SPI 929: Break These Old Rules for New Growth in 2026

SPI 929: Break These Old Rules for New Growth in 2026

Pat Flynn: Okay, picture this, it’s 2008, I’m sitting in my cubicle as an architect and I just got laid off from my dream job during the Great Recession. A lot of you have heard this story before. But this is true.

I decided to start a website to help people pass an architectural exam and here’s what exactly that looked like.

I bought a domain for $10, I built a WordPress site using a free theme, I wrote blog posts stuffed with keywords like lead exam tips and green building study guide, and I submitted that site to directories. I built backlinks by commenting on other blogs and you know what? It worked! Within just a couple months, I was ranking number one on Google for several of my target keywords, and within a year, I was making six figures.

And that was life changing, of course. And fast forward to today, if you tried that exact same strategy, you would get absolutely nowhere. The game has completely changed. I mean, it’s changed many times, but, to think back then, it’s like, man, it is, the landscape is so different. And so today, I want to take you on a journey through that change. We’re going to compare how entrepreneurship, marketing, and things like content creation worked back then, back in 2008 to 2010 versus how they work today.

Because if you understand this shift, if you really get what’s changed and why, you’re going to have a massive advantage over everyone who’s still trying to play by the old rules. And I don’t mean just old rules like, oh, people blogging or trying to rank for keywords, but there’s a lot of principle related stuff from back in the day that just no longer applies.

And there are things from back in the day that always apply. They apply today and they’re going to apply tomorrow. They’re going to apply in 50 years. So this is the story of the greatest transformation in business and marketing history, and it’s still happening right now. So let’s talk about what we’re going to call the old world.

And I know that makes me sound old because I am a part of the old world, but this is the picture that we’re painting, right? The blogging era. In 2008, if you wanted to build an online business, you started a blog. Like, period. That’s what you do. I mean, the strategy was simple. You write keyword rich blog posts, you optimize them for search engines, aka SEO, search engine optimization, and you just wait.

You wait for Google to send you traffic. And I remember spending hours, absolute hours, Hours researching keywords using tools like Google Keyword Tool, which was free. I used later Market Samurai. Anybody remember Market Samurai? And then Long Tail, bro? No Long Tail Pro. Sorry. I was thinking about my bro, Spencer Haws, who made Long Tail Pro and then sold it.

Long Tail Bro is something completely different. I don’t even know what that means. But I would find phrases like, lead exam study materials, lead exam study guide, you know, that got a thousand searches per month with low competition, and then I’d write entire blog posts around those exact phrases. And it worked because A, there was less competition. B, Google’s algorithm was just simpler. Just, you knew exactly what to do. And C, people actually used Google like a library. They’d search for specific information and read long form content. And yeah, that’s changed. Many of you know that. The SEO game was exactly what it was.

So SEO in 2008 was like a video game with clear rules, right? Stuff your target keyword in the title, URL, and throughout the content. Get other websites to link to you, even if you had to pay for it. Submit your site to directories that would, again, bring links back to your website and write meta descriptions with your keywords.

Yoast was an amazing plugin that allowed you to write that metadata, right? The WordPress plugin, Yoast, Yoast SEO. Man, this is like a, we’re going in the DeLorean back in time thinking about this. So I remember spending like entire weekends doing link building, reaching out to other websites, commenting on other websites writing guest posts, right?

And Google rewarded this behavior. If you followed the formula, you would rank and I proved it. This was during the niche site duel where later I did this publicly and I was able to rank a security guard training website. And in 73 days, I was able to rank number one for the keywords security guard training and started generating revenue.

And from that point forward, A decade later, I was still generating revenue from that business until I sold it in 2020. Then, the email less strategy. You know, email is still important, it is the holy grail, but it was a little simpler back then, right? You’d create a lead magnet, usually a PDF guide, you’d put an opt in form on your blog, collect email addresses, boom.

Right then you’d send a weekly newsletter with tips, maybe promote an affiliate product here and there and that was it. And open rates were very high because again, there was less competition in an inbox. People actually read emails email still. I just. I’m flagging this. It is still one of the, if not the most important thing you can do to grow your business because there really is no vehicle like it.

