Transcription
Marketing used to be about convincing me from baseline that you're the person or the company I should buy from. Now, it's first convincing me from a place of distrust because I don't trust anybody. Why should I even continue reading your sh? Then you have to convince me why you're the one I should buy from.
The linear funnel is dead. Someone clicks, they sign up, they then buy from me. If they don't buy from me in a certain number of days, because I can no longer optimize for that conversion, let's say through Facebook or whatever, that funnel is no longer converting.
Are the robots coming to steal your job? Alex Katon, it is awesome to see you. It doesn't happen enough, but thanks for showing up. Brad, I am so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, so I don't even know how long I've known you. We met eons ago through marketing channels. Since then, you've lived the life of a copywriter and launched a company in 2019 called Copy Posi that now has over a half a million people listening to you on the edge of their seats to learn the tactics, tricks, and lessons around copy and building businesses. Recently dubbed the marketer of the year by Digital Marketer, and you produce some great sh.
I want to start with my sales background, which is direct sales. Like, I'm going to close you at the kitchen counter or it's never going to happen kind of sales. That led me to have tremendous disrespect for direct response, but sometimes direct response just seems super salesy. How do you handle that? How do you make direct response marketing not be salesy and douchy?
Great question. Yeah, so I discovered direct response marketing back when I was an intern at a company called Mind Valley. Many people have heard of it in the personal development world. I think the thing that blew my mind was really this idea of, oh my gosh, you can write words on the internet and inspire people to take action and buy from you.
But I also kind of came from this background of branding because as much as Mind Valley was a direct response marketing company, it was really heavily focused on branding. Then when I started my freelance copywriting business in 2011, which would have been maybe just a couple of years before you and I met, I did direct response marketing and I loved it.
But I did direct response marketing in an industry where direct response marketing was not very well received. It was personal development and spirituality. So what I sort of found, right, is like, okay, that's a very fluffy environment, fluffy situation, and you're giving a hard call to action.
Yeah, exactly. And that's what I realized: you can integrate these two ideas. I think there's a right way to do direct response and I think there's a wrong way to do direct response. But at its core, I love direct response marketing. I mean, if you boil it down just to its classic definition, it's you do something that inspires or evokes a direct response, some sort of a call to action, whether it's to click, to sign up, to buy.
And there's a way to do that in a way that doesn't feel douchy. I think that's where, to me, brand storytelling and deeply understanding your audience comes in—not just for the sake of saying something to get a response, but saying something that's actually building trust in the process. I think that's more important now than ever before.
What a lot of people have lost sight of in marketing is back in, you know, 2008, 2009, it really did feel like you could say anything on the internet and people would be like, wow, this is incredible, and they would trust you just because you were online. I mean, I remember literally thinking that, like, can anybody build a website? No, they must be really special important people if they have a website. I remember having that thought.
The market was less savvy then too, and so you were able to really track for this very short window of, hey, I'm going to write an ad or write a sales page, and if I don't get a direct response within the first 24 hours, couple of days, then there's no point continuing. That lead is dead to me.
Now, I think that's changed so, so much. To me, I focus first on building trust so that even if someone doesn't buy from me right away, it's still direct response marketing, but I'm not making them feel like that's the only option they can ever possibly take from me. If they don't, you know, they're dead to me, so to speak.
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think there's no question that there's all sorts of data around the number of touches required to get a sale now. The number of touches required to get a sale 20 years ago was like 13 or something, and today it's like, I don't know, 45. It's crazy. It's just significantly more points of influence have to happen.
I kind of struggle with this idea of brand against testing conversion. What I mean by that specifically is if you're writing copy and you're doing it by the numbers, and I like to be, you know, I pride myself in being somebody that is very deliberate in his approach to things. So that means that I want to pay attention to metrics to track the objective reality of whether or not something was productive.
Where is the line between the conversion numbers being better with direct response versus I want to stay true to my brand?
Oh, such a good question. So there's this report that I recommend you and everyone listening read, published by Google. It's called "Decoding Decisions: Making Sense of the Messy Middle." This whole report talks about exactly what you're saying. There used to be these two very distinguishable content versus copy, branding versus direct response.
We were able to go, okay, yes, I need to do both of those things in my business, but really direct response is where the sales happen. What this report talks about is how, exactly what you were saying earlier, where it used to take, say, seven touch points or 13 touch points or whatever the number was a decade ago for someone to make a decision. That number is now, for a cold lead, between 20 and 50.
What's really interesting is a lot of those touch points are zero click. A lot of those touch points are a video view or someone, you know, scrolling through your feed on Instagram, and they're not actually clicking on anything.
What's happening is it's getting significantly harder to track conversions in this isolated direct response funnel. Something that I talk about a lot is this idea that the linear funnel is dead—not dead like funnels don't work anymore, but we can no longer treat it as this isolated, you know, someone clicks, they sign up, they then buy from me.
If they don't buy from me in a certain number of days, because I can no longer optimize for that conversion, let's say through Facebook or whatever, then that funnel is no longer converting. What's actually happening is someone clicks, they might sign up, then they're interacting with you across a number of different platforms.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to know, was it that sales page that converted them, or was it the fact that they watched a YouTube video, or they read a LinkedIn post, or they read an email of yours, and then they went and bought? Attribution is incredibly difficult.
What's happening with this brand versus direct response conversation is I think as marketers, we need to integrate them and go, it's no longer one versus the other. It's all part of this holistic approach. If you talk to any marketer who's looking purely at just directly attributable clicks to conversion, most people will tell you that conversion rates are going down.
But when you zoom out and you realize, like, at Copy Posi, my average customer took 44 days before they made a purchase with me. We were able to get that down to about 28 by doing some lower ticket stuff because we had never really done low ticket before. That's still almost a month that it takes for the average customer to purchase from me.
It's easy to blame a funnel and say that's no longer working and throw in the towel. What I look at now is what are the leading KPIs? What are the leading metrics I can look at? The micro conversions actually dictate whether or not my marketing is performing. Those are often the less obvious, like sale conversions or landing page conversion rates, but instead looking at views, engagement, interaction, because that's going to be an indicator of overall conversions.
Functionally, like lead scoring would be another way to look at that, right? So if you look at a CRM, in some of the better CRMs off the shelf, like HubSpot is amazing at this, will feed that stuff in and say, hey, we saw a view on social channel A, you know, we saw a comment on social channel B, and a like on C, and that all feeds into a lead scoring mechanism.
How do you think about that? Or I guess, how do you track that yourself inside of Copy Posi?
It's hard. You know, I think tracking attribution is one of the hardest things. We use UTM parameters, Google Tag Manager, that we pull into a tool called Seg Metrics to try to get close to appropriate attribution tracking, knowing that there's no way that it's 100% accurate.
What's that? That's wrong. Knowing that it's wrong, yeah. Paying all this money to know that it's wrong, but it gives you the ability to compare apples to apples, right?
So I think for me, coming from a background of branding and direct response, and then like who had never created a piece of content on social media until 2019, and then really going hard into organic, being able to not just ignore—like for me, if my YouTube metrics are down, that's an indicator that we're not reaching as many people, and I know that that's going to directly impact all of my conversions down the road.
I used to not pay too much attention to that, and I think it is, you know, vanity metrics are one thing, but if you know that, say, YouTube or Instagram or LinkedIn is the primary source of your organic traffic, it's worth paying attention to that.
And then, of course, you know, my strategy is to get as many people as possible on my email list because that, to me, is the one way that I'm able to accurately track what's happening with those leads and control it, right?
And control the audience and conversation. Exactly. Well, that brings me back to the same question, and I think I know the answer, and I think I heard it, but if you're writing an email and you are very clear one email converts better but is a little off-brand, do you pick the one that converts better, or do you pick the one that doesn't convert as well but is completely on-brand?
That's a really good question. You know, I don't send many off-brand emails, but when I say off-brand, like I sell hard in my emails. I'm not afraid of making an offer, and I think there is a way to do it that is still on-brand.
To your point, I would truly pick the more on-brand email, not because of the conversions, but because of the importance of consistency. Right now, everyone is looking for a reason to count you out.
I feel like marketing used to be about convincing me from baseline that you're the person I should buy from or the company I should buy from, and they're comparing you against other options. Now, it's first convince me from a place of distrust because I don't trust anybody. Why should I even continue reading your sh?
Then you have to convince me why you're the one I should buy from. I do really feel there's an importance right now in consistency of messaging and brand voice because even if it's subconscious, even if I were to show you, for example, an email that I wrote, and I'm a copywriter, and my brand is very sassy. I swear. I mean, my audience knows how I communicate.
