SPI 852: Why Making Money Online is Easy (But Still Feels Hard)

Pat Flynn: Making money online is easier than ever, but why does it still feel impossible? And it's super annoying, right? There are more tools and platforms to help us succeed now. You don't have to know how to code, or do any of those technically challenging things anymore, and all the information you need is out there.

And you know it's possible. You've seen other people do it. Which probably adds to your frustration when you wonder, "Why not me?" But here's the thing, technically making money is easier than ever, but emotionally and psychologically, it's actually harder than ever before. But once you understand why it's harder psychologically, you can combat and counter those thoughts and finally start to make some progress.

So let's talk about it. To start, I want to share some interesting results from a survey that I ran with my audience of aspiring entrepreneurs. I asked them what their biggest fears were. These are specifically people who have yet to even pull the trigger with an online business or some sort of online platform and two main reasons floated to the surface.

Number one, they didn't want to waste their time. And number two, they didn't want to waste their time. They're money, time, and money. This is exactly why the subtitle for my book, Will It Fly?, is How to Validate Your Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money, which, thankfully, went on to become a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

But those survey results were from 2015, over 10 years ago. But 10 years later, not only are the fears the same, they're even worse now. Why? What is the actual root reason for all of this? Well, because as Kendrick Lamar says, it's too many options. Today, you have an overwhelming number of choices to start a business, right?

There's so many choices you have. The sheer volume of options you have can lead to decision fatigue and anxiety about choosing your right path. So what do you do? Should you start a YouTube channel or a podcast or maybe TikTok, or should you be on Instagram? Should you do long form video, short form video, LinkedIn, e commerce, coaching, freelance?

Should you write a book, create a course? What do you do? Right? There's so many options. And the fear of making the wrong choice is so overwhelming that you'd rather not choose anything at all. You prefer to stay in your comfort zone, even though you're not completely happy with it. It's better than losing or fearing the idea of failure and wasting that time and money.

Because what you have right now is guaranteed. You've been in it before. But the other part of this is true. If you just keep doing the same things, you're going to keep getting the same results. Here is the truth though. The big takeaway. It is through making wrong choices that you find the right ones.

And it's hard. Because the wrong path is Is actually the shortcut to the right path. It's so different than everything we've thought about, right? Because the only actual wrong choice is not making a choice at all. And it's really hard. It's one of the hardest things to do if you're just starting out.

Especially if you are like me, a millennial, or you have been conditioned in school to believe that failure is bad. Which, for grade purposes, yes, failing is bad. But for entrepreneurial purposes, failing is good. It's actually the shortcut to the right path. And it's so counterintuitive, it's so hard to get over.

You need to understand that m these mistakes that you make, these videos that you create that go nowhere, these scripts that you write that are terrible, that is the path to progress. You gotta be cringe before they binge. You gotta be a disaster before you become the master. Whatever fancy phrase you want to say.

Now, if you are curious about the process of choosing a single niche and building a brand and an audience around it, I do have a process called "brand in a hand" I'll go over it really quickly, really quickly here for you. If it's your first time hearing about it we have some links in the resources and in the description for you, in case you want to check that out and go a little bit more in depth with it, but imagine your hand, right?

Your hand, your palm is facing you and start with your pinky, right? Your pinky. Are the people, the people that you are targeting, who is it that you're going to serve? You have to understand that or else you're going to be all over the place. The ring finger, the next finger in line, and it's ring finger for a purpose because this is their pursuits, their dreams, their ambitions, their goals.

What are those? You need to understand what they are. You might know them already because you are a part of that particular niche, or you might have to do some research and have conversations and understand them. Go in the DMs and start to learn about these people. Then you have your middle finger.

Middle finger for a reason because it is the problems, the things standing in the way of a person achieving those goals and succeeding. Then you have your pointer finger, which is the one platform that you will point people to where you will say, this is what it is and this is how it is and what you need to do, how you're going to help them.

And then your thumb, when you put all of those fingers together, you have your thumbs up, and that becomes your product, your service, right? So five P's, people pursuits, problems platform and then product. So that's just a quick overview of brand in a hand. But when you take that approach, it really simplifies a lot of the route to success.

Again, with the understanding that you shouldn't know exactly what to do. The only way to know what to do is to take action, to fail forward, fail and fall forward. Now, with regards to this overwhelming number of choices that we have to start a business, and really that is the root of this problem, and there's no getting rid of that, right?

There are not going to be a less number of choices and ideas and opportunities out there. There are going to be an overwhelming number of more choices coming your way, which will make this even harder. So how do we succeed? Well, picking one strategy and moving forward is a start. You have to take action and start.

But there is another hurdle that you will come to immediately after you do that. And it is self doubt that you made the right decision, questioning the very choice that you just made, which is another symptom of, again, the underlying problem here is just there are too many options. It's sort of like checking out at the grocery store.

If you've ever been to the grocery store and you know, there's multiple lines that you can go down. You pick a checkout lane that you believe will be fastest, right? We all do it. We try to look to see which one has less number of people. You might look at other people's carts to see what's inside and go, okay, that person has way too many things.

I'm going to go into a different line. We do that, right? Because we want to make a decision that's going to help save us time. But once you pick a lane, what happens? You start to doubt your decision, you look at the other lanes because those ones might seem to be moving faster and maybe you make the switch.

Only to realize that the lane you were originally in was maybe the one that you should have just stayed in. Or maybe not. We begin to question and overthink it. Now have you ever been to the grocery store when there's just one line? Like, super late at night, right? What do you do? You just go to that line and you stand in it, no matter how long it is, and eventually it becomes your turn, you check out, and you're on your way.

You didn't have any other lanes to question yourself about, you just took the one path forward and got it done. Once you make a choice of what lane to go down in your entrepreneurial pursuits here at the start, by still allowing these other choices to be available to you, you find yourself susceptible to changing lanes or changing your mind again and again.

And if you're like many, you end up feeling stuck in a cycle of indecision, never truly progressing, and always wondering if you've made the right choice. And imagine you go down a lane and you believe that you made the right choice, but you have that doubt and suspicion. How are you going to give your full self and full energy to this thing that you chose if you still have a doubt in your mind that this may not be the right choice?

This is the entrepreneur's dilemma. It is by far one of the hardest things to do to make a choice and stick with it. So I have two strategies for you that are going to help you through this. First is something that I like to call just in time information. In fact, it was a mentor of mine, Jeremy Franson, from 2008, and his partner Jason Van Orden who taught me this, so credit to them.

But just in time information is the only information that you should be consuming when you've made a decision to move forward. And that is information that is about your next step in the lane that you've chosen. All of the other information, all of the other noise that's out there, should be just, put your earmuffs on, right?

None of that matters. It's hard because we live now in an age where there is so much information coming our way. Information that we didn't even ask for. It's literally getting pushed to us through notifications, through emails, through social. We need to be disciplined enough to only allow ourselves to intake the things that matter and the things that relate to the next step in our process.

That makes life so much easier, and it \\reduces not only just the noise and confusion, but it also reduces the potential for us to go, Oh, that's cool. Maybe I should try that. Or, Ooh, that's cool. Shiny object syndrome, right? Squirrel syndrome. It reduces that.

The second strategy to keep us moving forward is to commit not to the results of the lane that we've chosen, or the direction that we're going down, but rather, commit to the work required to potentially see those results. Our success and our happiness related to the work we're doing should not be based on the results of those things, because sometimes we cannot control them. We cannot control necessarily the algorithms and how YouTube feels that day or how TikTok feels that day.

But we can control whether or not we show up every day to create that video. Or that we put our best storytelling foot forward in that next script that we're writing. That is what we should base our success on. And that commitment to do that for a certain period of time will, in more cases than not, allow us to get the results that we want.

And I'm going to tell you a very specific story about something that was recently done. Last year in 2024, I started a 60 day experiment to create a short form video on TikTok, which then was reproduced for Instagram and YouTube shorts as well. I started a new shorts channel for my Pokemon community called Short Pocket Monster.

And I said, you know what? I'm not going to link. to this channel or any of these short form channels from any pre existing platform or account that I have. I just want to see if I can commit to 60 days of publishing daily. Can I do that? And if I do that, no matter what the results are, I'm going to feel proud because by the end of 60 days, I'll know whether or not this is worth it. Continuing moving forward, I've given myself the best chance to see if this would succeed or not. And if it doesn't, great. I can put it aside and not have it be a lane that I could ever think about again. I can move on to something else. So what happened? Well, I started to create daily 60 second videos that I published on Instagram and TikTok and on YouTube.

And for the first three weeks, I was getting nothing, hundreds of views, randomly, and it just felt like it was kind of all for nothing. But I said, you know what, I'm only 21 days into this 60 day experiment. If I give up now, I might be giving up on that opportunity for some algorithm thing to finally happen.

And after 30 days, it took about a month, but after consistently showing up for a month, no matter what the results were, the results finally came. One of the videos that I published did very, very well. Started to see hundreds of thousands of views in a single day, which then lifted the rest of the videos in the archive.

And fast forward to today, now six months later, The YouTube channel, it's about to cross 1 million subscribers. It already has half a billion views and it is generating over five figures a month at this point. The TikTok account just passed 1 million subscribers and it landed me a collaboration with the Detroit Lions, a completely unknown opportunity because they in fact had opened Pokemon cards before every game for good luck.

Somebody on their marketing team. Shout out to Neil. Larson, by the way, who connected with me on TikTok, and we created this unique opportunity for me in December or excuse me, at the beginning of January, to go and open a pack of Pokémon on Ford's field. All because I committed to this experiment to see it through and give it the best chance.

And it didn't happen right away, but it eventually happened. And what also happens when you do this more regularly, when you commit to something, when you fully focus, on that lane that you've chosen and nothing else matters. you start to get better at that thing that you're fully focusing on. I mean, it kind of makes sense, right?

When you're focused on something and nothing else matters, that thing just starts to improve. The quality of what you create starts to improve because you're continually committing and recommitting to this thing and seeing it through and consciously trying to make it better. So in the world of these short form videos that I created, my process was getting better.

It was getting better. Taking me less time to edit every single time I did it. I started to create a template so it would be much, much easier and it just started to flow much better, right? What once took an hour and a half to edit, now takes 15 minutes a day. You start to understand your audience a little bit better the more you show up and the more consistently you show up.

As a result of, again, consistently not letting the outside noise break through. And I started to understand more about the nuances of the space, and what the audience liked, and what kinds of things triggered them, and what kinds of things I could include in the videos. And now the videos just continue to get better and better.

And now, within 24 hours, I'll see over a million views across those three platforms, and half of those views are from non followers. So, incredible opportunities ahead. And it was only because I fully focused and committed to it, It reminds me of a story with Darren Rouse from ProBlogger.net when he started his digital photography school blog back in the early 2000s.

He's one of the first more popular bloggers back in the blogosphere. He told a story on stage once when I was at at his event in Australia where he said his wife gave him six months to make digital photography school a viable business that was generating revenue. Or else, he would just go and get a full time job.

Because in the beginning, he was blogging, but he wasn't really fully committed to it. He was kind of bouncing around and trying a bunch of different things. But once his wife said, Yo, you got six months. And if after six months, this isn't producing an income, you're getting a full time job. He committed.

And he committed to publishing daily, to getting something out there, and Digital Photography School, which, I'm not sure if he sold that eventually or not, but it was, at one point, one of the top websites in the world about digital photography and was generating a lot of revenue through sponsorships, through affiliate revenue and his own courses and products as well.

Shout out to Darren Rouse, who was a huge inspiration for me back in the early days when I started blogging in 2008, which if I do the math, that's 17 years of doing this, which. Kind of boggles my mind that I've been doing this for so long, but despite the fact that every year there is seemingly some new platform and there's new tech coming out that allows us to reach our audience and teach them and, and show up as an authority, and it is short form video, it's a long form video, it's podcasting, it's blogging, and you know, there's cycles of all of this.

Two things remain true. Number one, it is always about serving your audience and showing up for them. And the more consistently you show up, the better. And number two, it is always going to take commitment from your end to fully focus on something for a certain period of time, whether it's six months like Darren or 60 days, like me, you might need some more time. But you have to commit and not let those outside noises distract you from what you've said yes to. You don't have time to do that, but you have time to commit and try and discover whether or not something will work out. And if it doesn't great, you've given it a chance and then you can move on.

Speaking of moving on, let's move on to another thing that is really, really making it difficult for us to succeed today. And that is isolation and a lack of structure, right? So the second major challenge that trips up a lot of new entrepreneurs Is this isolation and a lack of structure when working online? I mean, I remember my nine to five job. It was actually nine to six as an architect. And the nice thing about that was I knew exactly when I was going to start. I had somebody tell me exactly what I was supposed to do and I would go home and work would be off my mind. The beauty of the nine to five or nine to six job having a boss. When you are your own boss, and you are dictating your own day, and there are no colleagues just a desk away to chat through a quick project with.

