255: The Voice of Your Dreams: Get Noticed, Serve Others, Overcome Setbacks, and Build Up Passive Income with Aaron Anastasi

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show Episode 255, the voice of your dreams, get noticed, serve others, overcome setbacks and build up passive income with Aaron Anastasi. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the show. Our guest today is Aaron Anastasi, and he's a SoCal native with a master's from Princeton, and Aaron founded the Superior Singing Method, which is an online singing program grossing seven figures annually. Aaron is also a prominent life coach, and he's the author of the voice of your dreams, which is an Amazon best seller. So Aaron, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Robert, happy to be here. I'm happy that you are here, and so we read a little bit about you. But can you but can you tell us, sort of in your own words, what makes you unique and special?

Aaron Anastasi 0:44 What makes me unique and special? That is a question. Well, let's see, I have a varied background. I do a lot of different things, so I have an online singing lesson program, so I've got that whole singing side of me, and I was a touring musician for a long time, and I, you know, did, did the Princeton and academic thing. Love doing that and but nowadays I actually, I don't do much with music, and I don't do much, I guess, with academia. But now I mostly spend my time acting and life coaching and working working on books. So it's kind of a, I guess, a varied background was what makes me unique, awesome,

Robert Plank 1:20 and all those, those professions that you describe, it sounds like they're all things where normally the people in them don't make a lot of money, right? Like the student side of thing, the musician side of thing, all that stuff. So, I mean, do you know, or is there a reason why you've somehow, like, you've been the person to make all this money in these areas where a lot of people are like those starving artists.

Aaron Anastasi 1:43 Well, for the let's just take the music one, for example, I something pretty radical happened for me. There was a switch that when I was pursuing music and I was touring and I was putting out records, and I was doing all the things that musicians do, and I was really enjoying all that. I had a level of success and that's where I could pay my bills, but I was kind of the starving artist. And then when I shifted to, you know, what I would actually I'd like to help other people reach their dreams, which is why I created the online singing lesson program. And when I shifted the focus from like a self aggrandizement thing to like a real concern and a joy in serving others and helping them reach their dreams, that's when I, you know, started making a lot of income, and then, in the same kind of way as a life coach, I make a really strong income as a life coach, helping people reach their dreams and kind of all different areas of their life. So when I went from it's all about me to it's all about serving others, there was a big shift in my life, in my focus, in my level of joy and certainly my level of income, awesome.

Robert Plank 2:42 I mean, good life advice in general, right? Like, instead of just focusing on on what you're all about, all about focus on helping others. And so, I mean, how did you, how did you get that sort of, that stuff, sort of ramped up so you you had a little bit of success, and you know, you're singing and making records, and you decided, Okay, I'm going to make a course teaching other people how to do it. So I mean, what was your thought process there? And, like, how did, how did, like, the early stages of that happen for you?

Aaron Anastasi 3:08 Well, it I was still a little bit in my own kind of selfish, uh, thing when I started it. So it was just like, Oh, I'd like to make some passive income, and I know how to sing, and I understand how to teach people how to sing, because I I wasn't a natural born singer. I had to, like, learn painstakingly through every step. So I knew every step really well. So I kind of knew what it would take to take somebody from like a terrible singer to be like, actually a professional singer. And so it was about, you know, make passive income so that I could continue to pursue music and all my other dreams and things I wanted to do. So that's kind of how it started. But as I began to get into it, this desire began to raise up inside of me to serve others. And the joy of once I started getting some feedback, literally from all over the world, people saying, hey, you've helped me reach my dreams, and this is working, and all that kind of stuff, I started experiencing a feeling I hadn't really experienced before. And it was like this joy of service, this joy of like, Oh, I'm actually making an impact in the world, and, like, leaving some type of legacy. So it wasn't altruistic for me to begin with. It was like, I stumbled onto it in my selfish way, and then realized I really liked it, and then started heading more full force in that direction. That's

Robert Plank 4:17 pretty awesome. Because, like, I mean, I think that the the way that that we would imagine things would happen is like, Oh yeah, one day I decide I'm gonna change my mindset. But it sounds like, for you, it like you said, like it came sort of as, like an accidental byproduct. You went out there and did some action and almost kind of realized, like, what excited you personally, or what motivated you, and that the serving of others helped, kind of overpowered everything else. And so, I mean, as you were, as you were making like that about those websites, or you're, you're working on that passive income, or making those first few sales. I mean, did you come up across any like, stumbling blocks, like, you know, like, for example, did you come across any like, technical challenges? Or were there a bunch of competitors in your space, and you realize, like, how am I going to compete? Or. Was there where there are not enough to model. I mean, what kind of things, what kind of roadblocks came up for you as you were sort of making this thing happen? Yeah,

