Episode 273.

Late Night Internet Marketing.

This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, I'm going to tell you all about my life journey with Zig Ziglar and the five most important things that Zig taught us that will impact your side hustle journey. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason.

Hey, hey, hey, how is everyone doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in Dallas, texas, where we talk about side hustling with online business and all the stuff that that entails. I'm excited to be with you today to talk to you about really one of my childhood heroes which sounds kind of weird Zig Ziglar. So if you don't know, zig Ziglar? Zig is clearly one of the most famous, most popular, most well-known and most beloved motivational speakers of all time. He's been gone for years now, but the work that he did over the course of his lifetime lives on long past Zig. And I tell you it's amazing to me how some of the simple but incredibly fundamentally true things that Zig had to say have impacted my life since I was 18 years old.

When I was 18, I was a high school kid. Actually, I was involved in high school debate. It's way cooler than it sounds, but I was big into high school debate and I was dating a fantastic girl who I cared about. You know, at 18 years old, I was head over heels in love with this girl and her dad was an entrepreneur. I didn't even really understand what that meant. I understood that he owned a business. But my dad had worked his way up in corporate America and I didn't really understand this idea of being a business owner. But as it turned out this small business owner it turned out he owned a pool chemical treatment company business where he went in and installed these big chemical treatment systems in commercial pools. That guy trained his sales force using Zig Ziglar's stuff and one of the very popular Zig Ziglar programs at the time was called Secrets of Closing the Sale.

So one time I borrowed a set of Zig Ziglar tapes and, yes, there was no audible. At this time there was no digital media. If you wanted to listen to a book on tape, you listened to it on cassette tapes down here in Texas about making sure that those didn't get too hot. And I listened to those tapes over and over again, so impressed by Zig and his mannerisms and the things that he had to say about sales and how to achieve sales goals and really how to achieve life goals in general. And so I started listening to Zig and basically I listened to every piece of content that Zig Ziglar ever produced. Years later I actually ran into Zig in a gym one time. I was in an executive gym down at Baylor University Medical Center. I ran into him super nice guy. I've met the people that are running his company today all very cool.

Zig has had a big impact, not only on my life in general and my corporate career and how I treat people and how I do things and achieve goals, but I think what Zig had to say is especially applicable to people who are trying to build a business online, and so I wanted to curate for you what I believe are the five most important lessons that Zig leaves for us that apply to online entrepreneurship, and the very first one is one that I see plaguing online entrepreneurs. It's probably plaguing you, and that is Zig says you don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. There's just no way that you can do anything unless you get started, and the truth is that a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs that say they want to have their own business, they want to build a side hustle, they want to work for themselves, they want to help people, whatever it is, a lot of us are waiting for the perfect moment to start. This is one of those tree things, right, the best time to plant a tree clearly was 20 years ago. We're not going to be able to go back and do that. So the second best time is right now, today. But a lot of us we fear when it comes to business. We fear failure or we have a lack of experience or we feel like we're not ready, and that keeps us stuck.

But what Zig tells us is that you don't need to be great to start. You don't need to have everything figured out. So my recommendation and my call to action to you is to start before you're ready and actually embrace the imperfection, because when you first start out, no one's paying attention to you anyway. So go ahead, get the mistakes out of the way early, before you have a million followers that are gonna point all that out to you. Get going, whatever it is. If you're opening an online store doing drop shipping, okay. So maybe you mess up the first couple of orders, maybe you lose $100 the first month, that's okay, just because you don't have everything figured out. If you don't start, there's no way you'll ever build anything. Focus on your actions and stay away from overdoing the analysis because, as Zig tells us, you don't have to be great to start, but you must start in order to be great.