It’s changed and thankfully we have our new community director, Liz Wilcox, who specializes and is a master at email marketing. She’s already teaching a lot of things inside of the SPI community that are really helpful for people and we’ll be doing more stuff together in the future. So check out the community if you aren’t a part of it already.

What else changed? Spam filters, right? We’re much less sophisticated. So emails got through right. There was a lot more. There was, this was before you know, all, all the privacy acts and laws and all those kind of things came into play that we’ve had to kind of work around and, and, and work with.

Then there was the PLF for product launch formula. So this is sort of the model, right? When you were ready to sell something, you do a product launch, right? And that usually meant a series of blog posts that built anticipation, maybe a webinar, right? Using cutting edge technology to go live and to have people register for that live and even get automatic emails after they’re done.

You’d have a sales page with a super long form letter. And you’d email your list for a whole week. And again, a lot of this still applies, but in different kinds of ways. The formula was much simpler back then and conversion rates were much higher. We’ve seen the tides change. We’ve seen a lot of creators who were doing exactly what I was doing, who are no longer here.

I mean, there’re still live, but they are moving on to other things, or they’ve gone into higher end coaching, or they’ve built software products, or they, you know, they run agencies now. I’m one of the few left, in fact, doing it in the way similar to what it was, but we’re always trying to skate where the puck is going.

We started building community, we started to take our courses and put them into a library that helped walk people through in a certain order versus just having them all a cart. Again, we’ll get into this later. I’m kind of jumping ahead a little bit. Social media has changed. Right? Social media existed, but it was different.

And Facebook was for connecting friends, not business. Twitter was Twitter, and it was for sharing random thoughts, not for marketing or politics or anything like that. LinkedIn, just for job hunting. YouTube was for funny cats, and Instagram didn’t exist. TikTok was, it was, I mean, before Musically. ly, it was, before TikTok, it was Musically, and before Musically. Ly, it was nothing. Right? Most entrepreneurs ignored social media entirely, and it was just more of a It was just more of a place to share thoughts, right? It was almost seen as a distraction from real marketing back then. Then came the 2010s and the podcast pioneers. And I feel like I’m definitely one of them.

I started my podcast in 2010. This very podcast that you’re listening to right now, nearing 1000 episodes. And there were at the time, Maybe 50,000 podcasts total compared to over 4 million today, and that’s still a very low number. I still think podcasting is still ripe and still something that should be paid attention to, but video podcasting obviously has taken part of that.

I got featured in iTunes. Right? Before it was Apple Podcasts, I actually had, for a moment in time, when episode 100 came out of the SPI podcast, a banner at the top of iTunes. Everybody who signed into iTunes saw it, and it helped grow my show early on. There was very little competition, and so if you published consistently and had decent audio quality, you would show up in the new and noteworthy section, and you’d kill it.

For like eight weeks, you would be guaranteed like additional listeners that, you know, You wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise. This is different now. You know, podcast advertising wasn’t really a part of this. Sponsorships was rare. Brands were still going through traditional means to expose their brands.

And most podcasters did it for the passion or to build their personal brand. So glad I started a podcast back in 2010. So what happened? Where did this great shift happen? How do we get from that to today’s world? Well, there were, there were several massive shifts and this might be a history lesson for some of you, but they all kind of happened pretty quickly, right?

There was sort of an algorithmic revolution. Google seemed to get smarter and smarter. There was a thing called the Panda Update in 2011, Penguin in 2012, and these were Moments in time that I remember just killed and crushed businesses that relied on search engine optimization. Like overnight. I mean, it also helped others overnight who were providing a lot of value and not just keyword stuffing and those kinds of things.

I don’t remember the exact details of those updates, but I do remember massive shifts happening. User experience was seen as better than keyword density, you know, authority and trust over manipulation, content quality over content quantity.

And then suddenly all those keyword stuff posts and paid links became liabilities instead of assets.

