Eric and Neil's Favorite Way to Learn New Marketing Tactics

0:00All right. So we're going to talk about our favorite way of learning new marketing tactics. So we're coming up on seven years of doing marketing school. I remember the very first episode we ever did, Neil. Do you remember the title of the episode? No. It's where to learn marketing. And so now here we are again. We probably talked about it in the first episode. I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm going to take a guess. We're like the best way to learn marketing is create your own website and do it yourself. I'm guessing. I think that was in there, but there was more to it. Because we were going for 10 to 15 minutes in the beginning.

0:32So question for you. what is your favorite way to learn new marketing tactics? How do you learn them? So I talked about this in the last episode. You and I talk a lot about new things that we're trying. I just talk about more so now I like talking to business people that are in love with marketing. And so they might've started their background in marketing and we're just trying to get better, not only in business, but in marketing. And that's where I learned a lot of these experiments that people are running. It's really when you go into a mastermind setting or like a one-on-one setting where you and I are talking on the phone, it's the 5 % of things that we can share with each other that you can't share in public.

1:06And especially in the world of marketing, when you start to share something that really works, everyone starts doing it. Yes, I tend to learn a lot of the new tactics and strategies from conferences. And the nuance here is you don't just go to any conference. Of course, you go to marketing conferences, but the nuance, real nuances is you go to marketing conferences throughout the whole world. Because what I've seen is a lot of the marketing tactics that we use, a lot of others use in the United States. A lot of the marketing tactics that people use in Brazil, others in Brazil use, but they may not use in the United States.

1:40There may be some similarities and majority of the stuff, yes, are used throughout the whole world. But when you go to different marketing conferences in different countries, what I find is there's quite a bit of different nuances in their strategies, their tactics, their approaches. And that's where I end up learning quite a bit because it opens up your eyes on new ways to do things because the way that we may do marketing in America is quite a bit different, not just for different industries, but just in general, compared to how some other countries think about marketing. Yeah. The other thing I'll say is there's a window of time.

2:14For example, when we started this podcast for the first year or two, it's like we're sharing all of our secrets, like banger after banger, right? And so when you see someone that's up and coming, my point I'm trying to get to here is, for example, in the newsletter space right now, Now there's a guy named Matt McGarry. He helped grow a couple of newsletters, like the hustle newsletter, the milk road newsletter, and got these up to like a couple hundred thousand people. So he really understands the economics, all the ins and outs around newsletters. And he has a website called the newsletter operator right now.

2:41And I highly recommend everyone subscribe to it. So his name is Matt McGarry. And I know right now from the content he's putting out, it's like banger after banger, right? It's like means it's like the best of the best. I'm like, man, he's sharing all his secrets right now. And when people are initially starting to build their audience, that's when they start to share the best of the best stuff. But after a while, it starts to kind of taper off. Like Neil and I repeated a lot of the same stuff on this podcast, right? But my point is when you find someone that's up and coming, follow them and try to extract as much as you can.

3:09And what I did with Matt, it was I actually got him on the phone call and we started talking about it more and actually got him on a phone call with our email guy. And so I'm happy to pay for the phone calls. I'm also happy to pay for consulting or coaching for the people that we have on our team. The other strategy that I love doing is when I end up learning new tactics from people, I love to ask him to share the stats and the data. Like, oh, cool. You got better rankings on Google using this tactic for local businesses. Can you show me how you did it? Oh, can you show me the analytics? And the reason I like asking those two questions, in essence, I'm just asking for proof is because a lot of the tactics that you end up learning from people may not work or a lot of people lie.

3:52I was trying to figure out a nicer word than lie. I mean, they butter up their stats. Yeah. And when you end up seeing the stats and the analytics and the data and the case studies, it'll not just give you an idea if it works, but if it'll work for the long haul. And that's really important to clarify here because a lot of people would be like, oh, check out this tactic. If you're a local business, you'll crush it from this. And I remember I met someone at a conference in Bucharest that was telling me about this. Funny enough, I'm actually going to Bucharest again, I think in a week or so. When they were breaking it down, I looked at their analytics and it was fly by night.

4:28And what I mean by that is they were getting really good results for call it 30 days to maybe three, four months, and then it would just taper off and it wouldn't work anymore. That's cool. You can generate more traffic and sales for a few months max, but you're spending all this effort for a short-term strategy. And I think that's really important for marketers to keep in mind because the last thing you want to be doing is spending your energy on things that won't last. You need to think about the long-term, not five years, but 10 years out. What can you do in marketing that's going to continually work and you can build upon?

5:00You don't want to just start doing things that you're going to have to rinse and repeat the processes because the tactics won't last. You don't want to be in that mindset. And a lot of affiliate marketers are in which like, oh, all right, we're going to create this system and framework of rinse and repeating these fly by night marketing tactics that will last three to six months. And then we're just going to keep doing this. Well, there's going to be a point where the tactics aren't going to work. You're not going to have built a business, but you spent all this energy. And if you just did it on long term tactics, sure.

5:29In the short run, you wouldn't have made as much, but in the long run, you would have built up way more traffic and generate way more revenue. So the last thing I'll say from my side is earlier, I talked about the concept of mastermind. And so I look at that as a micro mastermind. And what I mean by that is when we did Turkey a couple of weeks ago, it was only seven of us, but it was seven high powered entrepreneurs. And that's why I call it micro mastermind because it's a small group of people, but it actually gets a lot more intimate and you do things that you couldn't really do in a larger environment and it's a lot more flexible.

5:58So there's that. The other piece is that there's a larger mastermind. So for example, I did the leveling up mastermind. I do that twice a year and we try to keep that intimate, but it's more people, right? So for example, we did the one in Miami and about 80 people or so came through. And I'm perfectly happy to do that. I don't want an event with thousands of people. That would just be an event. That would be a conference. But you still get to have a lot of serendipity around these things. And that's what it is. Now, the final thing I'll say is there's also the concept of a virtual mastermind.

6:27And so let's say, Neil and I, we want to learn more AI stuff. We might get six to eight other people that we know. Maybe they're good AI marketers. And we'll say, hey, we're going to do this virtual mastermind where we meet once a week on Zoom for about an hour or so. And we're going to do this for the next six to eight weeks. And we're just going to share what's working, what isn't working. And we're going to share some news as well. And we're going to share information with each other. You can do that. That's a lot lower of a lift and it's a lot more convenient because there's no commuting there.

6:55And so each one has its own benefits. Obviously there are trade-offs, but still at the end of the day, it comes down to community. Anything else, Neil? Nope. That's it. All right. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. It helps us a lot with our downloads and our rankings. And whether it's a positive or negative one, obviously, a negative one would be better. But that's it for today. And we will see you later.