A candid look at a major marketing initiative that failed and the expensive lessons learned.

1. Facebook advertising with zero tracking
2. Paying for backlink service
3. Hiring too many writers and it not paying off

Have you thought about that for your own company? Do you just consider a percentage for every person who’s trained? or one price to train 100 people for instance?

I took a massive break at the end of 2024. And here's what I learned from that mental recharge.

I don't think you ever talk about actually what's in your course, and how do you decide what's good about it and what's not, or what needs to be updated. Why a course and not a membership or community (or why not that in addition)? What software do you use? Do you feel it's important for people to finish the course - meaning are there incentives and gamification to finish? Can participants get something like an amazon/starbucks gift certificate or something for referring friends to purchase the course? Have you also tried youtube ads to promote the course? What metrics do you use to decide whether course sales are good or not, or the course meets your standards or not?

An episode introducing new people to the podcast.

1. Raise prices
2. Do less, but more on the things that work
3. Focus on improving existing structures- do not invent new ones
4. Niche down

Exploring when to deliberately keep your business small versus when to expand, based on Matt's experience growing Swim University with just a 3-person team.

1. New B-roll: a steady stream of new b-roll will keep our content looking fresh and provide us more opportunities for visual hooks.
2. Running Ads: running low budget ads to our lead magnets and products will help our reach to new people.
3. Train The Algorithm: like and save pool content every day to train the accounts and find new visual inspiration.
4. Trending audio.
5. Add longer captions.
6. Use 3 hashtags. 
7. Improve Bio
8. Play around with adding the title in the first 5 seconds on screen. But make sure it's clear to read.

Being prepared is underrated. I want to practice preparation in all my work.

1. Research
2. Plan
3. Execute

How to Make SEO Articles Better

1. Answer the question in the first paragraph, even if it’s just a quick summary.
2. Be direct with the headlines
3. The Smart Way to Kill Algae In Your Pool Quickly -> The Fastest Way to Kill Pool Algae
4. Video should be near the top after the intro. I believe most people rather watch than read. Under the video we can include a Lasso box to one of our products.
5. Edit so it reads at a 3rd grade reading level
6. Create custom graphics for each post and make it feel like it’s part of the flow. Text should be limited so it can be read on a mobile device.
7. Create new featured image
8. FAQs are good if they do not make sense to include within the content.
9. Do not include complex charts. They cannot be read on a mobile device. Instead, replace these with a custom lead generation box to download the cheat sheet which will include charts.
10. Add built-in calculators where it’s appropriate 
11. Before making any improvements, collect questions using crazy egg for about a month or so. This will probably only work on popular articles or if we pay for traffic just to learn.