of us and you take those steps like you, when you’re doing your jujitsu had no clue about what you’re doing right now.
[00:39:20] In the realm of what you didn’t know, you didn’t know, you didn’t even know it was possible. Didn’t even know it existed. Didn’t even know like it was possible for you. Wasn’t even a thought, but you just kept taking that next step. And we can, we can see that next step, that next step. And we take it and that next step we take it.
[00:39:33] And eventually making your daily videos. You’re like, I got free time. Like it’s not taking absolutely every minute of my day, I’ve got 30 minutes. I can breathe at the end of the day. Well, I might as well start to work on a opt-in report. Right. Then all of a sudden that takes a little bit less time. It’s like, well, I got an extra hour.
[00:39:48] I might as well try to get a blog post in here. And that’s how the path goes, um, for everyone. And it’s like, we want to see. The end before we start, but it’s like plugging in a GPS if you’re in. So you’re in Chicago, I’m in Sedona, right? You want to come? Hey, come visit, man. You’re a cool pop Sedona, Papa. My address it.
[00:40:03] Ain’t going to tell you the whole path. It ain’t going to the, you’re not going to memorize all the turns. It tells you one turn. So I go left here. Great. Cool. Okay. Get on this hallway. Turn right. Cool. Got it. You know, and you just follow the next turn and the next step and the next step. And they they keep coming They keep, they keep showing up in front of you. Yeah,
[00:40:19] Brendan Hufford: [00:40:19] I think that’s a really good analogy. Uh, two things I wanted to touch on before we kind of wrap up is number one, like I skillset side, I know you’re really passionate about. And the thing I keep hearing you talk about and is this like overarching skillset of copywriting, like it’s SEO, it’s Facebook ads, it’s blogging, it’s email marketing, like everything is copywriting because you’re just learning how to talk to the people.
[00:40:45] Like that you want to like help and like engage with where would you recommend? As far as like, I know I’m like really bringing it down to a beginner level. Um, I mentioned Eugene Schwartz. Like if you have $125 buy breakthrough,
[00:40:57] Miles: [00:40:57] if you don’t
[00:40:58] Brendan Hufford: [00:40:58] like, obviously I would recommend like your YouTube stuff, like look on YouTube.
[00:41:03] What else do you think is like a good resource
[00:41:05] Miles: [00:41:05] for. So again, back to the books, right? And I think in copywriting specifically avoid all the new people. Anybody who’s putting out content today, right? Being a copywriting guru, selling a cupboard in court, blah-blah-blah sands a very, very few people. I’ll put John Carlton in the one list of people who like that dude is a gangster, but he’s old school.
[00:41:24] Um, cause the old school was copywriting. They had to do these things. They printed, mailed things. They had to buy envelopes. They had to buy stamps. They had to mail it out. Yeah. Literally like if you think of how easy it is for me to go test an idea through a Facebook ad and a landing page, I can get that up and running in 30 minutes, easy run a traffic, see did this work or not?
[00:41:42] They had to spend tens of thousands of dollars. They did bulk mailings, they rented lists. And then they had to wait like two weeks for people to send a self-addressed stamped envelope with nine 95. Right. Literally it’s crazy. So those are the guys I study, um, Gary Halbert, the Gary Halbert letters. Uh, he has a website you can read most of his letters for free.
[00:42:01] The website is terrible. It is the most unorganized, but where there’s a will, there’s a way. And literally just reading Gary Halbert stuff is crazy. Um, swiped.co is a website where you can go back through the great sales letters of yesteryear hand, write them out. Um, I hand write out even modern sales letter that people have Andre chaperon, I think is a great copywriter.
[00:42:20] I love the dude. He’s a good guy for sure. And, um, His writing is so hypnotic. I will write out his blog posts, handwrite it, just sit there, writing it because what you do is you start to build the neural network is what you’re doing. You’re, you’re kind of like, it’s like training wheels. It’s like you’re on a bicycle riding with training wheels.
[00:42:36] And eventually you get to the point where you just don’t need the training wheels anymore. Um, Dan Kennedy is the ultimate sales letter is a good one. Um, Robert Bern, how to sell anything? Um, just the old books and then, uh, Victor Schwab. Uh, how to write a good advertisement. And he looked back, it’s a short course in copywriting.
[00:42:54] I think he wrote it in 1940 or 1960. Uh, and he looked at the a hundred best, uh, headlines of all times and why they worked because
[00:43:02] the truth is that human nature hasn’t changed, right? Like people are seeking fulfillment. People are seeking happiness. We all have challenges in our life, the medium or the media in which we use to communicate has changed drastically.
[00:43:13] And the rate of speed and the number of distractions, every human being has presented to them. All day, every day is at a, at an all time high, but human nature has not changed. And that’s the core thing that those old school copywriters got was the absolute human nature of it. The Ogilvy on, on advertising, uh, John Caples make ads that pay.
