Below is the transcription of this episode:
Dave: Hey what's going on my friends this is Dave Sharpe. Welcome to Wake Up Legendary and as you can see this episode today we're going to be talking to an agency owner who binge watches our education and implements it fast. Let's see what it did for Emily. Welcome to the show.
Emily: Thanks for having me.
Dave: Yeah You're so welcome. Tell us where you're calling in from.
Emily: I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It's like 12 today so it's freezing cold.
Dave: So, what led you to Legendary and what happened when you found us?
Emily: Yeah, so interestingly, I've had this book on my bookshelf since like 2014 affiliate marketing dummies, and I read it, you know, pretty quickly, but I was scrolling through Tik Tok one day and I saw a video and I was like, wow, I should really get on this affiliate marketing thing. It seems like it's catching steam here so you can make some passive income. So once I saw the video, I signed up for the 15 Day Challenge and just really, really learned a lot.
Dave: So what did you learn that was different than what you already knew? You're an agency owner. So you had some internet marketing experience?
Emily: Yeah. So I actually graduated with a marketing degree and I started my business a year after college. And a lot of it, a lot of what I learned was mostly self taught for the things that I do day to day in my business, and that was something that I really related to. With Legendary, you can learn so much on your own or with these great courses that are available like Legendary, rather than what you learn in college. I mean, college is great conceptually like you learn a lot but actually turning those skills into money making day to day things is totally different. So yes, I have marketing experience that legendary definitely helped. catapult me into the affiliate. Marketing World.
Dave: Yeah, it's amazing how those college knowledge is, you know, very philosophical in some respects. You know, I hear that from a lot of people don't have personal experience, but it's very different taking those skills and figuring out how to how to how to implement them into money making skills and with a job it’s like okay you go get a job, but am I actually get a job that where I'm using the skills and so there's Yeah, it's it's, it's it's it's a fascinating, dynamic colleges, especially for marketing people, because marketing changes so fast, that there's definitely some strategies that have been around and are still working for a lot of companies. But we're talking about this tick tock thing. I mean, this is something that's happened over the last year and a half or so. And there's still people who aren't convinced that you can do affiliate marketing on TikTok even, that they're even doubtful that this kind of stuff is happening, that people are making money. How has your outlook changed on both career paths? But anything else now that you've started your own business doing affiliate marketing, compared to your Outlook before you started doing this?
Emily: Yeah, so just in terms of like, TikTok, I thought TikTok was the most ridiculous app that I've ever seen when I first saw it. I was like, Oh my gosh, you would never see me dancing on this app. And I'm a former dancer. I was a ballerina growing up.
It is so ridiculous. You just get somewhat, you know, normalized to it. You know what I mean?
Right, right. So yeah, I guess I got turned into like the business side of TikTok and I was like, Oh, wow, there are so many people like doing different things, selling courses, affiliate marketing, really making money on Tik Tok, and I was like, Wow, I love making money. So I should probably get on this. So yeah, I would just say, being very open to new marketing strategies. Not like Pooh poohing things because you think you'll look silly. It definitely pays off and you don't have to look silly. You can contribute knowledge to people without, you know, dancing around, if that's not your cup of tea. And yeah, I would say that would be the biggest change in my outlook.
Dave: Yeah, my dad just signed up for TikTok the other day, and I was just sitting right there next to him as he was. You know what I mean? We were smoking a cigar. And it was funny. It was fun. I mean, because he was just getting a kick out of it as if it was a new toy. You had just handed this child, you know? I mean, as if he didn't even purposefully go and grab the phone to sign up as if he just had this phone and it was playing these funny videos in his hand. It was just surreal. It is hard to see through some of that stuff right at first. I think nowadays, we're battling multiple mental barriers. We're battling the same beer that we've always battled, which is where people in this space are always battling, which is oh, what are others gonna think? And then you have a second battle, which I think you have to get over yourself, which is something similar to what you just said. But basically you know, who gives a shit? I mean, really, you know, you have to see through the initial kind of mess and in the circus to see down below what's happening, what's happening. Basically, you have commercial airtime in front of millions of people similar to them sitting down at the Superbowl watching a football game, and getting ready to watch your commercial. That's the seriousness of it, that you have human beings eyeballs, but there's some serious cash to be made. If you can take that seriously. But it's a shame, Emily and this has been happening. All of our lives that we human beings will actually give up huge upside because we don't want to look bad or be uncomfortable. How does that come up in your life?
Emily: Yeah, so I would just say as a dancer, I had to overcome that at a young age because you know, you would, you would get these rolls. I remember I was like 12 or 13 years old, a clown in the Nutcracker. And I mean, a clown doesn't really fit my personality, but you get to a point where, I guess in that case, I had to do it. But I would say you just need to put yourself in somewhat uncomfortable situations in your day to day life. So you know you can try it if you don't like TikTok if you don't like doing something. marketing wise you can obviously stop, you have full control over that. So yeah, I would just say be comfortable with being uncomfortable because you can make money from it. No one's no one else is paying your bills. No one else's. You know, trying to build wealth for you. You're in total control of that.
Dave: You know, I'm sitting here. I was looking at your TikTok and I was looking at some of all the different stuff that you're doing and the different types of content that you're creating. It's not like you've been doing it for that long. You've probably got 30 videos or something like that. But it's you're trying lots of things you're jumping in. You're doing some some acting you're performing you know, I mean, you're not being I was looking at this video right here. Have you given the big face here to the point of view, working two weeks and seeing a tiny direct deposit of big Adderall and everything. You know, you're getting you're getting into it, is that normal? Some people might look at you and say, Hey, you're a young person, that sort of that sort of acting like that is gonna be natural for you and normal for you. Is it and how are you coming up? With these creative ideas to kind of create this content? That is these little 15 minute commercials that are getting people to click your link in your bio and become a lead and so forth. So again, question number one. Do you even remember what question number one is at this point? Let's start with that one first. He knows you're really doing some performing. You mentioned that you are in dance before but for the people who have never done any performing before, there is an element of performance with your phone. And when you're talking into your phone, there is an element of performance there that we shouldn't be afraid of whether that's just turning up a little bit of your volume, whether that's a little bit more facial expressions. All of these are used as human connection to get people's attention to get them to pay attention to you to get them to interact with you but that sort of extreme facial expression or those sort of performance type behaviors are not natural to everybody. They may not even be natural to you. But anyways, how have you been? How have you gotten comfortable on camera using such personality and quote unquote, letting it all hang out?
Emily: Yeah, I would say it's definitely not natural for me. You can even ask old dance teachers. I have one dance teacher that would beg me to smile and I was dancing because I was just so focused and so serious and I would say I'm a pretty like smiley person in general, but making facial expressions and acting is definitely not my strong suit never has been it just isn't like who I am as a person. But if you watch a video of yourself, where you're just kind of sitting there talking into the camera, you know, no one else wants to watch it like if you don't want to watch it yourself. Who wants to watch you sitting there just like blah blah blah, no one so I think you get to a point where you want to be proud of what you're putting out. And you want to make sure that you are trying your best to grab people's attention. Like I don't want to put videos out where I'm just sitting there talking. I could talk about marketing all day if you want me to but you know how interesting is that? So I just think like you do what you have to do. Treat TikTok as a job and you have to pull people in some way. I don't have the best hooks on my videos, but I can definitely, you know, make different faces do different things.
Dave: Yeah, and those are all ways to catch people's attention. You know, it doesn't always have to be a written hook. Like you said, sometimes it can be some sort of a performance hook. And what that means is I'll never forget Ian McClure's where he did the apple jobs for $18 An hour and he had a little apple on his finger. Then he threw the apple five seconds into the video, you know, those sort of props and the, you know, things that you can do at your camera, like a look, you know, for when somebody scrolls over it. They see something that's interesting. They see something that makes them stop scrolling. A lot of times we can't forget that that can be a form of a hook as well. Something that looks weird. Why do you think that? Is it better to ask this from a Netflix series perspective than a movie perspective? Because I think that's almost more popular nowadays. But don't you notice in the first episode, they rarely ever start to show in from the beginning. It started in the middle of a dramatic moment. And there's a clue there, don't you? Think if Hollywood directors and movie producers and writers have all figured out that from an entertainment step standpoint, it's better to create a story, the drama right there to hook somebody in the middle of the story, rather than at the beginning. Why wouldn't we borrow that knowledge now what does that mean in a 15 second video, it just means I don't start the video off going. Hey guys, my name is David. That's what it means. Right whenever the screen additionally stands up in front of the classroom and presents my project, whatever I'm feeling, that's traditional. I should not do it because it's the same thing with writing copy in marketing. It's almost a good thing that I didn't go through so many English classes in high school in college, because writing a copy is less about writing it all within proper format. Even more about writing it with lots of white space at a fifth grade reading level with lots of questions with, you know, shorter sentences with potentially grammatical errors. Why? Because all those things keep the reader moving. And the only rules that we're trying to follow here are not that I speak perfect English. But did it get me traffic leads and sales? And so the sort of marketing things I would assume are some of the things that maybe didn't come up in marketing classes in college.
Emily: Now you're definitely right. I did take journalism classes. So those helped a little bit with the hook, but you get stuck in that certain format that you have to write in. Like you have your hook sentence you have your inflow and then you continue on in the following paragraphs. So yeah, definitely. Writing in a more conversational manner is something that I was reminded of when I went through Legendary because I do I love to write but I do get caught up in the typical you know, you have your intro sentence, intro paragraph, and then you have each supporting paragraph. So definitely for affiliate marketing and other marketing I'll do that was super helpful to remember that you're talking to people you aren't just giving them a paper to read.
Dave: Yeah. And, and even that, even even that saying is is is is conflicting because if I give you a paper to read, there's lots of whitespace it doesn't have big columns of text on it. It's interesting because that comes from a copywriter versus an English major, because that's probably going to be easier to read than that than that written paper with those big clumps of text. So unfortunately, once again, we found something that that is taught in promoted within our classrooms but doesn't translate over into real world results in the real world. Right there is that the class that's taught on how to write, copy and sell a boatload of your product or service is not really in college classes. How do I know because I've interviewed dozens, if not 100 marketing people over my my, my, you know, career and they don't know what sales page is they don't know what sales copy is. They don't know what a peep. You know, they don't know what direct response marketing is. They don't know what a call to action is in the form of like a sales letter or an ad or a tic tock video like so we have to be real smart and for those of you who are thinking that you missed some boat or you behind the eight ball because you haven't done lots of courses or you haven't gone to college, it's probably better that you know less because then we don't have to unteach you things. It's sort of like the idea Emily with a website. Right? Didn't I would assume in college the word website was used a lot, right? Right. Why not? I mean, websites are the most popular and effective thing in the in the in the 2000s, right, wrong. Websites are nothing but a bunch of shells on an internet domain. It's it's it's it's just a bunch of shells, you just walk into a Walmart is basically what it is, versus a carefully executed process that moves you through one step at a time to make sure that you are understand and are clear about that one topic that one question and then before that is over, that stops and then you move on to the next step. Meaning you opt into a landing page. There's one thing to do, then you go over to a sales page. There's one thing to do, right? That's never mentioned in this is an example of things philosophize about in classrooms, but when it comes to the real world, there's a very small percentage of people in the world who understand how this works. And that's why those people are so highly paid. There's a spec wise in these things. They specialize in infomercial campaigns. They specialize in online marketing campaigns. And that's why they're so highly paid is because the stuff works, versus what's kind of filler content to continue to push the narrative that college is the path for every student in America.
Emily: Yeah, I definitely agree. I have a younger sister and she's not sure what she wants to do for college. She doesn't know why she wants to go to college. Sorry about my dad. And I was just telling her like, there's so many online resources available. Maybe explore different things that you can specialize in because you're exactly right. It's the same with doctors too. If you're like a general medicine doctor, like dermatologists for example, make much more just because they're specialized. Yes, there's more schooling, but same with real life. Like if you're, if you're investing time in learning a specialized skill, it'll pay off. So that's always my outlook on learning new things, educating myself outside of what I learned in my college experience.
Dave: Yeah, I'm not here to bash on college. I mean, that you learned there. But, you know, we're in a sense disrupting or at the beginning of the disruption of the education, the self education movement, and I believe they'll come a time to where it is, and I believe it already is starting to happen to where degrees will be much more, there'll be worth much less in results in the ability to get results fast, will become the dominating factor in hires and so forth. And again, I do think that's already starting to happen. The person with the most paperwork shouldn't get the job, or the person with the most knowledge and ability to get results should get it. Honestly, that's the foundation of capitalism. But you know, we've just got an odd system in America. That was no doubt creep. In my opinion, and this is me speaking out of my ass at this point, but College is a money making business and it is a lot of money, way bigger money than what most people realize. I mean, they have endowments that are billions and billions of dollars that just literally sit there and just collect interest to make their wealth even bigger. I mean, some of these Ivy League schools are truly something else and then all the years that they don't, you know, pay athletes and so forth and all that money comes in, they're just starting to do that a little bit. Now, this is not a college bashing segment. For those of you who are wondering, it's just looking at the world from a you know, a 2020 perspective meaning that I can. I don't have to wonder if I've got enough examples. I can look back and I can say okay, what do I want to do here for the rest of my life? Do I want to you know, Emily, you can make some decisions is that this is the answer for me to go back to school for me to do higher education is it for me to pursue something else I got what I needed. Now I need to go in a different direction. You know, being a part of a community like this with lots of different people with lots of different experience gives us the 2020 hindsight, maybe through somebody else's life that we didn't have in our own life, to be able to look back and say, Ooh, or look forward, right, look forward, and to be able to say, ooh, do I want to go back for that PhD? Or do I want to just keep trucking along building this business from 10,000 to 100,000 a month to a million a month and building a brand if you know what the ironic thing is, anyways, Emily is most people with masters and PhDs work for somebody in flip flops and a tank top anyways. So always keep that in the back of your head.
Emily: Yeah, for sure. I actually I was considering going to law school coffee a couple years ago, as I was finishing college, and I just got to a point where I was thinking, I'm going to be in so much debt when I finished law school, it's going to take me forever to make it back even if I'm making you know, 60 $70,000 in a job that still getting me further ahead than, you know putting myself in debt and that's the same case with undergrad. So yeah, I always choose the money making option over the debt collecting option.
Dave: And you know what? There's no rush, folks. There's no rush. You know, here's the problem that I have is forcing kids into college right when they're 18 That's the problem that I have because I know how immature and ignorant I was and still even am sometimes that 38 But especially when I was 18 That's, that's 20 years ago, for God's sakes, I'm still an ignoramus, dumbass that sometimes you try to ask me to make a decision about my finances. And what I want to do for the rest of my life at 18 I didn't know my ass from a homograph. Right. So just like you know, Keith said, college has its place but it's stupid, stupidly and needlessly expensive. In my opinion, unless you're super crystal clear about what you want to do. That place shouldn't really be something that you pursue unless you're more clear that that's what you want to follow through with. Now if there was a $7.15 day challenge at the University of Alabama, it's up for you to go dip your toe that might be a little bit different. You know what there's not you know, usually I have to commend 50 G's up front. So anyways, not our business, just a business. It's fun to make fun of college. Because, you know, it's just a big GM model. You know, it's the it's companies, businesses that are so big. They forgot what it was like to be small and scrappy, you know, small, happy. So anyways, what would you tell yourself and now that you know that you didn't know you first got started?
Emily: I would definitely say, dive right into anything. Don't hold yourself back with your own thoughts. Like don't be afraid of what people are going to think of you. Ultimately, it's you and your bank account. At the end of the day. No one else is contributing to it. Well, if you have someone contributing to it, I guess you're lucky. But I would just say to keep focus on yourself. Be open to trying new things. And definitely invest in educating yourself like there's nothing better than learning skills that make you money. You spend hours to make 1000s hundreds of 1000s Millions. So it's definitely worth it. So I would say go for it.
Dave: What was your experience with our education here versus other places that you've had education? I mean, just in a nutshell, how would you summarize it?
Emily: Yeah, so I would say it's very digestible, like digestible content. You're not sitting there and just either reading or watching videos. for hours on end. I did it all in like maybe a week or two and it was just very real life, very only teaching what you need to know, no fluff. So I would say that's what really differentiated Legendary from the other stuff because I would sit for weeks years learning these skills, or not even skills concepts, instead of actual, you know, things I could use in the day to day
Dave: Everybody loves a good concept. Teachers love the concepts too. Right. Alright, Emily. Well, thanks so much for your time. It's been fun, stay warm. Okay. You're stuck inside? Most likely but you know, at least you got you know, I mean, we've got lots to do now inside don’t we?
Emily: Now there's TikTok to be made.
Dave: Alright, well, hey, take care of yourself. Alright. Keep us updated. posted. Come back and see us if you would, okay.
Emily: All right. Sounds good. Thanks for having me on.
Dave: All right, Emily. I'll talk to you later. Alright. See ya. Thanks. Alright, my friends. You can follow and find Emily @makebankwithEmily on TikTok. You know, whenever I have somebody who's recently in college, it's always interesting because I get to hear that fresh perspective, you know, of somebody who has recently gone through classes or maybe even be kind of dealing with the gravity of a large student loan bill, now that they're out on their own, they actually now have to get a job and pay it back. But the truth of the matter is, that all education isn't good. You know, often, our whole life is education. And oftentimes, we just continue to learn till we run in and find the teacher that really makes a big impact in our life. And we usually have a couple or a few of those if we're lucky. It's not that we might just have one, right. But, those few teachers throughout our lives, that we do find from going through many, many pages and many classes and oftentimes many experiences are all worth it unnecessary to lead us to where we're going or even lead us to where you are right here today, which is found Legendary. So anyways, whatever you've done in the past, my friends, it's led you to be here today with us. So take this moment, don't let it go seize it. Make this a fantastic week. Okay, and we'll see you back here tomorrow. For another episode.