So then SEO became removing those things or masking those things or redirecting those things. It’s crazy. Also what happened is after the iPhone was launched, By 2012, mobile internet usage was exploding everywhere. Most people before then were using flip phones still and BlackBerrys. Remember BlackBerrys?

By 2016, mobile searches exceeded desktop for the first time. So that was in 2016. And this changed everything, right? Content had to also be mobile friendly. That’s when attention spans started to get shorter and visual content became more important and apps started competing with websites. And then the social media landscape changed between 2010 and 2015 social media went from kind of optional to essential.

Facebook became a business platform, right, with Facebook pages and then later groups. Twitter became a news source. LinkedIn became a content platform. Instagram launched and exploded. Snapchat introduced stories. They were if we remember back in the day, they were the first to do these disappearing stories, right?

And now we all have it. TikTok which again was originally Musical.ly was born. And suddenly you couldn’t just build a website and wait for Google traffic. You had to be active on multiple social platforms. Then there was the content explosion after that. Creating content became much easier. This is where we saw a lot of people creating videos because the tools were getting easier.

It was easier to upload. It was easier to record. We had recording on our phones, right? Blog posts and podcast episodes. This, it just all started to take over social media posts and especially informational things, right? And this is why I wrote Lean Learning because We need to shield ourselves from a lot of that stuff.

And a lot of it is not relevant right now. And then attention became the scarcest resource. Attention did. And getting noticed became exceptionally harder and exponentially harder. And this is why people who know how to make good hooks or capture attention are the ones winning right now. Then came the trust recession.

I did a podcast episode a couple episodes ago about this trust recession. And what that means is as more people started to come online, scams and low quality products, low quality content, all that kind of stuff flooded the market, and people became more skeptical, more careful, and more demanding of trust, the sort of fake it till you make it mentality that worked in the 2008 to 2010 era because again, there was nothing else available that became a liability. Authenticity and transparency became competitive advantages. And that’s something that I was very, very adamant about early on, like with my income reports and sharing the wins and the failures and bringing on people on the show who aren’t afraid to share those things as well.

And then came the creator economy. This was not, this was a term that we all, this is a term that we all know about now. Back when I started, that wasn’t even a thing. The creator economy? The rise of the creator economy is perhaps the biggest part of this entire shift. So in 2008, for example, if you wanted to make money online, you typically sold info products, you did affiliate marketing, and or you offered services.

Today, creators make money through sponsorships and brand deals, membership communities, live streaming, donations, merchandise, even digital things like, I mean, NFTs and things like that came about and just left, thankfully. Platform specific monetization, YouTube started paying, Instagram started paying, TikTok creator funds, etc.

And the creator economy, is now worth over $104 billion and it barely existed 15 years ago.

So what works now? Right? That is the question. We, we, we’ve kind of caught up. So what does entrepreneurship and content marketing look like today? Let’s break it down.

First, the blog first strategy is dead. Today’s content strategy sort of looks like this.

It could be a video first approach, which is very popular, that’s what I would recommend, especially with YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels and TikTok Facebook Reels and of course YouTube. Multi platform distribution, right, repurposing one content across five to ten different platforms. Community has become the center.

Building engaged community, connecting with people, not just broadcasting, but broad asking and broad connecting, right? Not just building audiences, but building communities, passionate communities. And then number four, the personality driven content and creator and brand, right? Because people follow people, not brands.

Let me say that one more time. People follow people, not brands. And I see this in my own business, right? My blog still gets traffic, sure, but my YouTube channels, both for SPI and Deep Pocket Monster, drive a ton of growth. I mean, it’s my number one thing on Deep Pocket Monster, the podcast still number one for the SPI podcast, and referrals and recommendations from others, for sure.

There’s also a new SEO. A lot of people think SEO is dead. It’s not completely dead but it’s completely different, that’s for sure. There’s a focus on user intent, like, what are people going there for and are they getting those things? Keywords aren’t even a thing anymore, really. Create comprehensive, helpful content, right?

Like, in depth pieces of content. Oftentimes, content that includes other forms of media. It includes the podcast episodes, and it’s connected to the videos on your website and the videos on the YouTube channel that all are around the same subject. You build topical authority in this way, and, you know, you optimize for the sort of featured snippets and voice search.

