Category: Podcast

Ep 172: Leveling Up Your Paid Traffic Acquisition Strategy with Eric Siu

RV: (00:08)

Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call talk to you soon on with the show.

RV: (01:05)

I’m excited to introduce you to a new friend of mine, Eric Siu, because we are going to level up our strategy and conversation as it relates to digital marketing and traffic which is also going to tie into his new book that is coming out called, or just came out called leveling up how to master the game of life. But I started actually following Eric Sue because he’s the co-host of marketing school of the marketing school podcast which he co-hosts with Neil Patel, who we had on a few weeks ago. They have over 30 million downloads to date. It’s a super practical, very short episodes. And these guys are the real deal when it comes to the technicalities and the high level strategy for true digital marketing. And so they’re one of the, one of the people that one of the groups that I look to to learn from, but separate of being the podcast host, Eric is also the CEO of a content intelligence software, which we’ll talk some about what that means called click flow, which basically helps you grow your organic traffic and does a lot of reporting and analysis for you and, you know, makes you look like a genius.

RV: (02:18)

Some of you listening, it would be more for someone on your team to be managing that, but he also owns an ad agency that is called single grain. And they’ve worked with companies like Amazon and Airbnb and Salesforce and Uber, just to help them acquire more customers. We’re going to talk about that today, how to drive traffic quickly. And the reason that we were able to get them on the show is because he has a book that just came out called leveling up how to master the game of life, which are more of a, some of his philosophies about how he’s grown his reputation and his, his businesses, and just success in general, which will be fun. So we’ll dive into that as well. But anyways, Eric, Sue, welcome to the show.

ES: (03:02)

Thanks for the intro Rory. Great to be here.

RV: (03:04)

Yeah, man. So you know, before we talk about the book, I guess the number one issue, I think that a lot of our clients are having, right? So if you’re a personal brand, we help them get clear on their positioning. We help them, you know, get the right words in place. They build their funnels, they launch their sites. And then at some point, once you have all your ducks in a row, traffic is just like this, this is the issue, right. Is how do I get more people coming to the page, which I know is a complex issue. And there’s a lot of answers to it, but I guess that’s what I want to start with is just going, if I have built a funnel, like you’ve got, you are about to launch your funnel for your book, right? And so you, we were going to build this funnel and then the question is going to go, how do I get a lot of traffic there quickly? And of course there’s organic strategies, there’s paid strategies. How do I know which one to do? Should I do both? Like you know, can you just kind of like high level address that question? How do I drive a lot of traffic quickly?

ES: (04:17)

Yeah. I, I think what we’ll, we’ll tailor to this kind of, to the, the, the book is one, just to kind of simplify how you might think about this, this strategizing this. And so for the book, what I’m looking for is where are my people hanging out? So for me, I know that I have at least two audiences right now. One is the gamers that are looking to do more, make a bigger impact on the world or those that are just lost. It really, the book is for my 13 year old self. Cause I played a lot of games growing up now. Also I used to fight with my parents a lot too. So it’s all for the parents that have kids that play games, right. And they want their, they want the best for their kids. They don’t think this gaming is the future.

ES: (04:56)

Right. So now I know, okay, if I’m targeting parents, where are they hanging out? I know there’s different coalitions, different organizations. There’s sometimes even groups of parents that, that are actually supporting their e-sports kids. And so I’m going to where the attention is, right? So it might be forums. It might be, you know, different Facebook groups and things like that. I’m looking for where the attention is now that’s on the parenting side. I can obviously hit the Facebooks, the Googles of the world, but that to me is kind of table stakes. Right? Everyone knows about those channels now. And the other side what’s more interesting is actually the gamer side of things. So, okay. I, on the gamer side, a lot of these people are hanging out on Twitch. They’re hanging out on YouTube, they’re following people on Instagram. Their heroes are really these YouTubers or these streamers.

ES: (05:42)

And so I know a lot of the attention is over there. Can I bought a, buy a sponsorship slot from these influencers, these gaming influencers, they don’t necessarily need to be the mega influencers, like a Ninja with millions and millions of followers. They could have, you know, 50,000, you know, a couple hundred thousand followers. That’s a micro-influencer. So I can go try to reach out to a couple of these, right. I can use a tool like a mighty scout. So that’s the word mighty and the worst scalp.com. And I can find a lot of these people is just by typing in certain keywords. And then I can make a list of outreach people just like I would with an email list. Right. So again, what I’m looking for first principles here, where’s my, like, where are my people hanging out? Okay. That’s the audience? And then how do I get a good price for getting these campaigns going?

ES: (06:27)

And how do I get a good tested testing price? Right. So that’s how I would do it for this campaign. But again, I think it’s, it’s really important to think about, okay. It could be in some cases where whatever you’re promoting there might be a lot of email lists out there where you can buy, you know, you can buy different blasts or maybe everything is done through, you know, a lot of, a lot of your niche. They’re all hanging out with on you know, these other websites, all the traffic there’s communities are on other websites, which have strong SEL. So the answer is, it depends, but you have to think about first again, where are your people hanging out and how do I get the best price?

RV: (06:59)

Yeah. So I love that. And so if I were to that’s cool, I’ve not heard of mighty scout.com. I’ve not actually heard of that tool. So that’s that’s cool. I would summarize that part of it as, as basically influencer marketing and brand deals, right. Which is, this is an emerging area, like you said. Okay. One thing is to go to, you know, Facebook business manager to Google ads and just dump some money into the machine and pick an audience, which is, you know, a game that has been going on for years. And it’s probably one, we need to learn how to play. But the influencer game is, feels very interesting to me because it feels like just the dynamics are different because you’re not dealing with like this big, huge company you’re dealing with an individual person, a small team and put money directly in their pocket.

RV: (07:55)

So how much is this, do you think is the future? Because I know that, I mean, both for yourself, your clients, your agency, you guys are, you’re no stranger to running paid traffic campaigns. Are you seeing that influencer marketing? And when I say influencer marketing, I mean, actually I go into mighty scout looking someone up and then paying them and putting money in their pocket for them to do a post. Are you seeing it as effective as part of the future? And cost-wise, how are you seeing that compare to like dumping money into the Facebook machine?

ES: (08:31)

Yeah. So we have, we actually have an agency that helps us on that side. Right. So I’ll tell you what they do. I mean, what they do is they will reach out to maybe 300 influencers in a month, right. These are micro influencers. And what they’ll do is they’ll have them do a story post, right. So they might, you know, show the book next to them and they might talk about how it’s been an amazing book and then tell people to swipe up, to go to leveling up.com or whatever. And so, you know, we just started working with them, right. So it’s too early for me to say, talk about the results, but naturally it just makes sense. Cause I know that’s where my audience hangs out. Don’t get me wrong. We’re we’re starting up the F the, the, the ad stuff again.

ES: (09:10)

And it’s, it’s, the targeting is very simple. Like we can hit parents that have kids with a certain age. Right. So all that to say is you know, if you don’t, if you haven’t done it before you could work with an agency, or you could just get a mighty scout account for yourself, reach out to a couple of people, do a test, maybe your budget’s $500 or a thousand dollars, or so give a test, do a test and see how you perform, look at the numbers. Cause your mileage may vary. Right. but what we’ve seen in the past with, with other people when they run these types of campaigns, so this has be anecdotally because I don’t have my own data yet. Is that it’s a lot more cost efficient cost effective versus running

RV: (09:48)

Ads. Yeah. I mean, it kind of feels that way to me. Right. Let’s go. And like, if I put in a thousand bucks in your pocket, that’s feels like to the average person, even if you have 50,000 followers, I mean, a thousand bucks is real money. You know, if you talk about 2000 or 3000 or 5,000, it’s like, that’s nothing on Facebook or Google. Like you can’t even get them to answer an email back for 5,000 bucks, but to a real person and go, yeah. Especially if I’m on, you know, social media all day, like I may not have just because someone has 50,000 followers doesn’t mean they’re a billionaire. Like a lot of them have audiences, but they don’t have a lot of money and it feels like you can just go directly to them. So that’ll be interesting to see how that works specifically. So, so you actually are working with a different agency just for the influencer piece for your book. Correct?

ES: (10:39)

Right. And there’s a lot of these influencer agencies popping up. So I think you can probably get a pretty good price working with these agencies right now. Cause they’re, they’re they’re up and coming, so yeah.

RV: (10:48)

Yeah. fascinating. So then separate from influencer marketing just to touch for a second. Cause you also said for your, for, for the book launch of leveling up, you’re also kind of doing traditional Facebook. Are you doing Facebook and Google stuff? Yeah.

ES: (11:07)

So it’s primarily Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Those are the ones that were starting up because to your point, we just got the book funnel going.

RV: (11:15)

So now, and, and in your case you’re doing a free plus shipping thing, which, you know, our audience very, very familiar with. So you got basically add two free plus shipping to then the thank you page as an upsell or something

ES: (11:31)

Sells and one down sell. Yeah.

RV: (11:33)

Okay. Now it’s, it’s interesting. So you’re not using Google and just to kind of like point out the point that out for a second, you know, the obvious about Google is it’s kind of like an ad need a tool. So is, is the reason you’re not using Google because it’s like, there’s not a, there’s not a specific term that you would target, right?

ES: (11:57)

Yeah. I mean, to your point, so you’re saying demand generation versus demand fulfillment, I think you know, w with Google search specifically, you’re fulfilling demand and the demand isn’t really there right now. But you know, when you’re generating demand through a video, like YouTube makes a lot of sense. Instagram makes a lot of sense. Facebook makes a lot of sense and it, it just those channels are you just throw up a video and then you know, you’re, you’re, you’re good to go. So that’s not to say we won’t turn on Google display ads later. Also, there’s, there’s an element of of, of focus in the beginning, we know these channels are going to work and that’s what we Excel at. So let’s do that first. It’s our, it’s our bread and butter.

RV: (12:34)

Yeah. Well, and it seems like Google display ads. I mean, that seems to make sense because it’s just, once you have them pixeled from your side or whatever, you’re going to follow them around. I mean, that makes a lot of sense, but so to, to look at YouTube really quickly this is another area that I feel like YouTube is kind of still the wild West in terms of advertising. That there’s a lot you can do on with YouTube ads that I feel like there’s a lot of specificity that people don’t realize when it comes to running ads on YouTube. So it is, is there anything you’ve been looking at, whether it’s for you, for the book, for your clients related to YouTube ads that you feel like we should know about?

ES: (13:16)

Yeah. I mean, I, I remember there was there’s one company where you know, we, we, we bet the entire fate of the company on YouTube ads and you know, it was, it was an online web design and programming kind of online school and you know, bet the entire company on YouTube ads. And it worked out because all the people that are on YouTube are hanging out there, we get into your point, we can target very specific keywords, like learn, HTML, learn Java, script, that type of stuff. And you know, we, we went from acquiring, you know, 200 new users a month to about that jumped to 500, then a thousand, then 3000 and then 6,000 a month. And so, you know, that company, it worked out, it was able to raise their series B and then you know, they’re doing very well today.

ES: (14:01)

And so I think YouTube is very scalable because, well, one thing is you can target very specific keywords. You can also retarget people that have seen certain videos or retarded people that hit certain sections of your website. And so you have it’s, it’s more complex than Facebook ads or Instagram ads, but the complexity is worth it because it’s also like it filters out the people that are serious versus the people that aren’t serious. So you can target specific channels too, but I, I prefer to go for keywords because with keywords you gave, like, I know people that target just the keyword money and you know, they, they have programs that are selling, you know, 36 to $40 million a year.

RV: (14:40)

So, wow. Now, just to now, even though you’re saying you don’t go after channels, that is an interesting feature. I think that a lot of people don’t know about YouTube is when you, that you’re saying you can run an ad where your ads display on in front of all the videos on a specific channel, which is very targeting. You can,

ES: (15:03)

I can do that. That’s one thing you can do. You can use a tool like tube sift.com S I F t.com. And you know, the other thing that’s interesting is you can actually target based on what people search in Google search, right? So if they, if they type in like brand builder if they specifically typed in that you can actually target those people with YouTube, right.

RV: (15:22)

That’s later based on what they search on Google. Yes. You’re. And you’re saying that you can do that natively in the YouTube ad manager. Yup. Yeah. That’s pretty, that’s nuts. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s incredible. But you’re, and that’s more of what you’re doing. I mean, you’re targeting keywords, so it’s, it’s more like well, when you say you’re targeting,

ES: (15:45)

So when I’m saying I’m targeting keywords, so what we’re just talking about right now with search to YouTube right now, what I’m talking about. So if people go into Google search, just to clarify the last thing, if they’re typing in brand builder, then when they go to YouTube later, they’ll get served an ad, right. That’s, that’s the first example now, but that’s the, you know, that’s the retargeting lists. It’s not RLSA, I forgot what it’s called. Exactly. But it’s tied to search intent right now. What I’m talking about when I’m running YouTube ads is we’re targeting keywords, but we’re targeting from a from a display standpoint. Right. So there’s certain keywords that we can target. It’s almost similar to Google display, right? You’re, you’re looking for, it’s scanning for certain keywords on the page. And then if those keywords are showing, then the video will pop up. Right. so if it’s showing them the description or the tag or the title or whatever, then the video

RV: (16:37)

Got it. So it’s reading kind of like the tags of the video, the title of the video what was the other one? You said the description, the description. Yeah.

ES: (16:48)

It could even be like, you know, the transcripts are all you know, generated now. Right. It can even put me pulling from transcripts.

RV: (16:53)

Well, so, and then you’re saying you basically is going to recommend your video next on those pages, like up in the, whatever the upper right. And

ES: (17:05)

The best format to use is you have the, the pre-rolls and the mid roll. So the pre-roll videos, those are the ones that come before the video, the mid rolls are obviously in the middle. And then there’s a, post-roll we’ve seen the in-stream ads, right? Those are the ones that get in the middle of a stream. Right. The first two are the ones that

RV: (17:23)

Interesting. So not, not so much like the next video to watch or whatever, but right. In the middle of the video. Right. That’s amazing. And then I think you can, you can even target on YouTube, us specific video, right. To say, I want to run my ad on this individual video. That’s crazy. All right, well, so I love this man. I mean, this is, so it mean it is leveling up, like to me, that, you know, is going this, some of this is just like, so Ninja, it kind of blows my mind. And you know, I think for a lot of personal brands, in many ways, we’re behind the game. I mean, you work with SAS companies, right? I mean, that’s like a core part of what you’re doing is your team is like growing revenue for recurring revenue, for like marketing SAS companies.

RV: (18:13)

So it’s very, very sophisticated. And I, and I think for personal brands to break through the noise, we have to level up, like we have to, we have to get our minds and our teams and our strategy upgraded to the level of which like a marketing SAS company would perform. So question for you, why write a book on mastering the game of life, which is kind of like success habits. It seems like the obvious thing would have just to, you know, done a book on like Eric Sue’s like master techniques for, for driving ads and marketing. But yes, I’m just curious, where did the, why the leveling up book and how did that come into the picture?

ES: (18:59)

Yeah, I mean, you know, I played a lot of games growing up from ages eight to 22, and the way I look at life is it’s just a puzzle. And you know, I’m just trying to love a lot, 1% better every single day. And when you look at life that way it’s a game that never ends then, you know, it only ends when you die. Right. And you just, so you just keep playing, it’s not a zero sum game. It’s not, you know, it’s not like football or basketball where one person has to win. And so if you look at it from that lens, life becomes a lot more fun. And so, you know, it’s, to me, it’s the book I wish I had when I was, you know, when I was a gamer at 13 years old. And you know, a lot of the power ups I talk about in the book, like in life, you’re going around collecting power-ups right.

ES: (19:38)

You’re whether it’s you’re training, you’re learning to fast, you’re, you’re improving your sleep. All these things are powering you up. And so those parts, I think a lot of people listening to this podcast are like, yeah, we get that Eric, like, yeah, that that’s great, but that’s, this is also for, you know, my younger self, right. Or the parents that want their kids to kind of you know, look beyond gaming. Right. Cause again, for me, I look at business very much as a game. Like if I’m trying to deal, do a deal or buy a company. Okay. How do I make it a scenario where one plus one equals five. So do they have other assets besides you know, kind of what they currently have? How strong is their executive team, right. How can I make it super good? And then now I need to think about the terms of the deal too.

ES: (20:16)

And so there’s, there’s puzzles within the puzzles there that I need to solve and how do I recruit the best person? Okay. How do we work out? How do we incentivize that person to? So it’s like, there’s all these dynamics at play here. And you know, we’re all just playing a game, but I think it’s, it’s demotivating to think that, you know, the game is going to end at a certain point or you need to kind of you know, someone needs to lose, but if it’s just like, I’m trying to get better every, you know, 1% better every single day. It makes sense. Now the answer to your question around, why not do a marketing book? That’s the easy route, right? Like to me, I, I feel like it’s inevitable. If I just keep doing what I’m doing, long-term like, it doesn’t matter the money will be there.

ES: (20:54)

Right? I don’t need to worry about that. What I need to worry about more. So is what’s more higher impact to me. If there’s four forms of leverage, you have code capital, labor and media Lape or sorry, media is, is, is one of the ultimate forms of, of leverage. And I get to build a moat around me. And so if there are 3 billion gamers in the world or 3 billion people in the world that have played games, well, if I can latch on and I can show them, I have this intersection right now where I played games, and now I’m playing the ultimate game of business. I’m going to have an unfair advantage around building a community. And I think community is very defensible. And so I’m going to build that. And I, I think that’s going to be infinitely more valuable than me doing a book right now on marketing, which is everyone does that th th the, the it will become outdated very quickly. And sure. I might make maybe a couple million dollars or so. That’s great, but I get to have a much bigger impact from leveling up and the money is that that’s a scorekeeper, but that’s not what really matters. Long-Term so it’s, it’s what has a bigger long-term impact me doing the marketing book or leveling up?

RV: (21:58)

Yeah. Well, it’s interesting too, because it’s like it seems very consistent that you reach a level of success or just, and just like, just even say money where it’s like another dollar isn’t gonna like, change your satisfaction or joy that much, but the idea of, you know, writing something that you care about leaving behind, you know, philosophies that you want, you know, that, that it’s like the impact factor really does become the driving force to do something like this. It sounds like that’s part of what you’re saying. It’s fun.

ES: (22:33)

And I mean, like, you know, I’m very grateful what, you know, we have a marketing audience with marketing school, the blogs and all that stuff. Like, you know, we have a foothold in SAS as well, and it’s like, okay, well, what else can we play? It’s the same thing with business. It’s like, okay. You know, we’re able to turn the agency around and then it’s like, okay, we have our software company. And then we have all the other stuff too. And now it’s like, okay, what else can we do? Right. Oh, can we go buy other companies now? Right. So it’s just like, there’s levels within business too. You can, you can have a job. Totally fine. You can start freelancing and then you can start your own thing and you can just keep getting stronger and stronger. And you decide if you want to go to the next level or not, it’s just, you don’t get to go to the next level, unless you beat the current one.

RV: (23:10)

Aha. Which I think is super relevant. I mean, that’s even just like when I’m thinking about paid traffic, you know, and I’m saying our audience really, I should be saying me as I feel like we’ve, we’ve gotten to where we are by just, you know, mastering organic traffic. We’ve done book launches, we’ve done speaking, we’ve done PR. And it’s like for us to get to the next level, it’s like, we have to learn paid and we have to master it. And that’s kind of like the level that’s right in front of me. And that’s part of why I was really drawn to you guys. You rattled something off a few minutes ago that there’s no way I can just let rush past this. You said the four, you called this the four types of leverage. What did, what did you call it? As you said, code capital, labor in and media. What, what did you call those? Yeah.

ES: (23:58)

So there’s four forms of leverage. And this comes from the vol rocket and he’s a billionaire and created angel list. And you know, this has stuck with me because if you think about the, the oldest form of leverage you have is labor. So you hire people to do things, right. Even if they could do it, 70, 80% of your capacity, you’re gaining leverage. Cause you, you free up your time. So that’s obvious to all of us, I think. And then, so you have labor and then you can hire programmers. So that’s code, right? They can write code for you where you can make money in your sleep. So you’re getting even more leveraged now. Right? So if you think of leverage, it’s like a Seesaw maybe, right? That’s like one form of leverage. If you put more weight on one side, obviously the other side goes up.

ES: (24:37)

So you have code and then we talked about labor, a capital, right? You have to have capital. So maybe when you start working somewhere, you start saving all the money and then you could go invest in and hire people. Right. And then they can write code for you. Now media is something like, I think we all know, because we’re talking about on the brand builders podcast right now we know the audience of building or the power of building a brand. I think you can build a brand. You can have a website, you can have a big email list. Those are all forms of kind of media leverage. I think the ultimate form of leverage is having community because you Rory talking right now, people, maybe you might speak at a conference. Everyone might be looking at you, that’s building an audience. But I think when you build a community and everyone’s interacting with each other, the community, it kind of it’s, it’s, it’s, self-sustaining at a certain point and it just continues. And there’s a lot of, you know, entrepreneurial communities I’m in like, like YPO or EO. And I love those because it’s just, you have like-minded people just hanging out and talking shop with each other. So

RV: (25:36)

I realize you’re in, are you guys, are you any or YPO? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we don’t. We have, yeah, we don’t have a YPO chapter in Nashville. We only have EO. So we’re we’re in, at technically my wife is the CEO of brand builders, so she’s the one that’s in it. But I was in the first, the first couple of years, but yeah, and we, you know, we got engaged at a YPO event speaking at a YPO event. So that’s a great community, but anyways, to what, to what you’re saying, you’re saying when people start interacting with each other, it becomes self-sustaining. And so that’s why you’re saying it’s a form of leverage where it’s like building an audience is more like media. Yeah. But building a community you’re delineating that.

ES: (26:22)

Yeah. You’re taking it a step further. So to me, community is a level up from the audiences. And so I, I think they’re, they’re, they’re both important.

RV: (26:30)

Yeah. The, the code one is interesting. So in my Ted talk, so I have I did a Ted talk called how to multiply time. And one of the things probably the most retweeted from my Ted talk and this is my second book was called procrastinate on purpose. It was based on, this is, I said, this line automation is to your time, what compounding interest is to your money. And as you’re talking this out, it’s occurring to me that basically code and automation are really kind of closely related. And we talk about eliminate automate, delegate procrastinate and concentrate. That’s basically the outline of the Ted talk. And the, and the book and code is basically automate. Labor is basically delegate. You know, what we do at brand builders group is really around media capital is an interesting one too, because you’re, it’s kind of like where your money is making money instead of your, your time.

RV: (27:39)

But the community one is interesting that one’s rocking my mind here a little bit. Like I’ve not thought about community as clearly. And I, I think this is super powerful, what you’re saying, like, even before we started talking, y’all, didn’t hear this cause it wasn’t on the recording, but our community of personal brands is growing so big. They’re needing stuff that we can’t provide. And so we’re having to go crap. We need to go get agencies and vendor partners and people that we can partner with to go, Hey, you know, this client needs help with executing this thing. And it’s, it’s funny cause it’s like the community is taking on a life of itself. And I don’t really think about that as a, as a form of leverage, but so that’s the fifth form of leverage you’re adding to it. There were four, but Eric’s, Eric has added a fifth one.

ES: (28:35)

Yeah. I mean, I would still lump it into intermediate, but you know, fair enough. I’ll, I’ll call it a fifth one on this pocket.

RV: (28:44)

Well that’s awesome, man. I think this, the mindset of leveling up and just like you’re saying, there’s so many parallels here of just, you know, the power ups and you keep going and it’s, it’s, you’re not playing against like another person necessarily where someone has to lose. It’s just like getting better and better. You can’t, you can’t get to the next level until you conquer this one. There’s, there’s a, there’s a lot of parallels there between gaming and you know, and businesses. So it’s really cool. So where do you want people to go? You know, we’ll, we’ll obviously put links to your sites and stuff, but where do you want them to go to learn about the leveling up books since that’s kind of like your main focus right now?

ES: (29:26)

Yeah, I mean, simple enough. They can go to leveling up.com

RV: (29:30)

Go to leveling up.com, you know, and I would just say like, listen, if you are going to go check out, like if these, the concept of the, the four forms now forms of leverage is interesting to you, or if, you know, you learn something about YouTube ads just now, or if you realized that Hey, there’s a couple of tools, like tube sift that I could check out that I didn’t know about or mighty scout. Like if one of any, one of those ideas is easily worth hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of dollars go spend the 20 bucks to support Eric on his book. Because I, I, that’s why I asked him here because I was just like, I mean, these guys dropped so many little nuggets that they speed through that are worth. I mean, I think this, this, this idea of these, these different types of leverage is so super valuable. So anyways, leveling up.com, check it out. If you’re not listening to the marketing school podcast him and Neil will blow your mind. I mean, I can’t keep up with half. The stuff they’re doing is so good. And so so solid, but anyways, Eric, thanks for being here. Thanks for sharing some nuggets, man. And we wish you the best. Thanks for having me, Rory

Ep 170: Chatbot Automation and Conversational Marketing with Natasha Takahashi

Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call talk to you soon on with the show.

This is get ready for an amazing episode. This is like a mind blowing episode. This is one of these things that you’re going to go, Whoa, I can’t believe this exists and where the world is going and that this is a part of the future. I’m given a little special introduction here to my new friend, Natasha Takahashi. Because honestly the first four minutes of the interview we did together cut out for some reason. And so you don’t get the normal, like live real-time introduction that I usually do with my guests. So I have to recreate it here, but it was, it was mostly just like you know, the pleasantries a little bit. And then, you know, we captured the conversation, but I want to say this. So Natasha is somebody that I brought on who is a new friend who which again, you know, I don’t do that very often.

It’s usually something that really catches my attention. And she is actually somebody who caught my attention specifically because of her expertise. In fact, I would say she’s a great example of somebody who has defined such a specific niche for herself and her partner and their company, that they are starting to dominate and own a space. And they have quickly become one of the world’s leading authorities, if not the world’s leading authority on this very narrow, specific pointed expertise, which is chatbots also known as conversational marketing, which is an emerging technology and emerging strategy, emerging tool that I, I think that we think can be huge for personal brands. Now I also want to let you know that typically we don’t interview a lot of people on things that we’re not doing yet ourselves, but this is something that we’re exploring. We’ve known about it for a couple of years.

We’ve had our eye on it, had we not exited our former business a couple of years ago, we would have implemented it a couple of years ago. So we started a brand builders group we’re having to rebuild and retool and reload if you will, and get our feet underneath us. And so we haven’t yet started using chatbots, but we do do some manual versions of this, which I’ll talk about in the interview. So I just wanted to give you that context and background both on Natasha as a personal brand and just how it fits in and, and go. And yeah, she’s a great example of somebody that we’re giving our platform to, because she’s done a great job of carving out, you know, this uniqueness. And she really is an expert. So who is she? So technically she’s the chief marketing officer and the co-founder of ineffable marketing marketing which is an agency that does chat bot marketing, and they have built these chat bot marketing campaigns for over a hundred different companies and brands.

