Making mistakes on the path to success is often a vital part of the process. My guest today, Jason Fladlien, says he has made more than his fair share. You get it wrong 100 times, you get it right once—that was actually the attitude he had with webinars. Well, renowned marketer Joe Polish describes Jason as one of the top five living marketers on the planet—that’s pretty high praise as far as I’m concerned!
Jason has sold over 100 million dollars of products and services on the internet over the last 13 years. It’s not often you meet a guy who has been a rapper, Hare Krishna monk, and digital marketing mogul all in one lifetime! For four years of his life, he meditated 4-6 hours a day, which grounded him, helped him recover from childhood trauma, and revitalized his passion for music.
In today’s episode we talk about how Jason’s spiritual perspective led him on a unique marketing journey where he was able to position himself to help millions of people with the webinars that he has created. So, without any further ado, please stay tuned for an impactful and memorable interview right here on Marketing Speak.
In this Episode
- [00:29] – Stephan introduces Jason Fladlien. He has sold over $100 million of products and services on the internet over the last 13 years. His main areas of expertise are selling on Amazon and doing webinars.
- [07:26] – Jason tells us how he got into the webinar world and shared his first-time experience.
- [15:08] – Jason discusses how he structures the framework of his webinars.
- [22:18] – Jason shares a genius strategy that gave his clients a huge advantage in webinars.
- [28:32] – Jason points out the concept of knowing who you build your webinars for and who are the types of people you can help transform their lives.
- [35:20] – Jason explains an effective webinar close that opens the audiences’ minds to go beyond their fear of success.
- [41:04] – Stephan and Jason express how you have a job to gently release audiences’ limiting viewpoints and empower them with alternative opportunities as a webinar host.
- [48:29] – Jason provides us with one of his best techniques when it comes to selling on webinars.
- [56:14] – What is the most accessible and most stable platform for webinars?
- [64:25] – Visit Jason Fladlien’s website at jasonfladlien.com to check out his book, One to Many, and learn more about creating million-dollar webinars.
Transcript
Jason, it’s so great to have you on the show.
My pleasure.
I met you through Genius Network through Joe Polish. You’ve been in Genius Network. You’ve been in Genius X as well which is his $100,000 a year mastermind. I’m curious, what has been the biggest value bomb, epiphany, relationship, connection, or whatever that’s come out of Genius Network and Genius X over the years you’ve been in it?
Success means a lot of sacrifices.
It’s a great question. Most of my life was focused on becoming successful in business. That’s the whole arc. Once you get there, you’re like, okay, what now? Typically, success means a lot of sacrifices—not good sacrifices. There are good sacrifices and bad sacrifices. For me, health sacrifices and taking care of myself seemed to fall backwards.
Being in Genius really aligned me to the idea of making sure I’m good and not burning myself out, and then from there just cascaded into all sorts of physical improvement, all sorts of mental improvements. I did a lot of trauma work as a result of that from issues that I had as a child. That allowed me to be more of who I am, which then actually shows up more effectively in my marketing.
It’s obviously not the reason any of us joined, but it’s fun when what you think you’re getting are more business connections, more business advice, more direction, and what you end up getting is something completely different. For me, that was the biggest takeaway.
That is so cool. I joined so that I would get more business benefits, and I did. I got lots of leads that became clients, lots of distinctions, tools, resources, strategies, and so forth, but the biggest thing is it contributed to my recent spiritual epiphanies. That’s for another show and another time. It’s been an incredible, valuable resource and network that I just wouldn’t trade for the world. It’s so worth $25,000 a year. It’s a no-brainer to me. I’m excited to have met you through it.
I’m curious, when did you meet Joe? We’ll start to talk about webinars shortly, but I’m a big fan of Joe Polish as are you. He’s on this year-long Sabbatical, completely checked out of his business and Genius Network. It’s all running without him quite well. That’s a big testament to his team. How did you meet Joe? How did that relationship start?
A lot of people give information, but they leave out transformation. You don't learn if your behavior doesn't change. Share on X2014, internally, my business partner, Wilson Mattos, and I were sitting down one day. We felt like we hit the ceiling in our business so we said, what’s the next level? I was not a fan of networking, going to conferences, and sitting in a room all day. I have severe ADHD so it’s very hard for me. It’s very challenging.
Wil was like, “We need to get you out there more to broaden the connections besides what we have in our industry.” I said, “Here’s the deal. You find me the very best mastermind you can and I’ll join it.”
Wil goes to a business associate of ours who we worked with on and off throughout the year. We’re actually working on a huge project right now with him—it’s funny how that works out—a guy named Dan Hollings, he was the Marketing Director behind The Secret. The joke was when they’d say, how did The Secret get so big and sell hundreds and millions of copies? They would say, “Oh, The Universe.” Dan was known as “Mr. Universe” because he was the one that actually put the ones and zeros, the steps behind the virility of that marketing campaign. Dan was a genius.
From that, things happened that weren’t supposed to have happened. There were disputes on compensation, blah-blah-blah. Dan put his heart and soul into this thing, but he was starting over again essentially. Joe first of all helped him get square again, helped him go through that. Then, when Dan was ready to go back out into the marketing world, we started publishing him. We published a couple of products of his.
Wil had asked varieties of different associates, “Who would you recommend we join a mastermind of?” Dan says, “You got to go into Joe’s.” Dan introduced us to Joe and then I joined Joe sight unseen. I went there and I just fell in love from the get-go. I’ve been there ever since.
He is a heartfelt guy. He was a guest on this podcast last year. I love that episode. He’s the real deal.
All right, let’s talk about webinars because that’s what you’re known for. How did you become known for webinars? What was a stumbling block or a misfire in the early days that taught you a valuable lesson?
I’ve made so many misfires. I’ve made more mistakes than I’ve made correct decisions in my life, but the good news is it’s very forgiving and flexible. You can just get it right once. You get it wrong 100 times, you get it right once. That was actually the attitude I have with webinars.
I wanted to do webinars. I got into business really in 2007. That’s when I first made any money online. I started with nothing. Literally, I had this little, tiny apartment I lived in. It wasn’t even an apartment, it was a shed converted into one. I don’t think it was legally up-to-code to live in, but I lived in it. My living room was my bedroom and my office. It only had space to accommodate either a bed or a desk. I’m like, do I work at a desk or do I sleep in a bed?
I started with nothing.
I worked at the desk and slept on the floor. That’s where I started. Early on, I saw the opportunity for webinars because there were Stella seminars that were popping off really big back then, so it naturally made sense that the next evolution was going to be webinars. There were people doing webinars then, but they weren’t really able to do them mainly because of technological issues.
First of all, there was no really stable platform that you could reliably do a webinar on that didn’t cost an enterprise-level type of investment. Secondly, Internet connections just weren’t that fast back then, so to stream audio, to stream video, both up and down, wasn’t practical. I just sat on the sidelines and I’m like, when this hits, I want to be on the ground floor of it. I want to master it. I want to get ready.