You prioritize page speed and user experience. These are things we didn’t even care about back then, and now it’s everything. But here’s the cool thing, and I’ve said this before. Social media is now the new SEO, right? More people discover content through YouTube than Google searches, right? And yes, there’s ChatGPT and other things like that too, competing with this, but social media is the new SEO.

So, it’s how you show up there and this is why, again, we’re very adamant here about doing short form video because it allows you to get on all of these platforms in the most visual and sort of attention capturing way. Email marketing has changed, right? Segmentation is crucial. Not a one size fits all thing like it used to be.

You could just have an email list and blast emails to everybody and hopefully with whatever your email was about people would be interested. Cool. And then the rest of the people would open your next email and maybe it would be relevant the next time. Not anymore. Now people are not afraid to unsubscribe.

There are tools built to unsubscribe from your email list unless a person is engaged with it. So segmentation and personalization is not just recommended, it is expected. Interactive content, right? Polls, quizzes, those kinds of things can increase engagement and integration with other platforms is essential.

This is where ManyChat comes in. Shout out to ManyChat, by the way. They’ve been helping us grow our list. Probably bigger than anything. We host our email lists on Kit, which we love, but many chat using social media as the new SEO is helping us engage with the community there and then bring those people into, yes, our email list.

You know, today’s successful entrepreneurs, they’re building their businesses on social media. They start with content creation, they build communities around their content, they monetize through multiple different kinds of streams from sponsorships and advertising to their own products to communities and even services, and even physical products.

And they’re treating social media as their primary marketing channel. If you look at creators like Ali Abdaal, who has been a guest here on the show before, Productivity Wizard best selling author, he’s built a multi million dollar business starting with YouTube videos about productivity.

Productivity Wizard There’s so many more people doing a very similar kind of thing. Then there is the community revolution. And this is exactly where we at SPI, we believe we really hit the nail on the head. This is huge, right? The most successful businesses today aren’t just selling products. They’re selling experiences.

They’re building communities. Circle communities for course creators. And that’s where we host our community. And it’s not just courses too, it’s workshops, it’s live streams, it’s office hours, it’s getting direct access to each other and masterminds and, you know, group meetings, those kinds of things.

In other niches you might know these as discord servers for gamers and creators, Facebook groups for niche interests. I’ve seen this firsthand. Like I said, with SPI Pro, our first membership, which is then later just converted to SPI Community, and we have the Superfans system running its way through that to help guide you into the courses that you need at the right time.

And I recommend, again, you check it out. Live streaming and real time engagement, huge. Live streaming barely existed in 2008. I remember attending a live stream. It was Darren Rouse from ProBlogger.net, he was doing a live stream and he was streaming on Ustream. And it was the coolest thing, it was the first time I’ve ever like interacted with somebody who I really really enjoyed watching and listening to.

Darren was in Australia and I was up at like 2am or whatever it was, and he actually answered one of my questions. And it was the coolest thing! And that was very new and innovative back then. Today, this kind of thing is a primary way that content creators are connecting with our audience, right? Twitch for gaming, Instagram Live for behind the scenes type stuff.

LinkedIn Live for professional content. Clubhouse was a thing. Remember Clubhouse during the during the Pandemic? I mean, that’s declined, but it just showed you people were hungry for connection at that time and, and like real time connection because AI is not replacing real time right now. Real time interaction, not just broadcasting.

And this is, again, something that has been working really well on the deep pocket monster Pokemon side of things. I went live just a few hours ago, it’s Monday, and we go live every Monday, and we had concurrently 9,000 people watching a grown man open Pokemon cards and give them away. And it was the most fun.

And people come every Monday, they watch, they superchat, I think we made several thousand dollars from both gifted memberships and superchats, and we were able to give away a lot of things and make a lot of people happy. Right? In 2008, back then, you could succeed by being professional and polished. Today, authenticity wins.