You're crafting your own workday from scratch. And it sounds liberating, and it is, but without a clear structure, it can lead to not just a lack of motivation and focus, but a lot of frustration, a lot of running around in circles, and a lot of, again, self doubt as to whether or not you can do this. I experienced this for years.

When I started and it took me a lot of time to begin to finally feel confident in myself So imagine this you're at home. You're ready to work. But instead of having a set plan you find yourself bouncing between tasks you're distracted by not just work related things, but even household chores or just the temptation to watch just one more episode of your favorite show on Netflix without the external environment of an office or the presence of coworkers or a boss to tell you what to do, staying on track becomes a personal responsibility that not everybody is prepared for right away.

And if you're just starting out as an entrepreneur, this is going to be a big struggle for you. So to combat this setting up. A few things will help. Number one, and this really helped me even though it doesn't sound like it would matter, but setting up a dedicated workspace is going to help. When I started out in 2008, I had a little corner of a nook in my office that was my workspace.

I had another computer for other things, or my phone, to dilly dally online and skedaddle a bit, whatever that means. But when it came to getting down to business and working on, back then, my computer, In the lead website, my architectural exam website, I had a space in the corner of my apartment with a computer, which is where that work got done, which helped me just mentally go into that space and focus.

It helped others around me at the time, my wife understand that I was in work mode and when I was out of that chair out of that little corner of the apartment, then, okay, I'm not in work mode and we can chat and we can talk about other things and stuff. And not only having a physical and dedicated workspace for that is important, especially if you're working from home, but having a daily routine is crucial.

You want to treat your remote work as if it's kind of like an office job, right? You start at the same time each day, you dress for success, even if no one will see you. Yes, it's nice when you're working from home that you can just work in pajamas, but there is again, this is the psychological part of all of this.

This is the whole point of this episode. You want to be psychologically ready to succeed. And in order to do that, you need a routine. And in order to support that routine, you need to change your clothes and in the morning, get up, put on clothes, get into work mode and start focusing, right? Nobody's going to see you, but you see you and you feel you, you feel you.

And I feel you as well, because I was there to schedule breaks, refresh yourself, find a. productivity method or methodology that works for you. I'm, I'm hesitant to say, you know, Hey, do the Pomodoro technique, right? 25 minutes on five minutes off, 25 on five minutes off. Get yourself one of those Pomodoro kitchen timer clocks.

I'm hesitant to share a very specific strategy like that because. Like a diet, different people have different bodies that respond to food in different kinds of ways. And we have different minds that respond to different methodologies in different kinds of ways. What I would recommend is purposefully and consciously try to find a method that works for you.

It might be The Pomodoro technique, it might be the one thing a day for two hours each day. It might be like me having every day of the week, which starts at a certain time, be something different, right? Like Monday is my writing day, Tuesday is my podcast and video recording day, Wednesday is my meeting day, Thursday is more of a cleanup day, and then I have Friday off and we have a four day work week here at SPI.

So You have to find the structure that works for you. But the point being, you have to find a structure. You have to create structure. You have to have this mental understanding that this is the time to get this stuff done. And while we're here, I do want to recommend something for you. If you do have a job already, yet, you're still trying to create something new on the side.

One of the most helpful things that I received early on, and I want to pass forward to you is this idea of paying yourself first. And this was a strategy that was meant more for the wealth building community or or personal finance space right when you get a paycheck you want to take some of that and put it away In a nest egg that will grow and that is step one It's similar to Mike Michalowicz and his idea of profit first in a business. Well pay yourself first, but when it comes to time, pay yourself in time first for this business and entrepreneurial endeavor that you're going down, which may mean, and this is, this is what actually has helped a lot of people here in the SPI community actually start to see progress, which is you wake up a little bit earlier for yourself.

Typically, we wake up for other people because we got to take the kids to school because I got to go into work and help my boss build his dream business. But for you and your dream business and your entrepreneurial endeavor, when you wake up first for you and you have 45 minutes to an hour in the morning before people get up before it's time to go to work dedicated to you.

A few things happen. Number one, you're using your full energy as you wake up during the day. Hopefully you get a good night's sleep. You're using that energy for you and your progress. Progress is great, even if it's just a little bit, a little bit each day that adds up. But secondly, knowing that you only have a certain period of time, a limited amount of time to work, you're going to hopefully using just in time information, figure out what the next step is and learn all you can about that.

Maybe you take your lunch break at work to listen to a podcast about that thing that you're going to do the next morning or on your way home on your commute, you're listening to a YouTube video, not watching it, listening it while you're driving about that next thing about the next steps that you're going to take the next morning and you wake up jazzed, energized, because you're doing something for you and you're making that progress every day.

And what happens when you start to commit to that little bit every day, again, to pay yourself first. You start to gain momentum. That snowball starts to grow. It starts to go even faster. You start to get even more excited about it. You start to put away that Netflix that you were going to watch at the night to make more progress on this.

You start to find yourself and your momentum. But it starts with a little bit of structure. So, dedicated workspace and dedicated time and, if needed, dedicated time to yourself early. Start your day for yourself, so that you can be the best version of yourself to help serve others.

And finally, psychologically, a thing that is holding a lot of us back, especially in today's age, and this is especially for those of you who are a little bit younger, because you're so used to this, you are in fact quite spoiled with what you have access to.

It's this idea of instant gratification culture. The third stumbling block is our culture of instant gratification. We live in a world where likes, shares, and viral content can seem like indicators of success and can happen overnight, which is true. Yes, it can. And we hear about it from others.

You read the success stories, you see it on Instagram, and this creates a distorted expectation that success in online business should also be instantaneous. And then when the results don't come quickly, that self doubt, that frustration starts to creep in. Think about it. When you post something on social media and constantly refresh, you do it, I know you do it, to see if there's likes or comments.

Now apply that to your business. If you were to start making progress and write a blog post, or create a video, or work on a lead magnet, or start to build your email list. If you treated that the same way and expected results, and you wake up and you have one new email subscriber, or zero, you're going to immediately consider yourself a failure. Or if you launch a product and yes, maybe you put a lot of work into it or a service and you don't see immediate sales, you might think it's a failure, but that's not how building a business works.

Building a business is not a snapshot of the work that you've just done. It's a culmination of all the work that you're doing and the things that you're learning about your audience and the services and the products that you can offer them over time. It is a marathon, not a sprint. And I'd like to quote Gary Vee here, Gary Vaynerchuk.

He said this way early on and it really stuck with me. And it's this idea of micro hustle, macro patience. In the world of micro, on the daily, when you're working on your thing, you are hustling. By hustle I mean you're finding that information fast, you're cranking on those things in the time that you have allotted for that.

But on the macro level, you are patient with the results. You're doing the work, but you're letting those results come when they are meant to come.

That is the way to succeed. Patience is key here. So for you youngins out there, stop expecting results overnight. What you need to focus on is what I just talked about. Which is that commitment to getting the work done and hitting publish every day, or every week, or whenever it is. Committing to that and letting the results speak for themselves, but basing your happiness, your wins, on the fact that you showed up no matter what.

Even when the results weren't coming in. When I interviewed MKBHD here on the podcast a long time ago, he said that his first 100 videos were for less than 100 subscribers. This is not an uncommon story.

So which story do you want to create? Are you going to be the one who commits and focuses no matter what, and despite there not being results right away, you keep going because you are patient, because you understand that building a long term successful business takes time, takes understanding, and takes a little bit of luck, but the more you put out there, the more luck is to be had.

Or are you going to create the story of bouncing around, trying a bunch of different things and having nothing ever really stick because nothing seems to work out for you. But have you actually given yourself a chance? Have you actually committed? 99 percent of the SPI audience has not. And we are here to help you do that with these podcast episodes, with our content inside of SPI and our community of like minded entrepreneurs, just like you, who were there, not just to help support each other through the learnings and the failures and the mistakes, but also celebrate the wins together and hold each other accountable to partner up together to mastermind together and to get inspired, but also take action without judgment and do all of that together.

And if you're interested in joining the SPI community and you want to learn more and see how you can get involved, go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/community. We have several tiers that you could join at and different levels of access access to me and office hours and my team. And of course, this incredible community with thousands of people inside of it. And I want to invite you to be a part of it.

SmartPassiveIncome.com/community. And remember what we talked about today, we talked about the idea that there are just so many, an overwhelming number of choices that you can make. And so you need to make a choice and you need to commit to it. Stay in that lane. That outside noise. That's just there to distract you and test you to see whether or not you are fully committed to seeing it through for a certain period of time to give it a real chance with the understanding that It's not going to happen overnight. Countering combating this instant gratification culture that we're in and also your isolation.

You need some structure around this and you need to find the productive strategies that work for you. Just in time information, a little foreshadowing of my book coming out in June called lean learning. So more on that later, but thank you for listening and hit that subscribe button. If you haven't already, as you can tell, we're taking a little bit more of a direct approach to how to serve you in your entrepreneurial endeavor this year here on the podcast.

So hit that subscribe button. We got more stuff that's going to really, really help you move forward this year. And I'll see you in the next episode.

SPI 808: How to Take Control of Your Time with Nir Eyal and Matt Gartland

Nir Eyal: The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That's really the summary of my 10 years of research. That if you wake up every morning and your cell phone is right there, you're going to pick it up before you even say hello to your loved one. If you leave these type of decisions to the last minute, you will fail. But if you plan ahead, there is no distraction we can't overcome. Paolo Coelho said, "a mistake repeated more than once is a decision." So, how long are we going to complain about, "Oh, social media! All these things are so distracting!" before we do something about it? So a distracted person keeps getting distracted. They are choosing to be distracted because they keep making the same mistakes.

Pat Flynn: One of my favorite authors as of late is Nir Eyal. And he has written a couple books that have gone pretty wild out there, Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products, and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. And we're going to talk more on the latter today, in a round table, with myself, Matt Gartland, and Nir, of course, himself, and we also get a glimpse into some of the other research and findings that he is doing with relation to a new book that he is working on, which is really fascinating.

But today we do talk about things like habits and willpower following through, how to make sure that you are being held accountable. What does that actually mean? And, and actually how to get to that next level in your business and in your life through the world that we live in today. And what I love about the way Nir approaches his work is it's always sort of science and research based and he explains it really easily.

I mean, there's a lot of authors out there who do science based findings for things that involve self improvement, but Nir, I find breaks it down easier than anybody else. And so enjoy this conversation between Matt, myself and Nir, and let's talk about leveling up in life and in business. Here we go.

Cheers.

Announcer: You're listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that's all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, it took him nearly 40 years to finally get over the fact he'll never be taller than six feet, Pat Flynn.

Matt Gartland: Hello friends, and welcome back to the pod. Another fun round table episode, as always with my partner in crime, Pat, and this time around a very special guest. We are thrilled to have Nir Eyal with us. Neer, how's it going? Thank you so much for being here tonight.

Nir Eyal: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, we're thrilled to reconnect.

There's so many great things that you've been doing over the years that, you know, are, I think, as relevant and prescient as ever. So really just to kind of jump in, and it's a fun connection point back to even our relationship where it started, is your book Indistractable came out about five years ago, which was crazy when I looked back at that.

And more than ever, these days, I feel more pulled than ever, you know, there's more signals, there's more noise, there's more fractiles on the internet where I could be putting my time and attention. So I'd love to kind of even hear your perspective being really like you wrote literally the book on it.

Like, do you feel like distraction in the universe that we're living in, especially with online media, has it improved in the five years since the book has been out or has it gotten even worse?

Nir Eyal: For sure, the world is becoming a more distracting place. And why does that happen? Because it is the result of abundance.

This is the first time in human history that we have so much, right? If you are fortunate enough to be living in the industrialized world, you're much more likely to die based on a disease of excess, like diabetes, than you are starvation. And that's, that's the first time in human history that that's been the case for 200,000 years.

Humans have been plagued by drought and starvation, and this is the first time that we actually die of these diseases of excess in any significant number. So we're seeing something very similar when it comes to information abundance. That the price of progress, again, the price of all this progress, of having all these good things in the world, is that now we have to learn how to deal with them.

So yeah, it's a wonderful thing that for the first time in 200,000 years of human history, we don't have to be constantly bored. If you look at literature, if you look at, you know, the historical record, there's Boredom was a huge problem for people for 200,000 years. This is the first time in history where we have this amazing boredom alleviation device in our pockets at any time of day or night.

And that's pretty great. That's wonderful that we can learn a new language with Duolingo that we can use an app to read a book. We can watch videos about pretty much anything we'd like to learn about. But the price of all that progress is that we have to learn how to become indistractable. So I really think that there's a bifurcation that there's people in the world who will allow their time and their attention to be controlled by others, essentially have their lives controlled by others and people who stand up and say, no, I will control my time and attention.

I will control my life. Because I'm indistractable. So the world is definitely becoming a more distracting place, but that doesn't mean we're powerless.