The benefit I had was I had no experience. What happened was a lot of guys were porting over their experience and they were trying to retrofit a ton of seminars into a webinar format. There were guys that were platform speakers. They would go out, speak publicly at events, and do presentations there. They would try to shoehorn those into the webinar.
I had no previous experience so I started with a blank slate. I said, okay, I’m going to do anything and everything I can. I had no biases and I was raw and hungry, so I started doing webinars.
I’ll tell you what attracted me to webinars first of all. The first webinar I ever did wasn’t a pitch webinar. Pitch webinars are my favorite because I really make money. But the first webinar I ever did went as follows. I had a very small audience back then, mostly people who are buying products from me on online marketing stuff. I was charging $7, $10, $15, $20. It was really cheap stuff, really tactical, and very specific types of offers.
In marketing, one of the most effective ways you can make a sale is to show somebody what it's like to be your customer before they become your customer. Share on XOne day, I said, okay, I’m going to do this thing called a webinar and I’m going to create my next product on it. I wanted to teach people about productivity because I’ve been very prolific. I was putting out all these products. I was creating all these materials. I was doing it really fast so I wanted to teach them some of the methodologies.
I said, I’m going to do this on a webinar. If you show up live, it’s free and I’ll give you the recording. If you don’t show up, then you’ll have to pay for it later. I thought everybody was going to show up. Hardly anybody showed up, but that was okay. I didn’t care. I had a little mind map.
Back then, I was using mind maps. I have what I thought was an hour of material, turned out to be four hours of material. I just taught for four hours. It was incredible. I was exhausted afterwards but boy was it incredible. There were about 100 people on, probably less, probably closer to 80. At the end of it, everybody was singing praises and how great it was, so I captured those testimonials.
They got it for free. Then, I went back to the audience the next day. I said, you missed it. I told you I was going to sell this to you for $37 if you missed it. I’m going to give you one more chance. For the next 24 hours, you can get it for $27. Here’s what the people set.
I had more people buy this free product than get it for free because very few attended, and many of them bought, but that got me into the webinar world. For me, the best part about it was I felt like it was a superior modality of teaching.
Again, this is pre-YouTube. YouTube existed, but it was just a tiny little thing back then. This is pre what we’re used to today with Zoom and everything else. I felt like this was a better way to teach a concept with interactivity, fluidity, and all this kind of stuff.
Then, the thing is this. In marketing, one of the most, maybe the most effective ways you can make a sale is to show somebody what it’s like to be your customer before they have to be your customer because there are a lot of risks involved in purchasing products, services, or anything. It’s not just the money. The money is actually oftentimes the least of it.
It’s the emotional investment of, am I ready for this? Am I capable to take this on? It’s a time investment and I got to figure out what’s going on. I got to figure out how they do this. I’m probably going to stumble and fall the first few times like riding a bike. The easiest thing for somebody to do is nothing even if they don’t like the result they’re getting. It’s easier to stay the same than it is to change, so there’s a lot of resistance to that change.
The way that we break that down is if you don’t have to risk anything but you can get the experience of what it’s like to be the customer, then you can just determine, hey, I like this. I want more of it. Here’s my money. You take out a lot of this unknown, uncertainty, and scariness. You reverse the risk, so to speak.
There are a lot of ways you can do that. Most of the ways are very inefficient though. Hey, start a relationship, become their best friend, speak to them for 27 touch points, and eventually, one day when you’re old and gray, then you can offer them something. There are a lot of inefficient ways to do that and I found that a webinar was hyper-efficient because for a lot of people, I could turn them from a complete stranger into a really solid, connected relationship in one sitting. I can give value in advance and then I could extend the opportunity for investment for more value.
Most advertising is, “Hey, spend money with me, and then I’ll do something for you.” It’s disruptive.
If you look at most advertising, it is inherently annoying. Most advertising is, hey, spend money with me and then I’ll do something for you. It’s disruptive, it’s pesky, it’s like the pop-ups that you can’t get away from. What they try to do to offset this inherent nature of being pesky is they make it entertaining. Oh, I opened a beer can and then a beach volleyball game breaks out with scantily-clad bikini babes, which is entertaining, but it requires a massive amount of money to build that brand association type of affinity. Small and medium-sized companies almost can never pull that off and it’s very unknown.
Advertising when you’re selling most products, if you’re a small business goes like this: “Oh, you got a wound? Hold on, let me rip it open, let me pour salt into it, and now let me sell you the solution to clean it up.” The framework that typically works the best and is most accepted is let me remind you of all the pain and problems you’re suffering. Let me heighten and magnify them and then let me provide the relief in advance because you got to do it if you’re going to get people over that threshold of resistance of wanting to change.
But this is the counter to that. This is like, let me show you that there’s hope and there’s potential. Let me cue you in on what really matters so you can see transformation ahead of time, you get an “aha” moment, or paradigm shifts, and then I will extend the opportunity for you to go further knowing full well that no matter what it is, one webinar is not enough. It never is. If it’s super valuable, you can give away everything you possibly can hope in one hour and you’ll still have truckloads of value left. People will then be able to decide if they want it or not.
Those are a few of the reasons that attracted me to webinars. When I started, the best thing that I did and I still do to this day—I try to teach this to people—is I just iterate it. My concept is how can I get in front of an audience as quickly as possible? Let me just do that and the rest will work itself out.
I didn’t get stuck on what platform should I use? I didn’t get stuck on should I do full-motion videos? Should I use slides? I didn’t get stuck on a lot of the mechanics. What about my lighting? I didn’t get stuck on what should I title the webinar? I just said, how do I get in front of people and try to create a paradigm shift, an “aha” moment? What’s the one biggest constraint that they have related to this specific topic? Can I remove that constraint in one sitting? Once I remove that constraint, can I point them to a solution to now create this new-found momentum into something bigger for the future? That was it. That was the play.
Focus and build your business not only because it'll make you more money but because you will have customers that are most likely going to benefit from your services. Share on XFor webinars, I just did that as much as humanly possible. After a year, two years, and several thousand hours later of being live on webinars, I figured a couple things out.
Yes, you did. What are some of the “aha” moments that drive the most signups and action-taking once they’re on the webinar and long-term or lifetime value for you with that customer or client?
It’s a great question. First thing I do when I sit down and create a webinar usually is create what I call a clearly-defined outcome, which is when this webinar is over with, from a behavioral standpoint, I want this person to now be able to do this. Something that they want but seemingly can’t get. I try to become very clear. There are exceptions to that but in general, that’s one of the frameworks in which I operate. It’s the easiest one to teach, too.
A lot of people give information, but they leave out transformation. My philosophy is you don’t learn if your behavior doesn’t change. The person who now knows 172 really great keto recipes to start their new keto diet and doesn’t cook any of those recipes hasn’t learned. They’ve intellectually understood perhaps, but it hasn’t shown up in a behavioral aspect. Behavior hasn’t changed.
My framework is what’s the clearly-defined outcome? Attached to that is what is the behavioral change? Psychologically, there are only a few that matter at a high-level for all human beings. It’s really and mostly filtering them and trying to match the one up that best relates to the topic and the context at hand.
People are more motivated to move away from fear than they are to move towards pleasure or gain.
Most people know this, but a common one is people are more motivated to move away from fear than they are to move towards pleasure or gain. Generally, the clearly-defined outcome starts with what can’t you do that’s keeping you up at night, that’s angering you, frustrating you, or putting you almost to the point where you’re ready to throw in the towel? How do we give hope once hope did not exist? You have to start with the pain. You have to meet them where they’re at.
A lot of people make that mistake because most subject matter experts went through the pain many, many months or many years ago. They’re on step 117 and their audience is on step 1, 2, or 3 at the journey. We typically, by default, want to talk about all the good stuff because we’d lived the good stuff, but we are now misaligned with our audience. We’re trying to get them to come to us. We need to go to them first. My thing is regardless of whether somebody buys or not, what’s a complete paradigm shift that I can have them happen by the end of it?
I’ll give you a very specific example. One of our other connections outside of Genius Network, The Wholesale Formula guys, Dylan and Dan, we do a webinar for them. A lot of ways we make money these days is we find great products, we write the webinars, promote them, and we take a commission. We don’t create the products. We find the good products and then we articulate what we feel are stronger sales messages to improve conversions of those products and we use a webinar to do that.
By the way, Dylan was on this podcast, so listener, if you are interested in how to crush it on Amazon, Dylan Frost is amazing. That episode is definitely a must-listen.
That’ll pair perfectly with what I’m about to say because he has the methodology of selling on Amazon that I think is the most superior in the market. My goal is to then have somebody realize why this particular approach to Amazon makes the most sense which is hard to do in an hour. Some of the constraints that get in the way are almost unbelievable. That’s one of the challenges that I have. It seems like it can’t be this way because it’s predicated, believe it or not.
There are so many products on Amazon that simply just need another seller to sell them. You don’t need to improve those products. You don’t need to know anything fancy. You just need to be able to contact the brand owner and say, “Listen, I like to also sell your product on Amazon.” They say yes and then you make money.
That seems overly simplistic. That seems like it’s not possible. Why would that work and why hasn’t that been exploited to death? Usually, these types of things that are easy to obtain are exploited to death and then they are no longer easy. This is the exception, but I have to take several minutes. Actually, I got to take the whole webinar almost to break that down.
I really have to solve two things in that webinar. One is to get them to understand that a huge value is just being redundant, so this thing doesn’t run out of stock in inventory. Redundancy on Amazon as a baseline can be a game-changer for a lot of people. It’s not going to make them rich, but it certainly can give them that extra breathing room in their finances that can make the difference. That’s the first constraint I have to deal with.
The second constraint I have to deal with is actually contacting brand owners or representatives of these products to open up authorized reseller accounts. This is the way that I do this on this webinar. It’s very interesting. I’ve taught this because it’s not what a lot of people think. This is how you speak to somebody emotionally to change behavior, not intellectually.
They’re afraid to reach out the scariness of talking to a stranger.
I start the framework on the second issue because I know the reluctance. This is one of the reasons why this model continues to work and most people don’t use it. It’s because of reluctance. They’re afraid to reach out the scariness of talking to a stranger.
I literally practice this in the webinar. I said, “You know what’s funny? As kids, we were taught not to talk to strangers because scary things might happen to us. Now, here we are, full-grown adults and we’re still afraid to talk to strangers. Our parents didn’t tell us that there was a time limit on when you shouldn’t talk to strangers anymore because you can’t live your life without talking to some strangers.”
That’s how I set it up. I put them in an emotional state to understand that I acknowledge, hear, and empathize with their fear, but at the same time, maybe there’s a new perspective that they can take on based on that fear which is like, yes, there is validity in when you shouldn’t talk to strangers. Perhaps, when you were a child, for your own protection, that makes sense, but now, it probably might not make so much sense anymore.
We go to great lengths to explain why the brand owners need them because a lot of people are unauthorized sellers of Amazon products, meaning they got it, it fell off the back of a truck kind of a thing, good gray markets, or somehow someway, they got their hands on this product. They don’t have a relationship with the brand, so they will do things like violate MAP (minimum advertising pricing), they will try to circumvent Amazon’s policies which can land the brand in hot water, they will misrepresent the brand, get bad reviews, et cetera.
It’s very parasitic, which I always found interesting because that’s what people would rather do than pick up the phone and talk to the brand owner, the representative, or whoever. I have to go to great lengths to break those issues down and explain these concepts in a way where people can get them, accept them, and be like, okay, even if I’m scared to make these calls, even if I’m brand-new, and I’ve never done this before, here’s why it’s good for the brand owner. Here’s why it’s good for Amazon. Here’s why it’s good for me. Here’s what’s involved. Yes, I can absolutely do this. I have to spin the whole webinar, essentially, articulating the case to get that “aha” moment, and that really just boils down to fear. It’s always some sort of fear of something that limits somebody.
Great businesses don't change people's lives. They help them change their own lives. Share on XI’ll give you another great example. We were working with a client two days ago who did a webinar that we knew he did just to have it put the product out there. It was done knowing that we were going to create a webinar for him a couple of months later. Now, we’re in the process of creating that webinar for him. It’s great because we have his webinar and we’re contrasting it.
I spent 45 minutes on our 1-hour call with a gentleman named Jonathan. Wil’s on the call. Everything we’re doing is hammering every possible objection or excuse that somebody wouldn’t want to do this with.
It’s so funny because he didn’t have readily, easily available answers. He had to think about this which showed me he was thinking about the outcome. He was thinking about the process. He was thinking about the procedure because he has this methodology where he’s getting Facebook opt-ins for 85% less in the market he’s in than what most people get without compromising the value of the buyer.
I can get you cheap opt-ins from Zimbabwe. There aren’t going to buy anything, but at least I got you an opt-in. There are ones that have commercial intent and equals what you would pay five times for. Great method.
The only problem with this methodology is that it involves using a book. It actually involves bundling books. What I’ll do is say, hey, are you a fan of business books? Here are 12 books. You can pick any one of these for a free, limited time. What he does is he takes 12 different books and puts them on a landing page. People can select the one, two, or three that they want, opt-in, and get those books.
There are two major issues that clients are going to have with those who aren’t authors, which is a majority of people. Oh my God, I got to write a book. That’s scary. Oh my God, I got to get lumped in with 12 other people. Is that going to work? What if they don’t pick me? How am I going to find 12 people, et cetera?
Your job is to help people release limiting viewpoints, states, and conclusions. You help them see the opportunities that empower them to move forward in their lives. Share on XOn his webinar, he spends a lot of time talking about how to create the book. He has a really slick process for it. They do produce really good books. I’ve read them, I’ve seen them, and I liked them. It really has nothing to do with this person even writing anything, but there’s so much emphasis on a book that people just mentally check out.
