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Introduction 0:01
Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast™, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

Russ Johns 0:19
It's a beautiful day for the #PirateBroadcast™. And, you know, it's always exciting to see new faces, new friends, meet new people and make new new connections. So, Dylan, good morning, how are you? I hope you're well today.

Dylan Ogline 0:35
Good morning to you, Russ. Yeah, I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me here, buddy.

Russ Johns 0:39
Yeah, you were talking about the show earlier, you know, and a couple of things before the show started. And we're in digital media. Digital media is actually not a bad place to be right now, you know, with COVID, and 2020 and everything else and going on. Talk a little bit about, for those that don't know you yet, they'll get to know you, in the next 30 minutes. Talk a little about...

Dylan Ogline 1:03
No pressure.

Russ Johns 1:03
...how you focus your attention on digital media, because we're talking about how spread out we can get, how many different platforms there are, and you know, how distracted and noisy it could be, how you stay focused on what you're doing. And, you know, share a little bit about that philosophy that you have, because I thought it was great.

Dylan Ogline 1:23
Sure. So there's so many distractions, so many different directions you can go in, you know, we were talking about that pre show. If you're doing any kind of marketing, any kind of media, you could do Tik Tok, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and you name it, you know, all these different directions. I prefer to stick to things that I know, things that are tried and true, things that are scalable. So for me, we were talking about this before the show. With my business, I like to focus on either Facebook or Google ads. And that's it. You can fall down the trap of wanting to go in so many different directions. And for me, the the 80/20 reason why you want to stick to just one or two things is that you get better. If you're doing 10 different things, you never really get good at any of them. But if you're just doing one thing, you just keep pounding that and getting better and better and better. You're going to eventually build a pretty good skill at it. It could be anything, it could be a Snapchat, it could be a Tik Tok, whatever. But really just focus on one single thing maximum up to.

Russ Johns 2:37
Yeah, I appreciate that so much. And the reason I do is because I'm one of those squirrel hunters, that I'm always curious about something, you know, and and it's it's not necessarily because I'm going to use it all the time. It's more about how does this work? And how does it fit in? And who could I recommend it to if the opportunity arrives? I'm almost like the researcher that loves to kind of piece things together and pull it together. And it's just I admire your tenacity. And that's what struck a chord with me. And it's like, okay, well, cool. That is something I could do. I'm actually listening to a book called Essentialism.

Dylan Ogline 3:24
I have it.

Russ Johns 3:25
Okay.

Dylan Ogline 3:26
I haven't read it yet. I haven't read it, but I have it. I don't know what side it's on. I'm pretty sure it's on that side of the bookshelf.

Russ Johns 3:35
So how long have you been in digital? What prompted you to even think about it or get into it? or What was your interest?

Dylan Ogline 3:43
So I started my first business when I was 14. And shortly thereafter, I started playing around with, I think, I think the first time they launched it, it was just called Google AdWords. Now I always refer to it as Google AdWords. I don't even think they use that term anymore. It's just google ads. But that's how I kind of got into it at the infancy of this kind of trackable, scalable, digital marketing thing. Like it was still this new agey stuff. So you know, that was 15-16 years ago. That's how I got my start. And I would add this comment, you know, we're just talking about going in all these different directions. For me, I spent 12-13 years going the opposite direction, going in all these different directions. I don't even, Tik Tok wasn't a thing back then. But all these different avenues that you could go in having a Facebook page. They had a good one was the Google one. Google had a social media. What was that? Yeah, don't have it. No one even remembers. That's all you need to know. Nobody remembers what it was called. Going in all those different directions, I wasted so much time and I got nowhere. Yeah, because I was going in so many different directions. So once I kind of had that epiphany, base of advice from a mentor of mine, I went opposite in the other direction. So just cut everything ruthlessly, and just focused on one or two things that I was that I felt I could get could get better at and that were scalable. So that mistake...this isn't like, I have some kind of greater knowledge or something that like, I made that mistake for a decade of going in so many different directions. And it's, uh, you know, chasing the shiny object and shiny object syndrome. I had that for sure. And I got nowhere because of it.

