This post is an interview transcript. Click here to listen to Bill Conrad ’s video interview featuring Antonio Centeno.
Bill: A one and a two and a three!
Antonio: Lots of coffee, up all night. I had paid a company — my first company, A Tailored Suit, I paid $10,000 for them to build the website and they delivered to me something that was not what I wanted. Basically, it didn’t work.
Bill: And a two —
Antonio: Before you hire someone to clean your house, you need to have cleaned your house, would have gone down on your hands and knees with a toothbrush and scrub those corners so that you know that okay, I know the level that I want this at and I know what it takes and you're not going to be able to pull the wool over my eyes. The same thing for a website, I've done the SEO. I've studied the SEO. It's been five years, but if I go to hire an SEO company, I can smell BS pretty darn quick.
Bill: And a three!
Antonio: So I think that's the key, is identify smart people and get closer to them. Surround yourself with smart people and you'll do fine.
Bill: Welcome to Timelines recorded Wednesday, February 24, 2016. Today, Antonio Centeno from Real Men Real Style returns to Timelines to give us the insight on how he built his online business from the ground up. Antonio was last on Episode 39 way back in August of 2014. Since then, this Marine has expanded content on his website and introduced StyleCon, which in Atlanta, Georgia is the gathering of top thought leaders in the sphere of men's style. Now, without further ado, let's catch up with Antonio by jumping right into this episode.
Antonio, welcome back to Timelines. It's good to have you back after 139.
Antonio: Hey! Good to be here, Bill.
Bill: So we're going to shoot right away. What should I be wearing when I do a Blab? What kind of clothes should I wear? Should I have the three-day beard grown? Should I have my rags on? What should I wear?
Antonio: My serious question to you is why not just do this Blab naked?
Bill: I guess I'd probably get thrown out of Blab, first of all, but I'm not the kind of guy to be naked on a show. I wouldn't feel comfortable.
Antonio: Exactly. You wouldn't feel comfortable. One of the powerful things about — and you served. You know what it's like. How did you feel in your uniform, your dress shoes?
Bill: It always felt good.
Antonio: It always felt good.
Bill: In fact, you'd be proud of me. When I was a young second lieutenant, one thing I spent a lot of money on was — I'm a West Point grad and we had a choice of the best tailors in the world. I bought the most expensive blues and system you could buy. I got married in this and they were great.
Antonio: Why? Why spend that money? Why care? I mean, you're a warrior. Our job has nothing to do with fashion — or does it? I always love that example of people think somehow fashion doesn’t matter. Go back to gladiators. What did they do before they went out there? Pretty much you're going in and you have a 50% chance you're going to die. You're actually braiding your hair. You're making sure everything, your armor, is perfectly clean and aligned because presentation does matter, if no one else, for yourself and for you to feel at your utmost highest level.
So whether it's a pilot getting into his — if a pilot is going to go fly an F-18 and he's wearing a ballerina's tutu, do you think he's going to fly as well? He just doesn’t feel like he's in his game face. Same thing, a football player walks out on the field. If he's not wearing his football uniform — baseball players, they don’t wash their underwear for a while. Why do they do these superstitious things? It's in the field of enclothed cognition and it's the study and it is proven that what we wear has an effect on our mind and our overall performance.
One of the classic studies out in Northwestern, they show people wearing doctor's jackets. They actually then take a test and they perform higher if they're wearing a doctor's jacket. They're more careful, more attentive to details. If they're wearing a painter's smock, no difference in performance. So why did the doctor's jacket make them perform better? Simply they felt smarter and they acted smarter.
And so, my answer is you can wear whatever you want that gives you the confidence to do your best, and that's what I stress at Real Men Real Style. It's not about suits. That is your style. Most people just go through life though and they never even really figure out who they are and what they stand for. I dress well even though I live in a town of a thousand people in the Midwest. I dress well because I represent myself. I represent my family. I represent my business every time I walk out that door. It doesn’t matter if I go to the grocery store or I go to meet my daughter's teacher. I have my own representation.
Many people think they're a jeans and t-shirt kind of person. Well, really, have you ever thought about that? What do jeans and t-shirts represent? Have you ever taken the time to actually reflect and really identify who you are and what you stand for?
Bill: That's true. Now, I have moved to Reno, Nevada and it's a western culture here and there's a lot of Levi's jeans like my daughter, their Levi's are pretty darn expensive.
Antonio: Like a hundred dollars.
Bill: It's that style, and boots, you've got to have the cowboy boots here.
Antonio: Yup.
[0:05:05]
Bill: It's where you are to fit in too whether New York or Midwest. It's a fine line. I notice you want to be at least for me — and we've had real estate businesses and construction companies when we weren't in the military and there are certain uniforms to wear in each of those industries. For example, you don’t want to be overdressed, but you want to be just dressed slightly as well as or a little bit more so than your client.
Antonio: It depends. Environment does play a factor, and not just environment, also your need in your profession matters a lot, but what you don’t want to do is betray expectations because if you go into the emergency room in Reno, Nevada or New York City or Houston, Texas, what do you expect that doctor to look like?
Bill: They're going to wear scrubs.
Antonio: Scrubs, yeah, or to see that white jacket. Do you think they really ever use that — why do you think they wear that stethoscope there? These are all little cues to get us to trust them because if that doctor walks out and he's wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt, he looks like he hasn't showered or shaved for five days, he smells like marijuana and he says, “Hey, I'll take your kid,” are you going to give them your kid, your child? I'm going to be like is this guy just a random drug addict that just woke up from an overdose?
Bill: Now, I worked in a collective down here and it's a group of computer programmers, developers, designers all working together in a collaborative, but a lot of times, you'll see that three-day beard. You'll see the Levi's and the shorts. They'll be clean though. They'll be clean and neat, but they just look a little different. It's a look.
Antonio: Yeah, and it's a fashion and oftentimes herd mentality. They look at the way other people are and they imitate it. Also, they're products of their environment because when you go shopping, it's harder — the sweater I'm wearing by Ben Sherman was curated for me by a company at Men's Style Lab out of Iowa, at Des Moines, Iowa. This is a hard to find sweater in my area, so no one is going to be wearing it because everyone shops at the local stores. So when you shop at the local stores, you're captive to what they can provide you, so that's another thing.
Most people, they're just going to buy locally and whatever is offered to them, they're going to fall into them. In a sense, they're following a fashion because they're buying into local fashion. If you look at pictures 50 years ago, were guys wearing ball caps, t-shirts, cargo shorts and running shoes? No. But if you go to a normal event now in the United States, what's everyone wearing? What I just described. It's a fashion trend yet they don’t even know they're in it.
Bill: Yeah, so true. So tell us a little bit more about how your business has gone in the last two years. What's happened since Episode 39, whatever it was?
Antonio: Well, we probably quadrupled the amount of money we make, so that's always a good thing. I'm trying to work less. I really got into advertising more. We've probably increased our traffic and views easily. We probably get about just over 40,000 to 50,000 people a day to Real Men Real Style, so well over a million uniques a month. My YouTube channel gets about double that. YouTube just continue to explode for us.
Really for me it's been about growing my team, increasing consistency, and being able to expand the ways that we're making money and trying to make sure I'm enjoying this. I also have an hour conference, which I told you about, the StyleCon. We're here in March 11th through 13th. We'll have about 200 people come out to Atlanta and for me, it's a lot of fun. It's just a big party and I get paid for it.
Bill: That looks like a lot of work to create StyleCon. I consider that here in Reno, Nevada to do something in a new media world, but this looks like a lot, lot of work.
Antonio: So here's how it wasn't a lot of work, is I reduced risk, I got a great partner, and we worked on this every single week on Thursday at a set time for a year to build up to it. Also, I already had an existing audience, so one of the hardest things for a lot of people that throw conferences is they don’t necessarily have the marketing arm or they've got to try to figure out how to sell tickets. I understood copyrighting. We focused in and we clearly identified who our perfect customer avatars were and we went after those kinds of people.
Actually, I was just telling my wife the other day, it seems like a lot less work to me simply because my partner, Aaron Marino, we held each other accountable. Every week we were knocking out a task even eight months before. And now, here we are just a few weeks before and I don’t really have anything to do except sit back and enjoy.
Bill: Well, you picked a nice town to do it in Atlanta, which is easy to get to and less expensive to get to.
Antonio: And that's why we chose Atlanta. That is Aaron's town and we wanted to reduce risk, so we got to grow out of the location.
[0:10:05]
Anytime you're going to go something, you can quickly figure out where do most people fail. Most people fail when they throw a conference because they can't get enough butts in the seats and they spent a lot of money on the location, on the audio, so we thought okay, first off, we'll start smaller. We can get the butts in the seats.
The other thing is we just went really cheap with the location. Now, we've got a sweetheart deal, but Aaron lives there in Atlanta. He drove over and he met with them versus if you do it in Vegas, yeah, everyone can get out to Vegas, but if you don’t live in Vegas, you're showing up to the site unseen. You're hoping that things are ready so when you show up, there's going to be all these things that are crazy. We're doing it there in Atlanta and we've got ten people that are local who have been facilitating things and Aaron already had existing relationships.
Bill: Now, Atlanta is not New York, but it's definitely become more of a place of style, hasn't it? Hasn't it become more of a hub? What is the hub in Atlanta these days other than great transportation in a big city and a lot of [0:11:04] [Indiscernible]?
Antonio: I don’t know. Good food. I think it's a clean, nice town. Like you said, it's easy to get to. Yeah, it's not New York, but the way I figured it is I created the conference with a unique — we have a great proposition if you are a content creator or if you sell to men. It just makes sense to be there. If I can't sell you on those two points to have this as a business expense come out to our conference, if you're not willing to pay the flight and the short little hotel stay to come out to the conference, which the tickets are relatively cheap, honestly it's not a big enough pain for you and we don’t need you there.
Bill: That's really smart. That's really good to have a partner. Yeah, the tickets are very reasonable, really reasonable. Who should come to this conference?
Antonio: You know, I try to get people — again, people sell to men. So if you own a custom clothier, if you have a large business and one of your target demographics is the male client, it would make sense because we've got over 50 content creators that are going to be there and all of these guys have very sizeable audiences when it comes to the male, so Andy Snavely over at Primer Magazine, Aaron Marino over at Alpha M. He's been on Shark Tank, Fear Factor, a few others, but he gets daily to his YouTube channel probably 200,000, maybe 250,000 to a million people a day to his channel, so he's got over a million subscribers.
When you see people like this and they have this type of reach that they can say something and create thousands of dollars in sales for you, it would make sense to come out there. For the content creators, it's simply there's nothing else like this where — yeah, New Media Expo used to be like this, but that was more of where all the people — it was a wide, collective group and this is simply if you're in men's lifestyle and you talk about it, you want to be around other people that talk about it because there's just opportunity to get to know the other people in the space.
Bill: I would think a great web company coming here and meet people to help them go where you've gone would be also a thing to do, to bring it to the next step.
Antonio: And that would probably be eventually somebody else we would look to bring in as we expanded it right now, but I wanted to focus in on those two suit who I viewed as the most — the third person we go after is just the super fan, the guy who's been watching a hundred of my videos, a hundred of Aaron's videos. Why not come out? We've got a self-development day. Why not come out and hang out with us, see where real people — you can use our information to get to the next level.
Bill: With that, we'll go into our first break.
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Bill: Antonio, we're coming back off the break. There are so many things I can ask you or want to ask you, but we don’t have enough time on this episode. We only have about 15 minutes left to the podcast, but on this portion, I want to go into both of your relationship with YouTube and this new podcast that you're launching and what your strategy is.
I want to say one last thing before we go into that. We analyze websites on Saturday morning on the WordPress show, which is WP-Tonic and have the very top people in the world on WordPress on it. Here's what I've learned from being part of that show, is we call this just to start the $10,000 website. That's how much it would cost to get the professionals in to create this connectivity or this greater website.
I would like to ask you about all those three things really. Let's talk about this podcast coming up. What are you going to do with the podcast and why are you doing the podcast?
Antonio: Well, really quick, so relative-wise, is there ever a $100,000 website or is $10,000 high or low?
Bill: No, there is definitely a $100,000 website. In fact, I have what I call the $1500 website, which is just the framework to get started. For example, when you look at your website and why it's a $10,000 website is because —
[0:15:09]
Antonio: Well, relative-wise, is that in the 90th percentile, in the 50th percentile? Where am I at? Where does $10,000 fall?
Bill: You're definitely in the top 10th of the percent, very top in that level. The step above that would be your high level corporate sites, which are $100,000. This is just a starter to get to this level, and we meet a lot of people who invest $10,000 who don’t have websites that are close to this website.
Antonio: Well, it's something we've been building for years and we have a lot of fun. It's a basic WordPress platform and it has a lot of content, so that was the key, is to actually make it, so how can you find — we've got 2000 articles on there and they're all good, great information. Most of the articles are 2000 to 3000 words long. That's why we do so well in the search engines, is it's great content and Google wants to index our content.
Bill: When I said $10,000, I wasn't talking about your content. I was just talking about the layout, the tabs, the artwork, and the framework, and the coaching it took to get you to start creating that content. There's a lot to this. Your site is what I consider a perfect site for a business person who wants to get where you are. This is complicated. We could talk about this — I'm going to bring this up on the WP-Tonic on Saturday morning.
Antonio: Cool! I'd love to hear it, yeah. I'd love to hear some of those guys. It's one of those things you can always do better and we've screwed up so many times on the website, but we always are trying to improve and make it more user-friendly. You have fun with it at the same time, but I did keep it simple. I'm simply using StudioPress, one of their premium things, their Genesis. We edit it all in-house, so that was another thing with the size. I didn’t want to hire a company and then them disappearing and me not to be able to adjust the site.
Bill: Well, who developed your graphics?
Antonio: I have just an artist in-house.
Bill: Wow! Well, that makes sense with your background with design.
Antonio: Yeah. You know, I'm pretty much self-taught. I'm a big believer that there's a lot we can do. When you think about what Isaac Newton was able to do, he was all self-taught; Ben Franklin, self-taught, so we all have the same pretty much genetic makeup. Why can't we figure out something like this?
Bill: Well, some of the people that come on — John Locke, who's a really top California WordPress designer, will be reviewing this site. I'm not going to tell him anything about what you just said, about how you self-taught built it up and I'm going to ask him what the value is, also Jonathan Denwood and a couple of others. We also have this week — we have Chris Badgett from LMS Lifter, which is really —
Antonio: Yeah, send me a link on it. After email, send me a link so I can —
Bill: I will cut out a little snippet for you and let you listen to it and look at it because I know — you know what I think? You're a Marine. I got this feeling. You're a Marine and you started out at Marine Corps. You went to base. You had to learn and be an infantryman and you come into your specialty. It's sort of like the Navy guys, too. They're even more like this. They say, “I can do anything.” If you talk to the Navy folks in ship because they have to learn to fight fires and do everything they do, there's something. This “can-do” attitude jumps in and it's one thing that I'm trying to teach.
I'm opening up a program which I call the $1500 website and this takes — you said StudioPress. It starts out with Genesis as a framework and it links everything together so you understand all the social media, linking it altogether then letting you build it and create it, but you don’t build something like this overnight. You don’t learn to do what you've done overnight. How long did it take you to get to this level?
Antonio: I've been doing this for five years, six years.
Bill: What was the first year like?
Antonio: Lots of coffee, up all night. I had paid a company — my first company, A Tailored Suit, I paid $10,000 for them to build the website and they delivered to me something that was not what I wanted. Basically, it didn’t work, but per the contract, they said that they delivered. The website didn’t work. It didn’t do what I needed it to do, but they're like, “Well, we did the work. We fulfilled it.” I think it's something that should've done a better job. So by necessity, I had to learn how to do this stuff.
You just go to Barnes & Noble and you sit and you just read books and you play and you create something that's freaking ugly, but that doesn’t really matter if your content is good and you get it out there, and then you just keep revising it and revising it and revising it and revising it.
Bill: See, when I looked at your site, this is not WP-Tonic, but I see right away you've got a place to join on the front site and you've got — I don’t want to talk all about WordPress because we do that on Saturdays, but I am impressed, extraordinarily impressed, and it feels so good. I think you find this with the military guys, is they get in there and they grind. They burn the midnight oil.
[0:20:04]
I know when you're a Marine — and I was on active duty — we work some insane hours. You just do it. You know that. Pre-deployment, deployment, you work insane hours. When you're overseas in the zone, sleep is the only thing you do and it's where you escape if you get to sleep.
Antonio: Yeah.
Bill: I'm impressed. I remember your story now from the first time we talked about that first $10,000 site, how you went back in there and figured it out yourself, and I believe the same way. I've tried to teach business folks how to understand the basics. I've got a WP-Tonic 101 plug-in to learn the basics of WordPress, then contract out because — and we have a show with a terrible name called The Weekly Scam. And even though you're not really getting scammed, there are a lot of ways to lose a lot of money online, as you know.
Antonio: Yeah, there is, and I completely agree about doing the work first so that you know what you're going to get at a later point. Everyone likes to say, “I work hard.” Before you hire someone to clean your house, you need to have cleaned your house, would have gone down on your hands and knees [with a toothbrush and scrub those corners so that you know that okay, I know the level that I want this at and I know what it takes and you're not going to be able to pull the wool over my eyes. The same thing for a website, I've done the SEO. I've studied the SEO. It's been five years, but if I go to hire an SEO company, I can smell BS pretty darn quick.
Bill: I'm 110% on the same platform. It's really refreshing. Well, with that said, I'm going to bring this up with our pros. By the way, some of our high-end website pros, you never know what you're getting, but I still shake my head around them. I'm like, oh, they're new.
Hey, let's go on. You're starting a new podcast. You've had a podcast with John Lee Dumas and the name of that podcast is — it's the?
Antonio: Yeah, that’s the High Speed Low Drag podcast. Basically, we interview successful veterans and we put it out there for veterans so that they can understand entrepreneurship and get a leg up, and that leads over to our Mastermind program called High Speed Elite, which we open up a few times a year and we usually bring guys in for about a six-month training program, so we don’t sugarcoat this. It's a tough program and we run people through a lot of information. We make them take a lot of action, but that's why we price it at the point we do and we only bring in a set number of people.
Bill: Now, John Lee Dumas, I take it, is the expert on the podcasting. How did you hook up with him?
Antonio: You know, John and I met years ago at — I think it was New Media. Well, we didn’t actually meet at New Media Expo. We had a coach in common, Jaime Tardy, and she basically said, “You guys need to talk and meet.” It just goes to show why you should look to hire a coach because sometimes they see something that you don’t see and I didn’t even know who John was. He didn’t know who I was, but when we started talking, we realized we were in Iraq at the same time during the 2003 invasion. And so, it was like hey, we got this in common. All of a sudden, I had a deeper connection and we stayed in touch. Next thing you know, we're starting a business together.
Bill: Very good. Antonio, I've got to follow up on this question. You just talked about having a coach. How did you pick a coach and how do you pick a coach and do you need a coach?
Antonio: That's a great question. There is a podcast out there. I think it's The Coach's Coach — gosh, I can't even remember. I remember I went out there and I looked at the questions I'm supposed to ask a coach. That was important. I asked a lot of questions before. I made sure I trust their advice. It really does help when you can have access to some of their information. Maybe they have a podcast. Maybe they have a YouTube channel. You see that they get you, that you get them.
I do think it needs to be at a price point, that it's a bit painful for you so that you actually do take action. You need to find someone that works for you. I wanted someone that would hold me accountable whose advice I could respect. So oftentimes, you need a coach that is going to be — again, the money that you're going to spend with them especially if you're at a higher level could be a lot more than you almost feel comfortable paying, but if they give you that one insight, it's going to be worth it, or if they give you those few introductions, it's going to pay for itself.
Bill: Have you ever coached?
Antonio: Yes, with High Speed Elite. I choose to coach military veteran entrepreneurs. That's really the only way I coach nowadays. Really it's not time-efficient. I've got four young kids and I want to spend time with them. So for me, it's the only way I'll do it, is if there's a unique angle to it, which for me I've chosen military veterans. It's my way of giving back. Still, it's not free because I don’t think anything really is free because it's always costing time and I want them to take it seriously.
Bill: I've donated a lot my life. Being in the military, you don’t really associate money with work. It's hard to explain because you worked all the time. It's just a different environment. So when I got out, I had to stop doing anything so much or working for people or causes, but Jaime Tardy, how did you pick her as a coach?
[0:25:00]
Antonio: Gosh, I don’t actually remember. Maybe she had a podcast. I knew she was smart and up and coming, and that's one thing I look for. So if you're ever looking for a great deal or a good value, you're going to have to take some risks. And so, if you feel you're pretty good at identifying someone before they — because eventually people reach a point where they realize what they're bringing to the table and what they can charge for it, so I think I caught her at a point right before she actually — I don’t really know if she takes on clients nowadays, but she was doing some things I wanted. She was ahead of me.
And a coach doesn’t have to be older than you. They don’t have to be necessarily smarter than you, but they do need to be ahead of you, I think, in a particular skill set. Just those few steps ahead, they can save you a lot of time so you're not banging your head up against the wall where they're like, “Oh no, you just go this way” or they can make those quick little intros.
Bill: Right. Now, one thing I can notice about who you pick, maybe it was luck or whatever happened, but you got lucky because I think they're scamming in coaching, too. You've got to watch that out, some high price coaching then you don’t get the value back. It's got to be the right fit.
Antonio: There's scamming in everything. I had to have my sewer pumped and I got scammed. I doesn’t matter what you do. There's always someone that is going to try to take advantage of someone that is not — and that's right. The first thing you have to do is you have to educate yourself. You have to be able to make — the ability of human beings is to be able to make decisions for themselves. That's the only true freedom we really have and you've got to take responsibility and realize that you will fail. You will make mistakes. Just pick yourself up and keep going.
Bill: I love it, just love it. In closing on this little coaching site, one thing I have noticed is Jaime Lee Tardy, the people who she coached at the time you got your coaching, a lot of them succeeded and did really well. John Lee Dumas is one, best example.
Antonio: Is it Jaime Lee Tardy? I know she's now Jaime Masters.
Bill: I remember — I'm not as current as I should be probably on her.
Antonio: I thought John's middle name was Lee.
Bill: I'm pretty sure I see something — we'll pause for a second. Okay, folks on the podcast, we had to take a break and look at the Eventual Millionaire and I want to say Lee, Jaime Lee Tardy, but it's just Jaime Tardy. We just pulled up a site of Eventual Millionaire, which I dropped the blog in then and down below, we see two testimonials, one from John Lee Dumas and one today from Antonio right there. Looking good, Antonio!
Antonio: Thanks!
Bill: And you didn’t know that was there. You've given permission, of course, but —
Antonio: Oh yeah, yeah, I created it for — but I don’t really track what people do with those testimonials. I do try to give nice testimonials to people if they help me out. They can use it however. It doesn’t take me too much time. Very few people ever do it. One thing I've learned is going on the extra mile, there's never any traffic. So if you do that, people will remember it and that's how you build, I think, real, long-lasting friendships online.
Bill: Okay. Before we go to our final break, let's talk briefly about YouTube because to me, when I think about you, I think you've got style and I'm thinking about really using that YouTube platform. I assume since you're self-taught on this WordPress site that you did the same thing with YouTube. Is that the case?
Antonio: That's true, yeah. YouTube is interesting. I saw a guy that was already having success on YouTube with men's style and he was talking about fashion. His name's Aaron Marino. I was like, “I'm better than this guy. I know more about style. I don’t even like what this guy's doing. I can do better.” So my wife, after me saying this for a few months and me seeing him cumulatively get well over — I think it was like three to four million views at that point that he'd already gotten, and I was like —
And that was the cool thing about YouTube, is not only can you watch their videos again and again and it's more engaging I think in sometimes written content, but you really connect with the person and you can see their cumulative numbers, which again, that doesn’t tell you how much they're getting per day or any of that stuff, although you can find out that information.
So I started creating the videos and lo and behold, I actually became really good friends and now he's a business partner on multiple ventures, Aaron is, but what I learned with YouTube is that I could actually take the same content I've been writing about for years, cover it in a different format, and actually get in front of a whole different audience and connect with them so much deeper than I ever could with an article. When you read an article, you rarely ever look at who wrote it and you even have less time to actually search and find out a picture of that person.
When you watch a video, you can't help but see the person almost — you're building a relationship with them. So now, it's kind of strange. I've been recognized in airports. I go places and people have this — you're almost this rock star to them, so you build a much deeper relationship and then companies see those cumulative numbers so they'll go on and they'll see, oh, you guys have over 30 millions views and half a million subscribers, and that's all built up over time.
[0:30:01]
To me, no one ever sees the fact that I've got over 120,000 people on my email list. Nobody sees that because they can't. That number isn't just publicly available on the website, but what they can see is those YouTube numbers and that gets them to start talking with me. So now, every single day, we have about three to four companies that reach out to us and want to work with us. So I'm in the very nice position of I turn down most deals and I cherry-pick the ones I want.
Bill: With that, we're going to go to our final break and we're going to come back with your commercial and one last question.
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Bill: Antonio, we've gone past the normal time here and we really appreciate what you've done for us, but there's so much to ask you. We'd like to give you a commercial and ask you how can a listener get a hold of you.
Antonio: Just Google search me, just Antonio Centeno, Real Men Real Style. You'll find my contact form. I was actually pretty proud. A guy named Cal Newport, he wrote a great book called Deep Work and he talked about my email contact form in his book. And so, I was like, wow! That’s pretty cool when you enjoy somebody's work and then lo and behold, they're actually reading your stuff. Go check it out.
Bill: Say that one more time, that link.
Antonio: No, there is no link. Just type in “Antonio Centeno”, “Real Men Real Style” or any of that and you'll find me.
Bill: It's Real Men Real Style, real easy.
Antonio: Yeah. We pop up all over. You can't not find this. If you're looking in men's style, we're there.
Bill: I love it. Do you want to give a commercial? Any commercial you want to give?
Antonio: No.
Bill: Just go to the site.
Antonio: Just go to the site.
Bill: So one last question. I wrote this down. Usually, I ask what do you want me to ask you, but I've got this question. How did you build your email list? What did you do? How did you start?
Antonio: I'm a big believer in pop-ups. So many people for some reason don’t like them. I think pop-ups are freaking awesome. Since we started putting up a light box pop-up, now we get about 300 emails a day because we use pop-ups and we use other things like that. Just to get started, AWeber is a great platform to start with. MailChimp is fine. After that, you want to maybe look at ConvertKit. It would be great to start with. Nathan Barry has done an amazing job with ConvertKit, but I use Infusionsoft now just because of the complexity of what I need my email to be able to do.
Bill: I have Infusionsoft also, but one thing I'd warn you, I should've stuck with AWeber a lot longer because I spent too much time learning Infusionsoft.
Antonio: I have a guy on my team who's — it's called “Confusionsoft” for a reason. If you're not making $10,000 a month with your email, I would not recommend going over to Infusionsoft.
Bill: I'm not quite high, but I'd also say budget about $5000 to $7000 to hire a third-party trainer that really knows what they're doing. That's one area that you need to help.
Antonio: Yeah. Kelsey Bratcher over at Hired Gun — just type them in — his guy won the Infusionsoft Marketer of the Year last year, Brian. He's a Canadian painter. That guy is just the best. He's one of my good friends. We talk all the time, and again, this is key. I was sitting at a lunch with him in ICON there in Arizona. I'm sitting across from this guy and I'm like, this guy's smart. I'll contact him. Within a year, one of his clients wins that ultimate Marketer of the Year. So I think that's the key, is identify smart people and get close to them. Surround yourself with smart people and you'll do fine.
Bill: Well, I want to thank you for coming on Timeliness. Again, Episode 39, go back and re-listen to that. The sound will probably be better in 39 than it is here because we're using the Blab platform, but we're committed to doing the best we can with Blab because of the easy use of it and it creates a wonderful YouTube clip automatically. Thank you, Antonio, and stay on for a couple of seconds, please.
Antonio: Yeah, not a problem. I see Mike's got a question for me.
[0:34:09] End of Audio
