(Transcript continued from the Episode 089 show notes and audio podcast)

I got a letter from Dave Ozment in Georgia. Dave has listened to all of the episodes. He found me through Pat, as many of you have. He wrote and said some really nice things, it’s almost a two page letter.

In fact, I didn’t even get it for the first couple of weeks because I was in Tokyo with my day job doing some cool stuff over there, eating a tremendous amount of raw fish and other delectable delights, including octopus suckers and a lot of other stuff. I’ll put a couple of pictures in the show notes at LateNightInternetMarketing.com/089. If you zoom in on one of the pictures, you can see the octopus tentacle suckers that I was eating over in Japan. That’s a whole other podcast, the octopus podcast, I’ll have to think about that.

Dave wrote me this really nice letter. The first thing he tells me is how much he enjoys the show, how he has listened to every episode, and how he found me through Pat. He mentions a couple of lines that he likes. One of the things that he picks up that I say all the time is “if you’ll work on your business a little bit each day, over time you’ll really like the results.” I really do believe that. For me it’s kind of a physician’s “heal thy self.” I’ve told you guys this before, you should do what I say and not necessarily what I do, because even I get off track.

I’ve been doing this on and off since 2007, podcasting since 2009, and sometimes I get off track. Probably you do, too. Maybe you’re off track right now. Today is the day; get back on track tonight, when you get home, when you get out of your car. Do a little something. Maybe you haven’t done anything for a couple of weeks but listen to podcasts. Take a little action today.

Dave says, “Speaking of overwhelm,” how do I manage to get it all done? Well, I don’t. I do a lot of stuff. We’ve talked about all of it; I travel, I have a day job, I have four kids, they’re awesome by the way. In fact, just tonight, just an hour ago I was out on the baseball field with my almost 9-year-old son (he’ll be 9 in January) playing kid pitch baseball.

They’re in the tournament, and we won on a walk off double. A kid who doesn’t have the highest batting average on the team is up, we have two outs in the bottom of the last inning with a runner in scoring position, and this kid who doesn’t always hit the ball, boy did he hit tonight. With two strikes, he slaps the ball out into center field, scoring the winning run with a walk off double. Totally awesome. Kids go crazy, the bench empties, kids on the other team a couple of them had tears in their eyes because they had lost. Coaches on the other team were upset because there were some bad calls, we don’t get the world’s best officiating crews in 9-year-old baseball.

That’s what I was doing. Dave wants to know how I do it all. The answer is I don’t. Obviously, I don’t, because this podcast hasn’t been around for the last six months. For that, I apologize.

I do have this dream of helping so many people with this podcast to be so successful that I can actually do this full time. I do have that dream. I don’t know when that will be. As I’ve said many times, I love my day job. In order to get there, I have to be more consistent with this content. In order for you to get where you want to be, you have to be more consistent with what you’re doing.

So I get this letter from Dave and he says, “I want to thank you for all of the stuff,” some other advice that I gave on the podcast months or years ago about how to get really cool animated videos on Fiverr, he talks about Zig Ziglar quotes and getting what you want by helping other people get what they want. It’s just a really nice letter.

He says, “Hey, I’m writing to ask you a favor. Let’s have another podcast episode.”

Dave, thank you, that was just the motivation that I needed. Awesome stuff.

Dave has a lot of stuff going on. He has affiliate sites that are actually making him money. If Dave can make money and these other people can make money with affiliate marketing, you can do it too. Dave is not making $170billion a year and retired on a beach in Jamaica, but he is making a profit with his sites.

He also has a podcast that is a passion of his, which really gave me a little pause. He has a podcast about Alabama football. That’s tough for me, because I’m a Texas Aggie. We just joined the SEC and Alabama just smacked us badly, really badly, like ugliness on national television. As big an Aggie fan as I am and as much as I think the Texas Aggies are awesome, I’ve said many times if I had to go to college 1,000 times I would go over and over again to Texas A&M University all 1,000 times, I have no interest to go anywhere else. But when it comes to football, when you’re facing a traditional powerhouse football team, an SEC team like Alabama, and they decide to just jam the ball down your throat, nothing fancy, just power football, straight ahead, and you can’t stop them, that makes for a really long afternoon. My Aggies will be fine, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for Alabama football and for Dave for reaching out.

What can we learn from Dave?

