Below is the transcription for this episode:
Matt: Good morning everybody. It is Tuesday September 28. I always have to look up at my screen and see what day it is to be happy to see you guys here. Let me adjust a little bit of a spike care thing going on here. There we go. Alright, good to see everybody here. Well, we've only got 11 People, people are coming on texts or giving us a comment, let us know where you're tuning in from. We've got Paul's in the house with Murray's in the house, good to see Murray again, I think you were here yesterday, what's up, and we think our text message just went out, so we'll have a lot more people joining now. Sarah, what's good to see you. Sonia, Paul, where are you guys tuning in from? It's always cool to see people tuning in from all over the world. And, yeah, we've got a great guest in the house for those of you who are newer who haven't watched rubes, What's up, who haven't watched wake up legendary before we go live every single Monday through Friday at 10pm Eastern here on our Facebook page, and afterwards we post it to Spotify and Apple podcasts and. Geez, where else you too, so it's kind of all over the place but the live version is always on our Facebook page okay so. All right, now we've got a lot more people in the comments, good to see everybody here. Awesome, awesome, good to see. So, each day we'll bring on a new guest or some sort of a guest, whether it's an affiliate of ours or just a client somebody who's purchased our Blueprints or something like that. And today I'm excited to bring on Dustin so for everybody who's in the chat if you can give me a little hand clap emoji, and welcome, Dustin on. Dustin what's going on?
Dustin: Hey how you doing,
Matt: I'm great. I'm great. So you're in South Africa, right.
Dustin: Yeah.
Matt: Awesome. Well thanks for what time it is there, it's got to be. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna guess like six or seven viewers. Cool, well, why don't you let people here who are tuning into our show, let them into your world a little bit and kind of just tell us, what do you do for work right now you've got a full time job, family, you've got a lot of different stuff. And so this has been kind of a passion business for you. What, you know, what led you to serve it coming online, maybe take us back in like into your career and sort of your thoughts of doing something online?
Dustin: Well, consequently, I am the financial director for a national consulting director. We're a large national mall and nature is entrepreneurial. And being an accountant. You see a lot of business, but you don't actually get to be entrepreneurial, because you’re always getting into the numbers. And I would say about a year and a half ago, as we were coming out of covid I was thinking about just what kind of business I would want to go into. A lot of people were working from home. Businesses were closing, and even our business consulting engineering, a lot of projects were put on hold. A lot of budgets, and loss of jobs is gone from new brain rovers. I want to launch. May or May June last year I was trying to come to a position. I don't have that much. And I really only have an hour with the weekends. I’ve got boys. And there they keep me busy. I needed to find something in the house. I'm searching. It took until about January this year. I stumbled across a Facebook post making a pitch on doing a lifestyle business, doing it on Facebook, and actually something I'm passionate about which is writing. I'm able to do this online. And that's what sparked the interest in learning about affiliate profit in the first time that I'd ever heard about. And so that's, yeah that will continue researching and reading up on it. That’s where I started.
Matt: That's cool. In your journey of discovering sort of, what, how did you select a business model? Because you're already in consulting, basically. So, affiliate marketing, why didn't you go into launching a consulting business or something like that or what, what appealed about the affiliate marketing business specifically?
Dustin: A lot of things. Practically zero overhead. That's what appealed to me the most. Many businesses have fixed overheads like electricity, leases, and other things. If you're not making any money you can’t pay it. Today, with affiliate marketing, online business you just have to spend a little time. That's it. So your return on investment grade. It's a no brainer.
Matt: That’s so true. And you are an accountant. So my wife owns, like a real brick and mortar therapy practice right, and you know we do all the books for that, so I'm also a side accountant. Not really but my sister's a CPA, and, and, and so any questions I have I go to her I've really learned how to do, you know, decent, small business accounting, and I've just had. But here's what I'll say is, I would seem most people in this industry in the, in the digital marketing industry, affiliate marketing industry have no idea what the real margins of most businesses are, which are very small, and so my guess is, when you came online and you were like oh my god there is no overhead to this, especially if you can, organically, figure out how to organically without paying a ton in ads. How to generate new leads and customers predictably.
