Category: Podcast Recap

Ep 129: How To Get Your Product Found with John Jantsch | Recap Episode

Speaker 1: (00:06)

[Inaudible]

RV: (00:06)

Welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. We are breaking bad breaking down John Jantsch interview. And I’ve known him for a lot of years. And so it was a great, a great time to catch up with him. AJ is here with me. We’re going to give you our top three takeaways. I’m going to go first today. And as we were talking, you know, it wasn’t so much exactly something that John said, but it was something that he said that made me think about something that we have talked about. You know he mentioned our mutual friend, Mike Michalowitz and we were talking about writing books and it kind of dawned on me that when you write a book, your book shouldn’t be an initial hypothesis. It should be a final conclusion. In other words, you don’t publish a book when you have an idea about how something is, you publish it at the end, once you’ve kind of tested and tried out your concepts on your clients and yourself and your own business in your own life. And I guess that was just a simple takeaway, but it kind of edified in my mind. Oh, that is, that is worth realizing that it’s what happens at the end of a, of a career of research and testing. So that was my first.

AJV: (01:20)

Yeah. And honestly, mine is quite similar to that. And it just talked about, he talked a lot about when he has an idea I’m reading my notes here, so I don’t forget, but he has an idea. He immediately started writing about it and I thought that was really good. And it’s kind of seems like a duh aha moment, but it’s really more of like putting that writing out into the public. So, so as soon as I have an idea, I start writing about it and testing the content. And that’s where I get feedback and suggestions and ideas. It’s not that all of this content creation happens in a silo. It actually happens out in the open in the public with other people participating and help vet the idea. And that’s very similar to yours. I don’t publish an initial hypothesis. I publish the conclusion, but how I get there is I actually start putting the content out immediately. I put it out in blogs and podcasts and social media, and I use my community to give me the process of bedding through it, to figure out what really stuck. And I thought that was a really great quick takeaway.

RV: (02:22)

Yeah. And it’s kind of like, it gives you a lot more confidence that like this, these ideas have been tested

AJV: (02:27)

And people really like it and it’s valuable. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a very good, it’s creating your own built-in audience for the content.

RV: (02:34)

Yeah. Yeah. And they’re all kind of like your audience is helping you, helping you write it. So all right. So my second takeaway was I think just, just a good reminder of, and this is a central premise of we have a phase three event called high traffic strategies where we talk all about like, you know, paid traffic and everything. And it was just this idea that your audience already exists somewhere. So you just got to figure out while you’re, while you’re building your own audience, you need to also be working to find an existing audience. And I think there’s so many opportunities for partnerships here. And that’s one thing that John has done really well with his whole community. But for you in your business, think about who serves the same client you serve, but in a different way. And at brand builders group, I think as we get more, you know, mature as a company, we’ve only been around for a couple of years, but I think over time, our team will get better at pairing up our own clients. And I was thinking we have this, you know, we have a client ed who has a marketing firm who does marketing for small business owners. And then we have lots of other clients that are financial advisors and they do wealth planning and they often manage 401k’s for small business owners. So they’re, they’re selling to the same person, but they’re selling to different services. They’re not competitive. And that’s a great place to look for partnerships is who is serving your same audience, but with a different product or service.

AJV: (04:09)

Yeah. That’s so good, simple, simple, but really important and strategic and something that quite often we overlook the simplest things. So I think that’s really, that’s really good. Okay. So my, my second thing, and this is not a new thing that we’ve heard from a ton of our guests, but again, it’s one of those things that I feel like out in the normal everyday world world, you don’t hear a lot about, which is the focus has to be on building your email list, not on your followers. And I think that’s just, that’s so huge. And it’s so repetitive with almost every single guest who comes on our show is yes, there’s tons of value when it comes to social media, but the focus has to be on building your email list. Do not forget the importance of your email list. And for all of you out there who don’t have a process or a plan of building your email list, get one, find one, what’s your lead capture. What’s the simple download what’s that ebook or video course or a webinar funnel, whatever it is, whatever you can get out there to drive all of your social media followers to a place where you can capture their email list. That is the priority. And again, once again, that as a, a huge part of the truth behind building a sustainable personal brand is having an email list that you can market to.

RV: (05:29)

Yeah. And you know, one thing that you did, you kind of spearheaded this internally for our new website, which I would have never even thought to do, but you guys did this, the whole team was you created a lead magnet for each different event that we have, or like each different product. So it’s like not only are we building an email list now, now we have a dedicated list, a segmented list for every product offering that we have that’s developing. And that’s kind of like, you know, if you already have an email list, that’s kind of like a next level version of it.

AJV: (06:00)

Well, it’s just like for any of you who already have content, you already have a lead capture. You just haven’t turned it into it. Or you have, and maybe you have several different products. Maybe you have a book and a course and a coaching program, well, you should have a lead magnet for each of those. Or maybe you have a coaching program with four different curriculum offerings while you should have a lead magnet for each of those. Like, if you already have the curriculum, you already have the lead magnet, you just haven’t turned it into it. And that was the beautiful thing about what we did on our new website. It’s like, no, we have 15 event curriculums, 15 different two day events that we do. So I already had the workbook and the PowerPoint I just had to go through and edit it and turn it into a simple lead capture. The content was already there. It just needed to be formulated into something that people would want as a free standalone product. Yeah.

RV: (06:51)

But like, literally what you’re saying, you already have it. Like, I never thought that, and it took another person like you to just go, Hey, we already have this. Let’s just, you know, make a shortened version and make it a lead magnet. So you, you step over this stuff, even, even when you do it all day, every day, like, like we do teamwork, teamwork makes the dream work Baden okay, awesome. So the third point for me is a total nerdy thing, a total tech thing. And you’ve probably heard me light up cause I light up about nerdy stuff like

AJV: (07:21)

This, just trying to get free consulting,

RV: (07:25)

Which is what I’m doing on every, every interview. That’s what I, that is what I’m doing. But you know, when we, when we teach even high traffic strategies and there’s a section on Google and we talk about search engine optimization and H one tags and H two tags and metatags but there’s this thing called structured data that I did not know about. Like, I literally, you know, with you listen to the interview, it’s like, what is this? Like, how do I not know this, this thing with structured data is just apparently like, you know, tables and, and just another way to signal to Google what this element is on your page, so that your page ranks for people searching for those terms. And I mean,

Ep 127: How to Build a 9-Figure Personal Brand with Dr. Josh Axe | Recap Episode

Dr. Josh Axe perfectly embodies our strategic approach to building a personal brand. For Josh, this approach has been incredibly lucrative — he’s converted his personal brand into a 9-figure business.
Today we reflect on our previous episode with Josh, highlighting our top takeaways from the conversation. For our first takeaway, we discuss the importance of forming your brand around one core message that you’re passionate about.
While chatting about how Josh’s business evolved from a newsletter, we talk about why you should start creating your brand as soon as you can. After sharing the power of consistently adding value and having a desire to serve, we touch on why reaching only one audience member can still significantly impact your success.
Near the end of the episode, we dive into why you should build a strong website and why having a data dashboard allows you to better market your products. A master of following the formula, tune in to hear more takeaways from our fascinating and informative conversation with Dr. Josh Axe.

Ep 123: Becoming a Profit First Personal Brand with Mike Michalowicz | Recap Episode

Welcome to the recap edition of the Mike Michalowicz interview on the influential personal brand podcast. It’s your man, Rory Vaden here. Breaking it down for you. I’m rolling solo tonight. We have had craziness. We our three-year-old went to the emergency room to get stitches for the second time, I think in like six weeks. And we also had power without power for a few hours today. So it’s been a wild day, so momma’s not here and I’m rolling solo. And this interview with Mike, I I loved, and I’ll tell you, tell you right up, right up front. Oh, okay. Actually I have an important announcement. So before we dive into this with Mike, I want to let you know those of you that listen religiously every single week. Next week we’re not going to have episodes. All right.

RV: (01:03)

So we’re not disappearing, but just next week we are gone. And we’re not gonna publish an episode, but then we’ll pick up the schedule. So I wanted to let you know that in advance. Okay. So back to the topic at hand, which is the brilliant Mike Michalowicz, and I wanted to say right upfront that if, if you follow brand builders methodology, okay. If you’ve seen our various trainings been to one of our events, if you’re one of our clients, if you’re familiar with, you know, our overall structure we divide our training into four phases. Okay. And each phase has three different sections. Each, so we basically have 12 different sections of our curriculum. They all represent each of the 12 sections is a different two-day experience. So you, you know, people come to it as an event or they get it through one-on-one coaching or our private strategy sessions.

RV: (02:01)

But anyways, so our whole body of knowledge is organized into these four phases. And phase four is what we call eight figure entrepreneur. So that is where we talk about scaling a personal brand into a real business, which almost nobody does, and almost nobody has ever done. There’s so few people who have ever scaled something, you know, to eight figures, scaled a personal brand, eight figures, and then very few who have ever actually been able to sell that or exit that business. And that’s something that we love talking about because we’ve got a lot of entrepreneur, friends, and we, we love understanding like the real nature of small business. And it’s something that we have actually done grown a business to eight figures and then had an exit. Well, this interview with Mike, and then the another interview we did with Jim combi a while back, I would say are the two interviews of all the guests that we’ve had that have focused the most on phase four, which is, you know, eight figure entrepreneur, the concepts and ideas around how to build a truly scalable enterprise, something with, with equity value beyond just the income that it brings to the personal brand.

RV: (03:23)

So I just wanted to kind of give a quick shout out to that other interview with Jim Comey, that if you loved this and you love this concept of like, you know, building a real business as a real entrepreneur, then you should go back also and listened to the Jim combi interview where we talk about business valuation. And also the recap of course. So just a quick mention for that. All right. So my big, my three biggest takeaways here from Mike we’re just so good and so important and so relevant specifically to this concept of scaling a real business. And I, and I honestly think this episode transcends far beyond personal branding as, as a lot of them do, but, but this one definitely applies to, you know, all entrepreneurs in general. And so the first takeaway was sending that, here’s what he said. He said, the big fallacy

Speaker 3: (04:20)

Is top line thinking. The big, big fallacy is top-line thinking, and this is such, this

RV: (04:30)

Is such an important concept because It’s the wrong way of thinking. But it’s like the thing that people brag about is how much revenue do they do. And it’s really like, okay, it’s, it’s one thing to, to measure. But the real question is how much drops to the bottom line, what really shows up in your bank account, right? And it’s like, would you rather be the company that generated 5 million a year in revenue and you kept a hundred thousand or would you rather be the company that generated 1 million in revenue and you kept 500,000 and, and, and the, the, the obvious is the second, right. Specifically for personal brands where it’s like, usually a personal brand is not going to have much equity value because it’s built around the personality and thus, it makes it difficult to actually scale and not to scale necessarily, but to sell to someone else.

RV: (05:30)

Because if you pull that personality out of the business, it’s like, what is left? That’s, that’s challenging, which we’ll talk about, but this, just this concept of focusing on profit, right? And like, you hear this all the time too, of like, Oh, they did a seven figure launch and immediately we go, Whoa, seven figure launch, right? It’s not that seven figure launches are bad. Seven figure launches are great, but in your mind, it’s like this thing that brag about, and you go, well, okay, well, wait a minute. So if you did a seven figure launch and you had affiliates and you paid 50% to your affiliates, now you’re down automatically to half a million, and then you go, all right. And you look at all the vendors, you had to hire to pull it off. And maybe you had copywriters and video editors and video production crew and staging, and, you know, depends on everything that went into it.

