Imagine this, you wake up tomorrow, you
grab your phone and your
Instagram account is locked.
Or maybe the app itself is down.
Or the algorithm just decided that today
is the day it stops showing your stuff.
The big question is what
happens to your business?
And listen, I get it, you've been posting
consistently, you've been putting in the
work, building a following, but there's
this quiet voice that is asking, what if
the platform changed tomorrow?
Would any of this hold up?
Listen, I get that because me too, I'm in
that same bucket and I was reminded this
week of what is so important when it
comes to leveraging these platforms.
And by the end of this episode, you'll
see the one shift that turns rented
attention into
something you actually own and
Mr.
Jeff Walker, and it was for an interview
for a membership that my wife and I run
where 100% of the proceeds go to our
charity, Village Impact.
And I always love talking to Jeff because
Jeff has been around for a long time.
In fact, he's been selling the same
product for 22, or 21
years, 21 years, it's crazy.
And I know this because I was one of his
first customers of his product called
Product Launch Formula way back in 2005.
It's kinda crazy how successful he has
been for such a long period of time.
And with that, he's seen a
lot of things come and go.
So this was something that I was looking
forward to, and in that
conversation, we just got jammin'.
We got talkin' about marketing and
business and product launches, and Jeff
is literally the guy who
invented the product launch.
And so I've been in
Jeff's world for decades.
And so anyway, we get talkin' about it,
and then Jeff, in passing, he brings up a
story where he's talkin' about a couple
customers who, in his most recent
promotion, bought from him.
But both of these customers joined his
email list way back in 2016.
10 years on the list before
they ever bought anything.
And then he goes on to say that there
were another two from
2021, so five years ago.
And that one comment, it hit me, because
most creators today are
obsessing over the wrong number.
We're chasing views
and follows and likes.
Meanwhile, Jeff has people who quietly
stayed on his list for a decade, never
bought a thing, and then
one day, they were ready.
So I've been doin' this for
a long time myself as well.
I have been online for 20 years, and I
have been helping people with memberships
for 18, and so I've watched a whole bunch
of platforms rise and fall.
I mean, you remember MySpace, or Vine, or
Periscope, or, now that I can't leave out
Clubhouse, you remember Clubhouse?
Oh my gosh, that was like a massive flash
in the pan, wasn't it?
Okay, my point is, is
these platforms come and go.
The list always stays.
And here's the bottom line.
Your real asset has never
been your follower count.
It's been the people you can reach
without asking anyone for permission.
In this episode, we're gonna get into
The first thing I wanna talk to you about
is the landlord problem.
The algorithm is the
landlord, and you're the tenant.
And the rent can go up any second.
Imagine renting a beautiful storefront in
the busiest mall in town.
The mall owner can change your hours, can
raise your rent, kick you out, or could
close the whole mall.
That is exactly what social media is.
Three things that you don't actually own
when you build on a platform.
Number one, who sees your content,
because the algorithm decides that.
Number two, how often they see it.
And number three, whether you can contact
them when it matters.
Now, research backs up the fact that our
views and reach are
dropping every single year.
Sprout Social analyzed nearly two million
Instagram posts and found organic reach
dropped 30 to 40% in a single year.
So if you have been watching your views
drop, you are not alone, my friend.
And this wasn't just one format.
This was carousels, static
images, reels, all of them.
Down 30 to 40% in one year.
That is crazy pants.
And so do I believe that we should
continue building on these platforms?
Yes, but do I believe that we
should be dependent on them?
Heck no.
That brings me to point number two,
what you actually own.
See, there are three buckets of audience.
There's rented, those are
followers on a platform.
There's borrowed, people who follow you
on YouTube or a podcast where the
platform sits between you and them.
And then there's owned,
and that is your email list.
And email is the only one where you can
sit down, write a message, and that
message actually reaches the
person who you wrote it to.
Now, according to Litmiss's 2025 state of
email survey, email still returns about
$36 for every dollar spent.
In some studies, put it as high as 42.
Nothing, my friend, nothing else even
comes close to the return
you get on email marketing.
And listen, I know it's not sexy to talk
about email marketing, because
it's been around for so long.
We want to talk about the next fancy whiz
bang platform or the strategy for
Instagram or the strategy for TikTok or
whatever it might be.
I get it, I'm in that boat too.
I love those platforms.
But business owner to business owner,
nothing gives you a return like email.
And so when I was chatting with Jeff, he
told me way back in the day that he used
to buy clicks for a penny, and then the
platform at the time, they raised it to a
nickel, and he thought it was highway
robbery at the time, and
we chuckled about that.
Because now we celebrate when we get
leads for $5 a lead.
So the cost of a lead has gone up 500
times in 20 years, and I hate to say this
to you, but it's never going back down.
So here's the good news about that.
Every person on your email list today
gets more valuable every single year, and
this is why it's so important that we
channel our energy to moving people from
whatever platform we're
marketing on to our email list.
You own it, and that email
list gets more and more valuable.
So third point, this comes down to the
shift you need to make.
Now this is the big one.
Every piece of content that you make has
to do one of two things.
Either it's gonna build the platforms
business, or it builds yours.
And you and I get to
decide that by the way.
See, a like on Instagram, that builds
Instagram's business.
A view builds TikTok's business.
But an email subscriber,
that builds your business.
And most creators are spending 95% of
their energy building someone else's
business, and they don't even realize it.
So here's the simple test.
After every piece of content
you publish, ask one question.
Did this give the right person a reason
to step closer to me?
Not louder, not flashier, just closer.
So in the next episode of this podcast,
I'm actually gonna do a
little bit of a deeper dive.
I'm gonna talk about a specific way to be
able to bring your
audience closer to you.
And it's actually the same approach
that's worked for me for over 10 years.
It is our single most effective list
builder that we have ever created.
And I'm also gonna give you insights on
new list builders that are absolutely
exploding right now with AI.
mastermind,
both for the business owners who are
running six and seven figure memberships,
and then our highest
level, which is impact.
And that's for people who are running
seven and eight figure businesses.
And we had one presentation from Matt
Diamante, and it was so inspiring,
because he was showing a new way to build your email list, and he was showing a new way to build your email list.
And he was showing a new way to build your email list and he's adding more than
a thousand leads a day to his email list.
Now here's the kicker.
He's doing it for less
than eight cents a piece.
I was like, what?
It is incredible.
So I'm gonna talk about that
in depth on the next episode.
But the bottom line, my friend, is that
you and I, we've gotta focus our efforts
on building our email list.
It is the most valuable asset that we
will have in our business.
So here's your next steps.
I want you to pull up.
I want you to pull up your last 10 posts.
I want you to count how many gave the
person a clear way to step closer to you.
And if it's fewer than three, well,
you've got what we call a bridge problem.
Look, I'll just say it.
Everyone is building an audience, right?
We're all growing followers, wanting more
followers on all the
different platforms that we've got.
But almost no one
actually owns that following.
And that's why I'm hosting a free
workshop where I'm gonna walk you through
the exact thing that I've been doing for
10 years to turn
followers into subscribers.
And as I said, this one little thing that
we created 10 years ago has been the
single most valuable thing and the most
effective list builder
that we've ever created.
And by the way, it's super easy to do.
And I'm gonna walk you through the whole
thing in this 90-minute workshop because
it is the bridge between content where
people scroll and a real list of people
who actually choose you.
So during this workshop, we're gonna
build this together.
So by the end of those 90 minutes, you're
gonna have this list
builder done and ready to go.
So I wanna encourage
you to come and join us.
Come to the workshop, just go to
workshopforai.com forward slash convert,
workshopforai.com forward slash convert.
And I can't wait to see you there.
All right, so let's give a recap of what
we talked about today.
Number one is the landlord problem.
Unfortunately, when you're building on a
platform, you don't own those followers.
The platform does.
And so it is something that we want to be
very mindful of because we never want our
business dependent on any one platform.
Number two, what you actually own, and
that is your email list.
And so friends, every effort should be
put towards growing your email list
because it is the single most effective
form of marketing and a
method to reach your audience.
And number three, that
is the shift to make.
Every content, every piece of content, we
should be asking ourselves, is this
helping build a bridge to bring those
followers to closer to us, to a list, to
an asset that we actually own?
Now I get it, it is easier to keep
posting and it is easier to hope the
algorithm is gonna help us
and help us reach more people.
And sometimes it does,
like I'm not gonna deny it.
Sometimes it does.
But the people who last in this game are
the ones who quietly build
something that they can't lose.
And everyone is building an audience, but
almost no one owns it.
So be the one who does.
All right, my friend,
thank you for listening.
Looking forward to talking to you more in
the next episode where I'm
gonna unpack the two most