I said to myself. “Let me see who else is talking about digital marketing on the streets of Youtube.” Then I stumbled into Adam’s videos.
Needless to say, I am impressed by the videos I’ve seen so far. Well detailed and clean presentation in simple ways to understand.
And I quote…
“Strategy First - which has allowed me, my clients, and students, to consistently build, grow, and scale powerful, profitable, and freedom providing businesses – regardless of what channel, network, or platform we use.”
From my gatherings, Adam is a marketing strategist who lives on the west coast of Canada. I happen to be in Calgary, Alberta Canada on a business trip at press time.
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https://myempirepro.com/adam-erhart/
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https://youtu.be/pxCRSxVyhYo
Adam is also one of the instructors at digitalmarketer.com. He is a YouTuber and on his YouTube channel, he runs a weekly show called The Saturday Morning Live - Business and Marketing Q&A.
Adam has a very similar marketing story and journey to mine. I also was a victim of the shiny object syndrome culture. It cost me years and millions of dollars. Nonetheless, I don’t regret any part of the journey. Okay. I am starting to sound like him.
From what I’ve seen, this guy is a master at video marketing. So I will be paying attention to his moves; not necessarily what he says.
I found 7 quotes from Adam ErHart that I am going to edify and add some context to from my personal insights namely:
Let’s break them down one after the other.
My name is OLA and I am the founder of myEmpirePRO. myEmpirePRO is all about learning, earning and building empires.
I am also the author of 4 books namely Digital Marketing Certified, Smart Real Estate Wholesaling, Get My Marriage Back co-authored with my wife Lola and Real Estate Money Secrets.
Depending on what mood you are in. Sometimes, it seems that you’ve got all the time on any given day. But I couldn't agree with Adam more on this one.
If you just track your time for 3 straight days in a 30-minute interval, you might find your discovery, in his own words, “enlightening but disturbing.”
For me, I have discovered that I simply have to keep track of what I spend my time on because 80% of it is unproductive; though seemingly productive at initiation.
The distractions are just that bad. A great reminder from Mr Erhart
I am one of the fortunate ones who learned this a long time ago due to my early exposure to marketing. Most people do not fall out of the skies understanding or having the ability to comprehend this.
Instead, their knee jerk and still emotionally-driven response is often “common sense” based. Emotions are not just the money maker. Emotions which include anger, fear and greed drives everything that any of us cares about.
So when it comes to video marketing, it’s in your best interest to pay attention to your emotional intelligence. I strongly believe it’s one of the many reasons why video marketing is such an effective marketing channel.
Your audience is able to connect with you visibly; obviously a heightened level of emotional connection. It preframes them to want to do business with you.
That’s very true. I often tell people that trust is a by-product of consistency. But yes, I feel comfortable to add frequency to that.
But that frequency also needs to be sustainable. Here is what I mean. If you are a busy person, it might not be sustainable to try and release 3 videos to 7 channels per day.
Nonetheless, I believe that for every one week you are not releasing videos, you will have to compensate for… in filmmaking skills and talent.
For video marketing particularly, at least once per week video release in frequency, will drive your brand trust equity wild.
I, like many others, have also made this mistake. I’ve spent time with people who are simply not fit, at least not yet, for my products.
A person who doesn’t have a source of income is not a fit for learning how to market or build an online empire. But I guess sometimes, I just empathize wanting to help everyone.
The reality is that no one can afford to help anyone who is not willing or able to sow some kind of seed.
And there are many other reasons why some people are just not a fit for your offers and especially your most valuable asset; your time.
As much as we all know that we are in a microwave and quick-fix era, some things are timeless. One of them is emotional connection and the fact that people make business decisions with their emotions 85% of the time and justify it with logic later.
I believe video is the best way to connect with an audience emotionally. According to Cisco, it was estimated that by 2022, 82% of all consumer internet traffic will be made up of videos. This number is 15x higher than what it was in 2017.
