TCC Podcast #344: Looking for Opportunities in Unexpected Places with Paulo Faustino

Paulo Faustino is our guest on the 344th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Paulo is a serial entrepreneur and digital marketing expert who shares his experience in building and scaling businesses even in the midst of chaos. From writing 550 articles for $100 to scaling a millionaire-dollar business, Paulo shares insights all business owners can glean. Tune into the episode to find out: How a gut feeling kept him on the path to entrepreneurship. How he scaled his business to a million dollars and why it took an extreme hit.  The pivot he made to save his business and grow his audience.  What is affiliate marketing and how can it benefit your business? How to navigate a financial loss and why fear cannot stop you from moving forward.  This reality of business can make or break you.  The 4 foundational pieces your business need to thrive. Why marketing and authority go hand in hand? When does the sale really start?  The effects of a world-class client experience.  Why it’s not your job to fix all your client’s problems (including money mindset). How to filter the types of clients you work with.  The simpler and faster way to save time and energy in your business.  The ins and outs of Paulo’s social media marketing strategy and how he grew his following and email list to hundreds of thousands.  How to bring aligned content to your audience.  Why you need to focus on value rather than design.  What Paulo would do differently if he could start over. Authority grows when you have these two things.  The current struggles of a high-earning entrepreneur.  Press play or check out the transcript below.  The people and stuff we mentioned on the  show: The Copywriter Think Tank Kira’s website Rob’s website Paulo's Instagram The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM AI for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  Building a business is hard. Sometimes things go really well. Clients are plentiful. The work is fun and rewarding, and the money comes in, and other times things don't go so well. Laws change or the algorithm changes or the economy changes and the client pipeline dries up. The work is hard and the money runs out. Our guest for today's episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Paulo Faustino, and he built a thriving affiliate business that collapsed in less than a month, thanks to a change in the laws. He had just enough money to last four months, which means that he had to completely rebuild his business in 120 days and in this interview, he tells us how he did it, and along the way, he shares a ton of great business advice for anyone who's trying to build their own business. Kira Hug:  But before we jump into this interview, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Think Tank, which is our mastermind for copywriters who want to figure out a new revenue stream for their business and launch something new that can transform their business in the year ahead. We have a retreat coming up actually in a couple weeks. In early June, we have our next retreat, and if you want to be a part of that mastermind retreat where we bring in top speakers where Rob and I teach and share. Well, Rob, what are you sharing? Rob Marsh:  I think we're going to talk about profits, profit margins, and how do you increase the money that's coming in, but we'll cover a lot of other stuff too. We have guests who are speaking about the client buying cycle and how to implement the things that were taught by Eugene Schwartz. We're pulling in guests to talk about all kinds of things like email and such. So, definitely worth tuning in and learning from all of these experts as well as the super smart people that are already in the think tank. Kira Hug:  Yes, so that is coming up in June and if you are listening to this, it is not too late to apply and possibly participate in that upcoming retreat if it's a good fit for you. So, you can learn more at copywriterthinktank.com. All right, let's kick off our episode with Paulo. Paulo Faustino:  So, I started in 2007 and I started building companies in 2005. I built my first company when I was 19 years old and it was a technology company. We sell computers and all overclocking stuff and water cooling stuff and I started there. I left the company in 2007 and I went home with some bills to pay, and the first thing I searched on Google was how to make money online and that was my start because no one was searching for digital marketing or all that stuff because no one speak spoke about that at the time. So, they were speaking about how to make money online. That was the thing and I started there and I found a lot of really interesting North American stuff from Jeremy Schumacher, from Darren Rose, from John Chow, and a lot of different entrepreneurs that were teaching at a time how to make money online. There was a lot of different strategies like affiliate marketing, like PPC, like a lot of other things, and Google Adsense, and I started going deep on affiliate marketing and that's my journey. My journey started as an affiliate market and I started in 2007. In the end of the year, I was building forums and blogs related to affiliate marketing on the sports betting industry, which was the industry I selected because I loved football and I love football, or soccer, like you guys. I love soccer, and I went there and I was creating contents every single day about football, football predictions, football analysis and a lot of stuff, and one day in 2007, I entered in one of the affiliate marketing companies I was registered on, and there was a 30 euro commission and that was my eureka moment, like God. God, this works. I just need to know how to do this every single day and that was my drive. So, it started there. In 2008, I created a blog called Get Rich, in Portuguese, "get rich," and I started documenting every single thing I was learning online, like SEO, like creating content, creating blogs, affiliate marketing strategies to make money online. Everything. I was documenting everything and on the first year, I posted 550 articles just on the first year and I won 100 bucks on the first year, which was incredible. 100 bucks. Rob Marsh:  Wait, did that feel like a win, $100 dollars with five? Or were you just like, "Wow, this is going slower than I thought"? Paulo Faustino:  Yeah, but I don't know why, but I was seeing these Americans making 100K with Google AdSense, making a lot of money on the affiliate marketing and I was... Man, just keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going and at the time, I had some part-times. I worked on a café. I worked in a hostel and I was doing some other stuff to bring some more money than 100 bucks, but I was completely focused on that because I don't know why and that's really strange. Every time I speak about my story is that I can't understand why, but I knew that I should keep going on that path. I don't know why and I keep posting article after article after article and in 2010, I did a rebranding on the blog and it went from Get Rich to Money School and in 2010, I was doing like 2K a month already, and we launched Afiliados Brasil, the Brazil affiliate events on that year, the first edition. So, I started there. In 2013, I already had my spouse with me. We met in 2009 and we started working together in 2010, 2011, 2012 and in 2013, we created our company, which is our digital marketing agency, but at the time, there wasn't any agency. It was just a company to invoice all the affiliate marketing stuff we were doing. So, from 2013 to 2016, we were full-time affiliate marketers. We didn't did anything else. In 2014, we were making a million a year with four people on the affiliate marketing, on sports betting. We were the second-biggest affiliate marketing player on the bating industry in Portugal and one of the top 10 in the world. So, we were doing really, really good, but in 2015, there was a regulation in Portugal. So, every sports betting brands closed the operation in Portugal and we went from like 100K a month to 5K. Kira Hug:  Oh, wow. Wow. Paulo Faustino:  That was the moment we decided to create the agency because we were working for several years, almost 10 years, and we had a lot of knowledge and we decided to starting to deliver services to other brands with that knowledge. If we know how to do this for us, we can help probably some brands and other companies to do the same. So, that was the moment we decided to launch the agency and that's it. We have a lot of other stuff because in 2016, we launched the agency. We created a physical event, a two-day event, related to digital marketing and entrepreneurship here, which is Think Conference, and in 2017, we started to do in-person training related to digital marketing and digital marketing, social media, and all that stuff and there was a boom. After 2017, 2018, we had a boom. For you to know, in 2018, when we did the last edition of Think Conference before the pandemic, because we did in 2016, 2018, and we were doing in 2020, but there was a pandemic. So, we stopped and we are relaunching this year, but in 2018 when we did the last edition of the conference, I had 5,000 followers on Instagram. So, from 2018 to 2023, I grow up from 5K on Instagram to almost 270K. So, our email list went from like 20K to 350K. So, there was a lot of things. I like to look back and look at this as the compounding effects because you are working, working, working, and in a moment, the growing is so fast because it's compounding. It's compounding. So, it was probably between 2018 that we went really fast, really, really fast, and on the pandemic,