Aaron Anastasi 5:08 so the technical stuff, like, literally, like hundreds, if not 1000s of technical things. So, like, so many setbacks, more than anybody would even ever care to listen to. But the other thing was, yeah, there were a lot of competitors out there and people that were crushing it too, so I didn't think I'd even come close to any of them, which we have now, which is, I'm really grateful for that. But one of the biggest setbacks we had was when I first developed it's called Superior Singing Method now, but when I first developed it, it was called the singing guide. And what created the singing guide took about two years, and had a couple of business partners with that. And when we launched it, it was like a complete failure, like a non star, like nobody ever bought one single thing of it. So that was a pretty major setback, which, you know, I was pretty disappointed and pretty heartbroken, actually, because I'd spent two years really working hard and creating it. So what I did, I kind of got to a moment of a crisis, moment of like, what am I going to do? Part of me was just like, well, you know, we had, we put in a valiant effort, so let's just it's not going to work. Obviously, we put all this time, it's not going to work and move on. But there was something inside of me that was like, I really think this could work. I think that if we just push a little harder, so we did. We pushed a little harder, right? I started, I studied more, we rebranded, refilmed, read everything for another year, not like, oh, and then we launched it two weeks later, no, another year of study and really deciding, what is it that we want to do, and what is our big why? Like, what? I realized that my big why was I want to help inspire people to do what inspires them so that they could reach their dreams. And that's kind of one of the things that really drove me through that. And when we launched again a year later, that's when it it blew up, and we had a bunch of other stumbling blocks after that, but that's when it blew up and we were able to quit our jobs and all that stuff,

Robert Plank 7:01 awesome. So have that big why, and so do you happen to know, like, in hindsight now, like, why the singing guy, the first attempt at it didn't sell? Or was it just a matter of it just wasn't quite tweaked for the launch or something?

Aaron Anastasi 7:16 Well, marketing was a big part of it, and quality, i The quality was just garbage. We realized that, I mean, it was just like, these really, like yellow looking videos shot like against like a white wall, that it was just like, we didn't put a lot of time and thought into the production. That was one thing. The other thing was, I think I was still in that period of, I just want to get something out so I could make some money. And when I think it was the between the singing guide and Superior Singing Method is when that shift began to take place. So when I filmed my other videos, they were really like with my my intention, my level of being was different. I when I was on the videos, I was looking at the camera and I was looking at my my avatar and telling my avatar, look, I really want you to learn this. I really want you to reach your dreams, and I'm going to give you everything I can give you to make that possible for you, so that I think that level of intention and way of being translated a lot more than the first one of like, I'm just trying to get this done,

Robert Plank 8:20 that makes a lot of sense. And so it sounds like we're sort of building on some, some really cool principles here that that you've used, like number one, like that, that joy of service, that even, even if we're not completely there yet, if we can sort of move ourselves in that direction, once we sort of take that action, get the feedback from that'll that'll sort of reveal itself more and more, and then have that big, why that big goal? And then be talking about one singular avatar, and this is, and this is cool so far, because these things are sort of interrelating, or, like, building on each other's. And so, you know, when you're when you were making the like, those products and those videos and things like that, like, how did you sort of balance out that, you know, like, on one hand, there's like, I'm helping people, but then it's, it sounds like it would be easy for like, the procrastination to creep in, or the perfectionism to creep in that like, Well, I really want to help people, and I really want to have good production values and things like that. But how do you keep that from sort of keeping you from finishing? If that makes sense,

Aaron Anastasi 9:15 it does my, my root, my, I was gonna say my roommates and I, because my business partner is my former roommate of like, 10 years ago, but my my business partner, and I and his brother, who was my other business partner, we were in, this is just a story that kind of illustrates how we kind of got past that. We were in LA. I live in LA now, but we were up here, and they were living in LA at the time, and we went to movie premiere. It was for a movie called skyline. It was, it was in like the mid 2000s or something, and it was a real the movie didn't do that well, it wasn't that great of a movie, but that's kind of not the point. They got the movie done in a year, and they got it done for a million dollars, but the CGI looked like a $200 million film. I mean, it was really, really, it looked amazing. And even though the story was just kind of whatever, and ended up making almost $100 million this huge profit. And so anyway, we were at the premiere, and the producers and directors that were talking about it, and one of the main directors, producers had said, when we were in the room, there were just in in his words, he said there were, instead of being 20 a holes in the room. There were just six of us a holes in the room. And so what we decided is we, if something came through and it wasn't perfect, it was just but it was good enough, we said. We said, that's fine. Just push it through. Push it through. Push it through. Because they they were more concerned about staying on budget and getting it done within a year, and that, for whatever reason, had a huge impact on us during that time. So as we were building the sites, we we coined the term skyline, because the film was called skyline, and we started using skyline as as, like a a verb, hey, let's just skyline. It, let's just Skyline it. Meaning, hey, we're not going to get obsessed and get bottlenecked here. It's good enough. Let's just move on. We can fix it later. We can get feedback later, all that stuff. Let's just keep moving. Let's get it done, because Done is better than perfect. So that was a big part of I think what helped us be successful is actually just getting this stuff done and not getting bogged down in the details and imperfection, which historically, I am very capable of doing, getting bogged down in perfection. Cool,

Robert Plank 11:15 and I heard a little bit, and it almost sounds like like you're maybe better now, about like the planning and having the deadlines and organizing the project than maybe you were in the past. Is that about accurate?

Aaron Anastasi 11:27 It is I learned, I learned a lot of that over the time, and I actually really enjoy that now. I enjoy deadlines and I enjoy a certain amount of structure, because for me, I could work really well within a structure and have a lot of freedom within that structure. Before I was like, Ah, screw structure. I'm an artist and I'm going to do what I want to do. But now I realize that I could be the most creative and be the most productive artist I can be, and businessman and coach and writer, whatever I can be within a certain form of structure, and staying within that and allowing myself to be creative there

Robert Plank 12:04 awesome. So, I mean, I think that that's a pretty good takeaway for just like anyone in any kind of business. And so I want to maybe switch gears a little bit, because you mentioned that you had what was, first the singing guide, and then you came out with the Superior Singing Method. And you kind of built some stuff since then, and you built up this YouTube channel. So can you kind of tell us, like, about your YouTube channels and how you've built them up so much?

Aaron Anastasi 12:27 Yeah, the so when the singing guide had, and most people probably not even heard of the singing guide, because, literally, we just nobody ever, ever found it. But when, when that tanked, and then we launched the pure singing method, Superior Singing Method, did really well, and we were doing a lot of search engine optimization and backlinks and all that, all that garbage, you know, like eight years ago or whatever, and and it was, it was working, you know, like I said, we're able to quit our jobs, and we're starting make good money, and we're excited. I was getting more and more emails from people all over the world. This is working. It's helping. My dreams, like, everything was good. And then in 2011 I don't know if you know about this, but Google released Panda, an algorithm that basically crushed all the SEO kind of search engine optimization stuff that we were doing. And so we went from like, making a really strong income to literally zero in in a moment. And so that that was another really big turning point for us that I was just like, All right, well, let's, let's go to YouTube and just see what we can do there. And so I filmed 21 videos, and again, just my very best content, like, literally all my very best content at the time. And I do with the same intention. I just want to help people learn to sing. Let's just see what happens. And so started the YouTube channel like that. And then within a couple of months, you know, the videos were getting hundreds of 1000s, and within a year or two, they were getting millions, and it blew up

Robert Plank 13:50 crazy and and so it was. So was that just a matter of just it grew organically, and just keep cranking out content, and keep cranking out content that solves all these little problems.

Aaron Anastasi 14:01 That's really all it was for us. It was, I mean, it was organic. We knew how to do, like, a little SEO around YouTube videos just to give them, like, a little bit of a boost. But they had to take off on their own, like people had to grab onto them and love the content in order for it to really skyrocket. Because not all of them did, but maybe, like, three quarters of them, or maybe half of them, at the time, did. And then the other one started, started catching on. So no super secrets, except really just down to that idea of, like, the the intention, the intention, the way of being, of just serving, like, Hey, I'm do give you everything you can, anything you need. And then people send comments, hey, what about this? What about that? And I do videos about that, it was just, it really just came down to service at the time. And as those started blowing up, we ended up, you know, the income we were making, and the impact, more importantly, that we're making was, you know, probably five times what it was even before,

Robert Plank 14:55 awesome. And so, just to make sure that everyone can follow along as we're talking. Talking about this, is there an easy way for someone to type in a web address in a browser and find one of those YouTube channels?

Aaron Anastasi 15:07 Yeah, yeah. My, my YouTube channels, if you just go to like, one is called superior singing, and the other is called How To sing.com, like, all, all like, spelled out. And I think it's like YouTube forward slash user, you know, superior singing, then the other one, how to sing.com or just on a search engine, you can find either one of those YouTube pages. And then, of course, the site itself is superior singing method.com

Robert Plank 15:31 Awesome. So how to sing.com type that out in in YouTube, and superior sing method.com and so, I mean, how do you like the the niche you're in. Like, this is, I mean, it seems like this sort of hobby niche. It seems like there's gonna be a lot of maybe passionate people, and maybe some buyers who, you know, don't have any money, and some buyers who are super enthusiastic. So, I mean, what are your thoughts on it? Like, what are your thoughts on number one, like, there might be a lot of, like, just really, like, control freak, maybe, like, some like, unteachable kind of people, but it seems like there's a lot of, like, really passionate people. So I mean, how do you like this kind of singing niche that you're in?

Aaron Anastasi 16:11 Well, we, we like it a lot, because we're all singers, and so we like that. What What was, what was challenging for us over time and continues to be challenging for us is, you know, I talk about the idea of an avatar. Our avatar is, it's so spread out that it's a little bit challenging to market correctly. And a lot of the users are, are really young users, you know, between 11 and 16. And then we've got like, you know, and then we got the college age crowd, and then we have, like, the second career people, so we had it spread out, but a lot of them are younger, and so they don't have credit cards and and there's, you know, they don't have a lot of access to to buy our products. So that was a challenge to figure out along the way. And then, to be perfectly honest, like, I still do that, I still maintain that site, but I literally probably spend an hour a week maintaining that site right now. Most of my time and focus is on acting, filmmaking, and right I'm working on my second book so that that's actually and then life coaching. Those are like, where my main focuses are. Now,

Robert Plank 17:14 okay, well, let's, let's sort of switch gears and talk about that. So you have the like, the information product business, and you have all these, these YouTube, you know, channels and videos and stuff like that and so. And it sounds sort of like, you know, as you, as you were sort of building up these skills, like you figured out, like, you know, how to how to make better videos and how to make better websites. And so are those kind of skills coming back into play, and are you able to, like, reuse those in the new projects you have going on.

Aaron Anastasi 17:44 Well, yes and no. So yes in that we've launched a bunch of other sites. So we've got superior songwriting methods, which is a songwriting thing, and then we've got another one called Play worship guitar, which is a guitar one. And we actually just launched one called Signing success is how to do sign language. We're about to do a big marketing thing for that. So all those skills helped us create a formula to launch all these other sites, but get, get a team surrounding us to where we don't have to spend a ton of time working on it and focusing on it, get a team kind of launching that for so it helped us with that, and then with the book. It it helped create a funnel and a system for me to offer my book. So we've created a big email list, and so we've created a site that funnels people to that to our site, and all of our singing people. So it allows, allows me to kind of spread out and get some more influence with the book and with the life coaching as well, but not so directly, like that formula of creating a how to, you know, system, fair

Robert Plank 18:44 enough. So, so yeah, like you said, yes and no. So, like, some skills, but not others. And so you mentioned the book and this funnel. So could you kind of tell us about what that book is and where you can find that, and what that's

Aaron Anastasi 18:56 all about? Yeah, it's called the voice of your dreams, and that subtitle is, turn up the volume of success and turn down the voices of limitation. And the idea is that we all have this voice of our dreams that calls to us, but it could be hard to hear and hard to follow when our voices of limitation are shouting so much louder. So it's a book about it's a lot of principles, principles of success that I learned along the way, and that a lot of my clients have learned a lot, lot of the ways. There's a lot of anecdotal type of stories about clients and their successes. Awesome.

Robert Plank 19:29 So to give us, like, a little bit of a taste, can you maybe like share or tease one of those principles with us? Sure,

Aaron Anastasi 19:35 yeah. In fact, I'll just tell you one of the stories my I have a one of my early clients was a was a film director, and he would mostly do commercial and music videos as a director, but he wanted to switch over into doing narrative. And he had written this short film, and he was about a 1414, page short film, and he wanted to raise $60,000 for it on. Know, which is a lot of money for just like a little short film, but he knew, knew what it would take to do it right. And so he was trying to raise this money. And when I, when I came in contact with him, he had just his crowdfunding campaign had failed. It had been two or three months, and all his dates were passed, and he'd basically given up on it. And so once we started coaching together, we realized that one of his, one of his limiting voices of what I call rackets, was this idea that I'm good at a lot of things, but I'm just not good at raising money. And so as we began to explore whether or not you know the truth of that, and what was even more true than that, he got he got inspired, and not only raised the 60,000 but raised $80,000 and then within a couple of, you know, not too long later, he won a country music award for for a music video he had done as well. So it kind of reawakened his sense of possibility, of of get of taking a look at his limiting voices and really seeing what's true and what's not true. Awesome.

Robert Plank 20:58 And so, I mean, what's what's really the the lesson in that is that the, like, the we have those voices, and we should sort of confront them and sort of, like, break them down. Or, I mean, what was the real secret there?

Aaron Anastasi 21:08 Yeah, that's a big part of it. So a lot of the, one of the major tenants of the work I do with my clients is helping them expose their limiting voices, helping them expose their rackets. Because we live in these stories, these stories that are not necessarily true about our own limitations and about the limitations in the world and what is is and isn't possible. And these stories create our reality. So we're all living in our separate reality of what we think is possible and what we think our limitations are. And so living inside these lies is is a way of keeping us, keeping us stuck, and keeping us living safe. And so what I do is begin to expose those lies I kind of, I have a way of like walking people through their rackets and walking them through kind of this interrogation process that begins to open up their mind and allow their mind to slowly let go of these stories and these beliefs and recreate other stories and beliefs that open up a greater reality and a greater sense of opportunity and a greater sense of possibility for them

Robert Plank 22:07 awesome. And so this whole idea of, you know, finding the racket and getting rid of it and that kind of stuff, that's just one of all the different chapters in this book, is that right? It

Aaron Anastasi 22:18 is. It's a two I think there are, like 27 chapters. One is called, What a racket, and that that outlines my exact process that I walk my my clients through and, and the reason I don't say it now because it would just take too long, but, but it's, it's, it's all right, there, awesome.

Robert Plank 22:33 And so this book sounds amazing. And where can people find that?

Aaron Anastasi 22:37 Oh, yeah, if you go to, I mean, it's on Amazon. If you go to the voice of your dreams.com it's called the voice of your dreams, or just search on Amazon. And actually, it just came out on Audible too. So if people like consuming their content that way, so it's on Audible, there's ebook, and it's also the physical book as well.

Robert Plank 22:54 Awesome. So the voice of your dreams.com, it's on Amazon, that's on Audible. And so, I mean, if people listen to our episode today, Aaron, and they say, Man, this Aaron guy, he's got it all figured out. He's, you know, had all these, all these ups and downs, and he's got this self help book in addition. I mean, we mentioned all these resources, like, if someone was just like, Okay, I hear this guy, I should go to a website right now. I mean, what's, what's the place people should go to right now, after they've listened to us talk today,

Aaron Anastasi 23:20 I would say any of my social media, I do a lot of free content all the time, on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, if you just go to at Aaron Anastasi, so I would say either one of those for like content I'm doing all the time, videos and graphics and all this kind of stuff. But also, if you go to the voice of your dreams.com I mean, you can get the book there. But there's also, like, a 10 or 12 minute video that kind of explains more stories, more kind of client anecdotal stories, and even opens up the book for you, like, literally shows you some of the pages of the book, and I walk them through that, if they're if they're like, that sounds like a cool book, but I'd like to hear more that would be a place to hear more awesome.

Robert Plank 23:55 So it sounds like people can get to any place they need to go, from the voice of your dreams.com. Watch those short videos. Get a peek at the book, or get the book itself. So the voice of your dreams.com. Everybody go there right now. So thanks so much, Aaron for stopping by the show and giving us this, this cool mixture of, you know, self help and life advice, plus some of your trials and tribulations from making a business and from getting the singing thing working. So lots of good material material today, and I really appreciate yourself and buy so thanks for doing that. Aaron, it's my pleasure. Robert, thank you. Check out the latest episodes of our podcast on the web at Robert plank.com and subscribe to us on iTunes at Robert plank.com/itunes you