The Work From Anywhere Podcast

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Money. The word has a lot of connotations. Some positive, some negative. It depends who you talk to.

Money is a means of value exchange, and in order to acquire a lot of money, you need to learn how to exchange a lot of value. For most people, this means learning skills that help other people. Small business owners who start from the ground up and become successful do so by helping people on a large scale.

On the other hand, you have people who are totally broke who complain about rich people. Most of the time, these people are broke because they don’t have skills to provide value. We don’t all start on a level playing field, but once you are conscious enough to realize that you can develop your skills, it’s your responsibility to do so.

First, you have to learn to take care of yourself. That’s the best thing you can do for society. The next best thing you can do is take care of your family so that nobody else has to worry about them. By learning skills, you can take these burdens off of society right away.

Next, once you start making real cash, you employ people. You give them jobs, purpose, meaning, skills, and pay. Then, you help your community by creating more tax revenue. In turn, you’ll create a healthier economy, and this impacts your customers.

Guess what else we have? Freedom to dedicate our lives to a cause or purpose that we care about. If we want to help the needy, we have a lot more to offer than a few hours of our time. We have financial resources, power, influence, and we’re creating value on a massive scale. That’s what you can do by getting rich.

You have to learn the skills to provide value to a large amount of people, and you have to go through so much pain to do this. It’s a lot easier just to stay broke, but it’s selfish to do that because you’re missing out on helping thousands of people.

To learn more about obtaining skills that provide value, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast 

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Are you one of those people who needs to be liked at all times, and if somebody doesn’t like you, it really bothers you? If that’s you, do you have the success you want in business? If you don’t, your need to be liked is stopping you from succeeding.

Thank about your favorite television show and your favorite actor. Think about how much you like them. Now, are there people in this world who don’t like that show and will trash talk it all day long? Are there people who hate everything about that actor? There are probably thousands of them.

Anything that people love, people also hate. There’s polarity in great things. If you ever want to do great things, you have to be okay with that polarity. You have to be okay with being hated in order to be loved.

For years, it was very hard for me to do things because of the threat of rejection. I didn’t want to take on clients unless I was positive that they were going to get amazing results. You can develop your skills over time to get better results, but it’s not possible to be 100% sure about anything in life

Clients that are in business and successful know that. They know that not everything works and that not everything needs to work. If you’re waiting to work with clients that will never be disappointed in you, you’re probably never going to get started. The only way to learn how to get results is to get out there and try.

I want to challenge you. You have to make it a goal to get your first hater. If you have zero haters right now, I know you’re not doing anything significant. I want somebody to be upset with you. I don’t mean you should be an asshole to people, but I want you to realize that the things you think are bad aren’t as bad as you think.

You’re never going to make everybody happy.

To learn more about getting your first hater, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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I talk a lot about struggles that beginners have in business and why they fail. It’s because I think about it constantly. Two people might have the same business opportunity. One person can crush it, and the second person can fail over and over again.

What’s happening in their minds and actions that cause these people to not succeed? I think it comes down to if they are performing their business activities or not. Some people think that just starting a business gets results. They don’t understand that what gets the results is doing their daily business activities.

These five functions have to happen every single day in your business, no matter its size.

1. Lead generation. This is how many people you can get each day to say that they’re interested in what you offer. When most people start, this is about reaching out to local businesses.

2. Nurturing leads. What do you say to a lead after they contact you and say they’re interested? Do you offer to get on a call with them? You have to nurture the lead to get them to the next stage.

3. Conversion. This is when you convert a lead into a sale. It can involve having a conversation, figuring out what problem they’re having, and determining if you can help them. If you can, you make them an offer and they pay you.

4. Delivery. This is actually delivering the product, and for a marketing business, it means running ad campaigns for your clients.

5. Retention, resell, and upsell. This is how many months the client stays with your marketing business. Are you sending them updates to communicate the value that you’re bringing to their organization?

You have to learn the skills to perform these five business functions. If you can do that, you will have a business. Ask yourself if you have been performing them every day.

To learn more about improving your skills to accomplish these five tasks, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast 

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Most freelancers go from feast to famine. They work really hard to get new clients who keep them busy, so they stop prospecting. Eventually, the projects will finish, and the freelancer will have no clients left.

So, what do you actually have to do to get clients for an advertising agency?

You need to specialize not only in a market, but in a result. If you want to get clients and charge a lot of money, you have to be the expert. This means that you don’t ask your clients what they want, you tell them what they need based on the problems they’re describing.

Sell solutions, results, and outcomes. Not services. Your client doesn’t care how many backlinks you’re going to use or how many hours it’s going to take. After you give them the solution, maybe then they’ll want to hear about the method. Stop focusing on yourself and focus on solutions.

