The Unconventional Transition From Politics To Affiliate Marketing With Tom Woods

Hi I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the list building lifestyle. The podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my bestselling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email, swipe files, and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

00:50

Welcome back to the list building lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets and today, I am really excited because after months and months and months of chasing him, I finally got my friend Tom Woods on the show. Now the reason I’m really excited is because he’s like a unicorn in what we do. So we’re in the internet marketing, making money online, and you don’t get to meet people like Tom a lot, because Tom is actually running a political show. He’s got a political show that you can look up, just look him up Tom woods or Tom Woods show. And he’s mostly talking about politics and politics really topics online. But, but for some reason, he also attends to make a lot of money during virtually any affiliate competition he participates in. And the way I discovered it was when I was promoting a program that doesn’t exist anymore. I won’t mention its name, but I was pretty good at it. I was actually like, if not the old time number one than at the very least the number one for that year, I think I made over $200,000 in that program. And throughout the whole year, I kept looking at the leaderboard. And there was this guy, Tom woods, he’s always like number three, number two, number four. Number three, he’s always there. And I’m googling him. And I was like, this doesn’t seem right. Anything that comes up for Tom Woods is a political related thing. There’s probably going to be a different time war. But eventually I finally realized that it turns out you can be an influencer in a non-related space and then take that list. And with some smart tactics, of course, not just randomly taking that list and starting blasting with different offers they didn’t sign up for. But if you’re smart about it, you can build a presence in a different market, using the relationship and rapport you’ve built with the audience in your niche. So that is why I am really pumped to welcome Tom woods to the list building lifestyle. Tom, welcome to the show. I’m glad to be here. Thank you.

02:53

So tell us how did that even come to be so? So you run a political show, but how did you end up even getting into this affiliate marketing space or the make money online space?

03:06

Well, first of all, now that I’m in it, I mean, this is the way my brain works constantly. So the other day, just the other day, I discovered that my 17 year old daughter, Veronica, has a friend who has a YouTube channel with 700,000 subscribers. It’s a Minecraft channel. And my first thought was, is he monetizing that? I think if you have 700,000 YouTube subscribers and you’re not making six figures a year, then I’m going to smack you in the face. You know, that’s just ridiculous. If he’s not, then you gotta send him to me, and I will teach him how he can, you know, make a fortune with 700,000 subscribers, right? So yeah, so this is on my mind, because I’m always looking for opportunities for myself and for others. But anyway, waking up started with something like this. There’s a guy out there named John Lee Dumas. And he hosts a very long running podcast called entrepreneurs on fire. He’s been doing that since longer than I’ve been running the Tom Woods show. He does an episode seven days a week, 365 days a year, I have never seen anything like it. And that’s why he does it that way. He said, I do it that way because nobody else was. So I decided to do it. So I joined him, he has a podcast training program called podcasters paradise. So I joined that even though I was about a year and a half into podcasting, I figured you can always learn more. And it was about how to start a podcast, you know all the technical requirements, but also how to grow a podcast and how to monetize a podcast. Well, who wouldn’t want to know about that? If you’re putting in a lot of effort, why would you want that? And he had on that site, some suggestions for monetizing, and one of them took me over to JVZoo where, you know, which I don’t use as much anymore, but at that time, almost everything I was interested in promoting was done through them. And that was where I could find all kinds of

05:00

Interesting offers that might be interesting and I came across somebody named Sarah young. And I’ve promoted her maybe two, three times, a couple times at least. And what was interesting about her is that she is a stay at home mom with at least five or six children. And she had not envisioned she would stay home, she thought she would have her first child, be home with a child for a while then go back to work. She said, I had that first child. And I laid eyes on him. And I said, I’m not going back to work. I’m staying home with this kid. And so she had to figure out at that time how to make a living. And so that was when that back when the internet was more in its infancy, you could start an affiliate site and get a lot of traffic organically. And it wasn’t as hard as it is now. So she started a site where she would promote Amazon products about babies. So she would have baby strollers, stuff like that. So people shopping for baby strollers would find her site, click on the products and she would make Commission’s then all her neighbors want to know how she was, you know, making money from home. So she taught them. So I brought her on my show, as you say my political show, although because it’s called the Tom Woods show, that kind of gives me some latitude to just talk about anything that’s interesting to Tom woods, you know, because then it’s not all to advertise. And Tom Woods is very interested in how this day is somehow making a living. And also Tom Woods, being a libertarian wants his libertarian audience, not to just talk about how in theory, capitalism is a superior system to socialism, or whatever we want to talk about. But how about actually going out there and doing it, you know, selling things like offering something to the world? So I brought her to my show. And I said, you know, tell me your story. How did you get started in this? And so at that time, she was running a training program, kind of showing people how, in this day and age , you cannot just throw up a one page affiliate site, Google won’t even rank it. Yeah, it’s hopeless. So you have to do something different these days. So she had a whole thing of how to do that. So I brought her on to talk about that. And I figured I’ll promote her program. My mom ended up joining her program as a matter of fact, and I did really well, I actually, it turns out, I ended up being the number one seller of her program. And I didn’t even have an email list dedicated to that subject. I had just brought her on my podcast, I made, you know, a few references in my regular mailing list. Because my regular mailing list, it’s true, is about politics, history and economics. But again, it’s the Tom Woods letter. So whatever is interesting to Tom Woods could theoretically go in it. So I put a few pieces in there. Oh, PS, by the way, if you missed Sarah younger that day, she has a really compelling story. And so it was that I was not making a hard sell. It was just to know if you’re interested in this. And sometimes that works better. Why, by the way, if it looks like you’re desperate, like, I can’t stand when I get emails, you’ve got to see this, you must be there you better that shows the seller is desperate, you know, because I don’t have to see this, like I can obviously live without it. So I just made a very soft sell. And it worked very, very well. And so that’s when I realized that’s the crossover, which is, in my case, the crossover is that we talk all about the nobility of the marketplace and commerce, and why there’s nothing morally wrong with selling something to people. We’re not communists, you know, who have no problem with this, then then I owe them to live and they ought to live what they believe. And so I have, you know, let’s say a chunk of my audience, that especially after 2020, when they saw how readily regimes around the world could close businesses down. Well, gee, if you’re not at least mildly interested in having at least an online side hustle, then I don’t know what I could ever do for you to convince you.

08:47

Yeah, that’s what makes sense. So did I hear it right? Your mom ended up buying Sarah’s program? Yes, she did. And for a while, she had a fairly successful site that was dedicated to gaming in particular things like chairs. She didn’t know there was such a thing as I didn’t either. There’s a great gaming chair that the people who are really avid gamers want to have. I got one right there, a chair record. They’re a high ticket item. And so the nice thing about that is that obviously, you know, selling affiliate products through Amazon is not the way to, you know, super-duper riches because the margins just aren’t high enough for the Commission’s to be super high. But if you’re selling a bunch of high ticket products, those do add up. And also the way Amazon works is if you click on an Amazon link, I’m sure you know this, but whatever the person buys, even if they don’t buy that particular product, whatever the person buys in the first in that 24 hour period, you get credit for so when she made her first sale, she didn’t make her first sale. She made 20 sales at once. It all came in as 20 sales. And so she was in the Facebook group for Sarah young. And Sarah was saying

10:00

This isn’t usually how it works. You know, you’re always happy about your first sale, you made 20. But that’s how it worked.

10:07

Now, that’s incredible. That’s how you know you’re really, really good at this stuff is if even your mother ends up buying through your affiliate links, I’m pretty sure that this isn’t something most internet marketers can say about the products they promote as well as their own. So wow, that’s pretty incredible. So let’s dive a little deeper. So you, you had this taste, you got to taste right. So what happens then? How did you do? Did you just look at it and say, well, okay, and let it go? Did you start developing that direction? What happened? I decided I need to have a separate list for this. Because I realized that there’s obviously intense interest in it, given how well I did with Sarah.

10:49

There’s intense interest in it among my people. But I’m sure there are a lot of people who have no interest in it whatsoever. So I can’t clog my initial mailing list with this, I have to build a separate one. And so that’s what I went ahead and did. And so that way on the on the new list, the internet marketing list, I can promote, like mad, and I don’t promote, you know, I promote in the Ben settle Michael Chaney kind of storytelling style, I don’t promote with just, here’s an offer, here’s an offer, here’s an offer, here’s an offer. I make these emails compelling enough that people just have to open them and read them. So I decided to do that. But that meant that you know, you know, as well as I do that if you want to build a mailing list, you don’t just say, hey, here’s how you sign up to get my newsletter. Nobody does that. Even though the newsletter is free, they need another free thing in order to be persuaded to join your list. So I thought what would my free thing be? And I thought, well, I’ve actually been making a decent living online for some time. And I have various ways that I’ve done it, because I have, I had done affiliate marketing before but not for I am products, I had done it for Blue host web hosting, which is sort of I suppose as sort of an I am product, really, but I have done it for foreign language courses, lots of different things. And of course, I have done podcasting and podcasting, you can run ads, and you can make money that way. So I decided I would, I would write an eBook on five different things that I myself have experience with online, that I could walk people through step by step, because I’ve gone through the steps. So I didn’t buy some PLR book and throw it up there. I wrote this thing myself. And it’s called five paths to an online income. So pathstoincome.com is where it is. And so I put that up. And I would channel people from the first list, so as to not bother the ones who really don’t care about this who have fulfilling careers, or they already have more money than they need, or whatever the reason is, I would take them off that list, I’m not off, but I would keep them on that one. And then also bring them on to the new one. And then on my podcast, I would mention the website or on social media. And so that way, I built up another list. Now, this other list has never, I don’t want to. It’s sort of proprietary how many I have on my main list, but on my I’m list, it’s only at about 17,000. Now, some people listening to this might think that sounds like an enormous number. But when you compare that to some of the big guns and internet marketing, that’s like nothing, I’m like an insect compared to them. And effect through most of the time when you were encountering my name, I wasn’t even a 10,000. But I was just good at engaging with that list. And then secondly, if I wanted to promote something that I really believed in, that was high ticket, I’d get them on the podcast and talk to them. And then that would warm people up to them. And then I would combine that with really hitting that second list. So I’ve been able to do it without

13:46

some kind of massive buyer list because I really don’t have the products that I sell, I really am strictly at least at this point, that’ll change. But at this point, I’m strictly an affiliate, and I nevertheless built up, you know, a decent sized list but a responsive list. That’s the key thing. Yeah, I think one of the things you’re really good at is communicating ideas to your audience, because I’m on your list. And on your email list. And

14:15

What I find interesting is that I do end up opening your emails, I can say that about most people. I do read Ben’s emails, I read some other people’s emails, but your emails, then it’s like, when I get an email from you, I know there’s going to be an opinion, or a rant or something. You know, it’s like this, you know, this, this person did what? You know.