Matt Gartland: So then how do we think about trying to reclaim some of that power or at least put, you know, the guardrails so much of that wisdom is in the book. I just wonder in five years, how have even your own applications of that right in your own career, with your own business, with your own family, you know, we all here have some kids.

So I'm curious, like how you've even adapted and evolved along the same guidelines.

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. So this is what the book is all about. And it took me five years to write Indistractable because I kept getting distracted. And so it wasn't until I learned these tactics for myself that I could put them to use.

So today I'm 46 years old. I'm in the best physical shape of my life. I have not quite a six pack, maybe like a four and a half pack, even though I used to be clinically obese. It goes to show I'm not very athletic at all. I've never been athletic. But I work out when I say I will, I eat right because I say I will, I have a better relationship with my family than ever before because I'm fully present with them.

I'm not on my phone. I'm not distracted. I'm fully present with the people I love. And so I have a better relationship with my wife and my daughter than ever before. And I'm more productive at work than ever before because instead of diddling around with email and slack channels and whatever other junk, I do the work that I say I'm going to do.

And so this is the skill of the century because there is no facet of your life, your mental health, your physical health, your professional wellbeing. All of this stuff requires you to be able to focus your attention. If you can't focus your attention long enough to read a book or to, you know, take an online course or to sit still long enough with your family over dinner without checking your device, you got a problem and we got to figure out how to fix this problem. And listen, I was patient zero. I wrote this book for me more than anyone else, because when I read everyone else's take on the subject, it was stupid stuff like, well, just tell your boss, no, right. Just say no more. That's stupid advice.

Who's going to, you know, the only people who give that kind of advice are tenured professors who can't get fired. If you tell your boss, no. You're going to get laid off. That's a stupid thing to do. Or here's a better piece of advice. Stop using social media. Stop checking email. Thanks, stupid. I'll get fired.

I won't have a career if I stop using these technologies. So I just, I didn't feel it was productive. It was certainly wasn't for me to tell people, stop using technology. Technology is the problem because you know, when I started studying this topic, well over like 10 years ago now, one of the first things I learned, Was that distraction has always been part of the human equation.

Plato, the Greek philosopher, 2,500 years ago was complaining about how distracting the world is. So the problem can't be caused by our technologies. It's not technology's fault. We love to blame the technologies. It's very convenient, right? It's Mark Zuckerberg's fault. I'm not doing it. But of course, what I learned when I studied the psychology of, of distraction is that the vast majority of distractions are not external triggers. External triggers are the pings, the dings, the rings. That's where everybody starts. They think they know how to manage distraction. Turn off your phone, grayscale your screen, turn off notifications. That stuff doesn't work because only 10 percent of distractions come from your phone.

You know where the other 90 percent of distractions come from 90 percent in here, right? They start within us. They're not external triggers, their internal triggers. So the big aha moment for me was realizing just digging into the basic research, starting from first principles around what is distraction.

Distraction is an emotion regulation problem. It's an impulse control issue. Your brain probably is not broken. You don't need any pills. What you need is skills. These are skills that we don't learn. I didn't learn them in school. And we don't teach our kids. How do you focus? How do you make sure that you can become indistractable?

It starts with, there are four big steps, so I can, I can walk through those in a minute, but the first and most important first step is to master the internal triggers. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. If you don't understand the root cause of why you are escaping reality with distraction, you're always going to get distracted by something, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you're going to find distraction because you're always escaping a feeling.

So if you don't have tools to deal with the feeling, none of that other stuff is going to work.

Matt Gartland: I think it's, it's powerful to continue to even reflect on history as then a barometer of the future, right? I mean, so many of these things that truly can be, I get synthesized into constants, right? You know, some things are truly timeless.

And then just trying to acclimate ourselves as best we can to current state realities, but know that, yeah, some things there's just really common denominators for. It was an appreciation I had. for the book when we were working on it together. And I don't think I completed that thought in the setup, but it was one of the last book projects that I did before Pat and I joined forces and created SPI Media was working on on Indistractable.

One of the big takeaways though, of that time working together and then just even myself trying to, you know, continually work on myself in the same capacity, right? To try to do the internal work and then set up external environments, my office, other things to play a factor was how much of this was like on me personally, right?

And there's still that, that sense of self responsibility, of course, to process this information, to do the internal work and to do that. But what, what I've also found and would love Pat, you didn't even chime in on this as well, is surrounding yourself with other people that kind of believe in trying to operate in the same way, sort of like an internal and the small community effect where like, if I can have, you know, my team or my partners also like talk about these concepts, right, maybe together in our sort of safe spaces.

Trying to help each other has helped me in my own ability to reduce my susceptibility to distractions. And I'm curious if like more of a network effect has played into, you know, Pat, your lived reality with distractions and in your, if it even, even remotely begins to kind of overlap with some of the research that you've uncovered on the subject.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, for me, you can't read the label when you're inside the bottle. And sometimes when I'm in my own work or I'm even being distracted, I don't even notice it at times because it's almost automatic in many cases. And when there are other people who I've given agency to, to catch me or, you know, help me stay on track, it's always helped out.

And this is where my mastermind groups come into play. This is where my wife comes into play. This is where you Matt have come into play several times as well. It's like, Hey, we, we got something to focus on. Let's stay on the path. And, you know, some people need outside help more than others, but it's been vital, absolutely.

The hard thing is Nir the last time you were on this show, I think it was on a seven years ago, and that was after your, your book hooked, which plays directly with this because like these tools and social media, like they're not built to help us through these problems we're talking about right now. I mean, they're actually working against us, which is why I love that you follow this up with your book and they're not going to stop trying to hook us.

So for me, it is a willpower and discipline more than anything. And that is something that If you don't consciously think about it, these things are going to control you. You're not going to have control over it, and it's really scary what can happen.

Nir Eyal: Yeah, I'd love to build on some of that. So one of the things, the concept that I had to change my mind about was this concept of willpower.

In fact, we're starting to realize, and much of the psychology community has already come around to believing, that willpower is a myth, actually. It's not a concept that's actually a helpful psychological designation. In fact, we used to have this belief, that we called it ego depletion in the psychology community.

Ego depletion is this idea that you run out of willpower, just like battery charge on your phone, that it becomes something that you run out of. And there were some studies done by one very prominent professor that showed that in fact, this was true that people, when they were taxed with difficult tasks, they would run out of willpower.

They would, you know, use up the gas in their gas tank, so to speak. And so this got a lot of popular press. And then it turned out that as we do in the social sciences, when a study sounds fishy, when a concept sounds too good to be true. What do we do? We replicate the study. We run it again. And as far as we know now, a decade off from, from when these studies were published, it turns out that this idea of ego depletion, that we run out of willpower, like gas in a gas tank, as far as we can tell, the studies don't replicate. It doesn't exist. It's not real, except, interestingly enough, in one group of people. There is one group of people out there who really do experience ego depletion. They really do run out of willpower like gas in a gas tank. Who are those people? People who believe that willpower is a limited resource.

That's it. It's the only people that had this effect. So this is super important because when we hear things in the media all the time about how technology is addictive, how it's hijacking our brains, how we're powerless to resist it. In fact, what we're doing is reinforcing exactly what the tech companies want.

It's called learned helplessness. The media companies want you to believe there's nothing you can do, right? You're powerless because what do people do when they believe they're powerless? Nothing. So it's not me. It's not my parenting style. Oh, it's my kids are playing are on TikTok. They're playing Fortnite.

That's it's addicting them, right? The word addiction comes from the Latin slave, addictio. It's a clinical term and addiction is not, Ooh, I like it a lot. An addiction is a pathology, but we toss this term around as if we're all enslaved. And as Henry Ford beautifully said, whether you believe you can or you cannot, you're right. So one of the things I'm really fighting out there is this perception that we're powerless, that we're slaves, because that is the number one best way to give these media companies what they want is to believe there's nothing you can do about it.

So I think a much healthier approach is to see, you know, what media, all forms of media, whether it's the news, whether it's movies, whether it's social media. All form of media is fine. It's great as long as you use it with intent. I think the big problem is that people, they use these tools to escape a feeling.

And this is not something we talk about. We talk about willpower and grit and resilience. We don't talk about how to manage uncomfortable emotions. And if we can begin to identify those emotions and figure out, wait a minute, when I'm bored, I tend to check email because email will tell me what to do.

When I'm lonely, I check social media. When I'm uncertain, I Google something. When you can begin to identify the internal trigger, the feeling, with the action, then you can start taking steps to break that spontaneous stimulus and response relationship. But if we just go about our days thinking, oh, it's something broken about my brain.

I probably have undiagnosed this, that, or the other. I probably need pills for this because there's nothing I can do. Then we actually do become powerless. So that, that I think is a very important aspect.

Pat Flynn: And then confirmation bias kicks in and you look for signs that that's true, which like just furthers the spiral.

Nir Eyal: Totally. Absolutely.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. I wonder how, again, with a certain sort of accountability mechanism, you know, and this is coming from a layman. I don't have social science or psychology to back up maybe a theory, but like I can physically feel more focused and in more control.

Maybe that's just my, my brain doing things, but when I am in a small group or I can get help from my mastermind, right. Or Pat and I are having a private conversation and we're able to really kind of refocus ourselves on what's important and kind of check in on priorities. That to me feels like it is helping to fade away some of the distractions or the impulse pulls that sometimes are just kind of their own, which is like they're in the ether. So like, is there any science or truth or, or backing to, again, the power of accountability in groups like that to try to assuage some of these, these impulses?

Nir Eyal: Yeah. So, so this is called a pre commitment device, which is just a fancy way of saying you're going to plan out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. And this is very well studied. I mean, there's thousands of peer reviewed studies about exactly this mechanism that you're describing. There are a few different kinds of pre commitments, or you can think of them as a pact.

We have an identity pact where we have some kind of self image. So that's why the book is called indestructible. I made up that word. It's meant to sound like indestructible. It's who you are. It's an identity. This, by the way, comes out of the psychology of religion. When someone calls themselves a devout Muslim, they don't say, Oh, I wonder if I'm gonna have a gin and tonic with my dinner.

No, devout Muslims don't drink alcohol. It's who they are. When someone says, I'm a vegetarian or a vegan, they don't say, Oh, I wonder if I'm gonna have a bacon sandwich for breakfast. No, because that's who they are. It's their identity. So one very important pact is to have a new identity, to call yourself indistractable.

It is who you are. Because remember, behavior change always necessitates identity change. If you want to get in shape, you have to call yourself an athlete. If you want to learn a new skill, think of yourself as an academic, right? Thinking of yourself as a new identity is incredibly powerful as a tool. So that's one identity pact.

We also have a price pact where we have some kind of monetary disincentive. So the way I got in shape and stop being clinically obese and today I'm in the best shape of my life is because I have this price pact that every morning I walk into my closet, and I see this calendar on the wall and taped to the calendar is a crisp 100 bill.

And every day, this is called the burn or burn technique. Every day I look at that 100 bill and I have a choice to make. I can either burn some calories, right? Take a run, go for a swim, do some pushups on the spot, some kind of physical activity. It's a rule I made for myself. Or I have to physically light that 100 bill on fire.

So burn some calories or burn the money. So I've entered into this price pact with myself to do what I say I'm going to do. Right. To finish this book Indistractable, I made a bet with my buddy, Mark. I said, Mark, I'm going to finish this manuscript or I'm going to pay you 10,000. Works like a charm. It's the most one of the most effective techniques you can use so the only problem with these packs there's a couple other packs.

One of them is a social pact you described earlier the only problem is these techniques come last. Okay, if you listen to this interview and you say, oh great I know how to change my life. I'm gonna start making these packs and tip making bets. It will fail It will 100 percent fail unless you do the other three steps first.

So step number one, master internal triggers. We talked about those emotions. That's the most important first step. And I show you how to do that. Step number two, making time for traction, putting in your calendar time to do what is in accordance with your values. Step number three, hacking back the external triggers, all those pings, dings, and rings.

That's kind of the simple part, but super important. If you do those three things first, then the packs will work. What most people do if they try these packs, even the social packs that you talked about earlier, which are very effective, right? Entering into a pack and saying, okay, Pat, we're going to get together.

We're going to sit next to each other. We're going to keep each other accountable for the next 45 minutes. Go very, very effective. But if you do that last. It will fail. It will break. You have to first do the other three.

Matt Gartland: So they stack. It's one plus one equals three maybe equation. If you can be successful with the foundational layers, at least I would hope so, you know, they become more powerful collectively, right?

Sort of the unity of all the forces together.

Nir Eyal: It's like learning any new skill, right? If you want to play basketball, you have to learn how to dribble before you can dunk. So you really have to figure out how to manage your emotions. That's the most important part. You have to have those arrows in your quiver ready to go.

And people gloss over this stuff because I don't want to think about my icky sticky emotions, right? That's no fun, but I'm telling you, we have to acknowledge that distraction is an emotion regulation problem, an impulse control issue. So what I found in my research is that the most successful people, people who are at the top of their game, whether it's in business, The arts, sports, whatever it is, these people, they experience the same exact internal triggers.

They also feel lonely and bored and stressed and anxious. They feel the same emotions that everybody else feels, sometimes even more so than the average person. The difference is that those people know what to do with those emotions. So highly successful people, they don't do what most people do. Most people, when they feel a little bit bored, a little bit anxious, a little bit stressed, they look for an escape.

Give me a pill. Give me a drink. Give me a scroll. Give me a click. Give me something to take my mind off of this discomfort, right? What highly successful people do, they don't escape the emotion with distraction. They use it as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction. And so that's really the big difference.

But good news is that we can all learn how to do that.

Pat Flynn: I'm curious about, in terms of high performers, you had mentioned time for traction, calendar, and putting things on there is so important, but I know a few people who use them in completely different ways, right? There are people who will literally put minute by minute what it is that they're supposed to do so that they don't have to think about it, they're not going to get distracted, and that's not my style.

I prefer more time blocking, and this day is meant for this, and this day is meant for that, or in between these hours. I'm curious if there's perhaps one that works better than another, or is it kind of like a diet. You kind of kind of have to figure out the one that works for you. How do we best utilize our calendar in that way?

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. Okay. So step number one, master internal triggers. Step number two, as you said, is make time for traction. You have to turn your values into time because you can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. I'm going to say that again. This is so important. You cannot say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from.

So if you have a big open white space calendar. What did you get distracted from? You didn't plan traction. So you can't say that you got distracted. You have to plan what you're going to do. Now I'll tell you what doesn't work. Pat, what doesn't work is when people say, I'm going to be spontaneous, right?

Whatever happens happens. I'm just going to go with the flow just so I can, you know, go wherever the muse takes me. That absolutely doesn't work. We know. From study after study that the more freedom, the more leeway, the more unscheduled time people have, the less productive they are, which is of course is an illusion, right?

How many times we have a weekend and we say, Oh, I've got nothing planned. I'm going to sort through the garage and I'm going to organize my bookshelf and I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. None of it gets done. We need constraints. People operate best when they have some kind of constraint. And so the best constraint you can have is time blocking now.

And a lot of people have converted to this. Mark Andreessen, the famous venture capitalist and Andreessen Horowitz, he used to have a famous article about how he doesn't plan ahead. You know, if someone needs to see him, he needs, they need to come during the moment and that's just how he operates. And I was so happy recently, just last year, he said that technique doesn't work at all.

What does work? Time boxing. And that's exactly what I promote in my book is planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. So this is what Elon Musk does. This is what Mark Andreessen now does. If you look at the calendars of highly successful people, they don't go with the flow.

They plan their day. If you look at the calendar of unsuccessful people, they don't plan their day. So what that means is you've got to plan out according to your values, right? Values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become. You have to turn your values into time. Now, whether you schedule them like I do where I do 15 minute blocks, some people do an hour block, some people do a minute block.

It doesn't actually matter what denomination you choose. The only thing that matters is that it's chosen in advance. So sometimes I'll actually schedule half a day. For example, when I'm with my daughter, we have what we call planned spontaneity. Sounds like an oxymoron plan, spontaneity. Why do I do that?

I have four hours with my daughter where we're just going to hang out and we don't know what we're going to do. Maybe we're going to go surfing. Maybe we're going to go to the library. Maybe we're going to go to the park. We don't know what we're going to do, but why do I plan that time? Why do I time block it?

Because that tells me what I will not be doing. I will not be putzing around on my phone. I will not be taking business calls. I will not be saying, Oh honey, let me just do this one thing on my phone. No, I have scheduled that time and devoted it to somebody I love very much because that's in accordance with my values of being an available father.

So that's why it's so important to schedule that time is not only what you will do, but what you will not be doing. And then you can experiment it, right? You can try 15 minute increments, 20 minute increments, all day increments. It doesn't really matter as long as it's planned in advance. Do not change it in the moment.

Matt Gartland: How far in advance are you doing that planning? Are you doing weekly planning, monthly planning? And, and I ask in part, because especially with say some of our, our community members trying to build businesses, they're in the early stages, they have lots of ideas. They're trying to, you know, kind of curate their ideas, right?

And the notion of going from an earlier stage of even a creative process, whether I guess it is a business endeavor or just even a hobby project or something, the question of, of that time horizon, like how far out am I trying to, to do that planning so that I can bring more focus to the thing and I can see a light at the end of the tunnel and I can stay committed to that end point.

Right. So I'm curious how you in your own work, in your own life, do that.

Nir Eyal: So in my 10 years of experience and working with thousands of clients at this point, I would say about 80 percent of people can do this once a week. That's what I do. So almost all white collar professionals have visibility for about a week's time, right?

That's about what we kind of know. All right, I wake up around this time and I tend to have lunch around that time and I, you know, have these tasks to do in these meetings. So that's what I do every Sunday night. Okay. 8 p. m. It's on my calendar. I have 15 minutes where I review my schedule from the week that just passed.

I look at my schedule for the week ahead and I make adjustments. Now, I would say most of my calendar stays the same, right? I tend to work out at the same time. I take meetings at the same time. I have my focused work sessions around the same time and I'll make adjustments. Oh, you know what? This person needed to meet with me at this time, so I need to move some things around.

No problem. So for me, the cadence is the every week I do it on Sunday nights. Sometimes I meet with professionals who say, you know what? I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, right? Like, I don't know until I get there. So for example, doctors give me this a lot, right? Like I need to show up and then I need to know what's going on.

Then I can make my day. So the idea is that you make that schedule in advance. With the amount of visibility that you have into your day, week, or month. So if you can see ahead and say, okay, I basically know where things are going to fall out from my day. Then you can make it, you know, so many people I work with, they do it first thing in the morning.

Many people do it the last thing at night for the following day. I happen to, and about 80 percent of people I work with, we can do it once a week.

Matt Gartland: Pat, do you have any rituals? I'm kind of curious, even with your creative processes, you have a number of projects, obviously SPI, but you have the Pokemon channel, you have other things happening. So yeah, how do you even give some curation and definition to that?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, to add a little bit more color to this amazing discussion is one thing I've learned that I've needed to do is plan to plan.

If I don't give myself time to then figure out the time that's going to happen later, nothing happens. So when I'm working on a new project, okay, we need a two hour block of time to sit down and plan this project out. Right. And that has helped so much because not only just does it help me, but it helps everybody else who's involved in the thing.

When I'm planning a video shoot, okay, we need to sit down, figure to then talk about how we're going to shoot this thing. We don't just like get into it right away and put it on our calendar. We need to figure out the spacing and when, when this is all going to happen. And it's, I don't, I don't know if it's a different part of the brain, but it feels like it, because in some moments I need to be more creative and spontaneous.

And I do block time out for that as well. But other times I have to be in planning mode to think about my future time right now, and without that space, I think it would just be a jumbled mess.

Nir Eyal: Pat, I'm not surprised that you use this technique because this is something I see in successful people that unsuccessful people don't do.

And that is that they don't differentiate. I think I use different terminology, but you're already doing this. It's the difference between what we call reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is reacting to notifications, reacting to emails, reacting to taps on the shoulder from your colleagues.

Everybody in their day has to have time for reactive work. That's just the nature of work. These days, the problem is that people get habituated to reactive work. Why? Because thinking is difficult. Most people do not like to think it requires cognitive horsepower. It's much easier to say. Huh? What do I do right now?

Well, let me check email. Email will tell me what to do. That gives me that nice warm glow of, Oh, I'm being productive. Even though if you're not planning time in your day for reflective work, reflective work is a kind of work that can only be done without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking for God's sakes can only happen during reflective work time without distraction.

So if you are not planning some time in your day, to think, and that could be 30 minutes, an hour. It doesn't matter, but you'd have to have some time in your day for reflective work. If you're not doing that, I guarantee you you're running real fast in the wrong direction.

Pat Flynn: I think I remember Ramit Sethi talking about how he reserves his Fridays specifically for that kind of planning, right?

He's doing his work. He's doing his calls Monday to Thursday. 20 percent of the week is dedicated to literally, okay, let's strategize for the future. Let's all come together and think in a way that we just didn't have the space to do so earlier in the week. And so he's a high performer. He's doing well. I know a lot of other people would do that now too, that you've said that.

So I appreciate you calling that out and giving it some structure.

Nir Eyal: It's kind of an untapped competitive advantage. I mean, if you look across your industry, most people ain't thinking. They're not. People are not thinking. They just do. They just react. They don't reflect, but game changers take time to reflect. Now, the reason people don't do this because they don't realize you have to plan that time ahead.

So even when they do plan that time, they do it for like five minutes and then they have to check email and then they have a notification and then the, the, the, the, and they don't have the time to properly think about the task in order to make those game changing discoveries. So you, you've got to not only plan that time, but keep it sacred.

Pat Flynn: I don't know if you know this Nir, but I have started a YouTube channel in the Pokemon space and it's been doing really well. We're almost at a million subs. And there's been a lot of other Pokemon YouTubers who've been in the space for such a long time. And they're starting to notice how quickly we are growing.

And they're just like, where did this guy come from? And you're producing all these amazing videos and the audience is going to you. And we've been here for such a long time. Like why aren't we getting views? And it's interesting because I just see them habitually creating the same videos every week, and it's the same thing.

They're not giving themselves time to step back and go, okay, let's actually talk about what the audience wants today. The audience has changed over the last decade. And of course me coming in new, I have a new perspective and I do plan time with my producer to go, okay, what is trending right now? What's coming up later in the year?

That's, that's interesting. Oh, the Olympics are coming this year. Can we do anything related and around that? Okay. Well, we got to start that planning now. So now we're ahead of everybody because we have given ourselves time, literally the space to come up with stuff. And like you said. And you're spot on, just a lot of us are on automatic mode because it's like, okay, one podcast a week, let's go, let's record it, let's schedule it, we're in it and we're doing it and we're feeling like we're getting busy work done and maybe we're not seeing the results because we haven't given ourselves time to plan a big bold move that can, that can help us jump up.

Nir Eyal: Totally. And not only is that, do we see that in the professional space? That that's very relatable. Unfortunately, and here's where it gets pretty raw, we see the exact same results and deficiencies when it comes to our personal lives. How many of us give scraps of whatever's left over in our schedule to our significant others, to our kids, to our brothers and sisters, to our parents, to our best friends.

We just give them whatever scraps of time are left over. And what this leads to, I mean, my, my mission in life here, the reason I wrote indistractable was because I don't want to live with regret. My goal is to live the kind of life that I can look back on and say, wow, I did what I said I was going to do.

Not what social media said I should do, not what the New York times or my friends or whatever else said I should do, but I lived my life according to how I wanted to live it to minimize regret. That's, that's the idea is to kind of become the kind of person that I would admire by doing what I say I'm going to do according to my values, as opposed to, you know, letting the wind blow me this direction, that direction based on other people's interests.

Because if you don't plan your day, somebody is going to plan it for you. So that's why we can apply the very same techniques that we would to our business, to our own life, to our personal life, to make sure we have that time with friends, with our family, by the way, also time for yourself. You know, we see a lot of people ragging on different behaviors, you know, Oh, you like to go on social media.

You like to play Pokemon. You like to watch YouTube videos. Oh, that's a waste of time, right? That's ridiculous, right? We see so much negativity around how people spend their time. People are so judgy around how other people spend their time. Oh, what you play Pokemon? That's ridiculous. What a waste of time.

But oh, I watch four hours of golf on TV. That's somehow okay. Ridiculous. That makes no sense. So we need to stop moralizing and medicalizing these technologies and realizing anything you want to do with your time is fine. Enjoy it without guilt, but do it according to your schedule and your values, not someone else's.

So the difference between traction and distraction is one word. And that one word is intent. As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So if you put in your calendar, Hey, I like to watch YouTube videos. There's nothing wrong with that. It's in my calendar. See, there it is. Now it's traction.

In fact, anything else would be distraction. So it's not that I'm arguing for, you know, this acidic life that you have to just work all day. No, no, no. I want you to plan time for the fun things in life. That's what makes life worth living. But again, have it scheduled according to your values.

Pat Flynn: I'm going to give you a second to pick up the mic you just dropped real quick.

Matt Gartland: Pretty darn good. What I find fascinating, interesting, maybe even difficult, right, to talk about publicly, and I don't know this way because we'll publish, but even privately is, at least in our industry, there is like literally the term creator now, like the identity to even or with the identity point that you brought up earlier Nir is now ingrained as to just execute to make a thing and make as much stuff as possible.

There's sort of this implied idea that if we slow down to plan, if we go slower, right, that is a bad thing that you're not hustling hard enough. You're not working fast enough. Like velocity is, is a big thing, right? Or at least it's implied or even externally discussed in that way.

Pat Flynn: If I'm not creating, who am I?

Right, Matt? It's like, so therefore I must create and create more.

Matt Gartland: Yeah. But if your primary identity, and this is something that spicy takes and whatnot, like if creator is your primary identity, it's something that I think is somewhat of a slippery slope, if not even, you know, a dangerous thing to the, the ultimate concluding thought or the end point of, Oh, I just, thus must always be creating.

Right. And, you know, create with intent is, is a different thing than just like create on autopilot. Or at least that's my interpretation of some of this conversation and just my own work, our work together, the creating communities were a part of. So I think it's a real thing to like consciously. Choose to slow down, right, and plan and dial things in and to look at the right KPIs and signals in your business or whatever it is that, you know, you should maybe be calculating right and looking at to then further inform your path is probably even harkens back to your example with the Pokemon if you're probably looking at certain signals, right?

In your analysis with your producer to further inform what you plan out and execute, but you got to slow down to do that.

Nir Eyal: The important part I think is it's not necessarily about the pace per se. It's about isn't in accordance with your values. So values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become.

So what does that mean? It means you look at how does the person I want to become spend their time. And so I give people these three domains, you've got you, you're at the center. If you can't help yourself, you can't help other people. You can't make the world a better place. Then you've got your relationships, right?

This is part of the reason we have a loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that people don't make time for these close relationships, particularly with friendships, right? Friendships don't die, right? They starve to death. You know, people who lose touch with their friends, they don't end these friendships because they got in a big fight.

That's pretty rare. They end these friendships because, Oh, we haven't talked in a long time. And I don't know. I guess we're still friends, but if we were friends, we would have talked a long time ago. So what happens now? We're not friends anymore. So that happens because we're not making time for those relationships, let alone with our kids, with our spouse, et cetera.

And then finally the work domain, which we talked about reflective and reactive work. I think the part that's, that's missing is the frame by which we assess how we turn our values into time. So I actually advise people not to make too many super longterm goals. Like for your example, if you're saying, my identity is to be a creator that that can be helpful, but it shouldn't be, you know, a forever and ever type of goal.

I think it's very hard people to define their values by saying what's important to me, right? Write down my values. Most people have a really hard time with that because we have conflicting values. I want to be an available father, but I also want to be a great business person, right? Like these are conflicting values.

So the reason a time box calendar is so powerful is that it forces you to make these trade offs given the constraints. If you want to know someone's values, you look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money. Now what they say, you look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money, right?

The problem is that for most of us, we're so stingy with our money. We look for sales and coupons and deals, and we split checks because we want to save a buck when it comes to our time, we just give it to whoever wants it. Oh, there's a stupid thing trending in the news. There's a war 5, 000 miles away. Oh, let me give my time to pay attention to those things, as opposed to spending the time the way I really want to, with intent.

As opposed to people who, who spend their money in a way that's very cheap and they count every penny, what we should be doing is being generous with our money, but stingy with our time. And why? Because we can always make more money. You can always make more money, whether you're Bill Gates or Elon Musk, you cannot make more time.

So I think we need to be stingy with our time, but generous with our money because time is a non renewable resource. So when we turn our values into time, when we say to ourselves, you know, I'm just going to plan a week's time, that's it. No more, no less. I'm not thinking about five years from now, certainly I'm not thinking about a lifetime, just this week.

How would the person I want to become spend their time, meaning how much time would I spend taking care of myself? So if personal health is important to me, well, do I have time in my schedule for exercise? Do I have time for rest? Do I have time if I like playing video games? Is that on my schedule, right?

How would the person I want to become spend their time, time with my relationships? Is it in your calendar? And then time for work, of course, reactive work and reflective time. So having that time in advance on our schedule is the only way we can turn our values into time. And then that will change over time.

So if you find, you know, like for one season of my life, being a creator was super, super important when I was writing my books, that was really my top priority. So I could see I had to make more time in my schedule, without neglecting my other values. But then after the book was done, you know what? I wanted more daddy time.

I wanted more time with my daughter and I could adjust that week by week, as opposed to having a very calcified identity that this is the way it has to be all the time that tends to stretch you in too many directions at once because you just can't do it all. Whereas when you put it on a calendar, you have to operate under those constraints.

Pat Flynn: I've heard a lot of other creators talk about that similarly with seasons, like, this is my season of writing a book, so therefore, during that season, yes, it'll be, you know, I'm gonna be waking up early and sacrificing a few things to get that done, but once that's done, it's my season of being at home all the time with the kids, just like you said, I've heard that, and it works really well.

And the idea of time being something that we shouldn't just hand out, although we do, it reminds me of this movie. I don't know if either of you have seen it, but it starred Justin Timberlake. And it's where time till death shows up on a person's arm and it's like a ticker. It goes down, but you can exchange time with other people so that you can live a little bit longer.

And it like changes your idea of like what time means when you realize that you only have so much of it to offer and the decisions you make and the things that you do change because of that, and that's actually how it is versus like you said, money, you can always make more money. It just doesn't feel like it or it doesn't feel like there's an unlimited amount compared to I don't know.

It's just relationship with time and money is so important here, and I'm so glad you called that out because it's, I mean, we see it with our kids are growing up so fast. I only have four summers left with my son. Crazy, right? You know, before he's out, it totally changes the decisions that I make and where I spend my time.

And I've had to tell myself that if I catch myself going down a TikTok rabbit hole, that that is time I took away from my kids with the limited amount of time I have with them. That gets me to shut off the app and go back and, and, you know, play catch again or something.

Nir Eyal: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And look, there's nothing wrong with some time on TikTok.

You know, parents, we need a break too sometimes. Sometimes I say, you know what? I've had enough kid time. I need to go do something on my own for a little bit. And that's, that's totally fine. But again, it should be planned. It shouldn't be I can't stand this feeling that I have right now in my head, let me go play a video game.

Let me go hang out on Tik Tok. Rather it should be, okay, I know that time is coming in my day. And this kind of is counterintuitive in that. One of the things you can do for yourself as well as your kids, you know, many people there's asked me about how do I help my kids become indistractable and there's a whole section in the book on how to raise indistractable kids.

One of the best things you can do is actually schedule the distraction. So if you're struggling with TikTok or email or YouTube or whatever it is that you find you're using for psychological relief from discomfort, in fact, putting it on your calendar, scheduling time for your kid to play that video game that they, you think they're addicted to, it's one of the best things you can do.

Because now the brain isn't constantly thinking, when can I play, when can I play, when can I play? I know exactly when I'm going to play, it's in my calendar, it says right there. So I don't have to constantly keep ruminating about it.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, very powerful. That, thinking back to a younger version of me, I will at least label myself as old, you know, now with kids and everything else.

I, I just wish these sorts of conversations were happening earlier, and again, I wish I had more access to that stuff 10, 15 years ago, you know, when you, you're an early stage entrepreneur, you're young, you don't have some of these important other kinds of constraints to like a significant other, or maybe you're married, maybe you have kids yet, right?

It's, it's at least it was for me easier to justify just drifting, right. And spending more time working or hustling or things with less intent. So if anything, you know, we're trying to like pull some of this wisdom forward to like the next generation of entrepreneurs that, you know, Have the next best idea, right?

But still to try to practice these disciplines and actually turn them into muscles and habits now, right? Far in advance of maybe other life events, you know, happening down the road.

Nir Eyal: That's right. Yeah. And, and look, there's nothing wrong with hustling hard, right? Like if you want to go be an investment banker or build a startup, you're going to work a lot of hours and that's, and that's fine.

I'm not saying people shouldn't work like crazy. If you want to work 24/7, that's your prerogative. It's not up to me or anyone else to tell you how to live your life. Okay. What I want to help people do is to live the kind of life they want. If you say you want a certain type of life, if you know you're capable of more, but you're not doing it, that's what I want to help with.

So I'm not going to tell you exercise and you know, here's what you need to eat. And then, you know, no, I'm not gonna make any judgments. If you want to play video games all day long, great, do it. But I want to help you do it with intent because the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. I mean, that, that's really the summary of my 10 years of research.

The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That if you wait till the last minute, right, if you're on a diet, but the chocolate cake is on the fork, You're going to eat it. If you're trying to quit smoking, but the cigarette's in your hand, you're going to smoke it. If you wake up every morning and your cell phone is next to your nightstand, right?

If it's right there, you're going to pick it up before you even say hello to your loved one. So if you leave these type of decisions to the last minute, you will fail. They will get you these distractions. If you plan ahead. There is no distraction we can't overcome. So there's a wonderful quote, Paolo Coelho said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.

Such a good quote. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So, how long are we going to complain about, Oh, social media! Oh, video games! All these things are so distracting! My email! All these things are so distracting! Before we do something about it. So a distracted person keeps getting distracted.

They are choosing to be distracted because they keep making the same mistakes. Whereas an indistractable person says, okay, I see what you did there, right? You got me distraction, but I know that there's only three causes for every distraction, an internal trigger, an external trigger or a planning problem.

That's it. There is no other source for distraction. So an indistractable person says, okay, I'm going to take steps today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow.

Matt Gartland: That's your second or third mic drop probably in one episode. That's outstanding. It has, these things tend to happen. It is evaporated on us. Nir, this has been just a remarkable chat and you're continuing to write and expand upon all of this work.

Where can folks go to engage on that and get the latest and greatest from you?

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. Thanks. Yeah. I'm working on my third book now, so that'll be a few years ahead. But if you want to follow my writing until I get there, I publish a lot of my ideas as I'm working on my next book. And so my blog is called Nir and Far.

Nir is spelled like my first name, NirAndFar.com. And my latest book is called Indistractable, how to control your attention and choose your life.

Pat Flynn: Neil, may I ask you, can you give us a little heads up on maybe the topic that you're focused on for the next publication?

Nir Eyal: Yeah, sure. It's about beliefs.

It's about how our underlying beliefs affect our reality. And it's, it's an old topic. It's probably the oldest self help topic, but there's been a lot of research lately that's kind of overturned our understanding about the effects of beliefs. So for example, I've been going really deep into placebo research.

Placebos are frickin fascinating, and there's all this interesting research that actually now, I'll give you a taste. So, we used to think that in order for placebo to work, you had to not know that it was a placebo, right? So you'd go into the doctor, and you'd be in some clinical trial, and they'd say, okay, you know, we, we don't, it's a double blind controlled, randomized control study, so the doctor doesn't know if the pill is a placebo or not, the patient doesn't know if it's a placebo or not, and then we could see if the placebo has an effect.

And we used to think that you had to be deceived in order for the placebo to work. You had to believe you were getting the real drug. Turns out, that ain't true. That in studies where they tell people this is an inert substance, it has no pharmacological effect whatsoever, it is a placebo, it still works!

It's called an open label placebo. And in fact, the placebo effect in clinical trials, you know, like if you're a pharmaceutical company and you're, you have a new drug, you have to prove it's more efficacious than a placebo, right? The problem is that year after year after year, drug companies are having a tougher time getting their medications approved because the placebo effect is getting stronger.

The placebo effect is getting stronger in the general population in all of us. Why? Because more people are hearing about the placebo effect. And so it's turning out that it's beyond the belief. You don't even have to believe it's the medication, that there's something hardwired in us around expectations, essentially beliefs around, around how things should work.

That actually does change our perceptions. Placebos can't cure cancer. They can't cure heart disease. But turns out they have an amazing effect in Parkinson's. They have an amazing effect in insomnia, in depression, in anxiety, ADHD. I mean, the list goes on and on and on all the things that placebos can do. So that's just kind of a taste of what I'm working on now.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that. That I cannot wait for that.

Matt Gartland: That's a fantastic trailer on what's ahead. Yeah. Excellent. Nir, thanks again so very much for everyone listening. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll catch you next time in our next special episode of around table. We'll catch you then.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Nir. Again, you should definitely check out his books, Indistractable, Hooked, pay attention to what he's got going on for his next stuff about beliefs, placebos. I want to know more about that. And I'm glad that we have somebody like Nir who is kind of advancing on that stuff, researching it, understanding it. And again, like I said, in the intro, he's so good at taking all of this stuff and making it easy for us to not just understand how it works, but how to apply it in our own lives as well.

So Nir, thank you so much. Matt, as always, thank you for joining me here on the podcast.

And I hope you enjoy this one until the next round table. We have more Friday episodes, some coaching calls ahead, and of course, our amazing interviews on Wednesdays, which you'll see coming up very soon. So if you haven't done so already, please hit subscribe.

I look forward to serving you the next one. We'll see you then. Cheers.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I'm your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!

SPI 791: How to Generate More Course Sales and the Crossover between Data and Art with John Ainsworth

John Ainsworth: Sending out an email promotion every month, one of the reasons people don't do that is because they feel salesy and spammy if they send out regular email promotions. So the trick is people think it's either send out an email promotion and then feel salesy and spammy and my audience hates me or don't send out an email promotion. But there's a third option, which is send good email promotions that people like receiving and make your sales at the same time. So that's the trick. And that's actually where the bulk of the additional revenue for most people is available, is just sending out good email promotions on a regular basis.

Pat Flynn: What I find very interesting about today's guest is not his awesome British accent, but rather the kind of juxtaposition between his domain name and really what he's about plus the name of his podcast. So let me tell you both and then we'll get into it. The name of his podcast is The Art of Selling Online Courses.

And this topic is something that is near and dear to my heart. It's near and dear to a lot of your hearts as well, since you might be selling online courses or looking to sell an online course in the future. And of course, online courses have changed a little bit over the years. And we do talk about that a bit.

But here is the name of his website, DataDrivenMarketing.co. So our guest today, John Ainsworth, is going to help us with the crossover between the two, data driven marketing and the art of selling online courses. He also has a third website where you can get an actual personalized audit of your own funnels called PimpYourFunnel.com. So, I mean, we're kind of going through all the spectrum here, but all of it is here to help you and serve you. And online courses, winning strategies. It's all what we're going to talk about. So let's get right into it. Here is John Ainsworth from Data Driven Marketing and The Art of Selling Online Courses.

Announcer: You're listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that's all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he's not sure if a wireless mouse should even be called a mouse anymore. Because there's no tail. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: John, welcome to SPI. Thanks for being here, man.

John Ainsworth: Thank you very much. Delighted to be here. I've been a fan of the show for many years.

Pat Flynn: Well, I appreciate that. And I was so grateful to be on your show and everybody's going to be grateful that you're here because we're talking about making more revenue, generating more sales with our online courses.

And a lot of this can be used for whatever it is that we're offering online. Because there's a lot of principles that will matter. And The Art of Selling Online Courses is your podcast. And like, tell me why it's more of an art. Why isn't it just like, oh, numbers and stuff. Like what makes it an art?

John Ainsworth: I know, right?

Because my business is called the Data Driven Marketing. So we're totally all about the numbers. And it's because my copywriter was coming up with possible names for the show, and she thought that one was the coolest one. And we all liked it. And that's it. There's no, I don't know. There's a bit of an art to it, right?

So there's a certain amount of science and a certain amount of art to it. What we've tried to do as much as we can is like boil it down into like systems and processes and stuff that you can do repeatedly. And then within that, then there's a certain amount of creativity that you have to do inside of that framework.

Pat Flynn: Were you always into marketing and data driven in your previous life if there was one?

John Ainsworth: So my first thing that's kind of led me to here was I started off in sales. When I was a student, I had your typical rubbish jobs working in a factory and all that kind of stuff. And then I saw this advert for job selling.

Actually, I don't think they said in the advert what it was. It said just like travel to America, meet lots of people, get great experience. I was like, Oh, this sounds interesting. And it turns out it was a job selling books door to door. And it was absolutely brutal. Know, 80 hours a week, commission only, they give you a week's training, and then they kind of throw you out in the field and off you go.

And I did really well at it, and I made a lot of money in my summers when I was a student selling books door to door. But it was, it was like, oh, it's hard, man. It's a really hard thing.

Pat Flynn: You're in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. And you went from the UK to the US during the summer because of an ad. I mean, that's good copywriting, number one. To sell books, how do you do that? Like, what's the approach when you go into a bookstore? It's like, Hey, I see you have like thousands of books already. Like, do you want another one?

John Ainsworth: Oh, you sell it door to door. You sell it to people, like to family books, go to people.

Pat Flynn: Okay. I mean, that's even worse.

John Ainsworth: These books were for helping people with their homework. So as families, you had school aged kids helping them with like the maths homework, English homework, that kind of thing. You know, you've got encyclopedias back then, you know, or the internet just kind of started to exist and that kind of stuff helped with doing like big book reports or doing like big assignments.

And this was for more like the little bits of homework, how to do algebra, how to remember the names of all the presidents, whatever, that kind of thing.

Pat Flynn: I see. So was it, was it hard for you to, I mean, you got good at it at some point where you naturally get at that at, at the start or?

John Ainsworth: Oh, no, no, it was terrible.

How'd you get better? So my first week, my first door, I remember going and knocking on it and they given us this whole script and we'd practice the script and we'd got amazing at it over the course of like a week and we really nailed it. And I got up to the first one. I'm so nervous. I just, the guy opens the door and I look at him and I just go, everything's gone.

My whole head is completely empty. And I just look at him and I go, books?

And he's like, no, I was like, Oh, okay. Then I moved on. But I basically, I just got obsessed with it. I was like, okay, right. I know that this is a thing that other people can do. There's a process for how to do it. Let me learn how to do it. And they had a whole manual for it. And I'd just go home and I'd study the manual and I'd read back through it and I'd practice all the stuff and every day I'd be like, right, I'm going to get better at this one little part of it and I just get better day after day, week after week.

And then I went back like three different summers and did it again and again until I got, you know, really, really good at it. Nice.

Pat Flynn: So it was reps. It just took reps for you to get it.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, reps and like, it's quite easy to have rubbish reps. Do you know what I mean? Like we just do the same thing again and again, but this was like, you know, really focused on, okay, how do I make this a bit better?

How do I make it a little bit better? I quite like that whole, what's that term? Kaizen? You know, like 1 percent improvements, just a continuous little improvements kind of approach.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, James Clear, Atomic Habits, 1 percent better every day kind of thing. And I think that relates very well to, business online.

I mean, a lot of us go through our rubbish first door knocks, if you will, on the internet and like, you've seemed to have figured out how to do this very well. So in today's world, you know, it's early 2024 right now, John, what is working for generating revenue? Cause I've been in this business for 16 years.

There are principles that always remain the same, but things are changing all the time. It's confusing. It's hard. Give us a little rundown. What, what framework systems should we be worrying about right now? And then we can get into the dirty details after.

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So there's three main elements that work for increasing revenue, especially if you're selling courses.

The same thing applies if you're going to be doing e commerce or selling services, but the details change between whatever you're saying. So when you're selling courses, there's three main areas. One is how can you make more revenue per client? The second one is how can you make more sales to your email list? And the third one is how do you grow your email list bigger? And what most people who are in this kind of space are doing is they send out one or two bad email promotions a year. They have low revenue per sale. They have low numbers of promotions, the emails themselves aren't good, and they're not building their email list that much.

Now, listeners to your podcast are probably doing a better job at a lot of this stuff, because I know you cover a lot of these things. But that's the general trend. That's like 95 percent of people that I see. So if you can correct those and have high revenue per sale, good percentage of your email list buying, and a bigger email list, then overall you make a lot more money.

Normally, like five times more, that kind of thing.

Pat Flynn: I think it's interesting that you started with more revenue per user. That's really interesting to me because in most cases, I think, especially for the beginner, it's like, okay, we need more people to just know about us, right? I mean, yes, maybe we have a few sales here and there, but we need more.

We need to introduce ourselves or get in front of or interrupt somebody else's thing to put our thing into it. However, you're saying no, like there are people who are already potentially buying from you. This is for maybe you had a first lunch, but there's when you say more revenue. We're not just saying like, okay, I should just double the price of my course, right?

What do you really mean?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So what else can you sell those people? So the people who buy something from you are 20 times more likely to buy something else from you. That's approximately what the data shows with our, with our customers. 20 times. About 20 times. Yeah. So if you've got an email list and you've got a percentage of that email list you've bought from you before, those people are 20 times more likely to buy the next thing from you than the ones who haven't bought something from you before.

And it varies slightly, but that's the right kind of ballpark. So once someone's bought something, why not offer them something else to buy from you? And that could be an order bump or an upsell, or it could be, you know, ongoing membership, something like that. So the reason I put them in that order is because that's the order that we recommend people to do them in.

Because it's easier to make more money from an existing customer than it is to grow your email list. And the reason for that is you make more money right now when you start making more money per customer. It's the easiest one to see the result from it. So I had someone come up to me at a conference a little while back and he said, I saw your talk at a previous conference and I implemented the order bumps and now I make 5,000 more per month.

And it's like, that's fantastic. Like it's the only thing that he changed. He just did that one thing. It makes 5,000 more per month. And I was like, did you do tactic number two? He's like, no, I totally forgot that it was anything else. That's the only one that I remember, but I did that. And that made me five grand.

I'm like, okay, cool. I've got tactic number two for you. Tell me again in a year, how you got on with that. And so the ways that you do that is there's two really simple ways, order bumps and upsells. So if you're selling courses at the moment, this is about how do you offer an additional product to someone as they're buying from you.

So an order bump is an additional offer that you have on the checkout page and an upsell is an additional offer that you have after the checkout page, like the confirmation page after that. Apart from that, they're basically in concept, kind of the same thing. It's just offer them something else, but technically they're in different places and then there's slight nuance to what you offer.

Pat Flynn: So how do you make an order bump, you know, this is before checkout, not feel like the aisle at the grocery store where it's just like, Hey, okay, you're checking out. You got your stuff that you needed, but gum, beef jerky, the little travel Advil's, how do you make it not seem like you're just kind of siphon as much money as possible, but how do you make it more valuable?

What kinds of things are good order bumps?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. What we're looking for is something that makes the course that they're buying be quicker To implement or goes along with it nicely. So for example, if you're selling a course, you might sell additional workbooks, or if you're selling a main course, you might have a secondary course that kind of goes along with it. As we've got a client who was selling a course for about 600 and it was about SEO. It's about how do you build up the traffic that you're getting and then they had as the order bump a whole bunch of pre research niches. So they'd gone and they'd found like there's 30 or 40 different niches that they thought were going to be, you know, good for SEO that you could be like, but that's the topic. That's the niche. I'm going to be focusing my content on that. They've already done a bunch of the work for you in advance. So people can kind of see why that makes sense that it's not an essential part of the main course, but it's something else that makes it easier, makes it faster for you.

Anything that you could put as a bonus, you also could put as an order bump. I think that's kind of a good way of looking at it. It can't be an essential part of the course that you've just missed out. But if there's an extra thing that you can come up with that makes it easier for the person to implement it or faster, then that fits really well.

Pat Flynn: How would you know whether to make something a bonus versus an order bump? That seems like it might be hard for a person to decide.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, I guess maybe that's part of the art of it, I suppose. How would you decide with that? That's an interesting one. So here's what we do, right? We go through all the products that somebody already has, and normally people have got more stuff that they've ever made than they even realize.

So people have in their head, Oh, I've got this main course and this main course. Okay. What have you ever created? Have you ever done an additional Q and A webinar that you no longer have available for everybody out there? Do you have any extra training that you did in person that you recorded? Do you have anything that you've ever done that you've sold through a partner that you don't have as a main offer?

Just list everything that you've got, then look through all of those things and say, which of those would make the best order bump. Now that's not necessarily the perfect order bump, but the huge benefit of doing it this way is you can get something up straight away. And if it doesn't convert, if people aren't buying it, then you can go back and say, okay, that wasn't perfect.

Maybe we're going to try something else, or maybe we're going to make something bespoke. But the biggest mistake that I see people make here is that they try and create, they say, ah, I've got the idea. I know what the perfect one would be. I'm going to make that that's going to take me two months and then they don't get around to it for four months because I've got other projects going on and then they don't do it.

That's not the approach. The best one is make a list of everything you've got and then choose something from in there and go that, let's try that out. And I think if you're making your course and something feels at that point, like it belongs in the course and you, yeah, call it a bonus, you call it part of the main course.

Don't include that, but find something else that fits with it. So I had a friend actually who did had a main product was for marketing agency owners, and it was a training on how to run some specific part of their marketing. And the order bump was. A Q& A with other agency owners about the biggest mistake they made when implementing their marketing.

And so it was obvious that that didn't have to be a part of the course. It wasn't how to do the thing, but it fitted really well. It was really kind of nice fit with it.

Pat Flynn: That's nice. I like that because you're right. I mean, we can think of a good one and then we have to create it and then we're not going to do that.

But you might already have those assets. What system or tech are you using to do the order bumps? This often will hold people back as well. They're just like, well, it sounds like a good idea, but I don't, I don't know how to do that. Do you have any recommendations?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. I mean, most of the systems that people are using for either checkout software or for course hosting like Kajabi or Thinkific or Teachable have all got order bumps in there.

So as Thrivecart, so as ClickFunnels. So most systems have already got this in. If the tech stack that you are using doesn't allow you to do order bumps, then don't do this one first because changing tech stacks takes ages and it's so much a form of procrastination. It's really easy to go, I'm going to change to the perfect tech stack, and this one's going to be exactly right, and none of them are perfect.

I've never seen anything that people are like, Oh, my God, every single thing about this is exactly the way that I want to be. You've got to make some compromises. So just go with what you've got. If you can't do order bumps, but you can do upsells. Do upsells. And if you can't do order bumps or upsells, leave that for now and focus on doing more email promotions and then come back to this at some point once you've implemented the other steps.

