13 Years of Marketing Advice That Will Make You More Money

For over 13 years, I’ve been deeply immersed in the world of marketing—building, scaling, and selling nine companies, including my last one for $46.2 million. Along the way, I’ve written two bestselling books on marketing that have sold over a million copies. Today, I’m sharing the distilled wisdom from those years: practical marketing advice that can help you grow your business, increase profits, and scale effectively.

1. Start With Low or Free Prices to Build Momentum

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is to start with low prices or even offer your product or service for free. Why? Because it's much easier to raise prices over time than to lower them. Early on, your goal is to get flow through your system and validate your offering.

Here are three examples from my journey:

• First business: An online personal training service where I asked clients to donate to a charity of their choice in exchange for 12 weeks of training. This approach helped me get my first 13 customers without feeling like I was charging prematurely.
• Gym Launch: I flew out to gyms and did turnarounds for free, covering all my expenses, and only made money if sales were made. This risk-free offer quickly earned trust and led to licensing the system to 5,000+ gyms.
• Software company (ALAN): I started by giving away the software for free to collect case studies, testimonials, and feedback, which later helped justify premium pricing.

Offering free or low-cost access early on helps you:

1. Convert free users into paying customers if you deliver results.
2. Generate referrals from satisfied customers.
3. Collect testimonials and reviews that boost credibility.
4. Gather valuable feedback to improve your product or service.

Once you’ve validated your offering with an initial batch of customers, gradually increase prices by about 20% every few sales until you find the sweet spot where revenue maximizes without hurting conversion rates.

2. Volume Is King: Do More to Learn More

When it comes to marketing and advertising, volume negates luck. Early on, you need to create and test a high volume of content and ads to discover what works. I learned this firsthand when I realized that a friend posting once a day was nowhere near the output needed to truly scale a personal brand compared to my 50+ posts per day.

This principle applies to paid advertising too. For example, a company spending $40,000 a month on Facebook ads in a $10 billion industry is far from saturated. The key is outcompeting others by delivering better service and having a higher customer lifetime value (LTV), allowing you to spend more on acquiring customers.

The goal is to constantly increase volume first, then optimize for better performance once you have sufficient data and flow through your marketing funnel. This cycle—create flow, monetize flow, then add friction—ensures sustainable growth.

3. Optimize From Front to Back: Headlines and Hooks Matter Most

When optimizing marketing, focus 80% of your effort on the first few seconds of your ad or content—the headline, hook, and thumbnail. These elements frame how your audience perceives everything that follows and massively impact engagement and conversion rates.

For example, a friend once spent $250,000 on an ad campaign featuring a Larry King interview that failed because the hook was wrong. After re-recording the first 30 seconds with a better hook, the campaign generated $100 million in sales.

Make your headlines clear and simple—aim for a third-grade reading level. Be specific enough to catch the right audience’s attention but broad enough to attract many qualified leads. Test multiple hooks and calls to action to find what resonates best.

4. LTV to CAC: The Ultimate Business Metric

The ratio of Lifetime Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the most important metric to understand and track in your business. LTV is the gross profit you earn from a customer over their lifetime, while CAC is the total cost of acquiring that customer.

For example, if it costs you $100 to acquire a customer who generates $500 in gross profit, your LTV to CAC ratio is 5:1, which is excellent. Ideally, you want at least a 3:1 ratio to ensure profitability and scalability.

Knowing your LTV to CAC ratio helps you decide how much you can spend to acquire customers and whether your marketing efforts are sustainable. It also guides your pricing, product offerings, and growth strategies.

5. My Ad Creation Process

After 13 years of running ads, I’ve developed a process that maximizes efficiency and effectiveness:

1. Collect inspiration: Continuously gather ads and hooks from competitors and other industries to stay sharp.
2. Review past winners: Analyze your best-performing ads to understand what worked.
3. Create 50 hooks per session: Write 40 proven hooks based on past success and 10 experimental hooks for innovation.
4. Develop 3-5 core ad angles: Focus on education, beliefs, proof, or storytelling.
5. Craft 1-3 calls to action: Clear next steps for your audience.

When you find a winning ad, squeeze every drop of value by:

• Changing backgrounds, props, or outfits
• Reordering content
• Applying visual filters or effects
• Adjusting pacing or adding music
• Re-recording with the same hook but different settings

This “collidoscope” approach multiplies the impact of your best-performing ads.

6. The Four Ways to Advertise Your Business

Marketing boils down to four core methods, crossing two dimensions: communication style (one-to-one vs. one-to-many) and audience familiarity (strangers vs. known):

• One-to-one to people who know you (warm outreach)
• One-to-one to strangers (cold outreach)
• One-to-many to people who know you (content marketing)
• One-to-many to strangers (paid advertising)

If you’re not spending significant time on at least one of these daily, your business won’t grow because no one knows you exist. For small businesses making under $3 million a year, dedicating four hours every day to promotion is essential.

7. State the Facts and Tell the Truth

Truthful marketing backed by data is powerful. Track your results meticulously—measurement alone often improves performance. For instance, gyms using our Gym Launch system typically add over $100,000 in profit annually. Even the bottom 20% break even.

When you can confidently share verified stats, your marketing becomes compelling and trustworthy. Present data clearly by covering four variables:

• Percentage of people achieving the result
• The outcome achieved
• The timeframe or number of attempts
• The conditions under which results were achieved

Less complicated conditions make your claims more credible and relatable.

8. Say What Only You Can Say, Show What Only You Can Show

Differentiate yourself by highlighting unique achievements and outcomes. Instead of telling people what to do, show them what you’ve done. For example, if you’re a marketing agency, play a live sales call with a real lead to demonstrate your impact.

Value is about “value per second,” not just quantity. People want quick, high-impact insights. If you can compress years of experience into digestible, actionable content, you offer enormous value.

9. How and When to Expand Your Market

Most businesses don’t need to broaden their market; they need to serve their existing niche better. For example, Gym Launch initially focused narrowly on micro-gyms doing weight loss transformations, yet still achieved $30+ million annual revenue.

When expanding, consider five strategic directions:

1. Go upmarket: Target higher-value customers with fewer numbers (e.g., large health clubs).
2. Go downmarket: Serve lower-value, higher-volume segments (e.g., personal trainers).
3. Go adjacent: Enter related industries (e.g., chiropractors or med spas).
4. Go narrower: Focus even more tightly on a sub-niche (e.g., only boot camps).
5. Go broader: Expand to a larger industry segment (e.g., all health and wellness).

Data-driven focus on your top 20% of customers—those who generate 80% of revenue—can help you refine your avatar and marketing efforts, often leading to a more profitable and manageable business.

10. Provide Real Value by Solving Problems

Value comes from four key components:

• Dream outcome: What your customer truly wants.
• Perceived likelihood of achievement: How confident they feel they’ll get the result.
• Speed: How quickly they get the promised results.
• Effort and sacrifice: How easy or hard it is to achieve the outcome.

When crafting offers or content, focus on helping your customers achieve what they want faster, easier, and with less risk. Use feedback and comments to generate new content ideas continuously—problems never end, so neither does the opportunity to provide value.

11. Give Away the Secrets, Sell the Implementation

Don’t be afraid to share your best knowledge freely. Make your free content so valuable that it could command a price. This builds trust, authority, and attracts highly qualified leads.

For example, a registered dietitian I know makes over $1 million a year from just 5,800 Instagram followers by sharing deeply niche content about insurance billing—demonstrating how specific, valuable content can convert a small audience into a thriving business.

Within your free content, use calls to action that focus on personalized help rather than just more information, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

12. All Advertising Works—It’s a Matter of Efficiency

Whether it’s Facebook, Google, TikTok, direct mail, or radio, all advertising can work if you have a qualified audience and a compelling offer. The key challenge is knowing how to optimize ads to reach different levels of awareness:

• Unaware: Audience doesn’t know they have a problem.
• Problem aware: Audience recognizes the problem but not the solution.
• Solution aware: Audience knows solutions exist but not your product.
• Product aware: Audience knows your product but hasn’t purchased.
• Most aware: Existing customers or warm leads.

Most beginners market only to the “most aware” segment (e.g., their email list). To scale, you need to craft ads that educate and warm audiences at all levels. Remember: The bigger the offer and the colder the audience, the longer your sales runway needs to be.

13. People Need to Be Reminded More Than They Need to Be Taught

Content isn’t just about teaching new things; it’s about reminding people of what they already know and keeping key ideas top of mind. Even reruns of TV shows get watched repeatedly because they offer comfort and familiarity.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ve said everything. As you live and grow, you’ll have fresh stories and angles to share the same core lessons, helping new audience members while reinforcing the message for existing ones.

Henry Ford famously said he was sick of seeing the same ads repeated, but his audience had barely begun to absorb them. The truth is, most people don’t consume every piece of content you create, so keep producing and repeating your message relentlessly.

Conclusion: Focus on Flow, Volume, and Truth

Marketing success comes down to creating flow—getting your product or service in front of people—then monetizing that flow, and finally adding friction to optimize and scale. Start low or free, do massive volume, optimize the front end of your marketing, and always track your LTV to CAC ratio.

Be authentic, provide real value, focus on the right audience, and remember that repetition beats novelty in building lasting connections. If you apply these principles with discipline and persistence, you’ll build a marketing machine that not only grows your business but sustains it through all challenges.

Now, go out there and crush it.