On Adam Erhart’s first video on his YouTube published 6 years ago, he talked about consistently “being you” at your touch points but also balancing that out with consistently being different.
And he also mentioned “authenticity discrepancy” which is not being true to yourself particularly detectable by your prospects.
Consistent and well planned out video marketing will exponentially grow your business and that’s evident by the dramatic growth that Adam’s Youtube channel demonstrates sitting nicely above 200,000 subscribers at press time.
Last but not least, I personally will be exploring this strategy; in-app retargeting. The internet has been evolving on a consistent basis.
In the past few years, there was lots of drama around the iOS 14 update which makes it difficult to track consumer behavior across digital assets due to privacy policies.
But in that same time period, it became more and more profitable to leverage in-app applications and native creative on the actual ad platforms.
Retargeting allows us to consistently showcase our brands and products to prospects that are already exposed to our brand inside the social media app where the engagement was initiated.
I wanted to keep sending my prospect to my website myempirepro.com which is external to the social media apps because I am addicted to traditional methods of list building and following up with autoresponders.
The truth is that it has made me and my student lots of money over the past 12 years.
But Adam has now reminded me that I have to apply consistent differentiation. I have to adapt and evolve consistently with digital marketing. It makes complete sense.
Building a profitable emotional connection between your brand and your ideal customer with video marketing is something that I cover extensively in my book “Digital Marketing Certified”. Chapter 4 on “the connection” is where you might want to pay particular attention to.
And by the way, you can download the book for free at www.DigitalMarketingCertified.com
He is a guy who apparently went from $35,000 in debt at the age of 19 to becoming a best selling author.
He was a sidekick on Dame Ramsey’s show which is all about personal finances. So I would guess that the Dave Ramsey brand has helped kick his influencer and content marketing career off well.
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https://myempirepro.com/anthony-oneal/
I promise. I won’t use that as an excuse to not keep on building this platform beyond 3,500 subscribers. I appreciate every single one of you. Actually, I am about to share with you some specific reasons why I am inspired.
He is a content creator; a YouTuber. He hosts a show called “The Table with AO” where he interviews many other successful people, with an audience of over 450,000 subscribers.
I stumbled into him on the episode where he was interviewing Tony Gaskins on relationships which is another favorite topic that I cover on my platforms.
Personally, I will be watching some more of his videos. He’s interviewed people from stock traders to course creators, real estate investors to multiple 6-figure IT and Tech guys.
I can only imagine that he is inspiring so many young people in taking control of their financial profile as well as showcasing ways to build sustainable income.
I am not mad at that at all.
Well, this platform is supposed to be about marketing. But I promise, we will get there soon.
The first video I stumbled into as I was trying to know a little more about Anthony is a video where he was being interviewed by a lady; Cherie Johnson.
She explains how she first ran into Anthony after he shared a story about a lady he really liked but she insisted on a date to a particularly expensive restaurant.
Anthony would tell his potential date that his budget for that month won’t carry it. He promised her the date for the following month.
Then another gentleman in that conversation asked Anthony. “Let’s just say you’ve got a relationship, you are with your woman, and she wants to go out and you ain’t got it. What would you do?”.
Anthony answers. “That’s my woman. A man has gotta keep it 100 with his woman.” Anthony, what do you mean by 100… elaborate please.
But in that same video, Anthony talks about how he saves, invests and gives away about 40% of his income. He is apparently the money and budget guy.
Just like you, I was now on the edge of my seat and I want to share some of the insight I got from Anthony. In Particular, I will share my thoughts about these 7 quotes.
My name is OLA and I am the founder of myEmpirePRO. myEmpirePRO is all about learning, earning and building empires.
I am also the author of 4 books namely Digital Marketing Certified, Smart Real Estate Wholesaling, Get My Marriage Back co-authored with my wife Lola and Real Estate Money Secrets.