Pat Flynn: Nice. Final question on order bumps. Also, I want to throw in SamCart in there as well. That could be easy one to add on top of anything else you have to do. Order bumps, that's what they specialize in. Last question. Order bump for additional access. Is that something that you'd recommend? It's like, Hey, here's a 30 minute call with me if you pay this much or get into this cohort that will allow us to connect together for a certain period of time for our course or something like that.

John Ainsworth: Probably would put that as an upsell. And the reason is, as a general rule, we found that about a third of the price of the main product is a good price point for the order bump. And about the same or more expensive is a good price point for the upsell. So if you're offering a 30 minute call, unless your time is being offered quite cheaply, then probably that's going to be more expensive than the course that you're selling.

So I probably wouldn't put that in. I've got a friend who he does that as I don't know if you know him, Jack Hopkins. Oh, yeah. He runs Piano in 21 days. And he's got, I think, two free sessions with him or something like that as the order bump. And it kind of works for him because not that many people actually ever book those sessions.

But then that's not great for his customers. So he's like, is that good? Is that not because if people aren't ever booking that thing, well, I've just spent money on something. They're not actually using, which doesn't, you know, it's not amazing, but if everybody booked them, he'd almost definitely stop doing it because.

He would just be booked up with all of these one on one sessions with people. So, I think you need to be charging a good amount for any one to one session. And the same thing with, you'd said about like, you know, get access to me through whatever, a cohort or an ongoing session. That's probably going to be more expensive.

I think you talked when you came on my podcast about it being maybe 300 bucks if you're buying the course and 500 bucks if you're also buying the access for the cohort kind of process to go through.

Pat Flynn: Exactly. In general, your time is valuable. You don't want to cheapen that, right? And that anchors the other things too, that you have going on.

You don't want to cheapen, in fact, you kind of want to also just keep that higher. That's premium so that everything else will feel like, okay, well, I can't get access to Pat or to John because it costs a lot. So I'm going to, you know, this course sounds like a great deal versus the other way around.

That's really great. Okay. So that's order bumps and upsells. You obviously talk a lot about this on your podcast. There is some art to it. There's a lot more science behind it as well. The more you do something, the more data you get and the more you can analyze what is working and what's not, and continually making changes over time.

When you. Are looking at the data. I'm curious. How often are you looking at data and what kind of data is important to you when it comes to sales? You know, obviously, revenue is important. But beyond that, what are we looking at? And how do we analyze that best?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, we break this down into a lot of small steps.

And then we know what the benchmarks are for each one of those steps. So therefore, you can tell exactly where you should be focusing. So most of the revenue for course business comes from sending email promotions. So we're looking with that with how many emails were sent. Yeah. How many were opened and what was the open rate?

How many were clicked and what was the click through rate? How many of those people actually got to the sales page? So you might lose some people between the click and the sales page, especially if it loads slowly. Then how many people got from the sales page to the checkout page? How many people went from checkout page to buying?

And then what percentage of those people who bought got the order bump and what percentage got the upsell? So it's a funnel. It's like the numbers in a funnel. That's exactly what we're always looking at every single time. So every email promotion that we do, we'll track all of those numbers and then we'll analyze them and go, How did it do?

Was there any step in there that wasn't good, that needs improving?

Pat Flynn: How do you track easily? I know a lot of people get flustered by that and it's like, Oh, now there's like five different tools and there's numbers from each of them, right? Your email service provider, and then it's like the click through rate, but then they go from there to the sales page. And so you have to look at traffic, but then. traffic to conversion into the sales page and then checkout, it just again could be very overwhelming. Can you simplify this for us?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so we do it all in the spreadsheet. We don't use any fancy software for it. So we'll be using, let's say it's ConvertKit, right?

We're going to be using ConvertKit for what was the open rate, what was the click through rate? How many emails were sent? And then we'll be using Google Analytics typically for what was the conversion rate from the sales page to the checkout page from checkout page to buying is easy, right? Because that will be in whatever software you've got for the sales.

You have the number of sales in there. How many people bought the upsell will be in there as well. How many people bought the order bump will be in the checkout software. We put that all in the spreadsheet, and then there's a formula that calculates the conversion percentage. We don't ever do it in anything more complex than that, because that is the simplest possible system that can get you the result and that keeps everything under control.

Pat Flynn: I like that. It's kind of, it's just raw at that point. There's no connections and APIs. And I mean, I know a lot of, there are tools that are available that try to help you see the funnel and those can work too, if, especially if you've figured it out, but if you or a small team or a solopreneur, it's going to be much, much easier to just kind of go to the raw data for important metrics.

So there's a lot of conversion points here, right? There is the conversion point of just open emails from email to click, click to sales page, sales page, to. Of the entire funnel, where do you think is the biggest opportunity for people to generate more revenue?

John Ainsworth: The way to look at this is what steps are you currently not doing?

So let's say you already got email promotions going out and they're going to a sales page and you've got a checkout page. Now you can make your sales page convert better and you can make your checkout page convert better. But if you don't have an order bump at all, then it's the easiest win is to just put an order bump in because you're guaranteed it's going to do better when you've got something versus when you have nothing.

So the first thing to do is go through and actually just put all of those steps in place. So anything that you're currently missing now what most people are missing completely are having an order bump, having an upsell and then doing email promotions regularly. Most people only do email promotions like once or twice a year.

So for example, Black Friday is one time when everybody does it. And then everybody has this giant spike in sales when they do the email promotion. And then the rest of the year, they're not sending email promotions out at all. And then they don't have that spike in sales. So one of the things there is sending out an email promotion every month.

Now, if you've only got one course, that's tricky. But if you've got, let's say, three courses, then every month you could do a promotion for a course, and then after three months, you cycle back through again and start again. One of the reasons people don't do that is because they feel salesy and spammy if they send out regular email promotions.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, the pitchforks are gonna come and get me if I promote too much.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, and they feel uncomfortable about it. And they're worried that their subscribers will unsubscribe, which are all fair, yeah, fears, right? That's all things that could happen. So the trick is it's not a, it's a false dichotomy. People think it's either send out an email promotion and then feel sales can spam me and my audience hates me or don't send out an email promotion.

But there's a third option, which is send good email promotions that people like receiving and make you sales at the same time. So that's the trick. And that's actually where the bulk of the additional revenue for most people is available is just sending out good email promotions on a regular basis.

Pat Flynn: So define good email promotions.

John Ainsworth: So it has to be really, really valuable content for those people who aren't going to buy, because in every single email promotion, about 99 percent of people are not going to buy from that promotion. So you want them to actually think the content was valuable and want to stay on your list.

So we've got a structure of kind of framework of how we always do this. But I would say that you want at least half of it to be useful content, even if someone doesn't buy that thing from you. And even if someone never buys from you, they should actually be getting value from receiving all of these emails.

Pat Flynn: It's funny because when I do a webinar, it's like, Oh, it's got to be 45 minutes of incredible value because I want it to be worth a person's time because their time is valuable. And then I can go into a much easier, not even pitch, but it's just the end of the conversation is, Hey, if you want to work more with us. Like here it is. Yet when we think about emails, we don't think about it in the same kind of way. Although we are still asking people to spend time reading that email, why not make it valuable? So what is a valuable email to a subscriber related to a topic look like? Is this a listicle? Is it a story?

What's in that email specifically?

John Ainsworth: So we've got a framework that we use where it's 11 emails that go out over two weeks. And the Framework for it is pain, agitation, solution, gain, logic, fear, future casting, frequently asked questions, going, going, gone. So that's the overall framework and kind of break down if you like what all of them are, but that's the kind of the overall structure.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, we don't have to go through necessarily all 11, but let's go through the first one pain. So the first email that goes out that then talks about a course or something that we're offering. What do you mean by pain?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so we're not mentioning the course at this point. at all. Oh, not at all. No, the first week is just value.

So what we're trying to do is so pain, agitation, solution emails is the pain is talking to them about this is a pain point that you're currently feeling and you're trying to make sure that they understand their own problem more clearly than they previously did. If they believe that you understand their problem, they're more likely to believe that you might have a solution for them.

If they don't believe you even know what their problem is, why should they think that you can solve it? But we're not just trying to show them that we know what it is, we're trying to help them understand their own problem at the moment. And then the agitation, when we're talking more about, okay, this is what that might mean in your life.

This is what emotions you might be feeling because of this is what knock on effects that might have in your which they probably don't even realize because they're too day to day within their own stuff that's going on. Let's say they've got a new puppy and their puppy pees on the carpet and they're just like frustrated because they haven't managed to train their puppy first.

So first of all, your email, you're talking about the pain of what that's like. And then the agitation you're talking about, okay, here's how that might affect you in the future. Here's how six months later you is going to feel because of this thing, which you know, and they don't know, you know, because you've gone through it.

That's a separate email, right? The agitation is like email. Yeah. Okay. Got it. So as a sequence, and yeah, that's great. And then the solution is, well, let's give them a tip. Let's help them to actually solve that problem right now. Even if they don't get your course, we're just solving, we're just giving them a tip on how to solve it in the solution one.

Pat Flynn: I like that. I talk about quick wins all the time. And sometimes I go into the quick win way too fast. It's like, Hey, if you're dealing with, you know, a puppy that pees on the carpet, here's a quick win for you. Because I want to give as much value as fast as possible. But I think it's so important that I need to be reminded often that we really need to lean into the pain and the just relatability.

And this is where story comes into play. This is where a case study might come into play or data like studies, like 68 percent of people who don't take care of this end up either getting rid of the puppy or, you know, having fights with the other people in the house because of it. And we don't want that to happen to you too.

And it's like the more care you take into setting things up, the more a, the solution is wanted. and B, the easier it is to just bring it up in a conversation like manner where it doesn't become salesy. I think almost it's salesy if you don't do the pain and agitation part. It's like you're just trying to jump into what you have to offer.

You're not really trying to be relatable, right?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. One of the things that goes wrong, I think, in people's psychology with this is that they're so worried about how they feel about themselves that they don't think enough about how does the audience member actually feel when they're reading us. So the starting point for this has got to be this person has got a problem. You have got a solution. We want to help them. We've got to forget about ourselves. We've got to get rid of our own thoughts about our own insecurities. And what if someone thinks this about me, what have you? And really focus on this audience that I've got. Some of them have got a dog that is peeing on the carpet.

We've got to help these people. And we've got to think about like, how's that affecting them? How's that affecting their life? And I've got a solution, which is I've got this course, which is going to help with that. And with training their dog overall, if they buy the course, their life will be better. So it's my duty to try and get that across to them and not like force it down their throat, but to actually like, see, can I help this person to see that this thing can solve their problem?

And when you start to look at it like that, it, Gets a little bit easier because your own fears and worries and concerns don't get in the way so much.

Pat Flynn: That's so true. A lot of things are coming to mind where we kind of jump to trying to be problem solvers so quickly that we forget to do the listening part up front.

That helps a person realize that you know what they're going through, right? I'm sure you could talk to my wife about that, in fact, about me. Anyway, what goes after sharing the solution? So that's like email number three. You mentioned a bunch of other letters and we can pick apart a few of those.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so gain logic fears the next one.

So this is reasons why someone should solve this problem more deeply. So our first few emails have talked about the problem and got them thinking about it and make him giving them that tip. Now we're starting to launch the course and tell them yes, you can actually go and buy this course, it's available, it's going to help you to solve this problem.

But the content of the email, the gain logic and fear all about why should they solve the problem. So the gain one is about what benefits are there going to be to them, by solving this problem, whether it's through getting your course or through something else. The logic is all stats, figures, examples of like specific numbers, studies, whatever about people who've solved this problem, how much better their life has been or have you.

And then the fear one is about the emotions of it. What are someone concerned about losing if they don't manage to solve all of this? So each of those they're going to appeal to each person to a certain extent, but some people will gravitate more towards one of those angles or more towards another.

Some people are more fear based and some people are more logical and some people are more gain based.

Pat Flynn: That's really great. Now, I know you go deeper into this in your podcast and you have a website called Pimp My Funnels?

John Ainsworth: No, Pimp, Pimp Your Funnel. Pimp Your funnels. Pimp Your funnels. Yeah, I went to buy Pimp My Funnel and I found that Russell Brunson had already had the same idea and he bought it before me.

Pat Flynn: I mean, great minds think alike, you know. No, that's cool. So yes, definitely check those places out and you go much into deeper detail about each of these things. But one thing that I'm thinking of, that like none of this works if we're not getting people to open our emails. Yeah. So what are we doing and how do we get a person to see our email and click it when literally that's what everybody else is trying to do at the same time?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So I think this is really just about trying to provide as much free value as you can. And I think most people who certainly a lot of people who I'm talking with are making lots of great content on a regular basis. They're creating a podcast or they're creating YouTube videos or they're writing blog posts and the simple version of this is just sending out useful links to all of those things and saying here's what's great about this video.