Now, the second thing that Zig tells us is that and this is my personal favorite you'll find it on my website, you'll find it on the back of my business cards, and I really believe this is one of the fundamental truths of life. So, if you only take one of these five to heart and you only carry one with you for the rest of the month or the year or, like me, for the rest of your life here it is, it's number two you can have everything in life you want if you'll just help enough other people get what they want. See, the problem is, I see a lot of entrepreneurs focused on what they can get from what they're about to do. They're worried about the money, they're worried about followers or sales, and really the whole trick is to focus on what they can give to people, what they can do for people, how they can help people, and this applies whether you're an entrepreneur or a manager in corporate America, or you're an individual contributor on a team, or you're a husband in a relationship or a wife or a kid in a household.

Really, if you spend a bunch of your time focused on how you can help the people around you, there's going to be a lot of good things that happen from that. One of the simple ones is just reciprocity. People will reward you for that behavior and, even though that's not the reason you should do it, one of the things that happens when you help people is they want to help you. The other thing that I find that happens besides this reciprocity thing, or a karma thing, is that when you get that satisfaction and dopamine hit from helping other people and seeing their success and get fulfilled that way, if you make that part of what fills you up, that gives you the energy you need to push forward. When you get people things that they want, they focus on helping you and sometimes they reward you with those little green pieces of paper, those certificates of appreciation that we call dollars, and you can build businesses around that.

So my call to action for you on this second one is focus on serving your audience. If it's a drop shipping store, it's those customers. On serving your audience. If it's a drop shipping store, it's those customers. If it's a podcast like this, it's the people that listen. Your 1,000 true fans Help them solve their real problems and your success will be a byproduct of those solutions and as part of that process, you'll build trust and relationships and that will result in selling and all the good things that you think you want to do. But what I know you really want to do is to help all the people you can help. You can have everything in life you want if you'll just help enough. Other people get what they want.

Now the third thing that I think is super important that Zig leaves us with is talking about how it's your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude. Let me give that to you again it's your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude. I see this all the time in corporate America. The smartest person in the room, the guy with the highest aptitude, is not always and in fact, often is not the person who makes the project successful, and this is definitely true in online business. It's really the attitude. It's a can-do attitude. It's a positive attitude. It's an attitude that doesn't accept failure when bad things happen. It's a person who asks the question what does this thing that just happened make possible? It's a person with a success attitude, and I'm not talking about blind, positive mental attitude. I'm just talking about a bias on things that happen, on things that are said to you, on outcomes that you get, that tends to see the opportunities, that tends to be positive, that tends to expect success rather than failure. Those things that will determine your altitude. The height of your success will be determined by that attitude that you have.

Really, too many entrepreneurs now believe that they need to be naturally talented to be successful, but the truth is that your mindset and your ability to manifest perseverance right, that attitude gives you the ability to persevere. That matters much more than raw skill. After all, if you want skill, we can build skill right. We can learn how to do things. We can take classes and training and get coaching. Really, it's the attitude and the perseverance that comes from that that makes these things possible.

Some of the biggest names in business weren't the most talented. They didn't have success At first. The attitude, one that I talk about all the time is Thomas Edison. He had 10,000 failed attempts before inventing the light bulb and you say, okay, yeah, but that's Thomas Edison, he's a famous inventor. Well, my good friend, pat Flynn, he almost quit multiple times and I mean, look at the guy now. He's got multiple six and seven figure businesses all over the place in various fields. All because, I believe, of the way Pat approaches problems, the way he thinks about things, and also Pat is a big believer in helping other people, which is the thing we talked about before, about helping as many people as you can. Pat puts these things together and has amazing success. So I know this is true.

So my action items for you are to adopt that growth mindset. This may be a learned skill for you. When something happens to you, ask what that initially negative event makes possible, what good can come out of it, and learn whatever skills you need. Don't worry about the skills. Worry about the mindset. Be resilient and consistent. That resiliency and consistency will beat raw talent every time. I've seen it thousands of times in my career, both in corporate America and in online. It's people with stick-to-itiveness that really can make a difference, and if you're one of those people, that can be you, and you know this is not just true for you. If you surround yourself with people like that, with like-minded people, you'll rise to that level of engagement and perseverance, because that's what the people around you expect and that's the example that they're setting for you. So if you've got people around you that are negative or prone to quitting, get rid of them, and I don't mean in a mean way, just intentionally spend more time with the people that are lifting you up, because those people with good attitudes, just like you. It's your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude.