Russ Johns 5:47
Yeah, and then once you focused on Google ads, and Facebook, huh, it turned around, and then you just got really good at that. And skilled at that and that's what your focus has been since.

Dylan Ogline 6:05
Yeah, it was like the end of 2016. The short story, compressed version of the story is I had like 10 different business projects going. And, you know, each one of them had the Google social media and like, so many different directions. And I just was getting absolutely nowhere, I was miserable, and just ruthlessly cut everything focused on one single business, which was agency work. And then I went further. And it was just one single service, which was Digital Marketing Management Services. And that was end of 2016 and 2017, grow the agency to multiple six figures, and then seven figures in 2018. But it was, you know, from nothing to very quickly ramped up, because I just focused on one thing, and then I got better and better and better at it. So my clients got better and better results, because I was only doing one thing.

Russ Johns 7:06
That's awesome. It's awesome. Note to self. I know that there's a lot of people that are going to appreciate that lesson, because you know, there's, for me right now, I'm focusing on live streaming, primarily LinkedIn, you know, getting leads, generating leads, conversations and relationships with LinkedIn and live streaming. I think it's appropriate right now. And the thing that I think about or reflect on is, how could I start using ads? or How could I start using some lead generation, you know, paid streams? What would that look like? So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and say how you operate or how you think about that as you go forward with a client?

Dylan Ogline 8:06
So I don't particularly know a lot about video. We do some YouTube ad management, but but not a lot. And I do think that YouTube ads are still still in their infancy. What the appeal of doing, say, live streaming or content creation and trying to get things to go viral is that it's typically low cost or free. The problem that I have with it is that you don't have control of the scale. When you use Google ads, use Facebook ads, as an example, you just add another zero to the budget, and boom, 10 times the amount of leads coming in, you know, you just double your budget and boom, you just doubled your leads coming in. Sure, you have to make sure it's profitable. To begin with, you have to make sure that you have a profitable ROI. But scaling things up. You have a lot of control with paid advertising, when you lose by going, you know, kind of these low cost or free, or the free route is that you don't have control over that lever. You have to continue to feed the beast of content creation, which takes a lot of time. So do they have I don't I honestly don't know. Do they have like on the LinkedIn channel or LinkedIn platform? Do you have the ability to buy more views for your live streams? Is that a thing?

Russ Johns 9:48
Not directly that way. However, you can buy ads to point to your shows your events, your activity, sure. So it's it's much the same way, it's much like a Facebook ad. You advertise the fact that it's there and I want to push it in front of this many people. And then if they show up, they show up if they don't, that's the challenge a lot of people have with ad spend is, is getting the right ads, you know, the magical words that drive people to the result. So, you know, that's something that you've probably learned how to do and help coach individuals to say, Well, you know, that ad, that title is not quite gonna grab people by the, the beard and draw them into the crowd here. So, you know, yeah, there's a lot of creativity still exist in AD spin. And so it's one of those secret sauce methods that you have to kind of, like you said, after you know, the last five, six years, you've had to really hone that skill and to get much better at it,

Dylan Ogline 11:03
Oh, 100%. But I would also say I, I ruthlessly apply the 80/20 method to like every aspect of my life. So when it comes to writing, copy, creating a good ad, no matter if it's Facebook, YouTube, Google, it doesn't matter. A lot of people overthink it, they want it to be complicated, they're looking for the advanced strategies, to, you know, the 20% of the 80% of actions, you're going to spend a lot of time to get just 20% of the results, just move that the needle make your ad a little bit more profitable. Like I had a conversation with someone yesterday, we were talking about, on a landing page, if you circle something in red, it will automatically...people just look at it. So you can draw attention to something on a picture by just circling in red. And that's cool. That's a strategy. But that's really not going to move the needle a lot. I focus on the fundamentals and the basics, that 20% of effort that it's going to give you 80% of the results. And for me, it's just two blanket strategies that I use. One is to get very niche down and narrow with your ad copy with your landing page. And all those things, try to specifically describe one single main problem that the end customer has. Get as specific as you can. And if somebody sees an ad, and it's, oh, we provide all these services, all these products that can go in so many different directions. But if you say, you see an ad, it says Russ, I specifically help people like you with this specific problem. And you're like, wow, that's a problem I am having. And you know, that's what services and products, do they solve problems that speaking to you. I find that the more specific you can get when you can define the problem better than the end customer can, they will automatically assume that you have the solution. So get very specific on defining the problem and defining the solution. The second thing, the second blanket strategy that I use is I write copy, write ads, write landing pages to get people to not click on them. I want the very...the buying pyramid? It's like 3% of people are ready to buy today. 7% are ready to buy within like the next month or whatever. You just want to target those people at the top. And you also want to target the people that can afford whatever your particular solution is. You don't want everybody clicking on your ad. Those are my two blanket strategies.

Russ Johns 14:02
You almost want to eliminate a lot of people from clicking that are just searching the web thinking something special.

Dylan Ogline 14:12
Yes, you don't want tire kickers.

Russ Johns 14:14
Don't get the tire kickers. I want to give a shout out to a few people. Mark from Houston. Mark Lacour, he operates OGGN. He's building a huge empire around podcasts in the oil and gas industry. Awesome individual. We do live streaming for that network and a lot of community. Good morning Wendy. I hope you made it to Seattle safe and sound taking care of your folks. We were talking about that before the show here. Dylan. You know we're all taking care of somebody. And Angie says Good morning. She loves the book as well. Essentialism. So we got some fans in the house. Patrick says hello. JD is in the house. And yes, Angie, she's been encouraging me to get people to sign up for my YouTube channel. It's like a space. Dylan, I've got well over 600 videos on YouTube. I mean, I just crossed over 300 episodes of this.

Dylan Ogline 15:21
That's a lot of content.

Russ Johns 15:22
That's a lot of content. And I'm under utilizing it. So when you said that YouTube ads may be someplace where I could play and make some progress there. I might have to check that out and talk to you about ad spend stuff. And then Gabriel's in the house. Thank you so much for Gabriel. He's another individual that's great. He has a great show, Made from Scratch Broadcast. He does it in the evening, Central Time. Awesome individual to connect with. Russ Hedge out from Oregon. He just launched a book. Thank you for being here, Russ. Appreciate you. Loving the vibes. So Dylan's in Florida. I'm in Arizona, little bit of sunshine here today, bringing you sunshine. So sign up for my YouTube channel, do all the social things we're telling you not to do. Or you could just do some ad spend and send it to Russ. Follow us on YouTube. Love you all guys. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you. Dylan, I want to talk a little bit about the the landscape. You know, you started out young. You said, hey, this is something I can learn. You kind of crafted your skills. Sounds like you write a little bit of content, a little bit of copy, you know, crafting that skill. Where do you see the next 12-18 months, two years? Where do you see that working out? and changing? Or how has it changed for you? You know, is it just a continuation? I mean, talk a little bit about that.

Dylan Ogline 17:13
I think there's it's mostly going to be a continuation. I don't see a lot of things changing. We talked a little bit about YouTube ads. I do believe that there's going to be a lot of explosive growth there. But I particularly don't try to guess where things are going. This is actually an interesting question. So I had a conversation with someone yesterday and they were talking about...some company they were working with had somehow partnered up...I knew nothing about Tik Tok ads, or how you do that at all. They partnered up with somebody on Tik Tok or to influencers on Tik Tok. And they were generating about $500,000 in sales. I don't know what they were spending and what their profit margin was, or anything, but they were generating about 500 or $500,000 in sales per month, mostly from these Tik Tok influencers. And that sounds appealing, right? That sounds pretty good.

Russ Johns 18:26
But like you said, you don't know what they've spent.

Dylan Ogline 18:29
Yeah, I don't know what they spent. How do you scale that? Is it just when these new platforms, when these new things come out? Most of the time, what it was just somebody went at bat and just so happened to hit a home run there first at bat. The other 999 people struck out. But we only hear about the people that hit a homerun. Again, it sounds appealing because we don't know what they were spending, but it's probably very profitable. But it was probably just, they hit a homerun their first at bat. I try to not get caught up in that kind of stuff and try to stick to things that are tried and true. Google Ads has been around for what 15 years? Sure, it's more expensive. But it has a track record. it's scalable. You can go and you can quickly learn it. And you're not just hoping to go viral. Same thing with Facebook ads. So because I kind of apply that filter of, I want things that are tried and true. That kind of keeps me out of thinking about what's coming next. You go back two years ago, but it was like snapchats gonna be the next big thing and everybody's gonna be using Snapchat ads. I don't even know how to do a snapchat ad. I don't care. Because it's probably just people hitting home runs. They're having success. So yeah, I don't know where it's going, but I do think YouTube is getting more established. I think there's gonna be a lot of growth coming there.

Russ Johns 20:16
There's a lot of activity on YouTube. And it involves, one of the things that I think is really curious is, you know, when you do an ad, you know, testing multiple ads, one of the things that Facebook is really good at is, you can actually run multiple tests and kind of tweak the demographics a little bit. You go through that process with clients. Is there a process or a strategy that you use that on Facebook?

Dylan Ogline 20:48
100%? Yes, I literally have a document that we follow. I'm trying to think off the top of my head. It's basically, so let me back up here. So with Facebook, the power of Facebook is in the algorithm. You can't possibly understand everything about your potential customers. You can kind of guess maybe they're male, maybe they're 25 to 35, whatever, maybe they're conservative, liberal, you can kind of guess these things. Maybe they like country music, maybe they like rap. Maybe they like Tim Ferriss, maybe they like Rachael Ray. I don't know why I thought Rachael Ray, but you can kind of guess these things, but you don't know how aggressive they are, or how much time they spend on Facebook or like, people don't come close to grasping the deeper understanding that Facebook has about our psychology. So what we do, when we're onboarding a client, we will run...it's 600 different tests at one time. So, again, I have...I wish I had that document in front of me, but it's like, five different pictures with 30 different audience variations. And then I think, five different that's still not enough, but and then five different actual ad copies. So you're running all these different variations, and you just throw them out there into the market. And what Facebook does is Facebook will figure out which ones are the most efficient. You don't know why they're the most efficient. It's deep psychology, and pattern human behavior patterns that that Facebook figures out. And listen, I'm making this sound really complicated. But it's literally just the short answer to what your question was, is, yeah, we do a lot of testing. But a lot more than people think we're not doing two tests, we're doing 600 tests at one different time, and just letting the algorithm pick whichever one works.

Russ Johns 23:09
And then it's like, I'm not gonna decide which one works best. I'm just gonna throw a lot out there. Let me decide which one is going to be the best converting out.

Dylan Ogline 23:22
And there's no way you could guess which one, but the algorithm can, not instantly, but give it a couple days, and it'll figure out which one for some reason got people to click. That's fascinating to me.

Russ Johns 23:35
Mark Lacour asks a great question. Maybe we can talk about this. Any best practice advice on Facebook ads success measurement? That's a great question. Because it's exactly what you're saying is like, okay, well, yeah, I made $500,000 on this tik tok ad, but I spent 620,000. That's not a good measurement.

Dylan Ogline 24:04
Simply put, is it profitable? That's kind of the the bulletproof, like that's gonna tell you is, this profitable or not? And I would say the way you do it is you put up 600 different ads, which sounds really complicated. It's not, it's not a lot, because you could just copy ads and whatnot. You put up a bunch of different ads, a bunch of different variations, and maybe one of them's got like a point nine ROI, so you're losing a little bit of money. And that's like your best performer. That's okay. If that's like your first test. So you delete all the bad ones, and then you copy the good ones and you create another 600 variations. You're constantly tweaking until you get a positive ROI and listen, most of the time, whenever we put something out there, you're getting like a 1.5 or two x ROI. It's really, you don't want to overthink it, you want to just put out variations into the Facebook marketplace and...

Russ Johns 25:15
It's content creation for ads.

Dylan Ogline 25:20
Well, yes, however, it's when people think 600 different ads, that's like laser focus. That's all. That sounds exhausting. But it's literally just a lot of copying, and allowing the algorithm to pick which ones are profitable. But that's, yeah, the best metric is is this ad profitable or not?

Russ Johns 25:42
Yeah, that's it. That's fantastic. And I have to guess, and I'm less familiar with Google Ads than I am with Facebook ads. But I have to imagine that Google ads are much the same process, or is it?

Dylan Ogline 25:56
There's not as much testing, there's not as much. I mean, there's not even close to the amount of testing. It's more about just getting really specific with your keywords and really specific with your ads. Facebook is a little more difficult to figure out. Because you're just putting stuff out into the marketplace and allowing the algorithm to figure it out. But once you get it, the profitability and the scalability is just massive, whereas Google is a lot easier to figure out. Yeah, there's a lot of scale, certainly, depending on your market and region, etc, etc. But it's kind of a trade off between the two.

Russ Johns 26:48
Yeah. Wendy's giving a shout out, Dylan, you speak with such confidence, when you focus on one thing exclusively, you have the ability to go so deep, that the results are undeniable.

Dylan Ogline 27:02
That was heavy.

Russ Johns 27:05
She's an awesome individual that gets deep sometimes. Good morning to all the #PirateBroadcast™. Thank you Kenyatta. She's doing some great work out there as well. I just find it fascinating. I love these conversations, I really appreciate the fact that you've dropped by and you know, share a little bit of knowledge. Because ad spend for the the solopreneur, or the freelancer or something like that, you know, it seems like dangerous territory, it's like, okay, well, you know, you wouldn't hesitate. You'd probably put an ad in the newspaper here, something like that, you know, a lot of business owners don't understand the complexity or the simplicity of digital. And I got into outdoor advertising back before you were probably even born in 85.

Dylan Ogline 27:54
It was before my time.

Russ Johns 27:55
Yeah. before your time. And, you know, when you're buying KPI versus your actual results, you know, you're spending on clicks. And the fact is, you're not spending any money on the people that don't click. And where it is, as with outdoor advertising, or broadcast advertising, you're spending on a potential click or a follower, you know, some interest.

Dylan Ogline 28:26
And you can't track it. You can't track it. That's my main...you're just throwing money out the window and just kind of hoping it comes back. With the time we have remaining, I would like to finish by saying that I truly believe if you have...it doesn't even have to be an internet based business. But I really believe that marketing should be the number one focus. Digital marketing should be the number one focus in your business. And I like to always add a disclaimer when I say something like this. Yes, you should deliver a great product or service to your customer. But that's like me telling you you have to breathe. I'm not going to say that. When it comes to growth, your number one priority should be digital marketing. And the reason is, once you get it, which there's pretty much for everybody. There's a certain level of tweaking it and testing and testing. But once you get it, you literally have the ability to buy growth. You want to double your sales this year, just double your ad spend. Like that's it. It removes the question of growth. You literally can just buy it. So, yeah, I finished with that, I guess.

Russ Johns 29:46
Well, that's a great place to end up. I just love the opportunity to have these conversations because I know that it's going to help someone. It's going to help me remove things that are no longer necessary in my life.

Dylan Ogline 30:04
You're completely cut on all that unnecessary stuff.

Russ Johns 30:06
Yeah, I was gonna cut it off. I'll check with you in a few months. Hey, Dylan, I made it.

Dylan Ogline 30:12
Well, good luck to you, Russ, good luck.

Russ Johns 30:15
So, as as always everyone, thank you so much. I really appreciate you and I do humbly ask you to go follow and subscribe to my YouTube channel. I'm going to grow that, I'm going to be expanding that and working that. I may even spend some money on adspend over there. The focus now is on YouTube, focus, spend money on marketing. And then also you know, as always, #kindnessiscool, #smilesarefree, and you #enjoytheday. Thanks, Dylan

Dylan Ogline 30:48
Thank you.

Russ Johns 30:50
Stick around.

Exit 30:51
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