Make Money Online (Without Destroying Your Reputation)

Video

Summary

• When asking for money, there's a right and a wrong way to do it, and I can guide you through the process based on my own experience.
• Use the gift-ask ratio to balance between providing value and making offers, much like GaryVee's "jab, jab, jab, right hook" approach.
• The give-ask ratio has been well researched by big media companies, aiming to maximize asks without losing viewership.
• I recommend the tweak of "give until they ask you" to ensure your audience is ready for you to make an offer; it's important to give in public and sell in private.
• Depositing goodwill by giving makes it more likely for people to comply with your requests later; society operates on reciprocity.
• Building an audience is crucial as that is the real asset, not the content itself. Your audience compounds over time while individual pieces of content are temporary.
• Avoid making frequent asks in the beginning to avoid losing audience goodwill, which could be more detrimental than beneficial.
• Share transparently about your business and give away value for free to collect testimonials and build trust.
• For content, consider two ways to ask: integrated (naturally within the content) or intermittent (between pieces of content).
• The commercial cost is not money but goodwill; losing too much audience goodwill can be costly.
• For your initial business announcement, be simple and generous with a light ask, as I did when starting my personal training business.
• Hold off on full right hooks, as patience and holding back may lead to more significant opportunities later.
• Compounding growth in audience goodwill can lead to opportunities knocking at your door without hard asks, which can drastically increase demand and pricing power.
• Prioritize giving over asking, maintaining a ratio that favors giving significantly, to prevent diluting brand value and keep scaling effectively.

How To Take Action

A good way of doing business is to focus on balancing giving with asking. Here's a simple action plan:

1. Give First, Ask Later: Provide value before making any offers. Whether it's through social media, blog posts, or podcasts, consistently give helpful information, tips, or free resources to your audience. This builds goodwill and trust.

2. Understand the Give-Ask Ratio: Aim for a ratio that leans heavily towards giving. For example, share valuable content three or more times before you make one small ask. This prevents you from losing the goodwill you've built.

3. Be Public with Your Giving: Share your knowledge and helpful tips openly. This way many people benefit, and they remember your generosity. When it's time to sell or make an offer, do it privately or subtly.

4. Grow Your Audience Over Content: Remember, your followers are your real asset, not just your individual posts. Your audience grows over time and gets more valuable, while content comes and goes.

5. Keep Asks Rare and Integrated: If you include asks in your content, make them feel natural and not too pushy. If your video is 10 minutes, maybe spend 30 seconds on your ask. For short content, like posts on social media, one in every ten could be an ask.

6. Initial Announcement: Make your first business announcement simple and generous. Offer something for free and just lightly ask for support or to check it out.

7. Be Patient with Full Asks: Hold back on big requests. Play the long game so when you do ask, it's more impactful. Over time, the compounding effect of giving can lead to more opportunities naturally coming to you.

8. Focus on More Giving than Asking: Always favor giving. If you need to make a living, make your asks sparingly, with perhaps a 30 to 1 ratio of giving to asking. This keeps the demand high and allows for potential growth in your pricing power in the future.

Start giving today, and use this approach to build a community that’s eager to support you when you do have something to ask.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"I'd like to just change it to give until they ask you"

– Alex Hormozi

"when you do it that way, your brand consistently is reinforced publicly and you continue to grow and expand"

– Alex Hormozi

"if you consistently give and give and give, then what happens is your audience compounds"

– Alex Hormozi

"the audience is the asset, not the content you make"

– Alex Hormozi

"the strongest driver of pricing power and profits is supply and demand"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

don't want to feel icky or sleazy to the people who know and love you when you ask them to give you money so there's a good way to do it and there's a bad way to do it the good news is I can show you step by step how I got my first 20 clients posting on social media for my personal training business a decade ago and I've continued to use that in each company going forward and this is a sneak preview from my upcoming book 100 million dollar leads which you can check out at acquisition.com forward slash leads so there was a friend of mine who had a podcast that blew up and very quickly he had millions of downloads and his business started to grow it skyrocketed and it was almost 100 from people who were listening to his podcast and what happened was he made an ass during one of his podcasts he made a lot of money he thought when I make an ask I make more money and so what I'll do is I'll just make more asks he learned the wrong lesson and so he did make more asks and he then made a little bit more money and then he would continue to make less and less and less until eventually his listenership dropped and dropped and dropped because he had lost the Goodwill of his audience the key point I'm going to talk about today is mastering the gift ask ratio how much to give versus how much to ask garyvee popularized the whole concept jab jab jab right hook which is the idea of giving giving giving and then ask it not take but ask the good news is this ratio has been incredibly well studied why because the biggest media companies in the world want to be able to ask on their platforms as much as humanly possible without losing viewership listenership audience on television for every 47 minutes of content there's 13 minutes of advertising if you look on Facebook every four posts there's one ad it's almost like a three to one ratio between how many ads there are and how much content there is what I want to do is give you my slight tweak on the give give ask concept instead of give give give ask I'd like to just change it to give until they ask you and that's when you know your audience is ready for you to make an offer and my personal preference here is actually to give in public and sell in private whenever you give you deposit Goodwill into the audience if you give someone something first they're far more likely to comply with your request later when someone helps us we feel indebted to them we want to help them back right that's how Society works but with media we can do that at scale you can gain Goodwill and provide value to millions of people at once but then it all funnels back to one person and that's why it's so powerful and it's free when you do it that way your brand consistently is reinforced publicly and you continue to grow and expand it will force you to keep that content amazing so that you continue to reinforce your reputation if you consistently give and give and give then what happens is your audience compounds and this is something that I didn't understand for a long time the audience is the asset not the content you make so when I make a video and then it disappears in three days on my news feed what that one piece of content is is it got me 300 more people to start seeing my stuff and then they permanently enter the audience provided I don't ask too much too frequently in the beginning it'll be really small and if you can hold off and you keep giving you keep giving you keep giving you eventually never even have to ask publicly because instead of asking you just start getting transparently this is something that I've now personally experienced and I was like I don't know but you know what I'll give it a shot let's just see if I can make a bunch of business content and see if that will attract one million five million 10 million dollar profit per year businesses not Revenue profit so that I can invest them and help them grow and it turns out it did now there's two ways that asks work in content and so I want you to think of your asks as commercials you're interrupting your own content with a commercial about your stuff an integrated approach would be like during the content like hey if you want to learn more about this stuff go to 100 million dollar leads 100 million dollar leads is coming out and there are eight methods that I talk about advertising and by Design I'm using all eight to advertise this book and at this point we already have 200 000 people who have registered for the book launch live which is on this day Saturday August 19th so that would be an example of an integration it's natural it comes up as you're talking and then you can point to it and you get back to what you're saying Integrations work better for long-form Content books videos pod podcast blog post those are all things that lend themselves to integrating in very small percentages of the total amount of time it takes someone to consume something for example if I made an integration and I started with a minute about something valuable and then I spent five minutes in the middle talking about my thing you still need to keep the ratio of minimum three to one because remember television's 13 minutes to 47 right for a 60 Minute slot in terms of commercials so that's the Max and so for me I would rather be at like 98 give two percent ask so if we looked at the total seconds of this video the give to ask ratio is still super strong and I'm not going to lose audience because of that ask the other way is intermittent which means in between things intermittent is typically better for short form platforms if you have 10 Instagram posts or 10 Tick Tock reels on the 11th one you make one about your services that you offer and then you go right back to the pre-programmed show it's even harder because if you're doing multiple posts a day I wouldn't do more than three percent so once or twice a month one post that feels reasonable and you're not gonna lose audience and so fundamentally the actual cost of the commercial is not money but Goodwill how much of my audience am I losing by making this ask I though to be clear I always want to under ask my audience personally so if you're new to making content believe it or not you've actually been providing value to certain people for an extended period of time it's you actually do