Ep 440: Be An Author Entrepreneur with Allison Trowbridge
AJV (00:03):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is AJ Vaden here, and I’m so excited to introduce everyone to a new friend of mine, Allison Trowbridge, who also goes by Allie. Ubut if you’re gonna look her up online, you’re probably gonna find her by Allison. Now, before I do a formal introduction of Allison, I wanna make sure you guys know who this episode is for and why you wanna stick around. First and foremost, if you have a dream, a passion, a goal, or you’re even on the road to being an author, this is an episode that is curated for that person who wants to write a book and get it out into the world. So that’s who this is for. It is for the established, the aspiring, or the one day, maybe that might be a thing I wanna do. This is who this is for
AJV (01:07):
You’re an author of any sort. This is an episode for you. Second, it’s for everyone who considers themselves an entrepreneur or a solopreneur, and they’re going, well, how does this personal brand thing and content and writing, like, how does this fit into my entrepreneurial journey? That is also something that we’re gonna talk about. And then third and definitely not last, we’re gonna talk about how authors are entrepreneurs. And I think that’s really important. Being an author is like starting a business, and so it needs to be treated like one. And we’re gonna talk about everything that it means to be an author and an entrepreneur in this world of marketing and personal branding. Now, let me introduce you to the one and the only Allison Trowbridge,
AT (01:59):
Aj, I’m so thrilled to be here with you. Oh my gosh. I just have to say, I have to say, AJ and Rory are officially hands down my new favorite people, favorite people in Nashville, probably favorite people in the world. I adore the two of you, and I’m obsessed with your content. I, I met AJ and Rory recently, and I started just going down the rabbit hole on everything you guys do online. And I have learned and gained so much from everything that you, you share so generously. So thank you for being you and everything you do for authors.
AJV (02:35):
You know what I love connections like this because Allie and I were connected by a mutual friend. And you know, it’s kind of one of those things too, when you get a random email, even though it’s from someone that
AT (03:02):
This one
AJV (03:02):
AT (03:32):
The biggest the biggest thing is I, I just learned before we started recording that their son, Liam actually asked after me at church on Sunday. And so that for me, I’m like, I’m in
AJV (03:45):
AT (04:52):
It was just Harry Potter mode,
AJV (04:55):
So there’s all these different things that really kind of led to like, why are you such a well positioned person to talk about this author entrepreneur concept? So let’s hear it from you. Like, tell us a little bit about your journey.
AT (05:10):
Oh my goodness. Well, aj I got started actually in the nonprofit world. So I spent my, I mean, I grew up with a deep love of books and I always had this dream of writing a book someday, but I got my start in my twenties working in nonprofits, working in anti-trafficking, anti-human trafficking. And when I was 22, I was graduating from college and I pulled in all-nighter with one of my best friends. And I said, there has never been a book, like there needs to be a book called 22 that speaks to all of these existential questions that we’re wrestling with right now. There needs to be, we need a mentor and it needs to exist, and I don’t see it anywhere. And so whatever I do career-wise, I’m going to write that book someday. And it was, gosh, it was seven or eight years later before I actually got a book deal on that idea, and it started to come to fruition.
AT (06:02):
But it’s so interesting because I’ve, I’ve heard you and Rory say a lot that you are, you are most equipped to serve the person that you once were. And so it was so interesting to be going through that season of life saying, I need guidance, I need direction. Someday I’m gonna come back and I’m gonna do that for someone else. So just one thing I wanna say. If you’re, whatever you’re in the midst of right now, maybe you’re like, I have no idea if I will ever write a book, but I’m like, I’m just in it and I’m wrestling with certain things right now. Pay attention to what that is. ’cause That may be directing you to where you’ll go back and help someone else someday. But that was really, that was really my origin story. So spent my twenties in human rights also as a partner in an impact investment fund.
AT (06:49):
So I was in the business world, and then I always knew in the back of my head that I was gonna write this book. It wasn’t a career move, it was just, it was almost a, a soul calling it that I felt like I had to, I had to follow through on this. And so went down the, the route of, I, I mean, first I built a, a really meaningful network of other authors and people doing similar things. And I just wanna call that out too because I think a, a lot of a lot of aspiring authors have the dream of publishing a book and they just get kind of stuck with it, and they kind of sit in a silo thinking about it. And I think becoming an author starts with becoming a good literary citizen and actually supporting other authors supporting the community of, of that was so strange.
AJV (08:36):
That was so weird. But I know the last thing you said was being a good author, so, okay, we’ll just pick up there. Okay. So it’s still recording. Okay, perfect.
AT (08:48):
Becoming an author really begins with becoming a good literary citizen. And so I, I really got my start in the book space by befriending and supporting other authors and championing them, making connections for them, supporting their book launches. And so I just wanted to call that out just to be thinking, if you have this dream of, of writing a book, how can you begin by supporting others who are further along in that dream knowing that someday down the road, that community will also rally around and support you. So fast forward am able to find an agent, put together a book proposal. I didn’t have any social platform. I wasn’t a well-known figure, but it was really based off of this, this concept that I knew there was a huge audience for and really identifying and communicating that effectively. Now, I made the ill advised ti life timing decision to publish that book while I was doing my MBA at the same time.
AT (09:58):
Which I, I would not advise. That was a very, very intense year of
AJV (10:39):
Well, I love, well, I love too that all of this is kind of organic and following your calling, and I love what you said that it’s like more than a career move, writing a book is a calling. Yes. And I often feel like being an entrepreneur, entrepreneur should be like that too.
AT (10:58):
A hundred percent. It’s not worth it otherwise. It’s too hard.
AJV (11:02):
It’s not. But often I think people use this as, Hey, I’m gonna do this thing so one day I can get this thing, which is freedom of time, freedom of money, it’s whatever. But then you realize, oh, snap. Like this is all consuming. And if there’s not like that deep calling, it’s when we feel burned out, exhausted, spent tired, whatever is the word you wanna use. But you know, those are, those are the same. Those are synonymous. It doesn’t matter. It’s like whatever you do in life, it should be a calling, not just a career move. So I love that you called that out.
AT (11:42):
Yeah. And something else that AJ did my wifi.
AJV (11:49):
Yeah, you’re breaking up. All right. You’re back.
AT (12:10):
I have, I have no idea what’s going on. I think I, I, it says I have full bars on my wifi and it’s Google fiber, so maybe I’ll switch to my iPhone wifi just to,
AJV (12:23):
I mean, we can, whatever you think. I mean, we can just keep rolling with it if it
AT (12:26):
Okay. I’m sorry about that. That’s okay.
AJV (12:30):
Okay.
AT (12:30):
It’s like a little trap door keeps dropping me out.
AJV (12:33):
AT (12:34):
Well, I heard the last thing you said. I, I can run with it.
AJV (12:37):
Okay.
AT (12:38):
You know, aj what that, what that makes me think of, I actually, so right now at Copper, and we’ll fast forward to this, but, but we’re hosting an accelerator for aspiring authors, and we had my friend Donald Miller on earlier this week talking about his writing practice and, and the process of writing. And he said something that, that really, that really kind of shook me, which was about, he, he carves out certain, a certain set of time every single day to focus on writing whatever book he’s writing. I was asking him how he produces so much, and he said, you know, he is like, you’ve gotta love the process. And it’s funny because if I were to tell you, if you were to ask what is 22, about 22, the book, my book about, I would say the, the moral of the story is that the journey is the destination.
AT (13:30):
It’s about learning how to lean into and love the journey of our lives instead of thinking we’re gonna arrive at some point. And I think that that is such an important piece of wisdom to apply to authors, also to apply to entrepreneurs. I think the, the big temptation is to think that we’re doing these things for some end result. I wanna be an entrepreneur because I want the big payout when I sell my company someday, or I wanna be an author because I want the credibility of hitting some bestseller list. And you are really going to, to hate the entire process if you don’t fall in love with the journey. Fall in love with the actual creation and the writing. Fall in love with learning how to reach your reader, your, your audience, and identifying what their pain points are if you’re an entrepreneur, learning how to enjoy the building. So it was something that was a, a really important callback for me this week of, of just this reminder to, to love the process of these things that we feel called to create.
AJV (14:34):
Yeah. You know, it’s so funny, as soon as you were talking, it made me think about this quote, how, and I think I saw it on Instagram, but you know, you look around at everything you have today and you realize that many times you have today what you once dreamed of and what you have today is what drives you nuts. And it’s kind of like, man, the thing that we wanna dream of is now the thing that is crazy. And it’s like so true. I think we all need to be taken back sometimes to falling in love with the process and not this desire for an end destination. Because if it’s all about that one day, you’re gonna look around and be like, wait, what was this all for again?
AT (15:14):
Totally. Totally.
AJV (15:15):
It’s Hannah Montana. It’s all about
AT (15:18):
Time. Totally.
AJV (15:18):
It’s all about time.
AT (15:20):
Yes. And, and the thing that’s that’s funny is that if you want to continue on that journey, you’re gonna begin again and go through the process all over again. I know authors who not only have hit the New York Times bestseller list, they’ve been selected by Oprah as part of her, the Oprah’s book club, and they still are like, it feels like the first time every time. And I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m still learning. And so I, I think it’s the falling in love with that process because those mountaintop experiences are gonna be short-lived, and few and far between. But if you love the journey of getting there, if you love the hiking up the mountain, then you’re gonna, you’re gonna really enjoy your life a lot more, I think. Oh
AJV (16:02):
Yeah. So tell us about ’cause I know we’ve had conversations about this, but I, what I love is your take on being an author is being an entrepreneur. Yes. Yes. And it needs to be treated like that. This is a business, it requires a business plan, it requires that, and most people who are writing books, unless you’re a full-time author, likely don’t know that going in
AT (16:26):
Yes. Well, I, I think a lot of the frustration around becoming an author starts starts with this point. So a lot of people will say to me, how do you write a book? How do you get published? Tell me how you get published. And they get frustrated because they think that there’s a silver bullet. Like, why isn’t everybody telling me how this actually works? And that’s like someone, an aspiring entrepreneur saying, how do you start a company? It’s, the answer is, there’s a lot to it. And it’s, it’s, you have to be able to give that full life commitment into the pro.
AJV (17:41):
Okay.
AT (17:42):
I’m, I’m gonna switch to my phone wifi. This is ridiculous. And I’m gonna call Google Fiber after this. I’m sorry. I dunno. Okay. It says it’s paired. Can you hear me Okay?
AJV (18:12):
Can. All right. So the last thing you said is it’s a commitment.
AT (18:18):
Let’s see. I, I think I’ll go back to the beginning of the author, entrepreneur thing. Okay. how did you tee up the question, the idea of just
AJV (18:29):
The fact that most people don’t know that being an author is like starting a business
AT (18:35):
AT (19:33):
The author really needs to be the entrepreneur. So if you think about the book writing as being the product development, after you develop the product, then you need all the other parts of the business. So you’re gonna need marketing, you’re gonna need sales, you’re gonna need partnerships, business development, operations, finance to make this all happen. And I also think about when it, when it comes to choosing your publishing path, should you self-publish? Should you go with a traditional publisher? Should you go the hybrid route? I really think about that just like taking an equity partner. So if you work with a traditional publisher for your book, that’s like being a startup that’s taking venture capital. It’s not for everyone. It’s for a small percentage. And that, that finance partner is gonna give you money upfront, which is fabulous, and they’re gonna take a lot of ownership, and they’re going to expect a huge result.
AT (20:30):
And they’re, they’re investing and making these risky betts hoping that one outta 10 books that they invest in are gonna pay for all of the ones that they lose money on. So it’s understanding those economics. And if a traditional publisher isn’t jumping at your book, it doesn’t mean it’s not a great book or a great idea, or that you’re an amazing author, just means they’re looking for that like venture return, then it means that they’re not seeing that based on the market, based on your reach. And that’s okay. So, so traditional publisher is like having a venture investor. Self-Publishing is like bootstrapping where you’re, you have a startup and you’re like, I am going to learn to do all of the pieces of the puzzle, and I’m gonna do it myself. I’m gonna own the whole thing myself. I’m gonna figure it out. Or I’m going to hire for the pieces where I don’t have natural strengths.
AT (21:20):
I’m gonna hire brand builders group to help me with the book launch part and to understand the, the branding and marketing piece. So I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get support in different areas. And then you have the, the hybrid publishing down the middle, which I kind of think of like having an equity partner. You get to own your intellectual property, you get a lot more control over the process. You still get the high-end professional results, but it’s a higher cost of capital. You’re putting more in on the front end. So I think shifting our thinking as, as authors and creatives realizing that if you just wanna write, there’s plenty of spaces to just write. There’s ck there’s, there’s blogging, there’s newsletters, there’s LinkedIn, there’s you can journal, there’s a lot of spaces to write, but if you wanna be an author and publish a book, you’re actually selling a product to a customer. And because you’re selling a product, the book, you’re gonna have to think about it in the same way that ACEO thinks around selling the product in a business.
AJV (22:31):
Oh my gosh. Every single person in the world needs to hear that
AT (23:12):
Yes. No, it is.
AJV (23:14):
You know, it’s like,
AT (23:16):
Yes. And, and I spent as much time, so I was able to get that traditional publisher, Harper Collins chose to work with me, but my book proposal took about as long as it took to actually write the book, which is crazy. But it’s because I had to show them that this is a worthy investment. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (24:03):
I mean, that’s so important for everyone who is listening to realize of as you’re, you know, thinking and dreaming of one day, you know, I’m, I have all these books in my office, but it’s like holding up this book, and it’s like, that’s a product.
AT (24:18):
Yes.
AJV (24:18):
And businesses produce products, and in order to make the product get into the hands of other human beings, there needs to be a sales pitch, a marketing plan, a distribution plan. And those things take human resource, human capital, capital and dollars. They take dollars. Yes. Yes. And it’s treating it like a business. So I would love to know from you, in this world today, as you think about this author, entrepreneur, what do you see? Because I think this is a great opportunity for you to also share like, what is Copper books and what does Copper Books do? Because you have so much access to authors aspiring and current, but what are they doing well, and what do you know they should be doing
AT (25:11):
Yes. Well, my, my heart in this journey has always been for the author. I, I believe for one, that a book can change your life. Like, quite literally, can, can change your life. It can change the world. I, and, and it sounds like a cliche, but I really mean it. I I mentioned earlier that I began my career in anti-trafficking and human rights, that entire social movement, the reason why you as a listener know about that issue right now is because of books. There were a series of books published in the early mid two thousands on, on this issue, and it laid the groundwork for an entire social movement. So I get so passionate about the way that, that a book can move the needle, but then even more so, I think there is no more transformative or meaningful process for a human than to write their story and to write a book.
AT (26:05):
So, wherever you are, however many people you think may wanna read your book, I could not encourage you more to do it, because going through the process, it will transform you. It will be a before and after. It’s a meaning making journey. So I, I love the transformative process. I also think that this should be the golden age of publishing. It used to be that that publishing was an industry of gatekeepers, because it takes time and energy to determine what content can potentially sell. It takes a lot of time to read a book, right? And so the industry has operated off of gatekeepers and a small group of people being able to publish their work that has gotten blown open, blown, wide open over the last decade. It has never been easier to self-publish a book. It has never been easier to reach readers yourself to build an audience yourself.
AT (27:04):
20 years ago that wasn’t possible. Authors weren’t able to build their own audience. And so a lot of people get frustrated by the fact that they need to build a relationship with their reader. I think it’s the most liberating thing possible. You need to be more intentional. You need to, to really strategize it, you need to develop your personal brand and think about how you’re gonna outsource that trust so that people are coming to you to solve these problems that they have. And there’s consistency in all of that. But I think it is the most exciting time. If you have a dream of writing a book, now is the time to do it. Okay. So fast forward to, to Copper. So we built actually a tech platform. So, so you’re in the, in the iOS store, you can download the Copper Books app. We, we made it a place where authors and readers can connect and build community around books in a way that was centered around the author.
AT (28:00):
So with, we always say the author is the star of the show. If you are a, an author with a book, however you published it, self-publish, hybrid, traditional, you get verified. We link your book. There’s a all of this book data on the back end of it. And then readers can connect directly with the author of the books that they’re reading. We have a live events feature. If you’re a reader and you just love books, it’s a really great place for recommendations. You can track what you’re reading, create bookshelves, all of these things. So that’s the, the platform we created. And I actually did that with venture capital backing, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life to, I think the number is about 2% of, of all venture funding goes to, to female founders. So, I mean, you wanna talk about a steep mountain to climb that was, was not the most enjoyable the entire way.
AT (28:50):
I’ve gotten a lot of rejections, pitching, pitching this company, but was, was able to build raise the capital, hire engineers, build the platform. Here’s what we learned, seeing all of our community and our users. I realized that the people who were leaning in the most, who needed the support, who needed, who needed the tools and the resources and education, was actually the aspiring author. And so I built this platform thinking it was a two-sided marketplace for authors and readers. What I discovered is that the aspiring author is the most underserved group. And so I say all that in that we have shifted the entire focus of the company into how do we serve the aspiring author? How do we serve the person who is getting woken up in the middle of the night because they have this dream, this calling in them, this idea that they wanna put on into the world and they don’t know where or how to begin with it.
AJV (29:53):
Mm. I love that. I love that you said that too. They get woken up in the night with this at least once a week. I will wake up around four or 5:00 AM like looking for Rory, looking for my husband on the other side of the bed, and he’s missing. And then I’ll usually like go back to sleep. ’cause I know where he is,
AT (30:40):
My gosh. Yes. Yes. I would say I, all of the best parts of, of my last book 22 were like one-liners that I voice noted into Evernote in the middle of the night. Like, so much of my writing process is sitting up in bed being like, oh my gosh, I have to get that down and, and I’ll, I’ll voice note it into voice to text. So then I get up in the morning and it’s half gibberish, but I’m like, that’s a really great idea. Buried in there. I gotta put that in the book.
AJV (31:10):
But a lot of that comes back to enjoying the process. Yes. The process. And it’s a calling. Yes. It’s not a career move. It’s a calling that needs to be one of your signature lines, ally. It’s a calling, not a career move. Oh,
AT (31:25):
That’s good, aj. That’s good.
AJV (31:28):
It’s gotta be one of your signature lines. But I think all of this is so important because for the author, right, it doesn’t matter if it’s your first book or your 10th book, the same business planning is required for every single book. So tell us about this new awesome course that you are launching the author entrepreneur.
AT (31:49):
Yes, thank you. Well, so one of the things that, that we’ve experimented with this, one of the things we experimented with this year was helping to solve this pain point for aspiring authors. And we launched an accelerator this fall for aspiring authors nonfiction specifically who are working on their book ideas. And AJ it was one of the best, most fun, most life-giving things I have ever done. Everyone who went through it said that it’s, I mean, it’s totally rocked their world. It’s been the fav their favorite thing in their life right now. It’s, it’s been an incredible, incredible ride. And that was kind of my test ground to see is this a real felt need and can we, can we solve it? Is this you know, are these the questions that aspiring authors are really asking? And so, coming off of the success of the Accelerator, we’re, we’re, we’re wrapping it this week.
AT (32:47):
We’re gonna transition that content into an evergreen course where someone can go through it on their own time. So, so the accelerator was a live accelerator twice a week, every week. It’s a, a much bigger commitment. And a lot of what I heard from these aspiring authors was, oh my gosh, I want to do this, but it’s, you know, I don’t have capacity right now, or I, I’m gonna focus on the book next year, or Is there any way, are you gonna do it again? And and so instead of trying to do the accelerator all over again, I, I said, well, what if I can make this easier for that aspiring author and cheaper, honestly, to do it on their own time? So that is this course that we’re launching, we’re announcing it and opening up registration on December 12th. And because we love Brand Builders Group, we wanna give a discount to anyone who comes through Brand Builders Group. So just use the code bb g Yeah. For $200 off the course. We would love, love to have you in it. Oh,
AJV (33:49):
That’s awesome. And if you guys are listening and you wanna check this out, you go to copper books.com/course. I’ll put that in the show notes, and then use BBG as a discount codes copper books.com/course. Use BBG for the discount code. Now, what I, I know we’re almost out of time, but what I wanna talk to you about is kind of what you just said. It’s like, are these the questions that these aspiring authors are really answering, and what are the answers they need to know? So if you were to highlight one or two things that an aspiring author needs to know, what would they be?
AT (34:27):
One of them would be get to know your reader, who identify who your reader is. So thinking about your audience is one of the most important parts. If you wanna write just for you, that is beautiful, and I could not encourage you to do it more, but if you want to sell a book and actually create meaningful transformation in the lives of the person who decides to read your book, then you need to, you need to write with them in mind. Mm-Hmm,
AT (35:23):
What are they struggling with? Because that is going to be the big umbrella idea that’s gonna be the consistent line through the book that you write. It’s gonna be the, the shareable the way that, that people talk about your book and share it with others is to, to solve that pain point. And then it’s gonna help you start to, to speak on that content and attract that kind of reader, that kind of audience now long before your offering something to sell to them. So, so that would be one. And the second, which is related to that is I would really get clear on what your big idea is. So if you could distill your book down to one sentence, I think that the books that go the farthest in the market are ones that can be easily distilled down to one big idea.
AT (36:16):
Because I know when I buy a book, I’m usually buying into the big idea that I know that the book stands for and saying, I want more of that. So I agree. Let me give an example. 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman. I’ve given that book to so many people, and it’s, it’s about how, it’s about the shortness of life, and yet how you can expand your days. I, I call it the anti anti productivity productive productivity book. And so it’s easy for me to share the concept of the book with other people and encourage them to buy it. And many times I’ll buy a book because I love the idea. Maybe I read part of it, but I’m buying into the concept. So I would encourage you to really get clear on who your reader is and start to build a relationship with them now and then. And then really, once you’ve identified their problem, identify the big idea of your book that’s gonna solve that problem for them. And that is gonna help you make decisions around the content that goes into your writing.
AJV (37:19):
Hmm. I love that. And I think I love that. It’s just clarity. All right. You gotta know what yes. What it is and who is for
AT (37:25):
Yes. And, and it’s an act of service. It’s an act of service.
AJV (37:30):
I love that. All right, one last question. Yes. what is your favorite book?
AT (37:36):
Oh my goodness. Oh, I have so many. I would say my favorite book is Vitor Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning. Okay.
AJV (37:45):
I’m
AT (37:45):
Obsessed. I’m obsessed with this. I with meaning, with meaning making. Mm-Hmm. And, and I think it is, is the most beautiful. I think it’s one of the greatest books of the 20th century and the most beautiful journey in how you create and build a meaningful life. And everything I do in my work is around trying to help people build meaningful lives, whether it’s through reading incredible books or creating them.
AJV (38:12):
Oh, I love that. Well, I always love a good book recommendation. Ooh, A man search for Meeting. I just wrote it down. Put it on the list.
AT (38:19):
Amazing. And 4,000 Weeks, too. You’ll love that one. All right.
AJV (38:23):
I’ll put that down too for you.
AT (38:24):
AJV (38:25):
AT (38:56):
Yeah. And
AJV (38:57):
Those are not exclusive. Those are, those are, you know, together. And we have to treat it that way. And that was such a good reminder to all of us. It’s one thing to write a book, it’s another thing for someone else to read it. And so thank you so much. Ally. If people wanna connect with you online, where should they go?
AT (39:16):
You can find me on Instagram at Allie Bridge also at Copper dot books, on Instagram and LinkedIn. All the places, all the normal places. Would love to chat with you all. Would love to hear what your book idea is. And lastly, I just wanna say, if, if that dream won’t let you alone, it’s, it’s there for a reason and follow it.
AJV (39:40):
Hmm. Love it. So good. Everyone please check out Allie go to copper books.com. Visit her online, chat with her on Instagram. Do whatever you gotta do. But get connected and stay connected. And also catch the recap episode, which will be coming up next. We’ll see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. See you later, y’all.
Ep 439: The Secrets of Building an Amazing Affiliate Lead Generation Machine | Matt McWilliams Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
One of the greatest secrets behind Brand Builders group’s success in the last few years has been affiliates. Um, we should hit eight figures this year. We’re right, we’re, we’re right on track to hit right around eight figures in our first and five years in businesses will be our fifth full year in business. And affiliates are a huge part of that. They represent over 60% of our revenue as a company comes from affiliates. It’s some, something around that number. And we simply would not, we would not exist at Brand Builders Group if it weren’t for all of our affiliates. And if you know much about the, the start of, of how our company started, we unexpected suddenly and unexpectedly exited and sold our last company and started Brand Builder’s Group. And we didn’t really have any plan whatsoever to do that. And yet we had a friend named Lewis who, uh, reached out to us, asked for some help, we started helping him.
RV (00:58):
And he was the one that said, this is what you were born to do. I’m gonna tell the whole world about you guys. And, uh, even though we had no audience and no platform, ’cause we had sold it, we, we previously had, but um, all of it was gone, uh, you know, very, very suddenly. And so we didn’t have that platform. And Lewis said, that’s all right. I have one and I’m gonna tell the world about you. And so right from the beginning, roots of our company, we, uh, you know, the, the arrangement was have us on your podcast and then we will pay you a referral fee for everyone that we meet from your show. And that is like the origin story of Brand Builders Group. And so affiliate marketing has been built into our DNA and we love it. We believe in it.
RV (01:47):
It is, I think, one of the most magical forces on the planet. It’s, it’s incredible. It is such a win-win. And if you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, just to catch you up, what the, what, what It’s referral marketing. It’s referral marketing. It’s basically to say, Hey, if you’re a client of ours, um, if you refer us to another client, we’ll pay you for that referral. And part of our philosophy and our strategy at Brand Builders Group is something that we say to turn your customer force into your sales force, turn your customer force into your sales force. I mean, think about that. How many salespeople do you have? If you’re a small business, you probably don’t have many, and there’s a good chance you are the leading salesperson if you’re the owner, the founder, the the entrepreneur, right? If you’re the CEO even. But how many customers do you have? You know, probably lots, maybe, yeah, dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands in some cases, tens of thousands. What if every single one of your customers was a salesperson? That is how you wanna do customer experience. That is how you want to create your product. That is how you want to, to create your offerings, is you want to do such a great job
RV (02:58):
And you wanna overdeliver for the people in front of you. And I think so much of the world is out there chasing thinking, oh, I need to have millions of new followers, and they’re trying to make mo money selling to strangers on the internet instead of the real secret of making money. The real secret of growing your revenue. And the real secret of building a business quickly is to serve the customers you have in front of your face in a better way, in a deeper way to overdeliver for the people who have already trusted you. And then if you do that, those people should want to and likely will tell their friends and family about you if you do an extraordinary job. And so, but, but, but too many small businesses are out there just chasing new customers all the time, that they’re overlooking the people right in front of them to go, how can I overdeliver for these people?
RV (03:48):
The way that we say it is, don’t forget, right? Don’t be so busy chasing the width of your reach that you forget about the depth of your impact and serving people in a deep way. Now, if you can pay your customers to do it, that becomes affiliate marketing, is to say, I’m gonna pay you for telling people you know about us, about our business. And we have built that into our business model. We have a very open 10%, uh, lifetime referral fee on all strategy services that are purchased from us that, uh, come from anyone that our clients ever refer us to. So many of our clients, this includes people like, you know, Lewis Howes and Ed, my lead, and, uh, people who have big platforms, they make more money from us than they pay to us. And that is just because they have very large platforms.
RV (04:45):
But even in our own community of, of like clients who are new, we actually call our affiliate program BBG for free, BBG for free. And the reason we call it BBG for free is we tell our clients, look, one of the fastest ways to make money from being associated with Brand Builders Group is just by referring friends and, and client, you know, friends and family and like other people who are mission-driven, messengers and aspiring speakers, authors, coaches, small business owners, professional service providers, you know, uh, direct salespeople. We, that’s a lot of our market, uh, or corporate executives who are wanting to like, rise in the ranks and build a personal brand. Well, since we pay a 10% lifetime referral fee on all of our strategy services that, uh, are purchased by anyone who our customers refer us to, that means if our customer, if our one customer refers us, 10 people who all bought at the same level that they bought, like at the same, you know, we have a couple different levels and tiers of our membership program and our, our various services.
RV (05:48):
But if you referred us 10 people who all signed up at the same level, you signed up then because you’d make 10% on each of those 10, that would add up to a hundred percent of what your service is, which means you would get your BBG for free. So we call that program BBG for free. And many of our clients get their BBG for free. They pay for their whole membership here, or they subsidize their own membership by the fact that, you know, they pay us whatever they’re paying us, but then we’re paying back to them on anyone they’ve referred us to. They can do that on day one before they have a website, before they have a book, before they have a funnel, before they have a sales team, before they’re doing live events, before they’re out there doing keynotes or have you even written a speech?
RV (06:29):
So our clients make money quickly. So this is, I think, the greatest secret that has been the secret to our success so quickly in growing our revenue. And it’s a win-win, right? Because if, if it starts with you though, it starts with you overdelivering for the clients that are in front of you, right? With us, it just so happened that Lewis Howes was our very first, you know, client or became our very first client, um, and it was going, how do we overdeliver for Lewis? How do we add so much value to him that he wants to tell us? And the idea is to overdeliver for the customers that are in front of you in such a big way that they want to tell you about their friends the same way they wanna tell their friends about a great movie they just saw, or a great restaurant they went to.
RV (07:20):
Even you wanna be so good, you wanna do such a good job that even if you didn’t pay them a referral fee, that they would refer you anyways, because that’s what friends do, right? Friends share good things with each other. If you see an amazing movie, you want to tell your friends about it. If you go to an amazing restaurant, you wanna tell your friends about it, partly because it makes you look cool because you found something really awesome. And you know that when they all love it, they’re gonna thank you. That’s how business should be done. Business should be done, especially small business. That’s how small business should be done. Small businesses can’t compete with the Fortune 1000 on advertising spend and employees and, you know, buying, you know, buying traffic and building these extravagant ad campaigns. But what we can compete on, and we can, we can win against the big companies, is by over-delivering through a customized experience for the people that we’re working with to where they become so, so, you know, uh, so loyal to us that they would refer people now when we pay them to do that, um, which is, you know, amazing.
RV (08:26):
Now in some industries, there’s actually, you can’t do it, right? Like I think in healthcare industry and then, you know, some financial, like financial services, there’s, there’s certain industries that there’s so much regulation because of what you’re selling. You, you can’t do it. But I mean, and, and most of the industries you can. And it’s, it’s amazing, right? Because it’s like everybody wins because you service your customer really well, which is where it starts. It doesn’t start by them giving you referrals. It starts by you over-delivering to the people who are right in front of you. That’s how the cycle starts. You overdeliver to them, then they refer a friend to go, I had such an amazing experience with Brand Builders Group, they blew my mind. They’re, they’re changing my life. They’re, they’re helping me make this dream come alive. And it’s, it’s fun and it’s exciting and it’s, it’s, you know, academic and it’s proven and it’s researched and the the people at the company are amazing and the people in the community are amazing and the people in the community are winning, right?
RV (09:21):
I mean, that’s, that’s one of the things that we’ve got going for us right now. Uh, last week we had our 24th client hit the Wall Street Journal, or USA today bestseller list, and we hit, hit the New York Times. We’ve had two of our clients hit the New York Times bestseller list this month. We’ve had eight clients hit the New York Times. In the last 12 months, we’ve had six clients have Ted Talks that have gone viral with over a million views. We have nine clients who’ve grown their annual revenue more than a million dollars a year. Now, are those results for everybody? No, they’re not. We have hundreds of clients, but it shows you the magnitude at which our clients are winning. And it’s because we’re not teaching gimmicks and tricks and hacks. We’re not cheating the system. We’re not trying to shortcut What we’re doing is we’re teaching people the proven methods of doing the hard work it takes to add value, to exceed expectations, to automate trust, because you’re over-delivering.
RV (10:16):
And that’s the secret. The secret is to do the work that other people aren’t willing to do, uh, to take the stairs. As I said so many years ago, in my first book, uh, that hit the New York Times, that broke through the, broke me through the wall, was this idea of do the things other people aren’t willing to do. So it starts with you making a commitment, making a resolution, making a decision, and taking an action to go, I’m gonna love on the people in front of me, and I’m gonna turn my customer force into my sales Salesforce. So that’s what it starts with, and that’s the psychology, uh, uh, of it. And then all you do is you put money behind it. And in our case, we do a simple 10% lifetime referral fee. And we’re transparent about it, we’re open about it, we tell people about it, right?
RV (11:00):
It’s disclosed in our website, like, this is how we do business. And so, um, when we recruit affiliates, part of what we’re doing, I think that’s working really well, which is what most people aren’t doing. When most people try to recruit affiliates, they try to recruit famous people, and they go out and they try to get like, you know, big celebrities with millions of followers. That’s not wrong to do, right? That’s not like bad. It’s just hard. It’s difficult, right? Like, how are you gonna get the rock to promote your stuff? I mean, like, what’s your strategy there? I mean, good, good luck, right? And you and everyone else, and you’re competing with companies who will literally pay the rock millions and millions of dollars to let you know his have his face associated. So you think he’s gonna post about your thing because you sent him a free sample.
RV (11:49):
Like, you know, it’s just, it’s just, it’s not impossible. It’s just not very possible. Um, so that’s what most people do when they’re chasing affiliates, is they’re chasing people with like large platforms. It’s the same idea that that small businesses are, are they’re chasing width. Everything they’re doing is, is reach. They’re trying to expand wide. That’s the whole mentality, right? Is I need more followers, more views, more impressions. Those things are not bad, but they’re not necessary to make more money. In fact, you can waste a lot of time chasing those things and overlooking the money that’s right in front of you, which is to go deeper with fewer people. Um, and so the way that we do that is even with affiliates, we’re not trying to find affiliates. We’re trying to find customers. And then once we find a customer, we’re trying to make a customer love us so much that the customer turns into an affiliate.
RV (12:43):
And who is more likely to refer us a celebrity that knows nothing about us or someone using our product, and which endorsement is truly more authentic and genuine. Someone who’s being paid to say something or someone who’s actually paying their own money, their hard earned blood, sweat and tears, cash to buy your product or service, and they’re spending money and they’re going, this is worth it. It’s worth more than what I’m paying. These people are amazing. They’re changing my life. And you go, that endorsement is, is worth more frankly. I mean, in, in some ways it’s worth more, it’s more authentic, it’s more legitimate, it’s more genuine for sure. And the thing you gotta realize is that most of us, most of you, you don’t need hundreds and thousands of new customers to have the greatest income year of your life. Most of us need a couple dozen customers, a couple dozen of our, our greatest customers.
RV (13:44):
Like our our best perfect customers would, would, you would have the year, the best year of your life income-wise. So you don’t need celebrities with millions of followers. You don’t need millions of followers to make millions of dollars. That’s the law of AJ Vaden. That’s what we, we call it the law of AJ Vaden, because she says that all the time. And AJ has now been the co-founder of six different multimillion dollar companies, two eight figure companies. She’s had four years where she’s personally produced over a million dollars in revenue and she’s never had more than 10,000 followers. How does she do that? How does she do it? Because her strategy is to land and expand. Her strategy is to go deep, not wide. Her strategy is to do relationships and reputation and knowing that reputation precedes revenue. And that if you overdeliver, then you will win.
RV (14:33):
Because most people don’t overdeliver. What most businesses do is the least amount of e effort to acquire a customer, and then they go looking for the next customer. That’s what they’re doing. They’re now, and, and if anything, where they spend most of their time is on marketing and sales. And once they land the customer, they forget about the customer and they just move on to try to find the next customer. That’s not the, that’s not the strategy. At least it’s not the strategy that works for us, right? I can’t say it’s, it’s not the right strategy, or it’s not the best strategy. But, but the secret to how we’ve grown these large businesses in just a few years with no venture. We’ve got no private equity. We’re not venture backed. We have no outside investors. We have no debt. We have no bank loans. How do we do that?
RV (15:16):
It’s by helping people
RV (16:09):
So first of all, make it easy for people to agree to be affiliates. So make it easy for them to say yes. How do you make it easy for someone to agree to be affiliate? First of all, over deliver for the thing they’re paying you for. Second of all, over deliver for things they’re not paying you for. Ask yourself, how can I, what other ways can I add value to this person’s life? What other way can I help them? Right? What people can I introduce them to? Do they need vendors? Do they need employees? Do they need team members? Do they need speaking opportunities? Do they need podcast opportunities? Like, uh, who, who are they looking for? How can I introduce them to people? How can I, how can I give them advice, encouragement, uh, how can I cheer them on and, and give them, like, you know, celebrate them.
RV (16:55):
Those are things you can do that cost nothing. And then, and then also it’s like, what, what services can I add to people’s lives that maybe are just things that you don’t even offer for sale, but you do it for people to help them? Like, so one of our brand builders group mantras. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. So find those people and over deliver. The other part is serve people who have the same audience as you, but who have a different offering than you, right? This is part of making it easy for them to say yes, serve audiences who have the same, or, or, you know, try to, try to pick, when you looking at affiliates, look for people who have the same audience as you, but a different offering from you, right?
RV (17:42):
Amy Porterfield is a great example of that, right? So she’s a client of ours who became a client first, then became an affiliate kind of at the same time. But, but really she was a client first. We were, we were, we were serving her first. We were adding value, um, first as friends, then officially informally as a client. Well, Amy has our audience, but Amy doesn’t sell one-on-one coaching Amy teaches, she, she, she has course, right? She has courses, but her flagship course is a course on helping people create courses, right? So her primary business model is teaching. Uh, so selling courses, you know, digital Course Academy is her primary thing, right? And she does that. She’s had thousands, tens of thousands of students go through this program, right? So she has a great course on helping people, uh, teach them how to launch courses.
RV (18:27):
So her business model is different from ours. Our business model is not courses. Our business model is membership one-on-one coaching. We’re nurturing our community all the time. We have live events, right? We have pay for hotels and people fly in and like, we pay for food and catering and coffee. Like we have a, we have a, a human like interactive in-person experience. And then we do one-on-one coaching over Zoom. That’s what our strategists do. And then we have a training, we have live trainings constantly. We have 10 live trainings a month that are virtual, um, that, you know, I lead two of them for our community. So it’s a very heavy, you know, human experience. And it’s not as, it’s not as much digital or, or automated. So it’s not that one is better than the other, not they’re, they’re both good, but they’re different, right?
RV (19:13):
So our people can benefit from her stuff, her people can benefit from our stuff, and we’re not, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re both trying to serve the same audience, but we offer different things. So that’s a part of what you wanna think of. It makes it easy for people to say yes, you know? So you wanna find who has your audience, who has the same, who’s going after the same people as you, but they do something different, right? Like if I’m ACPA, right? And I’m doing, I, uh, let’s say I’m looking for small business owners. I wanna maybe form alliances with insurance agents who sell, like employee benefits and stuff, because we’re going after the same person, but we serve different, we, we, we have different offerings. We serve the same audience with different offerings. That’s part of how you make it easy for people to say yes.
RV (19:58):
The second key to to having affiliate program work is make it easy for them to market You. Make it easy for them to market you, right? Part of the reason why we do so well is we don’t ask our affiliates to do 50 email blasts and do these open cart, close cart launches, like the all between specific dates. That’s not bad to do. That’s not wrong to do. A lot of affiliates do that. That’s great if you can do that and you can get people to do it for us. All I have to be is a podcast guest, like any other podcast guest. And I just, I just, you know, and, and their, their mind is blown when they go, how does this work? And I say, just invite me on your podcast like any other guest. And they go, and that’s it. I said, that’s it.
RV (20:36):
And then we will build you a custom link. We build a custom landing page for each podcast we’re on, and we say, the only URL we’re gonna give it on your show is that link. And when we do that, everyone who comes through that page, we pay you a 10% lifetime referral fee on all strategy services that we sell to those people. Boom, there it is. And they go, you’re kidding. It’s that easy. It’s like, it’s that easy, right? Make it easy to say yes, then make it easy for them to market. And then if they say, well, are there emails I can send out? Sure can. I’ll write the emails for you. Here you go. You wanna post on social? I’ll give you assets. Here you go. You wanna know what ad you wanna read an ad for us on your own podcast and get affiliate fees?
RV (21:17):
Here’s a script for it. You don’t have to use it, but it makes it easy. Like you create all the assets, you create all the materials, you do all the work to make it easy for them to say yes, and then make it easy for them to market. And then the third thing is, make it easy for them to make money. Make it easy for them to make money. Make it easy for them to get paid. And you do that by having a great product, by having proven funnels, by having digital, you know, dashboards and metrics that you can tell them, you can estimate for them on the front end. Hey, if, if you send an email to this many people, this many people open it, this many people come to our free training, this many people watch this, many people buy, and this is how much money you’ll make.
RV (21:52):
Like if you don’t have those metrics dialed in, you’re not ready for an affiliate program yet. I don’t think like, I mean, you could do it more casually, but like not a large scale one. And we go, why do people refer us? Hopefully, because first of all, we’re awesome at doing what we say we’re gonna do. We’re over-delivering for them as clients. But second, we make it easy for them to say yes. We don’t compete with what they do. We do all the work of creating the assets for them. And then we send a massive passive mailbox money. We just go here, click this link, set up your bank account and we’ll wire you money every month. And boom, it’s on autopilot. And we’re sending out massive passive mailbox money to our affiliates. And that is my goal. My goal is not to go, how can I get something from them?
RV (22:32):
It’s not so much what can I, you know, what’s the least amount I can do to get them to refer me? I’m going, how can I constantly overdeliver for them in a way that they wanna say nice things about us, they wanna help us, and I’ll pay ’em on top of it. Massive passive mailbox money. So guess what happens? People are flooding to invite me on their podcast, right? They’re flooding us to invite ag on their podcast. They’re, they’re talking about us without us even being there and using their own affiliate link, because that’s how this works, right? And so start with your customers over deliver, build relationships before you need them. And that is how you build an incredible, amazing life-changing referral fee affiliate program. One of the most powerful dynamics in all of small business. Make it happen.
Ep 438: How to Get Affiliates to Promote Your Product with Matt McWilliams
RV (00:02):
Hey, at Brand Builders Group, you know that we say the more specific, the more terrific. And you hear people say The riches are in the niches. We say you’re most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. And one of the things that I love about Matt is I have now known Matt, I don’t know, probably for 10, maybe 15 years, but Matt McWilliams is, if you ask me, who’s the expert on affiliate marketing, he’s the name that I think of. He owns that space. He has worked with several of my friends as their affiliate launch manager. Some of our clients, you know, this is people like Tony and Dean Tony Bins and Dean Graziosi, shark Tanks, Kevin Harrington, who’s a client of ours, Ryan Leveque Lewis Howes, obviously Brian Tracy Michael Hyatt’s a close friend, Jeff Walker’s a friend. And Matt has r has run launches for all of those folks.
RV (00:55):
Stu McLaren, on and on and on. And so a lot of the people I know and respect, they have hired Matt to help him run affiliate launches. And we’ve never done an affiliate launch per se at B B G, but our whole business model is more of an evergreen affiliate model where we pay people a lifetime referral fee when they refer people to us. But we’ve never done an affiliate launch where we have lots of affiliates all at once. But I know the power of it, and I just don’t know that much about how to do it. So I thought, let’s get our friend Matt in here to like drop some value bombs and teach us the affiliate game. So brother, welcome to the podcast. All
MM (01:33):
Right. Thanks for having me, Rory. And I, I love that. What was it you said that the, that your biggest something is in the, your previous pain point. I can’t, how did you word that?
RV (01:40):
Yeah, that’s one of our, that’s like our flagship thing, is that you’re most powerfully positioned Yeah. To serve the person you once were. Mm-Hmm.
MM (01:47):
RV (02:19):
Yeah. Did you
MM (02:19):
Trademark it yet?
RV (02:20):
MM (02:23):
The, alright. Trademark Roy Vaden. How about that? There
RV (02:25):
You go.
MM (02:26):
Yeah.
RV (02:26):
So the people you work with are obviously well known, right? And when you hear that, you go, well, yeah, of course everyone’s gonna promote for Tony Robbins and Dean Azizi, but like, talk to us about why do you need affiliates like e even if you’re small, even if you’re new, and can you really get them? And, and, you know, I wanna kind of hear a little bit about the why and the when. Like
MM (02:51):
Yeah.
RV (02:51):
Why do you need them and then when is the right time to go get ’em?
MM (02:55):
Well, I mean, first of all that yeah, people do promote for Tony and, and we, you know, promote for Jeff and promote for Stu and, and we help them, you know, two x their, their affiliate program and you know, Michael Hyatt, we helped him almost four x year over year when we took over. And, and while those are certainly easier, I mean, 90% of our clients nobody’s ever heard of, you know, because they’re in the parenting niche. And there, you know, it’s funny, when we’re in like a certain niche, I I always tell people this, when you’re in like a certain niche and you have that celebrity in your niche, so like Jeff Walker in internet marketing product launches, Stu McLaren in Membership world. I say go to Target. I call this the target test. You wanna know how non-famous Stu McLaren is outside of his little niche, go to Target, ask a hundred people. If they’ve ever heard of Stu McLaren, you’ll be lucky if one of them ever has.
RV (03:44):
Hmm.
MM (03:45):
You know, I mean, in in your niche, you know, you are famous in building brands and you’re famous in, you know, productivity kind of in your past life, right? And you’re famous as a speaker, but again, you’d be the first human may go to Target and ask a hundred people out, you know, go to a target in, you know, Columbus, Ohio, and you’d be lucky if one person’s ever heard of Rory Vaden.
RV (04:03):
Well, even Tony Robbins, like at Target. Yeah.
MM (04:05):
You know,
RV (04:05):
Might
MM (04:06):
Be five. Might be
RV (04:06):
Five. Yeah. Maybe five or 10.
MM (04:08):
Yeah. And, and, and he’s, you know, this larger than life person or Dean Grazi who’s sort of, and so yeah, most of the people outside of their little niche in the world, and even sometimes in their little niche, you know, we’re working with the, you know, people that are, you know, they’re not a lot of times seven and eight figure businesses. They’re people you never heard of. And this is working for them. And in fact, it’s one of the best ways to get known because the reality is you know, I I I say this a lot of times, like it’s never been harder to get noticed and therefore it’s never been harder to stand out. You know, there’s a, a, a correlation between the two. If you go back a hundred years ago, you know, no, most people outside of presidents and, you know, like a few politicians weren’t known out of their, before the advent of radio weren’t known out of, outside of a 10, 15 mile radius.
MM (04:55):
You know, it was almost impossible. The the problem with that is because now it’s easy for everybody to get their 15 minutes. It’s easy for everybody to go viral. It’s easy for everybody to get 10 million views or even, you know, a hundred thousand views that it becomes almost impossible to stand out. You know, there’s more content uploaded since you and I have been talking on YouTube than either one of us can consume in our lifetimes. So think about that, how hard it is to stand out. And so affiliates are one of those ways when you’re breaking into a niche, this is how I did, I mentioned back in 2005, we tried everything else. Now, this is before the advent of social media and, you know, targeting and all those things. But we tried all the stuff you do back in 2005 to break into our niche, which, which was the insurance world.
MM (05:37):
And it wasn’t until we started an affiliate program that we began to get some traction because, you know, couple things. Number one, you pay after the sale is made. So you, you pay only per for performance. You know, you pay later
MM (06:28):
And we’re still trying to figure things out. We don’t have to worry about targeting, which can take months or even years to figure out your affiliates do it for you. And what happens with affiliates is sometimes they will market to their list and you will discover niches or pockets of niches that you wouldn’t have thought you could profitably target. But you realize, oh my gosh, we had 12 people buy this week that are moms of, you know, such and such, right? We moms of special needs children. We never thought our course would be good for moms of special needs children, but you know what, maybe we could target them. And so you start to learn things. Obviously, you know, one of the biggest benefits is just the fact that the, the leads are warm. You know, the prospects are warm. The reality is, very few people woke up today thinking, you know what I need to do?
MM (07:17):
I need to buy so-and-so’s product. Or they’re scrolling through Facebook because they wanna see their niece’s new. I wanna see my new, you know, baby I didn’t think nephew. Now why? I had to think of, was it a nephew or niece
RV (08:16):
Wanna, so just some of the reasons why it’s great. I talk about, I wanna talk about that part right there about landing on the page. So, so, you know, let’s assume that you get affiliates is most of what’s happening in the affiliate world, like your world is, is that still today, like you’re recruiting people to basically promote some type of free training, either a free lead magnet or a free webinar, or a free, you know, like if it’s a Jeff Walker, it’s like a free video, like a little video, mini video course. Is that pretty much what’s happening is you’re still just promoting, everyone’s promoting to something for free, someone’s adding value, and then they’re selling something at the end,
MM (08:55):
Not necessarily in your world, you know, kind of in the, you know, if I think of your clients, yes, that’s the norm. Probably 97% of the time. It’s going to be a free report, a free webinar, a free, you know, launch sequence type thing. You know, like you said, the three video series, something like that. Other options, you know, if it’s a software could be a free trial, you know, that’s obviously a good entry point. One of the things we’re seeing that’s working really well with some of our clients is a free training, you know, free webinar with a backend. Make sure you claim this free trial of this software. ’cause We’re gonna show you how to use it on the webinar. You know, and that works really well because it, you know, now gets them into like using the software and if we can get ’em to use the software they’re gonna stick around, you know, seven times outta 10. And so there’s all types of things there. But yeah, I mean, there’s direct to sale, there’s direct to call, there’s all types of things. But yeah, in brand building world, typically it’s gonna be to a, some sort of a free resource or Okay. Video series or webinar.
RV (09:58):
And then is most of what you’re doing, like, you know, like when I think of affiliates, I tend to think of more information products, like mm-hmm.
MM (10:28):
Yeah, I mean, again, it’s all over the place. Retail products, obviously the commissions are lower, but they’re, they’re more commoditized. And you’ve got a lot of, you know you know, brands that spend the majority of their time promoting things that are retail products. And yeah, you might only make 10% of a $57 purchase, you know, five 70, but multiply that by a thousand people. You know, you’re making close to $6,000 for Facebook post. You know, that’s not a bad way to make some money, right? It’s really all over the place. But again, in, in your world, typically it is gonna be to a, a higher priced, you know, course or, you know, coaching. And we have some clients that are killing it with, you know, $24,000 a year coaching offers where we pay the affiliate of flat $3,000. And, you know, well that’s not a very high percentage, but at the same time it’s $3,000. You know, typically the higher the touch, which is we consider touch, meaning my time. So when I coach somebody for an hour, it costs an hour of my time. That goes into the cost of goods. So obviously the higher the cost of goods, the lower the affiliate commission’s gonna be. So the higher the touch, the lower the commission is gonna be. And that’s accessible.
RV (11:43):
That’s how brand Builders group works, right? I mean, this is how we built brand builders group so fast. We pay a 10% lifetime referral fee to any of our clients who refer someone because we’re, we do one-on-one coaching and live events. I mean, it’s, it’s so people intensive. It’s non-scalable. It’s not digital. Exactly. It’s completely the, the, the low margin human experience trying to pay people well and recruit ’em because we, we try to, we try to know people one-on-one and it’s less about like the courses and stuff. And and so it’s a lower percentage, but we just pay it forever and it just goes on mm-hmm.
MM (12:25):
Yeah, exactly. And that’s just normal and that’s expected. So when I promote something as an affiliate, ’cause it’s, you know, there’s a lesson by the way. If you’re gonna start an affiliate program, spend a little bit of time promoting something as an affiliate first just so you have the understanding of how it works. And, and a lot of times, like for me, the reason I’m a much better affiliate manager than I was my first five years. And, you know, to be clear, my first five years I built a program from scratch to more than a million dollars a month and had won affiliate managers of the year twice. But I’m still, I was 10 times better by 2014 than I was in 2000, you know, 10 because I became an affiliate and I started seeing things and I started going, I don’t like the way, you know, that works.