Use the case study method. Put together a case study of one of your past successes by laying out where a client was when you started working with them. Then, describe what results happened after you began helping them. What is that client’s life like now that you have provided a solution? You can then send this case study via email to other people in the market.

If you don’t have any results to use in a case study yet, you can use the springboard method. This is when you work for your first client for free, get them amazing results, and then ask for a case study, a testimonial, and referrals.

Prospecting needs to be an ongoing process. Commit a certain amount of time every day to it. That way, you’ll always have new clients in the pipeline, and you won’t have to work with clients you don’t want to.

To learn more about getting your first case study, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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If you hate money, you’re not going to make any. If you resent rich people, you’re never going to be rich. If you think it’s greedy to make a lot of money, you’re going to be broke forever.

A lot of people have serious hang-ups about money, but it’s not their fault. It’s called a money blueprint, and it’s the beliefs you have around money that were imprinted during your childhood. Some people were told growing up that there’s never enough money, money doesn’t grow on trees, that reach people are greedy, and so on.

Money is great. It’s an incentive to innovate, provide value to the world, and help other people. Most people who get rich through their business do so because they found a way to systematically help a large number of people. There are exceptions, but generally, people who build their own businesses have gone through great failure and persisted.

Can’t people just help one another without having to make money? No, because it’s extremely hard to run a business. You get shut down over and over again, and nobody else cares about your business. Money is what keeps you going. Without it coming into your business, you’ll have to stop and get a job. You must have a healthy cashflow in order to pursue a mission. Part of an entrepreneur’s job is to take on risk in exchange for financial incentive.

If you have false beliefs about money, like that every rich person is greedy and terrible, you might want to go talk to some rich people and then examine where these beliefs are coming from.

I love money because it produces far more good than bad in this world.

To learn more about making money by helping others, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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People in the beginning stage of their businesses that focus on details is a problem I see a lot. There’s a concept I teach: optimize wide first, fine tune later. When you look in entrepreneur groups, beginners will be wondering about which logo looks better, which software to use, etc. None of this matters, because they don’t have the big things figured out yet.

Business has an order, and if you go out of it, you don’t get very good results. Beginners see the people at the top focusing on details and think they should too. They haven’t figured out what market they serve, what problems the market has, or how to convey that they have the solution.

The fundamentals are some of the hardest things to get right. So, what do you have to do?

1. Get the big things right. We covered this already. Who are you serving, what problem do you solve, how do you solve it, and what words do you use to convey that to the market? Regarding what words to use, you have to continually test until you start getting reactions.

2. Get the big things right over and over again. When some people finally find what works, they suddenly feel like they should try something different. Keep doing what has brought you success.

3. Once you get a significant amount of business, getting the details right will improve results. In your business, the first customers you’ll sell to are early adopters. They’re not worried about perfection; they’re worried about finding a solution. When you get to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per year, then you can focus on perfecting for the middle of the market.

4. Optimization. The people who pick up things last, right at the end of the middle of the market, will want to see things very fine tuned. You will lose them if there are any sort of deficiencies in your business.

Go out there, get the fundamentals right, crush it, and you will succeed.

To learn more about getting the fundamentals right, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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A lot of people don’t understand what It means to get a job. They think they can just put their resume in a stack of other ones and that they stand a fighting chance. It’s just not true. They’re going to get destroyed because life is a competition. If you do things the same way that everyone else does them, you’re going to blend in and be ignored.

To land an interview you need to submit a plan, not just a resume. When I’m hiring, I don’t even look at an applicant’s resume until the second round of interviews. Submitting a plan is what will make you stand out.

Most interviews are more about cultural fit and commitment, and less about skill. You should ask questions about the company. Many people are so nervous because they have to talk about themselves that they just focus on what they’re going to say. That’s a big mistake. Focus on the company and act like you care about it.

In the post-interview, the employer is considering all the applicants that they have talked to. By this point, they’re sick of talking to applicants because it’s a lot of work. All the applicants start to blend together. A big mistake is that most applicants don’t follow up, even after a great interview. You need to follow up and give them ideas that you got from the interview.

I get a ton of applicants at my company, and when someone makes it to the final round of interviews, it’s usually because I really like something about them. I’ve had a couple of interviews with people who weren’t a great fit for the company, so they didn’t get the job. Afterwards, they’d follow up with me by sending a sample of their work. Twice now, I’ve hired people who did not get the role they applied for because of this. I created a position for them because I wanted them to work in my company.

If you’re having a trouble finding a job, it’s probably because you’re not showing the company what value you can add.