Several of them you’ll recognize ClickFunnels, mind Valley, digital marketer social media examiner. Those are really good friends of ours over there. Michael Stelzner Matthew Hussey. Billy Jean is marketing, you know, in a, in a, in a bunch of other ones, but Michael Stelzner specifically is someone that we know really well that we trust. He really knows his stuff and he doesn’t introduce or use vendors lightly. Which is one of the reasons it was, it was such a compliment for him to recommend us to his audience. And, you know, I’ve spoken in front of at, at social media marketing world several times. And Natasha has spoken at social media marketing world as well. So she, you know, is highly reputable and this, this company we haven’t yet engaged them personally, but I suspect that there will come a point here in the not too distant future that we will engage with them.

But I want to just to give you that context of how I met Natasha and what we’re talking about, chat bots, this is the automated, you know, when you go to a specifically Facebook messenger is where we started to notice this, right, is like you send an email, people may or may not open it. You said a texts. You know, you may annoy people if you do it too much, but chat bots, which happened through direct messages and it started primarily on Facebook messenger are extremely responsive. They have incredible engagement and open rates. It is, it is a great way to get your message to more people. But it’s a little delicate, right? Cause we’re automating it. And so we talk about a lot of that and I would very much classify this as an advanced technique and advanced technology and advanced tool.

This is not the thing that’s going to make or break your brand early on. You’ve got to build substance, but once you’ve got that, whew, this is a way to throw some fuel on the fire. And anyways, I think, you know, some of this may blow your mind. It definitely did, for me, it was, it was a lot of new information. So without further ado, that is my introduction. And now you will pick up exactly four minutes into my conversation that I had with the wonderful and delightful and extremely intelligent Natasha Takahashi. All right. So, so for those people that don’t know, like just to take it super high level, what is a chat bot? And you like, you, you mentioned Facebook, but then you said other places as well. So like, how should we, how should we think about chat bot in general? Like where are the places that this shows up and, you know, this is basically if I were going to summarize it, this is automating, this is creating automated, like marketing automation for DMs, more or less. Right,

Exactly. Right. And the way that we define chat bots is one-to-one conversations at scale, which has never been possible in history because even though conversations have always been a part of business, you know, somebody walks into a store, they want to know a little bit more, and then they buy something from you or they come back later on. Now we’re doing that at scale online. But the conversation part of it’s still hadn’t been scaled up until chat bots on Facebook messenger actually became available. So 2016 was when chat bot uses for marketing and sales really became a thing before that there were chat bots in other use cases, you know, there’s different apps that allow you to talk to them. You know, it’s a little bit more of an automated system that’s been going on since the 19 hundreds, essentially. But now with Facebook messenger, having led the way for Chapa automation from a business to user standpoint that is directly for discovery, for sales, for customer support, for retention of members, et cetera. All those use cases really started to blow up in 2016. And so when we talk about other channels right now,

This is totally new. I mean, this is, this is, this is like brand new stuff going on, which is why I wanted to talk to you. Cause I was like, Whoa, I think to what you just said, the reason I think this is so powerful, is it as one-to-one conversations, which most of you know, this is how I started. I started out going door to door when I was in college knocking on doors. And it was, it sucked, it was so painful and hard, but there was nothing faster than having a, having a one-on-one conversation with someone where I could take them from never heard of me to here is some money than a one-on-one conversation in a, in a 20, 20 minute window. And what you just said, Natasha, about one-on-one conversations at scale that are automated. I mean, I, I, I think this is a huge part of the future.

Absolutely. and to go back to your second question about the different channels, Facebook messenger, hands down is the best place, the most affordable, the most accessible place channel, if you will, to start out with regardless of business type or industry. And the reason is because all you need is a Facebook page, which ideally you are already utilizing for your business, right? You’re posting ideally a few times a week, engaging with people they’re using all the other wonderful features on Facebook, as well as running ads. And so when you attach a Facebook messenger bot to that page, then not only can people come to your page and just message you, but you can also leverage it for Facebook ads and use it in so many different types of campaigns and use cases. And apart from that in the Facebook ecosystem, right, in terms of messaging apps, we have Facebook messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. So just to bring us back for a moment, Facebook in 2019, announced that they wanted to create a way for all three platforms to talk to each other, they called it interoperability. So we’re going to just get technical for a moment and their goal with it.

Yeah. That sounds, it sounds like an expensive word. That sounds smart. Yeah,

It does. It does. And so their whole goal was, you know, with different demographics in an audiences preferring different channels. You may have, let’s say a mom who loves talking to friends, business, et cetera on Facebook messenger, but then maybe her, you know, 20 year old daughter loves only using Instagram, DM, maybe WhatsApp a little bit. And so they could talk to each other on their platforms that they love. So let’s say the daughter’s on Instagram messaging or DM. And the moms let’s say on Facebook messenger, she can message the Instagram profile of her daughter while staying on Facebook messenger. Daughter’s going to be on Instagram, DM, right. Messaging mom on messenger. But they’re going to have their own experiences in the platforms that they know and love.

And grandma’s on WhatsApp talking to her home girls over, over in Singapore about some, some investment deals and they can all be so they can all be chatting in their native, in their native platform. That’s cool. I’d never even realized that.

Exactly. And so Facebook has already rolled that out. Maybe some of you have seen that and you’ll see more and more of it, where on messenger, you might’ve gotten a notification or an Instagram that says, Hey, now you can talk to your Facebook friends here in this inbox. So they’ve already started the process, but the reason why, you know, any of you guys should give a crap about this is because that means that businesses who are currently set up on Facebook messenger will be able to leverage more and more of that automation on those other platforms. We’re already testing Instagram, DM bots and WhatsApp bots in private beta with Facebook. And that’s going to be rolled out to more and more businesses this year. So that long story short, you know, going back to my concept about choosing different channels, Facebook messenger is the Guinea pig. Like you should be on there yesterday because you can be testing out conversational psychology for your audience. Like what do people actually want to talk to you about? What are the use cases that will bring the most ROI to your business and all of that translate to any other channel in the future, SMS, Instagram, WhatsApp, et cetera.

Yeah. I mean, conversational psychology, like there’s the term right there of which, you know, those of us from the old school. Cause you know, I’m almost 40, which makes me like an old gray haired person in this industry now is, you know, this was human to human sales. It was actual like one-on-one like quote unquote, like hand to hand combat of persuasion. And now this is happening. And so before we talk about all the things that can do, I need to help you, I need you to help me get past a psychological block that I have, which is number one, it’s this idea of feeling like I’m pretending that people are talking to me, but they’re not actually talking to me. And so that’s number one. And then I guess just kind of like I mean the worry there, there’s like a couple of worries.

One is like, okay, I don’t want to mislead people to somehow make them think that they’re actually talking to me when they’re not, even though if I write it, it’s kind of like, I am, it’s the same thing. Like my assistant, my assistant has a set of responses right now that she’ll copy and paste as me. Cause it’s like, I literally that’s what I would type if I were there and then the other, but the other, the other part of it is is, is making sure that it doesn’t ever do something that I wouldn’t do that like, Oh gosh, I would never say that. So how do you, how do you, how do I get past that emotional, like roadblock before we get into the technical part?

Sure. And those are great questions that I think, especially for personal brands, really important to consider and think about links for the number, the first thing that you mentioned right around, ultimately you’re asking, you know, what should the persona of the Bot be, like, how should we position this? So that people think of this as a helpful automation, almost like a personal concierge to help them with whatever they need, rather than positioning it as this is Rory, you know, and I’m here right now, talking to you. It’s actually illegal in some us States to have a chat bot pretend that it is a human. So there are laws in place in the world that essentially prevent you from doing this anyways. And you know, it’s not super ethical to say I’m actually here when you’re not. So the way that we typically position this for personal brands is that we’ll say something like we’ll either give the bot its own persona and say, Hey, I’m, you know, Jennifer. Yeah, exactly. You know, I’m Jennifer, I’m, Rory’s personal concierge. I’m here to help you with whatever you need from brand builders group. Like let’s get into it. You know, which of these things are you looking for? Just as like an example, or you could say, Hey, this is Rory’s bot, I’m not here right now, but I did create all of this for you. And I’m excited for you to go through this experience so that I can serve you 24 seven, you know, insert other benefits that make sense to your audience. So those are the,

I think that’s really cool because I would, I, you know, like that’s how I think of even how I think of a funnel is like, I’m not here with you live, but it’s like, this is my brain. Like if we were having a conversation, I would be telling you the same thing you’re seeing on this video, which is not that different from a podcast or anything else. I guess

That’s actually a great analogy that I haven’t really mentioned in the past, but I mean, a hundred percent, you know, if you’re viewing anything prerecorded or pre-written online, that person’s not there in your life to you. So yeah. That’s a great perspective to bring.

I like, I like Rory’s bot plus I could give him like some awesome alter ego and he could be like way more confident than I am and like really smooth talking and like really handsome, exactly a smooth, smooth talker, but so, okay. All right. And then, so this is, this is Rory’s bot and then how do I go about doing this? Because when I think about a conversation, my mind goes to what makes a conversation a conversation is there’s like an infinite number of possibilities. The conversation could go. And how do I get my mind wrapped around the idea that we could actually structure a conversation somehow that would feel like a conversation, but still be scripted enough that you could automate it without me writing like a hundred thousand, like, do you use like a decision tree to do this? Or like, how do you actually map this out?

Yeah. So a lot of people will come at it from that perspective, which is why they get overwhelmed of like, there’s so many things that we could do with this. You know, me, if I’m a personal [inaudible] and I’m sure a lot of people listening to this feel that way as well, if they’ve tried to tackle this. And so what it comes down to is simplifying it down to one specific use case. Let’s start there that you want to start with. So if we go back to my original example of somebody wanting to, let’s say, come into your business, learn more and see if they can book a call with you or, you know, buy something low ticket to, to better understand know that your chat bot shouldn’t be able to do everything a human could do. It should be able to handle specific use cases.

And those expectations should be set at the beginning of the conversation. So let’s say that you are setting up a chat bot with one use case, let’s say one campaign that is going to help leads book calls. You’re going to qualify them. Let’s say for your coaching program and you are then going to allow them to book a call, or if you find that they’re not qualified, then maybe you send them to a lower ticket offer or something free. That’s one campaign, one conversation that you technically already have scripts for, right? If you got on the phone today and someone’s like, Hey, I am XYZ business owner trying to do whatever my goal is. Then you know, what should I do with you guys? And then you would have probably specific questions that you are already thinking of right now that you would want to ask them, what’s your revenue?

How much are you spending on ads, marketing, et cetera, how many people are on your team, whatever it might be. Those qualifying questions that you might even actually already have written out on, like, let’s say a discovery call form or something of the, like an application. And you put all of that into the conversation, keeping in mind to always give the person opportunity to speak. So it should very much so always be a back and forth, right? Of like you asking the question that, you know, you need to know the answer of the person sharing that and then saying, great, thanks for sharing that, going back and forth, back and forth. And then at the end, the expectation you set at the beginning of, Hey, I’m going to let you know what I think the best next step is for us in this relationship. Then you shared that at the end.

And technically you already have this all mapped out inside of your head. You just need to get it out into a conversation and going back to expectations, just one last thing to say here, because you know, you bringing up the concept of, well, there’s so many different things I could pull up and things like it say again, it all comes down to the fact that if somebody were to message you and say, Hey, tell me a joke, or like, I need help with this super random thing. You’re like, I’m not gonna help you with that. That’s not what we’re here for. And so in the same way, your bot should just be able to handle things like that, which is very easy to implement at like a minimum viable level. So you can just say, Hey, you know, I can’t help with that at the moment, but here’s what I can do. I can help you understand what the next step would be if we were to work together. Does that all make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. So I just, how many of those things do you, you know, like if I’m going to write out a script to go, you know, what’s your goal with your personal brand? What are you struggling with? Are you hoping to write a book one day? Did you know that we can help you with that? Like that’s a pretty straight path to a free call, but planning for the other stuff of like, Oh, they asked me for a joke. Well, you know, tell me a joke or they asked me, I guess, do you just kinda like have a set of templates? You walk people through that says, you know, you need to write something for this and you need to write something for that. And I mean, is that, is that a cell? And are there a thousand or are there like five?

So when you first start out, there will be more like five, because what you should build into your bot initially is what we call the fallback. And that’s pretty common language and conversation design, which is that if you don’t have specific triggers set up, like let’s say someone says a personal brand inside of your body, then you might want, that’s a little bit vague. Still. Let’s say something more specific. I want to work with you. Then if somebody says something like that, you can set up a trigger so that when someone messages you that then you would send a specific response. But if they sent hey, tell me a joke, plus a thousand plus other random things someone could send you, they’ll all get directed to this fallback that says all, you know, you can test a few varieties of that. Like, Hey, you know, I’m learning every day.

So I’m not smart enough to answer that right now, but here’s what I can help you with. Or like, Hey, you know what, we, we actually don’t help with that, but here’s what I can help you with. And just always letting people be able to reply to that and say, okay, then just kidding. You know, maybe I was looking for something else or no, thanks. Or they might need to talk to a human or go to your help center. So there’s always different paths to kind of take people through and just close the loop. But you should not feel any pressure to have, to have all of those different triggers available for the most random things. Like you’ll get that data in over the first few months of the chat bot running and you’ll know what you actually need to implement in terms of those triggers.

So how much of this is kind of like a mapped out decision tree. If they say this, you say this, or you ask them a question and it’s like, this answer goes here. This answer goes here. How much of it is that versus like artificial intelligence where you’re just basically like putting in, I don’t even know how that, is it artificial intelligence or is this more like a decision tree that you’re mapping out?

Those are two different levels of, let’s say chat bot, marketing slash conversation design. And so the AI level is something that we, from a marketing perspective, we add that on as a layer on top of the decision tree. So the decision tree would be a sales and marketing conversation, even customer support style conversation that we create inside of a specific chat bot platform for a channel like Facebook messenger. And then as we start to see the data coming in for what people are saying, as well as just like random conversations that aren’t related to this, because people can message your Facebook page, anytime about anything they want. So getting all that data, and then we can start to stack the AI on top of that. So it can make sure people are going to what they need to essentially, and it can answer more questions that maybe didn’t start in a specific use case that are, you know, just incoming questions or messages that don’t have to do with a specific campaign.

You start, you start effectively, you start with a decision tree, like you’re saying, pick one objective. Like I want to get more people into this funnel or more people to request a call or more people to click on this link or whatever. And you just kind of like write a conversation for that. And then after you’ve got data coming in, then you can layer AI on later. Exactly. Right. And, and, and in terms of the technology that you’re using to do this, cause I see this as like, you know, there’s a little bit of an emotional part here, which we talked about, and then there’s like a strategy part, which is the decision tree and the conversational. And then there’s the technology part. So is this, this is like drift, right? Like this is, these are our, what are the, is that, is that the tool like, cause there’s a tool that you have to actually use to integrate with Facebook to, to build all this out. Right. And there’s different ones. Does it, is there pretty much like only one that you’re using or they’re like three or like what are the, what are the industry best standards here? Like, does it, are there a hundred already or how many are there we really looking at?

Yeah, there are quite a few platforms available, but just like, there are a gazillion platforms available for email marketing and you’re looking at like five to 10 top industry, totally eating platforms, same thing here, there are a gazillion platforms you could choose from, but the tech stack for chatbots just looks a little bit different than email marketing, although similar aspects, like there’s some crossover for short. So for example, we will start with a no code Shopbop platform because we come at this from the marketing perspective. And at this point it doesn’t make sense to code your own entire bot. It takes a lot of maintenance. It’s kind of like managing a WordPress site, but like 10 X, you know, you’re having to update things all the time, et cetera. Whereas if you use a out of the box solution, so what we primarily use is called many chat and that platform allows us to build everything we need to, they manage all the development code side of things, but we can still customize on top of that and add custom code and things that we want to. So that’s one example of a platform that you could go to similar, like using, you know, infusion soft drip, et cetera, for email marketing, but you would have this dedicated platform for your chat bot channels. So that’s,

So I basically, if I set up a Manny chat account, M a N Y chat is how this is, I set up Manny chat, you know, I integrate it with my Facebook and then it pulls me into some interface where I’m going, if this, then that, if this, then that, if this, then that, and you basically just write it out.

Yes. So you can create the entire backend automation as well as the content that users would see all inside of there. It’s kind of like a CRM plus, you know, content slash campaign management platform.

Huh. And then are you able to S to basically like, look at all those conversations or export them after to like analyze and go, okay, here’s what happened here? This person, you know, all these people are asking this and we’re sending them to the wrong thing. I mean, does that

Definitely, there are a few different perspectives on this though, and also more advanced techniques. So when you’re first starting out, like you can be reading through all the conversations happening just to be searching for certain areas where maybe the bot dropped the ball, you want to adjust copy, or like, Oh, that actually was confusing. Right? So that’s kind of level one of just taking a look at everything. Now level two would be to actually attach an analytics platform. So that be another step in the tech stack. There are tools out there, for example, dashpot, that’s a D a S H bot, and there’s also a platform literally called bot analytics. And both of those allow you to plug in whatever channel it is, Facebook messenger or otherwise. And it’ll analyze all the messages coming in. So it’ll tell you literally everything that you would want to know, right. What’s the most common word someone is saying to the bot, how many messages are coming in every day and anything else in between. So, so there’s a lot of great data that comes from that, that then you can use to optimize your experiences. And one other thing that I’ll just add to this, because even though you didn’t directly ask this, I think it’s still a question.

I didn’t know what to ask Natasha. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing. No, no, this is perfect. This is, so this is so like next level, we would call this phase three for us. Like, there’s so many other things you got to get right before you do this. Like, definitely. But, but, but like once you have your foundation and your principles set and like this can be something that can create exponential growth it seems like it feels like,

Yeah. And let me say that, it’s amazing. You guys have those two phases before you add on things like this, because when businesses are at, let’s say a phase one, as you guys define it and they try to add a chat bot into their business, it’s just not going to do a whole lot for them. Yep. They’ve got to have all those other pillars of their business there. They have to have an established business really in order to capitalize on this. So if you’re listening to this and you’re just starting out a chat bot can support you in a certain use case. Right? Make things a little bit easier for you, but understand you’re not going to get full advantage of a chat bot until you’re well-established.

Huh. Well, so you said, sorry, go back. You said you, the question you, that I should have asked that I didn’t ask that you were going to answer was what

Just around essentially transferring data between your CRM email marketing platform. Let’s say, for example, or if you use something else, active campaign Infusionsoft, and the list goes on there and something like many chat or your chat bot platform of choice. And so when you integrate those together, whether it’s natively, which is an option, and we don’t need to go down, you know, very logistical paths, but long story short, there’s a way for them to connect to each other. And from there you can pass data in between them. So that if somebody took some important actions inside of the bot, or maybe didn’t complete, let’s say a lead qualification form inside of the bot questions that you were asking, and you already send follow-ups in the bot, the user still hasn’t replied, well, maybe you send them an email and you can trigger that through, you know, your email marketing platform, but you can also just have all that data seamlessly integrated. So that then when it comes time to, like you said, pull certain data out of, like, let’s say you want to see all the responses coming in for those questions. When people go to book a call inside of the bot, you can put that not only just like a Google sheet, but also have that in your other platforms for your business,

You got Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is this is different than a chat bot on your website or is it similar?

Great question because I know you mentioned drift earlier and I was going to get to this. You know, we’ve been, we’ve been going a little bit all over the place, but I love it because we’re covering quite a bit of ground that is all adjacent, right? And these are all questions that people have when they’re first is trying to figure out what the hell this is. So, so, so website live chat, which you can go to pretty much any website these days. And there’ll be a little thing in the bottom, which actually fun fact. Now, most of the big enterprises ever since COVID really hit the U S are all using a chat bot. So next time you go to literally any website, your bank, government websites, et cetera, you will see automated chat there, which is really cool. But historically that’s all been, you know, humans who will come online and actually answer things like with drift or with Intercom.

So the difference between using one of those widgets where you don’t know anything about the user before they tell you it, so you have to say, Hey, you know, I’m here to help you, but what’s your name? What’s your email. Maybe there’s other things that they need from you in order to help you as a user with Facebook messenger. What Facebook has enabled businesses to do is actually capture a certain set of information about every person opting in. So whether you message the page directly on Facebook, or you go to their website and opt into a little widget, that looks the same as like another website live chat, but it’s actually Facebook messenger, but it’s happening on that website page.

Yeah. You can take your Facebook messenger and basically put it on your site, correct?

Yes. And so the page itself for the business in this case would receive the first name, the last name, gender time zone, and language of that person who’s opting in based on their Facebook profile information. So that’s one of the biggest advantages is that unlike website live chat, you’re getting that information and that conversation will now follow that person because if they leave your website, well, guess what? They’ve got Facebook messenger on their computer, on their phone mobile app, right? And so you can follow up with them. They can follow up with you. And it just becomes a seamless transition. Whereas with website live chat, that’s the only website page. You can actually have that conversation on. And then it might get moved over to email if you’ve ever had that experience, but it’s not the same as it all being gone. Right.

And can you broadcast push a message once somebody has been chatting with you on messenger? Can you basically kind of like flip the conversation where it’s more like a text blast that you would like push out a notification or no?

Yes. There are some changes that have happened over the last few years that make it different from like just sending out an email campaign, like blasting that out. Let’s say to an entire list, there are certain rules now around when you can do that, what those messages, but long story short, it’s definitely a critical part of a strategy to monetize your messenger list because everyone who now talks to your page, as soon as you connect a platform like many chat, they now become a subscriber on your list. Just like somebody would become an email list subscriber. So you can definitely leverage them in that way to send out broadcast promotions, new content releases, launches, et cetera.

Yeah. I mean, the fact that you can integrate this with your marketing automation tool, either natively or third party, but the, that you can follow the conversation with them across multiple platforms that you can add AI on top of it, that you can incorporate analytics to, to pull all the trends out of this. You can strategically design these decision trees, however you want. I mean, this is fricking nuts, like, and, and, and it’s a conversation, a one-on-one conversation. It’s not, it’s, it’s totally interactive. It’s not like email. This is amazing. So anyways, y’all, so here’s what we want you to do. Of course you can go find Natasha Takahashi online. The school school of bots we’ll put links to that in our profile, but here’s what I would love for you to do is if you want to learn more about this, go to brand builders, group.com forward slash chat bots. And you can learn more about some of the stuff that Natasha is up to and her team. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna, w we’re gonna learn more about this and we’re gonna, I think we’re gonna see more of Natasha in their game cause they’re, they’re doing it, and this is a huge part of the future. So Natasha, any other last little thoughts that you would leave people with?

I think the biggest reminder is starting simple. I know it sounds stupid and silly, but as with anything in business, it really is the key to success with this to not feel overwhelmed, but to take what Rory and I just talked about and understand that just starting with one use case, getting a win there, proving the channel for your business, and then expanding from there and expanding and scaling to the moon. Whatever you want to do with it is possible, but prove the channel for your business first. And we’re happy to help you do that and get clarity on it. So go ahead and check out the link that Brody mentioned. Yeah, there you go.

Oh, totally.

My friends this stuff makes me feel like I’m so far behind, but it inspires me that there’s a lot to learn and a big future ahead, Natasha. We wish you the best.

Thanks so much. And thanks for listening.

Ep 168: Secrets to Selling the Go-Giver Way with Bob Burg

RV: (01:04)

One of my favorite books of all time is a book called the Go-Giver sold about a million copies and is written by the man you are about to meet who is a long-time friend of mine, Bob Burg. He coauthored that book and several others with John David Mann, who was also a long time friend of mine. And they turned it into a Go-Giver series. His, their newest parable is called the Go-Giver influencer, but Bob and I met, I believe through Zig Ziglar way back in the day. And that was how we got connected. And then we’ve just known each other over the years. He is a hall of fame speaker. He BB for so many great companies, even a former us president speaks all all over the world. And, and these days is, is more focused on just building up a community and impact and people from home in, in a world of COVID like we all are. And we hadn’t connected in a while. And so Bob, I just, man, I’m, I’m honored that you’re here. My friend, it’s good to see you. Oh,

BB: (02:10)

The honor’s mine were already one of my all timeFavorite people, which I believe, you know,

BB: (02:14)

I hope you know that.

RV: (02:17)

Well, I thank you. I, you know, it’s funny because I knew you personally, bef long before I read the Go-Giver, there’s, there’s a few of author friends that I have where it’s like, I don’t actually end up reading their book until years after I know them. And, and once I read the Go-Giver, I was like, Oh, now I know why we hit it off. We have such a shared philosophy. And for, for people that don’t know, haven’t heard of the Go-Giver you know, I certainly want to hear the story about you, how you’ve built your business in your personal brand. So what we talk about on this show, but I, I feel like it’s so interconnected to the message and the principle that you teach in your parables specifically, the Go-Giver. So can you like, just give us the, the, the premise and the introduction to what the Go-Giver concept is all about?

BB: (03:07)

Oh, sure. The, the basic premise, and it’s actually very simple one, and that is that shifting your focus and, and this is where it really begins shifting your focus from getting to giving. And when we say giving in this context, we simply mean constantly and consistently providing immense value to others, understanding that doing so is not only a, a more pleasant way of conducting business. It’s actually the most financially profitable way as well. And, and, and it’s important to note, I think that when we say that it’s not for some, you know, Wu Wei out there magical mystical reasons. It, it actually makes very rational, logical sense when you’re that person who can take your focus off of yourself and place it on making other people’s lives better, right. Helping them solve their challenges, helping them get what they want help helping to bring them closer to happiness.

BB: (04:09)

Right? However, that, that ends up working out through what you do. If people feel good about you, people want to get to know you, they like you, they trust you. They want to be a part of your life. They want to do business with you. They want to refer you and introduce you and tell others about you. So, you know, that’s really you know, where, where it comes from. And, but it has to be very genuine. It has to be authentic. You have to not, and I know you are, and, and I know the people you teach and who you coach and mentor are as well. It has to really come from a place of, of wanting to help, desiring to bring that kind of value to others.