RV: (06:18)

And it’s like, I don’t know, maybe, maybe you spent a hundred thousand dollars to make it, and then you go, all right, how much did you run in and paid traffic? Right. And so you go, well, I had to run a quarter million dollars in ads. And so now I got 250,000 there and a hundred thousand. And so it’s like, well, my million dollar launch, really one, I mean, it’s a million dollars in revenue, but 500,000 out the door to affiliates a quarter million out the door to Facebook, another a hundred thousand expenses. What I really had was $150,000. And then after I pay my team and, and my staff and my, all of my overhead, it’s like, what’s really left. So, you know, it just, it’s just a good reminder to, don’t be impressed by external sort of frivolous numbers. And don’t be intimidated by them.

RV: (07:14)

You know, I, I think it’s, it’s kind of similar to social media followers is we can be so infatuated with how many followers that somebody has, right. And you go, Oh my gosh, they got, let’s just say a hundred thousand and go, they have a hundred thousand followers. That’s amazing. But when they post something on social, because of the algorithms, that hundred thousand followers might actually legitimately get viewed by two or 3000 people. So it’s not that that’s bad. Right. It’s w that’s why wouldn’t you want to have more, you, you, you would, I’m not saying that it’s, it’s not, I’m not saying that it’s bad at all, but I’m saying if you had a choice between a hundred thousand social media followers, followers of which two or 3000 of those might actually see your post versus building an email list of 20,000 followers, where you send an email and you get, let’s say a 20% open rate.

RV: (08:18)

So that means you’re reaching 4,000 people. Every time you send an email to 20,000 and you only quote, unquote only have 20,000 on your email list. So it’s like, what really matters at the end of the day, right? Is what’s the real impact we’re making? What, what is the, is the net result? The net gain, not just the, you know, fancy super superfluous kind of numbers. And, and, you know, the other thing is that I think personal brands are a lot like golfers, which is they lie about their score all the time. I mean, personal brands are, I mean, I, I, I don’t mean to like harp on our space too much, but I say this delicately, but man, there’s a lot of dishonesty in what people report. Right. People say crazy stuff. I mean, they they’ll say crazy things like, Oh yeah, I’ve sold a hundred thousand copies of my book.

RV: (09:20)

And it’s like, well, you know, and it’s like, Oh, I sold them in the back of the room. And it’s like, well, you know, by my count, that means, you know, even if you’re doing really great, you’ve gotta be in front of about a half, a million people in audiences to sell that much in the back of the room. So, you know, it’s maybe not that likely. And I, and I’m not harping on anybody. I’m just saying for you, don’t be impressed by fake numbers. Don’t be impressed by things that don’t matter. Focus on the things that really matter. It’s not revenue, it’s profit, it’s not followers, it’s engagement, right. It’s, it’s, it’s not like any of these, there’s so many of these, these indicators, it’s not what people are saying is what they’re actually doing. And be focused on real impact and real reach.

RV: (10:13)

And don’t, don’t be intimidated or impressed you know, too much by the external and don’t allow yourself to be caught up in like, Oh, we made a lot of revenue. And at the end of the day, it’s like I had no money left over. All right. So that’s the first thing, the big fallacy of top-line thinking, the second thing, which is very much related to an eight figure entrepreneur concept is he said, the number one driver of a healthy business is the removal of the dependency of that business on the founder. And this is true. This is the whole crux of our eight figure entrepreneur event, which is the, the problem is dependency. Now for if you’re early in your brand journey, you might want to just skip past this because it’s so advanced. It’s, it’s, it’s not like relevant to most people until much later, but it’s also not a bad thing to kind of be, be thinking about. You know, always kind of having the end in mind is as dr. Stephen Covey said, which is that, You know, you, if you want us, there’s two

RV: (11:23)

Things happening here with your business. One is the ability of the business to generate income, right? Income is super valuable. Income is super useful. It’s like the money that comes to you to pay your bills and do stuff with. And you know, there’s a lot of ways to do that. We talk about the five ways to earn income, what we call the paids. And then we help people look for the dares, D a R E S things that are digital automated, recurring, evergreen, and scalable, the digital automated, recurring evergreen and scalable. That’s a brand builders group, original concept about driving income, but income is different than equity. Income is, you know, like income value is different from equity value. Income is like how much money you bring in home at the end of the day, equity value is what does this business generate an income or, you know, or in profit, let’s just use the word profit, not to confuse things.

RV: (12:25)

What does this business generate and profit without you? If you are gone, if you went on vacation for a year, what would happen to that business? And if the revenues and the, and or the profit would, would go way down, then you don’t have much equity value, which can be okay, right. It’s not necessarily to say that OU equity value is better now in a true entrepreneurial sense. It is. If you’re a quote unquote, a real entrepreneur, and you’re trying to grow a business, then that business would operate without you. But when you’re building a personal brand, you’re not necessarily growing a business, you’re growing an income stream. Now it’s possible to do both. And if you, you know, if you work long-term with brand builders, we’ll talk about that. And we’ll show you how how we do it and what we do and how we delineate between a personal brand and a business.

RV: (13:28)

But they’re both good when they’re both important. And, and, and sometimes they compete against each other because sometimes the way that you build the equity value is to give up income and to reinvest money into the business, into hiring more staff and training and operations and policies and procedures and people, right. But if you, if you want income, it’s like, no, I’m just trying to throw off as much income as I can. So it’s not that one is better than the other. What matters is that, you know, the difference between the two and most of all that, you know, which one is most important to you. And that gets back to why we do one-on-one coaching, because there’s not a right answer. There is a right way and a wrong way to execute certain skills involved in running a business and in PR building a personal brand.

RV: (14:23)

But which skills you need, which strategy you deploy D is dependent entirely upon you. So you can’t necessarily just take blanket advice that is out there for everybody and apply it directly to you. If the answer is, it depends. Should you have a podcast? It depends. Should you launch a book? It depends. Should it be self published or commercially published? It depends. Now, do we know how to do all those? Yes. But path you take is dependent upon everything in your life. What you care about, what you love doing, how much money you have in the bank, how much money you need to make, what are your longterm goals? Like, what do you want to happen with the business one day when you die? I mean, all of those are, are individual factors, but you need to understand the difference of the two. And when you, when we take off the personal brand hat, which is really about income, most personal brands drive income.

RV: (15:20)

And we put on the true entrepreneur business hat, which is what Mike McCalla talks about and is really known for. And it’s what phase four of brand builders group is all about, which is building true equity value, not just income value, but equity value. Those are two different conversations. And when you talk about building equity value, it’s ironic that what got you here as a PR successful personal brand, won’t get you there as a thriving, scaling a business with true equity value, because the more the business is dependent upon you being there, the less equity value it has. Now there’s lots of things you can do to mitigate that, or, or, you know, or to maximize that. But you need to know the difference between income value and equity value. And when you’re talking equity value, it’s all about if it’s dependent on you, you don’t have equity value.

RV: (16:18)

So that was really a clear point for me, a reminder, a refresher and just something that was salient that I thought, you know, we need to make sure that that’s clear for everyone including myself, right. Just talking this out and going, yeah. Let’s, you know, let’s always be reminded of, of this long-term impact. And then the third thing that Mike said, which I’ve never heard him say, because it sounds like this is a subject of his, of his new book, but really hit me hard. And it hit AIG hard as well, even though AIG is not here during the debrief, she, she listened to the interview and she loved it. And here’s what he said. He said the biggest challenge that entrepreneurs face is knowing what the biggest challenge is that needs to be fixed. The biggest challenge that entrepreneurs face is knowing what the biggest challenge is that needs to be fixed.

RV: (17:16)

And I think that is fascinating. Right. I, I, and I think that as super, super interesting thought the, and, and I’m, I’m, I’m really interested to see what my, you know, Mike, how he lays this out in his, in his new book. And I think it is super important because if you don’t know, what is the next biggest challenge in your business, then what you do is you dilute all of your resources and your energy and your focus, trying to solve a lot of different things. A lot of insignificant things, a lot of trivial things. And this is where I think the focus funnel from my Ted talk, how to multiply time in my second book, procrastinate on purpose, where we, where we invented the focus funnel, and we presented it, the focus funnel is meant to help people figure out what is my next, most significant thing.

RV: (18:16)

What is the, the most important use of my time today? What is the thing that multiplies my time? And how do you multiply time? It’s very simple. And we invented this concept. Well, we, we, yeah, we invented the concept. We, we articulated it as you, and you multiply time by spending time on things today that create more time tomorrow. That’s it, that’s the subject of my whole second book, procrastinate on purpose. And, and the Ted talk had a multiply time, which, you know, are both based on this concept. So the focus funnel, which is the tool that we introduced in my Ted talk helps you identify what that is. And I haven’t read Mike’s new book. I’m really interested to see it. But, but I really think that that insight that he shared is super important, super powerful of going, not just solving every problem that exists in your business, but asking which problem is the most significant to solve, which is the next most significant thing, which problem do I need to solve that by solving that problem?

RV: (19:31)

I solve several others. Now I think for most people it has to do with, you know, lead generation and revenue generation. I mean, for most small businesses, that is their problem is their revenue isn’t high enough. They don’t know enough about marketing and sales, which, you know, I would say marketing sales and leadership influence is, is our area of expertise. It’s been our whole career. And that’s why we, we talk a lot about it, but you got to have some system in place now, for some of you, that’s not the case. Some of you have lots of revenue, right. But it’s, you’ve got more of that. The thing we talked about earlier, the top line thinking fallacy. And so your real problem is, is figuring out how do I keep it? And so it’s more about expense reduction and system systemization and, and optimization and reducing waste and things like that.

RV: (20:24)

But all of us need to have some process that we go through, even if it’s just thinking about what is the next most significant problem in my business to solve now inside of marketing specifically. And we’re not gonna have time to go through all this right now, but, but when we teach eight figure entrepreneur, we talk about the eight departments that every single business has, no matter how big or how small eight functions of every single business. And the reason it’s so hard to be a solo preneurs, cause you’re doing all eight of them by yourself, but in the marketing department specifically, which is one of the eight and really in all the departments, data is one of the best ways to know. And so for those of you that have funnels and you have traffic, but you’re not making profit, or you’re not keeping it, or you’re, you’re spending it all into ad spend.

RV: (21:30)

You need to become really, really good at tracking it and using data in what we use is digital dashboards that we set up to report on not only just our funnels, but all of our online traffic, all of our different traffic sources, including free traffic and paid traffic. And by the way, there’s a great interview. You can go listen to that we did with Aja Jaeger and Megan canal from Praxis metrics. We did an awesome interview, just talking about data, but, you know, I would say in terms of tools for you to use, to identify what is your next biggest challenge one, you know, it would just be thinking the second would be the focus funnel. So go watch my Ted talk. If you’ve never, if you’ve never watched it seriously, go watch it. Like it’s 18 minutes. It will. I mean, as humbly as I can say, this it’ll change your freaking life.