I do not disagree with any of these tips as usual. I am just sharing my thoughts and may be adding a little context here and there. As you know, it’s easy to turn talking points into absolutes and religion in ways that it can hurt us.
So let’s countdown down Anthony’s tips.
He is absolutely right about this point. In fact, one of the quotes you can attribute to me is this right here. If all you’ve got is a good credit score, it’s not sustainable all in itself.
It’s only a matter of time before you destroy the credit score if you do not have real income with consistent cash flow to keep fueling it. Anthony said, “it’s just a sign that you know how to pay debt back.” I agree.
I would add that paying debt back is different from paying it down.
Sure cash is king. But if cash is king, then cash-flow has got to be the emperor. At press time, I am still listening to Anthony. So I am sure he is going to talk more about income and cash-flow.
A lot of his beliefs around saving, investing and giving 40% will literally be impossible or at least unsustainable without consistent cash-flow.
From what I have observed so far, Anthony’s digital marketing strategy is content marketing. It seems to be the source of his cash flow; YouTube, podcast etc. He is a master at this game and I will be paying attention to a lot of his moves.
I see where he is coming from. But let's add a little context. Wouldn’t that depend on how you utilize debt? As I share in my addition to Tip number 7, debt, just like an 800 credit score, is a leverage.
As an entrepreneur and high achiever, you already know that leverage is key to success. So abusing debt is not sexy. Debt, just in itself, is not sexy. But how you leverage debt can absolutely become the sexiest thing you can ever do.
It’s no surprise that Anthony is prioritizing paying off his house mortgage in the same sentence as building net worth. That sounds like a Dave Ramsey talking point. There is more to it.
I love that Anthony continues to share this story of how he was homeless at the age of 19 and how he was kicked out to go figure things out ending up with a $35,000 debt. It’s inspiring.
But I want you to be clear that at press time, Anthony is about 38 years old. That’s another 19 years to figure things out and learn all this wealth of knowledge that he is sharing with us.
I am asking you to recognize that patience and respect for process in going after your own dream are major keys to his success.
During the process, 19 years can feel like a long time. When you start telling your own story, it will be all worth it.
While you have to be careful with this present culture of faking it to make it on social media, it’s important that I point out a little nuance there.
Anthony told an Ocean California story where he caught himself flexing beyond his means with his friends after college even though he was broke like a Church mouse.
I think presentation matters. There is a fine line between faking it and ensuring a compelling presentation in a marketplace.
Outrightly “faking it” with no value based purpose is not sustainable but you can present with value as part of your personal branding efforts and strike a sustainable balance as you are marketing and building your brand.
That’s why content marketing is the most profitable marketing activity in this era. But let’s not be stupid. Presentation still matters.
Anthony presented a stat of the fact that people who live paycheck to paycheck are people who make good money. That makes complete sense to me.
It always comes down to your ability to manage the resources at your disposal. You can also think of it as your ability to play the cards you have been dealt.
If you don’t have these skills, all the money you are making will continue to find its way out of your life.
Anthony talks about not being afraid as a man to tell a lady that a certain type or caliber of date is not in your budget.
I’ll tell you this. Anthony can definitely teach me so much more about branding, marketing, personal financing and so much more. This brother has it.
But with all due respect, it is quite obvious now why he is not married (contrary to his expressed desire) at the age of 35 plus. We are about the same age and I am happily married to my wife of 15 years.
Anthony, my brother. A woman needs to have a little more to wonder about you. All that transparency stuff, especially during the dating phase, has less romantic values than even the least sense of mystery.
Within this present social construct, the right woman will simply follow your lead as she looks forward to more and she wants to spend time with you any way you want; not demanding where and how she wants.
And by the way those girls still exist.
You should never feel the need to “mansplain” your budget to a woman who is not your wife already. If that’s necessary, it would be obvious already. There is no paycheck next Friday. This is simply the reality in the romantic context.
