SFR 37: "The Power Of Perception"

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One of my videos totally fooled an ad agency a couple years ago, and I wanna show you how I did it on Youtube

What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio.

Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.

All right, that was kind of cheesy...

Hey, today I want to tell you guys a little bit ... I want to tell you a cool story. I want to tell you about the power of perception. I didn't have any other name for that except for this, so this is the power of perception, right?

Perception is huge. Perception is amazing. It's very, very real, right?...

When I was in college ... Oh, you know what? I'm totally going to put this video in the show notes too. All right, when I was in college ... A lot of these stories I tell, I realize, are about college, but realize that I have not even been out of college for a year, so that's where a lot of my stories come from, so I'm so sorry.

I tell you a lot of things that I'm doing with Russell right now currently, but obviously there are some cool things that happened while I was in college too, because I was a really active kid and I was not a normal student.

Anyway, there was a class that I was a part of, and part of the class, what we had to do was we had to create a video, and we had to go get as many views on it as possibly could. And whoever had the most views, I can't remember what the prize was, but it was something crazy.

And the whole show was about social media...

And I will tell you that 90% of what that guy was teachings was totally old. It was not ... It was outdated information, it did not help. It was actually very bad information, some of it. But the principles were cool, right? I mean, as far as the tactics. The tactics he was teaching were old. They were outdated. School can't keep up with it, which is one of the reasons I had such a hard time with the school, right?

School, college in general, does not keep up with what's going on in business and marketing...

Anyway, as a group, my little group of four people, we had to come up with a video, and then we had to go get as many views on it as possibly could to get, I think, to get an A. It was kind of a cool and interesting assignment.

We had to go figure out different places to post it, we had to learn about some SEO, we had to learn about ... It was really, really fascinating to do that, and it was just a whole lot of fun.

We went and we decided the new Star Wars ... Let's see, which one was it? Not the most recent one, obviously, it was A New Hope. I like Star Wars. I like Lord of the Rings, I love Harry Potter. I mean, I just like a good story in general. Anyways, I like all that stuff. I especially like it when there's good music in the movie.

I'm a huge music buff, so if there's good music and it's a good story, done. I don't really care if it's ... Anyway, whatever.

We went and we decided that we were going to play off of all the hype for the new Star Wars. I said it would be best if we looked around the industry, and we decided that we were going to go and make a video off of what was currently happening and what all the buzz was already about, right? We were going to ride, basically, the hype.

We decided it would be about Star Wars, and a video that was going around that was huge was this lifting video, and it was this bro walking around saying, "Do you even lift, bro?" Have you ever seen that video? Maybe I'll just put that in the show notes too. It's like, "Bro, do you even lift? Do you even lift, bro?" And he's saying it to all these really jacked guys that are huge and they're getting all ticked at him.

And it was really, really funny. I mean, it's a funny video...

And so we decided, okay, Star Wars and then the bro video, so we said, "Do you even Jedi, bro?" And so what we did is we had one of the guys in our group dress up like a Jedi, and we got him like a lightsaber and we got him a cloak. It was actually a bed sheet. And he ran around campus asking people if they Jedi. It's really funny. And he did it all these random places, and ... Anyway, it was actually a good video.

I was like, okay, perception is reality, perception is reality, perception is reality...

And people knew in that class that I was really, really into this weird thing called funnel building. This is towards the end of my college experience. And we made this video, and we got it together, and I was like, okay, I guarantee you none of these people or any of the teachers know about some of the gray hat stuff of the internet, right?

White hat, black hat, gray hat, right? White hat is the totally clean stuff, black hat is the ... That's like straight-up hacking, right? And gray hat's kind of the in-between. I'm all about gray hat, you guys. If there's something that's going to my stuff ahead, then why would I not do it, you know what I mean?

If it's not breaking any laws, then shoot, I'm going to do it...

So I went and I was like, I'm going to prove a point to this teacher that there's a place for this stuff. A certain place at a certain time. And what I did is I went to Fiverr, and all things scammy come from Fiverr. That's not totally true. But it certainly was at this time. And I was like, I'm going to buy YouTube views. Right?

I'm going to pay people to watch this video. And I went through and I paid like $5 and I got 50,000 quote-unquote "views." Straight-up bots, right? I mean, no one's ... They weren't real. Maybe half of them were real, because they placed it in certain spots, but the other half I'm sure were bots, just so they could deliver on their $5 thing.

And in one day, we were watching the stats. We'd get into class, and we'd watch the stats. Get in the class and watch the stats. Well, I got into class and we watched the stats, and there was like this flat line and then, you know, it was like a hundred views that last day, 200 views the day before that, and then boom, 50,000 views.

And they were like, "Oh my gosh, what happened? This is crazy." And I think I paid a little more and I got another 50,000 views. I was like, "This is crazy. Look how viral it's going, oh my gosh." And everyone's like, "Oh my gosh, this is so nuts."

I was just chuckling on the inside...

It was so funny, because the teacher was like, "This is nuts. Oh my gosh, I've never had anyone happen, this is crazy." And I was that kid that was kind of pushing the envelope. I ended up getting an email and a phone call from an ad agency. I don't think I've ever told this story before. I'm sorry if you guys are listening to this so I won't say the name of it, but I was walking around on stage on ... Oh, excuse me.

I was walking around and I was ... Anyway. I got this call and this email from this company, from this ad agency, and what they do is they acquire video assets that are going viral so that they can place ads on them. And I was like, oh, that's interesting.