All of that is about me. What does Dave have to say that you need to recognize is really about you?

First of all, Dave hits this point. If you do a little bit of stuff every day – just a little, not a lot, skip that episode of NCIS – if you do that over and over again, most days of the week, after a year you’ll really like the results. That’s one thing that Dave calls out.

The second thing that he calls out, that I think is maybe more important, is reaching out to people is a good thing to do. Dave sends me this letter blind in an envelope, I don’t even get it for three weeks, he even enclosed a little gift inside. Thank you very much, Dave, that was very kind. What a great guy. Totally unnecessary, not needed, but it really made my day. A little piece of Dave, maybe it took him an hour to pull all of this together and look up the address. I’m not going to forget that.

I think there’s a lesson in there about how to treat people and how to treat your customers. If you’re trying to start a business online, that’s also how you should treat your customers. I think that’s how you should approach life.

Kudos to you, Dave. I think that’s the best kind of example. He just writes to express his appreciation and gratitude. How much better would the world be if we were all like that, if we were all looking around for ways to help people, to encourage people, to be a bright spot in people’s lives? Whether that’s your customers, the people that are following you, your children, your neighbors, the people at work that you meet, the people that work for you. What a great example, Dave. Thank you very much for that.

If you want to be more like Dave, you want to hook up with him online, go check him out over at BamaHammer.com. He has a partnership with those guys over there, he’s running the Alabama football podcast over there. It’s really cool, it’s a nice podcast. Give it a listen. Even if you’re not crazy about SEC football like I am, give Dave a shout out, tell him you heard him on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I think he’ll like that.

Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie

This next segment is something that occurred to me at 37,000 feet over the ocean when I was on my way back to the United States from Asia. Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie. I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out here.

My contention is that one of the key ways to stay focused on your business, to keep moving forward, to keep the momentum going, to accomplish this doing a little bit every day is to keep your business top of mind. There are lots of ways you can do this.

You can listen to podcasts like Late Night Internet Marketing and other great business podcasts, like the Smart Passive Income Podcast, John Lee Dumas’s Entrepreneur On Fire podcast. By the way, I will be on Entrepreneur on Fire on December 30, 2015, and I have an interview with John coming up here in the next couple of weeks.

There’s this old saying that everything is marketing and marketing is everything. It occurred to me that every fortune cookie can teach you a lesson about your business. To prove this, I’ve been collecting up fortune cookies. Usually I don’t get those overseas, I only get them in the United States, I don’t know what’s up with that. I’ve been collecting up fortune cookies and I’ve been saving them up for this weekly episode.

My intention is to use this as a way to work in some motivational content, because I think one of the hardest things about internet business, especially if it’s a side gig for you, is staying motivated, keeping after it, doing it every day. So sneaking in a little motivational content I think is good.

So my first segment of Late Night Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie…

This week’s fortune cookie (and this is a real fortune cookie) says, “It could be better, but it’s good enough.”

This jumped out at me as something really important for internet businesses and solopreneurs. Something that I’ve known for a long time, something that was taught to me by Jason Van Orden and Jeremy Frandsen over at Internet Business Mastery way back in 2007. That is that sometimes you just have to pull the trigger, you have to ship the minimum viable product, you can’t wait for perfection.

If you are someone who is sitting there worried that the website that you’re about to launch is just not quite good enough, that the article you’re about to write needs a couple more days of editing, that the product that you’re about to launch isn’t good enough, because you’re paralyzed worried about whether or not it’s good enough because you know it could be better, according to this fortune cookie it’s good enough, you should go ahead and pull the trigger. Launch the minimum viable product.

I’m not saying you should ship garbage, but ship whatever is good enough and let’s get it out there. Chances are it’s probably already good enough and you should just ship it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t work on it afterwards. Make it better. Edit the post live. Put out another episode that’s even better, if it’s a podcast. Deliver additional value to your customers after the sale, if it’s a product. Go ahead and ship it.

Quit using perfection as an excuse to delay the work on your business. That’s something you can do right now today, a change you can make. Be more aggressive. Get it out there. People will give you feedback. They’re going to give you feedback anyway, be responsive to the feedback but don’t wait. If the product, or podcast episode, or blog post, or tweet, or Facebook post is on your hard drive or in your head it’s not helping anybody, especially not you and your business.

My fortune cookie, “It could be better, but it’s good enough,” that’s a pretty wise fortune cookie. I like this one as the first installment of the Late Night Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie.

This Week in Internet Marketing: Facebook Video

I like to stay abreast of internet marketing news and I encourage you to do the same. We talk a lot about affiliate marketing. Some of you are doing some affiliate marketing with another kind of business, some of you are trying to establish a brand online; probably all of you are using or considering using Facebook.

I think Facebook continues to amaze me. I think they’re at 1.5 billion users. There have been some studies recently about what’s going on with Facebook. Are they maxed out? I think one of the interesting things that’s going on, particularly, there was an article in The Wall Street Journal where the Global Web Index Study was reported that in the third quarter one-third of Facebook users updated their status at some time. That’s down from what is usually half of the people in any given quarter make at least one status update, or at least that’s how I understand the study, and that trend is down.

Everybody has always wondered will Facebook go the way of the Dodo Bird like MySpace did, will it disappear, will it come less relevant. There are a lot of people in the industry that Facebook drives them crazy and they’re sick of it. Leo Laporte is one of my favorite anti-Facebook people out there who complains about the way Facebook is. He also complains about Twitter. He has some interesting opinions on all of that.

So it looks like that trend is there. There’s nothing to do there.

I think the more interesting data that also came out this week was from another article where Facebook was reporting 8 billion video views a day. That is a lot of video views a day and those 8 billion video views are coming from 500,000,000 people.

You hear a lot of arguments about this. They basically have 1.5 billion users, about one-third of them are viewing these videos. Of course the thing you always hear is that a lot of those views are over-counted because of the way Facebook counts video views, if you just scroll them in your feed and they’re viewed a little bit that gets counted.

My friends and I have all tested this. Numbers aside, I don’t know if there are 500,000,000 views are really the equivalent of 200,000,000 YouTube views. Maybe the marketing value of 200,000,000 YouTube views because someone is actually hitting the play button is equivalent to 500,000,000 Facebook views because they’re not actually hitting a play button. Maybe there are some equivalents there, but who cares? Holy cow. It’s a ton of video views.

I know that a lot of my friends  are having a lot of success with their videos being shown on Facebook. They’re getting engagement, they’re getting comments on the videos. If you’re in a niche where you are using video and you’re typically posting to YouTube, of course you want to be sure that you’re also posting the same video to Facebook and linking back to your website. That’s generally what I recommend. It depends on exactly what you’re doing, but a lot of times it’s really good for the call to action in the video to have something to do with getting back to the website where you can capture the lead.

Give it a try. If you’re not doing it right now, you can get some really interesting results. Specifically, regarding what Dave Ozment mentioned earlier when I was talking about the fact that you can get some really cool videos made on Fiverr for not much money, really eye catching animated videos. Those tend to work really well on Facebook.

Think about it as a Facebook user. What kind of animated video would catch your eye and cause you to pause long enough to possibly click over to a website to read an article and then maybe get a user to leave their contact information so you can capture the lead? That’s a really important idea, that idea of putting yourself in the spot of the Facebook user. When it costs only $5 or $10 to throw together a Fiverr video and post it on Facebook, you maybe spend another $10 or $20 promoting it if you want to test something out, that can be a really effective way.

I encourage you to do that, post a video to Facebook and YouTube this week, promote both of them and see which one gets the most views, and let me know. Leave me a comment in the comments at LateNightInternetMarketing.com/089 or reach out to me on Twitter @Masonworld and let me know what happens with your experiment. I’m very curious. My results show that I’m getting a lot more views in my Facebook feed than I am on YouTube, and I think you’ll find the same thing.

How those convert is going to depend on exactly what you’re trying to do with the videos. Do the experiment, do that little something this week and post a video. Maybe it’s just an iPhone video. Let me know what you think.

Wrapping Things Up…

That’s going to do it for this week. I have a lot more stuff planned for coming weeks. I’m trying to be more planful about what the episodes are going to be four or five episodes in advance. My number one priority for internet marketing is to get this podcast out every week. Let see how I do.

If you think that’s a great idea and you want to help me, give me a shout out @Masonworld on Twitter and let me know you’re listening, that you’re liking it, that you want more episodes, and I’ll be cranking them out. Those tweets really help. It doesn’t have to be a two page letter like Dave sent me, just the tweets themselves help and they’re very much appreciated. I look forward to hearing from you.

Until next time.

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