8 Years Marketing Advice in 11 Minutes

I’ve been running an online business since 2018, and over the years I’ve helped more than 50 brothers start their own journey toward earning a halal income online.

Since 2020, building an online business has also given me the freedom to make hijrah from the US to Egypt and live on my own terms.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of lessons about building an online business — many of them through experience, mistakes, failures, and figuring things out the hard way.

In this article, I want to share 11 of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from 8 years of running a marketing agency and building an online business.

These are principles that have shaped the way I approach business, money, failure, opportunity, and ultimately the relationship between taking action and putting your trust in Allah.

Here are the 11 lessons:

🎯 1. Your rizq is already written for you.

Whatever you're looking to achieve in life is already destined for you. Everything from who you will marry; where you will live; the life events that will happen in your life; to the exact dollar amount you will make.

• Many people mistake this for inaction.
• They say “If everything is already destined for me, what's the point of trying to change my circumstances?”
• This is a flawed way to think about it. Wishing for a better life and not doing anything to achieve it is wishful thinking not tawakul.
• The Prophet said, “tie your camel and then put your trust in Allah”.

📈 2. Do more than you think you need to do.

As humans we underestimate the amount of volume needed to reach a specific outcome. This applies to everything, whether it's:

• learning a new skill;
• clarity and communication you need to have with your team;
• the number of outreach you need to do to close your first client or scale to the next milestone.

Hormozi — volume negates luck — do something long enough to where you get “lucky.”

Whatever number you have in your head, you need to 10X it. That's what is required to reach the outcome you need.

🧠 3. You don't need to know everything to get started.

Having gotten on sales calls with hundreds, the number of people who think they need to know everything in order to start the business is too much to count.

You don't need to know everything to get started. You need to do your due diligence; do just enough and eventually get started.

• Many people spend too much time trying to figure things out, thinking they can't get started until things are perfect, but perfection never comes.
• It's through action that you understand certain things which allows you to make a pivot and gives you clarity.
• Action provides information and through that feedback you are able to iterate and adjust.
• Do your due diligence and get started — nothing matters till you get started.

🔄 4. You only give up if you fail.

If you are in the right vehicle and you're determined to succeed, success is inevitable and the only way to fail is if you give up.

• When we do something and don't achieve the outcome we are looking to get, we look at that as failing. But that's all part of the learning process.
• A simple mindset shift from “failing” to “this is a lesson I can learn from” is what separates winners from losers.
• You only truly lose if you quit, and as long as you continue to iterate and learn from setbacks, success is merely a matter of time.
• At the end of the day the person who succeeds is the person who is able to endure the timeframe from where they are to where they want to be.

💰 5. The opportunity you have dictates your financial situation.

I think if you focus on one thing for a long enough time you can succeed with it and make money, whether it's AI; dropshipping; affiliate marketing, etc. That said, there are opportunities worth pursuing over others.

• Right now AI is the best opportunity anyone can get into compared to starting a newspaper business.
• The idea here is to understand supply and demand and ultimately understand that making money comes down to helping people solve problems they have… problems they are willing to pay money for.

🤝 6. Become the customer you wish to have.

This advice is not only in business but also in your personal life. It's the same concept as treating people the way you want to be treated.

• In the context of business, when I was first getting started I was very nervous about hiring people to help me get to where I wanted to get.
• Whether it was a course; one on one consulting; or a product or service, I would approach the call with a lot of skepticism, oftentimes wasting people's time even though I knew I wasn't going to buy.
• But I expect others to buy my services, despite me being the exact opposite of what I wanted — I was being a difficult customer.
• Changing this allowed me to miraculously be able to close clients, perhaps because I approach the call with the confidence that I have invested in myself and got a good outcome, and if the person on the other end of the screen did the same with my services they would get the same outcome.

🏬️ 7. Show up everyday and put your trust in Allah.

In anything you do, the only thing you have control over is showing up and giving it your best.

• If you do that it gives you glad tidings and leaves the rest to Allah because you detach from the outcome considering you have given it your all.
• This is the Law of Detachment — a principle suggesting that to achieve your desires, you must relinquish your attachment to specific outcomes while maintaining the intention to achieve them. In Islam we call this tawakul.
• So show up; give it your 110% and leave the rest to Allah regardless of the outcome. 9/10 times with consistency you’ll reach the goal you have set.

👀 8. The ability to attract attention is the greatest asset you can master.

I posted my first YouTube video 9 years ago and one of the biggest regrets I have was not being consistent with sharing my entrepreneurship journey early on.

Let's talk about why creating content and sharing your journey and insights online is very powerful.

• Iman Ghadzi has built a multi-million dollar business simply by his ability to attract attention, and all this came from sharing his journey since the age of 15.
• Alex Hormozi was able to sell over $100M in books in 24 hours because of the years of consistently posting 100+ pieces of content a day.
• Having an audience will significantly increase your chances of succeeding in business, whether that's creating a group of people who will buy from you or being able to attract other like-minded people who can present you with other opportunities you otherwise wouldn't have.

👪 9. Don't worry about others' opinions.

The reason I wasn't consistent in sharing my journey online was because I was too discouraged and scared of others' judgment. Looking back at this now it's the biggest regret I have in my life and I wish I had someone let me know this back then.

Here's how I overcame this fear of judgment of others. I was discouraged because of 2 main things:

• How to overcome being a beginner — you don't need to share that you're an expert. Share your journey and be transparent. The wins, the losses, and everything in between.
• How to overcome people's perception of what they might say of you — understand that your thought of what some people might say of you online who you don't even know is stopping you from building a business that will provide you with the life you want; the life to take care of your family and loved ones.

The people who criticize you:

• Are beneath you and most likely make less money than you.
• They have insecurities about themselves.
• Will never do business with you — and that's a good thing.

Your selfishness of what people think of you is preventing you from giving your family the life they deserve of you as a man.

⭐ 10. Focus on providing exceptional service and money will follow.

When we get started we focus on the money and shortcut the fulfillment in which we deliver to our customers.

Our focus is money but we fail to realize that money comes from providing an exceptional product or service, and if we want to make more money then fundamentally the biggest lever we can pull to do that would be focusing on getting our customers the best results possible.

Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs both built the most successful companies in the world by being obsessed about the customers first and everything else second.

• In 2000 Steve Jobs said, “One of the design goals was that when you saw it, you wanted to lick it.”
• Jeff Bezos said, “If a product results in a loss, that's okay, as long as it meets customer needs.”

So if you want to make lots of money, the logical way is to focus on providing exceptional service and money will always follow, rather than the other way around.

🚀 11. Investing in yourself when getting started is the biggest force multiplier.

When you're getting started you're limited in your resources and you have everything going against you.

During that time your biggest asset is yourself, whether that's investing in courses or programs like our DFY and consulting program, like what we have.

• Once you scale you can invest in a bigger team; invest in the right assets or buy entire companies where you become just a gear in a bigger machine.
• But when getting started you are your biggest asset, so investing in yourself is the biggest force multiplier to get you where you want to be.