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The Power of Internet Opportunity
Hello this is Manuel Suárez here with you guys again. This is Episode #3 and today I want to talk a little bit about opportunity. That is one of the words, one of the big words that I always hear people talking about and that it seems to be very popular. But a lot of people don’t really understand when they have an opportunity in front of them and when there is not an opportunity. They just evaluate and make decisions but not really looking at what is going on in the current landscape and what we have gone through in the past.
The reality is that there’s always been opportunities. There’s always been things that one can do to improve their own condition. They have gone through great opportunities, to okay opportunities, to incredibly massively ridiculous opportunities. I would say that today in 2017, we are living through one of those incredibly massively enormous opportunities and it’s basically because of one single thing, one piece of technology that has made these all possible for us, one thing that we can pretty much say that it’s like a miracle which is what everybody knows as the internet.
The internet is what has made this opportunity so big. Why? Because when people were trying to build empires in the forties, in the fifties, in the eighties, in the anywhere, they didn’t have the opportunity to grow at a pace like we have today. They didn’t have an opportunity to build a business with less than a couple of thousand dollars. This is the reality of the situation that we have right now. They didn’t have smartphone devices. They didn’t have the opportunity to work 18 hours a day because if you work 9 – 5, after 5 you were done. The office is closed and you couldn’t operate anymore and you didn’t have a smartphone to continue building your business or your side hustle or whatever it is that you wanted to do and you didn’t have a laptop, or you didn’t have a desktop computer and you didn’t have internet to communicate with the entire planet.
Just like this is something that is a real situation for me as I was building my business a couple of years ago, my online business which was concentrated on Amazon selling products. This business, the reality is that, many days I was building it with my boxers on with no t-shirts. I’m sorry that if some of you guys are having some images especially those of you guys that know me. But, I was building a business in my house in the middle of my kitchen or my dining room. Thanks to this incredible thing that we call the internet which is in itself a miracle. And if you guys think about it for a second, most people in this planet, majority of them really do still remember the world before we had this technology. So this is something so new that still the generations that are present do recall the world before the internet.
The Pre-Internet Era
I remember when we used to talk to people, when we use to actually look at billboards, we used to look at signs. I used to glance for magazines when I was at a doctor’s office. I used to listen to the radio, the FM station. I was upset because they were playing 2 or 3 songs and then I had to listen to a couple of minutes of ads on radio and it was horrible. I remember all of that. I remember having to watch. I used to be very into cartoons like for example grade school or Popeye. And then I had to interrupt at the middle of the show to watch 10 commercials and it was something that it wasn’t optional.
So most of you guys, especially most of you guys that are listening to this podcast today, understand that we live on a very different landscape right now in which all of those things have become completely irrelevant. And when I say completely, mean a hundred percent nobody’s watching commercials anymore because people are actually fast forwarding. They’re using DVR services. They are watching Netflix. They are doing Hulu. They’re doing other things that don’t require for you to watch commercials forcefully.
So really in short the entire planet has dramatically shifted in a matter of about 10 years. Now everybody’s using a smartphone device. Nobody’s looking at billboards. Nobody’s looking in the toilet when they go to a restaurant at the signs that are on top of the urinals. Everybody’s looking at their phones all the time. Everybody’s communicating through their mobile devices. Everybody’s watching ad-free commercials.
Sneaky But Brilliant Ideas
So, even though the world is completely different, the reality is, it is still being treated as if it was 20 years ago still operating in the same way. Like 1960, television came about and it became a huge thing and advertisers realized that there was a lot of opportunity in it and they started going in it and they started making a lot of money promoting their products and their brands on those channels. That opportunity has passed and even though that has passed completely, when I do seminars, I ask people to raise their hands if they’re still watching commercials. Out of a hundred people, sometimes I get one or two of them to raise their hands. That’s it.
But even though I’ve been doing that for the last couple of years and this has been an ongoing pattern, even though this is a very real situation, companies are still flooding money into these channels which means that, hmm, “Do you think that we have an opportunity right now? I would say that we have the greatest opportunity in the history of humanity to be able to create an impact for next to nothing. We used to need $20,000, $50,000, $100,000 in order to create a good solid marketing campaign. Right now with a couple of hundred dollars, a couple of thousands of dollars, you can accomplish incredible miracles if you know what you are doing.
To give you some examples, there’s all kinds of variations, right? Because the countries that are not a hundred percent up to date like the United States, like countries like Colombia, like Mexico, the advertising on a platform like Facebook is so incredibly cheap that you almost feel like your getting it for free. You might as well get it for free. Why? Because the opportunity is still not obvious enough to most people.
They haven’t fully realized what they have on their hands. That’s great news for us! If you have an Amazon-based business you can get awareness for next to nothing still and build your brand and plan to root. If you have an online store that you saw products you can build massive awareness. If you have a local shop which I’ve been helping a lot of our customers that have local shops – dentists, chiropractors, services – some kind of agencies of any kinds of services. They are getting some massive results specifically right now with Facebook advertising. It is the greatest advertising product opportunity in its history.
When Preparation Meets Opportunity
There is a famous philosopher from the old age called Seneca which he talked about opportunity and he says, and also about luck, right? “What is luck? What does it mean to really be lucky?” Seneca said it better than anybody else. And I have had this on my mind forever because that is what I use to understand that I have to continue to get myself prepared for when those opportunities present themselves.
Seneca said that being lucky is when an opportunity presents, it’s met with preparation. That when you are prepared for something and you are presented with that opportunity you are “lucky”. When preparation meets opportunity – that is what being lucky really means.
So, if you are well trained like myself, a couple of years ago I decided that these platform that control so much attention like Facebook and Instagram have to be dominated because they are controlling people’s eyeballs. People are staring at them all day long. Actually, to be exact, out of all those smartphone devices that everybody has 60% of the time that is being spent on those devices is being spent on these platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter – social media platforms.
So, we’re going to continue talking about this on our next episodes and I hope that you have woken up to the opportunity. It is a big one. It’s not something to be taken lightly. See you next time.
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