RV: (04:50)

Yeah. And I, you know, I know you’re, you’re such a proponent of like the free enterprise system in general. And, you know, I think like what you said, there’s a heart part of this, of just being, you know, thinking about other people, which I agree with so much. And I’m so aligned on and was an area that I’ve, I’ve had to grow and continue to have to grow constantly and actively pursue. That brings a level of satisfaction and joy, but there is also a shocking element to this, that money somehow shows up as a by-product of this. Why do you still believe that? Why do you believe that? What other evidence do you have, you know, in, with your, the success of your own personal brand or other people that, that make you go, if you trust this, it will work

BB: (05:45)

Because it’s not something you have to trust on blind faith. It’s, it’s actually the only thing in a free market that’s ever been proven to work. Now let’s, let’s clarify when we say free, what we mean is no one is forced to do business with others. People do it on their own volition. Now this should not be confused with cronyism where, you know, as we know you know, whether big businesses, special interests, whatever, through their lobbyists on K street, basically by the influence of politicians to make laws and rules and regulations that benefit, that’s not what we’re talking about. That is not capitalism. That is cronyism in a free market. People only buy because they believe it’s in their best interest to do so. Right. But this is great because it means that that entrepreneur whose focus is on bringing value to others, right?

BB: (06:44)

Pleasing that other person, helping them get what they want. That’s the person who, you know, let’s put it this way. I used to sit when I used to speak at sales conferences, you know, back before the COVID days when we actually went places to speak at conferences, I, you know, I’d be sitting in front of a room full of all these salespeople. And I’d say, I know nobody’s going to buy from you because you have a quota to meet, right. They’re not going to buy from you because you need the money and they’re not gonna even gonna buy from you because you’re a really nice person they’re going to buy from you only because they believe that it’s in their best interest to do so. And in a free market, which all I guarantee you you know, you and me and everyone listening, watching this, we, this is how we operate because no one has to buy from any of us. Right. It, that’s the only reason why anyone’s going to do business with us. So there’s nothing that we need to have, you know, blind faith about if we don’t please that other person, if we don’t bring immense value to them, they’re not doing business with us.

RV: (07:46)

And how does that, how has that showed up in your career? I mean, you know, you sell millions of books between all your books. You’ve got all of these, you know, places that you spoke at. And I know you’ve spoken at some of the largest, I mean, you mentioned the sales meetings. I know it’s more than that, but specifically in the world of sales, you have spoken at some of the biggest and largest you know, kind of sales gatherings, you know, is that a philosophy that you carried into your career early on as a personal brand, and it helps you, or is this something you kind of learned along the way that amplified what you were doing? I think

BB: (08:21)

There are two aspects to that. And it’s a great question. One is I was very fortunate, very blessed to be born to two great people who they were all about bringing value to others. So I got to see that as an example, now, as I grew up and got into the business world, you know, I, I think I kind of lost my way for a while. And I was around people who did things in a way that probably weren’t the best example and in some word, but some weren’t, you know, and so I don’t know what if I was necessarily on the right track. I think for a while it became more. Now I always had a great product or service I was representing when I sold for other companies. So that wasn’t the issue. It was a matter of the focus being on myself and the sale.

BB: (09:09)

Okay. and I remember that I was in kind of a, kind of, I was in a sales slump and I came back to the office one day and I saw a guy there and a much older guy. He was not even in the sales department. I think he was in the engineering department. Nice guy didn’t say much, but he was one of these people and we’ve all met, you know that when, whenever he did say something, it was always very profound. Sure. And I think he saw me as sort of a Joe in the Go-Giver, which I would write about 25 years later with John David Mann. But I think he saw me as that young up and coming ambitious, aggressive, you know, nice guy, but whose focus was on himself, but not where it should be. And he said to me, can I give you some advice?

BB: (09:58)

Fortunately, I’ve always been a pretty good student when it comes to listening to people around me. And I said, absolutely, please do. And he said, Berg, he was a last name kind of guy. He said, bird, if you want to make a lot of money in sales, he said, don’t have making money as your target. Your target, he said is serving others. Now, when you hit the target, you’ll get a reward. And that reward will come in the form of money. And you can do with that money, whatever you choose, but never forget the money is simply the reward for hitting the target. It ain’t the target itself. Your target is serving others and Rory that’s when it hit me that great salesmanship is never about the sales person. Great salesmanship is never about the products or services as important as those are. Great. Salesmanship is always about the other person. It’s about the people whose lives you choose to touch with the value you provide. It’s the people whose lives are a little bit better just because you were part of it. And I think when we go with that attitude, which is much more like my parents’ attitude than, than the people who I kind of started to learn from, I think we go with that attitude. We’re nine steps ahead of the game in a 10 step game.

RV: (11:30)

Yeah. I mean, amen. It’s, it’s, it’s so good. And I mean, when I say go-givers one of my favorite books, Shaw, like I read a ton, I love it. And I’m telling you, this is like one of my top five all time favorite books. I mean, I think because, and it’s, it’s, it’s shocking to me, how rare you hear this message that you’re talking about, and particularly in the world of success, it’s all about achieve grind, hustle, grow. It’s a very centered message. It’s a very self-serving accomplish acquire, like, you know, grow your influence, grow your title. And, you know, I just am so aligned and believe with in the same that, that all of those things happen as a by-product of the number of people that you reach and the amount of value you provide. And I think it’s so, so eloquent. So, so tell us a story about the go giver. Like, did you, I mean, a million copies of a book is, is amazing. I mean, this is so few get there. How did you get the book deal? How did you meet John David Mann? Did this, did you guys like light up the bestseller list right away? Like, was it easy to write? It’s a parable, right. So did you, did you know you wanted to write a parable? Like what’s the, what’s the story behind the success of this book?

BB: (12:50)

I can answer those really pretty easily. At first it came about because years and years ago, I had a book out called endless referrals. The sunrise with network, your everyday contacts into sales. It was basically a book on business networking, creating relationships, really for entrepreneurs and salespeople who knew they had a great product or service, they were proud of it. They knew how much of the value it brought, but they, they didn’t necessarily feel comfortable with the process of going out into their communities and creating those know like, and trust relationships, right. That they didn’t know how to associate. I was a how to guide that’s what it was, but I’d always read a lot of parallels, whether it was books like OD Mandino’s greatest salesman in the world or Babylon.

RV: (13:38)

Oh, another good one.

BB: (13:41)

I’m just trying to think, you know, back in the the late seventies, early eighties, doctors, Blanchard and Johns, and I’m a one minute series and then friends of ours, like Chris Weidner and certainly John Gordon, and so many people who have these magnificent you know, books. And what I w I found is that, you know, I’d read these parables and always enjoyed them so much learned a lot in a very short period of time. I think, you know, as, you know stories connect on a deeper level than a how to book, don’t get me wrong. I love how to books. I read hundreds if not thousands of them. But I think parables connect on a different level. So I thought, what if we could take the basic premise of endless referrals, which is all things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those people. They know like, and trust people have heard me say this for 30 years, probably they’re nauseated. When they hear me say that, by this point, I said, how could we take that and turn it into a parable? So I just thought, well, so what’s the, what’s the basic

RV: (14:47)

Trait.

BB: (14:48)

What’s the essence of a person who’s able to very quickly and sustainably create those those know, like, and trust relationships. Well, they’re givers, right? They’re always giving value. Their focus is on giving value. So that part was easy to come up with the title, but go giver. But it was, it was when I, when I, when John David Mann agreed to, to co-author it and be really the lead writer and storyteller, because he’s a genius I’m a how to write. But so what happened was John was the editor-in-chief of a magazine I used to write for, and every month I’d submit my column and he would write back. I’d never met him personally at that point. And it would always be just so kind and so fantastic and so, so much better than what it was. And he, but he was always very polite and humble and say, you know, is this okay?

BB: (15:38)

I put this here does this honor. And the running joke was that every month I’d, you know, write back and say, not only is it okay, you write my stuff better than I write my stuff. You know, when I came time for the book, John was the only one I wanted to write this with back then, John wasn’t well-known outside of his niche. Okay. Now this guy is the, the the co-op writer of choice. Whenever an agent or publisher has a celebrity, a CEO, a athlete that they right. But back then, very few people outside of his, his niche.

Speaker 4: (16:12)

Fortunately, I knew him. So I had asked him, so

BB: (16:16)

He was still busy though. And so one day he and his fiance now, his wife, Ana they were at her mom’s in on the West coast of Florida. They took a four hour drive. We, we had a three hour dinner and discuss the book and what we thought it could be. He he called me back about three weeks later and said, you know what, Anna and I talked it together. I think it’s a good idea. Let’s do this. So it really only took us a few months to write the story, but it took us 25 rejections over the course of a year from the various New York publishing houses to actually find the, the pub now along the way. And you know, of course, some of them were, well, we don’t need another parable. There’s already too many. Some, it’s just not what we’re looking for other

Speaker 4: (17:01)

Agent at the time. Yeah.

BB: (17:03)

Yeah. The McBride literary agency. And they were absolutely fantastic, but we always listen to what the, the publishers who said no, and we listened to what they said. And sometimes it was just, it just wasn’t the right fit or whatever. But other times they Al they had advice that that was really good. And so

Speaker 4: (17:22)

We kept on, you know, with chiseling it

BB: (17:24)

And improving it. And what we really did was improve the marketing package for okay. Because that kind of came up, you know, a whole bunch. And, and and finally, I think the 26th one, if I’m, if I’m correct, and that was portfolio of business, division of a penguin random house, they loved it. And I’ll tell you what, Rory, they have been the perfect publishing, supportive and knowledgeable, and, you know, you know, they’re rooting for it. And so it’s just been great. So it happened exactly when it was, when it was supposed to. But yeah.

RV: (18:01)

And did you have a big old lawn? Did you do like a big old launch? I mean, this of course is back in the days, mostly before, you know, virtual summits and funnels and lead magnets and all that kind of stuff, but, but did you have a big launch plan? Did you sell a bunch of units in like opening week or did it, was it kind of a slower build or like what, how did that happen?

BB: (18:25)

So for that, we, we did put together a really nice size launch. I, you know, I don’t really do those anymore when I have new books and I don’t really see, excuse me, them being as effective as they used to be. Although that might just be me also, because I also know there’s launches that do wonderfully well for people. So I don’t want in any way to say it’s a, you know, this or that, but but back then, you know, we, we did a, a really big launch, but also sold a whole bunch of books to different companies that were going to have me come in to speak. And I really lowered my feet to do that because we really wanted in the first few weeks to really have a big buildup a bit. Right. And and, and that helped, you know, get the book on the wall street journal bestsellers list pretty quickly.

BB: (19:14)

And we’re very fortunate because the early adopters of the book were not the people who really needed to read it the early adopters. Cause we, we received emails from many of them. They were simply people who were already extremely successful at huge organizations. They were the, this or that and said, what you guys wrote is just what I is, how I built my business. Okay. But nobody believes me. So they were getting our books to cut up, put through their organizations because you know how it is, the third party says it and it’s Oh yeah, well, of course. And you know, and so, so that really helped as well. So there were a whole lot of good things that came together at the, at the same time.

RV: (20:02)

Yeah. Well, that’s, you know, that’s one of the things that’s so powerful about being a speaker and publishers, you know, even today love working with speakers. Cause they know if you’re a speaker you’re going to be out in front of a lot of people and they’re going to buy books. And that was how we launched take the stairs. I mean, we were doing, doing deals with early clients to get them to order lots and lots of copies. And I was basically leveraging my speaking as a, as a carrot to get them to do it. And we generated a bunch of pre-orders that way. Did you? And, and for me, I wanted to be a, I wanted to be a speaker and kind of became an author out of necessity. And then now I kind of view myself as more of like an author, like more of a content creator than even I do a speaker. But how did speaking happen alongside is, did you, did you start speaking first and were you really successful as a speaker and then you kind of bolted this on, did they kind of grow together? Like what was, how did you get, how did you get your first speaking gigs and when did it happen in relation to like the Go-Giver?

BB: (21:06)

Yeah, so I was in, in sales of course, and then I was sales manager of that company. And I started after, when I was a big student of sales, you know, so I was, I was, you know, reading zigs books and Tom Hopkins books and, and getting the back then it was cassette tape albums. Right. and I, I was just a total student of sales and I went to a a seminar once and at the UN I bought the person’s tapes in the back afterwards. And in the back of his Syria, you know, the, the album, there was a page that said, if you want to make some extra money speaking and selling these tapes, call our office, which I did. And they taught me how to speak at all these places for free every civic club, group, organization, anybody that would have me in to do these 25 minute talks and then like, you know, a three minute commercial at the end.

BB: (22:06)

And then in boom. And so, and I did that for a couple of years and you know, sold a ton for them. And it was great training, but eventually I wanted to kind of go into my own with my own sort of things that were working for me that I put together. And, and and so I just, you know, I actually, I joined the national speakers association, which you and I are both part of it. You had mentioned about the helping you, you were inducted into the hall of fame, I think. Was it last year, two years ago?

RV: (22:36)

2019. I was, I went in, I think it was the year. Yeah. Just like just, I guess two years ago.

BB: (22:43)

Yeah. So congratulations. And I remember I was not at that convention, but I remember when I saw it, cause I opened up the thing to look to see who were the CPAs, which is the, you know, the hall of fame and I saw you and I said, Oh man, that is so wonderful. He so deserves it. That was wonderful. And and yeah, so so it, because at, at national speakers association, you know, you, you, who, who were there, the people who are successful have successful speaking businesses. So I learned from them how they did it. I’m a big believer, Rory that you, you know, that it’s not necessary. It’s usually not productive to try to create the wheel. Right. You invent the wheel, especially when it’s already been invented. I’m a big believer in learning systems. So long as those systems are congruent with your values I define a system as simply the process of predictably achieving the goal based on a logical and specific set of how to principles, the key being predictability of it’s been proven that by doing a, you’ll get the desired results of B, you know, all you need to do is a and continue to do you’re going to get the dessert.

BB: (23:54)

Right. So I learned from those who did it, and then at one of the meetings Randy Pennington, I remember, I don’t know if you know, Randy great, great guy. And he had said, you know, Berg, you really should write a book because it’s going to help you position your side. I didn’t want to why write a book? I was selling my cassette tapes up there, you know, doing programs and having a lot of fun, doing that. And and you know, doing pretty well for a couple of years, but, but he said, you know, it’s going to help you market yourself better. You’re going to be better position. You’re going to get higher fees. You’re going to, you know, so I did. And that’s when I wrote endless referrals and he was right. It was a wonderful marketing tool, but I’m like, you, I I’m like you. I started out as a speaker who wrote for utilitarian reasons. Now I consider myself more of a writer and content creator who’s who speaks.

RV: (24:45)

Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, NSA, I mean, that’s where I met Zig Ziglar and Brian, Tracy. I mean, like just walking around the hallways, I mean, it’s incredible the people that you meet there. And that was such, such, such an important part of my journey. And then the other thing that’s interesting is the more that I am around these really ultra successful speakers and authors, almost all of us have a story about how we started our career at one point, doing speeches for free selling something for someone else who was career track or Fred Pryor, or in our case, we, we, our former business, it was our business, but that was how we started. We would speak for free. And then we would sell a ticket for like, I think Anthony Robbins, he sold tickets. I want to say for Jim Rome. And you know, there’s Amy Porterfield used to who today is like a big celebrity. She used to work with Anthony Robbins. I’m pretty sure, like, it’s, it’s amazing how, you know, national speakers association, reading books and then learning to speak by under kind of someone else’s tutor, ledger, umbrella is such a common, common,

BB: (26:03)

Isn’t it? Yeah. There’s a pattern there. Definitely.

RV: (26:08)

Yeah. Well Bob, where, where do you want people to go if they want, if they want to connect with you and learn about all the things that you’re up to and like what you’re doing these days.

BB: (26:17)

Yeah. Best places. Burg B U R g.com and pretty much everything’s there.

RV: (26:23)

See, that’s a whole level, like Oprah goes by just her first name, but just when your last name only that’s like next level.

BB: (26:31)

And it’s also, you know, what it is though, Rory it’s age, because I remember I, you know, I’m 63. So when the internet really kind of started to be out there a little bit, and it was just, there was a who I knew who said, and he was from the Silicon Valley and, and he called me and he said, bird, I want you to get Berg. This thing called burg.com. I said, why would I want something called burg.com? I’m never going to, he said, trust me on this one. He actually walked me through showing me how to get it, but a am I glad I did? But you know, again, this is back of that. I think that was the mid nineties or something late nineties or something like that. So it was age more than anything, more than anything else

RV: (27:13)

That is classic. Well, Bob, thanks for sharing these stories and thanks for your wisdom. And I mean, just at, you know, a career, as you mentioned now, a couple of decades have gone by of just promoting and teaching these simple truths that continue to be true and they’ll continue to be true. And you’ve made such a difference on our, on our industry and our profession and and just on the world, man. So we wish you the best.

BB: (27:40)

Thank you. Likewise, my friend and brother, I appreciate you.

Ep 166: How to Create a Viral TEDx Talk with Jennifer Cohen

Hey brand builder Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

You know, nothing fires me up more than when somebody that we know that is a friend. And then also someone who is a client succeeds in a really big way. I mean, that is why we started brand builders group is we just, there’s no amount of money. There’s no amount of recognition that gives you the satisfaction that you get when you watch someone else succeed and you help them. And that’s why I’m excited for you to hear the story of Jennifer Cohen. Now, Jennifer is a, here’s why we’re on the show. What we’re going to talk about is she hired us about a year and some change ago to help her create a vision that she had for a Ted talk that Ted talk has now gone viral. It has millions of views. It is actually featured on ted.com, which is incredible and very rare.

And so we’re going to talk about how did she do that? What was the story? But you know, she is a very successful personal brand really, and, and was long before she met us. I mean, she’s been featured on good morning, America and entrepreneur. She, in fact, she hosts a podcast called habits and hustle all in partnership with entrepreneur and she’s interviewing Dr. Oz and Matthew McConaughey and Tony Robbins. And she’s also an author. She has several books. One of my favorite titles that she’s got is called strong as the new skinny which she released a few years ago. But she’s also a successful entrepreneur and she’s done a lot of things in the digital space. She is most proud of launching the good human foundation and some of her non profit work, which hosts an annual it’s called babes for boobs bachelor auction, supporting breast cancer research and treatment. So she’s just super cool. And we want to hear the story of what she’d been up to over the last year, because, and, and this is a bone I have to pick with you, Jennifer. You didn’t tell me how well the Ted talk went. I saw it on YouTube and I was like, what the, what? Like what, like, how did you not tell us? So anyways, welcome to the show.

You’re right. You have a boat to pick and, and a well-deserved bone to pick. Actually I have to say you know, why I was so busy that I didn’t have the everyday of, I told you, when you texted me, I was like, Oh my God. Like, thank God. Because for like Mo like for like five weeks, probably I was like, Oh my God, I got it. I got a contact. Or I got a text where I got a call Rory. And like, I just one day bled into another. And I, I know I’m I was,

And you are a ma I mean, you’re, you’re momming. You got, you know, kids. So that’s, that’s also like a whole thing that you’re doing all that.

Exactly. I’m trying to do everything. And like, with two kids it’s not easy. And they’re also unschool virtually right now. So that whole layer of stuff as well, right. With the pandemic. So my apologies though, for sure.

Yeah. Well, anyways, you’re forgiven because this is such a, such a great thing. And you know, and obviously you are an author and you’re a speaker and stuff, but it’s, it’s also like, you know, there’s always a part of you. That’s like, is the stuff we’re teaching, does it actually work? Like, would it actually help? And, you know, to see someone that you work with have, have the kind of result that you did. And so I, it’s just really, really exciting. We’re so proud of you, which you are already know. So what, tell us the story, like, how did it ha how did you get the Ted talk? How did it all happen?

Okay, so really, I mean, you know, I’ll just start from the fact that I, so they actually approached me. So a Ted person reached out to me and they asked me if I’d be interested in like doing a Ted talk, which of course I jumped at the chance then of course, you know, how I met you is through a friend of mine who hired you to do something for his stuff. And I was, you know, my friend wanted me to come along to Nashville and, you know, sit there and like hear and listen to everything. And quite frankly, I was really blown away by how you kind of your, your approach and how good you are at what you do that that’s when I asked you afterwards, I’m like, can you help me carve out? So this is thing, like I wanted you to help me carve out or kind of take the ideas and the nuggets of information that was in my brain, and then create something and execute on those messages in a, in a way that would resonate.

And that was streamlined. So like, I think a lot of times people have a lot of good content. They have great ideas, but they don’t know how to like put them in a place or they don’t know how to like display it in a way that is succinct and organized. So you helped me with that. Like, you guys helped me, you especially helped me with that organization, creating, you know, taking what I had and creating soundbites that like really landed on people really well. And what’s really funny is what you don’t know. Cause I haven’t spoken to you about this is that, you know, when I did this, when I did the talk so many, like so many, like other things were happening that first of all, there was a baby crying, which then threw me off, which then, you know, which made me kind of, I ended up like what we actually created together.

I thought was even way better than what I actually executed because right away that baby threw me off. And so I like missed a chunk of really good information at the beginning. And then towards like the middle towards the end, I had another really big chunk that really like drove my messages home and the guy working the slides made a mistake and didn’t put the right slides up. So it threw me off again. So I missed it check. Yes. So I missed another chunk and I was like, Oh my God. Because when I practiced, it was like really strong. It was tight. It was strong. I was like, Oh my God, this was really good. I was really, I was really proud of us. Let me say, and then when those things out of my control that was complete, like external forces that I really had nothing to do with, through my, you know, cause I’m also, by the way, I was super nervous. Like let’s like not, I mean, it’s a very,

Of course. I mean, yeah, like it’s a big opportunity and they’ll know like, so my Ted talk, I was turned down by 27 different Ted organizations. I think I told you that I was actively prospecting to try to get one. And then I finally got one Douglasville who only took me because they were so small and it was their first year. I don’t even think they wanted me, but they’re like fine. We need somebody and, and contrast this with your experience. But either way, like when you get that opportunity, I mean the Ted stages at this point, it’s sacred. It’s like, this can change your life. This can change your life. So I did not know this. So, so this is a big moment. You’ve prepared all of this. Like you spent time and money working up to this and then a baby’s crying. And then the dude in the back messed up your slides, freaking out.

The other part that you don’t know also why I was like, I was even extra freaked out about the baby was when I went out. I said, like I said, the first sentence. And then they’re like, Oh wait can you go back? Something was wrong with the sound we can’t really in the back. We got, I started again. So I was like, are you serious? So like I had to go and do that again. So I was like, Oh my gosh. So when I got off the stage, my husband was with me, whatever. And I was like really kind of upset. Like I was like, Oh my God. Like that was something that I spent a lot of time on money on. And it was really good. Like there, the chunks that I didn’t talk about were like, I thought really good. And I was really bummed.

So then when all of this happened, like I think out of the gate, it did fairly well, like right off the bat, I got like a hundred thousand views maybe. And then like, did you promote it? Like, no, I did nothing. Like, nah, I still haven’t done a thing, not a thing. So we should talk about that. Cause we could throw fuel on the fire know, trust me. I know. Cause like, I’ll tell you about that after. So like not, and then I’m like, Oh, this isn’t true. But then it kind of stagnated at like a hundred thousand. I was like, all right, whatever. And then like, I don’t know, like a few months ago or four months ago or whatever, is that a one 50? And I was like, all right, whatever then. And I forgot to check it. Like I was just not really paying attention.

And then one day, like three months ago, maybe four months ago it went to 200. And then I started noticing that at 200, I started to get a lot of like DMS and like different emails. People were sending me to info at Jennifer Cohen. Right. And then from 200, it jumped to like every day it was like climbing 20,000 more, 20,000 more, 20,000 more. And then next thing you know, I was like at the million and then it went to a million, one, a million, two, and millions. And like, I was like, I had no idea like how this happened because everyone was like, are you promoting this? What are you doing? I’m like, honestly I have no idea even how to promote this thing. And like, like the amount of incoming, thousands of DMS, thousands of emails, like, so now it’s, it’s hitting like I think on YouTube alone, I think it’s going to, it’s going to be at 2 million problems, like looking at my wife, like probably in a week maybe cause it’s at one nine ish or something like that. But like, yeah, you’re going to pass me, which me off.

That’s like, not even a question. I mean, let’s just say it right now. It’s going to happen. I mean also the engagement, if you look at the engagement or the comments crazy like, hi. So I think what ha what I find interesting is that I think people are what they liked about. It were all the things that I wasn’t so crazy for, which was the fact that there was like a a rawness to it. It wasn’t perfect. It was kinda like disheveled a little bit. And like, you know, it was like, it wasn’t, I wasn’t, I wasn’t. So polished was, I think that people actually were like, you know what, she’s, it’s it kind of like makes them feel there’s like, I’m less intimidated that like resonated a little bit. And the messaging, I think overall the content people really were inspired by what the content was. And so, yeah. So thank you for letting like helping me put it together and you know, you’re you’re, you guys are really good at what you do. So,

You know, th thank you for that. I mean, that it’s, it really is just fulfilling and exciting by the way. So we need to tell people that the, the name, the name of the talk is how to get anything you want. Is that

The secret to getting anything you want?

Yeah. The secret to getting anything you want. So at the time of this recording, it’s just like South of 2 million and climbing it in less than a year. And it’s, you know, this is changing, you’re changing. This is changing your life. And I think to what you said, many of the people who come to us struggle with exactly what you were struggling with, which is like, I have all these things I want to say and all these different facets. And it was just about focusing it and finding this, you know, the uniqueness, finding the through line all the way down to boldness and then turning, you know, figuring out what problem does that solve? What is your message in one sentence, and then building a technique around it this, this framework. So the, are you tell, tell us about, tell us about that process. Like how much, like, how did that help you or what do you, what do you remember about doing that work? Cause that’s, that was hard work that that’s harder work than even coming up with the word,

Not for you. It’s not, I mean, you’re just good at that stuff. Like what, you know, what it is. I find that everyone has some, a skill and something that they’re good at. Right. And that’s just so happens to be what you’re really good at. You’re able to take a lot of like jumbled information and like really, really, really organize it and streamline it to make, to be succinct. So the process was quite easy actually. I mean, like I said, I think that you’re just naturally gifted at this. I said this to you too. Like, I think you’re just naturally gifted at like, hearing all the verbal, you know, diarrhea and blahblahblahblahblah and then making and like, and then making it, like making it into something that’s actually coherent. Right. Cause I knew that it, I knew what my key points were and I think what view I said, I want, I knew that it was about asking for what you want being fooled going after it, all, all of that stuff. And like, and the key story, which was like a big story. I don’t know if you want to ruin it or talk about it here, but you know of that being a pivotal moment in my life. Yeah.

You talking about the Keanu Reeves store. Yeah. We’re not going to tell the whole story, but they can go watch the talk if you want to see. But I think, you know, like the process that we take people through, which, which, you know, and you also had the benefit of going through with Darren, like big shout out to Darren Prince, like much love to you, buddy, miss you connect, connect us. You had the benefit of going through that experience with him. And so you got to like work it on someone else and then apply it to yourself. But

Why saw what you did with him and this not to him. I wanted to interject because you know, it’s very hard. I think when it’s a very saturated and very claustrophobic environment right now with social media and everybody trying to build a brand, I feel that’s become like a very big thing right now. And it’s very hard to like stand out right when everyone’s kind of saying generally the same thing. So it’s super important. I think now even more than ever is to like really find that like little niche, that little nugget that sets you apart from everybody else. And when I sat with you in that room with dare and doing it, but a bunch of other people with all those pieces of paper on the wall and like really like that whole I don’t, what do you call that when you,

Yeah. So, so that’s called a brand strategy day, which is, you know, it’s the most expensive way for people to do business with us to do that. But we, but we, we take people through that same day for that, obviously. Well, yeah, that was, we were working on Darren’s stuff that day, but the, the same, we take people through the same process in our events and through one-on-one coaching, like the same questions, the brand DNA helix and all this stuff. But anyways, so what we did with you is a brand strategy day. Most of our clients experience that through one of our events, which are like 20, 30 people. And we take, we take them through all the same exercises and all the same stuff. It’s just not one-on-one.

Yeah. And it’s, and like I said, like, I, I, what I saw was you took all this information that was generally just good ideas or ideas. And then you like created like some type of like meat on the bone to kind of disseminate it. Right. Which people I think over underestimate how hard that is. I mean, it’s very hard to do it. That’s what I’m saying. That I think that there’s like very much a skill in that. Right. Cause you know, it’s that being able to take an idea in your brain someone’s brain and then figuring out a way to create a brand and structure around that is very difficult. And so I sat there for it the whole day and I was like, wow, I could not believe where we were from walking in to when we left. Like it was a massive difference in messaging.

Well I love hearing that. Thank you. And I, you know, for you, we identified your uniqueness as boldness and that’s the first thing is to really what we call find your unique uniqueness so that you can exploit it in the service of others, which is a quote from Larry. Winget one of, one of my mentors that I had heard. And once we narrow that down for you, was that boldness was, it was what it was about. And then the message, the one sentence statement or command and instruction you want people to do, which for you was chase what you want or ask for what you want. Don’t just take what you can get. And so when I saw your Ted talk and I was like, what a Whoa, and then I and then I watched it and I was like, gosh, I wonder how closely you delivered it.

And I was like, you followed it to a T and it was so clear. And and so we, we create that uniqueness. And then, like you say, we, we take people through in captivating content, the modular content method of building it into a story and points these, you know, the catchphrases or the sound bites, as you say, and extrapolating the signature story, but you stayed so on point and to what you’re talking about, the problem is noise. And what cuts through the noise is that precision level of clarity of knowing in one sentence and then building the framework around it with the 10%. So, so we’ve you, then we, we created that little formula, which was which is something you do in your real life called the 10% target. Can you, can you like walk us through the 10% target? Cause this is like good for everybody.

Well, the 10% target is making 10 attempts at what you want in life. Right. So and what we talk about not to give away the whole Ted talk, but

We’ll watch it. We’ll put a link to it too, like in the show notes so people can go, go click on it. Yeah,

Absolutely. But I mean, the truth of the matter is, and this is actually true. Most people don’t even go after what they want. One time, let alone two or three times. So the idea behind the 10% target is making 10 attempts and failing 90% of the time. And again, you know, what’s funny. It’s like, it’s what you it’s, it’s not so much like what you say, it’s how you say it. That makes it resonate and hit somebody in a certain way. And what I found so interesting is the way that we said it really hit people in a way that wanted them to take action, which you know why, which is why I think that it became very sharable, right? Repeat viral, right. People started sharing it with their friends call. You know, I can’t tell you how many times people like are calling me or what not calling, but DM-ing and emailing me that calls people don’t get nobody calls anyway, nobody calls. But like, Oh my God, because of this, I did X or because of this, I’m going to do X, right. That actionable item that makes people actually go from watching something passively to actually doing which I think I’m very, I’m very proud of it actually for that reason.

I mean, it’s so good. And that’s where, you know, and that’s where it’s like, you know, we, we always have to step back and go, we can’t take credit for that. Like that was, those are your ideas. All we’re helping do is pull it out of you and sharpen it and package it and like position it. But you know, when we try to teach people how to do this, you know, we’re always telling them the best marketing in the world is a changed life. It’s not a fancy graphic. It’s not the perfect words on a page. It’s not beautifully edit video. The best marketing in the world is a changed life. When you have a clear message and you deliver a clear behavior, then someone can hear it because it’s so clear and then they do it and then it changes their life. And then they tell everybody and their actions tell everyone because their life changes and people go, what are you doing?

Why did you do that? How did you do that? And they go, Oh, you know, I watched this talk to help, you know, help me just be more confident asking for what I want. And it’s, it’s, you know, like you said too, it’s, it’s simple truths. It’s, it’s like, we’re all saying variations of the same thing, but the way you say it with such precision and clarity and it just like it just so much, it made me so happy. And then, you know, even for me as a, as a viewer, I’m just delighted, even though I, you know, I know what’s coming, but for me to sit, like, I’m like, Oh yeah, here’s the Keanu Reeves story. And here she’s introducing the problem. And here comes your uniqueness and here comes your message and your framework and, and you, it was delightful to see you execute, but then it was just so wonderful as the receiver to just be like, I get sucked away into your message of going, man, I need to be, I need to be more bold. Like I need to do this. And it’s just so, so, so clear and simple.

Well, thank you. I mean, and yes, I, I agree and I appreciate it and I, I thank you for that, but I think that you’re right. The clarity is what, how it hits on, right. That’s the difference between being a success or, or not being right. A success, right. Because it’s the clarity of how you’re able to bridge your message to other people.

Yeah. That’s a great way of, of, of saying it, it, that is like the bridge, that connection between you and other people is kind of how, how clear can you say? Well all right, well, I, this has flown by, like I knew I knew it would, but we had to share this story. Where do you want people to go? If you want them to learn about you and we’ll put a link to the Ted talk again, so that they can, that they can get at the secret to getting anything you want in life is the name of the talk. And which, by the way, passes our title tests, where we, we are very, we have very structured formulas for titles, which you also, you know, we’re so humble and malleable to learning, especially being as successful as you were, you know, doing lots of things in life before we ever found you, you were such a great, you know, willing to just take input. So we’ll put a link to the Ted talk, but anyways, where else do you want people to go to, to learn about you connect up?

You can go to Instagram, which is the real Jen cohen.com. One N J E N C O H T N. The real Jen Cohen. They can go to my website, Jennifer cohen.com, I think that’s.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, and, and this is, so would you say this has really changed your life? I mean, have you, you’ve seen, you know, like change your business, change your business.

It’s given, it’s giving me more work if that’s what you’re asking in the sense that like, you know, I was not really focusing so much on my own brand is much beef at all, but now this is kind of kicking me in the butt and I have like a lot of different opportunities when it comes to my own personal ground. And I’m also, I didn’t, I’m writing a book right now based on the talk.

Did you get, did you, do you already have a publisher for it?

Well, no. I have like a couple, I’m not, I’m going to be using a difference. I’m actually just signed with an agent actually a couple of weeks ago. And I don’t have a deal yet. I’m not, I had a deal to be honest with you, but now I’m redoing it. So yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll report back in about three weeks or a month.

Yeah. Well, let’s wait. We need to talk more both about what you can do to throw fuel on this organic fire. And then also talk about leveraging this into a book. So be on the lookout for that y’all, but we’ll put a link to Jennifer cohen.com. You could check out the real Jed co and on the Insta. And Jen is just, I mean, congratulations, I it’s inspiring. And I, and I hope that people listening are inspired because it shows that it’s like, it’s real. And if you, if you do it and you’re humble and you work hard and you do the right things and you give value, like it, it pays off and you’re, you’re, you’re literally impacting millions of lives and just job well done.

Thank you. And a job well done to you. If anyone’s listening to this and you know, they’re, they’re on the fence about you guys for you or the company to help them this should be a huge, a huge push in that direction because quite, and I will say this quite frankly, and I meet a lot of people. I live in Los Angeles and you know, everybody and their dog are, are, are pitching and approaching me and everyone around who say they do this. And you really are very talented and I wouldn’t hire anyone except you.

Well, thanks, Jim. We wish you all the best stay tuned. And we’ll, we’ll, we’ll look forward to following your journey be well, thank you.

Ep 164: Successful Self-Talk for Personal Brands with Jon Acuff

RV: (00:08)

Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

RV: (01:04)

Well, yeah, every so often I got to get together with my pal, Acuff, John Acuff, and tell you what he’s up to and glean some wisdom from him. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the New York times bestselling author of seven books. His last book was a number one wall street journal bestseller called finish. Give yourself the gift of done. He’s incredible speaker. He’s freaking hilarious. He’s been doing a lot of research lately and conducting studies and just really fascinating. We’ll hear about that as related to goals and specifically today about overthinking, but he speaks for big companies, FedEx Nissan Chick-Filet he’s got well over half a million people following him on social and we’ve just been friends for years. He lives here in Nashville. And so we have known each other for a while and he’s got a new book that is coming out called soundtracks, the surprising solution to overthinking.

RV: (02:07)

And so we’re going to talk about what that is and specifically some of the mindset issues that need to be resolved to really build and grow and become an influential personal brand like Mr. Aycock. So John brother, welcome back. Yeah. Thanks for having me again, Roy. It’s always fun to see you. Yeah, man. So so tell me about soundtracks. What, what is this all about? Where did this come from? I know that you’ve been really diving into some of the data and some of the research here in the last few years. And so I’m guessing this is connected to that.

JA: (02:45)

Yeah. So I would say if you’re a personal brand and you’re going to launch a book, you’re going to do a product you’re going to do any sort of new endeavor. There’s three things to look for. That’s kind of my Venn diagram. The first thing is you look for a personal connection. Do I have a personal connection to this content? Second thing is, is there a real need in the marketplace? Can I identify a need? The third is, is there a hole in the market for me to put it into? So for me I’ve always been an overthinker. I learned some things about my thoughts and that I got to choose them in 2008 and it kind of launched my speaking career. And so I’d been working on choosing my thoughts, which turned into my actions, which turn into results for a long time.

JA: (03:28)

And then I said, okay, but I wonder if other people need that, are there other overthinkers? And so I have a PhD named Mike Peasley who helps me with research and we asked 10,000 people if they struggle with overthinking and 99.5% of them said yes. So I knew there was a need. And then I went to the marketplace and there’s some great books about overthinking, but a lot of them say, stop it, stop it, stop it. And my opinion was, why would I ever turn off this amazing machine? What if I just said it with good things were thoughts that pushed me forward up thoughts that pushed me back. And so that for me was the Venn diagram where I said, okay, I’m willing to invest a few years of my life into this idea. And I think it’s going to reach a lot of people and I’m deeply connected to it. So let me spend the time. That’s kind of the Genesis of why I decided to write about overthinking.

RV: (04:16)

So when you say overthinking, is that the same as saying, we’re thinking limiting thoughts about ourselves. Like we’re, we’re, we’re dealing with self doubt and insecurity and there’s like, like when you say soundtrack is like the metaphor here, is it the, it is the negative kind of tape rolling in our mind is that’s what we’re talking about.

JA: (04:41)

It can be at a hundred percent. Can be. I mean that, you know, one of the things we say is that in all the research, cause we took thousands of people through this. Like that for me has been the evolution as a personal brand, you know, early books. I didn’t understand the research side of things. Now I have ideas in this office, but if I send them out of this office, you know, who they help John ACOF, you can only, it’s a very narrow focus. But if I take all these ideas and I have the generous thousands of readers who go we’ll test those for a month, we’ll give you feedback. We’ll then I have 35 different stories where a stay-at-home mom, a CEO, you know, a college student can go, Oh, I see myself in that book because I’ve tested the ideas with other people.

JA: (05:22)

And so for me, one of the things we said was we never found somebody who’s problem was they over-thought compliments. We never found somebody. Who’s like, I just keep overthinking what a good mom I am. And it’s really causing problems in my life. But on a broader sense, I define overthinking as when, what you think gets in the way of what you want. And the difference between overthinking and being prepared. Cause that’s great. Natural pushback. Okay. Well maybe I’ll just prepare it. I like to be analytical. Being prepared, always leads to action. Overthinking always leads to overthinking. It always just leads to more thinking. So be, be analytical, just look okay, does this turn into action? If it doesn’t, you might be stuck in an overthinking loop. I call that a soundtrack, which is this, you know, kind of repetitive thought that you hear again and again

RV: (06:10)

And again say, and you say that again. You said being prepared, always leads to action, but overthinking just leads to more thinking

JA: (06:19)

Some more overthinking. Yeah. That’s the difference. So if you said to me, you know, as somebody who writes books, people come up to me and go, Oh, I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’ve been working on one for 10 years. I know that that’s too long. Like I know, you know that you’re, there’s the chance you’re overthinking that. Where if you say I’m working on a book, I’ve already finished four chapters, I’ve already submitted to the publisher. Like I can see actions. And so the goal of the book is to help you get new thoughts that lead to new actions that generate new results. And most people don’t understand that they get to choose what they think about. They think I thought of something. They have not something they hone. And what I, what I try to teach is your thoughts are going to come by choice or chance and choices so much better.

RV: (07:04)

So as it, as you apply this to personal brands and specifically yourself, you’ve built a huge social media following, you have launched New York times bestselling books, you have this great speaking career. What are some of the evolutions of like the soundtracks that you’ve had to battle in your own mind related to those different things? Or is there a certain part of your business that you’ve really struggled with it? Or is there like, if, is, has it been like a series of, you know, I had to overcome this hurdle and then this hurdle and this hurdle, and like talk to us about your evolution as a personal brand, as it relates to the evolution of the soundtracks you’ve had to like rewrite in your own head.

JA: (07:54)

Sure. Well, I mean, where I first discovered that it was powerful, impossible was 2008. I get an email from an event planner. Who’s been reading a blog. I had and said, Hey, would you come speak at our event? I’d never spoken professionally before. I didn’t even know that was a thing. I didn’t know. People got paid for it. I didn’t know how to do it. All I had was a thought, I had a new soundtrack that said, I think you can do this. I think I can do this. And then I, I threw overwhelming action at it. I worked on it. I did repetitions. I worked on it and it changed my life. Like the start of that thought was the start of me moving to Nashville was the start of writing. New York times. Best sellers was to start getting a speaker on the world.

JA: (08:33)

All I had no other evidence except for that thought. So that’s an example of where it worked well for me, where I said, okay, I’m going to listen to this soundtrack. I’m I’m going to make it true through action. And I’m going to see the results I get through that one that’s been more challenging is I’ve got a note right on my wall right here. I’ll pull it off. And all it says is ask for more. And I wrote that on 27th, 2020, because I found myself in negotiations, undervaluing my work. That’s something that every personal brand struggles with the idea of like, what do I price it as? I don’t want to price it as too much I don’t want to. And so I just, I needed those words. They’re not sexy. They’re not that, I mean, they’re not that catchy, but I needed to see ask for more because I found myself listening to a broken soundtrack, who are you to charge that amount of money?

JA: (09:19)

Who are you to give that advice? Who are you? And I think that’s something that every personal brand struggles with. So for me, when it came to specifically money, I needed to say, okay, remember, ask for more, remember, ask for more value. What you do remember ask for more, even if it takes, you know, people have said that before, like, even if it takes you an hour, they’re paying you for the 10 years of expertise. They’re not paying for you for the hour. So change that soundtrack. So yeah, I would say there’s been, for me, it’s been a process. And every time I find a new one, I go, okay, what, what do I want to do with that broken soundtrack? How am I going to change that? How am I going to use a new one to push me forward into my business?

RV: (10:00)

And is that, so that’s a great example. So negotiating fees, or just what you’re pricing, your various offerings that have there been any others in the journey that we’re like along the way that were big ones or as it just kind of been more like a series of small ones.

JA: (10:17)

I mean, it’s been like they come in all shapes and sizes and that’s the fun thing is a soundtrack can be a song lyric. It can be a question from a friend. It can be a paragraph you read in a book. It’s not that you have to sit down and come up with the next, just do it. Don’t put that pressure on yourself. So for me, another one that I recognized fairly big one was when I show up at a speaking event, I’m there to serve the client. Not there to look like a rockstar. I want the event planner to win. I want the CEO to look good. I want the audience to win. And that service switch changed everything. Because now I get to say to the event planner, I’m here for 45 minutes. You’re here all year. How do I make you look like a rockstar?

JA: (10:58)

What have I done that? My goal is you’re getting texts during my speech from your CEO that says, this is exactly the kind of keynote we were looking for. Thank you so much for that. And that mindset changes how you serve on the front end. Now I’m, you know, I’m having a pre-call interview where I’m really digging in and going, what are the needs? What are the challenges? How do I serve them? Versus I have a keynote. I want John AKF to look a certain way. I want to get X amount of applause. Like that’s not what I’m trying to do. And that changed my business because then an event planner goes, okay, this is like, we’re working together. Like this is somebody who’s on my side. This is somebody who’s going to be easy to work with. I want to book them again. I want to recommend them other people. So that’s another example of a, a big one for me that I would say, okay, that changed how I look at, you know every event I speak out.

RV: (11:47)

Yeah. I love that. I I think that is so cool that it’s healthy for your, for your mindset. And it is a massive driver for the business, right? For them, the moment they think of you as like their partner versus like a piece like a, it’s like a speaker as a table setting. It’s like a task on a checklist that you check off when you’re planning a meeting. Like you have to deal with this thing. But once you kind of come on that side of like, this is a partner, this is my asset. Now you’re like doing stuff together. Long-Term I love that. Now I know you get the question a lot because you’ve got such a big social media following about, I want to write a book. I want to do what you do. What do you think are some of the biggest negative soundtracks that you hear? Other people that are personal brands, like th that you think, gosh, this is one I hear, or I notice all the time that keeps people stuck from like doing it. Whether it’s writing the book, starting the podcast, you know, going live on social, starting the keynote business. So what are, what are some of the other ones that you feel like, gosh, I see these all the time for personal brands.

JA: (13:02)

Yeah. The results aren’t coming fast enough, you know?

RV: (13:05)

Oh my gosh, that’s so good. The results, right.

JA: (13:08)

Coming fast enough. I tried this thing. It didn’t work. How long did you try it for 10 days? Well, that, I mean, what could you have possibly learned in 10 days? You know, I have a friend who’s a YouTube expert and we always talk about that because that’s one of the challenges is that people will go. I know, I know, I know I won’t get instant monetization. I know, I know it’s not going to be like, they say that on the front end, but the reality is three months in. They go, Hey, how come? I’m not like making a million dollars on YouTube yet? And you go, well, like it takes time to grow the thing. It takes time to serve the audience. It takes time to be. So like, I always, you know, my soundtrack to that would be the positive version would be accept the gift of invisibility.

JA: (13:46)

Like you get to make some mistakes when you’re invisible that you won’t get to make when you’re public. So don’t fight that, like learn the things before everybody’s watching, grow the things, like get a structure, get a foundation so that when I ball show up, you’ve got something to do with them. There’s a lot of personal brands that a million people getting into your thing would wreck your company. Cause you couldn’t even handle that. So like learning to be patient with the results and gracious with the progress, I think is a, is a big, is a big soundtrack. And, and like focusing on the marketing before the craft. So I think like to take writing, for instance, people go, I got to spend a ton of marketing and go, well, did you spend any on editing? They go, no, I didn’t. It didn’t need to be edited.

JA: (14:30)

It was great idea. And I go, then it, it’s not going to have a long tail. Like you need to like, make sure the craft is good too. Not just the marketing. And you see this when people say, Hey, John, I need writing advice. I’ll go. Sure. No problem. Then go, which publisher should I work with? And I’ll go, is, does the book exist yet? Do you have a good concept? And it’s, and there, you know, there’s this to rush to the finish line versus go. I have to do the things that are going to take me a little bit to get better at and grow. And so, yeah, I think those are that. And then I’m trying to achieve a hundred percent acceptance of your idea. I’m thinking that’s possible. It’s not, they’re going to be people that don’t like your idea and that’s okay.

JA: (15:13)

And if you get distracted by them, we live in a culture that over focuses on small handfuls of people. So you read an article that goes huge backlash to dah, dah, dah, dah, and you read the article and it was four people on Twitter that each have 20 followers. And that was huge backlash. So as a personal brand, you have to go, here’s who I’m serving these three people who weren’t going to buy my thing. Anyway, don’t get to decide that I don’t do it. And so that’s another one is not talking about your stuff enough and consistently. So my example of that would be out in, you know, back before COVID I do book tours and say, I’d go to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and I’d tell people three different times, three different ways, emails, Instagram, I’m coming to Lincoln or coming to Lincoln. Lancaster. I’d feel like I’m bothering them.

JA: (15:57)

And then the next day I’d post the picture of the event in Lancaster. And inevitably people would go, Oh, I wish I’d known about it. Like why? And so I was afraid of the random person who, by the way, doesn’t live in Lancaster, somebody in Dallas going, Oh, stop talking about your event. That wasn’t for you dude. Like, but I underserved the people it was for in fear of the one person. So I think sometimes keeping your focus on the people you’re trying to serve versus the people who just want to be professionally angry and are always going to do that anyway. Like they don’t even want to be happy. So don’t, don’t let them tell you how you shape your business.

RV: (16:31)

Yeah. Those are, those are, those are good. I mean that the, in the timeline, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. It’s just like, people get so discouraged. I feel like, I mean, frankly, I mean, how, how many years have you? And I know each other, I think it’s been like 10 years now. Cause I think I met you

JA: (16:47)

For coffee at Starbucks. And like, that was like 10 years ago.

RV: (16:52)

And it’s like, how many people? 10, 10 years ago. I don’t know. Like, so we’re in our early, early thirties then, right? Yeah. There were so many people that were like, Oh, I want to write a book. I want to do that. I really feel like 80% of the battle is just hanging around. I mean like you and I have been at this 10 years and it’s like, we have all of these ideas. Like if you do this technique and this technique, and it’s like, the reality of it is like, we just been here for 10 years. People start to hear about it.

JA: (17:21)

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it’s so funny. I’ll have people go. I met somebody the other day. I was like, man, love your books, got a couple at my house. I was like, this is awesome. They said, when’s the next like, are you working on anything new? And I was like, yeah, I have a new book that comes out in two weeks. They’re like never heard of it. And so like, you just have to stay in the conversation. You have to try things, you have to experiment, you have to be, you know, willing to go, okay. That didn’t work and that’s okay. Like you can’t get your identity up in the personal, that’s the other thing, when your identity is a hundred percent wrapped up in your personal brand, now when somebody criticizes it, they’re criticizing you, not the thing that you’re creating and that makes it really hard to stay brave.

JA: (18:01)

And so there’s all these things where you have to be really deliberate. But yeah, I mean, for me, it’s, it’s, I think it’s really fun. I don’t think it’s too late. Somebody asked me that the other day I started a podcast this year and they were like, isn’t it a little late to get into podcast? And I was like, well, I mean, this is the time I have, like, I don’t know if the window was 2004 because I clearly missed that one. So I’m going to start it today. And so I think being willing to start something, regardless of the timeframe it can just be really encouraging to a personal brand.

RV: (18:31)

Yeah. And I mean, just to like to share a little bit of my personal story, it was pretty discouraging two years ago when I had to start all of my social media over and all of my podcasts over and then, you know, it took us a while to even get going. And then we started like my YouTube channel, like a year ago. And it’s like, man, I’ve been in this business since I was 17. I’m posting videos that get eight views.

JA: (18:57)

And I’m just like, Oh my gosh, dude, I’ll tweet five different times to 290,000 people on Twitter and I’ll have videos of like 30 views. And you’re like, this is like, like that. Yeah. So I, I get that. And then anytime you start something it’s gonna take time. Like I wish my podcast had a million downloads. I wish I had Lewis Howes audience, but you know what I haven’t done. I haven’t put in Lewis house work to my podcast. And so,

RV: (19:25)

And to your, to your point too, it’s like, even though it’s painful, I sure am glad I started my YouTube channel a year ago and didn’t wait until right now because it’s like, at least I’ve got, I’ve got it going again. Right. Like it’s starting to grow and yeah.

JA: (19:39)

And you developed a muscle. That’s the other thing you develop the muscle, like so much of this is like getting into the muscle so that you’re not afraid of the work. So like doing the writing, doing the speaking, doing the consulting, you know, putting your flag up. I think that’s the other thing is people say people aren’t booking me for whatever and I’ll go, well, do they know you do that? And a lot of times they don’t even, they can’t book you if they don’t know you do it. And so you have to talk about it. You have to talk about it beyond your comfort zone. And I think that’s challenging.

RV: (20:09)

So is the, is the strategy here basically recognize when you have one of these is that half the battle is just go recognizing, Oh, I have a negative soundtrack going on. And then basically just installing a new one and just going, what would be more, what would be more helpful? Like ask for more as you go, Oh, I’m undervaluing myself. I need to install a new soundtrack called ask for more.

JA: (20:35)

Yeah. So the, the process is really simple. I like to, you know, part of my job, I consider myself a handle maker. I try to put, handles on ideas so that people can take them with them. Like we have enough ideas in the world. We don’t have handles, carry them into Tuesday and next Thursday and a month from now. So the three things you do is you retire your broken soundtracks, you replace them with new soundtracks and then you repeat them. So often they become as automatic as the old ones. So you retire, you replace, you repeat. And if somebody said, well, okay, what do I know to retire? No problem. The easiest way to find a broken soundtrack is to think of something you want to do personal brand. You want to write a book, you want to start a podcast. You want to do YouTube, write that down and then listen to the first reaction. The first thought you have, because every reaction is an education. And so you write that down. And then now that you’ve got that, you ask it three questions. Is this thing that I just heard? Is it true? Is it helpful? Is it kind? And if it’s not, if you can’t say yes to all those three things, you probably need to retire it and come up with a new one that you then repeat until you actually believe it.

RV: (21:44)

Yeah. I love it. Well this is so awesome. I mean, it it’s, it is such an important part. And like with personal branding, everyone’s like, well, give me the technique, give me the technique. And it’s like, it like everything. It’s more about the mindset. Like if you don’t believe you’re worth it, if you don’t believe you can succeed, like until you believe that you actually have value to offer the world, it doesn’t matter how many programs you take on social media strategy or building funnels or being good on stage. It’s like, if you don’t believe that about yourself, it’s nothing else matters.

JA: (22:24)

Nobody else will. Like your belief has to be here to get people to hear like it’s a sliding scale. And so for me, I always think about two things. I think about confidence and competence, like great personal brands have confidence and competence. So I have the confidence I’m going to like, I’m going to stand on the stage and believe I have a spot on that stage. And part of the reason I’m going to believe that is I’ve built competence. I’ve done the reps. Like the, like one of my favorites, kinda like, like little hacks, if you will, is I had a, a pastor say to me, John you know, I’ve got a new position where I read the announcements every Sunday and I’m nervous about speaking. And I was like, well, how, you know, how many times do you practice? And he said, I do at one time. And I said, well, you’re only getting one rep. So practice that 10 minute thing, four times each week, you’ll get four years of practice in a single year. So like, that’s the, that’s the competence part. And so I think there’s a lot of that where you go, okay, if I can combine those two things, there’s, there’s nothing I won’t be able to do.

RV: (23:21)

Yeah. I love that. We had John Lee Dumas on here a few weeks ago, like with his launch. And one of the things that really stuck with me was he said, you know, AAJ pick this up where we asked, is it quantity or quality? And he said, well, it’s the same because quantity is what leads to quality. Always. I mean, it’s just like

JA: (23:43)

Seinfeld says, it’s a game of tonnage. Like writing is a game of tonnage that you have to. And John Lee Dumas is a great example. Like I think his book, like his book has so many things in it, then I was like, Oh no, he’s right. And I’m not doing that. Like, I love how he simplified it. I love what he laid out. So yeah, I had him on my podcast too. And he was a really fun actually doing it interview. Yeah. Well buddy, where should people go if they w they want to learn about this new book is sounds soundtracks. The surprising solution to overthinking available wherever books are sold, but where should people go get it? Well, I mean, you can get it certainly Amazon, your local bookstore, whatever. But if you’re curious and you’re like, all right, I want to read the first chapter first, just go to soundtracks, book.com. You can download the first chapter, check it out before you actually buy the book. And then if you’re, you know, if you had a good time today, or like, I’d like to know a little more about how John’s doing his personal brand check on my podcast, it’s called all it takes is a goal. And it’s about goal setting because I believe that starting is fun, but the future belongs to finishers. And so I have a podcast that’ll help you actually finish the book.

RV: (24:55)

I love it. So we’ll put links to that and soundtracks, plural yall, soundtracks, book.com is where you go, buddy. It’s always great to reconnect with you. I learned so much from you every time I talk, and I’m just proud of what you’re doing. And it’s really, really wonderful and inspiring to see how you continue to grow and shape lives, man. So keep it up.

JA: (25:17)

Thanks for having me on, man. It’s always encouraging to connect and see, see where you are in your, in your Nashville experience.

Ep 162: How to Produce and Promote Your Self Published Book with Honorée Corder

RV: (00:09)

Hey brand builder Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show

RV: (01:06)

Writing and getting books published and written and distributed and marketed properly is one of the biggest pain points that so many of you have. We know that and over the years, I’ve had an opportunity to interface with a number of different people who have different, you know, magical superpowers in the book, writing and publishing space. And today I’m going to introduce you to one of my favorites. She’s a longtime friend of mine. Her name is honoree a quarter and honoree, a first of all, she is worked very closely with one of my dear, dear friend, two of my dear, dear friends of Hal Elrod which many of you probably know she helped Hal turn the miracle morning into a whole book series. Honoree has written more than 50 books and not just with Hal, but lots of people, Phil Hellmuth, who was the world series of poker champion.

RV: (02:00)

Also one of our other dear friends, John Ruhlin and his book Giftology who we just absolutely adore John we’ve had him of course, on the show. And she just works as a strategic book coach to writers. And also, I would say a publishing specialist specifically for people who want to self publish and maintain all the ownership and the control and, and the rights, but to do it in a way that it looks and acts and feels and operates like a traditionally published book. So anyway, she just recently moved to Nashville. Well, not that recently, but a little bit recently and we reconnected and had to bring her to you. You’re going to love her honor, a welcome to the show. Hey, Hey, good to be with you. All right. My friend. So I want to start with the question of the, the, the writing process. Okay. So you’ve written 50 books. You’ve coached people through this. You’re teaching lots of people on, on the writing process. I feel like people get stuck at the blank page. Like they go, I want to write a book. I know I got a book in me. I probably got five books in me, but then they like sit down and it’s like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t come.

HC: (03:24)

What’s that Netflix I’ll do it later.

RV: (03:29)

So what do you, what do you, think’s going on there? What do we need to know about that stage in that moment and how do we kind of get ourselves past there?

HC: (03:39)

That’s a, that’s a great question. Thank you. And there’s a lot to unpack there. I think what people get stuck on is what goes in a book. Why am I the person to write a book? Other people have already written a book like the book I’m thinking of writing. Why should I write a book? And then how am I going to write it? How did I, how am I going to know it’s any good? And then once I’m done with it, what the heck do I do with it? Who’s going to read it. What if nobody buys it? So there’s a lot of static and a lot of head noise going on and, and without a process to follow. And without some clarity that they will stand to get stuck, even if they get past that blank page.

RV: (04:21)

Yeah. So let’s talk about the mental part of it then first, because I do think that that is that sort of self limiting belief of, you know, one I’m not smart enough, I’m not good enough or more of the imposter syndrome, which is like, well, someone already wrote that book. Like, you know, I already read that book. I mean, do you find that that’s a pretty big, a pretty big part of this and how do you, how do we get ourselves beyond that moment?

HC: (04:48)

Sure. So yes, someone has probably written a book about what you have knowledge and expertise around semi-colon however, comma, right? They, there is no book written in your words, from your perspective, with your additional experience and you are the messenger that only some people can hear. And I love to use the example of like Brene Brown versus Tony Robbins in the motivational space for the people. Lots of people stand at the, at the the stage and watch Tony Robbins and think that he’s the best thing ever. And other people think he’s too big. He else’s teeth are too big, right? He’s it’s too much for me. And other people think Brene Brown is just the most wonderful thing in the world. And other people think she’s too quiet and she’s not commanding enough. Their messages are not the same. They’re similar.

(05:48)

And you could say, well, it’s motivational, I’ve been motivated. I’m done, that’s it. And yet there is that other option, which is what you bring to the table, your experience, your expertise, your knowledge, and your words, your approach, your philosophy, how you connect with people. And that is not in a book if you haven’t written it. So I like to get people past that, well, who am I to write a book I’m not experienced enough or who cares, or there’s already a book out there contextualizing them and saying, hold on, you have something to offer. You must write a book. Right. And then helping them to figure out what goes in the book and where and why, and getting started on that process because, and let’s go to all the way to the end and you’ve been there and I’ve been there. You get that book for the first time and holding it in your hands. And you’re an author. It’s kind of the coolest thing ever. It’s worth all of the trouble.

RV: (06:45)

Yeah. Well, and, and you get the first comment from a reader or Amazon review that are like, you know, that’s, it’s so powerful. And, and I, you know, I, I do use myself as an example on this. Cause I go look, take the stairs more or less as a book that about hard work. There’s not many more on original topics that, or messages than hard work. And, and as a 20 something year old kid, when I wrote the book, I was like, you know, I, I felt like, well, what am I saying? That’s different. But it was totally from my lens. And I think the beauty of me being so young was I knew nothing else other than to write it from my lens. And I wasn’t old enough to have as much self-doubt I think as sometimes people get in their thirties and yeah, it’s you bringing you to the table, contextualizing you, no one else can do that.

HC: (07:36)

Right? No one else has your voice, your perspective, and all of the other things that make you, you, no one else can write your book. And so I think you owe it to people. I’m just going to throw it out there. You owe it to people to write your book. And I read, take the stairs. And I sent you a screenshot of all the tabs and notes and highlights of re reading the book. And I had read every other book on hard work. Yeah. Hard work is not a new philosophy, but your perspective and that phrase, Oh, I’ll take the stairs. I’ll, I’ll do the harder thing. I can do hard things. I do this hard thing. And it builds that muscle and builds on top of that. Some of that book has never left me. It’s stayed with me. So if you hadn’t been that 20 something year old kid going, all right, I’m going to write a book and you did it.

HC: (08:29)

Then all the people who benefited from it would have missed out. And so now I’m just, I’m not talking to you, right. I’m talking to your audience and the people that are listening and are thinking well, but what would I say that would be any different. It’s not necessarily that you would say something different it’s that you would say something different that you would say it in your way. And the person who would have said, why am I going to take the stairs? Why would you take the stairs when you were taking the elevator? Might hear another message, your message in a way that actually moves out and transforms their life. And you’re right. Then the thing that is even better than receiving that first book is receiving that first letter in the mail, or that first email where someone says, I read your book and it changed my life. It inspired me. I am behaving differently. I’m doing something differently. I’m believing more in myself. There, there are very few things that are more fulfilling than that.

RV: (09:22)

Yeah. That’s, that is incredible. And I, and I think another part of the fear, like, just since we’re talking about the emotional side of this, I do think there is this fear of like, well, I could pour my life into this thing and nobody’s gonna read it right. Or no, one’s gonna buy it. And then it’s almost like I have this, it’s almost like I have this public declaration that I’ve put out there that I want something to be successful. And if it’s not successful, then somehow it’s like this public reflection that, you know, my book wasn’t good enough and or something like that. And, and ironically, I think it’s, it’s it, when a book doesn’t sell, well, it is less often to do with what is written in the book and more to do with the promotional plan. And I want, you know, I know that that’s a part that you really kind of specialize in, is going okay, what are the things? So let’s say, if we get past the self doubt, we’re operating in what we would call our uniqueness, we’ll help people find their uniqueness. They create a great outline. They work with you or some, you know, somebody like you that helps them really like flush out and write it out. And, you know, we’ve got lots of people that we love to help. You’re one of them they get this book written, then what, what do they do to make sure that people find it

HC: (10:47)

Connecting the book with the reader is the $60 million question, right? How do you connect the reader to the book? And most importantly, the author and it starts actually with that blank page, with the questions that you’re going to ask yourself, when you’re putting pen to paper, the first one would be something like, where does the book fit into my business? And what is the purpose of the book in my business? What do I want the reader to do as a result of reading my book with taking the stairs, you want people to work harder, right? With you must write a book, which is my book. I want everyone to write a book. I want the right person to call me and say, I want you to help me with this process that they’re figuring out, where does the book fits into the business and where the book fits in with the author.

HC: (11:38)

And then everything else that you do actually is informed and influenced by the answers to those questions. How do people connect with you and how do they connect with you in their journey of reading the book? Do they like you more, as the book goes on and are you adding value to them? Are you helping them to solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity or both? And then how do they, how do they come to understand if they’re the person that you could help beyond the book? And all of that is linked into the marketing

RV: (12:11)

Surgically. Even thinking beyond the book to going, let’s say I write an amazing book. I market it, I get someone to buy it. I, they actually read it. They get to the end then what? So it’s kind of like thinking about how does this direct and fit into your overall kind of business plan and like, not just your business plan, but how can you service that person at a deeper level once they’ve been through the book and how are you pointing them in that direction?

HC: (12:39)

Right? So the, the, the trick is, and there’s no trick, but the trick is right. The question that you want to answer is how do I serve the person? So they feel like in exchange for their time and money, right? The time they’re reading the book and the money they’ve spent on the book, that they are getting value, that the question of the book has been answered because you buy a non-fiction book. I read limitless by Jim quick, because I want to be limitless. So Jim had a big Hill to climb with me. I had a lot of questions about how to be limitless, and those questions were answered in the book. But at the end of the book, there were a lot of other ways for me to take my limitlessness to be even more unlimited, right. There were ways that I could connect with him.

HC: (13:27)

And those had to be built into the book too. So there were resources in the book and options for connecting with the author before someone puts pen to paper, or even while they are thinking about what those things would be, how am I going to connect with my reader? How can my reader connect with me after they’ve finished the meat of the book? What’s the next thing for them to do? What’s the next stage in our relationship? And what does that look like? And how do we connect those dots? I think we live in a great time when it used to be that an author was a person that you didn’t know where they were. You’d never, you would never hear them interviewed or talked to unless it was on the mic MacNeil, Lehrer report or something. Right. and now or Charles Cronkite, right?

HC: (14:15)

Like authors were unicorns that were inaccessible and now authors are accessible people and have to think of themselves as accessible and readers love to know their authors, authors that you like, we want to know who you are and we want to connect with you right. As readers. And so thinking about that as an author, as an aspiring authors, how can I make sure that my readers know that I’m not inaccessible or not a unicorn? And I want to be connected with, and here is who the, who the person is that I want to connect with the most.

RV: (14:47)

So let’s, let’s talk about Amazon specifically for a minute. Cause you know, I, I know most of, most of your experiences, like really kind of dominating this, the self-published world and, and helping people promote, what do people need to know about Amazon that they, like, what do authors need to know about Amazon? That we don’t know? Like what, what as a first time author is not obvious to us about Amazon, that it’s like, well, you really need to know this. Like, in order since Amazon represents, I don’t know what it is. Something like 50, 60% of all sales. I mean, maybe even more than that whatever the number is. It’s it’s a, it’s a massive percentage. What are the things you think most authors go? Oh, I didn’t realize that. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know I needed to do that. I didn’t know. I needed an update that I didn’t know. I had to like do this or that for Amazon specifically.

HC: (15:42)

Sure. Well, not UN find-able information, not information that you can’t find if you’re looking for it, but understanding how to engage Amazon as a retail partner when launching your book and marketing your book is very important. And understanding that if you know how to engage Amazon as a retailer, as a retail partner, they will serve up your book forever. If you can prove to Amazon that your book is profitable, Amazon wants to sell profitable things. If you’ve ever opened your email, or like maybe 12 times today, you’ve opened your email. And there’s a name something from Amazon that says, well, are you done reading this book? Because when you’re done reading this book, you should read this book over here. Oh, did you buy this thing? Well, people who bought this also bought that right. There is a way to engage Amazon as a retail partner so that you can have them serve up your book.

HC: (16:44)

And it’s not with ads it’s free. It’s just knowing the process, right. Of engaging Amazon in such a way that they say, well, take the stairs is a profitable book. And so we’re just going to keep selling, take the stairs. We’re just going to keep recommending, take the stairs. Honorary, read the book. And honoree is like these 1 million other people. And so we’re going to send this email to these 1 million other people that are just like honoring, because they’ve read all the same books that Andre has, but not take the stairs. So they’re going to email those people on your behalf.

RV: (17:15)

And you’re saying, you can do something, you can do something proactively as an author. What are, what are like, what’s an example? Or like, what are, what are some of those things that we go, Oh, I didn’t even realize I was supposed to do that. Or I could do that. Amazon seems like this ginormous, like faceless enterprise, like that I think is something I didn’t even think. Like, I don’t even feel that way that it was like, Oh, I can, I should be doing these steps.

HC: (17:42)

Yes. So there is three things. One is having an advanced reader team that consists only of your ideal reader. So assembling an advanced reader team of of the right size and the right consistency, right? Having the right people that are the ideal reader for your book, as opposed to I’ll, I’ll give you the thing not to do too, which is don’t launch your book to everybody for 99 cents because that will kill your book. So specifically launching your book to the exact type of person who would read your book. So not telling everyone about your book, telling a specific group of people about your book and engaging them in such a way that it tells Amazon, Ooh, people are going to like this book. And these are the type of people that are going to like this book. And then the two other things are cheating.

RV: (18:36)

So I want, I want to get the other two, but before we do this, so when, when you go like find the ideal, right? I mean, that’s really powerful. So number one, don’t try to just go. I want to sell a million copies that are 99 cents. And just like, you know, set the market. Like, this is what my book is, where it’s 99 cents. You do get, you know, some people do that for the bestseller thing. And you know, there’s some value, I guess, to some of that, but the w how do you find these people? Is that just like, go look on other books in your category and see who’s reviewing those and reach out and try to like, reach out to those people.

HC: (19:11)

That is a strategy, but that is that’s pain and suffering. And I try to avoid pain and suffering. So there’s, I’m anti pain and suffering in every, in every situation. Your ideal client, your past clients, people, you know, who read books like those books. I bet you could tell me five books that are like, take the stairs. I can tell you five books that are like the miracle morning for entrepreneurs with Cameron, Harold. Right? So we went and looked for who are the other books that are like this book, who’s read those books. And those are the people that I want. The people who are the ideal reader for the book are who I want to talk to about the book,

RV: (19:51)

Which if you have an email list and like you do a lot of the things that we teach at brand builders group, what we call the relationship engine and all this stuff. So you’re basically saying it is those people. I mean, those, it is those people, okay. They’re not, they’re not hidden. Yeah. And then it’s other, other podcasts like yours and other authors like yours and other social media people like, you know, posting similar content.

HC: (20:14)

Yes. If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one, you know, this better than anyone, right? Identify who your avatar is, your ideal reader, your ideal client, they’re all the same thing. And put a group of those people together to be your advanced reader team and curate them and help them to help you engage Amazon and other retailers as your partner in your book marketing.

RV: (20:35)

When you say advanced reader team, you’re saying, give them a copy of the book before it comes out. Why is that? So that they can leave reviews early on, as soon as the book comes out. So I have a

HC: (20:48)

Process that I have authors walk with. Like, this is the day that you do this, and this is the day you do this. And this is the day you do that. So that you’re engaging the, the algorithm of the engine, right. Of the retail engine in advance so that they know who to market it to as well. So it’s, it’s, it’s a little Ninja, you know, behind the curtain under wraps, keep it quiet. Don’t talk to anybody about it. I say that a lot. Sip it. Dot com. Don’t tell anyone you’re engaging the exact rate and perfect reader. I know, I know this from experience and I have to say it a lot. You got to keep it quiet, even though this is probably the thing, one of the top five things, you’re the most excited about, right? You have a new kid, your book, and you want to tell everybody about your new kid, but you just can’t for a little while. You’ve got to keep it under wraps and only talk to people about the book who are your avatar, your ideal reader, your ideal client.

RV: (21:44)

And if you get those, those people that go leave reviews, and they’re very either whatever, a verified purchase, those really help. So, okay. So that’s awesome. So I don’t need a million people to read it. I need to find like a core group of a hundred or 50 or whatever, like, and just get them to actually read it, co foster that audience, get them to support it, to leave, you know, share it with whatever start small. All right. What’s you said there were three things we’re running out of time.

HC: (22:12)

Yeah. The other two are quick. The other two are quick keywords. What are the keywords that people search to find your book? Identify, identify your keywords. And it’s not a word. So brand builders would be a key word. So if someone were saying, how do I build my brand? What’s the best way to build my brand. Each of those is a key word. So you identify the keywords that people would use to find a book like yours. And those become your keywords.

RV: (22:42)

You’re talking about, this is similar to search engine optimization for like Google, but you’re, you’re talking specifically in Amazon, correct? You need to select your keywords, but then, but like for SEL, I can. Yeah. Where do you put them on Amazon? That

HC: (22:57)

In, in the backend, in, in when you’re, when you’re publishing your book or when I’m publishing your book, I identify the keywords and I, I put them in the, in the, I do the publishing piece. But there is a, the dashboard, right. Where you would go to upload the book cover and the book files, they ask you, what are your keywords? And you put in the keywords and then the keywords match.

RV: (23:19)

Yeah. And that, see what’s wild about that is when you traditionally publish, you have less control over things like that. I mean, this is, yeah, you do. As you know, it’s, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s so many great things about traditionally publishing and self-publishing, it’s like one of these, these balances, but, you know, procrastinate on purpose mist, the wall street bestseller list. Not because we didn’t sell enough units because the book wasn’t categorized in the proper category that the, that BookScan and Nielsen and that the wall street journal picks up. And it was like, what, like where, who was supposed to tell us that like

HC: (24:05)

Who’s gonna lose their job today. Yeah. So that’s actually, the third thing is, are the categories your book has to

RV: (24:12)

Look at

HC: (24:13)

That is the third one. Look at you being all star student and everything category is the next ones are key. So advanced reader team in the algorithms getting, you know, the team and teaching the team and, and teaching the author gotta do everything. And you know, at the right time, right, you got to, you got to marinate the meat before you make them put it on the grill, right. The right thing at the right time, then you have to understand what are the keywords and what are the categories and how to change them, how to see if they’re working and how to make sure that you’re making the moves and how to make the moves at the right time. So, like I said, it’s a little bit art, a little bit science.

RV: (24:55)

Where does the CA is the categories of backend dashboard? I mean, I know it’s like monitoring categories. This is one thing. And there’s different ways to do that in different tools in your, hopefully your publisher kind of knows some of that helps you figure that out or, or, you know, but like once you, you’re saying that it’s actually like monitoring it and then going, let’s change the category of this book to put it somewhere else. You can just log in and do that.

HC: (25:22)

You can ask, you can actually send an email to Amazon and ask them to put you in certain categories. Otherwise, they’re just going to put you in categories. If you’ve ever looked at a book and it’s like, this is a book on dog-walking and it’s in the kitten legwarmers category, just because it happens all the time. It’s just because somewhere in, in, in the, the computer, somewhere in there, something got off and it went in the wrong, it went in the wrong. Okay.

RV: (25:54)

So basically you just need a note notify Amazon, say, Hey, can you move this? My, can you list my book in this other category? If you’re self published, if you’re traditionally published, your publisher has to do that.

HC: (26:09)

One would help. Yes.

RV: (26:10)

Yeah. Okay. And then keywords is the same thing, basically like there’s some, there’s a backend part of Amazon where you basically re similar to how you would do with like meta-tags and H you know, like H one H two tags on a website. There’s a, there’s somewhere in Amazon in the backend where you, this dashboard, is it called a dashboard? Is that what you’re

HC: (26:33)

I called the dashboard. Yeah. Let’s see. It’s, you’re just logging in. So it’s Kendall digital publishing, kdp.amazon.com is the, is the login is where you create your account. And so you create an account and you upload all the files and the information it’s where you put in the title and the subtitle and all, and the, and the book description. And you’re right. You have to have HTML and a call to action and making sure that the font sizes right in the spacing is right. Otherwise it just looks a little jeopar walkie on the, on the retail page. And all of those things factor into whether your book appears professionally published.

RV: (27:12)

I know, I mean, again, with procrastinating on purpose, for some way are tight. Our original book cover got uploaded, and it had this like weird glitchy thing on the cover. And there was like a weird splotchy looking thing. And it was like, how does this happen? Like, how does that happen? And it’s just like, somebody uploads a file that’s wonky or something, and yeah.

HC: (27:34)

Wonky or, or corrupt or something. And, and then you have to change it and you have to get to the right person to make the change and all, all the things there’s, my checklist has 487 things on it.

RV: (27:47)

Yeah. Well, 487 steps to success. You know, but you, you, there are small specific things like this, that Matt that really, really make a difference. That’s, that’s, that’s wild. I didn’t even know that about, I mean, I guess I, it made sense, but as a traditionally published author, I don’t actually have control of my keywords and categories. I have to go through with the publisher because it’s all in there. They control the dashboard for it. Right. I presume, although I’m going to ask, I’m going to have this based on,

HC: (28:23)

They have access to the same. They have access to the same. There’s this, there there’s might be a little more robust than what they let you know, the common folk have. The traditional publishers probably have something that’s a little more robust, but they definitely have keywords and categories. But the thing is, yeah,

RV: (28:38)

I got to I’m depending on someone else to do the work of updating it, versus I can’t just log in and do it myself, which is one nice thing about self publishing is you can like log in and update the thing. Yeah. So that’s, that’s, that’s part of the partnership of publishing. Really interesting. So all right. Well honor. So, so I got one more question for you before I ask you that, where do you, where should people go if they, if they want to connect with you? I mean, you’ve worked with Hal, rod, John Roland, Cameron, Harold. These are all these, those three people specifically are close, personal friends of mine. I know you’ve done a ton with Hal and you know, we want, if someone wants help, like actually writing a book and, and I mean, I know you teach people to do it, but you also will do it with them. Where should they go, go find you and say, Hey, I found you on brand builders podcast, or like, where do you want them to go,

HC: (29:42)

Go, just go to my website, honorary quarter.com and send me an email, send me honorary honorary, quarter.com or go to my website and do a, a form and send it over. I get those. And Megan is my assistant and she will, she will get you on my calendar to discuss if this would be a good fit. I love it. I love it. And when you get your rights back on your books, call me you talking to me. Yeah. I’m talking to you.

RV: (30:14)

Oh, well, we should talk. We should talk off, we should talk offline about some things. But the okay, so Andre quarter.com. We’ll put a link to their honorary honorary quarter.com if you just want to email or and then, so the last little thing that I just I have for you here is you know, coming back to this mental side of things. Yeah. The fear that it won’t be good. The self doubt that I’m not smart enough, the imposter syndrome that someone else has already done it I guess, is there any last thought you would have as it relates to this emotional block? Because over time I’d become more convinced that the disk, the barrier between a mission-driven messenger, which is we call our audience mission-driven messengers. The primary barrier between a mission-driven messenger and actual published book in their hand is a whole set of emotional challenges that are much greater than the logistical challenges. So is there anything you would, you would say to that person who knows they should write a book, but they’re struggling to get their own, you know, pass some of their own beliefs?

HC: (31:37)

Probably a hundred things. So I’ll try to come up with a few that are impactful for right now. The first one is you have done something difficult in the past that you were unsure, you could succeed. So go back to those wins that you’ve had in the past and revisit them go to the people who know you the best, your encouragers, your coach, your mom, your therapist, your best friend, and ask them what they think. And when they encourage you, listen to them, they are right. Right. They know they have a line of sight to something that you cannot see. And also you do not publish a book by yourself. I mean, unless you crazy.

HC: (32:19)

And I must be crazy because I’ve done it myself a number of times, but for yourself and by yourself are different. And I have not ever published a book where I didn’t use a graphic designer to give me a good cover and the editor, or more than one editor to go through and make sure that my message was strong, right? So you’re going to need a proofreader and you’re gonna need a copy writer, and you’re gonna need this advanced reader team of people who are gonna read your book and tell you that what you have done is, is a beautiful thing. And writing a book really is a team sport. And so engage the right team of people, make sure that you do use an editor and make sure you do use a graphic designer who does understand book covers and that sort of thing.

HC: (33:05)

And once you have your team around you, you will feel less fear and less reticence that you might be running a marathon for the first time, but you got a coach, right? How many miles do I run today? Do I do strength training? Do I do yoga? Like, what are the other things I need to do? Listen to the other people that you have around you. And then also find some other people that have written books and have gone through the process who can give you some words of wisdom and say, Oh yeah, I felt fear too. And I’m going to add one more thing. And that’s what you touched on it before, when you said I was a twenty-something kid and I wrote, take the stairs. When I wrote my first book, it was kind of like, okay, I’m going to write my first book. I didn’t have that monkey mind either. I didn’t have those self doubts because I honestly didn’t think anybody was ever going to read it. So who cares?

HC: (33:57)

Right? So if you put the pressure on yourself of like, I have to write a book and it has to be a New York times best-selling book and, and, and ad, right. If you make it really hard to feel good about the success of your book and really easy to feel like a failure, you’re already starting behind the eight ball. So just give yourself easy wins. Oh, I’m going to, I’m going to sit down and come up with an idea for a book. Okay. I have an idea. I wonder if I could flush it out with an outline, let me come up with an outline. Okay. That’s a win, like, make it easy for yourself to feel good and make it really hard for yourself to feel bad, not just in book writing, but in life. But in this instance, let’s focus on the book writing so that the fear side and recognize that you’re not doing it alone. And there are a lot of books out there. There are a lot of inferior books in there, a lot of superior books and it’s okay, this is your book. And you get one spin around the rock, right? You better leave something for people to remember you by

RV: (34:58)

There. It is some, some Ninja secret, undercover, whatever you said, confidential tips just, just between me and you and a few tens of thousands of listeners on the podcast podcast. But it’s all about, who’s going to take action on it. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s it. So Honoree, so good to reconnect with you, my friend. And thanks for sharing some of your wisdom. We wish you the best. I know we’ll be staying in touch, especially now. You are a Nashville neighbor, so all the best to you.

HC: (35:36)

All right. Thank you so much.

Ep 160: Building a Trusted Personal Brand with David Horsager

RV: (00:07)

We say around Brand Builders Group a lot that reputation precedes revenue and reputation effectively is an unconscious calculation of how much people trust you. Do they trust you? Do they trust your brand? Do they trust what you are saying? And it only made sense that I would bring to you one of my very best friends David Horsager for an interview, and I’ve purposely been waiting for you to meet him. He is one of my most trusted friends. We are super close and he is the guy on trust. He owns the topic of trust. He is the CEO of the trust edge leadership Institute. He wrote a national bestseller called the trust edge. He also every year puts out a study called the trust outlook. And then he invented something called the ETI, the enterprise trust index, which kind of measures trust inside of organizations and things. And he is a hall of fame speaker. He works with companies like the New York Yankees, FedEx Toyota, global governments, department of Homeland security and just really, really world renowned. And so he’s here to share a little bit of his story about how he became the guy on trust and how he built the business he’s got today. So brother, thanks for being here.

DH: (01:28)

Hey, Rory, it is a treat to be with the brand builders and just playing with you and what a journey, great to be in a friend group and mastermind group and just doing life. So yeah,

RV: (01:41)

Thanks. We should mention, we should mention that, right? That you and I, and Jay Baer and Jason Dorsey are in a, a true peer colleague, unpaid friend, friend, supported mastermind. We call it the struggle. We have been together five or six years,

DH: (02:00)

I think at least something like

RV: (02:01)

That. We’ve had all, we, we, what people don’t know, every single one of us, we for back-to-back-to-back years were inducted into the professional speaking hall of fame and where you first or was Jay.

DH: (02:16)

I was, I think, yeah.

RV: (02:19)

And then me and then Dorsey. That’s right. So the power of surrounding yourself with amazing people, but I want to hear your, I want you to share the story of how you started, right? Because somebody’s listening out there right now are going, gosh, I’d love to speak. I would love to work with the New York Yankees. I’d love to have a, you know, a multi seven figure business. I’d love to do these things. How did you start?

DH: (02:47)

Yep. So I, it goes back, you know, I grew up on a farm in the poorest County in Minnesota and, you know I was a youngest of six kids and I, I definitely had kind of vision for great things, grateful for my parents to be the great leaders they were. And mom and dad are still 91 now and still run the farm. And actually just sold about 750 acres. So they’re thinking about how they can give away money these days. But I basically, after after college, I went to be on staff with the youth and faith and the organization. And after that, I, I later became director and I built a little bit of leadership curriculum for kind of college students do youth, whatever, move back to Minnesota. And this is how it started. We put every penny we had into that first organization.

DH: (03:35)

I have to tell my kids, this is back in the 19 hundreds, you know? But we moved back to Minnesota. I had one booking for $500. One thing I’d booked. I moved back, moved everything from living on a golf course, down in Arkansas to back to Minnesota. I, and so we jumped in and, and I, I thought, how are we going to save money? How are we going to do this? So we found not, not really an apartment, the basement of 86 year old Clara. Miller’s no windows, no bathroom, no kitchen, black mold on the walls. And that’s where we started this. And we lived there for two years and actually we we started with nothing. And by that October, I don’t everything we had into marketing and videos, all this stuff. And we add a dollar 40 to our name, 60 cents in the business account, 80 cents in the home account after paying her urgent bills, that’s all we had. And at the time we figured if we could just make 700 bucks a month, I could pay my urgent bills. And I think my, I think my, I think my statement that year from the IRS was that I made $2,000 or something. So for the, for the year. So anyway, that, that was the start. And I’ll tell you, it’s not

RV: (04:53)

Fast start a dollar 42,000 bucks your first year.

DH: (04:58)

Yup. 2000 in profit, 2000 in profit, not revenue. Okay. So and that was half a year in, you know, so all we had was a half a year to work with her, but basically we started with call, call, call, call, call, and working till 11 at night. And making calls people that say that phone calls don’t work anymore. I just don’t where we we still make calls. But anyway that was, that was how we started. And we’ve shifted things, you know, several times the grad work was a big launch pad. Obviously all my work around trust became interesting to people, more famous than me. The book.

RV: (05:36)

Yeah. Let’s talk about, let’s talk about trust, right? Because you, you know, that we, we talk about she hands wall with our community and being known for one thing and breaking through the wall. You are one of the best examples of that. Of just, just owning one thing, one topic, one issue, one problem of trust. How did you decide that? How did you land on that? How did you choose it? Did it choose you kind of a thing? Like what was that?

DH: (06:07)

It was a mix. And I think I was, I had been kind of sharing this leadership work, got asked to speak to the us coast guard Academy, a few other things. And basically I still remember where I was. I was at it was not that it was some big spiritual epiphany, but I was, it was before we had the four kids and all that. And Lisa and I were traveling together and we’re at an event down in, I think it was Tucson, Arizona. I just remember it was probably the most expensive place we’d stayed at till that point. It was the Lowe’s resort. After a day of this, at this business conference, I just turned thinking the problem they think they’re having. I don’t think it’s real problem. It’s not a leadership problem. The reason people don’t follow that leader is trust. I think that’s the problem.

DH: (06:47)

They think they’re having a sales. It’s not a sales issue. The reason people don’t buy as trucks and, and, and it kept going, and this was just intuitive. This was not grad work. This wasn’t research basis. It was just, Oh, that’s a trust problem. That’s a trust issue. That’s just me now. Fast forward. I believe everything genuinely is a trust. I believe you. I believe most people are not solving the root issue. It’s always a trust issue at the core. It’s not a leadership issue. It’s not a sales issue. It’s not an innovation issue. The only way to increase learning issue is increase trust in the content that the teacher or the psychologic saving the environment. It’s not a diversity issue. The only way that, that biggest Harvard study shows diversity on its own pitch to people against each other, the only way to get the benefits of it is increased trust, which is our many with trust.

DH: (07:29)

So, so, but back then, so I press into it a little bit. I started thinking about it, more sort of reading. There was, by the way, Rory back then there was nothing written on trust and leadership. There was no research. I mean, a lot of people are talking about trust the last decade to deck over two decades ago. Nobody, almost nobody in business and leadership was nursing psychology stuff. So I decided at the time now speaking some already, I kind of had enough going on that way. It wasn’t like I had to, but I thought I just had gone away for this one weekend. I thought, I think it was just to get my bachelor’s degree. So I just look at colleges and turn up the one that I graduated from. Usually you want variety in your grad work, but I just decided, Oh, I can get right in.

DH: (08:14)

And they have my transcripts and they had this organizational leadership degree and I put every bit of my research and my final dissertation, everything on trust. And that became interesting to some people. And that led to my passion, that then led to us using that framework in organizations. And it worked, we saw tripling of sales. We saw retention reduce. We actually had something real. So I think one thing that I will differentiate on the two people that are just brand builders is I’m big on, and I know many of your people are, but I’m just saying I was, it was real for me. It was, I was genuinely passionate. This work changed me. So I would just argue with people, find one thing, but something that is and true to them because now my work has been used on six continents. We just had an outside university triangulated, revalidation, revalidated, the work as the framework that builds trust globally. So I mean the research added passion, the books added passion, the scene change in people and organizations that passion. I just, I should walk over to the other side of my desk. There’s I just got a postcard from a guy that said five years ago, you were here and helped us with this. And it changed our organization. And here’s how and whatever. So, you know, that was the, some of, you know, there’s a long, there’s 20 years in there, right.

RV: (09:33)

But it’s connected to your personal passion, personal belief system. And then you mentioned the grad work, and this is something I wanted to talk about. You know, we’ve had, we’ve had Dorsey on Jason Dorsey came on you know, the, our, our audiences, you know, a little bit familiar with that. But one thing that you, you do, he does, and Jay Baer does, and we’ve not really done, which we are in the middle of is really doing more data driven research. So you started it in PR in grad school, and now you do an annual study. And so talk to us about why data, how data, how does, how does that happen?

DH: (10:14)

I remember at the core, I love story. I love keynote speaking, but I thought was different. I saw speakers that were kind of motivational with no depth or value. And, and we said, instead of putting money into marketing, we’re going to give value. And really our research study became a way of showing value. That was a marketing play. We didn’t mean it to be, but that’s, that’s kind of what happened. So so the, we do the annual study to be on just the cutting edge of thought leadership around trust. You know, we call the trust outlook. That’s what it’s called. Trust, outlook.com. You can see our last several years, we had done one way back, you know, called trust trends in 2014 big study, I had done a course, my grad work, we put out some different studies over time that weren’t so deep.

DH: (11:00)

Like w w I remember we did one at the Obama Romney election to judge trust between those two at the time. So we, we did some other studies, but basically, and now we even had a tr revalidated by an outside university that, and they said, this is the framework for building trust globally. So it’s, it’s costs. It can be costly, but it’s the way of being authentic thought leaders in your space. And so we do use that data. Of course, it gets out on social media. You know, the trust outlook out of the trust edge leadership Institute puts this out and, and all that. And then, you know, I can start, you know, whether it’s in a boardroom or, or with 5,000 people in front of me with something very fresh and relevant to them. And even my, I know you have certified folks, my certified certified trust ed coaches around the world.

DH: (11:49)

There’s a whole part of the platform that we offer that has research slides. So you have trust and leadership slides. You have trust in sales, trust, and culture trust in policing. We have people dealing with our trustworthy for corruption issues and needs to Africa, you know, so, so it gives them grit and beef, and it serves them well, to be able to start with research, I’ll give you a one in one research I’m finding last year, the number one reason people wanted to work for an organization ahead of being paid more ahead of more autonomy ahead of a more fun work environment with the pink bunk table. Number one, they wanted to, they wanted trusted leadership. And really that just points to our whole, the whole new book, trusted leader. Like people either want to be a trusted leader, or they want to follow leaders. They trust and more than anything else. So that just backed up. You did take that one piece of data that can show 92% of people said this or that or whatever. And all of a sudden it backs up what we’ve been saying, and it gives grit to it. And people people want more depth than ever before. If you’re going to build a brand, you know, they want to feel like you genuinely do. It’s not just some idea pulled out of your head, you know?

RV: (13:03)

So when you, you mentioned the money part of this, and it also, you know, kind of makes sense. Like if you’re the trust guy you’re doing research and pulling data and all that stuff, it helps, it helps it be trusted. That’s very aligned,

DH: (13:15)

Huge differentiator by the way, huge. Because if you know who else in my space, that is a big, big name and whole family has a big name for years. The difference between us as I as far as trust goes, our book, our first books came out about the same time, but we have done all this, you know, proprietor

RV: (13:35)

Anybody, right? Like, like, yeah. I mean, just anybody do you know this data, which, you know, if you didn’t listen to the interview that we did with Jason Dorsey, you should go listen to that interview about how data is the differentiator. Now you mentioned the cost, right? So I thought that was interesting that you said, instead of putting it all into marketing, we put it into this and it kind of ends up also be marketing. Are these, you know, to pull off a study, are you talking thousands of dollars, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands? Like, I mean, what’s the,

DH: (14:09)

No, it depends. So for us, I can remember the first time I did study for maybe it was only, I don’t know. Well, not the first time, the first time I did the trust, outlook way of doing a study, it was, I don’t know you know, I don’t know, 30,000 or something, we’ve done them 10 hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands. And I did it only on the us side. And then I’m sharing the data. I’m at a massive conference up in Toronto and I’m like, Oh my goodness. Each piece of research says us the worst. I was so embarrassed that I said never again. And we went to global and global it’s much more expensive generally, but now we do it in house. So we do it in numbers that aren’t aren’t figure like those, like one year we were up toward almost, you know, a six-figure study there

RV: (14:57)

Just a field, the study. Then you got to like, produce the assets and like do the infographics and it’s, and the time, I mean, there’s a bunch of time to write the questions and all this stuff. Huh.

DH: (15:08)

But we, but nowadays it’s, it’s so worth it. I mean, we make, it’s such a differentiator that in an hour, you many people could do a study for, you know, that 20 to 30,000. That was actually quite, you know, I don’t know. It depends on how much of the globe you’re going to reach, but we, you know, one year we took the top, top GDP, peak country on every continent. So it wasn’t like every, every country, but then you have seven or whatever countries that we decided to, to go after. So you had some relevant, you know global data, but we’ve done them different sizes. But I think today you better do global, not just us generally unless you’re doing a specific area, like we did a specific executive edition. That was just us. And we also added interviews of those CEOs.

RV: (15:58)

Do you think this is part of what leads to this has led to speaking engagements is basically just publishing this kind of thought leadership. You know, we all hear, you know, we hear YouTube, LinkedIn podcast, blog, you know, book. We hear that pretty often. And then this is another whole piece is like, Oh, the study. And then is that the, I mean, are those the things that drive your speaking or is there some other like secret formula to getting speaking engagements?

DH: (16:26)

Well, the secret formula in speaking is in the mix, but I will tell you something I can tell you you know, when we make beautiful, real magazines, like I could grab one and show you across the room actually. So, you know, just trust, outlook that, you know, the whatever and, and you can see it

RV: (16:47)

And you print it, you make it as a magazine and print it. Okay. Okay.

DH: (16:50)

Yeah. And you can see the data in here if you’re watching, or I just said, you know, pie charts and whatever, that’s makes it interesting and fun to read and this many of this or whatever. So I’ve had someone hire me for a tens of tens of tens of thousands of dollars by opening up the page and saying, building trust in crisis or building trust in the midst of change. I’m like, Oh my gosh, it was this article right here. And that person hired me for a, you know, tens, tens, tens, tens of thousands of dollars a day. Because they’re like, this is what we need. Come spend a day with our executive team. We need to build trust in the midst of this change so that that’s not always you know, I’ve had, I mean, you go to the book and you go, you’ve written some amazing books that I love.

DH: (17:39)

I mean, that is another part of it. I had someone pick up the book of high powered, you know, Senator to pick up the book in the Denver airport. And that’s why I spoke to Congress twice. I had the president of Procter and gamble pick up the book in a, on a Sunday with his, when he’s with his daughter at a Barnes and noble. And that’s why I spoke to Procter and gamble. So th th there’s, there’s some kind of anomaly type things that, that, but th the, the book, the research for us, as far as speaking it is, you know, doing a great job and by the way, and you’ve done so well at this from back to your Toastmasters data, everything, you know, but I’ve had mentors on like I’ve hired comedy, I’ve hired, you know comedians to look at myself.

DH: (18:26)

I had helped me. I’ve had, I’ve hired speech coaches. I’ve hired improv. I’ve heard all these things. I’ve had you look at my speech before I gave my hall of fame speech. If you remember, because I’m like all of the mentors on being great on stage the book piece, the research piece you know, there’s social media pieces that we’ve gone more all in on than we ever were before too. But I would say something about the speaking piece, a big differentiator for us by the way is how we think people, huh? That’s, it’s, we’re just better at thinking everybody. And then many, like, I can’t even believe all the people that say, you know, the other 25, 35, 45, $55,000 speakers. I never got anything for having them at our conference. I couldn’t believe how you followed up and thanked us, and we send a big package and all this stuff. So I think, you know, there’s all, all kinds of little things that can make it, you know, build your brand

RV: (19:26)

Well. And, you know, I’d take that in investing into your business and investing into your trade, both the, both the message part of it and the depth of the thought leadership, and then as well as the presentation of it, you onstage, which seems like all the way back to those very early days, you’ve always been investing into it and growing. So, so you started in 1999. I’d love to hear just a, kind of just a couple minutes on your business model today, right? So this is 20, over 20 years later. Now you’ve got a team, you’ve got these great websites, these great demo videos like you, you, you, you can see how over years it has built up. And, and I’d love specifically for you to talk a little bit about like the train, the trainer model and the certification business model, because I think you do a really great job of, of taking your curriculum and having other people be able to teach it, you know, and that’s, I think that’s a scalable model for what, you know, a lot of people can learn from.

DH: (20:31)

So it sounded the research, the ways we fulfill the mission of developing trusted leaders and organizations around the world, remember we think that’s helping to deal with the root cause. So we’re, we’re training, leading leadership events, sales events, all these kinds of things, but are all these different problems, but there’s three business units. One is speaking and training from us. That’s me speaking a hundred events a year. Now we have a five camera studio right here, 20 yards from rehab producer. Full-Time I mean, we’re doing that. Whether that’s onstage live or virtually, we’re doing, you know, that’s, that’s a kind of, that’s a one and done though, right. Then there’s, then we have the consulting piece. And that is, you know, I had built several assessments in my grad work and was overseen by the, the guy that wrote the book on three 60 gap analysis.

DH: (21:16)

So we have an enterprise trust index it’s built on 50 years of Accenture data and, and, and my grad work and its way of measuring trust in big organizations and closing gaps. That’s consulting. I have consultants subcontracted on my team to do big. Those are big, significant issues. We’re working with the global pharmaceutical that you all would know right now, trying to pill trust globally with the vaccines going on all this stuff. Okay. So that’s, that’s really customized part, our biggest push right now. And the love is this certification part. And that is we certify independent coaches and corporate trainers inside of companies to use our content, but we don’t just certify them. We support them. So they pay monthly or annually. And we heard a lot of people say, well, I’ve got this one. We, you know, I got certified and then I never got support, or I got certified.

DH: (22:07)

And I just got these five, you know, 20 videos and worksheets. We give them everyday, my 21 years, we took and built ourselves and coded and created a beautiful platform that has everything that we heard they wanted. So it has, you know, research-based content and courses they can use on their people. It has assessments unlimited. They can use these assessments. They can see the cool, beautiful pie charts and everything, and how they can close gaps. They CA it has community. So I’ve got, you know, I’ve had the Dean of Penn state and the Dean of university of Nebraska that are certified the police to the seat, Las Vegas, and the, you know, people in Uganda, Kenya, Quebec answering them one of the former heads of, you know Nike is one. So you have this group really cool group of learning pros, whether the inside of companies or independence that then monthly, we support, they, they have the online community built kind of a, you could say a Facebook, whatever, right. In our site. And then we have monthly calls where they get to share ideas and sharpen each other. And, and yeah,

RV: (23:17)

So they pay up, they basically pay a fee to get certified. And part of that includes access to this library of stuff they’re in this community. And then they have the ability to like, reteach your content, effectively

DH: (23:33)

Assessments on limit. They can make so much money, you know, to using our content and having our support. And they get real people in my company when they need help. And they get these monthly calls and they get our annual event with it. So they pay an onboarding fee and then they pay monthly or annually, whichever way they choose on the support and ongoing we’re updating the site all the time. It’s we had some, we’ve had some big companies come and look at it. Like they heard about what we’re doing. Like, what are you doing? This is, you know,

RV: (24:01)

I mean, they pay, they pay a one-time fee at the beginning, and then monthly after that is basically how it works

DH: (24:07)

Or they pay the one-time fee plus annual, and then they can use it for you. But they pay either, either they pay that one time fee, plus they’re paying monthly, or they play the one-time fee and an annual, and then it doesn’t get again until another year.

RV: (24:21)

I gotcha. But, but, but, and so that is, that’s a model that you guys are doing, where basically you can certify and train and support other people to go out and teach your content, which you make money from. They can make money from, and it helps you spread the mission.

DH: (24:38)

And, and it’s so fun. Like I had a, I was at a banquet with John Maxwell and I got seated up, you know, I didn’t necessarily do it over. I just got to be seated with him. Anyway, we you know, he said he said, David, you’ve got to stop just letting corporate dudes. Cause I used to do train the trainer only like you buy this big pack, you know, three ring binder, and then you can you buy the workbooks? And the annuity is in buying the workbooks. And the thing is today, people want it flexible. They want to teach one-on-one one on a thousand. They want to be able to do all these things. So we said, well, if we can support them, I mean, it’s cool. What’s happening. This one, one of our corporate trainers, our trainers in Indonesia, she’s using our work on banking and oil executives. And she’s using our work in this foundation with girls that are coming out of sex trafficking to rebuild trust. I mean, how fun is it to see the mix of use of, of, of these coaches that are making money with it and making a difference with it?

RV: (25:35)

Yeah, really, really cool stuff. It’s a long way from your dollar 40 11 in the basement with no windows.

DH: (25:46)

There’s a lot of people like you, like, you know, mentors, God’s grace, my wife, I mean, this has been a journey. And you know, thankfully it’s been amazing

RV: (25:59)

Well and influential leader that the trust edge, if you will, you’ll want to, one of your first books is to me a book that is, I, I think of it, like take the stairs. It’s a book that every single person should read. No matter your age, your position, your title, like you should read the trust edge. I fully plan on having our boys read it. Like as soon as they can. It’s, it’s, it’s just like a solid staple that everybody should read.
We have the trusted leader, the brand new book coming out about how to apply this inside of organizations and to apply it to your own life, to develop a culture of trust. Where should people go if they want to get trusted leader, you know, right now I know you’ve got bonuses and all that stuff at the time, this is coming out. So where should people go to connect with you?

DH: (27:30)

The best place where we have some special guests for all your listeners is trusted leader, book.com/rory, R O R Y. So trusted leader, book.com/rory. Otherwise you can find everything at trust, edge.com and all kinds of things, but you get a bunch of free resources. If you just go to trusted leader, book.com/rory,

RV: (27:54)

I love it. So go there trusted later. Book.Com/Rory pick up the book. I’m telling you this is quality stuff. Not, not just the, you know, the watching clearly the way that they do what they do is super valuable for you as a, as a, you know, someone as a personal brand, but also the actual substance of the content that David and the team they teach is absolutely extraordinary. Incredible. It’s made such a difference in my life, our marriage, our kids, how we run business, we are just huge, huge fans of the trust edge. And so excited about the trusted leader. Now, applying this and helping our leaders go through it. So go to trusted leader, book.com/rory. David, thank you for being here, brother. We wish you all the best. Thank you.

Ep 158: How to Launch a Powerful Podcast with John Lee Dumas

RV: (00:07)

Hey brand builder Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

RV: (01:05)

Well, you can’t really have a conversation about building a personal brand and specifically about podcasting without talking to and about my man, John Lee Dumas, I mean, EO fire entrepreneur on fire is a podcast that is like, he’s like the godfather of podcasting. Certainly one of them his show now has over a hundred million total downloads. He gets like a million monthly listens. He’s interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins, Seth Godden, all these other legends. And I’m excited because you probably know, or if you don’t know, you need to know him for his work and what he does at EO fire. But he also has a book really his first official book just coming out right now called the common path to uncommon success. John and I have known each other for years. I feel like it’s amazing to see everything that he has done.

RV: (02:02)

And you know, I was lucky to be, I’ve been on his show several times, three times, I think, and now honored to have him on mine. And he’s just a solid dude. So John, thank you for being here. Rory, whenever I get to hang out with you, whether it’s on entrepreneurs, on fire, your show, wherever that might be in the world, it’s a good day, man. So I’m excited to be here. Yeah. Well, and I appreciate you doing this. I know you’ve got a passion for the, for the entrepreneurs and specifically you understand our mission driven messengers, you know, that is our audience. And you know, I think when I, when I think of the common path to uncommon success, I feel a little bit, and maybe you can tell me whether or not this is true, but when you look at your success as a personal brand, in a podcaster, it’s pretty much been that it’s been a, a straight forward path. But you’ve had uncommon success because you’ve stuck to some core fundamentals. And so I’d love you just to take us back to in the beginning, launching the show and from there to a hundred million downloads, what are the most important principles that we need to know to be growing our brand?

JLD: (03:25)

So, I mean, Your brands is really building your life. I mean, how are you building your life? I mean, I’m from Maine, very small, tiny town spent the first 18 years there went to college and an army scholarship. So post army, you know, I did a 13 month tour of duty in Iraq actually while I was deployed. So I kinda got like the real deal, Holy field army stuff, not just like I’m playing army. And I went through six years of struggle. Post my military experience from 26 years old until I was 32. I knew nothing about building a brand. I knew nothing about building a business. And I tried a bunch of things. Law school dropped out corporate finance, commercial real estate. Like none of it works. One thing I finally did right towards like my fifth and six year during that six years of struggle, the sort of listening to great content, reading, great contents, you know, the right business books, the right podcasts.

JLD: (04:20)

And that led me to, to find these podcasts, you know, many that you’ve been a guest on Rory that, you know, interview entrepreneurs. And there were some great shows that were out there. Unfortunately they thought it was the right move to have one episode per month or two episodes per you know, per month that were going live on their feeds. And I was just, just voraciously consuming these content, this content with, you know, interviewing entrepreneurs and their stories. I was learning so much from them, but there were so few of them. And so I remember saying to myself, I’m just going to go find that daily podcast, that interviews entrepreneurs. So I can just have a fresh episode waiting from each day. So I went home, loaded up the Apple iTunes back in 2012, searched all the way through it. And the show did not exist.

JLD: (05:09)

And it was literally like, like Paul McCartney waking up and being like, wait, the song yesterday doesn’t exist. Like I just, I had a dream about it and it doesn’t exist. I can just make this hit song from a dream. I was like, this is like a dream. I can’t believe a daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs doesn’t exist. Cause that’s like, that’s the show that I want, that’s show that I need. And so I said, Hey, let’s follow Gandhi’s advice. I read about it somewhere. Like be the change you want to see in the world. And I said, I’m going to create the first daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs. So the day I launched Rory back in 2012, entrepreneurs on fire was the best daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs. It was the worst daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs. It was the only, and so like I built this brand entrepreneurs on fire that one because I was the only game in town delivering a daily podcast, interviewing entrepreneurs, it’s called the first mover advantage.

JLD: (06:07)

I had the first mover advantage I won as a result. Was I good? No. Was my interview style good? No. Did I bring on good guests? Yes. Thankfully like they made the show good, like listened to ball. And then I put in the wraps and I got a little bit better. Every single time I did that. And like, that’s the story of entrepreneurs on fire. So I challenged people who are building their brain right now. We can take this in any direction you want. But I challenged people to like, look in the mirror and say like, how am I being the best at one thing that I’m doing? Like, how am I being the only, like the quote that I love is the higher, the barrier, the lower the competition, a daily podcast is a flip and high barrier. I had no competition. I built a moat around my business and I won as a result. I’m the quote unquote godfather of podcasting. Not because it was the first, but because I was the first person to go all in daily, seven days a week. Now you and I are talking, as you mentioned, the intro 3000 episodes, a hundred million listens, 1.4 million listens every single month, eight years in a row of a multiple millions in net profits, all from that one big idea.

RV: (07:19)

Well, and you know what I love about one of the things. I mean, there’s so many things I’ve always, always loved about you. Not the least of which is you being a military man, which I always have much love and respect for, but I is, and, and I don’t mean this to sound bad at all is to go. You didn’t try to even compete so much on my quality. You just went for quantity and that’s that you don’t hear about that as a strategic decision that much, but to go well. Yeah. Where else were people gonna go? You know, like that, I think you hear so, so do you believe in quality over quantity? Or do you think it’s quantity over quality or is it both

JLD: (08:04)

Question? Cause there’s, there’s different circumstances. There are absolutely times when quality is going to win. Period. End of story. The highest quality product is going to win a lot of the times. Then there are times you look in the mirror and you say, well, I can’t be highest quality because I’ve never podcasted before. I’ve never interviewed somebody before I am going to period. End of story. Stink as a podcast host for the foreseeable future. So I’ve got a win some other way. I’m going to win on quantity. Do you think the person that just went actually there’s actually, I’m gonna back up. There’s a, there’s a fantastic, fantastic, like real case that I’ve read. And one amazing book. Maybe, honestly it was even years. I was like this, this pottery class and the professor divided them into two separate sides of the room.

JLD: (08:52)

He said the left side. I’m only you on your best pot, just one single best pot. That’s all it means. So just take the whole semester, but only present me one pot and give you a grade on that one pot. He goes to the second half of the class. I don’t, I’m not going to grade you on any quality whatsoever. I’m only gonna grade you on the amount of pots you finish. That’s it just the quantity. And guess what? At the end of that semester, not only were the best pots, all from the people who did the highest quantity, but the people who just had to do one good pot, none of them were good because they was just trying to get one good pot. They weren’t putting in the reps, they weren’t actually doing the work. So I was a really bad podcast hosts for like 480 episodes.

JLD: (09:39)

Like that’s really the number that I look back at. I was like, okay, four 81. I was kind of good that episode. It took a year and a half of daily podcasting to put in the reps to become a quote unquote decent podcast, or just like it took those students 50 pots of just cranking it out. Cause they could care less. It’s like, I’m only getting graded on the quantity, but then they started getting good almost despite themselves. Cause they already even trying to get good. It didn’t matter if they were good, but they became good because they put in those flipping reps and this one person trying to create the best pot ever. It was just one they stunk. They never put in those wraps. So as both sides of the equation, listen, I buy the best products because I love the best, the highest quality. But if you, as an individual, can’t be the best, the highest quality step day one, step one. How are you going to get there? You’re going to put in the raps, you’re going to put in the quantity and you’re going to get it.

RV: (10:36)

Yeah, yeah. I mean that is, that is my story of, of professional speaking was like, I was in my twenties, I spoke 304 times for free, like back of a Perkins restaurant, two people in the restaurant, me on a Friday night, like doing my speech and, and you know, and now people see me on stage in front of thousands and thousands of people and they’re like, Whoa, you know? And it’s like, no, you don’t understand. Like it was quantity like quantity is so underrated. It is so underrated. Now. What’s interesting. One of the things I love about podcasting sometimes, like I actually think I enjoy being a podcast host more than I like being a podcast guest. I actually like the role of being the student and the interviewer more than the teacher. And you know, it’s interesting about podcasting is the nature of it is someone else can be the star. Like you can be the host and, and it’s like, you’re bringing in the stars and you did that right away from day one. You always had great guests, like from the very, very beginning. So you also kind of had a both situation going. Yeah. So that’s

JLD: (11:54)

Exactly my mentality. I said, Hey, if the spotlight’s on me, this podcast is going to fail because I’m not good. But if I can bring a guest on, I can ask them four or five really meaningful questions, quickly turn the spotlight on them and just step back and shut up. They’ll make this podcast listen to bowl. So Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, you know, Tony Robbins, Barbara Corcoran. Like I brought them on. I ask a question, I step out of the way and I shut up and boom, they took it off and they crushed it. And that’s what they do. They were great. They had put in the reps for years. I knew how to ask a question and I stepped out of the way. And so that’s how I got my feet wet. That’s how I put in my reps. That’s how I put in the work. So would you,

RV: (12:40)

When you talk about quantity, so of course, you know, your book is just coming out and this is your first book, common path to uncommon success. Do you feel like quantity and reps? Is that a part of that story? That it’s just, it, no matter what you’re doing, that, that ties in

JLD: (13:00)

100%. So this book, the common path to uncommon success, it is a combination of these 3000 interviews I’ve done over the past nine years of again, interviewing people like Rory, Tony Robbins, Seth Godin, Tim Ferris, and just sitting down. And this was in late 2019. I sat down and I literally like wrote down, like, what are the core foundational principles that Rory has that Tony has that Tim have that these successful entrepreneurs have, that they possess? What are the similar touchpoints that they’ve all gone through on their journey to uncommon success? And I wrote them all down. You know, I matched up the ones that were identical and I got rid of the ones that didn’t make any sense. And I was left with just 17 core principles that every one of us and by us, I mean successful entrepreneurs that we have as foundational core principles, I put them in chronological order, step one to step 17.

JLD: (14:00)

And then I sat my butt down in 2020 and for two hours every day for eight months, I wrote this book 71,000 words, 273 pages is my first traditionally published book. It very well could be my last, I mean, I’m not saying I want to write books for a living. I wrote, I needed to write this book because it needed to get out there. This book is the book that people need in their hands. And they’re looking for financial freedom and fulfillment. But man, I put everything in there. I got nothing left. I don’t have any illusions of grand jury. Like, this is what you need. If you have a question, there’s the answer crashing.

RV: (14:38)

Keep your energy up. I mean like 3000 is a flipping ton. 3000 of anything is a ton. Like I don’t know that I’ve been on stage 3000 times. I definitely I’ve done close to a thousand interviews. But like every time I listened to one of your interviews I’ve been interviewed, like I know that you’re doing a ton of interviews now as a guest, like somehow you have this energy that is always turned on. Like where does that come from? How do we do that? And is, is that a part of, of this you think like, is that a part of the 17 principles here?

JLD: (15:24)

Absolutely. It is a part of the 17 principles. In fact, it is principal numero UNO. When you see Rory Vaden onstage, guess what he is living in his zone of fire. He is living in that zone of fire. When you hear me in a podcast, whether I’m being interviewed or interviewing somebody else, I am living in my zone of fire. That is it. So guess what? Step one chapter, one of this book, identify your big idea. So few people have identified their big idea. They don’t know what their zone of genius is, what theirs on a fire is, and they’re not living it every single day. That’s why I have so much energy because I feed off of this. I’m an extrovert. I love having these conversations. I thrive in them. This is my big idea. It’s not everybody who’s watching. This is not your big idea. What I’m doing, what Roy does, this is not. But your big idea is out there. It’s up to you now to find it. So that’s step one, chapter one. And Roy is my video coming in. Okay.

RV: (16:30)

Yeah. So I think you are a great example of like living your truth there and being the zone of fire and you feel it. I mean, it’s it that conveys it transfers through, through the interviews. One of the other things that I’ve always admired about you personally, I actually don’t even think I’ve ever told you this. I’m gonna use the word transparency. He is it, it is a couple examples of this. You have always posted your income your income statements, your Mo what’s it called the Mo it’s a monthly, monthly reports, monthly income reports, right? You you’ve always been so trans a trans parent with how you’re making money and what’s going on. The other thing is, is with your, just this launch that you’re doing for this book you know, you sent me a video and I know you sent it out to some others of just a very direct two minutes.

RV: (17:28)

Like, Hey, this is what I’m doing here. Here’s, here’s a few ways you can help me. I’m just asking for your help. And it was amazing as the recipient, you know, I’ve always like been in launch mode. How powerful, the just clear, open, honest ask it. Wasn’t like buried within something there wasn’t like some like, you know, Hey, help me and I’ll help you in there. No, it was, it wasn’t pushy though. W at all, it was, it was just very like, and so I feel like there is some strength about you that you’re willing to just like, be open about your intentions in what you’re doing. How did you get to be that way? How do you think it helps you? And then how do we get to be more like that?

JLD: (18:20)

I think life is short. Life is short. We’re here on this earth for a blip of time. And I’m here to have fun, to make an impact, to add value to this world. And when I write a book like this, where my heart, my soul, my blood, my sweat, my tears, I poured into it. And I know with a hundred percent certainty, and this comes to confidence, and this is something we can talk about later, cause this is a huge part of it. But when I know the a hundred percent certainty, a hundred percent confidence that this book is going to help. So many people, basically every single person that reads this book and genuinely falls the principles and takes action is going to have a massive impact positively on their life. I’m not going to be shy or I’m not going to, you know, kind of come at things in that.

JLD: (19:07)

Half-Ass kind of way. Like I want to be direct and honest, and I’m gonna say, Rory, you have a great platform. I’ve had, I have a great platform. I’ve had you on my show. You’ve rocked the mic. I’ve helped you, you know, promote I’ve helped grow your brands and build your audience. Now it’s time to flip the tables. I would love to come on your show. I would love to share with your audience, the value this book will bring to their life. By the way I want you to, pre-order not just one but multiple copies of this book.

RV: (19:34)

Well, and you did.

JLD: (19:38)

Why? Because Amazon bases their bulk order off of my pre-order. So pre-orders are so, so importance. And that even went forth. And I said, Hey, I actually want you to consider a bulk order because I have amazing bulk orders starting at 12 books, going up to 1200 in a bulk order will help me cause that’s how HarperCollins basis their print run off of bulk orders. And lastly, and then that was the last part was all about. I’d love to find a way to get on your platform and your show in front of your audience, because you built an amazing audience. And it was a personal video. I recorded only for Rory. You know, I started by obviously saying his name and giving a couple of personal examples of, you know, things that we’ve done in the past together.

RV: (20:15)

I literally was, I was like, what technology is he using to do this? Cause I was like, it was, so it was called sit down and record a personal video for your personal friends, doing a personal ask. And I was so blown away as, as just the recipient of it, John, I forwarded it to some of our clients and I was like, this is how this should be done. Correct? Honest, confident, not arrogant. And like a personal ask. Like it

JLD: (20:48)

Was so powerful. Did you say, and by his book, that’s my point though, is that like, I literally was just like, Hey, this is what I’m asking of you. And I gave the reasons why though, too, like, I didn’t say, can you prepare some copies? Like, I think it’s important to give people reasons and clarification. Like why, you know, you tell the story, like the story’s huge. It’s like Amazon will base their pre-orders of my book based off of pre-orders. Roy knows that he’s a very successful author. And when I say that, he’s like, Oh, I get why John’s asking for not just one order. He’s not like being greedy because he knows I’m not making money from these books. You know, sales. I mean, I’m with Harper Collins, you know what? It’s not this isn’t a money play. This is, I want to get this book out, ranked high, as many sales as possible so that I can help as many people as possible. And in fact, we can talk in a second about a way that I’m losing a ton of money on every pre-order literally, but that’s not the point like this, isn’t a financial play. Like I’ve made my money in other ways, over nine years, this is, get this flipping book into your hands. Yeah.

RV: (21:52)

And you, you know, this concept of give value, you know, give you build relationships like before you ever need something, you’re doing that with the book. You’re I know that you’re, you’re giving away like hard cover bonuses. Like isn’t it. Three, is it? It’s all three of your journals.

JLD: (22:10)

My mastery journal. I am shipping you my freedom journal and my podcast journal. These are $150 of journal value that I’m shipping to everybody’s door. Who pre-orders one copy. Like most people like order. Pre-Order 10, 10 copies of my book and get all three of my journals. Pre-Order one because I just want you to get one and read it. If you want to get two and three, I’m not going to stop you of course, but I want you to get one of these books, read it because you’re going to love it. And you’re going to tell your friends about it and it will spread organically that way. And by the way, these are fantastic journals. So I’m going to ship them to you, to your door with one single pre-order. And I hope you love them. And it’s going to cost me a lot of money to do so, but that’s not the point.

JLD: (22:52)

The point is, how do I make this a no brainer for people that I know need my book? Cause I know there’s a lot of people out there that are like, like this is $16. This is $28 a hard cover. This is a $17 audio book. That’s not insignificant money for a lot of people. And I don’t take that lightly. So I want to make this a no brainer value for you. So that’s just one bonus. I have four other bonuses. I won’t bore you now, but well let me, yeah. Yeah. Here’s what I want y’all to do. Go to where

RV: (23:20)

We go to uncommon success, book.com and here’s the thing one you should buy the book. Like I, I believe in John, I love him and love what he’s doing. Th you know, he’s done all of these interviews. He’s put this together. The bonuses are incredible. The other reason why every single one of you listening to this specifically should go is because you should go to uncommon success, book.com and look at how launch is done.

JLD: (23:46)

This is a great example of the bulk bonuses that are laid out. You’ve got links off the, Oh, it’s very clear. It’s very simple buying in bulk a personal message from you. It’s just a simple clean website. And it’s like, this is how a book launch should be done. So even if you’re not going to buy the book, you should go to uncommon success, book.com to see a real life example of someone who has spent years developing an audience, thousands of episodes, hours and hours of reps living in a zone of fire, pouring into people’s lives, being transparent. And now that culminating with a, with a traditional book launch, which is exactly to a formulate T what we teach, build the audience and then release, release the book. And I just, man, I’m, I am so proud of you brother. And I’m just grateful for you.

JLD: (24:42)

And I hope this book just crushes it and that you just keep doing what you’re doing. Well, listen, I don’t take this lightly. I, I really appreciate, you know, our friendship and, you know, your kind words, they mean a lot. And, and you know, this is one thing that I hope people that are watching and listening really take note of is when you’re building your brands, like your network is your net worth. Like you got to find ways to connect with the right people. Like there’s a reason when, why, when Roy is on my show, I end each episode by saying, Hey, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You’ve been hanging out with Rory and JLD, so let’s keep up the heat. Cause I want you to realize that’s how I went from this 2012 law school dropout kind of loser to, you know, a year later making a hundred thousand dollars a month.

JLD: (25:29)

And now I just crossed my 89th month in a row of net profit, a hundred thousand dollars a month. And I’m not saying it’s all about the money and all about this and all about that, but it is about financial freedom. It is about fulfillment. It is about living in your zone of fire. And those are all the things that Rory’s achieved that I’ve achieved, that other people have achieved. The you can too. And why not make it easy on yourself by learning from others in the common path to uncommon success. It is the book that will get you there. I’ve bought and read every one of Rory’s books because they’re awesome. And I know if you’re watching this, you likely have as well. That’s smart. Keep educating yourself, keep investing in yourself. And that’s not just money. I’m much saying like invest enough and buy this book. It’s the time it takes time to sit down and read a book and really, you know, apply its principles. But that’s what winners do. That’s what I did in 2012. And I was struggling. This is what you can do today. The common path, the uncommon success is the name of the book. Uncommon success book.com is the URL. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes, buddy. We wish you the best. Keep kicking butt and stay on fire brother. Thanks Rory.

Ep 156: How to Unlock Your Hidden Genius with Victoria Labalme

RV: (00:00)

Hey, brand builder Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

RV: (01:04)

I love when I get to introduce you to some of my oldest friends and mentors and people that I’ve looked up to for years. And that is the case with Victoria Labalme. She is a hall of fame speaker, which is how I know her from the national speakers association. Someone that I admired for years and somebody that I would say is truly one of the best platform presenters on the planet. And it all speaks to what she does. I mean, she was a performing artist who was originally trained directly under the world, renowned Marcel, Marceau. She is magnificent in keynotes. She, she has she’s the creator of programs that help people with this. But the reason that she’s on the show now is because she is releasing her first official, traditionally published book is called risk forward, embrace the unknown and unlock your hidden genius. And so we’re going to talk about building your personal brand in a world of uncertainty, accessing your energy genius, and just hearing her story about how she has built this extraordinary reputation and personal brand. So Victoria, welcome to the show.

RV: (02:13)

Hello, Rory. And hello everyone. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

RV: (02:18)

Yeah, of course. Well, you know, we’ve got so many interconnectivity points you’ve been to our events before, right? So I it’s, it’s, it’s the people in our community should know about you and should meet you. And, and so I, I wanted to, I wanted to just kinda like start off with a little bit about your, your, your personal brand and the, the unlocking your energy genius or unlocking your hidden genius. Which is, I think one of your, one of your taglines of subtitle of the book. And I want to talk about the presentation part of things, because that, to me is like, you know, part of where you came from you and I have that shared interest in, and a lot of people listening, they’re either doing, you know, virtual webinars, virtual keynotes and stuff like that. And I think when it comes to making that pivot from onstage live in front of humans, to now virtual keynotes and webinars and things, how do you, how do you make that transition and what are some of the things that we can do to just kind of like still over deliver as presenters, even though a lot of what we’re doing these days is virtual.

Speaker 3: (03:32)

So great question. It’s really, how do we create the virtual experience to have some of the pizazz that we are used to? Well, it all begins with taking creative risks. I have a session I do call risking forward on camera. And, you know, if you think about what you can do on stage, what can be translated and there are all kinds of ways, you know, those are a lot of technology out there. The people are using E cam and green screen and different camera angles and different mikes and music and instruments. And part of what I like to help people do as well though, is really take what’s within them, their hidden genius and bring that out. So that’s your content and your creative expression that only you do in the way that you do that distinguishes your brand. That’s part of what risking forward is.

Speaker 3: (04:21)

How can you create and communicate with the unexpected twist, the unexpected twist that distinguishes your brand. And that’s a core tagline of mine because, you know, everyone can put up a green screen, but what can only you do and how can you do it in your own way? So that starts with your personality, your past your passion. I call it the prison effect in each of us is a full spectrum of colors. So one of the things that make you distinct and different, you know, what stories, what props, what examples, what physicality, what expressions, how do you pull? So you don’t look from it, look, look like everyone else from everyone else’s perspective.

RV: (04:59)

Yeah. And I, you know, that’s interesting in terms of, it’s not so much an external thing of like a camera angle or lighting, or, you know, something fancy I’m doing on the screen, but you’re talking about accessing the internal uniqueness or you know, one of the terms we use around brand builders group all the time, which I originally got from you is through line. And this, this idea of the through line of your, of your message. We usually talk about that term related to your content. But like when you say a take take that, you know, take a creative risk, what is the thing that only I can do? How do I find that? Or is it just asking, okay, what stories can I tell that are unique to me? What props can I use? What physicality does it basically just come by asking myself those questions and then base it, then, then just giving myself permission to just go, yeah. Let’s act on that crazy idea. I mean, is it as simple as that?

Speaker 3: (05:58)

Well, yeah. I mean, part of it is trusting that the, the things that are different and weird about you are often valuable. I mean, Sally hogs had our good friend has a whole phrase called you know, different is better, you know?

RV: (06:14)

It is better than better. I love, I love that. Yeah, that is such a great line. Different is better.

Speaker 3: (06:19)

Oh, you meant different as being better for a long time. And it’s just, it’s true. Not, you know, not in a terrible way, but it there’s so much value. And what happens is, and I talk about this in the book risk forward. And I talk about this in my program, rock the room is we shave off parts of who we are to fit into a mold. So for me, I’m extremely physical and, you know, they’re all kinds of things I can do with my body, but other people are more visual, you know, and some people have instrumental skills and some people have comedic skills. So it’s really access to what’s unique and different to you. And bringing that out in terms of taking those creative risks. I always encourage people to do what I call is a micro risk, because you don’t want to go out in front of a thousand people on a zoom or on a video recording or a webcam and try something new for the first time.

RV: (07:05)

Oh, this I’m glad you’re saying this. Cause I was going to ask you about this. So you’re, you’re, you’re not testing it out in front of like, you know, the largest audience you’ve ever been in front of them.

Speaker 3: (07:15)

Right? I mean, any comedian will tell you two things. Number one, and this is my background is a performing artist, a comedian and a movement artist is that, you know, you’re either going to do one of two things. You’re either putting new content between two time-tested pieces of material. So that if it sags, if you tank your out quickly, so you put it in there and then you recover. But more importantly than that, the first time you do it should not be in front of your biggest, most important audience comedians tour their work across the country, in small clubs before they bring it to Broadway, same thing with shows. And it’s the same for us as presenters. What we do is we try it out with a few friends. We tried it with a couple of colleagues. Is it working? We refine it over time and we increased the size of that audience.

RV: (07:59)

Yeah. I mean, it’s funny cause I, I literally my, my original Toastmasters club, which is where, you know, like my speaking journey started cherry Creek Toastmasters. They last night I sent them a video. They asked, they asked if I would do a video of what, 15 years later, how it shaped my life. And I told them that my best jokes today are the ones that I originally wrote. The first renditions are versions for my icebreaker speech in front of eight people at my, like my local Toastmaster club. And you know, I think that’s interesting. I mean, you’re, you’re saying that as like every comedian knows, but I that’s a good reminder even for me. And I’m sure some people listening have never heard that, like don’t put new content, like put it in between two things so that you can recover and don’t test it out, like on, on the world’s biggest stage.

RV: (08:54)

So think that’s, I think that’s handy now on the topic of risk in general, risking is risky. And so I think, no matter if it’s even just writing a book or even doing a virtual presentation or maybe talking about a different topic or going live, like is a big thing right now, like it’s risky to go live on social because you don’t know it. You can’t add it. Talk to me about the emotional side of dealing with risk or managing risk. Even it could be in a business like, Hey, I wanna, I want to launch a new funnel or do something I’ve never done paid advertising. All of these concepts are, there is a fear of uncertainty, which I know is more about what risk forward is kind of about. So like how do I navigate the emotional side of, of uncertainty?

Speaker 3: (09:48)

Right? Well, I’ll start by explaining where the term risk forward was born. Years ago, as you benched in my introduction, I studied with the French mime, Marcel Marceau, and people love to joke, Oh, you’re a speaker, but you studied mine, which is a stupid joke. You want

RV: (10:08)

It actually took me a second to get it. I was like, what? Oh, Oh, okay. Okay. Now I see now I see.

Speaker 3: (10:14)

Yeah. I always tell people, be careful not to say the obvious because you lower your status. It’s like, if someone’s laughing,

RV: (10:21)

Right. That is so funny. I’ve never heard that. I love that. That’s funny.

Speaker 3: (10:27)

Yeah, no, it’s true. If someone’s really tan, don’t say you’re really tan. If someone’s last name is hamburger, don’t make a joke about it. Like, cause they’ve, they’ve guaranteed. They’ve heard it. So have I heard mom jokes? Yes. Do I need to hear them? No, because when I do, I’m like, okay, you’re now in the category of a certain

RV: (10:45)

Type. You’re that guy. You’re

Speaker 3: (10:46)

That guy. So you don’t want to be that guy. In any event. I studied with Marcel Marceau and there was a type of movement. He called he scab, they schema. And it was, it was a way of being almost like the sale of a boat. You know, you were arched open with the wind, your body. And for those of you listening, who can’t see me, I’m my body is arched open, like the wind. And it was, it felt very exposed, a little scary. And I’ve come to think of that as a philosophy for how we approach our work in our life. And I returned it risk forward and trademarked it years ago. And it’s really how do we go forward heart open, even if we’re a little off balance because the mistake that we each make and part of what I address in the book is that we think we should always be clear.

Speaker 3: (11:35)

We think we should always have a plan. We think we must have a goal if we’re going to succeed. And having worked with so many people from top executives at Starbucks and PayPal, these are my clients, the C-suite at these companies like Microsoft Starbucks, PayPal entrepreneurs, running multi-million dollar brand. Speaking on Oprah’s stage artists from Hollywood. I’ve learned that many of them didn’t always have clarity or a plan. And so while it’s good to have some idea, sometimes you can meet with great success without always knowing where you’re heading and we all have that experience in our lives. And that’s what risking forward is about. And it’s lots of stories and examples and tools and principles from the arts to help you navigate through that. Not knowing through that period of uncomfortable near miss discomfort to find your best way forward. And so whether it’s to your point, you know, you’re launching a new funnel or you’re putting together a new blog or podcast, there’s a ton of unknown. And what we do is often as we grasped for like the, the, the simplest the most convenient way out or what everyone else is doing instead of finding what’s original to us, even if it’s not been done before.

RV: (12:52)

Hmm. I love that. And the, the, that con that was re re is the translation of what Marcel used to say, is it, does it translate directly as risk forward or is it not really the direction?

Speaker 3: (13:11)

Not really. I mean, it was my interpretation of it. I mean, this is obviously risk and Evonne means in front of

RV: (13:17)

Huh. Huh. Yeah. But that’s,

Speaker 3: (13:20)

If all means before or in front of, so huh.

RV: (13:24)

So, but that, that concept of, of, of even just applying these principles of the arts to the way that we live and the way we make business decisions is to kind of like, be willing to almost like listen to the way you feel pulled in the direction and not necessarily just what is clear because it’s of what has been done before. And that’s why, I mean, in a COVID like in a world of COVID, I mean, this is our life. I mean, our, everything, like in this moment, at the time of this recording, which is before your book is coming out, we are living in a complete world of uncertainty. Like nobody knows what’s going to happen next month or in the next six months, it’s just like, this is the world that we, that we live in. And so it seems like somehow, and I would say this about you as a friend that you you’ve been able to give yourself that permission to just kind of like explore the wonder of that rather than to fight against it. Is that yeah. Would that be accurate to say

Speaker 3: (14:30)

It is accurate to say, and my life is I I’m pleased and humbled to say that my life has been extraordinary. The career I’ve had, the successes I’ve had, the personal successes I’ve had have led so many people to say to me, how’d you get to where you are? What was your plan? And I always say, I didn’t have a plan. You know, I did what was next. And I learned that in my life for my parents. And I’m here to tell you, I am living proof. And the people in the book are living proof that there are all kinds of other ways forward and it’s freeing to people it’s freeing. And I think it also depends on what you value, because if, if you know, if what you’re after is status you might not take as many risks and it oddly it’s the risk taking.

Speaker 3: (15:20)

That’s going to get you there. You know, and same thing with finance. You know, if, if you’re trying certain mechanisms to generate a ton of sales, but the word, my word back to the, your through line is not pure. It’s not going to last long. And so we’re always coming back to what’s, what’s truthful, what’s that inner current, and this may sound woo, but I have worked with the top executives, as I mentioned, and this translates and it is redirected companies. It is redirected teams, it’s redirected entrepreneurs and artists of all kinds to come back to that because it’s the pure path forward.

RV: (16:02)

You know, I would, I would second that, yeah, there is one of my friends here in Nashville is a guy named Jerry Jeremy coward, who is he is an artist. He is one of the best photographers in the world and shoots Taylor Swift. He shot the Pope. I mean, just amazing. And I remember one time you know, he liked did this, there were some fires in Tennessee and he went and took pictures of the houses that burned down and just to like showcase to the world, like how devastating this was. And I asked him, I was like, dude, where did you come up with the idea to do it? And he said, he said, I just felt it. I just had it. And he said that everybody has those crazy ideas. The difference between me and everyone is I actually listened to them. That’s right. And, and Jeremy is an artist. And I would say, right right now I have two personal friends that are billionaires which is a recent thing. I’ve, I’ve interviewed several of them, but there’s actually two that I now know personally and interact with on a fairly regular basis. And I would say these are business billionaires, like business. And I would say, this is true about them. Yes. They

Speaker 3: (17:12)

Literally, in both

RV: (17:14)

Cases, they were both told that what they were doing was stupid. It made no sense. It was ridiculous. It would never ever work. And so it’s like, there’s not that much different know. I think being an entrepreneur is being an artist.

Speaker 3: (17:31)

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the argument I make in the book and exactly that the successes we’ve each had. And I think anyone listening can think back on their lives, some of the most extraordinary successes that you’ve had happened when you were following that. And there are many, many stories of that when you took that creative risk, even though you didn’t know where it was going to lead, but it felt like the right thing to do either morally ethically, or just creatively curiosity wise. And that, as I always say to my clients, one of three things will happen when you risk forward. And they’re all good either. You’ll discover the ideas. Terrific. And it’ll come out to be something like your friend with the photographs. Yeah. Number two, it will be the step that leads to the next one. And so you’ll realize that wasn’t quite it, but it took you down the right path and you wouldn’t have seen the right path.

Speaker 3: (18:22)

Had you not taken that step. For my case, it was doing standup comedy. I thought, Oh, this is my thing. This is many, many years ago. I took that step forward and I realized that wasn’t it. But it was actually my trying to get into a comedy club show. It was, I was trying to audition for the HBO Aspen comedy festival. And I was in a comedy clubs thinking that was my path. And someone from the speaking world saw me and said, Victoria, you should come and be a speaker who would have thought, so it’s following that steps. That’s the second thing. And the third possibly the most important of all is that they say the number one regret of the dying is that they didn’t take more risks. People say, I lived life on other people’s terms. I didn’t take the risk I want, and I never tried X or Y or Z. And you don’t want to die. Wishing you taken more risks. So risking forward is all about finding what’s ahead by stepping forward into it. Even if you don’t know.

RV: (19:21)

Mm. How do you balance this idea of having a plan? Cause that’s something we do. I do this in my life. We teach people to do it as like we do set targets. We do have goals. We do, you know, we have a budget for our company that we have to operate by. Like, you know, there’s, there are KPIs and there are, you know, new initiatives and we have project management and you know, these are things we do that have helped us scale at least to where we have been. How do you balance the idea of goals and planning, but also what you’re saying, which is more of, of risk-taking. And I, I, you know, I, I think an intuition or creativity, like how do you reconcile these two? Or do you, do you think one is right and one is wrong? Or do you, do you think there’s some type of a balance and how do you, how do you find your way there?

Speaker 3: (20:17)

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s a, it’s a both and type of scenario. I’m all for goals and plans and clarity. And I have that with this book. I have this with projects in my business and in my personal life, what I’m addressing is the in-between when we’re between moments of clarity. So let’s say you’re coming up with the plan for your year, or you’re coming up with how you want to approach your new podcast. Are you new speaker demo or your new blog as you’re in what I call in the book, the fog of not knowing it’s how you embrace that fog embrace the unknown. As I say, in the subtitle of the book that will determine your success. And most people are so uncomfortable with not knowing that they want to make a plan as quickly as possible. And that’s where we screw up.

Speaker 3: (21:07)

So in a personal life, it’d be like the woman who’s 29, who says she has to get married by the time she’s 30 looks around, sees her two viable candidates and picks one, even though it’s not right, that’s you see that happen all the time. I have many friends who got married because they were scared and they wanted something in place. And 10 years later they’re divorced and it’s messy. The same thing in our work. We don’t want to be in the phase of not knowing people are afraid. So they make a decision really quickly. I’m going to go this direction or we’re going to do that. And when we make that commitment, the potential for loss opportunity, cost stress, money, time, creative expression that goes down the tubes. And we’ve all had those moments in our lives where we’ve committed to something out of fear, because we want to look clear and everyone else is doing it.

Speaker 3: (21:55)

And then two years later, or two months later, we realize what was propelling us forward was not something from within and something that lit us up, but something that we thought we should do from the outside. And that’s what I want to help people save themselves from, because I have seen it around the world and I’ve spoken around the world and Japan and Brazil and France, there’s so much that’s lost and there’s so much sameness homogeneity and you see it in all industries and this is risky for it is all about breaking through that and doing it the way only you can.

RV: (22:29)

Yeah. I mean, I think this message of taking creative risk is going to stick with me. And gosh, there’s just so many examples of this in, in my life. And it it’s such a relevant time for this conversation. Cause we like are living in such uncertainty right now. And yet that’s why like there’s more millionaires made in down markets than ever before, is all these opportunities emerge. And if you just kind of like listen to it and step in that direction. So I wanna, I want to tell everybody this, all right now this won’t apply to all of you because we’re releasing this episode before Victoria’s book comes out. And if you happen to hear this in this, this little window, so your book, your book comes out on March 16th. And if you, if you go now either way, you’re going to get some good things.

RV: (23:24)

But if you go before March 16th if you go to risk forward.com forward slash book, there are some incredible bonuses that she is giving away. Both here on the emotional side related to, you know, like working through uncertainty, but also there’s some real practical things related to some of her in terms of being a physical performer, which are just extraordinary. So if you go to risk forward.com forward slash book, by the way, if you’re international, you can also order, which is rare. She’s got an international thing set up. If it’s after that date, it’s totally fine. You could still go there. You’re going to get some bonuses and some extra resources that she has included. But if you get this before, you’ve got a little window to go to go check it out. So risk forward.com forward slash book is where we will, we will put it.

RV: (24:16)

I am, I’m giving a shameless plug here for my friend that I’ve known for years who you can see just her, her wisdom and, and how graceful and in touch she is with exploring this artistic side. And I believe that it will help you unlock your hidden genius. And that’s why I want to encourage you to at least go check it out. Right. plus it’s a great opportunity as always to go see how someone is executing her pre-launch and doing her launch and how she does her book website. So other than that, Victoria, is there anywhere you would point people to or anything you want to leave us with?

Speaker 3: (24:53)

Yeah. Well, that’s it, that’s the website. We have an amazing video up there. That’s one minute and 40 seconds, which shows a bit more of what the book looks like, because here’s the thing. This is not a typical book. It breaks the mold of what a book is. It’s an experience. Every page is different. You can read the book in any order. Each chapter is unique unto itself. There isn’t a book like this that I’ve seen. It is my ability of bringing through. And this is what I want you each do for yourself. Take your different sides. I took my background in arts and in performance and in poetry and in business and an entrepreneurship. And I put it all together into a book experience. That’s my style. What’s your style? How do you do it? Not like me, but like you. And so check out the book, not to copy it because that would be a bummer.

Speaker 3: (25:42)

Cause it wouldn’t be you, but to do what you do in the way only you can and that’s, what’s going to distinguish you. So this is all about, as I say, in the book at the edge of not knowing, cause I didn’t know how I was going to do this book in the beginning, but then it became clear as I stepped into it. So at the edge of not knowing is the beginning of the extraordinary. So trust yourself, risk forward, put those ideas out there. I have tons of tools in the book for how to do that. I’m so excited if you’re ordering this before the book launches, we have a book team that you can be part of you get inside behind the scenes of what’s happening. But thank you worry for having me. I’m so happy to be here. You’re a stellar human being. Love it.

RV: (26:25)

Thank you, Victoria. We wish you all the best with your launch and far, far beyond. And you know, we’ll be, we’ll be watching closely. So good luck. Thank you.

Ep 154: SEO Secrets for Personal Brands with Neil Patel

Hey brand builder Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

So excited to introduce you to someone who I think is one of the top thought leaders in the world today in his space. In fact, AGA was asking me you know, she’s like, I know I’ve heard of Neil Patel. And I said, well, he’s basically the world’s top thinker on SEO search engine optimization, as well as a number of other, you know, digital marketing related initiatives, which we’re going to talk about today. If you have never met him, he is a New York times bestselling author of, of a called hustle. He hosts the marketing school podcast with his pal, Eric, it’s a fantastic podcast. It’s super short every day. And they you know, the cover of variety of different topics. I’ve, I’ve been listening here in the last few months, pretty much on on repeat, but he also is the founder of a company called crazy egg and a tool, a tool called crazy egg, which we maybe will talk about.

And then Uber suggest which some of you, even if you don’t recognize Neil, you’ve probably used Uber suggest, which we will talk about. So anyways by our mutual friend, Jay Baer’s who connected me and Neil, welcome to the show. It’s good to meet you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. It’s rare that I have people on that. I don’t know personally, but even though you are just meeting, you know, I’ve been I’ve been a fan of your stuff for a while and I thought your expertise, clearly it would be relevant to our audience. And I, I want to start just right inside of search engine optimization specifically for personal brands. And I would say, you know, a lot of our audience, you know, they know what search engine optimization is, but they easily get overwhelmed by it. They’re not highly technical people that most of our audiences more mission-driven messengers is what we call them.

And you know, of course the 2080 rule says that, you know, 20% of your activities will return 80% of the results. If I’m a personal brand and I’ve got like a, a blog, you know, or a podcast, what do you, what are the what’s kind of the 20%, you know, the fundamentals of SEO that today, like in the current time, I need to make sure I’m doing this with my site, with my posts every week. And if it’s like, if I just do these few things consistently for the term, it’ll work out. Maybe not like the most Ninja stuff, but like, what’s the core fundamentals I have to nail.

So the big one is just posting content. You know, the, the biggest thing that you find is people posts or content or two. And then they’re just like, Oh, this is a lot of work. You gotta be consistent and you gotta keep doing, and you gotta do it for like a year, literally a year. And you gotta be consistent like three times a week for a year. And if you do that, you’ll start seeing results. But what most people don’t realize is, is stuff on the web. When you post content it’s hit or miss, whether it’s an image on Instagram or a blog post, or a video on YouTube, it literally is hit or miss. There’s no guarantee that just because you think it’s amazing and it’s a hot topic it’s going to do well, and people have to play the numbers game. Now it doesn’t mean you put out crap. You just have to try to put out high quality stuff each and every single time and you’ll get your hits and misses. But that’s the biggest thing that people make a mistake on is they’re not consistent. And with the consistency also comes time, right? You have to be patient. You can’t just have it happen in two or three months, or you have that.

And so does this happen? I mean, does that mean even you where you, you know, you know how to optimize a post, you put something out it’s still like, you still have a lot of posts that don’t don’t hit. They don’t go that well, even if they’re optimized. Well, I mean, is that what you’re saying? Even, you know, at your level that you bump into that

All the time. I have stuff that misses all the time, even if it’s well optimized and stuff, it still doesn’t do well. It’s hit or miss. It really is for so many people. And they just don’t realize that the next thing that you have to keep in mind too, is when you’re doing this, you gotta do your keyword research. See if you want to build up a brand, let’s say you’re a doctor or a real estate professional, or a book author. And let’s say, I’m writing a book on, I don’t know losing weight. If you look at the keywords and losing weight is a lot really popular and searched a lot, probably do well because it shows that people are interested in that. On the flip side, though, if you want to be known for, I’m trying to think of something super vague right now, if you want to be known for

Motivational speaker, how about that?

Because a big market, but if you want to be known for a clubhouse marketing tactics, clubhouse is blowing up with a problem with clubhouses. It’s still small. Even if you dominate your brands only going to be so big, you know, and you look at trends, people like, Oh, there’s growth hacking. Now this is a cool term. And all this, a lot of these terms, and these buzzwords are still not as popular as the major categories like losing weight is a massive category. I don’t care who you are. There may be some new thing like Asahi or something that you can eat or drink that causes you to do better. But in general, if you end up going after big categories, popular keywords, in essence, it’s much easier to build a brand than if you go after small category.

I mean, this is kind of reminds me of like, you know, on shark tank, they’re always trying to determine like, what’s the market, like, what’s the total potential market market addressable. Yeah. The total addressable market. So it’s really similar, but so, so let’s, let’s go down that for a second. So let’s say you go after losing weight, which is not super niche and there’s a big market for it, but then on the flip side, I go, well, yeah, there’s definitely a huge market for, but there’s a lot of competition. Like I’m, I’m never gonna rank on the top 10 pages organically for a term like losing weight. So is it, is it better to go after broad terms that have mass appeal, even though I white link much lower or do I want to go at like a very specific term, like with with an individual post or something that it’s like, I really want to get, you know, using infrared saunas to lose weight you know, it like, well, how do you balance the, like the big total addressable market with like the competition and being able to like own a keyword.

So you want to first go after how to lose weight with these red infrared saunas, and then you want, you want to go after how to lose weight by intermittent fasting, right? We’re getting super specific. And then in general, as you do that in golf, a lot of these little terms, and you do that for like six months and you keep doing it for another quarter, then you do it for another year. So after that 12 month Mark, you’ve gotten a lot of traction on these little terms, then you want to go after the bigger terms.

Interesting. So it’s so, and, and you’re saying, so you’re kind of like start narrow, do it consistently, but, but narrow inside of this kind of big umbrella.

Exactly. So you can start narrow in a small market and then be like, I’m going to go abroad because that doesn’t work because just the market’s too small. You want to start narrow in a big market that you can easily expand, you know, and still be an expert because you talk about how to lose weight through intermittent fasting, or dieting, or how to lose weight for men or women or exercise that helps you lose weight in your stomach exercise that helps you lose weight in your arms. And you get super specific. You’re still known as someone who teaches you how to lose weight. So you’re still branding yourself that weight loss expert, but you want to focus on all the niches, cause they’re just not competitive. You just want to go from day one saying, I want to be this person that teaches you how to lose weight, period. Well, you got another million people that you’re competing with, so good luck. But if you start in these little niche and then expand yourself, it’s easier to build the brand.

And would you use whatever the, whatever the big market term is like lose weight in this example, would you, would you say that every, each one of those kinds of individual micro focus posts, are you still including that term? So it’s like the big, the big mothership term that you’re going after. All of the small posts are also indexed for that same term. So it’s like your S your overall site is attacking this big.

Yeah. I, I don’t do it on purpose, but it happens naturally. Right? So, cause if you’re talking about how to lose weight in your belly, you’re mentioning like losing fat, which is another word of losing weight, right. Or losing your love handles. That’s another example of losing weight or getting toned up. But Google is like at the source. And a lot of these platforms are like the sources and dictionaries where they understand what you mean. And they understand there’s all these different variations because they understand user behavior. So yeah, you, you want to focus smaller and then expand upwards. And that model works extremely well. And when you’re using tools like Uber says to do your keyword research, you just type in the term, like how to lose weight. It’ll tell you all the segments that roll up into how to lose weight. So that way,

How about that for a second? Cause I wanted to mention Uber suggest. Cause I think actually my guess is actually a large part of our audience. Doesn’t actually know of that term. I bet probably about half of them do, but what is Uber suggest? How do you use it? Why do you use it? And like, you know, if you’re just hearing about it the first time, like, what do I go do there?

Sure. So you just go to Uber, suggest.com or you can just Google, Uber suggests it will land you on a, it Ford’s to the Neil patel.com website. And on that page, you just put in a keyword related to your space and it’ll tell you all the keywords, how hard they are to get traffic for, to build your brand for how popular they are, how expensive they are, if you want to run ads against those keywords. And it’ll also tell you all the longer tail terms, right? Like how to lose weight through intermittent fasting. That’s a longer tail term, multiple three, four word phrases. It’ll tell you all the longer tail terms that are popular, that convert well and are easier to be known for and get results quicker from.

So yeah, we’ll put a link to that, of course, in, in, into the show notes, but Uber suggest is where you go. And then the other thing you can do too, right. As you can look up what some of your competitors are, are doing as well. Right. So you could type in their domain and it’ll kind of tell you, these are the terms that they’re indexing for, like more or less. Right.

Exactly. You got it. Right.

And so coming back to the competition thing and I just want to make sure I’ve got this pegged is, is going all right. So if there’s a highly competitive term, then it’s kind of like you do, what do I do? I aim at that highly competitive term? Like if there’s a lot of volume around it or do I, do I go for the term where it’s like, there’s, you know, 125 searches a month, but it’s you know, it’s, it’s a much less competitive term. And what I kind of hear you saying is it’s like both, it’s kind of like you create individual pieces of content to go after the small ones while you sort of position your overall site and content to kind of go after the big ones, is that the right way to think of it

I’ll even be more specific at first, start off with the terms that get at least 500 searches a month, which will tell you that aren’t competitive. And there’s this score called SEO difficulty. SEO difficulty tells you how competitive it is. So any number under 40 is less competitive. So go after terms, I have at least 500 searches a month. That means they’re popular, somewhat popular, but not that popular, but popular enough and have a SEO difficulty score of 40 or lower. And as you do this after a year, you can start targeting terms that are getting, you know, minimum of 5,000 searches a month or whatever number you want. And you can target terms that have SEO difficulty score of 60 or 70 or under. And you may find terms in between that are like, Hey, there’s this term that gets 17,000 searches a month.

And the SEO difficulty score is 20. That means this is a great keyword and no one’s going after it. Right. And if you feel that it’s really relevant to your space and you can convert people off that term because it’s related to what you do and what you want to brand yourself on, go for it. But the big thing is, is you want that minimum bar 500, because 500 searches doesn’t mean you’re going to get 500 people to your website. It just means 500 people are searching for it. And the reason I say 500 is remember, even if there’s a term like how to lose your belly fat people may also type in belly fat weight problems. They may also type in belly fat weight, all similar terms. So what you’ll find is even though that term only had 500 searches, you’ll start ranking for all these other random terms that you didn’t think about. So it actually adds up to more over time.

Well, I think it’s super helpful to have the, like, you know, those minimum thresholds, that’s just super helpful to have the practicality, the specificity of that. And then, you know, w when, when yeah, I mean, I, I guess when I think about going after these things, like when I think of SEO, somehow, I feel like I’m missing it, right? Like I go, well, I know to do keyword research. And I know for every single post I’m going to, you know, I’m going to pick, there’s like three key terms I’m gonna, I’m gonna target at with this post. And then there’s some overall terms. And then it’s like, Hey, I’m gonna make sure my title tags are updated. You know, like my H one tags, I’m gonna make sure the meta description has, you know, is updated. I’m gonna make sure the URL it has in it. The name of the terms, which if I usually, if I have a title of a blog post and then I just post stuff, is that it? I mean, is that, is that it? And it’s basically just that times, consistency times time,

You also need to promote too. So when you post stuff, you need to share it on the social web. If you’re linking out to people within your articles, email them, letting them know that you linked to them, like, I may email you, or we know I, we may email Jay saying, Hey, Jay, even if I didn’t know him, Hey, Jay, linked out to you in my article, check out here, hope you like it. If you enjoy it, feel free to share it. Like little things like that, we’ll get more buzz. So then that way it does better. But those are the two things that you can easily do share it on your social. And second is, is email the people you link to and ask them.

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, but that’s, it, it’s basically, you know, do the, do the fundamentals, right.

I’m not the smartest person by any means. I’m just consistent and I’m willing to grind it out while other people are quitting.

Well, I love that. And I mean, I think that the other thing that’s interesting about this, you know, it’s just like most of what we’re talking about today would have been true five years ago. I mean, it’s, we think of it as like it’s changing all the time, but what you’re saying is like most of the fundamentals here actually aren’t changing that much. It’s, it’s basically just doing it consistently. Okay. Can you tell us, Oh, go ahead.

I believe that it’ll work in the next three, four years now. I don’t think much will change for this exact strategy, right? To build your brand because you have to remember just, if you don’t go viral on the web, who cares, you know, most people don’t like the guy drinking cranberry juice, right on that longboard, which is actually a cool video. And good for him for doing that. But people always will type in how to lose belly fat on Google or whatever sector you’re in and trying to build a brand there’s always problems or queries. People are asking just like, you may ask the Lesco Alexa or Siri, a question. It’s the same thing that some people use Google. And that builds a brand it’s just consistency over time. And people continually finding stuff. You don’t have any kids. These days are probably like how to improve my three shot jumper. Right? Like when it comes to basketball or anything, it’s just like very specific. Yeah. People get very specific. That’s what the traffic is around the web. And when you get specific people like, Oh wow. You know how to solve my exact problem. You’re an expert. That’s how you build a brand.

So this was a perfect segue. I was going to you about voice because that is the voice search Alexa and Google and, you know, Facebook like that, to me, does feel a bit like a new frontier that’s emerging in terms of more and more people are just asking Siri or they’re, you know, just saying, Hey, Google or Alexa, whatever. Is there anything that we need to be doing now to prepare for that forthcoming trend? Cause it seems like the data is pointing to that more, there’s more and more growing search happening through those voice. I don’t even know what you call those, but those voice activated search

How much you actually have to do. So these devices are already figuring out how to pull. The biggest thing that you can do is one, make sure your website loads fast. Cause they don’t, if it loads slow, then it’s going to take them forever to crawl your site and get the data. And the second thing is use schema, markup, schema markup. If you just Google for it, there’s these tools provided by Google that just help you with it. And it just ensures that these devices, when they’re crawling your site, they can easily understand what your website is about and the text.

Yeah. that is the schema markup thing is a new thing that I didn’t realize just basically telling Google, this is a table on blank, right?

She’s been more specific. This is a question. This is my restaurant rating. I have 4.5 out of five stars. That’s what that means. These are reviews. I have 112 reviews. So when you get super specific, it allows Google to know what each individual site, because having the word reviews can mean multiple things. Using schema markup to say these are reviews on my restaurant, on my product, on my course, on my coaching services, right. That gets very specific in schema markup. There’s also something called question and answers. This is a question, a question B could be what is personal branding? And this is the answer. The answer is personal branding is you probably know that one better than me. Right? So getting super specific, like it that’s what schema markup is. It’s not really changing how your webpage looks or anything like that. It’s just your code. So that would, Google can more so understand what you’re trying to push out and these voice search devices love using it.

Yeah. Interesting. All right. So if we’re doing schema markup and we’re doing meta descriptions and we’re doing keyword research and all that stuff, the voice, the voice tools are using the same mechanisms to, to index stuff. So we’re okay. We’re okay there. Okay. I want to turn for a second to CRO conversion rate optimization. Cause this is something that y’all do. You created a tool that is like one of the industry, best tools crazy egg. Can you tell us and, and for our audience specifically, you know, a lot of what we will teach them to do is, is, you know, basically is let people sample your expertise for free, which often happens by way of an online training or video training. And so usually there’s some type of a registration page that people are coming to like a squeeze page to capture a name and email address. And these are pages where the conversion rate matters tremendously, especially if you’re driving paid traffic. I think heat mapping is something that a lot of people still don’t know about indu and crazy egg is that tool. So can you talk about like, what is heat mapping? What is crazy egg, and then specifically, how would we use it or what would we be looking for to optimize a certain, any specific page?

Sure. So if you’re building a personal brand, you may click emails, you may have articles that help build your brand. Like we discussed. You may be some products. Eventually if you’re a doctor trying to get people to buy your supplements or schedule appointments, or if you’re a fitness trainer, getting people to schedule some coaching sessions with you, whatever it may be, what crazy egg does is like you’ve mentioned heat map. It shows you where people click and where they don’t ones. If you found out through a crazy act test, everyone’s clicking on this image of yours thinking they can buy it, but the image isn’t clickable, you can then go and fix that and make it a link where they can buy or ones. If you have the sales page that sells them on your services or your newsletter or your digital products, and then majority of the people cause crazy, we’ll show you in the heat map as they’re scrolling, what portion of the page are majority leaving ones? If they leave after scrolling twenty-five percent, but all the good stuff where you’re selling them is that the very bottom in the last 90%, then you know that, Hey, I’m not getting people down there. I need to adjust the copy. It shows you how someone’s navigating. So you can see where they’re getting stuck. Like if they’re reading an article and you notice that everyone’s leaving after a certain paragraph, well maybe you said something in there that they don’t like, or they don’t believe in and you can go in and fix it.

So you’re basically just, it’s, it’s almost like it’s kinda like a video camera to what a video camera might be to like a grocery store where you see like the path people go through the Isles is kind of the same thing, but for your website to see where the cursor moves.

Exactly. Like if you see that everyone at a grocery store is picking something up from the very bottom shelf in an aisle, and it’s the most popular area, but they’re not picking the suffer from the middle and you probably should move the products at the very bottom in the middle and the stuff in the bottom. Right. And that’s what crazy we’ll show, show you where people are spending their time or attention. Even with the page, it’ll show you, the elements are spending most time on because sometimes people scroll and skip a lot of stuff and they get to the meat. And if that’s where they’re spending their time, well, then you can just get rid of all the stuff in the middle and just put the meat higher up. Right.

So it was basically just observing their behavior and then just saying, what are they wanting? What they doing? And then just trying to give them that, make it easier for them to get to what they’re wanting to get to or what they’re spending time on. And then taking away the things that are making them leave or, you know, bug out or whatever. I mean, it’s pretty simple. Is it, is it super technical to incorporate heat mapping into a website? Like how do you, I mean, is it, do I need to like hire a programmer?

You just paste this piece of code on your website or install a plugin, like you’re going to solve the WordPress plugin or Shopify plugin, whatever it may be in your case, on the seeming more WordPress. And that’s it, it does it all for you automatically. Wow.

I love it. I love it. Neil, where should people go? You know, I already mentioned, you’ve got the marketing school podcast. You guys are covering all sorts of interesting little topics and things there. You’ve got your book, the crazy egg, Uber suggest, anything, anything else that you would point people to in terms of how they can just connect with you and follow up with more what you’re doing?

You can find all my [email protected] from my social profiles, to my blog, all the tools, all that stuff.

Awesome. Well yeah, I know we didn’t really talk that much about how you built your personal brand, but I, I really also holds you up as an example of someone who has dominated the space, just given tons of value. Give, give, give, give, give, and just over time, you know, more and more. It’s just like you, you have built such a strong reputation, so thank you. Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks.