Below is the transcription for this episode:
Matt: What is going on everybody? Happy Wednesday, new month, June 1, and we're live. And if you are new to the show for the first time here, you can text the letters, text the letters WL 132968553. You'll get a short little text message reminder, every time that we go live. It'll pull open on your phone. It'll say, Hey, here's a little show intro, whatever. We write up a little blurb, and then there's a link you can dive right into the live super easy if you would like some merch I've got all sorts of merchandise if you want some merch okay I got I got a whole wardrobe just you can go to belegendary.shop, I got people asking me all the time or email me where can we get it hats, shirts, hoodies, sweatpants, you name so every single Monday through Friday for the past I don't even know. We started doing this around 2020, early 2020 or something like that. We go live with a guest and it's unrehearsed and unscripted. Don't even give them questions that we're going to ask. We honestly don't even know where it's gonna go honestly. And we just unpack a little bit about their story and their journey. When we were at our last mastermind Dave said something he said you know, people don't need more training. They need to hear more stories. And it's really true and sent throughout my journey. I know that that sounds like I've had days where I'd be like, You know what, Dude, shut up. But the truth is, is I've had a lot of points in my journey where I was able to push through and figure things out and it was because I was inspired it was because I had the right people and the right stories around me that inspired me and helped me believe and so that's part of why we've taken this approach on the show. And so, we're going to bring on our guests for today. I think he's from Atlanta, but now residing in Florida. Is that right Mike?
Mike: That is correct. I am in South Florida. I grew up in Atlanta. So I made the trip back here. The perfect winter.
Matt: Nice, nice. Well, thanks for coming on. You are sort of in our community. Tell us a little bit about the early days of getting started online. For those of you who don't know, we give a little a little questionnaire that we have people submit and you're talking about how you kind of started in drop shipping but do you go way back so tell us a little bit about your journey online and you've been in this about the same amount of time that I have which is pretty rare. Most people are out here by now. Tell us a little bit about your journey online and how you got started. Well,
Mike: I mean, online around the late 2000s before like around 2008-2009 ish. I actually got into drop shipping and so I was doing it was before the whole craze
Matt: Yeah I didn't even know drop shipping was a thing.
Mike: I was an eBay hound teenager. I would always wonder how these people would get all these different things and posts on there. I've been wanting to make money since I was like 1314 years old.
Matt: Hey, me too. I used to steal my parents debit card and would buy wholesale calculators and resell them on eBay for like a small profit.
Mike: Exactly, exactly the same. So I came across it. I knew where to start getting the suppliers. I looked at all the different suppliers in the Asian market. And the biggest opportunity that came around was the whole p90x craze and I saw that I can get p90x DVDs. And wholesale super cheap and they were going where they were going up at that time for upwards of 100 bucks for a whole set. And I was getting them for maybe like $20 a set and so the market was crazy. And that's what I started doing and I was making a killing and you know it led from doing the p90x to start doing the iPhone chords like you know the iPhone was gaining traction at that time. And so all the little accessories associated with the phone were picking up steam and so I just started sourcing those things out over lunch on Alibaba and, you know, buying bulk and listing them on eBay. eBay was the place to do it. Yeah, and going really well. Then, you know, of course, eBay started to tighten their restrictions a little bit. It's always a battle. It's always a battle with them. But then you know, I switched out products. I switched out to a really nice product, which was a women's women's hair, flattening iron. Man, and those things were selling. Those are the good things, those things were selling. And so that's how I got my start, you know, it slowly started to decline because you know, more people got associated or got into the whole drop shipping game. And so, you know, eBay and Amazon started to tighten up their restrictions and they got to a point where I didn't want to be left holding the bag buying a bunch of supplies from overseas and not being able to offload it. So you know, I can just move out of there, but I was doing all of it. I was doing the arbitrage you know, Walmart Wayfair, those types of things. buying it from their marketing nope on Amazon, selling it directly from them. All of it. I've been doing this. I've been doing this for a while. That's how I got my start at least online and started making money online through the E commerce drop shipping area.
Matt: Cool. Now that's super cool. I've been around a while and didn't even really honestly realize that that well I guess I knew the eBay craze because I was a little bit in it. But man that's pretty wild. What so tickets from the beginning there were in the late 2000s Like 2009 1011. Two, how did you get to where you're at now? I mean, have you been working a job? Have you always been full time online and always been just making a living online? Like what's what's your life been like and what's How did you end up sort of in the Legendary circle? How'd you find us?
Mike: Okay, well, to bring it back. I am in the military. I was in the Marine Corps Reserves. And so that's all I was able to do in between because I wasn't active. So I still have a life out in the civilian world as well. So after the drop, the Drop Shipping type phase, I did jump into MLM around the 2012 timeframe as well and it was with Dave's previous company and I got to learn the basic skills of you know, what has actually taught and legendary you know, when it comes to blogging, SEO related, all those types of things. So, I got to get a taste of a little bit of my foundation from there, okay. And in 2014 I got a job in Afghanistan as a private contractor. And so I jumped on that and I went ahead and did that. Because it was either going to lose either dad or you know, maybe go back to school to you know, relearn some things, get my education up, but I decided to go to Afghanistan. And it was there when I decided like, Alright, I need to get back to the online game like this. I can't deal with this right here because while it paid well like the money was good at being out there. But man, it took maybe about the third rocket attack that we had out there for me to realize like I think I need to go find something else to do. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy out there. So saluting anybody that's been out there, they understand what goes down. But I really need to make a change. I mean, I'm out there in the desert. And, you know, you're risking your life, day in and day out, you know, and so you don't know what's promised for the next day. So it's just like, let me let me jump on my computer and I said, I gotta find something else to do. And so that's when I went ahead and I started looking at other Make Money Online type of stuff because it was a little weird. There were a lot of things going on at that time period like MLMs coming and going, all these different opportunities. So you just didn't know which one was going to be the best one to jump into.
Matt: And for everybody who's listening, what he means by that is, these companies would basically open up, do a big pre launch and get a bunch of people to join this MLM. And then you wake up one day, and like, literally, the office was closed. You're like, you're calling support, and you're like, they're like, they're like, We filed for bankruptcy. Sorry. And you're like, how do I get my money back? And they're like, you don't and that and the phone call and that's basically and that was that was Tom and I Dave tells a story about how he got into this like cell phone MLM plant in 2013 or 12 or 11 or something way back in the day, and before he could even I think he could only you only sold his data on it. And before his dad could even get the phone, they went out of business. He didn't even get something like that. Much of that. But you know what I mean? That's that kind of thing and people have gone through that a lot. And you know,
Mike: It was running rampant during the mid 20. Teens, like, that's what was going on. So you just weren't sure it was just, you didn't want to jump on the opportunity that wasn't gonna be there next month.
Matt: But you also didn't want to miss the opportunity you didn't exactly get in.
Mike: It was definitely the wild wild west in the online space. So I finally got out of Afghanistan. And while I was there, I was looking at different opportunities. This is all illnesses leading is going to lead into legendary but I started doing local degeneration, which I still do to this day, but it's more so of rank and rent. And so that's why I started doing it and that was going pretty well actually. You know if you can rank a website and local websites are much easier to write. And if you can do that, you can obviously sell the benefits to a business owner. And so that's what I was doing and I'm still doing that now in association with legendary, but it was creeping up onto when the pandemic started, it was starting to creep in. So around 20 about 2019 timeframe was when I could start seeing things changing. And I always loved the idea of affiliate marketing and all of that, but it was just like, I I got stuck when I got stuck in something that was making me money, and that's what I was doing. But I can read the tea leaves and see that things were about to change. And so it was in 2019 I actually came across Legendary. I saw an ad or something on Facebook that day and I was like oh man, so David Sharpe is back in the game. His training was always solid from back in the old days. And so I was like okay, let me take a look. And see what's going on. Because I was already kind of done with the MLM phase because it was just, it was unreliable. And so I saw that and I started looking into really what it was about. And I was like, Okay, this makes sense. This is something like the price point, of course, was the most attractive thing because you pay the seven bucks and take the online business challenge. And man, the knowledge you get from that there's people out here charging 1000s of dollars for the same information. So even if you only took that you'd be off and running. And so that's how it was me. So I was hooked. I went ahead and signed up to the Business Challenge, spoke with my advisor a few times when I was off and running and so once I got it once I got into the ecosystem were Legendary, and I said okay, I can see now how I can start pivoting to do some more affiliate marketing related things. Because, you know, dealing with just local businesses, I'm at the mercy of, you know, what happens to that business itself. And of course, you're also at the mercy of Google. So because it's the largest search engine around and if you're always having to play around with things every time they decide to do an algorithm change, and so that's too much. I didn't want to leave all the chairs there's too much control on. So I need to diversify.
Matt: And that's when many variables are controlled.
Mike: Exactly that is the most serious part and the most nerve wracking part of doing at least you know, Local Lead Generation and things like that is most of it really is out of your control. If Google didn't decide to just do an update, and all of a sudden, your different web properties are no longer on the first page. They're on page three, and you're trying to figure out what it is you need. To change and nothing happens overnight. All right. Let me put more focus into affiliate marketing, because that part of my business was good. And it was good that I did that because shortly after that's when the pandemic actually happened. And we know what happened with that. With a lot of local businesses. All right, customers, so your services weren't as needed, and you just didn't know how long that was gonna last. And so there was a decline, a temporary decline as well. And it was actually affiliate marketing that was I was able to make up everything and surpass. Everybody was hoping at the time.
Matt: No, I mean, the whole online space took a huge, huge leap and run at the beginning of that pandemic and honestly hasn't really slowed down since which is pretty great. You know, I even thought, you know, okay, summertime, summertime is here, people out of school are back traveling, but it's just it hasn't really changed.
Mike: No, not at all. Um, honestly, I mean, there's no better time now than to learn affiliate marketing and just learn that part of the business. I mean, there's so many places you can go once we actually learn the skills to do it. You can just apply it to so many different things. And now is the best time to do it. There's so many people that are unsure of what's to come. And there are at the same time, so many more opportunities being introduced, like with the whole crypto space and the web 3.0 And all the different things that come along with that. If we just tap into something that you are really interested in and learning well, you can start promoting those different products or services or those opportunities that come along. And so it's just it's so much that's happening. And so I think right now is a great time and I'm actually really appreciated that I did find legendary when I did because it got me it brought the spark back back in the early days over why I want to come online and working for yourself or at least learning the skill sets to do these things. is so beneficial. And so
Matt: I wanted to well, where I was where I was thinking of going with that was exactly where you just took it which was, you said building the skill sets. And when I was I just you know, you found us almost exactly three years ago. And at that time. I mean, I hadn't even been working here that long. I was here but I'm working on that one. And I think that there's something really powerful about how long you've been in the online space because I think for context, a lot of times people will tune into the show or tune into our training or come to the 15 day challenge or whatever. forget sometimes that life is a pretty long journey. And, and and everything gets boiled into this like one moment, right? But when I think back to 2010 2009 and I'm first discovering you know, when I first figured out when I first heard about MLM it was I was watching this I was watching this training and you know MLMs get this bad vibe about being a pyramid scheme, right? Well this video is literally laying it out in the shape of a pyramid. And I was just like, and I was so I mean I was really torn, and I had no clue. But I was just sitting here talking about perpetual leverage. And I'm like, oh my god for leverage. Yes. You know, and I'm like, This is it. This is how I get rich. And so it's so anyway I found a way to get a couple of credit cards and get into this MLM travel club and all of this stuff right. Long story short, I had this. Here's what I think is interesting about this dynamic is if you would have told me 10 years ago as I'm getting started, hey, just build skills, right? Trust the process, maybe 10 years down the road, it works out. I wouldn't have felt that inspired. But if you told me hey look, not only can you can you learn skills that will be valuable for the next 1020 30 where you can have autonomy and total freedom, but also you can kind of earn while you learn as you're going and as you're figuring out these skills, you can earn a living like you can pay your bills, your rent your mortgage. And, you know, maybe you don't become a millionaire in five years, maybe become a millionaire and 20 but as you do it you also experience freedom and autonomy of not answering to a boss every day or you know going my wife quit her mental health therapy practice to start her own business and and you know, not going in and having management tell you out you're not you're probably not gonna get that promotion. And it's like what, excuse me, you know, and never dealing with that again. But I feel like there's also this element of which it would be it would be hard to to summarize all of the different skills and things you've learned in 10 years because you've put this into a career where you've taken all these bits and pieces and I know how that goes because that is the same thing. And now you've got this valuable skill set. That you it's sort of like wearing a tool belt some people only have a hammer, some people only have a tape measure, and you've got it all you've got all of these not everything but you've got a lot of different tools on that belt that you can pull out and reference in history and you know, fail that some successful ads and all of that stuff where you've seen it then there you've got the actual lived experience, which I think is really cool. You only been in our space for three years only in our company around our company for three years. But I think that from the time and let's add more to this. You're a blueprints member of ours as well, I believe right? Yes. And in 2019 We didn't have, for instance, a module on Instagram or Pinterest. We upgraded the business rents in 2020. From what they were before we took the affiliate marketing business blueprint and Dave update to give it a full update. And we keep doing that we're getting ready to update more of it. And I think that's an interesting sort of, isn't that kind of cool to have purchased something and then you know that the guys and gals in our industry usually when they do that they're like, Hey, you want to get 3.0 That's another extra 100 bucks. It's gonna go and how many times and you came into our atmosphere in 2019 Have we called you up and tried to sell you something for $20,000? Never. Yeah, yeah, never never. Because there isn't anything else to sell. It's just lifetime updates forever, which, for us, that's just how we operate and I sometimes don't make a big enough deal about that. So I'm a big deal now and I'm doing a little braggy thing here but it's fun. It's almost unfair. I haven't heard of it, but it's unprecedented in this industry. And as you go it is five years from now that we're still gonna whatever. I don't know what's going to come out in five years, maybe some new TikTok right or something. So the new app that's hot. And guess what? There's going to be probably me or somebody in our community who's got this brand new training, and we won't have charged anybody for it. As long as they've purchased our Blueprints. It's crazy. But how's your experience been in Legendary with our community with the training, and then also now as you're starting to really see some traction and things are picking up for you a lot of 1000s of followers you're making money. How has that changed things?
Mike: Oh, well, like when I first started the goal wasn't for me wasn't actually to promote Legendary. I just found the training so valuable that I can apply it just out in the world and on the online world. And so that's what that's where my focus was, well, you know, with the changes of everything going on, more people really need to have more options. And so, I always have you know, different family members, our friends are actually what I'm doing and how they can get involved. I just performed the legendary, and I was like, You know what, let me let me take this series and actually, along with doing my regular affiliate marketing stuff, let me actually put a little more effort into promoting legendary itself because more people need to see the opportunity because we don't know what and and so the little effort I started putting in I know you get the traction, you start getting leads and get the people joining this you get the sales, you know, you start you start seeing it happening and it's like okay, all right. So people are starting to actually see what it is that I'm saying, because it's not about me, it's not about getting rich overnight and getting all these fancy things. It's really It's, I really want to get better at the skill sets. And show people that if they learn skill sets, there are so many things that they can actually do with it online. Maybe they don't want to do affiliate marketing, that's fine. But everything that legendary teaches, you know, can be used for any field online. You're always you're always going to need to learn how to know how to market a product or sell products, how to how to pick up traffic, all that good stuff, all the different techniques and once you dive in, as the 15 they train then you go into the blueprints like I did, I went through the affiliate marketing, blueprint, both versions. And awesome. They're awesome. I always go back because I'm always learning something new. And so and I'm always you know, going back and taking notes, and all that good stuff. But, you know, you never know. And so the skills that I have acquired personally, I'm able to apply it to my you know, my rent and rent business as well are to all the other affiliate products or products that I am promoting to make affiliate commissions and things like that as well. And I just want to you know, have decided I just said you know what, let me show other people what it is. I'm talking about what I'm doing, because I'm just doing my own thing, because I don't care about being everybody's face, you know, so I but now I was like well, let me show people what it is I'm talking about I have enough people want wondering where they're making my mind they realize I don't work in nine to five. I haven't worked a nine to five for a very long time. And so this is what I do. This is this the reason I did it, not because it's going to make you rich overnight is because you're going to learn skill sets that could
Matt: Possibly make you rich depend
Mike: On what you're doing. Right but you got to learn how to do these things. And so it's not expensive. $7.07 hours, get on the ground and get on the online business builder challenge if you want to better hacking, go ahead and get the $1 training course. Sure you get the business, you get the business training. Dollar versus $7. I mean it's so many opportunities in the air, at any price point. You don't take advantage of it because you're not you're not serious, are your mind somewhere else.
Matt: And And for somebody who's I just feel like for somebody who is newer and has never delved into something like this before. I really feel like for seven bucks to actually dive into some sort of training like this. What a cool thing like being able to dive into some sort of course or a or training about how to make money on the internet. It's such a risk free Dave says I think what Dave says in the video he says something like, you know for less than apparel Wrangler Jeans at Walmart, you can get started or whatever. But I feel like if I'm thinking about it, and I'm like this normal person, just anybody out in the world, like what a cool thing to be able to just lay down seven bucks, which for a lot of us we do for much less like just stupid stuff, right? I mean a venti Frappuccino at Starbucks. You're gonna chalk up seven bucks, basically. But I just feel like what a fun experience to be able to go in and start to really unpack this world and even just, even through day three, you get on day three, you get a bunch of pre built funnels for you that are already ready to go. If you want to sell your own digital course here's one that you can use. But I also think that your strategy of coming online and how you went about that is super powerful because you came online and you use the training for whatever it is that you were already doing. You're like, Hey, I'm gonna get trained from the best. I'm gonna figure this out. And then also, I thought the other thing that was interesting is you then kind of looked around and you were like, dang, people actually need this. So for you, you sort of, I like your strategy of how you purchase training as relevant to solving a problem for you right now. But then also, you're always sort of looking down, you're looking down the road a little bit. Like, okay, what's going to be valuable for people? What do I see as valuable for people right now? People around me and you start to connect people to the right things. And as I think more and more I am trying to instill in affiliate or referral base marketers, people who come into our community, to be less of a one trick pony. And to be more of a matchmaker, a facilitator sort of you got, you can have all these different offers on the table. You can have sort of an ecosystem of offers. Sure you can have a core offer that you send most people to, but you can also the people who become really skilled and stick around for a long time are people who can sort of have the common sense and strategy to listen to people and guide them down. You know, correct paths based on what they actually need, which leads to higher conversions, which leads to higher lifetime values, because I'm just, you know, slamming everybody into one funnel, which by the way you can do but if you can, if you can keep in sort of a ecosystem that's branded to you, and then, you know, get people maybe to know, hey, what can I how can I help you? What are you struggling with? While I'm struggling with lead generation? Well, great. You know what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to send you a training on high ticket closing, because that's not what you need. I'm gonna send you a course. Here's a $1 course on how to get started on TikTok: start generating free leads right away, and then this person purchases your course that you recommend and you make a little commission, and that company starts to offer higher ticket products and education that gives more value. They're going to feel like they got scammed or played by you. They're going to feel like dang, you know what, Mike sent me to the right place. I got what I needed when I listened to Mike and took his advice. Maybe I'll take him up on this offer too, because he was right the first time. And it's, it's a more of a common sense thing. If we were all sitting in a room together. This would make so much sense but there's a piece of this that's online, that sort of convoluted things and people can be fused by it. But it's just like imagining just being in a room and asking somebody what do you need help with and sort of solving that problem for people? I just wanted to say I feel like your strategy around that is common sense. But also common sense isn't all that common. You know what I mean? The rest are all metal with metal with that with a lot of people. And there's a set but I'm not. I'm not the one I'm not creating the course myself. To do anything. I think a lot of people are very accustomed to the high ticket courses. Everyone has a course on some particular subject. And I'm just like, Look, I'm just practicing what I learned. And I'm just taking you to the source. This is where I learned it. At the end of day, you know, you can pay the dollar for the tic toc course, seven bucks for just the training itself, and then you'll be able to learn the skills that I have learned and that I've put into practice. And that's all I can actually do. I try to keep it really simple because I know I know people are already on edge when it comes to online and so you have to be aware of that. You know, and so just keep it really simple. And you don't have to be the person that knows everything to lessen the skills from Legendary. Here's the link. Go to it. This is how I learned. I'm not here to teach you anything. I'm not making any promises. I'm just going to take you to the source and what you do with it is on you. And what's great is when they do sign up, you know sometimes they're not ready at that moment but they can always look back around the lesson there but you guys don't put any weird paywalls are anything weird like that, like you can if you if you sign up today, life happens and you know six to eight months from now. You decide Alright, let me come back in here you come right back in the Legendary and pick up where you left off. And I keep as simple as possible in my business when trying to, you know, refer people to the source. And it's all about listening because things are changing so rapidly. You know, online offline, you don't know how the world is gonna look wherever it is that you're at this time next year. You don't know what opportunities wouldn't be around. I won't be around anymore. But if you learn these skill sets I mean the world when I said the world is your oyster. And so and that's and that's, that's what I try to do for my business and I try to relate that to other people as well. Just learn the skill sets and you can take those skills and apply it to anything that you are passionate about making money around, man. I mean, that's just what it is.
Matt: What else that's it?
Mike: Well, yeah. And so, this business has been good after I focused on you know, referring more people to Legendary. You know, I started doing it. I started taking TikTok a little more seriously. It was hard at first, because all I used to see was just kids dancing. I was like, I don't know what to do with this. But I took the training and I was like alright, I see the opportunity. And that's what I've been doing. And so while it's still fresh on my mind, because I do go through the group, as well. I see a lot of people that are always struggling to, you know, get their first 1000 followers on TikTok so they can, you know, put the URL in their bio. I was there to start off TikTok just, you know, casually I had 100 and something followers and then when I took it serious, maybe like two and a half, three months ago and you know, I grew it over to now little over 4000 followers right now, and that's just, you know, maybe doing a few videos a week. But the thing that I found that helped me and I did this purposely now, I went ahead and I looked up through the you know, the whole filtering system of I found the I found videos of similar accounts that are, you know, digital marketers, affiliate marketers, things like that. Find the ones the videos that go viral and I particularly I specifically found the ones that were viral maybe three days ago, you know, that they posted three days ago and and went viral. And I sat there and I said, Okay, I know I took notes on how they put the video and what the video was about. I vetted it, you know, because sometimes these videos and people would like to paste tutorials up there but they don't know what they're talking about. You bet the tutorial first and make sure all right okay, I can see this works. And I am all flaring I'll redo the video myself and he's saying using music, same song. And I've done that two times. And my follower count went skyrocketing.
Mike: You know it's really just research and you have to do everything with intention and not just by expanding, like literally, I mean, tick tock is always changing. Algorithms are always changing. You know, things are going to get more difficult, but you just have some attention and you research other people in your market and what's working for them and what they're doing. And as long as you're sitting there providing value on the platform, and not just throwing out make money online, make money online, you know, because that's starting to be that people are starting to get new to them. They're getting blind to it, because it's all over the place. So you just study what other people are doing. If you see that they have a successful video. You see why they have it. And then you figure out how to present the same information yourself the same way. We're adding your own personality, your own flair to it, and just copy the hashtags and then their hashtags, and topic music and posting and see what happens. You know, you might get some functions. It's usually just simple tweaks out there. And I found that you know, tick tock has helped me to bring out more of my personality and it's reflected in my own and my YouTube videos as well, because that's what his TikTok is very good camera practice. There are people who see the light on their screen or whatever, and they lock up and they freeze. Use TikTok and have fun with it. But be very intentional with what you're posting and why you're posting it and use it to practice on bringing out your business personality. who you are because at the end of the day, that's what people are falling for they relate to you. You know whether it is your parents sometimes that sometimes is your actual personality, you know, and how you present information and always test because that's what I started doing. I started testing you know, I love editing videos and doing different things so I find fun and doing that. So I started testing out different things. And you know, it's been working on for me and it's helped me to grow better in front of the camera and present my material out better as well. And so it's it's multipurpose it's, it's been working for me and don't be afraid and just just go out there and always try out new things. Always test different stuff out to get you a better camera if you can, you know, I know you can use the cell phone. But you know, TikTok has been around for a while. So you always want to look for the edge, something that can make you stand out just a little bit more. And you know that's what I did. So I just want to put that out there before I forget.
Matt: Oh, that's dude that's real. That's yeah, that's awesome. I feel like I feel like the TikTok piece where you were talking about finding different videos going through that research. It's, I tell people all that and I tell this all the time and you know what I actually made. I did training last year about this late last year. And I got a bunch of shit for it. And people were like, people were like, oh, man, like, like teaching people how to make clickbait videos, teaching people how to copy other people's videos and I was like, hey, look, here's the deal. You want to know how many videos are on TikTok? You want to know how many video ideas are actually, like fully somebody's own thoughts? Like, like barely any. There's this old saying that there's nothing new under the sun. It's an old like, I think it's an old biblical proverb or something. But it's basically like there's nothing new under the sun and
TikTok. The thing that people forget is that like this platform, one of the main things that was built on is actually like copying people's ideas or playing off of people's ideas. Like that's actually the platform like it's a thing where people do the same dances, right? When somebody does the same dance to the same song and the exact same thing. No one's like, Wow, what a copycat. It's like, everybody's got to do their thing, right? And it's just funny how people in certain niches or industries have ideas or just funny videos or how to videos that you're talking about. I talk about this every week on Thursdays we do this business blueprint webinar with our business blueprint members, every single Thursday at 3pm. Eastern. And I say dammit, create educational, entertaining videos that teach people how to do something. Right. Here's a you know, here's the number one way to get your dog to stop barking at the mailman. Step one, step two step three like and follow from and then you do these kind of growth videos. I call them growth videos or I stole that term from Andrea who spoke at our most recent mastermind, but it's a growth video and in these growth style videos, the whole point is you're trying to grow your audience and my guess is you've got a couple of videos on your ticket, got over 100,000 views. A lot of your 1000s of followers come after those videos, because people enjoy watching little tidbits. And people are like, well, that doesn't even have anything to do with what you're selling that doesn't make simple videos about things or strategies or things that you're not even selling. Because the point is you're creating content that is beginner, the beginner isn't all concerned, every single detail. Somebody's sitting at home and they're a nurse and they've been working as a nurse for 15 years and they come across your video. All you're trying to do is open their mind to maybe the option that there's a way to make money online. That's it that's the only thing and in those how to style videos, you give them one little piece that they're like can I think I can make some money online? This is crazy. Alright, you know what? I'm not ready to sign up today, but this might go. I kind of like that I'm gonna follow this guy and see if he comes back. Two weeks later, you know, you post something about your journey or something more personal and then they're like, this guy again. Like, you know, I forgot that I forgot about this guy, but maybe I should check this guy out. Right? Or maybe it's on the eighth video of yours. Your link and then they opt in and they disappear for you know, a couple of weeks and you keep following up with them on the email and then you're on Tik Tok again, it's like Damn, I can't do this. Alright, I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna purchase it. Right? And it all started with this little video that just talked about one little, whatever strategy as a little side hustle or little, whatever. And you can do this in any niche training. You'll grab people's attention by just teaching them one trick. You don't have to turn them into a perfect dog in one video. Just one little behavior. Source guarding here is the best way to stop dogs from resource guarding. Or here's the number one way to get your dog barking. Elbows off, right. And these little tricks people are like, dang, that was cool. And I learned something in 30 seconds that I didn't know I'm reversing because I liked that. And this has been going viral since these types of questions early 2020. And then next up in our groups and in TikTok and all of these different things people have been saying, Oh, well, I think it might be over. I think it's not what it once was. And every single month I watch people posting educational entertainment and videos that teach people how to do something. They go viral. They start making money. It just, it's never ended. It's so mind boggling to me that it is pretty simple. But it ain't easy, because you know better than anybody to get good at those kinds of videos. I mean, it took work.
Mike: It took it took work and it took organization, that was the probably the number one thing the driving factor that has propelled me is especially when it comes to TikTok
Matt: Yeah, what do you mean by that?
