Marketing Runs Deep: Episode 23

Hey everybody, this is Bryan Hatch, founder of AutomateBIG. And I'm excited about this session of our blog today to talk a little more about the infopreneur's plight. Now, what do I mean by infopreneur? If you are selling an online product or digital service, something online that you don't necessarily even have a physical store or a physical product to sell, that's you. Whether you're doing events, whether you're doing speaking engagements, whether you're doing courses and training, whether you're doing anything in that regard, anything that's information. If you're selling information and you do it all digitally then this is a fun episode for you.

I've had the opportunity to speak with many entrepreneurs about what they're doing, especially in this info space, about what is happening in the business. I see it time and time again that there are some main buckets. They're dividing their brain into all these different parts. First, the infopreneur learns that there is this possibility to make money online selling their information. So they learn about that. They follow gurus and they follow these people that say do this and check this out, and this is what you can say and this is how you can do it. They get excited, which is good. From there, they start creating their content.

They usually create their course or their offering, their product, whatever the case it is. So they create that product. Once they've created the product then they figure out how they're gonna market it. In that process, the marketing can divide someone's brain into like 17,000 portions from there. But in the marketing perspective, they're thinking, okay, going back to the person that they learned, I can sell online courses or maybe they figured that out on own their own. So then they go, okay, I gotta post on social media every day. I've gotta do a blog. I've gotta make sure my website's up to date. I gotta make sure that people can talk to me.

They've got a group setting to talk to me. They can do some big event with me. They can do these little courses with me. I got to have some mini-courses that are lead magnets. These lead magnets are little things that people give me their name and their email and then they get a PDF or a video series or whatever the case is. After they get through all those things, then I'm gonna get them into my sales funnel. In the sales funnel, that campaign is gonna teach people that they could do business with me, and then they're gonna buy something from me. After they buy something from me, I'm gonna help them buy more from me and help them keep part of me forever.

They're gonna be awesome clients and it's gonna be amazing. My favorite part of the infopreneur in that journey, they sit down with and it's usually somebody they love or somebody that is making them excited about doing this thing. But what they do is they do fake math. Oh, I love fake math. I laugh at fake math 'cause this is the fake math that is produced and put out there by so many ad agencies. All you gotta do is get 10 clients paying you $1,000, you're making $10,000. Or all you gotta do is sell 300 of this little thing, and then you're gonna make $300,000. Amazing. This is fake math that we the infopreneur, do to ourselves.

Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't have goals or objectives or look at things and say, okay I wanna make $100,000, how can I do that? And then back it out. I'm not saying that's bad, but it's funny how we do that to ourselves and say, look, all we need is X, then we make like a million bucks. That's all we need is X. But to get X is years of time. And to get X followers is years of time, to get X number of people that know me for this thing, years of time. It is so interesting and intriguing to me that we do that to ourselves.

This is the infopreneur's plight. They go through, they get excited. They build a course. They learn how to market it. They figure out how to do ads. That's another part of the marketing. They figure out how to do ads. They'll either get an agency or they do it themselves. They figure out how to do it. And they're like, "Wow, this is crazy!" And then they realize "It's not easy and the way that people tell me to do it, I'm doing it that way, but I'm still not making a lot of money because I'm not spending $4,000 a day in ad spend. I'm doing $30 a day or $50 a day or $100 a day."

They go through this learning curve. It's this up and down learning curve. This infopreneur is like "I can do it. Whoa, that's really hard. I can do it. Whoa, that's really hard. I can get a team. Ah, that's really hard to manage them. I can do this. Ah, crap, I gotta pay taxes." It's all of these things that go up and down for these infopreneurs and it's hard. If you are a true infopreneur, you've had nights where you felt so alone and so depressed about what you've built.

You've written a book, you've written these blogs, you've done these videos, you've done all this work. You've done all this stuff and it's not working. It's like ripping your soul out of your body and you feel horrible, you feel worthless. You feel like you can't provide. That you need to quit this infopreneur thing. You gotta quit what you're gonna do. You struggle and you fight through that and those that continue that path recognize that that's just a doubt. That's just a feeling.

They push past that and figure more things out, and really there's a lot to it. I mean, seriously, if you're gonna put out a video every week for this whole year there's some serious consideration of what you're going to do. Some people say, well, just throw up a video. I know infopreneurs that have followed the advice of sending out a video every week and have seen nothing come of it. That's because there's a whole lot more at play.

Ads are a portion of it. Content creation is a portion of it. Social media organic is a portion of it. Building landing pages is a portion of it. Copywriting is a portion of it. Building a team is a portion of it. Knowing who your audience is a portion of it. Your message, your branding is a portion of it. There's so much. The audience you're going after, the audiences that are following you and that shouldn't be following you. There's so much to your business. The accounting. Guys, there's so much that happens to this infopreneur, and I recognize how much of a struggle that can be.

I wanna offer some words of advice that would help you if you're feeling that way or if you felt that way and you wanna know that you're on the right path. Here's a couple of things you should be doing. Number one, seek out true experts. Now I'm very cautious to use the word expert because every day there's a new, every day there's probably thousands of experts that do that fake math thing that someone says, "Look, you could run ads for 50 businesses, you get paid $1 million. It'll be amazing!" And they're like, "I don't know how to run ads."

An expert does what they tell you to do. Okay? If an expert tells you to run ads, they are running ads. If they are not running ads, then they are not the expert on ads. Now, someone that's not running ads could say you need to run ads, but they shouldn't be telling you how to do it, right? So seek out true experts. They can shortcut the time it takes. They can't shortcut the learning. They can't shortcut the lessons, the heartache, the failure. They can't do that. They are gonna shortcut your failure to success rate and they're gonna help you through the things that you were like, "Ah, I don't know how to do this" So that's one thing.

Seek out true experts that, and I'll put one more caveat in there, that you can trust. You have to be able to trust them. The fruits of their labors. You have to know what they've done, what they've created and if it's working for them, great, but they also have to have been through what you've been through. If they haven't been through what you've been through in the last few years, then it's likely they don't remember what struggles you're dealing with. Not quite so much. If they're trying to teach how to build a business. it's different if they're doing other things for you. That's the first thing. Seek out experts you can trust and get their help.

The second thing you should do. Stop everything right now and the same if you're an infopreneur. I don't care how long you've been in this. I don't care if you've been this for three years and you're making decent money. What you need to do is go do research. You need to get on the phone with people that are in your market, your audience, and talk with them.

We hide behind this tech. Infopreneurs, you hide behind the digital funnels and campaigns, all this stuff that everybody tells you, you need to do. When you do it that way, you're bound to have, you just beat your head against the wall. You don't have to do that. So call real humans. Talk to real people, do research, ask them questions, find out what they're worried about, struggling with. In your audience, the people you're after to go serve and then build something to help them.

I know that seems like 101 but I'm saying build that. Don't build first, do research first, then build and sell. Really sell and then build. But that's what you need to do. If you'll get on the phone with those people, find out what's going on in their lives you'll be so much better for it. And then your success, your momentum, will just grow exponentially. So those are my two tips that would help you no matter where you are in the infopreneur space. If you've done well, if you're learning, if you're new or you're brand new, you're figuring it out. That's what you need to do.

Get on the phone with people, get out in front of the people that you wanna talk to, make connections on the social platforms, actually go make connections and then message people, make new friends, find out what they're going through. Help people. Go into some forums and help people. Just help them. Because if you do that, you're gonna find new friends and new people that need more of your assistance. You can learn from them. If you seek to learn, you seek to serve, you're gonna grow and you're going to grow and you're gonna do just fine.

I have learned that in the info space, it's the crazy thing. It's not always what you know. You need to know, you need to be an expert. You need to be good at what you do. You absolutely do. Knowing things is far less important than doing the actions. Accomplish something big and push forward. Likely you've done that if you're listening to this right now, but know that if you're an infopreneur and you wanna get ahead, you've gotta get the right people, trust them, and you've got to make sure that you're actually helping people that you know you can help by talking with people.

That's the key to success in this world. It's easy to connect to people all over the world that need your help. That's the beauty of social media. You'll get there. You'll get there, but it's just through connections. Talking with people, helping people. I hope you've learned something new today and this is just another small way to AutomateBIG.