The other issue is there is this problem with that whole bundle of how do I get 12 people on it. He has a really elegant solution to that, but he doesn’t introduce that until an hour after he breaks the concepts, so again, they’ve mentally checked out.
The way that I’m thinking about it—I don’t know if I’m going to go this way—right now, my initial premonition is this. Here’s how I’m going to start the webinar. I’m not going to get into the weeds and the details. Basically, I want to assert this concept of if you’re going to buy advertising on Facebook, you got to have some sort of advantage. Otherwise, you’re going to lose.
Find some innovative way to change the rules of the game.
There are historically two types of advantages to buying advertising on Facebook. One is you outspend everybody else. That’s a very effective method, provided, of course, that you have more money than the next person which most people aren’t going to. The second one is you “outflex” somebody. You outmaneuver them. You find some sort of innovative way to change the rules of the game, so you play by a new set of rules.
Until you can do that, it’s probably unlikely you’re going to be successful with this advertising. If you’re trying to funnel-hack what everybody else is doing or model what they’re doing, you’re probably going to lose. You got to have some sort of advantage. Otherwise, you can’t play the game.
What does an advantage look like? Now, I’m going to build and framework of what an advantage could look like. Then I will spend 45 minutes because it’s great because in this type of advantage the ads are easy to write. They’re not sophisticated. The real value in this advantage comes from the bundle effect.
Essentially, they don’t sell baseball cards in packages of one, Pokémon cards, or anything. They put them in a big bundle. You buy them thinking, I will like one, two, or three of these. Then psychologically, the effect is that if I choose which one I want, that’s ownership and I will value it more.
If you force the choice on me, even if I make it, I will value it less. I have to get that all high in there as well. Let me stack all these advantages you get up using this particular model. Now, they’re committed, and then it’s like, oh, by the way, we’re going to use a book to do that. Now, the book becomes where it should be.
What matters strategically is you have an offer that’s hard to match.
It’s a function of the bigger picture, but generally, because we all get so excited about the craft and what we master, we tend to focus on the details which ultimately don’t matter. What matters strategically is you have an offer that’s hard to match, that is different than anybody else. It’s completely compelling that it taps into certain psychological processes that most people don’t have access to. Then it’s just a matter of let me now convince you that you in fact can write the book. Let me show you how we bundle these together for you, but we got to set that up first.
That’s another example of how we would create a paradigm shift or an aha moment. The aha moment is I can have an advantage when buying advertising on Facebook even if I’m brand-new, even if I’m just starting. Even if I’m not technically that sophisticated, I can have an advantage. If I did have an advantage, then I would understand that I can now be successful whereas I couldn’t before. There you go.
Wow. Those are great examples. I love those. While you were telling us these stories, essentially, I was thinking of the three-act structure in how the setup—you used that term—is the exposition. That’s the beginning of the story-telling.
It just makes all the sense in the world that you’re taking people on a journey. They’re rooting for the underdog, they’re on the heroes’ journey, and it’s not about the product, it’s not about the details, it’s not about a whole bunch of different tactics.
You laid out at the beginning of our conversation that there are a lot of tactics when it comes to producing really effective webinars, things like the lighting, the price point, the risk reversal, when to insert the pitch, and all that stuff, but none of that matters in comparison to getting the right transformation, behavior changes, and getting them emotionally involved in the story.
Again, you got to give hope to the hopeless. That’s how I look at it. The concept I use is this: nobody goes to the therapist and says, listen, my life is almost perfect. It’s just really crushing and every day is pretty stupendous, but I think I can eke a little bit more happiness out of my life. Help me get that.
People don’t go to the therapist for that. People go to the therapist because they’re depressed because they can’t get out of bed. They can’t even motivate themselves to brush their teeth in the morning. It’s a disaster that precedes somebody seeking a solution.
In most cases with rare exceptions, when you’re selling a product, you are selling it to people who are seeking to get out of a very painful and stressful situation. “I want SEO because I can’t get traffic.” It’s a very common reason why people go to SEO. They don’t say, “I want SEO because I really want my brand to be best represented in all facets and all places that I am.”
There are some customers that do that, but a lot of them are like, “I need traffic. If I don’t get traffic, I can’t make payroll. If I can’t make payroll, I’m going to have a revolt. My kids are going to starve to death. I need to drive traffic. I will do SEO if I’m convinced it’s a better solution in buying the traffic, or I will do SEO if I’m convinced that there’s some way that I can make this work even though I don’t even know how to spell SEO.”
This is where we have to meet the clients. Most people will never get on a webinar. Let’s just be very clear. This is always a funny conversation I have because people will say, “Jason, who in their right mind watches an hour, two-, or three-hour webinar?”
The answer is most people for most topics in most situations do not. If it’s a TikTok link, that’s about their limit. For most people that are the best prospects in your market, one minute isn’t even scratching it. They need at least an hour. They probably need 100 hours and you can’t even give them enough. They always want more. These are the people you can help the most. These are the people that are going to spend the most money. They’re about 5% of your market.
We don’t want to build our business—unless we’re a gigantic corporation, a public company, or we have very deep VC-funded pockets—on the 95% of the audiences that represent about half the revenue in a market. We want to focus and build our business on the 5% because not only will that make us more money, we will have customers that are most likely to benefit from our services.
Your mom-and-pop dry-cleaner down the street could probably benefit from SEO. Their SEO is probably horrible, but are they really going to do anything with that? Is it really going to make a difference? They’re probably going to complain at every step of the process. It’s not going to be very enjoyable. But if you have somebody that has some life-changing, life-altering, new medical procedure and they can’t market it, SEO can completely change their lives and their customer’s life. There’s a lot of money involved to the direct proportion in which impact can be measured.
The concept here is most people most of the time won’t get on these webinars with a few who are most in need of help and are most willing to do what it takes on their end to get that help and take it, because I can’t do it for you. I can open the door, but you have to walk through it. What we do is we don’t really change people’s lives. We help them change their own lives. They change their lives. We set them up so change can occur. That’s a very important distinction.
Those types of people are who we build the webinar for. These are the types that are likely to come. They’re likely to show up. This is why with a little bit, you can do a lot in terms of your marketing. For me, in the webinar, what’s great about that is who comes and watches this? Only the people that matter the most. In fact, right now, they are underserved in the given market because people think attention spans are getting less and less.
And show-up rates are less and less.
They might be and they certainly will be as things trend up and down. The idea, though, is we don’t play the show rates, we don’t play the conversion percentages, and we don’t play earnings per attendees or any of these other metrics that people quote when they do webinars. We play the people’s livelihoods.
I got people to tell me, “Oh, nobody’s going to sit through a webinar, Jason.” In a seminar on day 2 of a 3-day seminar, they’d spend 10 hours a day. They flew 10 hours halfway across the country to attend, but no, nobody’s going to sit on. You will sit on if it’s life-changing possibly for you but here’s the point if that’s what you’re coming for, I better be able to deliver that. I got to hold up to my end of the bargain.
