Ep 312: Creating Videos That Go Viral with Travis Blakely and Teun van der Lugt
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
AJV (00:53):
Hey, all this is AJ Vaden. Welcome to the influential personal brand podcast. I am one of your co-hosts here today, and I’ve got two friends on the podcast today, which is not normal. We usually don’t get two. So double the fun for the next 45 minutes, get excited. But these are actually two newer friends of mine. Met them through a really good friend of mine Carrie, Jack, but then we learned through conversations that, wow, we actually have a lot of friends in common. And in fact, Tony and Travis have done work with some of people that we’re super connected to like, like Louis House and lots of different shared connections along the way. And I love, I love what they’re doing. And I actually started following Travis on social media. You guys will get to hear from both Travis and Tony in just a second.
AJV (01:46):
But I really got interested because of his like motivational inspirational messages. And then I came to learn like, oh, they actually help videos go viral. And when I first started fol, I didn’t know, that’s what they did. I just really liked his vibe. And I thought what he was doing was really cool. And then we had mutual friends and then I started like stalking their website and going through all their different things. And I’m like, wow, you guys have had some amazing clients like prince CA and Louis House and Tom Billue and some like really Jay Shetty, some like really amazing clients that you’ve done work with. And so, so glad that we got connected and we’ve got like this unique, common set of friends that we didn’t even know existed. And so I invited them to come on the show today and here are two reasons that you wanna stick around is one.
AJV (02:37):
I know that 99% of you who are listening would like to know, is there some sort of secret formula and how to make a video go viral? And I’m not saying that Travis and Tony have the answer to this secret formula, but they might, you have to stick around to find out. And the second second reason is because video is king, right? Video is where it’s at. There is so much power in video. I have my own beliefs of why that is. There’s a human connection part. But there is also some really good dos and don’ts of how to do video successfully. And we’re gonna talk about some of those two and in between, we’re gonna get to learn about two really awesome human beings who have incredible backgrounds and who have worked for incredible individuals and companies and have outstanding work. So without further ado, both of you welcome to the show.
TB (03:29):
Thank you. Is a massive pleasure.
TV (03:34):
Yes. Thank you for having us.
AJV (03:36):
Oh my gosh. It’s gonna be so fun. And Tony is is his morning. It’s our afternoon. Yeah. And so you’re in Amsterdam, right?
TV (03:45):
No, right now I’m in, I’m in Tokyo right now. Oh, you’re
AJV (03:47):
In Tokyo.
TV (03:47):
AJV (03:50):
I’m pretty sure you’re not in Tokyo. You’re you’re, you’re traveling the globe. Alright, so I’m gonna give both of you guys a separate chance. So I’m gonna start with Tony. So, you know, you’ve done some pretty cool work and you know, a company that you know is so funny. I was talking to my husband about this and he goes, I’m sorry, he he’s done video work for, for who? For mine valley
TV (04:27):
Right.
TV (05:19):
Youtube was definitely out there. Facebook was definitely out there, but I don’t think a lot of people saw that there’s a big connection between business and social media. Back then it was just, Hey, let’s, it’s cool. Let’s make a post, a video on social media and see what happens. So I didn’t see any direction. And then, then I already like I love to travel. I wanted to leave my own country and but at the same time oh, how old was I then back 24, something like that. I kind of had in my mind, also a bit of a social pressure that you need to find a bit of a career path at one point. So that’s what I was hoping to find something that combined boat like somewhere I could like, you know, leave my country and yeah, find a career basically.
TV (06:04):
And that’s, I don’t, I don’t really don’t know. That was just, I think just a random YouTube video that that, that saw that, which I saw mind value as a company. And I just really wanted to work there. I don’t know. It was just the whole vibe that they portrayed, like the, the, the personal development, which I was really into the mission that they have of changing education which, which I still firmly stand behind as well. Like because like yet, like school, wasn’t the best for me, for me either, maybe for a lot of people. So I really believed everything they say. So I just really wanted to work there. It didn’t even matter if I needed to do video or something else. I just really wanted to work there. So yeah, I, I applied I didn’t get into the film team because like, they, they have a whole separate film team, but cuz I was not experienced enough, but so I joined the customer support team, but then within two months they, they saw Tony, we need you in the film team actually.
TV (06:57):
So I’m like, oh, okay, cool. Let’s, let’s get, let’s get going. And that’s how, that’s how I got there that so cool. Yeah, so, so I really went for, like, I worked there for three, for three years. I would say I learned like everything that I needed to learn about video in this space. You know, when it comes to marketing videos, product launches event videos and most importantly social media videos and yeah, that’s and after three years I thought it’s time to go on my own, quit mind valley on very good terms and moved to Bali because mind valley itself is based in GU Lumpur. So Bali wasn’t so far around the corner from there moved there and I really don’t know how to this day, but on some random day Travis sent me a message on Instagram and I have a following like I mean back then, like it was even like a thousand, so I have no clue where that came from
AJV (07:58):
Oh my gosh. I think there’s two really important things in there that I think is amazing. It’s in this era of the quote unquote great resignation that people talk about I love what Ariana Huffington says. She goes, it’s not the great resignation, it’s the great reevaluation of what are people wanting out of their work experience and to see that you found a company on YouTube yeah. Through a video and said I am for what they believe in. I don’t even care if I can’t do what I wanna do. I’ll do whatever they’ll take me for you do not hear a lot of that right now, especially from millennials. And I can say that because I am one too.
AJV (08:55):
I just wanna work for this video. Yeah. I think that’s a great reminder to all of us that having a great presence online and offline really means a lot, not just for income and revenue and sales, but also for talent, attraction, talent, acquisition, and retention. Like that’s pretty cool to hear. And I think the second thing you said that I wanna highlight to everyone listening, cause I think this is substantial is that when Travis found you, however miraculous event occurred, that that happened, you had less than a thousand followers. So it ain’t about the followers. Y’all right. It’s not always about the followers. So don’t get obsessed with the follower, count thinking somehow what you’re doing doesn’t matter that it is just not true. It’s just not true. Yeah. yeah, so, so cool. Both of those things I love that. Okay. All right. Travis, tell us, I wanna know cuz like, for those of you who’t know, like Travis is the CEO of inter like media he and I have got these like awesome little like growing group of like mutual friends. So tell us like how, how did you get into this space? Like why start this type of, you know, viral video, social media, social media management company, like how’d you get into that? Like you also are doing your own personal brand, like why that like fill in?
TB (10:14):
Yeah. whew. Where did I start? I loving
AJV (10:17):
Question. Right.
TB (10:21):
So I come from St. Louis, Missouri. I grew up, you know, in children’s homes did had a very bleak future. Didn’t really have much to look forward to and didn’t really know what I wanted to do in my life. So as I got older I ran into a gentleman by the name of Princey, by the way I ran into him online. First I seen his video, he had a video called something about saving hip hop. I can’t remember the exact name of the, the video and this was back in like 2009. And it was a very similar thing to what Tony just said. I thought what prince was doing was super amazing. And at the time he was, you know, pretty local. He didn’t really have a whole lot of followers. And, but I believed in that mission, you know, he had something called make smart, cool, smart, being an acronym for sophisticated minds and revolutionizing thought.
TB (11:23):
So I thought that was a pretty powerful message that he created wanted to be a part of it. I, I felt like it was time for me to really dive into my mission. Ironically, this is, I was around the same age that Tony was talking. I was 25 years old at the time. And so as I looked more into it, me and him connected me and him developed a really close friendship. I mean, we were best friends for a very, very long time. And during that time period from 2010 to 2000, I met him in 2009, but from 2010 to 2014, we spent that time really trying to figure out how do we connect with people online, right. How do we go viral? Right. He always had this philosophy of why should I do a show in front of a thousand people when I could do a video and get it in front of a hundred thousand people.
TB (12:22):
So that always clicked in my mind that always let me know the power of video at that point. Like yo the, the, the online spaces where it’s at, because you could definitely connect with, with more minds that way. And so in 2014, kind of like the code was broken, right. Where we went from, you know, getting maybe a few hundred thousand views to maybe a million views to now a video getting over a hundred million views. And then every video after that was getting hundreds of millions of views is just like, wouldn’t stop. Like it was to the point where it’s like, yo, this is like crazy. Like what next? Right?
TB (13:17):
We went through four years trying to figure this out. And there was a lot of doubt creeping up. A lot of times that we thought it just wasn’t gonna happen. But yeah, so, you know, eventually as you know, we were continually going viral, people were reaching out, you know you know, I, since I was, you know, one prince with Princey since the beginning, I was, I, I knew everything because I ran a social, I was part of the videos. I was part of the creation process. Like I literally did everything with them. So I, I knew what it took to build that audience, to build that community, what the creation process is like. And so when other people started reaching out people like, you know, Jay and Lewis and, and people like that, trying to figure out, Hey, listen, they kind of like want to, you know, create content and, and, and really kind of like go to the next level.
TB (14:11):
Me and Jay developed a friendship too as well, you know? And we started working together. You know, I ended up working with Lewis from there. I ended up working with Tom, Billy and a bunch of other people, because for me interlight media, the name of my company. It, it stems from that. We all have interlight, you know, we all have a fire inside of us. Right. I believe that everybody has a purpose and that we are, as we are living in our purpose, our purpose is helping to inspire someone else to live theirs. So I am taking my talents to help other people flesh out their stuff, create, build their community out reach as many people as possible. So their inspiration can meet as many people as possible, and their impact can reach as many as possible. And it just continues to have a compound effect. But yeah, so this has been a life long dream of mine. I am thankfully living my dream now. And it’s been quite a journey.
AJV (15:17):
Yeah. That’s so cool. I love, I love what you said too, is like about the name of the company inner light because there there’s this light within all of us. And I think too, it’s kind of like, what you do is it’s, it’s helping showcase the inner light. Right. And one of the best ways you can do that is on video. And just in social, you just, you’ve got more reach. And there’s, there’s one thing you said, but I wanna go back to it’s like, y’all were trying to figure this out for like four years. Yeah. Not four weeks, not four months, but four years. Yeah. And I think that’s significant because we all know that we live in a society of like, we want it, we want it right now. And you know, it’s, we often are talking to people in our community at brain builders group where they’ve been at, they’ve been working at building their brand for six months. And they’re just like, man, I’m just, we’re not, I’m not seeing the progress. And I’m like, mm-hmm,
TB (16:36):
So two things prince always said something that, you know, was really it’s a really powerful thing you used to say, plan B is to make plan a work. Right. Mm-hmm
TB (17:46):
I am not living my true self. And so for me, I would rather spend every single day living my purpose or trying to fulfill what I am supposed to fulfill. What I know my purpose is than trying to do it for somebody else. Right. Than trying to just go along with the, get along right. Where you’re just like doing things to survive. And that’s not really my thing. I didn’t want do it for the money. I didn’t wanna do it for anything else. I really wanted to have an impact because I, I, I just genuinely have this belief that serving a million people is a much better pursuit of your gifts and talents than trying to get a million dollars. Because if you serve a million people more than likely, you’re gonna get a million dollars anyway. But even if you don’t the service and the act in itself is gonna be fulfilling for you. Oh yeah. So for me, I have always had this idea, especially coming from a very poverty background that once I was able to have that impact and serve people, that was gonna be my fulfillment. And I always had this idea that like getting the money was gonna be the byproduct anyway. But even if it wasn’t, I’m still gonna be happy. So,
AJV (19:06):
Oh, that’s so good. You know, we have this, you know, reminder for ourselves too. Like my husband, Roy Fain, and I who are business partners, as you guys know, it’s like, we have to constantly remind ourselves it’s about the power of the one, right? Not the 1000 or the a hundred thousand or the 1 million. It’s the power of the one. But because in reality, in real life, if I knew that I changed the life of one person, that would be good enough for me. But somehow we get online, we get on social media and if I only have one like, or one share, it feels like a failure. Yeah. But in real life. Yeah. If I knew that I’d changed the life of one person, it would all be worth it. Yeah. And then somehow online it gets devalued or minimized to what was just one like, and it’s like, well, that’s one person.
AJV (19:58):
Yeah. Right. It’s the power of the, one of trying not to look at the count so much trying and staying focused on the mission. Right. Staying focused on serving, like what you said is like, even if it doesn’t work, it’ll be fulfilling in the process. I love that. That’s so good. Y’all I’m so excited to have you guys on and just talk about this. And so so let’s do that. So for all these listeners out there who are building their personal brands, aspire to do these things and have their message heard right. By the one or the 1 million, whatever it may be. I would love to, I wanna hear from two different perspectives. Right. Cause I’m gonna guess that Tony, I could be wrong, but you prefer to perhaps be behind the scenes.
TV (20:41):
Both. Both ways. Yeah. Like I, I, I like to for sure, like, you know, like I lead a video editing team. I, I make my own, my own videos as well, video editing, but what you do really realize that a lot of these people we work with what I notice at least is that there is still like a gap between the knowledge of creating videos. And what I mean by that, like, everybody can make a video nowadays. That’s that, that’s amazing. You know, like I got an iPhone 13, like the camera on it is like amazing. Like I can create the best videos with that. So I, I encourage people to do that as well, but I, I fully understand that there’s still like a little barrier you need to overtake. And that’s actually like, you know, especially if you’re doing it by yourself, go into a room by yourself, turning it on by yourself, standing in front of the camera, by yourself and getting the energy out of yourself to actually say something. So that’s what I, like, I try to be on set. Like even, even it can be remotely just even just for like that direction, that like energy push. Oh, that’s all them basically. Yeah.
AJV (21:49):
That’s really, I’m important. I’m curious to hear the director mentality in you of going, like, what, what do people need to be doing to be more relatable, personable, engaging charismatic. Like, what are some of the tips that people need to be doing to be better on video? Yeah,
TV (22:10):
Well, like, honestly, I, I think like, especially when, when you’re really starting out the first thing people do and I totally understand it is compare. Like they compare right from the start like, oh, Hey let’s say prince or Jay. I really like what they’re doing. I wanna do that. And they, they then, and then they come to me, like they come forever say, can you, can you make that like, and on my end, as a creation, I’ll always say yes. Yeah, for sure we can do that. There’s no problem. But I think there’s, there’s still a difference in us making a, a crazy edit, like that can go far out of nothing. Yeah. And actually the quality that we’re getting, cuz like we, we, we fail to understand like prince CA or J she Lewis house. These people have been in front of the camera for like years.
TV (22:56):
I would say there’s, there’s just a lot of experience in there that you can’t get out of in like your first take. There’s no way there’s no way which is totally fine. So that’s something that, that you should need to grow into. But the second thing, like it may sound stupid. I really prefer then when people start to go on camera, they really need to loosen up. They really need to loosen up. So that’s why I prefer to be there. So when I’m gonna be on set remotely or in person, I just, you know, like we start making jokes a bit.
AJV (23:35):
10 pushups or 10 shots of either one. They go,
TV (23:39):
Yeah, 10 shots of the
AJV (23:39):
Kilo, like whatever works,
TV (23:41):
Get something
AJV (23:42):
TV (23:42):
Exactly. Exactly. And when it to scripting, like a script is very important, but at the same time, you know, I, I would say like the best, best process for me would always be like, make a script, put it in bullet points and learn that. So you can say it in your own voice. Like if you’re gonna rehearse the exact thing that you wrote down, not saying it’s not possible for sure. It’s possible, but like the greatest, like I’ve met some of the greatest creators. They, they really just read off a script, but it’s hard to get your personality out of a script, especially if you haven’t even read renew yourself. So that’s why the bullet points are so yeah. And, and just get loose, you know, just, you know, make a bit of fun, jump a bit around and don’t worry about the edit. Like in, in the edit we can do everything.
AJV (24:26):
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because I think, I think that’s a huge part of even like what we see with even people on our team. Like we do this, this doesn’t mean it’s, it’s easy, but there’s some people on our team who are super adverse to video and it’s like, there’s super charismatic, engage human, engage, engaging humans. And then as soon as that red light goes on, they’re like, you’re in the headlight. And I’m like, who are you? And where did you go? Like what, what just happened to our friend? What just happened? And it’s a bizarre thing. And what I have found is that, you know, there’s two things. One is that they are literally trying to remember their script and it’s, you know, one of the things I have to constantly remind myself, it’s like, this is my content. I don’t need a script.
AJV (25:11):
Yeah. I just need to be myself. Why am I scripting out my own content? And it’s because I’m, don’t feel confident, right? It’s not the content it’s like, I’m worried about, does my hair have strays? Like, does my face look fat? Do I have a double chin right now? It’s like, it’s all these little things that we get obsessed with. And we forget, and this is like, my husband tells me this all the time. He goes, if you’re focused on you, that’s why you’re nervous. And he goes, anytime you’re nervous, it’s because you’re focused on yourself. But when you’re focused on others, it’s hard to be nervous. And so we have this little saying in our company, is that when you’re focused on service, it’s hard to be nervous. Mm-Hmm
TV (26:12):
Yeah. And I think, I think it’s a good point that you touched as well when, when it comes comes to, to, to those things. Like one, like, I think like, again, people really under underestimate, like, I mean, you have to have a good edit there, I reckon. And here we are, but
AJV (27:12):
Oh yeah. And it’s like, then you’re talking about 15 things that make no sense.
TV (27:16):
Yeah, exactly. There’s no direction that’s going
AJV (27:18):
Fully aware of these, these videos. Yeah. That’s, that’s super, I think that’s super helpful is like you gotta bullet point out what you have to say, but keep it bullet points, not scripted. And it’s like, then you gotta figure out what’s gonna loosen you up. So play music, do pushups, take tequila shots, like whatever it is, like do what you gotta do to get yourself in a place where you’re not obsessing of what you look like on camera. Now Travis, you’re someone who’s in front of a camera a ton. So I’m curious to hear from you, not only from you yourself, but from working with all these pretty influential individuals who have built really big followings over the years, like, what would you say are the keys to a video? Getting a lot of traction,
TB (28:05):
Getting a lot of traction. That’s a good question. When something is important to you, it’s usually important to somebody else. Hmm. I think probably the most fundamental thing to, to go viral or to make a video that’s meaningful and impactful is don’t base it off information base it off your feelings, meaning like carry that feeling into the video. How do you want somebody to feel right? That is what is gonna get people moving that’s what’s gonna get people to share is the feeling. Obviously you want to talk from a very, I’m a very data driven person, very factual. In fact, if you watch Prince’s video almost in every video, he’s, you know, listening out facts, but it’s more like a, a, he he’s using it. Right. it doesn’t carry the weight. Right? The weight is the feeling. How do you get people to feel a certain type of way?
TB (29:08):
Right? What are the things to say, right. Albert Einstein says, if you can’t explain this simply, you don’t understand it. Mm. So whenever you know, we are going into a video process, it’s about how do we explain this simply in a way that everybody can understand it, but we’re talking about something in a way that people understand that we care about it. Right. so that’s like, like kind of like the key and you carry that in each video. So for example, whenever he makes a video and this is something, you know, I run into when I’m talking to a lot of different entrepreneurs or people that’s making videos is, you know, sometimes I just kind of like wanna create content. It’s like, no, no, no. Every piece of content that you create should be the B like this is the best video you can create right now.
TB (29:55):
Mm-Hmm,
AJV (30:52):
Oh, that’s so good. I love that. You gotta focus on the feeling yeah. That you want people to feel. I think the other thing that you said that I think is so insightful is are you creating your best content right now? Or, you know, it’s like, I think we, so sometimes in this space of like building your personal brand and becoming more well known, we kind of get obsessed with, I gotta have something out. Right? Yeah. And so it’s like, perhaps you’re not doing your best content because you’re just trying to like, get something out. And I love it’s, you know, it’s that whole concept of save the best for first mm-hmm
TB (31:51):
Yeah. So a couple of things first off, you know, when it comes to creating content you have to know your industry. If you, or, you know, know your audience, know who you want to communicate to. So for example, if let’s just say you review baby products, right. Is, should be something you’re passionate about. Is this something you’re passionate about? Is this something you actually care about? Mm-Hmm
TB (32:47):
Mm-Hmm
TB (33:40):
Yeah. Which allows you to build a community of people that love you. Some that like you and some that are like, oh, okay. And then you are also gonna have some people that disagree with you and all that is fine because it’s about building your community and your authenticity. So if you’re consistent, you’re being authentic. You actually like what you’re talking about. And you’re passionate, what you’re talking about. You have some experience in it and you don’t have to be the first. You don’t have to be the best. You just have to be yourself. Mm-Hmm
AJV (34:35):
Oh yeah. I, this was beat into my heads. Like as soon as you started talking, I was like, oh my gosh, I haven’t thought about this quote in years, but this was beaten to my head early on, in my sales career. And you just made me think about, is that people don’t care how much, you know, until they know how much you care. Right. And it’s like, are you talking about stuff that you actually care about? Or you just out there, you know, trying to get that next, you know, sale or that next, whatever. I think that’s so good. And so you kind of teed up and I’d, I’d like to hear both of your perspectives on this. Is this concept of authenticity mm-hmm
AJV (35:27):
It’s like, you know, I’ve, I’ve got this one person in mind. It’s like, their content is amazing. And they’re amazing. It does not come across that way, but it’s like, man, if would just read their book or have a one on one over coffee, it’s like, they’re so wise. And so insightful that yet, because of this issue they have with like putting themselves out there, they’re kind of like the world’s best kept secret and not a good way. Right. So I wanna, I’d love to hear both of your perspectives. Like how do you create more authenticity for social media or your website or your podcast, or just anything to do with video when that’s really hard.
TV (36:08):
Yeah. Yeah. Like, I, I, I can if I can first say something actually that, because that’s, that’s a very common problem. I, I can totally get that. Like, it’s totally like, like you said, like you said before, the moment the red light goes on, like it’s, it’s, you’re in a different, different zone. So, so I totally get, so there’s two things to that one, obviously. And I think that that’s, that’s the, the, maybe the bad side of social media media, everything seems to be so easy. Everything seems to be so easy. So it’s very easy to compare yourself. The moment you get started to like Hey, you know, I want to be Gary V always tells me to be consistent and always post to video every day. So let me do that. And that that’s, that’s super hardening. Cuz then people forget to understand one.
TV (36:52):
He’s been doing it for quite some years. Two. He has a big team around him. There’s, there’s, there’s a whole, there’s a difference perspective in it that you don’t really see by watching it’s a machine behind it. So one, it takes time, you know, never, never think that the moment you start is gonna be the best ever. And second thing is like, it is true. There are two different types of people, one that can, that are just really good on camera. And everybody can learn that for sure. But it takes time. One PE some people are just naturally they go from the start. But a lot of people, like you said, you just said like, if, if, if you start talking to them, you get so much good information out of them, but it doesn’t translate well on camera. Well, what does that mean?
TV (37:31):
Like, for me that means like, okay, what if you just ha, if you record a conversation, then you know, why don’t you record like a zoom call with somebody? Like, we’re like, girl, you know, like, like a podcast like we’re doing right now. It’s different. The camera is on. Yes. But like, you know, we all kind of forget. Yeah. And then you still get the conversation out of it. And even from that part, send that to an editor. They can create a lot of cool, interesting snippets out of that. And then your authenticity is there.
AJV (37:59):
Oh, that’s so good for any of you who are listening. I just wanna make sure you hear that. It’s like, if you don’t have confidence or you feel insecure on camera, it’s like, just do it interview style, right? Have someone interview you, film it, send it to an editor and they’ll be able to take out the best parts of you talking. Right. That’s a really great tip because it’s like content comes in a variety of mediums. Right? So have someone interview you. That’s a really great format. Cause I feel the same way with a lot of people who have major fears around public speaking, but they don’t mind doing a panel. They don’t mind doing an interview. It’s just the concept of me standing on stage by myself, trying to tell all these people, something there doesn’t come across, but you sit ’em down on a couch with an interviewer and it’s like brilliance, just coming out of their mouth. Yeah. Somehow as this keynote speaker, doesn’t come out that way. So do an interview style. I love that. Yeah. That’s a great, tangible takeaway for anyone who doesn’t feel confident on camera to still create content and get your message out there. So, so love that.
TB (39:14):
Yeah. So one thing that I think this is gonna sound a little more bit, but it’s something for me that’s worked when communicating to my clients and wanting to create like the best pieces. You ask yourself this question. If you were to die in 30 days, what’s the one thing, the most important thing you want the world to know, like what what’s, if you knew you were gonna die in 30 days, what’s the most important thing you would want the world to know. Right? If you, if you think about that for a second and you give that message, when you’re coming from a place of, you know, what of, of your own mortality, it usually comes across as visceral as possible because you’re thinking to yourself, you know, this is the most important message to me. Mm-Hmm
TB (40:18):
Okay. Now that I’ve created that if I were to die, what’s the next most important video or what’s the most next important message that I would want to get across the world. And so what happens is this forces you to dig deep inside of yourself because it’s not about performing, right? It’s about talking to that one person. Like, because I know we’re talking to the world, but it’s really about talking to one person, right. When you’re talking to the camera, you’re not talking to the camera. You’re not even talking to yourself, you’re talking to one person, right? Who’s that one person, your client avatar or the individual that, you know, who’s, you know, if it’s, if it’s his story about something that you were going through, who’s that person that you wanna speak to imagine they need your help right now. Mm-Hmm
TB (41:10):
You’re gonna show up, oh, this person needs my help. I’m gonna show up. You know, that’s going to give you the energy and the empowerment to kind of like show up. And so that’s how I show up when I am making my videos or when I’m talking to clients, making them videos. Who’s that one person that you wanna show up for, let’s say they needed you right now. You’re gonna die in 30 days. Mm-Hmm
AJV (41:53):
Yeah.
TB (41:54):
And when you make it relatable and you connect, it becomes shareable.
AJV (41:58):
Mm-Hmm
TB (42:09):
Well, once I go through the process with them, yeah, not initially.
AJV (43:30):
That’s so good. I love that. And I know we’re coming up on time here. So I have just like one last question for each of you. So I’ll start, I’ll start with Tony. So here’s here’s my, here’s my last question for you. It’s like, if you had one creative piece of advice, right. For anyone out there who’s listening, it’s like, Hey, if you can just do this one thing, it’s going to help you get your message across on video, what would it be?
TV (44:02):
Oh, to get your message across on video? Well, I, I think people, well, I do think like a lot of people stress too much about it. Like, like, like you, like, you’re, like you said, like it’s, oh, I, I, I need to record something today because everybody tells me I need to be consistent. I need to post every single day on Instagram, on Instagram stories, YouTube, everywhere.
TV (44:52):
Don’t don’t please don’t think like that. I would for sure. Say like, you know, take your time one day, create a couple of videos, focus on one platform, just be a bit active on there. When it comes to, to quality focus, the quality on what you’re saying, that’s the most important and what you’re saying, not how it looks like. Not on a crazy edit. Just what are you saying? Start with there, start with there. And then, then you’re gonna create momentum in yourself, in your audience. And then from there, just take the next step. Like what could the next step be? Could it be a better edit? Could it be more clarity in what I’m saying? Better camera gear. Should I move to another platform? Those things, but calm down.
AJV (45:35):
I would
TV (45:36):
Say
AJV (45:36):
TV (45:57):
Yeah.
AJV (45:57):
Saying like, who is saying this? And like, why are they saying this? It’s like, you know, we get pressure. I get pressure. I shouldn’t say we, I get pressure. I, them, you need to be on TikTok. I’m like Noah don’t they’re like, oh yeah, you do. Yeah, exactly. Noah don’t. Yeah. I don’t wanna be on TikTok so I should not be on it.
TV (46:12):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it was funny cuz I was speaking to Travis actually last week and cuz I, I was also like, everybody kind of looks up to like these prince CAS and, and these J she and like they, they, they want to be consistent everywhere, but like, and or Gary VFR who is definitely consistent everywhere, but people really on the resume, like say prince say, Hey, he doesn’t drop a single, a video. Every single day of that quality. He drops once a month. Maybe sometimes once every two months. Mm-Hmm
AJV (46:51):
He literally had, but someone following him around with the video. Yeah. So until you got those resources, it’s like, yeah, like
TV (46:59):
Calm down, calm down,
AJV (47:00):
Calm down. It’s OK. That like the advice of the day, calm down. Good one Tommy. It’s so true. It’s like, you know, it’s like our, like even people in like our client community at brand builder’s group, it’s they stress themselves out of going, well, I have to do this and I have to do this. And I’m like, no, you don’t. Yeah, you don’t, you can, but you don’t have to. It’s like, you can actually be really successful and not even be on social media, spoiler alert. Right. It’s like, yeah, it’s not a dependent factor, but it definitely is a huge conduit of getting your message out there. Yes. Faster. Right. Okay. So Travis, here’s my last question for you. And it has to do with social media since inter like media is got this, it’s an amazing company doing really cool things. You had me at your hook making videos go viral. I was like, how do I learn more? Right. So I’m curious to hear your perspective of like, in order to really make social media work, what’s the first thing you need to do.
TB (48:11):
So interesting. I’ll tell this really quick story. So I had a company I work with for, for 90 days power for you out of salt lake city, Utah. And so first thing I did was identify what type of company is this? It’s a personal development company. I said, okay it’s a personal development company. So now I go to market research.com and say, all right, who’s into personal development, the most millennials. Okay. Millennials into personal developed the most. Okay. Where are these people located at California and New York, you know, places like that. Okay, great. Which platform are they on? Which social media platform are they on? Okay. So I see that they’re on Facebook mainly. Now this was a couple years ago, but, and so now it’s like Instagram and YouTube, but back then it was Facebook and YouTube.
TB (49:07):
Okay, cool. All right. Now I see who’s the top performing personal development coaches and, and influences on these platforms. So I check and see who’s the top performing influences on those platforms. Then I see the most viral videos that they are putting out. And then after I see which the most viral videos that they’re putting out, then I see the most common questions that people are asking in a comment section mm-hmm
AJV (50:25):
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s like how I translate that in my mind. It’s like, you gotta get so in tune with who your audience is, that everything else is second to that, right? Yeah. It’s like, where are they? What are they asking? What do they need? What do they want? And how can we give it to ’em in the way that they want it.
TB (50:43):
And, and also do want to, at this one last point, something Tony said, and I don’t want, wanted to gloss over choosing one platform, probably one of the biggest things that I run into, you know, entrepreneurs is they wanna be on every platform.
AJV (52:07):
Yeah.
TB (52:07):
And it’s much easier to learn how to build on one platform than it is on V. Yeah.
AJV (52:12):
So at least gives you more focus and tension and takes away the pressure of, and this and this and this and this. Exactly. which really quite honestly is probably what halts most people is. I feel like I just can’t keep up. I just can’t, I can’t do this so they don’t do anything. Yeah. So, so, so good. Anna lied. I’m gonna ask one last question to each of you. What’s your favorite, what’s your preferred platform, Tony? Like what’s your go-to platform? Just for curiosity sake.
TV (52:41):
AJV (52:42):
For me. Youtube. All right, Travis.
TB (52:45):
Yeah. YouTube is the platform for longevity. It’s the second big, biggest search engine. It’s evergreen. And honestly, anybody that wants a sustainable platform to build on YouTube is definitely number one. It’s not the quickest.
AJV (53:01):
Yeah, that’s so
TB (53:01):
Good. Y’all definitely the one that lasts the longest.
AJV (53:04):
Ugh. Y’all just so many awesome nuggets of information. So grateful for both of you guys coming on, everyone who is listening. I am telling you go check out interlight media. It’s I N N ER, not inter inner. You have to listen to my Southern accent and translate inner like you’re intervening you’re media, interlight media.com. Also you’ve got interlight social. Are those, do those go to the same place or is one better than the other?
TB (53:33):
So interlight media is the name of the company. Interlight social is the name of the website.
AJV (53:37):
See, that’s so glad I asked interlight social.com. I will make it correct in the show notes, ignore everything. I just said, enter like social.com is where you wanna go. We’ll make sure to have all the links in the show notes and y’all, if they wanna follow you on social media, where should they go? Travis,
TB (53:56):
Instagram and YouTube, just Travis believes. And if you Google, Travis believes you’ll find me everywhere. You’ll follow me on any platform. But Instagram and YouTube is where you’ll find me most active.
AJV (54:08):
Travis believes on Instagram and YouTube. And how about you? Tony
TV (54:12):
Instagram really plays that’s Instagram. That’s tone to Tony cuz my, my real, my Dutch name is tone. T E U N. It’s gonna be hard to pronounce for an English audience. So that’s why Tony
AJV (54:27):
Make it clear. I’ll put it in the show note. Yeah. Y’all thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and all of your insights. We so appreciate it. Everyone else, make sure you catch the recap episode and we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand. See y’all.
Ep 307: How to Dominate on YouTube with Evan Carmichael | Recap Episode
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
Oh my gosh, Evan Carmichael blew my mind. Like it takes a lot. It takes a lot for me to find an educator on something related to personal branding where I go, holy moly. I’ve never heard that before. Now I, we ha this we’re on this episode here. We’re gonna break down. We’re gonna obviously break down what happened in, in the, the podcast interview that you just heard with Evan, but he came and did this, the training, you know, this very, this much longer in depth training for all of our, our monthly members. And it was just, just awesome, like really, really good and love, love seeing somebody who’s a really tactical expert and you know, somebody that we’re now confidently recommending, which, you know, we don’t, we don’t recommend people lightly, right? Like we, we, we flush out what they’re about and if we catch any sniff of them being weird or doing silly stuff, we immediately shut that down.
RV (01:51):
So if you go to brandbuildersgroup.com/evancarmichael you will hit our affiliate link and go over to his training. That is just, you know, that that’s, that’s his training, that’s his, his little monthly program. But for all of our, our like active coaching clients, he did came and did a special thing that we recorded. And it was like, oh my gosh, like just amazing. So anyways you can check that out brandbuildersgroup.com/evancarmichael, which is a link to some of his other stuff, but three, three biggest take takeaways here in terms of how to dominate on YouTube. My, my big three takeaways from the podcast interview specifically. So first of all this is something that’s not necessarily unique to Evan, but it’s super edifying to hear him talk about it. And it just reinforces one of our core central beliefs, which is put education in front of the sale, put education in front of the sale.
RV (02:52):
You have to, you, you, you have to earn the right to sell something to somebody you have to earn their trust. Trust has to be in place first before there’s a transaction. Trust must take place before there’s a transaction. Like the trust has to be in place first. How do you build trust with the stranger? The answer is you give you, don’t ask you, give you give value. First, you deliver first, you teach and, and, and most of you, most, most of our audience and in, in some way are experts and educators, right? Like you have some valuable knowledge that you’ve acquired over some journey you’ve been on in your life, which is what makes you a mission driven messenger, which if you’re listening to this show regularly, anyways, that’s who you are. You are a mission driven messenger. You’re, you’re, you’re, you’re feeling called to like, share your message with the world.
RV (03:49):
Well, why are you doing that’s because you’ve, you have some expertise. Why? Cause you walked the path, right? There’s a problem you’ve been down. There’s a challenge. You’ve conquered, there’s an obstacle you’ve overcome. So take that massive education and put it, give it away and put it up front first. And that is a core central belief. And, and I think when, when people get so lost in, like, how do I podcast? How do I YouTube? Like, what do I do on social media? Like, I don’t know what to post teach. ’em What, you know,
RV (04:39):
That is how you build trust. Like that, that’s it, that’s the secret. At least that’s our secret. If we got a secret, like however we’ve been able to do what we’ve been able to do. I mean, go look at my Instagram, go read my blog post, listen to all these podcasts you know, my books we sell for whatever, $12 on Amazon, but like, you know, we’re giving away everything. We can that we’re we’re, and we’re pumping it out into the universe as fast as humanly possible. Now I will say part of my action item from this E even though we know this part and we preach this part and we believe this and we do this part pretty well. I think, but was when Evan said you should, you, you should take your live coaching calls and publish those on YouTube. That’s really interesting because we, we do have our customers sign a release that, that gives us permission to, to, to do that.
RV (05:39):
And it, it does, I mean that that’s an infinite stream of content, right? An infinite stream of content is to go take questions for people and, and give them live coaching and publish that online, make that available to people. And I thought, huh, that’s fascinating. Like we’ve got hours and hours and hours and hours of that, but it doesn’t, you know, whatever it is, just teach, add value, share, educate, inspire, entertain. You know, the three E’s is what we, we talk about with our members, your, your, your content marketing strategy effectively is one of the three E you’re either, you know, educating, encouraging, or entertaining some mix of the three, but it’s typically one of those three, you’re either an educator, an encourager or an entertainer. And if you’re trying to sell stuff online, put education in front of the sale, give people a chance to sample you.
RV (06:33):
So anyways, that’s a, that’s a good one. Always good to be reminded of. Number two, my number two takeaway is make data driven decisions about your content specifically with YouTube, specifically, this audience retention curve concept. I mean, what, this, this is so simple and so practical, and like, anybody can do this. Like, why aren’t we, why aren’t we not doing this? This is so straightforward. And, and so if you miss the interview, what’s the audience retention curve. It’s a, it’s a tool it’s a widget on, in, in the back end of your YouTube channel that shows you second by second, how long people are watching and what’s gonna, what happens? You know, remember what he was saying here is, you know, typically the, the highest spike is the beginning is everybody starts watching. Almost everybody starts watching your video in the beginning, and then they keep for a little while, and then there’s some sharp drop off.
RV (07:35):
But then what you’re looking for are the spikes. Cuz if it’s flat, okay, if it’s flat, that means you held their attention. So that’s good. Like holding their attention is a massive victory. If it’s a drop that’s bad, that means we lost people. That means whatever we said right before it wasn’t interesting enough to help people keep hanging on, to hear what was coming next. So that is a big time problem. But then what you’re looking for are the spikes. The spikes are gold because what’s happening. There is people are pausing, rewinding and rewatching your video, which, you know, if you’ve ever wondered, like I wonder what’s the best part. Like if I, if I posted a 20 minute on VI video on YouTube, which 60 seconds of that video, should I post on Instagram reels or TikTok or like a YouTube short and you go, I don’t know, like, you know, I’ve got a one in 20 chance there, or you could just look at the data and see either where you held the audience flat or where there’s a spike and go.
RV (08:43):
That is that’s the clip. Like that’s the hotspot. Just grab it, that, grab whatever that is. Take it out in 60 seconds. And boom. Now, now your, your whole content strategy, like the art is gone pretty much. It’s mostly science at that point. So good. So simple, right? Like, I mean that one idea can grow. Your social can help you get your next great client. You know, it can help you make your impact in the world. It can help you become more well known. It’ll help you drive more leads. Like just that one practical idea. I mean, this podcast is nuts.
RV (09:31):
I mean, incredible, incredible. So that was the second one. And then the third one also sort of blew my mind and this one was like, where’s AJ, AJ. I want you to listen to this AJ, this clip is for you. I need to cut this clip. Somebody, can we cut this clip and send it to AJ? Because it was when I asked into question, how long should my videos be on YouTube? And everybody in the world is saying shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter attention. Spans humans are developing. We don’t pay attention. We want things shorter. Right? And, and Evan’s going, that’s not what the data says, sweetie. That ain’t what the data says. Not on YouTube anyways. Not on YouTube. His advice was a minimum of 10 minutes, but really 1, 2, 3 hours hours, 1, 2, 3 hours. That is amazing. 1, 2, 3 hours, no stinking way. One to three hours, unbelievable.
RV (10:36):
1, 2, 3 hours inly.
RV (11:24):
And we had Vanessa van Edwards on our podcast here. Not, not that long ago, like recently. And she was telling us some of her secrets and, and she’s a great example. Vanessa is blowing up on YouTube and I’ve known her for few years now, but like blowing up because of her YouTube channel. And if you go look like her, I, I, I, she, I sent I sent our team, her videos just because I said, look, it’s not that fancy. She’s not doing fancy editing. There’s not fancy lighting. I don’t even think she’s using a microphone. Like, and she’s blown it up, cuz she’s just teaching consistently like these great little tips, these little vignettes, you could do the same thing. Just you know, this is a game of education at scale. I mean, that’s how, that’s how Evan Des defined and described YouTube education at scale.
RV (12:17):
That’s it like that makes sense. And you go, well, I could, I could go speak to, to, to five people at a rotary club or I could record myself on my phone uploaded to YouTube and have a few dozen people or hundreds or maybe thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people watch it. Why are we doing this? Why are we not doing this? So and long form, long form content, man, that’s a that’s that. And, and AJ always tells me I’m she says you’re a little verbose, honey, a little verbose. But she, you know, she’s like trying to be to cut it down, cut it down. That’s cuz she, she doesn’t she’s like just cut to the point, cut to the chase, give me the deal. That’s how she operates. But the data, the data in general, sweetie says long form content rules the day, at least on YouTube.
RV (13:08):
So I I’m going with, I’m going with my men, Evan Carmichael and the data that makes me happy. That’s excited. Just teach, share what you know go back, listen to the episode. There’s there’s a, there’s a ton of, of great little things in there. Again, brand builders, group.com/evan Carmichael. If you wanna learn more from Evan and check out what he’s doing, very tactical, very specific to YouTube, but extremely, extremely tactical. And this YouTube being one place that I would say, yeah, we’ve, we’ve dropped the ball. Like we’ve never dominated YouTube, like we should, but we’re, we’re getting on the, we’re getting on the, the train. Now, even though I feel like a million years late we’re we’re starting now. And and you know, Evan is, is one of the people that we’re learning from. So check that out and keep coming back, share this podcast.
RV (13:54):
We’ll share this episode with somebody who needs to start a YouTube channel or, you know, you think somebody, you know, that’s really smart and go, Hey, you’re really smart. You should be posting your knowledge on YouTube because it’s gonna change your life. And you should listen to this interview with Evan Carmichael and Roy Vaden at brand builder’s group. So do that, would you for a friend and probably share it to your team, maybe if you’re listening and you’re not the one who actually edits your video, probably wanna share that interview with Evan Carmichael. And might I add the one with Vanessa van Edwards as well? So and Sean can the interview with Sean can, that we did as well was also a great, a great a great one on, on YouTube. So there you go. Look at that. You go, you got other episodes to go listen to right now, if you want more on this subject. So thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 306: How to Dominate on YouTube with Evan Carmichael
RV (00:02):
Oh, you don’t even know about the powerful interview you are about to hear right now. My man, Evan Carmichael, first of all, is a genius. He’s so successful. I mean, he sold his first company when he was 19 years old, a biotech firm biotech software company. He’s raised 15. He was raising 15 million for venture capitalists when he was 22 years old. And he’s done so many things for entrepreneurs today. He is known for a lot of things. What we’re gonna talk about is specific his genius strategy on YouTube. And when I say genius, I mean, he’s got over 3 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. He did a, he did a, a training, a full, like a 90 minute training for our members inside our portal for our pain community. And it just absolutely blew my mind and, you know, Lewis Howes and Brendan Burchard and grant Cardone and ed Mylett like Gary V like all of these people are people that look to Evan for advice and ideas on YouTube. So I was like, I’m begging him, please come back on the podcast so that we could sell everybody our entire community at large. So Evan, welcome to the show, man. Thanks
EC (01:17):
For having man. Always, always an honor to be here talking to the one and only rory Vaden. Let’s go, man.
RV (01:22):
Yeah. So you’re such a beast on YouTube. How do I get, how do I become a beast on YouTube? Like what, what do, what are the key things I need to know to just like start dominating on YouTube?
EC (01:36):
Yeah. Okay. So listen to position it let’s go here. Youtube is, is an education platform. Like I think a lot of people think of it as, as entertainment and fun and movies and music. Cool. But YouTube is, is the number one education platform. So, you know, people are trying to figure out how to be, become a more influential leader. Where are they gonna go? They’re gonna go to the library. Like, who are they gonna talk to? They’re gonna talk to their mom, like what they’re gonna go and search and your stuff will pop up and not just your videos, but again, other people’s videos, this content that people are going there to learn. And so YouTube is different than any, every other platform where we wanna be making long form content, teaching people because ahead of whatever, we’re trying to sell, we wanna put information.
EC (02:19):
We wanna put education, okay. We’re teaching people at scale to then bring them into whatever the thing is that we’re selling coaching products, program services, books, et cetera. And the beauty of something like YouTube is one your, your contentless forever. So the videos you make now in a year and two years, and six years are still getting your views, subscribers, attention leads, et cetera, where every other platform it goes away, right? Like Instagram, nobody cares what you posted a week ago. It’s instant, it’s Instagram, it’s gone. Every other platform’s the same. Youtube has the best monetization. So they’ll pay you, right? Like you could be making seven figures just from the ad revenue on your videos, as well as actually building your business. And the best part about YouTube is you can take the content since it’s long form and splice it up to put on all the other platforms.
EC (03:07):
So YouTube will tell you the best moments in every video, according to what the audience cared about, those little highlight moments, you can then tweak and put them to Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and all the other platforms. So all you really have to do is have a regular show long form on YouTube. And now we’re creating content everywhere. Most of the people listening, watching your goal is not to be a full time, just content creator. You got a business that you’re trying to run. We’re, we’re trying to build our membership groups and our coaching services and be a speaker and all of that stuff. And so you don’t have time to all day, every day, be on every single platform. You don’t have to be long form from YouTube, take the data, cut it up to be on every platform. So it kind of sits above all the other social media platforms. And most importantly, to help people’s message get out, to change the world.
RV (03:49):
Yeah. So I wanna dive in on something you just said there, because if we don’t highlight it, it’s easy to miss it. And this is such a tactical thing that you can do where, so the idea of repurposing your content, right? So a lot of people talk about that. We have a thing we teach called the content diamond, which is, you know, taking long form content and dividing it up. But part that you added, you know, specifically, at least to my education, which was so brilliant, was making that a data driven selection to figure that out. So can you talk about like, where do you go on YouTube and what are you clicking on? Like I know you just gotta talk us through it, cuz it can’t like show the screen, but, but what exactly are you looking for? Because just that, that one tip alone goes, if you win on YouTube, even if you don’t win on YouTube, if you suck on YouTube, but you can figure out the moments that win, like you can use that to inform everywhere else. So, so talk more about that.
EC (04:52):
Youtube has the best data platform of all of all those social media networks. And I love the data and I can geek out on it all day long and, and dive into it. It’s overwhelming for a lot of people. The only thing you have to care about is this, the audience retention curve, like write that down. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and you think you might at someday want to start a YouTube channel, come back to that, write it down. It is your golden ticket. The audience retention curve. What that does is show you second by second, where people are either falling off your video or sticking around second by second. So if your intros are really bad, it’ll show you, you lost half your audience in the first 20 seconds. Cool. Like let’s not do that again. And it’ll show you these little flat moments and a flat moment means you never lost anybody.
EC (05:38):
Like whatever you did in that moment was really good. Right? You held their attention that whole time. Think of it. Like if you ever watched those elections and like the election debates and there’s like the red and the blue in America, right? Mm-Hmm
RV (06:12):
A flat moment is good.
EC (06:14):
Flat moment is good. That means you’ve kept their attention. So if you have a flat moment, that’s 40 seconds long. Cool. What happened there? Let’s turn that into a tweet. Let’s turn into an Instagram reel. Let’s turn that into something else. And then you have these rare moments, these special moments where it goes up, well, how does it go up? Like we lost people. We understand why it goes down, but how did we gain people in the middle of the video? Doesn’t make sense, right?
RV (06:36):
Because most people drop off like in the first few seconds or whatever minutes is the big fall off, but then you, it doesn’t just go down. There’s these spikes.
EC (06:46):
Yeah. So why does the spike, like how does that make sense that new people join the video halfway through?
RV (06:50):
Right.
EC (06:50):
Usually not usually what the case is, is the people who are currently watching REW that video to watch that part again, it’s like, what did Rory just say? What was that thing again? And they rewind it to watch that part again, that’s your goal. And that may be 20 minutes inside of your video, but that’s what we cut. And one, we wanna make more content like that, like that can educate you to make better content. But then that also, that’s what we cut. So the flat moments or the spikes, that’s what we cut to take to our other social media accounts because we know that that’s popping. And a lot of people who are making content, whether they’re doing it themselves or they have team, there’s a lot of subjective decisions that go in. It’s like, well, I like that part. And I like this moment and I think we should do here. And there’s a lot of wasted time to be honest and going back and reviewing and watching the footage again. And then relying on one person’s subjective opinion to make the call on what goes through the platforms to make your, your diamond. The data will show you. It’s a lot easier, just look at where we help people on the video and let’s take that to our other platforms.
RV (07:51):
That’s, that’s so powerful. Like what a simple, practical thing to go. There’s no guesswork, like, just look at where people are watching it. So we’re looking, so if something’s flat, that’s like good. That’s solid. If somebody, if something drops, we go, let’s not do that again. But then if it’s a spike, you go, man, that’s, those are your moments that you want to cut it, clip it, repurpose it, use it. Other places love that. So audience retention curve, that’s the name of like the widget in the back, the back end of YouTube that we’re looking for.
EC (08:22):
Yeah. For every video, give it a, give it a couple days after it goes out. And then on every video, just look at, click on the analytics tab for that video and scroll down and it’ll be right there. It’ll be this curve and it’ll show you how the video’s doing compared to your other videos. And it’ll show you the exact moments where people are falling off or engaging. So
RV (08:39):
Love it. Yeah. Here’s another com super common question. We get this all the time. How long should my videos be?
EC (08:47):
So for experts, thought leaders you have something to train on educators long, long, long, long, long, long. So the advice used to be 10 minutes plus, which is which it still is like as a minimum 10 minutes, a minimum 10 minutes, but the highest growth category we’re seen is in the one, the three hour category.
RV (09:05):
That’s insane. What, like who’s watching a
EC (09:08):
Youtube video for three hours, the, the, the entire world
EC (09:50):
So if I wanted to learn how to become that influential leader, if you did a four minute video, how much are you gonna teach me in four minutes? Not a lot, but if you talk for an hour or you did a coaching session with somebody, or you had a guest coming on, sharing something, people would watch that because it’s the best thing there available. And then when you’ve got your next launch, your book, your course, your program, your private memory, she like, I love this Rory guy nobody’s talking like him. How do I get more of him? And they want to pay for the access to get into everything that you’re offering.
RV (10:19):
And so you don’t worry about giving away too, too much there. I mean, like I mean, how many of those videos is, is it, is it kind of more like have one really killer two hour video? Or are you trying to like crank cuz to do that every week would be pretty tough not to mention, you know, if you did an hour long video every week, that’d be, that’d be a lot of content. Like what would you be charging for if you were giving away that much? So is it kind of like have a couple key key trainings out there and do it that way or
EC (10:52):
It depends what game you’re playing. Often the best thing to sell is access. So the best thing to sell is access to a community. So if you’re trying to sell your, your program, your community, which is awesome, I was able to, you know, had the honor to speak in front of, if you had a lot of long form content that was getting millions of views, you’re gonna convert a lot of those people to want to spend more time with you because they love how you think. Like, you’re, you’re a weird duck. You think differently than other people. Like I want to think the way Rory thinks and I wanna be around him more often. So I wanna join his community. It’s less about the actual ideas. A lot of, a lot of people have paid programs. A lot of the same content is in the YouTube video as in the paid program, it’s just packaged altogether.
EC (11:33):
So it’s easy to find it’s sequential, there’s community, there’s access. And so that’s really what we’re selling, not just the information I’m I put out, I’m giving you every, I got nothing to sell here. I’m giving you the best. Like you’re asking me questions. This is what I do. This is what I teach people will still some of the names that you mentioned want me to help them, their channel. I’m telling them the same thing that I’m telling you guys right now here on Rory Madden’s show mm-hmm
RV (12:08):
Yeah. And I know you’re, I know you’re, you’re not selling anything, but we are. If you go to brand builders, group.com/evan Carmichael Evan has this program called Brandly where he walks you through exactly how like every, every time he does a training, he’s reviewing these live videos, showing you the data, telling you exactly what to do. It’s a very affordable program and we were like, dude, you have to let us be an affiliate for this because it’s so good. Like this is Evan is the guy that we go to for this, and it’s gonna restructure our entire YouTube strategy. So you can check that out brand builders, group.com/evan Carmichael. And you’ll, you’ll see brand Alytics and all the people he’s working with. So you know, so anyway, so coming back to this conversation here another common question that we get a lot from our members is when do I need to start a separate channel versus just a different playlist? So like you know, like I’m a good example of that. So we have brand builders group, which teaches personal brand strategy and we help experts, you know, become more well known, build and monetize their personal brand. Then we have Rory Vaden who more classically is known in the more like leadership and personal development space. And so it’s like, can I do content for both on one channel? Do those have to be two channels? Like how do you demarcate, you know, channels versus playlists.
EC (13:41):
So first off, nobody consumes by playlists. So nobody’s like waiting for a new, no, nobody’s waiting for a new Evan Carle video to drop in this playlist, but not this playlist. Right? So where playlists are helpful, the, the biggest value of playlist is on your channel homepage. When somebody goes to your channel homepage, they can see what you’re kind of all about. Like, I just watch one or Eva, video’s my first, I’ve never heard of RO Badden before I watch a video. I like this guy. Hmm. Let me go check him out. They click on your channel. And then they see some of the content that you’ve got. And so that’s where you can structure your playlist, but it’s more of a conversion tool for first time viewers. And it is a consumption pattern for ongoing viewers or repeat viewers. Mm. In terms of a different channel, if it’s a different audience, it’s a different channel. So the easy one is language, right? I have a Spanish channel with almost million subscribers. I have a Russian channel with almost a million subscribers. It’s a different audience, cuz most of my audience does not speak Spanish or Russian some do. But if, if you love my channel, you just first met me and then half my content is in Russian and you don’t speak Russian. You’re gonna not consume most of my content. Right. Because it’s just in a it’s it’s a different audience. So that’s the easy one to understand
RV (14:51):
So different audience, different channel. But like in that case, it’s the same content, but it’s translated. So you’re just taking your, your English based content and translating it to Russian and Spanish. And now you’ve got another 2 million subscribers that way that’s brilliant in and of itself. But if it’s, if it’s the same person, it could live on the same channel. If it has to be a different person, different channel,
EC (15:16):
Not necessarily person. So I mean the, the language is that’s, that’s basically applying the diamond strategy as well. Right. We’re we’re repurposing content. It’s gotta be dub built. So like not just captions, like full on dubbed into that language. If you guys are going there. Okay. It can be the same. It can be different people on the same channel. And that might be weird for your channel cuz it’s called Rory Vaden. So like who is this Jennifer person showing up when it’s your name on it? But it’s audience. So are Rory’s too, like what is Rory known for? Are they, are they two completely different universes that would be completely different audiences or is there enough overlap between those two worlds that it all makes sense and fits under one Veda?
