Like a horse competing against a race car, old methods are no match against the new.
Remember, back in the old days of traditional marketing, we had stuff you might not have heard of: the good old newspaper and fax machine. That’s what we used to do advertising and marketing before the internet came along and revolutionized how we do things.
Now we have what I call the three T’s, the reasons digital marketing is far superior than traditional marketing.
Reason #1: Targeting
With traditional marketing we had massive billboards like what you see in Vegas. They still have billboards, but it’s more like for brand awareness. The problem with the billboard is you can’t choose who you target with it. If someone sees it, great, if no one sees it, you don’t know.
But digital marketing, you can precisely target who you want to see your offer. You can choose.
For example, with Google AdWords, you can target the keywords that people are searching. You know the buyer’s intent, so when they search the keyword, they will find you and your message. Or with Facebook, you can also target exactly who you want, their interests, and the profile.
You can be very precise about who you want for your customers or for your offer. That you cannot do with traditional marketing. In the good old days with direct mail, we have a term called A Pile and B Pile, meaning that people sort their mail so that ads and flyers go in the trash can, or the B Pile.
The A Pile are all the personal letters, credit card statements, and bills. As a marketer, our first goal was not to get people to buy, but to make sure they didn’t throw away our stuff. We wanted our mail in their A Pile.
Now with digital marketing, you don’t need to do that anymore. You can put your offer, your products, your service, in front of exactly who you want, when you want, and where you want. You can choose the country, demographics, and psychographics.
It’s extremely powerful to know exactly who you’re marketing. And with advances in technology, we could almost look over a person’s shoulder to see what they’re reading.
Reason #2: Tracking
With direct mail in the old days, we would send out thousands of letters and we’d get so many order forms back. People sent back an order form or money order, or called a phone number to buy something we marketed in the mail. This method is so archaic now.
With digital marketing you can track exactly what happens. You can see the customer’s journey when they first saw this particular video, and then they opted-in to this particular offer, and then they didn’t buy, but they read email number four in your email sequence and finally bought your product.
You cannot do that with traditional marketing. You can do so much more with digital marketing, even update your marketing with the flip of a switch.
Reason #3: Tweaking
Back then, if I made a massive billboard and changed my mind about my message or offer, what did I have to do? I had to replace everything! I had to reprint everything! But with digital, if there’s an ad that I’m running that I don’t like, I can change it just like that.
I can also split test different ads at the same time. In marketing, we call it A/B testing. We can tweak different things. On my webpage, I can test different guarantees, different price points by running traffic to it. The results are immediate.
With traditional advertising, there’s a huge delay in terms of time, and that gap makes advertising very expensive and costly.
Digital marketing has so many advantages over traditional marketing. You can target, track, and tweak very quickly to get better results.
But there’s also a downside. The marketplace is getting more sophisticated so your competitors are doing the same thing as you. You could be running a large company and competing with a 17 year old kid living in a basement.
Digital marketing has many advantages, but it changes all the time. You have to do more to keep up the pace and have that leading edge. And they always say, if you’re not the lead dog, the view is always the same.
The one word that makes people millionaires and billionaires isn’t attitude, mindset or time. It’s something else that’s much more powerful. Let me tell you why.
If you had $86,400 in your bank account and someone stole $10 from you, would you throw away the remaining $86,390 and try to get the $10 back?
You’d probably forget about it and move on. Why? Because I want you to imagine the $86,400 represents a bank account called time. Every single day you have 86,400 seconds to deposit to your life, your time, but there’s one catch.
It carries over no balance. It means whatever you don’t invest, you don’t take out that day, it gets to zero. Now, what would you do? You would withdraw every single dollar every single day, wouldn’t you?
You’ve probably heard of the concept of return on investment, ROI, but here’s a more powerful concept and that is ROTI and that’s return on time invested.
You see, most people when they think about that one word that makes people millionaires and billionaires, very often the word that comes to mind is hustle. They think you have to work your face off. It’s the price of admission to get in the door to success. If you don’t hustle, you’re not in the game.
That One Word Isn’t Hustle!
When I was getting started, I was hustling because I also believed that was the key to success. I was living in a one bedroom apartment with my mom, working hard to pay the bills. But hustling didn’t make me into a millionaire. ROTI doesn’t come from hustling.
Instead, I want you to imagine lifting a big heavy stone with your own two hands. You try your best and it doesn’t even move… until you use a long pole as a lever. Suddenly, with the same manpower, you can lift that heavy stone. That’s leverage.
The definition of leverage is maximum productivity with minimum effort. Leverage is how you get your time back. It’s the one word that makes people rich.
There are many, many forms of leverage, but I’ll give you four today.
Money Leverage
Imagine you are buying a piece of real estate from the bank. You put a down payment and then you borrow the rest from the bank. It could be up to 90%. That’s money leverage.
You’re using the bank’s money to create more wealth and to build your business, or you want to buy some kind of new equipment for your company and you go to the bank or you go to an investor to borrow some money.
Marketing Leverage
The second kind is marketing leverage. Let’s say I’m running an ad on social media. I create a video ad that is run 24/7. Even though I am not there “marketing and selling,” my ad is working for me, being viewed by tens of thousands or even millions of people.
People Leverage
Another kind of leverage is people leverage. By hiring someone, delegating someone, or outsourcing to do your task, you can save time and money. You want to find someone who can handle certain tasks and whose hourly rate is lower than yours.