If I were to all of a sudden use ChatGPT to write me a sales email, whether or not my audience or my entire audience would be able to immediately pinpoint if that was written by me or not, I don't think is the issue. I think what happens is when over time there's a complete removal of a consistent voice, even subconsciously, we're learning not to trust certain things we read and see.
To me, I would go with the brand play any day of the week. If it didn't convert as well, I would put on my marketer brain and be like, what can we test and optimize here to try to get it to convert better? Do better.
Yeah, just be better, Alex. Yep. I prevent myself from saying that to people quite often, but often I think it just do better, just be better, just do better. Isn't that marketing though? Everyone always thinks marketing is like, everyone always looks at me and they're like, you're a marketer of the year. You must not make any marketing mistakes ever. It's like I'm some marketing oracle and I always know it's going to work.
I'm like, oh my God, I do so much that doesn't work. Like that's the whole point, you know? That is the point. The point is always testing, right?
That's why I think it's a curious question because sometimes the tests show you data that lead you to what objectively looks like success, but if it's misaligned from the brand, is that really success? Right? Or is it just a short-term win, but you're sacrificing any sort of long-term loyalty, trust, future conversions, upsells, repeat customers, all these other things that really truly matter for long-term growth.
All right, so another random question from an email marketing perspective while we're on it. Long form versus short form in email specifically. Is it better or more effective to write a long narrative email that covers, handles objections, lays this all out, or is it more effective to write a one-sentence email, a seven-word email that gets a response?
Great question. So my philosophy on this is that there's pros and cons to both. I mean, you write a long email where you're overcoming objections and you're weaving the story and you're presenting the offer, and then you get the click. Your on-site conversion rates are going to be way higher than someone who is clicking on a blind hyperlink where you're just saying, oh my gosh, have you seen this? You'll never guess what happened next, whatever.
A blind CTA is going to have high clicks in an email and lower on-site conversion. The first thing I ask myself is, well, one, what's my goal with this? If I'm trying to re-engage dead leads all day long, the one-sentence email. If I'm trying to build trust and educate and create, you know, really create that gap between where my current audience is and where they need to be in order to believe that my offer that I'm going to be making in two to three days is the thing that can help them, I'm going to spend a bit more time educating and building up that trust so that the time I do drop my offer, they're that much more likely to receive it and believe it.
I like to mix it up. You know, I have people complain that my emails are too long and unsubscribe. I have people email me being like, I love reading your emails. I feel like I'm talking to a friend, and like they're long, but I read them all.
I think, like anything, mixing it up and knowing that different formats have different goals and they also speak to different personality types and different types of people and in the way they make decisions—logical, emotional, right? There's room for all.
Is it better to write a long email or link out to a video that explains it all and has the same explanation on a sales page? Another great question. Again, I think it speaks to the audience, right?
I think actually my old answer would have said link to a video that explains it, and I do think there's still a lot of like really amazing trust building that happens through video marketing, and I'm a huge fan of video. It's kind of this idea of the thing before the thing, right? Anytime I sell anything high ticket, I'm always asking myself, what's the thing that I can do to build trust before I offer the thing, the big thing?
That could be a video, that could be a free challenge, that could be some sort of a live experience, a Q&A, whatever. With that being said, you're going to have way higher consumption with something right there in the inbox, right? It's zero click. You're getting the message across.
So again, my answer would be how do you do both? So as an example, I just did a master class at the top of the year, and like any master class, you know, I think I had 8,000 people sign up, had a pretty decent show-up rate, like 30%. But immediately my brain is going to these, you know, 70% of people who weren't on the master class, and I'm like, these people aren't going to watch a replay.
Like, hey, watch this two-hour replay. So what I did is I chopped up the master class into short chapters, and I trickled them out over email after the fact. So there was no, hey, 48-hour replay, you have to take two hours, and then maybe more with time in between, and if you're pausing to take notes, etc., to sit down and watch this master class. Who's going to do that? Very few people now take the time.
I see the metrics. I track the replay rates in my paid memberships and communities. If someone who's paying me 10 grand a year isn't watching a replay, what's the likelihood that someone who signed up for free is going to give me their time?
So I think about, okay, how can I take all the lessons that I shared in this longer piece of content that 30% of the people on the sub list watched and dissect it into different formats that other people are going to consume in different ways to get the point across?
I really do feel like it's, again, that kind of holistic, how can you think about what every single person in your audience needs and what's best for them and know that it's going to be different, but you can reflect that in your messaging marketing?
Yeah, I like that a lot. I think that thinking about what the actual outcome is that you're after is super relevant, right? There's a question of, with like a two-hour block, if you back out and you look at sort of the old infomercial model, basically you've got a 30-minute block, and you're telling the same story three times in a row.
That was the infomercial model, and it was the model because they knew that people would happen to jump into the infomercial at different points. It's like you flip channels and you catch it 20% of the way through. Well, you need to tell the full narrative again.
If you're in a situation where, in your case, you have a two-hour webinar and you want people to have all the information from it, but they're not going to watch it all in one sitting, well, how do you get that to them?
Yeah, and your answer is drip, which I like. I love my friend Ste McLaren's shares. I'm always like, what's your format for creating content? He's like, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.
I do think we have a tendency right now to overcomplicate. We've been told—and I'll take responsibility for this—we've been told that you have to give value, value, value, value, value. I think the biggest thing we can do right now as leaders and as marketers and as business owners is know that everyone is experiencing major information overload right now.
What is so much more important than content, which by the way is now completely free and essentially valueless because anybody can go create quote-unquote content using AI, what people are craving is leadership, guidance. They're craving being spoken to like a real human. They're craving connection.
Some of the changes that I'm making in my marketing and in my programs is being like, why do I do a one-hour session with my mastermind members every single week and feel this pressure to have to bring in these experts and do a full-blown training with slides and all of this?
I thought, wait a second, what if we did half as much content every month and instead created twice as much connection? The feedback we're getting is like, oh my God, this, I didn't even know this is what I needed. You don't have to watch four hours of replays this month in order to feel like you're keeping up.
What happens when people don't keep up in paid memberships and communities? They cancel. So instead, it's like, hey, there's only two sessions all month that are recorded, and I now have a one-hour max rule, which is hard for me because I just have this desire to constantly give them more.
I have to catch myself and be like, Alex, you don't have to give anything else. This is enough. One big idea is enough. Then we have one other call that is purely just connection, and it's not recorded because I'm like, the whole point is that we're just chatting with friends.
If you don't want to show up live, you're not going to get the same benefit from the replay. Then we're integrating other ways for them to connect, not having to be on Zoom in front of their computers because we're all fatigued by that.
Well, there are like 15 different elements of that that I want to talk about, but yeah, I just like rant. I'm like, okay, your turn, Brad. Insert funny advertisement here.
Or just check out Easy Pay Direct. It's EPD, bam! You can find out about credit card processing for your business. Lots of our guests use us for credit card processing, and this seemed like more fun than writing a scripted ad.
To the content point specifically, or to education specifically, yes, information is everywhere, but confidence—and you use the word leadership—but confidence that the information you're getting is accurate and actionable is what's difficult to come by right now.
Challenging very, very smart people are good at taking complex topics and making them simple. Smart people are great at taking simple topics and making them complicated. That's a challenge because there are tons of smart people out there that can't simplify things, and they just overcomplicate.
It is not that you're stupid; it is actually that you're smart. It's just like you can't get quite to the level until you study, study, study, study to distill. But that distillation is what gets people to follow you quickly and say, oh sh, I get it.
In the past, and actually, I'd love your feedback on this, like there is something to be said for the sales pitch of, I'm going to explain to you how complicated this whole thing is, and then my CTA is, but I'll do it for you. Don't worry about it, right?
Does that still make sense today from a marketing perspective, or have we passed the point of, I'm going to tell you how complicated it is because it's so easy to go get information today?
I mean, that's a good question. I do think that you want to be careful with not making something sound too complicated at the risk of someone just going, this is too much for me. I can't handle this right now. F this, I'm out.
Exactly. I think to your point, right now, what I'm seeing is more so now than ever, I'm seeing time almost match or pass the objection of money. It's simply this: I am just so overloaded, I cannot possibly dedicate time to this right now.
I still do think what you're saying absolutely is a strategy, and it needs to almost be rather than agitate with the complexity too much because I think everyone is already aware of, especially now, like you see everyone talking about how things are harder than they used to be.
You can no longer just like, you know, put up a video and run an ad and make all this money. I think the flip side of that is making someone feel really understood in their overwhelm and going, I get it. I get why you're frustrated with this. I get that you're mistrusting the information you're getting online, and of course you are.