And you know, related to this and I alluded to it in this last point in point number three, for point number four, zig used to always say look, failure is just an event, it's not a person. Yesterday ended last night. Many entrepreneurs, they internalize failure. Something goes wrong. They take the setback personally. That's totally the wrong attitude, because the truth is, failure is just data. You know what I call failure. Failure is learning and as a trained engineer, I know this. I might run 30 experiments to get the right answer right. 29 of them are failures. But the one experiment that I run that is successful may turn my 80% profitable process into a 90% profitable process that results in tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, all on the strength of 29 consecutive failures. Right, you know, failure is just this thing that happens, it's an event and it's in the past. By definition, failure that happened to you is in the past and you need to leave it behind. Walt Disney was fired for lacking imagination. Can you imagine that he had a failure, and his failure was that he was fired and, ridiculously, the reason they gave was that he lacked imagination. But he put that behind them and built an empire that we now know as Disney Oprah. This is great. Someone told Oprah she wasn't fit for television and she went on to become a media icon.

Every failed launch or product failure that you have, every campaign that you start an ad campaign that doesn't work, that's a learning opportunity so you can get that out of the way and get to what works. So my call to action for you here is to always build the habit, the muscle memory, of reframing failure as learning. Own those failures, but not personally. Own them as a thing that you did, that you learned from, and don't get your self-esteem and self-worth tangled up in those results. Those don't define you. You have goals and you want to achieve those goals, but your self-esteem and self-worth can't be tied up in a product launch. It just doesn't make any sense. What you want to do instead is use your failures as stepping stones on your path to success, because failure is an event, not a person. And yesterday ended last night. I love Zig so much. All right, so the fifth one for you today and the last one today.

People often say Zig used to say that motivation doesn't last, and to that Zig would say well, neither does bathing, and that's why it's recommended daily. So you know, the problem is motivation fades over time. You may be really motivated by listening to this podcast episode I hope you are but motivation fades and you can't rely on motivation alone to drive your business. What you need are systems and habits which we've talked about on many other podcast episodes that help you stay consistent in your actions. And then you need to reapply motivations. You know, in the seven habits of highly successful people, stephen Covey talks about the seventh habit, which is sharpening the saw, and to this I ask what are you doing to help stay motivated, to stay consistent, to keep your mind in the right place? What are you doing intentionally to do that? Maybe what you're doing is listening to the late night internet marketing podcast. If that's you, man, I love you for that and I would love to hear your story. But that's what you need to be doing is constantly surrounding yourself with and filling yourself up with a little dose of daily or weekly or monthly motivation, because motivation doesn't last. Zig tells us that Develop those successful habits, because motivation follows your actions, and you may wish to do something that you probably think is silly, like daily affirmations or journaling or visualization to help you stay focused. Look, it doesn't matter what you decide to do, just be intentional about the things that you do to keep your mind moving in the right direction, and build systems around that. I think it's really could be as simple as setting a recurring appointment on your calendar to go find a podcast episode once a week or once a month that you can listen to. That's mostly about stuffs like that.

So what are we talking about here? What's the recap? Well, the recap is Zig was a genius of a man, and he left me personally with five things that I think can dramatically impact your business. Number one you don't have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great, and the call to action for you is to get started. Number two you can have absolutely everything you want in life if you'll just help enough other people get what they want, and my call to action to you is focus on your customers and the people that you're trying to serve. Be a servant leader. The rest of it will take care of itself.

Number three it's your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude. Focus on your attitude, do the work that you need to do to get your mind right and make sure that you're the person that expects success and is always drifting in that positive direction. And related to that. Number four failure is just an event. It's not a person. You are not failure and, by the way, yesterday ended last night. Failure is in the past and my call to action to you is to focus on what those failures make possible, use them for learning and focus on the future and move forward. And finally, number five people say that motivation doesn't last. Neither does bathing, and that's why we recommend it every day.

