Presentation notes coming soon. Leave a message in the live chat if you want to be notified.
Presentation Transcript
[00:00:00] Nabeel Azeez:
So today is going to be short. It's just a few tips, more and more of it's more of a, like a mindset training than it is like a messaging training, but the mindset is going to help your messaging.
Because if you've been following the past, if you watched the recordings for the past two times, The idea is if you want to build a personal brand, you have to show up, and express yourself, honestly.
And when you do, you're inevitably going to attract haters. Malcolm X said, “If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything.” So you want to take a stand, you want to have a point of view and you want to have a personality.
And when you have these things, naturally, there's going to be people that like you and people that don't like you. And this training is about how to think about the people that don't like you.
Because the number one reason why people don't post or are afraid to post or don't post or don't publish content that is edgy or interesting, or actually, is worth giving a shit about is that they're afraid of what people will think about them.
And that's a natural reaction based on our, like our tribalistic instinct of wanting to belong to the tribe and not, and to not anger the tribe, because back in the day, if you got kicked out of the tribe, you were basically dead. Like it was like open season on your ass.
But we're online and there's no even if you do get kicked out of the real tribe online, like who gives a shit, nobody's going to do anything to you. So that's the premise of today's presentation, which is called “F*ck ‘Em: 7 Mental Reframes For Handling Haters.”
All right. And I'm going to go through the seven, seven mental reframes, and then I'm going to go through like a practical example of how businesses and business owners can handle haters like live as it happens.
Okay. So the first mental reframe that you want to understand is that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. Love and hate, if you think about it, they're the same emotion and at least in terms of intensity. And the more you can get people to feel something the better it is for you and you don't care if it's love, or if it's hate.
Now you're not trying to make people hate you on purpose. But if the people you're making hate you are like the evil people, like the bad actors in your industry, and people who are terrible customers. And those kinds of people who you naturally don't want them around you and you don't want their attention, it's okay. But in fact, they're actually going to give you their attention, whether you like it or not. And that is actually a good thing for you. And I'll show you why in a second.
Following on from that point, that the opposite of love isn't hate, the opposite is indifference. Most people, the vast majority of people never do anything worth criticizing or hating on. The vast majority of people, they live quiet lives of desperation, and they will die without the world ever knowing they existed.
And that's not, I don't think that's how you want to be if you're an online business owner, entrepreneur, trying to make an impact in the world and help people and improve the lives of people.
So the third mental reframe is that for every vocal critic, you have 20 silent supporters. And the reason why is that when people support you, they tend to do it from afar. And I mean, people are busy right? They tend to go about their, they've got things going on they tend to go about their day. And they support you, and it could be that it does take a lot of energy to actually engage with somebody's content.
And if somebody is supporting you there isn't that much of a motivation for them to engage in your content. And in fact the way I got Mike as a client is by sending him a DM on his birthday and wishing him happy birthday. Come to find out he has been following my content for awhile. And he liked my style and the way I write, because it matches his own personality. And that's how we started talking about working together.
And he became a client of mine. He's my longest running client. We've been working together for over a year and a half now. But he never engaged with my content. Like he never, I never saw a comment or whatever. He was just following my content; we call them lurkers. So they don't actually engage. In fact, you'll find your best customers coming from people who never engage with your content.
On the opposite end, somebody who's a critic who doesn't like your work, you aroused enough emotion in him and motivated him or her enough to openly come out and say: this is bullshit, you're bullshit, you're a fake, you're a fraud, you're a phony, you're a scam, whatever. And they'll go out of their way.
Because another thing you find on the internet and just people in general, humans love to tell people that they're wrong and to correct people. That's why sometimes I actually leave typos in my copy on purpose, because I know that's going to get great engagement. Whether that's email replies saying, “Hey dude there's a typo here.” And I just reply back and “Hey man, thanks, man. I appreciate it.”
But really what I'm going for is like, he's replied to me and I replied back. Now I have an email response going back and forth. That improves my email engagement metrics, which makes my open rates go higher and my click through rates go higher.
And the same thing on social media, somebody comments on my post saying, yo, you got this fact wrong and you got this spelling wrong. Perfect. Comment, man. “Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for correcting me. I'll get that fixed right away.” And I don't even fix it because I want the other people to comment that it's still wrong and they might send you DMs. All that is good for engagement.
So mental reframe number four. And this goes back to the point I made about tribes. Online mobs, let's say you piss a lot of people off. And the tendency, when you piss people off is that they gang up and they form an online mob and you'll find, whenever you say something that pisses people off, you'll be in a fight or flight response for 24 to 48 hours while the thing is going on. Because the attention, the negative attention is so palpable and so real that it triggers that, that physiological response in you. But the online mobs aren't real and they cannot harm you.