[00:43:33] I’ve got a library of books that were all written pre I would say pre 1980, 85 is where I would stick. And again, a hundred dollars worth of books. You get them used on animals. That’s it. Then you have to right. Because again, you can’t just study this stuff, you got to write. And even if you’re just handwriting out their sales letters, you’ve got to write.
[00:43:54] And it’s great when you’re writing it in your blog and you’re starting to practice and you look your headlines. You’re like, okay, did that headline work? Digging in search console? Right? You’re looking, what am I? What’s my average site click through rate in search console. My average is 4.2. Why did this blog post get a 2% click through rate?
[00:44:08] And this blog post got an 8% click through rate. Title and description. That’s it? It’s that. And let’s maybe you’ve got schema and you got stars, whatever. There’s, there’s my new HSA beyond title and description, but it’s 90% title and description. Was your title compelling enough to get the human being to think, huh?
[00:44:24] There’s something in here for me. Cause if you don’t get the human to think that thought they’re not gonna click on you, they’re gonna click on somebody else. Google’s going to put them above you. So, so it’s, it’s like a, you could study the grades reveal books, um, be right. Do the work. Please listen to the war of art by Steven Pressfield or read war of art by Steven Pressfield.
[00:44:44] It’s the mindset. He’s a writer. He wrote, um, the legend of bagger Vance. He did a bunch of fiction. Some of his fiction got picked up by Hollywood, got option for movies, multimillion, but like his story, he wrote. 13 screenplays and novels that all got thrown away before one got picked up 13, he spent 27 years writing, writing, write on a typewriter to write with like whiteout 13 years, just grinding away, like, like.
[00:45:10] Hellacious approach. And then one day it’s in like, Oh, he’s an overnight success. Not when you dig deep enough. And he’s so eloquent. Like I just, it’s the right mindset for us creators of like, we need to put out content every day. Like that, that is the currency of today’s day and age and contents. One thing, content that compels people to take action that compels people to improve their lives that gives them what they need to get on the path to.
[00:45:34] Happiness, essentially fulfillment because that’s what every human being actually wants secret of life right there. Um, when we create content that gets people into action, they’re going to love us if your content is just like, Oh, okay. They just regurgitated that other blog posts that everybody else is parroting.
[00:45:48] Um, it just falls flat, but when it gets people to. To change, to shift the two users from the thousands of people who will listen to this who actually get into motion, who actually do a 90 day challenge who actually get on that path to three years, three years later, going to look back, and this will be the turning point for them.
[00:46:03] And most people will just kind of go on to the next thing, but, um, put out the kind of content that gets people to say. Effort. I’m a do that 90 day challenge. I’m going to do it. I’m going to break through, I’m going to get the war of art book. I’m going to do the work because I’m tired of being stuck in action, preparing all the time.
[00:46:17] I realized now clearly that I just have to start taking steps, doing my iterations. And, um, it’s elusive. It’s always elusive. And that’s one of the segments of where I think I know what I’m doing. I, the data just says like, Oh, that new opt-in page you thought was going to work socks. And I was like, okay, I get humbled all the time by copy.
[00:46:35] Brendan Hufford: [00:46:35] A hundred percent. So people want to check out miles, beckler.com, uh, go on YouTube, check out miles, Beckler, plus whatever they heard, whatever they want to learn. You go forward at this point. Uh, and I don’t say that facetiously,
[00:46:48] Miles: [00:46:48] like you just had it there technically is. And if there’s not leaving a volume of orders, Yeah, 560 videos.
[00:46:55] Every topic I can a hundred percent for free teaching everything. Cause I, I wanted no one did that for me. Right? No one did that for, I just I’m like the rubbish content. You don’t need a course. I had to, I had to put it out there to where anyone who’s willing, who’s scrappy who broke or not just wants to build it.
[00:47:09] Can the hub, the guidance, just remember the goal is not to binge watch all my stuff, which is. Not self-fulfilling YouTube wants you to binge it. There’s there’s just in time. And just in case information, you don’t need to learn all the, just in case, just in case I do Facebook ads. No, no, no. The day you’re starting a Facebook ad go off from a Facebook ad video until then just go do the work, right?
[00:47:26] Like when you have a problem search, find the solution, get back to work. And just search miles Beckler. I’m the only miles back there in the world. So you’ll find me anywhere you search for me. Let’s boost that search volume on my name, right. A hundred percent.
[00:47:37] Brendan Hufford: [00:47:37] And you’re really good at SEO. So of course you thanks, man.
[00:47:39] I’ll just say that Brendan Hufford is the same way. Just Google me. I’m good at SEO. That’s it. Unique names win. All right. Miles. I really appreciate it. Thanks man.
[00:47:47] Miles: [00:47:47] Appreciate it. Thanks for time. Cool.
[00:47:49] Brendan Hufford: [00:47:49] Um, let me stop.