Technology Leverage
The fourth form of leverage is system leverage. For example, I use QuickBooks to manage my finances and do the bookkeeping. That’s system leverage. Another example is managing my email list. I’m using an email system that allows me to craft one message that goes out to two million people. That’s leveraging technology to grow.
There are many, many forms of leverage, not just money, people, marketing, and technology. I would challenge you to think about anyone who is a millionaire or billionaire – each one has highly utilized different forms of leverage.
That’s the one word that makes people millionaires and billionaires.
Mark is currently serving as Founder and CEO at Simpleology, a web application that doubles your productivity (and your free time) by simplifying your life.
Author of over a dozen books translated into 20+ languages. Several of which were #1 best-sellers. Including … The Irresistible Offer, Integration Marketing, The Worst Case Scenario Business Survival Guide, The Great Formula, and more.
Serial entrepreneur with 30+ startups under his belt. Widely recognized as the “father of online marketing” for his pioneering work in the early days of the Internet. His startups include Aesop (the first ebook publishing company), ROIbot (the first online ad-tracking company and first client-side SAAS), SearchHound (the 2nd pay-per-click search engine, years before Google), StartBlaze (first ever traffic exchange system, the 36th most visited site in the world 6 weeks after its release), Neurogizers, and more.
Have you ever wondered why you watch so many motivational videos yet your life stays the same?
Or you get all motivated, excited, psyched up, and hyped up, and you improve your life by a tiny bit… but you never get the breakthrough you were hoping for. Frustrating, isn’t it?
So why is it that motivational videos don’t work?
Before I answer that, let’s clarify one point. I am not here to motivate you. I cannot motivate you. People watch my videos, looking for me to be their motivator, but I’m just a merchant of truth.
I simply tell you the truth, what it actually takes to be successful. Only you can motivate you.
When you watch motivational videos, you get this temporary energy that gives you the illusion that you’re actually doing something. What you really need is something more permanent.
What you need is skills. If all you have is motivation and no skills, then you won’t get anywhere. For example, you could watch Bruce Lee’s movies 10 to a 100 times but you’re still not going to be Bruce Lee.
You can watch his videos, my videos a thousand times but you don’t develop your skills, your life stays the same. I can’t transfer my skills to you through my videos.
However, when you combine motivation, tenacity, and drive with skills, you get results.
So how do you develop those skills? Here’s the formula. You need to imagine a triangle and each point of the triangle represents an important point.
Point #1: Proximity
Point one, you need proximity, and proximity equals power. You need a mentor to learn from and give you feedback. That mentor has to be physically close to you, as close as possible.
This is why motivational videos don’t work – it’s a far distance between you and your mentor. But if I’m coaching you through a class, that’s closer. Even if it’s online, if it’s live, we are interacting with each other and I’m answering your questions.
If I’m coaching you one-on-one, that’s the best, but obviously, I cannot coach everyone that way. One-on-one gives me more time to mentor and motivate you, but you must also immerse yourself in what you’re learning.
Point #2: Immersion
When you immerse yourself in the skills you are learning, you will improve much faster. Watching a video here and there will give you a little energy boost but it won’t do much long term.
You need total immersion. When you dial up the intensity, you will start to see results. But to see real improvement, you will need experience.
Point #3: Experience
Now you have a mentor who is teaching you and you’re immersing yourself in what you’re learning. Finally, you have to put these new skills into practice. That’s how you develop a skill.
It’s the same when you are learning martial arts. You’re not going to learn it by watching 100 martial arts videos. You need a sifu, an instructor, to give you feedback. You will also need to immerse yourself in classes once a week or more. After class, you need to practice a few hours a day, and gain experience by sparring with a partner.
When you’ve gained some experience, you go back to your mentor, get proximity and feedback, and immerse yourself in class again. Then you build up more experience. This is how you build up a skill.
Motivation itself means very little if you don’t have the skill to back it up, so this will save you a whole lot of time.
This triangle should give you some insights about why you feel stuck after watching all these motivational videos. The videos give you the illusion that you are actually doing something with your life when you’re not.
Unless you’re committed to develop that skill set and change your life, you won’t get to that next level. You won’t move ahead and you won’t stay motivated.
Kevin Harrington, known as an original “shark” on the hit TV show Shark Tank, the creator of the infomercial, pioneer of the As Seen on TV brand, and co-founding board member of the Entrepreneur’s Organization— has pushed past all the questions and excuses to repeatedly enjoy 100X success
His legendary work behind-the-scenes of business ventures has produced well over $5 billion in global sales, the launch of more than 500 products, and the making of dozens of millionaires. Twenty of his companies have each topped $100 million in revenue.
In this podcast, Kevin shares how he started with zero sales, then skyrocketed to success and a million-dollar enterprise when he learned that closing high-priced products didn’t take more effort than selling products at lower prices. Later, he discovered the world of infomercials and the reason why “tease, please and seize” is the magic formula.
When TV viewership started to drop, Kevin adapted to new ways of marketing. With digital marketing came social media and an abundance of other ways to build publicity and establish a brand. Kevin discusses these in his latest book, Key Person of Influence.
His strong personal brand led to recognition and an invitation to join a panel of sharks on the show, Shark Tank. Investors, called sharks, evaluate pitches and decide if they want to invest or not.
Kevin’s legacy includes the “but wait, there’s more” expression that has become part of our cultural history. He’s launched massively successful products like The Food Saver, Ginsu Knives, The Great Wok of China, The Flying Lure, and many more.
Kevin’s been called The Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneur and the Entrepreneur Answer Man, because he knows the challenges unique to start-ups and has a special passion for helping entrepreneurs succeed.
