From The Desk of Clayton Johnson, COO @ The HOTH
It was 2011, and I had just flown in to do a mastermind with 3 top marketers in a sick house overlooking the beach in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
The excitement of it all was pumping through my veins.
For the last 2 years, I had been creating on an online guitar course that was going to be my ticket to freedom.
I could almost touch my dreams of country hopping, automatic income, drinks on the beach... living the life!
I had the entire course completed, clickbank approved my product, and I was ready to launch but then....
I froze.
Every marketing article I had been devouring for the previous 2 years started rushing back to me.
Wait, shouldn't I be split testing the landing page?
Should I be doing adwords or facebook? Or Bing? or Yahoo?
Shouldn't I set up retargeting to capture all the people who bounce?
Should I change to a faster host?
Should I put a countdown timer on my VSL?
AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
It went on and on and I was paralyzed.
You see, I had spent so much time reading every random marketing article on the internet that I knew TOO much.
On top of that, I had a limited budget and I couldn't afford to just "test" everything.
That "knowledge" stopped me right in my tracks.
Even though I could talk shop about internet marketing for days on end, I felt like a total failure.
I was spending all my time on the WRONG things, staying up late just trying to make it work.
That product never took off. I burned up all my money and time on it.
But I didn't give up there...
While growing The HOTH we came to a similar problem where we had a successful business, but we had flatlined.
We couldn't grow past a certain point, and it was the same frustration.
So I set out on a quest to really understand WHAT MATTERS so we could stop spinning our wheels and really start growing.
It took a long time and over $250,000 in testing (in high end training courses, coaching, real-world testing)...
But what resulted was a system to consistently and AUTOMATICALLY massively scale our company.
And it was actually pretty simple!
What I would give to have 10 min just to explain it to my previous self!!!
Anyways, once I knew what to do, everything started to take off like that hockey stick growth that everyone wants.
We added millions to our revenue, 10's of thousands of leads to our list, and started having WAY more fun.
What was crazy is that after setting up the system, I was actually doing LESS work, and getting more time back!
During this heavy growth period, I learned:
• How to create a marketing system that was going to work consistently for growth
• What things ACTUALLY matter for growing the business
• How to eliminate 99% of the things that were sucking up all my time
• How to make traffic actually CONVERT!
You see, we created a marketing SYSTEM.
This was like putting rocket fuel on our SEO.
In fact, we used this plan to become one of the fastest growing companies in the United States and landed on the 2017 INC 5000 list.
Then I started thinking....
If I could have gone back and had someone just show me what to do, then I would have saved so much time...
...and frustration...
...and money...
So that's what I did.
