TCC Podcast #344: Looking for Opportunities in Unexpected Places with Paulo Faustino

The people and stuff we mentioned on the  show:

The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
Paulo’s Instagram
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Free month of Brain.FM
AI for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Building a business is hard. Sometimes things go really well. Clients are plentiful. The work is fun and rewarding, and the money comes in, and other times things don’t go so well. Laws change or the algorithm changes or the economy changes and the client pipeline dries up. The work is hard and the money runs out. Our guest for today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Paulo Faustino, and he built a thriving affiliate business that collapsed in less than a month, thanks to a change in the laws. He had just enough money to last four months, which means that he had to completely rebuild his business in 120 days and in this interview, he tells us how he did it, and along the way, he shares a ton of great business advice for anyone who’s trying to build their own business.

Kira Hug:  But before we jump into this interview, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Think Tank, which is our mastermind for copywriters who want to figure out a new revenue stream for their business and launch something new that can transform their business in the year ahead. We have a retreat coming up actually in a couple weeks. In early June, we have our next retreat, and if you want to be a part of that mastermind retreat where we bring in top speakers where Rob and I teach and share. Well, Rob, what are you sharing?

Rob Marsh:  I think we’re going to talk about profits, profit margins, and how do you increase the money that’s coming in, but we’ll cover a lot of other stuff too. We have guests who are speaking about the client buying cycle and how to implement the things that were taught by Eugene Schwartz. We’re pulling in guests to talk about all kinds of things like email and such. So, definitely worth tuning in and learning from all of these experts as well as the super smart people that are already in the think tank.

Kira Hug:  Yes, so that is coming up in June and if you are listening to this, it is not too late to apply and possibly participate in that upcoming retreat if it’s a good fit for you. So, you can learn more at copywriterthinktank.com. All right, let’s kick off our episode with Paulo.

Paulo Faustino:  So, I started in 2007 and I started building companies in 2005. I built my first company when I was 19 years old and it was a technology company. We sell computers and all overclocking stuff and water cooling stuff and I started there. I left the company in 2007 and I went home with some bills to pay, and the first thing I searched on Google was how to make money online and that was my start because no one was searching for digital marketing or all that stuff because no one speak spoke about that at the time. So, they were speaking about how to make money online. That was the thing and I started there and I found a lot of really interesting North American stuff from Jeremy Schumacher, from Darren Rose, from John Chow, and a lot of different entrepreneurs that were teaching at a time how to make money online.

There was a lot of different strategies like affiliate marketing, like PPC, like a lot of other things, and Google Adsense, and I started going deep on affiliate marketing and that’s my journey. My journey started as an affiliate market and I started in 2007. In the end of the year, I was building forums and blogs related to affiliate marketing on the sports betting industry, which was the industry I selected because I loved football and I love football, or soccer, like you guys. I love soccer, and I went there and I was creating contents every single day about football, football predictions, football analysis and a lot of stuff, and one day in 2007, I entered in one of the affiliate marketing companies I was registered on, and there was a 30 euro commission and that was my eureka moment, like God. God, this works.

I just need to know how to do this every single day and that was my drive. So, it started there. In 2008, I created a blog called Get Rich, in Portuguese, “get rich,” and I started documenting every single thing I was learning online, like SEO, like creating content, creating blogs, affiliate marketing strategies to make money online. Everything. I was documenting everything and on the first year, I posted 550 articles just on the first year and I won 100 bucks on the first year, which was incredible. 100 bucks.

Rob Marsh:  Wait, did that feel like a win, $100 dollars with five? Or were you just like, “Wow, this is going slower than I thought”?

Paulo Faustino:  Yeah, but I don’t know why, but I was seeing these Americans making 100K with Google AdSense, making a lot of money on the affiliate marketing and I was… Man, just keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going and at the time, I had some part-times. I worked on a café. I worked in a hostel and I was doing some other stuff to bring some more money than 100 bucks, but I was completely focused on that because I don’t know why and that’s really strange. Every time I speak about my story is that I can’t understand why, but I knew that I should keep going on that path. I don’t know why and I keep posting article after article after article and in 2010, I did a rebranding on the blog and it went from Get Rich to Money School and in 2010, I was doing like 2K a month already, and we launched Afiliados Brasil, the Brazil affiliate events on that year, the first edition.

So, I started there. In 2013, I already had my spouse with me. We met in 2009 and we started working together in 2010, 2011, 2012 and in 2013, we created our company, which is our digital marketing agency, but at the time, there wasn’t any agency. It was just a company to invoice all the affiliate marketing stuff we were doing. So, from 2013 to 2016, we were full-time affiliate marketers. We didn’t did anything else. In 2014, we were making a million a year with four people on the affiliate marketing, on sports betting. We were the second-biggest affiliate marketing player on the bating industry in Portugal and one of the top 10 in the world. So, we were doing really, really good, but in 2015, there was a regulation in Portugal. So, every sports betting brands closed the operation in Portugal and we went from like 100K a month to 5K.

Kira Hug:  Oh, wow. Wow.

Paulo Faustino:  That was the moment we decided to create the agency because we were working for several years, almost 10 years, and we had a lot of knowledge and we decided to starting to deliver services to other brands with that knowledge. If we know how to do this for us, we can help probably some brands and other companies to do the same. So, that was the moment we decided to launch the agency and that’s it. We have a lot of other stuff because in 2016, we launched the agency. We created a physical event, a two-day event, related to digital marketing and entrepreneurship here, which is Think Conference, and in 2017, we started to do in-person training related to digital marketing and digital marketing, social media, and all that stuff and there was a boom.

After 2017, 2018, we had a boom. For you to know, in 2018, when we did the last edition of Think Conference before the pandemic, because we did in 2016, 2018, and we were doing in 2020, but there was a pandemic. So, we stopped and we are relaunching this year, but in 2018 when we did the last edition of the conference, I had 5,000 followers on Instagram. So, from 2018 to 2023, I grow up from 5K on Instagram to almost 270K. So, our email list went from like 20K to 350K. So, there was a lot of things. I like to look back and look at this as the compounding effects because you are working, working, working, and in a moment, the growing is so fast because it’s compounding. It’s compounding.

So, it was probably between 2018 that we went really fast, really, really fast, and on the pandemic, we decided to create our membership because we stopped every in-person training we had. So, we created the digital marketing academy and we started teaching just online. Right now, we have 4K members in our membership and after that, we decided to create several digital products for our value ladder. So, we created Sales Masters, which is our iTickets program, our masterminds, which is Golden Circle, and we created several other different online courses during the Pandemic because it was… Man, it was an awesome time and I think we didn’t squeeze the orange as much as we could at the time because everyone was thinking, okay, this is just a one-month, two-month thing and we are free to go, but right now, when I look back, there was so much opportunities over there.

Rob Marsh:  So, Paulo, I want to ask. This is a dumb question, but just in case anybody who’s listening doesn’t understand what affiliate marketing is, you did not have your own products, right? You were creating sites to attract customers and then you were selling other people’s products and collecting commission.

Paulo Faustino:  Exactly. The first popular affiliate program in the world was created by Amazon in ’96 and that affiliate program was the way that Amazon becomes so big because you don’t see Amazon ads on Facebook or Instagram or Google or whatever because Amazon doesn’t do digital advertising on those platforms. Why? Because they have 100K affiliates on their platform promoting all the items on different categories they have and the thing is, when I promote an Amazon product, depending on the category, Amazon pays me between 3% to 12% on the shopping carts items, which is quite interesting because I can send someone to Amazon to buy a pair of shoes, for example.

But if they enter on the Amazon online store and they decide to buy those shoes, but also a lot of other stuff, I will receive a commission on everything, on every single product that that guy checked out. So, that was one of the things that attracted me on the affiliate marketing was because I can attract someone that spends, I don’t know, $50,000 on Amazon and I can get a commission on top of that and that’s the way affiliate marketing works. I didn’t add the needs to create a product for myself. I just recommended products that already existed and it was really, really fast to start growing.

Kira Hug:  Because we’re talking about affiliate marketing, how has that space changed and what’s working today or not working today for anyone who’s interested and is like, “I’d like to do that. That sounds great. How can I do that”?

Paulo Faustino:  So, it’s working the same thing or the same strategies are still working. There’s PPC< affiliate marketing with ads, digital advertising, which is we call it arbitrage because in some way, you are investing in one side to get a commission on the other side and the balance between those two need to be positive. So, it’s more difficult. It’s more difficult. When you are selling products that pays you on a CPA base, which is I send someone to buy this water bottle. If the person buys the water bottle, I receive a commission and that’s it, but one of the things we do, for example, on the sports betting industry, and there are a lot of different industries that does the same, is recurring customers.

For example, when you register, for example, on a sports betting or an online casino website, you register just once, but you come back to the casino website several times in a year and I receive commissions every single time you come back. So, it’s recurring commission and it’s one of the things we call revenue share, which is if I send Kira for a casino and Kira makes a 100 bucks deposit and she loses the 100 bucks, I received 40% commission of those 100 bucks, but if Kira won 200 bucks, I will have my commission negative. So, it’s both ways, but the thing is 99% of the players lose in the long term. So, it’s always positive.

Kira Hug:  That’s a little depressing for them.

Paulo Faustino:  Yeah.

Kira Hug:  Okay. So, you mentioned you went from-

Paulo Faustino:  Recurring revenue. Yeah, it happens the same for example with SaaS software because it’s recurring commissions. It’s the same for example on adult websites, adult websites like porn and all that stuff because it’s recurring payments too. So, every recurring membership or software or wherever, they pay you recurring commissions. So, for example, ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels, it’s a recurring affiliates commission. So, if I brought Kira to ClickFunnels and she’s paying for the software every single month, I will receive a commission every single month. So, it’s the same.

Kira Hug:  Okay, and you mentioned you went from a 100K a month to 5K a month. During that time, how did you deal with that type of drop? I mean, mindset-wise, emotionally, how do you deal with that? And then what do you do to get focused again as a team, not just for you, but as your team, with your partner? What do you do in those moments where you have to start over?

Paulo Faustino:  On that day, me and my wife, we were out of the office when I received the call. I received the call from Bet365, which was our biggest affiliate partner at the time and they called me to let me know that they were leaving the country, and on that day I spoke with my wife and we decided to create a plan, and we went to the office on the other day and we did a meeting with everyone and we told them, “We have money to keep the company for six months and we have to do something about this,” and we decided to do two things. At the time, we were doing 100K a month in Portugal, and we have some few affiliates websites in Brazil, but we were not exploring too much because we were 100% in Portugal and one of the things we decided was, okay, if we can’t make money in Portugal, let’s go to the Brazil market and try to do the exactly same thing.

And we did that, and right now, we are doing 20K a month. It’s not 100, but it’s quite better. It’s quite better, and the other thing was, okay, let’s start to sell online services related to digital marketing and advertising because at the time we were spending like 20 to 30K a month just on Facebook ads, which in 2013, 2014 was a lot of money. No one was spending that kind of money at the time and it was quite different because at the time, we could advertise gambling. Right now, you can’t. It’s on the guidelines, so it’s quite different right now, but it was a moment that we made a meeting with everyone on the team and this is the game plan. Are you guys with us or do you want to leave? Every single person on the team was with us, and one of those guys, my first developer, he scheduled a meeting with me and my wife to tell us that if we wanted to drop his salary for one year, he was fine with that and we did that. We dropped the salary and he kept working on the same pace and it went really, really well.

After one year, we raised the salary again, not for the same value. We were growing a little bit every single year and it was a moment that we understood the kind of persons we had on our team and the love they had for the things we were doing because they were really enjoying every single moment we were creating together. So, it was really, really cool on that time, but emotionally it’s like I need to find a job. I need to find a job.

Kira Hug:  But it seems like the two of you and the team turned it around within a couple of days. You created the new vision and got everybody on board. Or did it take longer?

Paulo Faustino:  Yes. Yeah.

Kira Hug:  It sounds like it was the next day.

Paulo Faustino:  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It was like two, three days. We had the master plan and we kept the master plan until today, because we are working on Brazil for affiliate marketing and we still have the digital agency.

Kira Hug:  Okay, so I feel like you’re… I don’t know what you would call it, but you’re like an early adopter. Maybe trendsetter. First to market, but I’m wondering how you look for opportunities, especially in that moment when things fall apart here and you have to pivot. Or even now for copywriters with ChatGPT and everything changed overnight. So, they have to pivot. They have to look for new opportunities. I know part of that probably is just in you and intuitive, but what advice would you give to us if we are trying to look for opportunities, how could we approach it so we can do that too?

Paulo Faustino:  I have this phrase in my head that says… I will try to translate to English, which is the fear of losing keeps you away from winning and the thing is when something like ChatGPT or other technologies and the world transformation and all that stuff. The thing is everyone normally, the first thought and the first emotion is, “I will lose everything,” and for some people they kept there. They stay there, and for other people is, okay, but I could lose everything, but I can win everything too, because there’s opportunities too and the thing is it’s more related to the person than is related to the markets because for example, the pandemic, the ChatGPT, the blockchain, the wherever. Everyone that was afraid of losing money, for example, on the blockchain, never sold an NFT or bought a crypto coin or wherever and there was a lot of opportunities.

One year and a half ago or two years ago, the crypto mark market was $3 trillion. I don’t know how much money it is, but it’s too much. $3 trillion and the thing is if you stay with the fear of losing, you are a way of winning and the thing is you are not doing anything on your behalf to build on top of that and it is 100% related to the person more than the market. Definitely.

Rob Marsh:  So, Paulo, one of the things that you do so well, obviously, is helping people to build their businesses and it’s not a particular niche, you do it across all kinds of niches. So, just thinking about starting a business. If I’m going to start a new copywriting business or a new marketing consulting business or whatever, what are the foundational pieces that people need to be thinking about as to get started, but get started in a way that helps them succeed and not necessarily struggle?

Paulo Faustino:  There are a lot of topics. The thing is if I was starting a business today related to copywriting services for example. One of the things I had in mind was I need to know how to prospect clients, how to close sales, how to onboard new clients and how to do marketing. These four things for me are the foundations of everything, because I need to prospect and there are different ways to prospecting new clients because you can do that by yourself or you can create, for example, an attraction funnel to bring those people to your site.

It’s different strategies, different approaches, but they still bring new clients in. So, that’s good. The other thing is marketing. Marketing on social media for example, it’s important and why it is important? It’s important because it is 100% related to your authority and authority is 100% related to perception. Authority, it’s 100% perception. For example, I don’t know if you guys have seen the Tinder Swindler on Netflix.

Kira Hug:  No. I’ve heard of it.

Rob Marsh:  I haven’t watched the show, but I’ve seen it there. It’s like on my watch list.

Paulo Faustino:  Yeah, you guys should watch. That thing is 100% authority perceived. It’s perception. It’s perception. Because if you look at the guy, the perception he built about him was that he was rich. He was son of a diamond king and that he had a private jet and all that stuff, but everything was a lie, but it’s authority’s perception. So, the thing is, when you go to social media, you need to understand this to everything you do on social media builds a perception on your followers.

So, every single post, every single photo, everything you do on social media builds your perception or builds your follower’s perception about you. The thing is what kind of perception are your followers getting about you? It’s an authority one. It’s a relaxed one. It’s a knowledge one. It’s a results One. For example, if you look to Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuk, isn’t what you see on social media because on social media, you only see what the person wants you to see. Okay?

But the thing when you look to Gary Vaynerchuk, you see results. You see results. You see motivation. You see focus. You see a lot of cool things and authority over there because if I want to get results, Gary Vaynerchuk can bring me the results. It’s perception. Do you know if Gary delivers results?

Kira Hug:  I assume he does.

Rob Marsh:  Personally, I haven’t worked with him, but-

Kira Hug:  I assume he does. Yes.

Paulo Faustino:  You assume he does. It’s perception. The other thing is sales. If you do a bunch bunch of prospecting, if you do a bunch of lead generation, if you do a bunch of potential customer attraction and all that stuff and you don’t know how to close sales, you are leaving tons of money on the top of the table. So, you need to understand sales, every single one. If he is a copywriter, a social media marketer, or someone that works for another company, you need to understand sales because every single one, every single person sells from the day he born to the day he dies because we do that all the time. You sell your ideas. You sell everything. You defend everything. You are loved about it. You sell everything every single time. The thing is for those that say that sales… Oh, sales are not my thing. It’s because they can’t handle the idea of swapping money from a service because if we are selling ideas.

For example, let’s bring politics. For example, Donald Trump or Joe Biden or wherever. The guys that love those persons, they defend those persons. They sell those persons, right? The thing is, you don’t have any problem to sell that because there isn’t money related. You sell that to those friends, to those families, wherever, but when it’s a service and we are changing money for work, everyone gets, “Oh my God. Oh my God,” and that’s the thing. So, you need to understand sales, and the fourth thing was prospects marketing, sales and onboarding. The experience. I used to say that the sale starts when the client says yes, and for everyone, the sale stops when the customer says yes, and that’s the wrong strategy.

The good strategy is my sale starts on the day my client says yes, because now I need to deliver and I need to deliver a world-class experience. So, the onboarding, the way we are going to work, the timings for the project, the deliverables. Everything needs to be set up in a way that my customer understands on is reality because the majority of the clients don’t understands marketing, technical stuff, or words or whatever, because we talk market-ish stuff and they don’t understand. We need to bring that to a relatable way for them to understand what we are doing and why we are working this way. So, the onboarding is essentially to bring the clients to a safe zone and then delivery world-class experience.

Kira Hug:  So, you were talking about sales and that we stumble through the money piece of it. So, how do you help your clients with their money mindset? How do you help them work through the money component of it so they don’t get in their own way? Are there any techniques or any advice you give to your clients?

Paulo Faustino:  It depends on the type of client. For example, for us on our agency, one of the things we try to do is try to understand the type of clients we can help and the monthly minimum wage they have to spend, for example, on marketing, on software and all that stuff and those barriers are way also for us to filter our potential clients because we don’t work with every single client that’s interested to work with us and we do those filters because it’s a way for me to deliver a better experience and it’s a filter for them because if they don’t have the mindset, they don’t have the money. They don’t have the courage.

For example, a client that is desperate to start selling on his online store. One of our filters is we don’t take desperate clients. Never. Every single client that says is desperate or it’s, oh my God, you’re going to save my business. It’s out of the business because we don’t want to work with that kind of mindset because I’m not God. I’m not going to save your business, because if you are desperate, desperate decisions are the worst you can do. So, we try to bring some filters, more than try to change those mindsets about money because that’s a really hard work. That’s a really hard work.

Rob Marsh:  So, in addition to that particular filter, when you’re looking for great clients that you can help build, what are some of the other characteristics that you’re looking for aside from they’re not desperate?

Paulo Faustino:  Product validation. It’s essential for us. For example, we don’t work with businesses that are starting right now or started a few weeks ago and they didn’t prove the concept. That’s one of the filters too, because if I’m getting a client that is starting from the ground zero and I don’t have any idea. If that product, its market fits, it’s not a good business because I’m taking too much risk and if the product or the service isn’t market fits, the client will say, “You didn’t bring me results,” and the problem sometimes is it’s not that you can’t provide results. It’s that’s the product or the service isn’t good or the market is not looking for a product or service like that. So, we don’t take clients that are starting… They need to have the products already validated.

Rob Marsh:  All right, Kira, a lot of stuff to unpack here. Why don’t you kick us off? What would you like to emphasize about what Paulo was talking about?

Kira Hug:  Oh, it was so fun to hear his story because you and I know where Paulo’s business is today, right? It’s successful, impressive. He’s been at it for a while, so I didn’t know the origin story and the ups and downs. So, hearing about that was just such a great reminder, especially since his team, his company, he lost everything in such a short period of time due to the change in and legislation and the laws changing and it flipped everything upside down for him. So, that to me was the most fascinating part, hearing him talk about how he turned that around with his partner, with his team so that they could save, not only save the business, but then grow the business dramatically into what it is today.

So, my takeaway from that is just you could lose everything. We are not guaranteed anything steady in business. That’s what we signed up for. It’s the roller coaster, ups and downs, and that’s what we’re all here for and if we’re not here for that, then it’s probably not the right line of work, but he had a really positive side to that around, yes, you could lose everything, but you could also win everything and there’s always an opportunity no matter what happens in the industry, in the space. So, that’s the type of positive mindset that I’m trying to channel even on hard days. It’s like where’s the opportunity here?

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, there were three things from his story that I think I would repeat. One is as things started going, and he started to earn a little bit of money, that thought of how do I do more of this? How do I keep this going? What are those things to get this engine spinning even faster? He talked a little bit about that inflection point where stuff just starts to compound and it takes a lot of time and effort to get to that point. A lot of times we look at other businesses, other people who have been doing this for a while and think, “Why is their business so smooth? Why do things look like it’s easy for them?” They’re not always easy for those people, but on the outside, it certainly looks that way and it’s because oftentimes they’ve hit that inflection point.

That compounding that Paulo talked about is happening and then you mentioned this as well. As things collapse, you just got to work hard and even if the thought occurs, “Do I need to get a real job?” Paulo talked about how the fear of losing keeps you away from winning. Oftentimes we’re so afraid of putting ourselves out there and the rejection or spending the money on the thing because we’re going to lose out and it keeps us from those bigger wins. So, just hearing him tell his story brought all of that stuff to life for me.

Kira Hug:  Yeah, and he also talked about authority, which I thought was really interesting because you and I talk a lot about authority, but the way he worded it about how really it’s perception and that is something that we can control how we’re perceived by reverse engineering it. So, that caused me to think differently about how I’m building my authority and whether or not you like that word, you’re drawn to it or not. It’s a real thing in marketing. So, what is the perception that you’re creating by taking consistent action in your business? Whether it’s intentional or not, we’re all perceived a certain way. So, just reverse engineering it would be really helpful to think about for many business owners.

Rob Marsh:  I like how he talked about that perception is a massive part of authority. There’s fame. There are people who are famous, but don’t necessarily have authority because they’re not necessarily doing a thing in the right way. They’re just famous. We see their faces all over, whether it’s Instagram or TV or movies or whatever, but creating that perception, it takes work. It’s not just a matter of showing up on social media. You need to be talking about the things that you do. You need to be talking about how you solve problems, how you work with clients, your frameworks, all those kinds of things. It all plays into that perception that you know what you’re doing.

Kira Hug:  And if you could just take two ideas from the conversation, going back to the compounding effect, like doing things consistently in your business, whether it’s marketing, whatever it is, that compounding effect is so critical and I think the copywriters I see struggle are not doing the work consistently and struggling and wondering why they’re not getting the positive results that they want. So, if we pair the compounding effect with authority building and really taking control over the perception and what we’re putting out there, and if you do those two together and really think about how they work together, that can dramatically change your business.

Rob Marsh:  And that dove tells really nicely with what Paula talked about, the four things that you need in order to start your business. You need to know how to prospect. You need how find clients and your perception as an authority plays a pretty big part in that and attracting people to you or when you show up in their inbox with a pitch, building that trustworthiness that comes from your authority. Also, closing sales. Once you prospect, you’ve got to be able to close the sales. Once you close a sale, you’ve got to onboard people into whatever it is that you’ve sold, whether it’s service or product or a membership or whatever and then he made a really good point about that’s where your business activities end. You’re really messing up because marketing to your clients and helping them solve their problems, it’s an ongoing thing and sometimes we focus so much on that front end that we forget that the backend is really where dedicated, loyal customers and clients happen and come back over and over or refer their friends. So, those four elements really stood out to me as well.