MM (13:08):
Like, I hated it as an affiliate not getting a leaderboard every day. You know, it drove me nuts. Like, did, did the thing I did, did yesterday, did I move up the leaderboard? Did I move down? I wanna know. ’cause I’m competing against my friends and I wanna beat them and I wanna win a better prize. And so we invented the live leaderboard back in 2013. Now it’s, most programs have one, you know, it’s just become ubiquitous because, you know, somebody got tired of the way that the norm was and changed something. And so we see things as an affiliate that drive us crazy. And so we address those, or we quite frankly can copy things from other people. I mean, I give all credit in the world to Danny Ney because in 2014, I was promoting him and he said, Hey, I’d like to get on a call with you.
MM (13:50):
And he, we got on a one hour zoom call and mapped out my entire promotion of his launch on a spreadsheet. And then he sent me the spreadsheet and I went, oh, I get what he’s doing. That’s the principle of commitment and consistency, right? Outta Robert Seal D’S playbook. Right? He’s holding me accountable to what I said I was gonna do versus me just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll do that, that, that. And then there’s no documentation. And so we stole that idea from Danny. We started doing the exact same thing. If you look at the way we do it, if you look at one of my calls and one of his calls, you could overlap them and they’d be exactly the same. And so be an affiliate first. And when you do that, you’ll start to, to see those things that,
RV (14:27):
Well, how do you do that? Like, how do you, how do you find affiliates or how do you find affiliate opportunities? I mean, obviously your friends, right? Like they go, Hey, I have a book coming out, or I have a course launch. I mean, I guess that would be one way, but like, how do you find affiliates?
MM (14:43):
Let’s talk about the first one. How do we find like things to promote ourselves opportunities?
RV (14:47):
Sure.
MM (14:47):
I say, look around at your desk, you know, your virtual desk might be your computer. What sites do you log into? What software are you using? What tools are you using in your business? You know, you said it best, like your biggest area of, you know, strength is where you used to be weak. The, the be the best place for you to serve your audience is from the place where you struggled 5, 7, 10 years ago. You know, for me it’s now 18
RV (15:33):
Basically just promote the tools you love. Like find like the tools,
MM (15:35):
Promote love. Mm-Hmm.
RV (15:37):
Yeah. Promote the thesis,
MM (15:37):
Promote the brands that you love. Promote the, again, and it can be as simple as, okay, if I have a friend who says, who comes to me and, you know, they’re relatively well-known and they’re launching a book in a year, and they say, who do I need to talk to about, you know, yeah. Obviously us for selling books through affiliates, but who else do I need to talk to? Who, who on earth am I gonna recommend other Roy Vayan? I mean, literally it’s not, I, there’s, I mean if’s no reason.
RV (16:01):
You’re smart, you’re not gonna for sure Uhhuh
MM (16:03):
And so the fact that you have a referral program, all that does honestly, in my opinion, is kind of make it more top of mind. Mm-Hmm.
RV (16:10):
MM (16:11):
And to your stand, you know, from your standpoint. Let’s flip to the other side. When you send me that PayPal deposit for, you know, a good chunk of money, I go, huh. You know, I wonder if there’s anybody else I could proactively think of, right? Instead of just waiting for people. Come, you know what, I’m gonna reach out to a few people. I’m gonna reach out to my friend Brian, who I know has a launch coming up in eight months. And just say, Hey, do you need anybody? If so, I’d love to introduce you to Rory, and it takes me 20 minutes and two of them say yes, and I make a bunch of money for 20 minutes of my time. Like, what else could I do with 20 minutes of my time to make that kind of money? Probably nothing. So that’s the finding, you know, like finding affiliate programs to promote side. Many of those can turn into two-way relationships. I was just talking with one of our coaching clients the other day, and I
RV (16:59):
Go,
MM (17:00):
There we are. Yeah. I was talking to my friend the other day and one of our clients and introducing her to some other clients and I said, you know, here’s why these clients would be good partners, because they have your audience and you have their audience. So the question we ask and we wanna find affiliates is who, who already has my audience? So if you get a software that’s for course creators and coaches and somebody over here that teaches how to create content for course, you know, course creators and coaches to match made in heaven, let, let’s get those two people working together. So the simple formula, let’s, let’s say take a book. Let’s just take a book for example. I call it the Amazon Rabbit Trail because Amazon makes this super easy for us. We pick one book that we think is similar to ours.
MM (17:48):
That’s exactly what we did, did for our book. It’s, you can do this for products or anything. I’m just using a book as an example. And you look that book up on Amazon and you see, when did it launch? I wanna find a book with a launch date of, in the past three years. So I look and it says it launched in January of 2018. I’m not gonna use that one. Let me think of another one. All right? I look at the other book up, it launched in February of 2022. I’m gonna go to Google and I’m gonna look up all the search results from about one month before and one month after that launch date. ’cause I want to find specifically people who promoted, who interviewed, who did whatever for that launch period. Not that wrote about the book nine months later and said how good it was.
MM (18:29):
That that’s not who I want. I want people who promoted this book launch. And I’m gonna look those people up and I’m gonna reach out to them and I’m gonna say, Hey, this, I’m gonna give you the gist of the email here. Hey, I saw that you promoted such and such book a year ago. I’ve got a similar book coming out in nine months, and you wanna do this plenty of time in advance. ’cause People’s promo calendars fill up. I’ve got an, I’ve got a similar book coming out in a few months. It’s different in that it covers this, this and this. You know, whatever the specifics are. Can I send you a copy? Would you be, or would you be interested in having me on your podcast? Or would you be interested in promoting it as an affiliate? And it’s a very brief email.
MM (19:09):
We don’t write a 10 sentence, 12 sentence email. ’cause What do you do, Rory? When you get a long email from somebody you don’t know asking you to do something? You delete it before you even read it. So it’s a very short email with a specific call to action. And that’s how we find affiliates. The same is true for products. You have a product, what are some similar products? You have a coaching service. What are some similar, you know, things like what would other people, what would they have bought that is similar to yours? And it doesn’t have to be if you offer a coaching service, you don’t even have to reach out to affiliates of coaching services because people who bought courses or books or whatever joined a mastermind about this topic might have also, or might also be interested in your coaching service. So you reach out to those people who are affiliates for those products and ask ’em if they would like to promote you mm-hmm.
RV (19:56):
MM (20:02):
That’s what we do. Yeah.
RV (20:03):
If I don’t wanna do that, I go, I get an affiliate manager and I say, Hey, go recruit me some affiliates. Yeah. And then we share in the, we share in the pay together, right? Yeah.
MM (20:11):
I mean, like right now, I mean, you and I have been on, you know, for 20 minutes or so. I mean our team’s, you know, we have multiple people on our team right now finding affiliates for our clients. You know, obviously we have a huge database of people that have been affiliates in the past, but we’re breaking into new niches all the time. Like I, we’ve got a client in the parenting niche right now. We’ve never done anything in the parenting niche. Now there’s a little bit of overlap with the entrepreneurial side. So we reached out to our entrepreneurial affiliates about this parenting offer and we got a few and done had success with it. But now we’re kind of in that phase where we need to go out and find people who’ve promoted other parenting courses. We got another one that’s in the health and fitness niche. Her summit is, she’s doing a virtual summit. It’s all about getting off sugar. I don’t have a list of people for that. So we’re doing what I just said. And yeah, it’s extremely time consuming. And yeah, to your point, you know, there’s two types of people in this world. People have more money than time, and people have more time than money. And people who have more time than money go do it yourself. Like it’s, you can execute on this. It just takes a lot of time.
RV (21:11):
Mm-Hmm.
MM (21:55):
Well, again, the easy way you just said it, you know, hire us,
MM (22:44):
You know, any of the myriad of CRM slash shopping carts slash funnel builders, et cetera, et cetera. You have a built-in affiliate tracking system in there. It’s pretty, it gets a few clicks and it can take you as little as 15 to 20 minutes to set this up. Like it’s really easy, thankfully, if you are not on a system that has a built-in affiliate program. And I would venture to say I’ll put it this way, we’ve worked with 70 clients over the last eight years. And I’ve only had one who didn’t have a built-in affiliate tracking system in their software. I had two that they had a built-in, one that I didn’t like. So we used a different one. So three out of roughly 65 to 70 clients did we have to use an external thing. So again, it’s very rare.
MM (23:32):
There’s 50 good ones out there. Typ, you know, I don’t even wanna name ’em ’cause it depends on what platform you’re on, but depending upon what, whether you’re on WordPress or this or that, there’s plugins, there’s softwares, and I’ve never had one Rory that, and I’m not super techie. People are like, oh, you gotta be super techie. Like, dude, I don’t know how to edit my own WordPress posts. I have to message a teammate to do the thing that I want him to do because I don’t know how to do it. I barely can function on Google, you know, sheets and, and you know, stuff like that. And I literally just learned the other day how plugins work on WordPress. All right, so it’s 2023 and I can make these things work. They’re super easy, thankfully. So
RV (24:15):
What I hear you saying there is that a lot of the built-in functionality that come with the off the shelf tools, so whether it’s like for, for us, we’re, we’re heavy Infusionsoft Keap users, right? So we’re, we’re big fans of Keap. But a lot of our clients use ActiveCampaign. They’ll use ClickFunnels. Yep. They’ll use Kajabi, they’ll use HubSpot.
MM (24:38):
Everyone you just named has that built in.
RV (24:40):
Okay. And, and then I’m not as familiar with SamCart, but you’re saying that SamCart has, has it built SamCart I think of more as like a e-commerce, like a store? Is that not the way kind
MM (24:51):
Of is? Yeah,
RV (24:52):
Kind of is. It’s more like shop like I think of it as more like a Shopify
MM (24:55):
Not exactly. It’s it’s shopping cart. It’s
RV (24:58):
A shopping cart.
MM (24:59):
Now keep in mind I haven’t been, I haven’t logged into SamCart in seven years, so it might have changed, but I know it has affiliate tracking. ’cause We, we have an affiliate program that we promote that uses the SamCart link. You know, so, so,
RV (25:10):
So you guys are kind of tech agnostic in that way. Like you can grab, you can, you can work within, you’re just, you’re used to seeing all the different systems. And I,
MM (25:18):
I say all the time I’m platform agnostic. Yep. Uhhuh, I don’t, I mean outside of, and I’m not gonna say who it is publicly. There’s one and it doesn’t matter. There’s one that we can’t stand because the tracking doesn’t work properly.
MM (25:57):
I mean, it’s a eight minute process. 20 if there’s some nuance to it, like, oh, we told this person we’d do something different or what I don’t, you know, I can’t even think of it. Occasionally if you get some, you know, like big, big payments, we will pay those in a different manner. But usually it’s a download upload, right? I mean it’s download to a CS v, upload the CS v, it pays them. Now this is one little thing, and I’m getting a little bit advanced this why you hire people like us. ’cause Then we do this, we then send emails to all of those affiliates. You go, but PayPal sends them an automated email to Pauly sends ’em an automated email that says, you know, you made, nobody reads the automated emails. Right? At least I don’t, and I don’t very many people do.
MM (26:38):
We send ’em a personalized email that says something like, Hey Tom, thank you so much for supporting Amy this month. Just wanted to let you know we’ve got a PayPal deposit on the way for $8,226. You know, that’s pretty awesome. You know, that that’s, you know, you made 14 sales and people loved the webinar and we’ve, here’s three people who responded already saying they love the, the course, you know, that you referred, and by the way Amy’s big summit’s coming up in four months. Would you like to support it? ’cause What’s a better time to ask somebody to support something that you’re doing than when you just told ’em you’re sending ’em a boatload of money. And so that little extra step that I have never seen anybody outside of us. And I’m not saying nobody’s doing it. I just have never seen it. I have never seen anybody else take that one little extra step on those payment things. And, and it works every time. I mean, I would say one third of those emails get a response like, absolutely sign me up. I’m in for whatever you got going on.
RV (27:41):
Yeah. And man, I just, you know, I just have to say like, one of my favorite things of, of like, of my whole life is sending out our check the checks every month to our affiliates. I mean, we give them massive passive mailbox money. Yeah.
MM (27:54):
I mean,
RV (27:55):
We have several affiliates that have earned six, like six figures from a podcast interview with me. Like it
MM (28:02):
That’s crazy. You
RV (28:03):
Know, tens of thousands of dollars from one podcast interview and they’re still getting paid. And it’s, it’s such a fun thing to do. There’s like a part of it. That’s the
MM (28:13):
Right attitude. That’s the right attitude to have, by the way. ’cause Some people are like, oh my gosh, you’re gonna keep paying the affiliates. No, I mean, you’re, you’re re not only are you rewarding them, not only is it the right thing to do, but they’re gonna return in kind because every time you send one of those checks, they’re thinking, like I said earlier, Hmm. I wonder what else I could do to refer business to Rory. That’s
RV (28:32):
Right. That’s what I want. I mean, I, I have found that one of the best ways to make friends is to send them checks every month.
MM (28:48):
Buy me love
RV (28:50):
Well man, this has been awesome. I in, in the spirit of affiliate links, I want to give out an affiliate link for you all to meet Matt and to learn more about what he’s up to. So I’m gonna give you the link here. So the, the, the link is brand builders group.com/affiliate guy. So that’s what Matt McWilliams, he goes by affiliate guy. So brand, so brand builders group.com/affiliate guy. If you do that, Matt is gonna give you this download. I’ll let him explain it a little bit. Yeah. But it is called How to Get Your First a hundred Affiliates Free Report. And that is exactly what, if you’re getting exposed to this for the first time and you’ve never done it, you need, and affiliates has changed Brand builders. I mean this has, we’re an eight figure business in five years. And like the secret is affiliates, like this is the thing that we do. We send out money every month now we do it in perpetuity. So it never goes away. And that helps, that helps. Part of it helps people continue to refer people to us. Yep. But anyways, anything you want to tell ’em about that. So brand builders group.com/affiliate guy, how to get your first a hundred affiliates free report?
MM (30:01):
Yeah, it’s just, it’s got 15 places, you know, defined affiliates. A few, one of which I covered today. A few of which you probably never even thought of. I mean, again, it depends on your niche. We’ll show you how to work with like nonprofits and how to, you know, how to work with your friends, how to work with even competitors. That’s probably my favorite one. Like, you just have to read it because the working with competitors one when I was in the, the music business, you know, music construction business, that completely changed our business. I took one affiliate program for about one and a quarter million, over 6 million. And about half of that growth was working with competitors in some pretty cool ways. So we covered that in the report. You got some templates in there for emails you can use to reach out and all kinds of goodies. So yeah, go grab it.
RV (30:42):
That’s really cool, man. Well Matt, so great to see you. Thank you for making time and so great to talk to you. Really appreciate this. We haven’t talked enough about this. This is a key, key part of growing the business. So all the best my friend. Thanks Rory.
Ep 437: How To Get Better Outputs Using ChatGPT | Kyle Stout Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
Do you want to be better at using AI to write copy? Well, I do. And if you happen to be in the category of me and millions of other people,
AJV (01:09):
It also sounds a little stiff or perhaps a little static or generic, or it feels like you could have read that anywhere else on the planet. It doesn’t cater to your avatar. And probably just generally speaking, it doesn’t sound like you it doesn’t sound like you. Well, we’re gonna talk about a few tips that you can start using right now to give chat g p t better prompts in order to get you better output. So here, here we go. You ready? I’m ready. Let’s do this. Number one, start by training chat, G p t. You can train chat, g p t and that means you have to teach chat, G p t how to write for you. It has to get to know you, your company, your products, and your avatar. So start with having it create your ideal avatar.
AJV (02:02):
So actually start by saying like, please create my ideal customer avatar based on blankety blank, blank, blank. Based on, you know, and this is just an example of mine. Hey, please create me a, an ideal customer avatar that is a female age, 35 to 45, who is successful in her career, lives in the United States, makes over six figures who is super ambitious and driven, but struggles with feeling not worthy, not enough, feeling invisible. You know, you kind of just go through the process, right? So first of all, you have to know who your avatar is. It cannot make it for you. But what you wanna do is you want to have it create your ideal profile by you telling it all of the demographics and psychographics, right? Where do they live? How old are they? What’s their industry? What’s their,
AJV (02:59):
Their socioeconomic status? And then the psychographics. How do they feel? What are their goals? What are they looking for? What are their fears? All the things. But by feeding it into that and having it create your profile, it will remember that as you start giving it new prompts, or you can just copy and paste those, that prompt or that output that it gives you and copy and paste and saying, Hey, please create me a landing page for X product that caters to, and then you can copy and paste and insert your ideal profile. But the thing is, is like, the more that you teach it, the more that it remembers. So the more that you do in there, it’s gonna remember that time after time again. So step one is train it on your ideal avatar. Step two is train it on your products, right?
AJV (03:46):
So the next thing you’d be is, please write me a product service or program description that is fill in the gaps. If I’m just using a brand builders group, it would say, I would say, Hey, please write. I wouldn’t say, Hey, but I would say, please write me a service description for a one-on-one personal brand coaching program that includes unlimited events to two day live experiences in Nashville, Tennessee. That includes 14 course curriculum access that in, you know, I would keep going on and on, and then it’s gonna write that. So I’m going to feed it my current descriptions. Now, if you don’t have a current, you know, product or service description, it can help you. But it’s gotta know your avatar and it’s gotta know who you are, what it’s for. It’s gotta know your company all the things that it’s gonna do.
AJV (04:39):
And so this is better suited for once you have your clear right service offering, your product offering, then have it go in there and have it build that this is a part of training it. It’s not that you’re u using chat g p T to create everything. You don’t have some of that work you gotta do yourself, right? That’s your job. And that’s why companies like Brand Builders Group exist, is we help with that part of the strategy, but it’s to help feed it into chat G P t to train it. So it’s now it’s learning who your avatar is, what your product is all about, or your service is all about. Then you wanna also teach it about your company, right? So for me it would be, you know, help create a company profile for brand builders Group who blank, right? So I’m going to help help it learn about brand builders group. So in my case, I would say like brand build create a pro a company profile for brand builders group who specializes in servicing the bur the personal brand strategy arena, who we cater to, coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, small business owners, buy dah, dah, right? So I’m gonna feed all of the things that we already have established
AJV (05:57):
About our avatar, about our offering, about our company is an effort to train, chat, G p T. So that’s step one. That was a long step one, but that’s step one. Step two is keep everything in one chat thread so you can build off of each new prompt. That’s a quick and easy one. Number two, use prior prompts in your new prompts to get more specific. So you can just copy and paste, use the little clipboard icon right there in chat, g p t, copy and paste the avatar. And you say, Hey, write me a email that caters to this avatar for this service offering, right? And you could just copy and paste the whole thing in there. It’s long, right? So some of those prompts are gonna be long, but the more that you do that upfront, the less you have to do it later on.
AJV (06:45):
Okay? That would be the the third thing. Fourth thing, be specific with what you want, right? So if you’re going, Hey, write me a landing page an active voice use X copywriting formula. So for us, it’s like, Hey, please write me a landing page, an active voice using the 15 Ps of copywriting from brand builders group who caters to blank avatar. That is not a discount oriented service offering that blank, blank, blank, right? And so I’m talking about be specific. So I would include things like please use humor, be concise. This is for a first time buyer. On and on, right? I’m gonna give you some of those examples in a second, but be specific, right? The more you do this upfront, the less you have to do it later on, or it changes, right? Use things like, are you looking for active voice, which is what most of us are probably wanting, or is it passive voice?
AJV (07:51):
Is this for a first time buyer? Is it for a repeat customer? Is it a, a re-engagement campaign of some sort for people who showed interest but never purchased or they did purchase, but it was X amount of years ago. Is this a discount, seasonal discount type of thing? Do you include a discount or not? Is this seasonal or not? Right? Is this something that you do every summer or every winter, every Christmas, every back to school, whatever. Do you want it to include humor? Do you want it to be serious? Do you want it to be verbose? Do you want it to be concise? Do you want it to be in the voice of a certain person, right? So it, you can say, write it in the brand voice of AJ Vaden from Brand Builders Group, or write it in the voice of c e o of Brand Builders Group. You can be that specific. In that case, you would also need to train it on you as a personal brand. You can say things like, oh yeah, I mentioned this. Like, is there a certain copywriting
AJV (08:55):
Formula that you want it to use? Use things that say, I like it. Please use an email. Like, and you could use examples of other people or other companies. You can give it feedback, right? Rewrite this with more humor or less humor, or make it longer. Make it shorter. Make it more nuanced with different things based on who they are in your list. It’s like these are long-term clients that I’m catering to for this. You can do it for the sales pipeline, you can do it for nurture. All of those things. You have to be concise that this is a, the first email of a five email series, or this is the second email of five emails. All of those things are the things that we need to think about that most of us aren’t thinking about when it comes to using chat G p t.
AJV (09:50):
So there’s a lot in here, but here’s what I would say as your takeaway from this is number one, train chat, G p t. Help it get to know you, your business, your product, your avatar. Number two, get specific. No upfront, is this a funny email? Is this a short email? Is it serious? Is that with an offer or not an offer? Is it for a first time buyer or an existing customer? Is it for a past customer? That does no, has no longer has any engagements with you? All of those things are what you wanna think through, detailed out first, because those are a part of the prompt that you need to get or give to get the output that’s actually going to be usable. And just note too, it’s like, it’s not gonna write it perfectly, but it will take you from a copywriter to a copy editor, which most of us can edit in our voice. But we struggle with writing it from top to bottom. That’s where chat g p t can help you, save you thousands of dollars, save you tens if not hundreds of hours and help you get something that you can use right away. So how do you get better outputs with chat G P T? You learn how to tell it what you want upfront, and that’s what we did right now. So go test it out. Go use it and tell me what you think.
Ep 436: Become A Better Copywriter Using AI with Kyle Stout
AJV (00:02):
Hi everybody. Welcome to the influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here. Super excited to have a conversation around something that everyone is talking about and continues to talk about. And so we’re gonna continue that conversation here today on the topic of AI and your personal brand. And so, before I introduce my awesome guest, Kyle Stout, I wanna tell you guys just a couple of reasons why you wanna stick around for today’s interview. So here are some things to ask yourself. And if you have the answer is yes to any of these questions, then this is an interview custom designed for you. Number one, do you want to use AI better? If you answer yes to that, stick around for this interview. Do you want to figure out better questions, better prompts to be putting into AI to get what you actually want? The answer is yes.
AJV (00:57):
Then you wanna stick around. And if you wanna talk about how AI can improve your email marketing, content marketing, or anything else that you’re doing online, then this is probably the conversation that you wanna stick around and listen to. So without further ado let me introduce you to our guest who’s going to make us better not only at using ai, but also becoming better email marketers for everything that we’re doing in our business. So Kyle Kyle Stout is the founder of Elevate and Scale, which is a marketing agency that helps with direct to consumer brands improve their revenue and put their sales on autopilot. Who does not want that
KS (01:52):
Thank you for having me.
AJV (01:54):
Yeah, this is gonna be a great conversation. I know everyone’s been talking about it. Everyone Conti continues to talk about it, and I feel like the same questions continually get asked from everyone in our community, everyone in our audience, which is, how do I become better at using ai? And so I would love to hear a little bit of your backstory about how you got to where you are and how have you learned so much about using AI in the most efficient and effective way?
KS (02:25):
Okay. So my background is in copywriting, and there have been a lot of these AI copywriting tools that have been out prior to what everyone now knows as like chat, G P T and that level of, of ai. And honestly, they weren’t really very good. I had, you know, but I was always kind of keeping an eye on it just because I thought, well, it would be really useful if it was really good someday. And then chat G p t, of course has changed everything and all of the new you know, technology that’s come about since then has changed everything to where now you can actually get really good copy. But what I have found to be the most important thing for getting, not just copy, but the best outputs in general from the AI tools that you’re using, is the detail in the prompts that you give it. And being specific with what you’re looking for in an answer as opposed to just asking a very broad question. Because you have to think that, okay, while this AI is very smart, it’s considering so many different possibilities of answers like way beyond the what we would ever consider in our mind. And it’s trying to come up with this, you know, generalized response that will cater to all those things instead of honing in on the specific, you know, variables that you really care about.
AJV (03:39):
Yeah, I love that. And I think that’s, well, one, I love that you have such a, a strong background in copywriting because I feel like you still have to be a copy editor to use ai. Well, and I still, I just know from our community at Brand Builders Group, we’ve got, you know, 750 monthly members and one of the biggest struggles that people still have is copywriting. And most of the use cases that we’re encountering from our community and even just increase from this podcast is, man, where do you find good copy? How do you write good copy? Who can, who can do it affordable and make it quality? And so I’d love to hear your take on just the AI generated copy as a copywriter, because I think what a lot of people think is, oh, this is going to solve this problem I have, or it’s gonna replace, you know, all of these people. And it’s like, I don’t agree with that. So I would love to hear your take on being a copywriter and using ai.
KS (04:39):
Yeah, so it’s definitely not as good as a, as a trained copywriter. And you know, I still have copywriters on my team who are writing the copy for our clients, but it is, I mean, it’s honestly pretty good to where in a lot of cases you can get copy that’s good enough to where you just need to go in, make some tweaks, of course, add in the personal language that fits your brand, that that’s the biggest piece is you want to mm-hmm.
KS (05:31):
So yeah, I think that you, it, again, it’s not as good as the copywriter, but you don’t have to have a copywriting background to use it. One thing about great copy is that it is very conversational. Mm-Hmm.
KS (06:17):
So things like that. So you’ll learn just by practicing little tricks of like your go-to things that you always include in the prompts, but really it’s gonna get you the, the base level of information you’re trying to convey. It’s pretty good at getting that. Then you just need to kind of massage it and humanize it to your brand. And that’s where you can really save a lot of time and money and you know, be able to produce really good copy without having to go hire a full-time copywriter if you’re, you know, not in a position to do so.
AJV (06:47):
Yeah. No, I love that. And I think you kind of nailed it on the head and a part of our conversation today is you have to know what you want in order to put in the right prompts so you get the right outputs. So let’s talk about that for a minute. Like, how do you get the best outputs? Like what’s the key to putting in successful prompts and like, how do you get better at telling it what you want so you actually get something that’s more usable?
KS (07:16):
So there’s a couple of pieces here. So before jumping to like, having this really detailed prompt, I think it helps to actually train the AI a little bit for, so let’s say for example, you’re using chat G P T and you open a new chat thread if I, for any business, any whatever it is, if it’s your personal brand, whatever, you keep all the conversation in that one chat thread. And I initially like to start off by having it do some research on creating an ideal customer profile for that business. Mm-Hmm.
KS (08:01):
So you know, a business that sells t-shirts online or, you know, whatever your business is. And then I put including information on demographics, psychographics, behavioral patterns, and customer needs and pain points. And that will give you a really detailed output of all of these demographics. And like, especially the really important stuff are like the big pain points, the, the wants, needs, desires, all of that of your ideal customers. So now the AI is familiar with, okay, the prompts you give, it’s going forward, it’s going to take into consideration this profile that you’re targeting. And then not only that, but you can take that output you just got from it, and then you can copy and paste that back into a prompt and say, now give me, you know, 10 topic ideas for videos or for emails or for whatever it is. And then that will usually give you 10 kind of broad ideas for your category where whatever, you know, industry you’re in, and then those broad ideas, you can actually go back and have it give you 10 more or even more than that.
KS (09:00):
But I like 10, you know, 10 more specific pieces of content. So now you have 10 different kind of angles to take to talk about that broader topic. And that’s how you can scale up the, or or solve the problem of, okay, what do I, what do I say in my content? So at, at this point now, there’s unlimited ideas for topics. And when you drill down to those specific subtopics and then you have the AI write the email or write the video script or whatever about that, now it’s gonna be a lot more refined. And so you can copy and paste in your ideal customer profile, in your prompt, you can copy and paste in the specific smaller, more refined topic that you wanted to write about. And then below that I would give it some details of like what, what type of content this specifically is.
KS (09:46):
So if it’s a, if it’s a sales email, if it’s a nurturing email, if it’s a, a video that’s, you know, and I tell it what objective I have for the video, and then I’ll, that’s at the end of that I’ll put in my little personal notes. So for example, I always tell it to use active voice because I find that a lot of times it uses passive voice, which is just not good copywriting. I might tell it to use a specific copywriting formula, and you can Google these if you don’t know any copywriting formulas that you might like. Little details like that. So other, other things would be like, don’t mention this, you know, ’cause you find that it kind of gets into patterns where it does certain things you like and does certain things you don’t like. So I always tell it not to do the things I don’t like. And with that kind of prompt, that’s how you’re able to get a really good rough draft of copy that now it only requires a little bit of editing and you don’t, you, it is not just completely off the mark to where you feel like you’re having to start from scratch each time.
AJV (10:39):
How long are your prompts
KS (10:43):
So here’s the thing, if you do this upfront as you go, because it remembers all your, your chat history, you don’t have to do that every single time. So for a while I was doing that every single time because I, because I was getting such good outputs, I started to think, oh, I guess I have to do these really long, detailed prompts every single time. What I have found is that if you take it through that journey of doing some customer research, then doing some topic research and then having it write specific types of content for you from that point on, I can say, Hey, write an email about this, this particular product or whatever. And it’s, it’s already on point. It remembers all the stuff I told it before, so I don’t have to be that detailed every time. So yeah.
KS (11:22):
But it does help to at, at some point be that detailed and to give it feedback of, I don’t like, you know, use less humor, use more humor, you know, be more concise, like whatever. And it, it just kind of picks up on on your preferences. And then from that point on, that’s where, that’s honestly, I think is the biggest difference where some people have a really bad experience with AI and some people have a really great experience and the people who are having a great experience, they maybe didn’t know this is why it happened, or they aren’t sharing that because they just spent so much time practicing and doing all these iterations that they’re, the, the AI is just working more effectively for them than for someone who just starts and they try to jump right into write a script for this video right from the very first prompt without a lot of detail of, you know, considerations of your brand and your target customers and all that.
AJV (12:13):
Oh, that’s so good. But it’s, you know, it’s like the more specific and the more detailed you are in the beginning, it’s gonna remember that and it’s, you’re gonna have to be less and less of that over the course of time.
KS (12:24):
Exactly. So I always, on my in chat, G P t I have like all my saved chats. So for whatever it is, whether I’m planning my YouTube videos, I have a chat that I only use for that. Or if I you know, for certain clients, you know, stuff I’m, if I’m researching ideas for emails, I have a certain chat for each one of them. So, and then that way I don’t have to go through that whole learning curve again. I just save it and go back and just pick up where we left off. And it’s, it’s super easy.
AJV (12:49):
Oh, love that. Super, super insightful. And although I’ve heard tons of people talk about you gotta just ask better prompts, you gotta have this, you gotta have that. No one has made some of the comments that you just did, which I think is really helpful because you have a copywriting background such as use more humor, be more concise, use an active voice, like those are all the things that I’m like, yes, that right there would even help. Like, you know, it’s like we do a ton of copy and we’ve been using custom G P T to kind of like train our own copywriting, like bot mm-hmm.
AJV (13:52):
You know, it’s like, but it’s because people aren’t using these type of nuanced just little tips. That’s awesome. So, so, so, so, so super helpful. So that kind of like leads me to my next questions, which would be, what do you think are some of the, the strengths and weaknesses of using AI to generate, you know, content and, you know, and I would say just content in general, but then super specific to email marketing content.
KS (14:22):
Yeah. So the biggest strengths and the things that I really love about it the most are doing the initial ideal customer profile type of research. Because when I first am am working with a client, that’s a, that’s a big time consuming task that we do. Before we write any copy, we need to nail down the messaging strategy. And a lot of that is just really dialing in on what are the big wants and needs and pain points, because that’s what’s gonna drive all of the topics we write about. ’cause Even if we’re, you know, if we’re selling supplements or, or t-shirts or whatever, it doesn’t matter what it is. If it’s a an online course, whatever, we’ve got to write the message in a way where the person who’s receiving the email feels like you care about them. They wanna know what’s in it for me.
KS (15:02):
And so you always wanna frame it around those things that, those desires and those problems that never go away for them. So that’s the first part, just saves a ton of time and helps us be, you know, really thoughtful and strategic with that. Then coming up with, you know, sometimes you just, especially if you’ve done a lot of emails for, you know, for your business or for a particular business, you get to where you’re like, okay, now you know, how do we find another way to talk about the same things? And that’s where chat PT is really mm-hmm.
KS (15:48):
So adding in those little, ’cause at first, if you just ask it for topics, it’ll give you a bunch of topics, but then you’ll run through those. So that’s where you start. You have to start throwing in extra things like, you know, I need topic ideas with this extra little detail to, you know, narrow down the list of topics. So that’s a, those are the two best things. I really like it to, to get alternative headlines, subject lines, things like that. So copy we’ve written, but we’re like it’s good, but we don’t love it. Let’s get some ideas. And it doesn’t always mean that we’re gonna use what chat p t gives us verbatim, but it will give us ideas. I’m like, oh, I like that thing. I didn’t even think of taking that angle and I’ll write my own version of it based on what I got from chat p t, but I would’ve never got the idea in the first place if it wasn’t for chat p t.
KS (16:35):
So those are the things I, I use, if those are the things I would say are the biggest strengths that I have found personally. And also just saving time and, and all the processes, actually, I guess that’s the biggest strength. The weakness would be that the copy is still not to the level that you can just copy and paste it in and, and send it off and, and be good to go. Like you, you’ve, you do need to, like you said, not everyone can, but every, all marketers can, you know, they can tell whenever it’s AI copy and it is a little bit more generic. And so it’s not like, it’s not a matter of will your customers know it’s AI or not, it’s just not going to resonate with them in the same way as if you personalize it more and you add in your personal touch and your own signature phrases and how you say things, that’s what’s going to take it from just okay copy that explains what you’re trying to communicate to copy that really connects with the person and forms that emotional connection where now they wanna do business with you over the other coaches who offer the exact same service you do, but they just like you better.
KS (17:38):
Right? So that’s what we wanna do with our copy. So that has been I would say that’s not a huge weakness. It’s, but that’s something to keep in mind. A weakness, another weakness just for me personally is there are some tools that are great for creating original art, but for creating the kind of graphic design I need. So designing really nice emails and I just haven’t seen one yet. There are some that are kind of, you know, testing the waters right now, but I have not seen any that come close. I mean, just, it’s just nowhere close to what a good graphic designer would do on our team. And so that would be a huge
KS (18:20):
Time and money saver
AJV (18:31):
Yeah.
KS (18:31):
But again, it’s like there’s a learning curve of how do you even put the prompts in to get the output the same way that I know copywriting and I know the little nuances to ask it. If you’re not a photographer and you don’t really know the nuances of a lens and different colors and aperture and all that kind of stuff, which I don’t know anything about, then you won’t be able to get as good of a prompt as someone who does have that background.
AJV (18:54):
Yeah. Like one of the things, and I’m so glad that you brought that up too our team plays around with Mid Journey a lot with just like, like we’re, we’ve been making, like taking all of our clients’ photos and turning them into like superheroes mm-hmm.
KS (19:11):
No.
AJV (19:12):
But one of the things that you kind of said, it’s like, and this is what I heard anyway, so tell me if I’m wrong, but it’s like, almost like you already have to be an expert in your field and then AI can just help save you time. But if you don’t know some of these nuanced things, it’s not gonna give you what you want. So instead of, you know, you don’t have to be a copywriter, but you still have to be able to copy edit, right? It’s like,
KS (19:36):
Yeah. You
AJV (19:37):
Know,
KS (19:38):
That, that’s exactly how I feel about it. So a lot of people, they, they feel threatened by ai and I’m not saying it won’t completely eliminate marketers, right? So it’s, it’s possible. But for the time being and, and in the near future, what it looks like is it’s just gonna make us way more efficient and effective at what we do. And like you said, so a a good copywriter with AI is gonna be way better than someone who is has no copywriting background using ai and they’re gonna be way faster than a great copywriter who is not using AI ’cause they’re just not saving as much time, right. So mm-hmm.
AJV (20:32):
We
KS (20:32):
Have an idea of how we would like our company to communicate to us and how we would like to be communicated to versus you know, photography and graphic design is a lot more technical in nature. And if you just have, if you’ve never had any experience with it, you would just never even even learn the terminology. So I definitely think it’s easier for the average person to pick up the copy side of ai.
AJV (20:53):
Yeah. And I love that too, where it’s well I have a question. Do you think that using like chat G P T and other AI sources is going to allow copywriters to lower their prices because now they can do more volume?
KS (21:10):
I def Well, so yeah, I think it’s gonna affect different parts of the market. So you definitely will have a lot of those people, you’ll have a lot of those services where it’s gonna be high volume, low cost. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (21:46):
They
KS (21:46):
Don’t, they’re not really, I, I thought people would not like the idea of us using ai. I found that they kind of, their attitude is, well, if you’re not using ai, you’re like, are you really even keeping up? Are you gonna be able to, you know, keep, are you, are you gonna be innovative and be able to help us keep up with everyone else? And they don’t seem to be like bothered by it at all as long as the final output, which is the emails we’re creating for them. As long as they like those mm-hmm. They like how it represents their brand, they’re performing well. They never really ask questions about about that.
AJV (22:19):
Yeah. No, that’s interesting. I think our response has been right nor wrong is yeah, I’m still happy to pay your full prices, but can you get it done faster?
AJV (23:11):
And they’re on a limited budget, which most of us have budgets. So super helpful. So I wanna kind of expand beyond AI before we went outta time. ’cause I could talk about this for a really long time ’cause I find it fascinating. But I would love to just talk about email marketing in general of, I think this is one of those things that over the last few years, at least in our circle in our community, that people have kind of stopped talking about. I think there has been such a unbelievably heavy focus and emphasis on social media that people have stopped talking about the value and the importance of your email list and email marketing. And at least for us, we find that we would much rather have a bigger email list than a big than a big social following. I care much more about our email marketing than a do just having a new, you know, social media campaign. I’m not saying it’s not important, I’m just saying I think there is, I there has been a devaluing on the importance of your email list and email marketing in the digital landscape. And I would love to kind of just be like, let’s, let’s talk about the importance of your email list and the importance of email marketing and let’s bring it back to, hey, don’t forget all this other stuff is not yours, but your list that’s yours.
KS (24:28):
Exactly. That, that’s really what it comes down to or comes back to for me, is that your email list is really the only channel that you own and control where you can directly communicate with your leads and customers versus social media. And so to your point, the, the two things I see the most often as far as, you know, why do people neglect email marketing is one, they’re just, you know, there’s so many new and sexy things out there with social media and AI and all this stuff that they know like, email’s always been there, it’s always gonna be there. I’ll get to it at some point. And so they think that, and they haven’t actually personally seen firsthand how valuable it can be. So it’s, it’s a lower priority for them. And then for other people, I think that it’s, it’s just kind of taken for granted. Like they maybe they have been doing it, but they didn’t realize that they haven’t been strategic about it. So maybe they do a monthly newsletter and so they’re like, yeah, we have a list and you know, we don’t really generate very many sales from it. So they’ve kind of written it off, but they, they never really did the deep dive into, okay, what can I actually do with email mm-hmm.
AJV (25:34):
KS (25:35):
They did that with everything they did on social media. They were just a sponge and they wanted to learn everything and they didn’t take that same attitude with email. So they haven’t gotten the same results out of it. And you know, I mean, truthfully, social media is awesome and a lot of businesses have have built their businesses off of social media and they get almost all of their sales from there, if not all of their sales. And so they might be thinking, why do I need email? But I can tell you on the other side, so like with the types of businesses we work with, email typically generates 30 to 60% of their total revenue.
AJV (26:09):
Hmm. And
KS (26:09):
It’s a lot easier to do than social media. It’s a, it’s a lot cheaper to do than social media and it’s a lot more reliable month to month. And you don’t have to worry about, you know, all of a sudden they make a change in the algorithm and now your people aren’t, aren’t getting your content as much, or you have to pay more for them to see your content. You don’t have those issues that you have on social media. Yeah,
AJV (26:31):
No, I love that. And you said something that I wanna dive into is people don’t know what they can do with their email marketing. So what can people do with their email marketing? I would, would, I would love to kind of bring this back to the focus of, you know, what we talk about at Brain Builders Group because it’s a huge part of our business. Like, I think less than 1% of all of our clients come from social. It’s like we track all of that so super diligently, not most of ours come from podcasts, but it’s, it’s so interesting of how we’re tracking it, but if we were to go to our email engagement and our email, it’s like, so monumentally more significant to us. So what can people be doing in their email list with email marketing? Like, what are some of the things that are really working?
KS (27:18):
So the first place every business should start is, I call it optimizing your sales process, which is really just creating all of the automated email sequences that make sense for your business to get someone to go from being a stranger to being a customer. Mm-Hmm.
KS (27:59):
Whatever your sales process is, map it out step by step. And in your analytics, look at how many people make it to each step. And then there’s gonna be typically at least one area where there’s a major drop off where lots of people make it to the webinar, but very few sign up for the call on the webinar. That’s gonna be the first place where if you put in an automated sequence to do follow up right there, where you’re gonna get the, the most immediate return on your effort because there’s just a lot of low hanging fruit. But ideally you won’t wanna have that follow up in place in between every single step in your sales process. And what it does is, is just more follow, you’re giving them relevant information for where they’re at in the sales journey. So depending on the software you’re using, for example, if you, if you have a webinar or a free training, typically there’s, you’re gonna have a pitch at the end.
KS (28:47):
You might have some value content for most of it, and you have a pitch at the end. And if the, so if you’re using the right software, you can see if people make it to the end or not. So if people don’t make it to the end, you can send them follow up information to send ’em the information that would’ve been in the pitch that they didn’t see. So a lot of times we assume, oh, when no one signed up, we assume they weren’t interested. Well maybe they didn’t even see the offer in the first place. So yeah, that’s, that’s the first place and that’s really where, I mean, to me that’s the, not only the highest priority, but you’re gonna get the most return for your effort. ’cause Once you set it all up, it’s just running 24 7. Beyond that, you wanna look at, okay, now how are we gonna start doing email campaigns on a regular basis to the different people on your list?
AJV (29:31):
Yeah. No, I love starting with the sales process because at the end of the day, most of this is for some sort of conversion. It’s nurturing, conversion, nurturing, conversion. So I love, love starting there. What would you say for the people who are going, okay, I have something in place, but it’s not really working, what would be some of the best things to put in the emails as you’re thinking of like, okay, maybe you have a webinar and they didn’t show up. Or maybe you have an application that people have to fill out and maybe they have to schedule a call and like all the things. And if they didn’t buy, what’s the follow up? What, what would you say for the people who are going, yeah, I have that, but it’s not really doing it, it’s not working. What would you say to go back and look at in terms of like, the actual words and content in the emails?
KS (30:19):
Okay, so let’s say if you had the webinar people sign up, but no one’s really responding afterwards. First thing is, ’cause you might need to, there’s multiple tests you might have to do here. But first let’s just assume that they like the webinar. And we, and we’re just gonna try to change the outcome with the emails, is I would look at, okay, at this stage, what information do they really need? Mm-Hmm.
KS (31:01):
Let them know about all of the, you know, unique value props of your business. But really you also want to make sure you are addressing questions and objections. So all of the big questions people have, all of the sales objections address those early and often in those emails because a lot of times you won’t get the opportunity, they won’t give you the opportunity to a, to answer those questions, right? So you’re not gonna hear them ask, but they still have those questions. So all of that stuff needs to be given to them early. So it’s very easy for them to make a decision to move forward. And then the, the overarching thing here is that all of the emails should be framed around them. Mm-Hmm. So even though I said you wanna introduce your brand, tell your brand story all that, I don’t mean you just go on and on about yourself and how great you are.
KS (31:43):
It’s all about what you bring to the table and what that means for them. What, what they are going to get out of it, what they are going to experience. So talk about the, you know, before and after of this, of their scenario. So if you offer some sort of you know, service, whether it’s coaching or professional service or whatever, know people are paying for outcomes. They’re not just paying for the service. So you wanna tell stories and you know, and involve the emotions of what someone is experiencing in this before state, before they have the results they want and what they’re going to feel and experience after they have those results. And so that’s gonna make, that’s just gonna resonate a lot more with people and it’s gonna make your, your marketing a lot more powerful. And then if that, if all of that doesn’t work, maybe it’s the offer, maybe you just need to try a different offer on the front end and the people who already signed up and didn’t engage with the first one, they’re not lost.
KS (32:35):
You can always just try to, you can pitch them on a new free offer and then get them involved in a new sequence. And you can bring of course, other new, new leads into that as well. But that’s a great way. Sometimes it might take two or three offers before you find the one that really resonates. And so if you keep testing these emails and nothing’s working, it’s not always the emails. Sometimes it’s just the, the way you started the relationship with them in the first place was either targeting the wrong people or it just positioned you with the wrong offer for what they’re looking for.
AJV (33:06):
Yeah. Super insightful. And I subscribe to all kinds of weird offers just so I can watch the email sequences
AJV (33:49):
Yeah, tell me more. It’s like, I’m not a prospect, but yet I’m interested and it’s really easy. And I would just say like, for anyone listening, if you don’t do that, do that. Right. Be a study of this process. There are plenty of people who do this well and plenty of people who don’t do it well. So just start kind of like testing things out out there and just, you know, kind of like put yourself in a bunch of funnels. ’cause You’ll see really quickly like how many are they sending? How long are they? Which I have a question for you about that. But also just reading like the meat of the emails is so insightful. And I love what you said. It’s like you can’t make it about you, you gotta make it about them. And that’s where looking at the analytics makes a big, big difference.
KS (34:32):
Yeah, definitely.
AJV (34:34):
Okay, so here’s the this is an ongoing debate in our company about email link. And there’s two schools of thought on this and I’m probably much more into tell ’em exactly what they need to know, what they need to hear and nothing else. And my husband, my business partner loves to tell them all the things. And so I’m gonna use you as our tiebreaker here. What would you say that you’re seeing in terms of trends when it’s like, how long should the email be?
KS (35:04):
So I would, I would say is the rule of thumb is to be concise. Like more often than not, lean towards keeping the emails short and to the point. But I will say the emails we do tend to be longer. On average, they tend to be a little longer. And, but it’s more challenging to have a really effective longer email ’cause you have to hold their attention. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (35:27):
Longer.
KS (35:28):
So it depends on what you’re selling. So for people, for a personal brand, I actually prefer just text only shorter emails, keep ’em brief, keep ’em specific around a specific topic. One call to action and, and keep it pretty simple. And, you know, if you, if you don’t get to cover everything you wanted to just send another email later to, to take that other angle. Just because again, people have short attention spans in the personal branding space. Whether you’re a coach, consultant, whatever it is they really, really wanna know about you and like they want to, it’s not just about your service because you probably have, you know, insane competition, whatever you’re offering. There’s just, there’s a ton of coaches and consultants. So it’s not always just about your unique mechanism. They have to relate to you. And, and so if you can keep these emails, you know, if they’re, if they’re not reading the emails, they’re not gonna relate to you.
KS (36:20):
So you want, if you keep ’em shorter, keep ’em specific, keep ’em friendly, conversational, that’s a great way. But just, just to throw it out there. And maybe this will give your husband some fuels. I will say a lot of our emails are longer and, but a lot of times it’s because for example, if we’re, ’cause we work with a lot of product-based businesses, so a lot of times we’re doing a combination of having educational content in the email with an offer, with a relevant offer at the end. So for example, if we’re selling supplements, there’s a million, you know, angles we can take for topics around, you know, you could, it could be as general as, you know, fat loss or building muscle, but we like to get specific into things like, you know, how to shop for healthy groceries on a budget, you know, those kind of things.
KS (37:03):
Mm-Hmm.
AJV (38:12):
No, those are super great. I think one of the things that I’ve noticed I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but the higher the price point, the more the coffee.
KS (38:22):
So that’s definitely, that’s all, that’s been a, a long time thing with copywriting. So like the, the really, you know, if you go to a long sales page for a big offer especially if it’s like, you know, multiple thousands or 10,000 plus. Yes. So you’re expecting this super long sales page with a, maybe a really long video sales letter on the sales page. But what’s interesting is that that doesn’t have to always be the case with the emails. In fact, I actually learned this from Frank Kern. I I did this program with Frank Kern and it was a huge investment and his, his emails were all very brief, but of course it was Frank Kern. He is, he is a legend in the marketing space and the copywriting space. So, so I was already pre-sold based on that, but he kind of taught us this format of, you have the, the offer section of the email stays pretty consistent from email to email when you’re selling these high ticket services.
KS (39:17):
Meaning that you’ll say like, you know, in this program you’ll, you’ll get, and then you list off like four or five bullets of the, the benefits, but it’s the copy that goes before that where you’re having a different conversation each time. So you’re trying to target a specific pain point specific benefit each time, then you lead to the offer. But really the email itself is pretty short, but he is having you do a high frequency of emails. So as opposed to it being one long email or maybe five long emails, it’s like 10 shorter emails Yeah.
AJV (39:46):
You know,
KS (39:46):
Within a certain timeframe. So yeah, I definitely feel like that, while that is the rule of thumb, you don’t have to go, you don’t have to feel the pressure of doing really long copy if you’re selling something high ticket.
AJV (39:59):
No, I love that. And I think in general, I, I find myself anyway preferring, I’d rather get a higher frequency and keep it short if I can. We follow the, the window pane policy, right? It’s like if I have to scroll, I’m probably gonna come back to it later, but if I can get the gist of it and just like what you see as you’re pulling up your outlook it’s like that’s gonna give me the gist of, oh, I do wanna read that. Versus my goodness if I see some of these emails where I’m like, I’m scrolling, I’m scrolling, I’m like, I’ll get to it later and then eventually I just end up deleting it. But that’s just me. That’s just, no,
KS (40:34):
No. I mean, that’s,
AJV (40:35):
You find
KS (40:36):
That that’s pretty normal. And I, I think really it’s like you have to have a, usually there’s a sales call involved with a high ticket offer mm-hmm.
AJV (40:42):
KS (40:43):
I think that that’s where you need to have a really good sales script and, and sales call, you know, experience dialed in for people and those short emails. It’s just, it’s not so much selling the full high ticket program. It’s like, we’re just trying to sell the call right now in those shorter emails and then let the sales call do its thing. Right. So, ’cause people will try to do too much in email and like you said, if you don’t read it, then the whole purpose was defeated.
AJV (41:09):
Mm-Hmm.
KS (41:25):
The, probably the most common mistake is relying too much on discounts and emails. A lot of people have this idea that if I’m, like, they think that they’re going to be annoying their list by sending an email. So they think if I’m going to email them, I have to make it really good, I have to make it special for them, or they’re not gonna buy, which is not true at all. But, you know, if you have that preconceived notion, you’re gonna, you can see that play out because that’s will, that will frame how you write your copy. But a lot of times, you know, people get addicted to the spikes in sales that come with offering a big discounted promotion, and then you end up training your list to only buy when there’s a discount when you do that. And so I see this, I mean, I see this all the time over and over where it’s, it is difficult to wean people off of those discounts. So you’re better off not getting to that place in the first place if you haven’t already done that yet. So that’s that’s probably the most common one. Another one, which is maybe a little bit lesser known would be that not sending every email to everyone on your list. Hmm.
AJV (42:25):
So
KS (42:25):
I, it is another assumption people, people make, which, you know, I can’t fault them because if, if you don’t, if this isn’t your world and you’re not nerding out on email marketing stuff, then you would just assume, well, I have this really valuable asset, which is my email list, and so I’m gonna get the most value I can out of this. So every time I send an email, I want it to go to everyone that can possibly reach it, because that’s how I’m gonna get the most amount of sales.
AJV (42:47):
Yeah.
KS (42:47):
And again, that’s, that’s actually not true. What would be better is to segment your list and create different segments of groups of buyers so you can segment them based on how recently they’ve engaged with you, based on their past purchase history, based on where they live, their gender, all kinds of things. And then you craft the content of the email more specifically to that group. And now you can actually send out more frequent emails, but not everyone is getting every email and the emails they are getting are a lot more personalized to them. So that’s a way to not only get more sales per email send, but have a way to scale up the volume of emails you send without annoying your list. Because not everyone in your list is going to be getting all of those emails.
AJV (43:30):
Love that. I love, just don’t try to make it so general that applies to everyone, but cater to the different segments of your list so you can make it more personable. Love that. Such a good tip. And all right, here’s my last question. So I love those, those are really good. What would you say that you would tell someone who’s asking, okay, but what kind of emails do I send to my list now that I have all these people on the list? Let’s say they’re not in like a sales funnel, but I just have a large list. Like, or even if I have a small list, what do people want? Like what do people want when it comes to emails today?
KS (44:08):
Okay, so you first have to have the attitude of, i I call it always be testing. Kinda like salespeople say, always be closing, where you have to be willing to have some emails just not perform well. Mm-Hmm. And know that you’re, you’re testing new topics. So if you’ve done the initial research of, you know, defining your ideal customer profile, you have some idea of the big wants and needs and pain points they care about, then first just start with the big ones and start crafting some content around a specific pain point or a specific benefit that ties to what you’re selling. And just first start with those. So keep it more like evergreen. These are, these are emails that would be relevant today and a year from today, and they would always be true. So first just start testing those to get an idea of, okay, of the big topics, what does my list care about the most?
KS (44:59):
And you’ll know, because you can’t judge the first email because if you haven’t sent an email in a long time, or if it’s the first one you’re sending, you have nothing to compare it to. So send one email a week for a month at the end of the month, look at, out of those four emails, okay, which one performed the best? What, what was said in that email? What was the offer if it was different? And then the next month, keep that same type of topic in rotation, but try talking about it from a different angle and then maybe mix in a couple of other, you know, slightly related topics. And then try something completely, you know, brand new left field as another one to test. And as you go on, you’re gonna start narrowing it down to certain benefits or certain things about your service that they care about most.
KS (45:41):
And there are a lot of times it’s surprising a lot of times the things that you think are most important are not really what they care about. And so that’s where a lot of times we have to give them what they want mm-hmm.
KS (46:20):
So I’ll, again, I’ll go with, you know, I always use supplements as a, as examples. So well, let’s just say jewelry for, for example. If say you’re selling jewelry, a specific pain point might be that people have a hard time defining their style. Mm-Hmm. So you just write an email, just give them a little few tips about how they could define their personal style. And then at the end of the email, you share some jewelry options that are great for matching with different outfits or different styles or whatever. They’re very versatile. And so now you have a very, it’s a non-salesy, very relevant offer for them. And if they’re not in the market to buy today, they at least got those tips and hopefully they learn something interesting. So they’ll keep coming back to open future emails. And if you, if you just take that, that framework and that attitude and just test different topics each time, after two or three months, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what works for your list and what doesn’t
AJV (47:14):
Love that. I just, even like, as you were talking, thinking about fun and creative ways that just thinking about our list, even at Brand Builders group of, you know, we cater so super specifically to people who are trying to build their personal brand to increase brand awareness for lead generation or speaking or writing a book of even doing something that would be super heavy incentivized for just people who are in the book stages of wanna know how to sell this many books. Here are the 10 things you can do right now. And that would be a super easy thing just as you were just even talking about that, about how to reengage people that we’re not doing. And so again, it’s just those little reminders of like, oh yeah, like we should do that.
KS (48:00):
Yeah. That’s and that’s exactly what I’m talking about, where the, the tendency is to, oh, we need to tell them every single time about the book part and about the public speaking part and about everything else. And what I always tell people is, well, you can do that sometimes, but hone in on one specific thing at a time. And when you see the reaction to it, you start to learn which aspects of your offer they really care about most. And you, then you can just lean into that more.
AJV (48:23):
Love that. So awesome. What an amazing conversation. Thank you so much. This has been so helpful and so insightful. And for everyone listening I will put all of this in the show notes, but also there is an awesome free resource that Kyle has provided if you go to when before you send.com. So when before you send.com, you can download a really awesome checklist that you can go through before you launch your next email marketing campaign. So go grab that resource. It’s going to be what we covered today and so much more, but win before you send.com. Grab that resource. And also if you wanna learn more about Kyle and his business, go to elevate and scale.com. And Kyle, if people just wanna follow you on social media, where should they go?
KS (49:18):
Yeah, the best place would be my YouTube channel, which is Elevate and Scale.
AJV (49:22):
Elevate and Scale. You got it. Kyle, thank you so much. This was so awesome. So many awesome tips. And for everybody else, stick around for the recap episode and we will see you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 435: 3 Secrets to Getting Publicity | Paige Dungan Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Let’s talk about how to get attention for your book launch or your product launch, or your company launch, or whatever it is, and specifically how to get traditional media attention and how to get other people to feature you or your work. And this is sort of timely, right? Because right now I am launching we are officially launching a brand new podcast series that’s a total side project, but I have created a podcast called Eternal Life. Seven Questions Every Intelligence Skeptic Should Ask About Jesus of Nazareth. And in this case, it’s a total side project. It’s just looking at the logical historical, archeological, practical, rational evidence for the story of Jesus of Nazareth, and how as a logical person, I’ve come to believe that. And so we have, we in its 15 episodes, and they’re free, which you, you can go look at it right?
RV (01:01):
On Apple or Spotify. Right now it’s, it’s now finally up. And that is something that I have created that is really for my two boys that in case something were to happen to me, if I, I didn’t, I was not around to explain to him how daddy has become to believe in the historical accuracy of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, right? So let’s say I wanted to launch that. Now I’m not actually launching it. My, like, I’m not doing a traditional launch. There’s no book attached to it. There’s no revenue stream attached to it. It’s a total give back. But if I were trying to, I would go, okay, what are the things that I need to do to get attention for that podcast? And that’s what I want to talk about here. Okay? Not just, we can use that as an example, because it’s a real time thing going on in my life that I’m, you know, semi or quasi launching.
RV (01:57):
So these, these principles will apply a hundred percent to you launching anything, whether it’s a book, a podcast, a company, a product, et cetera, a nonprofit, anything that you’re, when you’re trying to use traditional media to get the word out, okay? And number one is super simple. You have to connect your expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. Connect your expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. This is the first of these three major publicity secrets. So the news, the news, you know, remember that the metaphor of news, if you don’t know this, news, NEWS originally began as an acronym, not a metaphor, excuse me, as a, as an acronym. It stands for Notable Events, weather and Sports. That’s what news stands for. Notable events, whether in sports. So still to this day, that’s what the news covers. Notable events, whether in sports specifically, if you’re not a, if you’re not, you know, talking about the weather or you’re not talking about sports, then what you’re talking about is notable events, or that’s what the news is talking about every day, right?
RV (03:08):
All the major news channels are talking about notable events. What is notable? Notable is notable. It’s remarkable. It’s worth remarking about. It’s unusual. It’s, it’s, it is unexpected. It’s different. It’s, what’s everyone’s talking about is captivating people’s attention. So the news, the news is not really interested in reporting accuracy. Unfortunately, the news makes money from attention, right? So they latch on every day, news channels, latch on to whatever the trending topics are in the world that have people’s attention, wars, diseases, economic collapses, you know celebrity stuff, like anything. That is the thing that people are talking about. They’re trying to ride the wave of attention. And so that’s what they’re doing, because the more that they do that, the more attention they hold, which means the more eyeballs they have, which means the more they can sell to their sponsors, and the, and the higher the packages, the higher the, the, the higher the impressions, the more money they can get from advertisers.
RV (04:15):
And so they’re playing not a game of accuracy, right? The news is not playing a game of accuracy. They’re playing a game of attention. Once you know this and understand this, then you go, great. If I wanna be featured in the news, I have to think of it as a highway, right? Think of it as like all of the trending topics are the interstate, and here you are, right? And just, you know, using me as an example, go, oh, Rory’s got this new podcast about eternal life. I gotta go. How do I somehow connect? I have to, I have to create an on-ramp for connecting my expertise into the flow of information and attention. This sort of attention superhighway that everybody is talking about. That’s what you have to do. You have to connect your expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. If you can do that, then they’re gonna feature you.
RV (05:10):
Like when we launched our trends and personal branding, national research study which by the way, you can go download [email protected] under free training, or under brand builders group.com in our free trainings. Those are, those are downloadable. Also AJ vaden.com, she has it on her website as well. You can download that free training. Well, the day that it came out, the day after it came out, I got a call from Good Morning America, and I was, because there was a, a notable event. There was Victoria Secrets. The company made this major announcement that they were, they were going away from supermodels as their, as their spokespeople. And they were, they had instead selected personal brands, like they were taking recognizable people. And there were, you know, people from different women from different walks of life, but it was a major strategic shift that the company announced.
RV (06:08):
And they were saying, we’re, we’re banking on personal brands and we’re going away from the angels. You know, this, this women dressed in scantily clothing. So when we released a study, we, we happened to release a study right at that exact moment that was about how the trends in personal branding, national research studies showed that people are more likely to trust individual faces, then they are company names. And so it fit. And so they had me comment on, on that story on Good Morning America, right? That’s an example of connecting it into the news cycle. So if you want to get on television first of all, you’re gonna have to be prepared to pitch, or someone’s gonna have to pitch for you. But you have to think about, or, or the radio, right? Or, or anyone who’s, who has a big blogging platform, who’s blogging about current events, or even videos that go viral are often connected.
RV (07:03):
I mean, they’re trending topics, right? So they’re often things connected to things that are happening in this. You know, the nation’s conscience, Tom, Tom Hanks used to say, if you wanna make a hit, you have to enter into the nation’s conscience. So you have to ask yourself, what is everyone talking about? And then you kind of ride that wave by just figuring out what is the connection point that on-ramp is what your pitch is to producers. Producers are looking for interesting and new ways to cover the stories that everyone else is talking about. So if you can connect your expertise to what’s happening in the news cycle, they’re much more likely to say yes, right there. The news is not that we released a new national research study. The news is not that you have a book coming out. The news is not that I’ve launched a new podcasts, that’s news to me, that’s a notable event to me, but to the rest of the nation, that’s not news.
RV (07:54):
And books come out, you know, hundreds of books come out every single week. That’s not a notable event in the grand scheme of things. The notable event is whatever people are talking about. And all you have to do to figure that out is turn on the news and watch it for 30, 30 seconds. You’ll see there’s, there’s typically only a few stories that are dominating the headlines. Or pick up a newspaper scan, you know, scan the web, the, the major news outlets and see what the major headlines are. You just gotta pitch the, the producers of those networks, those channels, those outlets to say, Hey, I’m an expert on personal branding. I want to tie into this. You know, if, if, and, and if I wanted to get attention for, if I wanted to get mainstream media attention for my new podcast, I’d have to do the same thing.
RV (08:37):
Now I have zero desire. That’s not a part of my strategy nor my plan to deal with that. And part of that’s because I didn’t write a book on it. And, you know, I, that’s not the goal, right? Is that it’s, it’s, it’s a resource I’ve created for people to genuinely go study in an objective way, the data and the evidence that supports the narrative of Jesus, of Nazareth as being a deity, right? So I’m not trying to sell anything. I don’t need a bunch of urgent national attention. I’m putting it out there in the world. I’m letting people know about it, but I’m not like, you know, all in on trying to like promote this thing. So that is publicity secret number one, connect your expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. Publicity secret number two, become the media. Become the media.
RV (09:25):
And, and by the way, this is a recap of the, the the interview that I did with Paige Dungan, who is, is one of our, one of our implementation partners for pr. And we talked about, you know, if you’re looking for a PR person, go listen to the episode. I shared how you can get in touch with her. And she’s one of the people that we recommend for that service. And we have a, we have an affiliate relationship with her, and, and she’s great. I’ve known her for years, right? So we, there, we talked about, and this is true, is become the media build your own media platform. This is what we teach people how to do at Brand Builders Group. We teach you how to build your own audience. And you do that on social media, on blogging, podcasting, YouTube you know, whatever outlets you have.
RV (10:07):
And you know, if you’re, if you’re a brand builder and you’re one of our members, you know that we teach something called the relationship engine. And there’s a technique as part of that called the content diamond. These are the strategies, these, these techniques that we teach that you know, what is a relationship engine? A relationship engine is a digital automated ecosystem that we build an infrastructure around whoever the messenger is that pumps their content out into the universe as fast as possible to automate trust and capture, you know, and, and engage in lead capture. So that is how you start to become the media. You’re producing content, you’re producing videos, you’re producing audio. If it’s, you’re producing short form videos, you’re producing the written article, whether it’s on LinkedIn, pulse or Medium or Blog. If you’re following our content diamond strategy, you’re doing all of those things.
RV (10:57):
And most of all, you’re then converting those, you’re using that media to draw in attention and awareness. And then you’re using lead capture conversion to build your email list, your text message, opt-ins you know, direct message automation is a big place where we’re doing a lot right now. And so then you’re building this audience, and you are the media because you’ve built your own audience. The media is anyone who’s who, anyone who creates content for an audience on a regular basis. So there’s several things about this. First of all, when I launch a new podcast, I don’t have to beg anyone for favors. I can just go into my list and I can just write a, write a message and hit send. And boom, I could tell tens of thousands of people that I have a new podcast out. I can announce it on our own podcast, right?
RV (11:45):
Which is kind of what I’m doing now. And I, and I mentioned in, in some other places to go, Hey, I’ve got a new podcast. If you wanna listen to it, go listen to it. Eternal life. Seven Questions Every Intelligent Skeptic Should Ask About Jesus of Nazareth. It’s my story as a skeptic going through the evidence and the history to go what ev you know, how can any of this be trusted and believed? So there’s two parts of be being the media. The first part is obviously that you’re building your own audience. And when you build your own audience, you can announce stuff to them. And that’s why publishers and literary agents and, and speakers bureaus and, and places like that, they wanna get ahold of creators who have access to their own audience because they can teach ’em how to monetize that in, in various ways.
RV (12:33):
And that’s what we teach people how to do both, how to build their audience, and then how to monetize that audience, how to add value to them in exchange for money, right? So there is obviously that part of it that you’ve built your own audience. The other part though, is that when you become the media, you understand the pressures, the desires, the demands, the challenges, the opportunities of having to create content regularly, right? There’s some beautiful parts about that. ’cause You go, man, I get to inspire people. I get to, I get to talk about the things that I think are, are, are important to me and are important to my audience. And then there’s some challenging parts of that going like, oh my gosh, like, you know, it’s, it’s another week. I gotta produce more content. I gotta have another video. I gotta have more articles.
RV (13:18):
I gotta have more insights. I, I, there’s, there’s this need, this engine, this, this engine that you have to constantly be fueling with new content. Well, when you understand that, it helps you relate to the rest of the media world in general, right? Like every day I get people sending books to my, you know, office and, and pitching me emails on, you know, sending me dms, trying to get on our podcast and all this sort of stuff, right? So I’m, I take the role of a producer and vet to go, does this person have anything worthwhile to say to you? To my audience, to our audience? Is it worth me putting them in front of you? Are they gonna add value to the conversation? If yes, then I say yes. If no, then I say no, but it’s not so much that they’re gonna pay me and I’m just gonna put ’em in front of you.
RV (14:07):
That doesn’t do me any good. I have to create content that’s useful for you, that’s relevant to the audience that we are building. And once you do that, you go, oh, that’s exactly what the, the producer on the Today Show, or Good Morning America, or Oprah or Fox or CNN or whatever the outlet is, they have to do the same thing, right? So they need, they need you as much as you need them. That’s something you gotta understand about media. They need you as much as you need them. They need someone to help them produce content that is worthwhile to be consumed by their audience, but they also need to make sure that that content is relevant to be consumed by their audience. So they’re both desperate for you, and they also have to filter out the right person. So it’s not so much about who’s the smartest or who’s the most famous, it’s who has the most relevant bit of expertise for my specific audience at this specific moment in time in history.
RV (15:06):
And that’s why someone could turn you down to be on national TV today and three months from now, everything can change in the news cycle, and you can make the same pitch and they would have you on. So when you become the media, you understand that, right? Like I’ve, I’ve, I, I’ve watched a lot of our clients do the same thing, right? A lot of our, a lot of our clients are the biggest podcast hosts in the world, and they get on these kicks of certain things like you know, Tom, Tom, Tom and Lisa biu, so they’re clients of ours. And Tom Tom’s a good example of this Tom’s podcast. He kind of like goes and kicks where he, you know, suddenly he wants to talk to anyone who’s talking about like, health and longevity or some, you know, anyone who’s talking about like you know, like crypto or Bitcoin or like any of you know, the metaverse kind of stuff.
RV (15:53):
And, and that’s just because he’s interested in that. And so in that particular moment, somebody who would’ve said no to as a guest six months ago, he might say yes to today. So you go, well, how do I know when to pitch him? Simple? Pay attention to what he’s, what, what he’s promoting. And, and then you have to, and then you have to check all the boxes, right? So you gotta pitch him the right message at the right time for his audience, what he’s interested on, and then you gotta have the credibility points that he’s interested in. So every different media outlet has different criteria for those. It’s not just about who’s the smartest, who’s the most famous, who went to the, you know, the most prestigious school. It’s a combination of all of those factors unique to their audience. So if they say no to you, don’t take it too personal.
RV (16:34):
It just means you weren’t the right match. You weren’t the right fit for what they’re producing at this time. It doesn’t mean you should never pitch them again, but it does mean if you’re gonna pitch them again, you need to pitch a different angle to a different, a different, you know, a different hook to a different thing going on in the news cycle. And when you become the media, when you’re producing your own YouTube show, your own podcast, your own blog, your own Instagram channel, your own LinkedIn feed, and you start featuring other guests and, and filtering content. You understand better how the media operates and what, what they’re looking for, which makes you a better guest. You also know, like, what are the things that are credible, right? Like, someone sends me an email that’s 18 paragraphs about why they’re coming to the show.
RV (17:18):
It’s like, I can’t, I’m not even gonna look at it, because the idea of reading 18 paragraphs is overwhelming. So it’s just a no, right? On the other hand, if someone that I know and I trust really well sends me and says, Hey, Rory, you should meet this person. I think they’d be great for your podcast. Here’s three sentences on ’em and a link to their website, and I click on it. I go, oh, website looks awesome. They look credible. They’ve got a book, they’re credible. You know, they, they’ve got some, you know, maybe some social media following whatever. They have these indicators that go, yeah, this person is legit. Great, let’s have ’em on. And it’s that simple. So the more you produce media, the more you produce content, the better you will be at understanding how to get on other media outlets. So that’s publicity, publicity secret number two.
RV (18:00):
And then publicity secret number three. And this is the biggest secret of all this. One’s the magic. This one is, this is the one that, that has built my career. This is the one that if you go, how did Brand Builders Group go from zero to eight figures in five years with no investors, no debt, no bank loans, no credit cards. Like how did you guys do it? It would be this one. And it is something that I call the relationship switchboard. Well, that’s the technique. Let me tell you the principle. Here’s the, here’s the principle, and like, write this down. Okay? Seriously, if you are driving, like pull over and write this down. If you’re running on the treadmill, stop for a second. You’re gonna wanna write this down. This is one of our flagship BBG Brand Builders Group mantras. This is one of the things if you became, if you were to become a member of ours and you were to become a paying client, which by the way, if you’re curious about that, if you go to free brand call.com slash podcast, free brand call.com/podcast, you can request a call with our team and learn more about what that would look like.
RV (19:05):
Well, if you became one of our monthly paying members, you would hear us say this all the time. Ready? Write this down. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. What do I mean by that? I mean, invest in helping the people that you might one day need help from long before you ever need help from them. That’s what I mean. So how have we built this company so quickly? We’ve built it through affiliates. These affiliates who have who, huge audiences. How did we get to these people? Especially, you know, when we started Rambler’s Group in 2018, we did not expect to start the company. And when we sold our last company, we sold, we lost everything that went with it. All of our social media, our podcast, our email list, our whole team, we were sitting on zero, baby Zero starting over.
RV (20:05):
This was only a few years ago for us, right? How did we get back to, to where we are so quickly? We built relationships with affiliates, we built relationships with people who have large platforms. How did we do that? Well, we paid attention to who had something going on that they were launching, and when they had something going on that they were launching, we showed up and we offered to help for free. We said, Hey, I see that you’re launching a book, right? This is how I met Gretchen Rubin. This is, I always tell the Gretchen Rubin story because I love Gretchen. And she’s, you know, I guess I would call her a friend. Like we go back and forth a few times a year, but we’re not super close. But we’ve built a relationship. She’s been a, been a big supporter of ours.
RV (20:48):
She’s been on this podcast, she’s been on our summit. She lets us YYY you know advertise that, that she’s been a guest, things like that. And you know, how did I meet Gretchen? I said, oh, look, Gretchen has a book launch coming out, and when she has a book launch coming out, I say, Gretchen, I have some friends who have some very large podcasts. Would you be okay if I pitched you to see if they would have you on their show? Right? Not for money for free, right? I do PR for Free Brand Builders Group. We have a full-time person on our team that does free pr. We only do free PR member to member, though. We, we, we offer it as a free service for people who are active members in our program to help them get booked on the shows of our other active members.
RV (21:33):
We do that for free. You can’t buy it. It’s, it’s a, it’s just a, it’s just a value add that we do. It is also my number one prospecting mechanism and tool that I do to build new relationships. And I call it the relationship switchboard, because I keep track of everyone I know who is the host of a media outlet, right? Most of them are podcasts, right? They have great podcasts. Some of ’em are, are huge bloggers, some of them are top talkers, some of them are are YouTubers, some of them are in national tv. But I just keep a list of everyone I know who has a large platform. And then I keep a list of everybody I know who’s like AVIP guest. And all I do, a huge part of my time is just connecting these people to one another. And so I just go, if somebody, if somebody I know is launching a new show, like this is a good example right now.
RV (22:29):
Dr. Josh Ax, who, you know, we’ve been sort of casual acquaintances over the year. We become really close in the last couple years. We become really close friends. Part of that is because he’s launching a new podcast and he’s wanting to meet a bunch of people. And I go, dude, I got you. Like, I can get you access to like 30 major VIP people who I think would be a great fit for your show. And I’ll do it for free. Why? Because it helps Dr. Axe, it helps my other friends, and it, it helps me. I get caught in the crossfire. Now, a lot of it is it work for me? Yeah, it’s a ton of work. Do I get paid for it? No, I do not get paid for it at all. $0 zero now. But here’s another mantra I wrote about and take the stairs.
RV (23:12):
And this is another life philosophy that is true. You always get paid for how hard you work sometimes. Now, oftentimes later, always. Eventually, you always get paid for how hard you work sometimes. Now, oftentimes later, always, eventually. That’s spending your time on what we would call and, and procrastinate on purpose. My second book on things that are significant, what are things that I can do now that create more time or money tomorrow? Well, connecting people is something I can spend time on today that multiplies my influence tomorrow because it builds my reputation with both people. And I have nothing to gain from either per se, like no specific ask nothing, no money. It may never come back to me from those specific people. I’m simply going, oh, you need guests for your show. Let me give you access to all of these VIP guests that I have that are friends of mine.
RV (24:04):
Or if somebody is a guest and they have something they wanna promote and they suddenly launch like a new book, a new course, a new program, a new company, a new nonprofit, whatever. And I go, Hey, are you looking to get the word out about that thing? Let me introduce you to 30 friends I have who all have big platforms. Now, I know for you, when you hear this concept, you might go, oh, well that’s great, Rory, because your clients are, you know, all these famous people and Amy Porterfield and Ed Millets and Louis Howell and Eric Thomas’, and yes, but they didn’t. How did they become clients? They became clients from me doing this for them, right? This is how I build relationships with people. Save the best for first, give, give, give, give without expectation of receipt. I do this for people. I’ve done this for many people who I’ve never gotten anything from return.
RV (24:55):
I’ve helped some people get booked on shows, podcasts, like dozens of shows. They won’t even have me on their own show. Am I bitter about it? Yes.
RV (25:50):
And I could say, Hey, here’s a new podcast that I launched. You know, if I wanted to, I’m not gonna do this. ’cause I don’t wanna do a huge podcast tour for it. At least not right now to say, Hey, will you have me on your show? And they go, of course man, because I’ve been talking to ’em every week for three years, helping them get on shows and helping people get on their shows. So that’s the relationship switchboard. It doesn’t have to be media. That’s how I use it. I use it a lot for media. I also use it for speaking, right? I take all of my past speaking clients and all my friends and, you know, clients who are speakers who are in up and comers or in, in or around my fee range. And I go, Hey, you should meet this person.
RV (26:30):
You should meet this person. ’cause My clients need speakers, and my speakers need clients just like my hosts need guests and my guests need hosts, and I wanna get caught in the crossfire. So do I do it because something good will come out of it for me? Yes. But when I don’t know, I don’t keep, I don’t keep score. I, I don’t, I don’t let, it’s not about having people owe you one. It’s just about going, how can I add value to the community? How can I add value to the, the shows that I’ve been on? How can I add value to the guests who’ve been on this show? And how can I add value to the clients who’ve had me book on their stage, have me come speak on their stages, and how can I add value to my friends who are really good speakers, who I really believe in to help them get on stages?
RV (27:11):
This is the answer. And I get caught in the crossfire. I’m constantly in this interchange between awesome people. And what happens is that tends to cycle up. You tend to get around better and better people and bigger and bigger and more and more influential people, more and more people of notoriety. And it’s, it’s an upward snowball, just like everything we do with the relationship engine and building your own media platform. It’s about automating trust. It’s about saving the best for first. It’s about building relationships before you need them. It’s about give, give, give, add value. And it’s trusting that you can’t outgive God.
RV (27:50):
You can’t, you can’t outgive God. You can’t outgive the universe. You can’t outgive like, you know, Zig Ziglar said, help enough people get what they want and you will get what you’re, you want. And I have found it to be absolutely true. Now, I’m not always in a one-to-one relationship. There’s some people that I’ve helped a lot more than they’ve helped me, but then there’s other people who have helped me a lot more than I’ve helped them. But in total, I have received a massive amount of blessing far beyond the work that I have done to help others. But I’ve done a lot of work to help others. And so that blessing seems to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And even if not, you end up getting to play a role in shaping the world, right? And that’s awesome, right? I, I love, I love it when two of my friends or two of my clients get together and I go, yep, I connected them and they made magic.
RV (28:40):
They made magic happen. And I go that, that interview would’ve never happened if it weren’t for me. And I, I can take quiet credit for it ’cause it’s true. And I can be so proud that all I did was connect these two amazing humans and they made a little piece of magic for the world. And that’s all we wanna do at Brand Builders Group. We want to shape the voices that shape the world. That’s why we’re here at Brand Builders Group, right? We’re not trying to make a, you know, bazillion dollars. We don’t care about private jets. We don’t even care about being famous and selling lots of books and speaking on stages. I mean, those are good things. We’ve done a lot of those things. We wanna make an impact. We want to shape the voices that are going to shape the future of the world.
RV (29:22):
That’s why we do this at Brand Builders Group, and we wanna have a hand in it. And so that’s why we work with Mission-driven messengers. And that’s also why we turn clients away. There are some people where we go, yeah, sorry, we can’t help you ’cause we don’t believe in your message, right? No offense, we just, we don’t, we don’t, we don’t believe that that message lines up with what we think makes the world a better place. And so we’re not gonna do it. But if you are a mission-driven Messenger, and you do genuinely care about making the world a better place, you should probably think about joining our community because we have big things happening, big things happening. On that note, I, it would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to two of our brand builders, group clients hit the New York Times Bestseller list.
RV (30:04):
Just recently this month we have had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 clients this month. Eight clients who have become USA Today and or Wall Street Journal bestselling authors. And we have had two clients, Nicole Walters and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who have become New York Times bestselling authors. Two this month, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon wrote this book Forever Strong. This was the number one selling book in the nation. She hit number three on the New York Times. But she as a came to one of my private brand mastery events only about six months ago. And followed our system to AT no hacks, no gimmicks, no tricks, just adding value, working her butt off following the system. And you know, her book absolutely crushed. It was the number one advice, how to book by unit sold. It was number three on the New York Times but the, the, the highest selling book in the nation last week.
RV (31:08):
So congratulations, Dr. Lyon. That’s the eighth time that a Brand Builders group has hit the New York Times in the last 12 months. So we’ve hit the USA today in the Wall Street Journal with eight different clients this month. And then we’ve had eight times that we’ve hit the New York Times in the last 12 months, two in this month alone with Nicole Walters and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. And these are just people doing work, adding value. What are they doing? They’re, they’re, they’re they building relationships before they need them. They are becoming the media. They’re building platforms, they’re creating content, they’re adding, they’re automating trust. And then when their moment comes, they connect their expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. That my friends are the three biggest secrets of publicity. And I hope that helps you if you are a Mission-driven Messenger, and I hope we get to work with you one day soon. Until then, keep coming back. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast.
Ep 434: How to get Publicity for Your Book Launch with Paige Dungan
RV (00:00):
Well, if you’ve listened to this show for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard us talk a lot about book launches. Book launches is one of the things that we do really, really well. As of this recording, we have helped 17 different clients become New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestselling authors. We had two clients last year that pre-sold over a hundred thousand copies before their launch date following our system. But what we do is we help people come up with the sales strategy for how to sell the books, and then we help make sure those, those books sales happen in a way that get optimized and reported in the most optimized way for the bestseller list. What we don’t do is PR and we get asked this question all the time, who do you recommend for pr? Do you have someone for PR that we could talk to that can just like, just focus on getting you booked on shows and, and all that kind of thing?
RV (00:53):
So we’ve, we’ve worked with lots of people. We’ve talked with them, but today I want to introduce you to Paige Duncan, who’s a longtime friend of mine, and she is, her team is who we recommend for this service. And so we’re gonna talk about doing book launches, PR specifically for book launches, because this is a part of Paige’s expertise. So she was the head of PR and Talent at Success Magazine, which is where her and I met. So one of our brand builders, group clients bought the company. He asked me to be an interim editor for like a year. Paige was there. I met her immediately, was like, oh my gosh, this woman is awesome and good and smart and sharp and all the things. And she’s been in this industry for 15 years. She’s, she has sort of developed a very specific niche around PR for book launches. She’s been credited also with landing multiple authors on many of the bestseller lists, and she’s just super innovative and, you know, knows how to get an author attention in a crowded marketplace. So, Paige, welcome to the show friend. Woo.
PD (02:02):
Great. Thank you so much. It’s like we’re just grabbing a coffee today.
RV (02:06):
Totally, totally. So let’s talk PR for book launches. Yes. what do you think authors who are moving into this world, whether, whether they’re doing it themselves or they’re working with you, or they’re hiring somebody else, what do they need to know, like about getting media attention today for their book? Yeah. Like what are some of the big things where you go, man, I have to tell every author this over and over and over and over, and so we’re gonna tell ’em all right here one time, get it recorded.
PD (02:40):
Yes. Yes.
RV (02:41):
And
RV (02:41):
They’re gonna, they’ll come to you knowing, knowing this.
PD (02:44):
Yes. The number one thing where I tell all of the authors I work with is, the media actually doesn’t care about your book
RV (02:53):
That statement, what a great way. Can we cut? We need to cut that for social media. That’s the clip right there. The media doesn’t care about your book.
PD (03:03):
They don’t, and it sounds harsh, but here’s the thing that I, then I follow that up with. The media doesn’t care about your book yet, because what they have to understand is who you are, why you are the authority or expert in this space, and you have to build that trust with them first as an individual or as a company. Then they will care about your book. Mm-Hmm.
RV (04:22):
Mm-Hmm.
PD (04:51):
Exactly.
RV (04:52):
So what do you, how, how do you go about building that, you know, relationship and trust with the reporters?
PD (04:59):
Yeah. There’s two approaches that I teach. So number one is a approach that works really well, and that is you pitching yourself as a source to one of their stories. So if they, if you see them writing stories, let’s say about TikTok and all things happening at TikTok and your book is about the effects of social media of today or something like that, you simply find their email address and you reach out letting them know you really enjoyed their TikTok story on X you share a little bit of background about yourself and just leave it at, I would be happy to be a source for any other future articles you’re working on. You’re simply offering them, because journalists and media need sources every time they put out a piece of content, it’s part of the credibility of journalism. And they’re always desperate to find an expert to share a quote, share another perspective. And it’s a baby step in getting your name, like in quote, roundups, or like I said, if they just need you to come and give like an alternating view on that topic. And so what you do is literally Google search news stories about your book and your industry and what’s trending right now, and reach out to those reporters.
RV (06:15):
Got it. Uhhuh,
PD (06:16):
The second part of the so
RV (06:17):
Hold on, hold on. That I wanna hear, I do wanna hear, hear the second one, but, so, so when you say you find their email address, okay. So I love what you’re saying. So you go mm-hmm.
PD (06:54):
Easy. Yeah. Yeah.
RV (06:56):
How do you find the contact information? Like
PD (06:58):
What’s
RV (06:59):
The, how do you go about
PD (07:00):
That? That, this is my favorite part, Rory. ’cause You get to be a little bit of a spy in the best way. And so there’s a couple ways you can do this. Let me start with the free to like the page. Yeah. So the free way to do this is actually like Wall Street Journal and some of the outlets will list an email button for their journalists. So some outlets, but that’s probably a 20% Right. We’ll share the email upfront. The second thing you can do is you can find them on social media. Right. If you know their name like Rory Vaden, I’m gonna put ’em on Instagram. You can also start a relationship on social. Like if you cannot find their email free and you still wanna do free, find ’em on social. Yeah. And again, just serve them, interact with their content and message them there.
PD (07:46):
The third way you can do is you can pay for like a rocket reach or email lookup platform. Right. That can find their email. And so that’s a wonderful way, if any of you are in sales, you know about these different, and, you know, platforms that will help do a reverse email lookup. But then the last option is you can actually get a PR C R m. And so this d r m literally lists the database for all journalists and media unit talent bookers. And it allows you to be able to put in like an, a company like Forbes, like the media brand, Forbes, and it pulls up all the writers and what beats they cover. And the recent agencies, we almost all PR agencies have one, they do have cost effective solutions, though also if you’re just a one-on-one looking to have this access. But if you know you’re gonna go out and you’re like, at PR is my focus right now, this is, I’m going all in. I would suggest looking at the PR C R M because it will take, save you a lot of time compared to the free version to be able to find exactly who you need.
RV (08:52):
Is that, and is that like is that like Cision or something else that you’re talking about?
PD (08:57):
Yep. It’s like Cision. There’s one called MuckRack. There’s a cost effective one called Prowly. You’re exactly right. It’s any of the
RV (09:05):
Prowly,
PD (09:06):
Uhhuh
RV (09:10):
. I haven’t heard of that one. Uhhuh.
PD (09:54):
Too,
RV (09:55):
Way. ’cause Not only do you have to, you have to figure out who you gotta figure out what topics are they writing on, who is writing on it. Mm-Hmm.
PD (10:17):
It doesn’t work. And it’s too long. And I love what you’re saying before, and I wanna hop back a minute, to your point, Rory, of serving them, I always tell people, what problem are you trying to solve for the reporter? That’s what they wanna know.
RV (10:29):
Yes.
PD (10:29):
Like, what is the problem? How are you solving it? That’s news. And so, to your point on the communication, I always, always preach no longer than 250 words in your first email. It sounds super short, but all of my editor friends have told they get over a hundred to 150 emails a day of pitches that literally on top of every other news thing that come into the inbox,
RV (10:53):
Wow. They
PD (10:54):
Are not gonna read no longer do you just send that a press release. You’ve got to really build that relationship. And then the art of crafting a pitch is more critical than ever now. For sure.
RV (11:06):
Yeah. And it isn’t, it’s an art and it’s like anything, I mean, it’s, it’s like, are you likely to open your mailbox and mm-hmm.
PD (11:45):
RV (11:46):
PD (11:47):
Number two is tapping into what you just said as well, is serving them content. So becoming a contributor to their outlet and serving them with their expertise. So this works really well. Like, let’s take Fast company for example, right? And you are an expert in kind of business and innovation and even like team structure and management, reach out to the editors and share your story idea, right? Don’t ask them if you can be a contributor ’cause mm-hmm.
PD (12:37):
And nine times Outta 10, because they are desperate for content. Because teams are leaner than ever at all of these media brands, and there’s just not enough of them to create content. And so if you can really provide value as a contributor, also known as a bylined article, right? You get your name listed on Fast Company’s website, and if it’s picked up in print, the magazine, and you start to build that relationship of credibility with that brand serving them. So when you do go in for an ask for your book, you’ve already provided them immense value mm-hmm.
RV (13:20):
Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean I, there’s a couple things there going on. One, I love like treat it like a date, right? Don’t show up and ask to get married. Like, Hey, I wanna be a monthly contributor, right? Like, let’s go on a, let’s go on a date. Let me pick, you know, here’s an idea for a story. Mm-Hmm.
PD (13:42):
Yes, yes. Easy. Yes. Rory. And so many outlets are literally calling and needing it and quality content because like I said, they just don’t have the manpower to produce it anymore. Yeah. Unfortunately.
RV (13:55):
And just to pause, like a little side note here for you listening, if you’re a speaker or an aspiring speaker, you know, with speaking business is another thing that we know a lot about and have a lot of success with, and teaching people how to get speaking gigs. And we say, Hey, the number one reason you get booked to speak, which will never change, is because someone has seen you speak. That’s the, if you wanna be a speaker mm-hmm. You gotta go out and speak, but the number two way to get booked to speak is because someone has read something you have written. And you know, like a lot of speakers become speakers because they start writing. One is a book, which is much harder in longer process than you just start cranking these articles, you know, a couple times a week. And you know, I I, I think of, you know, I’ve got a couple friends, Dory Clark, Matthew Mayberry, like they have really built a great speaking career at a lot of it started from writing these articles and it’s almost better, like not almost better. Mm-Hmm.
PD (15:11):
Yes, it’s
RV (15:12):
Way more valuable.
PD (15:14):
It is. Ryan, I’m so glad you brought that up, because it leads to a much longer lifecycle right. Of promotion and opportunities for you doing this strategy. And like you said, it requires some upfront work, but nothing like, if you’ve already written a book, this is a walk in the park, right? This is nothing of your time. And the beautiful thing is you can pull elements from your book can serve as that content generator for years for you to pull from, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with what you’re writing about. Mm-Hmm. And you can
RV (15:43):
Find
PD (15:44):
Ways to thread the content together for soft promotion. But that is one strategy we help do immediately out of the gate, especially during pre-sale, right. In setting up those relationships and starting to build that awareness. It’s a great strategy to start, honestly now, like even if you haven’t thought of your book idea, just incorporate this into your media outreach plan.
RV (16:07):
Yeah. The the other thing that it does is it becomes a huge networking opportunity for you because you become a member of the media. Mm-Hmm. You go from trying to be mm-hmm. In the media
PD (16:15):
To
RV (16:16):
Being I am a, I am the media. Yes. And now you can network with pretty much anybody you wanna know because they, you, you’re in control of who gets mentioned in in that. The, the other thing I wanna mention here is on, on the, on the topic of like getting booked to speak from this mm-hmm.
PD (16:32):
RV (16:33):
And, and for beginners, you also don’t need to, it doesn’t have to be Forbes or entrepreneur No. Or fast company. Like those are the huge ones. But when you were saying they’re spread thin, the ones that are spread the most thin are the, like, trade industry journals. They gotta produce a magazine every month or every quarter.
PD (16:54):
Yes.
RV (16:54):
They’re begging their members to write an article. Nobody wants to do it. And yet, if you are in an industry or a vertical and you go, it’s easy to get those writing jobs and it’s literally, it may not have 500 million readers, but it’s gonna have a thousand of your perfect readers. And that’s, you know, that’s a really big key. You, you think
PD (17:18):
It is key, Rory, that is the other element of this. Make sure you’re contributing to where your target audience is, right? Mm-Hmm.
RV (17:51):
Create
PD (17:52):
A greater opportunity through those smaller publications.
RV (17:56):
Yeah. That, that’s the other thing is like, you’re never gonna get Forbes to send an email. Like even e even if you’re James Patterson, they’re not gonna send an email out about your book. No. But, but if you, if you have some relationships with some of these smaller ones, and that’s part of the deal mm-hmm.
PD (18:41):
I think that first mistake is that people do not plan PR the same way that they plan on writing a book. PR is always like an afterthought. Like, they’re like, oh crap, my book comes out in 60 days. I don’t have the sales I wanted. I need to do, you know, like, now is the time to start. No minimum, I beg you authors to start at least six months out because in media news cycles, it can take that long to place impactful stories. So the ones of the bigger outlets, the bigger podcasts, right, the bigger articles you need that longer lead time. And that’s probably the number one pain point that I see when authors come to us, is they’re scrambling. Right? And it doesn’t have to be that way. The second thing is, I always recommend you plan for a year strategy also, not counting pre-sale, but from when your book launches following that year. Because so many authors, and you’ve seen this already,
RV (19:37):
You’re saying post public, you’re saying post-publication,
PD (19:40):
Post pub, all the way through your year anniversary, have a robust media plan. ’cause Too many authors I’ve seen, they do amazing presale and amazing that first month of pub and then their media just like drops off and they’re, you know, it’s just sprinkled throughout, but it’s a sprint, right? And you need to continue that sprint. And so when you’re looking at planning, of course you wanna bank many of those large episodes as you know, in pre-sale. But it’s just as important to continue that momentum, especially through that first year. And keep your eye on the media and focus on the pr part of the book as well, because that’s where you’re gonna continue to reach new audiences and garner new attention and continue to bring that sales momentum going instead of letting your sales dip and then trying to inflate it back up with media like three months later.
RV (20:33):
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I mean, you gotta, you gotta keep building the brand, building the platform being out there. So are there certain, are there certain mediums that you think mm-hmm.
PD (20:59):
Right?
RV (20:59):
And it can, it can help, but typically you have to be more focused. If you’re trying to make a sale like a conversion, you’ve gotta be doing other stuff far above and beyond pr. But, but when you,
PD (21:11):
Yes.
RV (21:12):
When you just go, what, what are the mediums or the outlets in PR that you think actually do move the needle on book sales? Like somebody going to buy, not just hearing about it, but actually going to make a conversion.
PD (21:27):
Do you know what we’ve seen the number one medium that sells through PR right now, books specifically is podcasting. Yeah.
PD (21:34):
So podcasts, podcast, podcast, which I know all of your listeners have probably heard before, but it’s still the leading way that converts to a sale, specifically when we’re talking about books. So what I already say is, don’t poo poo any podcast that might not seem like up to your elevation of where you think you should be. Right? Like, let’s not be too big for a britches if they have a target engage audience, those are customers and they’re waiting to buy your book. So it’s like you have to level set what you’re doing with podcasting during a book launch. Like, yes, your end goal might be on your podcast, Rory, it may be on Lewis’s podcast, but let’s also look at the, just like trade media. Let’s look at the ones that still have similar target audiences and do as many podcasts as you can. ’cause That is a huge driver. The other one, Rory, and I know this can seem like a little bit of a stretch, but it still rings true TV converts to sales.
RV (22:34):
Hmm. And
PD (22:34):
So when I’m talking, but I’m talking about like nation national, right? So if you have a book, I mean, for example, anytime we have a client on today’s show or Good Morning America, it moves a thousand to 2000 books, right? Like it moves a significant number of books depending on kind of where you are known wise to the audience. So I know, and national can be kind of far out of reach for some people. And so what I say with that is like, don’t throw away the local TV station. Don’t throw away that opportunity thinking it’s too small for you because they feed up into the national station. So if you have interesting content and you book yourself on your local N B C, it is much more likely for you to get picked up nationally by taking that clip and sending it to the Today Show how you’ve already been on the affiliate and the reaction that you’ve had there. And it is a great proof point to then take to the national media as you pitch them for that opportunity.
RV (23:37):
Yeah. That’s also huge for your, for your speaker demo video and to put, you know, screenshots of it in your book proposal and in your PR to get yourself booked on other podcasts to show those clips of you on tv. Yeah. All of those, all of those things. Your, your media sizzle reel, the, the, yeah. Let’s talk, oh, one thing on the podcast is, you know, just to echo what you’re saying, you know, to, to become a Wall Street Journal, hardcover, business bestselling author, which is like one of the ma it’s the easiest major list to hit. Mm-Hmm.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
RV (24:11):
I say easy, it’s not really easy
Speaker 3 (24:13):
RV (24:13):
Like, you know, to hit the New York Times, you need to, to sell well north of 10,000 units in a week. But to hit the Wall Street Journal business list, it’s typically like a few thousand units, two or 3000 units. So you don’t need millions of people to buy your book in order to become a legit bestselling author, you know? Mm-Hmm.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
RV (24:33):
From a major, you know, reputable list. So if there’s a podcast and they have a thousand of your perfect person and you can get a thousand people to move and buy something like, that’s, that’s huge. Plus, you know, that’s, if you’re lucky enough to get on the Today Show, you might move a thousand copies that way. So, but that’s a thousand out of a bazillion people versus Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
You
RV (24:54):
Know, a thousand out of 5,000 because it’s your perfect audience. So I think that’s really good. You know, one I got one last question for you. Before we do that, I wanna let y’all know, so I mentioned at the start of the show, as you could see, right, Paige knows this space,
RV (25:43):
But in the subject line, I just want you to put book pr, that’s it. Just email us, put book PR in the subject line, send an email to [email protected]. And then we’ll have someone on our team connect you with Paige and walk you through, you know, the whole thing. So you can talk to her directly and her team and see how it works. And you know, I would say, you know, I can say this because I’m not in pr, we’ve seen a lot of people waste a lot of money on PR firms that don’t, they’re not accountable, they don’t have a good plan, they don’t do it, right. They do a total shotgun blanket approach. You know, they’re just sending out a giant press release and they’re not doing the kind of one-on-one follow-up work and building long-term relationships like Paige and her team. So, you know, it can be risky, risky business spending lots of money on pr. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
So, you
RV (26:32):
Know, make sure you’re, you’re working with somebody who knows what they’re doing. In this case we’re, we’re totally sure about that with Paige. So email us [email protected]. Yeah, of course, Paige. So one last quick question is on the tv, ’cause this is the, this is the dream, right? Good Morning America Today course show. You know, of
PD (26:51):
Course
RV (26:52):
What you know, I know you’ve, I know you’ve had that happen for clients when it happens, when you get the big national dream television hit
PD (27:02):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (27:04):
How do you get it? What, what are the series of events that led up to that producer saying, yes, I’ll do this. Like, I know it’s always a long shot, but what, what can we do to tip the odds in our favor for a big national TV hit?
PD (27:21):
The first is make sure you’re communicating with the right people. So both at today, good Morning America, c b s, they have specific book producers. So you need to make sure you’re a first talking to the right people. ’cause Too many times people just go to the general producer. That’s not their beat. You need to find the book producer and then to be able to, I mean, it takes a six month plus lead time. They book their spots for books six months out at minimum. So you need to give yourself runway. However, if you miss that window, what you wanna do is tie it to a breaking news or element that’s taking a conversation that’s taking place in society right now, whatever that might be. And you need to be able, again, they don’t care about the book. So you’ve gotta go in first starting with you as a tool and how you’re gonna solve this problem.
PD (28:17):
And it takes months of communication. Like to even, I have relationships with all the book producers and it takes us months of communication and understanding. ’cause There’s only so much airtime that the gift to books. And so you’ve got to be very strategic in how you communicate. And that’s by not spamming them with follow up. Right? What do you think? Do you like my book? How is this doing? What do you think? Right? Am I gonna get a spot like respect their inbox? So only communicate when they respond. You respond back and then give it a couple weeks. Don’t stay on top of it like it is your best friend because you will get blocked very quickly from the show. Mm-Hmm.
PD (29:07):
And again, just serve and interact with them on social. They get to see your name continue to pop up. They get to see your content, kind of psychological play, right? And just the power of how many times you’re introduced to them. And then if you’re realizing your pitch is not working, redo it. That’s what I think so many people are afraid of. They forget. It’s just like email testing, AB testing. Obviously they’re not biting over here. So do, is there a new research study out that you can tie that research into how it relates to your book that’s newsworthy to them? Is there a social trend that is happening that somehow ties into your book? Right? So have some type of element that it’s research-based or fact-based to go with your book and something that’s new and approach it that way if your first pitch isn’t working.
PD (29:59):
And then number three, it’s honestly not give up. So if you realize your book is just not hitting and coming through again, go back to this drawing board and reach out just as a source and an expert. I know it kind of sounds like being in a deb horse, but it’s relationship building. You’re retooling. You are not going in with thinking you’re gonna pitch and your book’s gonna end up tomorrow. You’ve gotta give yourself that runway to be able to do it. So the more you can connect with them on email serving and social, the more you can tailor your pitch to that six month timeframe and have it be something newsworthy and exciting. Or if it has a celebrity angle that you can tie to it mm-hmm.
RV (30:40):
PD (30:41):
More likely you’re gonna end up on national news. ’cause You have to think this is National Morning news is lifestyle, right? It’s lifestyle and news. So it’s talking about some politics, cultural elements, right? All of those. But also the second and third hour of those shows are heavily like health, fitness, books, wellness. And so that’s where you’ve gotta pitch your news. And the book editor sit is typically in that second hour or third hour of the morning show.
RV (31:10):
I love it. I love it. So many helpful tips, Paige. So I know practical, I’m so passionate.
PD (31:36):
Thank you.
Ep 433: Building Your Consulting Practice by Positioning Your Expertise | David Baker Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
All right, y’all. We are gonna talk about how to build your consulting practice by positioning your expertise. And I say consulting but you could be a trainer, a coach, a speaker, an author but this is consultative approach to what you do. How can we build that by positioning your expertise? And this was motivated. This was inspired by a conversation that I had with David Baker, who was a recent guest on the influential Personal Brand podcast. And I thought this was relevant enough to a break it away and have a separate conversation around this idea of expertise and really overcoming the challenge of being a generalist, which really just means overcoming the temptation to say yes to everything I suffer from that. I know you suffer from it.
AJV (01:04):
So we say yes to all of them most of them not in our wheelhouse, not where we feel like we’re a, you know, a deep expert, but we feel confident enough or well versed enough that we can go learn it, figure it out, or do good enough. And then what accidentally happens, and I see this happen all the time, all around me, is that all of a sudden, without effort and without intention, you have become known for something that you don’t want to be known for. You have strayed away from your natural giftings, your uniqueness, and the things that you do better than anyone else because you have said yes to the wrong things for long enough that now people come to you for things that you aren’t as good at. It’s not your passion, it’s not your expertise. And you wonder why you feel like you’re working all the time.
AJV (01:58):
You’re burnt out and you’re tired. You’re tired.
AJV (02:49):
I have to study, I have to ask questions, ask. But when I stay in my lane, my expertise where I have knowledge like nobody’s business, right? It’s like, I could do this in my sleep. I could talk about it in my sleep. I live it, I eat it. I breathe it. Yes, I can help you with that. I feel a hundred percent confident in it. It doesn’t feel like work. Why? Because it comes natural to me, because I have spent most of my life doing it, learning about it, talking about it. And that’s what I do now. So the question is then why do we say yes to all this other random stuff? And I believe it’s for one of two reasons. One, we have a scarcity mindset, or we’ve got fomo,
AJV (03:39):
Because I, I don’t know if my next deal or my next client, I don’t know, right? I’m scared of the economy. I’m scared of the money in my banking account. I’m scared that I can’t generate a lead. I’m, I’m scared, right? It’s scarcity in this fear induced pattern, or it’s this kind of FOMO thing of you’re, you’re in the middle of a land grab, right? You’re like, I gotta take it all. I gotta grab market share why? It’s up. It’s like I’m new, so I gotta take everyone. It’s like I gotta get my reputation built up. And that happens by saying yes to everything. And it’s like, that’s also not right. I’m, and there’s some middle ground in there. And yes, I know that there are some times where we gotta take on business because we gotta, we have mouth to feed and bills to pay.
AJV (04:21):
And it’s like, you just gotta take it. But there’s a, that’s a finite amount of time, and it should be in only desperate situations. Because what we should be doing is narrowing our focus, honing in on that expertise. And so people know when to come to you because they know what you do. And it is crystal clear because you have made it crystal clear because your positioning is right. Your branding is right. Your talking points are right. Your, your conversation is right. Who you work with is, right? It is clear. But what muddies up the water is when you start adding in stuff that now your expertise is just broadened to the point of, well, I can do a little of sales, I can do a little leadership. Sure, I could probably talk about billing and some customer service. And all of a sudden that honed in focus on sales is so broad that you’re like, well, sales is everything.
AJV (05:20):
And so people go, well, I don’t know what to hire you for. And now you’ve muddied the water so much that people aren’t clear. So don’t do that. How do we do that? How do we not do that? Right? Here’s a few things that I thought was really wise from this conversation with David Baker. And I thought, this is fascinating and interesting. ’cause I hear people at Brand Builders group say all the time, well, man, I just, I think I’ve run out of things to say. It’s like everything that I have to say about it, it’s in my book, or it’s in this. And it’s like, well, maybe that’s not true. And I love David said, the, with a narrow focus, you always have more to say with a narrow focus. You always have more to say. The more narrow your focus, the more you have to say.
AJV (06:12):
And as I was listening to him, I just had this immediate thought about my husband and business partner, Rory Vaden. Now Rory is seemingly an extrovert, seemingly but really he is a secret introvert. And I have given him a hard time, most of our marriage and even dating relationship of he’s not a great general conversationalist. And I am like, baby, like you need to learn how to make small chat. And he’s like, I don’t know how to do small chat. I don’t wanna do small chat. I’m not good in a networking social. But here’s one of the things that I think is so fascinating. Every so often we’ll meet a new couple or meet a new set of friends or, you know, whatever. And when a topic of his expertise comes up, he is the ultimate chatterbox
AJV (07:10):
And where, where did all these works come from? He’s like, we could go weeks when he’s like, I, I got nothing to say in these meetings or these environments until something comes up where he has something to say. And while David was talking, I immediately thought of Rory of going, that’s it. He has so much to say about a few things because on those things, he feels like I have something of value to give here. I have deep experience, I have deep expertise, I have a deep passion about it. And it’s like when those topics arise, you know, because the words are flowing, right? He is chatterbox central and when he doesn’t have anything to say on topics he doesn’t feel confident in or he is not interested in, he’s like, I got nothing to say on this. I’ve got nothing to add. I’m gonna let those around me who have interest in that share.
AJV (08:05):
And I thought that was a really good example to me of going, man, you don’t run out of things to say when it’s a topic that you feel like you have true expertise in, because you’ve done the research, you have these conversations. You think about it, you research, you read about it, you talk about it. So there is always something to say. And so there is always more to say when that topic is narrow, because that’s where your focus is. So you look at the, look at things through the lens of that narrow focus, and then new things start to rise all the time through that. And that was just a great highlighted moment of like, even in my personal life of going, and there is so much power in the value that you provide when you narrow in your expertise, when you narrow in your focus of going, man, it’s like, I know when I wanna talk about anything X, Y, and Z, who to go to, right?
AJV (09:01):
Because I know that they are a deep expert in it. They are read up. They are ready to share and provide value that happens when you choose something that has a more narrowed focus and it gives you more opportunity to provide value. So back to that, it’s like talking about a narrow focus gives you more to say, not less to say. And I love that. And David actually said in our conversation, he said, an author is just someone who uses a book to force you, the author, to think about what you have to say. He said, that’s the power of writing a book on a narrow focus is that you spend all this time trying to say a lot about a little versus saying a little about a lot. It’s like, go deep in a subject matter, not wide go deep, right? But an author’s goal is to figure out how do I have enough to say about this narrow focus that I can fill 200, 250 pages of words that are about this singular thing?
AJV (10:04):
So you have to learn how to say a whole bunch about a little, right? A a generalist says a little about a lot. An expert says a lot about a little. And that same thing could go, you don’t have to be an author to do that. Speaker a blogger a content creator for social media. It doesn’t matter, but it’s honing in that focus. And the gist of this really comes down to you have to be willing to talk about what you have to say in order for you to figure out what you actually have to say. There is an art and a practice of the more you write about it, the more you talk about it, the more you learn about it, the more you read about it, the more you research it, you figure out, you distill, right? You filter through all of this stuff for you to figure out, this is what I actually have to say.
AJV (10:59):
And the more that you do that, you are positioning yourself of being a true expert. And the more that you do that you can charge more and have fewer clients, which means you can have more time to expand on other things that you have passion and interest in. So back to the topic at hand, it’s like how do you build your consulting practice By positioning your expertise is you become known for one thing. And that’s because your branding is, your branding is aligned, your conversation is aligned, your clients are aligned, your service offerings are aligned with a narrow focus. ’cause You don’t have to be a big firm to make a lot of money, and you don’t have to have millions of followers to make millions of dollars. Being a small firm, being a solopreneur is not a bad thing. It’s the right thing
AJV (11:53):
For the right person. So you don’t have to go big to be really, really good
AJV (12:00):
At what you do.
Ep 432: Charge More by Doing Less with David Baker
AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is AJ Vaden here today, and super excited get to interview a, a fellow Nashvillian today. And also David is a, a brand new acquaintance of mine. I actually got cold pitch pitched him, which I, one out of a hundred times will say yes to those. But I thought this conversation looked super interesting. So I thought this would be worth coming onto our show because he is teaching the business of expertise. And as you guys all know, we talk a lot about the importance of being an expert in your field on this show. So what a better way to kick off today’s show with some conversation around what it means to be an expert and the pros and cons and everything in between. So, before I formally introduce David, I just want to give you a little preview of why you stick, need to stick around to the very end.
AJV (00:59):
I would say these are some of the highlights that I kind of pulled out of this, but I’m like, yeah, I wanna, I wanna know the answers to these things. So if you have a question around why long-term relationships could be dangerous for your advisory practice, then you’re gonna wanna stick around if you wanna talk about productizing your service offerings. ’cause I know so many of us are constantly going, man, like, how do I get out of the business of exchanging time for money, constantly time for money? Then this is an interview for you, and if you wanna just in general talk about how to position yourself as an expert, then this is a show that you don’t wanna miss. So, stick around. Don’t fast forward, don’t hang up early. Listen to the entire show. And then you can also catch the recap episode shortly after this.
AJV (01:49):
So now let me formally introduce you to David Baker. Here’s something that’s fascinating. He grew up with a tribe of Mayan and Inmans Indians in Guatemala. And we were just talking. He said, why is your zoom in Spanish? And I’m like, oh my gosh. I was just in Mexico and I couldn’t get it out. And he was like, oh, well, you know, I speak Spanish. I grew up in Guatemala, but not just grew up in Guatemala. Grew up with Mayan Indians. He’s also a airplane pilot, a photographer. He rides motorcycles. He lives here in Nashville, which is a super plus for me. But his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, fast Company, U Ss a Today, Inc. Magazine, Forbes. I could go on and on and on, but instead of me telling you about him, why don’t I just introduce him? So, David, welcome to the show.
DB (02:37):
Thank you. Thank you. You got me all excited about sticking around for this. It’s like, wow, that’s sounds interesting. And how did I not pick up that? You’re in Nashville too. I, I when you told me that just a minute ago, I thought, well, how have we not met? I know. Yeah. That’s, that’s great. Thank you for having me.
AJV (02:53):
Love getting to meet other people who live in Nashville. ’cause I feel like so many of my friends today don’t live here. So when I meet somebody else who’s local, it’s a, it’s an extra treat. So as we get into this conversation just to help our audience a and b get to know you a little bit better, can you just kind of give us like a high level overview of how did you go from growing up in Guatemala to moving to Nashville, to writing books, to speaking and podcasting? Like how did this all come about?
DB (03:23):
Well, I’m a total fraud, and this is the, I’ve chosen to say that on your podcast the first time. No, I, my parents were medical missionaries. That’s how I grew up in Guatemala. So, lived in Costa Rica for a year while they learned Spanish, very poorly, learned it
DB (04:11):
And then one day, just with a lot of hubris, honestly, I was talking with my wife. I was sitting on the couch and I said, you know what? The ads in this local newspaper really suck. They’re just like, I could do better than this. I don’t know anything about it, but I think I could do better. So I started an ad agency, didn’t know, had never worked at one, didn’t know anybody else in the field, did it for six years. And it was a pretty ordinary, average firm, you know, it, it was successful, but not wildly successful. But as a part of that process, I subscribed to a newsletter. And part of what came with that subscription is that you could ask the newsletter editor questions for free. I think it was, that was his way of just staying in touch with the market. And one day I said to him, why don’t, why don’t you advise your clients rather than just doing a newsletter?
DB (05:02):
Why don’t you do consulting for them? And he gave me his reasons for why he wasn’t interested, but he said, why don’t you do it? And before I could even think about that, the answer to it, I, he said, and I’ll just put an ad in the newsletter, and you just gimme 10% of whatever you make. And I didn’t think much would come of it, but it seemed like kind of an interesting idea. And people started calling, and very quickly, within six months, it just completely took my life over. I think people were hungry for just business advice. And so that it was somewhat accidental, but I embraced it very quickly with sort of a combination of some expertise and a lot of curiosity and willingness to kind of be out in front of my skis a lot. And since then, obviously it’s been, that just really started the process of learning. And so I just, I feel like I’m just learning a lot all the time and helping people in the process process. So that was 30 years ago, next March when I started this firm and worked all across the world with thousands of firms, and just really love what I do. So I, I’m completely irrelevant to most of the world, but I want to be deeply relevant to a small part of it. And that’s small consulting, branding sort of firms.
AJV (06:16):
Well, I love that. ’cause I think that’s all of our challenges, right? If we try to be everything to everyone, then we are nothing to no one
DB (06:35):
Six, but only four of them were any good, but, so let’s just say four. Yeah.
AJV (06:41):
So a, a huge part of the audience that listens to this show. It’s also, you know, an aspiring author, aspiring speaker. Mm-Hmm. And so what would you say is like, how have you written so many books? Like what would you say is your inspiration? What’s your process and how do you find time to do that in also the midst of all the other stuff you have going on?
DB (07:02):
Hmm. Gosh, I love that question. Not many people ask it. I, I really, really love that question. You know, I think it starts in my mind with having a business that makes enough money that I don’t have to work all the time. So, a business that delivers enough extra time for me to, without any guilt, spend time working on it. That’s part of the answer. I think the other is that I feel like at my core, I’m an author who happens to be a speaker, and who happens to be a consultant. I’m, I’m really feel like I ha I have to say things, even if nobody’s listening, I have to say things. And so, what really makes me think I love this question is, so I, I’m getting ready to do a talk next week, and it’s a new one. I never give the same talk again.
DB (07:53):
I just can’t do it. I, I’m not saying you shouldn’t, I’m just saying I can’t do it. So I’m thinking about what am I gonna talk about? And the topic is, surely there’s more. And then realize, oh my gosh, do I really have anything new to say? And I, I just, just for fun, I added up all the stuff I’ve written, and it ended up being 2 million, 400,000 words over the last published words. So, and a 10th of those are across all of the books, right? So 90% were in other things, articles or podcast episodes or whatever. And so many things hit me after I realized that it’s like, okay, with a narrow focus focus, you, you never run out of things to say, now you think you’re going to, but the narrow your focus, the more you never run out of things to say, I have more unwritten articles now where I have the idea that I’ve ever had in my life, even after written two, 2.4 million words.
DB (08:50):
That’s one thing. The other is that I, like, not that many people read the articles I write, but the articles create an audience who then are going to buy the books and the articles are how I work out what I think. And those things get shaped into a book, right? So if I’d written a book without all of that, all those years of work writing articles, then I wouldn’t have an audience and I wouldn’t have thought through all of these things. So I feel like there’s sort of this mix, this weird mix. You’ve got to have a blog or something that forces you on a regular basis, maybe it’s a podcast, whatever it is that forces you to keep figuring out what you think mm-hmm.
AJV (10:03):
Hmm.
DB (10:03):
I’ll never figure that out until I start writing. So it’s not, oh, clarity. Now, let me write that down. No, it’s like, until I, I wrestle with articulating what I’m thinking, then the clarity comes. So to me, writing is how I figure out what I think.
AJV (10:19):
Hmm. That’s so good. And I loved your comment too about, you know, blogging or even podcasting or just creating content, whatever it is, it’s like, that is the arc of figuring out what you have to say. It’s, it, it takes practice, right? It’s like with anything, in order to be good at anything, you have to do it a lot. And the same thing goes with our thoughts and what we have to say. I love that. Yeah.
DB (10:43):
Yeah. I mean, you’re, so you’re doing this podcast and you’re doing it, I think it’s twice a week, right? Or, you know, it’s regularly. And there are probably times when you think, oh, today I am so excited about another time. It’s like, I don’t know really what I’m gonna say. I don’t know, do I have anything new to add? But this forces you to be on stage and people like you and me and your listeners, we don’t wanna look stupid. Yeah.
AJV (11:07):
We
DB (11:07):
Don’t wanna look stupid. And we’re trying to, we’re like, I wanna stand in front of a group, and then I want to open it up for questions, and I want to not fear a single question that would come my way. And unless you keep putting yourself on the stage in a light, you’re you, you don’t refine what you think. Right. Because, and what forces you to refine it is you don’t wanna look stupid. That’s just, it’s a natural instinct. Right?
AJV (11:33):
Oh, I love that. It’s the whole concept. It’s like, I love that just that idea of like, you can only refine what you think if you talk about it all the time. Right?
DB (11:41):
Right. Yeah.
AJV (11:42):
And I think that, you know, for most people, you know, myself included, sometimes it’s like we struggle with wanting to be a generalist. Like we struggle with, oh, you know, I just think about the amount of speaker press, Kitts that I review for our community at Brand Builders Group. And it’s like, I can speak on nutrition, health, fitness, mindset, goal setting. And I’m like, no, you can’t
DB (12:06):
Yeah. Yeah. I
AJV (12:06):
Can’t. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And I love that too. It’s like your entire thing is that like, like narrow it down, right? That’s the, that’s the goal of expertise, right? Mm-Hmm.
DB (12:47):
AJV (13:36):
Mm-Hmm.
DB (13:36):
That then allows you to have excess opportunity that you can waste some of. So if, if you’ve got two options, two potential clients that wanna hire you, then you just choose the one that’s the better client. That doesn’t take any courage at all. But what takes a lot of courage is to say no to one opportunity that isn’t a great fit. So don’t put yourself in those positions. Put yourself in a position where you don’t have to muster all that courage. It’s not a question of knowing the right thing, it’s a question of having the right courage. Hmm. So I I just added a second person recently, but up for all these years, it was just me. Okay. And Billings were somewhere between 900001.7 million, and that’s taking about 10 weeks off a year. I’m not proud of that. We don’t use all that money. We don’t need all that money. That’s not, I’m not saying that I’m better than anybody that way, I’m just saying mm-hmm.
AJV (14:33):
DB (14:33):
Can, you can make a lot of money. You don’t have to be a big firm to make a lot of money. And what that, what that income allows me to do, what it gives me is the freedom to go out and figure things out and then write books, and then that just layers better marketing on top and more opportunity. I can be choos or, and choos or, and it’s just this cycle that repeats and helps make you better and better. Right. The world is just way too complex anymore to pretend that you can know everything about everything you, I’m feeding back to the comment you just made about the generalist, right? Like, people don’t pay a lot of money for generalists. They just don’t, they want, like, if you’re in a messy divorce or some kind of bankruptcy or whatever it is that’s, or a medical issue in your life, all you care about is hiring somebody that knows exactly how to help you in this situation. And, and the money doesn’t matter. Right. But when it’s like you need something done around your house and you just find a handyman that can do most anything and maybe not great at anything, that’s good enough. Right? Like, this is how we think and that’s how our clients think too.
AJV (15:41):
Yeah. I think, you know, one of the things that people struggle with so much is being afraid to be narrow. Mm-Hmm.
DB (15:50):
AJV (15:50):
Right. They’ve got FOMO
DB (16:02):
Right, right.
AJV (16:03):
I know that in my previous consulting life, I said yes to all kinds of stuff that I should not have said yes to. ’cause I’m like, ah, if they can do it, I can do it. I’ll figure it out. Mm-Hmm. But then it took 10 times the amount of time and effort and energy and resources to go and do that for the same price. Mm-Hmm.
DB (16:19):
I
AJV (16:19):
Guess it wasn’t that thing that I could do in my sleep. Right,
DB (16:22):
Right.
AJV (16:23):
Yeah, go ahead.
DB (16:24):
Well, I was just gonna say that sort of ties in with the whole idea of packaging productizing your services too, right? Because you want the efficiency that comes from doing, like, you, you should be leading that relationship. You’re not simply listening to what a client needs, and then you’re taking orders like a waiter would and says, oh, you need that, that, that, okay, now I’ll put, I’ll put together the perfect solution for you. No, it’s like, you’ve done this enough that you know generally what they need, so much so that you can put together a package and either they buy the package or they don’t, and if they buy the package, this allows you to be very efficient in how you work with clients. It also allows you to notice the patterns from one client to the next because you’re doing similar things for each of them. So it just, it, it really builds your practice better.
AJV (17:15):
Yeah. And I love that. So let’s talk about that for a second because that was one of the other things that you had said earlier, is this idea of productizing, right? Mm-Hmm. Your service offerings. So what do you mean by that? How do you do that? Like, what advice would you give people out there going Yes, yes. Like, how do you do that? Help me. Help me. Yeah.
DB (17:33):
Yeah. So here, here’s an illustration. So let’s say I’m going under the knife for surgery, and I’m a little bit nervous, and I talk to the, you know, the, the anesthesiologist will come in first, and, and then the surgeon will come in and they’ll ask you some questions. And usually it’s very perfunctory. But what if you just slowed that down a little bit and you said, Hey, I’m nervous. Can you tell me how you do this? Like, what, what are the steps that you follow? Here’s what you don’t want to hear to the dancer. It’s like, well, listen, I’ve done this a lot. You really need to trust me. I’m just gonna cut you open first. That’s the first thing I always do. Then I’m just gonna kind of look around and figure out what seems like it’s in the right place and what isn’t.
DB (18:15):
And depending on, you know, and like, no, you want, you want 17 steps in order. You want to know that they have done this many times before, that they’re an expert, and you’re, you’re putting yourself in the hands of somebody else. Now, a consulting relationship is not quite as important or critical as that, but your clients have a right to know how you think in advance, what, how you think about certain things and how you go about things. Because what they want to know is that you have applied a process in the past, and if you apply the same process for them, it’s likely to result in something good for them. Right? There’s a good result at the end of it. Productizing your service means that you you approach things in a pretty normal way and this in a regular way. And that regular way should be informed by your, your positioning, right?
DB (19:17):
So, my productized service should be very different than yours. And I also use a productized service to protect myself. So if a client comes to me and they’re sort of a hot mess, they just need lots and lots of help, and I wanna help them, right? But they want a fixed price. And I’m thinking, man, I don’t have any idea. I I don’t wanna learn all this on my own dime and figure this out for you. Like with an unpaid proposal that’s 80 pages long or something, I, I want to protect myself. So if I’m gonna give you a fixed price, I’m gonna have to shoot really high to protect myself. That’s not in your best interest either. So let’s start with a diagnostic or a road roadmapping exercise. Maybe it lasts for two weeks. Mm-Hmm.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
DB (19:59):
It’s $10,000 or 20 or five or whatever it is. And if you’re gonna start going down the productized path, that’s what you would always start with, is how a relationship begins. Picture that you’re on a plane with somebody, you’re both in first class, you’re just chatting. It turns out that they’re possibly a client of yours, they’re a candidate client, they’re not happy with whoever they’re using now. And they’re so intrigued that they say, you know what? This is really interesting. I can’t believe we just kind of ran into each other here. How would you start with somebody like me? You ought to be able to pull up a webpage and say, this is exactly how we start. We call it this. It costs this, it takes this long. This is what it involves. That’s productizing your service offerings. And that’s how you do it to start with at the beginning. And then you can productize everything else as well down the line.
AJV (20:49):
Yeah. No, I love that. It’s like the first product that you sell is a diagnostic.
DB (20:54):
Yeah. Right. Right.
AJV (20:54):
I said, I can’t tell you what you need until I get in there and know what you need.
DB (20:59):
Yeah. Right. Right. Exactly. And, and this ought to be at least as profitable as anything else you do for the client. This should not be a loss leader, right? This is not, you shouldn’t have on your website. Click here for a free 60 minute consultation. It’s like, no, you’re giving away your very best thoughts at that point. Instead, those early conversations should be about whether it’s a good fit. Like, tell me what you’re, what you’re facing, and let me tell you how I approach things and, and how I think about these kinds of things now. Okay. It seems like it’s a good fit. Now let’s do this diagnostic and really figure out what’s wrong, and then we’ll spend the rest of the money way more effectively, rather than just sort of bouncing around at the beginning without knowing where we’re headed.
AJV (21:47):
Now, would you also suggest when people come back from a, you know, diagnostic research type of engagement, that they also have a, a set suite of offerings? Yes. Or, yeah. So can we talk
DB (21:59):
Absolutely about that
AJV (22:00):
A little bit? Like how do people determine like, what are my suite of offerings?
DB (22:04):
Yeah. In
AJV (22:05):
Consultative arrangement.
DB (22:07):
That’s, it’s really good to think about that one. And so not too far from where you’re, where you live. I think it’s at the what’s the mall? The really big, the Green Hills Mall near where you live, right? Mm-Hmm.
AJV (22:30):
45 pages long. Yes.
DB (22:33):
DB (23:31):
‘Cause This is the best client relationships mean that we do these things for you. Otherwise, and this is particularly true, if you have a large firm with a lot of people doing different things, if they don’t wanna use this one third of your services, then you’re gonna lose a lot, lot of money because these people are just sitting around, right? So the best advisors lead the relationship and they’re gonna listen to what the client thinks they need, but then they’re going to say, nah this is what you really need. You need this list of services. And so it should be very specific. It should be in order, and there should be less and less variety around them. And if more and more clients aren’t using a particular thing, then just drop it off. It’s hard to be more specific than that. But generally, you always want a first one, like that road roadmapping thing you were talking about.
DB (24:18):
And then you probably want four or five or six other things on there. If people wanna get a sense of how to productize their services, we just released a completely new website. And I like I’m not sure your listeners or clients of mine, I’m not saying it for that reason, but they might want to look at the service offering. So they’re all very specific. They’re packaged in different ways. They’re all priced. That’s how you want to think about it. You want to get away from Cheesecake Factory menu towards the fixed price sort of menu.
AJV (24:45):
Yeah. What’s what, what website should you go to? If you picked,
DB (24:49):
Oh, sorry. Yeah, I didn’t even say right. Punctuation.Com. Yeah, it just released yesterday. So
AJV (24:54):
Punctuation.Com, if you wanna go, just check out what a suite of offerings mm-hmm.
DB (25:09):
Right? Right,
AJV (25:10):
Right. A huge part of this, it’s like when you offer less, then you can become better at it, which means you can charge more for it. Right. You can charge at a, a premium. But it’s like when you have 20, 30 things that you’re trying to do, it’s like, then you’re never doing the same thing enough to go, man, I can literally do this in my sleep. Yeah. It doesn’t mean near enough time to complete the same task. And
DB (25:34):
Don’t you think there’s sort of a dirty secret in our industry that many of us in our hearts don’t really believe we’re worth the money?
AJV (25:42):
Oh, yeah,
DB (25:43):
Definitely. And, and so we overdeliver, we, we keep checking in more than we need to. We write reports that are totally unnecessary, and let it, let’s just like, if you wanna report, take notes, I mean, that’s how we ought to think about this stuff, right? But we’re still, we’re so oversensitive about delivering value that we’re undercutting ourselves constantly. And if you are, I wrote a more recent book called Secret Trade Craft, and one of the things I said in there is that as you mature in your particular field, you should deliver less for more. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (26:27):
Delivered
DB (26:28):
To clients to justify your views because you were you were not very confident, right? Yeah. And, and, and you strip all that stuff out and you get to the core of what they need to hear. And this is really, really valuable because experts know how to cut to the chase. Right. And they’re not embarrassed by how simple their advice is that, anyway, I just wanna, I I, I wish I could preach that from the mountaintops,
AJV (26:54):
DB (27:23):
Yeah.
AJV (27:24):
I now know why this book is constantly selling thousands of copies every single week. Mm-Hmm.
DB (27:42):
Mm-Hmm.
AJV (27:46):
Right name. Clear
DB (27:58):
Mm-Hmm.
AJV (27:59):
And there’s power in that. So I love that. I love that idea of productizing it by starting with a diagnostic and then, then you can go, okay, all the things I offer, you need one, four, and five.
DB (28:10):
Right, exactly. Right. Yeah. And I know how to charge for it. We don’t have to waste a lot of time figuring that out. Right. No scoping questions.
AJV (28:18):
I love that. That’s so, it’s, it’s good sage advice for all of us where we feel like we have to offer everything to remember. No, you don’t.
DB (28:27):
Yeah. No, you don’t. It’s motivated, it’s motivated by our own insecurities more than it is. And when you have a client who’s pushing you to deliver everything, they’re not a qualified client. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (28:36):
DB (28:37):
Like a qualified client trusts you to do just what they need and not, and not waste their time with anything extra.
AJV (28:43):
And that’s where that courage to say, no, you’re not of me. No, I don’t do that. That really comes in. I love that. So, so good. That’s such wanted advice. Okay, next question. ’cause I know I’m watching the clock and I promised, you know, 45 minutes. But I would love to know like, what are some of these like, positioning mistakes that people make? So we’ve been kind of talking about, you know, this idea of like, position yourself in a way that you are this expert mm-hmm.
AJV (29:27):
And now they’re like, how do I get out of this? Mm-Hmm.
DB (30:04):
Mm-Hmm.
DB (31:01):
And if you want, I leave this out, but if you want, did you enjoy the work? So those three things, and you’re gonna end up with this map of maybe five to 20 different options, right? Then the next thing you do is try to draw a circle around the things that you’re going to include in your new positioning. And this is where the tension comes, because your tendency is to want to draw the biggest circle possible so that you don’t waste any of the opportunity that you’ve had, right? Mm-Hmm.
DB (31:56):
It’s like, nah, you can’t really do that
AJV (33:24):
DB (33:48):
That right? That’s a more human approach, right? It’s a more human approach. It acknowledges how difficult it is. Like the, the way you said that just a second ago is like that logically, literally that’s what you should say. But it’s not what we humans do. Yeah. It’s just too hard, right? So, yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think we just need to recognize that this is a hard thing, right? What I don’t wanna do is, I don’t wanna wake up one day and realize it’s like hit myself on the head. It’s like, shoot, my business is, has been shaped entirely by what other people want me to do.
AJV (34:20):
Hmm.
DB (34:21):
Now, in a way, you kind of have to do some of that, right? You can’t just create a business that nobody
AJV (34:34):
DB (34:35):
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, right? Your clients want you to do this ’cause they love you. Well, that would make that client happy, but then what’s gonna happen to your life? I mean, you have, your business has got to serve you the business. It, you, you’ve gotta be in charge of this thing, right? Don’t let the, don’t wake up one day and realize, okay, I started this business years ago because I wanted more time, I wanted more money, and I wanted more control. And now I look at my business six years later and I realize I’m spending too much time working. I’m working harder than I was. I’m making less money and I don’t have as much control that is messed up, right? Mm-Hmm.
AJV (35:19):
DB (35:34):
And
AJV (35:34):
It’s like, well, it’s so full because I jam packed it full. That’s why. Yeah. No one else to blame just me. But it’s that, you know, it’s back to, it’s hard to say no.
DB (35:45):
It is, it is.
AJV (35:46):
It’s a lot of clarity, a lot of courage to go, that’s not good for me. Even though it might feel good when I say yes. Yeah. It’s not good for me, not good for business to be like that.
DB (35:59):
And you’ve gotta make some brutal decisions that are going to disappoint some people, right? I, I’m not a particularly a religious person, but there, there’s this story of Jesus walking through this town, and he had the power to heal everybody. And I’ve, by just touching them, and I’m wondered, you know what, why didn’t he just touch everybody? Hmm. Like, and that’s sort of like you and you, you’re not, we’re not Jesus, but we, we have the power to help a lot of people, and it’s really hard to walk away from that. But, you know, you’ve gotta put your own oxygen mask on first. And some of the things that look really selfish, if you didn’t, if you’d never heard that repeated at the beginning of flights all the time, and you saw parents putting their own masks on first before they help their kids, you’d think, well, geez, that is selfish. No, no. It’s, it’s, it’s how more of us are gonna survive than not. And we have to keep there’s just, there’s so much. When you are good at something and you’re a genuinely good person, you wanna help everybody. But that is sometimes done at the expense of who you are and the other people in your life, and it’s just gotta stop.
AJV (37:14):
Hmm. That is so good. You can say that 1000 more times because we all need to hear it. We all need to hear it. And the, the truth is, and I love that story about Jesus and it as it relation to how we run our businesses, it’s like we aren’t meant to help everyone,
DB (37:31):
Right?
AJV (37:31):
Like we are uniquely positioned to help the people that we were meant to help.
DB (37:36):
Yeah. And
AJV (37:37):
If we stay focused on that, we will help more. Yeah. In the right ways that we are, you know, only we can do. And I love that. That’s so good. All right, I’ve got one last question for you.
DB (37:47):
Okay.
AJV (37:48):
How do you make your, you, your expertise or what I would say your uniqueness, how do you make that more narrow mm-hmm.
DB (38:10):
Mm-Hmm.
DB (39:11):
And if you find a lot more than that, then you’ve got to narrow it further, right? If you find less than that, then you’re probably gonna run out of opportunity and you need sufficient opportunity. You don’t want to go into any specialist sort of advisory role, assuming that you can lock up more than about 1% of the opportunity. And so the math is pretty deep, it’s talked about in the book, but that’s how you decide exactly how narrow to go. And so, so you’re broad and you picture yourself walking towards the right solution. And there are two things that will stop you on this path. As you walk from generalist to specialist. The first thing that might stop you is courage. And you just gotta get over that, right? The second thing, the legitimate thing that would force you to stop on that path is running out of opportunity. So you want to be in that special place where there’s not too many competitors, but still enough opportunity. And that math is 10 to 200 competitors.
AJV (40:10):
Hmm. That’s good. I love that. And I think too, it’s like many of us, I think we forget to look around and go, what is everyone else doing? Not that we should do what we do based on what others are doing, but it’s still good to have that comparative analysis of what is out there, what are people doing? Mm-Hmm. What are people charging, right?
DB (40:30):
Is
AJV (40:30):
There enough demand? Is there not enough demand? Not that it would change who we are and what we do, but mm-hmm.
DB (40:36):
AJV (40:36):
To have that comparative analysis of is there enough demand in the marketplace? Is there too much supply? You know, just basic laws of economics. Super.
DB (40:45):
Yeah. I mean, if we, we could apply that to your, your business. So the people who know branding, there are tens and thousands of those people, right? You apply branding in a very narrow way in your business, and that’s personal branding. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (41:10):
And it’s so funny because we left the world of, you know, corporate consulting and sales specifically in sales when we started Brain Builders Group. And it was a, a very decided decision of we don’t work with companies.
DB (41:26):
Mm-Hmm.
AJV (41:26):
We work with people, right?
DB (41:28):
And
AJV (41:29):
The hardest temptation in the last five years has been to say no to all the people that we work with. They’re like, oh, we love what you’re doing for us. Can you come do this for our company?
DB (41:39):
Right. Because
AJV (41:40):
It would’ve been so easy to go. Sure,
DB (41:42):
Yeah. I’m not,
AJV (41:44):
It applies and it’s been the hardest thing in the, it’s where we’ve been most disciplined of going, we don’t work with companies. We, in fact, we had to put it in all of our branding to hold ourselves accountable.
DB (41:55):
Right, right, right.
AJV (41:56):
It’s everywhere. So that we remind ourselves, oh yeah, we said we weren’t gonna do that.
DB (42:00):
Well, the best, the the best way to understand positioning is that there are a lot more things you don’t do than there are things that you do. Right? So it’s choosing a positioning is, is an exercise in irrelevance. Yeah. You’re becoming irrelevant to more and more people. And in the process you’re becoming more relevant to a smaller group.
AJV (42:19):
Love that. And I’ll say my drop on that comment, that was awesome. Such a great interview. I love also the narrow focus of the interview, which is apropos for the conversation. Y’all, if y’all wanna check out David and learn more about all the things that he does, go to david c baker.com. I also wanna give him a shout out for his I don’t think it’s your latest book, but it’s
DB (42:46):
The next to last book, right?
AJV (42:47):
Next to last book. It’s expertise is. So go to expertise is, I’ll put both of those in the show notes. David, if people wanna catch up with you on social media, is there one place that you would send them?
DB (43:02):
Probably LinkedIn David C. Baker, my middle initial, sometimes help you get to the right place. Or just the whatever, the slash dc b on LinkedIn. Happy to connect with people there.
AJV (43:13):
That’d be awesome. And we’ll put that in the show notes. Again, so check him out on his website. David C. Baker, connect with him on LinkedIn, and then go check out his book expertise Is is the website. Pick up a copy. Read it. David, pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank
DB (43:31):
You, AJ.
AJV (43:32):
And everyone else. Stay tuned for the recap episode and we will see you next time on the influential Personal brand.
Ep 431: How to Turn Your Personal Brand into a Worldwide Movement | Pat Flynn Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
So there’s a reason why Pat Flynn is a legend in the world of podcasting and just creating content and specifically creating community. And it’s the, it’s all the things that you heard on that interview. And if you didn’t listen to interview, go back and listen to it. I mean, pat is, I mean, he is one of the OGs of this space. He’s created this podcasting industry. He has impacted so many people, and you get to hear his philosophies. And that’s part of what I want to share with you now is what inspired me of what he said, like, what inspired me the most? Because, you know, it’s, it’s ironic that, you know, we titled that episode a, a after it, you know, we titled it How AI Will Reshape Customer and Member Experience. And I think the reality of how AI will shape that experience, if I had to summarize it up, is it will put more focus on the human elements, right?
RV (01:06):
Just like marketing automation and emails and things as, as automation comes in, creating automation in your business is not for the purpose of taking out or extracting the humanity of your business. It’s the opposite. You should be automating the routine things, automating the mundane things, automating the things that must be done as a baseline so that it creates the margin for you then to reinvest the time into the human experience, into the relationship, into the getting to know people, into transformation and changing people’s lives. And that’s what I think a lot of people don’t understand, or they, they do wrong, is they go, oh, I want to create, you know, some way to create massive passive income and not have to work or do anything for anybody. And, you know, maybe that strategy works, but I don’t, I don’t know of anybody that it works well for.
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The people who I know are winning are people like Pat, who are going, I’m using technology tools, automation, AI in the future as a way of creating a great experience and then adding the human element on top. You know? So as you, as we think about what is going to take your business to the next level, and what, how do you turn something from a personal brand into a world changing movement? And what does that, what does that look like? And, and right now as I’m recording this, I am texting back and forth with one of our private clients, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who wrote this book that is called Forever Strong. And this is amazing. What has happened with this woman is amazing. So she became one of my private clients. She came
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To my brand mastery event, which are these very micro group experiences that I lead in person. And we have usually only like five people there. And she came to one, several months ago, we were talking, you know, preparing and helping her with her book launch. Her book has taken off in, in an a way that like we’ve never seen. So she followed our whole system, followed our whole process, and everything we talk about is lighting the spark so that it will take off. That is what is happening with her book. Her book has been number five worldwide in all books on Amazon for almost a week straight for almost seven days. That is so insanely difficult. This means that she’s been selling, you know, well over like fif like between 1500 and 2000 units probably a day. Then the final numbers from last week are aren’t out yet.
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But, you know, she’s moved a ton of books. She’s, I don’t know if she’ll hit the New York Times, but she’s certainly gonna be a New York Times candidate. And I was literally just talking we’re, I’m just texting back and forth with her as we’re talking about, you know, what’s working and the strategy for how we keep this going. And so much of it is ties into like this episode with Pat and going, okay, what’s working for Dr. Lyon in many ways is, is is very similar to how Pat has built his personal brand and his platform. And it’s, it’s like caring about people. Specifically. If you wanna know how to turn your personal brand into a worldwide movement, it’s understanding that you have to make it more about the message and less about the messenger. You have to make it more about community and less about the content.
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You have to make it more about what you believe and less about what you’re trying to get people to buy. That is how you create a worldwide movement. That is how you create something that transcends your work, your expertise, your knowledge, and your vanity and your metrics and your profits and things, and go. And that is how you create something that becomes bigger than you. In many ways, it’s a matter of just setting the intention to have something that is bigger than you, that is greater than you, that is a purpose that is beyond just you, right? It’s more about the message, less about the messenger. What does that mean? It means that your personal brand and the content that you create is being created. Because what you are passionate about is wanting people to live a certain way, wanting people to act a a certain way, wanting people to change their life in a certain way.
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And you care more about that. You create more about creating that change in their behavior and making that impact in their life than you do about you becoming famous and you becoming well known and you becoming, you having more followers, right? It’s not that having more followers is bad, more follow followers is good. It’s just saying for, to be a mission-driven messenger, it means that money is good, but money is subservient to the message. Income is good, but income is subservient to impact. You have to be more about the message and less about the messenger. And that is what these people do, and that’s what drives them, and that’s what makes them great, right? And I, I think Lewis Howes a great example of that Lewis House is, is, is someone who’s always just been so focused on helping his audience win, helping his audience succeed, and then Al also helping his guests succeed.
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And he’s sort of come along for the ride, right? Like he’s the host that has come along for the ride. And now Lewis is this, this very world renowned, recognized, one of the most influential personal brands in the world, but it wasn’t because he set out on a mission to make Lewis famous. He set out on a mission to help people. The School of Greatness is about sharing and, and, and curating the greatest minds in the world, sharing their ideas for free on a podcast where people may not ever get access to that information, right? And so Lewis comes along for the ride. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon with this, this book, forever Strong is just blowing up. And man, I, I hope, I hope this, I hope we, we, we get good news that she hits New York Times. We got good news last week. So one of our other clients, Nicole Walters hit the New York Times.
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She, she hit number nine on the New York Times. That was the seventh time that we’ve had a brand builders group client hit the New York Times in the last 12 months, seven times we’ve done that, right? People following our system and, and what is our system? The system is not gimmicks, right? The system is not gaming. The system is adding value, making a difference, creating a movement. And what’s happening with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is she’s teaching the whole world, right? She’s an actual, she’s an actual fellowship trained doctor, is she’s saying, we all think that we’re over fat, right? We think that we’re over fat, but we’re not over fat. We’re under muscle. And so she is starting this muscle movement, right? She calls what she does, muscle centric medicine, and she’s talking about what she believes. It’s not so much go buy my book, buy my book.
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She’s, she’s, she’s passionate about educating people to go. The whole narrative has been about losing weight and cutting carbs and cutting calories and like reduce, reduce, reduce. And she’s saying it’s not about that. What really creates health is more muscle, right? More protein, more, more muscle. And so we all think we’re over fat and she’s teaching us, no, we’re under muscle. And then if we can build muscle, then all these other health benefits take care of themselves. And it’s, it’s a fresh, it’s a fresh message, but it’s, it’s about the message, not the messenger. And it’s, it’s about what she believes, not what she wants you to buy. That’s how you create a movement, right? And we’re just, we happen to be on the, on the behind the scenes, like inner workings on, on her actual team. And we have been for the last several months of preparing to launch this thing with the force it deserves.
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And now we’re seeing it like catch and start to take off. It’s amazing. I mean, it’s blowing my mind, the numbers that she’s posting,
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So the book gets caught in, in, in the groundswell of that, right? So the book kind of goes along for the ride. Her personal brand goes along for the ride. And that’s what happened with Lewis House, and that’s what happened with Pat Flynn with his podcast, right? He’s, you know, just been focused on the movement and the message. And, and I love what I love, one of the things that Pat said in the interview, again, go back and go back and listen to the interview. You just don’t get, you just are not gonna get access to somebody like Pat typically, you know, you don’t get that kind of access all the time. So it’s a powerful conversation. And one of the things he said, which I loved, he said, make each piece of content that you create a gift for your audience. Make each piece of content, you create a gift for your audience, right?
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Is your content a gift for your audience, or is it something you do so you can grow followers? Is it a gift for your audience? Or is it something you put together so that you can sell people and get your hands in their pockets and take some money? Again, I’m not against money, I’m not against followers. We’re, we’re fans of money, right? We like money. We, we like followers, we need those things to make a difference, but it’s where does it rank in the order of priority? It’s is money subservient to, to the message, to the mission is serving your audience the priority? And then all the other things are subservient to that. So it’s not that there’s, you know, these things are bad, it’s just the order of priority matters. It’s about service, it’s about your audience. It’s about making an impact on the world.
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It’s about going, what would I say if, if money didn’t matter at all, right? Like, what is the thing that I would dedicate my life to? What is the thing that I believe in? And when you’re creating content, the content is a gift. And y’all, I have one of these gifts for you, like, I’m, I’m gonna go, I’m, yeah, this is also a little bit off, off topic, but not really, you know, a few like a couple years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night, this very sobering thought, which was, what happens if I die before Jasper and Liam, my kids are old enough to have a conversation with me where I can truly explain to them the logical and historical and archeological elements of why I have come to believe that, that Jesus of Nazareth is actually a deity. Why he’s actually a messiah. How, what is the evidence that I have discovered through research and reading and exploration and critical thinking and challenging and, and, and discussing and, and, and, and, you know, all of these things that I have done in my personal life, not in my business life.
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And it was a sobering thought to go, wow, I’ve spent over 20 years, almost 20 years of my life now in my personal life, exploring this thing that is not a part of my business and my personal brand and what I do professionally, but it’s really important to me to share that with my kids. And what happens if I died before my kids got old enough? And that created this deep sense of urgency, this deep urgency in me to go, I have to get, I have to get this recorded for Jasper and Liam. Hopefully nothing happens to me, right? I’m not planning on going anywhere soon, but like, if something did, this issue of eternity is so important to me, and there’s so much misunderstanding around it, and I’ve spent so much of my own time exploring the evidence for this that it is of tantamount significant importance to me, that my boys one day will get the benefit of all of that knowledge.
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And I said, I have to create this. I don’t have a way to monetize it. I, right? And so all I did was I just driven out of this, this purpose really for them. And then, you know, we recorded it and it’s 15 episodes, and it was like, well, we can’t release 15 episodes on this podcast, so, you know, we need to start another podcast. And so we are launching this, this whole separate podcast series called Eternal Life. Seven Questions Every Intelligent Skeptic Should Ask About Jesus of Nazareth. What is this ep? What is this podcast? It’s just me sharing my personal life’s work of exploring the evidence, the logical reasons, the historical reasons, the academic reasons, the archeological support to go, how is it that a logical, rational person could ever believe in this idea of a human that was a deity, that was somehow a God who performed miracles and then died and re resurrected and came back to life?
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Like, how does any rational person believe any of that? And, and that was the question I asked that caused this 20 year journey of me unpacking it to where I have come to the full conclusion that it is definitely what happened, and that there’s a mountain of evidence that supports it. And I’ve documented it for my boys, and I’ve decided to go, okay, why not release this to the public? Why am I telling you this? Because it’s a massive amount of time. I have no way to monetize it, right? I have no plan of making money. I’m not suddenly gonna build a personal brand around this idea. It’s just a project that was like, I have to share this and I’ll, you know, I have to make it and I might as well share it. So it’s a gift, right? And it’s a great example of, you know, when Pat said that you have to create, make each piece of content a gift.
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It is a gift. I have no other benefit from that. Now, hopefully every piece of content that I create, everything around the four levels of influence and the psychology of influence, which is what my actual area of expertise is, and my actual business is about, right? Our business at Brand Builders Group, our team is about, you know, helping people become wealthy and well known, helping them make a bigger impact, helping them monetize their message and their personal brand, which is my actual core expertise, right? The content for that should also be a gift, right? But I have a reason to make that a gift, which is also that I get the side impact of having a way to monetize it. But even eternal life, it’s 15 episodes, it’s over 15 hours of content that I’ve had to create. It took me two years to build this, and I’m just giving it away for free.
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It’s a gift, right? Not all of you are gonna wanna listen to that podcast. Some of you might, right? So, you know, make sure that you, you know, opt in here or go, go Search For Eternal Life is the name of the podcast by Rory Vaden. And it’s coming out soon, and it’s like within the, I think it’s supposed to come out this week, like by the end of this week. So it’s either out now or it’ll be out soon. If you’re on our email list, of course we’ll announce it. If you follow [email protected], I’ll, you know, I’ll be posting it there too, so that you can see it. It’s not the future direction of my personal brand, but it’s a gift, right? You have to make each piece of content that you create, it’s gotta be a gift. There’s gotta be a piece of you in it. There’s gotta be, you have to care. You have to give a crap. You have to have put time and blood and sweat and tears to go, I’ve created this for you and I’m giving it to you for free.
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That’s the secret to content marketing, not which hashtags do you use and how do you edit and what are your camera angles, and what is your lighting and what’s the right hook? And how do you play the algorithm? To me, that’s not the secret, right? Those might be the secrets to GE going viral once in a while, but that’s not the secret to building a business and to changing the world. The secret to that is going create content that is, that matters deeply to you talk about the things that matter to you and create it as a gift to do the work of packaging it and preparing it, and then promoting it to your audience. And by the way, promotion is part of the gift, doing the work of telling the world about it. If I do all the research, discover the cure for cancer, but then I don’t do any of the work to tell the world that I’ve discovered it, the net impact of me discovering the cure for cancer is zero.
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I haven’t affected anybody, right? So promotion is part of the gift. Promotion is part of the responsibility. Promotion is part of your privilege as the messenger. It’s part of your obligation, it’s part of your duty. It’s not just part of your job. It’s not just part of like, you know, the the price you pay to be successful, although it is that also for a mission-driven messenger, I have to reach more people because that’s part of my calling. Marketing is art, right? Promotion is a privilege. It is my duty. And so when you stand in that place, not the place of vanity going, I need a bunch of people to know about my stuff, but standing in the place of service to go, I have put some work into creating something that I think you’ll enjoy. Here it is. And I want that to get to as many people as possible.
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That is the difference. And that is what converts a personal brand into a worldwide movement. It’s that conviction, that clarity, that dedication. And you see this with the biggest personal brands in the world, right? You see this with Dave Ramsey comes to mind, right? Dave Ramsey. He doesn’t need money. He hasn’t needed money for decades. Like he’s still on the radio three hours every day. Why? Because it’s a movement for him, it’s a mission. He’s going, I know what it’s like to be broke and, and bankrupt and be upside down financially, and have somebody come into my home and take my daughter’s crib to sell it, to pay off my debt. He knows what that feels like. So getting another download on his podcast or another follower on Instagram or another speaking engagement or another dollar in his bank account is great. It’s not why he does it.
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If he did, if it was why he was doing it, he would’ve stopped a long time ago. He doesn’t care about, it’s not that he doesn’t care about those things, right? Those are byproducts of the mission, of the movement of the cause. And, and, and those of you that are clients of ours at Brand Builders Group, you know, in our, you know, we’ve got 14, 14 courses in our, in our curriculum, 14 different two-Day experiences that we take people through. And our flagship first experience finding your brand, DNA, we take, we help you create a brand positioning statement, which is what problem do you solve in one word? What is your uniqueness in one word? What is your solution to that sentence or that that problem? In one sentence, what audience, what audience do you serve in one phrase, what one revenue stream matters above all others.
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And then we also teach you something called the cause, right? The problem is what people are struggling with the cause is why they are struggling with it. So the, the concept of a cause inside our curriculum, our formal curriculum at Brand Builders Group, it’s a, it’s a semantics. It’s a, it’s a formal, it’s a part of our vernacular. It’s an element that we teach on, is that there’s the problem which people are aware of. This is the thing they know they’re struggling with, they’re willing to admit it. And so we use that in marketing because it attracts people. ’cause They see it and they go, yes, that’s me. But then we teach, we teach messengers and we help them identify the cause, which is the thing that their audience doesn’t see, right? The problem is what they’re struggling with the cause is why they’re struggling with it.
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The problem is what they’re aware of the cause is what they’re unaware of. The problem is what they think they is. The, they think is their issue, but the cause is what their real issue is. Well, academically speaking in brand builders group curriculum and in our construct, in our paradigm, our semantics and our vernacular in our frameworks, the causes, everything that I have just said to you, it meets those academic criteria. Additionally, though, deliberately and intentionally, the cause we deliberately use that word as a double entendre, meaning it has two meanings, A double meaning. It has the meaning of all of those things I shared, but it also doubles as the cause for your life. It is the cause, the, the purpose of the messenger. It’s the reason why they have dedicated their life to doing this. It is, it’s the, the source of their inspiration.
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It is their cause for creating their personal brand, their cause for digitizing and monetizing their reputation, their cause for writing a book, their cause for creating a speech, their cause for launching a membership or a podcast or a course. It’s their cause. It’s their reason. It’s their purpose. In addition to being the cause of the root issue that people struggle with, the cause of the messenger is to say, I’m going to dedicate my life to eradicating the world of this invisible enemy that is taking them down. Right? For Dave Ramsey is helping people be debt free for Dr. Gabrielle Lyes, for helping people to be healthy, right? For Pat Flynn, it’s for helping people to, to, to create more income. Rambler’s Group, it’s for us to help you create more notoriety, to help you become more well known. So you have to find a cause that is something that you would dedicate your life to, and the the, when the cause elevates and you become subservient to that, that is when there’s a chance for your personal brand to turn into a worldwide movement.
RV (24:41):
And when it turns into a worldwide movement, there’s a bunch of other wonderful things that come along and you get to come along for the ride, right? I get to go along for the ride. The book gets to come along for the ride, your business gets to go along for the ride, but not because that’s first, because it’s a byproduct of being more focused on the message than the messenger. More about creating community and not just the content, and more about sharing what you believe and not just what you want people to buy. So make your personal brand a cause, make it a mission. Make it a movement. We’ll catch you next time on the influential Personal Brand podcast.