RV (15:57):
Yeah. I mean that’s part of what we’re trying to figure out. Right? Cause so take the stairs is very much personal development, you know, discipline my second book, how to multiply time. And my Ted talk is productivity. They’re very ubiquitous, personal development topics. Brand builders group speaks specifically to experts to help them to help them become an author speaker. So most of my, my work as an individual is helping someone become a better performer at their job. Brand builders group is much more narrow where it’s like, I’m helping you become an author speaker, coach consultant you know, or, or we are. So it is some of the same people, but I’m not, I think they’re probably different. Well,
EC (16:37):
Even in how you presented it, he’s like I help people with this, but brand builders group, we do this right. So brand builders group could be its own channel and it doesn’t have to be the Rory show all the time. Yeah. As you build and scale and grow and bring on guest trainers and experts and coaches and all the people in underneath you, that’s the team channel that R’s the head of and creator and founder, but doesn’t have to be the face for everything where RO Vaden, we
RV (17:07):
Mm-Hmm
EC (17:12):
And just in terms of making the content, you mean, you mentioned brand Linux and the offer. I mean, which is awesome. Love to have more people join in. The easiest type of content for a lot of experts to make is coaching. Half of the half of the content that I do live inside brand analytics is coaching people. It’s like, we pull up your channel. I would pull up if was in, I would pull up R’s channel. And it’s part of what, what we did for your group. Right? Like we pull up R’s channel and you just tear it apart in a loving way. But in a, like I’m not here to tell Roy Good job, Hey, you, you keep going, you know, do it Rory. It’s like, oh dude, this thumbnail sucks. Like we gotta fix this. Your intros are terrible.
EC (17:50):
Yeah. And so even if, you know, if you’re teaching the same essential eight to 10 themes to the people you’re talking to coaching is usually a lot easier to do is a lot more fun to do. You don’t need a script to do you don’t need people to show up and give you a, a answers to like 18 questions before they come on. They’re just gonna show up and, and you’re gonna say, Hey, how can I help? And they’re gonna give you their problem. And they’re asking you questions that relate to your expertise. They’re not gonna ask you like gardening advice, right? Or maybe you’re expert gardener too. I don’t know. But coaching videos are easy to easy to make. It’s easier to go longer with cuz there’s always another level to helping them out. And if you think about going to an event, you know, you go to a Tony Robbin’s event. Like the, the best part is not the content. It’s the, it’s the, his interventions. It’s the, the one-on-ones where you see like, oh wow, you see the unlock happen in somebody. And so if you’re a great coach, this assumes you are a great coach. Like if you are not a great coach, you cannot do this because you’re gonna get exposed. And, and, but this is where a lot of people struggle. Like if you’re actually really good at what you’re doing and you’re a great coach, this is the content you should be making. Most people,
RV (18:57):
The clients get, how do you get around the clients being like, oh, you’re sharing my coaching call on your public platform. You just need to get permission from them in advance or something.
EC (19:06):
And not even permission, like please do me a favor. You, you pitch it as a benefit. So if I was talking to two people recently who are both New York times by selling authors, working on their next book. Right. I gotta sell my next book. Cool. Here’s what we gotta do. A lot of authors will sell access, right? So, Hey, if you buy a thousand topics in my book, you get a, a 20 minute call with me to help you out. Cool. That’s trading time for money and cool. You sold a thousand books, pitch it as also YouTube video, 25 minutes with me buy a thousand books and we’ll do a zoom call together. That becomes a YouTube video on my channel as well. And it’s, it’s the upfront and we’re getting paid to do it. So you can, you can recognize members if somebody’s in your membership group and they crossed over a year and they’re coming back for year two, offer them a free coaching call with you, right.
EC (19:54):
As a benefit or you upsell it as part of your sequence at the beginning, they’re buying into the membership group. Hey, if you also, for a thousand bucks, you get a one on one with Rory, that’s gonna be turned into a YouTube video. And Gary V does this all the time with his four DS. Like you, you spend $10,000 to go meet him for a day. And it’s mostly his team. And he shows up for an hour and talks to the members who paid 10,000 bucks to be there for the day and then, and then turns it into content for the YouTube channel. So it’s like you sell it as a benefit, not as a, like, please do me a favor and come on my channel because one-on-one access to Rory. Vaden is impossible, so you can buy it. And it gets turned into a YouTube video, but that’s a contract that gets set up in advance, not afterwards. Oh, do you mind if I turn it into content for
RV (20:37):
Yeah. Do it on the front end, gotta happen on front
EC (20:39):
End. And you use it as a, as a bonus for them that they’re paying for as opposed to like, please do me a favor
RV (20:45):
Uhhuh. Yep. Uhhuh. It’s like an incentive. You turn it into an incentive for them, like for them. And then you get the content out of it. So I know you have to go last question. And again, y’all brand builders, group.com/evan Carmichael, brand builders, group.com/evan Carmichael. You can check this out. Like I it’s insane how, I mean, I don’t remember the exact number, but I’m, this is less than a hundred dollars a month or a hundred dollars a month or something like it’s, it’s, it’s not a lot of money for what you get. Cuz it’s like, this could change your life. Like this is career changing stuff. So check, check that out. It’s so tactical, it’s gonna change our it’s changing our entire world. The, how do I find video editors? Right? So that’s that becomes a problem. Okay. I’m an expert, but I’m not an expert at editing video. You know, what I really need is I really need to hire a video editor and I need that person to go through your training. Is that doable? How do I do that?
EC (21:43):
Or the editing almost doesn’t matter. Like why are people listening to you? Because like, if you think about quality content, it, people default the production quality, like, oh, what microphone using their Rory and what’s your headset, right? And like, what’s the lighting, but nobody’s watching your stuff for your microphone. So the quality isn’t production quality it’s quality of thought. Can you teach ’em to think like you think? And so the mistake a lot of people make is they, if they’re doing it themselves at the beginning, a lot of people do this. You spend 20 minutes making a video and then five hours editing it. You’re training the wrong skill. You’re training yourself to learn editing software as opposed to training yourself, to be a better speaker where your ultimate goal should be to be a better speaker, train, spend five hours making a video and 20 minutes editing it or zero time editing it.
EC (22:34):
Because the ability to communicate your message in front of a camera will be a skillset you use for the rest of your life, whether YouTube exists or not. When, when we’re beaming into your, your living room in VR and eight holograms and all that, you’re still just talking to a camera. And so that ability to get your message out there is the thing to train and practice. So I wouldn’t worry about editing, being the most important thing, train yourself to be a great speaker, train yourself, to press record, deliver a fire message and then release that as a video. Because when you, when I go live on a podcast like this, when I get up on stage, when I’m doing interviews, there’s no edits. I mean maybe if I really mess up, Rory will do me a solid and like cut out that piece. But you get on stage isn’t edits. Like you can’t train yours. If you’re a speaker, you can’t train yourself to only communicate when you’re perfectly edited.
RV (23:21):
Yeah.
EC (23:22):
So we have to train ourselves to be great. It doesn’t mean that you completely disrespect the editing, but my goal would be to, Hey, let’s get your business up to the point where the content is helping you generate enough money, whether it’s through your coaching or your books or your programs, so that then you can afford to hire an editor to take it to the next level. But the editing will not save you. It’s quality of thought more than production quality.
RV (23:42):
And then one of the things we’re not gonna have time to talk about all this, but like, so it’s, it’s less the editing quality. It’s all about the content. And then if I was gonna spend time, I would wanna use, use that time to do things like optimized titles and thumbnails and, and you know, those kinds of things would be a better use of time.
EC (24:04):
Yeah. And, and paying attention to your audience, attention curve, cuz that’ll make you a better speaker too. Mm-Hmm
RV (24:41):
Yeah. Well, those of you that become members, or if you are a member, we had, we had Evan a couple months ago and it was that awesome, like going, going through it. And so that training is available. That is now a permanent part of our, our library. So if you’re one of our members go watch it. It’s amazing. If you’re not, I would say go check out brand builders, group.com/evan Carmichael and, and, and check out what Evan’s got going on with brand Lytics. And man, you’re so generous. And you know, at this point I’ve known you for so many years, I’m just, I’m just grateful and you really do believe in entrepreneurs and, and so thanks for helping us. Thanks for serving us and thanks for making time to, to come be on the show, brother. We wish you the best.
EC (25:22):
Cool man. Happy to, and happy to do round two whenever you want to.
RV (25:26):
All right. It sounds good. We’ll do it.
Ep 299: Overcoming Sales Reluctance with Dean Graziosi | Recap Episode
RV (00:03):
Every time I get to sit down with someone like Dean Graziosi, it just like, I just think it’s the coolest thing that after doing this, I guess I’ve been at this for a while now, you know, 15, 15 years at least I mean, legitimately you would say, yeah, like 15, 16 years that I’ve been pretty much full, full time at this industry and getting to meet people like him, you know, it was like, this is someone I grew up, there’s watching on TV. Right. And Tony Robbins, like they’re doing business together. Like what an honor to just, just to, to get, to meet them and talk to them and then how valuable to get into this guy’s mind. And that’s what I wanna give you, these, these three core takeaways from me or, or from Dean that I took away, I took away from me.
RV (00:49):
And I love like if you didn’t listen to the episode yet, go back, go, go back and listen. Because a couple things, first of all, there’s sort of three things I’ve always wanted to like ask Dean about. And we got to all three thing, all three of them in, in that interview. So, and I’m gonna share the debrief of those right now, because I thought there was like, these are three very specific things that like, when I think of him and what he has done really well, I wanted to like, know how the, these, these parts that are really mindset things. And the other thing is, you know, and I just have to say, like, I just, I didn’t have much of a relationship. I had zero relationship with Dean other than what I saw online and stuff here and there in, in different promotions.
RV (01:31):
And you know, he’s definitely a, he’s definitely an information marketer. I mean, he’s, he’s one of the direct response Kings and and yet I never had a personal encounter with him, but I’ve had a few now. So this would be like my fourth or fifth time spending time with him, one on one. And every time I’m with him, I, I genuinely enjoy the guy. And I genuinely feel like, I feel like he is both serving and I think he is selling like I, and I think he’s, I I’ve known him as a salesperson, but also getting to understand a little bit more about, about his heart and stuff. And that’s why we wanted to bring, to bring him to you. We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t bring anyone to you that we, that we didn’t believe in. And obviously thrive 3 53 thrive, three fifty.com.
RV (02:18):
That’s our affiliate link. So we’re, we’re putting it in front of you because there’s a lot to learn from, from Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins, a lot to learn, like whether you know, a lot about ’em or nothing about him, whether you think of Dean as a, you know, you might think of him as a direct response. Marker. You might, whatever you think about Tony, like they they’ve been around a long time or maybe you don’t know either, but like, no matter what you think about them, it’s indisputable to me to go. These guys know how to reach people. These guys know how to get their message out there. These guys have an influence. These guys, they are connected to the most
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Influential people in the world, athletes and billionaires and politicians and charitable organizations and like churches and, and entertainers. And like they have built massive influence both in terms of their indirect relationships, the people they know and their direct reach, their ability to like their audience, the number of people who come to their events, read their books, follow them on social media are in their email list, et cetera, et cetera. And you go, I think myself included here. Some of us struggle a little bit with, you know, maybe it’s knowledge like maybe it’s knowing what to do to reach people. But I think a lot of us mission driven messengers, we, we struggle with sort of the conviction and the boldness of telling people who we are and why we’re like, why, what we’re doing matters. And that was a really important interview. And you know, that’s what they’re, that’s what they’re they’re teaching, right?
Speaker 2 (03:55):
So anyways, you could check out three fifty.com go as soon as you, as soon as you get this, as soon as you listen to this, because they, they have a bunch of free training with Matthew McConaughy and Tony and Dean, obviously he mentioned, so Jenna Kucher is another, become another really good friend lately. She’s, she’s a doll like and so, you know, check this out, go there. And I would say if, if nothing else go register and watch how they do these launches, right? Like I’m fascinated being that we’re an affiliate for this launch for them is I’m learning a ton, just seeing the way that they do things and just like, oh, this is how that this is how that works. And this is how that works. And they, they have reaching people down to a science. And, and so that’s actually my first takeaway that I wanna talk about was the whole conversation around advertising.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
And, and it’s amazing, like what Dean said is so true where it’s like, do you know the person who wins is the person who can spend the most on ads. That is the person who wins when, when you’re talk, not just about making money, but just reach where you go, who’s reaching the most people. Is it the smartest person? You know, like, is it the, is it the neuroscience, you know, scientist? Is it the neurosurgeon? Is it, is it the, you know, the doctorate at the university? Is it the brilliant guy that lives in somebody’s basement? No, it’s like, they’re not reaching the most people, the people who are reaching the most, people are spending the most money on advertising is Coca-Cola the best soda ever. No, like probably not. I mean, I don’t drink soda, like but like, it’s it, but they reach the most people they’re spending the most on advertising.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
And so that to me is a really important switch that has to flip for you, right? Like at some point you have to get over that you have to get over that reluctance, that apprehension of telling people about what you do, like whether you like it or not. If you can’t get past that roadblock, if you can’t get past this limitation, this, this mental barrier of, of saying I am unashamed of what I do. I have to boldly and unapologetically tell the world who I am and what I do. If I cannot get past that, then I’m going to be stuck here in secret in private, the world’s best kept secret. And you know, the parallel that he used of, of like Martin Luther king Jr, is, is a gray one. Like lots of people wanted to, to affect civil rights and, and, and, and cure injustice and inequality.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
But Martin Luther king is remembered in history because he was able to do it through influence and, and understanding people and communicating and getting the message out and, and being able to rally an audience. This is a life changing skill set. And, and it, you, you got to have conviction in what you’re doing. And, and I, I think the first is sort of like a logical realization. This isn’t the order that we talked about them in the interview, we talked about ads in the middle of the interview. But to me, the first realization is that the person with the most reach is not the smartest. They’re not the best. They’re, they’re not the most credible or qualified or experienced. They are just the best at marketing. And that’s a huge part of this. No, if, if I don’t know about you, I can’t buy from you. If I don’t know about you, I can’t donate to your charity. If I don’t know you are there, I can’t be involved in your mission, your product, your service, your program, your institution, your university, your organization, like people have to know about you. And if you are not willing to get into the game of going, let, I wanna let people in the world know that I’m here than somebody who is probably less qualified.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Somebody who is less credible, somebody with less expertise, somebody with less experience, somebody with a less effective program is gonna reach those people, because they’re willing to overcome that, that mental roadblock about their somehow inconveniencing other people by telling them that they’re there. And this has been a huge continues to be a huge struggle and battle for me. And, and, you know, for so long, I’ve worn it as a badge of honor that we don’t spend money on advertising. It’s all referrals and word of mouth of which I think there’s some real beauty to that, right? Like you want, you wanna grow your business in the most profitable way possible. And, and I do think referrals is the best way to grow your business, but it’s not necessarily a, like, that’s not at odds with going, what’s the, what is the predictable way to constantly grow or to reach more people is to go, but how do you win?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Who’s gonna reach more people. Is the, the, the person who can spend the most on advertising and the way you justify that will, you know, not just emotionally, which we’ve been talking about, but logically and financially is you go, you have to get really good at your metrics. You have to know your numbers. You have to understand customer lifetime value of, of every click and every step of the way. And you have to have a process of what you’re driving them to do. You know, these are the things that we, these are things that we teach that brand builders group in our, you know, revenue engine and high traffic strategies. Those are some of our phase two trainings to our clients. And, you know, that’s why I’m excited about learning from people like Dean and Tony in the programs they have, because they’re doing it right.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
And they’re directing so many people. So like you have to get past that, that roadblock, the second one is going, okay, not just telling people about it, but then selling people and collecting money. And so many of us struggle to sell. We’re afraid. It’s almost like we, we, we grovel at the idea of asking people like, oh, I’m sorry. I have to ask you, ask you for money. And we don’t think of it as, as a service. And I I loved what he said when it was like, you have to fall in love. You have to love so much. Here’s what he said. You have to love what you do so much, that you feel bad. If you don’t offer it to people, you have to love what you do so much that you feel bad if you don’t offer it to people.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
And you know, in this very moment, I feel that way. I go man, brand builders group, like we created this company because we don’t see anyone in the world that can do this better than us. Like our team cares so much about helping our clients succeed and in the human to human space of like getting real life coaching, like, and training human to human and, and live experiences encounters. It’s like, I don’t know anyone who has a better, a better program for that better curriculum. We spent our, our, our career life, learning these things and testing these things and putting together like, and the amount that we charge is so low. I mean, we literally have multiple clients who in the last few years have created seven figure businesses, a million dollar annual businesses from the stuff that they’ve learned from our curriculum. We don’t charge anywhere near that.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Like to, to, to, to know the value of it is we’re super convicted of it. And man, we’ve just, we’ve poured so much time into it to fall in love with it. And I feel that same way about Dean, right? Like I’ve gone, man. I have to at least let you meet Dean. I mean, because it, his results are irrefutable. Like the amount of people that they’re reaching. And it’s like a it’s, it’s like a predictable growth. He’s figured out a way to get his message out to lots and lots of people. And he’s done it consistent for 30 years. And it adds up over time to a lot of influence, a lot of influence. And so if you’re struggling with this, one of the practical things I think you do, like one of the practical takeaways is fall in love with what you do.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
The more convicted you are in what you do. The, the more convicted you are in your product, your service, your own expertise, the harder you’ve worked at crafting the thing, the, the easier, the more conviction you’ll have that people should buy it. And I feel like in many ways, brand builders group, I mean, honestly, we have spent the first four years of this business building a world class program, like we’ve, we have sold some like a lot. I mean, we’re a, we’re a, a very healthy, multi seven figure company. But like, I think we will become an eight figure company quickly because we haven’t been focused on advertising and reach. We’ve been building, we’ve been building the program, building the ship, tightening it, testing it, tweaking it. And we have poured so much into it, but it’s like, now we can go tell the world because it’s, it’s tight.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
And, and we have that conviction. You should do the same thing as go like, well, what, what would make you so convicted? Like if you had to cure for cancer that tasted like chocolate, and you knew somebody had cancer and you knew you could cure them, you would feel obligated to share with them. You would feel it was your duty, your responsibility, your, your privilege, your honor, to let them know that you have, that you can help them. You got to get to that, like, you know, to that level or somewhere close to that level with your own products and services. Like I’ve worked so hard at my craft. I’ve worked so hard at putting this together that I, I, I have to have the world know about it. And so anyways, we feel that way about, about brand builders group. And that’s why, you know, we’re putting out this podcast for you to sample us, our network, the people we’re learning from the things that we’re doing, so that hopefully one day you go, you know what?
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I trust these guys enough to take a chance on them. And by the way, if you, if you go to free brand call.com/podcast, you can request a call with our team. You know, if you want the more human based elements separate. And in addition to that, I would say, go to thrive three fifty.com and check out what Tony Robbins and Dean Grazi are teaching. Right? They’ve put together a program teaching how they’ve gotten to be, who they are hard to not pay attention to that. And I, I felt bad. I was like, I would feel bad about going Tony Robbins has put together something that teaches the things that he actually believes about what he’s done to help him become who he is and not give you at least the opportunity to check that out. And if nothing else, at least the opportunity to go through it, right?
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Like sign up, go through the training watch how they do it. And just from like, experiencing what they’re doing. And you know, even if you don’t buy it, buy it or check it out. But, you know, again, like Matthew, McConaughy free training with Matthew McConaughy and Tony Robbins, like that’s pretty legit. Like so anyways, that’s thrive three fifty.com or if you go, Hey, I love what brand builders group is up to. And I think I want like a human, you know, encounter like great do both of them, but free brand call.com/podcast is how you get in touch with us. Love. So love what you do so much that you feel bad that you, if you don’t offer it to people, that’s a great way to flip that, that mental switch. And then the last takeaway, which, which we talked about was just, you know, the mindset around money is to go, if you have a block of any type with making more money, and you somehow think that it’s evil, or you have to take advantage of people or it’s selfish, or it’s self-centered, or if you have any of that related to money, then just then just change the focus and go.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
The reason I wanna make a lot of money is so that I can give it away, because I tell you like, every non-profit that I know is doing that, that they’re doing amazing work. They need more money. Like they they, they need money. They need money to get the message out to about what they do. They need advertising and dollars and sponsor to raise money for what they do. And, and you, if you have a, a spiritual gift of making money, then you can write checks to solve problems. And that’s true in your business too, right? Like not just with charity as you go look making a whole bunch of money doesn’t mean you have to keep it for yourself. Doesn’t mean you have to like buy a private jet in an island. Like one of the amazing things about making money, like genuinely my heart.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
One of my favorite things, like one of the honors of my life is employing. So many people is saying like my work and my energy and my passion and my spiritual gift of generating revenue provides jobs. And, you know, I, I, I am motivated by paying our people more like that is something that has always been inspiring to me is like, I want to not only make money for me and my family and for our charitable contributions, but the people who on our team, like part of how I measure success is like, are we able to pay our team more and more? And are we able to pay them the top of the market? Like one day, I wanna be able to say that, like the people who work at brand builders group, it’s an amazing job. It’s an amazing mission. It’s amazing culture. It’s amazing people.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
And they get freaking paid girl. Like they get paid more than anyone doing that same role. Like that is genuinely in, inspiring to me is, is going. I want, I wanna provide jobs for people. And in order to build that kind of company, you gotta be able to write checks to solve problems. You gotta be able to hire people to do stuff. You gotta get copy written and videos, edited websites, built, and sales people hired. And, and, you know, whatever, you know, you need administrative folks and operational people and financial stuff like you need, you need legal contracts drafted, and you need all these things that it takes to, to run a business. And they all cost money. So you gotta make money so that you can solve problems. So you can write checks, not just so you can get rich and, and, you know, whatever, buy islands and drive cars and whatever.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
There’s nothing wrong with those things. But like, if those things feel off to you, then just shift your focus and go, no, my goal is because I want to, I wanna provide, I wanna provide charity. I wanna support charity and good works in the world. And I wanna support the people who are doing a good job and making a, a, a big contribution, right? Like, you know, the, the people who are supporting me are creating jobs and creating opportunity. I mean, that’s just super duper valuable. So if you struggle with those things, I mean, those are mental things that I, I think, you know, Dean has really pushed past this. He’s figured this out, he’s conquered this. And anybody who’s reaching lots and lots of people like anybody in general. Right? My, my, I am one of my, my, one of my central life philosophies was when mark Twain said, each man is my superior in some way each, I really believe that I really believe each person is my superior.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
In some way, everybody has something to teach. And if you’re struggling with reach and you’re struggling with like sales, I go, man, Dean and Tony, Tony Robbins, and Dean Grazi like, they have figured that out how to do that, right? Like they have figured out how to reach. A lot of people make a lot of money and do a lot of good in the world. So if you’re interested in learning from them, I am, I want to know, thrive three fifty.com thrive three fifty.com, check out the free training and the other resources that they’ve got going on. That’ll come your way. If you do that. Other than that, keep coming back here, stay plugged in. And, and I hope you’re, you’re enjoying this like, and stay here until you’re ready to take the next step, that whole conversation, that Dean and I had about, you know, when he was saying the, as you get, you become a more serious athlete, you go, I need the next level of coaching and when you’re ready for it, we are ready for you. So thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 298: Overcoming Sales Reluctance with Dean Graziosi
RV (00:03):
I am really excited and honored to introduce you to somebody who I’ve just recently gotten to know. And I wanna tell you why I’m bringing him to you. First of all, before I tell you who he is and what incredible things you’ve done, which you’re already gonna recognize who it is. But I saw this gentleman stand on stage and make a generous offer to support the victims in Uvalde, Texas, and their families, and to support another man who’s really, really near and dear to me at my let in a way that made a massive difference. And when I think of influence and how you create influence in the world, it speaks volumes to me about who are the people you surround yourself with and who are the people who will come out to help you. And Dean Graziosi stepped up in such a huge way with such a pure heart and being in the same room with him.
RV (00:53):
And we’d never met before, but the night before ed my let’s event, we were at dinner and I just caught, I caught 0% arrogance pretentiousness 0%. I’m better than youness. It was, it was a hundred percent. We’re here to do a mission to support ed, to support the people watching. And then he spontaneously throughout, you know, a pretty generous offer to help a lot of people. And you know, that was, that is how I got to know Dean Graziosi. Now you probably have heard of him before, right? He’s a multi New York, multi-time New York times bestselling author. He has worked with at least 14 major companies that are eight and nine figures that he’s helped him grow significantly. Of course he has millions of social media followers. He’s got lots of different programs, a couple of his books, millionaire success, success habits.
RV (01:45):
And then also the underdog advantage are have been, you know, read, bought, sold hundreds of thousands of people. And in 2019, he began a partnership with Tony Robbins and they started mastermind.com. And they have a, a, a program called the KBB the knowledge business blueprint, and they’ve helped over 50,000 people in this business. And the expert space understand how to better monetize what they’re doing, get their, their passion out to more people extend their reach. And so anyways, when I met Dean, I said, yeah, man, you know, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna be one of your top affiliates probably, but the way that you have ENCA interacted over the last couple days, I would love to be a part of introducing you formally to our, our community who we hold sacred and dear. So with that, welcome to the stage, the one and only Dean Graziosi.
DG (02:39):
Sorry. Thank you, man. That, that was a great introduction. I’m on vacation for just five days of my family and just happened to what a perfect spot it’s like. It’s great. They got the flag out front. But it, this was important. I come on with you, man. It, it was a pleasure to meet you. I saw what you stepped up and did for ed. He he’s a dear friend of mine and, and you did nothing but serve and help him get that great book in a lot of people’s hands. And I, I just wanted to do my part for everybody else. Listen, I know you got lots of options. Glad you’re here with us today. I promise that we’re gonna deliver some massive value today in the next 25 or 30 minutes. I, I know people have choices. So when you’re here, I always feel like I’m, I’m on like I’m performing.
DG (03:14):
Like I, I gotta bring it because you got lots of other options. So, and I know how much the depth of how Rory cares. We got the chance to know each other a little better. So pleasure to be here. And this is the perfect audience. This, you just explained who this is and what you do. And it’s so amazing when we have that desired dream passion, or sometimes it’s not even a dream. You just so, oh my God, I could be in an industry of sharing. What I know help serve others, help people get faster to the end result, help people avoid the mistakes I made or go quicker to where they wanna be or a million other things. When you get that under your skin, that we can truly, and this is the, this is easy for me to talk to this audience when we truly can make an impact and serve while simultaneously having the ability to create massive success in an industry that’s exponentially growing.
DG (04:04):
That is a real, real a rare combo. There’s not many places where you can impact and serve and create a thriving business. That’s why I’m, I love it. That’s why I think you probably love it. And today I wanna help deliver whatever I can to help you go faster, quicker, because this is a time the world needs the best version of you. We know we have 41 year high inflation. We know we’re headed towards a recession. We know we’re in an economic winter. We know that some people are, a lot of people are gonna hurt through this time, but we also know this industry is gonna grow through this. This industry is gonna be there to serve and help people. So I believe right now is a time we have to find another gear. We have to tap into our full potential. We can’t leave anything on the table. God, the universe, people, the world, whatever you believe need us, need the best version of us. Now, our family need the best version version of us now. And this is one of those rare things that if you do it right, and as you know, if you’re in this, this is a time you’ll actually grow. So anything I can do to help serve any of those topics I’m here.
RV (05:05):
Yeah. So here’s, here’s a, here’s one that I’ve always, I’ve always wanted to, to ask you about for our audience. So we, we refer to our audience Dean as mission driven messengers. So they are people who truly care about the mission more than the money, but sometimes it’s to their own detriment. Sometimes they struggle to sell because they feel like it’s pushy. Sometimes they’re shy about marketing cuz they feel like it’s vain. Sometimes they feel like if I’m asking people for money, you, you know that like somehow it’s, it’s very selfish. And I think one of the things that you do really well is you are, you are super service minded in terms of trying to help people, but you’re also very bold and straightforward in terms of like being convicted in why people should take a next step. Yeah. So if someone is wrestling, how do you wrestle with that? Like how do you reconcile that? Like
DG (06:00):
Really great, really great question. I’ve been helping people with that. If you don’t mind. I, I I’d love to jump right in here because sales, because we grew up with watching cheesy sales people on TV and, and somebody might have been sold something that didn’t serve you. So many people have this negative association with sales mm-hmm
DG (06:42):
Do you think there was other men who wanted to help civil rights and change the world because it was unjust. Do you think there was a lot of people that wanted he did because he was influential and a salesperson and marketed himself. And look at the change that man made to the world, right? Our association to sales is the reason that we might feel icky about it. If you don’t love what you do, if you’re selling an inferior product, if you’ve dabbled and created a half, half baked coaching program, then you should feel bad. But I’m gonna tell you the first thing to do love what you do so much. You feel bad if people don’t use it just simple as that. Mm-Hmm
DG (07:28):
I’m gonna give you a quick little story here. I think it, it really, cuz I’ve been asked this question a lot over the last 25 years of doing this. And I was on stage with five. It was three or four or 5,000 business. Women and women sometimes feel this more than men when it comes to marketing and sales. And I said, who’s ready for, you know, I was in my middle, my presentation say who’s ready for another level. Who wants this? Who wants that? Ever. They were fired up amazing audience. And I said, who’s a little apprehensive or scared or don’t let, doesn’t like selling almost all of their hands went up. Mm. So there’s a woman in front couple rows in, I called on her. I said, Hey, what do you, what do you do? She’s like, oh my God, I help women through trimester four.
DG (08:06):
Nobody knows what that is. That is after the baby, you feel insane. You still look like you’re pregnant. You feel like your life isn’t yours anymore. Cause you got this baby and you don’t know if your husband loves you anymore. And it’s this crazy time emotionally. She goes, I went through hell. But then I found a way to get myself strong and save. And she goes, now I help women go through that. And I, I have gooses cause she’s so passionate about it. Or she was like, so passionate. I said, are you good? She goes, oh my God. I love these women. I empower them. I change ’em and she tells me this. I said, I wanted to break her state. I said, then why are you screwing women over? And she’s like, well, I don’t understand. I said, you said you don’t like sales and marketing and her mannerism.
DG (08:44):
She went, no, I feel bad. I said, so then you’re willing to let women suffer in silence because you have the ability to help them. Can you help them? Oh my God, are you good at I’m the best? Do you love the women? You help more than anything. I was put on this earth to serve these women. I said, here’s the thing. If you build it, they will not come. I don’t care how great you are, how much you love these women. It will not come unless you find a way to attach service to marketing. When you realize every time a woman says yes and cut you a check, you get to impact her lives, her life in an amazing way. And if you don’t only two things can happen. That woman suffers in silence and never gets help. Or she goes to someone who’s not as good as you, but they’re better at marketing.
RV (09:26):
Mm.
DG (09:27):
And I watched three, four, I, I think it was 4,000 women. I watched, I watched cheers and no one had ever given him permission to look at it that way. And I know you, maybe you have, or you thought, but really, maybe, maybe today’s the first time you really heard it. That if you don’t sell, you don’t serve. So you could keep working on your, if it’s comfortable to work on your curriculum, if it’s comfortable to design the logo, you’re probably, if you’re not making the money you want or the impact you want, you’re probably working on the things that make you feel comfortable. And you’re avoiding the things that, ah, I don’t know about the marketing. I’ll get back to it. I’m gonna encourage you today to lean into the parts that are, you’re a little uncomfortable with gain capabilities, fall in love with what you do on a whole nother level. Cause when you fall in love with your product, then gets what the byproduct is. You fall in love with gaining capabilities about marketing and sales from those who’ve already been there. And when that combo comes together, oh my God. It’s magic.
RV (10:25):
Oh, that’s so good. I mean, and, and, and also true, you know, like a lot of the people who are winning in this space today, they’re not necessarily the best or the smartest, but they’re, they are great at marketing. Like it is a marketing game. So here’s another thing I’ve always wanted to ask you. Ads. So ads is another thing that people are afraid to do. Like, oh, it feels cheesy. It feels maybe like I’m cheating or I’m scared of losing money or it’s like, how do I, you know, spend money, not knowing if I’m gonna make that money back or going well, is it, it’s not the same. It’s more competitive yet. I’ve seen, you know, you run ads, you’ve done info initials. Like you’ve done so many things of like, I’m gonna make sure I get myself out to the world. So can you just like, if someone’s reluctance about spending money on advertising, what’s your, what’s the Dean Graziosi? Like what goes on in your head to be like, yeah, I’m gonna dump a bunch of money into this. Not knowing if it’s gonna come back to you.
DG (11:26):
Yeah. So because we’re stuck in a frame of what traditional advertising is. So I really want you to hear this traditional say, brand advertising, say, you’re advertising Coca-Cola you might have somebody drinking a Coke while they’re playing basketball or on stage, or you might have a Coke and a movie, or you might have a billboard or a radio ad or a TV ad. But none of it equates to the exact sale, right? That’s more of brand advertising. I wanna get my brand out there. And I want everybody to know about me, right? What we do in direct response, marketing and advertising is you measure every dollar. If I spend a dollar on Facebook, does 75 cents come back or a dollar 25 come back. So first and foremost know that there’s never gonna be a time right now. We’re Tony Robbins and I are getting ready to do a challenge here.
DG (12:18):
We’re gonna spend a lot of money on promoting this free five day challenge, but we know our metrics. We know every time we spend a dollar, how much we need to come back in order to make it so we can be sustainable and not go broke. Right? So let me just back up a little bit. First thing is we are in an absolute when I first started, there was no internet. How crazy is that? There was no social media. We couldn’t target a demographic. We, I had to do an infomercial. There was no other way to get into people’s homes and see if they, they wanted what it was that I was delivering. But you have the opportunity with social media, where you can go to Facebook groups that are similar to your genre. You could start a Facebook group where you’re given all away, nothing but value.
DG (13:03):
You could post on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and LinkedIn, and you can test different topics. So let me give you a little example, getting ready. I’m gonna pull back the curtain. We’re going, we’re doing this challenge. It’s called the time to thrive challenge. Over five days, we’re gonna help people in this space, how to go faster, quicker, how to be bolder, how to have more capabilities, how to thrive. Day three is all about selling. Day four is all about building an audience. Day two is about identifying exactly what you be sh should be selling. It’s five days. It is unbelievable. It’s free, but we still gotta get people to come. And what we wanna deliver so much value that people continue to work with us. That’s in complete transparency, right? Sure. But I wanna tell you, you know what I did last month, I was filming different one minute videos that I was posting on social.
DG (13:48):
Whether you have five followers, 500, 5,005 million, I was posting different content. And I found a couple of things. I did a one minute video and I said, Hey, during a recession, during inflation Warren buffet said, there’s two things you should do. Number one, invest in yourself, get better at what you’re doing, become the person that people go to. So you’ll get a bigger piece of the pie. Number two, be a part of an industry that has higher margins. Don’t get caught with supply chain issues or your product costs going through the roof. And then your margins are gone. I shared that in a video. And I said, why not consider the self education industry where you’re teaching your life experience? The margins are huge. You don’t have to store it. You don’t have to warehouse it. You don’t have to ship it. You could sell it over and over again.
DG (14:33):
And you really get to impact people’s lives while you make money. I did that all in one minute, that video skyrocketed people were sharing it all over the place. Roy. So then I had an unfair advantage when I was gonna run an ad. What do you think? One of my topics were when I ran an ad, I was like, oh, that video, everybody loved and liked and commented on. Let me shoot an ad like that. And then let’s spend 500 bucks on it and see if 500 bucks if 200 come back or 600 come back. Right. So just know it’s, it’s the art of Kaizen. It’s one step at a time. Don’t, you know, where people get in trouble is like, I gotta, I gotta market. I gotta do some ads. And they put a whole bunch of money in ads without testing it without tweaking it, without understanding the fundamentals and they could lose money, then they get stung. And then like, I’m never doing that again. It’s only cuz you didn’t have the right guidance. You didn’t have somebody step you into this one piece at a time.
RV (15:21):
Yeah. Yeah. And I want, I wanna talk a little bit more about that in a, in a, in a second here. I know I don’t wanna get too much in the weeds on this, but just a straightforward question. Do you ex do you expect to break even on your ad spend like on the first sale or is it more, do you have a longer lifespan of going ah, some of it I might make back over the second, third, fourth sale.
DG (15:41):
Yeah. So some of it that’s when you first start. So, so write if you’re gonna write anything down today, when it comes to ads, write this down, you know, who wins it at ads? Do you know where
RV (15:53):
The, the, the, the, the person who has the best metrics
DG (15:56):
Or the person who could spend the most?
RV (15:58):
Oh yeah.
DG (16:00):
The person who could spend the most to an acquire a lead wins. Yeah. So if you’re brand new and you’re selling, you know, a weekend, you’re selling your course and your course sells for 500 bucks and it’s costing you $200 to acquire that client. Oh my God, when you do it all day, you spend two, you give somebody a $200 bill. They give you back a $500. Bill spend as much as you can and you’ll get some of those sales, but then you’ll get to where it’s costing you $400 for a $500 sale. And then you’re getting to a point where it’s $500 for a $500 sale. And then most people go, this does this ad game doesn’t work. But when you look at serving people where they need it, sometimes you sell a course. And of course is enough for I sell a book.
DG (16:41):
Sometimes my books are enough for somebody to, I, we have thousands of testimonials just from my book. Then some people go books, not enough. I need Tony and Dean’s course, man, that, that project next, which is, I believe the greatest personal, you know, self education course ever created like that course, oh my God is amazing. And some people say, got the book amazing, got the course, but I need someone to keep me accountable. I need a coach or a mentor. I need to be on a call once a week to get these answers. These questions answered. It’s like the professor at a college, some kids could do it with the books. Some people need the professor, right? And some kids need extra tutoring. So if you have the books and the, and the teacher and the extra tutoring, some people are gonna self-select and say, Hey, I bought your course for 500 bucks.
DG (17:26):
Amazing. But do you have a coach that can help me through it? We do. And it’s X amount. So it’s, I know you guys get this. It’s about lifetime value. It’s not about trying to sell somebody so much stuff. They don’t need. It’s about delivering what they need. Some people need a coach. Some people need their hands held. Some people need to be held accountable, right? So when you have additional products, some people, maybe 80% of the people just need your course, thumbs up 20% might want a weekly coaching call or a deep dive. One on one coaching call. That’s more money. So, which means is your average lifetime value of your client over six months over a year for that $500 buyer could actually be a thousand dollars. Now I’m not getting in the weeds, but really think about that over time. Oh yeah. I want that coaching. Oh yeah. I definitely need that too. And all of a sudden, now that $500 buyer is worth a thousand. So you can go in and spend $700 to acquire a $500 client and you’re still winning and you’ll win in the ad game. Cuz most people can’t afford it.
RV (18:27):
Yeah. I love that. Parallel of some people can do it with a book, a textbook. Some people can do it by going to class. Other people need the tutor. Like, yeah. It’s just, it’s just the same.
DG (18:39):
Would you say, would you say, oh my God, that too, like that is horrible that
RV (18:43):
You’re taking, you’re taking advantage of people because you sold them tutoring.
DG (18:47):
Yeah. Because they’re struggling. You know, I I’ll give you an example. I’ll share this. We call it a value ladder. Right? So I wanna give you this. My daughter was in ninth grade last year. She pitched for her softball team JV. She pitched 13 outta 15 games start to finish.
RV (19:01):
Wow.
DG (19:01):
So proud as a father, right. Won about 75% of her games. And I think she’s gonna be I think she’ll be, if she sticks with it, she’ll be a superstar by the time she’s in 12th grade. If she decides I’m not the forceful type, but I wanna share something with you when she was younger, she watched YouTube videos on how to be better at softball. Right. And then there was a time she bought a $97 course on how to be better. And then we found the guy and he was doing pitching camps where like these little treat they’d spend an hour and it was 40 bucks to pop. It was $40 a pop. And she could go with like six other girls, right? So one was free. One was like 97 bucks. And now it’s 40 bucks. She was going once a or once or twice a week.
DG (19:49):
So let’s just say 80 160 say it was 250 bucks a month. And she was going to this clinic and all of a sudden she’s like getting serious. And the coach said she probably needs one on one she’s excelling. Now that went to 200 bucks, times four, it went to a thousand bucks a month for one on one. And he’s been teaching her a thousand bucks a month, one on one now for two and a half years. Right. It’s the difference where she’s at. You think I’m gonna say, how dare that coach offer us one on one to help my daughter. I feel blessed that I can I’m. So I feel blessed that I could afford it. Whereas some people can’t and if we couldn’t, I’d say work your tail off with that free video, hun, I feel blessed that I could afford it, but there’s somebody else out there in your niche right now?
DG (20:37):
That’s saying, I don’t just want the course. I want, I don’t just want the free YouTube video. I don’t want the $97 course. I don’t wanna work with seven other people. I wanna work one on one or maybe I do wanna work with other people. So when you offer those varieties as a value ladder, each one of those is value to my daughter. Each thing that you share will be value to someone else. But when you get done that client could be worth, you know, $480 a month on average between all of them. And you could spend $300 to acquire that client,
RV (21:06):
If you do, and what, what, what athlete do we go? Oh, you know, they got taken advantage of because they had the private coach. It’s the opposite. We go, they had an advantage because they had the best coaching in the world.
DG (21:18):
Absolutely. So, so when you shift your mindset is that you can be that person for someone else that holds them accountable. So they don’t fail this time. I mean, the, the worst thing I think about is somebody who’s bought 10 courses in their life and they never got the results they want. They need someone to go, Hey, stop buying courses. You need a darn coach that keeps you accountable.
RV (21:37):
Right? Yeah. Get in, get in there. I mean, it’s like those are, those are such, such great parallels. So and I wanna go ahead and throw this out, right? So if, if you go to thrive three fifty.com, the we’ve got some partnerships, there’s some free training, depending on when you go, the sooner you go, the more free training that’s gonna be available to you. So when you, if you’re hearing this, if you go to thrive three fifty.com, Dean and Tony have put together these free trainings and the sooner you get there, the more likely you’re gonna catch the catch, the free training. But it’s also like, it’s interesting to hear like, oh, Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi have to advertise. They have to go on podcast. They have to get the word out there. Like, of course you do. So I wanna mention that URL it’s thrive. And then the number three 50 thrive, three fifty.com.
DG (22:27):
Yeah. Let me, let me tell you, let me tell you if, if you’re watching right now and if anything I shared today is intriguing to you, then you need to go register and go see what we’re doing. The, the live portion it’s five days, it starts August 2nd. It’s gonna be probably two hours a day. It’s Tony, myself. It’s Jenna Kucher. If you know who Jenna is and Russell Brunson. Oh,
RV (22:45):
We know we know who Jenna Kucher is. Yep. For sure.
DG (22:47):
And, and Russell Brunson and Brendan Burchard and Lisa Nichols. And we even got Matthew McConaughy coming, cuz I loved his book, green lights. And you know, he really went into the self education industry with that and he wants to do more. In fact, we might be doing something special with him, but what we’re gonna do over five days is really pull back the curtain on how to really narrow down what you should be teaching who you should be teaching it to. Right. And I mean, day one, just with Tony, Robbin’s gonna blow your mind. You it’ll get you in a space, especially during, you know, recession during all this craziness out there, you need to get laser focused in here. And I don’t believe there’s anybody better on the planet that can do that than Tony. But over those five days, we’ll, we’ll narrow in that niche show you how to ethically market through service, how to build the following.
DG (23:26):
Even if you’re following is small or next to nothing and then how to tie it all together and how to launch your next sale. It’s either your first or your next sale, right? The whole goal of the five days is get your first sale, your next sale, inconsistent sales. That’s what makes this a real business where we impact others and and create success for ourselves. But it’s gonna be something really special. And it’s only happening once and it’s live. The two things I would share with you Zig Ziegler said if, if you don’t pay, you don’t pay attention. Really? Remember that in your business, think about the things you got for free and think about the things you worked hard for. If you worked hard for your first car, you cleaned it, you polished it. And we also know that we’ve bought children or friends that bought children in their first car.
DG (24:07):
They didn’t pay for it. And they wrecked it in a weekend. It was, it was so nasty on the inside, right? Cause they didn’t earn it. They didn’t have to pay for it. Right. I wanna tell you just because this is free, you need to value it as if it was 5,000 bucks. It’s Tony Robbins. I mean, he’s got a waiting list of people wanna give him a million dollars a year to be his coach, right? It I’ve been blessed. I get paid 250 grand a day for consulting just had one a month ago. I’m not saying that to brag. I’m saying, convince yourself, you paid five grand or a thousand bucks show up and play full out. And what I’d also do is take that 5, 3, 5, zero.com and send it to someone right now who needs it and have, ’em be your accountability partner, go through it with them, have them show up with you, go send ’em to strive three fifty.com. And yeah, it’s gonna be a fun. It’s gonna be a fun five days. It’s a lot of work and it’s worth it.
RV (24:54):
So before I let you go and, and, and check this out and like I said, I, you know, getting to meet Dean face to face in person was a, was a whole different experience and like, see, seeing your heart here. And, and this is, is really encouraging. So, so go there. One other thing that I wanna just like get into your mind a little bit before we let you run off, is your mindset about money, right? So this is another thing, sales, advertising, also money. You know, there’s big talks of recessions coming, obviously, you know, inflation, like there’s a what are you, what are some of the, or like, what’s one thing related to the mindset about money that a a mission driven messenger. I mean, that’s what our audience just, they all have that in common, which is also another thing where it’s like, ah, like making money sometimes feel like evil or like, you know, I, I have to take advantage of somebody
DG (25:47):
Money. Say, I’ll say, I’ll jump in here. Cause I’ve asked, I’ve had that question asked a lot and I love answering it. When people say money, doesn’t buy happiness. I say you haven’t given enough away yet. Mm, simple as that. Yeah. I haven’t given enough away yet. And, and I don’t say that to be disrespectful, but you know Richard Branson, I was blessed enough cuz I raised money for his foundation. It wasn’t, we were best friends and not wasn’t cuz I was super cool. But the billionaire of Richard Branson, I got the chance to spend a week with him on his private island in in the Caribbean Neer island. And I didn’t even know if I was gonna see him. I just knew I was going the same time he was there and him and I both got up at 5:00 AM one morning.
DG (26:25):
He said, Hey, you’re up early. You wanna sail? I’m like thumbs up. Right? And I got in a boat with him and I, and I had some of those thoughts, not a lot, but he said, Hey, I believe God gave us all unique abilities. And I believe some people, God bless their souls. They go to the soup kitchen or they go and they volunteer their time. And what would we do without those amazing humans? He said, but I believe all of us have different capabilities. I found it later on in my life that I had the ability to make money. And that was my purpose because I could cut checks to solve problems. He said, some people need to go work. There he goes, I might be able to do a campaign and walk in and hand that soup kitchen, a hundred thousand dollars gift.
DG (27:03):
And when I realized that I just wanna get better at me. And if I do the right things with the money, then I get to utilize my gift. He goes, favor, started coming my way in the biggest way possible. And that shifted for me too. You know, listen, when I was a kid, I would’ve, I dreamed, I used to dream that someday I could make a thousand bucks a week, 50 grand a year. Oh my God, that would’ve been that would’ve been like when I was in high school, I didn’t come for money. I literally lived in a trailer park with my dad. My mom worked three jobs to make nothing. And I remember, man, if I can make a thousand bucks a week, life will be good, 50 grand a year just because it was in my heart. When I was on ed stage, you know what it felt like that I said, Hey, you know, today, while I’m here last minute, I’m gonna donate $50,000 to the family.
DG (27:46):
Nothing lights me up more than that. And last year we passed eight mil, I think 8 million meals, seven and a half million meals through feeding America. We built two churches in Africa. I donated $600,000 to operation underground railroad to help children in slavery, man, what could be better than that? While simultaneously my business actually helps empower people to go faster, quicker, better to their own dreams. And we get to employ people and I get to make sure my family’s okay. So just like selling, I think you gotta find a way to shift what money means to you, make it and give it all away, make it and help change the world, make it and help your church. Do what serves you. But I just don’t think we’re put on this earth. I don’t think any creator would put us on this earth to play small. That’s just my belief.
RV (28:30):
Hmm. Yeah. What well in just fascinating to just get those perspectives and to see you know, that you’re, if you don’t have that belief, then the conviction to, to tell people about what you’re doing is gonna not, is not gonna be there. And, and, and, and people aren’t gonna feel the energy and they’re not gonna buy. And so getting, getting these mindsets right is so huge. And so that’s why I go to thrive three 50, you thrive three fifty.com. You can check this out. I mean, look, Tony and Dean are reaching millions and millions of people, like regardless of what you might know or not know, you go, you guys are reaching millions of people and you’re showing people how to do that. So like that is just really cool. And you’ve been so generous Dean with your time here, like so many great, great parallels. And just thank you for that conviction Dean. And, and, and thank you for this. I think this is, this is a leveling up my thinking and you know, to, to go, man, I wanna stand on stage and just go here’s $50,000 or a hundred thousand dollars, what an amazing way to to, to, to, to provide blessing the world. So thanks for being here, brother. And we just, we wish you the best.
DG (29:47):
Well, thanks man. Appreciate everybody spending time with us and we’ll see you on August 2nd.
Ep 285: How to Double Your Business In 12 Months | Recap Episode
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
I love it. Absolutely love, love, love when we have AJ on this show as, as a guest and not just a host, she’s brilliant. And I like, I’m not just saying that cuz she’s my wife and she’s my business partner. Like she is absolutely phenomenal. At selling, I mean’s several things, but specifically at selling, you know, like she is a one woman wrecking crew and I’m talking about she, she has had multiple years where she’s generated over a million dollars in revenue by herself as a one person individual. And so getting a chance to interview her and talk about how do you double your business in the next 12 months? Fantastic conversation worthwhile conversation. Of course, if you didn’t listen to it, you kinda wanna go back and listen to it. I’m gonna share with you what my highlights are and take away.
RV (01:47):
And you know, I, I hope this isn’t weird for you. Like I love learning from her, like, you know, just as a friend and a spouse, but as a professional colleague, I really, really love learning from AJ. And I find her philosophies very like original and refreshing and different. She has a very different take on the world. So I, I wanna share what my three top takeaways were from listening to her and just sort of like being around this conversation. And obviously she, the reason that she, one of the reasons she came on the show is cuz she wanted to let you know that she put together a completely free training about how to double your business in the next 12 months. And if you go to double dot brand builders, group.com, double dot brand builders, group.com, you can watch the whole free training.
RV (02:37):
Like it’s a whole presentation and everything. And it’s, I it’s, it’s gonna be it’s phenomenal. So the, with that, going back to what we talked about in the interview, the first thing that came up, which to me really is this necessary switch that has to happen. If you are gonna grow your business, like if, if you’re be a successful entrepreneur, salesperson, personal brand, like insert whatever term you want there, mission driven messenger. You have to reach this point where you decide that you are not ashamed of what you do and that it’s also not humble to not tell people about what you do. Like there is a switch that has to flip in your brain and, and for as, as much time as the switch is flipped to, I don’t wanna intrude on people. I don’t wanna push on people. I don’t wanna have to interrupt people to tell them about what I’m doing.
RV (03:43):
Like as long as that switch is flipped off, like flipped in that direction, you’re gonna struggle your whole life. Like the rest of time. Like until we flip this switch, you are going, you’re going to be broke. Like you’re gonna have a hard time because you’re gonna always be shy and embarrassed and timid about telling people what it is that you do. You can’t be timid about telling people what you do and have people find out about it, right? Like you have to be bold. You have to be powerful. You have to be assertive. You have to be commanding. You have to be convicted. Right. And it’s, and it’s not humble to, to not tell people what you do like humility is to me is, is, you know, I, I actually did an Instagram reel about this. That like the difference, like the opposite of humility is not self-confidence the opposite of humility is pride, right?
RV (04:46):
Self-Confidence is being convicted in, in, in what you do. Pride isn’t is about who you do it for, right? So this isn’t about you going, oh, I need to tell the world how great I am. That’s pride. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about being convicted to tell the world how great the thing is that you have can be for them, right? It’s not about, it’s the difference between pride and confidence is who you do it for self-confidence is going. I am a capable person of helping you. It is in service of you and in when I’m operating in service of you, that gives me the permission, the confidence the, the openness, the power, the authority, the, the, the, the white space, the invitation to kind of boldly proclaim and say, Hey, I’ve got this thing that will change your life.
RV (05:42):
It’s about you. Pride is when it’s about me. Let me tell you how great I am. Let me, you know, you, you should know me, look at what I’ve done. Look at who I am. That’s different than confidence, which is, let me boldly tell you about this thing that I have for you, how it can help you, what we have put together for how it serves you. And, and until you flip that switch, you’re gonna struggle. You’re gonna be broke. It’s gonna be hard. You’re gonna have a hard time finding customers. You’re gonna your marketing campaigns. Aren’t gonna work. You’re not gonna sell your sales people. Aren’t gonna sell. Why? Because selling marketing enrollment registrations are a matter of conviction.
RV (06:27):
There is this transference of going and listening to somebody who believes what they’re saying and not just believes what they’re saying. They believe that what they are telling me about is good for me. It’s not about them, right? They’re just the messenger. But the message is for me, the message can help my life. And that is you have to get to that point. I mean, think about it. You, you can’t shy your way into the world, knowing about you. You can’t timid your way into changing lives. You, you can’t soft pedal your way into making a difference in the world. You can’t, there’s too much noise. There’s too much competition for attention. There’s, there’s too much competition in general. There’s too much negativity. There’s, there’s too much misinformation. If you’re gonna win, it has to be bold and assertive. And, and DEC declarative, like I am here with something that can help you not look at me.
RV (07:30):
It’s look at this. It’s not who am I? It’s what do I have for you? But, but you have to make that switch. You have to turn that corner. Otherwise you are gonna be the world’s best kept secret. I mean, you’re not gonna be the world’s best kept secret. You’re just gonna be a secret. You’re just not gonna be known. And, and this, I think is one of the greatest struggles that mission driven messengers have. And why do we know this? Why do we, why do we have so much clarity about this? Because this is us. This is what we struggle with, right? For us, it’s a spiritual thing as Christians, we’re going, man, you know, the meek shall inherent the earth. So how do I, how do I stand up and go listen to my podcast and, and, and, and tell the world like, you should listen to this podcast.
RV (08:16):
How do we, how do we go? You know, like, oh, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, harder for a rich person to, or a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to inherit the kingdom of heaven. How do we reconcile that? Because we go those messages, that construct, that concept is not about being broke and, and hidden and shy. And that’s not what it’s about. That’s about positioning. What’s the position in your life. And where do you stand in the pecking order of the things that matter, right? And, and so if you’re a Christian, right? The what, what we’ve realized and have come to understand from studying this really understanding scripture and sort of the heart of this is going, it’s not about how much money you have. It’s about what position money has in your life, right? If money is number one in your life, that’s a problem.
RV (09:11):
That’s, that’s what Jesus is talking about. He’s saying, I want the number one spot. I wanna be first. God should be first. And that’s what he’s saying. You can be rich and God can still be first. You can be poor and money can still be first. And God can be second, right? Even if you’re poor and God is, but money is first, or your pride is first, and God is beneath that. That’s the problem that’s going on there, right? It actually is completely separate of the quantity of money you have. It’s about the position of that item in your life. This is a positioning issue. This is the positioning in your own mind. Like, and, and you, you, until you flip the switch, you’re gonna be living with this struggle of like, oh, I’m self promotional or I’m I’m, I’m, I’m, you know, I’m, I’m arrogant.
RV (10:04):
I’m egotistical. Yes you are. If the mission is about you and as, and, and about elevating you and making people worship you and idolize you. Yes, that’s wrong. But if the mission is to push the message out to the world, if the mission is to solve a problem for the world, if the mission is to help other people, if it’s to elevate them, then you can do that and be bold. You have to be bold and powerful and assertive and loud and consistent and dominating because you won’t get heard. Otherwise, like you gotta, you gotta break through, like you can’t sit in a corner somewhere in a room and think the world’s gonna find out about the solution that you have, that you’re not gonna impact lives. You’re not gonna help people. So it’s rooted in service. It’s not rooted in pride. It’s rooted in service.
RV (11:00):
It’s not rooted in pride, but until you click until this clicks, you’re gonna struggle your whole life. Your business is always gonna struggle because you’re gonna be at odds. You are gonna be subconsciously self sabotaging because on the one hand, you want to grow your business. But on the other hand, you, you feel like there’s this spiritual battle of going, oh, I have to remain meek and humble. And until you reconcile this, you’re gonna struggle. And the way you reconcile it is realizing that they’re not remotely connected at all. I mean, even Jesus, like the great commission is go tell the world, proclaim it. Boldly. Not about how great we are, but how about how great he is about what he has done about who God is, but go boldly into the world. Why can we go boldly into the whole world? Because it’s not about us.
RV (11:56):
It’s about this cure. It’s about this message. And it’s about another person. It’s about him, right? That’s why you can do it. If you are at the center, that is a conflict. But if your expertise is at the center, if your service is at the center, if the product is at the center, if service is at the center, then you can proclaim it wildly and boldly and loudly and confidently without doing it. Pridefully you have to get this. If you’re ever going to grow your business, if you’re ever going to grow your reach, if you’re ever gonna break free of, of being financially poor, like this is, is a really, really big issue. So it was huge. Right? And so just hearing AJ talk about it and give her her take on it. Super powerful for me. The second thing is something we’ve been talking about a ton like AJ and I have been talking about this.
RV (12:56):
We’ve been talking about it with our own team internally. We’re getting, you know, we’re, we’re trying to like make sure our members, our, our messengers and our membership program like that, they’re all super clear on this. And, you know, wanna make sure that you’re in, in the loop on this too, which is this huge mistake that like the entire world has somehow been tricked, like misled. Like it’s like the entire world believes something that is so ineffective. It’s unbelievable. And here’s, here’s what it is. We have all been misled to think that the key to glory is selling to strangers on the internet.
RV (13:57):
Like no, the path to riches is not through strangers on the internet. The path to riches is through trust. And the relationships of the people who know you in real life, the people who know your character, the people who love you, the who believe in you, the people who have been there in your darkest moments, the people who you’ve delivered for, it’s not millions of strangers on the internet. It’s a few dozen people who know you in real life. Why? Because it’s about trust. Now, can you make money from the internet and social media? Of course you can, but only after you’ve built trust, right? And it takes a long time to build trust. When people only watch, you know, three seconds of your videos at a time, they gotta watch a lot of three second videos before they actually really trust you. So it takes a long time.
RV (14:52):
The, the, your next great customer is not a stranger on the internet. Your next best customer is much more likely to be in your cell phone or in the cell phone of your current customer’s cell phones. It’s the people that, you know, like the people who know the people, you know, it’s leveraging the, the relationships. This is reputation, right? When you, when you hear personal branding, please don’t think social media and logos and colors and websites and YouTube channels and podcasts think reputation, right? That is what our company is about. The digitization of reputation. Like, yes, it is digitizing it. Yes, there are these modern things that we’re doing, but the core is not the digital part. The core is the reputation part, the character part, the, the, the personality, the integrity part. And so when it comes to selling and doubling your business in the next 12 months, it’s not going, Ooh, there’s some secret hack that I’m gonna learn on social media.
RV (15:57):
That’s somehow gonna introduce me to millions of people who are all then gonna buy from me, even if it does introduce you to millions of people, which can happen. And that’s a great thing and good things come from that. They’re not gonna all suddenly buy from you. You have to develop trust. And that takes a long time, a long time, right? Like a lot of people who buy from us, we, we had a, a great friend sign up this, this guy’s really cool guy. His name’s Ray Higg. And he joined our program yesterday and he’s got, he’s really huge in the network marketing space. And he’s got this program called rank makers. And, and he’s a great guy like and you know, him and his wife, Jess, like they have business together, but like, he really helps a lot of people that are in network marketing.
RV (16:36):
Like this is what he’s done his whole life. We’ve gone back and forth for a few years. And, and he just now became a customer because it was just like, it just takes time. Right? And so we, instead of believing this sort of lie that, oh, if every, if you do it, all right, people are just gonna flock to you and buy suddenly over the, you know, strangers from the internet instead it’s relationships, it’s reputation, it’s character. And so work through your relationships, work through the people who already know you get referrals from those folks. Right? So obviously our, our pressure free persuasion training is one of the reasons why we’re talking about this now because of the exit of our former company, there was, there was a window of time where we were bound by a non-compete. And so we couldn’t teach sales training.
RV (17:22):
And so we, we, we didn’t for a few years, but now we’re free of that. And, and we created this, I mean, life changing sales curriculum pressure free persuasion, which, you know, if you’re a member, you’ve got access to it. And it’s just like, you know, we teach this stuff, but the psych, the tactical part, but the psychological part is right here is going quit thinking the riches are gonna come from strangers on the internet. And instead start working through in a deeper way through the relationships you already have and asked to be introduced to people that’s and specifically getting referrals from your customers. Like if you’re not getting referrals from your customers, even if you only have one customer or five, like if you’re not getting referrals from your customers, you’re missing on the best, easiest, lowest hanging fruit for more revenue in your business.
RV (18:12):
And just ask yourself this question on a scale of one to 10, how good of a job are you at getting referrals from your current customers? My guess is it might be zero.
RV (19:08):
And so at scale, all this stuff works. That’s why we do it. That’s why we teach it. But it’s over the long term in the short term, do it through the relationships of the people you have, unless you have some massive platform, right. Then that’s, that’s the reason you have it is cuz you’ve been doing it for a while and you do have trust and there’s ways to monetize it. But for most of us, most of you, it’s gonna happen through the relationships that you have with real people in real life. And then the third thing, you know, third, big takeaway here. And, and I got a fourth bonus one, but the, the third one is when AJ was saying, just give away so much value that people feel compelled almost that they have to pay you for something. And that is such a rare philosophy.
RV (19:59):
I think like, I don’t hear people talk about it, but that is how AJ and I have built our life, our businesses. It’s like, we give it away. Like we give it away. We, it, it’s a, it’s a tremendous amount of time and pain and money to just give away so much of this stuff. But like, you know, a great example here recently is, is Tom and Lisa BIU. If you don’t know them, they’re awesome. They, they have a they’re superpower couple. They sold a company for a billion dollars. It was called quest nutrition. They were co-founders and now they have a, a huge podcast called impact theory. Well, Lisa had a book come out called radical confidence. We didn’t know them very well. I had known Tom a little bit. And so, you know, she’s doing her book launch and I said, Hey, did you think about this?
RV (20:42):
And are you guys doing this? And did you know this? And have you tried this and, and have you met this person and that person and this person, right. And just like, you know, we don’t charge for PR. PR is something we do for free for all of our, just our friends and clients. That’s just how we add value to the community is introducing people all the time. Right? So like the more we get to know somebody personally, the more likely we are to ntroduce them. So we’re introducing them, you know, just making connections, but we share tips with everybody, right? Like we’re sharing the same tips with them that we have, you know, somewhere in, in the archive here of all these podcasts, like, and we’re just going, Hey, are you doing this? And what happened was they literally said this. I mean, this is the craziest thing.
RV (21:19):
This is a true story. It happened recently. Right? And they’re really big deal. I mean, they’ve got millions of followers. That’s one of the biggest personal development podcasts in the world and an amazing reputation. And they’re tremendous people like super smart, super successful, wealthy, sharp, inspiring, tons of people, all of these things. And basically what they said was they said, Rory, this has reached a point where we feel guilty. Like about how much value you, we have gotten from you. You’ve been so helpful to us in, in, in our book launch Lisa’s Lisa’s book launch the book is called radical confidence. Right. And they were like, we have to hire you.
RV (22:12):
The intention was just to be helpful, but it was amazing how good people, like really good people actually do start to feel a little awkward when you’ve given so much. Right. And you’re because at some point it’s like, golly, like you’ve done so much for me. Like, what can I give back to you? Like, how can I help you? Like, oh my gosh, like you saved the day here. I, I, I want to repay the favor. I need to repay the favor. It’s like their law of reciprocity. It’s not a manipulative thing. It’s, it’s a, it’s an abundance thing. It’s a generosity thing. It’s a person of character thing going, gosh, you’ve done so much. You’ve done so much for me. Like, what can I do for you? How can I help you? I wanna be a part of this. And that’s what happens, you know, so good people that that’s what happens.
RV (22:57):
And so like, that’s our whole strategy. I mean, that’s our whole content marketing strategy, give away everything for free. Like we teach you everything we know. And so anyway, so they hired us, right? So they’re, they are brand builders, group clients, and we made a huge impact even officially after they hire us. Like, so with Lisa, we helped Lisa grow her book sales 33% in 10 days, right. Of everything that she had done in the launch, we helped her increase it 33% in a 10 day window. You know, and then, you know, she hit the USA today, national bestseller list. It’s amazing. Right. So now we have another client who’s a national bestseller and all of this happened. She’s so cool. Like I love follower. She’s super sharp and sassy. You know, she’s, she’s really, really cool. And all of a sudden we ended up with another client.
RV (23:47):
That’s a very recognizable client. We’ve had a huge, added, a huge amount of value to their life. And she’s a national bestselling author as she straight up legitimately would not have been. If, if it, if it weren’t for us, like, like that’s a really cool thing to go. All we were doing was just trying to help. And, and as much as helping them, we were also helping our network. Right. Because it helps a lot of our friends and a lot of our clients to be able to get to interview somebody like Lisa and get to build a relationship with her. Right. So it’s, it’s not even like, Hey, let’s help her and see if we can get in, it’s going, how can we just help? How can we add value? And it’s, if you just look, it’s another switch here. Like, if you can flip this switch, if you can go, if you can shift from going, what can I get from you?
RV (24:32):
What can, what can you do for me? And you can flip the switch to go, what can I do for you? How can I help you? It radically changes your life and it changes your business, right? Like people are coming to us going. I heard you guys are the best. And it’s like, all we’re doing is trying to help. Right. you know, our stuff is really good. Like our content is really good. Like, we, we, we do, you know, we know what we’re talking about, but there’s other people in the world who do it, but I think it’s, it’s people are drawn to that heart of generosity and anyone can do that. And here’s, and here’s one of the reasons why I think we do it. I hated selling so much. Right. Like I went door to door and felt like such a scam artist.
RV (25:17):
And, you know, I learned some, some really shady techniques along the way about, about sales. Like just some, some, some pretty shady stuff. And I was like, I just don’t wanna be that guy. I don’t care if I’m not the number one salesperson, I’m not gonna be that guy. Like, it’s like the, I, the amount of money you could pay me, isn’t worth a compromise of my own character. Right? Like, I’m not gonna compromise my character just to earn a commission. I’m not gonna compromise my reputation just to grow my revenue. And AJ’s the same way. And I think, you know, that’s one of the reasons we end up married is like, we have this apparently unusual philosophy and belief system that it’s like, no, no, no. Like I know, I know if I use that technique, I could sell more, but I would feel horrible and I couldn’t live with myself.
RV (26:11):
I don’t care that much about money. I don’t care that much about recognition. I’m not gonna do that. So what we defaulted to was just like, how can we give, how can we serve? How can we help? And she became this multimillion dollar producer, like in, in her early thirties. And, you know, it’s just by giving. So how can you do that? Like how can you adopt that posture of, and, and the more reluctant you are about selling, the more, I would say, embrace serving, embrace, giving away, sharing what, know, give it away for free, just go speak for free, put it out on social media, teach it for free. And just test me on this. I promise you, the money’s gonna show up. I promise, like you cannot lose when you do this. Like you cannot lose. And, and this story with Lisa was pretty crazy because it was like, she literally was like we have to pay you something like for them, they were like, we can’t sleep at night knowing how one sided this relationship has been.
RV (27:14):
Right. Like and so it was like, okay, well, I guess, you know, send us some money, but it was literally like, it didn’t really change anything. We were, we were just helping, you know I mean, I guess it did, it made us block more time on the calendar to show up and sort of be on their schedule. Right. Rather than just kind of operating when it was convenient. But do that go, how can I give away so much value that people would want to pay me and make that, make that your posture make that, make that your prayer make that your position in the marketplace make that your reputation and, and just, and just watch. So again, those are, those are the takeaways, love this story, you know, congratulations, Lisa USA today, national bestseller, radical confidence is the book, pick it up, you know, take a, take a look if you haven’t gotten it.
RV (28:02):
Really, really awesome. It’s, it’s endorsed by Jay Sheti and Mel Robbins and Dr. Nicole lap, like all these really modern day, you know, thought leaders, the thought leaders of future of our generation, like really, really cool. And then the other thing is go to, if you go to double dot brand builders, group.com, check out this, this full free training that AJ put together about how do you double your business in 12 months. And then, you know, that brings me to the fourth takeaway, which, you know, I wanna tell you about is we, it’s hard to build a personal brand. Like it’s, it’s hard to be an entrepreneur in general, right? Like you gotta do the marketing, you gotta do the sales, you gotta do the delivery, the customer service, the accounting, the HR, the legal, the strategy, the operations, like the finance, like it’s hard to be an entrepreneur.
RV (28:50):
And that’s one of the reasons why our heart is for so many entrepreneurs. And you know, anyone who builds a personal brand, then it’s like, yeah, you gotta learn, you know, content creation and presentation skills and social media and branding and color design and graphic design and, and, you know, paid traffic and all the things we teach podcasting, right? Like all of the things in our whole curriculum. And so it’s, it’s not easy to make money in the midst of all of that. You actually have to create content and you have to go, man. I started out just wanting to impact lives. I just wanted to help people. And now I have to do all this other stuff that like gets in the way between me impacting lives. Like I have to do all of these things in order to just get to impact lives and, and to be able to make any money, right?
RV (29:36):
Like you have to take care of all that stuff really, before you make money and you create content. And so one of the things that we realized and, you know, our, the feedback from our community’s been awesome is that our content is really, really good, really, really solid and really powerful. And so one thing we’ve never done, we’ve never done this in our career. We are just doing it now is we have started a content licensing program where you can actually you pay a fee it’s moderate, very moderate. You pay this fee. And then what’ll happen is you get a, you get trained on how to use our content to help people find their uniqueness, build their personal brand, established their position in the marketplace. All of these, you know, these things from our, from our flagship brand builders group curriculum, and we give you the content.
RV (30:29):
So you can then you know, like when you become, when most people become a client, we’re taking you through the content to apply it to your own life. This is a program that we have now launched called content licensing, where we are giving you permission to take our content and go out into the world and sell it. And you can make as much money as you want from teaching our content. And you get, you know, the legal authority and the, and the right to do it. And we actually, not only that we train you how to do it. So you, you’re paying just, just a, a very moderate licensing fee in order to be able to use our content and go tell it to the world. And, you know there we give you the tools, right? We give you PowerPoints, we give you you come through the training, we teach you how to teach it to other people.
RV (31:15):
And you get all of these resources that are assets to help you, you know, have this sort of off the shelf service that you can, you know, either, you know, do as a do as a business, or in most cases, just make it a part of your business. It’s specifically for like coaches and consultants. And if you’re interested in that, like go to license dot brand builders, group.com, license dot brand builders, group.com. And you can read about that and, and get more for more information if you want. And it’s just one more way. We’re trying to like help close the gap between where you’re at and money showing up in your bank account. Because it’s, it’s difficult and, you know, to practice what I preach here, the content is incredible. Like we have developed a systematic process to help people figure out who they should be, the rest of their life and what the calling is, what the unique calling is on their life and how they can turn that into a personal brand and to help them figure out what is their uncapable difference?
RV (32:19):
What is their uniqueness? What is their identity that only they can, the, the space that only they can occupy in the world and then teaching ’em how to make a bunch of money doing it. We, I mean, you know, has God inspired, like we believe this system was given to us, but like, it’s incredible. And we’ve now taken 600 people more than 600 people through the process, you know, and a lot of ’em are these really great clients that, that you hear of that we work with. So anyways, go to license dot brand builders, group.com. If you wanna read up about that and just switch on, right, switch on, be proud of what you, you do, be proud of how you can help, you know, don’t, don’t try to get, make people just, you know, worship you and idolize you and fall in love with you and tell them how great you are.
RV (33:08):
That’s pride self-confidence is telling people how awesome this tool is. This service, this technique, you know, that you have this solution to solving their problem, and you can do that boldly and daringly and almost provocatively and aggressively and powerfully and go out and tell the world, be an ambassador, right. Be an ambassador of the problem you solve and be an ambassador of the solution that you have that can actually transform lives, flip that switch. And I promise you’ll double your business. Like that is what makes it possible. Don’t flip that switch, and I promise it’s about impossible to double your business. So hopefully you’ve enjoyed this. Check out the full training with AJ at brain builders, group.com and keep coming back here week after week on the influential personal brand podcast
Ep 284: How to Double Your Business In 12 Months with AJ Vaden
RV (00:02):
Oh, we have a special edition today. Super special very uncommon format where you actually are going to get to hear from our CEO AJ Vaden. My co-founder my wife, of course, and she is actually going to be our guest. So obviously, usually either her or myself are leading the interview today. I get to play the role of interviewer. AJ is going to play the role of interviewee and our guests, because we’re gonna talk about something that is really, really important and really, really powerful, which is how to double your business in the next 12 months. AJ, as you know you probably know many of her credentials for being with brand builders group, but one thing you may not know about AJ is that she also is a million dollar producer. She is someone who spent personally produced over a million dollars a year in revenue by herself, many years in a row, both in as a in a speaking business, a consulting business, a coaching business. And so she just has a lot of experience growing businesses, coaching businesses, consulting, speaking. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Specifically, she’s gonna share some tips on how to double your business in the next 12 months, AJ made and welcome to your own show. We’re glad to have you,
AJV (01:23):
RV (01:29):
So yeah. So talk to us just a little bit about, I mean, obviously most of the people listening here know about brand builders group, right. They know what we do. But tell us a little bit about your past like pre brandand builders group. What were some of the types of businesses that you built? How were you a top producer and, you know, just what were some of the different business models that you were involved in?
AJV (01:53):
Well, it’s not me. It’s not just me. It’s us. It was our I think most of you probably know that brand builders group is Roy and I second business together, but a little known fact, I’m not sure how many of you listening know this, that we were actually business partners before we fell in love and got married. And so we started as business partners and then broke the Cardinal role fell in love, got married. Luckily 15 years later, it’s it worked out, it worked out in our favor. But prior to brain builders group, you know, we spent the first 15 years of our professional lives building a coaching speaking consulting, training business, but it actually started as a seminar business. So in the first four years of our very first business we lived on the road full time lived in 14 cities and five years was moving pretty much every 16 weeks for the better part of four and a half years putting on large motivational sales conferences.
AJV (02:57):
And that naturally involve evolved into a one-on-one coaching business, which then involved into a consulting practice. We started a speakers bureau brew. It, it was very successful. And when we departed from that company and sold back our equity to our former partners we had over 200 coaches. It was well into the eight figures business. On the coaching side, we had a healthy, a seven figure consulting business, a healthy seven figure speaking business. And so there’s lots of different components of, of what we did, but it naturally evolved over time from large public seminars to one on one consult or one-on-one coaching to full service consulting. Did training as a part of that, and then also built a speakers bureau.
RV (03:44):
Mm-Hmm
AJV (04:36):
Yeah, well, it’s not just double your business. It’s really niche down to a really important sub segment of all the audiences we serve, but it’s one that’s really near and dear to my heart and it’s coaches, speakers, trainers, and consultants. And part of why that’s really important to me is I could still consider myself one of all those things. But that’s really where I started. It’s where I grew. It’s it’s challenging, it’s hard and it’s as everything is challenging and there’s pros and cons to any business out there. I know this business, this world inside and out, and as a part of brand builders group, a huge part of our community find themselves in one of these categories. Even if it’s not their full time right profession, but they do consulting, they do training, they do speaking, they do coaching, they do all these things.
AJV (05:28):
And many of you want to figure out how to make it your full time gig, or maybe you’ve gotten into one of those. And you’re like, oh, I do not want this one particular piece to be all that I do, but I want to do these other pieces. And I think this is a really interesting, unique part of my life and my past and my expertise that I can really lend some really good solid tips and techniques. But also mindset to help any of you who are in that particular business model of a coach consultant, speaker trainer really truly help you amplify your business and, and double it in the next 12 months. And I think those are the things that are really unique. But I think they’re applicable to any business, as you said, it’s how to double your business, but we put together this training webinar hyper specific to that niche group of individuals, trainers, consultants, speakers, coaches to help them leverage five simple ideas, five simple. And I didn’t say simple, not easy, but five simple things that you can do to start doubling your business. But I do think there’s universal appeal and I think anyone can do that, but this specific training is really unique to that. So that’s what it’s all about.
RV (06:40):
Mm-Hmm
AJV (07:44):
Yeah, it’s, it’s a really simple answers. They try to do it all
AJV (08:27):
And at the end of the day, what, what happens and what I find so often for so many of these individuals, is that the reason you started this is cuz you loved doing what you wanted to do. And now it’s the least amount of time that you do it. It’s like what you did is you loved coaching or you loved speaking and you loved this, but it’s like, that’s not the only part it’s like, you gotta have contracts and agreements and signatures and sales calls and follow up emails and, and interviews. And you track people down and there’s customer service issues. And it’s like, there’s all the different things that start distracting you from keeping the main thing, the main thing. And that’s, that’s the biggest thing. And I find it’s distraction it’s that your, your attention is pulled in so many different areas so quickly, cuz there’s so much to do. And then in really in order to be really good at any of those things, you have to practice your craft, which means you need to be reading and learning and going to conferences and getting coached yourself and networking and learning in all these different atmospheres. And guess what? That takes time too. And let’s not forget any amount of time for yourself, your spouse and your families. Oh yeah. That’s important too. And so I think time distraction is really the number one thing that gets in the way of people scaling this kind of business.
RV (09:48):
Hmm. Yeah. That what you just said there, I think is absolutely true. Right? You start because you go, I wanna help people. I wanna make a difference in the world. Like I wanna change lives. I wanna meet people. I wanna like, see, look people in the eye and like share with them what I know and how I’ve helped. And then it’s so quickly can turn to invoices and bills and taxes and technology and operating systems and payroll and, and you know, documents and all of that stuff. Like this is a little bit of a dis a little bit of a disheartening reality, I think in, in, in many cases. So, so what are, what are some of these things that you’re talking about in terms of how to double the business or, or, or what are some of the tools that you think can help alleviate some of that pain and help experts, coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, help them actually make more money, faster, get back to spending more time doing what they love and, and return to the original reason they started in this space.
AJV (10:48):
Yeah. So in the training webinar that I host, there’s five things that we talk about that will help you double your business. I won’t probably have time to go into all five of those today, but we’ll cover as much as we can, but here’s one of the things that I thought was really interesting when putting together all of this information, which really just started as some value add for our brain builders group, community, our audience people like you who are listening. And I started looking at all these different research reports that were out there about the coaching industry and I found some really staggering statistics that made me stop in my tracks and go, I’m gonna spend a little bit more time here because I really just naturally got curious about, wow, like I wanna learn more about this phenomenon that is coaching training consulting.
AJV (11:33):
And where is it trending? And how does that relate to what we do in personal branding? Right. and I just think personal branding is applicable to anyone who has a reputation. All of you, everyone who is listening has a reputation. But there’s, then there’s a really unique group of people where the more dependent your business is on your reputation, the more important it becomes and being intentional about that reputation, which is personal branding. And so I was spending some time looking at some of these stats and here were a couple that really stood out to me that I thought were fascinating, is that right now coaching, the coaching industry is the second fastest growing industry in the world. Wow. It’s the second fastest growing industry in the world. And some of the backup statistics around that I thought were equally as interesting this year alone it’s, it is expected to exceed a 20 billion industry.
AJV (12:33):
Wow. And I thought, well, that’s a lot of money out there. How many people are involved in this? Right. And so on LinkedIn, and now this is just on LinkedIn, right? I thought this was so fascinating. If you just type in coach as a title on LinkedIn, there are more than 4 million people just on LinkedIn that have the title as coach. Wow. And then I narrowed it down to just the United States and in just the United States alone, it’s approximately 1.8 million people who have the title of coach. And so I got really sucked in one day like really sucked in and I probably spent an hour scrolling all these titles, scrolling all of them. Because I wanted to know like, what kind of coaches are these? Like who are these 1.8 million people? And how come I’ve been in this industry for this long? And it doesn’t seem that prevalent.
AJV (13:31):
Now I know there was a season a time where it’s like, everyone was a coach, right? You’ve got spiritual coaches, dating coaches, marriage, coaches, life coaches, business coaches. In fact, I remember being at a networking meeting. This was probably, gosh, it has to be 10 years ago. Right now has to be 10 years ago. And I remember being at this networking meeting, I think it was like a BNI meeting. I used to be like at every single BNI meeting I could go to. And I remember introducing myself and someone said, well, what do you do? And I said, I’m a consultant. And they said, oh, you mean you’re unemployed? And I was like, am unemployed. And they said, well, I just figured like most people who say that don’t have jobs is that the reputation that coaches and consultants have is that they couldn’t cut it at what they’re doing.
AJV (14:27):
So they go off and do something else, like the old saying, it’s like those who can’t do teach. And I was like, that’s some serious BS. Right. I was like, no, I’m employed. And I’m doing really well. And I’m a consultant. I was so offended.
AJV (15:19):
And so when I saw that number 1.8 million people, I was just fascinated around who are all these people. And so I started going through there and, and where are they? Yeah. They’re apparently they’re everywhere. Apparently they’re everywhere. But then it, it was really interesting cuz I was scrolling through all these titles around, this is why people think we’re unemployed. And I looked at those titles and they were so vague and so generic and so general that as I was scrolling, even someone who was in this industry who dedicates her life to helping people in these industries grow and build their businesses, build their reputations in these fields. I was really thinking through here would never hire. You don’t even know what that means. And I was like, whoa, pause right there. And that was like one of the biggest aha moments of going, I’m putting a training together.
AJV (16:15):
I need to talk about this because these are the same problems that I suffered from our team member suffer from our clients are friends suffer from, is that someone says, what do you do? And he says, I’m a life coach. What is that? And what do you do? And you hear that term so often, or I’m a business coach, I’m a sales coach. And those were these like wide broadening terms that I kept running into. And then it just started like triggering the triggering, that old experience that I had from this BNI meeting where they go, oh, that means you’re unemployed. And then it just all hit me at once. It’s like, yeah, like that is the problem. It’s because we’re not clear on what we do and who we serve as the coach, the consultant, the trainer, the speaker. And instead we go, I can help anyone with anything which why they have this, these ridiculously broad terms like life coach, like what can you help me with exactly in my life?
AJV (17:14):
Like, what is it exactly, same with business. There’s so many different things. And we try to be, you know, the master of many thus while mastering nothing. And then I tie that on all in with what we do at brain builders group. And that’s one of these things, all these dots started connecting for me and it’s like really, truly to break through. She hands’ wall. We talk about this all the time. Like to break through the wall, you need to become known for one thing. Yet most of us try to do everything we say yes to everything. Right. I did that for years as a consultant, they were like, well, can you help me with this? Sure. Can I’ll figure it out before I invoice you. Right. It’s like I said yes to whatever it was leadership. Sure. Marketing, sure. Sales, sure. Retention.
AJV (18:01):
Sure. Can you help me with collections? I think so. Yeah, sure can do that too. It’s like, did it matter what it was? The answer was, I’ll figure it out. And I think there’s a time and a place for that and that’s really short lived and then you need to figure out what exactly am I supposed to be doing and who am I supposed to be doing it with? And for, and then I ran into a few of these titles as I was having, like these revelation moments of these are all the mistakes I made. Right. I did it for years and it was really hard and it was exhausting, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It really doesn’t. And then I started running into some titles that said this high business growth coach for young CEOs. And I was like, BA click.
AJV (18:47):
I wanna see what you do, why I’m in a high growth business. And I’m a young CEO. It was so clear. It was so clear. They had niche down so much that I could literally just read their title and go, I think they could help me. Right. And then I saw other ones that were like, you know, a financial growth coach for small businesses. I was like, what do you do? I wanna go to your website. And then I started like paying attention to which ones caught me. And the ones that caught me were really, really specific. This is actually something you say all the time I steal it, but I always give you credit. Oh, okay. It’s the more specific, the more terrific, right. It’s like, however cheesy that is. I have never forgotten it. The more
RV (19:33):
Cheesy, wait a minute. We weren’t talking about cheesy. We were talking about brilliant, but okay. I’ll take cheesy.
AJV (19:39):
Brilliant. Yes. But the more specific, the more terrific. And that’s a huge part of this. It’s like, if you really want to double your business and double your income, if you really want business finding you, if you want other people to explain what you do in layman’s terms, without them having to go to your website, it needs to be that clear. You need to be able to niche down so that anyone who knows you, who has heard of you, who has worked with you can say exactly what you do and who you do it for in one sentence. It is so important for the ability for other people to think of you and to refer you to people because they think about what you do and who you do it for. Right. And I think about like us at brain builders group, like we see all the time, it’s like we help experts become more well known. And then I thought about the first decade of my life as a consultant coach speaker, I had no clarity. I was like, I can help any sales team grow revenue. Oh, well how specific is that? And it was like, then it just dawned me as I was reading through all of is like, they aren’t clear on what they do. And for someone who’s just scrolling of going, what do you do? It’s gotta be that clear in your title. So it’s, it’s ne it’s, nicheing down. It’s getting so specific that someone can read your title, read your business card, right. Scroll through literally a one line statement on your LinkedIn profile and go, I want to learn about how you could help me.
RV (21:15):
Mm-Hmm
AJV (22:15):
Yeah. Like one of the things it’s like, and I think about this in my own life, it’s like, I have, as you know, I have a business coach and I have a life coach. Right. And it’s like, both of them, their reputation preceded them. Right. And it wasn’t like, I probably would’ve just picked a random business coach or life coach off of a LinkedIn title. But it’s enough for me to go. I want someone like that. And so I always think about it. It’s like, do my friends, family, acquaintances, you know, people that I’m in the community with. Do they know what I do that specifically? And it’s part of, it’s a conditioning. Like people ask me all the time. I get asked this all the time. How can I help you? And I’m like, the next time that you hear someone say this, refer them to me. And it’s like, you gotta help people think about you. It’s like, when they say this, refer them to me, that’s how you can help them.
RV (23:12):
Yeah. That’s really good. Those literal like kind of triggers like yeah. And I think about like our speaker friends, like when someone comes up to you after you’re on stage and they say, how do I get to be you mm-hmm
AJV (23:47):
It’s speech down. Do not in general, do not be broad. It’s like, you are not a life coach. You are not, you, you focus on some component of life. What is that? Is it spirituality? Is it health? Is it mindset? Is it nutrition? Is it relationships? You do not talk about life. There are so many things to life. It is impossible, right? So it’s like, tell me exactly what you’re gonna do for me in my life, in my business, with my financials, with my team and with my leadership potential, like it’s not a leadership consultant. Like what part of leadership, what part of sales? What part of marketing, what part of business get so clear that it’s polarizing? And that, that is like, it’s not just get clear on what it’s like, be so clear. It’s polarizing. People need to say, I don’t need that. Or where have you been my whole life? Right. It’s like, here’s my money. Or I’m just keep on going. It needs to be that clear.
RV (24:45):
Yeah. I love that. And again, so the, the URL is double dot brand builders, group.com, double dot brand builders, group.com. You can watch this whole free training. We got a couple minutes left here still.
AJV (24:56):
I got two more. I got, I’ll go fast. I got two more. All
RV (24:59):
Right, go
AJV (24:59):
For it. I’m gonna start, I’m gonna start the second one with a story. So about a month ago, I was on a podcast with this amazing interview with Mo tepo right. And we were talking about negotiation and sales and mindset, right? And the reason that people aren’t sometimes considered good negotiators mainly by themselves or good sales people. And the reason is why. And we have a, a a distorted view of what is negotiation and a distorted view of what is sales. And that’s really true, right. I used to be embarrassed to tells people that I was in sales because I didn’t wanna be viewed as you know, that old cliche, a used car salesman today is the proudest thing. I tell people I’m like, I might be a CEO and I might be these, but at the end of the day, I’m a salesperson.
AJV (25:47):
And I now hold it in such high regard because it’s a skillset that’s so few really possess. And I have come to learn that over the years. And I really took for granted the sales skills and sales training that I was able to get at a really, really young age and just get beat around
AJV (26:42):
So they don’t talk about it. And instead of leveraging the people who know us and trust us and like us the most to help us grow our business, we somehow think finding strangers on the internet is what’s going to be this, the solution. How bizarre is that? Just stay with movers for a second. Just take a moment and think about the people who love, trust and believe in you more than anyone else. How much time do you spend with them talking about what you do? Do they know what you do? The clients who serve their results, do they know? And then think about how much time and energy you spend on trying to attract complete strangers who have never met you before to buy your products and services.
RV (27:28):
Mm
AJV (27:29):
It’s bizarre. Y all it’s crazy. And it’s because we don’t wanna come across as salesy. We don’t want to rub anyone the wrong way or offend anyone. And here’s the real problem is you’re only concerned with yourself. You’re so focused on what, how I don’t wanna look, you pay no attention to, are there people right in front of me who need what I do or do they know someone who needs what I do? And so I believe in something called the six foot role and the six foot role means that you have to be willing to tell anyone within six feet of you about what you do it is that simple, not always easy, but simple. And that is because you feel compelled to talk about it because you were that passionate about it, because you believe in what you can do so much, that you cannot contain it because you have seen lives change.
AJV (28:25):
You have seen businesses change, you know, the transformation that will happen with the work that you do with people. So you feel compelled to share it. It’s not about a sale or marketing or being self promotional. It’s about being of the belief and of the mindset that I do. Something that has the power to change your business and change your life. So, yeah, I will tell any single person who is in six, within six feet of me, about what I do, because I believe in it. And that’s a di a slight shift in mentality. And I’ll give you two quick examples about this. And and then we can just like, kind of go from there, but there are two things that I have found
RV (29:00):
In that that was fired though. Like just to put a punctuation point on like that little clip, like we have to cut that clip for social media, like rewind that and listen to it. Like that was so powerful. And, and you nailed it. Like, we’re so afraid of how we don’t want to look to people that we are ignoring all of the people who are right around us, who need what we do like that is that so sorry to stop you. But that was just like,
AJV (29:31):
Why preach
RV (29:31):
It preach it? Vaden
AJV (29:32):
Believes that some sort of digital marketing tip or some social media formula somehow going to help your business grow it ain’t let me just be honest with you. It’s not, what’s gonna make your business grow is getting incredible results for people and having the courage to ask them to share it and having enough courage and belief in yourself to talk about it and to put yourself out there, right? You don’t need clients from around the world. You need clients in your own community. It’s amazing to me that some people and it’s amazing to myself, right? Our, our, our mindset is so limited. It’s frightening. And we were at a, a recent brain builders group event that I had the privilege of MC and one of our customers was in there. One of our clients and actually has a very expensive package.
AJV (30:19):
It’s a six figure package. And she needs like 12 clients who are willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars with her on retainer for what she needs to do to hit her goals. And and I just, I paused and I said, you know, Joe, can you just listen to yourself for one second? And you’re like, I need 12. And I’m like, no, you only need 12. There are 358 million Americans. You need 12. What’s keeps for some perspective here. Y’all and it’s like, we get so consumed. Where am I gonna find the next person? And it’s like, let me say that one more time. There are almost 360 million Americans. There are almost 8 billion people on planet earth. Most of us are looking for 30, 40, 50, a hundred clients. That’s it? Y’all, that’s it. You do not need to look outside of your own, you know, zip code to find 10 clients you don’t, but somehow we’re trying to far reach far and wide, and we’re not looking right in front of us.
AJV (31:21):
It’s a huge miss. And I just one I’m super passionate about the second thing that I was gonna share is that most of us miss opportunities, because we’re not present in the moment. And I’ve got two stories about this. I wanna share. We’re so sucked into our devices that we can’t see human beings all around us. We’re so sucked into catching up on texts and emails and posting on social and trying to get ahead that we forget the people who are willing to buy our products and services are sitting right next to us on the bleachers. So what if we’re a second, you actually engaged in human conversation? What would that do for you? If every single time you had a spare moment in line or sitting, or on an airplane that you weren’t sucked into some sort of technology and you actually engaged in actual conversation, how much business could you get from just that?
AJV (32:09):
And it’s free. Y’all two quick stories. One of the best consulting clients I ever picked up, I picked up at a softball game brewer. You should probably remember this story. Mm-Hmm,
AJV (32:51):
And he said, oh, they’re on the same team. And he goes, what are you doing here? And I said, oh, I’m here to watch my husband’s niece, Peyton play softball. And he goes, no kidding, Peyton, Gale. And I said, yeah, Peyton, Gale. He goes, that’s my daughter’s best friend. And I said, no way. I said, hi, my name’s AJ Dayden. I said, so what do you do that? You’re reading this book. He goes, oh, I’m the VP of sales for this, you know gifting company. And I said, really, he goes, what do you do? And I said, oh, I actually help individuals. Like you build and grow their sales teams. He goes, what do you mean? And I said, I work with a company that does sales consulting. That specifically is looking to help improve their sales team and their sales processes and sales philosophies.
AJV (33:30):
And he goes, can you tell me more about that? He ended up being one of my best clients of all time, that one conversation at a softball game because of a human conversation led to a book, being sent a conversation, being had a proposal being accepted and more than $350,000 in business, because I was willing to have a conversation with someone sitting on the bleachers at a softball game. It would’ve never happened. If I was stuck in my phone, texting, emailing it, would’ve never happened if I wasn’t just willing to say hi, how are you doing right? More recently we were in The Bahamas for mother’s day. I told my husband here on this interview with me. I wanna go to The Bahamas from mother’s day. So that’s what we did. And we were our second day and our also our second trip to the water park.
AJV (34:18):
And it was at the end of the day. And it was a long day. And so I walked over to the Dery shack because that’s what I’m gonna do on mother’s day. I’m gonna get myself a Dery. And there was this very sunburn gentleman in front of me who was very hot and sweaty. And he had his two daughters and he was like, had a whole tray of drinks. And he was getting these lemonades for his kids. And he looks back at me and he could tell, I was also really sunburn sweaty. And at the end of like the five hours at a water park, and he said, you’re having fun. And I said, I am sits in a long day, but I’m having fun. I said, how about you? And he goes, yeah, we’re here on a big family trip. And I said, that’s awesome.
AJV (34:53):
And I said, your, your little girls are so cute. And he said, thanks. And I said, I do have kids. I know I’m by myself. They’re over there in the pool. He said, where are you in from? I said, I’m in from Nashville, Tennessee. And he goes, let me guess, you’re a musician. I said, I’m the least amount of musical talent on planet earth. He goes, wait an actress. I said, Nope, definitely not that. And he goes, well, what are you doing in Nashville? And I said, oh, my husband and I have a personal branding firm. I said, we help entrepreneurs build their personal brands. And he said, no. I said
AJV (35:38):
And I said, guess what? That’s what we do. We help people actually build their speaking business, craft their content and become better speakers and get booked to speak. He goes, you do that for people like me. And I said, I sure do. And I said, do you have your phone on you? He goes, yeah. And I said, pull up your phone type in www dot brain builders, group.com. So he pulls it up and I said, go to the about S page. So he pulls up the about S page. I said, scroll down. He scrolls down to the very end. You see that person right there. He goes, yeah. I said, that’s me. I said, that look really different. Not in a baby suit. I said, that’s me. I said, that’s me and my husband. This is our company. And so I took him to the next page and I said, scroll down.
AJV (36:13):
You see that little button where it says, request a call. I said, click that button. And I said, there’s a little form there where we’ll actually give you a free call to see if we can help. And if not, we’ll send you a bunches of free resources. And if so then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll help you build your personal brand and we’ll help you go speak all around the world. And he said, are you kidding me? I can’t believe I’m staying online. And I just met you. I was just telling my wife about this. And I was like, I don’t believe in coincidence. So click that button. Y’all wow. You have to be welling to tell anyone about what you do. If you believe in it, the person sitting next to you in the bleachers or the, you know, sweaty sunburn person and head of you at line at the Zachery, you know, at the Dery shack at the beach, it’s gotta be compelling. It’s gotta be just coming out of you. And it’s like, maybe he got a call. Maybe he did. And I haven’t looked it up. The point is, is I’m not afraid and I’m not ashamed cuz I don’t find it as self promotional. I’m like, I believe it. So I’m gonna tell you about it until the point where you go. It’s not a fit and then that’s cool too, but you cannot be embarrassed or ashamed about it. You wanna know why your business isn’t growing. You’re not telling anyone about it. That’s why.
RV (37:26):
Hmm. Wow. That is so good, babe. Like you all need to go watch this training and spend time with AJ double dot brand builders, group.com. She’s gonna walk you through this and just give us like 60 seconds this free training. One of the reasons that we put it together is we, we are launching a program, something we’ve never, ever, ever done before. Just give us a little 62nd hint on, on what, what that is.
AJV (37:58):
Yeah. I mean, this it’s part of the webinar too. Is this doing all this research? And again, coincidentally running across this research report, which I truly don’t believe in coincidence. I believe God puts every single thing in my path. It’s just, am I alert and aware? Am I present enough to see what he’s doing in our life and in our business? And I don’t believe coming across that study and getting sucked into this deep dark hole of wow, like that is what I struggled with. I just don’t think that was on accident. I think it was well intended. And a few of the things that I think are really unique is that one of the reasons that people really struggle with this is they don’t solid content to jump off of. Right? It’s like they know that they wanna help people. They know that they wanna coach or train or consult or speak, but creating content is freaking hard work.
AJV (38:46):
Y’all like, let’s just like, it is, it is work. And it takes energy and time and resources. And personal branding is a really popular topic right now. And we get approached all the time by individuals who are going, man, I don’t wanna be like a personal brand strategist with you, but I wanna be able to teach personal branding to my executive clients. Right. And they’re, everyone’s asking about like, do I need a personal brand or what is it? Or you know, how do I become more well known or in this age of there’s a lot of distrust in the marketplace, how do I create more trust? And so one of the things we said is like, well, we may not be able to do everything for you, but what we can give you is a really solid set of content that we know works.
AJV (39:27):
And that we wanna be a launching pad for people who claim themselves as consultants, speakers, coaches in this world. And we wanna be a launching pad of giving the tools and the resources. We’re not gonna give it all to you. Right? Part of this is like your own unique twist, but we’re gonna give you the, the certification and a personal branding curriculum, finding our brand DNA to give you that launching pad of content where you can take someone through a really secure methodology and a process of helping them identify their reputation and use it to help ’em grow their business. For those of you wanna be speakers, it’s like some of the, the hardest work is like, how do I get everything I wanna say about something into 60 minutes, right? It’s easy to talk for hours. It’s really hard to talk for a little bit of time about something really important.
AJV (40:10):
So we’re gonna give you a keynote. We’re gonna give you a webinar. We’re gonna give you all these different tools to be a launching pad for your business. Now for us, it’s unique in that personal branding reputation space, but I really do believe it’s like everyone has a personal brand. If you have a reputation, you have a personal brand. It’s just a matter of how we, we leverage that to help you become an expert or be known as an expert in your space. And that was the Genesis for all of this. And then along the way of going, maybe our curriculum isn’t for you, but you just need some, you need some insights of what really works and what doesn’t. And that’s why we put this training. You know, this free training together for you whether or not ever licensing our content or being a part of, you know, our community is a fit for you.
AJV (40:54):
We wanna give you free resources. And I’d say, that’s one of the things we talk about in the webinars, don’t be afraid to give it away. People are like, I’ve had a few people who are really close friends of mine who were coaches watch this. And they’re like, aren’t you afraid that you just gave it all away? And I was like, no, no, absolutely not. I was like, I’m gonna give it all. If I had two more hours, I’d give away some more stuff. It’s like, don’t be afraid to give it all away. This is, if you, like, there are two simple formulas to building relationships, give value, build trust at the end, give so much value that the person says, oh my gosh, I feel like I have to pay you for this. Right. Give so much value that they feel compelled to go.
AJV (41:35):
What can I do for you? Like I just learned so much, like I cannot believe how much you gave away in 60 minutes. Like, why would you do that? That’s how I want you to feel. Cause that’s how you should feel. That’s how you garner trusted followers and you don’t need millions of ’em. You need a few, remember you don’t need millions of clients. You don’t need thousands of clients. You don’t even need hundreds of clients. Most of you just need dozens of clients. Right. and it does, you don’t have to do a whole lot of work to get that, but you gotta, you gotta do some right. You gotta do some strategic things to help minimize the distraction that you’ve got in your business. And so this webinar’s gonna give you five of those.
RV (42:11):
Oh, so good. Again, check out the webinar, double dot brand builders, group.com. AJ goes through us whole training about how to double your business in the next year. Also you know, at the end of that, she’ll talk to you a little bit more about kind of our licensing pro program and what we’re doing. And there’s so much it takes to start a business. Creating content can be one of the things that we can take off your plate. I mean, our content has been so proven and well utilized the last few years by very, very recognizable personal brains. And also those just starting out. So we’d love for you to be a part of that. And we have
AJV (42:43):
No shame in saying we believe it is freaking awesome. We have awesome contents.
RV (42:49):
Our content is awesome. You
AJV (42:51):
Should not be ashamed either, right? It’s like brag on yourself because you believe in what it does. I got no problems bragging on Roy Vaden, who is the mastermind behind most of our content. It is life changing. It works. It’s methodical, it’s systematic. It’s all the things it’s entertaining. I will, I will happily sing our contents phrases and yours Rory because I believe that’s, if you believe in what you do that much, that’s what you should be doing. I believe in ours that much.
RV (43:21):
Well, thank you, babe. And, and thanks all of y’all. If you, if you are interested in that you wanna go straight to learning about the licensing. If you go to license dot brand builders, group.com, license dot brand builders, group.com, you can go straight there and start learning about that right away. But if not go to double dot brand builders, group.com. Listen to this training with AJ. Thanks for being here. We love you. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 282: Turning Your Lifestyle Into a Business with Natasha Stoneking
AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode on the influential personal brand. This is AJ Vaden. One of your co-hosts here CEO of brand builders group. And y’all, this is such a special treat today because I get to have an old friend on the podcast and you guys are about to meet Natasha. But she and I actually went to college together and completely lost touch for like several years. And then we both ended up in Nashville. And most recently I think this is like at the beginning of the pandemic. I don’t even know if you remember this, but we ran into each other at Starbucks. And I was like, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen you like 10 years. And then from there I started following you online and following your blog and you’re doing so many cool things online. And then one day I remember being at green Hills mall and I was walking around.
AJV (00:49):
I was like, pretty sure that’s Natasha on that.
NS (01:55):
Well, I’m thrilled to be here with you guys. Thank you so much for having me.
AJV (01:58):
Oh my gosh. It’s gonna be awesome. And so we start every episode with this kind of same, and, and I told you right before we started, you’ve had approximately two minutes to prepare for this
NS (02:17):
Yeah, I think, you know, first of all, a lot of people in social media kind of just stumble into it. And I was working in, in corporate media marketing for a big consulting firm and was just kind of doing the eight to five Monday through Friday, but not getting to use my creative brain, you know, which is what you and I studied at UT in advertising. And so I started a blog in April of 2008, which is crazy. Like I’m about to celebrate almost 14 of blogging, which, you know, back then there was no hashtag ad. There was no, you know, sponsored posting. There was no monetization of blogging whatsoever. It was mainly me sharing recipes, media events, things going on in my life in Nashville, just as a way to kind of document my life and serve as an online kind of creative journal, if you will.
NS (03:08):
And so I started doing that on the side and it really kind of picked up in 2010 when I got engaged to my now husband, Jeff. And that was pretty much when Pinterest started becoming extremely popular and everybody wanted to know all about wedding inspiration. So that was pretty much one of the early focuses of my blog and all the social media channels. And that’s where I developed, you know, an audience in a community of people who wanted to follow along. And so from that, it was all things wedding. And then we, you know, got married and got pregnant and that it was instantly all things, pregnancy and motherhood and nursery and home design. And so the cool thing about my social media channels is that it has absolutely followed me through a lot of the chapters I love and all of those peaks throughout my life. So it’s fun to see. So many of the people that have followed me since day one, believe it, or, and they’ve seen me, you know, go from a corporate marketing manager to running my own e-commerce business to a full on life and style blogger and kind of navigating all of those different paths.
AJV (04:11):
Oh my gosh. And you said something that I think is so important and it’s actually something that we talk a ton about at our company brand builders group, as we talk about how it’s like to really become known for anything, you have to become known for one thing. And to hear you say that it was like really where your following started was in that wedding niche. Yeah. And then was
NS (04:32):
So crazy to me, but there wasn’t a lot of bloggers back then. Yeah. There was a handful of us. And so I think obviously the pickings were a lot slimmer
AJV (04:41):
But it’s like, I think that that’s prove such a great point. It’s like, it’s like go all in on one thing that you’re super interested in that you’re super passionate becomes really easy to you build a falling with that and then let it naturally and organically evolve from there. Yep. And I,
NS (04:56):
It actually resonates with your audience a lot more and you build that relationship it and that rapport, and most importantly, the trust.
AJV (05:05):
Yeah. Well, I think that’s huge. And it’s like, because now it’s like you, do you talk about so many different things? It’s like, you’ve got cooking recipes, you’ve got fashion, you’ve got tips, trends, favorite things that you love, you know, you still have your girls on there all the time, which I love, of course it’s such, such a family component. But you talk about travel a lot. And I love, you know, learning about your properties that you have in 30 a, and it’s like all these different cool things that it’s evolved to. And so I’m curious, and rather this is just what you’ve done naturally, or maybe there was some logic and science to it. I don’t know. I’m so curious to see what you’re gonna say, but how do you decide what is gonna be the thing and the topic that you’re focused on?
NS (05:45):
Well, obviously I think a lot of that comes from just real life. What do I have going on in any, you know, any given day, week or month? And, you know, I sit with my assistant Ashley and we kind of, you know, strategize on a social media content calendar, what things are coming up, you know, obviously Easter’s on the horizon or summer. So we’re thinking of family stuff. We’re thinking of spring break plans. We’re talking about upcoming summer destinations. So all of these things a lot, you know, just go along with this season, but I’m also thinking about what do people wanna hear. I mean, a lot of times people come to social media for an escape from the real world, but I’m also just very blatantly honest. I think, you know, I kind of show different facets of my life, which is how I’ve kind of moved more into life and style rather than just family or just fashion. You know, I get, I can get kind of bored of just showing fashion or just showing my family because I think there’s so many different things that make me, me, and I hope that that kind of, you know, helps people to understand I’m just like them.
AJV (06:45):
Yeah, no, I think that is true. And I it’s like, like even I had all your stuff pulled up even before getting on here. And it’s like, I love too of like how much of it just reflects your personality. It’s like, it just everything you do screams you. And I think that’s really a huge part of just being authentic and probably why your followers continue to grow, grow and grow as they are. So I have a couple of like odd questions that I think would be just really interesting for all of our audience of do you find that there are certain things that you post that you just know, I know this is gonna, this is gonna be a win or are you always still kind of guessing of like, I don’t know, I don’t know what’s gonna be the most liked or the most shared or the most engaged. I have no idea.
NS (07:27):
Oh my gosh, I wish I knew the algorithms and how they’re always changing. And I wish I could predict all those things. I think if there was one source of content that I know is always is going, you know, to get lots of likes or comments or feedback, it’s gonna be me posting the kids. Everybody wants to see Caroline in Carson. I mean, I’m biased, but I think they’re adorable.
AJV (08:47):
Oh, I love that. You know, and I think that speaks true. It’s like, you know, and one of the reasons I’m asked is like, we’ve been doing a lot of split testing with our different social channels and I can post a piece of content and then I can post pictures of me and my kids in our Halloween costumes. And that will get 100 times the engagement that my piece of content did. And I, I think it speaks a lot too. It’s like people really want to know more of who you are versus what you do. Yeah.
NS (09:15):
Right. And I think that’s also why videos, reels, and stories are. So I think more and more brands and retailers are really spending their, you know, ad dollars on the more video type of things, because you can really get to know somebody, you can see it in action and use, and it’s not just a pretty picture. And, you know, kinda like what you said, the ones where from doing, you know, a selfie of an outfit in my office, they always get better engagement rather than a style photo shoot because that’s not real life.
AJV (09:41):
Yeah. I love that. So, okay. So this is a good transition then. So some tips for people out there who are building this life and style kind of business, and they’re trying to figure out how to monetize it, which we’ll get to that in just a minute, but for, for everyone who, okay, how do I increase my followership? How do I increase engagement? Do you have any best practices on the type of post or the type of reel, the type of video or the type of copy that you’re using to increase followers and engagement?
NS (10:14):
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, a couple things that I do very frequently I ask a lot of questions on static posts so that I am getting that engagement, you know, people are answering or if I’m doing a giveaway, I say, you know, list your favorite three things about the beach or whatever the subject matter may be. I think that always helps. One thing I am I do will never hand off to someone else as I respond to each and every DM that I get, it’s very time consuming. I will admit to that, but I do it throughout the day so that it’s not stockpiled for me. You know, when I’m in bed at night and the relationships and the rapport and the community that I’ve built with those people, because one, they know they’re talking to me and two, they know I’m going to respond as they, and it exemplifies what is missing in social media right now.
NS (11:00):
And I think, I hope that it, you know, really shows them that I’m not just walking the wall, but I’m actually, you know, if they ask me, how does that blouse run, I’m gonna text them back and say, you know, it’s true to size or, you know, this is how it fits or whatever it may be, but people remember those things. And like I said before, I think it’s all about building trust. And if you don’t continue to build that trust, they’re gonna go somewhere else. So I definitely think that’s helpful in kind of building that rapport with your followers. I think being open and upfront and honest is also, you know, I think people come to me for positive and, you know, happiness quotes and all those things and color. But I also am honest when I’m having a bad day or, you know, if I’m somethings go going wrong because they wanna know that you’re just a regular person. And so it’s all pretty to have a, you know, a, a very aesthetically pleasing fee, but that’s not real, I think, long gone those days. And as long as you’re staying true to who you are, brands will know that. And it’ll show, it’ll definitely start to show. And so your numbers will follow and you know, just, that’s all I can just, you know, that’s all I have to say about that.
AJV (12:03):
I think that’s good though. It’s like authentic engagement of not outsourcing it, not using bots. It’s like, Nope, this is real life human relationships that I’m working at building. And in order to build a business, you need to do that, right. Yes. Frankly. And
NS (12:16):
Quality over quantity. I think gone are the days where people are just seeing an engagement rate or a conversion rate, or how many followers you have brands really don’t care about that anymore. Yeah. More and more I’m seeing that, which is very great for somebody in my kind of niche, because they’re like, wait a minute. That doesn’t mean she’s not engaged. That doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have, you know, loyal followers. That just means that she’s really paying attention to what she’s doing. And you’re not gonna see me taking on brand partnerships and deals with products that I don’t wholeheartedly back.
AJV (12:46):
Yeah. I think that’s awesome. So, okay. So that’s a great transition to the next thing is monetizing, right? How do we do all this? Cuz I think so many people are fallen into one of two buckets. They have an amazing business and not enough people know about them or they have a huge audience, but they’re not monetizing it. Right. And it’s like marrying those two things is a really big deal.
NS (13:25):
Yeah, so obviously the biggest would probably be through like, to know it because it’s easy, it’s accessible, you know, many people I think through the pandemic had to become even more familiar with shopping online, whether they wanted to, or not, especially in those eight, those older age demographics specifically. I mean, my mom would come over and she’d be like, how do I do this?
AJV (14:14):
Right. Instagram
NS (14:15):
Ram changes, Facebook changes, LTK changes all of these change, things change. And some of these people are gonna be out there without a bone when things change. And they’re like, oh my gosh, I don’t own any of this content because I’ve shared it to only these platforms. So I always try to drive people back to my blog is kind of the hub yeah. Of everything, whether that be recipes or my travel or packing tips, or obviously the life and style component or my home design, anything like that. I always try to bring back to my blog and that way it, how it stays there forever.
AJV (14:46):
Yeah.
NS (14:47):
And I think that’s extremely important is having that platform that you own the rights to another thing is that’s been tremendous in, you know, growing my monetization is email newsletters. Again, that’s information that you solely own on your, by yourself. No one has privileged data to that. I also work directly with brands. You know, a lot of times you have to go through these middle media people. And a lot of times I’ll reach out to brands directly, whether that, you know, be searching for their PR or media email on their website, or if that’s actually sending them a DM on Instagram. And a lot of times that’s how I’ve gotten some of my longer term partnerships like Soma intimates. I work with them on a monthly basis and have done so for a couple years now. And it was me taking a chance and saying, I’m interested in working with you. I think I would be a good fit. And so I think it’s not being afraid to hear. No, I love,
AJV (15:39):
Hear, love, hearing that.
NS (15:41):
I mean, you’re gonna hear no, I hear it all the time still. So don’t be, you know, don’t get upset if you hear a no, because that just means that’s not the right fit. And I’ve, you know, been able to work with some household names over the years and sometimes it simply is, you know, sending them a DM. Yeah. Cause I think that shows ins and a lot of people don’t,
AJV (16:00):
I think, I think a huge part of, and I speak for at least the brand builders group community that we work with. It’s like, I think people forget the art of outreach. It’s like don’t expect the you’re just going to have all these followers and people just come and find you, maybe that happens sometimes, but you actually need to do some good old fashioned sales outreach. Right. Email someone actually pick up the phone and call them, DM them, do the research pitch yourself. Right. Don’t forget that there is a, still a sale to be made here. So you’re still finding, so that’s a great question. I would know. How do you know when a brand is right for you and when you are right for a brand?
NS (16:38):
Yeah. Well, depending on the brand I’m working with, so let’s just say, okay, right now I have a couple collaborations going on with anthropology, which every year I make a list of five to 10 brands that I wanna work with this bucket list brand, you know, that’s been included, Lily Pulitzer, that’s included Disney, that’s included you know, different cruise lines. I mean literally the full spectrum, Nordstrom, Sephora, whatever it may be. And honestly I reached out to anthropology and said, listen, I have a ton of your items. Not only in my wardrobe, but in my home, my audience knows I’m all about color. I think, to be an absolute win. And I just kept kind of building that rapport. I would tag them in outfits that I wore. So they know it’s very organic. Yeah. And then they’re like, okay, wait a minute. Natasha actually is not only a customer, but she supports us. See, she talks about promotions we have or new arrivals or whatever that may be. So I think it’s just, you know, obviously continu putting that kind of bug in their ears so that you do come top of mind when they think about the add dollars that they have to
AJV (17:40):
Spend. Yeah. And it’s really just, it’s reaching out to people that you already love. Exactly. It’s who you’re already using, but I love what you said. It’s like, you make a target list of like, these are my bucket list, clients like this is, these are the brands I already love. I’m already using might as well have a partnership with them and we mutually benefit.
NS (17:58):
Exactly.
AJV (17:58):
Yeah. I love that. And
NS (18:00):
They’re looking, I mean, they’re actively looking, they have a group of people, these huge brands have people looking to find, you make it easy to find, find
AJV (18:07):
That’s right. That which is tagging them. Right.
NS (18:10):
Exactly. Don’t be ashamed. I mean, everyone starts with zero followers.
AJV (18:15):
Yeah. That’s so good. Well, and there’s that, there’s this rise of these micro influencers. Yep. Right. These people that kind of have like that 10 to 30, 10 to $40,000 followers. Yes. There’s a huge rise in the importance of it’s like, you don’t have to have huge followers to make huge incomes by just, not at all, having an engaged Royal following. Cause that millions doesn’t mean anything if they don’t have engagement. And
NS (18:40):
Exactly. And I think more and more, you know, brands are seeing the bots. You know, I was in Dallas a couple weeks ago with the brand and they were showing me how they have access to all of these influencers, statistics through a, you know, a platform that they subscribe to. And it was eyeopening to kind of hear how things are ranked and you know, the response time with these influencers and how many of their followers are real and brands are starting to see this and get really smart. So it makes me very happy to know that staying true and myself and being honest, you know, is definitely gonna pay off in the long run
AJV (19:13):
Preach. Always, always.
NS (19:15):
Exactly.
AJV (19:16):
So, I mean, and you said something too, that we talk about all the time, which is, you know, if you’re only building on social media, you’re building on rented real estate, the only real, the only virtual real estate you own is your blog, your website, your email list, right. Those are things that you own. And some tips to people who are going, I mean, I cannot tell you how many people I know who are like, what do you mean an email list? Like that’s so that’s so old school. I’m like no, no, it’s not. It’s the only thing that you really own. Right. Otherwise you’re just building Zuckerberg’s platform. Right. You’re,
NS (19:47):
You’re helping them more than we have already done. I think they’re good.
AJV (19:51):
Right. I think they think they have hit their, their peak. I think we’re good there. So some tips on how do you convert followers into email addresses?
NS (20:00):
You know, a lot of times I’ll simply ask, you know, how kinda you said, ask for the sale, simply say, Hey, I would love for you to sign up. A lot of times I have added content on I email newsletter that I don’t have anywhere else. So they feel like they’re getting something special. You know, I include all my special discount codes that I’ve worked in partnership with brands to have. I keep those live on my email newsletters. I talk about my target Thursday favorites there. And also I recap a lot of things going on in my life. So I kind of do a little bit more of a deep if so I think people wanna know if they know you on a personal level, but they wanna continue to know you and develop a better relationship of who you are. That’s when they always, you know, wanna do that. I’ll do giveaways to get them to sign up. You know, that’s easy and fun and everyone loves something free. So just little things here and there and I dabble it, but you know, I make it easy to subscribe on my website. I have a popup that comes when you go to hello, happiness blog.com. So you just have to make it overly easy for them to be a part of it because people will continue to ask,
AJV (21:03):
Well, you said three things that I’m gonna highlight that I think are really unique and really important to make sure everyone who is out there listening, you pay attention to this one is create unique content for your eing, right? It’s like if it’s just regurgitated information that they can get somewhere else, you know, it’s like, I think there is a huge trend right now of creating unique content for each platform versus taking one piece of content and displacing it and putting the same piece everywhere. It’s like, are you creating unique content for each platform? And then making it really unique, special content, you can get nowhere else, nowhere else for your email list. I love that. I think that’s so smart. Second thing is giveaways. So are you providing giveaways to make it enticing for someone to want to give you your email? So any quick tips on like, what are the best giveaways that you’ve ever done that made like a huge difference?
NS (21:59):
Oh goodness. Okay. So as you mentioned earlier, we have rental properties down in 38. And so a lot of what I try to do is I like to haul out a lot of small businesses. That’s something that I’ve done for years. It’s super important to me, it’s the backbone of our country. And so I partnered with a lot of Rosemary merchants and catering companies and wine distributors. And I gave away a stay at our Roia boat property for somebody to come and experience 30 a. And so we had the buy-in of all of those different communities and brands and shops. And so they were just thrilled, not only because of the, you know, potential income that they were getting from that new followers, new customers, new people on their websites. But then it was also giving back to my community and saying, thank you for being here and doing this. So that was probably one of the most successful and way. A lot of the items that I design I’ve, you know, collaborated with social threads on Nerine totes, I’ve created custom collections of swimwear for the family, with the Oaks. I’ve done accessory, concierge, jewelry collections. So a lot of times I’ll buy those for myself and then kind of put them aside for weekly or monthly engagement giveaways, just to say, give back and say, thanks
AJV (23:12):
Love those ideas. And it’s like the next time you do a giveaway for a free vacation on 38, me who
NS (23:19):
Doesn’t want that. So, and it really helps those small businesses and, you know, it’s, if there’s anything I can do, that’s one thing I like,
AJV (23:27):
I, I love that. And it’s due, it’s like, it’s finding ways to that compliments what you’re already doing. So everything is still so synergistic and so connected. I love that. And so, so I do have a question tactical, a tactical question. So you’re these giveaways, is it only for new email subscribers?
NS (23:45):
Sometimes it depends on what the specific brands I’m working with asks for not necessarily, but most of the time I try to do it to everybody. Who’s a part of my email,
AJV (23:56):
Their list, but that’s just great incentive of why you wanna be on there and stay on
NS (24:00):
There. Great.
AJV (24:02):
Yep. I love that such good. And then the third thing that you said that I think is just really important, I’m just gonna hit it home one more time. Is that make sure you’re actually building your email list. Right? All of these things don’t matter if the algorithm can change and leadership changes. I mean, that’s such a big deal. It’s such a big, so
NS (24:22):
Make sure, make it easy for them. Have it on a dropdown on your blog, having a dropdown on your, you know, Instagram bio on your Facebook group page. Literally every place they can find you, you need to have a way for them to subscribe.
AJV (24:34):
Love that. So good. All right. So last, just couple of questions. I know when we have like five more minutes together, but a last couple of quick questions and these are just personal, just for fun. What is your favorite thing to talk about? Like when you think about this, all the things that you can be talking about, is there one that just like pulls at your heart of like, man, I love it. When I get to do this,
NS (24:57):
I think, you know, every day I get on stories and I share optimistic quotes and positive things. And I think right now, even more than ever, there’s so much negativity. And if I can bring a smile to someone’s face with just some heartfelt words that I have found from Pinterest that morning, I think it really helps start people’s day out. So I do a morning coffee chat and people, you know, tune in by the thousands to see it. It’s not me doing a hashtag sponsored event. It’s not so fancy thing. It’s me, literally in my PJ is drinking a cup of coffee and that’s something where I feel like I really kind of build that rapport and that relationship. And it’s super important to me.
AJV (25:33):
Do you do it every day?
NS (25:35):
Every day?
AJV (25:36):
I mean, if
NS (25:36):
I don’t come on, people are like, Natasha, where are you? Do the girls get on the bus? OK. What’s going on? I mean, so it’s just, it’s not anything fancy. It’s just me.
AJV (25:46):
I love that, but it consistency,
NS (25:49):
Consistency. And that is key. Yes. You gotta train your audience about when you’ll be there. How many touch points, what are you posting each week? So I think it just always, you know, goes back to being consistent.
AJV (26:00):
Yeah. But it’s like consistency and training. I think that’s a really big deal, but you love doing the more inspirational C that you do it every morning,
NS (26:09):
Every morning and then showing color. I think that’s probably another thing that really separates me from the majority. If you were just scrolling through your Instagram feed of, you know, life and style bloggers, everything is so neutral and that is not my life
AJV (26:31):
I love that. I love that. So. Okay. Two other questions then I promise I’ll let you go. I love this what’s what’s one trend that you would say I see everyone else doing this, but I’m not gonna do it.
NS (26:45):
Oh gosh. Well, one kinda touches on what I just said about everything. Neutral, every home looking the same, I’m just over it. You know, I would have wallpaper in every single room in my house. If I could, my husband would want to kill me, but he knows he’s pretty much taken a backseat to all things, design and decor. So I do take risks when it comes to that stuff. And I love it. Another thing I am not a biker short person.
AJV (27:22):
But I will tell you, it’s a, like, I think the color like makes you pop. Like if you scrolling your feet, anytime you pop up, it’s like, it’s always like just bright and colorful and just it, you know, it’s like, hello, happiness is such a great title for you. It’s like, because everything you are is like so joyful and happy. But like a part of why I wanted to ask is because I think so much of what you’re saying, just rest with who you are and it really does come through. So if you were trying to just play with the trends that are popular, it would be, you know, inauthentic to just who you are. Yeah.
NS (27:52):
You gotta stay true to who you are and
AJV (27:54):
Including no bike shorts. So including
NS (27:57):
No bike shorts. So if you shorts, you can come at me because I guarantee you, this is gonna,
AJV (28:04):
I love that. I love that. Okay. This is my last question. And this is more of a tip for the listeners for anyone who’s listening, who’s going all right. I really, I wanna make that jump from just building my audience to actually monetizing my audience. What’s one thing that you would tell someone to do. Who’s just kind of like trying to figure out how do I Mo this thing that I’ve accidentally built. What’s the first thing that they should do.
NS (28:29):
First of all, I would find the top three things that you wanna post about so that you can have a niche. I think people get so disoriented with, oh my gosh. And having to put, you know, balls in each bucket, find three specific subject matter areas and focus on those. That would be my number one tip. My second tip would be really engaging with your followers.
AJV (28:53):
So good. It’s simple that it’s not right.
NS (28:56):
I know it’s not easy. And it’s something that I’m constantly having to work at. So it’s an ever evolving marketplace and that, but that also makes it fun. Yeah. Makes it not feel like work. And I love what I do. And so it doesn’t
AJV (29:09):
And boring.
NS (29:10):
No, it’s not. It’s never boring.
AJV (29:14):
Oh, this has been so good. Y’all if you, if you don’t know Natasha please go follow her. I would say I’m gonna drive you to hello, happiness blog.com. Sign up for email list, get some get some free tips. There
NS (29:28):
You go. Ask for the cell.
AJV (29:31):
I’ll help you with that. But from there you can check her out on Instagram, Pinterest, all the places, but hello, happiness, blog.com. We’ll put all of her social handles in the show notes. We’ll put the, the blog link in there too. You’re doing amazing stuff. Thank you so much for coming on. It’s dually exciting for me to get to learn from you and also do reconnect with an old friend. So thank you so much.
NS (29:55):
Likewise. Thank you guys so much for having me a means a lot.
AJV (29:58):
All right, everyone. We’ll catch you next time. I’m on the influential personal brand.
Ep 273: How to Make Money Selling Online Courses with Amy Porterfield | Recap Episode
RV (00:02):
Amy Porterfield legend. I mean, did, when it comes to digital marketing, online marketing, personal branding, I mean, she’s a legend, she’s one of the, one of the, the fairy godmothers of this industry or this space, you know, I would say godfather, but you know, clearly godmother and she’s, she has just helped a ton of people, 40,000 people to be exact 40,000 people have gone through her paid courses. And I just, I just love that conversation. I I’m honored when we get a chance to be introduced to people like her and get to go behind the scenes a little bit and bring you the stories, right. Of like she’s working with Tony Robbins for seven years and she’s helping Tony do his first live webinar and she accidentally pushes the wrong button and, and, and, and notifies hundreds of people that the webinar is canceled.
RV (00:53):
I mean, just to hear those stories to me is just so rich and rare and, and, and, and powerful because it just, you know, it shows you where these people start and, and, and hopefully that gives you encouragement for where you can start. Like, you can start right where you’re at. And and I just, yeah, I didn’t know exactly what to expect from the conversation like Amy and I have been sort of acquaintances and, you know, a little bit messaging back here and there, and then more recent, we’ve gotten to know a little each other a little bit since she moved to Nashville. And and I’ve just always liked her, just never really known her that well. And, and this was so cool to get to learn from her and hear her story. So I, I let’s talk away. I’m gonna share, you know, my three top highlights from the interview with Amy Porterfield and the first one, one is, you know, we don’t sell a ton of courses.
RV (01:47):
It’s not a big focus of what we do at brain builders group. We, we do one on one personal brand strategy, coaching and training, right? Like we, we do human to human. And so we don’t, we haven’t like put a lot of time and energy into selling courses. It’s it’s and we don’t even really do it at all. I, a lot of our clients do and we’ve done it before, and we know, you know, we know something about it, but like this, the number one question that we’ll always get that always get from people when it comes to their course is how long does it need to be? Like, how many, how many videos and how long? And for some reason, people really get, really get stuck on that. And I loved Amy’s answer. She said simply however long it has to be to get them the result, what a great answer and just the true answer.
RV (02:41):
Like people aren’t paying for the amount of time, right. They’re paying for a result. If you’ve, if you’ve hung around our, our brain builders community, you’ll hear us say this a lot. People don’t pay for information. They pay for organization and application, right? They they’re, they’re, they’re paying for the application. They, they need help applying information to their life. And so in some ways, the, the better you are at teaching, the shorter it can be, and the shorter it should be. You know, I think it was mark Twain, who said, that said that brevity is the essence of wisdom. I shared that David Brooks, one of my speaker coaches in the world championship of public speaking said, tell the audience every word they need to know and not a word more. And, and Amy is applying that same principle here. It, however long it has to be to get them the result that you’re promising them.
RV (03:34):
So, but do it the fastest way possible, be efficient with it. Don’t just like don’t drag on and on with content, cuz you think it needs to be longer in order to justify a higher price. It’s, that’s lowering the value of it. Like if you can deliver the secret and you know, and you can do it concisely just that’s, that’s even more valuable. And I, I, I do also wanna mention a little subnote here where she said bake in pep talks to your course. I love that. That was such a great tip. Bake in little pep talks into your course and realize that it’s not just information. People need encouragement. They, they need motivation. They need inspiration. They, they need, they need wisdom and direction and, and, and they, they need help believing that it’s possible. And you know, it was funny when she said the, the more like signature course, the bigger course, the longer the course, the more motivation they need.
RV (04:33):
And that makes sense because there’s more places where they can get tripped up, right? There’s there’s more, there’s more points on the journey anywhere they can fall off. So bake little pep talks into your course. It’s not just information. It shouldn’t just be boring drudgery through like content, inspire them, challenge them, help them, coach them, encourage them. That’s a really, really important part of, of the journey. So that was really, the second thing was how do you sell a course? And I love, I mean, she said exactly what we do, exactly what she does, exactly what we teach and exactly what we’ve seen works, which is you don’t even really sell the course. What you do is you create a free training. You create a free one hour speech. The way we would say it is the fastest way to take someone from being a total stranger to a lifelong fan is an incredible 45 minute to one hour presentation, right?
RV (05:41):
It’s your speech now? You’ll that is a webinar like in recorded format. That is a webinar. If it’s, if it’s in live format, it it’s a speech. It could be a live on social media. Like it could be a podcast interview, but it’s like, you have to work to create this tightly bound content, rich value added 45 minute, just delicious and impactful training. And then you gotta deliver it to people like you gotta, you gotta run your mouth. You gotta go out and tell the world. You can do it by podcast. You can do it by going live on social media. You can go on other people’s podcasts. You can go, you can do it as webinars. You can break it up into smaller video funnels. You can, you can go out and do speeches. You like, you can do. ’em Virtually you can do ’em in front of humans, but like you have to give people a chance to sample what you have to teach.
RV (06:37):
And that’s why that 45 minutes is it’s gotta be so good. Not smoking mirrors, not flashing the pan, not a bunch of teaser. And then I’ll teach you the good stuff, like 45 minutes of life changing content that you give away for free give people. And, and you promote that. Drive people to that. You drive people to the free thing where they experience you. And then the people who are still there, which are the ones who are interested. They’re not only interested, they’re super interested because they were interested enough to register and then interested enough to show up, interested enough to stay and interested enough to be there at the end. So it’s like, those are the people who want to buy. So if by the time they’re there with you at the end, they want to know what you have for sale. That’s why they’re there.
RV (07:29):
So, you know, use your email and your blogs and your social media and your podcast and your YouTubes to drive people to a free training. And then at the end of the free training, that is where you make the, the pitch to sell. And, and I, I love the way that Amy said that she said, earn your right to sell to them, earn your right to sell to them. It’s like paying in rears instead of paying in forwards, right? Like some of your bills you pay in rears. Like you go, you pay for the service after you’ve experienced it. Right? You do that like at a restaurant, right? You eat a meal, they give you the food first and then you pay for it after, right? That’s, that’s, that’s paying in rears. Other other bills you have to pay first. And then you, then you get the service.
RV (08:15):
Well, when it comes to content marketing, it happens in rears. You have to deliver the training, add the value first. And then you get the, the, you earn the right to sell. As she says by giving immense value, like 45 minutes of truly immense value. So simple, so simple. The fact that it’s a webinar or a summit or a challenge or a podcast or YouTube video or a live stream, or a standing on a stage, like all of those, those are just details. That’s just the modality of delivery. The concept here is add values to people’s add value to people, add value to people’s lives, show them a sampling of, of what you have to, to teach. And, and then that you earn the right to sell. And then the third thing that I learned from Amy, you know, my takeaway, which is like the grand PBA of them all is we, we always are saying, if you have did focus, you get diluted results.
RV (09:18):
Focus is power, right? Those, those are concepts right out of our first book, take the stairs all the way back in 2012, that it is focus. That creates power. And you hear us say it, but you don’t believe it. And those of you that are members of ours, when we’re telling you, no, you don’t need five revenue streams you one, right? No, you don’t need to have 17 social media channels. Like you really need one. Like just, just like the ultimate thing that matters is your email list. Right? And, and then she comes on, like the queen of course is like one of the, one of the OGs. If you’re not familiar with Amy, the baby, this doesn’t make sense to you. But, but there’s a good, you are like, if you’re listening to this show, you’ve probably heard of her before. Like she’d been around from the, from the beginning of online marketing and, and her, her, you know, like that, she is one of, one of the, the creators of the space.
RV (10:11):
And to go 13 years into the business, she got two avenue streams courses and a membership site. But the membership site, she only sells to people who’ve been through the courses like her primary business model is courses. How many courses does she have after 13 years? Three? That’s it three, three courses, 13 years, one business model, one focus courses are not the answer. Coaching is not the answer. Speaking is not the answer. Consulting is not the answer services are not the answer. Any of these business models work. The answer is having one, not having one, having one, meaning you have a so low primary business, this model that it is, it all other things are subservient to that. You’re choosing it for us. It’s one OnOne coaching, right? Like one-on-one training. Like we’re pushing people, we’ve got a curriculum, but we do it through a modality of talking to you one-on-one every month.
RV (11:15):
And, and coming to our, you know, live coaching events, but we’re human based. Whereas you know, Amy’s doing it through courses and, and, you know, group, group, group teaching, other other people will do it through like selling tickets to their events. Or they’ll just, you know, they’re monetizing their podcasts, all the business models work, but it, none of ’em work when you do them all at the same time. So you gotta find your, your primary. And, and I love what she said too. She said, I’ve I never, one of the things that I did well was I never added something new until the thing that I was currently doing was working really well. I never added something new until the thing I was currently doing was working really well. And, and that’s how you get 40,000 clients. I didn’t do the math on this, but like, you know, you go, okay, if you’ve had 40,000 people, let’s just say, it’s, let’s do a a hundred dollars course buy a $500 course on average y’all that is 20 million in revenue, 20 million at 500, if it’s a thousand dollars, it’s, it’s $40 million.
RV (12:28):
Right. So, and if it’s $250, it’s 10, you know, per course it’s million dollars. All of those are pretty good, right? Like all of those are, all of those are pretty good. Again, it’s not that the, the, the, that courses are the answer. Courses might be the answer. They might not be. That’s part of what we help people sort out, but it’s like, you can make money doing this. If you just do this one thing and you do it really well, and you focus on one thing and you drive that and thing, that’s the secret. And she’s living proof of it, living example of it. And it’s just like, you gotta believe in it and you gotta just go. What is my one thing? And now if you’re struggling to figure out what is my one audience, what is my one message? What is my one business model?
RV (13:09):
What is my one marketing platform? Then request a call with our team, go to free brand, call.com/podcast, free brand call.com/podcast, request a call with our team. And we will help you sort that out. That’s why, that’s why we do what we do, but choose one thing, go all in and it will succeed. You can’t fail. If everything you do, if you have all, all of your focus on one thing, you fail because of distraction, you fail because of diluted focus. You fail. Cuz you’re trying to focus on too many things. Narrow the focus make focus on fewer things and you will guarantee your success. Amy, such a great example of that. So encouraging hope you loved it. Hey you know, share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. Tell someone about this podcast, leave a comment for us. And if you’re ready to find your focus, request a call with our [email protected] slash podcast. We’re ready to talk to you. Keep coming back here, week in, week out, we’re doing our best to bring you the legends and the fresh faces of everything in this industry, teaching you the best of what we can, as we are learning alongside of you here on the influential personal brand podcast. Bye bye.
Ep 272: How to Make Money Selling Online Courses with Amy Porterfield
RV (00:02):
Oh, oh, I’m so excited and happy for you to meet someone who is a, a newer friend of mine, but somebody that I’ve known for years, I mean, she is the definition of someone whose reputation precedes her, which is what we’re always talking about is building trust, building reputation, doing things that last in her significant over time. And those are all things that I think of when I think of Amy Porterfield. Amy is one of the, I would say original, like or online marketing experts. One of the founding people of this space that is digital marketing and course creation and content creators. She’s extraordinary. She has one of the biggest podcasts in the world it’s called online marketing made easy. I mean, if you go on iTunes, you’ll see it like every week, it’s right in the top five. And before, before she, you know, started this business you know, she’s got several different things that she does, but DCA digital course academy is like one of her flagship products that really, really became well known and really helped create the space that a lot of us live and operate inside of.
RV (01:13):
She worked with mega brands like Harley Davidson and she worked with Tony Robbins actually is where she started before. And so she just does things the right way. She believes in action. She helps people take, you know, small steps and she just has a really amazing track record of success. And I’ve had an awesome time just getting to know her a little bit here and there over the years. And so anyways, Amy, welcome to the show.
AP (01:37):
Well, thank you so much for having me. Yeah. I love that. We’ve gotten to know each other more and more, and now that I’m in Nashville, we’re practically neighbors, so that’s a lot of fun. So thanks for having me.
RV (01:47):
Totally. So I know that, you know, so much about online marketing, but what I would love to hear is the story of how you got started, because I think it’s really easy to go, oh, you know, one day, you know, a lot, I know a lot of people, a lot of our clients, a lot of our team members look up to you and go, oh, I, you know, Amy Porterfield, like, she’s amazing which you are, but how did you get started in the beginning? Like before anyone knew your name before you had the email list before you had hundreds of thousands of social media followers in a top rank podcast, like, can you take us back to that moment for a bit?
AP (02:23):
Yes. And I have to say it’s a little bit of a Rocky start for sure. So let me first take you back to when I was working for Tony Robbins. So I was the director of content development, which really meant I was lucky enough to get to travel the world with Tony and work on the content that he did at his live events, unleashed the power within date with destiny, all these amazing events that he still does. Well, I got to be a part of that from a content standpoint and work on his infomercials back in the day when he was doing his infomercials. So it was an incredible time, but I had this one fateful meeting where Tony invited a bunch of internet marketers to come into our San Diego office and talk about their digital courses in their online businesses. So people like Frank Kern, Brenda Rashard, Evan pagan, Jeff Walker were all at this table.
AP (03:12):
Now I didn’t really know who these guys were, and this is very humbling. It’s a big table. I was asked to come in and notes. So I was literally sitting at a different table, taking notes while these guys went around and talked about their online businesses. Tony wanted to sell digital courses at a, a deeper level. And he always looks at people who are getting it right, and figuring out how they’re doing it. So it was a really cool meeting, but I took the worst notes ever because once these guys started talking, all I heard was freedom. All I heard was like, I get to create my own content, call my own shots. I get to build my audience and work with people I love to work with. And they had lifestyle freedom, financial freedom, time, freedom. And I just thought, I don’t know what these guys are doing. And it was all guys. I don’t know what these guys were doing, but I want a piece of it. So my life was forever changed in that one very specific meeting. And over the next year, I
RV (04:07):
Decided what year was that?
AP (04:08):
So that was 2008. Wow. And so for the next year I worked on how would I have my own online business? And I remember turning to a girl I was working with at Tony Robbins and saying, you’re a writer. You have a skillset that can translate into freelancing and doing your own thing. I’ve been in corporate all my life, like from Harley Davidson publishing, before that I’m a corporate girl. Like I have no idea what I would do as an online business, but I was so wrong because I believe that everybody has some in them that they could take and turn into an online business. I am a, a huge believer in that. So fast forward about a year when I finally said, okay, I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna take the leap. I’m gonna start my own business. I quit my Tony Robbin’s job and start my, how have
RV (04:58):
You been there business? How long had you been at Tony Robbins?
AP (05:01):
Almost seven years. So I was there for a
RV (05:03):
Good that’s long time, a long time.
AP (05:05):
And it was an amazing job. They paid me well, I had a lot of clout. I got to call, you know, make big decisions. They respected me like it was, and I got to travel with Tony. I mean, come on. It was an amazing experience, but I wanted that freedom so bad, so bad. You know, I was traveling probably 200, 250 days a year to these events and these other things that we were doing, I had just gotten married. I never saw my husband. So shout
RV (05:33):
Up to Hoby, shout out to what’s up, man.
AP (05:36):
He’s such a good man. So I wanted to spend more time with him. So I thought, okay, I need to change. So I quit my job about a year after that meeting. And I started to do consulting for social media. So I would do I say consulting, but if I really looked at it, I was doing social media for small businesses. And social media was the wild wild west 13 years ago. And so basically I got to kind of just be in a market that was very, very hot at the time, but I hated it. So for two years I built a business I hated. And what I mean by that is I went from one big boss. Literally Tony’s is a huge guy to like eight mini bosses. My clients who I literally let treat me like an employee, I had no boundaries.
AP (06:24):
I was the yes girl. And so I would work way more hours than I did at my Robin’s job, which was a lot of hours. And I didn’t know what freedom was. And I thought, I don’t know who said being your own boss is a great thing, but this is not my cup of tea. So for the first two years, when I started this business, I didn’t like I had a a situation with a free contractor. I was a contractor for the guy in internet marketing, and he had a problem with something, decided to take it out on me. I was getting off of a plane going marketing conference, and he’s on the phone and he’s screaming at me like you did this wrong and you did that wrong and this, and he just needed someone to blame. And I was the girl. And I thought in that moment, I am done with doing this kind of work. It is not the thing I wanna do. I literally fired all my clients. I said, I’m not doing this anymore. I gave him a little runway. That is the day that I started creating digital courses in order to sell online and teach people how to do marketing. So it was a rough two years. I, I went into debt. Things didn’t work out, but it finally did. Thank God.
RV (07:31):
Wow. So, okay, so that’s a, that’s awesome. I, I didn’t realize that you were at Tony Robbins for that long. I mean, that’s pretty cool, like to get really good working knowledge of what a personal brand, you know, operating at that scale. So, so fast forward now, okay. To today, can you still make money selling courses? Like do, like, because people, I hear all the time, right? It’s like, nah, you know, like everyone has a course, like everyone makes courses on courses and how to do courses. Like no one courses anymore, no one finishes courses. Like, but then I go, I don’t know. Like I think my friend Amy’s like doing pretty well and like a lot of our clients are like doing pretty well.
AP (08:11):
Yes. Okay. So the, the short answer is absolutely you can make money with courses, but we’ve also seen the landscape change over time. And I think one of the biggest changes I’ve seen with people who create courses and deliver courses is that people are craving that interaction. We just came out of a two year pandemic. So yeah, people are craving that engagement, that interaction and wanting to get involved with the course creator or the course creators team, so that there’s some and catching going on. And so what we’ve seen is the best courses that are making the most money and the most impact are those were the course creators, willing to show up or willing to create workshops within their courses to actually implement and get things done. I think that’s a shift we’re seeing where back in the day, when I first started creating courses, you could create a course. You didn’t have a community. You didn’t even have live Q and A’s. People could email you if they have a question gone are those days, for sure. But I’m glad that that’s how it is because I love that. I get to see the transformations happening in inside of my courses, but courses are alive and well, and not going anywhere. If anything, we’re continuing to see the climb in people taking courses and really smart people, creating courses.
RV (09:26):
Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like, I mean, as long as there’s something to learn, there’s gonna be a reason for a course. And it’s like the more and more, it, it becomes easy to produce a high quality product. You know, just using like digital tools. I think to me, the real pressure is gonna be put on like colleges and institutions like that of going like, wait a minute. Like, why should I spend a hundred thousand dollars going somewhere to like, learn from people who have never done it when I can spend a few thousand bucks and learn from the someone who’s the master at this
AP (10:01):
It’s so true. I’ve heard over and over again, not to too my own horn, but to answer that question or to address that where people have said, I have a college education, I have an MBA and I got more out of this, the specifics of what to do than I’ve ever gotten out of that college education. And I think that is very normal for people who create courses that really take it seriously, like find great value in creating impeccable content. I think that’s what’s happening.
RV (10:29):
So, so let’s look at the course then and you go, like, there’s a lot of people. I mean, you know, and a lot of like our listeners and our are like profess service people, right? Like they might be an accountant or they’re a, you know, they’re a dentist or they’re a lawyer or, you know, something like that. And, and, and in those industries, you know, course creation is, is kind of even just coming, you know, just becoming a thing. So how long does a course have to be? I mean, like, I I’d be totally curious in some of these really fundamental questions, just like you said, you’ve been there from the beginning. You’ve seen the transformations that like how long does a course have to be, do I have to, can I shoot it on an iPhone? Does it have to be a six camera shoot? Like how much, how much does it cost? Like just the making of the, of the course itself. Like, okay,
AP (11:16):
I love where
RV (11:16):
We’re at today.
AP (11:18):
Love this question. So first of all, let’s talk about investing and creating a course. Absolutely. You can create it on a smartphone. Absolutely. But you can also even do it easier and use a simple software and do slides in audio. So they hear you, but you’re using slides and you’re educating in that way or a nice little mix of both, but you can do that at on a very tight budget. So number one, you do not need a big budget. Definitely don’t need a crew to help you six cameras, none of that. And I don’t do any of that either. So you could keep it really simple. Also when you ask how long does a course need to be? I teach three different courses and really four with a caveat. So let me tell you about the three courses. Okay. First I teach a starter course where that’s, where you’re helping people just dip their toes in the water just to get started, get that instant momentum.
AP (12:07):
So that could be a course that they get through over the weekend, three modules, a few videos in each module. It’s just the basics. So that’s a starter course, usually around a hundred dollars or so, the second type of course is a spotlight course where you’re gonna take one area of your expertise and you’re gonna go deep. So one of my students is a photographer and he did a spotlight course on flash photography that looked like natural light. So that was his spotlight course, really deep in one topic, never launched anything ever online made $12,000 with this first launch with a list of a hundred people. Wow. So $12,000, just some of you’re like, I wanna make way more than that. Well, yeah, when you have an email list of a hundred, that’s incredibly impressive. Imagine what he can do when he grows his email list.
AP (12:52):
And so that’s a spotlight course, usually around $250 to $500 is what you’ll charge. And then the third type of course is a signature signature course. I call this the Mac daddy of all courses. That’s where you’re giving someone a total transformation from start to finish everything they need to know for that total transformation, how to go from never running in your life, to running a marathon, how to go from never creating a digital course to creating and launching a digital course. So it’s total transformation, usually between 500 and all the way up to $3,000. You got a lot of wiggle room there. So those are the three different types of courses. But I wanna add one thing to that. I was actually reading an apple article about how they’re moving away from the word pro to studio for some of their products and this concept that you need to be pro is going away.
AP (13:43):
And I’m so excited cause I’ve been preaching this forever. You don’t need to be the ultimate pro in your topic, the expert of all experts in order to teach it, all you need is what is what I call a 10% edge. So Jill and Josh Staton are dear friends of mine. They first said this. And I was like, I’m stealing that. That’s exactly what I’ve been talking about. A 10% edge, which means you’re 10% ahead of those that you serve. You’ve done something or you’ve gotten results for, let’s say clients or customers. Now you’re gonna teach how you got those results. As long as you’ve got results in an area. And you’re a few steps ahead of those you serve. You’re perfect to create a course.
RV (14:22):
I love that now. So going back to, okay, so the starter course, you said it might be three modules, three videos in each module, you’re talking about nine, nine videos. How, or yeah, maybe like nine videos. How long are each of the videos?
AP (14:37):
Okay. So an ideal situation and where the market is right now, shorter videos, but multiple videos is better than, let’s say one hour long video. So if, if you need to teach something, it’s gonna take you an hour to teach. Let’s break that up into 15 minute short videos where they’re progressing on each other. People
RV (14:54):
Like four or 15 minute videos, you’re saying
AP (14:56):
Yes. Yes. Okay. Because what you had said earlier makes a lot of sense that people aren’t finishing their courses, we’re obsessed with, with the psychology behind how to get someone to finish a course. So we do a lot of things in our own course and I teach how to get people to the finish line. And one of the ways to get people to the finish line is allowing them to feel as though they have momentum quick 15 minute videos gives you that feeling of momentum. So for a starter course, yeah, you could do three modules in each module. There’s three or four videos let’s say. And that, but I think the more important quite is what do you need to do to teach them how to get the results, whatever it’s gonna take te you know, to get them to that place that you’ve promised that roadmap is really important, but when you’re looking at, how am I going to get them results, if you can do it in the fastest way possible people want instant gratification, let’s give them what they want as close as we can so long, drawn out courses, not ideal.
RV (15:57):
So then you might have, so I love that answer, right? I love that answer of going. It should be as long as it needs to be. Right? Yeah. The the one of, one of my, my speaking mentors in the world champion chip of public speaking said, Rory, tell the audience every single word they need to know and not a word more.
AP (16:18):
Yes, exactly.
RV (16:20):
Very similar to that. And, and so I love that. But like, and so if you’re putting your mind around it, it’s like, okay. It, it might be, if it’s 45 minutes long, like you have nine videos, they’re five minutes. Each that could be a starter course. Like it, it
AP (16:35):
Really could a couple hours. It could really get that way. Absolutely.
RV (16:39):
And then a signature course might be longer.
AP (16:43):
Yeah. So you’ve seen the courses out there like Marie Folio’s B school, it’s a six week course, digital course academy. It’s a seven week course. And there’s seven modules in that seven week course. And they’re gonna take you a few hours to get through now. And I said, you know, don’t create a long out, drawn out course if you don’t need to. But I’ve, if I’m teaching someone how to create and launch a digital course, who’s never done. So might not even have an email list to start out with there’s some things I’ve gotta teach. So then one of the things we do in our course is if it’s a longer course bake in pep talks, it’s a very big deal. So when someone’s going through your course, you’re teaching them something very specific, let’s say nutrition, or how to get their babies to sleep at night or whatever. It might be. There’s moments in the course, you have to stop and say, okay, this is gonna be a tough module. You’re gonna get stuck here and here. And you’re likely gonna think X, Y, Z going. And here’s why like stopping for the pep talks in a digital course are essential to someone getting to the finish line. So the longer, the course, the more mindset type of content you’re going to need to bake in.
RV (17:48):
Ah, that’s so good. I mean, cuz that it’s funny, cuz people are always like, Ooh, I want the, you know, I want the meat, like give me the technique, cut to it. But the reality is the reason they don’t execute is not cuz they don’t know what to do. It’s cuz they get scared and burnt out and frustrated and discouraged and it’s like, they need the pep talk. Like they need, they need that pep talk. Okay. So let’s say this is a big, you know, fast forward, but all right. I created the course, right? Like whatever I did, I, I have the thing now. Yes. how do I get people to buy the thing? Okay. So I got the thing, but if you build it, they don’t come and you go, I don’t have hundreds of thousands of social media followers. And I, you know, I’m, I’m not a like, you know, TV star. I don’t have millions of followers. Like what do I do to sell the thing?
AP (18:40):
I’m so glad you asked this question because one of the things I tell my students is a digital course with, let’s say a sales page is not a build it and they will come kind a situation. You need what I call a marketing vehicle in order to drive traffic. So what I wouldn’t do is I wouldn’t create a course and then create a sales page and then go on social media and email my list and say, I’ve got a course. Here’s what it’s about. Go check it out. I don’t believe that that is the most valuable way for you to get the word it out there about your course. So what I believe is you need a marketing vehicle. My favorite is a webinar. Now it’s funny. Some people will say aren’t webinars going away. 13 years ago, when I came on the scene full time, they would say aren’t webinars going away where they kind of just started.
AP (19:28):
So it’s just people like to, if they’ve a webinar, it hasn’t worked for them. Well, webinars don’t work. Well, let me tell you, I’ve got thousands of students who would disagree with you. Webinars are valuable because if you do it right, and in my course, I literally teach slide by slide by slide because it’s that important when you do a webinar, right? You are giving immense value for about 45 minutes, which I say is you are earning your right to sell. You are giving value before asking anything in return. They see how you teach. They see your personality, your teaching style is so important for them to know and just they get a good sense of what you’re about. And you start changing their mind through that webinar. What do they need to know or believe or understand before they’re ever ready to buy? You’re answering that question in your webinar.
AP (20:14):
So when you get to the selling portion, they’re more likely to buy your conversions will increase so much more. If you do, let’s say a webinar to a sales page. And then of course, if they don’t buy on the webinar, you use email marketing to a sales page. But also there’s other things you can do. You can do challenge challenges. Challenges are really big right now converting. Well, one thing that we’re doing in may that we’ve never done before is a paid challenge. So we’ve done tons of free ones, but now we’re having people. Is it really a paid workshop that we’re then going to sell our course in that workshop? So we’re trying different things, but webinars, workshops, challenges, it’s that vehicle that then gets them to the sales page.
RV (20:55):
Yeah. And I, so, you know, it’s funny when I was in college, Amy, I, I went door to door for five summers knocked on 15 hours a day. This is in, this is the year 2000 to 2005. And people would say, nobody will buy from a door door salesperson. I made $250,000 in five years, five summers knocking on doors. And it was like, there could not be a more antiquated old school doesn’t work anymore. And it’s like, when it comes to content marketing, like here’s the thing, you can call it a video funnel. You can call it a webinar funnel. You can call it a challenge. You can call it a summit. You can call it an IGT or a TikTok. The bottom line is if you give value to people first, if you teach ’em what you know, through whatever the medium is or the modality, the, they will trust you. And then they will buy from you. If, if you want more yes. Or like, yes,
AP (21:55):
Yes, yes. And yes, it’s so true. I love that you use the door to door example. Yeah. People will knock it, but then the people who have actually done it, taken it seriously, look, you’ve gotten amazing results with fit. And I think that the, the thing that people get a little bit stuck on webinars, is it that, that live aspect going live? What if the technology breaks down? I’ve been on many, many webinars where the technology broke down. Yeah. Real quick. When my very first webinar that I’ve ever done was with Tony Robbins and it was back years before I left the position and Tony was doing his very first webinar. Like he had never done it. It was on go-to webinar. He’d never done a webinar before. And he was selling people to unleash the power within, through this webinar. But they paid a hundred dollars cuz Tony’s Tony. So he can get ’em to pay a hundred dollars even be on that webinar. Right. And then he was selling them into U P w we had 800 people signed up the night before Tony and I. He was at his home. I was still in the office and we were practicing. And then he’s like, okay, I’m good to go. I pressed a button. And all of a sudden Tony goes, Amy, why did I just get an email saying our webinar has been canceled? I’m like, no, no, no, no. It’s not no
RV (23:06):
Way
AP (23:07):
Everybody got an email saying your webinar has been canceled. Yes. I literally deleted the webinar. I will say there were tears. I literally stayed in the office all night. Never went home that night. Thank God. Go to webinar, pieced it all together after hours and hours of figuring out what we’re going to do. But yeah, we had to send out an email saying just joking, it’s not canceled. I’m sure Tony wanted to fire me in that moment. But things happen. And I think as an entrepreneur, building a brand that you firmly believe in and that you’re here for the long haul, you have to roll with those challenges. You have to say like, I’m gonna look like a fool on this webinar. Maybe it might not go as planned. I’m gonna figure it out. And I think I’m better because of all the many mistakes I’ve made along the way.
RV (23:51):
Yeah. That’s such a, such a great story. And it’s people like to blame a tactic or blame a tool. And it’s just like, they all work. Like none of ’em, none of ’em are, none of ’em are perfect. They all work. If you work, like if you work it and you gotta, you just gotta keep going now. Okay. So, you know, this is helpful for me. Like even we have, you know, we see a lot of courses and all that stuff. We, we don’t sell a ton of them cuz we’re coaching. But Tony Robbins is using webinars to, to sell events. You’re using webinars to sell courses. We use webinars to drive people to free calls and then we sell ’em coaching. Like, like it, it, you can’t say it doesn’t work. It totally works. Cuz it’s just, it’s not the webinar. It’s human psychology.
RV (24:32):
It’s like I’m teaching, I’m giving value. What, what I am curious while I, while I have you, I know we only have a few, few more minutes, but like while I have you since we haven’t been, you know, all in on courses like, like this, I wanna kind of move to more of the, a little more of the advanced stages and talk about scale. So how many, how many courses can you really sell of the same one? Cuz I hear people be like, well, you know I sold 500 or I sold a hundred and I need a new course. Like, do you have any thoughts on like how often do I need to create a new course?
AP (25:09):
Okay. So you and I are new friends, so you don’t know this, but this is my favorite question ever, because I teach my students that it only takes one course to essentially make a million dollars. I made a million dollars with a $97 course that I did with Louis House. Back in the day, we partnered on a course and also I’ve made a million dollars with courses that were more expensive in a very short period of time. Now the million dollars is not what we should be chasing. That’s not a number that I want my students to fixate on. What I’m saying is that if you create one course and you launch it over and over and over again, and each time you relaunch it, you marketing gets better. Your webinar gets better. Your course is updated each time based on the feedback from the last student group, you can create one course and continue to launch it.
AP (25:57):
And I want you to launch it at least three to four times before you ever move to anything new. Every single one of my mentors, my peers that have done really well with digital courses, they don’t jump ship. They stay with that same thing, keep it simple, get fancy later. And what I mean by get fancy later is once you’ve dialed that in once, that course is making you money. You might wanna turn it on evergreen. You go from a live launch to evergreen and then you wanna add something else to the mix. So right now I have two courses on evergreen, one that I live long lunch once a year and I have a membership. And the only way you can get into that membership is if you go through my signature course. So I have four core things that I do and I do them really well, but I don’t do a lot of other things as well. I get asked to do a bunch of stuff and I gotta get on the no train because I wanna be really good at what I do. The last thing I’ll say to that though, is I’ve never added something new until what I was working on was fully optimized and dialed in and could run itself so that I could move on to something else. So my answer is you don’t need a lot of courses. You don’t need a lot of memberships do one thing. Well Del will down and don’t move on until you’ve perfected that
RV (27:06):
That’s so good. Like y’all, if you, those of you that have heard us talk about Shehan wall and if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. Yes. You just heard it from the mouth of the queen of this, of this whole space. Like how many years you’ve been doing this? Amy? Oh,
AP (27:23):
Al over 13. So almost 14,
RV (27:26):
13 years. And after 13 years you got three courses, 1, 2, 3, and a membership site, which is just a place to, for people to go after they’ve been through the three. Yeah, they
AP (27:35):
Have. Yeah. You don’t even market it publicly. Yeah.
RV (27:38):
So three courses, 13 years you said.
RV (27:42):
And, and you go, I mean just, if you think about it, you go, if you spend 13 years perfecting the, the sales of three things, do you think you’ll figure it out? The answer is yes. Anybody could figure it out, but when you spend 13 days and then you launch something new and then you go, I didn’t like that. And that webinar didn’t work and I need a new CR am and I need a new social media strategy and a new, I mean, that is so powerful. Like you’ve made millions and millions of dollars from three courses. How many students is this? How many people can you, can you really reach before you go? The market is saturated.
AP (28:20):
So we’ve served over 40,000 students over my
RV (28:23):
Lifetime. Oh man. That is awesome.
AP (28:25):
Yeah. Of building the business. So we’re really proud of that. And this whole idea that the market is saturated. I just feel like you could say that in so many different places, but then you always see people coming out on top. And I always think, well, why not me? Why can’t that be me? And I also really know what I do. Well, I do many things wrong and I’m weak in a lot of areas, but I know step by step teaching. I know taking people through the details, holding their hand virtually. And so I just bank on what I know best and whoever likes that kind of style of teaching, they’re gonna like what I have. So I just don’t focus on the saturation cause I just don’t think it serves us.
RV (29:03):
I mean, well, even if we say, okay, 40, thousand’s the number. Once you’ve sold 40,000, then we’ll call Amy back and we’ll say, Amy, our market is saturated. What do we do next? But
AP (29:13):
Call me then
RV (29:14):
We know 40,000. Okay. So 40,000 times $500 course. Eh, that’s a good bit of coin that you can make between between here and there. Amy, this has been so great. I know you just, you have so much information. One of the things that you mentioned that I wanted to get into that we’re not gonna have time to get into is list building and you building your email list. I know you did a, you did a ton with that. You did a brilliant job of building your own list. You have a a program called list builder society. Yeah. And we’re, we are a new affiliate for Amy because of this. If you go to brand builders, group.com/porterfield, brand builders, group.com/porter you can learn about this. So te so tell us a little bit about what that is and like, you know, the email list.
AP (30:07):
So I always say that the energy of your business is directly tied to the strength of your email list. I wanna repeat that one more time. The energy of your business is directly tied to the strength of your email list. Notice I did not say size because I know lots of my students was small email list, doing big things. But the energy that I’m talking about is your impact, your revenue, your engagement, your audience, building, all of that is surrounded by what you can do with this email list. Social media is fickle that algorithm, you can’t trust it. People will see two to 3% of your post on social media, but email can convert at four times higher than any social media post. So I always tell my students, if you’re asking, where do I start? What do I do? How do I make my business more profitable? You have to focus on your email list, the best time to do so was yesterday the best next time is today. So I created this free master class. It’s called we, why is starting an email list. So dang hard and what to do instead. And it’s all about what you can do to make your email list grow quickly, free masterclass. Whether you buy from me or not, you’ll walk away with value. So go check it out. I’d love to help people get started with that.
RV (31:17):
Yeah. See. So there you go. So brand builders, group.com/porterfield, you can check this out, you know, okay, Amy’s going to deliver 45 minutes of the best stuff she has.
AP (31:26):
Absolutely.
RV (31:28):
This is one reason we’re aligned. One of our mantras that we talk about all the time, Amy is we say, save the best for first. Save the best
AP (31:35):
First. Oh, I love that.
RV (31:36):
Just and, and, and you do this, you give the goods like, so go there brand builder, group.com/porterfield, go there, watch the training. You don’t have to buy the course. The training’s gonna be awesome. Watch Amy do this, right? Like here she is. Right. What? And do what she’s doing. You go on podcasts, you make friends, you share tips on social. And then you say, go watch my free training. And that’s how you, that’s how you build your email list. And on the free training, you say, she check out my course and that’s how you, how you sell the course. It’s. I mean, I think one of the things that’s gonna stick with me the most from this, especially since you and I haven’t like spent a ton of time together is just you know, you, from a far Amy, you look at somebody like you who’s accomplished so much.
RV (32:20):
You’re so influential in the space. You know, so many people like you, you know, everybody that is an, is OG in this whole space. It’s easy to get enamored. Like, well, of course she would, or she started earlier or you know, all of these stories, but to hear you go, I use webinars. I sell courses, I got three courses. I teach people as much value as I can in 45 minutes. And then I show ’em how to take the next step. It’s like, you’re, it’s, it’s, you know, not to take away from your magic whatsoever, but you are, you are a master at the fundamentals.
AP (32:56):
That is like the biggest compliment ever. I appreciate you saying that.
RV (33:01):
It’s awesome. So it it’s
AP (33:02):
Important. So thank you for recognizing that. No one’s ever said that about me before like that, and I appreciate it cause it’s important. And I hope I’m an example to people that it doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t have to have a tons of tons of bells and whistles to make this work. And, and I hope people see that today.
RV (33:19):
I love it. I love it. So anyways, we’ll link up to Amy’s free training. You can check it out, follow her on social. Amy, we wish you the best. I know you’ve got some big things coming up here in your future, which we’ll be praying for and cheering for. Thank you. And
AP (33:33):
Well, you’ve been such a, a great new friend and I’m, I’m excited for us to get to know each other even more. So thanks for having be me.
RV (33:40):
Yeah. You’re part of the Nashville posse. Now, like once you move into Nashville, it’s just like, we gotta, we gotta stick together,
AP (33:46):
Bring it on. I love it.
RV (33:48):
All right, friend. All the best. Thank you so much.
AP (33:50):
Thank you.