If you’re too polished and too professional, you are too bad. People are out. People want to see behind the scenes content. Failures and struggles, not just successes. Personal stories and vulnerabilities. Real time reactions to things. Like, unscripted stuff. This is why the Pokemon Channel works so well.

It’s polished, yes, in its editing, but it’s the storytelling. And we purposefully put in those moments that are personal, that are vulnerable, that are relatable. These are all big moments. Very, very important keywords. And everything nowadays is data driven, right? The amount of data available is probably the biggest change.

There’s so much of it. Real time analytics on every platform and paying attention to that. There’s A B testing tools on kit, on YouTube, et cetera. Customer behavior tracking. There’s predictive analytics now, but here’s the big paradox about all this. Despite all this data, the most successful creators often succeed by ignoring the data, or at least most of it, and following their intuition.

Which is great. You know, the mindset has to shift. So let’s talk about some of those mindset shifts that have to happen that kind of bring all this together. The strategies have changed, right? But the mindset has to change. Let me break down the mental shifts. We’re no longer broadcasting. We’re conversing, right?

The old mindset was to create content, push it out to as many people as possible. You’re like, read this, listen to this, watch this. The new mindset is to start conversations, build relationships with individuals, and that means sometimes you have to be the one that listens. I remember back in 2008, I’d write a blog post and hope people would find it, and today I create content specifically to spark discussions in the comments, in DMs, in community forums.

The old mindset was get as much traffic as possible to your website. The new mindset is build a community of engaged people who care about what you do, who will keep coming back to your website.

I’d rather have a thousand people who actively engage in my content than a hundred thousand people who just consume it passively. What else? Old mindset. Positioning yourself as the expert who has all the answers. New mindset. Becoming the guide who’s learning alongside your audience. This is exactly how I approached DeepPocketMonster.

I couldn’t compete on collection because I didn’t have one. I couldn’t compete on experience because I had none. But I could compete with storytelling and sharing what I was learning along the way. I know how to tell a story. And some of my most popular content is about things I’m learning, not things I’ve mastered.

Old mindset. Don’t publish anything until it’s perfect. New mindset. Share your work in progress. And improve publicly the sort of build in public movement, which is not new. I mean, this is an a perfect example of this shift. Old mindset. Create products and find people to buy them new mindset. Find people with problems and create the solutions for them.

Insert, Will it fly? my book, How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money. I mean, this is literally it. Find people with problems and create solutions for them. This is why community first businesses are so successful, right? You already understand your audience’s needs intimately before you created anything.

You can even create it with them, right? Crowdsourcing. Now, you might be thinking, Pat, this is like, it’s overwhelming me, right? It was just easier back then. And you’re right. In some ways, it was easier. But here’s what you’re missing the opportunities are exponentially bigger. In 2008, building a global audience took years.

Today, You can do that overnight. It might be the next video, or the next video after that, or the next video after that. And back then, maybe you had two or three ways to monetize, but now there are dozens, and you can choose the one that best suits you, that fits into the way that you wanna run your business.

You don’t have to do consulting and coaching. You don’t have to create a digital product. You can, and in many cases you should, but there are many other ways to generate revenue. There’s better tools, right? Oh my gosh, Canva, probably the biggest thing that, I mean. We know it’s huge, but I mean, what it’s unlocked for creators to do everything from thumbnails to graphics, to, you know, designing presentations, everything.

It’s just so huge. There’s Loom for video recording, Kit for email marketing, Circle for community building, Stripe for payments, Stan, Zoom, right? What used to require, like you would need a team of developers for it now can be done by one person with the right tools. And the internet is so big now that you can build a successful business around incredibly specific niches, like Fire Science. One of our members, Wojcik, has a podcast, The Fire Science Show. There might not even be 1,500 people in the world who would care to listen to that because it’s so specific, but he is the guy. He’s the man. So much so that companies Pay him, and he’s generating more revenue with his podcast, even though he just has hundreds of listens on it per episode.

He’s making more money with his podcast, doing the fire science show than he is at his regular job. The opportunities are there.

So what does this all mean if you are just starting out today or if you’ve been struggling to adapt to the, the sort of new rules? Right. Well, here’s the good news.