Kira Hug:  All right. Let’s get back to our interview with Paolo to learn how he was able to grow his audience and expand his reach and authority. I want to go back to your story and how you grew from 2018 to 2023, and like what was happening during that time? I know many things were happening, but when you look back, what were some of the pivotal changes or moments or decisions that you made during that time to help you grow?

Paulo Faustino:  I was the Facebook guy, not the Instagram guy and for some time, and that was a mistake that I learned at the time, was that I started too slow and too… Let me find the words. I started too slow and after the majority of the early adopters of Instagram, the digital marketers that were using Instagram to provide contents, to bring value and all that stuff, because I was that guy that, no, that Instagram is not for me. I will stay on Facebook. I will stay doing my thing on Facebook and I did that until 2019.

In February, in 2019, I had 20K followers. I remember that because I launched my book in February, 2019 and my book was one of the things that helped me bring more perceived authority, and that was really good and the other thing was, I have a really, really interesting story about Top One Mastermind because in 2019, after launching my book, I tried to enter on Top One and I filled the form and I had a call with Damian, and Damian told me, “You are not ready for Top One.” I was, “What? I’m not ready? What?” He told me, “What do you need is one day with Todd, a full day with Todd in a room.” “Okay, tell me more about that,” and it was a full day with Todd in Miami, and I could ask anything.

“Okay, sounds cool, and how much?” “Oh, it’s this amount on these days. Blah, blah, blah.” “Okay, let’s do it,” and I flew to Miami with one of my employees and we went to a room, like a war room with Todd, all day asking questions, and in 2019 when I did that, I wasn’t using ClickFunnels already. I started using ClickFunnels after that day because we built everything. We were the guys that designed everything and then developed everything and we were those guys, but we took three months to do a three-week work. So, we were those guys, and after that meeting, Todd told us, “You need speed. You need speed,” and ClickFunnels brings you speed, and I was, “Okay, let’s try ClickFunnels,” and we started making every single sales page, training, everything on ClickFunnels and our business speed was like five times the speed.

Doing everything we were are already doing, we did the exactly same thing five times faster and that was really, really important to us. After that, I started to look at Instagram as a marketing tool. I normally say social media, it’s a marketing tool because the objective to use a social media platform is to bring people to another environment that you control. So, if I use Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, wherever, the main goal should be bringing those people to an environment you are controlling. That doesn’t depend on algorithms or fake profiles or bands or wherever. You need to bring those people to an environment you are controlling. Like for example, your email list.

And when I understood every fundamental about those things, I started pushing on Instagram. I started posting every single day and promoting every single post because if I work for two hours in a post. For example, 10 image carousel for Instagram. If I work two hours to do that and I’m posting that on Instagram and 500 people are watching, I’m wasting my time. I need more people watching this. So, what’s the way to bring more people to watch this promotes those contents? You need to promote those contents. So, 5,000 people are watching. 50,000 people are watching, and Instagram in 2019, 2020 was really, really cheap. Right now it’s not that cheap, but it’s still cheap and I promote every single post I do on Instagram.

If it is a carousel, a one-image post, reels, video, whatever. I promote every single post because if I can bring millions of people to watch my contents and I’m creating a good content, those people will follow me. They will follow me and the other thing is if I build that awareness, I can use that as a remarketing audience on Facebook and Instagram and deliver my products, my eBooks, my lead generation stuff directly to them. So, that’s what I’m doing.

For example, my 365 days audience on Instagram, it’s right now 1.2 million people. So, I have 1.2 million people to advertise for. It’s a lot of people. I can bring a lot of leads over there because those guys already know me. They have engaged with at least one single content from my account. So, I need to squeeze that and I’m using it for that. On 2018 and 2019, the in-person trainings we did were amazing because we were doing eight to 10 in-person trainings per year and all of them with at least 100 people or 200 people. It was a lot of people, and for Portugal, because the second biggest was doing like 20 people. So, it was really, really good and we were pushing a lot on that and doing a lot of in-person trainings and that brought us to a whole new le