8-Figure Business Blueprint: The Power of a Healthy Email List With Stephen Somers

Welcome back to the list building lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets and today I’m hosting my dear friend Stephen Summers from Ireland, who built an eight figure company, with just 60,000 people on his email list, he agreed to come on the show, and disclose all of his advanced techniques to building trust with his email is that allow him to not only make a ton of money, but routinely place in the top five for virtually any joint venture or affiliate competition or launch that he participates in. So, hey, welcome to the show.

00:34

Igor, it’s great to be here finally, it was tricky, scheduling wise, but I’m so happy to be here to talk to you and your audience. And I want to make something clear to all of you listening, I have nothing to sell you today. I’m here just to talk about shared values. And I’m here because Igor is a great guy. So I look forward to getting into it all. That’s so amazing, because it’s a marketing podcast that sells nothing. This is absolutely the best type of podcast you can listen to. So for those of our listeners who don’t know you, and in spite of you, having been, you know, built a huge company, to like you were still you were like, under the radar for, for me, up until maybe a year ago, right. So for those of you who don’t know, you just use this opportunity to brag, just give us you know, lay down, lay the smack down. Like your top achievements to date for you and your company.

01:29

Yeah, well, yeah, it’s interesting, you say that we are under the radar. Um, definitely, as we go forward, you know, as we grow my company, marketplace, superheroes, I do not want to be as under the radar as we were. But I do think that was part of how we were so successful, which I’ll definitely talk about today. But yeah, so my company, I’ve got a number of different businesses we run, currently run microplates superheroes. I’m the co-founder of that company. And I am the person who’s in charge of building up our tribe, and of course, growing the company, as well as taking care of all of our amazing clients. But not only that, we run a freight company called superhero freight, where we help our Amazon sellers who we teach, we teach at Amazon selling in marketplace superheroes. We teach, we basically have a free company, and we import products from China, to the US, UK, Canada, we have warehouses and all those different countries. We also run solutions and services companies, for our Amazon sellers, as well. So you can see we’ve gone very deep in the niche that we’re in, which is a little bit of a hint, actually, as to what we’re going to get into today a bit more. And all these companies together make it an eight figure business and I started it in 2014. I had no email list whatsoever. I had no following whatsoever. Myself and my business partner, Robert, Ricky. And by the way, I’ve other business partners now as we’ve grown, but of my main first work life, business partner, whatever you want to call them, Robert, Ricky and I, we started back then. And yeah, we’ve no email lists, no nothing. And we grew our email list and a variety of different methods, which we can get into like going on a podcast for just one example. As well as obviously using advertising as we’ve grown the business. And like you mentioned, yeah, we’ve won, we finished top five and a lot of the joint venture competitions, and we don’t actually take part in that many because we are very protective about what we promote with what we call an all-out promotion. But typically, yeah, like we promoted the plan, we I think we’ve generated nearly $2 million in sales on that program on its own. With two promotions. We promote other stuff like Aidan booth, like Kibo code, stuff like that, whenever that was active, and again, produced, I think, nearly 2 million over well over $2 million in sales, because we promoted it twice. So yeah, we’ve got a pretty serious business now. And as you mentioned, we have about 60,000 people active on our list. We’re very, very, very big in the list of health, which we can definitely talk about again today. If I didn’t clean it, there’ll be 300,000 people on there, but it would be absolute nonsense, because it would not be active and any of us are in the game, and we understand what we’re doing. We know that that would not be a good thing. So all in all, look, I’m just a regular dude, Igor has actually helped me understand how much further ahead in a way that I then we are done. I think we are as we’ve gotten to know each other, which has been kind of a nice thing, because I didn’t participate in masterminds and stuff like that for so many years. I know that I am. Number one, I’m learning so much. And I’m meeting some many amazing people. But also it’s helped me understand, like, we’ve actually achieved a lot like I think we’ve won at least 10. And we haven’t even bothered to go for some more at two comma club awards now. And we’ve won the extra board. I just literally hadn’t put in my application yet, but like we’ve done it. So we’ve won all those things. And really, I just stopped playing for them eventually because it just thought like, it just doesn’t mean that much to me anymore. What’s more important is our clients and what we’re doing as a business in the direction we’re going. So anyway, I don’t think that was a great bragging session. I’m not very good at that. But that gives you terrible bragging by the way, just absolutely the worst. I’m Irish.