Mike: Well it can be time consuming to generate content for TikTok or for any platform. You know, I just one day decided no, let me let me actually listen to what my wife tells me because she's a super organized person. Let me plan everything out. So I came across a software free software called like notion. And I liked it because you know if you can customize it, it almost reminds me of the old days of Myspace, a bit. You can customize a person in your personality into it while organizing out anything and everything you could think of. And so that's what I did when it came to my my content type of schedule. I have my I have what I call a content hub, where I have my tic toc slash real section, my YouTube videos and my blog posts, and I pick a day out the week where I you know maybe for an hour or 2 am researching what it is that I actually want to post what I want to work on so I'll go through TikTok and I'm looking at all the different you know, the high moving videos different you know, getting ideas sometimes I'm moving outside of my niche into different niches because you get different ideas that you can apply. And I organize out, organize it out, maybe about a dozen videos for that week that I want to get done. And I go deep, I outline what is being said and how it's being said. And then I go ahead and notate okay, how can I present? Maybe I'll do this type of angle, this type of style, whatever, sometimes I'll get around to different two or three different ways of presenting the same content so that you can make, you know maybe you can basically put the same video content message across three different ways. You know which face you are talking, maybe, you know, video in the background and your voice over or maybe just text, you know, the way you have more content to push to make the most out of one idea. I will take everything and I have a skill up whether I'm working on our published you know, I will put down inspiration so I put down a URL for Tiktok person or whomever it is if it's a YouTube channel, the video I'll put down the web link to it as inspiration so I can go back and refer to it and really when it comes to sexiest part of your business, but man, it can move mountains, if you just get hyper organized with what you're doing. And that's what I do. I do my TikTok. I do my YouTube content and I do my blog posts, and then I just pick a time to go ahead and work on you know with TikTok, catch up on my video. So I take maybe an hour and I just work on them, get them all filmed up. I do everything or you know almost everything on my Sony camera so I don't do it on my cell phone. But I'll go ahead and record it and upload it onto my computer and it will be there ready to do the iCloud that is already on my phone to post when I feel like posting it. But man that I have saved so much time and I have actually moved forward so much quicker by organizing my content and it's always the little things that aren't sexy that push your business forward.
Matt: And I think about my wife all the time because when it comes to, you know, office, business type stuff I'm not the most organized.
Mike: Let me go ahead and follow what she is saying. And I found something that worked for me, okay, because I'm not a Google you know, Asana type person. I use notions and I use Trello that's what I do you know, and what I like about Trello was on my mind. For those of you out there, document your process. I do this on Trello. I organized my process from A to Z. When I'm starting something from the beginning put it I put it on there because it's sort of my SOP is my standard operating procedures. So if there's if, if there's something I forget something I'm not sure of. I haven't documented from start to finish so I can go back if something isn't working right. Not trying to wrap my brain to figure out what's not working right. And I see, where's the leak? What I need to fix is step three step four. What do I need to change and do different documents for the process? If you're just starting out, document what you're doing? Note take what's working, what's not working, why you changed it. So the units never know because guess what you might decide one day. Oh, I'm gonna make a course. Well, you got your course right there. You might not know, like, right now, I don't have a passion to make a course but if I wanted to have my process right there for everything, for everything I just didn't tell you I have a wash business as well that I do as well. Totally separate from this. When you make money from one area
Matt: And you shouldn't. Again, we gotta get you back on the show. A separate episode of this show is talking about watches.
Mike: You know, so it's, listen, when you get good at one thing, you start to make money off of one thing you can always diversify. So that's how I like to do that. Now I like to keep all my eggs in one basket. Once I do well in something, I take some of that profit and I put it into something much like watching business as a passion project from services like I love watching. So that's just my thing. But you can always diversify your stuff once you get good at one thing you do affiliate marketing, it works well for you. Go ahead and invest. Maybe I want to get into the crypto game. All right, well, you can start doing some stuff in that. Or maybe you want to start this new other venture. You can put money and you can build those things as well. So you have multiple assets for you. And that's what I do. But Organization is key for me now. And I hate that it took so long for me to take my wife's advice. So it's been working, it's been working and I tell you that things will be so much easier you'll feel a lot less stress.
Matt: And you don't have to get crazy about it. You just You just start a little spreadsheet I used to I used to share a little spreadsheet with people that was just like, you know exactly what you just said topic, you know, and then I would have a bunch of stuff in the whatever dog training or stop biting or whatever. And then you know, you can do it in the make money online space where it's like, you know, inspiration, wealth building, you know, crypto, like all that stuff, right? advertising marketing, and you start to just like TikTok links them into a little spreadsheet and I actually ranked them by how many views they got. And I wouldn't do a free video but man that strategy every five to 10 videos. It is Yeah, you'll start growing a channel and you'll start growing that channel. So I want to create some content that's unique to you. But especially as you're just getting started, viewing yourself as more of a reporter and less of an expert is such a freeing way to look at and look at content creation. There's people there's people who you know, there's this I can't remember what her TikTok handle is.
So they just crawl under their desk and their angle and their video is like can see the depth at the bottom of the desk and like crawled under their desk and there was like a news report and this person's gone like super viral. I can't remember who it is or what their hands guarantee somebody in the comments is gonna tell me what their hands are and I just got a message. Yeah, LA Times hired this girl Joanne just messaged me and said I've totally seen this person. But they Yeah, Susan says I yeah, she's fantastic. Yeah, see, everybody knows who this person is. I can't remember her handle but under the desk area, @underthedesknews. She just like she just started it's like, like kind of like, Oh, well. Let's try this out and see what happened. All he does is she just um, she reports basically on, like, what's happening in the world. And people kind of like getting the news from her as opposed to like their Cable News Network. Right. And it's really a sign of like, our world is going but it doesn't claim to be the foremost expert. Mostly. It's just like, hey, let me convince some world news while you're scrolling. Like let me condense some world news headlines for you in about a minute or three minutes or something. You don't have to turn on CNN tonight. How's that sound? Cool. All right. Creativity. And think about the genius of that is there's literally there's never a moment where you won't have a headline. There's never a day where you're not going to have content, right? It's a genius, genius idea. But the same is true of most niches. If you go into any content platform, YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, wherever. There's from 10 years back until right now, whether it's on a blog or on a video or whatever, there's always content about how to train your dog always in the in the day I showed this guy's video from like 2012 He's it's Zach something something dog Zacks dog training or something like that, and, and lots of academic like yeah, I follow that guy. I know that guy. He's super cool. And this is for 2012 He's on your social ranking for dog training. You know, just that keyword. And but there's training that goes all the way back people create. And you can come on as a reporter let me finish this idea. You can come on as a reporter, and you don't have to be the world's foremost expert. You can give little tips about dog training. You can get little tips about wealth. You can give little tips about crypto or just like you know common or common sense or big sort of universal truths in that space. Like crypto has a lot of basic facts about crypto that you can just record on that are like hey, there's remorse most important things to know if you're thinking about investing in crypto, and it's like sure it's subjective. But this is what you think. What's the most important thing to you if you just got into crypto, you can probably look at what are the things that I looked at to decide how to get into crypto, what were the things that were most important to me, right and then boom you've got a piece of code immediately. And you can also like what you did, what are other pieces? Most important? What do I think about that? Maybe I don't like that one piece. People, people and so many people who are getting started that's why we love this conversation. I love the way that you think about this because so many people come into this and I've got to have like three unique ideas today that I just came out with, or I came up with on thin air all by myself. And they're like that's too overwhelming. Can't do that. I don't even swear ravens start.
Mike: I started off that way. Well, it's like imposter syndrome. And so it's when you're presenting the content that all you need to do is to switch it this way it is to remind people of what's what, you know how to do this. How to do that. Don't Don't act like you are the expert of it just like you're minding, because if you think of TikTok or YouTube, whatever. And you see all sorts of different things. If you're constantly reminded over stuff, it's like it's like you've heard but it wasn't present. It was back there and all that video did was pull back to the front. Man, that's it, you know, because that's how that's how you need to look at other marketers as well. And it might be basic information, but it was right on my mind. And so it's almost like I relearn them, because they reminded me and so and that's the approach I take when I'm making my videos. That's the mindset I have. Make me feel more confident. What I'm doing is I'm not teaching you anything new. I'm not I'm not pulling something up from the universe and showing it to you for the first time. I'm just reminding that's all it is. I'm not minding my audience of this, that, that and that there's a way it's taken off but I don't feel like a fraud or an imposter or, you know, I'm trying to imitate this person. People there's so much going on. People need to be reminded of things all the time. And that's just what's your point.
Matt: We're just gonna end on that note, that's awesome as a great way to say it. Great way to say it. In a way that makes sense. Mike, thanks for coming on that we had over an hour. Thanks for coming on. And boy is this episode a rewatch. If people didn't get through this. It's basically paid content. But it's free. That's what we do. And you prefer people to go find you on TikTok.
Mike: You can find me on TikTok. You know, basically all my handles are my name Mike Garvey Jr. or Brandon Bob, which is like you know more of my business handle. So it's fine
Matt: Mike, thanks for coming on. We'd love to have you back on a fee if you want to check in send us an email and a couple of weeks or a couple of months and we'd love to have you back on. We'll catch you all in Davidson that you guys can chat a bit about watches make sure to bring your best stuff and raise this up to alright alright guys, Mike Garvey Jr.
You can also find them at the brand of the boss so if you go to YouTube, type in brands a boss right away, give them a follow up, let him know you found him on Wake Up Legendary and then don't want to wake up later. Or return the favor and give you a follow up and it'll all come back around what would he call it business karma. So we'll give him a follow on content and go look into what he's doing. Figure out how he's creating this content. We're going to be back here again tomorrow, same voice here at 10am Eastern. If you're not already signed up for our message reminders, open your phone right now and make a commitment to show up to these every single day Monday through Friday 10am Eastern, even. I grew up in the Midwest, so even if you're out on the tractor or combine or something or even your warehouse and you're on the forklift don't do anything dangerous, but I don't know why. immediately went to the operating heavy machinery. If you're if you're you know mom says in the warehouse sitting at your computer in the office, just turn it on, put it in your ear. It's so much more refreshing and inspiring than the average sort of bullshit that we go through. And listen throughout our day. Non stop soft routine Yeah, just I don't even know monotony. Text W ul The letters to 813296 You'll get a text from us every single Monday through Friday. We don't we don't send you a bunch of text messages like, Mike and I were talking earlier. You're not gonna get a bunch of phone calls. Like hey, we got this awesome 10,000 Never call anybody as a result of this text message. We don't call you, we actually can't. It's just a text message. And you're not going to get text messages with a bunch of pitches and offers. We've never sent a pitch via text message. So you're not opting into any marketing, no offers, nothing. We just want to get you on the show. The show during the story will change your life. That's it. That's our agenda.