You don’t need to be first anymore. Right back in 08 when I started being early was a huge advantage. And I was early. I was early to the lead exam space. And then entrepreneurial, you know, teaching entrepreneurship. And I was grateful that I had an existing business that actually I could teach behind.

Not, I wasn’t just regurgitating stuff. And that really helped me, right? But you don’t need to be first anymore. You could be niche, you could be more specific and help a certain group of people within that space. You could have your own flavor and spin to it. You can start with less. You don’t need a website or a business plan or startup capital.

You can start with a smartphone and a social media account. That’s it. You can test ideas quickly. Instead of spending months and months and months building a product, you can test ideas with content and get feedback immediately. You can build deeper relationships, because the tools that we now have available, the community tools for example, the communication tools, they’re better than ever.

The challenge is, of course, nowadays, is that there’s more competition, everybody’s a creator now, so standing out is harder, attention spans are much shorter, you have seconds to capture attention. Not minutes. You know, platform dependency, building your business. I mean, you’re kind of doing it in somebody else’s sandbox and that’s risky.

This is why email marketing still is important today ’cause you own that list and things are changing really fast. Algorithms change, platforms rise and fall. AI is coming in quickly and disrupting things. But here ist he strategy for success that I recommend. Pick one platform and master it. Don’t try to be everywhere at once.

Pick one platform and master it. Focus on building relationships, not just followers, right? Quality over quantity. Create content consistently. The algorithm, all of them, reward consistency more than perfection. Then build your own platform. Use social media to drive people to something that you own. An email list, a community.

This one’s an important one. Stay authentic, right? In this world of AI and fake content, being genuinely human is going to be your most competitive advantage.

The higher trust levels, people were more willing to try new things. It made selling things like courses definitely a lot easier. The longer attention spans, you could tell longer stories, you could go deeper. The only platform that would kind of allow you to do that now is podcasting or a long form YouTube video that has a really good hook.

Smaller, tighter communities, right? When there were fewer creators, the relationships did feel a little bit more personal. But here’s what I love about today. The endless creative possibilities. The tools and the platforms available today are incredible. The reach. I can make an impact to people all over the world instantly.

The amount of, which, you know, opens up the amount of people who could be inspired by you, who could learn from you, who need you. The authenticity movement, right? People are craving real connections more than ever, and that is something that I’ve always been adamant about. And I’ve always tried to lead by example with, and thankfully we’re there.

We’re just, just be real. And the multiple revenue streams, there are so many ways. To monetize creatively right now. So what would I do differently if I started today versus 2008? Well, I would start with video content, not blogging. I would focus on building a community from day one. I would try to be as authentic as possible.

I mean, I’ve kind of always was, but I was afraid in the beginning to share more of the faults and the things that I did wrong. I would try to not be as afraid of that. I did try to be everywhere too early, and I think, again, picking one platform, mastering it before expanding is more important than, like, throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying them all, right?

Maybe two max trying out. This is why, when we teach the short form video formula inside of our community, We say YouTube Shorts and Instagram. That’s it. Yes, there’s others, but we just want to hone in to start. And I would collaborate with more creators as well, for sure. So here is what I want you to take away from this journey through the last 16 years, the fundamentals, actually 18 years.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. People still wanna be helped. They wanna be entertained, they wanna be connected with, they still wanna solve problems and achieve their goals. That’s not anything different. But what has changed is how we deliver that value and build those relationships. And if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of the options out there, and all of these changes and the changes that are going to come, remember this.

You don’t have to master everything. You just have to master one thing at a time. Pick one platform, create consistently, build relationships, provide value, stay authentic. Read Lean Learning. The same principles that worked for me back in 08 still work today. They just look different. And here’s the very exciting part.

We’re still in the early days of the creator economy. Absolutely. The biggest opportunities are still ahead of us. And I hope this encourages you and doesn’t deflate you. But I hope it shows you that the opportunities are better than ever. You just have to go out and get them. Thank you for listening to the SPI podcast.

Now go and create something amazing.