Greg :
If you have something that people desire and you have an offer that they desire, they will give you their contact information. They might not give you their money right away, but the thing below money is, hey, I'll at least give you my information so you could send me that thing that I kind of want. When I really, really want it, I'll actually pay money for it. Right close. This is secrets for success. Welcome to the Secrets for Success podcast. I'm your host, Greg Tod. Thank you as always for joining me.
Greg :
Okay, you guys know how I do it. I have two episodes a week. One episode is me ratling off crap to you and telling you what you're doing right, or what you're not doing good or whatever. And then I have one episode per week with this podcast where I'm interviewing someone that either inspires me, that I know has amazing content that could basically inspire you and make your life better. And this week is no exception. This guy I actually met last year, it was through my older brother, and he was telling me about this dude that he met at an event that is just like, knows so much stuff about so much stuff. And one of those things is affiliate marketing is AI. And he said, greg, you just have to meet him.
Greg :
So a few months later, maybe a month or two later, I actually met him at an event, and it kind of just took off from there. It was in Arizona, right? It was in Arizona that we initially. And so now he's actually a faculty member for a seven figure mastermind that I'm a part of. And he basically helps all of us in how to leverage AI. So he does that. He does affiliate marketing. He's been around the whole online game for a very long time. And so what I really enjoy is that he knows how to leverage everything.
Greg :
And he doesn't have a big team at all. I don't even think he has a team. I think he's doing all these things by himself, just leveraging automation and so, Reed Florin, thank you so much for being honestekers for success.
Reed:
Thanks for having me, Greg. It's nice seeing you.
Greg :
Awesome, awesome. So, just to let you guys know, I was just telling him before we started live, he's probably one of the most giving people that I've ever met. I asked him, hey, could you speak at my five day online challenge? And he said, yep, no problem. And he delivered and then went above and beyond, and the people were so floored with the stuff he was talking about. I was like, well, is there a way I can get him to come back, I was like, well, can you fly into Clearwater beach and come hang out with us at our event? And he was like, yeah, sure. Okay. So I just feel like if I ask him anything, he's going to say yes. And so just a while ago, I was telling him that of all the people that are in our mastermind, he's the first person that I asked.
Greg :
He's actually the second person I asked to be on a podcast. And my reason is because I know he always says yes to me. So thank you, Reed, for just being so accessible. And can you just tell the people a little bit about what you do besides what I told them?
Reed:
Sure. Yeah. So I've been in the online marketing space for a very long time. I started as a teenager in the 90s making money online, doing affiliate marketing stuff. So promoting other people's products and services and getting a commission on my sales. Fast forward to today. And I've been pretty in demand for AI and automation stuff, and obviously affiliate marketing stuff. People always want me to promote their things.
Reed:
So, yeah, I've really run the gamut over the years, doing things from affiliate marketing to eBay to multilevel marketing to my own products and services and speaking all over the world and all sorts of fun things in between. It seems like every year I kind of reinvent myself with some new challenge to take on. So it's been a lot of fun.
Greg :
So you've been doing this since the 90s. Talk about that. 1999. Okay, so how has things changed? Can you take us through the last 25 years? Because you've been like most people, they're starting online, and the people who listen to this podcast, I would say half of them want to go online, but they haven't done it yet. And then you have the other group that they've been online for less than five years. So you have 25 years of experience. Can you take us through how it started for you? And then what was it like in the 2000s versus the 2010s versus now 2020 and beyond?
Reed:
So when I first started, we have to go back to 99. I ended up switching schools where I go to a school where I can work on my own projects instead of being told what to do. So I had the luxury of being able to kind of do whatever I wanted all day. I had a computer at my desk, my own computer. So a lot of schools you had a computer lab you went to. I had full access to a computer and printer and Internet at all time from 7th grade onwards. So it's very unusual upbringing and not having someone dictate what I need to learn, not having to go to classes, none of that. So I was just kind of.
Reed:
Were you home schooled?
Greg :
Yeah.
Reed:
No, it wasn't homeschooling. There was like 125 of us or so in this one room schoolhouse. And we all had our own desks and we did our own things. And some of us gravitated towards being on our computer more than others. And some kids wanted to do more like shop kind of things, like building stuff. And there were a lot of farm kids because I live in a very rural area, so there were a lot of kids that did that. There was actually a brain silo in the middle of our building. Like, they built that into the building to just be something unique.