have a decent amount of Goodwill if you make your first post what I would just call like a declaration of business which is just saying like hey you know you guys have maybe been following me for a while you might know me you might not from personal from College from work from out of the bars this is what I'm doing with my life now and I would love to give you guys something for free that would benefit you and if that sounds cool awesome if not keep following me be posting more about this stuff very quick very simple and I was actually able to find my first public decoration of business which is here this is April 9th I'm actually coming up on uh 10 years I hit my decade in business how about that for those of you know me you know two things one I am terrible with all things technology logical still true for example I just heard about Spotify a few weeks ago seriously two I love training slash nutrition and fitness more than well a whole lot so today is sort of special because it marks a day when my love of training vanquished to see me trying to use fancy words Vanquish my fear of Technology what do I mean for the better part of a year I've been taking part in a free personal training project that I would give away free personal training to anyone who's willing to give 500 to a thousand dollars to a cause of their choice give value for an extended period of time for a small group of people to prove that you know what you're doing so you can get testimonials by the way this way they wouldn't have to be motivated by the same thing as me but be motivated to give to their cause and benefit themselves when I first introduced the idea I was happily surprised the amount of positive sport I received so almost a year for my first client I now have a website to formally show some of the transformation that I've gone underway using my programming and as a formal means of contacting me about signing up I currently have a few slots open on my roster so drop me a quick note if you're interested thanks so much take a second to check out some of these ridiculous transformations in record time would I make this post again today probably not but I'm proud of the kid who did it because I had given value for free to people free because they didn't pay me I had them pay someone else because I wanted them to Value it but making that first Declaration of business post was actually how I got my first 20 paying customers I got 20 people who message me because because I to be fair I had always been in shape and people had known me my whole life as a guy who was always obsessed with Fitness so it made sense that I would make that my next natural thing and so you've provided value to people for a long period of time you can make your first post a light ask which is just declaration and asking for support and then you can start the business now if you have no content up to that point show them what you've been up to and then you can make your ask I would encourage you to make that first post because I think it'll show it's possible and I think if I can get you that first win you'll be far more likely to continue and if you're wondering well at what point do I fully right hook my audience and just drain it of Goodwill Real Talk part of the game is quote leaving money on the table so let me give you an example friend of a friend had a tequila business that was pretty big big enough that the rock approached him Dwayne Johnson and The Rock said I would like two-thirds of your business and mind you when you did that that might have been a big ask I don't know they said no now fast forward years later the rock started his own tequila brand which is now worth 6 billion so they probably would have made out really well with that but here's the thing if the rock had done that deal at that time he might have actually lost out on what he ultimately made with terramada and so that means if someone says hey Alex can you endorse my thing if I say yes today it's probably going to be a bad deal for me because in two years my audience would be significantly larger and so will yours when you're thinking about these right hooks there's a huge time component and the thing is is that compounding gets crazy near the end every time you decide to make the right hook if you hold it it could be 10 or 100 times bigger 12 months 24 months later could you imagine if two years ago when I started making content and I just started getting early engagement my YouTube videos and Instagram and people start dming me they're like hey can you Mentor me which I don't do if I had said sure I'm gonna do it I would have stopped my growth curve and I would have just been just another dude but by holding back and it takes a lot of self-discipline self-control and patience which by the way if you want the definition for me operationalizing patience is just figuring out what you do in the meantime you don't actually wait you just figure out what you do in the meantime because I am in the game of making money my goal is to always have significantly less Supply than I have demand and I always want to keep that demand because that is the Holy Grail of what you want Which is far more people who want to do business with you than you have capacity to do so the strongest driver of pricing power and profits is supply and demand when we make content what we're actually doing is artificially Shifting the demand curve in our favor and the other side of this is that if you are the business owner you control Supply and so you can inflate your demand and at the same time cut your supply and when you have that happen price goes through the roof and so do your profits I'm all about growing as fast as I possibly can which means you got to give as much as you possibly can just keep giving and people will start coming to you you'll start not even having to ask you'll just start getting and if you're going to ask because you need to put food on the table which I understand for me I would be way more than the three to one ratio more like 10 times that would be like a 30 to 1 ratio of giving to asking so I keep maximizing my growth and keep my brand compounding while still making a little bit of money for me because I know that long term the more I hold back my ask the bigger it will be