Even in real life, there might be a few exceptions where people can, it can affect you and your business in real life. But for the most part people have a short memory. Social media is ephemeral. The maximum lifespan of a post or a controversy is 24 hours. If we're stretching it, 72 hours. It's like the news cycle. The best thing to do, like when you people piss you off, is actually change the subject and start talking about other things. Eventually they'll forget about you.
And this helps you deal with that physiological sensation that I talked about. Realize that this is virtual, it's pixels, it's ones and zeros on the internet, it's not real. There's no crowd outside your house with like pitchforks coming to burn you down or string you up and lynch you, right?
So online mobs are real and they can't harm you.
Related to the point about vocal critics and supporters. Haters are your unpaid marketing interns. Nobody will give you more eyeballs and impressions than a f***ing hater. Like they'll be shouting from the rooftops and, and passively getting you hundreds of more followers and, and impressions and conversions.
And then one of the strategies that we copywriters use, popularized by people like Ben Settle, is to take those haters and use them for content. And use the content like, “Hey, this guy said X about me.” Let's say he called me he called me s***head. And then I'll write an email, “He called me a shithead but I don't care because I'm going to make money off of this post. For the next 24 hours, here's a coupon code s***head for 20% off. So you can make a s***load of money off of haters by doing what you call, it's like a judo move or an aikido move. You're taking their energy and repurposing it for yourself.
Everything is content. Every, every interaction that you have in your real life and in the online world is content. And the more you get good at seeing and internalizing that and using that to your advantage, the more money you're going to make.
Six, if you try to serve everyone, you'll end up serving no one. And this is similar to the Malcolm X quote that I gave at the beginning. This is really the thing: if you try to please everyone you'll end up pleasing no one, and people will just not care about you. People will end up indifferent towards you. And that's the worst thing that you could be.
So pick the people that you want to serve. Understand why you want to serve them. And then f*** everyone else. Because really, it doesn't matter. The people that you're not trying to serve, they're not going to be your customers anyway. They're not going to pay your bills. It takes way more energy to convert somebody who's not in your audience than it is to just serve the people who actually like you and care about you and follow you and are actually buying your stuff and growing your business for you.
[00:08:40] Nav Pataria:
Nabeel can I, can I pop in a real quick question for you? So should someone like tip-toe the line between the good and the bad? I can't think of a better adjective in terms of the type of messaging and who you're trying to attract. Or maybe tip-toe a little bit more into the negative type of vibe. If that makes sense.
[00:09:02] Nabeel Azeez:
It depends on two things. The type of marketing you're using. If you're using attraction marketing, you'll focus more on the positive thing. If you use repulsion marketing, you're talking more about the negative and the people you don't want to serve.
If you're so-and-so and so-and-so, and and so-and-so, I don't want your business. Don't even charge your credit card. I'll refund you and block your credit card and block your IP. So you can never buy from me again. People like Ben Settle do this all the time.
And it's like, you know, if you've been on Tinder and you're swiping and you see these girls with this f***ing laundry list of things that they don't want. You better not be XYZ, ABC, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… it's 101 bullet points and they have nothing about what they do want in a man and they have nothing about what they actually bring to the table.
So it's that's the kind of repulsion marketing that they're doing. In the dating case it doesn't work so well because it just puts you off. Actually it might be the case that it works in dating because it's putting people off who aren't, the people who are into you. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of similarities between sales and marketing and seduction. You're trying to repel people who you don't want to be your customer, so what you do is you lean into the negative side and say, listen, these are the people I don't want to work with. Straight up.
And you can do that either by mentioning it explicitly. Or if the beliefs and the motivations and the ideas these people have, you can call out those ideas and beliefs and motivations to repel people naturally. So for example, if you're following me on Facebook, a couple of days ago I posted on Facebook, “Trump gave us peace in the Middle East, Biden is f***ing it all up again.” Now that's a very reductive f***ing statement which is really, which has no concept of f***ing nuance and global politics and that kind of, that kind of s***.
I'm not lying. I do actually believe this. So be honest, when you do this. But realize that you can say things in a certain way that repel people naturally without being explicit about it.
So my, who am I trying to repel in this post? It's not necessarily that I'm trying to repel people who are Biden supporters and attract people who are Trump supporters. I'm trying to repel people who take themselves too seriously. People who can't take a fucking joke. People who don't enjoy off-color commentary and political humor and things like that. Those are the people I'm trying to repel. They'll naturally be repelled by me.
But we do have an example from, that Mike told us about where a prospect was talking to Dan or Louis-Rae, I don't know who it was. And she said, you know I was thinking of buying, but I looked at Mike's social media and I don't think, I don't think he's for me. I don't think it's a good fit. Perfect example. Just by being honest and authentic, you're going to repel people. And just by being who you are, you're going to repel people and that's okay. The point is not to make repelling people, causing controversy, and pissing people off your MO.
Because when that happens it's like the Dark Side of the Force, right? It's very seductive. The reaction is so strong and the desire for engagement is so strong once you internalize that, that good engagement and bad engagement, are all just engagement. And they're great. And they're good for you. And they're all the same thing. You can start to crave that bad engagement more than the good engagement. And you will start to do and say things that paint you into a corner. And the only thing that you'll be talking about is negative stuff and repulsion marketing. And you don't want that to be you. You want to be a, you want to be a bit more multidimensional. Does that answer your question?
[00:12:20] Nav Pataria:
This is, and I'm not just saying this, this is better than a college course. Nah, facts. Thanks for stopping to elaborate, man. I really appreciate it.
[00:12:28] Nabeel Azeez:
And finally, there's always going to be haters. So the best response to haters is winning. The best revenge, my friend Mike Cernovich said this, it's so great. The best revenge is a life well lived. Right? And then in the context of business, the best response to haters is winning. Okay.
Now I'm not saying, I'm not going to say that you ignore haters. My personal, my personal preferred way of responding because I like taking, I'm a bit on the edgy side and I like taking risks. If you're a risk averse person, you might prefer to ignore haters. Totally okay. It's up to your personal preference and it's up to your personality. If it isn't your personality to go to war with haters online, don't do it. Because it's not authentic and it's not natural to you. You'll just find yourself, doing stuff that you don't like to do.
And finally, we're going to talk about three approaches to handling negative comments on your Facebook ads. So this is a, like a problem I've seen, I've seen people asking questions about this in masterminds.
Sam Ovens will be having like a mastermind, his Quantum Accelerator, and somebody who's there to ask million dollar questions, he asked like some stupid question about how do you deal with negative comments on Facebook ads? And Sam Ovens, his response is just to ignore them. Okay.
That's one of the solutions here, ignore them. All comments are engagement. All engagement is good. When you're spending a lot of money on ads, you're spending like $10,000 a day on Facebook ads, it's really a waste of your f***ing time to actually give a shit about comments. Good comments, bad comments, you know, they're all the same. And the bad comments, spur on engagement and they're all good for the algorithm anyway. And they are especially good for the algorithm because negative comments create engagement and conversation, and that leads to more comments, which is good for the algorithm, which gets your ads shown to more people. Okay.
The second way is to manually approve all comments by filtering prepositions. This is something I learned from Justin Brooke. And he says that they filter all prepositions. Of, an, ad, is, that, for, when, any preposition is filtered. So by necessity, every single comment gets filtered because of that, because you can't write a comment without a preposition. Okay. That's going to result in lower engagement on your ad, but you can only approve the positive comments. And positive comments have a halo effect because positive comments are positive vibes and positive social proof. So naturally it's like a halo effect and it's going to reflect better on your advertising. And it might be the case that if you're spending a lot of money every day, the positive comments, all you need. Anyway, there's enough comments that you can post to send the algorithm an engagement signal that people are commenting on your posts and they need to show it to more people.
And finally, this is my personal favorite. And this goes back to the idea about dealing with your haters directly. Reply to every single comment. Because if you think about it, critics, haters, they're all an opportunity for you to handle objections right there, in real life, without some contrived, pretense to do it. You're not like doing an objection-handling f***ing routine on a sales call. You're not doing an objection-handling section in a webinar or a presentation or a piece of content. This is real life, unscripted, real time, you need balls to do this, basically. So when you reply to all comments, you can, what? Display authority, you can show that you're the man. You can handle objections and you can troll haters.
There's a difference between haters and legitimate criticism. Legitimate criticism, you want to deal with in a positive way. But haters, the only valid response to haters is mockery. And you should troll the f*** out of them. This is really easy to do when you don't have many ads running or your ad spend is low. It might get more difficult when you have huge ad spend and you're dealing with thousands of comments a day.
And so what it's going to do when you start replying, you're adding more comments to the ad, which means more engagement, which means more reach and a better ad score or whatever. Right? And it's also more social proof and you get to look like a boss.