To learn more about landing your dream job or dream client, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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I wanted to make $1,000,000 in sales in 1 year by my 30th birthday, but I failed. I was not even close. Bu here’s the thing: having this goal caused me to hit it less than 2 years later. In that time, I learned 10 things that made me $1,000,000 in sales in 12 months.

1. The market doesn’t care how hard you work. Stop focusing on hard work and start focusing on leveraged activities that produce results.

2. The market rewards excellence. In any market, the majority of the rewards go to the person at the very top. When you progress from an F player to an A player, you’ll see disproportionate rewards.

3. Success is exponential. Your life in five years is based on what you are doing today. You have to be patient for the payoff.

4. Focus is the hardest thing. You have to have faith that focusing on one thing will pay off even when you’re not sure if it will or not. It’s still something I struggle with and work on.

5. Play to win instead of playing not to lose. A lot of people aren’t willing to take short-term losses for long-term gain. You have to take chances and invest in yourself.

6. Think like you already have a $1,000,000 business. Think about someone who’s really good at the thing you want to accomplish and then ask yourself, “how would this person think?”

7. Surround yourself with those on the same path as you. If everyone around you is already making $1,000,000 a year, you’re going to be pulled up to that same mindset.

8. Stories sell. We have to package our marketing in stories. That’s how the human brain absorbs information.

9. You need to master Facebook ads. If you can’t make money while you sleep, it’s going to be really hard to get past a certain level. You have to automate lead generation, and one of the best ways to do this is with Facebook ads.

10. Marketing is the most important skill you can have as a business owner, at least for the first $1,000,000. Without marketing and sales, nothing else works.

To learn more about growing your business to $1,000,000 in annual revenue, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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Advertising is a lot like music. You have to learn the basic structures to be able to play music, but once you do that, you have to start breaking the rules and doing things differently. Once you learn the basics of Facebook advertising, how do you then dominate your competition? Let’s cover 10 ways.

1. Use testimonials in your ads. These work almost all the time. If you’re working with a client, you can copy one of their Yelp reviews and paste it into their ad.

2. Use a curiosity gap in your ads. Open a question in the reader’s mind that they’ll be curious about getting the answer to. You want the first line of your ad to work the same way as a cliffhanger in a TV show.

3. Tell a story. The human brain is hardwired to respond to stories, and we’ll remember them much more often than a purely informational ad.

4. Human eyeballs. There better be eye contact, because we are wired to respond to it. It means we’re coming in contact with another living thing, so we need to pay attention.

5. Ad scent. This means that the landing page matches the ad in look, feel, and what you’re offering. Put the same offer on the landing page as in the ad.

6. Stop funnel hacking. It’s good to look at what your competitors are doing, but eventually, you have to break away from that. The best ads talk in a way that no one else does.

7. Take a risk. Test meaningfully different angles. Test things that are weird, edgy, and uncomfortable. If you think that you shouldn’t publish an ad because it’s uncomfortable, you probably should.

8. Start the ad with conflict. The human brain absolutely loves conflict. Movie stars do this all the time to get people talking about them.

9. Be a stalker. Give your lead relevant information at every stage of the funnel by nurturing your prospects throughout the process.

10. Stop being boring. Being too professional in marketing is the surest way to be ignored. Put your personality into what you’re doing.

Which of these 10 things do you do in your ads now, and which are you neglecting?

To learn more about generating sales leads through Facebook, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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The myth of no competition is this thing where newbies get into a new line of business, and as soon as they discover that there is competition, they immediately jump ship. These people never find anything that sticks and never have progress.

I’m not trying to be harsh, because I’ve been there too. When people do this, it’s like they’re searching for buried treasure. This cycle will repeat itself until they eventually realize that they need to stay in one place, do the hard work, and compete. That’s because life is a competition. The sooner you can accept that, the sooner you’re going to get results.

Competition is amazing because it means there are a lot of customers, and you just need to do something slightly different than your competition to scoop all their customers away from them. Some opportunities are thought to be easy because there is no competition, but then you realize that nobody is competing because there are no customers.

As soon as a new market forms where there is a lot of demand, people are going to jump in. All you have to do is stay one step to the side of your competitors. You can try to do what your competition is doing but better, but it’s a lot easier to just do it slightly differently. If you get in there and you’re not getting the results you want right away, just focus on the process.

Also, I was talking with my screenwriter friend recently about people who debate whether or not they should spend money on a course. We were saying that if you’re debating, you’ve already lost because there are always thousands of people who have bought the course and are now ten steps ahead.

Think about if you were competing at a professional level in sports and refused to get coaching. Instead, you decided that you’ll just watch a few YouTube videos for free. You would get annihilated.

To learn more about differentiating your business, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast