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surviving the curse of the 80 20 rule on today's episode of Serve No Master, today's episode is brought to you by name. Cheap. The only place where I go to buy all of my websites To find out how much you can save and get a free year of identity protection, go to serve. No master dot com Backslash NAME Cheap. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams. Now thin, you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. Theeighty 20 Rule Is this very interesting and universal principle? It says that 80% of your money will come from 20% of your effort, and it applies to a lot of different aspects of your new and fledgling business. When you're first starting out, you're gonna be caught between these two poles at one end is making money. Pure capitalism, Pure mercenary. At the other end of the spectrum is passion, pleasure and enjoyment. Every time you're deciding what to work on for the day, you're caught between what you should do and what you want to. D'oh! That's really the balance between the 80 20 rule. As you're beginning your business as your first starting to build endeavor online. An example of this is your starting your new block. And right now, in the middle of one of my block contest cycles, which I'm excited about if you are, maybe you're starting your block this week. We've had a block for a few weeks. Whatever. You've got your block going and you've written a few posts and you sit down for the night. You work. You got your two hours in front of You have two hours to work and all you work on his aesthetics of your block. You just think, Oh, I want to make it look better. And so you spend two hours doing design work and the two hours of design word oftentimes won't change anything about your revenue streams. It won't increase. Your number of visitors won't increase your length of stay won't lower. Your bounce rate doesn't do anything. It just looks nicer. Makes you feel better about it. If you spent the same amount of time writing new block posts, those block Coast could have gotten more comments. More likes more social media, more traffic and generated you a bigger following, which means more people join your mailing list. More people buy stuff from your click on your advertising that would have actually generated more money. There's the 80 20 Rule Place. You didn't feel like writing Black Post. He wanted to make your sight look better because it feels good for you. You were driven by the second motivation desire rather than the first motivation. Profit. This is very simple example of a 20 role in action. It's very easy every day as you're working to get caught up in things that matter to you, it don't matter anyway. Else these air rabbit holes, thes air, little things that don't matter very much. An example of this is within my own membership site. With my best seller coaching program. There's nine modules and this around 100 training videos covering everything about building an Amazon empire. Everything from choosing your first topic to designing the cover of your first book to finding reviews to getting traffic all the way through audio books and building a mailing list. And building a tribe from books that covers everything is a huge course for a very long time. When you went through that course, you'd notice that the icons raw messed up, but you clicked unless and one unless into the text was always correct. But the icon would look wrong and people would say, Why didn't you fix that? And I say, Well, I wanted to launch the course, have it making money before I went into the stuff That's aesthetic but wouldn't make a difference because the content is the most important part. So I did all the content for the course first recorded all of videos, made all the worksheets, did all of that stuff first, because that's the most important part, even though for me and my heart yeah, I wanted to look really good. And in fact, when I finally did, it took me five or six hours to go in and fix the look. Now, if you go to that course, it looks amazing. This is me resisting rabbit holes, resisting things that matter a little bit and people will complain about. People often will complain about small things. They don't affect your business. Sometimes people say I really don't like this A perfect example Just happen to me recently if you've seen the contest I running contest this August, if this is the future, if you're watching this down the line, I'll probably running a different contest every month. I run different contests on my website to get people really excited. Some months it's a contest about starting your first bloggin 30 days. Some months I do a contest where everyone writes a book all the same time. We launch books together. We have a big contest where I do that sometimes the partner with other author and we do something really amazing. I love running contests, having competitions to get people into that cooperative spirit for my podcast launch contest, give away all the school prizes to give away some cool stuff from Amazon. Some my best courses, all of that stuff. I made this video. It took me a really long time. I spent a really long time making that video using cartoons software, and I sent it to a couple of people. I sent it to someone who makes between 78 figures a year. I sent it Thio two people that have done some intern stuff for me in the past, one of the interns of making a couple $1000 a month and one of the guys doesn't follow a lot of the stuff. I said he's doing 50 to $80 a month because it went in the direction that I said not to do is doing all these things. I said not to dio the feedback from the person. Making the most money was very simple, he said. There's one sentence with the audio's messed up change that in the video is perfect. When