Hey, entrepreneurs. It's your podcast, Mogo Field Better here. I am excited for this episode as as I know you are. Before we jump into this episode, I'm gonna ask you if you are also a podcaster and you're looking to grow your podcast or monetize your podcast, Make sure you stay till the end of the episode. I have a special deal for you or a special offer if you will. But ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, let's jump into the episode.

Welcome invest in yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. Join the podcast mogul Phil Better as he interviews successful entrepreneurs that make their living in the digital world. Now Let's join your host, Phil Better, and your special guest. Today, I'm a host of hosts.

Phil Better, and I am so excited to have a digital marketer with over 20 years of experience in the game focusing in on Google Ads. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Joe Belestrino to the show. Joe, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me, Phil. I appreciate it.

So I'm just gonna jump right into it, Joe. How did you get started in the world of entrepreneurship? Like, what started what lit your fire?

Well, you know, I always wanted to do something, and I never knew what it was. So I'm a old dude by my kids' standards. And so when I was growing up, the Internet was just Coming around. Right? So I'm Gen X. And, you know, when when the Internet came around, I would go to the local library because, You know, back then, most people couldn't afford a computer. And so I would go to a local library, and I would just mess around the Internet, Kinda find out what it's all about, what you can do on it. And, I came across this website called Homestead, and it would let you build websites. You can mess around.

And back then, it was kinda quirky. You have a little counter to gauge how many people came to your website, little GIFs that did thing. The websites really didn't do anything that I could design, but it kinda piqued my interest as to what I could possibly do. And then that's how I discovered multilevel marketing, and I tried to do some of that multi multilevel marketing. I printed out flyers and go hang them up on poles. I'm from New York, so that's what we did. Put cars, you know, flyers on cars and things like That but none of those things ever really stuck. And and I just I just kept trying.

I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to do something. And, at one point, I had downloaded a copy of Adobe Go Live and started messing around with, you know, how to design websites, And I taught myself how to kind of design what, you know, back then was considered a website, which wasn't great, But, everything was new. So Google was new. It was easier to rank. I was getting clients coming to me for web design, and they started asking me, You know, how did you rank for affordable web design? And, I really didn't know what that was. I I didn't It wasn't, a concept to me, and and that's when I started to discover what SEO was. And then that kind of Put me on the path of what I still do today, which is, you know, SEO and paid search, and and that kind of Pulled me off the path of web design and and focused more on online marketing.

So this transition from designing websites, which we were doing before to be handling the ad spend for businesses. Did you was that something you've were easily able to do? Like, it wasn't an a hard transition for you? Like, you were just like, oh, this is our the The the skills are similar?

No. None of this school not even close. And and and it was hard because back then, everything was new. So now you you have YouTube, and you have all these resources. Everybody's doing courses and all this stuff. Back then, you didn't have any of that. And so when it came to web design, one thing that I learned early on was It's great to have a website, but if the website if you can't market the website, and it's funny because it's still the same today. People will come to me and say, hey, Joe.