20 Life & Biz Insights in 20 Minutes!
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- Rudy, what is the most valuable lesson you learned from your worst failure? - I think probably the biggest lesson, which is kind of ironic is... - I'm struggling with creating viral content that resonates with my audience. What is your secret? - Something I've learned from a lot of people that are very successful on socials is just like,

What do you think will be the biggest change in the next five years in the digital marketing and social media space? Next five years, biggest change will probably be we're already ahead, I would say. We've been doing it over 18 months now. I think it's going to change how content's made, how content's produced, the ability to create content. I think that's going to be the biggest change. It's a good question, too. I think a breakthrough moment, there's been a few in my life. I would say one was...

My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life.

What's up, guys? We are back for another Q&A round on the podcast. This is where you get a chance to submit questions to me. If you have a question for a future podcast, I try and do one of these every couple of months. Send it in on Instagram. And while you're there,

make sure you DM me and let me know what you're loving about the podcast. And if you can, leave a five-star review and I would love to send you some of my free trainings just to thank you for your time. So let's dive into today's Q&A. This is where I try and cover up to 20 questions in 20 minutes, sometimes a little less. These are questions submitted by the audience staff. And here we go, question time. - Okay, Rudy, first question. What has been your biggest challenge in growing your business online and how did you overcome it?

Yeah, I think growing a business online, there's a lot of challenges or any business in general. I'd say the biggest challenge, I think you go through phases in business. So like my biggest challenge to start was like finding a good product and getting traction selling it. Next challenge after that was probably

scaling and like logistics of scaling and operations team and then i think the next phase is like all the other stuff hr and finance and stuff you don't think about recruitment and then you kind of figure all that out and then it's like managing big systems multiple companies multiple entities and

lawsuits, IRS audits, big collapses in like a partnership that's making millions, people scamming you, people stealing from you. So there's different problems or biggest problems depending on your face.

Next question, how do you stay motivated and inspired in the face of setbacks? I think it's a good question too because I'm very intrinsically motivated to do this and I think I have a great mindset where even when we have a lot of big problems, to me it's just part of the game and it's a challenge and I always see it that way.

I think I've had enough problems in my business and setbacks and failures that most people would have quit by now, but that's one reason I'm still successful, because I like a challenge. I guess I believe, maybe I tricked myself into believing from all the books and personal development, but I think I believe that they're all just part of what it takes to be successful, and they're just challenging to make me better.

Yeah, I think it's just that belief in myself, belief that challenges and failures are part of the process and you can always learn something from them and hopefully not repeat too many times. - Rudy, what is a breakthrough moment that significantly changed your business trajectory? - I think a breakthrough moment, there's been a few in my life. I would say one was when I really got one product that I could scale with ads in a funnel and it helped me scale to millions and built my first million dollar business.

I would say another one was like learning, finding masterminds where I could actually travel to these events and meet these people. I'd say another one was like, you know, partnering with big celebrities and major brands and influencers and a couple of big opportunities there. And then I'd say my newest one is like a big TV show I can announce in just a couple of weeks what platform it's coming out on. But that's a big one, too.

How do you balance your personal branding with company branding in your marketing strategy? Yeah, personal brand versus company brand. Good question. I think it's interesting because I lean more on personal brand now. I think people care less about your company until you get to a really big level, like 10x, like grants, right?

but I think it's important to grow your personal, like for me in my industry at least, like grow my personal brand first and then grow the company through it. Whereas some people are the opposite, right? E-commerce brands, they grow the company brand and then eventually the founder wants to be famous and talk about how they grew this big company. So, 'cause mine's more like marketing and socials, I think people wanna do business more with me and then the brand grows behind it, so I prioritize me.

Rudy, I'm struggling with creating viral content that resonates with my audience. What is your secret? So with viral content, we have a couple of people, not full time, but like every day they do a few hours where they're literally researching viral content and coming up with concepts similar for me. So part of it is research and looking at trends. And then something I've learned from a lot of people that are very successful on socials is just like consistency, right? Do 100 posts that...

you think have chances of going viral and eventually a couple will. - Rudy, how do you leverage influencer marketing to boost your own brand's visibility? - I would say I'm pretty good at that. We work with a lot of big celebrities and influencers and that boosts my credibility, my reach, my connections, the power intros I get, the opportunities I get because of it. So I'd say I'm very good at that.

And I think everyone should be doing that, right? Leveraging other people's audiences and other people's years of work to build a tribe and a community for their brand is a no-brainer. Rudy, what strategies have you found most effective for scaling your ad spend profitably on social media?

Yeah, scaling ad spends a common question. I was literally in Nashville yesterday teaching on this to a bunch of creators and a lot of people say, oh, when I scale my ads, my ad spend, it flops. And I'm like, well, it's probably because when you start, it's like small, warm traffic. And then when you scale, it's like cold traffic.

But I think my biggest tips are lots of creatives, lots of testing, lots of audience testing, and then just having a really good offer and funnel and product, but also be willing to spend a lot and go in the red and make the money on the back end. - Rudy, what's the best way that you identify and capitalize on emerging trends in digital marketing?

Yeah, how do I capitalize on trends? I try and pay attention to the market and pick my battles, right? So like some trends I've not capitalized on crypto and NFTs, I kind of was super busy running big companies and missed all of that.

But I think like AI, I saw it coming. I was in a better place to make advantage of that. And we made a million dollars in a few months with AI. We've had now like 70, I think 67,000 people registering for our AI events. And we've got hundreds of members in like our AI intensive program.

So I think for me, it's like seeing what resonates with me, not making it faddish, like we're genuinely using AI a lot every day, like all day, you know, in our companies. And it's a big part of our company. So it felt authentic and like actually exciting. And I do believe it's going to play a big part in the future. So that was very authentic. So I'm looking at trends, but stuff I'm genuinely also interested in. And then I'm going all in on that.

Rudy, how much do you pay attention to data analytics and how does it play a role in your decision making in your business? Yeah, data analytics and data is so important. Like, you know, I went through a phase about two, three years ago where I was obsessed with it. And I still am. I just it's like normal now a part of my business. But I get hourly reports, daily reports, reports on every department, reports on every funnel, like everything. Everything is tracked. Like

Hiring, we know how many people applied today, how many interviews we did today, how many good people we found today. Yeah, like everything, everything's tracked. Everything you can imagine is tracked. When people turn up in the morning, what time they show up, their happiness, staff's happiness rating every day, like everything is tracked. This guy wants you to share a story about a successful collab you've had with a celebrity or influencer.

There's been quite a few, some better than others, some that I can't name, some that I can name. I think more recently we've done a lot with some of the big experts in the industry, Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank, Les Brown, famous motivational speaker, very successful clubs there. I think my first ever successful club was an NFL Super Bowl champion and we did a million dollar launch in a couple of weeks.

So yeah, definitely, I would say the celeb stuff's like 50-50, some flop and some crush it. Rudy, what is the best way to establish trust in your brand?

I think building trust in your brand is a combination of social proof, testimonials, proof of results, and just putting out a lot of content and being everywhere because there's this reputation effect like Donald Trump knows that. And he was very good at saying, make America great again, right? And eventually there's an old saying that if you say something enough times, it becomes the truth. So yeah, I think all of those things combined.

- Rudy, I'm building my first sales funnel. What are the key elements of a successful sales funnel in your experience of business? - Key elements of a sales funnel. There's a few ones, so I actually told that yesterday in Nashville too. So it starts with the offer and the promise, and then it goes into like unique selling points and the hooks and the results. And then you need to talk about the system and how it works. Then you wanna have some testimonials and social proof.

You then want to have like a clear price, right? And price justification. You want to have a guarantee. And then that's like the main page. After that, you want the ability to have order bumps and a good checkout page. And then you want the ability to upsell and cross sell. Then you want the ability to put people into your backend, which might be a webinar, a sales call, an onboarding call, a live event, etc.

Rudy, we're struggling to keep customers. How do you approach customer retention and loyalty in your brand and business?

Yeah, for us, we built a massive customer back end department. Like my fulfillment team is more expensive and bigger than most people's companies that I also know in this industry, you know. So, you know, our fulfillment division is as big as, you know, most entrepreneurs entire company because we care a lot about that. And we obviously have a lot of customers and we put a lot of time, energy and effort into it.

And honestly, it's something I wish I could spend even more time on. But there's always a balance, right? Keeping the business running, expansion, sales and retention. So, yeah, it's partly investing in it, which we've done. It's having great people, which we've done. It's having good systems, which we've done. It's adding new stuff and innovating, which we've done. It's listening to customer feedback, which we've done. It's cutting out programs that you don't.

maybe serve the customers as well as you want, which we've also done. And are we perfect? No, not by any means, but we're always striving to get better.

I have, hi Rudy, I'm just getting my start in digital marketing. What is one piece of advice, if anything, you would give me right now? I think if you're just starting digital marketing, the best way to learn is go work for someone like me because customers pay me $50,000, $150,000 a year to learn from me. And if you can work with me, you're going to learn so much. So I wish I had just

just like flown out and like beg Gary Vee or someone to work with him for a year. Because that would have probably made me like way more successful. So yeah, I would just get in the rooms with the people and study like I binge watch every podcast, every course, every YouTube video on like Facebook ads and funnels to become good at it.

Rudy, how do you look at and measure ROI of all of your marketing campaigns? Well, we measure ROI by funnel, by product, by platform, and then we look holistically at ROI over an entire month versus revenue. Cool. Rudy, what's your approach to content creation and distribution across all of your different platforms?

So I build content based on like one main platform like Instagram and then we'll splinter it out and recycle it out to other platforms. Eventually we want to do more curated content per platform, which we do for the podcast, we do for YouTube and we do for Instagram. And then we use that curated content to create subcontent and repurpose it for the other platforms. Eventually I would like to do custom content for every platform, but I

focus on unique content and specific content for those main three, the podcast, YouTube and Insta, and then we go from there. Hey there, Rudy. We have a really large staff. How do you manage and motivate a large team to achieve high performance?

I think motivating a big team is a constant battle, right? Like it has to be, you need people that are intrinsically motivated in a fast growing entrepreneurial company. Then you need managers to motivate their team. And I think, yeah, look, when you're a CEO of a bigger company, 50, 100, 150, 500 employees, thousand employees, the CEO is more casting the vision.

and working with the managers and then the managers are motivating their team. So, yeah, I think it comes down to, you know, like the Jeff Bezos isn't in the factory motivating the Amazon workers. He's maybe casting a vision that might motivate them. But at the end of the day, it's the floor supervisor and the manager of that Amazon factory that really has to do a good job too. So that's why you need good sub leaders and managers.

What do you think will be the biggest change in the next five years in the digital marketing and social media space? Next five years, biggest change will probably be AI. You know, we're already ahead, I would say. We've been doing it over 18 months now. I think AI is going to change how content is made, how content is produced, the ability to create content. I think that's going to be the biggest change.

I have, "Hey Rudy, a couple bad reviews have set our business back a lot. So how do you handle negative feedback or criticism about your brand online?" Yeah, I mean, most of our bad reviews are customers that don't do the work, ask for a refund and we say, "No, sorry." Obviously, we have some reviews where we drop the ball or they missed an email or the zap broke and they didn't get an email and that stuff sucks, right? And it always frustrates you as an owner seeing that.

it used to get to me super personally like i would be like upset all day after like one review or a week but i i do think you have to take all that in and like try and be better but also understand the bigger you get you're always going to have unhappy customers like no one like if you go look at every billion dollar brand they have mostly good reviews and some bad reviews and it's the same for us right we have mostly great reviews and some bad reviews um so

So, yeah, I don't know in terms of fixing it. I don't specialize in reputation management or anything like that. We've never needed to like take a big approach to fix it because on average, like our stuff is four point nine stars or four point six stars or whatever. Right. Out of five. So it's generally good. I mean, it's but whenever we do get bad reviews looking at why was it was the customer just like, you know,

out of their mind and had bad expectations. What could we have done better? And how do we build a better process so it doesn't happen again? And the last question we have time for, Rudy, what is the most valuable lesson you learned from your worst failure? Good one. Most valuable lesson from worst failure. There's so many. I don't know how to just pick one. Like that's probably the place I've learned the most a lot of the time.

I think, you know, a couple of times we've like been growing like crazy, living life, everything's been awesome. And we've got hit in the face hard. And that like, kind of brings you back to like, okay, we need a backup plan, or we need some stuff in place for when this happens. So I think learning that it's never going to be a straight line to success. And then I think probably the biggest lesson, which is kind of ironic is, I've

I've learned that I'll always figure it out no matter how bad it gets.

yeah i just believe in myself and i know i'll figure it out and be successful and that's kind of reassuring because nothing really bothers me you know we've had irs all day audits we've had lawsuits we've had a bunch of staff leave to start rival company we've had people money launder pretty much everything that can kind of go bad almost touch wood there's a few things that i could still get in business obviously that could be worse but we've had a lot of the big ones

And they just, it's just like, that's part of business. I'll figure it out like I always do. And we get on with it. So there you go. A good one to end on. And I hope you enjoyed all of those rapid fire questions. And I would love to hear your questions. So like I said, head to Instagram. If you're going to head there anyway, leave a review of the podcast. Hit me up when you've left a review, do a screenshot and I'll send you a thousand dollars of free programs we have on ads, socials, funnels, marketing, a bunch of crazy stuff that you're going to love.

And then while you're there, ask me a question for the next time we do this. And I enjoyed today. I hope you did too. I hope you got a lot of value, some amazing questions. And I'll see you guys soon. Take care.