In fact, it's good that you are. It's good that you're smart. It's good that you're questioning everything because there's so many dupes and fakes and bots and sh out there. Build authority, build authority, build authority. Here's how I can help you.
To make it even better, I'm going to do it all for you. Not only can you trust knowing that you are in good hands with someone who has years of experience doing this, but you don't even have to so much as whatever, right?
I think the premise is still there. I think what's changed is the nuance of the empathy of really making people know that, one, we see that you're overwhelmed, and two, it's absolutely not your fault. In fact, you should be overwhelmed, and validate those feelings that people are feeling because everyone's feeling the same right now.
It's bonkers. Yeah, it's, I mean, overwhelm is an understatement. Yeah, exactly. But to your point, when you talked about this idea of overcomplicating, it reminds me of a client that I used to write copy for in the numerology space.
I never thought I would be a numerologist, but the founder of the company is so freaking smart, and he was obsessed with the process and the calculations and what was happening behind the scenes with the technology of creating these hyper-personalized readings.
I had this realization writing copy for numerology that nobody gives a rat's ass about the calculation or how the calculation works behind the scenes or the technology that does it. They just want to know what the hell it means to be a life path two.
I keep that in my mind all the time when I'm writing copy because, again, like you said, smart people tend to overcomplicate. While I do think there's a lot of power in pulling back the curtain and letting people see into your process, and that's something I really do believe in, it's more from a place of transparency and authenticity than let me tell you every little nitty-gritty detail that doesn't actually matter.
What you care about is what this means for you. Yep, well, that's the sales adage of selling. I'll now explain later, and you will talk yourself out of a sale just like you'll talk yourself into one.
I'm guilty of that. Yeah, everybody is guilty of that. Because someone will ask a question, a very legitimate question about, right, because they want to buy.
People buy emotionally and they justify logically. I can be talking to someone who asks a very left-brain question, and I actually had to train my team because they would answer all these super left-brain questions in the Zoom chat, and then they'd be like, Alex, we didn't have to send you any of the questions because we answered them all.
It's like, good job, and let me answer even the most mundane left-brain question because if someone's asking what time are the live calls every week, what they're looking for is a reason to count you out.
What they actually want to hear is everything is recorded. You can go at your own speed. In fact, you know, Jenny from season, she didn't attend a single live call when she was in the Launchpad program because she had a 9-to-5 job, and she watched the replay, and she was actually the first person to finish the program.
Or so-and-so who's in Australia and couldn't make it because of the time zones. Realizing that the logical questions, we have to almost fight the urge to answer and instead make it about them and why it doesn't matter.
You got it. In sales, questions are not there to be answered; they're there to understand the person and deliver the outcome that the person needs.
Oh, I like that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really, it's a great, it's a very helpful narrative in life in general. But you have no obligation to answer the question being asked.
What you should be doing is listening to what the question is to gain understanding of who that person is and hopefully deliver the outcome that they want or need.
And if you're, you know, egomaniacal or really, there's a sneaky word that I'm missing right now, but if you're manipulative, right, then you can drive towards your own outcome.
But the fact is, when somebody asks a question, it is a huge opportunity to think about where they're coming from and gain insight into who they are and what they want.
Yeah, that's so good. Do you ever ask—now I'm interviewing you—but do you ever ask a question in response to a question to uncover more of why that's important to them?
Yeah, you know, and I think that in sales, what separates good salespeople from the rest is the ability to live in an uncomfortable space and make it comfortable.
The first obstacle you have as a salesperson is to figure out how to not respond to a question or how to push a little bit harder in a moment when somebody said no. But it's how to break the social norm that you've been brought up with.
There are tons of these different little things that happen where it's not normal when somebody says no to ask again. It's not normal when somebody asks a question to ignore the question.
You know, to not answer the question, ask you've raised to be a good little girl who answers questions or a good little boy who answers questions.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But I think that the first thing you have to do is break that frame and say it's okay for me to not answer the question. That's not what I'm here for.
That makes me feel uncomfortable even thinking about that, but yeah, and one way to do that is somebody asks you a question, and you sit and you ponder for a second, and you're like, huh. But instead of responding with the answer, you say, well, let me ask you something.
Then you ask them a question, and you didn't give an answer, but you did acknowledge the question, and you did let them know that you had heard it and thought about it, and that response is still responding to the question. It's just not giving an answer.
That's so good. You have my gears turning. Like with every time, every time I do a Q&A call or whatever, I almost want to take myself through an exercise where it's like, what's the question behind the question, or what's the fear behind the question?
Yeah, what are they actually concerned about? What is it that's holding them back? Because it's so easy to deflect with questions that seem hyper-technical and, you know, left-brain, and it's not about that at all.
Yeah, no, and I think you brought it up, but like a lot of the time, the answer to the question isn't what they're after anyway, right?
A lot of the time, people are asking questions to, you know, like we use the term buying question in sales because the buying question indicates that that person is trying to get to the sale on their own, right?
They're asking you questions that are relevant to the purchase, and if you see those, then it's how do you help them get the information they need or help them get to that place where they're going to be comfortable with the sale?
Their independent question isn't actually often what they need. What they need is a level of comfort, security, trust, or further understanding, permission, right, to buy.
How do you see that? So I think about this in terms of verbal sales all the time. How do you think about that stuff in terms of copy or in terms of scripting a message?
It's funny. I talk about something, like I have something I call an objection killer roadmap, which is really kind of what you're saying. It's uncovering the objection behind the question and then how can you frame it back to them in a way that is answering the question, but it's giving them what they need.
For example, putting it in an FAQ section on a sales page. You know, the FAQ sections on my sales page, they're all just overcoming objections. If someone's asking what time are the live calls every week, you know, I'm not just going to answer and say the live calls are at 8 AM Pacific Time or whatever.
I'm going to reflect back a story of someone who couldn't attend a single live call and still got the success they wanted, right? It is the same thing that what you're talking about. It's just in written format.
I think where I struggle is on this, like the voice to sales stuff because in marketing—and I think I'm so natural at sales through words written—but then the second time on like a webinar or a sales call and someone asks me a question, it's like I forget everything I know about sales from a marketing perspective.
Instead, I'm just like, okay, and I tell them. It really is one and the same, and good marketing and good copywriting is conversational, and it is exactly what you're talking about.
One of the things that really helped me kind of pivot this in a similar vein is understanding what people want and then what they really want. If I do a survey, for example, and I ask someone, what is—and I'm, you know, trying to get input into messaging and figuring out what the core desires are of my audience—I might say, like, why did you decide to join this program, or why did you decide, or what would be a goal for you with this program?
You know, you hear the same answers: more money, more time, more freedom. That's basically it. I've started asking the question, what would that mean for you, or what would that make possible for you?
That's when you all of a sudden start to get those, oh, well, it would mean that I could quit the family business and, you know, stay at home with my kids, or it would mean that my parents would finally take me seriously, and I, you know, could prove to them that me leaving college and starting a business was the best thing I could have done.
Or, you know, it would mean not having to go back to work after having a child. That's when you realize, like, H, it's like we all say the things because it's easy. What do you want? More time, money, freedom? I know, but if you can get to the why is this important to you or what would that make possible for you, and weave that into your messaging, then all of a sudden someone's like, oh yeah, like that is relatable. That's what I want.
Yeah, I love that. I think, I mean, nothing in life lives in a silo, and it reminds me that getting clarity around your objective and why you're doing it and what it means to you is like, yes, this is a very valuable copy and sales exercise and path, but for the love of God, you should ask yourself that too on a routine basis.
You know, what does it mean to me? How does this change my life? Why am I doing it in the first place?
Absolutely. In the world of short attention spans, it's very easy to just drop everything and run in a direction really quick without that clarity. That clarity is the hard part, right?
Yeah, exactly. I think that's the thing is, you know, we talked about earlier how like what you do to get to seven figures is very different than what you do to get beyond that.
I think another way to say that is like the questions you're asking yourself before you get to seven figures are very different than the—like for me, before I got to seven figures, it was like, how do I get to seven figures? That was the question.
That was the question. You could say that I was, you know, seeking significance. I was seeking that I like prove to myself into an industry where I was behind the scenes for over a decade and always kind of had this seat of doubt, like could I actually—like can I? Do I know what I'm talking about, or am I just a fluke with, you know, it's not me, it's the clients that I'm working with?
I had a lot, I felt like I had a lot to prove. Now the questions I ask are like, what's the point of it all? Not to be like doom and gloom, but like what do I really want? What do I want my week to look like? What do I want my schedule to look like?
Do I really want to have 18 meetings in a week? Do I want to do more admin and less creative work? I mean, it's really about figuring out what you want and then building the systems and getting the support and the right people in who can make sure that you're not building this, you know, this castle that you never really wanted in the first place.
So this is a common—I like to ask this question because people have different approaches to it—but there are sort of two schools of thought. One is get ultimate clarity on your life's purpose and mission and build it accordingly.
The other approach is just go f around and find out. Yeah, f around and find out. If you're a brand new entrepreneur, what's your advice?
F around and find out because here's the thing: my mission didn't become clear to me until I f around and found out, got feedback, and was like, oh, I struck a chord with people.
You know, I knew I had a lot to say about marketing. It wasn't until I did a video or no, it might have been a live call with some of my students, and I kind of—it just fell out of my mouth. I'm like, you know, I just want to like deify the internet.
Then everyone was like, whoa, that's it. That's it. That's your thing. Now that is my mission.
Coming from a personal development background, I used to go to all these networking events, and it would drive me freaking crazy because there are all these like holier-than-thou, you know, people who would go up to and be like, Alex, what's your purpose?
Honestly, back then, to pay my rent. Yep, to not have to go get a regular job. You know, like what do you mean what's my purpose?
If I'm waiting for suddenly my purpose or mission to like download in this period of just complete inaction because I haven't gotten clarity yet, I'm never going to go anywhere.
Yeah, I'm 100% with you on that. I also, I laugh because I've been in many of those rooms, and the irony of those things is that very often the people that are doing that and pontificating on their life purpose don't make any f money, aren't making any impact, and aren't going anywhere.
Right, and they're like, yeah, but I live a peaceful life. But a lot of them are in tremendous internal conflict because they've just been told that they need to do this to get to the place they want to go and make sure they live in alignment.
But I very much believe that you have to be deep enough into something to really understand if you like it and if you're good at it.
Exactly. Until you have enough exposure and enough reps, you won't know that. You absolutely won't. My path has changed direction so many times, and it will continue to change direction as I learn about myself.
I think that's what business does. I mean, they say business isn't personal, and yeah, okay, I get why people say that, but to me, it's the most personal thing ever because you will never learn more about yourself than starting a business or doing the thing that scares the crap out of you and then getting that feedback, pivoting, and going, okay.
Then asking yourself, is this actually what I want? So this is a common—I like to ask this question because people have different approaches to it—but there are sort of two schools of thought.
One is get ultimate clarity on your life's purpose and mission and build it accordingly. The other approach is just go f around and find out.
F around and find out. If you're a brand new entrepreneur, what's your advice?
F around and find out because here's the thing: my mission didn't become clear to me until I f around and found out, got feedback, and was like, oh, I struck a chord with people.
You know, I knew I had a lot to say about marketing. It wasn't until I did a video or no, it might have been a live call with some of my students, and I kind of—it just fell out of my mouth. I'm like, you know, I just want to like deify the internet.
Then everyone was like, whoa, that's it. That's it. That's your thing. Now that is my mission.
Coming from a personal development background, I used to go to all these networking events, and it would drive me freaking crazy because there are all these like holier-than-thou, you know, people who would go up to and be like, Alex, what's your purpose?
Honestly, back then, to pay my rent. Yep, to not have to go get a regular job. You know, like what do you mean what's my purpose?
If I'm waiting for suddenly my purpose or mission to like download in this period of just complete inaction because I haven't gotten clarity yet, I'm never going to go anywhere.
Yeah, I'm 100% with you on that. I also, I laugh because I've been in many of those rooms, and the irony of those things is that very often the people that are doing that and pontificating on their life purpose don't make any f money, aren't making any impact, and aren't going anywhere.
Right, and they're like, yeah, but I live a peaceful life. But a lot of them are in tremendous internal conflict because they've just been told that they need to do this to get to the place they want to go and make sure they live in alignment.
But I very much believe that you have to be deep enough into something to really understand if you like it and if you're good at it.
Exactly. Until you have enough exposure and enough reps, you won't know that. You absolutely won't. My path has changed direction so many times, and it will continue to change direction as I learn about myself.
I think that's what business does. I mean, they say business isn't personal, and yeah, okay, I get why people say that, but to me, it's the most personal thing ever because you will never learn more about yourself than starting a business or doing the thing that scares the crap out of you and then getting that feedback, pivoting, and going, okay.
Then asking yourself, is this actually what I want?
All right, so I want to talk about something, but I also want to point out how much I appreciate your attempt to moderate the use of the word f and replacing it with frecking and other things.
I'm like, you know, Brad's okay with me saying f. I say f so much I get a lot of people emailing me, a lot of people responding to my emails being like, the language, I'm unfollowing you. It's so unprofessional.
I'm like, oh please, f off.
F you. So speaking of crafting your day-to-day and your day-to-day changing all the time, are the robots coming to steal your job?
Good question. Hey, listen, I think there's going to always be like, there's no yes and or there's no yes and no answer. It's not black or white.
I think AI is incredible. I think AI can replace a lot of tasks. I know there's a lot of fear right now, especially in the copywriting industry and the people that I coach and train that, oh, what's the point if AI can do it?
It's like, yeah, AI can do it. It can generate words, but as a copywriter, is that all you do? Generate words? No. I think actually our whole conversation really highlighted that.
We didn't talk about my process for sitting down and like finger typing, you know, two-finger typing copy. We talked about what we think about. We talked about the psychology behind it. We talked about how to be more persuasive. We talked about how to communicate with empathy.
So while there are going to be for sure some copywriters who always have looked at copy as a way to make quick money, and then before AI would have realized it's actually not an easy way to make money, it's still a skill that takes time to learn.
I think what's happening is there's just a shift happening where copywriting and probably any, you know, functional area needs to be redefined to say, yes, AI can generate words, but as a copywriter, that is such a small part of what I actually do.
Right now, I do feel like there's this crisis happening in the marketing world where there's so many AI bros teaching other AI bros about how to use AI to like start a business overnight or to launch a new campaign overnight and make all this money.
But what's really happening is the internet is becoming flooded with a lot of just sort of generic, watered-down, diluted messaging that doesn't really have any emotion, heart, humor, humanity, power behind it, and that's adding to this noise of people just wanting to shut down.
My philosophy is that there's actually an ever-rising premium on true messaging and copywriting that fosters connection and that there will be a huge demand as businesses start to realize, oh, maybe AI is a cool tool, but it's not the magic button that I thought it would be in terms of building trust with my audience, which is what we all need to be focusing on right now if we are selling to humans, which I'm pretty sure we all are at this point in time.
So it's 2025. What is something that people are doing with AI that they think is great but is really a terrible mistake?
I think it's the hamster wheel of, oh my God, you know, I used to post on social media once a week, but now I can post on social media 500 times a week, and that must mean I'm going to grow 500 times faster than everybody else.
The problem is if everybody does that, it really truly becomes a race to the bottom because you're like creating—content marketing is no longer about who can create more content faster. I think it used to be.
I don't want to say that it's not important to have frequency and consistency in what you do, but how do you instead shift this mindset of how do I create more content faster to how do I create more connection with the right people?
That might mean actually posting less. So that's what I'm playing around with this year is like I'm going to reevaluate my content marketing strategy that really did serve me well for years and instead go, how do I simplify but then go deeper and create more content that's truly from the heart and not just, again, that hamster wheel of more, more, more.
We are running out of time. I know you've got a tight schedule here. I'm going to have to ask you a thousand questions on other things later, but we can come back. We can do a part two.
I love it. While you're talking about content creation and being thoughtful about it, you have a solid YouTube following. Shorts, three-minute videos, 10-minute videos. What do you find has the most engagement and what makes the most sense for you?
I would say the longer form, like 8 to 12 minutes, 100%. Shorts are great for getting the, like getting attention, and it can be great in terms of feeding your channel, but if you want people to—like the end goal ultimately, I think about everything is how do I get more people on my email list?
People often aren't going to watch a short and get enough value or connection where they're then going to seek out a link to go join your email list. But they will watch an eight-minute video and go, oh my gosh, I feel like I know this person. I want to go get the free thing that they're talking about.
So I think longer form in terms of like 8 to 12 minutes on YouTube is where it's at.
Love it, Alex. It is awesome to get some time in. Next time you're in Austin, let me know for sure. We do hopefully we'll do round two in person.
Can't wait. Thank you so much, Brad. Thank you. My director of marketing told me to read this.
Thank you for tuning in to Beyond a Million. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and drop a comment below. We'd love to know your thoughts. If you want to learn the strategies that our guests, such as Neil Patel, Amy Porterfield, and Grant Cardone, used to scale their business, you can find more episodes on our website at beyondmillion.com.