We’ve all heard the quote, If one person can do something, anyone can learn to do it.
It might be a helpful belief, but that doesn’t make it objectively true.
Especially when it comes to marketing.
I had a client ask me if she should focus on Instagram, because a friend of hers grew a following of 100k in just 6 months.
Of course it turns out their friend is a massive extrovert with a huge personality who loves social media.
Once we identified that, it became clear that my client didn’t have those attributes that contributed to that success.
What does this have to do with the 80/20 Principle?
Everything.
Do you know Perry Marshall? He’s the author of 80/20 Sales & Marketing, one of my favorite marketing books of all time.
He points out that the 80/20 principle isn’t just a handy rule of thumb for economics, or a way to use our time better.
The 80/20 principle is a universal law of cause and effect.
The vast majority of actions don’t produce much in the way of results. Some might even backfire.
A few actions get huge results.
And that makes people *really* uncomfortable.
The 80/20 principle messes with our perception of fairness at a very deep level.
There is nothing equitable or fair about the 80/20 principle.
It doesn’t care who you are, it doesn’t care how much effort you put in, it doesn’t care how much you want it.
Especially when it comes to marketing.
On my podcast Real Estate Uncensored, we’re coming up on 700 episodes and 2 million downloads.
Would we get that if we launched the same exact podcast today? Maybe, maybe not.
We got in and built an audience when the podcast space in real estate was still relatively uncrowded.
We also got a huge boost from YouTube that would be hard to reproduce in the same way today.
On the other hand, there are podcasters who’ve put out far less content on their podcast and have millions upon millions of downloads.
Is that fair? Maybe not, but that’s the 80/20 principle in action.
Their actions produced a completely different level of results.
In marketing and in life, there’s no guarantee that just because we put in the same level of effort as someone else, or model their success and do the same things they did, that we’ll achieve the same level of success.
The 80/20 principle tells us that out of 100 actions, maybe 20 will produce measurable results, and only 5 of those actions will produce huge results.
Over time, you’ll tend to see this in your content, where a few podcast episodes go gangbusters and get tons of downloads for unexplainable reasons.
You’ll notice this in your guest appearances on other podcasts.
One will just hit the right audience at the right time and you’ll get a ton of leads and sales.
Like one of our clients, who went on Pat Flynn’s podcast and Entrepreneurs on Fire in the same year. The Pat Flynn episode went gangbusters and ended up making her 6 figures in revenue. EoFire did absolutely nothing.
So when it comes to starting a marketing platform like a podcast, you need other metrics of success other than how many views and downloads you get.
And I’m preaching to the choir here, too. I deal with this just as much as anyone, even though I choose smaller target markets and don’t need millions of views.
To get to where you can leverage the 80/20 principle to get better results, you have to go through the period of throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall to see what sticks.
One of our clients, Lars Hedenborg, said something really fantastic when he first signed up.
He said, I’m committed to this and I don’t expect to get good at this for at least 100 episodes.
That’s a great way to look at it because it takes the pressure off and gets you into action.
But it also just acknowledges the reality of the 80/20 principle. We don’t know in advance which actions will produce huge results.
And until we know that, just keep throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.
Maybe in your podcast you’ll find that guest episodes do fantastically well.
Or that your audience loves your solo episodes and doesn’t care much for interviews.
Either way is OK, but the only way to find out is to give the audience options and see what they respond to.
It’s also better for your mental health not to compare yourself to other influencers in terms of views and downloads.
That doesn’t show an understanding of the 80/20 principle. Life isn’t fair, it isn’t equitable.
The 80/20 principle says that a few causes produce massive effects, and most causes produce little or even negative effects.
It’s why people struggle to apply it.
Yet the more we embrace the 80/20 principle, the more settled we can be during the first phases where we’re figuring out what works. And the more we can identify the few things that produce massive effects and then step on the gas pedal.
That’s how to leverage the 80/20 principle to get more out of life and business.
Start seeing it as a universal law of cause and effect.
It works everywhere, it is not fair, it is not equitable, and as a result, most people struggle to apply it.
Coming to terms with it and aligning with that universal law gives us a huge advantage in the business world.