people first hear that, it will sound a little bit weird. And he was right. I'd actually been thinking about that. The guy in the middle said, This looks cool, good job, and the guy who's making the least amount of money was like all I know is that the cartoon face is out of sync with your voice, and I wasn't even trying to sync up those things. It's a little character hopping around. He's actually moving on a loop. He's not sink up to my voice at all. So when you're getting advice, when you're listening to the different people, you want to make sure you know the source to fix the voice thing took me 20 or 30 minutes. I don't know why I re recorded the sentence like 10 times. It kept sounding the same. It sounded really echoing when I would say this one sentence. I have no idea why it was so weird. I had to redo it a bunch of times, but I fixed it, redid the video, re uploaded a better version of you two. Have no idea who sees it will only hear it with the better audio thing. I fixed that to me about 20 minutes now to fix the cartooning and try and sink up, the voice to the sound of my voice would have taken me probably two or three hours because I'd be very difficult. It's very hard to sync up something like that to sync up a moving mouth with your voice. If you've done any cartooning, you know I'm talking about this is something very challenging and very advanced way beyond my level of cartoon stuff. I used a cartoon piece of software that helps you a little bit. I could have spent my 20 doing something that makes a video a better, more profitable or my 80 working on the same thing, working on the same video. Doing something doesn't matter because no one cares about that. No one else will look at that video and everything. Why isn't this three second loop of one of the characters on screen sync up to my voice? We can get caught up in the wrong stuff simply by taking the advice from the wrong people. Whenever you deciding what to work on and you're getting advice, make sure you get advice from someone who's further up the mountain and you rather than someone behind you. There are a lot of people on make money online. Start your own business travel. The world forms all over the world of people on these forms all the time that all they do is forum. They're just keyboard jockeys. They read other people's posts and they rewrite the same material and they sound very impressive. There's a certain form I've been a member for maybe 10 years, and I've only got a couple of 100 posts on there. But then there's other people that have 50,000 posts, and you see that you go, Wow, this guy's so many posts. You must be an expert. But really, it's someone who just knows how to read and regard J the same material. And when you get advice from someone like that, you think they're an expert because you see they've been a member for a long time. You see, they've written a lot of post You think, Oh, this person must know they're talking about because they've written so many posts and you end up getting advice that sends you down a rabbit hole that doesn't affect your profit margins. It doesn't actually help you. We keep running into different areas of business where the 80 20 rule can trap us. The way to overcome and defeat this limitation is to track your income at the end of every month. Look at where your money's coming from. Maybe put up a couple of videos on YouTube. You did a couple of block posting you mess around on Facebook. One of them made $10.1 of May 20 and one of middle 100 which everyone made the 100. Now you know. Okay, this is what's making me the most money. I want to do more more of this. So the next month, you focus on that for me. I noticed about a year ago when I was working for a lot of clients that a couple of clients were actually generating much more money for me, and I focused on them and I said, What can I do to increase my money from you guys? And at that point, I moved into copyrighting. We talked about that and they said, Yeah, if you could do the copy as well, we'll pay you two or three times as much. It massively bumped me up, and I moved into doing videos for them and cop writing for them and for a lot of the clients. I work with people I partner with in all these different areas. I do these things. I noticed that. And then as I was working with him more and more, I noticed that some things would take a really long time for me to dio and some things I could do very quickly. Then I said, Why don't I pay someone else to do this time intensive thing and then I'll just do the final, add it to the final rewrite, tighten it all up and save myself massive amounts of time. Same thing for how I researched. I can teach someone a lot about my research method, and they could make the notes for me some action to read the book because that's not effective. When I'm researching a book, it might take me three hours to read the book and generate my bullet points. Generate my notes, generate that part of it. But that's not really valuable to me. I don't make any money from that. The money actually comes from taking those notes and turning them into the content. That's where the real value is. Once those notes were generated, I can then write something really amazing. And actually taking notes for a book isn't a high level skill. Most people can do it. Anybody who graduated high school and worked a little bit hard or anyone went to college knows how to take notes. They could read a book and just mark the highlights, and they can Jerry Bullet points. That's not the high level skill. The really advanced thing I can do is take those notes and write an amazing book from it. I discovered as I was working this part, I can get someone else to dio. Another example of the 80 20 rule is when I'm learning to write, copy or write a sales video for a market. The first thing I do is I watch a competitors video to get a feel for the flow of the story that beats the story. Are all of those things Then you take that video, you turn it into text, you transcribe it, and then I kind of chop it up and really look at the sections. I really analyze it to understand the flow. All of that's very time intensive. For me to actually listen and write down an entire audio script that's insane. That's a huge amount of time. 30 45 minute video without taking me 345 hours to do. That's a huge amount of time. That's a full day of work for me. Instead, I could pay someone else to do it for $30. The place I use charges a dollar a minute. Sometimes when you're in the 80 20 rule, you realize you're spending huge amounts of time on something that doesn't make you any money. But sometimes you'll discover I'm sending huge amounts of time on something I can pay someone else to do, and it's very low. I could pay someone else a small amount of money to do it. Those are the two things you want to look at. If you're spending a lot of time doing something that's generating revenue, building your business, make sure that it's very profit before you. If it's something you could get someone else to do for very cheap, it's better to do that. It's better to pay someone else to do it. If I'm making $100 for a project and will take me 10 hours, I could pay someone $20 to do nine hours of the work. I make less total money, but I make more money per hour, so pay attention to the money, the time ratio. Sometimes you can cut your paycheck by 20% but cut your work by 80%. This is the value of outsourcing. This is the value and working with teams. This is the value in paying people to do small tasks for you as you're first starting out. And as I teach my block, walking through step by step, setting up your first block, building it out, I do think you should manually do that part yourself. First learned that cause it's very simple. It could be done in less than hour, even if you're a total technological beginner. But as far as designing your block when you get up, we gotta make it look really beautiful. Amazing and admitted school special effects. It might take you a very long time to learn how to do it. It's better have someone else do it. This is that 80 20 rule when it comes to hiring. People don't hire people to do things where it's more expensive, the value. So, for example, same project I have. The project's gonna get paid $100. I don't want to pay someone else $110 to the work for me. I'm gonna take a loss, and I don't want to pay someone else 90 only gonna make 10 and I'm gonna end up having a managed and work on all into taking the loss. You want to pay attention to that ratio and make sure that there's a big spread between the value you're getting, whether it's someone else paying you or the amount of time it's saving you and what you're spending. You don't want to pay someone $100 to save you an hour of your time. That's a very highway, But you do want to pay someone $20 to save you 10 hours of your time. That's the difference. You want to think about the value of the time you get back. Right now. I'm working on a project, a little video game thing, and I paid someone else 1/3 of the money to do 99% of the work. They're gonna do most of the work. I'll go through and do the final edit the final read through, clean up everything, test everything, make sure it's super tight. But it would have taken me a huge amount of time to do the project of my own. It's very, very labor intensive, taking lots of screenshots, lots of technical stuff, instead getting someone else to do it. I'm getting back a huge amount of time. Yes, I'll make less money from the project, but in the end the product will be better because the person I'm working with is very, very good. I often hire other writers to do for straps. Me rough drafts. Will you help me with stuff the author were coming from? A part of? Being in my tribe for informal relationships with me is that I often pass work on to the people that and my driver that I know are serious about what they dio. Those person will do an excellent job. I have total faith in their ability. They've worked with me on several projects in the past. I get the value of getting my time back cause I'm very busy with several other projects in same time, and they get the value of a project they dio making an amount of money that's good for them. For the amount of effort they're putting in. We create these good ratios. There's value for both people. There's value for me and that I get my time back to fight for them and then they have work. They have work coming in. They have something that getting paid a good wage for, and it's something inside their skill set. Track your time. Track your profits. The more you know what you spent your time doing, the more you know where you're different money is coming from. Then you can say, Oh, this is what I need Thio Invest more effort in each month or even at the end of each week. Look at the money that's come in. Look at the vow you've gotten from your different projects. If you put five books on Amazon and one book is making 90% of the money, well, then focus on that one book to everything you can to build it up, make a sequel, make bundles, make extra prizes. Do anything you can to build up that one property rather than focusing on the other books that all combined are making 10% because each of those other books is worth what two or 3% your income. This is the 80 20 rule. It really comes out when you pay attention to your results. Most people working for yourself we put in 160 hours of work a month. Let's say you're working a full time work for yourself 40 hours a week, about 100 60 hours a month, four week month at the end of the month. You I worked this many hours in this. How much you got paid. That is the 9 to 5 mindset that is a total amount of time in versus amount of money. When you work for yourself, you wanna look at where each piece of money came from, so you can isolate which work you're doing. That's the most profitable. Now I can't tell you in advance which thing that will be. You may discover that you make all your money from YouTube and then the person next to discovers they do much better with blogged posting. I can tell you right now I don't know how successful this podcast will be. I can't predict in advance that this podcast will be more or less successful than my book on Amazon or more or less success for my business than my block. I can't tell you because I haven't started tracking yet. Now down the line in a couple of months and I've done, we're tracking. I'll be able to keep that information, but I can't tell in advance before I do it. I can only tell you afterwards, and this is why you want to track it end of each month and say I got this many visits from YouTube this many visits from my podcast, this many visits from Facebook. That's the first level of tracking Tracking your following, tracking your traffic, saying these efforts led to this many visitors. When you get a little more sophisticated, there's a lot of software that could help you with this. You want to track the value of your visitors. Let's say you get 1000 visitors to website this month and 100 people bought something and you'll look and you'll go. I got 500 visitors from YouTube, 300 from Facebook and 200 from Twitter. So you think I should really focus on that 500 grow that because you think that's my largest metal traffic and you spend the next month and really invest and grow that 500 to 5000. But then we sell 200 units. Your profit doesn't grow proportionately. That's because you're just looking at total traffic rather than the quality of the traffic. Maybe when you do more research. You discover that only 20 people come from Twitter. But 75 year sales came from Twitter. So we know that quantity is great, But quality is what we want to move into next. Saying this is where I get people that actually buy stuff. When I started my first business online, my very first business was selling video doing s yo for local businesses for small clients in my area, I would get 2030 visitors to my website. A date, not a huge amount. But any individual client was gonna pay me 500 to $2000 a month. So I don't need huge numbers because I had quality. I for a while was on page one of Google for the term S E O. So I would get all this traffic from Google 99% of traffic. I started getting 102 103 100 visitors a day. All of this traffic were people that were researching the term or people on other s yo companies. There were no sales ever came from that key word. But when I would post on Craigslist and it would generate traffic almost always, it would lead to a sale when someone's on my Craigslist dad, and if they clicked from the ad to my website, probably 99% of the time, they would call me or email me. We would move into negotiations, and then most of those I would end up closing. Then you're in the point of where they actually have the money when you have that meeting all those steps. But the first step is really seeing if there even a buyer at all their people there online. And they're just doing research there, just looking up stuff. I all the time type and search terms on Google, and I'm just looking up stuff and doing research. I'm not in by mode, but if I'm on Amazon and I do the same search, I'm ready to buy and Craigslist is the same way. It's a site where people are ready to buy, begin to track your traffic, your efforts and say this is where the majority my profits are coming from these air. The customers might be the smallest total number of customers, but the customers to generate the most revenue as we build our business as you learn more and more. You get more sophisticated so you'll keep hitting walls and the solution will be to 80 20 year previous month, over and over again. 1st 80 and 20 year time. Then you start to 80 20 rule looking your traffic. Then you start 80 20 rule looking at your profit, how these people actually buy stuff, then the next level. Beyond that, as you're building your business and growing and growing, you start to look at lifetime customer value people from source A. They all by 100% by something but only 10% of buying anything else. People from source be 50% of them by but of those people, all of them by two more products. So even though source be generates less initial sales, less short term profit long term, they're 2 to 3 times more valuable. This is where you start to look a term which is lifetime customer value, and that's where these numbers coming. Players. You're building a business when you hear people saying these terms, this is the 80 20 rule. I want to invest in a place that generates the most valuable long term customers. Each phase as you build your business. You'll continue to run in these areas. Well, what should I spend today working on and looking your past and doing accurate tracking will allow you with the 80 20 rule to make the right decision so you become more and more efficient. And this is how you can keep making more money without doing big changes. And you could make the same amount of money by doing 80% less work. That's what's so amazing and so powerful about the 80 20 rule. To celebrate the launch of this podcast, I'm giving away some epic prizes. You could win an Amazon tap and have me personally turn you into a best selling author toe win. You're part of over $20,000 in prizes. Go to serve no master dot com backslash contest Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's best seller, serve no master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow