Transcription
So you want to make money online, but you don't want to feel icky or sleazy to the people who know and love you when you ask them to give you money. So there's a good way to do it, and there's a bad way to do it. The good news is I can show you step by step how I got my first 20 clients posting on social media for my personal training business a decade ago, and I've continued to use that in each company going forward. And this is a sneak preview from my upcoming book, "100 Million Dollar Leads," which you can check out at acquisition.com/leads.
So there was a friend of mine who had a podcast that blew up, and very quickly he had millions of downloads, and his business started to grow. It skyrocketed, and it was almost 100% from people who were listening to his podcast. And what happened was he made an "ask" during one of his podcasts. He made a lot of money; he thought, "When I make an ask, I make more money," and so what I'll do is I'll just make more asks. He learned the wrong lesson, and so he did make more asks, and he then made a little bit more money, and then he would continue to make less and less and less until eventually his listenership dropped and dropped and dropped because he had lost the goodwill of his audience.
The key point I'm going to talk about today is mastering the gift-ask ratio: how much to give versus how much to ask. GaryVee popularized the whole concept, "jab, jab, jab, right hook," which is the idea of giving, giving, giving, and then ask—it's not take, but ask. The good news is this ratio has been incredibly well studied, why? Because the biggest media companies in the world want to be able to ask on their platforms as much as humanly possible without losing viewership, listenership, audience. On television, for every 47 minutes of content, there's 13 minutes of advertising. If you look on Facebook, every four posts there's one ad. It's almost like a three-to-one ratio between how many ads there are and how much content there is.
What I want to do is give you my slight tweak on the give-give-ask concept. Instead of give-give-give-ask, I'd like to just change it to give until they ask you, and that's when you know your audience is ready for you to make an offer. And my personal preference here is actually to give in public and sell in private. Whenever you give, you deposit goodwill into the audience. If you give someone something first, they're far more likely to comply with your request later. When someone helps us, we feel indebted to them; we want to help them back—right? That's how society works, but with media, we can do that at scale. You can gain goodwill and provide value to millions of people at once, but then it all funnels back to one person, and that's why it's so powerful, and it's free when you do it that way. Your brand consistently is reinforced publicly, and you continue to grow and expand. It will force you to keep that content amazing so that you continue to reinforce your reputation.
If you consistently give and give and give, then what happens is your audience compounds. And this is something that I didn't understand for a long time: the audience is the asset, not the content you make. So when I make a video and then it disappears in three days on my news feed, what that one piece of content is, is it got me 300 more people to start seeing my stuff, and then they permanently enter the audience, provided I don't ask too much too frequently. In the beginning, it'll be really small, and if you can hold off and you keep giving, you keep giving, you keep giving, you eventually never even have to ask publicly. Because instead of asking, you just start getting.
This is something that I've now personally experienced, and I was like, "I don't know," but you know what? I'll give it a shot. Let's just see if I can make a bunch of business content and see if that will attract one million, five million, 10 million dollar profit per year businesses—not revenue, profit—so that I can invest them and help them grow. And it turns out it did.
Now there's two ways that asks work in content, and so I want you to think of your asks as commercials. You're interrupting your own content with a commercial about your stuff. An integrated approach would be like during the content, like, "Hey, if you want to learn more about this stuff, go to 100milliondollarleads.com." "100 Million Dollar Leads" is coming out, and there are eight methods that I talk about advertising, and by design, I'm using all eight to advertise this book. And at this point, we already have 200,000 people who have registered for the book launch live, which is on this day, Saturday, August 19th. So that would be an example of an integration; it's natural, it comes up as you're talking, and then you can point to it, and you get back to what you're saying. Integrations work better for long-form content: books, videos, podcasts, blog posts—those are all things that lend themselves to integrating in very small percentages of the total amount of time it takes someone to consume something. For example, if I made an integration and I started with a minute about something valuable and then I spent five minutes in the middle talking about my thing, you still need to keep the ratio of minimum three to one, because remember television's 13 minutes to 47, right? For a 60-minute slot in terms of commercials, so that's the max. And so for me, I would rather be at like 98% give, 2% ask. So if we looked at the total seconds of this video, the give-to-ask ratio is still super strong, and I'm not going to lose audience because of that ask.
The other way is intermittent, which means in between things. Intermittent is typically better for short-form platforms. If you have 10 Instagram posts or 10 TikTok reels, on the 11th one you make one about your services that you offer, and then you go right back to the pre-programmed show. It's even harder because if you're doing multiple posts a day, I wouldn't do more than 3%, so once or twice a month, one post that feels reasonable, and you're not gonna lose audience. And so fundamentally, the actual cost of the commercial is not money but goodwill: how much of my audience am I losing by making this ask? I, though, to be clear, I always want to under-ask my audience personally.
So if you're new to making content, believe it or not, you've actually been providing value to certain people for an extended period of time. It's—you actually do have a decent amount of goodwill. If you make your first post, what I would just call like a declaration of business, which is just saying like, "Hey, you know, you guys have maybe been following me for a while, you might know me, you might not—from personal, from college, from work, from out of the bars—this is what I'm doing with my life now, and I would love to give you guys something for free that would benefit you, and if that sounds cool, awesome; if not, keep following me, be posting more about this stuff." Very quick, very simple. And I was actually able to find my first public declaration of business, which is here. This is April 9th; I'm actually coming up on uh, 10 years. I hit my decade in business, how about that? For those of you who know me, you know two things: one, I am terrible with all things technology—logical, still true; for example, I just heard about Spotify a few weeks ago, seriously. Two, I love training/nutrition and fitness more than, well, a whole lot. So today is sort of special because it marks a day when my love of training vanquished—to see me trying to use fancy words—vanquished my fear of technology. What do I mean? For the better part of a year, I've been taking part in a free personal training project that I would give away free personal training to anyone who's willing to give $500 to $1,000 to a cause of their choice. Give value for an extended period of time for a small group of people to prove that you know what you're doing, so you can get testimonials. By the way, this way they wouldn't have to be motivated by the same thing as me, but be motivated to give to their cause and benefit themselves. When I first introduced the idea, I was happily surprised the amount of positive support I received. So almost a year for my first client, I now have a website to formally show some of the transformation that I've gone underway using my programming and as a formal means of contacting me about signing up. I currently have a few slots open on my roster, so drop me a quick note if you're interested. Thanks so much. Take a second to check out some of these ridiculous transformations in record time. Would I make this post again today? Probably not, but I'm proud of the kid who did it because I had given value for free to people—free because they didn't pay me, I had them pay someone else because I wanted them to value it. But making that first declaration of business post was actually how I got my first 20 paying customers. I got 20 people who messaged me because—because I, to be fair, I had always been in shape, and people had known me my whole life as a guy who was always obsessed with fitness, so it made sense that I would make that my next natural thing.
And so you've provided value to people for a long period of time, you can make your first post a light ask, which is just a declaration and asking for support, and then you can start the business. Now, if you have no content up to that point, show them what you've been up to, and then you can make your ask. I would encourage you to make that first post because I think it'll show it's possible, and I think if I can get you that first win, you'll be far more likely to continue.
And if you're wondering, "Well, at what point do I fully right hook my audience and just drain it of goodwill?" Real talk: part of the game is quote "leaving money on the table." So let me give you an example: friend of a friend had a tequila business that was pretty big—big enough that The Rock approached him, Dwayne Johnson, and The Rock said, "I would like two-thirds of your business," and mind you, when he did that, that might have been a big ask, I don't know. They said no. Now fast forward years later, The Rock started his own tequila brand, which is now worth $6 billion. So they probably would have made out really well with that, but here's the thing: if The Rock had done that deal at that time, he might have actually lost out on what he ultimately made with Teremana. And so that means if someone says, "Hey, Alex, can you endorse my thing?" if I say yes today, it's probably going to be a bad deal for me because in two years my audience would be significantly larger, and so will yours. When you're thinking about these right hooks, there's a huge time component, and the thing is is that compounding gets crazy near the end. Every time you decide to make the right hook, if you hold it, it could be 10 or 100 times bigger 12 months, 24 months later. Could you imagine if two years ago when I started making content and I just started getting early engagement on my YouTube videos and Instagram and people start DMing me, they're like, "Hey, can you mentor me?" which I don't do. If I had said, "Sure, I'm gonna do it," I would have stopped my growth curve, and I would have just been just another dude. But by holding back—and it takes a lot of self-discipline, self-control, and patience—which, by the way, if you want the definition for me, operationalizing patience is just figuring out what you do in the meantime; you don't actually wait, you just figure out what you do in the meantime. Because I am in the game of making money, my goal is to always have significantly less supply than I have demand, and I always want to keep that demand because that is the Holy Grail of what you want—which is far more people who want to do business with you than you have capacity to do. The strongest driver of pricing power and profits is supply and demand. When we make content, what we're actually doing is artificially shifting the demand curve in our favor. And the other side of this is that if you are the business owner, you control supply, and so you can inflate your demand and at the same time cut your supply, and when you have that happen, price goes through the roof, and so do your profits. I'm all about growing as fast as I possibly can, which means you got to give as much as you possibly can—just keep giving, and people will start coming to you; you'll start not even having to ask; you'll just start getting. And if you're going to ask because you need to put food on the table, which I understand, for me I would be way more than the three-to-one ratio—more like 10 times that—would be like a 30-to-1 ratio of giving to asking, so I keep maximizing my growth and keep my brand compounding while still making a little bit of money for me because I know that long term, the more I hold back my ask, the bigger it will be.