Here's what I'm covering and then sending out somebody a link to it and so that most of what those people are receiving from you is either useful educational content or entertaining content or what have you so that they are used to seeing stuff from you that is good and they want to click on it and go open and it builds up your authority and it builds up your your open rate I don't have any kind of magic, clever tricks on that.

It's just send those out on a regular basis and make sure they're really good content.

Pat Flynn: I mean, it sounds like the regular basis part of this is really important so that you can almost in a way, train your audience to know that every time they open one of your emails, every time they see it in their inbox, that there's going to be something worth their time in there.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, absolutely.

Pat Flynn: And then I know that it's really important that once you get a person to click on that email, it almost becomes sales page, like in the sense that you've got to hook a person in the beginning of that email or else they're kind of out, right? They got to understand that that is for them.

So in, for example, the, the pain email or the agitation email, how are you starting those emails?

John Ainsworth: A lot of it's based around either stories or stuff that's based on what your audience have told you. So one of the things that we do as an essential starting point, whenever we're working with a client, is that we do a survey of their audience.

We do a customer avatar survey. So we will send out a lot of questions like what is the benefit that you got from the course if they bought it or what benefit are you looking to get in your life? What problems are you currently facing? We ask them stuff about, you know, age and gender and we're trying to understand what kind of people are in our audience and we're learning as much as we possibly can about what their problems are, what their desires are, what they would do to solve this if they didn't get the course from us, et cetera, et cetera.

And we do two things with that. We make a customer avatar from that. So we're saying, okay, this is the kind of person who we're targeting. It's much easier to write for one person, even if they're an imaginary amalgamation of everybody in your audience, than it is to write for 50,000 or 100,000 people.

And the second thing we're doing is we're making a customer language document. So we're taking specific words and phrases that are repeatedly used by our customers, and we're including those in the customer language document. And we can also use going through forums or comments on YouTube videos or whatever else anywhere their audience has been participating to pull that information in from.

Once we've got that, that's what we're using in the emails. So we're talking to them about their pain points, not what we think their pain points might be, but what they have told us their pain points are. So that's all the stuff that we're taking and we're, we're saying back to them. And then we obviously might talk to them about how they're going to be solving that, how our understanding of that pain point, but our starting point is the raw material of what is our audience saying to us.

Pat Flynn: That's such a great tip. It almost becomes like you don't have to necessarily even guess anymore. Like, you know what the words are. You just kind of have to put them in the right order and, and try to hook them. Are you using or are you and your team using any AI or tools like Chat GPT to help you with coming up with this stuff?

And if you do, like, what are the things we should make sure to do so that it's just not like generic content that we're putting out there?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, we're testing it. And sometimes it's good. And a lot of the time, it's not at the moment, we're still working on, you know, which different tools might give us better results, the best process we've got so far that has worked the most reliably is we take all that data, I take our customer avatar and we tell that ChatGPT, we'll paste that into ChatGPT and we'll get it to say it back to us. So summarize this customer avatar back to me to show that it's got that in the memory that it's understood. And then we'll say, okay, and here's the customer language document.

And then we put that in and get it to say some of those phrases back to us to make sure that we've added it in. Right? Is it? And then we say, now what we're trying to do is we're trying to create this kind of an email. Now we're doing the pain email. Here's an example of that email. Now pretend you're a copywriter and write a version of that email for this audience.

Promote it. And we'll also tell it like, this is the course that we're promoting. This is the topic. And so feed all of that data in at the beginning and then get it to write the email back for us. With our current copywriter, we're finding that is getting her stuff that it takes it just as long to go through and redo as it would do if she just did it herself in the first place, but if you're not any good at writing emails, that process might be the starting point that you need, you know, feed all that data in and then tell it to give this a try, create a draft one for you.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you got to train the system and what are you going to trade it on all these things that we just talked about? And I think that's really smart. And then over time, like, hopefully you get to pick these things up and they just become a part of how, you know, you, you know, your audience.

Well, you know, and then just those micro improvements over time and with every email. So we talked about a few things we talked about order bumps and upsells really important. Start there. It's quote unquote low hanging fruit, as they might say, to send more emails, but not just more emails, good emails using the system. We talked a little bit about the framework, and we featured a few of those. And then the end of that sequence, before we move on to the last bit, was the going, going, gone. Can you speak to that, and what that actually means, and what that might look like in terms of an email sequence?

John Ainsworth: Most people procrastinate on making a decision about most things.

So what we're doing in the going going gone is trying to deal with what is it that's stopping them from actually going ahead and getting the course. The standard way of doing these, the more salesy way of doing going going gone emails are saying it's 48 hours till the sale is over. You must get it now, otherwise there's discounts never going to be available again. That kind of thing. What we're trying to do in the ones we're sending is understand what is the actual problem that's stopping somebody from buying. What is the actual issue that's getting in the way? Is it procrastination? Is it fear that they'll never be able to actually achieve this result themselves?

What is it that's their blockage? And then we're addressing that head on and saying, you know, if you buy in the next two days, you're going to get a discount on this course. But the real thing is that if you make a decision now, you'll actually have the course and that's going to help you to deal with X.

But you're probably feeling Y emotion, right. Let's address that and talk to you about why that's not a valid reason not to go ahead and actually do this. And that might be procrastination or fear or whatever else it is.

Pat Flynn: So uncover any known objection that might be there stopping a person. So I know a common one, you know, I've done courses for a while is, Oh, I don't know if I'm gonna have enough time right to do this.

Like, this sounds great, but I'm already busy. I don't have any time. How do you refute that?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So there's a beautiful approach to dealing with this. It works really, really well, which is you say to someone, okay, let's imagine that you've only got, let's take an imaginary scenario, one hour a week to deal with this.

You're not going to go through the whole course because you're not going to have time to do that. You're just going to choose this module, one of these three modules. And here's how you're going to decide which module it is that you're going to go through. And you're going to do one hour a week. This is the minimum amount that you might put in, and this is how your life might be different in a day, a week, a month, three months, six months.

If you do just that amount, if you do the whole course and you put five hours a week into it. Man, it's going to be phenomenal. But just that one hour, you still can have a real difference in your life. And it's actually going to be worthwhile. And here's how it's going to look for future you. And he'll be so glad, or she'll be so glad that you did that.

And here's the emotion that that future you is going to feel.

Pat Flynn: That's really good. I really like that position. Let's do another one. This seems expensive. Like the price is, you know, I know this is a common one as well. It's like, that's a lot of money, John. I don't know if I could, I can get it for maybe cheaper elsewhere.

It's not, it just costs a lot.

John Ainsworth: So there's a couple of different angles on this depending on what you're selling. So if you're selling something that's B2B, you're selling something that's going to help them to make more money. Then it's possible to break that down and give examples of, okay, this percentage of our clients who went through and did this made X amount more money.

Here's how that all works out in terms of it actually being worthwhile. And it depends whether they're saying it's just a lot of money or it's a lot of money compared to doing something else. Because there's something else, for example, might be going and just learning all from YouTube or listening to podcasts or what have you, which they absolutely can do.

That's like a totally valid argument. And the answer there is yes, you totally can do that. And if you have the time and you don't have the money, you Great, go do that. I've been making the podcast for three years. Go download all these episodes, knock yourself out. It's going to be fantastic. But what I've done in the course is I've put all that information in the correct order to make it really easy for you to be able to implement this.

And I've added in all of these additional resources to make it quicker and easier for you to be able to actually do everything. And you know, for definite that what you're getting in here is up to date and it is valid and correct. It's from me right now in 2024. So this is going to save you an enormous amount of time by buying the course and actually implementing that right now.

And if time is not the issue and money is, then I totally understand don't buy it. But if you just don't have enough time available, then probably it's worth spending the money on it because it's going to save you X number of hours.

Pat Flynn: Masterful. That is great. Let's do, let's do one more. These are good.

Actually, why don't you tell me what is a common objection that a person might have that we can address in our emails during our campaign?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. One of the things is that people just don't believe they're actually going to get the results. You know, they're not actually going to implement it. They're not going to follow through and do what they're supposed to do.

And that might be time or it might be something else about them. Right. So let's say it's around weight loss and everyone thinks, well, I've already tried all these other programs and they didn't work for me and they didn't stick. Well, presumably you've got some kind of a model, some kind of a mechanism that is different that you think is better.

So for example, I've got a friend, Ollie, who teaches learning languages through stories. And his angle is, you might not want to learn this, you might get bored learning these languages, you might find that you never stick with anything because it's all so dull. And therefore, what I've done is I've come up with this method called story learning.

And it's fun, and it's entertaining, it's interesting, and you can learn through reading books in other languages that you like, or learning through watching TV shows in other languages that you enjoy. Or I've got another friend who sells language learning courses, and she teaches people perfect English grammar.

It's called Shona. And her audience are people who want to get the grammar exactly perfect, they don't want to get it nearly right. They want to get it exactly correct because they tend to be academics and someone who's done really well in school, but in a different language. And so her angle is you haven't managed to be able to do this before because other people aren't focusing on getting the grammar perfect.

They're saying, go and just try out the language and talk to people and walk out into the world and just have a chat with people. And that frustrates you because that doesn't fit with what you're after. Well, in my classes, we're going to focus on making sure that you get the grammar exactly correct because I'm teaching this in an academic fashion that fits with exactly the way that you work.

Now they have completely different audiences to each other. Neither one's audience would buy the other ones course, but for their audience, they can say, this is why this thing is going to work for you for the kind of person that you are, this is why it's going to work for you. And that helps address that fear of Oh, I'm not going to do this.

I'm not going to implement it because I didn't manage with all these other ones.

Pat Flynn: That's really great, John. Thank you for those examples. Lastly, again, we talked about upsells and order bumps, and then we talked about sending more emails and we broke those down and we went into just a beautiful exercise here with the objections for the going, going gone part, et cetera.

The last one, correct me if I'm wrong, was just build your email list up, right? This is, and this is often where people start, which is why I love we started kind of in reverse order. But if John, you only had today one method available to you to grow your email list, what method would you choose today and why.

John Ainsworth: There's a very simple thing that most people aren't doing, and it's actually doesn't take terribly long to implement it, which is to take whatever your best lead magnet is, so you've, I'm assuming someone's already got a lead magnet of some sort, some free resource that they're giving away in order to get someone to the email list and just actually promote it everywhere. So if you're blogging, put the lead magnet, put adverts for your lead magnet, top, middle, and bottom of your blog post, put them in the sidebar, put them as a pop up, put them on your homepage.

Everywhere on your site, put those promotions for it. And what we typically find is about 0.5 percent of people's website traffic typically converts to joining their email list. That about 95 percent of the people I talk with, it's between 0.5 and 1%. And if you just do this, you can typically get to about 2%.

And the same thing with YouTube videos. If you've got lots of YouTube videos, but you never mentioned the lead magnet in the description or the pinned comments, just put it in every single video you've ever done go in and put a link to that lead magnet in there. So it seems so basic, but most people just aren't doing it.

And therefore, that's the easiest win is just to go and implement that.

Pat Flynn: I like that. You know, we often are hoping for the magic potion to do a lot of this stuff for us. And more often than not, the real answer is the thing that it was always in front of us and available to do. And this is another example of that.

So, John, this has been absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for the breakdown today. And if people wanted to go deeper with you, where should they go and shout them out?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So if you want to learn about any of those specific tactics in more detail, then go to The Art of Selling Online Courses. We've got a YouTube channel with that name and a podcast with that name.

And if you just want the direct link, go to DataDrivenMarketing.co/podcast or DataDrivenMarketing.co/youtube. If you want us to do a personalized breakdown for you of what tactics should you implement and link you to some free training, then go to PimpYourFunnel.com and fill in the form there, and we're going to ask you for a bunch of numbers about what you've currently got in place. And we'll send you a link saying, this is what you should be doing. This is training on how to go do it.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. John, you're incredible. Thank you so much for coming in today. I appreciate you. And hopefully we'll get a chance to chat again soon.

John Ainsworth: Thanks, Pat. Really appreciate it.

Pat Flynn: All right. Take care.

All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview and conversation with John. Super smart. And I cannot wait to see what implementations you take away from this particular episode. Again, The data driven stuff, knowing your number is really important, but there is an art to that.

There is sort of a, of an understanding that it can only come once you do. And once you implement, and of course, if you've implemented and you need some help, you can go over to PimpYourFunnel.com to get a personalized audit for your specific business and brand from John and his team. Or DataDrivenMarketing.co/podcast. And check out his website as YouTube. And of course, this podcast, The Art of Selling Online Courses. I love how niche and specific that is. Yes. I said niche, not niche is I'm sure he would say it, but anyway, John, thank you so much for coming on today. I appreciate you. Thank you for listening all the way through and make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on some of the upcoming episodes coming your way to help you in your business and with your brand as well, we're here to serve you. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I'm your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!