I recommend that you listen to the late night internet marketing podcast every time it comes out, because I'm going to give you a little dose of motivation every time. Hey, look, if you enjoyed this podcast and you think that you have friends that need to hear these five things from my buddy, zig, who I personally met in a sweaty gym about 20 years ago, I want you to send the link to that person and tell them hey, this Mark Mason guy, he listened to Zig and he's got some things that I think will help you Be that person. Be that person that's helping other people get what they want by spreading this kind of information. That's applicable to everybody. It's applicable to stay-at-home dads that are struggling cooking pasta. It's applicable to corporate executives. It's applicable to side hustlers like me and you.

It's applicable to those second grade teachers that are really having a hard time getting it done towards the end of the school year. If you've got a friend that you think this podcast will help send it to them, and you can send them the link. It's latenightimcom forward, slash 273. I'd really appreciate that If you did that. It would make my heart happy. And until next week, I hope you really spend some time thinking about what Zig has to say. I mean, I think this is really important stuff and it can really make a difference in your life, and that's why I shared it with you today. Ciao.

You can do it right when it's late at night. You've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Be sure to visit LNIMpodcastcom today to leave feedback for Mark, download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time.

Hey. So if you're new around here, this is the after show part of the show where I just talk about whatever I want, because I have your attention and that's fun for me. If you know if you got something else to do, I'll see you later, but if you want to stick around, I wanted to tell you this funny thing that happened to me. So I use AI a lot, particularly chat GPT, but I use a lot of AI platforms. My day job involves AI deployment and manufacturing environments and for customer solutions, and I use it in my business extensively. Next week, we'll be talking about some of the automations that I use for this very podcast a lot of stuff in my life involving AI. In fact, I use it so much. My family was making fun of me and, as some of you know, I'm also working on niche websites from time to time, and recently my son and I have been working on CPA marketing, or performance marketing, where you drive traffic to affiliate offers in order to make a commission. We use Google Ads for that. I'm teaching him how to do that and he's trying to build a business that he can run successfully in college. He leaves to go to college in the fall, and so I was talking to chat GPT literally using voice to text to communicate with chat GPT and I was asking it to help me with niche identification in a particular website that we're building. And it asked me what sub niche I wanted to focus on and it listed, gave me some options and it asked me if I wanted to focus down niche down because it knows, apparently, that the riches are in the niches or did I want to take a broad approach, and I respond. I responded like this I said first let's talk about SEO configurations of the blog, because at this point I was building a blog and give me a good SEO title tag and a good SEO description for the blog, along with a list of keywords for the SEO keyword tag, which, for those of you that are keeping score at home, seo keyword tags don't actually mean anything anymore, but I always fill them out anyway. So I'm just, you know, going through the motions of literally installing a blog and I'm getting chat GPT at two in the morning to help me figure this stuff out. So I don't have to think. And the problem was in the speech to text translation. It misunderstood SEO as SCO. So instead of Sierra Echo Oscar, it got Sierra, charlie, oscar, and it typed that out. Chatgpt ingests this. So I said first, let's talk about SCO. That's what I typed. And ChatGPT sees this and it says awesome, let's configure the SEO parentheses. I know you meant that, but now I kind of want to build a super cool optimization plugin.

Chat GPT told a joke. It made fun of the fact that I meant SEO and typed SEO and injected humor into its response. I think that's remarkable. I mean, that's something I would have said to you if you had misspoken and said SEO over and over again. That is just crazy. And I'm going to tell you what this AI stuff that we're using. It's the worst it's ever going to be. It's the dumbest it's ever going to be. It's the most useless that it's ever going to be in the history of mankind going forward. And already I just continue to be amazed at the sophistication and nuance that the AI solutions that we have now are able to deliver. Super crazy world. What an amazing time to be alive, ciao.

Late Night Internet Marketing.