Yaro.blog

07/14/2025

Have you ever felt there is a ‘ceiling' capping how much money you make?

You have goals and targets but for some reason your business income seems to get stuck at a certain point.

I've felt this.

Have you ever felt there is a ‘ceiling' capping how much money you make? You have goals and targets but for some reason your business income seems to get stuck at a certain point. I've felt this. My first agency business struggled to get past $3,000 a month for most of the time I owned it. Then [....

03/19/2025

Late last year my lead generation methods started to fail.

We had solid growth in 2023 and throughout the start of 2024 focusing on Google search ads and LinkedIn video ads.

They both started to decline late 2024.

Nothing I did changed the results.

I can’t say why this happened — but I expected it. Nothing works forever in marketing.

I decided in order to help motivate myself and come up with new ideas, I’d dive into the books of Alex Hormozi.

His book trilogy is almost complete, with the third book due soon as I write this.

I listened to his first two audiobooks, $100M Offers and $100M Leads.

I found the leads book in particular very practical, so much so that I went through it a second time.

I also listen to Alex’s podcast episodes almost every day. He has some deep dives into marketing and sales that are solid resources.

Alex is one of the most tactical marketing content creators out there. He gives specific direction that stays current because he is drawing upon the work he does with founders of active companies today.

This is not easy to do since marketing never stays the same, so it’s hard to teach it.

Desiring more content on lead generation I downloaded audiobooks from Russell Brunson. I was especially interested to re-review his Traffic Secrets book, part of his own book trilogy (Dot Com Secrets, Expert Secrets, Traffic Secrets).

I’ve never been a big fan of Russell’s content, but I seriously respect his results. Clickfunnels is a monster and if webinars and funnels are a part of your marketing, Russell is someone you listen to.

I thought for this newsletter I’d list a few highlights I took away from these two marketing legends, both who have the results (and net worth!) to back up what they teach.

Here’s a brief list of highlights from their books…

Late last year my lead generation methods started to fail. We had solid growth in 2023 and throughout the start of 2024 focusing on Google search ads and LinkedIn video ads. They both started to decline late 2024. Nothing I did changed the results. I can’t say why this happened — but I expected ...

02/06/2025

You live in a bubble.

I live in a bubble too.

Today I really got a reminder of this...

I've been planning a marketing experiment for my company.

The short version of this plan is to go after larger clients.

Right now our positioning is focused on the entrepreneur, leader, CEO or expert.

We help this one very busy person get time back by placing two executive assistants from North America to support them.

The new experiment is going to position an offer at a hiring manager or workforce executive in a company.

The client in this case is a larger organization and the person we sell to is solving HR problems for the entire company or a department in the company.

For example, we could roll out 10 assistants to support 20 people in one department.

Or 100 to support 500 people (provided we can scale our hiring and processes).

With this new offer our deliverables remain the same - we give people time back. We'd just be doing it for more people at once.

However, in this case the marketing is different. The person we sell to is different.

This is nothing new of course. It's common for companies to target larger contracts as a way to grow.

EXPANDING YOUR BUBBLE

The reason I saw the bubble I operate in today is because I did some research.

I wanted to know more about the staffing solutions industry.

Our company operates in this industry (a sub-segment), so I was curious who are the really big players.

My 'bubble' up to this point was made up of the 30 or so companies that we compete against who all offer remote assistants of some kind.

I see these companies advertising for the same keywords we do in Google.

I get targeted by their ads on social media.

I know these companies because they come up on sales calls as options potential clients are considering along with us.

I also know these companies from my own research to see how they present their offers, pricing, points of difference, etc.

I've even done a few competitor deep dives, listening to podcast interviews with their founders to see if I can learn a key tactic they used to grow.

The biggest player in this group, based on my research, does around $30 Million a year, probably more since I heard this number a few years ago.

I'm almost certain none of these competing companies do over $100 Million a year.

Today I learned about a staffing solutions company that does $25 BILLION per year in revenue.

I expected to find larger companies when I expanded into the more broad staffing solutions market, but I had no idea the numbers could get this big.

Since then I've spent hours discovering more staffing solutions companies, reviewing their service offerings and exploring their websites.

It's been eye-opening -- and exciting, demonstrating that there is a lot more money being spent than I previously thought.

BUBBLES ARE DANGEROUS

The thing with bubbles is that you stay in them by default.

You visit the same websites. The social algorithms feed you similar content from the same or similar sources.

It's all an echo chamber until you deliberately step out.

What's especially dangerous about being in a bubble is you follow what you see and set your expectations to match what others do.

You think you have to advertise in the same way a company or person you compete against or follow does.

The problem is you don't know about what you are not seeing.

Take for example the staffing solutions companies I learned about today.

I've never been exposed to their marketing before.

I didn't even know they existed.

Their marketing doesn't target me. They may not even do any advertising using media channels.

Companies can get very big from direct outreach and interpersonal relationships.

These methods are not 'broadcasted'.

You won't hear about these companies unless you are directly targeted by them, in which case you are probably working for a large company yourself.

Media doesn't pay any attention to them because they are in 'boring' industries.

We hear all day about tech companies and tech founders.

We see ads from a segment of mostly mass-market consumables, like food, entertainment, electronics, cars, homeware, fashion and other items we use every day.

Staffing solutions is not mass market.

Yet everyone needs a job. And every company needs to hire staff.

It's a global need, but it's not something that is in the public eye.

There are so many companies and industries like this that operate within bubbles you never see.

As an entrepreneur and marketer I find this FASCINATING.

There are billions of dollars in transactions happening and these companies are following different marketing playbooks.

I get excited because it shows how big industries really are and how limited our marketing has been.

There's always more you can do and more people to reach.

Yet so many give up because the few things they do are not working.

The world is vast and if you have something of value there are more buyers out there.

You just need to keep reaching new people with new messages.

Don't stop, keep growing!

Yaro

01/21/2025

On calls with coaching clients I frequently explain the 80/20 Rule and how it can guide your daily actions.
​
Much like Tim focuses on a few key decisions each year, I want to be sure the few key actions I do each day lead to what I want.
​
For many people, the actions they do each day are reactionary to whatever is coming at them.
​
As an employee, that’s fine.
​
As an entrepreneur, it can kill your business.

Once on a podcast Tim Ferriss was asked to describe what his day is like. ​ His answer was deceptively simple… ​ ​“I spend most of my time thinking.”​ ​ I’m paraphrasing here, but this was the general message. ​ He didn’t talk about tasks or goals or morning routines or anythin...

10/30/2024

Overwhelming proof.

It's the most powerful force in marketing.

If you watched late night TV infomercials you've seen it in action.

Customer faces appear, one after the other, talking about how their life changed thanks this incredible ab-rolling machine.

They just keep coming. Another happy buyer. Then another.

Wow, this product really must work...

And yes, I bought an ab-roller many years ago. I even used it.

Humans trust other humans.

Especially when they look and sound like us.

We are herd-animals. We follow.

Decision making is hard and we don't like making mistakes.

It's easier to make the same choice others did.

This is why ad campaigns include testimonials.

Sometimes it's overt and obvious, like online ads with testimonial after testimonial.

It can be indirect, an influencer on social media showing how they use makeup or a celebrity drinking a vodka brand.

The idea is to show that people make the choice to buy what you sell and they benefited.

Thus it must be a good choice for other potential customers.

Buyers talking about their experience with your product or service is also a disarming way to deal with objections and highlight specific benefits.

If you explain why your product is worth the cost, you sound like a salesperson.

When a third-party details the value they received using a deeply personal example, expressing emotion and appearing 'normal', that's compelling.

With my company InboxDone.com, we've been recording short testimonial interviews every chance we get from the first year we were in business.

Podcast host Lex Fridman became a client of ours over a year ago. I'm justifiably eager to get a testimonial from him, but he's very private, so no luck yet!

Recently my marketing team and I put together some 'overwhelming proof' videos.

We made three versions of different length, each featuring short clips stitched together taken from our client testimonial videos.

You can see one in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2lA4v5j1Tk&t=98s

These videos are in rotation in our LinkedIn, YouTube and Meta ads.

With several years of data to look back on, I can report that our best performing video ad so far is a simple one minute clip from one of our testimonials.

Having lots of media to test gives you options.

Having many testimonials to create media from, gives you a variety of messages to experiment with.

I love it when a client says something during a testimonial video using a story or concept that I haven't heard before.

The words they say become the ad.

For example, in the most recent video I filmed, our client used the phrase "I was traumatized by email before working with you".

That's some powerful wording that just came out naturally.

It's also a heartfelt experience this person went through before finding our company.

I'm currently cutting up clips from the interview to give to my video editing team.

If you're not getting testimonials and you're not demonstrating 'overwhelming proof' to your audience, you need to change that.

Go talk to your customers and start collecting their stories.

It should be fun for you. Enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Yaro

10/29/2024

There's a lesson life teaches everyone.

You're not the right fit.

It happens to us when we first start dating.

We're 'not the right fit' for a person we like.

You can be not the right fit for a job, so you don't get it, or eventually you get fired from it.

For business owners, not the right fit is part of every day life.

Every ad that isn't clicked = not the right fit.

Every sales call that doesn't close = not the right fit.

Every visitor to your website who doesn't buy = not the right fit.

Marketing is the art of refining your traffic source to attract the right fit people and show them the right fit message.

When you find that source of 'right fit' people, that's when the magic happens.

Yet at the start is when you have the greatest likelihood of hitting the wrong fit.

This may be because you don't know who the right fit is yet, so your intention, targeting and messaging is off.

Even if you have clarity of who is the right fit, you begin experiments with nothing but assumptions to test.

This naturally leads to more wrong fits.

More dollars spent to show ads to the wrong people.

More visitors to your website seeing the wrong message.

More campaigns that reach people who just don't care.

The remedy is advice you've probably heard before...

Keep going.

Don't give up. Focus. Test again.

These might be good motivational slogans, but there is a rational reason to do it.

The advice 'keep going' works because it allows you to calibrate.

Most great outcomes in life are a series of small, incremental improvements, built upon the improvements that came before them, and so on.

Test, insight, calibrate, test, insight, calibrate.

Do this often enough and a breakthrough result is guaranteed.

Much like the Japanese concept of Kaizen, calibration is a mindset business owners must adopt.

It's worth adopting for everything you want in life.

Unfortunately human emotions get in the way.

This is because for almost the entire time you calibrate there is a feeling of failure.

You don't yet have what you want.

This negative emotion can demotivate.

Lack of motivation kills action.

No action means no learning, and no learning means no calibrating.

This is why it's smart to build systems to power your marketing.

If your marketing experiments are scientific and not hindered by your emotions, they keep running.

You can take this a step further and build a team to manage your marketing for you.

Let them run the system. Let them test and calibrate.

Of course nothing is black and white.

There's no science without creativity.

There's no breakthrough without breaking things.

If you can keep an attitude of 'calibrate your way to success' then 'the wrong fit' will merely be a stepping stone towards the right fit.

Don't stop.

Calibrate .

(One of my top 5 favorite words.)

Yaro

10/26/2024

How long is your sales cycle?

Long enough.

That's a tongue-in-cheek answer but it is the answer.

The sales cycle for my services business is short...

Discovery > Website > Sales Call > Purchase

This can all happen in 24-48 hours.

My education business has been a bit more complicated...

Discovery > Landing Page/Website > Lead Magnet > Email Sequence > Sales Page > Purchase

This could last anywhere from two weeks to two years between first discovery and purchase.

A lot of content is delivered, all designed to build trust.

I've used webinars, reports, video series, email courses, infographics and blog posts to convince a prospect that my solution is the best for their problem or goal.

How do you figure out what should be in your sales cycle?

That depends on a few variables:

- Pricing point
- Product/service complexity
- Competition
- Audience sophistication
- Niche targeting

However, this is the variable that drives more action than anything else:

Motivation to change.

Or, as marketers for eons have said --

Feed a starving crowd.

The hungrier your audience the less you have to do to convince them to buy your food.

So, simple advice to follow -- make sure you are selling something people are hungry for!

This doesn't answer the question of how long your sales cycle should be though.

The answer is 'whatever works'.

What actually matters is how you test to figure out what works.

For my services business I could have built an education funnel as I had in the past for my teaching business.

That would require a lot of work, but I could do it.

I know how to sell with content.

In this case though, it wasn't necessary.

We had a hungry enough audience.

What actually mattered was what segment of the audience we went after and that our first impression content was good.

In other words, making sure we found the right people AND presented enough key content on our website to get the sales call.

From there, the sales call was enough.

When I say enough, at least enough to grow beyond $100K/month in revenue and become a seven figure business.

The status of the person who showed up on the sales call was what made the difference.

If they felt the problem acutely, had money to spend on our solution, and the benefit of solving the problem was clear to them -- that's an easy sale.

If the wrong person showed up on the call, a lack of budget or urgency, or misalignment in needs, would kill the sale no matter what we said.

No amount of 'education' in our sales process would help.

Everything came down to discovery.

Could this be the same for your company? Maybe, but don't assume it.

To sell my teaching products I had to teach first.

I had to give people an experience of my education before they paid money for more.

Hence, a longer and more complex sales cycle.

What you are selling matters.

My advice is to understand your options first.

Understand what types of content people use and what the purpose of the content is when it comes to making a sale.

Understand who your audience is and why they are hungry to pay money for something.

This matters whether you are selling e-commerce products, services, software or education.

From there it's a refinement process.

Start with a minimal viable sales cycle and get some prospects to go through it.

Then keep refining.

This has been my 'job' for over 25 years for many different businesses.

It should be fun, because it leads to actually growing a business.

Yaro

10/25/2024

I remember the first time I made $1,000 in a month from my website.

It felt like a breakthrough moment.

At that time I was selling Magic: The Gathering cards and I was 20 years old.

Five years later, with a different website, this time an agency selling essay editing services, I had my first ever $10,000 month...

I remember the first time I made $1,000 in a month from my website. It felt like a breakthrough moment. At that time I was selling Magic: The Gathering cards and I was 20 years old. Five years later, with a different website, this time an agency selling essay editing services, I had my first […]

10/23/2024

Nuance.

You can't have it without time.

Nuance is what you know because of the things you saw before.

I'm convinced nuance is also a feeder for intuition.

Take for example what happened this week with my LinkedIn ad campaigns...

There is a targeting setting I turned on earlier this year after a LinkedIn consultant we hired made me aware of it.

The consultant used this setting in the campaigns they ran for us for a couple of months, all of which failed.

I turned the setting on for my campaigns as well.

Why? It made sense to do so.

The setting narrowed the targeting down to business leaders/owners, our target market.

Over the months since then, my LinkedIn campaigns, which previously brought in some results, were trending towards zero.

No matter what I did - changing the budget, upping the bid price per click, testing new ad media - nothing worked.

I thought it must be market conditions, competition, the economy, etc.

As I was reviewing our campaigns this week for my co-founder I saw that setting again.

That night as I went to bed, my brain went to that setting.

I realized even though it was meant to give us more of the right people, it may be having the opposite impact.

It was reducing our overall audience size and forcing us to spend a higher bid price on a more premium group.

By removing the condition we will get more overall eyeballs to our ads at a lower bid cost.

Even though that means many more of the wrong people see it, it also put us up in front of more of the right people.

48 hours ago I removed the condition. Nothing else was changed.

We've had 4 booked calls, one sale, and it looks like another today coming in soon, all after months of nothing from LinkedIn.

If I hadn't spent the last three years inside the LinkedIn ad manager, I wouldn't ever have had this counter intuitive conclusion.

I wouldn't had the nuance to see it as a possible cause.

With pay per click campaigns you can't just trust audience criteria on face value.

I've learned this because I change settings, tweak campaigns, turn something on or off, even if I am doing what on the face of it seems logically wrong based on a description.

Then I wait and see what the actual results are.

Nuance is a valuable resource, especially because it takes time to create and often only applies to a very narrow field.

It can't easily be replicated and can solve very specialized problems.

It can be enough of an advantage to build an entire business around it.

The caveat is that nuance only comes from repeated focus in one area.

If you keep changing, give up, lose interest and restart with something else, you enter without a built up history.

As entrepreneurs we underestimate this switching cost.

Sometimes the better answer is to just keep going and build on what you know until it becomes nuanced skillset.