04:58

Kevin O’Leary.

05:00

Your Donald Trump videos like you need to learn from them. Okay, just make a mental note. But yeah, so yes, you’re by far one of the most advanced

05:12

info marketers slash service providers that I’ve ever met personally. And the to be able to produce that much revenue with a list of that size is absolutely an art, an art form in and of itself, which I would love to get into, by the way, I know you do a lot, and you truly do a lot, you’ve got multiple companies, a deep product line, you’re amazing at selling on the Webinars, you come up with these really sexy offers, and you know how to position them and everything. But let’s definitely focus on your list of health practices, because it is an Elizabeth Lee podcast, after all. So you said you’ve got a 60,000 active person email list, if you didn’t clean it, it would be 300,000. But that would be just a lot of noise and not as much result. So when you say list health, how would you define it?

06:05

Yeah, so I would say list health is defined as how active your email list is. And when you put something out there with a clickable link, how active they’re going to be, and how many how many registrations, you can drive for a webinar, for instance, that will be another indicator of list health, let’s call it but really, it’s all about making certain that the people that are on your email list are the people that are engaged, who want to hear from you, and who are actively opening your emails. And then some people, they will define list health as people who click your links in your emails, and that if we did that, our email list will be smaller again, right. And certainly, if you were really wanting to go that route, maybe that’s what you would do? Well, for me, I do it on a 150 day rolling open 150 days. So in other words, if you don’t open an email from me, within 150 days, we stop emailing it, we suppress you. And that’s a really important practice for us. And we learned a lot of this initially from a guy who’s unfortunately no longer with us, a guy called Chris Lang, who taught me a lot about EBIT deliverability. And one of the things he said was 150 days, that’s absolutely critical number one, the second thing he taught me, which again, is something a lot of people say they do, but they don’t actually do it. And that is to get into whitelisting properly. So again, in order to have this healthy email list where people are actively engaging, they’re opening, they’re clicking, they clearly like what you’re doing, you must have yourself in a position where you’re whitelisting. So what so whitelisting, every email marketer says, oh, and by the way, whitelist, my email, whatever people didn’t go, what the hell is that? I have no idea what whitelisting even means, but email marketers understand what it means. So what Chris taught me to do, and I’ll share with you today was really simple. He and some people are using this trick now. And it’s definitely his way to show people like little PBS gifs or gifts, whatever you want to say it now showing dragging that email and in, in Gmail, for example, from wherever into the inbox. And another thing that we showed people how to do was to create a little filter, if I’m right, and it’s a while since I’ve done this now, create a little filter. And the filter basically said, always put it in my inbox. And basically what we used to do was, we would livestream to our clients regularly, we still do. And we would do this from time to time, we would do little, what we call little whitelisting competition, whereby people would do it, they would come into the comments and say, yeah, just whitelisted I just did everything you told me to do. And we have no way to prove that of course. But we would then say great, you’re entered into the competition, of course, we would get all these emails in and we would do little competitions. But that practice of the 150 days rolling, plus really encouraging people to whitelist. And actually showing them was a massive game changer because I believe, as 77 0% of our email list, Raschi Gmail, emails, and we were in the spam folder for Gmail 100% of the time, which was a nightmare, right. And that’s whenever Chris came into the business, and he started teaching the system. So they were two of the critical things that help with your health. And they’re the rules that you should put in place. And then really after that, the other thing that’s important that Chris often talks about to me, which we do put into place, probably not as much as we used to storytelling. So if your emails are always selling, always closing, you’re going to have very bad list health. Whereas when you add in story based emails from time to time, in a period where you’re not promoting, for example, there might even be anything clickable in there and might literally just be a story based email with value by adding this in. It really does help a lot with the health of your list because people can look at you and go, this is someone who’s provided me with value. They’re not concentrated and it closes me into something all the time. They’re not constantly changing up all the different opportunities, so I become super confused. And so that’s a critical thing of story times we can definitely chat about that.