Dustin: And also when I discovered organic marketing and not having to pay for ads which was another thing I just couldn’t get over, it was amazing.
Matt: Yes. It's so true. I, yeah, for me, you know, we hosted this webinar a couple weeks ago for our affiliates, and, and we kept calling it the greatest opportunity ever in this industry. And that's because it is being able to sell even mid ticket or high ticket, digital products that are fully digital that have massive margins, is, is crazy and then on top of it, zero support, zero people to help you with merchant accounts. Zero legal fees, you know, to have consulting on the legalities of the business. I mean maybe you get a little, you do some reading or something online about, you know how to cover your asses as an affiliate marketer, but for the most part, like the big costs land on the actual business doing the fulfillment they handle all that the affiliate just has very, very little. It's, yeah, it's crazy. It is, I think you're right, I think it is, at least to my knowledge, the simplest sort of least amount of friction to get something started and get going and start selling something, I think that's true. Maybe the other one is like creating content getting paid by the content providers like just being a content creator alone and not dealing with sales funnels that couldn't be more, but your income is really capped in that scenario, and it's fully dependent on you being able to be, you know, in that world you've got to be a top 1% of content creators in the world, in order to pull it off as an affiliate.
Dustin: I understand and also if you want to go away for the weekend or a week you can just get up and go you don’t have to worry about requesting off. Ultimately everything just gets better and better.
Matt: What, what do you feel has been most successful for you and what do you do to drive leads and how's that gone and how have you learned that?
Dustin: Well, I have a mentor and I honestly believe everyone needs some sort of mentor or program that guides them, because no matter where you are on your journey you never stop learning. It doesn't matter where you are, you are always going to need someone to help you that can help you learn something you don’t know. So I started out doing a lot of paid ads, and it wasn’t the best investment for me so I started researching organic marketing and the Legendary Marketer program helped me learn to do organic marketing through trial and error and just trying out and learning about it and realized it was a lot easier to just do organic marketing and ou build your relationships with organic marketing and you start to learn and build relationships. With the pai ads type of marketing you get more leads coming in but people don’t really know who you are and you're not building your relationship.
Matt: Yeah, yeah that's a good point. I think a lot of people don't realize that with paid ads, your conversion rate on everything in your sales funnel is going to be a little bit lower and you have to build that into your costs. But yeah, if you can generate a highly qualified lead the way that you're talking about. We see people who have large TikTok channels who cultivate and curate those tick tock channels, and people who go live on tick tock or on Facebook or on YouTube, and they speak directly to their audience their conversion rates are 235 times higher than to cold traffic. And there's reasons for that, I mean, you're going to do a lot more work because you're going to be creating content for them, you're going to be going live with them, but I wrote about this in an email that we sent out as a weekly roundup, that it's called the mini webinar strategy. And, Yeah, you can do that in multiple different ways. You can do that through messaging people, you can do it through actually conducting a live webinar or going live on Tik Tok or whatever, but man, if you can break through the barrier. There's a lot of internal hurdles to getting on in life. You know a lot of people struggle with like oh my gosh there's nobody here there's nobody who's tuning in. Oh god, I'm nervous, you know, all that stuff but when people start to break through that and they go live. The results are crazy. They're crazy. And the sales pour in, so anybody who's on here as if it was a TikTok on Instagram or YouTube, I mean, just go live with like a quick little 10 minute training, like a, like a 10 like have something planned out like three things to consider when starting three things not to do. if starting an online business in 2021 and then just talk through three things and just go live, but the contents important but it's not nearly as important as just people feeling a level of transparency from you and feeling like wow, okay, this guy that I, you know, saw one time out there in outer space on the internet messaging me, or creating these tic tock videos is a real person. Answering my questions that's pretty cool. People love to win people. I've looked through comments before this one girl Sarah. She goes live a lot to her audience, and she stopped going live for a little bit, I think she had like COVID or something, and the comments on her on her channel were like, when are you going live again. I miss our lives, I miss your lives like everybody was just like, up in arms you know cuz she wasn't too anyway. So my point is, whether you're doing that as a live, that's just one example, or you're doing it through messaging or through however you choose to do it. I wanted to emphasize that when you sort of nurture that audience when it's real, when it's like, you know, when it's, when it's like, basically a human conversation. You can really warm up that lead and get a really highly qualified lead. I think that's true. Well I know that's true, I've seen that in practice, but also. Here's the next step to that, the next step is taking that feeling because really, that's a marketing and sales lesson for everybody. What you're doing Dustin is taking you're transferring a feeling to somebody right so you have a sense of confidence of clarity of knowledge. You have a feeling, and you are essentially transferring that feeling to another person. Now, that can be done in marketing automation as well, but it takes a little time and it takes a little bit of nuance. So, you know whether you do that through pre-recording webinars, or whatever it is, there's ways that you can do that in automation, which might be the next stage or the next level for you, if that makes sense. Cool. What do you what, what's like the future got for you like what is he so you're at this place now you're seeing some success, what's down the pipe so to speak. What are you excited for?
Dustin: There’s a lot to be excited about in this industry. I think the most exciting thing for me is meeting new people, I think that's the best thing about this. I enjoy meeting new people, you find a lot of people that need encouragement in the online community. Even if I don't get sales on them, just making sure I try to help them. But I think for me it’s just being in a different environment. Moving away from the corporate environment but at this point it’s not one of my goals, I do enjoy what I do, but this is just one of the passions I have. I can’t wait to get up and work on my affiliate marketing business. It’s a hobby and it’s a hobby that makes me money. Which is great because I can take my family on bigger holidays than what I have been. But I think for me it's just that opportunity to be able to in maybe five years time have the option to be able to say I’ve had enough of the corporate life, I want to settle down and work from home and spend more time with my family and it’s nice to have that option. It’s almost like a retirement thing, because this is the kind of business you can do until you’re 100. I am currently talking to a guy going into the 15 day challenge that's 86 years old and he's so passionate and I couldn't believe it when he told me how old he was.
Matt: That's cool. That's cool. That's really cool. I feel like there's a lot to pull out there but I like what you said about. I liked what you said about the just the social element of the business meeting new people, like I think that this is such a side like it's really weird to me so like 11 years ago, this was 11 years ago, I was like this 22 year old kid 20, 21 year old kid, like, super young could barely grow facial hair like and. And this, this mentor of mine did a did a webinar, and it was called the fast JV formula fast joint venture formula, and he said, Hey look, many of you have skills, and you have the ability and you might even have an email list that you started to build, or you have a Facebook group, and, and they, you have a you have a good audience but maybe you don't have a product right now that you can promote in an instant, and produce some commissions, and then there's others of you who have a little product that you created because you and I can create this little product. And so we connected so anyway, it was all about sort of messaging people, You basically message and be like hey, do you have a list that you know maybe a joint venture and I have this product so I created this product called the first page formula, which was in SEO product teaching people how to rank their sites on Google, I learned really quickly how to rank sites on Google using SEO and I joint venture with this lady, Andrea. Andrea had a smaller list but just like you had really cultivated that list, so really built relationships, and that list was incredibly valuable. So, so maybe only like a couple 1000 people or something not like 10,000 people or 100,000, smaller list and. And that was the first like sales of my product that ever happened was we joint ventures, and also included a done for you, website that I built for her audience whoever bought the product so it was only a couple sales that came through but it generated and started, but was way better than that. Yes I got, I got a little bit of. I got a little bit of traction for you know a little excitement that I that I made some sales, but what happened was, Andrea and I kept in touch for years and still are to this day still friends 11 years later, and she was the one who introduced me to Dave and got me hooked up with legendary to start. Basically I started as a consultant to legendary in marketing and in education so just edging at creating training videos, basically, and it turned into this which is like, I've been here for three years now. It's my home. It's where I love to be and it all, you know, stemmed from that one relationship, and that same mentor who kind of made that connection for us, he said to me one time he said, Hey look, getting from getting from zero to six figures is about talent and skill. It's about learning hard skills and getting from six to seven figures is about relational capital. So, relational capital online in the form of who, along the path from $0 to six figures, who did you screw over, who did you shit talk. Who did you, you know what bridges you burned, because if you're lucky enough to make it to six figures. Right then, going from six to seven is going to require a lot of partnerships, it's going to require you to have a great reputation. It's going to require that you haven't, you know, should talk to a lot of people so then they go out and they're like, now this guy's not actually very good he's not a good guy. And I think a lot of people miss that element. I mean, a lot of people who are here, like, trying to get to six figures and I get that. I'm not trying to speak to the wrong audience or anything but I feel like that piece for me, became very true because every relationship that I had along the way, maybe with the exception of one or two that I had a learning lesson from where I screwed up or I kind of shared. I just made bad decisions, but for the most part, I have. Yeah, I have really been careful with relationships. And when I, When I got to the point three years ago where I was introduced to Dave and Hangouts. And I don't have any water, but when I was introduced, it was like he went around and asked, and was like, and he went around and asked, bad feedback right it was like, oh yeah. He's a good dude, like he could probably dress. He's a good guy. So anyway, all that to say, I just saw some comments, and basically, for anybody, I didn't make some weird comment about Bitcoin, I'm not watching so I don't know what's going on but no I did not make a comment about Bitcoin or anything so anyway, that's all. Keep going to us and. So, I'll give you the final word today. Speak to our audience, speak to the people who are just getting started, the people who are just trying to feel out the online space. What, what would you say to somebody who's maybe a little hesitant, a little skeptical. And, you know it is in your shoes, back when you first discovered Legendary in affiliate marketing, what would you say to that person?
Dustin: I would say just jump in the water, and go all in. It’s not easy, you have to have commitment, drive, determination and all those things. But if you stick it out it’s probably the best business you’ll ever come across. It doesn’t benefit me by saying that but being in business my whole life I've never seen a business model that helps people and builds relationships and you can also do part time which is really really great. And don’t give up, it doesn't happen overnight. A lot of people want to make that first sale. And they give up after a few weeks and I know people who have taken three months to make their first sale and then it just explodes. It’s all about preparation and learning and my advice is don’t give up, go all in.
Matt: I love it. Well thanks for coming on and taking a little bit of time out of your busy schedule, I love that. I just wanted to say I love that you're, I love the way that you said, I'm excited to work on my business and I always love getting out with people who are like. Now, when I get off my job, I'm excited. Back in the day like I was, I was the same thing for me like I was working in a coffee roasting warehouse. And, yeah, I, I basically, I would get up in the morning at 4am, I would work on my business for two hours I go to work, I would come home, I was so exhausted I would like pass out on my floor next to my dog for like 30 minutes, and then I'd work on my business the rest of the day, and I was watching Google Ads courses anyway, I just, but I felt the exact same way I frickin loved, I was absolutely in love with it and I just love that energy and, and I'm excited for it. If you need anything from us, just let us know.
Dustin: Thank you for the opportunity.
Matt: Yeah, thanks for coming on. Alright guys if you want to get in touch with Dustin I didn't put his stuff up before but you can find him on Facebook, it's right there. You can add him on Facebook, let him know and say hey, we just, we just say yo and Wake Up Legendary and, and just, you know, give a little bit of feedback on the show. Tell him you know I was encouraged or felt inspired by your story so anyway guys thanks for popping on, I'll be back here again tomorrow, Wednesday, and then I think we're gonna have Dave back Thursday, Friday, through his little nose operation that he had done on his deviated septum so anyway. Dave, we'll be back, I think there's a Friday, we will, it'll be a touching go kind of feel it out kind of thing. otherwise, so for sure be back next week, I think, later this week he'll be back, and it good to see all you guys on here go give Dustin a little follow up. And, Yeah, take it easy. See you guys.