I can’t wait to explore more of his reports on 500 scholarships. Avoiding college debt for my kids definitely has me hooked now.
Understanding context, audience, value and content marketing as a business strategy is something that I cover extensively in my book “Digital Marketing Certified”. Chapter 2 and 3 is where you might want to pay particular attention to.
And by the way, you can download the book for free at www.DigitalMarketingCertified.com
How did I miss this guy since 2009 of actively participating in the world of business and marketing?
Ramon Ray is a motivational speaker whose laugh is extremely contiguous. He is also a piano player like myself. And he is a black man.
Isn’t it amazing how much time we spend in our own little echo chamber? Ramon Ray showed up on my radar as the first… only after my research in looking for the best marketers and entrepreneurs to profile for these series “and my thoughts.”.
Well, I am excited to share what I found with you.
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https://myempirepro.com/ramone-ray/
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https://youtu.be/qbeGDEI0ls8
He is the founder of smarthustle.com and according to his bio, he has sold a few businesses and he seems to be known for one of my favorite topics when it comes to building a business; personal branding.
Ramon was once the regional development developer at infusionsoft now known as Keap around 9 years ago. Keap is one of the email and funnel automation software in the digital marketing industry. I am not sure what his present corporate status is.
So I was watching an interview he did with TopRank Marketing TV where he was answering a question about the post pandemic challenges of business owners.
“Why did you have to wear a red hat in this commercial?” Making references to how careful B2B marketers had to be in order to navigate a very difficult time.
He talked about how sometimes you just have to take a stand. But there is a big “butt”.
My name is OLA and I am the founder of myEmpirePRO. myEmpirePRO is all about learning, earning and building empires.
I am also the author of 4 books namely Digital Marketing Certified, Smart Real Estate Wholesaling, Get My Marriage Back co-authored with my wife Lola and Real Estate Money Secrets.
He shared 4 tips on a very old video that had been posted on Keap’s channel from all those years back then.
I want to add some context to these 4 massive pieces of advice.
If people don’t find your headlines compelling enough, they won’t even look any further. So everything beyond that becomes pointless.
The idea is to hold your audience’s attention in the throat and emotionally remove peace of mind from as many of them as possible until they click to open the content.
The headline needs to hit the nerve in the right spot from an educational, entertaining or enlightening standpoint. Your audience won’t experience your content if you fail at this point.
But the next tip is even more important.
Once you manage to get a person to click into your content, you must deliver the most value within your power. This is what they are going to remember and what will make them decide to come back for more or not.
The video of Ramone Ray that I saw is pretty old. But what he was alluding to is even more important today with the emergence of artificial intelligence, machine learning, search and social media algorithms.
User engagement is measured at every stop, event, and human interaction with your online content. The longer and the more people engage with your content, the more the algorithm recommends and suggests to even more people.
Great content answers questions. Great content solves problems. And great content creates real life transformation because transformation starts with information.
In this time and age, you, as a business owner, can easily be forgotten. The competition is UNREAL. But that’s just the downside of not publishing frequently.
The upside of it is that you are able to absolutely dominate your marketplace while your competitors get buried away in their laziness. At the minimum of once a week, you have to show up to your audience with a new set of values.
Value is something that I am very passionate about. The more value (as defined by the market) that you put out into the marketplace, the more money you get to make. Obviously, the more you can afford to keep your business running.
There are some evergreen content that you only have to create one time and they will continue to attract more prospects to your business. And there are other pieces of content that are built around trendy topics.
If you want to be known as an authority in your business and industry, publishing great content frequently is the fastest and surest way to do it.
Attention span is at an all time low. But also people already have an idea of what they want and you have to do a really good job matching the values in your content with the problem they are trying to solve.
This is not a one time event. In fact, it’s a series of events (relevant content) that lines up to a strong personal brand overtime.
Relevancy also has a lot to do with staying relevant with respect to trendy updates in your particular industry. So two things; it’s relevant to the deepest pain of your audience and also to trendy topics of interest.
Well for one, he seems to be pretty excited about his message. I’m willing to bet that is a very contagious attribute. That’s important because we are talking about marketing which is all about attention first.
But I also like his take on a strong headline. Again, it’s all about getting attention first and foremost since nothing happens outside of it.
Personal branding and content marketing as a business strategy is something that I cover extensively in my book “Digital Marketing Certified”. Chapter 3 is where you might want to pay particular attention to.
And by the way, you can download the book for free at www.DigitalMarketingCertified.com
CHAPTER 10, The Structure - Early 2005, Sheraton Hotel, Woodbridge, New Jersey… after seeing an ad inside the newspaper Star Ledger, I showed up to an event where a gentleman was presenting. I purchased his $300 course and I consider it the best foundation I could have ever had when it comes to running a successful business and here is why.
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https://myempirepro.com/digital-marketing-certified-chapter-10-the-structure-plan/
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https://youtu.be/jF1VlhGwlXc
The course was basically a slapped-together black and white copy made from some sort of 1967 xerox machine. But the content is majorly responsible for the success I’ve had to date because it started with direct response marketing particularly targeted at a specific pre-defined audience.
But I have to tell you. I think I’ve come to really appreciate that training even more in recent times. However because of my lack of experience, I spent years testing out different ideologies that don't put marketing first over the years. After taking account and counting the blessings and the failures, I have concluded that I was in fact lucky to have taken that training earlier on in my career.
In fact, it doesn’t even matter that I had derailed quite a few times from this concept of purpose and people-driven marketing. It’s just that powerful to drive massive success at any moment that I’ve decided to come back to the foundation. The foundation is just as important as the “structure” if not more important.
A few times over the years, I’ve failed at setting up the “structure” sustainably because of many reasons. One of the main reasons is the fact that stable structures are boring. But at the end of the day, they work. Isn’t that all that matters?
But I am still human. And by that, I am alluding to the fact that I still get influenced by the “shiny object syndrome”. You can also call it “grass is greener on the other side” syndrome.
It’s an on-going battle. But I have gotten better and better with this in recent times. It’s about making the foundation just as important as the “structure”.
In fact, everything we have discussed thus far in this book is the foundation. And I hope that you took it seriously because it’s a foolish man who built his house on the sand.
Over the course of this book, we’ve discussed the goal, the person, the value, the connection, the system, the list, the data, the information and the sources. In essence, we have broken down all the parts of digital marketing to make it as simple as possible for anyone with a marketable offer to understand.
Back when I started engaging in digital marketing full time and more, I had to know everything. Actually, I chose to know everything probably because I really do enjoy the art and science of influencing and persuading people. More importantly, it was useful because I was building a business just as I am still doing today.
There is more structure with the digital marketing industry today. In fact, I just counted more than 20 jobs where you can earn 6 figures or more. These are skill sets that are primarily responsible for scaling any business.
Today, you don’t have to know everything. Sure you should have an overview understanding of each of the areas. But if all you want is a job, you can simply pick one of the previous chapters and don’t stop your research until you get to the level of the equivalent of a doctorate degree.
On the flipside, it is important to read this book 10-15 times in order to make the most out of it. For every additional time you read this relatively small book, you will learn something new. But you will have to excuse the fact that I am not your typical scholastic writer.
In the last chapter, the source, we covered the different web traffic channels. But we didn’t get too much into the actual platforms and their categories such as:
And many others…
However we get a little deeper with each one of these traffic sources and media forms inside our flagship 15 weeks coaching program “Digital Marketing Intensive” (DMi15). Here at www.myEmpirePRO.com , we primarily focus on content marketing through search engine optimization, and paid media via Google and Meta (Facebook) ad platforms.
There are many digital marketing and PPC ad platforms to choose from namely; Google Ads, YouTube Ads (also part of Google Ads) Meta Ads (which used to be Facebook Ads), Instagram Ads (accessible through Meta Ads), Microsoft Ads (which was once called Bing Ads), LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, Pinterest Ads, TikTok for Business, Snapchat for Business etc. Each and everyone of those ad platforms tend to follow the same campaign breakdown “structure.”
The idea of having to figure out all the different pay-per-click (PPC) ad platforms out there probably feels overwhelming right? I understand. All you have to do is pick two or three marketing strategies to execute on two or three ad platforms.
But I also wouldn’t do that until I have set up a successful campaign on one platform first. And what do I mean by success? It depends on your business objective for that campaign.
One of the problems that have cost me millions is the unproductive idea of multitasking. In a real business world, focus matters more than ideas. I find it cute when people talk about multitasking in this great light of new discovery.
It’s true that many things are happening at the same time in any given business. That’s why I will have to put context as priority over focus as well.
It all depends on what you mean. Each process among many in a system with respect to focus on a primary business objective has to be clearly defined if you don’t want to waste resources. So it’s best to set up a campaign successfully on one ad platform first and start collecting data before attempting to scale out to other platforms with the same “campaign breakdown structure”.
If your business has less than 10 employees, I would cap out the number of ad platforms at three. The rest of the focus should go into optimization of your campaigns on the two or three ads platforms you’ve chosen and your business operations.
Understanding a campaign breakdown structure is important because it’s the same skeleton that you will implement on any platforms you chose to set up campaigns on. This “structure” will be useful from both a mental and a campaign execution standpoint. Once you understand it, you can execute a digital marketing campaign set up on any ad platform successfully.
Level 1 - How: The first level is simply defining the platform you choose to run it on. This is the level where you decide which of the many ad platforms you want to run and test your PPC campaigns on. The rest of the levels are about the specifications inside the campaign itself.
Level 2 - Why: On this level, you get to choose the business objective of your campaign. What is the purpose for this campaign? The ultimate purpose of a digital marketing campaign is to make money right? But you need to be a little more specific.
Is it to primarily generate the most video views, reach, visits to external pages, capture leads, or sales? When you are specific, it makes your desired outcome and results easier to track, measure, monitor and control.
You may also be defining your budget for this campaign on this level.
Level 3 - Who: This is where you get to define your ideal prospect and/or customer and their attributes. It’s very hard to be specific with this level but you have to put in some effort for your digital marketing campaign.
At this level, you will get to define:
And more…
Level 4 - What: At this level is where you define the actual message that describes your offer to the audience you specified on level 3.
On the actual ad platform, you will get to upload the images, the video and the ad copy as we cover in more details in Chapter 3 “the value.”
This is the actual creative that the audience, again as defined on level 3, gets to see on the feed and the placements. So it needs to be intriguing enough to catch the attention of the audience you defined. Hence the time I took on breaking down “the value” in chapter 3.
On Meta Ads (a.k.a Facebook Ads), level 1,2 and 3 are Campaign, Ad sets and Ads respectively. On Google Ads, level 1,2 and 3 are Campaign, Ad group and Ads respectively. I promise. On the other platforms that may be unconventional, it's similar.
At the end of this all, it’s all in the mindset. Approach setting up a digital marketing campaign with this 4 level-structure and your chances of better outcome is sure.
Another way you can protect your business from losing money is to buy email marketing placement from other marketers who have built a healthy email list. Check out www.myEmpirePRO.com/traffic especially if you are in the biz-opp or financial niche.
You can simply order clicks and visits over to your websites to pique initial interest. After that, you can then set up a retargeting or remarketing campaign on major platforms like Google Ads or Meta Ads to re-attract your audience from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google and their various media partners.
This is an unconventional way of driving consistent traffic and building your list. But you can still apply “the structure” mindset to stay organized. Anyway, in the next and final chapter, we will enter the execution zone. It’s time to put this wealth of knowledge to work.