So what are we going to do now is I'm going to show you a perfect example of this, which I did for one of our clients, a former client actually, Dedicated Developers. I mentioned this to them, I was on a call with them one time and they said, y'know we're getting a lot of negative comments on the ad. What do you suggest? Or what's your advice on how to deal with it? Okay. Because there's a lot of like weird comments and things like that.
So what we did was I told them about this and I told them, just give me access to your business manager and I'll go in and reply to the comments. Okay. So all of these replies, you can see, are me.
So here's this guy who says science is sorcery and I just replied, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” which is Arthur C. Clarke.
So this guy is saying what's to stop them from, this is a common objection. You guys are going to steal my app idea and sell it to somebody else or build the app yourself. Okay. So what's to stop them from selling your app idea, blah, blah, blah. And then another guy replies, “I'm sure if you don't sign an agreement, they can use it and steal it like they stole Colonel Sanders chicken recipe from this African-American guy.”
So then I replied and said, “Drums of Heaven greater than KFC.” And if you're Indian, you guys are brown, so you know Drums of Heaven. Which is like a Chinese-Indian fusion dish, if you go to any Indian restaurant and you ask for Drums of Heaven they'll bring you this like next-level chicken wing, chicken drumstick dish. Okay.
[00:17:26] Nav Pataria:
Just so you know, you're living my best life doing this on a daily basis, just so you know. This is phenomenal.
[00:17:31] Nabeel Azeez:
And why this is actually on brand for Dedicated Developers, because Dedicated Developers are desis. If they were not, I would have replied something else. Okay. So this is the idea, you got to use your, like your noggin and have a little balls and have a little swagger and you can do this.
It's very easy. Really. The only problem is people are like, “Oh, what do people think?” ‘Cause motherf***ers are corporate. And that's like some f***ing conditioning that we need to beat out of us, one post at a time. Okay.
So this one says, “No to robots.” So I said, “You're part robot already. You can't live without a smartphone.” Because we're like cyborgs, basically. The smartphone is like an extension of our humanity. And then he argues back. So this is a conversation that happened. Look, from this one reply we got, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, we got 10 comments out of this one reply.
[00:18:12] Nav Pataria:
That's hilarious. So Nabeel, let me ask you about this, man. Like from the mindset, if I saw this ad, and I see all of this here, I would assume people would think they really stand by what they really mean in this ad and what they stand for. Willing to have this conversation with other people, like they really give a damn about their brand and authority. Or am I looking at that from a wrong context?
[00:18:33] Nabeel Azeez:
A hundred percent. You're absolutely right on the money with that. You're demonstrating authority and you know, most people, when people write a mean comment or send a really mean, nasty response to an email, they aren't actually thinking that somebody on the other side is going to read it and respond. Something's going on in their life that they have to get something off their chest or they need to vent or something. So when you actually read it and respond to them and respond to them thoughtfully, they're like completely taken off guard. And you can sometimes turn a hater into a fan in that sense.
So now this guy is talking about non-compete and non-disclosures. Objection handling. Okay? “We sign NDAs with clients who request it. However, in our experience,” and this is the authority building.
“However, in our experience–13 years, 300 plus clients, 80% repeat business–people who open with ‘will you sign a noncompete' are time-wasters who don't even have the funds to invest in building a quality app.” You can go that far if you have the balls. And you should have the balls if you actually, if you are legit and you are an expert and you do what you say you do and you have the case studies and experience to back it up.
And then this started a conversation. Because we took a stand that gives space for people to disagree with us and counter us. I could have kept this going, but these comments are a little bit more recent. I only did one round of replies.
[00:19:50] Nav Pataria:
What do you ask yourself, Nabeel? What questions do you ask yourself before you formulate an answer?
[00:19:54] Nabeel Azeez:
Me, I'm just going off the cuff. I'm just reading their comment, is this a legit criticism that I can respond to? Is this a hater? Is this like something that I should mock? So it's really just a matter of you just pick your spots. Do you want to respond with objection handling? Do you want to respond to build authority? This is an authority builder one.
[00:20:12] Nav Pataria:
This is sick, man. And then anybody else in this, they could read that and say, “Oh wow, 13 years, 300 plus clients,” right?
[00:20:18] Nabeel Azeez:
“We steal your idea and you get nothing for it. Great business model.” So then I respond to him, “Hey Mike, why do you think we steal people's ideas? We've been in business for 13 years and have 300 plus clients, 80% of whom are repeat clients in a business like this, reputation is everything.Ours is impeccable. We also sign NDAs with clients who request it.” Objection handled.
“I have an idea probably worth a lot. Can you really help?” And then this is one of those, like he's not a qualified person, so I just replied, “We're happy to hear about your idea if you click through and apply for a consultation.” So I'm making him take action.
And some of these like weird comments, I didn't just leave them alone. I still responded to them. “I'm an eye from down under and arise.” So I'm like, “Err… What?”
So here you go. This is a fun comment. “How about you f***tards get your ads and find another market to supply your bulls*** to. Read the updates, I just posted them today. adverting scammers,” spelling mistakes included, “don't get paid to play.”
I should have trolled this guy. But I didn't. I don't know why. Maybe I missed the comment.
Here's a good one. ” I'm the original one who came up with the app idea to take a picture of something, if you're unsure of what it is, or if you just wanted to take a picture of something and get back information on the picture you could, but my idea was stolen.
So this is like image search AI. She came up with the idea. So this is what I replied, “Jessica, this might be a hard pill to swallow, but it's the truth. How much is an idea worth that is not acted on? Zero. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is what matters. No one stole your idea. You just didn't act on it. That's on you.” So this is authority, demonstration, and it's objection handling as well because I'm trying to get them to act.
Here's another one about AI and robots. “Jesse it might paint you to know this, but you are already a cyborg, the smartphone that never leaves your side is a cybernetic extension of you.”
Here's this one guy calling a script kiddies, which is like a derogatory term for coders, basically, who copy and paste code from the internet to write programs. “Hey Jacob, not sure what you mean by that, but our clients hire us to solve problems. I.e. build and launch their apps.” So whether we use scripts or not, who gives a f***? If we solve your problem do you care, like if we launch your app on time and under budget, do you care? That's another way to demonstrate authority.
[00:22:31] Nav Pataria:
That's because then when people like your comments to the haters, like with the thumbs up and the… If you're a setter. What are your thoughts on this? That could be, somebody could hit that person up. Hey, I saw you like that common man. What stood out to you? What do you think of that, man? Is that a good strategy or?
[00:22:43] Nabeel Azeez:
Hundred percent man? A hundred percent. Now you might want to be careful of this. And this happens inside Facebook groups. When people try to do organic Facebook lead gen, right? Whoever likes, we immediately DM them with a pitch. There's a right way to do it and like a s***ty sleazy way to do it. So you gotta do it the smart way.
Here's a comment about the price of apps. So this guy comments, “they make it sound all appealing and then drop the bomb on you that it's going to cost you almost 20 grand.”
So what I wrote was, “Jason, most people have no clue how much time and resources go into building an app. The average app takes six to nine months and a team of several engineers to build. A junior developer salary in the USA is $53,000 per year. Your $20,000 figure won't even cover one developer's salary for six months. So what makes you think you can launch an app for that? People who want to spend 20k on an app end up off-shoring to the cheapest dev team they can find. And they usually end up with time and budget overruns. If they get a finished app [good luck with that,] it's half baked, looks like trash and is barely functioning. So let me correct your .Expectations. Expect to pay between $50,000 to $100,000 on the low end. Hope this helps. Wink.”
So this is a bunch of objection handling directly from the client. And I was glad this comic came up, so I could put this in here and then somebody else replied as well.
[00:23:56] Nav Pataria:
Dude. That's awesome. You just showed everybody, you guys, you do this, you guys know the game.
[00:24:01] Nabeel Azeez:
And this guy also replied he's another US-based developer. So here's more social proof. I'm also a US-based developer and a software agency and while I'm far cheaper than Dedicated Developers [I have a much smaller team and do a lot of development myself so there are less middlemen,] $20,000 with me will only get you a super basic app. Most of the MVPs I build for clients, which are minimally functional, cost $10-$15k.” So I can't pay for that kind of social proof.
So those are the examples of what you can do. If you have a little bit of balls, you don't need to have a lot of balls. You can have fun. Like, who the f*** says that being an online business owner and an entrepreneur has to be so f***ing serious all the time. Like people take themselves way too seriously. That's why they don't have brands. That's why they don't have brands because they're too afraid to like, just be a normal, f***ing human being and show up and just talk like a human being and interact with people like human beings.
So that's what you're dealing with at the end of the day. Whether you're B2B or B2C, whether you're a huge f***ing corporation, it's like people to people at the end of the day. And people are all the same. They just want to have a connection. They just want to laugh about s***, talk s*** to each other, fight about s***, buy stuff.
People want to feel like they're heard and they have a connection with somebody. That's all it is. And if you can give that to them, no more power to you.
[00:25:16] Alvin Rai:
The troll king. The troll king.
[00:25:19] Nav Pataria:
Dude, my confidence is on another level. I'll show you how much I'm about to rock these real quick. Okay. That was awesome man.