Reed:
So it was different. Anyway, so at that time, all the news and everything that you were seeing was like this Internet, this big thing. There's all this money to be made, and it's kind of right before the.com crash. And so you're seeing stuff all the time at Silicon Valley is just going crazy, and all this money's flowing into this. And I'm like, hmm, I kind of like technology, and I like being on the Internet. It's cool. And money seems kind of neat, so maybe I could do some of this stuff and make some money. So at the time, there's this program called all advantage.
Reed:
It was all advantage. It was like a banner ad on your computer screen. You got fifty cents an hour for every hour you were on. Ten cents an hour for everyone. You referred down like five levels deep. So I was acting in a college play at the time. I'm a 13 year old 7th grader, and I write on my little affiliate link on strips of paper and hand it out to all the other, all these college kids that are in the play, and some of them sign up and I start making some money. Fast forward a little bit after that.
Reed:
I tried to convince the school to let me install this thing on all the computers because all the kids could make money, and then I could make money off all the kids, and the school could make money because maybe they could be in my downline too. And their lawyer wasn't too impressed with that idea. I had an interesting meeting with him on that. You fast forward a little bit. After that, the.com crash happens, I kind of lose a little bit of interest. Like, I don't know, maybe this Internet thing isn't such a good idea. So I do a few projects on some other stuff. There is a kind of stock market challenge where you're investing with virtual money kind of play money.
Reed:
So you got like $100,000 to play with. And some of the kids were doing that kind of as like a group and competing with each other. And I was like, I'm competitive, sure, I'll compete with you guys. So I go from like 100,000 to 120, some thousand dollars in span of a few weeks, and I'm the best one in the thing. And I'm like, well, that's not enough. So I go from that. We're on a field trip, I'm at like 120,000. Dropped down to 77,001 day.
Reed:
I just brutally got wiped out on a bunch of funds in there and my competitiveness kicks in. So I was from first place to last place. I go from like the 77,000 to 1.3 million in 90 days. And so after that I start my own site on investing and have a stock market forum that does incredibly well online. Have like chat rooms and a newsletter and all this stuff that I build up, I'm like 1516 years old. Anyways, the site was called IBDU, so investors, business daily, university. I knew nothing about trademarks or anything like that. It was just a newspaper I subscribed to that was very popular.
Reed:
They send me a letter saying that I can't do that, that they don't like that I'm infringing on their trademark. They have no clue that I'm a high schooler. And so I get a bunch of media attention. So magazines, front pages, newspapers, some radio stuff. Based off that, I leverage it pretty hardcore. And so that's kind of what gives me a taste of this. So I make some money from the site, I change it over from IBDU to readfluorine.com, and it still is popular, has thousands of people using it. And then for our senior project, we're supposed to do a senior project that you put like 400 hours into and you speak in front of people at school on it.
Reed:
Like the community comes in and stuff like that. So I do a presentation. I wanted it to be sex isn't the only thing that sells on the Internet. And I did a couple of practice rounds of that, but school said I needed to clean it up a little bit, that I couldn't say sex in front of public for everybody, whatever. And then basically ever since then, I continue to do more and more Internet stuff. So I graduate high school, start doing what's called joint venture brokering, where you take someone that's got a product, like you've got products, and you line up different affiliates and you get a commission on the sales that those affiliates bring in, and you grow that business, and the affiliates get money, and I get money and stuff like that. So I start doing that for a few big names, start going to events, start creating my own, like a coaching program on how to kind of do that, how to broker these JV deals. And so I start speaking all over the world on that, have my own little home study course that I create.
Reed:
You fast forward from there. I'm winning these different affiliate competitions because my list keeps growing. I keep doing all these things to build my list. And then I have some kids, I get married and divorced, lose a bunch of money, and then kind of switch gears into creating a bunch of little information products and switch gears into eventually promoting a bunch of recurring affiliate income streams. So I promote a lot of software as a service, a lot of software things that people pay a recurring fee for. So I promote those as an affiliate. And in the last several years, it's been a lot of AI and automation stuff that people are really excited about. So I've been doing stuff with that.
Reed:
Wow.
Greg :
So it's a very interesting school that you went to that allowed you to explore, I think that's the first thing, and explore on what your passions and what your interests were. So first of all, listeners, isn't that the way that it really should be? It's like sometimes we're cooped up into, we have to go down this path and we have to do it this way. That's a really cool thing. We home school our kids, so we're kind of just allowing them to figure out what is it that interests you? And I just feel like it's pretty awesome that that's kind of the path that you went down. So can we dive into a few things? I want to spend a lot of this interview on AI, but my listeners know me as the guy that doesn't want them to trade all their time for a little bit of somebody else's money. Right. People want freedom, and they want mostly time freedom. And I have realized that when I start to leverage myself in the form of being able to get more output for very little bit of my time, I usually make a lot of money as a byproduct.
Greg :
So I tell my clients or my potential clients and just the people that follow me that there's a few different ways to do it. Either you know something that other people don't, and you can sell an information product because that's what we tend to consume is information. You can put together a group of people that are passionate about something. Right. And you can create a community and it could be a membership that can be monetized. But I think for most people, and I know for myself, probably the best place to get started, at least at that time, was affiliates. And so you kind of like talked about, I did affiliate this and affiliate that. Can you break down what an affiliate is? Because a lot of people don't know what it is.
Greg :
And then what did you do? If you can maybe tell us one or two things that you did that made you really successful as an affiliate.
Reed:
Yeah, definitely. So I like to think of it as, let's say that you've seen an amazing movie in the movie theaters and it just came out this weekend and you're telling your friends about this movie. Well, they might go see it later that week, but you're not going to get any money for sharing that recommendation. Now with an affiliate marketing relationship, you could endorse that product, that movie, that book, that software, that tool, whatever. You could endorse that to someone they go through, click on your link, and then you're going to get a commission. It might be really low, like if it's a physical product on Amazon, it might be one, two, 5%, something like that. Or it might be really high, like it might be an information product or a software product, might be 30, 40, 50, even 100% commission on some of those things because these companies want to really grow their reach and expand their audience and really rapidly grow their list and their customer base. And so that's kind of how I like to look at it.
Reed:
Whereas you're just kind of spreading the word and getting paid for it. And it's a really cool thing. You don't have to create the products, you don't have to do customer support, you don't need to create websites, you don't need to do a lot of the other stuff that these product owners have to do to create their products and put them online. All you basically do is drive traffic to other people's sites and their sites do the work for you and you get paid. So it's a really nice business model. Now, for me, some of the things I've done really well is like building an email list. Because if I can spend money to grow an email list, then I can direct that traffic to a bunch of different offers versus if I just buy traffic and send them to an offer right away. Well, that's kind of one and done.
Reed:
I might be able to send them, they might be on my list for 100 emails that they get and maybe they'll open 50 of them. Eventually they're going to buy something. And so I have a lot more chances to make money off of that person that joins my email list versus someone that maybe clicks on like a Facebook ad and goes right to the product. Now, I've done it both ways where know sent directly to the product and tried to make money and you can make money doing that, but it's not as lucrative as building that list and getting them onto an email list that you can follow up with them because most people don't buy something the first time they see it, that you need to follow up with them and convince them to buy it. Or maybe that product isn't for them, but they're interested in something related. And so that works really well. So a lot of my stuff's been list building related. That's worked really well.
Reed:
A lot of search ads have worked really well for me. A lot of things where I've got partners promoting me for different things. So I'm not spending money necessarily on traffic, but I'm paying them an affiliate commission. If they promote something of, say, mine and I grow my list that way and their customers end up buying something of mine down the line, I pay them a commission. So it's been stuff like that that's been really useful for me over the years.
Greg :
Okay, so a lot of my audience right now, they're in the process of building a list, right. And so I'm assuming your list is in the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands over the years, right?
Reed:
Yes.
Greg :
What are certain things that you're doing on a consistent basis that's continually building your list? What is the secret sauce to it? Is it just giving them an offer for them to be able to come in? What would you say? One or two things that are the key to anyone? You know, I'm a healthcare audience to helping them with building their list.
Reed:
Really just going out there and doing it. So many people talk about doing, know, if you can get started, you could even get started with as low as like $5 a day with some ads and start growing a business that way. Start growing an email list that way. Imagine that you create some sort of offer that people sign up for. You put maybe a Facebook ad up and you put a budget of $5 a day. So $150 a month. If you're looking for a way to pay for that, and maybe brown bag your lunch when you're going to work, you don't have to necessarily go out to eat every meal for a couple of months and have that help you initially grow your business. Now, if you got some affiliate offer on the back end or some sort of upsell, something you've created, so people sign up for something for free and you offer them something else that they can purchase, you can use that to help pay for that traffic.
Reed:
So it becomes what's called a self liquidating offer. And once you're making a big enough dent in your traffic costs, your ad spend, or even getting profitable, sometimes you can get profit right away with those kind of things. Then it's all kind of gravy and you can really scale that up. So you might go from $5 a day to 25 to 50 to 100, 501,000 and so on and so forth and kind of ride that offer, and then you might add another offer and another offer and another offer and you do things like that. I've also done things where I've created tools where people can promote those things and they earn the affiliate commission, where I can have it, where it puts their affiliate id and it hard codes it into the follow up emails and stuff like that. And that's built me lists of tens of thousands of people. Just those kind of offers where I've done those kind of things for like network marketing, MLM kind of things, where it's like, well, here's something that you guys can promote that does better than their page, and I'm just going to give it to you where you can promote it. And some people end up signing up through my link that way, or they're already in my downline and it just keeps growing and I'm not doing anything from it.
Reed:
So it's things like that that it's a little bit outside of the box from what maybe everyone's teaching about building a list. That's worked really well for me, but it's just keep your eye out for ideas like that.
Greg :
Yeah, you guys, I think the big thing is if you have something that people desire and you have an offer that they desire, they will give you their contact information. They might not give you their money right away, but the thing below money is, hey, I'll at least give you my information so you could send me that thing that I kind of want. When I really, really want it, I'll actually pay money for it. Right. And so when I look back at when I started in the coaching and consulting world, that's in essence what I did. I created something that I knew that people wanted and I was willing to put $5150 a day to getting that out to people that I didn't have their information yet, but using platforms. And at that time, the platform was Facebook that I use. And that got me my 1st 250 people on my list.
Greg :
And so from there, once it started to gain steam, then I was able to reach out to other people that I knew had that audience that maybe I wasn't reaching via Facebook ads and say, hey, could you present this to your audience on my behalf? And if they happen to buy the product, then I'll give you a percentage of it. And so, you guys, there should never be a reason why you can't build a list. And the cool thing about building a list is that once you have those people's contact information and you continue to serve them, I know that everybody is always buying something. And what you have might not be what they currently need, but then over time, as you build up affiliate partners and people have other offers, well, that offer might be the thing that your customers actually want and need. And so it ends up just being this perpetual cycle that you're continuing to get more people into your world, but then you're positioning different offers to see what they are looking for that could help them, and it's a win win for everyone. Would you agree?
Reed:
I completely agree. And it kind of reminds me of a list building strategy I haven't used for probably a decade or so. But I used to host these joint venture giveaway events. And are you familiar with those at all? Greg?
Greg :
Joint venture giveaway events. Like, we are all trying to promote one particular offer. Is that correct?
Reed:
Yeah, sort of. So basically what I would do is I would contact a bunch of people in a particular niche market. Usually it was the make money online crowd, but it could be in other markets, and I would get them to contribute something of theirs for free. It could be something that they're already giving away on a sweet page, but they're giving that away for free. And maybe I give away something for free as well. But people sign up in order to sign up for other things for free. Right.
Greg :
Got you.
Reed:
I've done those kind of things where I've had thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people come into my list by doing those things. And it's a strategy. I haven't done it in a long time, but it used to work incredibly well.
Greg :
Okay, wait. Okay, so that wasn't what I was thinking, but this sounds really good. All right, let's just say we were doing, I think I saw somebody do something like this. Maybe this is what they're doing. So like a twelve days of Christmas.
Reed:
Yeah.
Greg :
Right. And so they're doing a twelve days of Christmas and I'm giving away something on day two. They're giving away something on day one. Right. And somebody else giving away something on day three, day four, day five. And basically they're using all these things that people are willing to give for free because they're given for free anyways, but they're putting it out to their list and then it's helping to build that person's list that host it. Correct. Right.
Reed:
So the first one that I was a part of that I helped launch, we did that in 2006 and we built a list of over 50,000 people in 30 days. You can build lists really fast using that method.
Greg :
If you know me, you know that I hate clutter and I love efficiency and a one stop shop. And that's the reason why I am so excited that SSHC has partnered with Janeapp. Janeapp is a complete practice management software that does your online booking for clients, schedules your clients, allows your clients to come in, you can do your documentation, take their payments and everything in between. If you're doing subscription, if you're doing packages, you're doing solution based offers. Jnapp holds all those things in their platform and it's seamless and efficient and it is clean. And I can tell you right now, my clients have said nothing but amazing things about Jnap. What's even better is that it's not just for therapists. They work with so many different care disciplines from chiropractors, mental health counselors, anyone that has a practice, they can basically take care of you.
Greg :
So I highly recommend for you guys to use JNap. I actually have a code, SSHC, one mo, that you can use to get a free trial of JNap. Go check it out. Okay, so now let's talk about money and a list. I've heard, I know there's different metrics or different calculations for a lot of people, but a lot of people don't understand the power of a list and how much a list can actually make them. So can you give us an idea of an active list? What does that make you? Or make the typical affiliate marketer on a monthly basis?
Reed:
The typical number everyone throws out is like a dollar per person per month. So if you had like a list of 1000 subscribers, you might make $1,000 a month. A lot of things are going to go into that. It might matter on what niche market you're in. It's going to matter on how good. Your emails are the different things you promote. It's really hard to give. Here's what it is.
Reed:
I think everyone kind of throws out the dollar a month because it's just an easy thing to visualize for people. So it really depends. What I like to do is kind of sneakily promote different offers, usually something for free to give them, like a free trial to some software tool. And that's really easy to give away. It's really easy to give away. Hey, here's 14 days free of a software try it out, or here's 30 days free of a software and they'll try it out and they'll sign up. Usually I've got some relationship with those software companies where it's like, hey, that person signed up. I get access to the information of the people that sign up through my link and I can promote other stuff to them.
Reed:
So not only am I growing their audience and their list, but I'm also leveraging that to grow my audience and my list. And that way I can promote their recurring product. The list might be relatively small because it might only have 50 people on it or 100 people on it or something like that, but there's hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month in recurring spend because enough of those people end up buying the product. And so it's really fascinating when you approach it that way versus someone that's like promote this $7 product warrior forum and try to make a bunch of money that way. And I mean, I've done that, but it's hard. I'd rather be in the repeat order business than the one off sale business. And that's why I like to build kind of these micro lists, really hyper targeted for different tools and stuff like that. The numbers really vary for things, but I mean, something for someone to visualize is like a dollar a month per person.
Greg :
Okay, well, guys, just think of, I can tell you, for me it's closer to $10 a month per person, but it's because I'm in a niche. I've built an audience. I serve my audience extremely well. So yeah, it's worked out pretty good for me there.
Reed:
Yeah, you're definitely an exception. I've been to your event and stuff like that. It's spectacular and so you know what you're doing. But someone was coming into this.
Greg :
It could be fifty cents per person, it could be less than that. It really has to do with how you're serving the audience and what type of offers you put in front of them. Okay, now let's talk about this, okay? You don't have to give out numbers of what you make and whatnot. I think people you can read between him, he makes a couple of bucks a month. All right? He makes some good money.
Reed:
Just a few.
Greg :
Let's talk about the fact that you are a team of one. There are so many people right now, including myself many years ago, where I was in a world. Well, I wasn't introduced to this online world until late 2010. 2014 15 is when I started kind of really diving into it. Let's talk about you having a company that does extremely well and you impact lots of people, but it's only you. And I'm having a hard time understanding this because anytime I ask you to do something for me, you always say, yes, you always have the time. So how are you able to make all this money and you only are a team of one? How is this possible? Because when I started business in 2005, there was no other way, at least that I knew to do it, than to have a practice. And yes, I was a team of one for about four weeks, and then I went to two, and then I went to three, and it's all this money that I had to pay and staff and this and that, and da da da da.
Greg :
So can you talk about how you have been able to leverage yourself and still have time to be able to help other people and live life? Please tell me.
Reed:
Happy to. I mean, I've tried the outsourcing stuff. I've tried having interns and stuff like that. I'm not good at it. It's definitely a weak area of mine I'm not good at. I don't like being told, well, you need to do XYZ in order to get something done. And being that I've never worked a job or anything like that, I don't have that mindset of knowing this is how a good boss should be. And am I just telling them too much to do or too little to do? Every time I've done it, I've kind of crashed and burned for oddbang different things.
Reed:
It's oftentimes kind of focusing on kind of the core things that are really good for you. So you might have to step back and think about your business. You're in kind of the information space, and so for you, it's growing your list, getting that reach. So people, maybe you're creating some content to get people to be more familiar with you and they're interested in you, or maybe you have some ads wrangling. I know I've seen ads for your stuff. And so they're signing up for your list, or they're signing up for one of your events, or they're signing up for one of your training programs. And so if you can focus on those kind of things, like a lot of people, myself included, will kind of jump from thing to thing to thing and try to make something work. But by the time they get on step two or three of that something, they're already bored of it and jump to the next thing.
Reed:
Or maybe they don't even get to step two and they jump to the next shiny object out there. So you need to really put your blinders on and be like, let's get something working. And so for me, it was, well, I don't want to know how to make really pretty websites. I'm not the best copywriter. I'm not the best person to put on an event. I'm not the best person to do XYZ. What could I do? Well, I could go out and drive traffic to someone else's offer and make some money that way, and then I could reinvest that money and promote another offer, and then reinvest that money and promote another offer. And then eventually you got enough different things that you're promoting as an affiliate that some good money is coming in and you're not focused on a lot of the other headache, if you will, with a traditional business.
Reed:
And so that's a lot of things that I've done over the years is kind of work it that way, like, what gets me the end result with the least amount of effort. And so it's like, well, affiliate stuff. I don't have to do all these other things that all the traditional business needs to do, but I still get the money at the end. Maybe I don't get the notoriety. Maybe people don't have a clue who I am. I don't care. I can't cash that at the bank. It's like, well, I'll do that and make that work.
Reed:
And then if I want to do the other stuff, I can, but I'm not shackled to it. I don't. And so that's a thing that I think a lot of people, they're sick of their nine to five, and then they become an entrepreneur and it becomes a, they don't quite realize that going into it. And so I think everyone that's in business thinks about it throughout the day, no matter what. But if you can go in and be like, okay, I'm going to make something work, and that could be your own info products. It could be affiliate stuff, it could be whatever. It could be some sort of flipping stuff on Etsy or something. It doesn't really matter to me.
Reed:
Whatever floats your boat and makes you some money and then focus on you could either improve that skill some or you could try adding a second income stream and a third income stream and so on and so forth and go from there without it taking up a ton of time. So I have a lot of different software tools that automate a lot of different things for me, have different apps communicating with one another. So I'm not doing the work. I'll give an example. The other day I had a software tool go out. It scraped appsumo. So Appsumo is a site that has a bunch of software tools. And so it scraped Appsumo.
Reed:
It went out and it wrote like review articles for every product on Appsumo. And then it is posting those articles onto a blog of mine with my appsumo affiliate link. And my investment for scraping and writing those articles is like $17 and there's like 600, 700 articles. If I make one sale, I'm way in the black from it, right? It hardly took me any time because it was the computer doing everything. And so it's just a matter of thinking a little bit differently. And here I've got 600 some hooks in the water, some fish might bite and make me some money from it. And so it's like, it's just a little bit different way of thinking versus I'm going to put out the most epic, perfect video thing or whatever. That's another thing.
Reed:
I think a lot of people are extremely perfectionistic about this stuff and don't realize that there's 8 billion people in the world and maybe three people are going to see it. Who cares? It's you and your mother and someone else. Big deal. Just get it out there, get it done, get something going. Instead of making it perfect, you can make it perfect. Once you get to Greg's level and you're known and people seek you out. I understand putting on a higher class thing at that stage, but if someone's just getting started and wants to see if they can make a couple of bucks quick and dirty, just get something out there and just see. You can always improve it and you can just see what happens.
Greg :
I don't know if it was in driven in our mastermind, but I heard that you created like 600 blog posts in less than a day. I think it was a couple of hours.
Reed:
Yeah.
Greg :
And then you're able to put it out on sites. How do you do that?
Reed:
Yeah, that particular instance, I use a tool called zimwriter, and so it's a software tool. I want to say it's like $15 a month or something like that for the subscription. Then you use OpenAI, you get an API key from them. So they're the people that have Chat GPT. And when you use their API key, you pay per token, but you pay per request and receive, so you're paying maybe a few cents per article with that. So I use the same tool, actually, when I scraped Appsumo the other day, and it was like $17 for it to write a couple of thousand words for every single tool on Appsumo. And there's like six or 700 tools on there. So it was pretty wild what it can do that took me about a day for one computer to do that.
Reed:
I started in the evening, went to bed, and it was done sometime the next day.
Greg :
Wow. That's called leverage. That's called using a little bit of input to get maximum output, which kind of leads me into AI. That's what most of us, at least over the last couple of years, have known you for. That's how I came into your world. Could you just tell my audience, and you know, my audience is primarily healthcare providers, usually somewhere between beginners in business all the way up to 2030 years in business. But most of them are beginners when it comes to AI. What are some really practical ways, easy ways that people can make their lives a heck of a lot easier than how they're doing life right now.
Greg :
Using AI, that doesn't take a lot of brain power.
Reed:
I think the easiest thing that people can see a lot of results with AI and not really go down and buy a bunch of different tools is just try out Chat GPT, because you can get a free account. They do have their paid plan, so Chat GPT plus it's $20 a month, and that gives you access to a lot of other stuff, including these custom gpTs. Now these custom gpTs, they're really exciting right now because it's only been out for a month or two, and there's over 20,000 custom gpts that you can access in their custom GPT store. And as far as I know, they're all free. I think some of them I've seen where you have to have a user account with the company that created it. So there might be some paid things that you may need a subscription for if you want to use some of the tools. But a lot of stuff in there is 100% free to use as long as you have a Chat GPT plus subscription. That's a great way to just kind of dip your toes into this AI stuff without spending a fortune on all sorts of tools.
Reed:
I spend a lot of time and a lot of money looking at different tools, subscribing to different tools, buying lifetime deals of different tools. But that's my business. My business is promoting different tools and getting the commissions from them. So it makes sense for me to do that. But for the average person, they should stick with one tool, kind of figure it out, and then they could branch out. So you could do so much with Chat GPT. It's pretty incredible how much that's improved even since the last time we talked because I think you were really surprised that that wasn't like my top recommendation for everyone. But it's really changed.
Reed:
I like different things for different reasons, but someone that's just getting into this, that's an amazing way to really see the potential and see where things are going with it, because there's just constant things. Like I'm making these little custom GPTS almost every day, just kind of putting them out there for fun, and they're super easy to create. So one of the things that I've done with these custom GPTS is take transcripts from different products and put it in there, and then you can interact with that chat bot basically, and it's the expert on that topic. And so it'll only provide information based off of what it knows about that topic, what I've fed it, all that knowledge that I've just dumped into it. It knows to only give me answers on that. It's not going to tell me how to bake a cake or how to find XYZ thing. It's going to tell me how to do this laser focused task. And so it's really interesting to be able to fine tune and guide things that way.
Reed:
I know that's a pretty advanced, seemingly advanced topic, but it's really cool and a lot of potential for people to just kind of get their feet wet with the next steps, the next things in the evolution, like start with Chat GPT, like the free plan, see if you like it, sign up for the paid plan, play with some other custom gpds and other tools. I've done it where it's like I've uploaded like a spreadsheet to it and they'll tell me what's the median income for males in such and such county type of thing and things like that. And they'll give me a chart and show me everything. And I don't have to know how to use excel to do this. This is great.
Greg :
So it's really cool for those of you that are listening and you're in the coaching space, and you're probably like, well, no, I'm not an online coach. No, pretty much all of you are in the coaching space. If you're a physical therapist, you're a registered dietitian, you're a nurse practitioner, you're a chiropractor. A good majority of the value that you give to your client base is your knowledge and your expertise on an area. For me, I used to coach as a licensed physical therapist every day. Today I primarily coach as a business consultant, helping people go online and helping them with growing and leveraging their practices. Want you to think of everything that you know and think of all the different places that you have shared what it is that you okay. And if it's recorded.
Greg :
So here's in essence what Reed was just talking about. He showed me how to create these custom GPTs, which basically allows me to take whatever knowledge I have on a certain subject. So I took a program that I did, it's probably one of my most popular programs in 2023. And I took everything that I ever said on that program, all the lessons, all the trainings, everything that I said, and I put it into this custom GPT. This custom GPT, I let it process it, and I started to ask it all the different questions that people would have with regards to how to build an online business. And it basically said responses. That was me. It just took everything that I ever said to anyone about this stuff.
Greg :
I threw everything, everything from every coaching call, every training. And this AI basically is me 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And guys, I want you to think of the client base that you have where they want access to you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so many of you are burning out because you're physically having to be in front of them for the time that they want you to. And it's taking so much energy and so much strain from you. And this one thing allows you to actually do that for people without you having to be there. It's so powerful, and I think that that alone can be a game changer for people. Okay, is there any other one besides Chat GPT? Is there another one that you say, all right, if there is a one a or one b, this would be.
Reed:
It for someone just starting out. I mean, perplexity is pretty cool. What does that do? It's a lot like Chat GPT, kind of on steroids. It does some pretty interesting things. I haven't played with it enough to know everything it does. There's one like, if you just want quick research on your phone just to get a taste of AI, there's an app, it's called Arc search. So Arc arc search. And basically you can type in what you want it to search, or I think even talked about what you want it to search.
Reed:
It's going to go and look at the top ten websites and then create like a custom article just for you with images and videos and other references on that specific topic. So you don't have to do any of the research anymore. It's just giving you super detailed information that gives you just a taste of AI without all the technical stuff of AI. But it's really kind of a fun example. It's something that I've been finding that I'm using. Instead of just googling something, I'll put it in there and just kind of be like, wow. It's given me the references. It's looked at like the top ten pages that are ranking, and it's like writing this extremely detailed instructions out for me and has all these references that I can follow up for more information.
Reed:
And it looks really nice. I mean, it's like, that is a web page that I would go visit if it was actually my own content. It's really cool. So that's a fun one to play with for people that are just kind of getting started.
Greg :
So there's three recommendations that Reed has given us. Number one, Chat GPT using probably in your best interest, once you get a feel of it, to upgrade to the $20 membership so that you can get access to GPT four, and you can get access to basically creating a 24/7 version of yourself. Number two was perplexity, which is Chat GPT on steroids, if you want to kind of go into this a little bit more. And then number three, you said was, what was the last one that you said? I forgot.
Reed:
That's what it's called.
Greg :
Okay. And that arc search, A-R-C-S-E-A-R-C-H does a lot of the research for you. Now, you want to know what's so crazy? As I was preparing for the podcast, and I was using notion, right? And notion is like just a way for me to be able to put in notes and stuff like that. And it was like certain things that I wanted to ask Reed, and they had an AI feature on notion. And when I actually hit space on Reed Florin, it actually started giving me information on you. I was like, it's really cool. Yeah. Sorry to tell me a little bit.
Reed:
About your true, only the bad.
Greg :
Guys. It's just really amazing that today there's no excuse for someone not to be able to get started again. If you want to be an entrepreneur, if you want to start to delve into the online space, you don't need a bunch of staff. You don't need a bunch of employees. What you need is you need to have the ability to learn, to learn to relearn and to unlearn the crap that's not serving you. And if you're willing to do that, basically, sky's the limit. Reed is a team of one and is basically probably pumping out more content than every single one of you that's listening combined. Okay.
Greg :
And he's doing that as one person. And so, anyways, I hope that you guys found this valuable, whether it's the information that he talked about on how to build a list, the power of becoming an affiliate, the different ways that he was able to make money as an affiliate, being able to merge into AI. I think the biggest thing that I've taken away from the interview, Reed, is just in your ability to adapt and try new things and put out stuff and learn and relearn and unlearn. And I think that's kind of why you've kind of gotten to where you've gotten to today. So, anyways, massive props to you. Anything else that I should have asked you that I didn't ask.
Reed:
I was just thinking of our conversation about the chat gpts of creating one, where it was trained on your information. This is something that we should test, but we should put in some frameworks for creating content, and it might give you really good scripts for your videos or articles and stuff like that already based off your existing knowledge without you having to think about anything.
Greg :
Okay, hold on. I got to get you on a call. All right, you got time after this podcast. Okay, we're going to talk. I'm going to give you a zoom link in a second. Reed, thank you so much. Thank you for just continuing to bring so much value, not just to me personally, but to the place that I call home, outside of healthcare, which is driven mastermind. Thank you for investing into my audience and helping us with getting out of our archaic ways and learning this online space and learning it better.
Greg :
And so just thank you, man. You're just awesome, dude, and I appreciate you so much by the way you know who you know, you know a friend of mine. Her name is Kara Welkey. I don't know if you remember that name, but. So Kara is an occupational therapist. I think. Kara's in North Dakota, I think. But anyways, she was like, you know Reed? I'm like, yeah, I know.
Greg :
Yeah. So, anyways, it's a small. My. She was one of my first occupational therapists in my program. And in her first year. Listen to this. Her first year, she didn't even know how to start a Facebook group when she started my program. In her first year, she made nearly $100,000 off of just being an affiliate for me.
Greg :
Crazy. So, guys, I think that's really important, because the reality is that as long as you're willing to learn, as long as you're willing to unlearn stuff that's not serving you and you're willing to relearn new things that can serve you, sky's the limit. So, anyways, Reed, thank you so much for being on. Where can people find out more about you?
Reed:
Well, they should join driven number one.
Greg :
They got to be at that level, bro. They got to be at that level.
Reed:
No, they can google me. Otherwise, they'll find me through you. They are on your social media, I think. We're friends on just about every platform, so they'll find me through there.
Greg :
Guys, if you message me and you have any questions for Reed, I will get them over to Reed. And here's one thing I know. He'll answer it, and he'll answer it very soon. I don't know how he does it. I still think there's, like, 14 Reed clones. But anyways, yeah, there's a GPP for that. All right. Okay.
Greg :
Anyways. All right, Reed, thank you so much, man. I appreciate you for being honest. Seekers for success.
Reed:
Thank you, Greg.