10:00

My final thing I want to tell you, which is maybe, I don’t know, maybe you guys were all Yeah, of course, or maybe not, is I love seeing people unsubscribe, I love it. I’m so happy to see people unsubscribe. And every day, we probably get maybe 60 or 70, unsubscribes, something like that. And I love it. And the reason I love it is because again, it’s like people are saying they’re active. They don’t want to be on this list anymore. No problem whatsoever. See you later. Hope everything is good with you. And so when you have all these elements together, you’ve got a healthy email list. And I’ll just say recently, a guy called Paul Irvine, a very intelligent dude from Scotland, took a look at our email list health using the postmaster Google postmaster. And he said to me, anyway, he’d never seen an email list as healthy ever in his career, which was really cool. And so it works. But I’m saying, Wow, man, this is a first off so many good points. And I want to unpack some of these because, like, you just sort of dispensed this advice in a nonchalant way, as if it’s common knowledge. But I really want to highlight a few things you said. So first and foremost, you said 150 days if somebody has been on your list and didn’t open a single email in that timeframe, you’re getting rid of them, and you’re suppressing them, or removing them or on solving them. And I think that’s great practice. I do think you’re giving them a little bit more leeway, I guess, because for us, it’s, it’s about 30 days, we’re really, really aggressive on this. And I think it’s really important that everyone gets with the program these days. And does that because back in the day, this wasn’t as important as it is today. Because today, the email volume went up. And within the span of like 30 days, an average inbox is actually getting way more messages. So it’s much easier

11:48

for you to get blacklisted or to go to spam or even not get delivered at all, to an inbox. If you’re continuously sending to an inbox that doesn’t recognize you doesn’t want to open your emails. Because what that does, it sends now signals to Gmail and all the other services that hey, look at that people on their list don’t seem to be opening. And that’s a big deal. That alone, that tip alone is a huge deal. And if more email marketers recognize that, that’d be great for overall industry practices, right?

12:23

I agree. Just on that point, though, we used to be 120, and we actually increased it to 150. And the reason for that was we actually for whatever we are this works, every list is different, by the way. But the way our list works, that moving into 150, it captured a bit more of an active segment that enabled us to re engage in different ways. So it was something we actually decided to do a while ago. But we weren’t 120 I also would just say as well, depending on what type of business owner you are listening to the podcast today, if you’re a product owner, or a vendor, versus a straight up affiliate, I think that changes, the email is pretty considerably and I know, Igor, you obviously are a vendor as well as an affiliate as well. So again, and you’re in a slightly different niche to me, like I’m in the Amazon space, the commas space, you’re in the internet marketing space, like, like, technically, I’m in the internet marketing space, but it’s a little bit different. Right. So I think that’s an important thing for listening today as well.

13:17

Yeah, no,

13:20

I get what you’re saying. And I think what’s really interesting is it also depends on how you choose to re engage it. You mentioned briefly that there is a re engagement campaign, and I just got and I just brought someone onto my team who will be doing that I didn’t do before. So before, if someone didn’t open, I was okay. And I just got rid of them. Yeah, but now we’re gonna start doing some actual reengagement and see what’s happening. And reengagement means for those of you guys listening could be either bribing them to open right in the subject line, saying something like, you know, really just ringing the bell and be like, get this for free. And you’re all I’m bribing you with an ethical bribe, you know, whatever. Or you could actually start playing with your alias. It’s another advanced trick I’ve seen done, where, let’s say your mailing is Igor Kheifets and Legally speaking, you can’t really all of a sudden change your name to Steven and mail my that’s actually not compliant. But if you change your name to something recognizable, then you can actually mail them with a different name, which means you can go from Igor Kheifets to IK you can go from Igor Kheifets, to Igor from efarming.com. You can go from Igor key feds to other stuff like that, right? So as long as it’s like an eagle or somewhere in that name, you’re still within the legal framework. And what that allows you to do is allows you to stand out in a bit of a different way. By the virtue of your name do you ever do anything like that?

14:50

Yeah, interest in them, not too much, actually. But we have done and it definitely works. And that’s, again, like here’s the thing, that’s an opportunity for us as well that

15:00

For me, I mean, I will think about that because it’s like everything when you are growing. Like there are so many tips. It’s like I tried to learn, I learned how to play golf, right? And in golf, like, I mean, holy crap, there’s so many things you have to do to hit a good shot. And there are these things they call Swing Thoughts. So when you have too many swing thoughts like it were on my hands, where’s my body? Where is my hips room? Where is everything, you can’t hit a ball. And I think email marketing is kind of the same thing. You can have like an email marketing thoughts where it’s like, oh, shit, like, should I have this from the link today? Or this other one? Or, you know, this link or that link? And it’s kind of like, what, what tends to happen that I see anyway, having no, being more masterminds and stuff like that is, I find it the people who are the most successful are the ones who do the simple things right all the time. So in other words, if you’re sending an email, and he was right, everything you said is correct, by the way, but if you’re just getting your you’re getting your email out there, you’re doing more than what most people are going to do, because most people won’t send it down email, right, especially in the affiliate game, and they won’t do it. But here’s something I’m going to tell you all while listening today. But you won’t, you won’t come in now, you’re sorry. Yeah, I actually wouldn’t say something. Because this week, I’m not kidding, bro. This week, I connected with three different people. One of them had a 50,000 person email list, another one had 160,000. And another one had 1.5 million. Million. Okay. And they didn’t, one of them is sending emails, like once a month, or once a week, and then the others don’t even send emails at all. Yeah, anyway. That’s it. It’s the craziest thing, like we send about 1.4 or 5 million emails a month, you know, when you look at it all, I’m probably more than they would do other brands and stuff that we have. And it’s, it’s the, it’s the biggest lifeblood of our business. Now, I will also attack that. And we can get into specific promotional tactics. But we added an SMS this year, and it’s been a fantastic addition to our business. Adding that in along with email for specific promotions has been phenomenal, which I’m happy to chat about. But let’s leave as an open loop for a bit later on. But what I was gonna say to you listening today as well to consider is this.

16:59

How soon? Are you actually building a relationship with the people that are getting on your email list? In other words, when someone grabs your lead magnet, or registers for your training, if you’re doing that, or whatever the case may be, like, Are you jumping on camera, and then on the thank you page, I’m like, Hey, Steven here from F from whatever, you know, hustle free lifestyle.com ever, which is a brand that I own. And I love that name. So hey, Steve here from us free life.com Whatever it is, I’m really happy to wrap my opt in today, baba, baba, baba blah, but you’ve introduced yourself, or it’s a lot of people who want to be an affiliate marketer, because I wanted to be one when I first started before I get into selling on Amazon. But I didn’t do it. Because I didn’t have I didn’t have anything to share at another conference. I didn’t understand how the whole thing worked, right? But I genuinely wanted to sell on Amazon. The point is that you should get in front of people as soon as you can. I know it can be scary getting on camera. But I’m telling you now I think that’s one of the critical reasons why people open my emails because they know who I am. There’s, it’s not like some Steven have never heard of you before I grabbed the lead magnet and like you just had a thank you page with some text on it. Now, like you took the time to have a video. And if you’re scared, get over it. That’s all I’m gonna say to get over it. Because it’s such a big opportunity just to be a person. And you can really share your journey. If you’re a straight up affiliate, share your journey, like, Hey, this is something that I’ve been doing for the last couple years, I’m learning from amazing people in industry, people, Igor Kheifets. People like Steven over here, these are people who I’m learning from and what my goal is. I’m not trying to be like them, I’m trying to share with you the stuff that I’m learning, the things that make the most sense, things that have helped me a lot. And in doing so I’m going to talk about their different products and talk about what they’re doing. And if you see value, grab it or whatever, whatever your script is going to be. My point is, though, get in front of people. And then when they see your name in the email, an email inbox, they know who you are, and they want to open because like, oh, wonder why Igor has got going on share parts of your life in your emails, which we can talk about, like people know about my family, they know I just had a child at the time of recording. They know that I like playing golf, they know that I’m into music. I used to play music, right? They know things about me. I’m a human. And I think Igor that’s something that’s missing a lot of time is the human element, right? Yeah, I would say a personality. I think I think you’ve got an amazing super likable, super easy going personality, both in your marketing and in real life. Like you’re actually super genuine. Like the way you come across your emails and the way you are in your real life is absolutely the same super genuine excited high energy, just somebody who’s a pleasure to be around and somebody who sort of people orbit around him. You know, like you don’t meet people like that too often. So I would consider that to be a superpower because most people I meet aren’t like that, but I think it can be

20:00

mediated through write writing techniques or content producing techniques, you can actually create it. And one of the things that you can create with its storytelling. You mentioned storytelling briefly. But I think it’s such an essential part of any type of information driven business, that or even any business really, because information can be applied as a marketing tool to pretty much anything else. I mean, I learned storytelling. The first time I learned the importance of it, when I was listening to Dan Kennedy, I noticed he was telling lots of stories. And then he had a program, which I ended up getting like a bootleg version of it, because I simply couldn’t afford a program like that at the time. So I went on a tour and sites, and they found the recordings. It’s basic, it’s called the Influential Writing Workshop. I don’t know if you’ve ever. Scribble? You have it? Yeah, I’ll be down in the head. Yes, yes. So that program was my first and only, I guess, exposure that I ever needed to storytelling. And he does such a great job, breaking down everything that you need to put in your copy stories, newsletters, emails, at the time, you know, he didn’t talk about email, but email was the same as any newsletter. And it’s personality and copy. It’s basically your personality. And when people talk about building a relationship with their list, the list that like the relationship part are usually lists that show no personality whatsoever. And you said something about getting in front of people. And that’s actually something I see that people refuse to do a lot, especially affiliate marketers, who really want to be incognito, invisible, right, a lot of them actually still hold on to day jobs, and they can’t risk it, because of their discovered online be like shooting videos, you know. So even if you create a, this is where the personality stuff actually comes in, because even if you created an alias, or pending, let’s say my name is Igor Kheifets. And I can’t afford to publicly post anything because the NDA on my work contract as a coder says so right. So I can create an alias for Elon Beckmann, or something. And I can write as Alan but I can still inject my personality traits into the copy, talk about my love for video games, talk about, you know, the challenges of parenthood, or the rough patch in my marriage that I’ve gone through, you know, a couple years ago, like, if I talk about that, even if it’s a made up person, the feelings that this stuff elicits are real, and the personality is real, too. So you end up benefiting by creating this relationship.

22:42

I liked it. Yeah. And what I would say to that, too, is there’s a great marketing

22:47

tip I learned years ago at an event I was at, and the guy said, you know, don’t fix it feature. And I really liked that, you know, because in marketing, a lot of times we try to fix things, right? Or hide this or do that. But what if you literally like told people, Hey, like, here’s the situation I’m in, I work in a job, it’s quite high pressure job, but this is something I’m doing. So that, you know, blah, blah, blah, tell your story a little bit and be like so. So you could tell people that that’s the situation like, you don’t have to, but you could do that, like, you would literally tell people like I work in this job. And part of my job is that I have to sign this NDA says I can, whatever, whatever, whatever. So I’ve decided to talk to you and bla bla bla, like, you can, you could do that. Again, it’s not the perfect idea. But it’s something that you could do. And this guy called Kyle Cece, he’s a comedian. He was at Funnel Hacking live one year, some of you may have been to the Click funnels event. And he was talking about something similar. And he was like, one of the things he said, which was really interesting was he’s like, whenever I’m in a conversation with somebody, if I don’t know what to say, I just say exactly what’s on my mind. So for instance, if I was talking to you, Igor, and I was like, we’re chatting and like, I don’t know what to say, I’d be like, I gotta tell you something. I know sounds really weird. But I literally don’t know what to say, I have no idea what to talk about today. And tell me something about you. You know, so in other words, like, you literally say, what’s on your mind, and you really put that out there. And I think that’s part of what I do a lot of as well. I say what a lot is on my mind. I just talk and I, I don’t have any fear of like, people thinking one thing or another and, and I gotta say, my, my, one of my dear friends, Calum, the guy over here in Ireland, really one of my best friends in the world. He talked to me about this years ago. And this was when I was maybe three years into building Marclay superheroes. And he’s like, man, you got to be more yourself. Like you’re a little bit too much. Like you’re trying to put on some kind of professionalism or something. He’s like, just be you, like, people are gonna like you for you. And I was really afraid of that. And I have to say, from the time I did that and just learned that people are gonna like me for who I am. I just have to go for it and not be afraid. It’s made all the difference to me. So look, there’s a few ideas for you to listen to if you’re listening today.

25:00

Hopefully you’re not in that situation in general. And if you are, by the way, Igor is the guy to help you get out of that quickly, because you don’t want to be stuck like that forever, that’s for sure. Yeah, that’s for sure. You know, when I got into it, I was really afraid of that, what you just mentioned of being yourself and letting your, your personality and you know, shine through your copy, or your emails, or your whatever. I really always thought of myself as a really, really boring person.

25:28

But what I didn’t, what I didn’t realize is that most people live a boring life and a boring life, too, can be a relatable one. And this is, when you’re creating a relationship with your list. In my opinion, this is what you’re going for. A lot of people think, oh, it’s about making the next big claim, you know, I haven’t made a million dollars, I can’t be making claims, or I haven’t lost a million pounds, you know, in three weeks, but it’s really not about that it’s more about is this person relatable? And are they real? Because the moment you answer these questions, and the moment you kind of convey that, to your audience, it almost doesn’t matter what you’re selling. You know, I was having a conversation a couple years back with a really famous copywriter in Paris. I don’t want to butcher his last name, but he’s Greek. You know what I’m talking about?

26:19

I’m actually speaking at an event for him later this year. Yeah. Yeah. So he said something that some, some listeners or some people who own lists, the relationship they have with their list is so good. They trust the gurus so much that they can wipe their ass on a piece of paper and mail it and they’ll still make money. You know, he was that blatant about it. He likes to use word pictures as he calls them. Right? Which, which is to say that if you’ve established this trust and personality, and you’re and you’re real with your list in a way where people feel you and relate to you, and they don’t question your agenda, even if you’re selling something, you’re just openly stating that you are and that’s cool. People find you so attractive, and the like is so much that they’re pretty much willing to do business with you just because there’s something that you offer for no other reason.

27:16

Hmm, I listen, I fully agree and people, people tell me all the time, you know, Steven and Robert, you know, that’s my other business partner, or Steven or whatever. Like, people always say to me, I don’t know why, but I can just trust you. I just know, I can trust you I’ve had that said to me countless times over the years, which I love. By the way, I mean, that’s a huge deal. Because Trust is everything. And I remember when I used to read all these affiliate marketing things, and I never did anything with them. When I first started out years ago, you know, like, rich jerk and all that stuff, you know, all those funny programs. A lot of those guys were talking about trust, right? But, and they would say things like, oh, and your affiliate, if you have trust, like they’re going to listen to your recommendations and buy from you and all of that. So true, but people don’t go the full. They don’t go the full way on it. They’ll just say something like that and be like, oh, yeah, now just keep emailing the shit now, right? Like that kind of thing, right? Rather than go on. Let’s not just email shit all the time. Let’s email like stories. Let’s get people to know me. Let me put together ad free guides like regularly like, let me let me put in the effort. Because just kind of moving on a little bit and talking about when we are an affiliate because we do promote other people’s programs only a few times here. And ego you know this because you only see us show up on the leaderboards a couple times a year. But when we do it, we treat it like our own product number one. And also we’re really like, huge on let’s give as much value as we can up front to our tribe. Because we’ve, if we’re promoting something that means we believe in it, we believe it’s the right thing. And now like I’ve gotten the full way, like even now, we’re going to promote something I think you are as well, Igor, I’m not sure. And the New Year at the time of recording. And like we’ve literally put somebody do not look over against you, man. I am seriously not looking forward to it.

29:21

Now, but like we put in the effort to do that, like this guy, we’ve got a guy who we pay, he’s gone now and he’s doing the thing. He’s getting results or sales or whatever he’s getting. He’s doing well and doesn’t want to talk too much just in case. But just to say like he’s gone and doing the thing, and then we’ll share that with our tribe. Here are the results. Here’s what happened because when it comes to trust, we have promoted things in the past which I won’t mention and we didn’t put in that level of effort. And the products were not right for our tribe. And we lost a lot of people over that. People got really annoyed and they felt like you know, we didn’t

30:00

to value their trust. But the reality was, we did a lot of research on the products. We knew the people creating them. We saw them. They were really good. And the reality was the products were actually good. It’s just that they weren’t right for our tribe with the beliefs that our tribe had. So we learned a lesson. Whereas then, was it last year at the time of recording? Well, let’s say 2021. Let’s just call it I don’t know, you mentioned an actual date. This is not live yet.

30:28

You guys, we’ve written that off for you. So 2021, we promoted the plan, which was a crypto offer. And we did two promotions for that. And then we generate nearly $2 million, like I said, at the top of the call today, but it was different people loved it. Because we had, we had done it. So everything, we literally shared our results, we show people what we were doing, we shared everything. And so when it came to actually promote the offer, people were like, well, look, I see the guys are getting results with that. I we obviously I don’t know if you’re gonna get the same as us better or worse. I don’t know. Like, I’m not you. But I really liked this thing. I think it’s really interesting. I have a listen, see what you think. And that’s now how I promote things pretty much. Look, I’ve done something with it. Here’s what it looks like, here why I think it’s a really good thing. If it’s not for you, no problem. But here’s why I really like it. And I’m going to do it. Because if I’m not doing it, well then why the hell would ask them to do it. And that’s another thing that bothers me, in general about the industry. There’s just a lot of people are like, you know, give me the links, I’ll promote it. And it’s like, have you like looked into the product? Have you? Have you done your due diligence, because if you lose the trust of the people, and I don’t call a list, by the way, and it’s cool, if you do call list, I have no problem with that. But I call it a tribe. If you lose the value, the trust with the tribe, it is game over for you. Like I’ve there’s a certain somebody who is in our industry, and was recently gotten some trouble with the authorities. And that person’s done. Now, its game over for that person, you know, from a public perspective, you know? Yeah, yeah, I know, I know who you talking about? And, yeah, it does happen. It does happen. And I like that you call your list of tribe. I think it really shows how you treat them to. I don’t remember where I read it. But I think Mark Manson said it in his book.

32:20

The Subtle Art of

32:22

Mark Manson. Yeah, I think he wrote a summary about is the solution to all of your life’s problems is to start a cult, you know, but the cold is too powerful of a word with a negative connotation. I think a tribe is a much better word. If you do have a tribe, even if it’s only 1000 people, maybe even 300 Good people that hang on your every word, you’re pretty much set for life. Now you weren’t, you managed to build a tribe much larger than that. And obviously, your results are showing and it’s amazing man, like you’re, you’re a true role model, who leads the way for this industry that we should all learn from. And I’m really grateful for you to have spent time on the show a little bit, you know, breaking things down for us?

33:04

Well, look, that’s very nice to say, I’m happy to love talking to this stuff, as you can probably guess, and I talk all day about it, because I’m just passionate about it. I’m passionate about the people that we work with, and we serve. I’m passionate about this industry. And I hope I never lose that. And you know, and I just want you to know something else. As we are wrapping up or whatever today is like, I’ve not had it easy the entire time. I’ve gone through a lot of difficulties in business, you know, even as much as last year, we had issues post COVID You know, what our freight company and stuff like that. And like I talk about these things, like I’m transparent with my tribe, I tell people what’s going on. And sometimes, you know, it doesn’t work with people, they don’t like it, they’re not happy, and they leave the tribe. That’s totally cool. But I’d much prefer to have these things and be open and talk about what’s going on, then for people just not to know who the hell we are and what we’re about. So I just say in closing to you listening today, you might be way behind where I am, quote, unquote. But I started out just the same as anybody else I had no, I had not one person on an email list when I started. And you know, now we have something really big, but I’ve been doing this for 12 years now, you know, I’m not doing this for zero years. And I’m actually doing marketplace superheroes. And like being in the internet marketing industry for eight years now, you know, so nearly nine years. So like I’m here for a little while. So like, don’t be hard on yourself. If you’re not generating like hundreds of 1000s a year or whatever just yet. What I would say to you is just focus and look back at what we’re talking about today. Think about really being the biggest advocate for your tribe you possibly can be. And if you’re not where you want to be yet, but you’re sharing other people’s products, just know that you’re not the one who’s doing the selling at the end of the day. You’re the one who’s building the relationship and then you’re pointing people across to amazing offers that you know, get people great results. So there’s no pressure on you. The only thing you got to focus on is being a real person, being in front of your market consistently and just putting good stuff out there and

35:00

That’s the game that is the game. Yeah, and ask people to whitelist your email. That’s also kind of hard. But I’m just getting thank you so much for dispensing all this incredible advice. And I think it’s definitely one of the books I want to really listen to every now and again, some timeless wisdom there, hopefully, unless they change something and kill email, which I hope doesn’t happen, because that would suck for all of us. So I know you’ve got nothing to sell. But if somebody was like, you know, I really liked this Steven guy, and, you know, I really want to check them out. Where can they go? Maybe your YouTube channel, maybe https://home.marketplacesuperheroes.com/? Like, where can we go? Yeah, definitely go to my clean superheroes. And there’s a jump on the email list. You know, you can watch what we’re doing, you know, like, see what we’re up to? How are we doing things? If that’s what you’d like to do? A lot of my friends do that. Now. They’re like, Oh, I was watching. They’re all watching our promotions. Now. It’s just so funny. But it definitely is happening now. Which is good. I do the same thing, by the way to my other friends. So totally cool. So feel free to do that. And yeah, that your YouTube channel, it’s all obviously yours, teaching our various Amazon models that we do. But like, I think you’ll get an education by just looking at what we do and how we do it. And definitely watch out from when we do a monthly promotion, most months for something that beats our own programs and from time to time somebody else’s. And I do think you’ll learn a lot there because I have learned a lot from others. And I continue to do so. I still have mentors. I still have coaches. I’m still learning just like you are. So yeah, go there. Check it out. And I am considering building this website, hustle free life.com which I bought the domain I kind of liked that name. But there’s nothing on there yet. But that’s something in the future. Who knows? If this is a time capsule, maybe I’ll have done something in the future. And you can check it out then. So there you go. Alright, man, well, you got it. Thank you so much, again, for taking the time. I know. It’s like anytime I hit you off, you’re like either hosting a webinar or building an offer or building an offer on the webinar. Like there’s always something happening when you’re so active and it’s really incredible to watch your work and yes, I’m on your list and I spy on what you do. So there we go, guys, check out hustle free live.com if it is available, if it is up if not, then head over to https://home.marketplacesuperheroes.com/ Get on Stephen’s list, study him. Did you know that you put him under a microscope, put them in a lab, and put them in a jar? You know white label those emails, label them with something like study this and put them in a special folder, print them out, do whatever you need to do. This guy knows exactly what he’s doing. And he’s a true powerhouse in our industry. That’s now grown to a size much larger than the sound that people have been following for decades. So Steven again, thanks so much for taking the time to record this episode and to next time we chat. Have a good one.