14:41

Right? It’s like, oh, they just admitted the vaccines were whatever. Like it’s just

14:47

It’s like, I can’t ignore it. You know what I mean? Like, I just can’t ignore it. And even if I don’t read the whole email, I’ll read the subject. I’ll click into it. I’ll check out what’s going on. And a lot of times when I’m like, like, for example,

15:00

I’m waiting for coffee in my favorite coffee shop, Landover, and I got an email from you. I’ll click into it on my phone, I’ll scroll down quickly to see what you’re promoting, because you’re always putting this link and it looks like tomwoods.com/something. And usually the slash will tell me what you’re mailing. And so most recently, I remember you mailed for our mutual friend

15:21

Who just launched a book during your passions? Oh, you know?

15:26

Yeah, we hosted him on the show, and we chat every now and again. So, so you mail his book, and you mail it hard? I remember one day God Lake, I think it was for him, like four emails in one day. Oh, no, that must be something else. I just started mailing him.

15:45

Oh, really? Just now? Yeah, I’ve only done one. So far. Yeah, it was something else, it was a low ticket item as well. But it definitely was something. And what’s interesting is, every email that came in, it didn’t really have like, buy this book, you know, or, or buy this course, or buy this program or the software. It’s never like every email that comes in, it’s like, you have a reason to talk to me, it’s like you have a reason to share something with me. And I think that’s something that virtually no other internet marketer does really well, including myself, by the way, even I dropped the ball on this, because if you if you’re on my list, some emails can appear repetitive, you know, especially in the last day of the promotion, where it’s like three hours left six hours, yeah, and I’ve already sent 15 emails about this product, there’s nothing left to say I have to repeat myself.

16:38

Yeah, but your ability to come up with angles, and then lengthen and bridge them to, you know, the actual offer you’re promoting is just incredible. I think I’m actually very proud of getting your product. No, it you shouldn’t be, you shouldn’t be you, you got it, and you got it to a level of an art.

16:57

See, I am actually considering it because I, I had thought I have, you know, like you, I have a bunch of friends in this space that I’ve promoted with. And I’ve thought about teaming up with them to create a genuine newbie product, which I did a couple years ago. But I’d like to update it and start from scratch.

17:15

And then I realized I don’t actually need to partner up with somebody. The only reason I wanted to partner up was that I had self-doubt. But at this point, I think I know what I’m doing. And so I think I just want to create that myself. And just and just put it out there. And one dimension of it would be that I would take a whole bunch of these email promotions that I’ve done. And I break them down and explain exactly what I’m doing and why they work. And maybe even give some of them away. You can use it if you want to promote this thing, something like that.

17:47

Because as I say, I’m quite happy when I look back at some of my old emails, I look at the subject lines. And I think, doggone it, yeah, they had no wonder they open that one I need to, I don’t even remember what’s in here. And I need to open that. So that’s what makes me happy. And the fact that you can send emails and have them be fun and interesting. And in a way, that’s how you make your living almost seems unreal, on some level. Yeah, people really can fathom or comprehend. You know, I do have this thing on my Facebook. Because I know a lot of people like to look me up, not like in the industry, but rather in their day to day life when I meet with them, you know, as a part of the day to day life experience. You know, they’ll look me up on Facebook, and they’ll have me as a friend. And then they’ll approach me and say, hey, on your Facebook, it says you teach people how to break the link between their time and their income. I was like, Yeah, I was like, how, and I started explaining to them the concept of what I teach, like, how to build a list or email the list with offers, like I, I basically teach what we do for a living. And, they just can’t understand it. It’s like I’m talking Portuguese with them sometimes. Yeah, I know. He’s, I know exactly what you’re doing. I know he’s having your time. Well, because for example, I just talked to him, I have seven. I have five daughters, one of them 17. She’s a senior in high school. And she has this very rare in high schools in the US. She’s in an entrepreneurship class, if you can believe that. And so they invited me in to talk to them about what I do. And the nice thing about talking to a group of 17 year olds is that they’re not so cynical yet that they know that it sounds like Portuguese to them, you know, they still have this wonder they still have an open mind. And so I got up there and I talked to them about what I do.

19:37

And like I even I started off actually by talking about

19:42

Veronica was out in another state and I went to go pick her up, I had to fly out together. And I started off by talking about how much money I made while I was asleep on that airplane. And that immediately got I didn’t I didn’t go in and say hello boys and girls today I’m going to talk about I said the other day I was flying out to such and I started just like that

20:00

At. And I said I made $578 while I was sleeping. Now, obviously, there have been days when I’ve made way more than 570. If that wouldn’t sound plausible, 578 sounds weirdly plausible. And it was true. That was the figure I made while I was sleeping. And I said, No, if that’s intriguing, then you want to listen to what I have to say. So I laid it out to them. And then I said, now I’m going to show you the rest of the presentation and show you how you can do exactly this. Because anybody in this room can do what I do. And I laid it out to them. And none of them thought it was from another planet or so they just thought, wow, I’d never heard of this before. They didn’t think, Oh, that can’t work. The kinds of questions they asked me where? Well, if I had one of them say, aren’t you lying to people? If you give them away for free? And then you put them on the mailing list, like maybe they didn’t know they’re going to be on? And I said, well, that’s the thing you put on the landing page, that if you opt in, you’re going to wind up on my list. So yeah, you’re right, that would be spam. And you would do so that that was what they were asking. They weren’t asking, hey, are you some kind of shyster? Because? Yeah, you look at my lifestyle, it seems impossible. But this is exactly why I want to teach it to people. There is merit, there’s value in what I do, and other people can find fulfillment, and, you know, and do in doing it also.

21:17

Yeah, and this is actually a very common thing that you will notice is virtually, there are no commonalities between people who succeeded online in this space. Like they come from all kinds of different backgrounds, and most of them, yeah, don’t really have an MBA.

21:33

Oh, no, no, no. I have no training in this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I say I’ve no train, I mean, I’m self-taught. I mean, I did learn from Ben settle, I learned from a bunch of people, but I didn’t learn in a classroom. And so that shows that it’s open to anybody.

21:50

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, this is both the blessing and the curse of the industry, because a lot of people come in, and they’re still used to the, to the school structure, where they expect the curriculum, they expect a structure they expect for the teacher to be standing next to them and pointing and whatever. But there’s also a lot of people who are intelligent enough, or brave enough, I would say, I don’t think it’s an intelligent thing. It’s more of a, are you willing to do it on your own, like, they’re just willing to get into it just dive in. And then they started trying to figure things out, trying things and failing, maybe looking at how other people are doing it, modeling after them, we’re trying to dissect and break what they do. And this is pretty common in this game where, you know, no one’s coming in with an MBA and a degree in internet marketing. The industry is just too, too new for that to happen. Right? Yeah, that’s right. I mean, that’s interesting that you say that, because I think, little by little, you know, I’ve had the sense that it’s starting to seep into formal education, like a university education, you can take a course on stuff like this, or building your brand online, or at least something like that. But yeah, this really is for people who are prepared to break the mold. And not just, you know, do what everybody else does. But as I don’t want to do what everybody else does, because a lot of times everybody else does the wrong thing, or they go down a road, that’s just not going to be profitable. I want to do what other successful people I saw doing. And when I got into this, well, the thing I think that most struck me was the leaderboard prizes. So if you’re promoting somebody’s product, and they have a fixed number of days of the launch of the product, sometimes they’ll say, you know, the top five people are going to earn a monetary prize on top of the Commission’s they earn from the sales. And now, obviously, if it’s a $7 eBook, you’re not going to make 100k Prize, but you’ll get something you could get $1,000, $2,000 , $500, whatever. But then I would see some of these programs where the top prize was $50,000. Or, and since then I’ve even seen $100,000 or $25,000. And you just think, Wait a minute, what are these people just and then I would watch people, I would watch these leaderboards. And as you say, I would see the same names on them again and again. And I would realize, wow, so in the matter of three months, I know this guy earned a $25,000 prize, a $20,000 prize and a $40,000 prize, who knows how much in commissions he must have earned to earn those prizes? This is ridiculous. I think about you know, an auto mechanic down the street has to break his back to get a tiny fraction of that. I want to know what these people are doing. You know, I mean, that’s just natural. You know, it’s an amazing industry, and I’ll give you that much less sometimes. And the thing is, you have to you have to be in it a little while to figure out who is real and sincere and who you need to steer clear from, you know, and you just know it after a few months, you figure out who’s really producing something of value, and who is just on the take and if you subject your subscribers to

25:00

Then it’s going to be a big mistake.

25:03

Yeah, we can, we can actually mention that because I was just speaking to another fellow before I was talking to you. He built a $40 million business teaching women how to become real estate investors. And what’s interesting, he did it all without including any sort of affiliate component in the business, which I find, which I find fascinating because affiliate marketing can become a huge income stream for someone with a list of his size, which is about 300,000 people, all women, all wanting to learn how to invest in real estate. And I think 80% of them are buyers or something, because for some reason, they don’t really like to sell other products to them. But did he use affiliates to get some of those subscribers that other people bring him some of those subscribers? We know he runs the media. It’s a big media buying operation. But can you imagine how many millions of dollars he can recoup from the media ad spend, for example, just by doing like, once a quarter email promo to the buyers. And yeah, or as I say, going out to people in real estate, and saying to them, I’ll do a 5050 split, if you refer to people in my program, that’s no effort on his part. And see, this is not that’s another thing, I’m glad you brought that up. Because I think some of us feel like the amount of money I make should be in proportion to the amount of sweat that I put in, it should be in proportion to the amount of pain that I feel, and the energy that I exert. And that’s why it can seem weird. For an internet marketer who’s really starting to get good, sometimes like if I have a program that converts really well, and I promote it to my list with my own program. It is no almost no effort for me to say to my friend who has 100,000 people on his list, can you promote this thing, I don’t have to do anything. He writes the emails and whatever, I just sit there and watch the sales come in. And it was just all I had to do was I didn’t have to build my audience further. I didn’t have to put any more energy into it. I just said hey, why don’t you mail this. And then I sit here, and the money comes in. That’s it’s almost inconceivable, it was almost no additional effort. And the money comes in, I’ve had this happen. Because even though it’s not an im product, I do have a digital product online that I have and I have one person who is a really, really good affiliate. And there was one day we were doing a one day promotion of this thing. And he sent it out to his list of half a million people. And we ended up splitting $100,000 that day. And that was one day with one email campaign that he ran, it was no effort on my part, other than to invite him to do it.

