How I Went From $1,500/month to Building Three 8-figure Businesses! (MIKE DILLARD)

hey guys welcome to this episode of the passion if you today we have on somebody who's been an inspiration to me for a long time he is a serial entrepreneur he's a badass online and he's helped over a million people uh with his email list he's none other than mike diller thanks so much for being on the show today mike yeah glad to be here yeah man absolutely so for those that don't know mike i know you built um three uh eight figure online education companies i know you you have your hands in a lot of different things and you helped a lot of different people but can you just catch the audience up to speed as to a little bit about what you've done in business and uh sort of you know how you got to what you're doing today and uh what you're working on these days yeah absolutely so i knew i wanted to be an entrepreneur by the time i was a senior in high school i was waiting tables at the original macaroni grill in bernie texas before it was a chain and didn't like that i was being told when i had to be at work for how long i had to be at work and and the amount of money that i was making and i would come home smelling like food after work in a 14-hour double shift on the weekends and uh you know one in the morning and would plop down in front of the tv and back then this is in the late 90s the only thing on television was infomercials and so i discovered people like carlton sheets and tony robbins and that really opened my eyes up to the fact that there were other opportunities out there besides you know getting a normal career and so that's where the bug was caught also back in those days the only real opportunity available for someone in high school or college that really had no money was the network marketing industry this was like web 1.0 days before you know video was even a thing online and so uh i just got my start in that industry i failed miserably at it for five or six years company after company opportunity after opportunity i didn't make a dime in any of them and i finally realized that i was the problem it wasn't the business because in each of those businesses there was always people who were making millions of dollars and yet i continued to struggle and finally a mentor of mine said hey if you want to essentially earn this kind of income my goal was fifty thousand dollars a month at the time you have to become someone who's capable of making that kind of money and up until that point i'd really focused on avoiding the personal growth that i had to do for example i was scared to death of selling i was scared to death of talking to people on the phone and it's hard to make money when you're scared of those two things and so that really that fear really held me back for many many years until i got over it and i finally got over those by going out and getting a job that required me to face those fears directly so i was scared of talking to people on the phone i was like all right i'm going to get a job that requires me to jump on the phone all day so i ended up getting a position recruiting doctors at a company in dallas and i sat down the first day at a cube with a phone and a binder that thick and my goal was to make 300 cold calls a day to doctor's offices and so five years of fear was eliminated in about two days of doing that uh and it just worked really really really well so i decided i was going to do that again about a year later i was still kind of scared of selling people in person it's like i'm going to go get a job that requires me to go to door-to-door business sales so i ended up at a an internet-based startup telecom startup in downtown dallas and they gave me a territory and my job was to sneak into the high-rises and start knocking on doors until i got kicked out so i was not successful really in either of those businesses but that accomplished my goal which is to get through my fear uh which was a huge turning point for me and my entrepreneur business and and and back in the networking days so that's how i got my start that turned into my first uh information business i started to build my first network marketing business successfully i became the number one earner in a company what's that how old were you at that time uh probably about 25 and how long about 25 and your first four raise into entrepreneurship and when you were at the original uh macaroni grill like how long was that time period just so the audience has content you know i probably started as a senior in high school and then in college i dabbled in network marketing you know for the four or five years that i was there didn't really have any success i moved out to california to work with my upline and the opportunity i was in at the time right after i graduated like a week after i graduated from college the day after i moved in and landed in san diego uh 9 11 happened and so all of those plans kind of went away i ended up working at best buy for a year or so yeah moved back to san antonio dallas job but so i'd say by the time 2005 hit i wrote my first training manual for my team that was growing in 2005. so i graduated from college in 2000 uh it's called magnetic sponsoring that turned into a book and that book really introduced that entire industry to the concept of internet marketing right and uh that book put me on the map so it was 55 pages i wrote it in word i never had it spell checked i did the cover art myself and i had it printed at kinko's i sold it on a little one-page website that i wrote for 39 a copy i was waiting tables at the time at p.f chang's at that time so i strategically took a job waiting tables so i could work on my business at night wait tables in the evenings and within three months i was selling 50 dollars a month of that book uh because it just took on a life of its own and it's kind of like tim ferriss's four-hour work week my version of that in that industry and that really is what led into the first million dollars that i made by the age of 27. so that was about that was about seven years or so of trying to figure it out start stop failure success up down so from about 18-ish to about 25 and what was your income um when those books started selling versus right before like was was that a major income jump yeah no i was at pf chang so i was probably making 1500 to 2 000 a month and then jumped up to 50 000 plus a month and my my network marketing business took off i became the number one distributor in that company um and then that information business because we started i realized it was really good at writing courses and there was a huge need in this industry because until what we started to teach really took off it was still call your friends and family and hold hotel meetings right and for someone to read my book and be like oh i can generate my own leads and attract people to me and i don't have to do this silly stuff anymore it turned that turned into my first eight figure business so that we did around 25 million dollars over the next few years in just product course sales education uh courses on marketing for that industry so you went from fifteen hundred dollars a month at pf change to millions within 18 months yeah within 18 months yeah zero from from waiting tables to my first seven figures in 18 months so what was the mindset shift that occurred there or do you think it was just right time right product type of thing i mean was that do you do you remember a a radical shift in your psychology or do you think it wasn't that dramatic you just think you were at the right place the right time to write offer the right people the right product kind of thing uh it was all milestones that led up to that and it was milestones like making very strategic decisions to go out and face my fears and overcome those fears and the biggest shift for me was what my mentor mentioned which is like oh okay this isn't about finding a product or an opportunity outside of myself this is about transforming myself i actually have to become a professional at this industry if i want to get paid like one that was the single biggest shift for me and so at that point i stopped pursuing opportunities and that's when i dove into books and courses for the next year year and a half i would study copywriting every single night writing out sales letters by hand you know for an hour a night i've taught myself how to use google adwords i taught myself how to code a website so i made the shift from opportunity seeking to skill acquisition and that was the single biggest determining factor in in that change that you saw how many how many things did you try launching because i really want to zoom in on that period because i think a lot of people might be where you were at um except maybe instead of seven eight years you know maybe they're approaching their seven eight years but maybe they're 11 12 years or 13 years i haven't had that first big win and i love what you said about focusing more on skill acquisition than getting lucky with the opportunity per se but um how many things did you try launching before you had before you went from fifteen hundred dollars a month to pf changs to to millions was there that was my first product really yeah that was my first product in my first sales letter that i ever wrote and i remember writing the sales letter for that that course and i probably worked on that thing for hours a day rewriting it different draft after draft for probably three or four months wow before i ever thought it was ready for prime time and uh and that was it and then i was like okay i've got a letter now i need traffic so i learned google adwords and thankfully this is back in the early days of adwords you know before facebook existed where they would basically you know let you advertise anything right and uh and that was it and and then the next couple of years uh one click upsell technology finally came into place probably 2006 2007 and as soon as we could put a one-click upsell in place that's when it turned into a you know multi-million dollar a year business so wow and how old were you at this stage you're probably what 27-ish 28-ish when it started happening yeah and 2007 we 2007 or 2009 i have a picture of my old tax return we did 6.3 million that year from just course sales yeah um yeah so i was right around you know in my late 30s 27 28 29 wow and and you said you did over six million so and that was off one product uh by that time we had probably three or four products gotcha and what were the price points just so just so i have context for the audience i think we sold magnetic sponsoring which was just again a spiral bound book um for 39 and then i believe we had black belt recruiting which was ironically how to sell over the phone because i had finally figured that out and mastered that process with the help of a few mentors of mine so i recorded that product with them i think we sold that for i want to say either 97 or 197 and then i had a course called mlm traffic formula which was a big three ring binder and that was all of the internet marketing stuff that we take for granted today was fairly new back then it was how to make a capture page how to write copy how to write a sales letter how to get traffic use google adwords and all of that stuff and that i believe was either 297 or 397 and those were the three primary core products that we offered and were those on upsell like a line was that was the value letter or are they a little bit not connected um you know i'm not exactly sure don't remember i i do know that we offered one or two of them as upsells and the upsells were really key because obviously that took our initial customer value from 39 to let's say 70 80 90 depending upon you know what they purchased i just remember the day we implemented our first upsell our daily gross revenue literally doubled you know without changing anything else in the business so that was just massive were you were you tripping out was there any point where you were like holy cow i might be actually good at this marketing stuff i mean there must have been a few moments where your mind just really expanded you're like holy yeah because you went to one half million a month in income at a certain state yeah yeah by that by that time um you know i always i had when i started this and i and i chose entrepreneurship it was a zero failure mindset um i was not going to stop pursuing the dream of becoming financially independent through entrepreneurship ever or i would die in the process it was literally black and white there was no gray area i was prepared to sacrifice and do absolutely anything i lived when i was in san diego in 2001 i lived in an apartment even in dallas i never had any furniture because i couldn't afford it so i'd get an apartment i'd have my bed from college i'd have my little desk and one fork one knife one spoon one bowl one plate and it was the ramen diet frozen veggies taco bell dollar menu for a couple of years and and that was it and i didn't even bother unpacking my boxes with like picture frames and stuff like that i sat in the living room of the apartment for years didn't didn't go on any dates didn't bring any girls back because i'm like the place looks ridiculous there's nothing in it um what was driving you what was the what was the was it material things i know i've seen a couple year ferraris but you know what what was it that was driving you was it was it nice things what did you grow up in a household that didn't have financial security was it seeing what was possible did you just um what was it that drove you so intensely yeah i i mean my parents i grew up in a great household super hard working parents but they were both in kind of the corporate career you know america um we lived in a nice neighborhood but we were you know not the not the the wealthiest people in the neighborhood so you know we we weren't driving the nice cars or going on the cool nice vacations but they provided an amazing amazing upbringing for us so i think that was part of it and i went through looking back at this stage in my life with some more hindsight i went through a crap ton of uh bullying in middle school and high school so uh i'm certain that there is a huge part of it was kind of proving that i was good enough or worthy enough or whatever and your shoulder motivation yeah and that was i'm sure that was a big part of it so um that and just i don't like being told what to do so i was never i was never going to have a job i always liked the finer things in life and that was just not going to work out for either of those so yeah now now how about after that success did you have any sort of roller coasters you know i know one thing's a lot of my buddies have done really well and almost everybody in the industry you know they have these big successes and sometimes you can come off a million dollar launch multi-million dollar launch yeah crash you don't have another home run you don't have another hit maybe you sort of overwhelm yourself maybe you mess up with taxes you know frank colonel was talking about the ftc situation yeah uh you know a lot of people have these sort of ups and downs so did you after you you know having that mega success because that ended up being an eight-figure business right yeah well we did about 25 million in total revenue over the lifespan of that business so so yeah and at this stage you've done three uh companies that have done over eight figures um on education space but did you have any after those first big hits did you have any like sort of rock bottom moments roller coaster situations anything you can uh share or give insight on would help people out there who may be sure in that situation trying to get out so my next business after doing magnetic sponsoring for about five years i i had said everything i needed to say i didn't have anything else that was motivating me it accomplished every single goal and then some and the challenge was gone that was at the top of everest there was nowhere else to go so i was getting bored and i wanted to go do something different and my passion became financial education because i made all this money and i had no idea what to do with it so i bought all kinds of exotic cars a 6 000 square foot house you know with i'm the only one living in it boats trips all kinds of crazy stuff and and i hit it i'm like i hit oh i hit 30 and i was like okay this is stupid i have the opportunity of a lifetime and i'm just literally spending all of this money yeah so i really wanted to figure out how to invest and this is right after i think the crash of 08 happened so this is like 2 000 or i want to say 9 10 11ish uh yeah 2009 was was uh when i'm starting to think this way and i'm like okay i know what i'm not going to do because i just watched half the population lose half their money right and so i went to the bookstore and i remember vividly seeing that every single book on finance and investing was no longer relevant if you had followed what those books said you just got wiped out and and that was frustrating but it was also inspiring because it was an opportunity if i couldn't find a solution out there that would provide me with the knowledge i'm looking for then that means nobody else can either so that was the primary idea was for the second business is i want to go and interview basically uh wealthy entrepreneurs and i want to learn how to how to invest like the rich invested because wealthy people who are financially sophisticated make money when the market crashes they don't lose money and so that was the the inspiration that was the problem and i didn't know anything about that industry at all i was learning myself i was a student and that was a different twist because i went from being the expert to going into an entirely different industry where no one knows my name and i have zero expertise i have zero track record and that's a problem for most you know most folks and uh and i was like well why why don't i just try this and see what happens and i'm gonna basically just follow the oprah model i'm gonna be the interviewer i'm gonna bring the experts on to the platform and learn from them and i essentially treated it like a diary so it was a private membership area we sold access to to that for 97 a month or 597 for the years called the elevation group and i had obviously built up an email list and a following from magnetic sponsoring previously and i just didn't know how this was going to go so i wrote a webinar it's my first webinar i'd ever written and i basically said hey here's what i'm going to do i'm going to invest i'm going to learn how to invest from the wealthy i'm going to invest my money in a lot of these strategies i'm going to document what happens for better or worse if you'd like to join the journey and follow along with me you're welcome to do that and we did 3.2 million dollars in our first seven days we sold 8 600 memberships in our first week to that business how big was your email list at that time i don't remember i'm gonna guess two two hundred thousand-ish ballpark how important is it to have an email list just for people listening or maybe just getting into online entrepreneurship how important is that mike it's it is everything it is the business it is the single most valuable and important asset you can have as an online business owner or really any kind of business owner period and in terms of um targeted interests is it important or or just the bigger the list the better or do you do do you try to get only buyers or people who are interested in a certain niche or yeah yeah these are all opt-ins from you know our our targeted traffic you know paid traffic offers and and the the money is not in the size of the list the money is in the va the quality and the value of the relationship that you have with the people on your list and so a list in and of itself is completely worthless i could give you my list omar and you could do a big mail to it and you'll probably make a few sales but it'll be five percent of what i would make because there's no relationship and so uh size is certainly not everything when it comes to an email list but the relationship and the rapport you have and the trust level you have your audience is absolutely everything so that's why 8 600 people pulled out their credit card and bought my new product when i i moved businesses in a new industry that i don't know anything about just because i had delivered so much value to them previously and there was that level of trust there like hey if mike's doing this we're going to follow him into that so and how how long did you sort of grow that list were you writing it every day did you do your own copy always always write all of my emails all of my copy that's my primary job you know in my opinion um is to is to deliver content and value to my audience and to own that relationship and without getting i want to make sure i don't get sidetracked too much so that was the launch of that business and you asked what was the big blow up or mistake and so for that business i would interview someone on camera they would come you know into the studio or our office that we we built up and do an interview on a different investing topic and we would put that up in the members area once a month basically and that was the deliverable uh 18 months in we ended up interviewing a gentleman in the forex space who ended up long story short being a con man and so he had uh gotten all of these auditing documents from his trading firm you know from kpmg he had forged basically and came on to our show we put him in front of our platform we had 10 000 people and you got to think this is back in 2011. hey you i hope you're enjoying this interview and we'll get back to in a second but first i have a question have you ever seen inspiring content like this and thought to yourself i would love to share my story passion product service or business with the world well now's your chance to be interviewed on the passionate view all you have to do is click the link below fill out a short question there and if our team thinks you're a great fit who knows you could be the next person to be interviewed on the passionate view in person or on zoom all right let's get back to the show enjoy [Music] 10 000 people on a live stream with him this is way before youtube live streaming and facebook and any of that so to get 10 000 people on a live stream was a massive deal right and our email list at that point with elevation group is probably about 500 000 people and so uh we promoted his product and his services i invested money with him and about six months later we woke up one night to everybody like half of everybody's money being lost in a trade quote unquote and we called him up and said hey what's going on he's like well just invest more money it was a mistake on our part and we'll make it back twice as fast yeah and i got off the phone and my next call was to our attorney and uh lo and behold you know as soon as we go through the story with them they're like here's the scam you got taken by three days later we're calling the sec the fbi the cftc and i'd say about two weeks later i'm sitting in front of all of those people uh at the w hotel in austin telling them what happened and so essentially it was an entire the whole thing was a scam and we went from doing a million dollars a month in revenue to 200 grand a month because obviously all of the trolls who had been waiting for me to make a mistake found their opportunity and just you know took me to the cleaners yeah and the hard part about that is when you find yourself in a legal situation you're not allowed to say anything so i have an audience of 500 000 people i have a huge business where i'm getting recognized in whole foods and hotels that i stay at and um i can't talk about it and that sucks and so that led into a full-blown depression uh spent all of my savings all of my equity that i'd ever built up trying to keep the team still employed and just you know not having to let anybody go our illegal bills are probably 60 70 000 a month wow uh and that went on for three years until they were finally found guilty and put in jail uh and but it almost took me out like it took me out 100 financially but it almost took me out just from a health and stress perspective and anxiety and depression and all of that other stuff so wow dude and how old are you at this stage those three years that was uh it happened in 2012 so roughly 2012 to 2015. wow so one just one bad partner just screwed up just somebody we interviewed right and you know we you know we're not super sophisticated obviously in that arena one of my best qualities is i'm a very trusting person one of my worst qualities is that i'm a very trusting person and and i was just young and naive because i'd never been taken advantage of like that before i didn't i didn't know people like that really existed um and so yeah it was the the hardest thing i've ever been through uh for sure so yeah and then so dude so you blew so you had you had made eight figures by that stage and you had pretty much blown through most of it so here you are having to rebuild and this isn't that long ago this is what seven years ago or so six seven yeah i had 100 acre ranch in wimberley and you know the ferraris and the whole deal um yeah did you lose those i eventually sold them um you know i i i've bought other cars since then i had a 488 spider a year or two ago um and so that's a passion but i did you know i did lose all of my essentially investments and savings and had to liquidate and sell the ranch and all of that other stuff so it was uh it was a hard reset uh and as kern probably talked about the hardest part is having to go through this whole thing in a very public manner as someone who's an introvert having your reputation come into question is probably the single hardest thing you could ever go through and having someone else use you to get to your audience to then take advantage of them is one of the worst things you could ever experience um so i wouldn't wish that on anybody for sure yeah so then what'd you do how'd you get out of it what'd you do in that rock bottom moment where you had to win a big turning point was going to tony robbins date with destiny in 2015 i believe november or december and that that was something that a friend of mine dragged me to last minute and i went and at that event it i really got to a point where i was like okay it's been three years now i have to forgive myself i have to forgive everything else that's going on and i have to start moving forward and so that was kind of the pattern interrupt if you will that allowed me to do that and that's where the ideas for my next two business ventures were inspired and that was self-made man and ever grow um and so i came back from that kind of ready to get back in the groove and and do my thing again so and those two those both of those platforms are or projects were were two more wildly ambitious endeavors that uh did not turn out as intended went all in on those those are those are two more stories we could talk about if you want but yeah uh yeah i love i love the self-made man and actually that's how i first heard about you yeah and uh i would listen to those interviews and they were so good i think you had one of craig clemens yeah you had so many with so many legends and i just i would listen to them and i remember they were my favorite interviews and they were like the black and white background and then like white with the thing yeah yeah i used to listen to those when i was um i was working at tesla and i would knock doors for solar and while i was knocking doors i would actually be listening to those interviews so it's a trick awesome brother those those really inspired me a lot early on cool um so talk about that so you just your vision was like okay cool let me sort of get into maybe try and doing this a little bit more clean a little bit less sort of investi per se but let's just document stories so what happens because i really want to for the audience listening um get a gauge on sort of your mindset and your journey because a lot of people and i'm sure you know this mic a lot of people get started in online entrepreneurship you know they see the click funnels two week free trial they sign up they join it they don't really know what they're gonna sell they don't really know their expertise and i think you nailed it when you said they focus more on trying to find an opportunity rather than develop skills and then turn them into opportunities um but like what was your mindset at that time when you were like i'm gonna restart it was it you know just so the audience can get engaged they might be able to restart their thing or maybe start their first thing that could have success it's you know for me it's just easy because there is no other option you know once you once you've had that that taste of freedom and entrepreneurship you can't go back and get a job like you just can't and yeah you've got bills to pay and you know kids to feed and all of that stuff and like there is no other option so the single most important asset brings us back to the email list my email list is what kept the bills paid during those years um you know even if i didn't have the ability to create my own product at that time just for from depression or whatever uh i could promote somebody else's product and we've had affiliate promotions even you know as as recent as a year year and a half ago where we did a before email promotion and made 572 i think thousand dollars in commissions in a week half a million dollars in affiliate commissions in a week so the email list is really the asset that had saw me through those those three years of difficulty wow and yeah the heart the hardest part is just getting over the fear of you know am i being judged do people think different of me now and because i had you know i went through this situation um and thankfully i had some really good mentors who you know like kern that i could call up or like um uh gosh what's his name michael masterson but i can't believe i came you know michael masterton uh well uh mark uh mark ford thank you his real name mark ford um so mark is one of the co-founders of agora you know billion dollar publishing company and he's been in this space forever and he went through something similar during his career and so luckily i i had the ability to call him up and ask for his advice on how to handle that situation and he said he gave me the most valuable advice that i had gotten which was just be completely transparent and honest with everybody and you'll be just fine so i ended up writing a 30-page blog post that was titled you know sued by the feds um and there was about a thousand people again myself included who were invested with that company and i sent that blog post and that email out to our entire list of 500 000 people and so i didn't just send it to the people who are affected send it to everybody you remember clicking publish on it i do and you know i sent it to mark to proofread first and he just said you know great job well done and the whole thing was just the facts so we put all the links to all the documentation there in the timeline here's what happened and you know a big apology and uh i'll do everything i can to make sure you know justice takes place and then you know eventually we were able to to make that happen but uh that was the single best and most important thing that i ever did because i finally got to tell my side of the story and what happened is that it taught my audience that even if something bad happens if mike makes a mistake if something goes wrong he will always be honest and upfront with us and that was i remember seeing there was 500 comments left on that blog post and 95 of them were incredibly positive and supportive and that was a huge turning point for me as well to where it's like okay i've said my piece here's what happened and people know that no matter what happens i'll always be straight with them and i think that was a pivotal moment in cementing my reputation in people's eyes moving forward and especially coming out of that situation so yeah that would be a huge piece of advice and lesson learned for me is when you're in business bad stuff's going to happen it's whether it's somebody else's fault or you make a mistake or you have good intentions and things don't work out and whatever it is just be ultra transparent with everybody and they will stick with you they will forgive you but if you lie to folks and you try to trick them or whatever it'll all be found out in your toast at that point so that's something you want to avoid at all costs pretty cool man i appreciate that now what's your advice for online entrepreneurs mike who are maybe just starting or maybe starting to have a little bit of success but they're really looking for that home run product um would you say really goes back to the you know focus on your skills more than the opportunity thing what's you know at this stage i know you've helped mentor directly or indirectly over a million people um you know there's entrepreneurs all over the world particularly in the people looking to have success online especially what's along with covid a lot of people are looking at you know home-based opportunities um what do you see is the most common denominator of people who sort of get stuck in that failure or start restart mode and just kind of never quite get there versus the ones that actually eventually succeed i'm sure you have a good pulse on both a couple things success is always in the details so everybody that i know myself included who has found success online has been at one time or another incredibly ocd about acquiring these skill sets meaning when i was learning copy again i was in in my room handwriting out sales letters or video transcripts for an hour two hours a day for over a year and that's how i learned to copy but that's what i was willing to do most people will never ever ever ever do that same things when it goes to writing a sales page or writing a headline or an ad i'll write you know i'll spend an entire day at my screen like this probably with my head down on the desk just going through copy ideas and scenarios in my head for eight or nine hours a day and i might get three paragraphs that day the next day it might flow and i might get three or four pages uh it might take me a week where i'm sitting here at eight hours a day just banging my head against the table trying to come up with the right angle for my sales presentation and most people will never do that but the success is found in the single work right word for the headline or the single right word for the ad it's paying attention to every single detail on the page the formatting the font is it easy to read is it clear does it make sense is the flow you know does it have as little friction as possible as far as the checkout process goes is it confusing at all to anyone and that's the stuff that i've just obsessed over and i think you have to when it comes to this industry and if not then you have to do it like you do with your show you're absolutely obsessive when it comes to the shows that you produce and your preparation for them and all of that stuff so 99 of the people i see in the entrepreneur space who are not having results it's because they don't they don't dive into the details enough uh they're not ready for it they haven't earned it they haven't worked hard enough they haven't studied hard enough uh and that's it and so anyone else that i've seen who has put in the time and the work and the effort and mastered a skill set so that they could literally write a book about it is doing great success i mean skills skill requirement is the is the tool set that empowers you to take action but that action is going to be effective action it's going to produce a result that result produces a positive feedback loop it gives you confidence it gives you momentum gives you inspiration it just feeds your soul and then you just you just get into momentum and it's just awesome from there um so yeah i would say that's the single biggest thing is is not going deep enough especially today because we didn't have social media i wasn't being distracted by youtube or facebook or instagram yeah through three ring binders and books do you think a lot of people are distracted or maybe watch a couple videos and then confuse themselves into thinking maybe they're good at that skill set do you think there's a lot of that going on uh people get confused between learning and busy busy consumption meaning you're going to learn a lot from this interview but you're not going to master a skill through this interview right or any interview and so what i unfortunately see happening is people are watching garyvee videos on youtube or instagram or whatever and great there's little nuggets of wisdom and all of that stuff but they're not going to give you the depth of education you need to take an effective action and get a result and so if you really and i've been telling young especially the younger generation who's grown up on social media this for a while now do you really want to do what i've been able to do and make that kind of money you have to turn off social media literally delete it from your phone for a year and get your nose into books and online courses and whatever you need to do until you have literally mastered a skill set and that's all you need is one you have to become one of the best in the world at one single skill mine was copywriting and then you can do whatever you want to do with that skill set so for you could be you know facebook traffic or writing courses or seo or whatever it may be i've had i've had some young folks come and and work with me uh here in austin and we would meet up for lunch you know once a month and they would just kind of pick my brain and i'd walk them through the same exact advice they took it one of them was in seo so he went and taught himself seo over the course of six months got his first handful of clients and he went from basically leaving a job at wework to probably making 10 20 30 000 a month in less than a year just by teaching himself seo and getting some clients and i'm sure he's doing you know even better than that now so yeah so it's about going deep in the skill sets yeah so real quick real quick question i have two quick bullet questions first one what are some skills that you could just sort of rapid fire that you think are powerful skill sets to develop when it comes to entrepreneurship you mentioned a few but just for the audience listening what are some quick if you could just brainstorm 30 seconds yeah yeah the most valuable is copywriting because copywriting where you're when you're selling things online copy is the language of the internet you have to learn how to persuasively share your message with people who are not interacting with you personally online copywriting is the skill that allows you to do that whether it's watching your youtube videos clicking on your ads buying your product i don't know how it's possible to build a business without master mastering that skill selling over the phone would be uh the next best alternative because you have to learn how to how to how to sell that's how you get paid as a business owner you have to sell your product if you have a very analytically minded brain if your brain is wired for numbers and spreadsheets and things like that i would highly recommend mastering facebook advertising or google ads or youtube ads and starting that up as an agency and doing it for other people as a service first and mastering that getting paid to master those skills uh and then other than that you know those are the first most valuable skill sets you can master gosh after that you kind of have what you need on either side of the table with one of those two skills to make seven figures and you can plug whatever your idea is into those skill sets and right across i love that the second question i have is when it comes to testing um you know we had russell brunson on the show not too long ago and russell was talking about his potato gun and he tried all sorts of like what about this what about this like he would just he was telling me and joel marian same thing that they would rapid fire test stuff to see what would work and whereas they see a lot of entrepreneurs will think of one or two ideas for like one or two years and then maybe kind of launch um but then they don't do well so they're like i'm no good at this and then whatever they get stuck whereas russell would just like test this can you talk about how important it is to test ideas and be willing to fail because i think even in the we were talking about um you know hall of fame baseball players i think they have like a 30 that batting average like it's like a 0.37 and that's hall of fame yeah meaning that's like 37 in school if you did 50 that's an f but can you talk about in business how important it is to just mentally prepare yourself for the resilience of you know failure rejection being persistent resilience because people might look at you and go holy cow three eight figure education companies spend my whole life trying to make my first you know six figures or seven figures you know what what is it mike you know i'm sure you uh you know you sort of have gotten those questions so you know what's your thoughts on that well there you know that was the five or six years of a dozen different business opportunities that i failed at right before i made a dollar right so everybody goes through that process nobody comes into this and hits a home run on their first try ever and so i always set expectations for folks is you know three to five years minimum before you should expect any kind of result um if you if you do it faster than that great you congratulations you're better than i am so uh you know that's kind of the time frame i'd keep in mind and you know i the testings absolutely i would recommend if you have an idea throw it up on a capture page throw up you know the headline some benefit bullets give away a free report on the back end and throw some traffic at it and see how it does see what your conversion rate is on the opt-in page see if people are are interested in this get up on social media and put up a video you know whiteboard video in five minutes hey guys do you need help with x y and z i'm thinking about doing a training on how to blank blank and blank if that's something you would be interested in you know let me know or click the link below whatever it may be and just see what the response is whenever whenever we launched a new product still to this day the first thing i do is i send out a survey to my my audience and i say hey guys well uh what do you need help with most and i give usually three three choices a b or c and they literally dictate dictate what i spend the next year six months to a year of my life creating based on you know which wins that survey which answer wins so we don't leave anything to chance as far as that goes anymore um and as far as my business successes have gone they've all been inspired by my own biggest personal problems and so in the beginning magnetic sponsoring my biggest personal problem is i hate to sell i don't want to chase after people i want to attract people to me and have them already pre-sold so i learned how to solve that problem for myself and lo and behold there's a giant market of other people who would love to learn how to do the same thing elevation group everybody just lost a ton of money in the stock market crash great i really want to learn how to invest like the wealthy so this doesn't happen to me a lot of other people want to learn how to do that and so uh yeah that's just how how i've always come up with the ideas for my business the next business we're moving into now over the next year is really going to be helping people who do amazing things in the world thought leaders doctors people who are doing a lot of good and helping people but they're not they don't have the skill sets to do that at scale like we have i want to help those people essentially acquire the skills that they need to spread their message to more people to build up their own audiences to learn how to monetize an audience and do things like that and there's just a huge there's going to be a huge and growing need for that especially now that most of the world is being forced to change their career and move online um so what are the problems that you see in the world right now that are being created what problems do you have right now that are being created and how can you create a solution to those that's that's where i've started every single time i love that and and your new project is called revenue.com correct uh revenue is a little passion project it's a little mastermind group that we started for entrepreneurs to kind of huddle everybody together and support business owners as we go through this crazy time that we're going through the the next business that i talked about is actually uh superheroes and that's not live yet but you know we have our domains and we're building that out but that'll probably be q1 of 21 uh before that's up and ready but that's what i want to do for the next 10 years is the people that we have on the podcast a lot of them are not marketers but they're phenomenally awesome people and i just want to help them make a bigger impact and so that's kind of the problem that i see that i want to go solve now very cool mike now i have two more quick questions that that people uh that wrote in they said knowing what you know now aside from you know the challenging time you had mentioned for those three years and that situation with the guy who interviewed and that whole thing aside from that knowing what you know now being on this side of the fence what would you tell the young mike who was trying to find success early on before he had his first home run um what advice would you give them what insight would you give them that would maybe have set them up maybe a little bit first one is master money and so a very common challenge that entrepreneurs run through you know ryan dice talks about this i've talked about this um kearns talked about this mark ford kind of everybody everybody who's made a lot of money as a business owner usually runs into issues with money because we learn how to make it but no one really teaches what to do with the money once you do make it and it because becomes such a powerful skill set that if you ever run into an issue like a tax issue or whatever just like oh we'll just go make more money and what that does is it doesn't provide you with a long-term game plan when it comes to investing building actual wealth and so if i could go back and tell my younger self that it would be to go read a book like profit first mike michalowicz who's gone through this cycle as well and put together an actual financial plan that sets aside money from different buckets for every use every single month that automatically builds wealth for you long term uh because as entrepreneurs we are natural risk takers i've lost a lot of money and investments i've lost a lot of money in my own my own uh you know business endeavors and i've gone all in three times with my own chips like all of my money i've put into businesses three times and two of those that didn't work out and you know millions were flushed down the drain basically and so that's that's a risk-taking side of my brain that i'll always bet on myself but from a responsible wealth building perspective not that fun of an experience to go through and so that would be number one number two would be to just have more patience and a longer time horizon you know we tend to think of three years as four years is a long time in the internet marketing world to run a business right and every time you start over if you want to start over you're literally having to start over for the most part where the folks who have a much longer time frame of 10 15 years uh just seem to have this you know longer steady growth curve and so those two i think would be the single biggest uh lessons that i could i could pass on at this point yeah i love that and the last question is how do you build a community um that knows likes and trusts you that you can obviously monetize and serve because the bigger chunk of it before monetizing is serving that's what allows people to monetize um and that this was a great question is you know what's your best advice to do that i know i asked earlier in terms of were you writing your list um you know every single day is it more the quality of it i know tim ferriss writes his list once a week but i think he has like 60 70 open rate like crazy open rates because there's that trust so is it about frequency is it about capturing emails that have the right niche interest is it just trying to get as many emails as possible through your thing and then give them value i mean what are what are some tricks of the trade that you could tell people about building a community and the like knows likes and trust you it's quality first and treating your email list as if it's one individual so every time i sit down and i write an email i'm literally just thinking about writing to one person hey omar blankety blankety blank right yeah and so how first and foremost would i be glad if i opened up and read this email and be like wow that was a good use of my time or would buy like oh that was a waste of my time i'm not going to open up mike's emails anymore so that's kind of my first litmus test for for the emails that i send i don't worry about frequency i worry more about quality you know i i do know from stansberry and agora who again make more money from email than anybody else on the planet that they mail every single day and that day at the same time every day creates a habit of consumption and that habit of consumption obviously builds rapport generates value and just builds a snowball effect and and is positive in every way that you can measure the challenge is as a solo entrepreneur you might not be up for writing that day or you might not have something to write about you don't have a staff of editors like they do and so for me i would just simply try to write at least two or three times a week but i would try to make it interesting i would try to make it educational i'd try to make it personal so i would try to always include photos of even if it's just me at my desk or the house or wherever i'm at it's just like i'm emailing you hey omar check it out we're doing x y z today even if it's just going to the grocery store it doesn't matter because that's what creates that personal rapport and personal connection to be vulnerable right if you have something challenging that you're going through talk about it because that also creates that rapport and connection um and then three nothing corporate ever so it's always from your first name not from your company name it's always easy to read it's never in a professional email looking branded template you know html template it just needs to look like it's coming from your pal mic yeah you know and so to me that's that's the winning formula that i've used during my career have you seen copy change through time i just want to zoom in on that from maybe format from long format to shorter format to nuances or not really as long as it's in gdp it's interesting i still see both yeah and i you still get conflicting information about both sure i do believe that shorter it's actually getting easier these days because at the end of the day selling is a simply a matter of time and trust together with somebody right and on average somebody's willing to spend up to a thousand dollars with you for every hour hour and a half that they spend with you which is why most people use hour and a half long webinars for a thousand to two thousand dollar product um i explained sam evans that explains sam evans yeah yeah and so and so but that time that hour of time can be done through a podcast can be done through a format like this it can be done through instagram stories or youtube videos it just has to accumulate to where it's like okay i feel safe and comfortable you know with mike or omar or whoever it is and the interesting part about social media is because it has provided the ability to give those micro doses of rapport building is that you don't need these long super fancy sales presentations anymore because that level of trust is already so high and so that's been one of the benefits unless you're selling something to cold traffic and people who've never heard of you before well then you still need the hour and a half two hour three hour long webinar to do that um so we're making our stuff shorter and shorter we're focusing more on social media content at the top of the funnel to build rapport and deliver value and shorter sales presentations on the back end because again most people are fairly warm and and know you like you and trust you at that point and if the product is a good fit for one of their problems then it's a pretty easy sell with that being said copy still matters uh you've got a you've got a no copy to write the first 30 seconds of your video you know for whether it's youtube or instagram to capture people's attention because now you're competing with gary vee and grant cardone and everybody else you've got on the show right and so you still need to know the basic psychology around copy so that you can gain people's attention bring them right into their pain or problem transition them to a solution and you know all of those important endeavors that we and tools that we use here to communicate online persuasively beautiful mike i have one more question before we wrap up um you gave so much wisdom usually at the end i say do you have any final words of wisdom but honestly i feel like you nailed a big chunk of it um you know a lot of people are going to ask and have been messaging me saying you know i want to get into online entrepreneurship so the question i want to ask and i kind of briefly touched on it earlier we'd love to have you zoom in on this as a final question and you can attach advice to it but essentially for those people who want to create a product i know you mentioned that you know skills are important to develop um what's been your litmus test aside from you know doing ask surveys or ask campaigns or asking your audience have there been times where maybe you tested something didn't think it would work but that ended up being a home run uh or like you said it usually something that's a real big market need especially you know running the passion if you have a lot of people who are you know talk about ideas i am passionate about this or i'm passionate about this but there's no market need or market you know demand at that particular point in time what's what's your mental gauge on how people should approach it should they throw spaghetti at the wall see what sticks should they look for the need and try to attach their skill set and passion to the need should they test everything out you never know what'll hit uh what's your just i know i'm kind of throwing a lot at you it's a loaded question but uh what's your pulse on that i mean there isn't i don't know if there's there's one like solid answer because again with my businesses they were always inspired by my own personal need and i just said is there any is there is this do other people have this problem and the answer is just yeah but i didn't i didn't know if they were going to succeed when i wrote the webinar for elevation group and launched that i had no idea if anybody was going to buy that i mean i'm literally in the webinar telling people i don't know what i'm doing i'm just going to figure this out um and it ended up being the single most successful offer uh you know that i've ever done and we had people i i know the ceo at stansberry literally and russell too have both told me that they both saved that webinar and added it to their swipe file because it was one of the most successful that had ever come around and so but i had no idea if it was going to be successful i had to keep my fingers crossed um it was just something that i was passionate about and that i wanted to learn about and if i could get paid to learn it while i'm doing it then awesome now there are two you know resources that do come to mind uh ryan levesque in his book ask is essentially you know how to find out if your thing has legs and then pat flynn's will it fly is another book so between those two books and the ideas you're going to get from those on how to essentially vet your idea you have all of the the help and the knowledge that you need to do that i think one thing that people need to think about in addition to their idea is what kind of business are they uh wired to to want to build and succeed at and i bring that up because i didn't understand how important that was until i had failed at network marketing for five years but the one of the primary reasons i failed and i struggled so much because i was an introvert in an extroverts industry and so all of my mentors and teachers were like you know these cold calls a day you know talk to strangers get their business cards drop flyers in the mall whatever it may be all of these were activities that they had success with as extroverts that i as an introvert i could do it but it just i'd rather i'd rather do anything but that and so there was a giant level of resistance where i'm climbing the mountain and i'm you know holding a hundred pound sack behind my my back while i'm doing that and as soon as i gave myself permission and i basically reached a breaking point i was like i've been doing this for five years i need to either do something different or i need to go leave the industry and i didn't want to waste those five years so i was like i'm not gonna listen to that advice anymore i'm gonna go do this business and build it in a way that would feel really good to me and making that change and giving myself permission to do that and so now i'm in flow and in momentum and building it in a way that i can drop the weights and i can just sprint uphill was everything and so if you were to tell me if i'm a beginner hey mike the key to success here is to go sell products or services on amazon or to start a facebook ad agency or to learn and master seo i'm gonna fail because my brain is not wired for that my brain is wired to write and to be creative and to have ideas and to tell stories um and there's other people if i said hey those are the keys to building a successful business online and their brain is not wired for that kind of creativity creativity they're gonna fail so just ask yourself how's my brain wired what do i really like to do if i could build this business and make money in a way that i would just get lit up by and love to do on a daily basis what would that look like and start there and then figure out how to apply you know that methodology to whatever industry or business model that you want i love that and when you when you first launched your first thing did you have uh like a little bit of like fear or limiting beliefs because you know one thing i've learned from you know i've had the good fortune with the show to sit with the best of the best and you know a lot of them have i've said this statement over and over including russell we just had on like a month or so ago he said that marketing certainty wins that a lot of people like think about an idea but it's almost like when you're putting out an idea people are looking at you as a leader as an authority when you when you first launched i mean maybe you developed confidence as you went on but when you first launched do you remember the moment of feeling like the imposter syndrome a little bit or who might have put out this uh attraction marketing thing compared to other um or in its certainty when you're yeah no that's that's great that you use that word because that's the word i was actually going to use um i always had a 100 level of certainty as as far as i am going to be successful as an entrepreneur i didn't know how or what but the 100 certainty of ultimate success was there without a shadow of a doubt i do remember you know launching the book i think my network marketing team at that time i'd finally figured it out and had probably 100 to 200 reps that i'd built under me and that's nothing by most standards of leaders in that industry who have twenty thousand two hundred thousand people on their team uh so there was some imposter syndrome around like what do i have to offer in this book at all but my goal was not to write a book for the industry it was to write a book just for those 150 reps as my team is like hey here's what i've learned what to do and here's what not to do and then as soon as those people read it it was just like holy smokes this was just a giant paradigm shift and it just took off and so there was certainly some insecurity and you know a lack of confidence and am i going to be judged am i going to be criticized by people who have made more money than me for what i'm trying to do and again my mentors were just like man you just gotta you can't care what other people think about you if you let that continue to stand in your way you're done you're not gonna make any progress whatsoever because no matter what you're going to be judged and criticized and so i did have to make a conscious effort to just get past that and i believe i even talked about that in the book which is you don't need anyone's permission to do whatever you want to do but if you feel like you need it you have mine and i think that's what a mentor of mine told me at the time where it's like hey if you really feel like you need permission man you've got my permission to go do this so go do it um and that's really what i've tried to pass on to others who are just getting started that's beautiful man and you've had launches that were failures too right not all of them have been smashing hits um not really because once you have an audience yeah every launch is going to be a success to one degree or another yes how much yeah um yeah i mean you know evergrow was the hydroponic system i developed and that never took off that was an entirely new industry and building a tech device so that you know didn't didn't uh go as planned your audience came in from so many different places it wasn't just like one vertical right started in network marketing and then i and then i and then it and then it i brought that audience with me on my journey and told the story and it's not like i just left that group in that company but i transition them into elevation group in the finance space and then i transition them into self-made man and mentoring and so i've always involved my audience in every part of my journey and i have subscribers who've been on my list for 12 13 years still so it's not even about how they came on it's about where you've taken them on the journey and trusting that they'll come with you it's like vlogging right we watch casey neistat because we're just interested in his story of his life right he's just telling the story of his life and if you do that via email it's the same thing this is the next chapter in my story we're gonna go do this now right perfect well mike thank you so much for being on the show where can people find you if they want to get in touch and uh learn more from you uh just mike diller.com would be uh would be awesome awesome and we'll plug that link in the description below thank you so much for helping on and bringing value man i appreciate you so much you thanks for having me omar yeah man you've been a big inspiration for a long time man so thank you for the community appreciate that thank you guys for watching yep we'll see you guys on the next episode hey you if you enjoyed that video make sure to smash that subscribe button right now and also if you're an epic entrepreneur thought leader expert and you want to be interviewed on the show the same way we've interviewed over 10 billion dollars worth of entrepreneurs and reached millions of people then all you have to do is click the link below right now and fill out the questionnaire to see if you'd be a good fit to be interviewed on the passionate few and also if you enjoyed this video make sure to click any of these videos as well if you thought this video is epic these videos will blow your mind until next time live strong live with passion and thank you for being one of the passionate few i'll see you in the next video

Channel: OMAR ELATTAR & THE PASSIONATE FEW

Views: 8,371

Keywords: mikedillard, mike dillard, mike dillard interview, mike dillard podcast, the passionte few, digital marketing 2020, digital marketing, success story, Mike Dillard: How I Went From $1, 500/month to 8 Figure CEO, mike dillard list grow, mike dillard magnetic sponsoring, how to grow an email list, email list, how to make money online, mailing list, make money online, 8 figure ceo, rags to riches story, podcast, passionate few mike dillard, mike dillard story, mike, dillard

Id: HpOsbbYg1Zw

Length: 65min 15sec (3915 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020