Life-changing starts with usually the focus on what’s your biggest problem? What’s your biggest pain point related to blank that I could reasonably show you a solution for in one hour? I’m not going to solve all your problems, but I can solve one of your problems.
Inevitably, it almost always revolves around this fear that I’m not adequate enough to do this, that I am not deserving enough to do this, or I’m not capable enough to do this. The majority of our focus, we got to put it in plain terms and not abstract. It’s got to be concrete but almost always. This is true with the millionaires as it’s true with the thousandaires. Almost all of it is like, let me show you why yes, even you—you with little confidence, little self-esteem, little faith in your ability—can do this. That’s generally what we end up focusing on because people are their own worst enemy when it comes to their progress, so we got to help them realize their capability.
This is why I use a lot of closes. I love some of these closes. The talk to strangers close is a great close. Another close that I use oftentimes is, there was a point in time in your life where you couldn’t walk, you couldn’t talk, and you couldn’t even go to the bathroom—anywhere other than in your pants. And now, look at you. Look at how far you’ve come. You’ve learned a language without even any formal structure or tutelage. You picked it up even before you went to school. Why? Because you wanted to. You learned to walk even though you had no understanding of physics. Pretty soon, you took these 26 letters of the alphabet and you started stringing them together to make all sorts of complicated phrases, essays, and paragraphs.
That really puts people back in tune with what they actually can achieve. Now, that makes them feel okay. What made that happen? Curiosity, excitement, desire? You have that in you. How can we point that out? How can we channel that? It’s a big close I use all the time.
I use the close of the fear of success. Somebody says, “Jason, I’m afraid of this.” I say to them, “Are you afraid of failing or are you more afraid of succeeding?” I literally use this quote. I use this all the time. I’ll say, “You know what, you know failure.” Now, keep in mind, I’ve had rapport built. I have empathy. I have a connection. They want the truth at this point from me and they can take the truth.
I say, “You know failure. You are aware of what failure feels like. That’s very comfortable. It’s not what you want, but at least you know what you’re dealing with. For success, you don’t have any frame of reference for that. You have no idea what that is going to be like. Is it really fear of failure that’s holding you back or is it fear of success?” What I have to do there is I don’t have to convince them that it’s one or the other. I have to open them up to the possibility to see beyond this myopic viewpoint of this very microscopic thing that’s holding them back where they’re rigid and inflexible.
I had a client the other day. I was on a call with a customer on the webinar. I wasn’t running point. I was running support on this webinar. She says, “I need to be 100% confident before I purchase this.” I said, “Couldn’t you just be 60% confident?” She goes, “Okay, I’m in.” I’m like, “Does that have to be 100%?”
For her, that was enough. She realized that “Oh, okay, I’m trying to hold myself to an impossible standard that I can never be and I floated the idea. This is a money-back guarantee.” This isn’t that expensive of a product even, but most people have this issue of what if I make the wrong decision? What if I buy the product and it’s not for me? What if I buy the product, I try it out, and I can’t do it? What if I buy the product, I neglect it, I don’t even download it, or I don’t even consume it? They end up getting scared and they get stuck, so I help them get unstuck.
Ultimately, that’s what I do, but to your point, all of this comes from a framework and understanding of what’s the thing that’s stopping you from getting what you want? What’s a thing that I can show you how to destructively get rid of, crush it, or get it out of the way in one hour or less? Because if I can do that, then you’re going to entrust in me that any other constraint that you have, I am adequately prepared to help you handle that as well. Now, you’re very eager to buy the product or more open to it at least, right?
When you were talking about the fear of success, that reminded me of the Marianne Williamson quote I love which is, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frighten us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.” It’s just beautiful. It goes on, but I thought of that quote when you were talking about that.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frighten us.Marianne Williamson
That’s right on. Ultimately, that’s what we do. It doesn’t look that way, by the way. You analyze my webinars, you’re not going to see that. You’re going to see there are two levels of communication in any type of communication. There’s the overt communication and then there’s the covert communication. Really good communicators can simultaneously communicate on two levels.
It will seem as if I’m teaching you, mechanics, “Hey, do you want to sell on Amazon? Step one, do this. Step two, do this. Step three, do this.” But I’m also covertly creating the room for you to be open to alternative perspectives on the problem other than the one perspective that has you stuck because all those inevitably when somebody’s struggling with something to get something that they can’t quite get right now, it’s because they are stuck. They can’t see anything other than one specific perspective.
A flaw in human conditioning is if the brain were an operating system, this is a bug in the operating system that needs to be debugged. That bug is this concept of binary thinking or that’s also called dichotomous thinking. It’s called black-and-white thinking. There are 100 other names for it that psychologists and behaviorists have come up with, but it’s absolutely brilliant.
We tend to default to organizing things as one or the other. I’m either an introvert or I’m an extrovert, which is just plain ridiculous because there are certain situations where you’re somewhat introverted and somewhat extroverted. There are probably a million situations where that will change due to circumstance, context, set, and setting; that’s what they like to say.
Sometimes, you need failure to succeed. Sometimes, success is the ultimate failure.
Or good and evil. That’s a very dichotomous way in which to view the world. If you look at things, like I’m absolutely either good or I’m evil, you’re probably going to feel evil eventually because you’re going to do something that isn’t so good and if it’s an extreme. Most people see fear of failure and success. Those are two extremes. There are ways to fail in being successful and there are ways to succeed in failing. Sometimes, you need failure to succeed. Sometimes, success is the ultimate failure. You have to be aware of the fact that almost all of these have so much nuance and context.
What’s brilliant about that is there are so many perspectives to consider. A perspective of looking at the perspective of is the opposite, one of my favorite ones. If somebody says, “I’m afraid of failure,” I say, “Well, are you afraid of success?” If somebody says, “I can’t afford it,” I don’t think you can afford not to have it.
I’m not saying we do this. If somebody said, “I don’t have the time,” perfect, we designed this for busy people. We didn’t design this for people that have 50 hours laying around each week. We knew you didn’t have the time. There are a lot of methods. That’s just one perspective shift, the child perspective shift as you’ve heard me say earlier.
I got to interrupt and share something I learned from my Kabbalah teacher just recently, is to look for the good in the bad and look for the bad in the good because there isn’t the dichotomy of just good and bad, or good and evil. Evil has good in it. It all comes from our higher power, including the bad. That was an epiphany for me.
The way I look at things that helps me structure my webinars is that things are not good or bad. They’re either empowering or limiting to some degree. I ask myself, does this empower me or does this limit me? I ask myself if I’m teaching somebody, will this empower them or will this limit them? People will always come to you, catastrophize. They’ll say, “Hey, what if I do this and all this goes wrong? What if I sell on Amazon and Jeff Bezos personally singles me out and puts my head on a pipe? What if this brand owner accuses me of being an idiot, hunts me down, and beats me to an inch of my life?” They come up with not exactly that preposterous but boy, these are worst-case scenarios.
One day, because I got tired of hearing this, I was like, “You know what, nobody comes to me and says, ‘What if I accidentally become the best-seller on Amazon?’” Nobody sees it through that lens. If you’re going to catastrophize, let’s do it on both ends to at least be fair. But people tend to only view it from one perspective. Does that empower you or does that limit you? If that limits you, I suggest you don’t necessarily do it.
In the first half of my business, I used to use anger because anger was very useful to me. You get me all pumped up, I would knock stuff out. I would crush it. But I wasn’t very pleasant to be around after a while, even to myself.
Life is a series of refinements. The refinement to that was, is there a state that is as empowering as anger without any of the secondary harm that can be included with that? It turned out that there was. For me, it’s not about success or failure, it’s about curiosity. Let me see what’s going to happen. I’m interested to see what I’m going to find out. What’s going to go my way and what isn’t going to go my way? What am I going to be surprised about? Where’s going to be the challenge and the opportunity? Where’s going to be the opportunity and the challenge?
Imagine if you came into the state of mind with a problem with that. How much easier would it be? Your job on a webinar—anywhere for that matter but specifically when there’s money on the line; this is when you have to really be good at this stuff—is to help people gently release some of these limiting viewpoints, states, and conclusions, and open up the opportunity for them to try on other empowering alternatives to at least consider because otherwise, it’s unlikely they’re going to change even if they buy your product.
Einstein said it best. He said, “You can’t solve a problem with the same consciousness which created it in the first place.” Essentially, what we’re doing is repatterning it, but I don’t ever look at anybody as a failure, absolutely not. Think about how empowering that is. If I see you and I never see failure, I see potential. I see leverage. I see excitement. I see openness. How much better can I serve you?
I’ll tell you, here’s a great example. This actually happened in Genius Network. I was breaking down a model one time for the group. We were in a seminar. There were 60 people in the room, or 40, whatever. I said to them, “Listen, if you do this, after day one, day two, or day three, you’re going to get an 80% drop off from your audience. They just won’t participate.” I said to them, “Why do you suppose that is?” Immediately, they said, “Because they’re lazy.”
I actually got upset. It offended me. I didn’t mean to and want to, but I did. It was a knee-jerk reaction. I was like, no, never think of your customers as lazy. That’s a character assessment which is very dangerous because if you start to look at your audience with cynicism, it will limit your ability to serve them. It’ll limit your ability to connect and help them. It’s not good for them, it’s not good for you.
It creates that reality. You characterize somebody and you collapse their infinite possibilities down into the thing that you’re describing them as.
Absolutely. You reinforce the ceiling in which they’re operating on currently when you do that. By the way, it becomes very dangerous for yourself because if you try to do something and you’ll get around doing it, you may start to call yourself lazy, which is not going to serve you either.
I said a while ago, “You will lose 80%. Give me millionaires, you will lose 80%.” They said, “We’ll make a bet with you, Jason”—this group was going to go through that—”we won’t be that.” I said, “I’ll take that bet, 80%, day 3.”
I see leverage. I see excitement. I see openness.
This was my point to them. I said, “It is just one of those things. It’s the law of nature. If you obsess over trying to fix it, if you get angry about it, if you waste your potential on trying to focus on the minutiae, it’s not going to serve you, it’s not going to serve your customers. So you have to be okay.” My big buy into that audience was you have to be okay with losing 80% by day 3. If you’re not, it’s going to be hard. If you are, it’s going to be easy. “Listen, I don’t want to lose anybody. Do you? No. But you’re going to have to discipline yourself to that disappointment. Otherwise, you won’t be successful.” Now, they’re like, “Okay, I got this.”
My favorite framework on a webinar is saying, ‘’Hey, listen, even though you can do X, Y, and Z, really go for broke and be awesome, I don’t want you to. I only want you to operate down here because I don’t know if you’re ready to operate up here.” If you deliver this in such a way your audience will buy the product to prove you wrong, they will say, “Instead of trying to be worried about whether I can reach that goal,” they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to go way beyond.”
Most people, when they buy anything, are afraid that they’re only going to get a small potential out of the thing that they’re buying. Then, they have to justify, is that enough to make the purchase? If I only get 5% on the value that’s promised, does that justify the purchase?
In my case, I’m like, “Listen, even though there’s so much here, I forbid you to make this much money before the end of year one. Don’t do it. Only make this much.” They’re like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to show you.” That’s such a more powerful frame where I am now taking the opposite. I am being the limiting voice that they’re going to disprove, not an advanced frame, but nonetheless that is very powerful.
I used to do it all the time on Amazon, and it was true. This was where it was built on. There are two ways to play the Amazon game. One is you can go big or go broke. The other way is the steady, you make $3000 a month, then it goes to $4000, and over a year or two, now you have a real, serious, solid business.
I said, “I’m going to show you people that are making $40,000, $50,000, $100,000 a month in some instances. I do not want you to emulate them.” I said, “A large part of why they got there was the right time, right place, and that was a whole lot of luck. I know people are allergic to that word. I’m afraid if you attempt to do that, you might miss, and you might come up with nothing, so instead, I want you to follow this approach.”
You can’t solve a problem with the same consciousness which created it in the first place. Albert Einstein
I showed them this guy named Rahul, who is a customer of ours. Rahul’s approach was great because it had these setbacks and delays. He only said his goal is to make $1000 a month, and he ended up making more. Then, I showed them over time how that could look like. I was like, “Rahul to me is the best way to go about this because of the lack of risk. Yes, you limit your upside, but boy, you just almost completely get rid of the downside.”
What that reminds me of is James Schramko talks about this thing called the mildly impressive case study. You can relate to a 30% increase in your organic traffic, your sales, or whatever, but a 500% or a 2000% increase sounds like nonsense. A huge household brand name like Chanel or something, that might work for Chanel, but that’s not going to work for me. Then, they just tune out.
And there’s this concept that anybody can win the lottery. You just pick five numbers. It doesn’t take any other expertise. We were seeing this in the crypto market right now that we’re playing. Some of these guys think that they’re geniuses when I just call them “professional coin-flippers.” They’ve called the heads a couple of times in a row and now they’re going to sell you a course on the concept.
Anybody can win the lottery. It’s not relatable. It’s not something that I want my customers to model, even because I want their long-term success. I sell you something one time. Woopdidoo, I made some money. If I empower you and make you more money, you now have more money to spend with me and I could sell you many things. If each one of those makes you better, then there’s an unlimited amount of things that I can sell you over our lifetime—either yours or mine, whoever lives longest. That’s the business I want to be in.
I want them to have long-term success.
That’s the business I strive to be in. I don’t want my customers to act against their own interests. It’s all possible, of course. It’s their decision at the end of the day, but I give them these two models. I say, “This is what’s possible. These are the parallels involved. This is what’s safe.” Regardless, the idea is—this is called double-blind in psychology—I win either way because if somebody says, “Okay, I’m going to stick to the script,” great, I’m happy. If somebody says, “I’m going to defy you and I’m going to go overboard,” I’m not convincing them to burn the midnight oil. I’m not pushing them to work harder, which is probably not going to work that well. They’re doing it internally, and that’s more effective. That’s better and it still allows them to have this parachute with the backup chute. If I go for broke, I can always regress back down to here.
Again, this is higher-level selling. Most people won’t need this, but ultimately, if you really want to go big, you got to differentiate. Most markets don’t need that because what I’m talking about today is the key differentiation point, just doing it the way I described it to you. If it’s the same thing you sell that everybody else sells, you will uncommoditize yourself just through the medium as well. But when you’re playing all-star level, big-boy ball, you want absolute positioning that has countered the rest of the market.
One of the effective ways that we do webinars that’s kind of the rest of the market is everybody’s selling best-case scenario mostly. All this goes right. Look at all these success stories, it’s all good. There’s no failure. They are scared to even bring up the potential limitations and objections.
We come out there and be like, “Listen, I’m going to downplay this for you and minimize some of the possibilities. I’ll show you the big stuff but I always bring you back to reality.” Now, we sell differently because nobody else sells that way. When I say, “Yes, you can do $100,000. Yes, I got 50,000 studies that I can show you that do $100,000 a month. It’s absolutely entirely possible, but I think the problem with trying to go for $100,000 is you limit the opportunities to a very thin slice. I don’t want you to do that necessarily. I want you to do this model instead.”
You can get fancy. The problem with getting fancy is you might get overwhelmed. You’re trying to do 100 things at once instead of just doing 1 thing. You can do that, but if you’re my child, I’m going to tell you to do this instead. I’m giving them those options. Now, it’s a whole different sort of selling because people are not used to being sold in that way. Not only do you have any content, you need a presentation.
If you really want to go big, you got to differentiate.
That’s stat. It’s not just one plus one equal two. This is an exponential effect which can really differentiate you from your market. With that said, just getting in front of somebody and attempting to serve right now for most people is where I want you to be at.
By the way, I just demonstrated the technique for you. I gave you the big picture and then I pulled it back to reality. That’s a really good technique because the reality is where did I learn most of my stuff? At the end of the day, it came like this. It came from the fact that I’ve been on a webinar. I would sell products back then that were $300, $400, $500. Not a lot, not the price point typically I recommend you to do today but back then, I didn’t know what I was doing. We wouldn’t get a lot of people on these webinars. It was only me back then, but I wouldn’t get a lot of people on these webinars. I may have a whole hour of material and then a 15-minute pitch at the end.
I’m out of slides, but I got 50 people on the call still. They’re still active in the chat. I’m like, what do I do? I have energy, I don’t want to end the webinar, and there are souls in front of me. Maybe I can connect with a few of them. Part of me also does math. If I can sell to two more people in the next hour at $500 a pop, that’s $1000 an hour. That’s a lot of money. Not as much as I make these days, but back then, that’s a lot of money. Okay, let me do it.
It would take me an hour and I might close two of them. Now, there are 40 people left in the webinar. They’re still active. Can I go another hour? Turns out I can. Do I pick up another sale? Now, I’m only making $500 an hour, but even that was worth it back then. When you factor in lifetime value and when you figure out the skills, that’s what really is valuable.
Here’s what happens. After you do that, you do one of those a week. You go 4 hours one time a week where you got about 1½ hours of material and 2½ hours of free-flowing where you’re just talking to people and you’re trying different stuff out. By about week 50 of the year, you don’t care anymore, which is great, because you’re not so worried about the niceties. You’re not so worried about the normal things that keep people in a certain mode of operation. You just try things for your own amusement because you don’t want to say the same things over and over again.
You don’t want to do Groundhog Day, so you start screwing around even. You just start to see, what would happen if I did the complete opposite of what I’m supposed to do? Very often, you’ll find that the opposite is actually the thing because nobody does it. For a lot of people, the best thing is to get in front of audiences because they’re very forgiving. If you lead with your heart and you attempt to serve with sincerity, even if you get some of it wrong, even if you make it overly complicated at first, even if you screw up the pitch.
For some of our best webinars, we’ll go back to our audience and say, we messed up. We thought you needed to know X, Y, and Z. Turns out we were wrong. You just needed to know X and you needed to know that in-depth. If you will forgive me, I would like to make it up for you. Then, do a webinar two days later. Oh my God, you almost want to screw up the first one just so you can redeem yourself in the second one.
I will never do that intentionally, but the purpose of this is to provide value and service. That’s how you make the sale long-term. If you do that, they will be very forgiving of mistakes. Over time, you will develop inherent capabilities and unconscious knowledge that will allow you to just be able to look at a customer and say, this customer probably needs to hear this thing specifically in order for them to now be able to sit down that thing that they’ve been carrying around that’s holding them back. That’ll be 100% different than the next customer. This situation should probably be presented in this way, not that way. But you don’t get that until you get in front of people, make offers to them, see what happens, and then adjust.
I love how you see these people as souls and that you’re here in a place of service. That’s a great frame. That’s a great way to be in the world. Do you have a few minutes to switch to a lightning round mode?
Absolutely.
Cool. We’ll keep the answers short. I’ll get through as many of these questions as quickly as possible. First off, what—if any—are some of your favorite platforms that you like to recommend?
Zoom for webinars certainly is the easiest, most stable platform. Zoom brought me in, so I’m also loyal to them. I’m the only marketer that’s actually trained Zoom customers before the IPO. I came and I did that. I like Zoom because it’s simple, it’s easy, and it’s not web-based. The fact that it’s an app is actually going to help create better conversion. It feels more intimate. It feels like an event. I’m a big fan of Zoom.
Great. Related question, automated webinars or always live?
I like the concept of automated webinars. It’s very hard to make it work. There are a few times where we’ve made them work, but generally speaking, live webinars are going to serve you better. There are many exceptions.
If you’re going to do an automated webinar, throw out the rule book. It’s a whole different approach to doing automated webinars than it is to do live webinars. We literally have a complete, separate strategy if we’re going to do an automated webinar.
Ultimately, you do both. For you, one will work better than the other in most situations. You do one when it makes the most sense, and you do one when it makes the other sense. But my answer to people is, which one are you going to put out into the world first? That’s the one you do first.
It’s almost always live.
Almost always.
Favorite life-changing webinar that’s not one of your own? I’ll give my example first of all. I don’t attend very many webinars. I could probably count on one hand the number of webinars I’ve attended this year, but there was one that changed not only my life but my destiny. It was completely unrelated to business.
It was how to receive messages from angels and departed loved ones. I know it sounds pretty out there, but it was powerful, amazing, life-changing, destiny-changing, and one of the best hours I’ve spent this year. That’s mine. What’s your favorite or most impactful webinar that you can think of that you’re either familiar with, from it being a client or that you attended?
That’s a great question. Let me think about that one. Dan Kennedy did one. He made it a webinar later, but it was originally a platform speech at these Peter Lowe events where he would go and he would sell them like this marketing toolkit. I’ve listened to that one 100 or 200 times.
At one point in time, I almost said every word of it, memorized. This is before I ever made any money online. At one year, because it’s $300 to buy his product, so for my birthday, I had my mom buy it for me. That was my birthday present. That was all I got for my birthday that year.
That today is still the most impactful webinar that I’ve ever seen even though I didn’t see it honestly. The first time I listened to it in audio format before I ever saw it. Then, they ported it over to a webinar. I can’t think of one that is more impactful to me. I learned so many closes and so many strategies from that thing.
Is that available online?
I don’t know. A guy named Michael Senoff used to have this thing called Hard To Find Seminars many, many years ago in 2005. He had the ability, a right, or something at some point in time to give that away for free. I don’t know what shape or form it’s available in. It’s called Magnetic Marketing. It’s just so empowering.
I think another one was Phil Town. Phil Town would do this one on investing. It was one of the greatest pitches that I’ve ever seen. Again, this is before I ever sold. I modelled a lot of techniques.
I love Phil. He’s amazing. He was a guest on my other podcast.
Oh, cool.
He’s a cool guy. Awesome. Those are great examples.
I’ve been taking this one, too, many years ago. I don’t know if it was him or if he let it or hosted it. He was an LP master practitioner who taught this framework that I still use to this very day on a webinar which is essentially the concept of why what, how, what if.
That’s not exactly what he talked about because I modified it, but the whole concept of why is this important? Before I tell you what to do, let me tell you why it’s important. Let me tell you what’s involved, so you know the moving pieces. It’s like here’s the puzzle box. Before you put the puzzle together, you have the picture. Then, the how, how specifically to do whatever it is that you’re doing. Then, the what-if is the possible outcome or outcomes that you can see.
Most people focus solely on the how—do this, do this, do this. Seeing that webinar many, many years ago—again, this is 2006, 2007—was a complete game-changer for me from a communicative model. I’m like, wow, that’s so powerful. For years, I would only write every chapter or every piece of material that I would create in written form.
It would start off with the context, why this is important. What’s involved? Generally, the 3–5 things that might be related to the topic at hand. How to do it? How is either do this, do this, do this? How it’s either that or consider this, this, and this into these different degrees and how they interrelate to each other.
Then, what if. Here’s what can happen to you in the worst case that’s still acceptable, here’s what can happen to you in the best case which would be awesome, and here are some of the likely things that are going to happen to you. Here’s where you’re going to stumble a little bit. Here’s where you’re going to get some purchases. Here’s what can hold you back. That kind of stuff. Super powerful framework. I still use it to this day in some variation.
That’s amazing. I love that. Last lightning round question. How did you end up becoming a Hare Krishna monk?
Oh my God. I was always a musician. I was a rapper since I was six years old. I was introduced to the Hare Krishna philosophy through a musician friend of mine who was a monk. I was going through so much mental issues at the time. I was 19 years old, so I was depressed. I was having 3–4 panic attacks a day. I had a really tough traumatic upbringing as a child. I was just not feeling worthy of anything.
That philosophy appealed to me because I read the introduction before even the Bhagavad Gita—just the introduction to the introduction—where essentially it was said, if a sane person sees something that’s interesting, they try it out, and if they get a benefit, then they go further. That’s all we’re asking you to do.
That message at that time hit me, so I tried it out. Within a month, I felt so much better. I went a little bit further, a little bit further, and then, pretty soon, for four years of my life, I was totally in that state of mind where I was meditating two, three, four, five, six hours a day. It really revitalized my passion for music to be impactful in the world and show up with that desire to really communicate. Then, I was like, okay, I got the music but I can’t sell it, so I got to learn business now.
From business, I’m like, okay, marketing seems to be important. Then, I’m like, oh my God, this marketing stuff is even cooler to me than music which I thought was my calling. Then, I got into marketing. All of this is interconnected but man, some of the best years of my life were when I was the most broke monetarily speaking, but spiritually, I was so enriched. It’s amazing how things work.
That’s so cool. Congratulations on your success, on all the powerful epiphanies, life-changing transformations you’ve had, and all the life-changing transformations you’re causing in others or inviting them to through your webinars and your clients’ webinars. That’s fantastic.
I know you have a book, One to Many. Where do folks pick up that book? How do they work with you if they want to hire you and your company, Rapid Crush, to assist with their webinars or marketing campaigns?
The best thing to do is just go to Amazon, type in the book, One to Many, and grab yourself a copy. I prefer hardbacks, but some people like the Kindle. That’s a whopping $10 to set you back. That’s a good starting point.
We don’t do client work so much anymore. We do consulting. I do consulting off and on. Just mostly for intellectual stimulation, not for money-making, but if there’s an opportunity you want to flow by us, grab the book. In there, there’s contact information, and we’ll go from there.
Awesome. Thank you, Jason. This was fabulous, inspiring, and really thought-provoking. Appreciate your time. Listener, please do something with this because there is so much gold here. Just find one thing to implement and make it a great week. We’ll catch you in the next episode.
Important Links
- Jason Fladlien
- Facebook – Jason Fladlien
- Twitter – Jason Fladlien
- LinkedIn – Jason Fladlien
- YouTube – Jason Fladlien
- Rapid Crush
- One to Many
- Joe Polish – previous episode
- Dylan Frost – previous episode
- Dan Hollings
- Dan Kennedy
- Dan Meadors
- Dylan Frost
- James Schramko
- Joe Polish
- Marianne Williamson
- Michael Senoff
Your Checklist of Actions to Take
Focus most on investing in my relationships with others. Use my time, presence, and best intentions in building authentic and sincere connections with people.
Maintain a positive attitude and outlook in everything I do, especially on new projects I am working on. Focus on the good as positivity given is often reciprocated.
Be resourceful and creative while working on projects and presentations. Sometimes resources are scarce, but that shouldn’t stop me from creating something worthwhile for my audience.
Set clearly defined goals. When I have clarity on the outcome I want to achieve, I can easily map out the steps that will help me get there.
Empathize with the people I am trying to reach. Always have my followers, subscribers, or customers first in mind in everything I do. Bear in mind that what I do is not about me but about them.
Don’t be afraid of failure. I will always be a work in progress, eager to learn and improve every step of the way.
Aim to empower others through compellingly authentic communication. The best talks are those that open better worlds and offer new knowledge to others.
Experiment with how I deliver my presentations to find out what works best for my audience. On the other hand, make sure I stay true to my brand in everything I do.
Explore tools, platforms, and marketing strategies to make all my work more convenient for me and my audience.
Grab a copy of Jason Fladlien’s book, One to Many: The Secret to Webinar Success.
About Jason Fladlien
Jason Fladlien has sold over 100 million dollars of products and services on the internet over the last 13 years. His main areas of expertise of selling on Amazon and doing webinars.
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