RV: (22:28)

I mean, it is, it’s, it is that powerful of a concept. And, and, you know, even though we kind of coined the term, we learned it from studying and profiling, lots of hype ultra performers, but go watch that. So the focus funnel would be your second tool. And then the third tool that ultimately you want to get to long term in every department of your business is using data to tell you what is broken and what needs to be fixed. And you know, so in our phase three experience, we have a phase three topic. One is called high traffic strategies. And that is where we teach digital dashboards. And we talk about breaking down every stage in the, in the funnel to identify where is the breakdown? You, we do a similar thing in that’s in the marketing department. We do a similar thing in the sales department when you create sales pipelines. And the reason you have to create a sales pipeline is again,

RV: (23:27)

So you have these stages, you have these, these checkpoints that you are measuring against and optimizing for. So that’s a lot, those were three, just big takeaways. You know, don’t get sucked into the fallacy of top-line thinking, make sure you, if you’re trying to build income or equity value. And if you’re trying to build equity value, that means that the business can’t be dependent upon you. And then number three, have a process and method for identifying what is your next biggest challenge that needs to be solved? Mike is a I’m in truly, I think one of the smartest guys that I’ve, I’ve met in this space, fabulous interview, make sure you listen to it. Of course, check out his new book that we talk about as well as, you know, profit first that is, is kind of his perennial long tail bestseller. And you can check out more with Mike. Thanks for being here as always keep going. We want to, we want to continue to support you. Thank you for tuning in we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 121: How To Build and Manage a Membership Site with Chris Ducker | Recap Episode

Hey, welcome to this recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. It’s your man, Rory Vaden breaking down the interview with my good friend, Chris Ducker. I’m rolling so low on this one agent. Couldn’t be here, but I’ve known Chris for so long that I think it’s apropos that I got a chance to learn from him. And to just share with you, I think some of my highlights from somebody who I consider a friend, and I think that the first thing that Chris said that stuck with me was super simple and it’s related to something that we say ish, you know, like we, we, we talk about this concept a lot, but there was something about the way that he said it, that really,
Really resonated with me in, in a fresh way. And, and that was this, he said, when you’re building your personal brand, just focus on becoming someone’s favorite on something, right? Like, so we talk about finding your uniqueness. We talk about you know, staying, staying focused. If you have diluted focus, you have diluted results. So we kind of talk about it, like from the lens of you, of like you doing the work and our, our, our brand DNA experience is all about taking someone through these exercises to figure out what is their uniqueness. Right. But when he said it that way, it’s almost like coming at it in the reverse, it’s thinking about from your customer or from your, from your prospect’s perspective, what could you be someone’s favorite resource for, I mean, that’s such a good question. We should probably consider adding that question.
I mean, he didn’t say it that way. He just said become someone’s favorite about something, but to, to, to translate it, I guess, to a practical question and you know, maybe, maybe we should actually include, this is it’s it’s so good is to say, what could I become someone’s favorite resource for that causes you to ask the question, you know, it’s another way of coming at your uniqueness, but it also has the kind of the entertainment aspect of it to be like, you know, what do I learn the passion question of, what do I love? What am I good at? What do I know so well that I could just, you know, I could teach it in a way that so many people would, would absolutely just love it because I, I love it. And I know something about it. So that’s a question that I would, I would encourage you to just maybe think about for the week, what is something that you could become someone’s favorite resource for and think about it, think about it as the consumer, right.
As you think about, okay, who is my favorite person to follow that has spiritual messages. Here’s, who’s my favorite person to follow that has financial information. Who’s my favorite person to follow with like, you know, technology tips. Who’s my favorite person to follow in my industry. Who’s my favorite person to follow on like you know, fitness and nutrition and right. Like we another quote of mine, not a, not a quote of mine. Another one of my favorite quotes is from a guy named Scott McCain, Scott McCain, as a, as a mentor of mine. And he’s a hall of fame speaker and a bestselling author and all that. And, and one of my favorite quotes from Scott McCain, as he says, mind, share precedes market share. So it’s almost like, you know, the human brain, it’s almost like, there’s like these it’s like a filing cabinet, right?
And so we have a file for like, who’s our accountant and who’s our doctor and who’s our eye doctor and all that stuff. And so it’s people want to be able to like put you in a file. They, they want to be able to like, when I have this problem, this is the person I call. So you, you want to reverse engineer that and go, okay, what is the thing that I want people to think of when they think of, when they think of this, they call me I I’m their favorite resource for it. I’m their go-to person on it. I’m going to occupy that space in their mind. I’m going to work to own that question and to become their favorite resource so that when they have a problem that they need solved, they’re immediately going to think of me, mind is share proceeds market share.
So but anyways, the way that Chris said it was become someone’s favorite about something. And I just thought that was super simple, but super fresh in a different way of thinking about this, all important idea of finding your, your uniqueness. The second thing that he mentioned, which I really love, just because we don’t talk a lot about it. Like we don’t talk about pricing. We haven’t talked a lot about it so far in the other episodes now we have one of our events, one of our topics is called building your revenue engine. And then in the revenue engine, you know, we teach about offer structure and pricing and how to lay out your offer in a way that gets people to buy, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of our guests, we haven’t had very many guests on this show where that has kind of come up.
And one of the things that Chris said, which I think is a very salient, you know, important nugget that you, you might’ve skipped over, but I think it’s a really big deal. And it was a, it was a big reminder for me too, is he said we almost never discount things. We almost never discount things. And I find that to be a really important principle. Like I would actually consider that to be a core financial principle that we would, we would talk more about later on in like our eight figure entrepreneur curriculum and event, which is, you know, there’s certain financial ways of thinking that are really important. And I think discounting is one of the big mistakes that people make is they just get into this habit of discounting. They set this culture of discounting. You know, when you start to scale your business, you have salespeople and then salespeople think, Oh, I can just go out and discount stuff.
And I mean, think about this for just a second, about how negative, how negative discounting can be. Right. So generally speaking for many, many businesses are for most businesses, a 10 to 20% profit margin would be really good. So like, I mean, break even it’d be 0%. Right. And that’s hard to do a lot of most businesses never succeed because they they’re never able to break even. And 10% profit margin is like, okay, that’s healthy. And 20% is like, all right, you’re, you’re crushing it. Like you’re killing it. Right. So think about discounts. Think about like coupons. Usually, what, what do you think is the most common percentage that people give away when they discount? You know, usually it’s like 10% or 20%. Like now when you go to department stores and stuff, sometimes you’ll like, see deal for 30% off or whatever. Now, you know, that’s a totally different model than a personal brand, which is a professional service.
But even in service-based businesses, 20% can be very difficult to get to if you start having a staff and a team and you really start to scale a real business. So when you do a a 10% discount or 20% discount, what did you just do? You gave away the profits of the business. That’s what happened, like all of the work and the time and the energy that would have gone into creating a successful customer acquisition and making a sale and delivering a service and making a reasonable, healthy amount of profit. All of that disappeared with the discount. Now, when we give discounts, we think, Oh, 10% is not a big deal. Even when we get discounts, right? Like if I said, Hey, I got a 10% discount for you. You probably would be like, man, whatever. But when you put on your entrepreneur hat, when you put on your business owner hat, when you put on your CFO hat, when you put on your do I have resources to invest back into a team and to grow this thing, if I gave a 10% discount, I just gave away the profit.
I just, I literally gave away the whole financial reason of being in business. That means that every, all the work that we did to find customer, you know, find a prospect, introduce ourselves to them, make them know who we are, earn their trust, make a sale, deliver a product, make them happy. They have a great experience. We did enough to pay our team, pay our employees, pay the, you know, pay the government, pay whatever, and literally nothing left over. Right. So discounting is, discounting is extremely detrimental. Discounting long-term is extremely detrimental, which, you know, if you have to do it initially to get some customers and to build some credibility, you know, I guess you do that or did to build momentum around a book launch or something like that. But it is not something that can be a part of your core business for you to scale a truly successful long term enterprise.
So, you know, and now, and what he said, which I also appreciate is, so what do you do? What you do is you add on bonuses and you can add on incentives and you can, you can do promotions. You know, like if you’re trying to create urgency, you’re trying to get someone to action. What you do is you add on something, you add on some type of of a bonus, but you don’t discount the actual price of what you collect. And if you’re building a personal brand, that’s one of the most amazing parts about being in this space is that you can create a lot of digital assets, right? Like block two hours on your calendar record of, of some videos or have a long video training. And now you have this really incredible bonus that you can offer without compromising the profit margin of your business.
So that’s just not a lesson. We hear a lot. And I thought that was really good. And then the third thing which I always love. I mean, you’re just, I think you, you, I never get sick of tired talking about it, but again, the way that Chris said it, I thought was cool. He said, do the unsexy work? Do the unsexy work like so many people get into the personal brand space specifically because it’s like, it looks glamorous, right? Ooh, I have a book, I’m an author. I’m on stage. I’m leading a webinar. I have a lot of social media followers, you know, whatever I’ve got endorsements from all these people. And yet it’s like that, isn’t the job. I, it takes me back to an episode, another really great episode that we had a while back with David Avron, who truly is one of my most influential mentors in my life.
And he was talking about getting speaking gigs. And he said something on our interview that I’d actually never heard him say, or it never stuck with me. What Dave said is he said, you know, speaking is not the business. It’s getting the speaking gig, which is what the real business is. Everybody wants to be a speaker, right? Like being on stage speaking is the fun part, but that’s not really the business. The business is getting the speaking gig. And that’s what, that’s what you need to, you need to be willing to do the unsexy work. You have to take the stairs to, to use the metaphor and illustration of my first book. In fact, there was an interview. There was an interview in the take the stairs book, one of the ultra performers that we profiled. I’ll never forget this guy. I haven’t talked to him a long time, but he’s a total stud, his name is Chad Goldwasser.
And at the time he was like the number one agent in the world out of like 76,000 agents for, for Keller Williams worldwide. And we profiled him for the take the stairs book. And Chad said, you have to learn to fall in love with the daily grind. Not just deal with it, not just get by, not just like stomach it and be okay with it. The real measure is can you fall in love with the daily grind? Can you fall in love with the hard stuff? Can you learn to embrace and enjoy the, the challenge and the struggle of the day to day? Because that’s, that’s how you’re going to make it right. Everyone can make it when things are easy, everyone can make it when the economy is booming. The question is, can you do the work when things aren’t going well, will you do the unsexy work?
Will you take the stairs? Will you fall in love with the daily grind? Because if you cannot or you are not willing, I think maybe you should just pull the plug on the thing right now, because that’s what happens to most people. Most people hang around while it’s fun while it’s easy, while it’s super lucrative. And then it’s like the moment it gets difficult, they’re out. But if you just resolve and decide and commit right now, and you say, I am going to do whatever it takes, I am going to become whoever I have to become. I am going to build the business in whatever way I have to build the business to get my message out into the world, because I believe that is the calling for my life. And I am, I am going to be driven by purpose and driven by calling and not driven by financial incentives or what is easy or what is convenient.
If you can make that decision right now, you will make it. You will make it. You will simply outlast everyone. You’ll figure it out. You’ll stay the course succeeding in this business. And really in any business, isn’t rocket science. It’s about commitment and determination and discipline. The same thing we’ve been talking about would take the stairs ever since I’ve stood on stage is discipline. And, and you hear these people come on like Chris Ducker and say it. And so we’ll say it over and over and over again. And we’ll highlight that you hear the true story, right? Like the reason we’re inviting these people on this podcast is so that you can hear the true story. You know, not the stuff you see on social, not that you see on their website, not that looks pretty.
You can hear the true story of some of the biggest personal brands in the world. And you can hear them tell the behind the scenes reality of what it took and what it takes to operate at that at that level, at their level, because that’s what we want for you. We want you to become that person. We want you to follow that calling. We believe that your message matters. We believe that you can become that person and that that calling on your life is inevitable to come true. If you stay the course, you follow some principles, tenure simply be disciplined. Thanks for being here. We love you. We’re cheered for you. Make sure you keep coming back. Come on back. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 119: Blending Your Personal Brand and Network Marketing with Rebecca Louise | Recap Episode

Hey, welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast is Rory Vaden and AJ Vaden. Today we’re breaking down our top three highlights from Rebecca Louise. Why don’t you go?

Yeah, as far as well, I just love her. She s so spunky. It’s such a fun interview and she gives so much, so much transparency and value and this interview so highly recommend it I would say the thing that I’m going to start with, and we’ve mentioned this several times now on these recaps is the fact that we’ve heard it once we heard it again and again and again, and Rebecca just kind of came in and reiterated it again, is that YouTube is such a force to be reckoned with. And I just, I am just so I’m so awestruck of the amount of people that we talk to that talk about the fundamental elements of YouTube being a driver for their business, but yet, and kind of the external world, you don’t hear a lot of that being discussed. And what I loved about her, she said that, and this was my big aha takeaway.

So I’ll get to it. She said that the thing that’s awesome about YouTube is it helps you really determine what your audience wants from you so that you can just give them more of the same thing and that the more of the same thing that you give them. And the more that YouTube sees that that’s what people want from you. They, their own algorithm will help explode your videos. And that to me is just so awesome and just genius. And the fact that it’s like, yes, do more of what people want from you. Don’t try to do all the different things, just do more and more and more of the same thing.

I think for me, it was, it’s interesting because there’s technical takeaways from her like that, that I loved and took away also the emotional side of just her attitude and her mindset really stuck with me. And I, I love just this idea of, of starting where you are and just starting with what you have and just be willing to just start and just go, like, no matter how far or fast or slow you can go, just go and then reinvest and reinvest and reinvest, and you can make it bigger and better later on. But I think it was interesting because she, she is a client of brand builders also. And, and you know, her a lot of her personal brand message which I think is where she’ll end up going longterm is really about action. It’s really about helping people move and create motion and and just kind of get, get past being stuck. And, and it comes through in her personality. That’s a huge part of her uniqueness. So start with, start where you’re at and be willing to just reinvest and then, and then grow from there. And that’s similar

To my second takeaway. And my second takeaway was I thought it was such a unique description of how she said that she uses her direct sales business as a part of funding, her personal brand and vice versa, but how she spends her time in both of them as she goes all in on one of them in a season and takes the money that she has gained from one of them to help fund the other. She said, but I’m always all in, on one of them. So in some seasons is my direct sales business and on others, it’s my personal brand. But I think the thing that was most interesting, and she didn’t say this quite this way, but as the fact that they they’re both synonymous with each other, right, it’s her personal brand is actually driving a ton of leads to her direct sales business. And through her direct sales business to her personal brand is gaining an enormous amount of traction, but she’s spending super intentional time and seasons on each of them independently to make sure that they get what they need to get off the ground running. So I thought that was amazing and it goes back to the investment

Well, in my, and, and I, I, that was my second takeaway actually was the, the best way to monetize a personal brand is to bolt it onto the thing you’re already doing. Like the fastest path to cash is to just use it as an accelerant to what you’re already doing. And for her that was direct sales and in the beginning and still is. And I, gosh, I mean, there’s so many people in direct sales and other businesses, financial serves professional, all the professional services, all entrepreneurs that you can just take your personal brand and use it as a marketing engine for the thing that you already have. Why wouldn’t you be doing it? I mean, this, this, I think this is just like, it’s not just the, the, it’s the future of marketing in general. Like, this is what personal branding is, what marketing will look like in the future. It’ll be all about the personality. So I, I thought that was cool. Really cool. Example of her, you know, crushing it in both direct sales and her personal brand.

Yeah. And my third takeaway, and there were so many technical things, but for whatever reason, this really stuck out to me was the fact that she started by somebody else hiring her to do YouTube exercise videos, a casting call, and she was getting paid 40 bucks an episode. And I just want you to like, let that settle in. And here’s what I found that was interesting is she, wasn’t so sure about what her content was about. But it was, Hey, I know that this sounds good and I can do this and do this for her. It was talk, watch she works out. But here’s what I thought was fascinating. It wasn’t that she had this like compelling message within her to start is the fact that she started. Yeah. And from there she realized like, I really love this. I need to do more of this.

So then she got her certification. And then from that, she built her own show and now she just released a book and then she’s got her direct sales is like, now she’s got like this multi-million dollar empire, all because she said, I don’t know where this will lead, but I’m going to start with this. And it was doing somebody else just show getting paid 40 bucks an episode, but she was willing to just start. And from there, that’s where she fell in love with what she was doing and found her passion and found her message. And it wasn’t like all this work you do off by yourself and then trying to make it perfect. It was like, no, just get in and do it and figure it out as you go.

Yeah. I also thought her mentality, wasn’t like, Oh, I’m not making enough money. Or I’m being taken advantage of. She was like, Oh, I’m learning. This is fun. I’m doing it. And then it’s like, Hey, I’m going to do this myself and figure it out. Was super cool. W w one of the other things that, that she said, or we talked about that really reminded me of something that we say around here a lot is we say people don’t pay for information. They pay for organization and application. And when she was talking about that, she basically just puts her exercise tips on YouTube for free. And that’s what she does. That’s what she’s always done. And then what do people pay for? Well, they, they pay for more, but they pay, they pay for them more organized right.

Organization application

In a way it’s not just like some random, like three minute tip, it’s a full 20 minute workout or a series of workouts. And now she’s rolled that into, into her app, this awesome app. I mean, she’s just crushing the app business, which is so cool. And I think just a good reminder because all of us are either we don’t know what we would put out for free, or we go, well, I can’t just teach everything I know for free. What would people pay me for? And just don’t ever forget people don’t pay for information. They pay for the organization and application the assistance of implementing that knowledge into their life. That is,

Yeah. That’s such a good takeaway. And then too, that it’s like this just randomly came to me. It’s like the fact that she has taken this entire message and this archive of content and put it into an app, right. It’s like, it’s, yeah. It’s one thing to do social media, but it’s like taking it to a whole nother level in terms of what does a membership program look like for you? Now, you’ve got to have the money and the investment to do that type of infrastructure. But if you do this the right way and you go all in again, it’s take the money you make to reinvest it to make more money. And it’s building a business that you can have for a lifetime. That’s so much of what it’s all about.

The first, the out thousands of members, she had all sharing the same password. That was how she started. Right? Like it wasn’t, she she’s, she scrapped her way there and you can too. And Hey, you know, that’s why brand builders is here is also to help you apply the things that we’re learning and teaching. And that our guests are we’re in the business of one, on one coaching, help you apply this. So at some point we hope you request to call, talk to someone on our team. Umf nothing else, just keep coming back here and we’ll keep supporting you on your journey. That’s it for now? We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 117: Dynamic Speaking and Scaling Joy with Dan Thurmon | Recap Episode

Hey, welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcasts, Rory Vaden, coming to you. So low, a recap in this Epic interview with Dan Thurman and I’m covered for AIG to on this one just by myself. But you know, I’ve known Dan for so long. It’s, it’s fun to get to go back and listen to this and kind of analyze and break it down and give you my top three highlights. And there was so much going on in this interview. You know, we released these, these podcasts also on our YouTube channel. It’s actually not on the Rory Vaden YouTube channel. It’s on the brand builders group, YouTube channel and,

And you know, usually some people like to watch cause you see the facial expressions, but this one was, was crazy because there were a lot of visual components of it, which, you know, we tried to talk out for you for you visually, but anyways, so to dive in to the top three takeaways. So first of all, I thought the mindset to pivot and, and these were three mindsets that were my big takeaways from Dan and from that interview. And, and the first mindset is the mindset that it takes to pivot. And I loved the actual content that he was sharing, which is from his, his actual content that he, he teaches in his virtual keynotes, this idea that when things become uncertain, we can falsely feel uncertain about everything. And it’s like, when there’s change, not everything is changing. There’s a couple of things that are changing, but, but we sort of have this, if we’re not careful, we have this mental mushroom that we allow ourselves to do, right?

It’s if you’re not dissed, if you don’t have a disciplined mind, if you allow your mind to just run, it’ll run towards the negative it’ll it’ll, it will become just over-exaggerated and, and consumed with all of the, the, the negative possible outcomes. And I remember talking about this with Lewis Howes one time when I was interviewed on his podcast, actually the most recent time I was, I was on there and we were talking about how with successful people, there’s still always like this fear, no matter how successful you get, there’s like this fear that you’ll not just that you’ll fail, but that somehow you’ll fail so much that you’ll just become like homeless living on the street is like this, this deep rooted insecurity that drives someone to be so successful is always there. And it can get so out of control that like you just, when something goes wrong or doesn’t work out or you don’t get number one, or you’re not perfect your mind immediately freaked out and was like, Oh my gosh, I’m going to end up homeless.

Right? And it’s like, you’re so far away from that. Even though, even though things might be changing and you, you might not be winning or you’re just dealing with uncertainty. And, and I thought that was super powerful that, you know, Dan was reminding us that even though you’re uncertain about some things, you don’t have to be uncertain about everything and you can have faith in your, in yourself. And, and you can have faith in your ability that your entire life you’ve had to learn how to operate a new environment, your entire life. You’d ha you’ve had to learn new ideas and new skills and, you know, maybe work in new jobs or a new markets or verticals or industries, and you’ve been able to figure it out. So why do we become so scared and overwhelmed and frightened and stressed and anxious. When we face a little bit of change in our life, knowing that our entire life up to this point, it has been embracing change and learning new things.

We have the ability and the knowledge to figure it out. And if you can just embrace that, you’ll be able to pivot faster. And that’s going to put you in a, a much better position. So that I think was the first thing for me, was the mindset to pivot and, and what that looks like. The second mindset was, is really the mindset to up-level. And this one was more watching. It wasn’t so much what Dan said, like it wasn’t in the content. It wasn’t when he was like teaching his content, it was just kind of watching and processing his demeanor and looking at how quickly, you know, this is someone who’s made a career speaking in front of live audiences, and that’s like been the primary way that he’s made money. And that business model of the live keynote speaker has been disrupted. I mean, it’s been more than disrupted.

It’s been killed. It has evaporated. It has vanished. It, it went from, this is what I knew in my whole life to it disappeared overnight. So as much as like any business model the, the model of live keynote speaking in the physical sense in, in front of live audiences disappeared overnight. There’s no events, there’s no gatherings worldwide. It has shut down. Travel has virtually shut down. And so here you have somebody Dan, that that’s been his primary business, which, you know, we understand, we appreciate it. It’s, it’s always been a huge part of our business. But it’s actually, it’s become less and less over the years. It’s just been fewer engagements at higher fees, but still a smaller total of our proportionate revenue, because we’ve moved into more of building, you know, building a real business kind of outside of, of just being on stage speaking.

But that’s a, that’s a real scary thing. And what did he do? What has he done? He immediately turned to going, all right, I’m going to go virtual, but I’m not just going to do virtual presentations. I’m going to figure out a way to Uplevel the virtual experience. And he’s got a five camera shoot, three sets going on in his house with this ability to create this variation of, you know, the types of just kind of the type of energy in which he’s presenting with. And of course, if you watch, if you actually watch this video of the interview on our YouTube channel, you’ll get to just see. I mean, it’s, it’s worth going to look, even if you don’t watch the whole thing, but just kind of fast forward and see how this set changes. And it’s amazing. He just like walks out of the screen and into another, another screen, it looks like he was walking into a new room, different camera angles.

And it’s, it’s a simple bit of technology, but instead of being paralyzed and terrified and, and, you know, just scared, which would have been understandable, it is understandable. A lot of, a lot of speakers are still reeling with trying to figure out what the heck they’re going to do. He just said, how can I, how can I go virtual? And how can I, up-level the experience? How can I take this performance and this production to another level which people haven’t seen. And so we quickly did that. And, and so the mindset there, which he also did talk about is to go respond to uncertainty with new education, with new personal development, with new growth of, of, you know, he didn’t, he didn’t have all that technology before. He didn’t know how to do all that. He figured it out because he was leaning into the change and going great.

I’m going to, I’m going to use this opportunity for change and challenge and uncertainty to learn something new and, and to, and to prove that I have faith and confidence in myself, that I’ll be able to figure it out by investing and, and, and growing and learning and saying, you know what, there’s a way to learn how to do this and that. I mean, gosh, that is why I think brand builders, part of why we’re growing so much is because people are realizing that online. I have to be able to do business online. There’s, there’s, there’s no other way right now to really be steadily growing your business. And if you don’t have those skills, if you don’t have that knowledge, if you don’t know how to write copy, if you don’t know how to build funnels, if you don’t know what a words should be on a webpage, if you don’t know how to run a or to run Facebook ads, or if you don’t know how to do webinars, if you don’t know how to create content, if you don’t know how to manage social media, if you don’t have systems for training a staff to like, keep up with all this content production, you need to get going and you need to get going fast, sweetheart, like you’re, you need to get on it.

And I think, you know, God just had his hand on us in terms of guiding our life to be sitting in a place to provide this education to people in such a systematic way. And maybe that’s, you know, if that’s you, then, Hey, you should check out brand builders. We do it as good. If not better than anyone in the world, I really believe leave that. But maybe it’s not your personal brand. Maybe it’s some other part of your business that you need to learn. The point is is, and what I took away from Dan, both in what he said, and what he meant is that you respond to uncertainty with personal growth, with personal development, with education, with learning, with knowledge to go, all right, I’m going to adapt. I’m going to grow. And that’s not what most people do. I mean, let’s be honest.

Most of us want to hang onto the old days, rather sit around and commiserate about how things used to be and about how I wish it was the way it was and how, how hard it is been on me versus going, I’m going to educate, I’m going to indoctrinate. I’m going to learn. I’m going to develop. I am going to grow. And knowing that as I do that, as I push myself to, to develop and to grow and to learn out of that will come confidence and ability in the face of uncertainty, which of course is true because there’s always opportunity. Every problem creates new opportunity. And anyways, I just thought Dan modeled it. And you know, he talked about it and totally up-leveled his game to the point where, when I put on my virtual keynote speaker had I’m going crap. Like, you know, he, he sat in a new bar for what that looks like and, and going, man, we need it.

We need to figure it out. We got to find ways to up our production and, and up the exp up the virtual experience for our virtual keynotes. And so anyways, what are you doing, doing to learn? How are you growing your knowledge? How are you leaning in to change and uncertainty and instability with more education and more relevant education? And that was my, my second takeaway is, is the mindset to, to Uplevel. So that’s different from the mindset to pivot and just be safe is then adding onto it. Another layer, which is, which is the mindset to, and then for my third takeaway, I’m actually, you know, I wrote this down, it’s the mindset to serve the mind set, to serve. And this was the money line. Like this was the, this was the, the, the focal point point for me of the entire interview. And he said, yes, I can scale giving and helping on a global level. That is the type of success. I don’t even have to monetize.

Think about that for a second. If I could make worldwide impact, that is enough significance and value in my life that I wouldn’t even have to monetize it. And so that’s why he’s doing it. You got this 50 year old guy on Tik TOK going viral because he’s not, he’s not trying to figure out how do I suck the most money out of my audience. He’s figuring out what can I do that would give value to them? What would entertain them? What would educate them? What would encourage them? What would inspire them? What would teach them? What would, what would bring them a bright spot in their day, in a difficult time? And we say it, we talk about it. We say things like, you never feel fear when the mission to serve is clear. But, but when you look at people like Dan, they’re living it, they’re doing it.

And it’s, I think it’s like how many ultra performers do you have to hear? Talk about that extreme level of commitment to service before you really believe and adapt and buy into the idea that I’m going to serve my audience. Like that is what I’m trying to do. I will let the money follow. I will trust that the money will follow. I’ll have faith that the money will follow. But what I’m going to focus on is not the money. I’m going to focus on the impact. I’m going to focus on the service. I’m going to focus on making a difference. I’m going to focus on delivering value to people that I’m not even paid for. And, and once that, once that switch flips, you can’t be stopped, right? Like once, once that heart change really happens, like once that, that, that, that, that flip, that, that evolution wants that maturity.

Once, once that commitment happens, you can’t be stopped because you’re saying it’s not about the money. It’s not about the followers. It’s about making a difference and you can turn on your camera and reach across the globe in one button, right? Like it’s never been easier. So if you really want to make an impact, prove it, turn on the microphone, turn on the camera, pull up Canva and make a post type of caption. But like, if that’s what it’s about, do it make an impact and, and trust and know that the money’s going to follow and look, you know, Dan’s one of the highest paid speakers in the world. And, and he doesn’t know what life is going to look like in a post COVID area. That’s all still like sorting itself out. But you see him living that, that commitment to service in the midst of uncertainty and, you know, and you watch it from outside and you go, of course, he’s gonna win.

He’s focused on how can he, up-level the experience for his customers? How can he pivot quickly? How can he make a difference? Eventually the money’s going to follow that. And that is why we say we serve mission-driven messengers. It’s not that we don’t care about money. We do care about money. We, we we’re good at making money. We’re we, we, we consider it important, but it’s about the impact in the mission first. And, and trusting that if I serve enough people for a long enough time, I will eventually make money. If I serve enough people for a long enough time, there’s no way I don’t end up making money. But when all I focus on is money, it’s hard to, I’m not focused on service. And so when the money’s not there right away, I give up because it’s not fair today. And tomorrow and next week, and next month and six months, and maybe in a year, maybe even two years, and you go, I’ve been doing this for two years.

I’m not making money. Yeah. Eventually your going to burn out your going to give up, compare that to the person going I’m just here to serve. I’m just here to give value. I’m here to Uplevel the contribution I’m making to the world. And I can’t be stopped because there’s no measurement. That’s going to slow me down. Like I’m only going to make more impact. I’m only going to reach more people, whether it’s one or 1 million or 100 million, I know I’m going to, I’m going to naturally reach more and more people. And I I’m, I know the money is going to show up in some form or fashion, and that’s a switch that you need to flip. And, and it’s, it’s something that you have to flip regularly. It’s, it’s kinda, you know, it’s like what we talk about in the take the stairs book, success is never owned.

Success is rented and the rent is due every day. And the commitment to serve is never owned. It is rented and the rent is due every day. You have to wake up every single day and make that conscious decision that I’m putting impact first. And I’m all in, on making impact. And I’m going to trust that somehow some way, if I’m all in, on providing the best level of service and making the biggest difference, I can, I’m all in on that. And I’m all in on having the faith and the trust and the confidence of knowing it will eventually work out.

And that is how it is. That is always how it is. You just got to wake up and remind yourself of that every day, whether there’s one person watching or 1 million or 100 million, but if you can be making an impact, that’s something that it’s like, you don’t even have to monetize, but you can, and you will. And we’re going to show you how so thank you for hanging around here. Hope you enjoyed the interview with Dan. I loved it. You had listened to it yet. Go back and listen to it and just see if you can catch the mindset of what it takes to pivot to up level and to surf. We’ll catch you next time. [inaudible].

Ep 115: Top Secrets to Effective Speaking with Vanessa Van Edwards | Recap Episode

[Inaudible]

And we are back with another recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. Today, we are breaking down the interview with our new friend, Vanessa van Edwards, who we shared the stage with at the global leadership summit, which was awesome. And I’m actually really curious to hear AJ’s top three takeaways because this was, you know, really into the science of delivery. I feel like in presentation mechanics. So why don’t, why don’t you kick us off?

Oh, my honest, my first feedback was literally like the first part of the interview. She talks about her research and her book, captivate sales, which she said that hand gestures show trust. I was like, wow, Rory Vaden is the most trustworthy person on the planet. This is great for you. There is, there’s a future for you

As a speaker, I can do it. I could do it.

I was literally laughing out loud because just about after every podcast recap, I’m like, what is with you and the hand gestures. And then I realized I do the same thing monitor. I’ll just like blow for where you guys can see. But Rory is like literally hands coming, all the places all the time. And I’m like, wow, you’ve got a lot of trust going for you.

Apparently, other than you always, you always make fun of me for my facial expressions.

Those, those are different because no, it’s not the exaggerated ones. Those are entertaining. It’s the ones, his facial expressions are very expressive, very negative.

My neutral looks very Negative.

True. It’s true. So anyways, I just thought that was really fascinating and the fact that they actually watched every single Ted talk that was released in 2010 and compared all these things. And I really appreciate the data that goes into some of these findings, because if you just listen to them without, you know, the data driven back on her, like but I thought it was really fascinating and really interesting in terms of just like the fact that you use your hands shows like the passion and emotional involvement, but then the cues that it relates back to the audience of, you know, simply saying, Hey, there are three things that we’re going to discuss in this recap today, you make this visual connection with the verbal conversation, that there are three things. And I thought that was really fascinating. And just really a great reminder of like, people don’t just listen with their ears. Right. They listen with their eyes and I love that whole concept. So that was my first takeaway. But mostly you hear so many I’m sure Rory was sitting there going.

Yep. Yep. I, I, yeah. I thought that the whole way that she said that your gestures are basically a second talk.

Yeah. There, what did she say? You’ve got to, she said you have two different like content delivery.

Yeah. Two scripts. It’s like the words out of your mouth. And then, and then your gestures are like a whole second one. So I love that. And then the other thing is I was so excited and Vanessa and I nerded out after the interview was over because y’all, I did this, this was how I got started with in the world championship of public speaking for Toastmasters, I took 20 years of championships speeches, which was 200 speeches, analyzed them, graphed them, dissected them, and fact on what was the, we, I don’t know if we’ve shared this story. This is what, yeah.

We weren’t even dating a year. So it was like six months in maybe

So on my birthday the first year that AJ and I were dating you, what did you tell me? We could do anything. I wanted anything you wanted. She told me we could do anything I wanted, honestly,

Because we were also living long distance. And so I was with you on your birthday. I’m like, whatever you want to do I’m game.

And so I said, we’re going to spend the whole day watching world championships speeches from all the Toastmaster competitions. And you were such a trooper, babe.

I was, but I will tell you that’s the last time that I’ve ever said whatever you want, but no, it was actually, it was mostly pretty good, but you know, I was like, we were like watching videos from like the late seventies and early eighties at the time. And I’m like, do we really have to go 20 years,

Mark Brown. That was the day you fell in love with Mark Brown as a physical person from his speech. But so anyways, just for you, like the takeaway for me was this reminder that there is a science to this and, and all the things that we teach at world-class presentation craft are based on a science, a study, the research of, of these kinds of things. And if you’ve either been to that event or you, you know, you’re like me and you sort of nerd out about those things, I was just excited. Cause Vanessa seems like another great resource for people that really love the science part of, I don’t know, here I am using my hands. I can’t, I can’t stop it. I can’t stop it. The hands they just go. They just, they just go. So, yeah. So that was gestures. What was your second?

My second one was really, I, this was so thoroughly fascinated around this whole concept of how do you make a Ted talk go viral. And again, what I love so much about all of this is that it’s not just ideas, right? This is like there it’s very, data-driven it’s data specific it’s research research. I love that. And I think that, to me, it goes back to one of the recent interviews we had with Jason Dorsey around like information and data is your new competitive advantage. And same thing. We had another interview with Aja Yeager and Megan canal. I’m just like data matters, right? Those insights that you gather really matter. And talking about the titles. And so she was very specific and how she really wanted to create a title that was like a command statement that you are something right. So her title of her Ted talk is your contagious.

She talks a lot about how this a little bit different right now during COVID, but again, it’s just like really putting thought and intention into what would people search? What would people be attracted to? How are people gonna find me? And then I thought this was just so fascinating and I’ve really never heard anyone talk about it. The way that she did is the intentionality put behind getting on people’s playlists on YouTube. So just very definitive focus and intention on making sure that her YouTube strategy was intact, which will lead to my third point in a second. But just the whole concept of, you know, there’s a formula for making a Ted talk go viral that really has not as much to do with your Ted talk itself and what you do to make sure people see it.

Yeah. Th that thing about the YouTube playlist was cool because everyone wants to like reach out to the speaker, but she is like, I’m much more interested in reaching out to the person who has a playlist that nobody ever reaches out to, but they have like these really popular playlist. Yeah, that was super cool. Another tactical thing for me, that was just a good reminder, which I actually never realized the brilliance of what Ted did with the red circle. You know, if they do this red circle, the speaking, the dot and you have to stay within the dot. And normally when you take like presentation skills classes, they teach you to use the stage. We talk about that at presentation, craft of different sections of the stage. I mean different things, but one of the big risks is that especially non-professional speakers or early speakers, they have this shifty stance where they’re just always sort of like waffling back and forth and just wandering the stage like meandering aimlessly.

And it really takes away from the power of stand and deliver, which was like classic sort of like 1970s 1960s, I think of like more Utley or Cavett, Robert just standing there with a microphone and just like delivering. And that is, that is one of the most tactical things you can do to enhance the power of your presentations is to plant your feet solid, look, people directly in the eye and deliver a message, right. Not just wandering around because you heard, Oh, you should use the stage, but locking your feet on those key moments in those key points. And that was just a good reminder for me to get back to the basics of like, yeah, I need a lock. I need a lock in place every once in a while. So that was super

Tactical. Same time she talked about the importance of intentional gestures. Yeah. Not just, you know, using hands for the sake of using hands, not knocking the microphone, but for the sake of like, where are you going to place these and what impact does that have? Same thing. Same thing goes for using the stage,

Go to a location plant deliver, go to another location, plant deliver. Don’t just take it back and forth. Yeah. So that was, that was really good reminder. Yeah.

I love that. So then my third and final point was just a great reminder again, which I just keep hearing more and more about this from so many people that we interview on the podcast is like, get Joe self on YouTube. And I just feel like this has been this recurring theme that you don’t hear all the places, but we have heard it repeatedly. Over the last 12 months from all of our guests coming on of, you know, YouTube is still a little bit the wild wild West, right? You’ve got affordable advertising still on YouTube. You’ve got amazing search abilities on YouTube. You’ve got the ability to emotionally connect. It’s all video driven. We already know the data around video and how that’s going specifically with the emerging generations with gen Z. And I can’t even imagine the one after that where video is the most intimate aspect.

And I loved what she said. It’s like, if you’re selling a video course, then you should be on video selling your video course and no better way to be on video than on YouTube. And just like just little things that you’re like, you know, innately, but you’re like, Oh yes. The so those were just really great, but I think, I mean, everyone who is listening, if you listen to this podcast on a recurring basis, then you have heard multiple people talk about the importance of YouTube and the growing importance of YouTube if for a personal brand or for anyone. So I think this was just another, you know, kind of like,

Yeah, we’ve never, I’ve never placed, I think I’ve missed the boat on YouTube, which I talked about. Yeah, there’s still time. But, but I, like, I just have never realized just the power, the magnitude of everything that YouTube is. And there were two things about YouTube, cause this was my third takeaway too, that like YouTube is King. It’s like King of the social media is other than podcasting. But I, I think number one is that YouTube, unlike the other social media platforms, the longer the video has been around, the more valuable,

Right, totally opposite opposite, totally

Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, which is constantly pushing stuff down in the feed. Which is true about a blog and a website also because it’s, it’s like everything, Google, that’s the case. It’s like a fine wine with age. It gets better with all the other social platforms older is, is gone. And then the other thing, remind me, I can’t actually, I can’t, if this was recorded, did we talk about the power of being in the living room and watching the video because you and I are watching the mic, Todd.

Yeah. And also we talked about the TV series, the chosen chosen. So we’ve got this emerging kind of like thing happening with it is to, yeah. I mean, we link it to our TV and that’s what we want,

Literally sitting down to watch church to watch sermons, to watch.

But that is where we watch our, most of our church sermons specifically this year. That is yeah.

And, and sometimes, and sometimes in your bedroom, right. Like

We don’t, but people do. And I just think that’s really a great reminder of like this isn’t like this literally is where people are watching TV series, they’re watching sermon series. So why wouldn’t they also be getting all their content there? And the fact is they are, but you just don’t hear a ton of people talking about it, but you’re going,

Yeah. And we’re doing it. We’re, we’re ramping up. We’ve been, we, we recorded our first set of YouTube ads. Last week. They’re not live yet, but we’re going to be running those. And you know, we’ll report back to you on how those work. But anyways, Vanessa van Edwards, my fellow speaking research nerd. I’m so glad to have met.

Yeah. What you have created right here.

Yes. And now I am empowered.

I am empowered for full head gestures

Meaning, but so anyways, check out the interview. Thank you for being here. We hope you get in practical takeaways. That’s what we’re aspiring to do. We’re grateful for you. Have a great one. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 113: The Miracle Morning with Hal Elrod | Recap Episode

Hey, welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. We are here breaking down the episode with Hal Elrod. AJ was just making fun of me before we started. And so that’s why I see he’s chuckling, but we’re going to give you our top three and three takeaways, and I’m going to go first this time. You know, I have so much respect for how I think you probably hear that in the interview, but from a technical perspective, in addition to his personal story of dying and coming back to life, which is incredible. He also is an eight self publishing success story, probably my favorite self published success story. And everyone thinks you have to traditionally publish. And there’s a lot of advances. There’s a lot of advantages to traditionally publishing, but you know, he tells the story about for three years, he tried to ride it and he thought he had to traditionally publish.

And then finally just realized that actually the publisher doesn’t do that much to promote your book. And so you have to do the promotion anyway. So why not self publish? And he does it and boom, 2 million copies tell, I don’t know of anyone that sold 2 million copies, self published, and it’s just incredible. And to me inspiring that it’s not just traditional publisher. Self-Publish it’s what is your dream? And what belief are you allowing to hold you back? What, what wall are you allowing to be there that you’re, you’re acquiescing to? When in reality, there’s not even a wall there and you can just blow through it and figure it out yourself. You don’t need to get a TV show. You can launch your own show. You don’t need to get a traditionally book published deal. You can self publish, like you don’t need to be on national radio. You can launch a podcast. So many limits just exist in our own mind. And I just, I loved that. It was inspiring to me it a long rant. That was not that long. Hold on, pause the recording. Let’s go look. I don’t think it was though.

It’s felt long, been a long day, but I think is really pertinent to this particular interview. And as you can tell, this is a, not a shower day for me. This is my mommy day. And Rory, actually,

For those of you watching this on YouTube, those of you listening to the podcast,

I sound just as like normal

In full makeup and full hair and her nicest outfit.

Oh, well, yes, but I will tell you it’s, it’s kind of interesting because we, we came in through, from a weekend trip yesterday and didn’t have time to record our recap when we typically do. And Tuesdays are always my mommy day where I’m just full time mom, all day long with my two toddlers. Which means I don’t usually get a shower or hair or makeup or do anything for myself. Maybe I get to eat. But Rory was like, Hey, I really want you to listen to this. And I’m like, Oh, you can just record this one. And then I listened to it and I’m like, Oh, now I know why he insisted that I listen to it. Cause I had a really couple of negative moments of like, I’m so overwhelmed. There’s not enough. There’s not enough time to go around.

No one’s looking out for me. Kind of had some of those moments and he was like, Hey, are you going to listen to that podcast? And I’m like, okay, well now it’s all clicking and I’ll putting together. And I think that was one of the things that was really important to me listening to this and why all of you should listen to this as much as you’re going to learn about your personal brand and self publishing and traditional publishing for that matter and building a community. I think the first half of the interview is worth listening to whatever you, you gleam from the rest of it is awesome. But the first half is just such a great reminder, no matter where you are in your personal brand journey, you control how you feel, right. You control. If you think you’re succeeding or not.

That has a hundred percent to do with your perspective and your perception of what is impact to you. Is it one person? Is it a million persons? Like why does that matter? It’s like, why do you have to have a hundred thousand followers versus a hundred followers? If you truly believe in what you’re doing and what you’re called to do. And that, I just feel like that more than anything else is why you should listen to this interview and follow Hal and read the book and do all the things and why I really needed to listen to this myself right now is that great reminder of, I have nothing to complain about. I have everything to be grateful for and so do you, right? If you have the opportunity to share your message to even one person that is worth it, it is not about your follower count.

It’s not about six, seven, eight figure advances, even though those are awesome, right? Those are amazing byproducts of just doing what you believe in and what you’re called to do. And I just think if you just focus in on what are you called to do and what are you passionate about and what are you grateful for and how does that just exude from every part of your being, this will work out for you at some point at some time in some way, this will work out for you. And how is a great example of, I’m not gonna wait around for anyone else to do this for me, I can just go do it myself, because I feel that called to the message to the mission and to getting this out there and I’ll do what I gotta do. And sometimes that’s what we gotta do. So that’s why I really think this is awesome.

Yeah. And that, as I would, I would count that as my, I was actually going to save it for my third takeaway. But since you brought it up the first half of the interview, if you haven’t listened to it yet is his personal story about how he died. Came back to life, died again, came back to life, made it through this whole bout and then had cancer and just this inspiring outlook on what it means to be alive. And and how you are in control of what’s going on inside. Like there’s a lot of thing, a lot of things externally that we don’t have control over, but everything that’s going on inside, you are in control of your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, what you choose to be grateful for, what you decide to spend your time on and to hear it in the context of someone that has gone through so much challenge is just inspiring.

And I, I agree with you it’s that his personal story is just so moving that it is it’s beyond all the wonderful technical details that he shared, you know, things about how self publishing works and how do you do it and how did the advances work and how does the money work? He was super transparent. But you’re in charge of what’s going on inside of your head. And I think as influencers or personal brands we are, so we’re so used to being the teachers or the messengers, it’s easy to forget how we also have to be the students and getting to learn from other people like how and go, wow. Like I’ve got a lot of personal development work to do myself, in addition to all the business work I need to do on my, on my brand. So it was, that was awesome. That was my second takeaway.

Yeah. And I think one of the, I think one of the more technical components of this as it relates to building your personal brand and, you know, writing and speaking and publishing and all the things that he talks about. But I just really love this, this whole concept of people talk about this a lot in the space of you can’t really make a ton of money selling books anymore. A book is more of like a business card. We’ve even said that well he proves that very, very, very wrong, and I think that’s awesome. Like you need some people to step up and go, no, you can. It’s just, you’re not. And I, that was like a really good like, Oh yeah. Like you really can make a lot of money. I mean, you’ve got plenty of people. Who’ve, you know, you know, you’ve got, you know, the Twilight and Harry potters and all of those ends of the world.

But then, but then like when you come to like the real personal development and business space, it’s like, you’ve got those two, you’ve got, you know, like Dave Ramsey and how L rod on the self publishing route like that, that is worth noting. And I just want you guys to like, pay attention. It’s like he has sold 2 million copies self-published and average retail price is around $20. And let’s just say he even gets to keep half of that, which I think he said it averages a little bit higher than 50%. I’m on print version. Y’all at $9. And I just low balled. It like is $10 would be 50%, but at $9 at 2 million copies, you don’t have to be a mathematician to do this. It’s $18 million. You can make plenty of dough selling your books that you self published. And there is all kinds of talk in the industry about, well, if your book won’t just won’t be seen as credible, or it won’t have the same distribution. Well, that just ain’t the case here. And that just proves all of that wrong of, well, no, you can write, you can do that, but you gotta hustle and you gotta do it and you gotta be committed to it. And I, I think that was a great reminder of, you know, you can just, most people aren’t,

Right. Yeah. If you sell a million of any set and you’re going to make money, right. Like matter what it is. And that’s really good. And, and yeah, I think it’s, you know, John Gordon and John Maxwell are people who traditionally published, who I have sold a lot. They have make plenty of money from just book sales. And the Andrews makes plenty of money from just book sales through traditional route. And then you have hell rod. And then, you know, of course, Dave Ramsey’s self-published stuff and then traditionally published and gone back to self publishing. So yeah, I, I love that. And to your point about the hustle, I was just looking up the notes the first year, he said he did 140 interviews, 30 podcasts interviews did 36 speeches and sold like 13,000 copies. He’s strong, which is super strong, but it’s also not the one where you go, Oh, they sold 50,000 units on opening week. And you know, this is, this is the next book that’s going to sell a million. It was 13,000 copies over the first like year and a half, but then he did it consistent and it grew

Not consistent. It totally multiplied because it went from 13,000 in year, one to six years later, 2 million or a million,

Six years, six years to reach a million,

18,000 to a million in six years is like pretty aggressive.

That’s amazing. Well, and so that was my third point is this Facebook group that, you know, and here’s what I think the point is is that if you build a community around your message, then book sales naturally flow out of that, right? Like most people think, how can I build a community around my book when I have a book launch in order to sell my book. And it’s like this one time thing, how wasn’t doing it out of marketing, he was doing it out of impact. He’s like, I want to create a place for people to support one another in cheer each other on and get them to meet me and I can meet them and to answer their questions. And, and it’s the, the Facebook community that he built that, yeah. You know, when you have 250,000 people in your Facebook group every day, talking to each other, of course, they’re going to like the topic of conversation is around this thing.

That is your book. Of course, those people are going to buy, and they’re not just going to read it and forget about it. They’re in there all the time. It’s like having 250,000 salespeople for your book. And that flew flow out of flown out of it, grew out of it. It came out of a mission to serve and build a community around a message, not build a community around a book. And we actually use house book in our bestseller launch plan, which is one of our phase three events. There’s a, there’s a window of that event that we talk about the long tail sales plan, like the perennial bestseller. And we talk about building a community around you know, a movement, not just around a book and how is this great, an example of that? And you can do that today. Even if you don’t have a book, you can build that community now and pour into people and then it will sell books.

Well, you can tell Roy is very passionate about this particular topic. And now there’s a lot of hand movements, a lot of hands movement,

Youtube. You’re seeing my hand movements come aggressively at the camera.

There’s a lot, there’s a lot of hands moving over here. My third point is somewhat similar to that, but I think that I’m not going to say it’s easy, but how really deep details out the plan of, it’s not that difficult to get your book self published and get it distributed. Right. And he really lays out like, well, here’s the company that does this, and this is how you do this. And this is how you get an audio and here’s on Kindle. And it’s like, I’m not going to say it’s easy because that’s still work. But it is simple. It’s not rocket science. And we just have so many people in our network. And if people who are clients that are just baffled and stuck about what do I do, and it’s like, just do something right. If you’re waiting around to decide if you should get traditionally published, it’s like, I think he made a great point.

It’s like, ask yourself how big is your platform? And if it’s not going to sell itself for you, then you should go ahead and self publish. And here’s what you do, right? Here’s how you set up your distribution with Amazon. This is how you set up your Kindle. These are the percentages, and then you do the deal and then you go out and you sell it. You get on podcast interviews, you go speak and you the pants off of it. But if you really are trying to go for that traditional route, it’s just a great reminder of publishers. Aren’t trying to sell your book. It’s your job to sell your book. So do you want to sell it via a publisher and their distribution or sell it via yourself and use all the other distribution channels that have developed over the last 10, 15 years. That really weren’t there back in 2010, like these are all things that have exponentially made this process easier for people to get their messages out there, which is you. And you don’t have to be traditionally published to make tons of money and to be a super credible author these days, you’ve got tons of examples of that. It’s just how bad do you want to do it?

Absolutely. Amen. And you can find a way you can figure it out, by the way, if you’re looking for tactical strategies on how to actually market your book. I mentioned this already. We have an event called bestseller launch plan, which specifically teaches you tactics to market the books. And we use, like I said, how as a case study, another thing that we address in there is when to self publish versus when to traditionally publish you know, a quick tip on that just to rough, a rough guide is we usually say, if you have a platform where you think you can move 10,000 units in the first four to six weeks, that’s a good signal that you’re ready for traditional publishing. And that it probably makes sense. And if you’re not there, or even if you are there, you still need to take a good look at self publishing because of all the reasons that he was talking about the cool 18 million of them, if you got a calculator so anyways, go listen to the interview. Thanks for being here, knocked down the walls, let us know how we can help you. We’re here to support you along the way. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brands.

Ep 111: The Foot Traffic Formula with Stacy Tuschl | Recap Episode

RV: (00:06) Hey, it’s the Influential personal brand recap edition. Although it’s just me this time I’m filling in for momma CEO. AJ who is out today and I’m going to be breaking down my new friend, Stacy Tuschl interview, which I loved. And here’s why I loved it. I loved it because more, probably than any other interview that we have had, she talks about the intersection of digital marketing, marketing, online marketing, in other words, and offline marketing, this intersection between the offline world and the online world, which is where the magic happens. It’s it’s not about either, or it really is about both now, specifically. I think more of the angle that she takes in her business and in the interview, if you didn’t listen to it, go back of course, and listen to it. But, um, is she’s really teaching online marketing strategies for brick and mortar businesses. But if you listen closely, she’s really teaching both just online marketing and offline marketing, which is the story of my life. RV: (01:25) That is the story of our companies. It’s not free traffic or paid traffic. It’s both, it’s not, uh, offline or online. It’s both, when you’re launching a company, when you’re building a personal brand, you have to do everything you can possibly do to get the word out about what you do, right? Like it, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean you do all the things at once. It means you, you, you know, obviously if you’re one of our members, we teach the brand builder journey. So we teach a specific sequence and how you build this. But the thing you got to know is it’s, it doesn’t matter how advanced you are, how big you are. Like we have to over the course of time, master as many marketing strategies as we possibly can, like build in as many as, as we, as our team can handle and that we can, we can run effectively. RV: (02:23) And that is just important, right? It’s, it’s important that you know, that it’s important that you hear the truth, that nobody built a business on just going viral. And nobody just got lucky where people just showed up. Like that’s not a strategy and it’s not the truth. The truth is that every great personal brand hustled, they built one channel at a time and then the next, and then the next, and then the next all as ways of reaching out. And I think that’s just, you know, something that we can never, we can never hear enough of. Right? Because when you look online and you go, Oh my gosh, like I don’t have the followers that she has, or I don’t have as much engagement as he has, or my videos aren’t as cool as hers. That’s what we look right. That’s, that’s the thought process that we have, but you, you can’t compare your chapter one to somebody else’s chapter 25 and you got to remember that, right? RV: (03:31) You can’t look at what Dave Ramsey’s doing and be like, Oh my gosh, why? You know, like I’ll never be able to do that. Well, sure. You will. It might take you a while though. I mean, it’s taken him him 30 years, but he’s been slow and steady and consistent, and you can do the same thing and that’s marketing you all. Like it’s a, it’s a grind, it’s a hustle. It’s a battle. I mean, I I’m reminded of, you know, shark tank, you know, shark, shark tank has all these famous investors. And you would think, how do the sharks have a company that fails? Like, aren’t they famous enough that they can just like, you know, make a video post about anything and it’ll just turn into success. And the answer’s no, they’re not like it helps tremendously, but they can still fail. They, the companies still fail because, uh, you, you need a marketing system, you need a marketing plan, you need a marketing strategy. RV: (04:32) You need mechanisms that reinforce your message and are constantly working to, to tell people about who you are and about what you do. And that’s, that’s duplicatable. That’s, replicatable, that’s, that’s something that can grow all this other stuff, you know, going viral and all that. That’s just luck. That’s not something you can, you can reproduce. That’s not what you want to build your company off of, even though it’s worth aspiring to do that. So anyways, it was a great interview for that reason. I’m going to give you my three highlights, but that, that was the message, I guess, that was on my heart for me. And for you of just knowing that, Hey, this it’s all online and offline and we got to do everything we can do to tell the world about what we do. And that’s the truth of every successful business and successful personal brand. RV: (05:26) And so Stacy was a good reminder of that, but, um, all right, so here’s my top three takeaways. So first, first of all, she says directly in the interview, my traffic comes from three places, Facebook ads, Google search, and our referral program. Bam, like there, she is sharing her secrets two decades here of a successful brick and mortar business of where her traffic comes from. Facebook ads, Google search, I E search engine optimization, I E Google ads and referral program. So here’s my first question for you. How many of those three things do you have running in your business? Facebook ads, search engine optimization and Google ads and a referral program. It’s possible that you have zero. And if you’re not experiencing the kind of traffic that you want to be having, it might be because you don’t have any of those three things, things running. RV: (06:31) Now we teach all three of those things. Facebook ads, Google. We would break apart into two. We would call search engine optimization. One part that’s free Google. And then we, we, we have Google ads, which is paid traffic, which, um, specifically YouTube and, um, Google ads, which are both the Google ad network. We would actually kind of treat those as two separate things and then referral program, which we would call affiliate marketing. It’s just another word for that. Um, all four of those traffic sources we teach in our event, high traffic strategies. And there’s a reason why now that’s a phase three event and you go, well, Rory, why would you wait all the way until phase three brand builders group has four phases. We have three, two day experiences in each, each phase, right? So this would be like event number nine out of 12. RV: (07:24) And people say, well, Roy, why do you wait that long to teach traffic? I mean, isn’t traffic important. Yes. But if you don’t have, if you don’t have clear positioning and you, you don’t have a clear offer and you don’t have a clear business model and you don’t have your revenue engine, what we call your revenue engine set up for all your lead capture and all your funnels traffic is, is worthless. Um, but when, once you have all this stuff built and you go, bam, let’s go light up the traffic, the traffic ways, um, three of the six that we teach in our high traffic strategies event, you know, sh she’s doing the same thing. So there you go. Like you’re looking for the secret, like there’s the secret, like that’s what to do, um, how to do it is a different story, but that’s what to do. RV: (08:09) Facebook ads, search engine optimization, Google ads and referral program. And how many of those do you have set up? And if you don’t have any, or you only have half of them, well, the good, the bad news is that’s probably why you’re not seeing the traffic you want. But if the good news about that is, Hey, there’s a lot of room to grow. And, and, and it works, right? You’re not, you’re not yet doing the things that other people are doing that get traffic. And that’s why you don’t have traffic. So that’s a good thing. You’re, you’re clear, at least if you’re listening to this episode, you’re, you’re clear on what will drive traffic. Um, now there’s a whole bunch of things that we do for free traffic. And then our favorite traffic of all is what we call get paid traffic. So this, this category, Facebook ads, Google ads, and affiliate is in what we call paid traffic. RV: (09:02) We have another form of traffic that we teach in phase two, which is another reason why these are in phase three for us, which is free traffic. Um, and then our favorite traffic of all, which she actually didn’t talk about is what we call get paid traffic, which is where you get paid to be put in front of someone else’s audience, uh, which is the number one traffic source we have, of course, for us, it’s speaking, um, where you learn how to get paid and get put in front of an audience, which is amazing and book deals. But, um, anyways, there you go. That’s, those are the things you need to be doing. If you don’t have traffic, that’s why, why you don’t have traffic. You’re not doing those things. Um, and the, when is important, that’s what we would add to it, right. And brand builders group. RV: (09:47) So anyways, that was really edifying for me just to hear her go, okay, we don’t have a brick and mortar business, but even in a brick and mortar business, that’s what she’s doing. And that’s powerful. All right. The second thing is that she said brick and mortar is faster. In other words, offline marketing is faster. I believe that is true. What, wait a minute, Roy doesn’t brand builders kind of specialize in, in, in teaching like digital marketing strategies. Yes. We also specialize in teaching offline. Why? Because funnels and traffic and social media and podcasts. These are slower, longer term, more scalable solutions to traffic, but they are slower. So they’re more scalable. And, and in the longterm, they’re, they’re more valuable, right? Cause there’s only so many phone calls you can make in a day. Maybe not. I maybe wouldn’t say more valuable because you can build a team of people, but from you personally, as a one person, as a one man band or one woman band, you can only make so many phone calls. RV: (11:01) But remember our background, I knocked on doors for 80 hours a week for five summers. Then I tell them marketed in corporate enterprise sales. Then we did business to business sales for 12 years in our former company. And then we did digital marketing. And so that’s something I want you to know, like if you’re just starting out Facebook and Instagram and you know, funnels probably isn’t the fastest path to cash. It’s not what we teach. We actually have a, uh, in our virtual training, even for our virtual members, the very first training we put people through is what is called the fast cash, uh, the fast cash formula. And we talk about offline marketing because it’s people that, you know, it’s, it’s your customers, it’s your friends and family getting referrals from people that you know, and your clients. And it just people who trust you, that’s the fastest path to cash funnels and ads and, and, and social media and podcasting and publishing books. RV: (12:08) Those are all great things. They’re amazing things. They’re, they’re important things. They’re life changing things, but they’re longterm things. They’re longterm things, right? If you need to go sign up top 10 customers tomorrow to pay you a thousand dollars each, and you’re just starting out, getting on Instagram is not the fastest way to do that. You gotta get it through your, your friends and family from referrals and from your first clients, even if you do it for free so that you get testimonials and you can get referrals. Offline marketing is the fastest path to cash. Typically in the short term, unless you’re a celebrity, unless you have a huge following, then it’s, then it’s different. But for most of us, offline is faster. You can go knock on someone’s door. You might have to knock on 50 doors to get one person to buy from you, but you can get a credit card in a day versus, you know, it can take six months a year to get a funnel launched in some cases, depending on how much, you know, what you’re doing. RV: (13:10) Um, but asking your, your brother-in-law for a referral, emailing someone and being on a phone call tomorrow, you can collect a phone, a credit card by this afternoon or by tomorrow. So you work your offline relationships, your offline relationships are just as important. Um, and especially in the short term, you know, brick and mortar, I mean human humans. And by the way, those of you that have done, like if I speak in front of a live audience, we might see a 30% conversion. But if I do a webinar funnel, we might see a 3% conversion. So it’s a trade off. Now the good news about a webinar funnel is that we can have an infinite number of people without adding any time in my calendar. So, uh, a one to 3% conversion works as long as I have enough cash to last for six months while we get the thing built and launched and tested and tweaked, but you’re gonna see lower conversions online than offline. RV: (14:11) And it’s going to take typically a longer runway online than offline. And then finally, the last thing, this was so simple, um, was she just said, and this was just powerful, but she said, you have to scrap how you used to do things. And instead ask, how would I do things if I would just starting today in 2020? Right. So what I used to do, you know, it’s irrelevant. It’s irrelevant unless it’s still relevant, right? Like doing something because that’s what I used to do. That’s not a reason to keep doing it. The reason to do it is to go, isn’t the best thing to do today, IR, regardless and separate of what I used to do. But so many people are living in the past going, well, we didn’t, we’ve never done that. That’s never worked. I don’t know how to do that. I w I, we never used to do that. RV: (15:09) So I don’t know how to do it. Great. Learn how to do it. Right. The question is not, what did you use to do? What you used to do is irrelevant. All that matters is what do you need to do? What do I have to do right now? What do I want to do? What do I have to do? And I have to do, I have to learn whatever I have to do. And I have to do whatever I have to do, regardless if I want to do it or like to do it. It’s, it’s kind of what my mom used to say. Entitlement, you know, is, is interesting because enjoying it, isn’t a requirement of doing it, enjoying it. Isn’t a requirement of doing it. And that is true when it comes to marketing. So it’s, it’s what do I have to do more than, what do I want to do? RV: (15:58) It’s not, what did I used to do? It’s what should I do today? And some of those things from the past can still work and other things you need to let leave them behind. And in a lot of cases, you need to reinvent or supplement your traffic strategy with some new skill sets. And you can do that. And you can learn those. Some of those things right here on these podcast interviews, you can learn a ton of them from our team at brand builders group. But no matter how you do it, you got to pump your message out there into the world as fast as possible in many, as many outlets as you can keep up with. Uh, so that people hear about you because excellence is never an accident. People don’t accidentally find you and you don’t accidentally grow your business. So online marketing and offline bring it together. And that is where the magic happens. We’ll catch you next time. Bye. Bye [inaudible].

Ep 109: Why Research is Your Competitive Advantage with Jason Dorsey | Recap Episode

AJV: (00:06) RV: (00:07) Hey, welcome to the special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. We’re breaking down the interview with one of our best friends, Jason Dorsey about him and his wife and business partner, Denise, via dr. Denise via and their new book Z conomy about generation Z and how they’re going to affect the future of the world of business and all things, personal brands. So babe, what were some of your big takeaways from listen to our friend, Jason, in the professional setting that we do? AJV: (00:40) Now, it’s always so great to get a chance to listen to friends. Cause you forget. Wow. Really smart friend. Wow. You’re so smart. Like you have all these amazing skillsets. So I think that one for anyone who has a cause it’s so fun to get to interview people that you’re actually really close to in life, because as friends, you don’t really get to know all the intimate details of their professional lives sometimes. And this is just such a great chance to be like, wow, like I’m so honored to like get to be in your life because you’re so good at what you do. So anyways, that’s just a major kudos to Denise and Jason for just for being so smart. So cool. We love you guys. So here’s one of the things that I wrote looking at my notes here is that I thought this was so fascinating and I knew this, but it had never really clicked before. AJV: (01:35) Jason talked a lot about, he said the more research that we did over the course of time the more data we collected the more just information that we gathered, the more in demand we became. And I thought that was really fascinating. And he said that what they started to realize is that research, it was their uniqueness. It was what really differentiated them in the marketplace and really set them apart and thought leadership. It wasn’t just a motivational speaker or a funny speaker or a really great speaker. It was like, no, this is founded in data. It’s founded in research. That that means something to how you recruit and hire and lead and train. And in his case, millennials now moving on to gen Z, but that research was their uniqueness. It’s what set them apart. It’s what got them on TV and all these national media spots. It’s what helped them increase their fees is they became true thought leaders in the millennial, the generational conversation that has really been really big for the last 20 years. And now they’re changing that ever so slightly to be on gen Z, which will keep them very busy for the next 20 years. RV: (02:51) Yeah. And you mentioned research it’s, it’s interesting. I don’t think their expertise is so much on millennials. I’m just thinking, Speaker 3: (03:00) Thinking not so much on millennials, but it’s on research, which means that it makes them timeless in terms of it. And, and a Z economy of course, is the new book that is all about this next era and this wave. So that was my big takeaway too, is just the power of research. And it was, I felt a little bit of a permission to when they said that there’s, there’s different levels of research. And so you can start with something basic and then kind of like work your, your, your way up. But I loved this quote when he said success is when competitors have to cite your study because your data is, is so good. So that’s something for us to aspire, aspire to. Yeah. So that was the same takeaway for me. AJV: (03:45) Yeah. I thought it was just so good. And I just, I thought this was good to just kind of sum up that point. And he said that research is what separated them in a crowded market. Right. So for those of you who feel like you’re in a crowded market, looking at research and data as a competitive advantage, I think is is really unique. Okay. Why don’t you go ahead and do your second one? Speaker 3: (04:06) My second one was really just understanding this was more of a generational thing than it was you know, how they built their business, but related to where they were saying, well, Jason said a generation isn’t changing. They’re just bringing who they are into the marketplace. And so you need to know them and that’s that’s just a quick like pivot you need to make in your, in your brain. And as a personal brand, you gotta go, okay, who are these people? I have to know who generation Z is and I need to adapt to them. It’s not that they’re changing for me. It’s just, they grew up in a different world with a different set of belief systems and, you know, politics and technology. And so knowing really who they are and, and not being frustrated, like there’s somehow changing from you, but also realizing, gosh, in order to stay relevant in the next generation, I have to adapt some of the things that I do, some of my content, some of the ways I deliver content to reach that generation. And that was just a, AJV: (05:09) Yeah. Can you talk specifically around video? These people are so used to absorbing information through video that if you really want to reach them, it’s gotta be in video. It’s not photographs, it’s not static post it’s video. I think that was, there was a great discussion around video. So if you’re, you know, a little video shy to talk about who is your demographic and here are you reaching. And if it’s in this younger, you know, at this point, you know, gen Z is all the way up to age 24, right? So they’re in your consumer market to some degree. So yeah, I thought that was great. I’m going to read this a little bit. Cause when I listened to it, I took some really tedious notes. AJV: (05:51) So a couple of other things that I put down here if say this is, I thought this was really smart. The data isn’t quite good enough, you have to be able to translate the data into a story that connects with your audience. And I thought that was really smart. And I think so, so often you think, okay, I need data. I need research. It’s like, I need numbers and I need charts and diagrams. And that’s what you think about with data. And he’s going, no data alone is no good. Nobody just, nobody emotionally connects to numbers. And he didn’t say this, or this is what I heard, but you need an emotional story tied to the data that people can connect with, that they can relate to, that they can see themselves or their company or their audience in. And he said that, you know, just even a media, right? They don’t want you to talk about numbers. It’s what are the numbers mean? Like who are the people? What are they buying? Right? What, what, how does that change? How you do business, that those are emotional things. So the data alone isn’t good enough. It’s how do you take that data and turn it into real life stories that have an emotional connection. That is what will differentiate you. That is true thought leadership. It’s not just getting numbers on a piece of paper. It’s translating those things into real stories with real emotion. Speaker 3: (07:19) Yeah. That’s cool. Thought that data is the starting point of the story and really what people are after is the story. So my third takeaway you actually already mentioned was that gen Z specifically was their language. Their native tongue is video. And I was thinking about those of you that are writers going, okay, well, what does that mean for you? If maybe you’re, you don’t want to be on the camera, you know, or you don’t like to be kind of front and center, but it’s going okay, how can I still adapt? And this came up actually in one of our events, somebody asked this question specifically and there’s some really good collaborative discussion. And what came out of that discussion was going okay, well, if you’re a writer and you don’t like to be on video, you can write and then read your writing and overlay it on top of still images or stock Royal, you know, royalty, free footage. And if you don’t want to read it, you can get a voiceover, you know, like you can get someone to voiceover it, but you can still take the written form of content and produce it into video, which if you’re going to connect with gen Z, that’s probably something you should look at doing so that, you know, hit me. It was like, we gotta go video. Everything has got to find a way to be on video because that’s, that’s who they are. AJV: (08:38) That means more showers or having to do Speaker 3: (08:45) More hairspray. Yes. More hair. AJV: (08:49) Okay. My third one you kinda mentioned it earlier, but I’m just going to touch on a little bit more. I said, you don’t have to hire a research firm to start getting data rich, right? You don’t have to go out and spend thousands of dollars to have your own data to have data. He said, one of the first things that you can do is just start compiling all of the research studies that have already been done in your space. Third parties citing them. But then talking about that as you know, one of your core differences is like, Hey, you base it on this research, you base it on the studies, you base it on this data, you base it on this X, Y, and Z. And that you don’t have to be the one to foot the bill to do all of the research that other people are doing research. AJV: (09:34) Just so other people like you we’ll use it, we’ll cite it and we’ll give them credit for it, which is fine. I just think that was really also insightful of going, Hey, have your trying to create real thought leadership. It has to be more than just a personal story, right? It’s got to be a personal story, tied to data. That’s been connected back to a story and that’s really forwarding the message where it’s really concrete and substance, but you don’t have to pay for it. There’s plenty of research studies and data out there go and compile the most credible ones. He talks a lot about how do you know which ones are credible? It’s, it’s definitely an interview you want to listen to not just to learn about gen Z, which is fascinating. But also just like, okay, well, how do I get in this research game? And what does that mean? And what does that look like? And how can you start dipping your toes in it without spinning? RV: (10:34) Yep. So there’s at least two reasons to go buy the Zee economy. Book one is so you can learn about gen Z and know who the heck they are and how you can reach them. And two is to watch one of the best in the business in terms of Jason and dr. Denise via Jason Dorsey and dr. Denise via who’s his wife and business partner and how they make data, become a part of their brand and learn about it. So that’s what we got for you. Thanks for tuning in buys economy, and we’ll see you next time. Bye. Bye [inaudible].