Show Notes:

The will to win. “I was a top athlete in high school as our basketball team’s point guard, and that’s something that my dad was always really proud of. He was so excited about my involvement with the team that when we would play basketball together, it was anything but for fun — it was practice, and it was tough work. It got to the point where my friends wouldn’t even want to come over to play because they knew what we would be getting into. But my dad always said, ‘You only play the game to win.’”

Forging your own path. “When I went to college, I was really just a partier. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew I wanted to own my own business. Somehow I ended up with a degree in History Education — again, I don’t know how because I was easily the worst student — even though I was always on the brink of getting kicked out of college. In order to get my degree I had to write a 30-page paper, but of course I didn’t want to actually do that, so I outsourced it. I paid someone else to write it for me, but it turns out that the girl that I paid to write it actually plagiarized it herself. I got called into the office and had to play dumb since I couldn’t tell them I paid someone else to do it for me, so all in all I ended up having to retake the class. But that was indicative of my time there. Somehow I got good grades otherwise, somehow I graduated, and somehow I made it all the way through. I later got a job as a high school detention supervisor slash junior varsity basketball coach, and at one point I thought I was going to coach college basketball for my career, but that all changed when I did an internet search for how to make money online, and that’s when I discovered the world of online marketing — so I went from there, and that led me to entrepreneurship.”

The Internet then versus now. “Affiliate marketing back in the day was so much different than it is now. At the time, if you wrote a query or an article, it might not have existed on Google — meaning you could be the only one who had written about that content. If you were the only person with that content, that means you automatically ranked. It wasn’t so much about quality. I could build a bunch of backlinks and the site would be number one. There’s many different ways of funding growth, and while I don’t regret any choices I made, many people bootstrap it, but I wish I had taken on debt because of how effective it was. I could have really accelerated my earnings significantly, but even though it was the Wild Wild West in those days, I still managed to do really well in those areas.”

The times are a-changin’. “SEO is a bloodbath, and the game’s changing with AI and the quantum leaps there. Most of the time the issue is not the strategy, and instead, it’s an under-capitalization issue. They don’t have the capital or the strategy to compete in that market.”

The truth about Google. “Let’s focus on just the organic side. In 2016, there were 3 trillion web pages. What is it like today in 2023, especially with the advent of ChatGPT? Google doesn’t have the financial capability to crawl every page. It’s significantly slower than it has ever been. The reason Google wanted to have you delete old content is so that it could help them crawl the web. That’s why it’s a cost-based issue, so you can’t put content out and expect that Google’s even going to find it or index it. It may take two to three months, depending upon your site’s authority. It’s a very long-term play, and what I mean by that is that it’s no longer SEO; it’s search engine marketing. You have to combine local maps, Google Ads, and LSA to play in that channel. It’s no longer the gravy train that it used to be. When you look at the opportunity, the opportunity is still there. Google and YouTube — if you count YouTube as a Google property — have more monthly website visitors than the next 48 sites combined. It’s just a more difficult game.”

Kids really do change your life. “Wow, what a change it was to have a child. I was truly just thrown to the fire. My wife had some health complications on our first child, so I had to learn to do everything all at once. She couldn’t even hold our child for the first three days, and I’d never changed a diaper. You can’t just read about how to change a diaper. More importantly, you’ve got to do all you can to keep this baby alive. Everything changed after that. I get to experience things differently and all over again, like going to the zoo, seeing an animal, hearing those words. It’s an amazing feeling. I’m so glad I did it, but it changed everything.”

What does being a game changer mean to you? “The only thing that comes to mind is you only play the game to win. That’s all there is to it.”

RESOURCES & REFERENCES
Amazon
Google
Craigslist
Slack
Zoom
Upwork
Rankings.io
Dunn Kruger Effect
YouTube
ChatGPT
Disney+
Netflix
Dunbar’s Number
Starbucks
Seth Godin
LinkedIn
Neil Patel
Gary Vaynerchuk
Grant Cardone