27:51

Now it’s pretty crazy.

27:53

For people who aren’t a part of the industry yet, or haven’t broken through the initial barrier yet. It can be just impossible to understand. But you know, for me, the favorite has to be unreal. You know, you have it has to be unreal, you can’t believe it. You can’t. And the other thing about it is too, it’s like you have to say, Oh no, it’s fake. Because if you don’t, you have to admit that you’re not smart enough that some other knuckleheads like you say, on your landing page, you know, some other knucklehead figured it out, and I must be smarter than the knucklehead. You know, like that’s, that’s why I can’t make this work. It must not be real. But it’s more than it takes work. I mean, it did. This didn’t immediately bear fruit for me, I had to put effort in. And so I think people, there’s an important distinction to be made between the words easy and simple. In some ways, what I do is quite simple in that I can describe it to you in under five minutes. It’s not rocket science, I can describe it in five minutes, and you will understand it. But it’s not easy. Because by easy that would mean no effort required. There is effort, but the effort is going to these simple steps. But you have to put in that effort. And once you put in that effort, and of course, to some degree, it’s an ongoing effort. Like for example, building an email list, you have to keep that list refreshed because people are going to die on that list, you know, or they’re going to unsubscribe. Attrition is a real thing. You do have to put some effort in but not as much as at the beginning. You put your front load into the effort. It’s like with a podcast, most of the effort comes at the beginning when you’re figuring out how to get my podcast on Apple podcasts. And how do I hook it all up? But once that’s done, I just open my computer every day, record, close the computer, you know, it’s the initial work is the thing. And that’s where you lose most people. They’re not willing to put that initial work in, even when the potential rewards are just staggering. I mean, I would put in whatever it took. Because I have to say, I have seen knuckleheads do really well with this. So I want all my smart people to do well with it.

30:00

One thing that I really pride myself on, is that I’m disciplined, because I serve in the military, because I try to make sure every part of my life is an order as a father, as a husband, as a homeowner, etc. So like, you know, most people, for example, worry about their taxes, you know, next year in April or March, when they’re behind, I know what I’m going to pay in tax before the year is over. So I can put the money aside into a separate bank account, so I don’t spend it like that’s the kind of preparation level I’m talking about. And so when I go to internet marketing seminars, one thing that just jumps at you is just how dysfunctional most people are. In fact, a lot of them like getting drunk, a lot of them are socially awkward, and a lot of them don’t have their businesses actually running smoothly. You know, they, they have figured out an offer that works, but everything else is in shambles, like the deliverables, the staff, you know, everything else. It’s just, it’s just incredible. Like, how many of these people were making millions of dollars working, you know, 10 hours, 20 hours a week, from their laptops from some location in Bali, or Miami, how they’re actually not great business owners, if you take the same person and put them to run a, a gelato place, or a restaurant or an office of some kind, that place will burn to the ground? In the second week, I assure you, but somehow online, they’re made, they’re rolling in the money. And they’re still able to do it while being super dysfunctional, which is a testament to the business itself, just how simple it is, once you frontload the effort?

31:47

Yeah, you know, that’s an interesting point. That’s and I think, also, yeah, I think you’re right that some people are not suited to run a traditional,

31:58

quote, unquote, traditional business, or they’re there, frankly, they’re not that good with people, or they just don’t want to interact with people. For whatever reason, or, or the idea, like, sometimes when I’m shopping in a retail store, I think, well, thank goodness, somebody is willing to have this retail store open because I need it. But I would never want to deal with this with the razor thin margins . I have to cross my fingers every day that people are going to walk through that door.

32:27

I just, I couldn’t imagine it, and it would just be nonstop. Anxiety and stress. And the nice thing about what I have is I don’t have to deal with overhead. I don’t have to I mean, I have some sort of employees, they’re all contractors, but

32:46

it’s just not the same series of worries, I don’t have to worry about. I’m not coming in today because my dog is sick. And it turns out, the person is just a screw up. And I don’t have the headaches that I keep hearing constantly from other people.

33:02

Yeah, and a lot of times, you don’t even have to see these people or know these people. Because, you know, I started out and I started building my team remotely. My team was like in Europe, and then some wood was in Africa, India, like all kinds of places. But then one day, I said, you know what, I’m tired of all these dysfunctional freelancers. I’m going to build a team locally, at the time I was living in Israel, and I started hiring locals. And, you know, I thought if they’re local, they’re kind of like me, you know, smart, ambitious, sharp, etc. But what I discovered, as soon as I started hiring them and making them come to an office, it became an unbearable experience for me because I started micromanaging everybody. I was paying more attention to their behavior in the office than I was to the numbers in the business. I was miserable. I didn’t write a copy. I was constantly behind in my own projects. And overall, I realized that I’m just not suited to be in an office, like going to the office every day made me miserable. So then I just got rid of everyone. I said, you know what, you’re staying, you’re staying, you’re staying, and you’re fired. And you guys work from home. And I myself instead of working in an office, when I started working out of a coffee shop that was in the middle of a shopping mall, with like really, really high ceilings and lots of light. So I was like, in this spacious place, I had great espresso. There were people that would come, you know, regulars who would come in, we would chat with people who watched people who were like retail shopping. And I spent like the next five years working in that coffee shop. I recorded my first podcast episode using this microphone, using this MacBook from the coffee shop. In fact, the reason I got this microphone was because it has great noise suppression and it’s affordable. I can take it with me anywhere. Like I don’t have to hook it up to a table and have it you know, like in front of me. So it was just, you know, just this business. The beauty of

35:00

As businesses that you can make it fit your lifestyle, and not vice versa. What I found with a business is that it can make me have greater ambitions for my lifestyle because I have

35:13

the flexibility to live the way I want to. And now some people will say, well, it’s easy for you to say this because you have an audience already, and I don’t. But that’s true. But number one, I know people will be like Matt McWilliams, Matt McWilliams was not even though he does have a book coming out. He was not an author, like I was, he’s not a universal presence on YouTube as I sort of used to be.

35:39

And yet he’s built up an amazing, amazing online business. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is I didn’t come out of the womb with an audience. You know, I started at zero, like anybody, everybody starts at zero, every single person you’re looking at starts at zero. But the issue is, when you’re at zero, are you going to sit around saying, Well, of course, I’m gonna forever be at zero? Well, if that’s your attitude, then you’re not cut out for this, you know, go get a job for $15 an hour, because you’re not cut out for this. Instead, you should be thinking, Hmm, I wonder how I could do that. Because that’s what that’s what I did. There’s a guy out there, they’re there to Pat Flynn’s out there who I like, and the one I have in mind is the one who runs. I don’t know if he still does the Smart Passive Income podcast, but he used to have an income breakdown on his website. And every month, he would list exactly what he earned, how he earned it. And then all his outgo, what his expenses were, what he paid out. And I noticed that he was making 30 to $40,000 a month promoting Blue host web hosting, I thought 30 or 40,000 a month promoting one thing that everybody needs. By the way, if you’re going to start a website, you need to have hosting. So I thought to myself, I didn’t think to myself, oh, he probably had some big advantage. Or maybe he was on Oprah one day, or I didn’t sit there making a million excuses why I couldn’t do it. I sat there and thought to myself, and I think this is the mature way to look at it. I’m probably not going to make 30 or 40,000 a month with this. But maybe I could bring in a little bit of that. And input. And then also, I’m thinking about the end user, not just myself, but the end user. What does somebody seeking web hosting services need that Blue host can’t give them? So I thought, well, here’s things they need. They don’t know how to use WordPress, probably they’re starting a blog, and they probably never used it before. So I’ve got some tutorials for them. If they use my link, I’ll give them the tutorials. Secondly, they probably aren’t going to get any traffic because nobody knows who they are. But I have an audience, I’ll promote their website to my audience in exchange for them getting the product through my link. Then thirdly, I created a Facebook group for people who use my link, who because we all know, we all want to help each other. We all have questions. We all get stuck with a tech issue or a promotion issue, like how do I get more visitors, whatever. So I say you have free membership in that group. So I came up with a package of things. So this, this, again, is what the market economy is supposed to be about. That. It’s the old saying of Zig Ziglar. You know, you know if you give other people what they want, they’ll give you what you want, which is money, you know, so I get what they want, and they need the hosting. But I’m also saying to them, I’ll help you get visitors to your site, which is the thing that most people have a problem with. And I’ll do all these things for you. So I didn’t sit and think, oh, this could never possibly work for me. I thought, well, what do I have to offer? And by the way, I don’t know how to use WordPress, but I don’t want to make tutorials. So I bought tutorials from Charles Harper that I had the rights to. And so I’m only allowed to give those away as a bonus I just bought there. I think I paid $10 for that. And I’m allowed to give that away as a bonus. So I looked around and did my research. And the result is that I do well enough for the Blue host that every year at Christmas, they send me a gift basket with wine in it.

39:04

So that was it. So I didn’t say Oh, this is hopeless or rich people are exploiters or any of these types of things that completely sabotage you never even entered my mind.

39:17

Well, that’s no, that’s, that’s really smart. So you’re talking about the approach of using bonuses to entice people to sign up for your things. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I mean, it’s so smart to do. I mean, I really admire this approach so much. I actually have a program where I teach it, or I teach my entire campaign breakdown and how I could put bonus packages together, which I think is an important thing to do, especially today. Especially when you’re promoting something that would be considered a commodity like Blue host is really considered a commodity product online. So it’s hosting like you can. You can throw a rock somewhere on the internet and you can pay the hosting company, but to be able to promote such a competitive thing.

40:00

Um, you know, I think you’ve done brilliantly brilliantly to have come up with a way to bring you back and it makes sense to people. So that’s awesome. Well, we’re, it’s time to wrap up. So first off, I wanted to remind you guys that you can, you can, and you should go check out Tom’s work. And you can actually go and find more information about Tom in two places. First, you can go to paths to income, that’s path, as in plural form pathstoincome.com, we can get on Tom’s and make money list, which I highly recommend you get on that list. If for nothing other than just studying the way that he communicates to the listener, it’s just, it’s amazing. And another website that I recommend you go to is tomwoods.com, where you can get a full picture of what Tom’s about, as well as subscribe and listen to his show that, in my opinion, if you’re a capitalist, or you believe in the idea that making money is a good thing that we live in the material world and that you gain more freedom, the more money you have, this is definitely a show you should listen to. And because some of the ideas expressed in that show, like I really like it, I don’t get involved in politics, but I do resonate with a lot of what he says. So go to tomwoods.com, and go to pathstoincome.com, there will be links in the show notes. So you can check them out at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. So Tom, you’re great. You’re studying history, you’re a great communicator. So you’ve got this unique set of glasses proverbial,

41:42

the way you look at the world. Now that you have gone through this evolution from somebody who discovered the industry to somebody who became the player, like a serious player in the industry. It’s been some time, you’ve had some experiences, you’ve had some big successes, and you’ve had some failures. Looking back, on the moment, when you just got started, when you just worry kind of like this wide eyed, you know, shiny object secret, so to speak. Looking back at that moment, if you could go back in time, and give yourself some kind of advice summed up in one sentence or two sentences, what would that be?

42:29

I think it would be never stop learning,

42:33

you know, be a perpetual student of this. Because there are things that I started to do later. That seems so obvious to me now. But that I wouldn’t have thought of if I hadn’t learned them from somebody. And just to put a little meat on this. I’ll give you one example.

42:50

Two quick examples. If you don’t mind, what’s a wonder if it is true? You know, Russell Brunson is always talking about how every business needs a funnel? Well, it also needs like, I have a membership site that now has membership tiers, there’s a basic tier, there’s an intermediate tier, and there’s a the ultimate Super Deluxe tier, when I first launched, that site had only the basic tier, it never occurred to me to package up a bunch of things and give the deluxe one. That was a big mistake, because the deluxe one just brings in an absolute fortune, especially when I have my Black Friday promotion every year, it brings in a fortune. And

43:27

I was selling myself short not thinking of that.

43:30

The other thing would be

43:32

realizing that, you know, sometimes you think about I’ve launched a product, and I want it to make X dollars. So the way for to make X dollars is if its $100 product, and I want to make

43:44

$100,000, I need 1000 sales.

43:49

But this is where the funnel comes in. Maybe instead of trying to find all these people, maybe I ‘ll sell it to my core of people. And a lot of that core wants to buy the super deluxe version. And so you can do a kind of a price discrimination, you know, where you go through a funnel. And some people just gonna say I just want the $100 thing, but you offer the opportunity for somebody to get a $1,000 thing, you know, and now suddenly, I only need 100 sales. And so thinking that way, it is easier to sell to an existing audience than it is to go out and buy to find a whole new audience, find 10,000 new buyers, it’s way easier to take your 1000 buyers and just offer them something more deluxe. It’s actually easier to do that. And it took me forever to figure that out. But that insight has been the key to a big chunk of my success.

44:49

You’re right, you’re absolutely right. That and of course having the balls to sell something for 1000 bucks, which in and of itself can be a barrier for people you know

45:00

I was afraid to raise my prices. And when I just started coaching, I used to sell my coaching at $300 for a lifetime. So oh my god,

45:10

I quickly learned what a big mistake that was. And within the next 13 months, I raised the price to $8,000 for four months of coaching. So it was just, it wasn’t a big game changer in that year, I end up making $1.3 million,

45:29

of which I kept about 70 something percent, because I had some expenses. And some people, you know, on a percentage cut, you know, sort of deal. So, raising prices and selling fewer units was a big one for me. As well as of course, when you get a buyer that way, when you’ve got a relationship that’s on that level, there’s always opportunities down the line to create more income students, for example, they need tools, they need traffic, they need this, they need that. So it all ended up creating a solid customer base of several 100 People that ended up making me well over a million dollars. And I was only like 2425 years old at the time. So I was still trying to figure it out, to be honest with you. Yeah. But this is where I wanna be, this is what I want to like, give this final thought. And I see the internet marketing business as this giant puzzle. And a lot of times what people do is they think they need to have the entire puzzle figured out for them to be making money. I don’t think that’s true. I think you start making good money. As soon as you’ve got your jigsaw puzzle outline figured out, when you just got the outline figured out, you actually start making some money. And when you put in a few more pieces into it, you’re making 10k per month, but then you start adding another piece. And another piece and another piece and every piece has this exponential impact on your income because you go through evolution. And you can tell me this, if this was true for you, the evolution from making $100 a week to $100 a day

47:09

is slower than the evolution of going from $100 a day to $1,000 a day, and yet is slower than going from $1,000 a day to say, you know 510 $5,000 a day. Yeah. Yeah, I think because by that point, you’ve started to unlock some secrets. And then they start multiplying and I’ll finish with this. You probably know Marlon Sanders, who’s in marketing. Yep. Okay, so Marlon is kind of an OG he’s been around forever. And he’s got this cantankerous old man personality that I just, I just love. And I told him that I don’t want to say it just yet, because I haven’t launched it. But I’m about to launch a very, very expensive program, wildly expensive, but that will absolutely transform the lives of the people who do it, no doubt about it. And I’m only expecting a dozen or two people to take me up on it, even though I have a pretty big audience. And that’s okay, that’s, that’s all I want. If it was too big, that would defeat the purpose of what I’m trying to do. It can’t be big, it has to be small and intimate. And I was saying to Marlon, well, maybe I should price it at such and such. And he was saying, Tom, you need to go, he said, I have insisted that you go subscribe to the Russell Brunson package of Dan Kennedy material. And I need you to go listen to his brass balls presentation. And in his brass balls presentation, he talks about pricing your stuff. And sometimes you just need to have brass balls and just say this is what I’m charging. Because this is what it’s worth.

48:41

He put my head on straight with that.

48:45

Yeah, and he’s right, then then Kennedy has been a tremendous influence on everything I do. And if you’re looking into pricing and kind of you want to get your mindset right about that, he’s got a great book. It’s called the pricing strategy. The no BS pricing strategy, which completely revolutionized the way we think about price. In fact, it convinced me I’m gonna write this down, I didn’t know about this book, I’m ready to buy it as soon as you totally get it. Absolutely anyone would listen if you’ve got a product or a service where you control the price, and as an affiliate, by the way you control the price by choosing more expensive products to promote, you will see that getting a $100 sale is actually just as difficult or easy as getting a $1,000 sale. And I tested this many, many times I took the same presentation. And I put it in front of different people in different formats. Right, as in one presentation ended with a pitch to $100 or $200 item. And another one that was very similar, the only thing that was different, it was the offer that was made at the end. So like the price and the bonuses, etc. And but it took the exact same amount of time about an hour long and I pitched it

50:00

$1,000 item, and my conversions are on these on these offers were 12% for the $200 item, and 10% for the $1,000 item, which means I basically made a ton more money with the exact same presentation, simply because like you said, you know, the brass bowls have the audacity, you know, to pitch something for 1000 bucks. Now, this is a two game changer for anyone who sells low ticket because my first product launched on JVZoo. By the way, I made $10,000 in three days, and I was ecstatic. I was absolutely thrilled because I was selling a $17 product, and I sold like a ton of units. And I thought it was on the top of the world. But then a couple months down the road, I started selling things. They’re like a couple 100 bucks. And all of a sudden I’m realizing Wait a second, I need to make 10 sales of the $17 thing to make 170 bucks. I just made 300 with one sale.

50:59

What am I? Why am I wasting my time selling cheap stuff? And the other thing you will notice is that people who buy cheaper stuff, in general, tend to be higher maintenance than people who buy more expensive things. Like the people who’ve made me the most money are the least pain in my ass. Let’s put it this way. Yeah, not to say that. There’s pain. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yes.

51:23

And, you know, and because they’re and not to mention, it’s also true that when you pay more money for something, you treat it with more respect. And so if I pay $500 for a training course, I’ll probably do it, I’ll probably go through it. Whereas if the guy says have given me my training course away for free, it’ll sit on my hard drive. And I will never even touch it and that I wish mankind were different, but it isn’t. And that’s the way it is. That’s the way it is. So it’s I’m not doing anybody any favors by saying here’s a $10 thing, because first of all, they’ll value it low, they’ll think it’s out and couldn’t be worth anything. And so in fact, when I did briefly sell a course on how to email, how to build a list, how to monetize it, I sold that for a ridiculously low price. I mean, it was absurd. And I gave away PLR to it for $97. And this thing is like this is the key. If you understand this, you are absolutely in the driver’s seat. And that should have been at least 197 At least 290 says something reasonable to indicate its value. And so I will not make that mistake again. All you who got it at 97 you were lucky I was a dope.

52:35

All right. Well, guys, look, you can listen to Tom for hours, and he actually got a daily show. So you can check it out on YouTube. By looking up Tom Woods’ show on YouTube, you can also go to tomwoods.com, there’s probably going to be lots of different links on the website. And if you want to find out more about how Tom is making his money, you can go to base pathstoincome.com with an S and sign up on his email list and check him out. Seriously, this dude is a big player he doesn’t know and yet doesn’t realize it yet, or maybe doesn’t want us to know that he knows. But he’s a big player and you should be following him. So, Tom, thank you so much for taking the time today. I really appreciate it. It was a blast. Honestly, thank you for making the time in your busy calendar for me. My pleasure you derive joy Thank you.

53:29

Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle. Get access to the previous episodes transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with lists building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email, swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com. Now to claim your free package.