Category: Podcast

Ep 132: YouTube Secrets Tips and Strategies with Sean Cannell

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 recently, one of my best keynote clients asked me the question. They said, who do you know, that does YouTube and video? And I said, easy question, easy answer, Sean. Is that so you’re, and that’s who you’re about to meet. Sean Cannell is one of his, he’s a best-selling author as well, but man, he is YouTube. He is all things video. He is an international speaker. He’s built seven figure business. His videos have been viewed over a hundred million times, which I think is incredible. His YouTube channels have over 1 million subscribers, Forbes listed him as one of the 20 must watched YouTube channels that will change your business. And him and his team. I mean, they produce some of the best content ever, and they’re just on this mission to help 10,000 people, you know, do what they love. And so he gives amazing advice and just had a baby with his wife, Sonia, which is exciting. And brother, thanks for carving out some time for us.

Yeah. Rory, I’m pumped to be here. Thanks for that introduction. Yeah, I guess the other thing was you and I shared the stage also at Shaleen Johnson’s event. That was the first time that I was introduced to you. And then again at social media marketing world, just shortly thereafter. And now, and now, you know, this other client that we won’t be there at the same time, but I hope hopefully they’ll book you. And I have to say, man, the more that we’ve done, these interviews, I have just become so convicted on YouTube and there I have missed the boat, my entire career. I don’t know how, but I have somehow just completely missed what it is and, you know, so can you just kind of talk about like, obviously everyone listened to his personal brands, how do you view YouTube in the landscape of everything going on with a personal brand? Like all the other social, you know, social media outlets, website blog, like podcasting, how do you think of YouTube?

Yeah. you know, I think of course from my perspective, but I’ll back it up. I mean, I think YouTube is, is the most important place to build your personal brand. It’s the number one video site in the world by far, far and away, you know, Amazon bought Amazontube.com and the URL and people thought, okay, what are they going to do? And even if they do something, they don’t have the content library. Of course there’s Twitch and that’s kind of gaming and live streaming there’s other things. But even if a competitor was to start, it’s going to be so difficult for them to build the backlog of YouTube, let alone the technological infrastructure of distribution to mobile around the world, over 2 billion, monthly active users, the best feature set and it’s free. So I think it’s irresponsible for any serious personal brand, serious online entrepreneur, business owner, anybody that wants to share their thoughts, their wisdom, their message with the world to not be on YouTube.

I am empathetic because I understand that what with YouTube, it’s kind of like maybe the hurdle of content creation podcast, you know, audio it’s its own challenge for sure. But it’s, it’s a little bit simpler. I think some of the other social media platforms also give you more of kind of that quicker dopamine hit you. They’re able to like post on Instagram today, or even write an article on LinkedIn or a medium post. And you get it done and you didn’t have to like pull out your suit jacket, take a shower, do your hair that day, set your mic up, plan the content, figure out how you’re going to edit it. I think there’s a level of that complexity, but that keeps a lot of people if you will, out of the game that are missing out on the opportunity that if you can create a simple system to create what we would encourage one significant upload per week on YouTube it can have massive dividends.

And I think the other thing about YouTube is it doesn’t give you as much immediate gratification like, like a Tik TOK does right now, or even some of the other platforms. You get a comment, you get a, like you upload a YouTube video, you got zero views. You know, a week later you got 10 views, but you’re like, well, that’s how many my IETV got, but that was a lot easier to create. And the YouTube video took more energy. But the thing with YouTube is it’s like a fine wine. It gets better with age. It’s a content library. It’s not a content feed. You build up your thought leadership there, a body of work there. And over time you can create so much passive momentum, passive traffic. And I think the last example of that I think is important to note is there’s a reason why some of the most influential online entrepreneurs and personal brands really invest a lot in YouTube, whether it’s a Brendon Burchard, a grant Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk Billy Jean whether it’s just you know, a Marie Forleo whether it’s of course, a lot of the YouTube in foot, Jay Shetty, you think about these different people Lewis’ house.

Why are they investing also in YouTube, even if they’re doing a podcast as well or other things, because YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. There are so many people, there it is. It’s the town square of online video. And we are allowed to have our own shows all land the plane with this final analogy. What, what would it have been worth to buy? I looked it up a piece of land in Manhattan in New York. You can get a little lot, that’s an empty lot, so you could build on it. I looked it up just the other day. You know, real estate prices are going up. Maybe they’re going down, depends on the pandemic. But it was only 17 million, $900,000 to get that piece of real estate. And actually you can, we can connect later cause I got my license.

So I’m happy to flip that to you if you want. I wish. And, and so what, but what would that piece of real estate have costed 10 years ago? 20 years ago, especially 50 years ago. Nobody knows a future, but YouTube is such a dominant platform of where online video happens, where so much education and entertainment is consumed, where so many people are planting their flag. I think a lot of people are going to regret, not investing in YouTube even now and here. And we’re actually putting, we put an offer on a house today. Then the Vegas is a boom and bust market. We just need someplace to live. We didn’t really want to buy, but gotta live somewhere. And like, we don’t really want it. So we’re timing some things. Here’s the deal. It’s just continued to go up and up and up and up. And I looked at I’m like, it’s going to probably drop no, it keeps going up. And so I would rather get in today. It’s not too late to get into YouTube. I’d rather get in today because even if it dips a little, like if you play it out, it is where you want to really establish your voice as a personal brand in mind.

So the, the concept of getting in today. So just to talk about that, cause it’s, I think it’s a little bit overwhelming when you see exactly what you said, where it’s like, you don’t get the immediate gratification. I’m rebuilding my YouTube channel. You know, it’s taken a year to get to like 400 subscribers. I mean, it’s just like, or six, six months, it’s been like six months we’ve been doing it. And it’s just like, Oh my gosh, I’m just getting killed. Like w you know, putting energy into it. How do you get over that? How do you get over that mental block of like, I’m too late to the game? You know, it’s, it’s not worth it. I should be spending my time somewhere else. Cause I can get more traffic, you know, quicker, anything around how you think about that? Is it just what you’re saying? It’s just that long.

No, I think it’s two things. I think it’s mindset and systems and we’ll go systems first. I think the system is to just create a simple system to be consistent on YouTube. Even if you start really simple, let ask you will this episode go on YouTube? Yeah, it will. Yeah. Yeah. So you’ve already you’re this is what this is not, I mean, I’m not, I don’t want to belittle the process, but this is not that challenging. Like we’re on zoom right now. You know what I mean? Like we’re recording this interview. So, so I only have 400 subscribers. Yeah. But like also the show format, you’re doing a video podcast and that’s 400 subscribers. It’s like, it’s, if you can get this systematized and especially for those that are scaling out with a team, a virtual assistant, you just get a simple workflow going, by the way, I recommend everybody listening.

Here’s the model, a weekly video podcast. And if you are podcasting, especially during the pandemic, mostly just like this over zoom or something like stream yard or something else, like just flip the webcam on and have your guests flip the webcam on as well. That’s like the minimum viable product I think to get started with YouTube. Then you’re able to promise a weekly show. You’re able to leverage YouTube for the SEO properties. And if Amazon, if Apple podcast and Spotify and Google play is giving you more love, that’s just bonus on YouTube. And that becomes a foundational thing to get the algorithm seasoned. And then here’s your opportunity. Two things can happen if you were to layer the next strategy on top of that, the next strategy would be, well, this is 30 minutes. This is 45 minutes is you do a Joe Rogan. Does you cut out the three minutes or the five minutes?

That has more of a chance when we really touch on that, that hot button topic, that poll cause that’s the kind of stuff that gets clicked on. That’s why JRE clips, the Joe Rogan clips channel all the video podcasters that are smart, do this. They cut out the clips to go viral, to get awareness, to get more love. Because a lot of people that don’t know you yet, aren’t going to click on longer form content like this. And so that’s one way to evolve. And then the next one is not even necessarily weekly, but when you have the bandwidth, when you invest the time you study some of my work and you then actually create native YouTube videos, shorter that are meant to like pull or push all of YouTube buttons to blow up your awareness. So then cause you’re always one video away from changing your whole life in business with YouTube, you put out the right video at the right time with the right title, with the right thumbnail, with the right.

And again, maybe you don’t keep following up with that, but then they go, Oh, at least Roy has got a weekly show. So all of a sudden you go from four to 400 to 4,000 because of consistency. And because of having some smart systems because of potentially planning team and energy around when it is, you’re going to evolve into that. But in the meantime, Hey, in a year it’s 800 in another year at 1600 and YouTube does grow like a snowball, even if it is slow and steady, potentially with minimal effort, just with the videos you’re uploading here. So that’s systems, the mindset is simply that is really looking at it for the long haul, recognizing that you gotta level up with kind of the copywriting, the headline really good recommended book, Brendan Kane hook point. How do you write hooks? How do you grab people’s attention in a three-second world?

Those skill sets matter so much on YouTube, but you don’t want to get overwhelmed again. Even if you put out Sean Cannell was, you know, you’re already amazing at that, but if you just guessed, like it’s not the best title in the world, but you show up every week and keep leveling up. Then a year and a half from now, everything changes. And you’ve got a backlog and consistency for people that are like, man, now I want to go deep with this guy. Cause there was a short form star smart content that eventually kind of went viral. And in your case, my case as well, virals 10 K views, you know, it’s 25 K it’s a hundred K when you’re normally only getting 50 to a hundred and that’s so much more common when you just stick with it. And you know, I just got to pull this one on you. Then the mindset side is he got to take the stairs stairs on YouTube because there’s that moment when, when putting in the work pays off. And so that’s what I’d recommend.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I love the, I love the idea of, of your one video away from changing your life. I mean, my Ted talk is an example of that, right? It’s like, even though it’s not on my channel, I wish it was, but it’s like 4 million views later. I don’t do any, I don’t have to do any other marketing for speaking. It’s like people just email it. Hey, will you come do your Ted talk? People hire me to do a 25 minute version of the 18 minute Ted talk that’s available for free. But it’s, I mean, so I love that. And the, the other thing that this is part of why I’ve bought into YouTube finally, is what you were talking about, about how it gets better, like a fine wine, all the other social platforms. It’s like the, the longer it’s been around, the less valuable the content is YouTube is the opposite.

Just like Google, because they’re the same. So, you know, you mentioned the SEO part of the video, the, are there some basic things like you’re saying, okay, yeah. Just throw up some video content. That’s basically what we’ve been doing. We’re just now starting to you know, so we put these on brand builders channel and then I do a weekly video blog on Rory vaden.com, which is the, you know, we’re just starting to like put more into that or there’s some basic things because of the relationship between Google and YouTube and how SEO works that we need to know in terms of like, don’t, don’t miss this, right? Like if you’re not gonna take an hour to optimize every video, but if there’s two things you’re going to do when you post a video, my gosh, like don’t forget to do this on YouTube specifically. That makes it, you know, more find-able absolutely.

So there’s going to be two priorities, especially going into this next year that are critical for winning on YouTube. I’m going to share the lesser priority first, but it should be a given. It’s kind of like you, you like shouldn’t even have to mention the fundamentals because we should all assume you need to do the fundamentals, but it’s not the, the needle mover, but let’s address those first YouTube like Google needs to be optimized, like a great blog post. Your title should be attention grabbing and keyword rich still. And a keyword is what search term are you going after? You know what pain point or you’re solving? We teach ASQ answer specific questions. Just answer a specific question. And when I say answer specific questions, sometimes people think like a question, like what is personal branding? Well, that one’s probably been been touched on.

Here’s one of my favorite strategies. It’d be like how to upload a LinkedIn profile. That was a deep strategy, by the way, because when you answer like something super specific like that, if someone’s on LinkedIn, they want to build a personal brand. Maybe that question is not even answered. Well, the app was just updated. All of a sudden, those are the types of videos that have a quarter million views that are really practical and utility. And then you like it. And you’re like, and by the way, you know, I also help people with, with building their personal brands. And that’s why your other may be more personal development, softer topics actually get discovered because you get noticed cause you teach people how to install a WordPress plugin. So there’s something about answering specific questions and priority number two. Yes. The title, yes. The description should be filled out.

Like with enough words, like a good blog, post keywords, the tags YouTube has let us know these things carry less weight, but that is what’s called metadata. And it’s important. You just don’t want to cut corners there, especially when you’re just starting your YouTube channel. Youtube really doesn’t know what your video is about. So you’re giving it metadata. And that means you’ve architected the content to be actually tackling something very specific. And then of course the thumbnail, because that’s, what’s going to be what people click on or not. And so it’s like title thumbnail, tags description. And then the topic itself, that’s really the needle mover because if you’re not talking about the right things at the right time, especially, let’s say you were to talk about news, like there’s, this is what we would call trend surfing. It’s a good strategy. And that would be like related to personal branding.

You put, you extrapolate some principles out of pop culture and you commentate on somebody. They don’t know you, but they know something that’s happening in pop culture collection. We talked about how we didn’t do it, but with like we’d recognized, we totally could have personal branding mistakes from it and whatnot. And it brings awareness. So that’s actually a topic thing. That’s actually the content strategy, but all of that, I would cluster under important, but the lesser priority, the way to optimize your content going into this next year is the content itself. And what I mean is here’s how YouTube ranks videos now AVD and CTR, Oh, say those in reverse CTR click through rate. And then the second one’s average view duration. So almost all the other stuff is so much lesser important than does someone click on it. And what would determine if someone clicks on it?

Well, a great title that kind of like opens up a loop and curiosity, a thumbnail that’s also great and gets attention, but the topics almost more important because you might see it. You’re like that’s the best thumbnail I’ve ever seen. Well, I’ve never seen such a what Mark Twain couldn’t have written. And as PO Shakespeare, couldn’t have written a title as good as this. What does it matter if they’re not actually interested in the content? So your choice of topic, knowing and understanding your audience’s problems and ambitions their mindset, what keeps them up at night? What would actually get them to stop scrolling? Because that’s what they want to learn about. That’s what they want to hear about what gets you to click. You actually have to get the click, but getting the click. It’s not enough. They call it click bait. Wow, you got the click, but you trick me.

I don’t want to watch. So AVD average view duration, AKA watch time, right? Another way of putting it is just how long do people spend on the video? So then once you start the video, it’s actually the architecture of the content. So I would challenge you. I watched some of your stuff, this probably maybe a long time ago. Maybe you still need to do this in this next year. Quality over quantity matters. And it’s quick to be able to set your phone up and maybe just record real time for seven, five to seven minutes or 13 minutes on a topic. People who know you will endure that, but there’s so many people that are just putting more effort into at least editing out the breaks at any hour, ums, structuring their content, putting something powerful in the beginning. I’m not saying it needs fancy production value, but you’ve really optimize that content to hold viewer attention.

You’re really thinking about creating open loops, if possible, to have people go. You’re even more. So if you teach and you can have visuals, even if you do like kind of a webinar style and you share some things, you bring people from point a, B, C, D in the video. If you can hit an average view duration of eight minutes and a click through rate of over 10%, which your YouTube analytics will show you, YouTube will keep showing your video to more and more and more and more and more audiences through suggested 10% or higher 10 20, 30. And it’s crazy over eight minutes because if YouTube sees, so if you a couple of metrics and these are all taken with a grain of salt, but some good targets, a good target length of a video is 15 minutes. A good chance of a great 15 minute video will have an average view duration of about half that around eight minutes.

And if the topic has a wide enough reach that people click through it at 10%, meaning when YouTube shows and recommends it and impression someone clicks through and then stays on it at that percentage, then that’s what could potentially spread throughout the algorithm. And if you don’t hit those numbers, but you raise those numbers, people dwell and watch your videos longer. And then people are clicking through on your videos. More those priority. Number two, title, topic, covering a trend. All of that is very important. It’s like just the fundamentals, but those are the levers, which how do you optimize those? The content itself it’s taken some time practically editing. Like I don’t care if you shoot your video on your phone, get it to an editor that can actually make it more interesting, more poppy and like, think about, about faster, because everyone’s rushed. You know, everyone wants it.

It makes me think sometimes we’ll do something like this. That’s, you know, 30 minutes. But a lot of times we bond YouTube. If you took you 10 minutes to record the video on your phone, chances are a good editor could make that five and a half. And the difference between that 10 minute, just like free flowing train of thought versus just edited down is everything on YouTube. You know, this isn’t unlike English and there’s the English teacher story who had the class write a paper on a topic. And they had them write a six page paper. So he had to write a six page paper. And they were like, all right. So just choose a topic, six page paper, then they turn it in and then you send it all in. And then he handed it back to him and he said, look, I want you to cut this in half. And they were like, what?

You want us to cut 50%

Of this paper? Then he said, yeah, I want you to cut it in half because I want it to be stronger, more punchy, better. And they’re like, that’s insane. There’s no way. Okay, fine. So then they go to work and the class goes back to work, cuts their six page papers into three page papers. Then they turn them all in and then the teacher goes awesome. Great job. Hey, before actually we finished this out. I’m going to hand these back to you. I want you to cut these in half again.

What a page and a half are you kidding? Like from six to eight,

This is insane. He said, I want you to do it. And so then they cut it all the way down to a page and a half. Well, how strong was that content? By the time it got down to a page and a half, it’s what probably any great journalists would learn when they have to fit a complex thoughts into just an article in the New York times. So how can you make your content half short and twice strong? That’s sort of the idea of optimizing the content, grabbing attention, creating a story that has tension, a climax conflict resolution and holds attention. If you, I’m not saying that’s easy, but that’s like the key of YouTube right now. And to alleviate some pressure, just upload your weekly video podcast. And when you want to take a shot at maybe editing something down more or apply some of that editing to the clips channel, you go, man, during that conversation, we hit a point that’s strong that’s that’s title that one point, let’s settle that.

And let’s make this three minute clip, five minute clip, seven minute clip that just really directly delivers that promise. Let’s do a good thumbnail. And for example, Joe Rogan does it all the time. Like of course celebrity meets topic, but like Elon Musk shares opinion on Corona virus. And you know, you’re like what? And you see it. And of course you just clicked through all they’re doing is sitting there and talking, but it’s delivering like one idea. One question, one, answer, one video on sort of that you got to click on it. You want to think about how you can do that for your own content.

So if you’re saying a target length of 15 minutes and you’re trying to like cut it in half, does that mean you’re recording like a 25 minute and then trying to edit it down to 15? I mean, that’s interesting to hear you say 15 minutes and that’s low that’s long time. But you’re saying that that kind of, I mean, I don’t know if you would classify that as longer form content, but you know, like normally I am for five to seven and they end up being more like eight or 10, which then if we chopped it down, it would be like five or six. But you’re saying try that, that it’s good to have videos up there that are longer than 15 minutes because the, the AVD is higher.

The videos should be as long as they need to be, but as short as possible. So if you’re your eight should be fours and your thirties should be fifteens. And so, so I only put that out there because the average iteration of a 15 minute video, if it’s great will probably be eight minutes and YouTube loves videos that cross that eight minute threshold, but there’s no reason to try to inflate your content. Three’s great fours. Great. If you look at think media right now, our main channel, we spend a lot of time around six minutes, seven, but sometimes the content goes to 12 or 13 and it’s usually for a reason, doesn’t mean it holds attention. But if we’re we’re teaching somebody how to use a particular camera and walking them through all the settings, well, it takes 13 minutes to do that. My thought is, if you take 26 minutes to do that, when it could have been 13 a competitor, let’s say teaching on the same camera when you hold that viewer attention that YouTube is going to love you more.

Now, if both are pretty good and that person’s personality is so great and they do it in 30 minutes, we do it in 15, but they end up with 18 minutes of watch time. And we end up with like 12 minutes of watching that YouTube wants time on platform. Of course, there’s nuances to the algorithm period. End of story. How can you hold viewers attention longer? And so maybe the other way to attack this challenge is just definitely trimmed. The fluff, definitely think about dead spots. You know, I recently let me give you one example of, of actually how we practically do this. I do a show called coffee with Cannell. I livestream it. So I try to be pretty good as a communicator, but there nobody can be as good as a video editor on top of a community. There’s no way you could pause it.

Video editing is always going to make it stronger even to the point where a lot of people trim out ums and some breaths are long pauses because YouTube just likes people want that content. You know, there’s a reason we probably listened to audio books and podcasts sometimes on 1.2 or 1.5 or two X YouTube saying, Hey, just give it to me. And viewers are saying, just give it to me, you know, as fast as possible. So I don’t even have to turn it up to two X speed. And so I do, what’s called coffee with Cannell. I record the content. And then because we now have two channels, I almost have like a channel where I experiment it’s called think marketing. And then I’ll, I’ll put the hottest parts on think media that are like worthy of have taken off with. Great.

I want to ask you about that, about the channels. Okay. Well, where do you use the delineation between this should be its own channel versus like a, you know, you can, I think they’re called categories, right? You can go, I can have, I can just have several categories, like you know, like the, like you you’ve used this example a couple of times, the long form content is over here, but then the short edited clips live on a different channel. Like, is it by length? Is it topic? Like, how do you determine, Oh, I should move this to its own channel because then you’re also kind of fragmenting the viewers, but they’re getting a more focused experience.

Yeah. That’s a great question. I actually think it’s something you shouldn’t even worry about until your, you get to a hundred thousand subscribers. Yeah. So it’s kind of like, like if you’ve got your main channel, you could upload your video podcast there and also your clips there and also your one-off videos there. And also the seven week blog series when you’re touring on the road, because it’s all just building up momentum around the one channel for us, it was actually kind of creating two different brands. Think media was sort of my strategy as well as tech reviews and camera reviews combined. And this is a really powerful YouTube tip that the channel suffered for from is you never want to upload a video that subs the subscriber didn’t subscribe for. That’ll kill you on YouTube this year. You never want to upload a video that the subscribers didn’t subscribe for.

That’s how the trend strategy could backfire. Because if people thought you were always going to be political, I mean, you should do it anyways, potentially cause you want the growth and the reach, but it doesn’t make sense. Like I’ve learned this. If somebody is like, okay, Sean does camera reviews. And then I’m talking about social media strategy. They don’t want to watch that. Now. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t do it. I’m suggesting that you should know the rules and then break them intentionally and understand that it’s like, well, that’s why because they clicked subscribe because they want more camera reviews. So they don’t click on your next video, which kills it in the algorithm. Like anybody that doesn’t engage with your most recent upload and scrolls past it on any platform signals to YouTube, Oh, we shouldn’t show this to any more people. So the dream is to have a clear value proposition of your channel and continually deliver on that value proposition.

It’s almost like a target where you could on the bulls-eye is great. Those are your best performing videos, but you don’t want to like completely miss the dartboard. You don’t want to completely miss the dartboard. You’re like, it’s kind of like it’s tied in if I go to the far outskirts, but that’s about as far away from my core promise, my core value proposition that I want to go. So we just were really steering our channel. Think media, really towards tech how to use cameras, how to use your light. What is the best light black Friday tech specials for creator gear. And then we started to think marketing. When we launched a video podcast and our minimum effective dose was at least our weekly Tuesday video podcast show on think marketing. And then it also gave us though a chance to just experiment. So especially when the pandemic happened, we started a show called coffee with candle.

Cause all my traveling got canceled and I started answering people’s questions, had their tourists on our team, started to think marketing live show. And they started to be like one hour, 90 minutes, even two hours. We’d bring people on and talk to them side by side on stream yard and answer questions. Just try to do community and try to build momentum. But what we now do is we teach for 15 to 30 minutes at the beginning and sometimes that content can be really dialed in. Great. So to land a plane on the strategy the other day I did it, it was 30 minutes long, about 28. And my editor, one of my editors did it, did an edit of it. And I went back to him and I said, we got a half short twice, twice. You know, I was like, I maybe like to hear myself talk, but like this whole story, that’s not essential.

Let’s take that thing out. And four minutes was gone. It was kind of like, it didn’t help the content. And I was like, this part right here, I took 10 seconds or 25 seconds to click around. Cause I was sharing my screen to show people. I’m like, you got to cut that down. And, and he’s typically on top of it, but I was sorta like, you know, it was maybe he’s like, he just did a quick intro, outro, whatever I’m like, bro, you need to like, this thing needs to be optimized because that’s, that’s the difference between it doing well. Let’s say with people who know you and trust you, right, as soon as you hit like a lull and you know this, cause you’re a master speaker and architect, you know, it’s like, you’ve tried different things. You’re like, okay, that story bombs. Like I lose the audience during that time.

I lose attention during that time. So masters of YouTube, which let me encourage you and everyone to that, if you can learn these types of skills, which I would argue is not an option. You have to learn how to master getting attention in a 20, 21 and beyond world. It’s just the name of the game. Janell, Elena is a great example. She went from zero subscribers to 1.3 million in three weeks with three videos. Whoa. So you don’t actually necessarily, it’s not like, Oh, if I did it, if you put out the right video with the right title, with the right thumbnail, with the right tie you know, tags and the whole deal, that’s on the right topic. And it’s a good optimized video. Youtube. It can just blow you up overnight. And maybe the strategy becomes not being so stressed. Like hope is not a strategy.

Just thinking that, like Sean said, I’m going to eventually hit it, but, but creating a system and having a mindset of taking the stairs, but leveling up those little tweaks little by little because you go okay. Once I feel that once I hit my moment and arguably, I like to encourage a lot of people use your season and obscurity to prepare you for popularity. Oftentimes people are not ready for a viral video. So if you’re building a backlog of a catalog in a backlog and you’re dialing in your YouTube strategy, you’ll be able to sustain it after you go viral and keep following up with, with a level, if you will. And again, viral could be a 33,000 viewed video that grows your channel 3000 subscribers. Now you have that core audience that really changes everything for your topic, your niche, how you not, how you help people.

And so I had Kyle edit that video down. So we took a 28 minute video out of a really long live stream. Cause I went into Q and a and knocked about nine minutes off it. So it went till about 18. It’s still like a longer teaching. I wasn’t, I’m not worried about the time if you will. I was like, it has to be 15 or it has to be, it just has to all count. As far as what’s left in there, we got to trim the fat trim, the fluff that was I, my bro, I, I repeated myself and stumbled all over my words. That whole part was unnecessary. I agree. Yes it was. And so then dialing that in and that might start with you as your own editor. It might start with you with the mindset as you’re maybe coaching somebody else. Zero, very unlikely that you’re just going to find somebody who just gets this unless you like connect them to our movement. And we just we’ll train them for you. But like, you know, you probably just keep coaching, keep tweaking. And those small tweaks eventually lead to giant peaks on YouTube.

I like it. Sean canal, kennel. I say it wrong every time Canales, how you actually say it, right? Sean Cannell rhymes with YouTube channel. Nice. That’s that’s it Sean Cannell. You guys check him out. I mean, we could go on and on. There is so much stuff. He’s one of my favorite people to follow that I actually follow. And I learned a ton from him and his team really, really, really great stuff. I love this. I think, you know, use your season of obscurity to prepare you for popularity. Isn’t that true in also a spiritual sense and a financial sense and the every other sense buddy, we just wish you the best. Thanks for pumping out such great content all the time and for sharing some of your secrets here and you know, keep it going brother. Appreciate you. Thanks for having me on

Ep 130: How To Get Rich in a Niche with Clint Salter

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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.
It’s so fun over the course of my career, to look back at people that I’ve intersected with along the way. And I used to be the young guy like trying to like come up and meet people. And now I’m the old guy looking back. And Clint Salter, who you are about to meet is one of my favorite people I have met on this journey. He is such a cool guy, such a warm spirit. And I think I was interviewed on his podcast like six years ago when he was just kind of like coming into the online space and now he has built this empire. And here’s, here’s, what’s amazing about it. He’s done it in a very, very narrow niche, vertical. So he is the CEO of something called the dance studio owners association. And it is a community of dance studio owners worldwide.
So he, he is from Western Sydney Australia, and that’s where he grew up. He was involved in, you know, he was owning a studio. He owned a studio when he was like 16. He’s sold multiple businesses. He’d sold three companies by the time he was 28. And now the group that he runs, the DSOA dance, suitors dance studio owners association has 32,000. There’s like 32,000 members in this community that reach 800,000 kids every week through dance. And so I just, we, our paths crossed here again recently. I hadn’t seen him in years and I couldn’t believe the success that he was having. So Clint, thanks for being here, buddy.
Rory, it’s such a pleasure to reconnect and I’m so excited for our conversation today.
Yeah, totally mate. It’s going to be great. Okay. So buddy, can you just give us like a super quick history of your journey, you know, because you really are an example of you had a passion, turned it into a business, then turned it into a personal brand. So can you like, just give us the highlights of, of what that looked like? Yeah,
Totally. So as you mentioned, I was 16. I started a dance studio with a friend, cause like, that was my, that was my thing. I love dancing. I come from a family of teachers, I love teaching. And so I put those two things together and said to my friend, like, why don’t we, why don’t we start a dance studio? We were living at home, didn’t have to pay rent, like, like why not do it? There was no risk there and we started it and it just took off. And we actually grew a business. We weren’t making millions of dollars in our dance studio, but for, you know, 16, 17, 18 year old kid, like I was taking home a few hundred dollars every week. And I was really, I was really happy with that. Why was it school? And then sold that business. We both wanted different things in the business and sold that business and went on to do some different things. I was an agent for five years managing TV personalities. I worked in news.
I manage the Jersey boys at one point.
I was. Yeah. So it was touring in company manager for Jersey, boys, the musical managing a team of 56, highly creative people, which was a very interesting part of my journey. And then I started consulting and at the beginning I was consulting to every type of business, whether you were a gym or a lawyer, a graphic designer. I think I had a Gardner at one point I was helping, I was helping every service-based business owner on how to generate new clients into their business. And I had a dance studio come to me, a owner that I’d worked with previously. And they were like, Hey, can you help me? And I was like, yeah, sure. Like I know this space. Like I love this space. And I started helping Sarah and I was like, I love this. Like I get to blend business and my passion, which was dance and working with dance studios.
And I had my own dance studio. And I was having dinner with a friend one night and they were like, you know what? You need to go all in on this dance studio market. And I was so afraid cause I was like, there’s not enough of them. And I don’t know if they have enough money to pay me. And so I was this person that was working with everyone and I didn’t want to limit the opportunity by just working with dance studio owners, but I treated it as an experiment and six years ago, I said, you know what, I’m going to do it for a year, just for a year. If it doesn’t work out, I can go back to helping everyone. But for a year I’m going to become the dance studio owner guide that studios grow their business, get back their lives. And that was six years ago and I haven’t, I haven’t looked back. Wow.
Wow. So I just, I love this story because I think that’s what you know, so we, we, we teach a thing called she hands wall, which is like trying to break through this wall of, of becoming, from being unknown to becoming known. And in our minds we go, I don’t want to limit my opportunity. And so I want to talk to lots of people, but the real way you break through the wall is by becoming known for one thing and being the go-to person on that one thing. And then when you break through the wall, if you want, you have a much better opportunity to expand into various stuff after. So, so what happened? I like to just flat out ask you, did they have enough money? Like, I mean, clearly you’re, you’re living in a high rise, brand new high rise in Miami, like doing, you’re doing your thing. So you, you had enough to survive, but, but did that take a while or was it actually pretty quick? And, and, and did you, did you also have to charge really high prices? Cause when I think of, you know, dance studios and gym owners, they’re not, you know, it’s are people rolling around in Bentleys and living in mansions, they’re doing it for passion. So you probably were, were you charging high dollars or were you doing like lower dollar stuff?
Yeah. So at the great question at the beginning, I was selling a five 99. It was $599 for my 12 week course. And so that’s what I was selling at the very beginning. I was selling a 12 week course it was $599, or you could buy it for $399 plus $47 a month to get support. So I was selling like the subscription model on the back of the course where they could ask me questions, you know, inside a Facebook group. And after about doing that for nearly a year. And I was like doing a webinar every week and I was getting really good at the webinar and for selling the webinar exactly to sell the program, to sell the program. You know, I had one, I had like one funnel, one channel, you know, I had Facebook ads, I had a funnel tool webinar and I was just getting good, getting really, really good at delivering that webinar and enrolling people into the program.
And that’s how I started. And I did that literally for a year of just building, building getting better, better, better. And I’m so glad I did that because now when people come to me or they see what they’re, you know, what we’re achieving and they’re like, Oh, you know, I’m signing up and I want to create five courses and I want to be on Facebook and Instagram and doing all of these things. I’m like, no, have one great course or program Maso, one distribution channel and just stop by getting really good at that before you do too many things and don’t master any of them,
Preach it, brother preach it, preach it loud. That, I mean, that is so, like I said, you’re, you’re such a great example of this. So you not only did you have one product for one audience, you had one vehicle of selling it and one traffic source of getting people there and you just, so you just dominated that thing, like you just mastered it and you were running one webinar every week. Like a live one.
Yes. Sometimes I do too, but mostly it was one, one live one day of the week. Did you do it on, I’m pretty sure it was Wednesdays. And they think it was I think it was around like 10 or 12:00 PM Eastern. And I was in Australia and I was like staying up surface super late and be like 11 or 12:00 AM. I’d be like running these webinars or I’d wake up super early. Or I do something, you know, on a Monday to get them on a Sunday night. You know, I w I was, I was just like doing the work, you know, I was doing the work. I had the background with this audience, with this industry and I knew them. I think that’s the other thing is that I’d been a part of this industry for such a long time, that I, I knew what their challenges were. I knew what they wanted. I knew how to make their business achieve more success. And so my focus was really on delivering value. You know, that $599 program had like 35 videos in it, you know, with worksheets and check. And those videos went for like 30, 30 minutes to an hour, you know, like I wanted to just like give them like everything I knew. And, and that’s a reason I believe…
And you say 30 minutes, 30, like 30 minute 30 videos at like 30, 30 to 60 minutes.
So they were there, there was 35 videos and on average are about 30 minutes. But a lot of them, there was a few that went for an hour and I had the time
Talking about a thousand minutes of, Oh yeah,
It was, it was, it was a lot. And that program though, birth really kind of put our business, our DSOA on the map. And from day I was able to launch share, you know, we launched a $47 a month membership. So that, that piece that I was tacking onto the program actually became a standalone program itself, a standalone membership level. And so from that 47, then we created a, our inner circle, which is our, our main coaching offering that we have now for, you know, for studio owners. So, so,
So do you still have the course, or the course get absolved into the $47 membership?
I actually didn’t get put into the $47 membership. It got put into our inner circle membership is like the foundation, the baseline. So when you join us in the inner circle, the first thing that you do would be to go through our studio success formula program, which is our 12 week foundation covering every piece of the dance studio or our flagship program. Now that we sell, which I created, I think it’s going to be nearly three years ago is our student attraction intensive. And that is a program that is just focused on how to attract enroll and retain students, because that is our audience’s biggest challenge. And if we can get them doing that, we can really help them transform their business. And then we can look after them with their finances, their latest sheep and their operations.
So is that the student attraction intensive? That’s a course.
That’s a course. Yeah. That’s an eight week course that we sell. Okay. How much is that? That’s $2,000.
All right. So that’s kind of like your, you have that and the $47 membership as like the two entry points.
Exactly. Most people will come through the student attraction intensive. So if you’re looking at like the core business model, now it’s focused on the student attraction intensive and then the inner circle program, the coaching experience.
Oh, I got ya. Okay. So the membership isn’t so much like a main thing anymore. Okay.
We still have it. We have we have just over a thousand members in, in DSOA, but you know, for us, our focus is really on, we get the best results when we can work with people in a deeper, in a deeper way. And so yeah,
A thousand members at 47 bucks a month, I mean, that’s 50 grand of 50 grand a month to help.
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s fantastic. But you know, for me, where we’re at now in the company is where looking at, we know which of our members get results the fastest and how can we continue to accelerate their growth and their progress. And we can do our best work at our inner circle level. You know, those people are paying anywhere from 500 to a thousand dollars a month, depending on which level they’re at in the inner circle whether they’re a launch member or their premier member. And then, you know, we get to do awesome work in our student attraction intensive in our eight week course. And so that’s, that’s where our focus is currently.
I love, I love how you took, you know, like your first course was 600 bucks. You gave away the goods, right. To get yourself out of the, out of the ground. And then as you started to scale, you realized the number one pain point that my audience has is blank, you know, attracting new students and just focused on that. So, and that’s now $2,000. So it’s like, yeah, he took one sliver of this thing, you know, of this whole big thing. And now that one thing is, is, is so focused upon it’s three times over three times the cost of what the whole thing used to be, because you just really honed in on what they need. And then from there you move them up into, so for 500, a thousand dollars a month, then do you guys have other coaches? Or is it,
Yeah, so it’s it’s awesome. So inside of the inner circle, we have studio growth coaches. So these are studio owners who are doing over a million dollars a year in their business. And so they come on board as coaches in the inner circle. So we have a few of those. We have a Facebook ads coach, a profit first coach, and in-classroom coach a website and tech coach. And then we bring guests coaches in every month as well. But yeah,
But the one on is they have one-on-one calls with these people.
So the one-on-one calls happen with the studio guardian.
Yeah. And then you have, so, and then you have like other resident experts that kind of teach like that
Coaching calls. Yeah. So, so our, our kind of like expert, expert coaches, they teach like the Facebook ads and the finance and the legal and that piece. They do a group call every single month. And then our studio growth coaches will take one-on-one calls. And we also provide virtual retreats in person retreats curriculum. We do round tables. We have squads where everyone’s in a group of eight to 12 studio owners. Like we’ve got a lot of, a lot of cool stuff inside of the inner circle for them.
I just, I love, it’s like you’re serving this one niche in such a deep way, because it’s all you’re focused on. It’s what, you know, it’s what you’re passionate about. And I just, I just absolutely love this man. So interesting. So, so, so looking back here now is that basically the essence of the advice you would give to somebody who is starting cause, you know, we’ve got some of our clients are celebrity mega superstars. A lot of our clients are intermediate, but we have a good portion of people probably who listened to the podcast who are not yet clients who are just like early in the journey. And I think it’s kind of like they’re struggling to go, you know, to figure out their positioning in the world and who they should serve. And are you, I mean, would you say like, would you just basically recommend that path that you followed and just figure out what it is for you? I would,
I would. And I think important thing with that is that you stick to something, you know, I see a lot of people who are chopping and changing, they’re chopping and changing their message they’re chopping and changing their audience. They’re chopping and changing the content that they’re teaching because they don’t get a million dollar launch, you know, three months out of the gate. And you know, for me it was persistence, it was resilient. It was making that commitment to an audience, you know, sharing my message with them for a year. And so I would, I would ask everyone and challenge everyone. Who’s he is to pick it, pick a niche, pick an audience, you know, decide on what you’re going to share, what wisdom, what insights, what teachings you’re going to share with that audience, make sure it’s in alignment with what their challenges and their struggles are.
And that what you’re teaching delivers value and gets them results and focus on them deeply for a year, commit to that market and that message for a year. And I think anyone can do extremely well if they’re, if they’re focused and they have clarity and they’re delivering value at the end of the day, why we’ve done well is because delivering value to our customers is absolutely, you know, at the core. And it’s never been more than, than this year with COVID. You know, when our studio owners had shut down, when we had to take them virtual in four days we were doing one or two calls every single day, you know, with our members for like four months you know, to get them through this and, and to support them. And that, that is why we’re still standing and we’re surviving and we’ve had a terrific year, but we’ve also been able to really make a huge impact on our, on our members this year as well.
That is what it’s all about. My friends, Clint Salter where should people go, man, if they wanna, if they wanna like follow you. And I mean, gosh, if you’re a dance studio owner, you, you, you gotta be plugged into this community.
Yes. If you’re a studio or a no, please come and visit [email protected]. If you’re not a studio owner, I still love to hear from you. I’m on Facebook, Clint Salta. You’ll find me there, shoot me through a message. Love to share anything that I, that I can with you, but you’re only in a really good hands with Rory and he’s amazing company. So yeah. I’d love to hear from you.
Well, thanks brother. Clint Salter, ladies and gentlemen send him some love if you can. And we wish you all the best. My friend. Thanks for [inaudible]

Ep 128: How To Get Your Product Found with John Jantsch

RV: (00:06)

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: (01:03)

You are about to meet someone. My friend, John Jantsch, who has a reputation for being one of the most practical marketing strategists in the world for small business owners. He and I actually met years ago. We shared the stage at an amazing event called social media marketing world, which we love our, our very close mutual friend, Jay Baer introduced us. And then over the years, we’ve just kind of known of each other. And John is the author of several books. I mean, duct tape marketing, I guess you would say has maybe his flagship book, duct tape marketing is been you know, it’s, it’s become a kind of like a main ubiquitous term in the marketing world, which we’ll talk a little bit about. And he also has an agency they do done for you work. They work with companies, you know, all over the place he’s been featured in all types of major media spoken at large events. You know, he’s spoken for Ted and he’s just a really amazing guy. And he also has one of the, the biggest marketing podcasts in, in the universe of iTunes. And so we connected recently at a an author mastermind group that joined up and I thought, ah, you gotta, you gotta meet John if you don’t know him. So welcome. Welcome to the show, my friend,

JJ: (02:27)

Hey, thanks for having me. And I’ll give my first personal branding tip you. You introduced me as one of the world’s most practical, small business marketing experts. That was actually a line I made up and started saying and saying, and saying, now obviously, you know, you kind of have to deliver on that. But you know, it was sort of a self-proclaimed title that, that overtime I sort of made happen, but that’s my first branding tip.

RV: (02:51)

I mean, I, I love that cause I think you know, do you know Sally Hogshead? Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. So Sally is amazing and you know, everyone’s always like try to be outside the box, outside the box, but you know, she taught me this lesson when you’re, when you’re trying to market your business, you actually want to put yourself inside a box, something that people can clearly define as like your, the person on this. And most of that, especially when you first start, you just make it up and then, and then it becomes real

JJ: (03:20)

Well again, I think you have to deliver on it, but, you know, you’re the one who gets to at least frame it and, and define it. I mean, it, you know, whether it’s true or not, it will be told by, you know, how the market perceives it. But, but, but framing it, defining it, you know, one of the things I think that’s, that’s beautiful about doing that too, is that, you know, a lot of people have come and gone with this platform or that platform and, and, you know, being like, Oh, I’m going to be the early mover on that. I think when you have a, a point of view, you know, about, here’s what I believe, you know, sometimes some of that stuff becomes, you know, not, not that relevant. I mean, conforms come and go. You know, for example, you know, I’ve basically, I’ve said marketing as a system and that you know, it starts with strategy before tactics. And I have, that’s been my mantra for 25 years now. And frankly, you know, it’s, it’s independent of any of the platforms coming and going because that’s, I believe that that that will never change when it comes to working with and consulting with small businesses.

RV: (04:25)

Totally. And so can you take us, can you take us to the, I know this is like kind of the original work, but duct tape marketing, can you just like tell us what the premise is and like what that’s, what that’s all about? Cause I think it’s super relevant.

JJ: (04:40)

Well, well, so I’ll just give you an, I can do this pretty quickly, but the whole backstory, you know, I started my own marketing consulting firm about 30 years ago. I right out of college, worked for a, an ad agency for about five years and said, you know, any dummy can do this. I’ll launch my own.

RV: (04:56)

However, the entrepreneurs, any idiot can do this on their own.

JJ: (05:01)

I had no plan, you know, I, I knew I could hustle work. And so I got projects, you know, big companies, big projects, little companies, little projects, and took whatever came along. And at some point I realized I really like working with small business owners and they just, you know, you’re working with the person, you know, not necessarily a department or a company. And I just really love that, but they’re also really frustrating because, you know, I’d had kind of agency training and I was like, well, this is how you do it. And you know, they don’t have the same budgets or attention spans or anything. And so one day I just said, look, I’m going to create a way where I can walk into somebody and say, here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s what you’re going to do here are the results we hope to get by the way, here’s what it costs you want it.

JJ: (05:44)

And, you know, after the first three people said, like, where have you been? You know, I realized that in trying to solve my frustration, I was actually tapping into what is still today. One of the greatest frustrations for entrepreneurs and owners, it’s very hard to buy marketing services because everybody’s selling someone a piece of it or, you know, this idea of the week or that idea of the weekend. And so they just kind of lose control of it. And so the fact that somebody was kind of bringing up a package called marketing, you know, made it, made a ton of sense because I was sort of productizing, if you will a service of marketing, I thought it had to have a name. It had to have a brand and, you know, John’s consulting service didn’t really cut it. And so I just on a whim, quite frankly, just started calling it duct tape marketing.

JJ: (06:32)

And, and it was, it was because of my years of working with small business owners it kind of was this idea of look, you know, you’re making it happen, you’re making it up every day. Some days it feels like, you know, it doesn’t have to be always have to be perfect. It doesn’t always have to be pretty, it just has to work. And I think a lot of people kind of associate that sort of practical idea, you know, with, with the, the actual tool of duct tape. So that was the metaphor that I was really, really trying to play off of. And it, and it just, you know, for a lot, I mean, there’s a strange affection in the U S at least maybe in Canada, too, with, with duct tape. So it kind of played on that sort of fondness that some people have even jokingly, but also really kind of hit home with the sort of practical nature of let’s just get this thing to work.

RV: (07:18)

Yeah. That’s why I love that. It also has kind of the like double entendre, if you will, of, of, of stickiness, which is like what you want your marketing to be, but you know, when you say it just has to work, I think there is like this myth, you know, cause we’ve been, we’ve been small business owners several times. We’ve been startups several times that it’s like, you think that, Oh, there’s there’s these, these, these large companies, or, you know, let’s say like a multi seven figure and eight figure company that, gosh, they just have all these beautiful marketing systems figured out and dialed in and it’s like, they fricking down, it’s a mess. I mean, we interviewed Amanda tress. Not that she’s not a mess at all, but, but she admitted, she’s got a $50 million business and she’s running on spreadsheets. Like it’s, it’s crazy of, of going. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to work. So I, I love that. And I think that’s you know, that is duct tape, right? Just, just duct tape.

JJ: (08:18)

Right. And I’m not necessarily saying that’s the best way. I’m just tapping into reality that, that just, as you mentioned, that just is the reality of how so many people do it. I mean, I, there are definitely more beautiful ways in which to build a business. If you’ve got everything figured out, if you’ve got the funding, if you’ve got the, you know, the patients, if you’re not stressed out, you know, there’s a lot of beautiful ways to build a business. But what I was trying to tap into was the fact that people were saying, yeah, that, that is what we’re doing. Can we, can we actually take that and turn it into a system? So

RV: (08:52)

Relating this to personal brands, cause I know you work all different types of small businesses. But you know, you, you are an example of like, you know, the, the kind of people we serve, authors, speakers, consultants the, I feel like we have a lot, I’m gonna take advantage of a free coaching call here. Cause a lot of our members, what we’ve they’ve been doing is they’ve been building their product. Right. So they’re in that stage where it’s like, okay, they’ve been wrestling with building their product, whether it’s a physical product or it’s a video course or a coaching program or whatever. And then one day they go, Oh, I’m done building it. Now I actually have to do something to tell people that it’s here. And when you, can you talk a little bit about both the mindset and then also maybe some of the tactics, you know, tactical advice that you would give to somebody in that moment. It’s like, okay, I now have my widget. What’s the first thing I should go do to like create my first customer or my first lead from, from marketing. Wow.

JJ: (09:58)

So, so I will botch this, but there is a a Chinese proverb that goes something like when’s the best time to plant a tree. And the answer is 20 years ago. You know, but if you didn’t do it, then today is the best time to plan it. So, so my point in that is that, you know, and I know that a lot of things have changed in the world, you know, in the last 20 years. But you know, I started building a following before I had any idea what I was going to sell to them. You know, I started talking to people, I started educating, I loved sharing my ideas. I mean, I had clients. And so I talked about what might, what worked for my clients. But that’s, you know, that’s the first bit of advice, which doesn’t really answer your question, but I mean, that’s the first bit, you know, don’t, don’t wait until you have a perfect product, you know, go out and start talking to people, go out, go out and start seeing if it resonates, go out and get their advice.

JJ: (10:50)

I know some of the first couple of courses I’d built with potential customers you know, I said, Hey, come on in here. Here’s what I’m thinking. Oh, that doesn’t work for you. Okay. What if we did this? You know, and then it was like, okay, here’s round two. I mean, so, so start doing it with people as opposed. I mean, I, I, I know I had a couple products that I D you know, I sat in a room and launched. I said, Oh, no, the world needs us. You know? And then it was like, press go. And like, nothing, you know, nobody wanted it, it didn’t make sense. You know, it was, it was the wrong price. It was all those things. So so you know, that to me is, is what you have to do is you have to actually just go start talking to people. I mean, even if you’re not done, you know, here’s what it’s going to be. You know, here’s what it’s going to look like. Here’s what the problem is solves. Y you know that again, still, probably haven’t answered your question directly, but I mean,

RV: (11:44)

But I think it’s important cause it’s like a prelaunch, right. Is to go build, build the audience before you build the product. Like, that’s, that’s a great thing. It sounds like the way you built the audience was basically like, just teaching and talking about what you were interested in and asking questions and like sharing what, you know, and then people started following and then it was like, they were basically, they were there when you were ready to launch something. Yeah.

JJ: (12:09)

Th that’s right. But, but I think also you know, you get kind of, I mean, people talk about beta users. I mean, early adopters. I mean, you get people that actually help you improve it, what it is that you’re building. And that’s the part that I love. And then those people generally speaking, become evangelists to not just, not just buyers. There was a practice right when ad-words maybe kind of came around. And so this is, this is probably 20 years ago and I don’t think it’s taught anymore. But I think it’s, it’s instructional. You know, w when you could buy clicks back in the good old days for about 10 cents you know, on some things, a lot of marketers would actually put up landing pages and advertise products and courses and eBooks and all kinds of stuff that didn’t exist.

JJ: (12:59)

And then literally would you would, you know, take some of those early opt-ins and early buyers and, and create a product with, you know, they found out which one was the most popular. Again, probably shady, probably a bit unethical certainly not affordable today, you know, because of the, the, the online space has changed so much. But I think it’s instructional in that, that, you know, when I, when I start thinking of an idea, I start writing about it as though it is not like I have this course, but here’s the premise behind this idea, you know, here’s the problem I’m trying to solve. Here’s what I think is broken. And you start immediately getting feedback from people about, you know, not only is that a good idea or bad idea, but maybe, you know, how how to, to actually go about solving. Yeah.

RV: (13:48)

I, I hear that. You kind of saying that that’s kind of similar to what you did. You weren’t like launching landing pages for collecting money, for things that didn’t exist, but you were doing that early adaptive, like come in here, be a beta user and then test it out.

JJ: (14:04)

You and I have a mutual friend, Mike McCollough, which that I think just has done something brilliantly over the years, he gets an idea for a book. And in his mind, his product really is, is booked. He gets an idea for it, and he just starts talking about it get some group of people interested in the idea. And then he just holds a two day workshop and they actually come and they build, you know, how this idea would work, which ultimately turns into his book, which then ultimately turns into a course which ultimately then turns into a consulting or coaching licensing program. And he’s, he’s replicated that model about five times now, you know, and, and his, you know, what he’s personally selling is, is the book itself. And, you know, he’s selling hundreds of thousands of copies of books now using kind of proven method of, of actually having before he even writes one word, or maybe before he even pitches it to a publisher, he’s got a really good book written or, or outline created. And even some case studies, maybe a four for the book, which then again, his books exploded other things. But I think that’s a, I think it was a really informative model.

RV: (15:14)

Yeah. So, so let’s say you now, so let’s say you do that. Is there anything that you go, whether it’s a book or a course or whatever, I think that there’s this fear, you know, for every entrepreneur is going, Oh, crap. Like, what do I do? Cause there’s so many, like you said, there’s so many platforms, right? So it’s like, well, should I start a podcast? Should I do Google ads? Should I buy Facebook ads? Should I have a Facebook group? Should I send emails? Should I go knock on doors? Should I like, like, how do you navigate that list of a bazillion things you could do to figure out what you should do?

JJ: (15:49)

Sure. you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, if you’ve built a product and now you’re facing, like I’m not going to eat unless I sell some of this you know, go out. I mean, to me, the easiest thing is go out and find people who already have a list who already have a following and figure out a way to add value to their community. I mean, that’s the fastest way. You know, if I came to you or you’ve got a community and I came to you and I said, Hey, I’ve got this thing that would be great for your community. You know, we can, you know, we can revenue share or I’ll give it away or whatever it is. You know, that’s, that’s the fastest way to start building some things and

RV: (16:28)

Find an audience that’s that has that already exists. That has an appetite for what you’re offering.

JJ: (16:34)

Yeah. I mean, that’s the fastest way. You know, it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody, you know, you go, Oh, I’m going to go talk to this person who I know has 2 million followers, and they’re going to put, you know, obviously it’s a relationship building. It’s, you know, I’ve got to have something of value for that person. It’s not just about the money. You know, it’s about serving their community. Hopefully. So, I mean, that’s the fastest way, but, but ultimately, you know what I believe still today, even though a lot of people talk about Facebook and communities and groups and all that stuff, focus on building the list, the email list is pretty much going to be everything for you. So if you’re going to be on Facebook, if you’re going to have a podcast, you know, if you’re going to be doing videos on YouTube, somehow connect those back to a reason why somebody would give you their email address because that’s you know, I’m not saying that just build an email list and it’s like minting money, you know, but that’s how you build the community, the long-term connection to the community that you own.

RV: (17:40)

Yeah. Well, I, I think that, I love this idea of, of the F the first, so the email lists certainly it’s like always really good reminder also though. I do think people were so consumed with the idea of building a following, which, you know, I don’t know for you, but for me every time we’ve done it, and we’ve now done it three times from scratch, it’s been slow and painful and hard, and it takes a long time and you it’s like, what else are you going to do? You got to do it. But there, if there is a shortcut it’s going, who has this? Who has my audience already? And what can I do for that community and that person to get in front of them? I mean, that’s, that is so profound. I think it’s, it’s simple, but it’s easy to overlook that, that this, your audience exists somewhere already.

JJ: (18:34)

Well, it doesn’t just have to be, cause a lot of times it’d be people immediately think of, you know, who are the A-listers, you know, that everybody knows and they want to go to those folks, but there are all these companies out there. You know, I started my, my first big sort of success in that realm of kind of partnering. And again, this was early on and you know, we’re not everybody was producing all kinds of educational content, but I produced a, an ebook for a software company. Well, I, they didn’t know I produced it for them, but I produced it. It reached out to them and said, Hey, all of your customers are small business owners. They’re all trying to learn how to market. If they’re better marketers, they’re going to buy more of your software. And so what if we did this thing where we co-branded this ebook and I probably got 30,000 subscribers, you know, over a five-year period from that relationship, you know, there are lots and lots of people that need you know, what you have to say and have an audience that, that, that if you can make it right for them, make it valuable for them.

JJ: (19:34)

Then, you know, you’ll be invited in, you know, as a friend and effectively, I mean, I did thousands, tens of thousands of dollars of business with those people that they’re resellers, you know, because I was shown, you know, seen as this expert. And, and it just, you know, it really launched a lot of ways that it really launched the commercial side of duct tape marketing from a consulting side.

RV: (19:58)

See, I love that because, because everyone goes, yeah, I want Tony Robbins to send an email blast for me. Well, okay. It might like, it might take a minute right for that to happen, but these companies or the other one would be like associations, right? Associations are desperate for content and training for their members. And if you can show up and do a free training, now it’s like their email list became your email list. And then, and it actually could become that way if you capture those, those emails. I mean that’s, and when you do it with a company they’re not trying to sell the same thing you are, there’s just trying to serve the same people.

JJ: (20:39)

That’s right. And in a lot of ways, the way they’re going to look at it is, Hey, this is, this is work. We don’t have to do, it’s a value add for our customers, you know, whereas the other influencers, like I got only so many times I can send to my list. Right. And so, so the, so the, the calculus for them is, you know, it’s going to be much more what’s in it for me that whereas the company is going to be much more theoretically, you know, is this is, well, it’s still going to be what’s in it for me. But, but the, the math is different. What’s in it for me is I don’t have to do it now. And my

RV: (21:16)

Trying to get at the same thing, they’re both going for different things. Yeah. And I, I think I mean, that’s a, that’s a, that’s amazing. Every, every company has a database of customers and you might have a zero email lists, but you go, somebody is servicing small businesses. Someone is servicing, you know, single moms, someone is servicing, you know, gym owners in some way. And, you know, you just figure out who you get in front of. So I really love, I really love that if like, if there is a shortcut, you know, that, that would be, that would be it. Yeah.

JJ: (21:51)

Yeah. Everybody’s starting a business. Should, that should be their first marketing. I mean, they’ve got to build all the other stuff, but that’s the, that’s the jumpstart.

RV: (22:00)

So what about paid? Can we talk about, well, actually, before we get to paid, let’s talk SEO because you actually have a book on, on this you know, you know, something about SEO. And I, I, what do you think small business owners need to know about SEO? Because it’s kind of like this, Oh, this Ninja tactic, like high-level tech thing, but you know, there’s a lot of simplicity to it too, you know? And I, I thought it was interesting when I found out you had written a book on SEO because I was like, gosh, you know, I, in my mind, I almost think of it as like a big business strategy. And, and yet, you know, you obviously see the, the application for first, for super small businesses.

JJ: (22:48)

Well, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the services that you buy or, you know, you travel a lot back when people used to do that the you know, you’d come into a town, it’s like, eh, I want to find a restaurant and I want to get my hair cut. I want to, you know, whatever. I mean, we turned to a search, right. For that. And, you know, because you’re holding the phone you know, Google says, Oh, you’re in that town. And that’s 3.4 miles. You can find this thing. Well, that’s all SEO. I mean, that’s your, if, if, if local businesses aren’t showing up in the maps pack or, you know, the, the various ways that they show up in search, I mean, they, they don’t exist in a lot of cases. So it is certainly you know, a big business strategy.

JJ: (23:30)

It’s an every business strategy just because of the buying behavior. You know, today we all, I, I, I would guess that, that, you know, 90% of, of purchases today start with some form of search. I mean, if, if somebody came to you and said, you need to, you need to hire this duct tape marketing company. I mean, they’re, they’re amazing, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re certainly gonna turn online. You’re not gonna pick up a phone and call me. I mean, you’re going to do a search and maybe if you’re trying to figure out if I’m, you know, if I’m legit or not, you’re going to deeply search and see what other people are saying and stuff. So any rate SEO is, is hyper hyper important for every business, probably more important for smaller businesses who don’t have, you know, budgets to, to blast over the airwaves.

RV: (24:16)

So when you talk, when you talk about the budget, so what do I need to do as a small business owner? Right? Like, I don’t have a bunch of money to do paid, like, what do I actually need to do when it comes to SEO?

JJ: (24:27)

So truthfully SEO is a long-term game. And a lot of people don’t want to tell you that a lot of people want to tell you, Oh, no, you just, you hire us to SEO this stuff. Well, what you have to realize is that as is that search engine optimization is a strategic combination of your website, your structure of your website, your content, and then some technical factors. It’s not like black magic. If you don’t have great content, if your website’s not set up the right way, you know, for that content to be structured and displayed. And then there’s some little off, you know, are there other signals out there in the world of other people saying your content is great? I mean, that’s, you know, that’s really the part that people miss. I mean, it, it begins and ends with good, relevant, useful content.

JJ: (25:13)

That’s structured in the right way. I can’t, if you hired me and you don’t have much content, or it’s a bunch of crap, I can’t help you from an SEO standpoint. And that’s the part that I think a lot of people misunderstand that the, the optimization part is to take good, useful content. That’s structured in a way that that makes sense to Google and to, to, to send more signals. That’s the optimized part. So there are on page things that you can do in terms of internal linking, you know, amount of keyword structure, those things goofy thing called structured data. And it a goofy thing called metadata, which we will get into, but it’s all pretty simple stuff. And it’s gotten simpler because Hey, people have written plugins that make all that stuff, you know, happen for you. So all of the on-page stuff is just a matter of paying attention.

JJ: (26:02)

And then there’s clearly some off foot what people call off page signals. And those are just do other people like you or other people linking to your content? Do you get mentioned in social media or does your content get mentioned in social media and shared and circulated? I mean, those, you know, that when it really comes down to it, it’s great content on your site. It’s it’s then, you know, content that’s linking back to your content on other people’s sites. I mean, that’s really it. And, and if you, but it, to me, it all begins and ends with a content that is useful, you know, based on what people are searching for.

RV: (26:39)

You mentioned something weird on the ongoing, back to the, you said there’s something weird called data, what structured data, what is structured data?

JJ: (26:49)

It’s just it’s just some HTML code that tells Google very specifically, what something is. This is a book, this is a person, you know, this is an address. This is a local business. This is a blog post. You know, this is a list of products. This is a list of reviews. I mean, so it’s a whole set of different types of data that that, that if you add, you know, the HTML code to the data that’s, that’s under the hood, you know, in your website structure it, it gives, it’s just another very potent round of information for Google.

RV: (27:30)

So it’s, it’s kind of similar to metadata. Although metadata can be visible like INSEARCH, but it’s, it’s just, like you’re saying, it’s a signal back to Google saying, this is what, this, this is what lives here on this page.

JJ: (27:44)

Well, and maybe this is what this specific item is, you know? So, so a lot of times, like if you do a search real easy examples, you do a search for you know, movie, a movie theater you know, or, or, you know, best new movies in 2020. And, and, you know, you’ll see a list that is basically structured data. You know, here’s all the movies, here’s the movie times, here’s the price, here’s the theaters, you know, so it’s a table, you know, that’s presented in your search results. Well that, you know, that table is constructed, you know, using structured data to tell Google, this is what this stuff is, because, you know, there could be something like, you know, duct tape market. Is that a book? Is that a podcast? Is that a blog, you know, is that a company name? And so a lot of what it’s do, you’re using structured data to is to not let, not, not leave Google to guess, you know, what it is that, that thing is that it’s you know, you’re saying, no, I’m talking about the book.

RV: (28:47)

Interesting. I didn’t know that. So when you see like the little tables that pop up, it’s just basically directly populating stuff, right. Off of sites, based on what the structure data like input is.

JJ: (28:59)

That’s right. And, and we’ve had structured data for a long time. If you think about lists, you know, lists are basically structured data, you know, you see, but whether it’s a numbered list or an unordered list with bullet points, that’s, you know, that’s structured data and the concept of structured data, but now we’re basically just putting HTML code around all that stuff to say in the, this is a list of books. This is, you know, these, this is a list of authors.

RV: (29:26)

Interesting. So and so it’s like for each element, almost on a page, you could have some structured data. Cause cause you would have like your H one tags, H two tags, meta-tags your TA the page title, like the, like the URL, those are all things that would, are signals, but then that, this is interesting. I’ve never, I’ve never heard this before. Like

JJ: (29:53)

He’s gotten very deep in the weeds here, but the good news is, as I said, there are some

RV: (29:58)

Practical, small business marketing. Excellent.

JJ: (30:02)

That’s right. That’s right. But the good news, is there a WordPress plugins, if your sites on WordPress that you add to the site and essentially then every page you’ll have the ability to fill in elements that you want. So you’re not actually having to get in there and write the HTML code yourself. Yeah. so, and it’s, you know, for local businesses, I mean, it, it actually, it actually brings in not only the address, but the law latitude and longitude, you know, their business. I mean, so it’s a very, very specific signal to Google. Yeah. This is a local business.

RV: (30:35)

Wow. yeah, that is, that is awesome. Well, so there you go. I mean, there’s, there’s a lot to learn here and you see like, there’s, there’s the strategy and then there is the tactics, but well, thanks for this, John, and for this, this introduction I mean, super, super interesting and useful stuff. Where should people go if they want to connect with you or learn more about duct tape marketing and the stuff that you do?

JJ: (31:01)

So the easiest place is just a pretty much everything I’ve written for the last couple of decades. You could find that duct tape marketing.com and that’s D U C T T a P E marketing.com

RV: (31:15)

Duck tape like D U C K tape marketing.com.

JJ: (31:19)

Well, just plug it into, plug it into a search engine and see what happens, but I bought pretty much every variation of this spelling. And so it all, they all just redirect to, to, to

RV: (31:32)

Right spot. So you get a spelling lesson, you get a bonus spelling lesson as well as fast,

JJ: (31:38)

Because more and more than one more than one time, you know, when I’ve been out there speaking in the world and whatnot, and they’ll have in the program, you know, like not, it didn’t happen in social media marketing world, but, but it has happened before you know, where we’re appropriate. We’ll put John Jansen, D U C K T a P E marketing.

RV: (31:57)

Yeah. Well, I, you know, the D and the F are also right next to each other on the keyboard. So that could be a bad mix up.

JJ: (32:04)

Yeah, that’s right. Well, that’s right. Well, the the the the, the, the, the confusing part is there actually is a brand of duct tape. That is Fran. Yeah. So do, do you want to, do you want a history lesson on where the name duct tape marketing or not duct tape marketing, but duct tape came from, we probably don’t have time for that. We might have to do that on another one.

RV: (32:26)

I mean, if it could go for it, if you, if you think it’s relevant, it’s not relevant at all, but, well then definitely.

JJ: (32:34)

I mean, that’s what we’re really interested is the irrelevant stuff. So, so world war II the, the, you know, the army commissioned the company to make some, some tape that would help them repair the tops of those canvas Jeeps. I had to be waterproof, you know, I had to really stick. And so it was called something like GP 47, you know, fix it or something. And all the GIS just called it duct tape because of the, you know, it was, it was waterproof, you know, so they, they were talking about Duc K after world war II ended we started putting air conditioning in homes. And so that was, you know, all the venting and every other thing that ran through those homes. And some of these ingenious GI said, Hey, you know what? This stuff actually seals the seams in the gaps between the UCT ducks in their air condition. And so it officially became duct tape because it was used in that fashion. Nobody uses it for that anymore, but now it’s sort of universally loved as a, as a fix it for, for everything. So I don’t know if that was interesting or not

RV: (33:45)

Super interesting. I mean, that is like, what that is it? Yeah. You just won somebody a hundred thousand dollars on a future episode of jeopardy or something like, and, you know, you remember John Jansen on the influential, personal brand podcast, when you, you know, you send us a little referral fee when you get that quiz question. Right. that’s, that’s not, I had never heard that. And I have actually wondered that before, like where in the heck, like where in the heck does this name come from? Well, we’ll put a link there to duct tape marketing dot com John Jantz, which is pronounced like pants, but spelled a little bit different. But if you search duct tape marketing, you, you, you will find John. And obviously we’ll link up to him, all of the social profiles on our, on our blog and stuff. Well, John, thank you for being here and just for your, your consistent commitment to marketing principles that have lasted, you know, outlasted all sorts of different platforms, you know, over, over a couple of decades. And you know, certainly your personal brand has stood the test of time, which is a, a great Testament. And we’re so glad to have you

Ep 126: How to Build a 9-Figure Personal Brand with Dr. Josh Axe

Wow. It is an honor to introduce to you someone who’s become a friend of mine, Dr. Josh Axe. And we kind of live in different worlds in some regard, like we’ve built our companies and our brands in different worlds, but in some of the similar fashion and through, you know, we’ve got to share network, I got to meet, I got to really become friends with him at a dinner a few years ago with Michael Hyatt and Lewis Howes and Donald Miller, and, you know, it’s called Nashville mafia crew that came out of it and he’s extraordinary. And his team is extraordinary. So he is he’s the author of several different books, eat dirt, essential oils, a keto, diet. But he operates the number one natural health website in the world dr. Axe.Com. And I know he wouldn’t share these numbers, but I’m going to share them because it’ll give you a reference for the, the magnitude of what we’re talking about here.

RV: (02:05)

And I’m pretty sure this, this hasn’t been updated in a while, but 17 million unique visitors every single month to their website, 17 million they’ve got about two and a half million people on fate followers on Facebook, over half a million on Instagram, almost 2 million on YouTube. They are a nine figure business. So Josh represents one of the few nine figure. That’s North of a hundred million personal brands that started as a personal brand that he has scaled to this amazing team they’ve got over a hundred full-time employees. And it’s just incredible. So the, you know, the company is called ancient nutrition and his whole personal brand has been built around health and strength and vitality really based on whole food and the healthiest, whole food nutrients in and bringing that to the modern world. So anyways, I wanted to brag on you brother, cause I knew you wouldn’t say it. And I think it’s like, people don’t understand. There’s very few people that have been able to build what you all have built, which is it’s inspiring. It’s awesome.

Speaker 3: (03:14)

Well, thanks, Rory. You know, I think you know, for me, it’s, it’s really great to be able to do what I love every day. And also, you know, I have a great team, you know, they say teamwork makes the dream work. So yeah. Excited to chat today. I know it was, you know, it was great connecting with you recent. Cause I know we hadn’t seen each other, we ran into each other at true food kitchen and we have probably in the best place at our homes,

RV: (03:36)

I’ll find you, Oh yeah. The turf for our house. Yeah.

Speaker 3: (03:38)

Yeah. And so but man, yeah, it was so good to reconnect. And remember that dinner at Michael Hyatt’s house. That was a, that was a blast.

RV: (03:46)

It’s been years. It’s been years since that 0.5 years. Yeah. Although I think pretty much every time I see you is it’s either whole foods or true food kitchen. Like those are the two places. So man, I want to start with, where do you start? How did you start? I mean, I think the, the, the concept of a hundred full-time employees and, you know, nine figures, there’s very few people. I mean, you’re talking about the Dave, Ramsey’s the Tony Robbins, the Gary Vaynerchuks of the world, but you know, going back to, how did this start? Where did you start from? Can you just like paint a picture of those early days because you know, you’re a long way from there now.

Speaker 3: (04:30)

Yeah. I think it started with number one when I feel really passionate about. And so, and that’s that’s health, you know, for myself and I’m not going to go into the whole story. Somebody, somebody could search us online if they want dr. Ax and his mom, like, but my mom had a cancer growing up was very sick and we actually use natural protocols to help her heal. And so we started, you know, we, we, when I was even young, we had her start juicing vegetables and doing supplements. People had never heard of like reishi mushroom and frankincense essential oil and doing you know, meditation and visualization and prayer and all these things. And my mom beat cancer naturally. And she overcome came a number of health conditions. She lost about 30 pounds. She beat hypothyroidism, improved her gut health and also got off anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications.

Speaker 3: (05:25)

And so, you know, that that’s, so for myself, you know, anyone that has a family member that they just love dealing like their mom, for me in seeing her heal using these natural health protocols, there’s just sort of solidified in me that, you know what, like I want to make a difference in people’s lives in this way. So I think for almost anybody, you really have to align whatever you do. Number one with your passion. And number two, I know this is basic stuff, but the number two is what can you, what are you great at? And so I looked at what I’m great at. And I was, I felt like I had a gift to be able to communicate, speak to people, move people. And so early on, I started doing nutrition workshops and teaching people how to get healthy. And then I looked at what I w and then the next thing was I started building out a strategy of, okay, if I was going to really impact the world in a big way, what do I need to do?

Speaker 3: (06:17)

Well, one, I need to educate them. Number two, I need to be able to give them what they need in order to get healthy. And so in doing that, I started saying, okay, well, supplements, help supplement people. So I’m going to teach people how to eat healthy, but then also I’m going to create super foods like collagen and probiotics and herbs, like tumeric. And I’m going to create the best in the world and then educate people on diet and then, and then offer them these supplements as well. And so I mapped out the strategy of, okay, how do I go from here to here over the period of five years, and then 10 years. And then I said, okay, I can do this part, but I’m not good at all these other things. And so then I started hiring other people and partnering with other people to help us achieve and reach those goals.

Speaker 3: (07:04)

Now that that might seem pretty simplistic. One other thing I’ll mention is I modeled other businesses that were successful. I looked at people in the nutrition industry, like a garden of life and my business partner now, Jordan Rubin, who actually founded that company. I, I looked at other companies in this space who are doing well and said, what was their recipe for success? And so a lot of it was reverse engineering and saying, okay, I want to go from here to here in 10 years, you know, number one, who do I need to partner with, or who do I need on my team in order to accomplish this? And I could go on and on, but again, that’s, I think those were some of the key pieces.

RV: (07:43)

Well, I love the, I love that. I mean, I, I think no matter how many times we tell somebody that like building a personal brand, like it’s these basic fundamentals, it’s like, all of us just think there’s some secret that we’re missing. That there’s some like, you know, magic thing or some advanced Ninja trick that, that people like, you know, that, that the rest of us don’t know. And yet it’s never that story. Like, it is never that story. It is always the fundamentals. And, and one thing that you said that I really love is that basically you started with your passion and then you kind of said, how could I serve these people in a deeper way? Which wasn’t just education, but providing them the stuff to get healthy. But at some point you, you must run into the mental block of going. Yeah. But I’m not a formulator. Like, I don’t know how to create ingredients. I’ve never, I’ve never made a supplement. I don’t, I don’t know how to bottle a vitamin. I don’t know how to ship. I’ve never, I don’t run a warehouse. Like you had to have run into all that stuff.

Speaker 3: (08:46)

I did. Absolutely. And so then from that point, I said, okay, but who do I know? And that’s what I started thinking through is who do I know? And so, and honestly, if that person didn’t know, I said, do you know a person? Do you know, a person? Do you know a person? And eventually over time I found that person and you and I both see this Rory it’s like, I think a lot of times people let that keep them from succeeding, or they’ll say, Oh, I asked one person. They didn’t know, it’s time to give up. Now, now I’ve found like in order to find somebody to manufacture, and then also like we source now ingredients from all over the world. We source organic herbs from Asia. We yeah. Yeah. Like it’s not, that was not easy, you know, but we found somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody, we developed a relationship there, and now we get these certified organic herbs from Asia. We get a lot from the United States as well. And, you know, we develop these partnerships over time, but, but you know, the thing is you just gotta keep keep keep seeking and knocking and going after it, you know, it’s just you, you have to do that. And I think almost any business though, if you’re going to scale it to you know, to, to, to a certain degree.

RV: (09:55)

Well, and I, I think it’s interesting because the, the nature of a personal brand, we all think of, Oh, it’s about me. And yet your whole mindset here is who do I know? Who do I know? Who do I know it’s like these other people that you, that you can pull, pull around thinking about scale. Okay. Can you just give us a rough, a rough journey of like, when did you start and like, how did the growth happen and, and how many years? And like, where were the big tipping points? Cause it’s like to go from, you know, if someone’s listening right now, like they might just literally be thinking, you know, they may not even be on social media or something going, okay. I, you know, I see the need for this and the next generation, but having millions of followers, there’s a lot between there. So map that out a bit.

Speaker 3: (10:44)

Yeah. So, you know, I started dr. Axe.Com a little over 10 years ago. And that’s the website. Now. I started off in a clinical practice. I ran it more of a functional medicine practice. We did nutrition, consult, blood work. We did some chiropractic, we did physical therapy, all that sort of stuff. And so I started there and about a year or so into practice, I started putting out a health newsletter and then I had a patient say, Hey, I’d love to send this to my, my aunt North Carolina, can you post it online? So I just started posting it online newsletter. And and that was probably about 11, a little over 11 years ago. I started doing that. And then after about five years in practice that just kept growing. Like I started a F one day, like a, a four hour work week on my website and the rest I worked, you know, my full-time business.

Speaker 3: (11:33)

So I took sort of Fridays for four hours and I would work on this dr. Axe.Com website business. And I would write an article and record a video. And I just started putting out, you know, those two pieces of content every single week. And then I got to the point where that kept growing. And then I had a friend of mine, Jordan Rubin, or a new friend who said, Hey, I’m starting a company. We are going to create the world’s healthiest food, grass, fed beef probiotic, rich foods, kale chips, kombucha. And so I said, so I actually had my associate at the time he bought my practice and I invested in this business with with Jordan Rubin. And so we started this, this company, it was called beyond organic, well, the company was not set up to succeed because our margins were too small shipping, frozen beef across the country in July and having it melt. And then the returns, like we were losing our shirts. So I did that for a couple years and ended up losing everything I invested in the company, which was pretty much everything. And so Chelsea and I were at a point, my wife and I, and I’m like, and we actually had at this point less than $10,000, like left in the bank. And like, and I just left that company because it was going under essentially. And I in dr. X.Com was actually losing money every month. And and so, yeah,

RV: (13:01)

The on all fronts, like it’s just going out, it’s not coming in.

Speaker 3: (13:05)

It was, the ship was sinking. And the first thing we didn’t listen, I know everybody isn’t religious, but Chelsea and I just, we got down on our hands and knees, we just prayed. And we said, God, would you just give us wisdom and direction and what we should do? And I really felt like I remembered a meeting I had with bill Hampton, you know, bell and with him six months before, and he said, Josh, what do you really want to do? He said, cause it seems like you’ve got a couple, you know, a few different businesses going on. And he said, I think you just need to focus fully on one thing. And I said, you know, I really want to build the world’s number one, natural health website. And I want to help people heal using food as medicine. And he said, well do just that.

Speaker 3: (13:40)

And I literally had those words sort of ring back into my head. And I literally then the next day started working on putting out a health program. Six weeks later, later I launched a health program. I called it the secret detox program. And it was essentially just my way of saying, Hey, we got to cleanse our, our diet cleanse. Our bodies launched it online and it became our best-selling product. And it was just a program somebody would buy for, let’s say like a, you know, $200 online all content and launched that a year later, we launched our first supplement. And by the way, this is only like seven little over seven years ago. I had less than $10,000 in the bank. We were like, what are we going to do? So focused on that,

RV: (14:24)

Launching a course here at two, you’re talking about a $200 course informational educational product. That’s what you started with.

Speaker 3: (14:32)

Right? And then I had an email list of about 30,000 people. And around this time I had a friend of mine. I do, you know, Isaac Jones. I don’t, okay. He’d be a good person. Cause he’s a great guy. And so we were doing lunch and he said, Hey, how’s your online business going? I said, well, it’s going okay. I have a cookbook out and a fitness, but I said, it’s really, I’m losing a few thousand dollars a month, not making it. And he said, I heard that. He said, I just came over from a seminar. And I heard that for every email you have, that’s what you should be making in dollars a month, a month. So he said, if you have an email list of 30,000, he said, I heard that you can maybe be making up to $30,000 a month. And I was like, man, I’m like spending 10 and making like seven.

Speaker 3: (15:19)

And I’m like, I’m must not be doing something right. And so I said, Hey, who do you? Who do, you know, who’s good at this? And so he’s like, Hey, I’m going to a seminar. In a few weeks, I went to the seminar and learned how to launch an online program. Brendan Bouchard was there and heard his whole thing. And then literally went back and I said, okay, I am launching a program as fast as I can to put all this content together. We launched it. And we ended up making more in that single launch that I had in the, in the three previous years combined. And me, you know, just doing, making up stuff as I go, you know? And so in any ways from there, I ended up partnering with my business partner now, Jordan Rubin. So we grew that business to probably, you know, just online just content to probably about 47 million and that we ended up merging comp companies and my company at the time, anyways, all that being said in emerging companies, AI was

RV: (16:13)

[Inaudible] up to that. So up to 47 million was, was information products that you were doing classic, like launches. Were you doing like a V? Is this like a, like a video style, like a three video launch kind of a thing, or just,

Speaker 3: (16:27)

But Jeff Walker launch formula, like, but, but, but by that time we launched supplements as well. I only had like six supplements. But that was probably doing still about 70% of the revenue where content was about 30% at that point in time. And then we launched in retail. This was about four, four and a half years ago. And that my company now is called ancient nutrition. I’ve co-founded that with Jordan and yeah, that company, we have an over a few hundred employees over a hundred employees and you know, continuing to scale and grow and it’s it’s been a lot of fun.

RV: (17:04)

Wow. Wild. So that was four years ago. So w so retail has been a big part of the growth in the revenue and the revenue numbers has been from getting your supplements distributed through retail.

Speaker 3: (17:16)

Yes, that’s correct. And I’ll say this, I mean, it’s actually almost it’s retail, but a lot of it’s online sales. I mean, our, our direct to consumer business, if you include Amazon with that, well, if you don’t include Amazon, it’s, it’s about 50% of our revenue. I mean, it’s still a significant portion.

RV: (17:34)

Wow. Oh, so this is just like, from the people coming to your site, reading your blogs, watching your videos, and then clicking on the shop button and then go into your, your store, your online store and saying, I want to buy some supplements. Boom. And then, and then that, that, that’s still about half of the revenue. That’s right. Amazing. That is so freaking cool. So you, you start with this passion. So the email was a big deal, I guess. So, so that was like a big, a big turning point. Was there, was there a specific lesson that you learned there related to email that you were like, Oh, once, once I realized this, that opened it, that that helped me go from losing three grand a month to like actually making some money.

Speaker 3: (18:22)

Yeah. I think one is just having a process in place and understanding people typically don’t buy with the first offer, people buy with multiple offers. And so, you know, w and the other thing is, you know, don’t try and make it up yourself, get coaching, or, or, or read a book like Jeff Walker’s launch formula and, and follow the formula. You know, so for me, like I always try and be as coachable as possible. So when I’ve had business cultures like Dan Sullivan or those sorts of people over the years and their coaching, they like, I just, I try and be as humble and as coachable as I can be. And so we did that essentially. It was like a 10 day to two week formula of, we did three training videos where I went through the benefits of detoxification, your top detox food, your top detox supplements, people opted in then to that email list where we then offered the program over to a two week period of time, I did a webinar.

Speaker 3: (19:12)

And on that webinar webinar, we would pitch a product and I would let them know, Hey, if you buy this program today, we’re also going to give you, you know, all of these free interviews for free or something like that, you know? And so that’s really what we followed is that formula and had a lot of success with it, but it wasn’t, you know, I, I think the biggest moments were a few things. One do it with excellence, but don’t take forever, okay. Do it with excellence, but don’t take forever. So again, when you’re putting out a piece of content, don’t ramble on and on, like I knew, Hey, in video one, I’m going to hit on these three topics, video two, these three topics. And I would go and watch other people doing webinars and say, what made this webinar great. And I would break it down and say, Oh, you know what? They did pay, they did testimonials. That was one of the key ingredients. Oh, they had additional officer offices and offers and bonuses at the end. And Hey, there’s a Q and a where you’re having, you know, hitting these key questions and doing a second close, you know? So I just, my number one moment was, Hey, if you follow the formula, you’re going to get better results. And if you make it up yourself. Yeah,

RV: (20:20)

Yeah. I love that. I mean, and, and it’s fun. Like, I mean, we’ve made a whole business out of just learning all these formulas. Right. And like pulling them together and testing them. And and I actually, so I wanted to ask you about data real quick because you know, I feel like one of the things that you guys do really well, that a lot of personal brands don’t do is data. Now that’s completely anecdotal and theoretical from where stand, but that’s kind of what I’ve just picked up from watching a far. Is that true? Is that something

Speaker 3: (20:54)

Game changer? Huge, huge. And so, you know, I can tell you, we’ve had sort of two times in our business where one was when we started getting into Facebook ads and doing that and email list, like I started realizing, okay, we’ve got to do beta testing and testing what works better than others. And so we started really looking a lot at data and analytics. When I moved into retail, I realized if you don’t have data, you are flying completely blind and you can not succeed, period. You won’t be able to succeed for a year, but you will eventually run out of cash at some point, if you ever have a downturn. And so if you want to succeed again, I can not overstate this. If you do not have good data in a retail business, you will not succeed. Long-Term there is no chance of it.

Speaker 3: (21:39)

You have to know, you ha you have to be able to forecast. And if you ever run into a point where, how you have a downturn, if not people just lose their shirts. And a lot of times, so for us, like we have a, we have a chief strategy officer, chief data officer, who’s one of the four like heads of our entire business, because data is so important. Her name is Kat, Katherine, and we were lying on her and she’s a wizard. She’s amazing. And like now when we go into a place like whole foods market or target, or some of our biggest, our biggest you know, clients that we, we retailers that we work with, you know, we go in there and we say, Hey, here’s the, we call it spins data. They, Hey, here’s the 52 weeks of spins or the last quarter of spins.

Speaker 3: (22:24)

And look at how our college in protein is increasing in beating these three other brands. When you go in there and you can show the retailer like, Hey, look on Amazon, online in this competitor of yours, we’re outperforming all of them. It’s kind of like, there’s PR there’s absolute proof. We’re going to bring you in now. And we’re going to, you know, w w we’re gonna work with you in this business when you have that absolute proof in data. So data. Yeah. I mean, data is a huge deal. The other thing is, if you want to scale, you asked that earlier, how do you like scaling data is crucial to scaling a business because you need to know what lever to pull, what not to pull and just being aware of, you know, all of those things. And so, yeah. Data, data is a big deal.

RV: (23:13)

And did you, did you did you like, is this all stuff that’s happening on spreadsheets? Did you have like one tool? Did you mind, have you used different tools along the way? Like, as the business has grown? Yeah,

Speaker 3: (23:25)

Exactly. I mean, that’s the one thing that I can tell you too, from going from, you know, we did 2 million, one year, then we went to 12 million, the following year, then 47, then a hundred and then, you know, other numbers. But that being said, like every year in the stage of growth, like a lot of times you, you, you have to move on to a new platform. You have to, you to do data differently. You have to do the business differently. You know, I think once you, here’s, the other thing, once you get up to a certain size people by law, I mean, and this is true, even at smaller brands, but people buy the brand, not just the product, right? It’s like, there are a thousand different brands of tumeric out there. Why is someone going to buy our tumeric? Or there are over about a hundred brands of college and why is somebody going to buy our college?

Speaker 3: (24:11)

And it’s because of our brand name and people knowing they can trust us that we own our own manufacturing facilities that we source almost exclusively, like loads of organic products is that we show you photos from our farms. It’s like, you know, building that brand. That’s what I love about what you guys do, brand builders. You know, it is so crucial that you’re building a brand that’s known for excellence and being trustworthy. You know, I think those are the two key elements we really try and focus on is, are, do people see us as being the top brand, the premier brand in terms of quality? And then do they trust us? I think those are really important aspects of building the brand as well. Wow.

RV: (24:52)

I mean, this has gone by fast. I knew that it would, and it’s like trying to like get this story, but it’s, it’s amazing. I mean, it’s just really, really, really cool. So dr. Axe, where, where would you tell people to go if they want to connect with you or, you know, to kind of like follow your journey? Yeah. So if you want to learn

Speaker 3: (25:11)

A lot of what I teach in business, you can go to my my leadership website, that’s leader leaders.com, L E a D E R S. So leaders.com. Also if you want to learn more about art, so nutrition, the stuff I’m doing there, you can follow me on Instagram at dr. Josh Axe or Facebook at dr. Josh Axe, or, Hey, if you’ve got a health condition, you’re looking to heal your body naturally, you can just Google search my name, dr. Axe hypothyroidism, dr. Axe, you know, low testosterone or whatever health problem you have. You can look up, I’ve got a plan for it. And I’m also, I got a new book coming out soon. It’s called ancient remedies where I go over the top remedies used throughout history to heal the body in different conditions and that sort of thing. But and then my nutritional companies, ancient nutrition, which you can find at whole foods, market and health food stores around the country. I know there’s a lot of places. Those are some of the, some of the different places.

RV: (26:07)

It’s awesome, man. Well, so cool. Thank you for sharing. So transparently so much of your journey, like what the end to end and you know, really 10 years, but it’s really a short amount of time for such a dramatic growth, but there’s been some ups and downs and man, we just really appreciate you being open booking and sharing all that with us.

Speaker 3: (26:28)

Awesome. Well, thanks for having me Rory love what you do, love brand builders and yeah, always, always excited to to share

Ep 124: How to Write Books from the Heart with Lysa TerKeurst

Hey 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 build

ers, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

Oh my gosh. What an honor friends you know, that AJ doesn’t join me for every interview that we do, but for Lisa TerKeurst, she is here. Lisa is a new friend of ours. If you, if you’re not familiar with her, she’s the number one New York times bestselling author of it’s not supposed to be this way, which is a book that sold a million copies within its first two years. But Lisa’s 23 books together have sold over 6 million copies. She’s got 2 million followers on social media. She’s also the president of Proverbs 31 ministry, which has 5 million followers. They have a huge podcast. She’s been on the Oprah Winfrey show. Good morning America, the today show. And we met her because she got stuck on a dock, on a flight with the Vedas to go speak at the global leadership network a few months ago. And we were just, she was forced to be friends with us. There was no escape and we just really love her and art. And she has a new book out that just came out. It’s called forgiving what you can’t forget. And this is going to blow your mind when you hear this story. So anyways, Lisa, thank you. And welcome.

Thank you so much. I knew we were going to be fast friends when I first met you guys and you both had on matching monogrammed, masks. And I was like, that’s so impressive that a, they have their mask B, they actually coordinate with their outfits and c their monograms. I need to know these people.

Yes, that’s a problem we have.

Well, I try to match everyone in the family. I think it’s

An asset. I think that speaks volumes about how organized you are. And so I immediately wanted to lean in and listen to whatever you have to say. So it was an honor and a joy to meet you. And I loved our time together.

Yeah. Lisa didn’t know our, I don’t even know for ordinary, but I met at Bible study and have done several of Lisa’s books and I didn’t know that she was going to be on this airplane. And then I was like, Oh, I’ve got a, she stuck with me for an hour. I’m going to ask her every question I can. Well, it’s been great.

I think it was amazing. I mean, within a few minutes of you, I mean, just spending time together, you shared this story with us about your husband art, which is really what this book is about, or was the basis of this book. It was a, it was a betrayal that, that he made. And I was like, wow, this woman is opening up a very vulnerable part of her life very quickly. Do you mind just kind of catching everyone up on, on a little bit about what happened to you and, and how that kind of led to, you know, this new book

Sure thing. Yeah. And, and I always like to tell people to art is very okay with me sharing the story because we see that this is not only part of my redemption and healing, but it’s part of his as well. And so I don’t go into a lot of details about the story, but we share just enough to let people know that we’ve experienced the depth of pain that comes with the betrayal. And I think when people understand that that we’ve experienced the depth of just this horrific situation, you don’t have to go through the same situation that we did. But if you know that I’ve been through a lot of pain, you can trust that. The words that I write in my book are not going to be too neat, too tidy, too unrealistic for your pain. And I think when people know, I think my reader more, more than wanting to know my story.

I think people pick up my book not to be taught, not to be instructed, although all of that happens in the book as well, but I think they pick up my book to be understood. And I think I’m able to give voice to some very complicated emotions that people feel when they’ve been hurt, betrayed, rejected, wounded, wronged and all of those things certainly played into our story. But the basics of our stories that we’d been married for two and a half decades. And I found out my husband was being unfaithful and I wasn’t just broken hearted. I was completely shattered, shattered beyond what I could even describe because it wasn’t just the implosion of a relationship at the time. I felt like it could potentially be a devastation to our entire legacy. And I also, I was so worried about my kids, but I also felt the weight of the world on me because I was a Christian voice in a very tender space for a lot of women.

And there was honestly for me, a lot of shame around what happened. And I was just having such a hard time reconciling, like, do I continue to help other women? And do I even still have anything to say if, if this happened in my marriage, then what does that say about me? And I remember one of the most painful things that people would sometimes say to me is, well, you know, there’s two sides to every story. And it took me a while to figure out what do I say to that? But I finally just with all respect and kindness said back to them, this isn’t a spectator sport where you pick a side, this is the implosion of a family where you need to jump on the field and just offer to help in any way. But if you can’t be part of the solution, then don’t be part of the conversation.

Oh, that’s really, that’s really good. And I think, I think one of the things that I love most about you, isn’t just your writing because it’s incredible. And I think it’s very moving. But it’s also your natural vulnerability in all aspects. When we first met you on social media and in your books, and even in conversations like these, and, you know, we work with people who were trying to build their personal brand all the time that are really trying to tap into their message and that level of vulnerability that makes them appealing to other people, because then they feel like they know you and they can relate to you. And to know that I’ve got this commonality with you is it makes it so much easier to want to listen to you or to read your books or to follow you on social because you come from a place of not righteousness, but from, Oh, I’ve been in the depths and I know this, I come from a place of being there. So I’m curious, like how do you tap into that vulnerability and the willingness to be so open and bare and then create beautiful pieces of art that are helping people around the world? Like, how do you do that?

That’s a good question. You know, it’s, it’s kind of interesting. I’m a pretty private person which may surprise people. I’m an introvert who’s sort of at times forced to live the life of an extrovert. And but there’s a big difference between privacy and secrecy. So secrecy is when we withhold information for the purpose of hiding privacy is when we withhold details for the purpose of healing. And so I’m not a secret person, but I am a private person. And so when I write in my book, I don’t go into all the gory details of what happened, because that would do nothing but just satisfy people’s curiosity, but that’s like giving them sugar treats, you know, it’s like, it, it feels good going in, but it does nothing to nourish them at all. So instead I just let my story be a little bit of the backbone of a message so that people know what I’ve been through without giving them details. Because my focus isn’t the details of the scandal or the details of the betrayal and the hurt. What what’s a treasure to people is the transferable wisdom. It’s the life lessons. And it’s the experiences where I’ve gleaned insights and how to heal and how to move forward. That’s really, what’s important to get to, and that’s what will nourish a person’s soul.

I love that. I forget who said this, where you can tell me because I have mom brain 95% of the time, but there’s this great quote that we heard from someone at NSA that talks about how you take an eye focus story and turn it into a, you focused message. And

Craig Valentine everybody in 1999 world champion of public speaking, former, former professional speaking coach of Roy Baden.

But so much of that is like, you know, it’s like taking this very intimate story, but yet gleaming the insights and the wisdom that will apply to everyone around you.

So I liked that, that delineation of the privacy part of, of sharing. And yeah, I have to tell you like this, this, the power of this book, I mean, you can flip through and just read some of the lines. I mean, it is so moving and forgiving what you can’t forget again, is what the book is called. But I wanted to translate that also to social media. So I know we’re talking about this vulnerability and writing, and when we were at the global leadership summit, there was an after hours conversation that me, you and AIG had that I really loved, which was about as an author or even just as a person sharing some of my life and my views. How do you delineate what you should share and what you shouldn’t share, where it’s like, I want to be honest, I, I wanna you know, know that I have a voice in the world and that matters, but like, you know, maybe not everyone cares what I think about politics or this or that, or maybe not every wants to know the details of my marriage, but it’s also like people want you to be vulnerable and real, and you just seem to have a, I remember just feeling like this, just very centered place of truth of which you kind of communicate from.

And I personally really struggle with finding that balance. Is there anything you can share about that, but whether in the book books or on social?

Absolutely. So I think sometimes when we pick up a microphone to give a message, I think sometimes we misunderstand what we’re doing with that microphone. Sometimes I think we, we forget, we’re not speaking to a crowd because we see a crowd of people in front of us. We’re speaking to an individual. And that individual that we’re speaking to is really important that we determine who that individual is. So if that individual is the hurting person in that room, who thinks they probably shouldn’t even be there and your desire is to not share the facts of what happened to you as much as just connect with their pain, to say, I know exactly where you’re at different experiences, but the depth of the pain is in me too. And then you, instead of parking on the pain, you then move on to sharing wisdom in your journey that will be transferable to help them.

If that’s who you’re speaking to, then you’ll give the best message of your life. But sometimes people put the individual that they’re speaking to and they, it it’s really that there it’s that third grade teacher who told them that they weren’t good enough. And so the speaker then tries to prove to that teacher, that they have a place on that stage. And the problem is that if you are trying to prove something, that to that teacher, you may impress an audience, but impressing the audience is intimidating. It’s not inspiring. Or you may have that person that hurt you as that one person in the audience. And you may try, try to do some sort of payback, like I’ll show you, you know, and if you do that, though, everybody walks out of that audience, feeling a little more cynical about the world, then a little more hopeful about the world, or it may be that parent that was never there for you.

And if that’s that one person that you picture seated in the audience, that parent who was never there for you, then you may get up there and try to prove how, you know, you, you were worth it and you should have, you know, you should have shown up for me and, and you do so much to elevate yourself that you wind up depressing the rest of the audience. And so I think it’s really important that we remember, we don’t take the stage to prove something, to impress people, to posture ourselves as an expert. You know, sometimes when we try to impress other people, we wind up just depressing ourself. And so if we get up there and we take that stage for that one hurting person in the audience, and our whole perspective is I want to make that hopeless person hope again. And I want to make that person who hasn’t felt understood in a really long time.

I want them to feel like they have a comrade in this world. And I want to make that, that one person seated on the back row, who thinks they don’t belong. I want to tell them, I see you. And I recognize that you have a space in this place. And I want to honor you. If we take the microphone and we are using our voice, our platform, our opportunity to help the hurting person in the room, then it becomes so much less about us and so much more about the wisdom that we can transfer from our hurting places into hope in that person’s heart.

I tell you, that is why you sell millions of books right there. That’s also why you have millions of followers. You could even hear the genuineness. Even when you speak about that is so much of where you come from and for anyone who is trying to build a personal brand, it’s like, if you come from that authentic place like that, just naturally it comes across. Like it really, really does. Now there’s something that you kind of said that reminded me of something that’s in the book that I thought was just really interesting. And it’s this concept of marked moments. And I think that’s just something that regardless if there is a traumatic event or a tragedy or a deep hurt or a, you know, a deep wound, regardless, like we all have marked moments that we can look back and say, that was the moment. That was the comment. That was the person that was the experience that demarcated at change in my life, my attitude, my beliefs. And so like, I’m just really curious, like, share it, share a little bit about this concept of Mark moments and what that really means in the book, but then also just in life. Well, I talk

About in the very beginning of the book that we all have our own personal BC and a D moments. Now, of course, people usually Mark that, you know, that delineation of time using the life of Christ. But I think when we’ve been through something significant, some wounding, some accident, some betrayal, whatever it is, you know, we have our own personal before crisis and after devastation. And it’s almost like that line is drawn so sharply in our lives that we start to define our life well, before this happened. And after that happened, and it’s almost like it starts to define the very nature of our life and, you know, our I-phones don’t help because our I-phones are. So I don’t really understand how it happens, but they just put together these little memory movies. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten one of these it’s like four years ago on this day.

And you see this picture of all these smiling people. And two of those people in that smiling picture, they were the ones that devastated your life. And you just think, what do I do with this? And it can almost be so stabbing that it takes your breath away and you think to yourself, I was authentic in that moment. I loved those two people. And so what do I do with this memory now, like we went on this trip or we had this birthday party together, or, you know, we took this Christmas card photo together and I really authentically loved this person, but then they went on to hurt me. So what do I do? Do I burn the pictures and throw the memories away? No. In the book for giving what you can’t forget. I say those are your memories. And if you were authentically loving that person in that moment, you get to decide if you want to keep that you weren’t being fake, you weren’t being false. You were authentically loving. And if that was a beautiful memory to you, then call it a beautiful memory and keep it. If it’s a painful memory, guess what? You can toss it away. You can burn it, you can delete it. It’s yours to keep it’s yours to toss away, but you get to decide what you do with your memories.

So good. I think from a a tactical perspective, one of the things that I saw is that you spent over a thousand hours in scripture preparing for this book. And obviously, you know, for those of you listening that know the story of Christ, it’s like the essential message of Christ is forgiveness. And I thought, you know, separate from the spiritual part of it, just the craft of an author saying even after I’ve written 23 books, I’m going to spend a thousand hours diving deep into this one study before, you know, I, I, I come to this book, how important is that? And, and was there anything, I mean, obviously you’ve been very into the Bible for a very long time, but you know, taking a thousand hours on one subject, was there anything that showed up for you specifically that you had never really noticed before, but with that intensity of a focus on, on such a specific concept that, that came out and then ended up making it way its way into forgiving, what you can’t forget.

Yes. I’m so glad you asked me this question. You know, and let me just be, I’m going to have true confession moment. Is that okay if I’ve true confession moment on your show, is that allowed wow. Loud. Okay. True confession. Part of the reason I spent a thousand hours studying forgiveness in the Bible because probably for the first hundred or so, I was looking for the exception I was looking for where God said, okay, everything’s forgivable, but not this because sometimes when something happens to you and it’s unchangeable, like you can’t ever fix what happened, the unchangeable can feel so unforgivable. And so really I don’t shine my halo that I spent a thousand hours studying. I kind of say, it just took me that long to start to really understand what forgiveness is and what it isn’t. And I brought so much resistance to it, and I felt like such a fraud.

You know, when my team would gather up to listen to me, you know, quote, teach on forgiveness. The first five times they showed up, all I could write was all the reasons why I wasn’t qualified to be a person to write this message, because I had so much resistance to forgiveness. And I honestly felt like a forgiveness failure because how many times that I forgiven and then I got triggered in my pain and all that anxiety and frustration and anger just came crashing back on me. And I just thought, what in the world, maybe forgiveness doesn’t work. So I spent a thousand hours because I desperately needed to learn for me, but probably two things that surprised me the most one is that I started to understand forgiveness. Isn’t something I muster up inside of me. It’s not like I boss my feelings around and get enough spiritual maturity that suddenly then forgiveness becomes easy for me.

And that I can like conjure it up. That’s not what forgiveness is. Forgiveness. Doesn’t even start with me. Forgiveness is a gift given to us by God. And so forgiveness is not based on my determination. Forgiveness is based on my cooperation with what God is providing for me. And forgiveness is not an unfair gift I have to give to this person who hurt me. That just sounds cruel, right? Forgiveness is God’s way of providing the hurting inside of the human heart to heal. And so as God’s forgiveness flows to me, I simply must just cooperate with it and let it flow through me. And as it passes through me, it’s like washing out all of that bitterness and anger and resentment. That turns me into someone I don’t want to be. And when we are bitter, because of what something, this thing that this other person has done to me, we’re letting that person hurt us twice.

They heard us when the devastation happened, but if we allowed them to turn us into somebody, that’s not a real representation of who we are. They heard us a second time by making us bitter. And I’m sorry, but I refuse to let that person that hurt me, hijack my healing. So I don’t have to wait for them to say, they’re sorry. I don’t have to wait for them to realize what they did was wrong. I don’t even have to wait for them to learn all the lessons that they should learn. I can detach my ability to heal from those choices that that other person may or may not ever make. And I can stand in the middle of my pain and I can say, I deserve to stop suffering because of what this other person has done to me. And I am participating with God’s gift of forgiveness for my heart, as much as anyone else’s heart.

So that’s a big thing that I learned, but in the scripture, here’s one of the most surprising things that I learned. If you look at the Lord’s prayer, you can find it a couple of places in the gospel, but in Matthew chapter six, starting in verse nine, Jesus says, this is then how you should pray. So imagine this, God has given Jesus, the assignment, teach the people how to pray. And Jesus says, okay, this is how you should pray. Now who thinks that prayer is a pretty stinking, big deal in the Bible, right? Raise your hand. Perfect. Prayer is a huge deal. This is a big assignment. And do you know, over half of the words that Jesus uses in the prayer, the ultimate prayer that we’re supposed to pray every day over half of the words are about confession and forgiveness. I was astounded by this.

Think of all the things that Jesus could have included in the Lord’s prayer, the ultimate prayer, and he uses the bulk of the word to tend to the humans need for forgiveness and confession. Why? Because though he was perfect divinity, also absolute humanity without sin, but he carried hurt. He knew what it was like to be brutalized by other people rejected, spit upon, turned against wounded. And so I think he was like, you know what? You guys need. Most of all in your prayers, you need to know how to heal. The daily hurts how to look at an offense of another person and refuse to pick it up because you already pre forgave that person. And when this world be such a better place, like if we truly woke up every day and said our father in heaven, hallowed, be your name, your kingdom, come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts. As we have also forgiven our debtors, like forgiveness is not just for the heart and horrific in our life. Forgiveness is something we can do. First thing in the morning before we even enter into life. Like we can choose to pre forgive. We can send forgiveness ahead into that meeting into that coffee shop, into that doctor’s office, into that school, into, you know, the Jim that we’re going to go to later to might. And so when we’re walking into that coffee shop three hours later and some rude dude bumps into her happy, we can trade all that drama for an upgrade. And we can just say, Oh no. So actually I already forgave you this morning. So just because you’re laying down, this offense does not mean I’m going to pick it up and carry it with me and affect me all day long.

Like you do, you boo. I have already forgiven you and have a good day and we take our coffee, but we don’t take the offense. And we don’t weaponize the pain that they caused us and unleash it into every other person in this world. Like sometimes I’ll just have this moment where I think devil you have overplayed your freaking hand. You know why? Because you intended to multiply that hurt and pain in my heart so that I would carry it into this world. But that is not who I am. I am an evangelist of the gospel message. So the hurt stops here and you devil are shamed back to hell because I’m not going to pick up that offense. I’m not going to play your game and I’m not going to do the devil’s work for him. I’m going to be a gospel centered woman where I have loved to share, not crosses of a offense to bear.

Oh, we’re still having some church up in here. This is good. I love that. And having one of the things that I love so much about this book and your message and just you it’s that you’re standing as, like, I am not the perfect example. I’m quite, I failed at this quite often. And I set off on this research journey because I was looking for the wrong answers. And I think so, so many people in our audience are probably afraid to step into some of the things that they don’t think they’re an expert in, but instead it’s like actually lean into the fact that like, if, if you’re passionate about it, like lean into that. And even if you don’t start down the path with like the best of intentions, it’s like, no, I’m going to study this. And I’m going to find that exception, share that struggle and share that struggle. Because I think that’s where this authentic nature that draws you in and you come from this place of, I do not have this figured out and I was doing it all wrong. And that’s why I went on this journey to begin with. And I think there’s just, there’s, there’s this misconception that you have to be an expert or how it all figured out to be able to talk about it. And I think this is such a great example of no, like, no you don’t. It’s it’s not that at all.

I agree with that, you know, and I think sometimes authors shy away from people’s skepticism, but I say step into it because when you can speak to the skepticism and you can say me too, it disarms people for putting down a message thinking good for you, but it worked for me. And also we have to remember, we can’t start our books where we want people to be. We have to start our books where people are actually act. And so with forgiving, what you can’t forget, I knew I had to start with the pain and the resistance to forgiveness. I couldn’t come out swinging and say, you have to forgive. That’s not where I was at. When I started the message. I couldn’t expect my reader to be there either. And I think it’s really important that we remember people talk about two things. They talk about their problems and their questions. So the very best thing we can do is acknowledge the felt, need of the book. And it’s always a problem. Someone is having a question that they’re asking. So as an author, if we can acknowledge that felt need lean into it, then we can provide real value for people. When our author’s promise is presented as a question to answer or an answer to their question or a solution to their problem. And that’s where the magic happens.

Yeah. Forgiving, what you can’t forget is the book. Obviously you can hear directly the power coming through Lisa in what she talks about, what she believes in, just how she writes open, honest, authentic, vulnerable transparent, which is no doubt, a huge part of the reason for her extraordinary success. Lisa, thank you so much just for the honor of being here and opening up and sharing your story. And gosh, we just, we pray for you and art and we just wish you guys the very, very best,

Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to be with you and let’s do it again sometime

Ep 122: Becoming a Profit First Personal Brand with Mike Michalowicz

MM: (00:06)
[Inaudible]

RV: (00:09)
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: (01:03)
Mike Michalowicz is a new friend of mine, and he is a friend of friends. I actually met him at a mastermind group here in Nashville, and ever since we’ve, we’ve kind of been circling a couple different groups of, of authors and some mutual friends, Donald Miller, John Gordon, but he is the author of a huge best-selling book called profit first. And it is a long what we would call and referred to as a long tail bestseller, which are the books that I really, really respect the most. He also wrote a book called clockwork surge, the pumpkin plan, and then his newest books newest book is called fix this next. So he’s a writer, he’s a personal brand, but he also by age 35 had built and sold two companies. So one to private equity and another to a fortune 500.

RV: (01:59)
So he has the experience of being an entrepreneur and being a personal brand and writing about it. He used to also write for the wall street journal. He’s done a lot with business make-over special as a, as a business makeover specialist on MSNBC. And he’s just a great guy. So anyways, Mike, welcome to the show, Rory, thank you for doing this mask. It’s good to be here with you. So can I ask you about profit first because you know, I kind of, you know, tongue and cheek referred to myself as, as you know, a best-selling author, but I’m always been jealous of the people who sell, who have the books that sell week-in and week-out hundreds of thousands of copies every single week and profit first. It just, it is that book in, in the space of entrepreneurs. How did you, how did that happen?

MM: (02:54)
So, yeah, it’s a great question. I think what, how it happened. So first of all, let me qualify. You know, sellers become so bastardized. Like that’s the one thing I avoid. I got, well, I like now is a perennial popularity. Like, can you have something that’s perennially popular? And to do that when I was running profit first,uI wrote the book and I have this actually on my wall. I asked certain questions to myself. The first question is, will this concept be relevant 100 years from now? And because it’s for longevity, meaning if I wrote a book on like, you know how to advertise on Facebook, the longevity can be six months before they changed the engine again. And that would not qualify for what I’m looking to do. Uand then I put this, does this where on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is this so financial security is, is right there at the base level, needs up there with a breathing air and drinking water and eating food.

MM: (03:49)
So I determined where it is on there. And then probably the most important thing is, do I have a concept that is as fresh or new and perspective? So it’s this it’s this, maybe it’s the same old story, but told in a way that hasn’t been told before, or maybe it’s a new application, something that’s established and profit first is the pay yourself first system. So it’s not a new concept, but that’s always been in personal finance. I think it’s the first book that translated to business finance. So what I saw as it had life address a core foundational need for humanity, and it was, it was something that was was foundational in its execution. It was something that would work and that I think contributes to why it continues to sell.

RV: (04:34)
So that, did you, so talking about that, so one of the things that we described as thought leadership is kind of forwarding the thinking that has been done now advancing the conversation, not just regurgitating it. And what you just said was interesting. You said, it’s the pay yourself first concept, which is a concept that’s existed in personal finance, but you kind of brought it to the entrepreneurial community. Did you do that deliberately? Like, did you actually have that thought of like, Oh, this is a great concept over here that I should bring over here or was there,

MM: (05:07)
You know, what’s so funny in hindsight, so clear it’s like, of course that’s I saw that and I didn’t think about it. Maybe. I didn’t, I’ll say I conceived it was, I needed it for myself. So I was an entrepreneur. You should, you know, you share all the highlights. Really there’s more low lights than highlights and that’s true forever entrepreneurial story. It was in the low lights. I’m like, I was so frustrated. I couldn’t consistently make money. I couldn’t retain it. And I built and sold a couple companies. Yeah, fine. But those companies were never fiscally healthy. I did a really job running those. I was lucky in hindsight to sell those companies really? Yeah. Oh totally. I’m right place, right. Time. Right. Need from the acquirers. But not that they’re like, Oh my God, this guy is a genius. Uthat, that, and other things woke me up to my gosh.

MM: (05:54)
I’ve got to figure this out for myself. So once I had it figured out, I for myself, I said, Oh, this may translate to serving other people. I base it for myself on the payer self source system. Like, you know, how do you make money? How do you save money? And all these methods came up with think and grow rich richest, man in Babylon, you know, books and concepts from hundreds of years ago. And I was like, Oh, I need this personally. But by income sources, my business, let me apply to my business. I started doing it there. Once it started becoming, once it start getting traction for myself, I wrote an article in the wall street journal. And that’s when people started saying, Oh my gosh, I’m doing this. Where’s the book. So that brought about the book. It wasn’t such a deliberate, Oh my gosh, I’m taking an idea here. I’m moving here. I get this kind of, kind of to forming clay. It became that.

RV: (06:43)
So talking about the company. So this is important too. So how do you think the profit first? So not, not the book, but the actual concepts in the book. How do you think those apply to personal brands? Or can you talk about that? Because you know, a personal brand is interesting. It’s like you are both a personal brand and you are an entrepreneur. And so that I think is something that, you know, it’s amazing people talk about how many followers they have or how much revenue they do in launches, how much their speaking fee is. But in reality, how much are they actually keeping can be very, very little shockingly little. Yeah.

MM: (07:18)
Yeah. And it does it, does it add stuff matter? I remember when Twitter was getting popular, a, a, a person of influence in the Twitter realm was bragging effectively about the number of followers they had. And this person said just referenced your Twitter handle. You’re about to get X number of followers dot, dot, dot you’re welcome or die. You’re welcome. And does it really matter? I think at the end of the day, when it comes to financial viability, it’s how much money you’re retaining. So I would say profit first absolutely applies, listen, you may have one follower on your Twitter handle and they send, they spend $50 million with you. Here are the winner

RV: (08:02)
Winner, the winner.

MM: (08:04)
So I don’t know if those numbers matter. I listen and I try to get over my big fat ego constantly. It gets to my eye. And so if I have X number of followers, I’m like I only got mad at God and I’m comparing myself. I fought that same stupid game by realize at the end of the day, only thing that matters is for my business to continue, it needs to be financially viable. And the only, the only factor for that is profitability. If there is no money to live by and the businesses done, it’s all done. So profit first applies. It’s a system of as all these different sources of influence you have, as it becomes monetized, how much are you retaining, which then supports the longterm viability of the company. And also by the way, financial freedom for ourselves, like a profitable company, supports a profitable lifestyle, a lifestyle where you don’t have to worry about bills and you can be very comfortable. And then, you know, when you have that confidence, you can be even of greater service to your clients and followers.

RV: (09:03)
And so what do you think are some of the big mistakes that, that entrepreneurs make, if you can specify them to personal brands like you know, but this is also financial advisors, professional services, direct sales, like these kind of like very micro entrepreneurs and solo preneurs. What are some of the financial mistakes they make that compromise that, that viability or that financial health?

MM: (09:28)
I think, I think the, the lead bait concept is, is misunderstood, are MIS poorly executed. I should say. I think people go too far with it. So I’m very biased toward books, you know, you and I, and a group of authors had a call yesterday, actually just exploring how books work and stuff. And like, that’s, I thirst to understand that stuff. And I think some people publish books as lead bait, but a book, at least from my purview is, is something that has a permanent as permanent as it sticks as a historical document. That for whatever reason, when you say something in the spoken word versus the written word, the written word is seen as gospel. And the spoken word is seen as, as you know, flighting or fleeting. And I think some people put books out there and say, this is my lead bank, you know, free bucks spend $7 for shipping and you get my book.

MM: (10:22)
And I don’t realize, I don’t know if they really appreciate that, that book when someone receives it, it’s going to sit on the shelf for a lifetime. And if it isn’t the best, if you didn’t put your, every blood, every drop of blood, sweat, and tears and soul into it, you’re compromising your brand on the longterm. So it’s a short-term window. I can plop a book on a table and say, look how knowledgeable I am. But when people start to consume this, you actually maybe compromise your brand longterm, short financial gain for long-term financial agony. Then you, then you gotta just keep on kind of popping. Like what’s the new lead bait I can do. I think we give away when we give away free stuff, we’re giving it.

Ep 120: How To Build and Manage A Membership Site with Chris Ducker

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. Chris Ducker is easily one of my favorite Brits and probably like

I’m literally the only British person. You know, I think that is not true. That is not true. I would say that

Not true. I know quite a, quite a bit of British people, quite

A few Brits,

But man, he is amazing. I met him through Jay Baer, which just, we have close personal friends. Y’all know how much I love Jay Baer. And one of the reasons I love Chris because he’s a real entrepreneur in addition to being a, a phenomenal personal brand. So he’s written two books that are awesome, Virtual Freedom and Rise of the Youpreneur, but he owns and operates real companies. In fact, he has 350 full-time employees, mround the world. He’s got businesses in different countries. Umne of which is called virtual staff finder. For those of you looking for virtual assistance, we’ll, you know, we’ll talk more about that later. Um,t he’s also a blogger, you know, he’s a podcaster he’s, he’s got a great following. He’s built a huge personal brand himself. Uh,’s a speaker. He hosts an annual summit, u,,lled the Youpreneur summit, which, u,ually I think is in Cambridge or in England and is in London.

Okay. So he doesn’t event every year. And you know, we have a lot of overlap in terms of friends and audience and philosophy. And anyways, I just loved this guy and I, I, you need to know about him and what he does in his businesses and specifically his online business, which is the smallest part of how he makes his income because he’s got real companies doing real stuff. But he has a really big Academy called Youpreneur. It’s a membership Academy and I wanted to talk about how we built that and what does it take to really month in and month out manage a membership site because there’s good things and there’s bad things. And so anyways, Chris Ducker, my favorite Brit, glad you’re here. I’m glad

I just want you to keep talking about me. This is great. I could listen to you for hours.

Well, AJ always tells me she’s like, your introductions are too long. And I, and I, you know, I listened to everything. most everything AJ tells me, but I think it’s important cause I want you to know how much I love you. And I want, I want you listening to know every person that I bring on is here for a specific reason of someone that I learned from. And, you know, there’s you do so many of those things, but youpreneur.com, which is really the Academy, the membership site. I feel like Chris people, I feel like so many people get excited about a membership site. They start it, they run it for 15 months and then they’re like, this sucks and I’m out and you’ve done it. So how long have you done it?

We we have just hit our fifth year at the Youpreneur Academy. Which is fantastic. I mean, throughout the course of that time, gosh, I don’t know exactly how many people have swung through those doors. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say probably around about 3003 and a half thousand people have joined that period of time. We float anywhere between, you know, based on pre, you know, promotions and kind of mini launches to our lists and things like that, or float anywhere between kind of like six 50 to nine 50 members at any one time. So it’s a good sticking rate as well. I think the majority of people stick around for about a year and a half or so. Uyou know, but, but here’s the, here’s the big thing. I think the one reason why memberships, mome and go so quickly is because man it’s work that people that people think that it’s like passive income or something equally as sexy. And it’s definitely not passive. It’s probably about the most, you know, other than say, like coaching one-on-one or as well, we do, we do.

One-On-One like, it’s

That you guys, you guys would not be good poster Childs for the idea of passive income, but that’s your model you see, and that’s what everybody loves about you. And so look, here’s the deal. If you want that recurring reliable income on a regular monthly basis, you need to show the heck up every single month as well. And we do that. We do that through, you know everything from, you know, video training that goes live every month, right? The way through to a massive archive of stuff. We, the funny thing is actually we don’t produce that much new content on a monthly basis anymore. We’ve been gone well, we’ve been going five

Years, five years. You

Can talk about building relationships and, you know, providing solutions to people’s problems and packaging, your experience, which is what we do and what we’ve done, but what we, what we have been doing really successfully over the last year and a half or so is going in and revamping stuff and re kind of touching stuff up to bring it kind of more up-to-date and things like that. But there’s still a lot of stuff. I mean, without a doubt, the most fun that I have with the Academy is our monthly chit chats, which is where I get to sit down 99% of the time in person. Cause as you well know, I travel a lot and we actually usually, you know, when we’re at a conference or something, I’ll hire a suite and we’ll bring a crew in for an entire day and we’ll film like six videos in one day and then that’s our content for six months. You see? Uand you know, we actually, even though I haven’t recorded anything since March this year, which is the last time you and I saw each other in San Diego,uwe we’ve still got content good until like February next year. So, you know, we’ve

Six hours. So you batch are, are, are those like six hour long videos or are there

They run for about 30 to 40 minutes on average? I mean, how long are you going to actually honestly sit and watch two people talk to each other with like, you know, two different camera angles, you know, like people’s span of attention, pretty poor nowadays as it is. Right. But we, you know, we, we, we do great con you know, we’ve had some incredible people that we’ve sat down with over the years and that

Strikingly mediocre people like Jay Baer and Elsner Pat yeah, Pat Flynn, I know that given a large, large number of very average, average people, [inaudible] one time just wore the pants. I,uyou know, I think what it is is that that’s me,

I’m more of a talker than a typer. So, you know, I like to podcast, I like to do video work. I like to speak on stage and I like to coach and train people. And so everything else that revolves around the Academy and then also the incubator, which is kind of our higher level membership, which is more kind of one to group coaching. So if you imagine,

Are you comfortable sharing the prices with just like, so we were totally, yeah. Kind of give us a sense of like how many people and how difficult it is.

The, the Academy is 39 us a month. That’s it that simple, right.

I know I’m American, but we do have people who listen, but I appreciate that the, the th the, the U S translation, but I’m, we travel a lot. We are quite international,

Actually. It’s funny, you mentioned that on genuinely, because, you know, we, we have a massively like big worldwide audience as well. We’re very blessed like that. And so the question actually did come about, you know, what are we going to do? How are we going to charge? Are we gonna do it in GBP? Are we gonna do it in Euro? Are we going do it in the U S you know, USB? Those are really the only three currencies we talked about when we launched you know, online and Euro was kind of ditched pretty much straight away because people in Europe are used to paying, you know, in USD for stuff online. The, the, you know, the British pounds things was a conversation that went on probably for too long, purely, just because of the fact that I’m British. And since two years ago, we’ve now been based here, back in England. Whereas obviously, as you well know, we’re over in the Philippines for 18 years. Right.

So just, just for everyone to catch that, like you built these businesses living and operating and doing business in the Philippines, you moved for 18 years from England to the Philippines. I mean, that’s a, I don’t know. I mean, you’re definitely my favorite Filipino. Like, I don’t know. I don’t think I know very many and that’s, that’s amazing. Yeah. And I’m pretty sure you S you were charging us dollars when you were in the Philippines. I’m selling a very international membership site.

Totally. And I mean, you know, our businesses, you know, the, the larger of the businesses is fundamentally a B2B call center facility. So we, you know, we bill in USD and we pay all our bills and Philippine pesto, and it’s very, very profitable. And so with the Academy, it, the USD, it was just, you know, the other conversation, a lot of people have this who maybe are not, US-based, they’ll have this issue of if I’m going to write in English, obviously if I’m in Germany and I’m talking to a German audience, I’m writing in German. But if I’m international outside of the United States and I’m writing content in English, do I go with a U S spelling or do I go with British spelling? And that was an open discussion that we actually add to have. But, you know, we went, we do everything in American English. We do everything in USD billing mainly because of the fact that internationally pound for pound, the U S way of writing and charging for products and services online specifically is more universally accepted. So for your, all of your podcasts listeners slash viewers that are listening to this, there you go. I’ve just solved the problem.

Well, that is, and it makes me not feel quite as such a self-centered American. Even though that, that you, you know, so that’s interesting that that’s actually really helpful to have your perspective of that’s a conscious decision that you’ve made is just kind of the most transferable or universal. You know,

The thing is, you know, ever since my know, ever since I kind of got in, you know, left school and I didn’t go to university or college as you guys would call it. And so I went straight into the workforce strain and sales and marketing for a publishing company. I only ever had two jobs in my life prior to setting up my own firm. And,uit, it’s always, I’ve always dealt with people on an international setting. So pretty much from week one, I was talking to people all over Europe, for example, based in the UK, mhat when I went over to the Philippines, you know, set up the firm, et cetera, et cetera, I, you know, instantly knew that America was our big melting pot of prospect of customers. So, you know, it’s just one of those things. I’ve always done business on an international setting. Uh,u know, everything from time zones to international dialing codes, they’re all up here, baby. I don’t need to look any of them up so,

Well, yeah, I mean, you got tired, you got dialing codes, you have currency, you have taxes, there’s you have the writing. Like, [inaudible] like, like you’re saying the American English those are a lot of things. So, so $39 a month also gives you a very, you know globally affordable you’re factoring in certain countries that it’s like 99 a month. Like our lo our lowest price point is 99 a month, but you’re, you’re able to probably capture a much, a large percentage of the, of the world that maybe the 99 a month. Isn’t

The thing is, look, this, this is the way I look at it. Right. whether you’re just getting started online and you want to learn, you know, you want to learn how to build an audience properly and to, you know, become, I always say, you know, that you’ve got to try and become somebody’s favorite, right? So whether you’re looking to become somebody’s favorite podcaster or blogger or YouTube, or live streamer or whatever it might be when you get started, it’s good to have something other than just non-stop Googling that you can go to, that you can converse with other people that are in a similar situation and kind of learn from and brainstorm and you know, that kind of stuff. Right. But then the flip side of that kind of beginner coin is that there are people inside of the Academy who have been in business for 10 plus years, who are already running very profitable businesses, but I’ve never considered personal branding, or as I call it building the business of you ever before, it’s something they’ve never done.

And so, yeah, I’m, I’m profitable. I make money. But I’ve got no idea how to you know, build, build my website out properly to position myself as an expert. I’ve got no idea how to utilize my uniqueness as a person and my personality and my experiences to be able to bring in additional business et cetera, et cetera. Right. So this is, you know, the Academy really kind of just like it ticks all those boxes at a low price so that anybody can really afford it. Some might say, well, why don’t you just give it away for free? The reason being is because I didn’t give anything away for free. It’s really that simple. My time is a premium. And if it requires my time, even just a couple hours a month, if you want it, you’re gonna have to pay for it.

It’s really that simple. And so that’s why, you know, that, that’s one of the reasons why we got around to,ulaunching two years ago, the incubator, which is like, kind of like the next tier, mhich ends up, you know, it’s like 2,500 bucks for the year and us dollars. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, that is, you know, more time with me each month as a group one to many, no, one-on-one coaching one to many. Um, you know, it’s a smaller group of people, uh s up being around about a hundred people or so at any one time, some people come, some people go, um,a uh,i great because you know, those who do stick around for that entire year plus, uh,t see incredible, incredible growth. Uh, ioesn’t take much.

And, and, and even though you, you said you’ve been kind of hovering steadily between 600 to 900 members, you know, 40 bucks a month. That’s still, you know, whatever 20, 25, maybe $30,000 a month. And you’ve got, you got expenses, you’ve got some staff and stuff, but that’s, that’s a, a nice, healthy stream of consistent revenue that helps like pay the bills. And then the incubator becomes a little more profitable and a little more time. And then, you know, most of your time, your personal time, you’re actually putting into these other, other businesses. And so how do you, how do you fill it? How do you fill the membership? Okay. So I, I really love that it’s work, like hearing in that truth is important. How do you go about filling it? Like, do you do the big push twice a year? Like open cart, closed cart? Is it always open? Do people come and go, do you have affiliates? Do you run ads? Is it social? Is it Google, YouTube? Like, how do you actually sell the thing? Right. Like, how do you, how do you get people to pay money for this?

So we don’t do any affiliates. We don’t do any Google ads. We do a little bit of Facebook advertising, I guess we probably drop a couple of grand a month, us on Facebook ads for it. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a low price point. So you’re going to look at like cost per acquisition, feature, new customers,

Right? Someone’s got to stay a long time,

Incubator incubator a little bit more. That’s a little easier to kind of warrant pushing more ad spend behind because it’s that 2,500 price point, right. Or if I have to drop a hundred bucks, 150 bucks to acquire a customer all day long, I’ll do that all day long. Right. But with the Academy a little bit different, I’ll tell you what we do. We produce [email protected], both from a blogging perspective. So written content along with graphical content. So infographics, Instagram stories we’ve got something that we do on my Instagram account called carousel wisdom, where people have to flick through and it sits on the grid. People love those. We do the podcast on a weekly basis, and there’s just one very simple formula that we follow to every single piece of content that we create. And this is what we teach our clients as well when we’re coaching them.

And it’s just as simple as this, always answer a question, that’s it. If you can create a piece of content that always answers a question, or for want of a better term, provides a solution to somebody’s pain point, regardless of what that might be. If you can do that with every piece of content that you create, it’ll have a long form effect on prospective customers, not only finding you, but then having those actually convert into paying customers for you. And, and by the way, that’s not a $39 like product strategy. That’s just a strategy for selling online. Consistently periods show up every single week, over and over and over again, with whatever piece of content that you feel most comfortable producing, but just make sure that you’re always answering a question or solving a problem. If you do that, people will find you

You’re constantly building trust. You’re, you’re blogging, you’re podcasting you you’re, you’re putting out that content. And then how do you what’s the conversion mechanism? Is it just, you literally send them an email and say, click and go to this. Like, here’s what it is. Click go to this, there’s a sales page. This is what’s included. It’s 39 bucks a month and sign up. Sure.

Ah, I mean, it’s, that’s pretty much it, you’ve just, that’s it’s I don’t like to complicate things out. And so you know, it, it, it really just comes down to obviously, I mean, we’ve, we’ve rewritten and rewritten them rewritten our landing pages, not sales pages. We tested things out. We know what you know, what terminology to use on our ads, but, but we never actually ever, will we ever spend money on cold audiences? All of the ads that we run are run to warm audiences, meaning they’ve either visited our website. They’re either on our email list or engaging with us or at the office.

So they’re all pixeled. They’re either pixeled audiences, or they’re an email list, custom audience that you have.

But for us, I mean, without a doubt, email is King. I mean, that’s yeah, you visit youpreneur.com. You’ll have multiple opportunities to get onto our email list. We have a great opt-in that we provide called the personal Brown roadmap. And it’s just a simple 10 step kind of checklist, 10 things to kind of pay attention to when you’re building a personal brand. Uwe get an average of around about a hundred organic opt-ins every single day and just every day, every day. Yeah. Every day, if we run ads that will double, triple that. Right? So this, this is because the website has been around long enough with, you know, four or five, 600 pieces of content on it that Google is indexing us for all of our search terms, right?

This is why the blogging is so important. Cause it’s like social media over time gets less valuable, but blogging content over time gets more valuable. The website.

Exactly, exactly. And I always say like, social media is great. You should absolutely utilize those platforms. Use that. Absolutely. Make sure that you’re focusing in on maybe one or two of them that you really like yourself, but his, the brutal reality of it, you don’t own those platforms. Google owns YouTube, Mark Zuckerberg and his friends own Facebook. You own Chris ducker.com or Rory vaden.com. You can control those. So you always have to utilize those other platforms to get people back to your hub. And then your number one goal as someone building a business online is to get them on your email list. And we went through five or six different opt-in magnets before we settled on the personal brand roadmap, which has been updated two or three times over the last three, four years. So it’s fully up to date links work, you know, resources are good, all that good stuff in it. But the fact of the matter is that once people are in that funnel, we can not only serve up more content that will obviously help and help them, but we can then obviously, you know, let them know as, and when we might be running promotions, you know, white, this is a good fit for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I stay away from launches. It’s not my style. It’s too stressful. Um, I do like running promotions two, three times a year where,

We’ll, we’ll very rarely

Discount anything we do, but we’ll add on certain bonuses to it. I stand behind our pricing because I feel like what we do is truly worth it, but I don’t mind giving somebody a free access to, you know, five videos for a month to learn how to XYZ, whatever it might be.

Well, I love it. You can see this, as we’ve mentioned, several times, you preneur.com. So this is, you know, several of our audiences, the perfect audience for this. So you guys go, go watch what he’s doing, check out what he’s doing, get on his email list. And I mean, Hey,

Everything, copy, swipe them and take them for yourself and get them

30, 39 bucks a month. I mean, it’s, it’s like 39 bucks a month. I mean, that’s like what you, you, you, you spend that on like sliced deli at the, at the grocery. So is there anywhere else you would drive people to Chris, Chris Ducker? Where do you want people to go?

I wouldn’t be much of a personal brand entrepreneur myself, if I didn’t have Chris docker.com. So that’s what it’s all about. Really. Chris ducker.com at Chris Docker, Instagram, there are two spots

And we’re going to talk more about virtual staff finder because we have a bunch of people who need help running our system, that we teach them, that we call the content diamond for managing social. And I need to talk to you about virtual staff finder because we need to see if we can hook up a deal for our audience on that. So

Would love to do that. Everybody should have a virtual assistant if they’re building, you know, a personal brand and

Yeah.

Helped just over 10,000 people in the 10 years we’ve been in business, actually find that. So yeah, we, we know a thing or two about it. Let’s do that

When you come back and talk about that. But anyways, Chris ducker.com check him out. He’s awesome. Cool guy. We love him. Appreciate your pre-state your transparency buddy. And showing us just like how straightforward and simple

It’s work, baby it’s work. I’ll do the work. You gotta do

The work, the unsexy work. That’s what you gotta do. You gotta do the unsexy work. I like it. Wish you the best. My friend.

Thank you, brother.

Ep 118: Using Your Personal Brand to Grow Your Existing Business with Rebecca Louise

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 want it 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.

I am so honored and excited to introduce you to my friend, Rebecca Louise. Those of you that follow her on social may know her as Rebecca Louise fitness. If you don’t know her, let me just give you a couple stats, I guess, cause I’m a big fan of, of people’s, you know, their actual results and what they have produced, which is what one of the things I love about her. So she, I guess was originally known for her YouTube following. I don’t know if that’s right to say, but she’s gotten about 648,000 followers subscribers on YouTube 250,000 on Facebook, 540,000 on Instagram. But here is to me that one of the coolest things, and one of the reasons I, I invited her on the show is she has an app that is now called BTES that has over 11,000 paying monthly subscribers.

She’s got two different pricing tiers, which we may talk about, and it is one of the, the best fitness apps in the world. And, and very longstanding, very reputable has a lot of success stories from clients. But she also is she kind of, she came out of, or one of the things that she does is network marketing as well. We’re not going to mention the name of the company here, but it is a very recognizable, very well known network marketing company. And you all know that we love network marketing. We believe in it. I’m a product of it. My mom, yeah. I grew up around it. I speak to a lot of network marketing, marketing companies. And then her newest thing is that she actually released a book this year called it takes grit which quickly became a bestseller. And anyways, she’s just an all around baller and awesome, awesome lady. I met her as part of a mastermind that I was a co-leading with Lewis howes for, for Lewis was Lewis’ mastermind. She was, she was in there and anyways, it was like, you got it. You got to meet Rebecca Louise. So welcome to the show, Rebecca,

Thank you so much for the lovely introduction. I go down, I’ll record that and just wake up to that every day. It’s going to be my new affirmations

It’s been recorded and I, you will have, it will be available to you whenever you want. So can you just talk to us a little bit about your journey? I mean, I that’s, we kind of think of this show is like the real life story. Because people go, Oh my gosh, you have millions of social media followers and, and, and literally, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring revenue from your app every year. But you know, my guess is it didn’t start quite like that right out of the gate. So could you just give us like your, your backstory?

Yeah. So originally I’m from England and I came to America 22, 23 years old to get my commercial pilot’s license pilot’s

License. That’s awesome.

Yeah. And I ended up getting the whole license. I went back to the UK, did all my written exams. And then I was like, I just don’t feel like this is in alignment with what I’m supposed to do, but I loved Southern California and I grew up watching Laguna Hills on MTV. And I was like one day, you know, Lauren Conrad, I’m going to be driving down PCH in my convertible car and I’m going to go for lunch with my my OC crew. And so I got a visa managed to get myself a visa work visa to come to America because I’d done loads of random jobs in London before. So I had tried to do acting, you know, backing, dancing, TV, hosting, like all the things I got myself, a visa together to come to America. And when I got here, one of the first things that I did was I just started go for castings in Hollywood.

And I was like my British accent. It’s going to be fine. I’m going to be able to get jobs turns out that’s not the case. But what I did is I went to an audition to be on a YouTube channel. And I didn’t even know what YouTube was at the time. Yeah, it wasn’t even, it really wasn’t. It was, I mean, I feel so old. It’s like nine years ago now. And so I get that and it’s to be on a YouTube channel. That’s about fitness. Now. I grew up playing so much sports. I knew. What about fitness? Nothing about personal training. So I did not have my personal training license at the time. However, when I went to the costing and they’re asking you to do like a little workout and tool, I was like, Oh my goodness, this is my one talent in life. I can talk and workout the thing.

This is my thing. And so I remember getting the job and I got paid $40 per episode. And I was just so grateful and I would go up and I would film. And I was just in my element and off the 18 months of filming, we grew it to, I think, a million subscribers it’s now like 3.2 or something. And then they just filming. They stopped filming because I just wasn’t really a passion project. It was more a test or trial and error thing and probably to make some residual income. So after about a year of not filming workouts, people on my social media were like, are you going to film more workouts? Are you going to do this? And I’m like, I don’t know, because I’ve just built something to a million subscribers. I got to start again. She didn’t own it. I didn’t own it.

I was part of it. I just got paid $40 per episode to make these workouts. And I grew it because I was excited and I didn’t think about the residual income. I didn’t understand that. And so during this time where it was ending, I found network marketing and my coach in network marketing was like, you need to be doing it yourself so that you can make the money. And I was like, cause we talk about that in network marketing, right. I’ll do the work and I can do the, make the money, or you can do the work and you can make the money. Right. So I got started with network marketing and got amazing results on these nutrition products and then got my confidence to actually start my own YouTube channel. And I

Just a pause right there, even though you were doing network marketing, it was still kind of aligned with your audience because it was a nutrition, your network marketing business was a nutrition product, and which is kind of what you were building your whole personal brand around. So even though it’s like a different business model, it still fit inside of the personal brand that was becoming Rebecca Louise.

Absolutely. And I knew about fitness because I, by that time, I then got my personal training license. Cause I thought I better get this, this I’m doing these workouts online. And I actually didn’t know anything about nutrition. I’d really struggled in my teens with an eating disorder. I got down to 86 pounds and I’m 107 pounds right now. So 20 pounds lighter, that’s quite a difference for somebody who’s five foot, two and a half. So I didn’t actually know anything about nutrition, but it did fit and because it’s nutrition of fitness, but what it gave me was confidence. And, and energy and strength. And I got an incredible result from it as well. So yeah, I started the network marketing business and from the income that I got from that, I was able to invest it into creating my own brand.

Yeah. That’s, that’s such a common story that it’s like, you’re, you know, you do something to create income and then you’re taking that income and actually reinvesting it into the, the thing you, you wanted to do. So yeah. Talk to me about the, the mentality there of YouTube. Because I went through something similar here, we exited our former business and like one day you, one day you go to sleep, you’ve got hundreds of thousands, millions of people you’re reaching online. And the next day we literally wake up. It’s like, I have zero followers. And I’m starting on zero. So did you have some of that, like emotional, you know, head trash to deal with? Or like, how did you bounce back from going? There’s millions of people watching me too, nobody a hundred and I

100% I Didn’t have confidence. I was like, I’ve already built this. How am I going to start again from zero? So I actually started to do is I created a subscription model way before I even started my YouTube channel and I was trading. It was 9.99 a month. It was all on desktop. It was one video a day, which was 10 minutes. There was no recipes. There was nothing at anything else, but I was like, I need to be able to make money because I just, you know, hadn’t got money anymore from this $40 per episode. I mean, it wasn’t much, but at the time when somebody takes that kind of income away from you, you’re like, you know, even if it’s a thousand dollars a month and you’re only making 3000, that’s a lot of money. That’s a third of your income. Right. So I actually had this subscription because I was like, I needed to get money in.

And after about, I would say like nine months, I think I just, somebody told me like, you need to put this stuff out in the world. You need to just let it go for free. And you need to build your YouTube channel because that’s how you’re going to build your brand. And so my income and my network marketing company had kind of built up by that time. So I didn’t feel that, you know, letting all of this stuff and letting my subscription model go would be such a bad thing financially. So then about six years ago, I was like, you know what, I’m just going to put all my videos on YouTube. And for probably about two years, I just let all the videos go. And then I brought the subscription model back as a desktop version that was through Squarespace where everybody had the same password. So it looked like your unique password. Cause it was like que exclamation, Mark, lowercase, whatever. So it’s like number I like probably had, you know, five, 600 members at that time paying nine 99 with all the same password, no idea how to cancel anyone’s account, but I was just alone. And then it just evolved more.

And if you have, if you have five, if you have 500 people paying you 10 bucks a month, you had, you were having $5,000 a month coming in, just doing it yourself. Like, no, you didn’t have like the tech the about you’re using free Squarespace, like set it up, just password, protect a section. And that was how you started. Like that’s how you got to $5,000 a month.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Squarespace. Same, same password for everybody. We’ll be fine.

Huh. But you’re so you’re just so you’re hustling it and, and now I don’t want to skip over. It sounded like you said for two years, you actually, when you went free, you gave everything away for free for two years and then went back to charging. Did, did I catch that right?

Yes I did. Because I just let go of everything of the subscription model because it wasn’t actually building my brand. Like it wasn’t building YouTube. And honestly that is where I get most of my referrals from that’s where I’ve grown most of my brand from. So I’m so glad that I wasn’t narrow minded to say, you know, no, I’m not going to allow any free videos out there because then nobody’s going to want to pay for my subscription. That’s not the case. You know, you can have hundreds of videos or hundreds of free content online and people will still pay for your product. So I had my mindset about that.

Yeah. So can we talk about that? Cause I was, that was one of the things I wanted to ask you is I think a lot of us struggle with, okay, what can I give away for free and how much can I give away for free and what should I charge for and where do I draw that line? And like how much and how frequent. So how have you wrapped your mind around that? Like, what’s your personal philosophy there, about how much you give away and what you give away versus what you charge for in the app?

Honestly, I’ve given out a free YouTube video every single week for almost six years. I’ve never missed a new workout coming out. That is one thing, consistency. So there are, I think there might be four or 500 videos on my YouTube channel, but what that does is it keeps the channel alive. It keeps new people coming in and that’s the whole thing. It’s new people coming in that you’re exposing it to one workout a week or even two a week with a couple of recipes here and there isn’t even a patch and what you get inside the app, like the app is just a whole other level. It’s all there in one place. It tracks your progress. You know, you can check off your workouts that you’ve done. You can get points for doing things in the app. So it’s just a whole other level. So there’s a massive difference in standard, but I can still put out content all the time with getting people to still want to purchase the app.

And so would you say those, like, I would classify a lot of that as like additional features beyond the content. So would you say that the way you do that, it was like, okay, I’m kind of giving away a lot of the content on YouTube, but in the app it comes with all these additional, these additional features. Is there also more content in the app or is it more about the additional features?

Yeah, there’s more content, there’s more, less, longer length workouts. So on YouTube every week I put a 10 minute workout out and that same workout is just a 28 minute workout with a warmup and a cool-down in the app. So you just get a lot more you know, there is 300 recipes inside of the app. You can filter them, you can search which ones that you want. There’s a whole video library that you can search through. It just makes it easier. And for a starting price of $3 and 99 cents a month, that will also track your workouts. It gives you what workouts to do each day as well. So that you, everybody’s kind of doing the same thing. It’s an accountability group. We have a Facebook group and people are just feel part of the community. They’re like, Oh my goodness. Did you do your BTS workout today? Yes, I did. Like how did you find it? So it’s more about a structure and being part of it, like being part of the community, rather than just saying, I’m doing a 10 minute workout here, 10 minutes here and I don’t really have anything that I’m missing.

Yeah. I love that. You know, I think brand builders group is very similar cause we do like a five minute video every single week, but then the, the, our, our, our entry-level product is $99 a month. And it’s two hour long virtual trainings every month where it’s like, it’s very similar to the content you would receive for free, but just spread out over forever and disorganized. So I think that’s, so that’s interesting to see in that application, even in inside of your world, inside of the, the fitness, the fitness space. So while we’re on the topic here of, of YouTube, I mean, this is one that I missed the boat on. I’ve missed the boat on YouTube, my entire career. It’s always been just like this, like, eh, I’ll throw something up there and now I’m like, Oh my gosh, I am stupid.

Like YouTube is where it’s at. W you mentioned consistency, which seems like everyone, everybody says, you know, that’s the ultimate secret is just consistency. Which, you know, don’t anyone skip over that and miss that in addition to that, is there anything else specific to YouTube? Cause you’ve done this twice. You’ve built a huge following, started over and built another huge following, which I find even more impressive than someone who’s done it once. Are there any other like tactics or strategies or mindsets or things that you think are out specific to YouTube?

Really, it’s just what your audience want. Like, I mean, that’s the thing with like any social platform? Like what is it that they want? Like I know which videos do really well on YouTube that AB workouts, you know, a lot of AB workouts, basically a lot of app, maybe some booty workouts. So I know that when I put one of those workouts out, it really does like help the algorithms. So, you know, you could just be a YouTuber. That’s like, Hey, this is the one thing that my people like, and you can keep putting the same content over and over and over again and not being worried like, Oh, well I just didn’t add work at like three weeks ago. No, they want more, they want another one and it helps the algorithms go up as well. And you know, I’ve sometimes made the mistake of going, you know what?

I want to give people overall fitness because that’s what I’m about. I’m about doing the cardio, the weights, you know, a bit of everything. So I try to put that on my YouTube channel, but it actually hurts the algorithm. You know, I have a girlfriend that’s done really well on YouTube and completely blown up this shit at everything is just abs abs and the same thing over and over. And again, so sometimes you want to be creative and do different things, but the algorithm on YouTube is very specific of, you know, what is working and it will really literally rocket you, you keep putting the same content that your audience is liking over and over and over again.

And you’re doing, you’re determining that by data.

Yes, you can tell. So as soon as you put a YouTube video out, it will tell you, Hey, this workout is doing higher than your other ones normally. And it will give you a ranking at a 10 with where it’s at, or it’ll say, Hey, this one’s just not picking up as many subscribers or it’s not doing as well. And then you’re like, Oh my goodness. Like I knew I shouldn’t have put that out there. So there is a little bit of like trial and error sometimes because you’re like, I want to put this out to see if my audience would be receptive to it because sometimes they’re not, you know, I started putting vlogs on my main channel and it hurt the channel because that’s just not what my audience were there for. So I had to pivot and put it onto a different YouTube channel.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I mean, that’s such a simple process. I mean, that’s, everybody’s create, that’s the way comedians they create and they test, they create a joke, they test it, they create and test and then they’re just responding from, from the audience. So I love that. Do you do you know, so you have the app, which is huge and y’all, if you didn’t catch this, so three $93 and 99 cents a month, like it’s, this is a very affordable deal. You’re loaded into this app. You have you have also a eight, what is it? Eight 99 for a VIP version. And then 11,000 paying monthly members on this thing that you’ve built over, how long

It’ll be three years in January that the app came out.

Interesting. Okay. So within three years now you had spent two years before that though building up the audience for free before you really started monetizing it. Okay. awesome. So one other question here about, I want to ask you specifically about network marketing, because we, you know, I mentioned we love network marketing as part of my background. My family’s background is we speak, it’s probably the number two audience that I speak to. And how do you balance? Because I think this is becoming a really big issue with network marketing is people make a lot of money in network marketing and it’s, it’s kind of a thing where it’s like a lot of people leave but they don’t leave because they’re still making money. And you know, we’re big fans of going, Hey, the, the fastest way to monetize your personal brand is to use it, to throw fuel on the thing that you’re already doing.

That makes money for some people that makes a lot of sense. They go, Oh yeah, for sure other people go, no, I actually like having kind of two different streams going here. So is there anything you can say about maybe your personal philosophy about how you kind of balance a brand of network marketing and then your personal brand, and, and, and I also would ask you in your network marketing company, do you have people on your team, like in your organization, you do right. You’ve got in your kind of downline, a bunch of people. So I think this is a question that network marketing leaders are also struggling with is like, okay, social media and personal branding is so powerful. What is the message I should give to my team about how to use it and not use it. So anything in that kind of mess, because I think that’s like a little bit of a mess that the network marketing world is trying to sort out and we’re trying to sort out and trying to help them, you know, Edify something that enforces the company, but also, you know, helps people succeed with their personal brand.

And, and you just hit the, like one of the top levels of your network marketing company. So you’re doing both. So yeah. Talk about that for a minute.

Yeah. And I love this and mine are completely intertwined and I love it that way. Because I really feel like net what marketing is, how I can help somebody have the life that I have. I have a brand, I, that’s a specific thing that I know if you want to learn how I did my brand, you have to pay me, you know money to do that. But I want to be able to give the opportunity to everybody. And that’s why I love network marketing over the last seven years. You have to be all in. And one of the things to really Excel at that. So first of all, it was my network marketing company. Like I was filling with that. Once I got that to a certain position for 18 months, I was like hard on in my network marketing company. When I got my check to a certain level, I started to work on my brand when I was starting to employ people.

I would get this to a level where then I would go back into the network marketing really heavy and get that to the next position. And so I would literally do one thing at a time because you really have to it’s, it’s trying to build a multimillion dollar business, both of them, you know, they’re going to take all of your time, but Hey, have you got employees that can just take over for a couple of months while you dive back into your network marketing company? This year was the only year that I have been a hundred percent in both because we’ve had so much growth because of what’s been going on. I’m like, I, can’t not, I can’t afford not to go all out with both of these, but how I’ve worked at over the years is that, you know, I worked in fitness and it’s nutrition is that it’s completely interlaced. So I have YouTube, Instagram, all of the things they funnel into a free 30 day program. After that 30 day program, they get on the app or maybe they get on there.

Okay. Sorry, hold on. So I back up a little bit, I’ve, I’ve started to miss that and I don’t want to, I don’t want to miss this. So tell me, this is kind of like how you see the flow of, of moving somebody in kind of through your system. So maybe from the beginning, they start with YouTube.

Yeah. Because if you have a personal brand, it’s like, how can you bring in those leads to actually have enabled them to become distributors? You know, this is my flow. This is how it works for me. So we have you come in through YouTube, Instagram, whatever, probably they’re followers of mine. They come in, they get onto the app after they’ve done like a free 30 day program that we offer or they get on the app. Once you’re inside of the app, there is a free, like five day better you program. And on that, they get a coach and I have nine frontline coaches and they talk with my new clients that come in through the app about, Hey, what results that you’re looking for? You know, are you allergic to anything? How can we get you started? And then they actually get started on a nutrition plan.

And so those leads come in and they get given to my well, I have my BTE as coaches, and they are all in my network marketing team and certain levels in my network marketing team. But they have to be a certain level to be able to apply, to become a BTS coach. So then they get those leads. And then what happens is those people then get started on a nutrition plan. They get amazing results and we tell them, Hey, do you want to be part of our girl group? Do you want to be part of our community of the BTS coaches and other people, you know, getting started and helping your friends and family get results. They’re like, Oh my goodness, of course, I want to be part of your girl, dang. Like this sounds amazing. Like I have 30 girls flying into my, you know, into my home this weekend to celebrate and recognize all of the new coaches.

We have a leadership development weekend. So then those people got started on a program, become distributors because they want to be part of it. And it just drip feeds from them. So I’ve used my personal brand to help build my network marketing because, you know, I love my network marketing company. I’m never going to leave it. My heart and soul is like some that web marketing companies you get in and you get out and you make the money. And that’s absolutely fine. All companies kind of different. We have people that have been there for 40 years. And when I got started as all the same people that are there, and I know that, you know, if I, I can’t film workout videos forever, like there’s going to be a point where I’m just too old and I thought move around. So I don’t know what’s going to happen with that business, but I know that I’m always gonna have my network marketing company and I can always flourish that, and that really is, I think the strong part of this top part here, it’s actually building this legacy forever.

Wow. So you basically, you’ve done exactly what we were talking about. You have taken a personal brand and you have basically bolted it on as the entry point to a network marketing business model. Now it’s, it’s, it’s also its own thing. It’s a sustainable thing of its own, but it’s also feeding back towards towards a long-term network marketing company. Yeah. Wow. I love that. I mean, I just, I think that’s so brilliant because it’s like, you’re living your passion. You’re helping lives. You’re building your personal brand, you’re making a difference. And some percentage of those people are going to be a fit for the ultimate thing that you’re building long term. And you’re not, it’s like a constant pool of people, but you’re not, you’re not offending anyone. You’re not forcing it on them. You’re letting them kind of self-select through the whole process.

That is fascinating. Love it, love it. Love it. Okay. I want to ask you about your book, but before I do that well, let me ask you about your book first, real quick. So it takes grit is, is now you are officially a bestselling author, which is so awesome. We were talking about that when I first met you whatever 18 months ago. And you know, some of those, some of those, some of those things tell us about the book and where does the book come from and how does that book kind of sit in between the space of your fitness personal brand and your network marketing business, and, you know, you’re the old Rebecca Louise and then the future, Rebecca Louise.

Yeah. So I started writing the book in 2019. So I was introduced to an agent in March of 2019 and pitched this idea. And I didn’t know at the time, like I was ready for a book, but I have all of this training inside of my head for the last six, seven years of working with mentors and going to masterminds. And I want it to be able to give my audience something that was like a no BS guide to how you get to where you really want to be. Because I feel like loads of people are like, Oh yeah, just do this and just do these Instagram posts and blah, blah, blah. And then you’re going to be fine. It’s like, Oh no, I’m going to prepare you for all the crap that’s going to happen. And when you’re prepared for that, you’re going to be like, Oh, Rebecca told me this was going to happen.

And this is how it happened to her. And this is how she overcame it because in my community, I have a lot of people who love the fitness and love the nutrition. But what changed for me, most importantly, as I got older was my mindset. You know, I was introduced to Jim Roan and Tony Robbins, and I was like, my community don’t know personal development. And I was like, I get to be the vehicle to share with them. And that’s why I started my podcast in January 28, 2019. It takes grit. And that, that involved into something that I can actually give people to say, Hey, you know, this is what it really takes to get to where you are. And you can look at somebody on a pedestal and be like, Oh my goodness, it’s amazing. How do they get there? But I share a lot of my own personal testimonials and stories of things that have happened to me that could have thrown me off, but instead I just like stepped forward and made it happen. And this is how I got to where I am today.

Wow. Well, I love, I love it. This is thank you for being so transparent with just your YouTube secrets, your app, your numbers your network marketing business. And I think it seems like, you know, transparency, there is like one of your, one of your superpowers and it takes grit. Seems like it’s a lot about the honest truth about what it has taken to build what you have built, which is incredible. And you know, you’re still so, so young, like I think it’s, it’s, it’s really exciting to see the trajectory of where people will be, you know, not just where they’re at today, but where’s the trajectory of go in 10 or 20 years. Like it’s nothing but extremely exciting. So where do you want people to go, Rebecca, if they want to connect with you, if they want to follow you and, and just plug into what you’re doing.

Thank you. Yeah. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook, Rebecca Louise fitness, head on over to my YouTube channel, Rebecca Louise, you can get a free 30 day program or just go to Rebecca hyphen, the wheeze.com and all the details are right there. Check out the podcast. It takes grit, the book. And yeah, we have we have just an amazing gear coming up. We’ve got new transformation programs, you know, new features coming to the app and it’s just going to be an amazing 20, 21.

Love it, love it, love it. We’ll put links up to all of that. Rebecca Good luck to you and your organization and your team. I know we’ll be seeing you around the brand builders group, community, and our events more and more, and just really appreciate it and wish you the best. So we’ll, we will look forward to watching and monitoring your progress, tune into Rebecca Louise fitness. That’s it for today. Thanks Rebecca, for being here all the best.

Ep 116: Dynamic Speaking and Scaling Joy with Dan Thurmon

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. Dan Thurman is one of the reasons why I almost gave up my career as a keynote speaker. He is extraordinary.

I mean he provides amazing content you know, just kind of like real, true thought leadership, but in the most acrobatic and entertaining way. And I use the word acrobatic because he does backflips. He juggles, he throws knives. He can do handstands on podiums, like and I know that most of you are listening to this, but if you don’t know this, we record all of these episodes as videos and we put them also on our YouTube channel. And you know, I don’t know for sure, but like, there’s probably going to be some elements because Dan is so visual that you, you may hear us reference and usual bit too to the visual and you might go check out our YouTube channel and you know, we’ll post we’ll post a link to that. But so Dan is incredible. I mean, he is a hall of fame speaker.

He’s also a former president of the national speakers association. I’ve known him for years. Although I wouldn’t say we’ve been like super close friends. We have the same friends that we’re super close to, and it’s not for any other reason than we just both been out there running a gun. And, but I mean, listen to his client list. Okay. So when I talk about the kind of work that he’s doing and the, the kind of companies that, that he is speaking to it’s extraordinary. So you’re talking about the Coca-Cola’s of the world bank of America, Proctor and gamble, Marriott Johnson and Johnson, Walmart crafts, state farm Honeywell. I mean, these are some of the world’s biggest and brightest companies that have brought him in to speak. The reason, not the only reason, but one of the reasons that I invited Dan to be here is because he has been around in the speaking world as a very successful speaker for a long time.

I mean, he was inducted into the hall of fame almost 10 years ago. So and he has also, you know, he spoke on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. So he’s been around a long time, but he’s doing some incredibly innovative things. So he’s checks like all the kind of like classic marks, you know, he’s got a great book called off balance on purpose, but he’s doing some things. So first of all, on Tik talk, him and his teenage daughter, Maggie are like tick tock celebrities. They have multiple videos that have been viewed more than 30 million times. Their Tik TOK channel has over a million subscribers. And so it’s so innovative. And then one of the other things that he’s doing is the way that he has pivoted to his virtual live stream events is just extraordinary. And so we’re going to, we’re going to just talk about how to stay relevant in a kind of like COVID world as a speaker and all, all things. How do you get to be Dan Thurman except, you know, we’re not going to do pushup and handstand tutorials, I don’t think, but anyways, welcome to the show, Dan, glad to have you,

What an intro of Rory that is so amazing for your compliments. One quick update because things change quick, you know, that Maggie’s following on Tik TOK is now over 3 million. And so yeah, so things just keep growing and growing, man. It’s, it’s a lot of fun though.

I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s really crazy. Like, you know, and I’m serious about that. Like the first time I saw you keynote, I was like, why would someone hire me when they could hire this guy? It was like you know, I have that thought every week, not very often, but every once in a while I have that thought and I was just like, you know, that was it. And then, and then just seeing you guys crush it on social media is kind of the same thing. And I mean, you’re an entertainer. I think there’s a, there’s a big part of your background, right? Like you just been in entertainment, but so let’s talk about tech talk for a second. Since we can kind of dive in, what the heck, like, how do you get 3 million followers? Like why, what are you doing? Like, what is your strategy? Because most speakers, I think, a what a waste of time, and you guys are just crushing it. So like, what’s your mindset there a little over a year,

Year ago, like most people never heard of Tik TOK, but Maggie had. And so she got involved on the platform. She had a good background and foundation because for a year she had been in high school, a brand influencer and advocate for Hollister. She was hired on a team and a project to promote endorse, launched new products and things. They, they really educated her in many ways about social media and Instagram. It was really Instagram based on that platform in terms of how to work for for Hollister that ran its course and the program ended, but she already was quite marketing savvy, had grown her Instagram following a good bit and heard about Tik TOK got involved in, tic-tac had a couple of her videos that did well. And then she had a, she asked me, dad, do you want to do a dance together?

We did this dance that to a Fergie song that just went completely bonkers. We went to the gym to play racquetball. And by the time we got out of that session, it had over 300,000 likes or something stupid like that. And then it just kept going and going and going that elevated Maggie’s platform. And, and she continued to do her own thing, but the things that we did together, what was interesting is it became very much about our relationship. We have a very genuine, loving natural relationship which filled this need in Tik TOK. A lot of people responded saying, I wish I had that in my family. I wish my dad would do these kinds of things with me. And so in a very careful way, we’ve, we’ve managed her brand to she’s now in college, a freshman in college and envisions this as her career. Obviously I’m not going to be a part of that journey for her whole life. And so we we’ve grown the dad daughter stuff in dance and comedy. And of course the variety of skills that we do with juggling and acrobatics and unicycling and silks, and, and kind of found different ways to introduce all these skills.

And very quickly, I just have to say, like, you know, it’s a little bit frustrating that you like God was dishing out talents. And I think there was like a glitch in the system and just like dumped. I mean, you guys are incredible, like the dancing, the acrobatics, the juggling, I mean, that’s really, it’s really, it’s entertaining. It’s really entertainment, entertainment in the most pure sense.

It’s, it’s so fun. And it’s a part of who I am. It’s just by my language of my love languages, kinesthetic movement. I love to just do things, learn things, develop skills, always have. That’s kind of how I channeled my hyperactive energy. And now you and I are a lot, a lot the same. But as she got closer to college, what we began to do is, you know, obviously she’s branching out more with her own videos and her own skills. And, and now it’s probably like 90 10, like where she’s doing Mo mostly her content I’m involved in our channel here and there. We had a trip to LA last week to see some other influencers. And so we did some more together during that. I have my own tech talk where I only have like a half a million followers on mine, but but, but it’s, but I’m still thinking about Tik TOK relative to my brand, because this is gen Z. This is that next level audience. And what I’ve sort of learned is that they, they are very receptive to what I have to teach and to the way that I can teach it, it’s just a different vibe and a different connection. So I’ve been very careful and very fascinated by how I could develop that relationship, that relationship with a new, a new generation all over the world. And it’s extraordinary to wrap your mind around.

Yeah. So like talking about, thinking about the generations for a second, you know, we had Jason Dorsey on here just a few, a few episodes ago, talking about generation Z and all of their research and stuff, you know, on the one hand people kind of go, you know, how do you make money from tech talk other than like brand deals and stuff. But if you’re going to be like a speaker or an author or a, or a personal brand, and do you have some type of a monetization strategy or is it more of like, this is street credibility? Or is it more of like, these people one day will be the book buyers and the decision makers. And so I want to connect with them or do you just, or is it just like, I’m just there because it’s fun. And I think it’s fun to do, like, how do you approach that?

So I’m not trying to monetize it in any direct way. Although I have had speaking engagements that came in through Tik TOK or coaching relationships that started because people found me on Tik TOK, people who find me on Tik TOK, find me, go to my LinkedIn and see my business side. So, so it’s definitely feeding that pipeline. But so much of it, Rory is I know that something great is happening as a result because it’s pure and it’s, and it’s real. And, but my intention is only to give and to help. And if I can scale giving and helping and filling a need on this level, you know, that’s a type of success. I don’t even have to monetize. I would be, it would be so satisfying and wonderful to know that I, that I could contribute, especially now to a world where so many kids are facing depression and bullying and, and all this frustration.

And I’ve been challenged at early early ages to feel like they’ve got to have it all together when really they could, they don’t and they shouldn’t, and they can just be themselves and find themselves and they need joy. They need, they need, as Maggie’s tagline to her whole brand is go make someone smile, literally just go make someone smile. So there’s a lot of ways that you can make someone smile. And the best smile that we can have is when we appreciate ourselves and who we are. And so that’s really my intention with it is that yes, these will be perhaps future clients. It’s nice to have that brand elevated. It’s good to get recognized in Starbucks and in, by Jenny’s eaters, which, which happens regularly now. And, and it’s pretty bizarre cause it, it doesn’t matter where you are, right. It’s not geographic, it’s, it’s a, it’s a bigger type of celebrity, which I’m obviously not accustomed to, as a keynote speaker, I’m accustomed to going into the room. Nobody knows who you are. Right. Right. And then, and then when you’re done, you, everybody knows who you are and you get that like temporary celebrity. And then you can go back to the airport and blend in again and be completely anonymous. So it’s not that I’m super famous. I’m really not, but it’s, but it’s been fun to, to, you know, get recognized here and there.

Yeah. That’s amazing. I mean, I think I don’t want to skip over what you said there about, if you could just scale giving and helping at this kind of a magnitude, this sort of a level, that’s a success that you don’t have to monetize. And I feel like that mindset alone is the thing that ultimately is the cause and the source of the people who break through the wall, what we call breaking through the wall and sustain longterm, regardless of its Tik TOK or Instagram or email marketing or speaking or writing books. And just to like, hear you say that, you know, I want to ask you about some other stuff, but I don’t want to skip over that because that, that is such a big, a big moment. And that’ll probably be one of the biggest things that I take away from this, which I, I love,

It’s easy to say it’s, and we’ve always said that, that we’re in the business of giving and helping and serving, but, but, but really a huge part of our brain is always trying to work the revenue and work the business and grow the business and, and measure ourselves and compare ourselves to our competition by what we’re doing and how busy we are and how much we’re making. And so for me, the challenge of COVID was, you know, obviously the dates fell off the calendar and when you identify yourself as a speaker, who’s out there doing live engagements and there certainly are no, there’s no events, there’s no engagements, there’s no stages. There’s no audiences. Now we’re faced with the question, well, who are you now at? Or who are you really? And so very, very early on the shift became, I’m not sure how much money we’re going to make this year.

Yes, we’re going to, we’re going to pivot. We’re going to do our thing. We’re going to serve our clients. We’re going to grow our business, but let’s change that measurement to how many people can we help this year, because one, thing’s for sure in the supply and demand world point that the demand for our help and our services has never been higher. People need it more than ever. So if, even if it’s just giving it away, that’s what I want to do because I think it’d be interesting if we got hall of fame awards for the biggest impact that we made in the world. I pray, I certainly wouldn’t get one of those. But I I’d love to.

Yeah. And that’s, that’s such a great perspective. And social media gives you that ability to like, if you really want to change lives, like if it really has nothing to do with money, like turn on your camera and talk to the camera and change lives. Like there’s never been an easier way to, to, to access people. So I want to come back to the technical a little bit. What are you doing with reels? So now Instagram has released the reels functionality, which is basically like their answer or competitor of Tik talk, you know? Are you reposting the same videos to reels? Are you not yet paying attention to reels or like what’s yeah. What’s, what’s going on there.

Yeah. It’s not something on my radar right now. I I’m aware that it’s happening, but, but Maggie has I think it kind of told me that her generation kind of thinks it’s it’s not there yet in terms of what it could do and the capabilities you know, so, so that’s not something we’re doing. We are posting on Instagram and we’re posting on, IETV sort of my weekly coaching videos, which get a very modest impression. I think it’s, it’s nothing like the scalability of tick-tock for me. But I’d be very curious to know more.

What is your just for the purpose, what’s your Tik TOK handle and Maggie’s, do you mind throwing that out so that people,

So Maggie’s is Maggie Thurman, T H U R M O N. So just at M a G, G I E T H U R M O N. And and my, my ticket Tik TOK handle is actually Maggie’s dad one, two, three. So, so this, and this was a very early decision because I didn’t. So for me, what was happening with tick-tock was so special as a father and in our relationship. And I didn’t want to, in any way feel like I was trying to, you know, chase her clout and, and trade off of that in my own business. So I’m just, Maggie’s dad one, two, three, which is kind of funny. And it sticks because even though now I’m doing more of my own content on my channel, that origin story is still really special to both of us. But you know, all along, I really saw that as more our thing than my thing.

I love that that is really, really, really cool. So yeah. Okay, great. So we’ll put links to that. Maggie, Maggie Thurman at Maggie’s dad, one, two, three. So I love that. So you mentioned COVID here a while ago and the pivots, and I think most people are pretty aware of this. I mean, if for those of us that earned a large percentage of our ordinary income from getting on an airplane, flying to an event, being in front of hundreds of thousands of people coming in as a stranger, as you say, you know, delivering this whatever 60 or 90 minute performance slash teaching, and then COVID happens. And all of those events disappear. I mean, like literally all of them disappeared and almost literally overnight, they were gone. What so separate of this tick talk, social media thing, you also have done some amazing pivots with your, you know, what let’s call it, your corporate brand or your classic brand, or your classic message even down to the technology and the studio that you’re using. And again for you listening, you’re not going to have the benefit of this, but can I ask you to do a virtual tour for, so the people watching the video can literally see what you’re about to change rooms. Like, like just give us the, the tumor, if you, because when we jumped on here, you like stood up and walked to a different room and like the whole thing changed. So can you just give us like a virtual tour of your studio so people that can watch the video can see what’s happening here?

Absolutely. Okay. So the first thing to understand is my brand, which is that elevated experience. People hire me because they want more than just a speaker. They want mind, body, and spirit kind of all in connection. And my method of teaching is very physical, very, very visual. And so we realized early, we wanted a space where we could do that very well. So we have three different sets I’m currently sitting in the library, which is where we really get into that heart connection. More that spiritual connection, driving stories, home, closing points, that type of thing. But then we needed a physical space, which is right over here. So stepping just to my right, this is the stage, this is our action room.

Okay. And for those of you that aren’t seeing this, I have just, he stood up out of his chair, walked, I don’t know, three feet to the right. And the entire screen changed. And we went from looking at a library to now we’re still on a zoom meeting, but now I’m seeing a completely different backdrop with a podium and a teaching screen.

Right. So, so for example, you see the podium and you see my, my teaching screen. And you mentioned the book off balance on purpose. So in many ways I’ve been preparing for this moment this year and teaching in my contents, very, very congruent because we’re more off-balance than ever before. Moving through these changes with uncertainty, just kind of unfolding and forth in front of us for the foreseeable future. And so one of the ways I teach that here, I’m moving to the lectern is you know, this is like our foundations, which all of our foundations, how we work, we teach how we parent, how we eat, how we shop, all of it’s been rocked. And so the question is, how do you position yourself on top of uncertainty? Okay, here we go.

Going for it. This is crazy. He is vertical, complete handstand on top of a podium. This is so corroborate.

You got to see us. I’m not, I’m not balanced. I’m balancing, I’m making constant adjustments and corrections. And after all that effort, I’m still right here. So we just cut to a second camera, but here’s the message balance. Isn’t what you get balance is what you do this year is about developing the skills to make those adjustments in real time, even though your foundations are rocked and unstable, which you can do, if you bring a greater sense of purpose to the moment that you’re in and manage and use these skills, which we teach to help you leverage the positive aspects of uncertainty in order to, in order to change and in order to grow. So that’s,

That’s awesome. So, so this is where, okay, so hold on. I want you to, I gotta interrupt you because I want everyone to know what just happened. So he just, first of all, the last angle we were looking at, you were doing a handstand on a podium and there was two camps. There were two different camera angles on that shot. So it was the second setup, like a second stage with two different camera angles. And now you’re just walked another, like, I don’t know, three feet to a different direction. And now you’re in a different, what, what do you call this set? Okay.

This is our classroom. This is really where our we teach and break down ideas. So if you think of mind, body, and spirit, so this is where we would really focus on your mind and how we teach you ideas, but then break them down into strategies. Like for example, on this Flipboard here we talk about this is actually a different work for a client that we we’ve been working on right now. But let me move to one of our recent phases. We can interact with this and we can artfully go through different content in different phases. One of the things we talk about quite frequently is this spectrum of certainty. Like I talk about, you know, managing the positive aspects of uncertainty, which you can do because really all you ever get is some certainty. You know,

Just again for everyone that’s listening. So now he’s in his teaching classroom set and there’s another camera angle. So it just shifted. So you’ve got two camera angles here going,

And, and what, what I want you to know is that even with the, the other set, you had the low angle where I went into the handstand, we switched to a different camera here, we have this forward camera, and then we have the second camera, which is how you, where you see me, right. And it’s also a closer shot, a more personal shot. The point is, it’s not extraneous, everything’s intentional. And if you have different cameras, but they’re not for specific reasons, then it’s really the same as pacing a stage without any purpose. And so everything has to be well thought out and used in a strategic way. And so, okay.

So one other, sorry, real quick, before you go into the spectrum of certainty, because I think both your content is relevant to us, as well as how you’re delivering the content is super relevant. So I apologize for the interruptions, but like, are you looking at, do you have tally lights, like a camera lights that come on to tell you where to look or does the camera switch when you look to the camera?

No, I have Stephanie and Shan. Right? So, and that’s been another incredible thing this year. Rory is that so often we’ve, we’ve been on our own on the road doing our deal, and it’s been very much a solo effort. This brought our whole team together. My wife Shea is incredible and is a visionary and a video producer and developer in her own, right? So she brought a lot of understanding in terms of how to do this and was able to source the equipment. We leveraged fellow NSA, friends, like [inaudible] and others who, who helped us understand what they were doing and really cut our learning curve in terms of making this happen. So Shay’s here and she’s operating a camera and and kind of running some things in the background producing Stephanie is the, is doing the camera switching. And so we’ve, we’ve practiced enough and she’s watching me attentively. So when I, when I look from this camera, I do it very abruptly and she sees that and then she’ll, she’ll make that change. So it’s, it’s really a matter of me being clear with where I’m looking and, and then she knows how to read that. But you know,

And direct, you’re directing the camera shots basically by a definitive gesture to move where normally in a TV studio, somebody, the director is moving the tally light, the little red light, and then you follow that. You follow it, but you have it in reverse.

And what I’ve learned is I just have to be very clear because if I’m kind of like wandering around, she’s got no idea where to go. Right. And so it’s just, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve developed that skill over time,

But I love what you’re saying. That’s a, that’s a very SIM, that’s a similar parallel to just wandering eyes in an audience versus deliberate eye contact to like different people in the room. Right.

And, Oh my goodness. I can really go into that. We could do a whole tutorial on how to, how to teach to a camera which is maybe we should

Have you come back and do another one of those.

Yeah, exactly. But but the point is, we’ve learned a lot and we’ve really used this period of time to our advantage. And so this concept of a spectrum of certainty really is about three steps, three strategies that we teach to claim your certainty. So we got to claim what is certain, everything that we know already, still counts. We just have to use it differently. We have to redeploy what we’ve gained all these years and say, how does it still serve us? Or how does it serve us now in maybe even a better way than it did before? And so, instead of when you feel uncertain about some things, you can feel like you’re uncertain about everything, and it’s not true. There’s a lot that, you know, and it all counts and serves you. So you really have to claim it. You have to embrace what’s unknown because you, and I’ve seen a lot of speakers, authors companies, clients, who who’ve just spent enormous amounts of energy saying, well, when will this be over and how are we coming out of it?

And when will we be back on stages? And it just, all this mental exercise on really what is right now, not only unknown, but on knowable, right? We can’t control that. But what we can do think about your future as if it’s not just uncertain, but it’s unfolding, it’s unfolding and you have this role you’re playing in terms of how to shape it. But there’s just some things we’re not going to know until we get to the next chapter, like reading a great book or watching a great movie. You don’t have to know the ending to enjoy the movie to be engaged. And, and, and along the way we can create more certainty than the way you create more certainty is by testing yourself and improving yourself and saying, regardless of how everything else is working out, I know for sure we’re going to be better on the other side of this because of what we’re choosing to do now. And this studio is really our response to putting that into action. Right.

Right. Yeah. I, I mean, I love this. So can you walk back to the library? Is that, is that doable? Yeah. Amazing. And so then you just move over. So these are three, literally three different physical setups you have in the space. Then the room that you’re in this, isn’t like a virtual background shift at all. This is

Three physical spaces, five cameras. So there’s only one camera in here, which is all I really need, because again, this is about pouring into your heart, you know, and, and just really connecting eyeball to eyeball.

Yeah. So, so it’s a five camera shoot. And then the, in terms of the other technology, you got two people to run the room. You said Shay and Stephanie are both there to like help you operate things when you’re doing it. And then so you obviously have a switcher. So this is just like an alive event. You have to have a switcher to switch camera feeds. So you have a switcher. And then is there any other big pieces of technology that’s going on? I mean, must be some program that you’re running to like S or is it just different camera feeds into a school?

The beauty of keeping it with the physical switcher and we’re using an ATM system, a black magic ATM, which has a total of eight different camera inputs. We’re only, we’re using five for cameras, we’re using one for media. So in other words, we could start our show by taking a video and intro video that brings it in or cut to a video. I have, I have a scene where I’m in the action room and I finished something and I’m talking about, you never know where your next challenge is going to come from. And literally at that moment, a rope drops from the ceiling and I’m like, okay, well, I’m going to, I’m going to go for it. And meanwhile, watch this video. And I literally climbed the rope out of the camera lens, and then we cut to video. And so it’s, it’s really like producing a TV show, but the equipment of the cameras, bid cameras, a good switcher, a good computer to drive it, the S the software, because it’s hardware, you don’t need a sophisticated software program.

Usually there’s another device that flows out of the switcher for the interface to whatever platform you’re using. And what we found is depending on the platform, whether it’s zoom or go to meeting or black or whatever, it could be a Microsoft teams this afternoon, we’re doing one for a platform we’ve never done before. It’s a proprietary thing with each of those setups. And also with each of the updates, because there’s always new security settings and things like this, you really have to always, re-examine how your equipment’s working and make that happen. So it’s not a one and done set it and forget it. This is something you have to keep learning as you go.

Wow. but more or less you, you got, you got, you got a switcher, you got some camera and you got inputs from the from the cameras. And it’s not, you know, it’s not impossible. I mean, you guys are pulling it off. This is incredible.

Well, thank you. But I, and I also want to point out because I know that that a lot of people starting out are thinking, well, sure, like if I had a studio and a set, then, then everything would be easier and I’d be much more engaging and whatnot course. And the point is, you know, that’s the trap of this business is that comparison to what others are doing or what they, what you think will be necessary. And it’s not, it’s not necessary. There are so many of our speaker friends who are, who are doing something so much more simple and are still having incredible success because they know how to connect with an audience. And they’re bringing relevant content, which is the whole key. I mean, if you think about like an X, Y axis, this whole business and success and brand is about relevant content and then your engagement and your experience, and, and not just, not just what, you know, how, what, you know, really fixes the problem, applies to your audience and are you delivering it in a way that they can really absorb it, learn from it, remember it for a long time to come.

And so you can do that in any number of ways. This is just one of the answers. This is the answer that works for me.

Yeah. Well, this is so extraordinary. And, and I would, I would just, you know, I echo that point and emphasize that it’s not about the technology or any, it’s like, it’s your mindset to go? How can we serve? How can we adapt? How can we pivot? How can we be off balance on purpose as you say, and make the most out of this. And and it’s fun, you know, like I just, I really love it. You’re, you’re what a great way to showcase you, living out your message and your whole team coming together, and, you know, the family business of your wife and your daughter, like it’s just really, really cool. So Dan, where do you want people to go if they want to connect with you and like find out more, and man, if you’re booking virtual keynotes, like don’t bother calling Rory Vaden, just call Dan Thurman, just like skip past us contact Dan. And w H how do people connect with you?

Sure. Just it’s super simple. Just go to my website, Dan thurman.com Dan Thurman, T H U R M O n.com. It actually loads at the moment to our virtual page, but there’s a lot of content and resources there too, as well as our weekly coaching series. So maybe you’re running a team and you’re really looking for something that you can use to help them recalibrate their mindset. There are some videos on my website that can serve you and conserve them. And by all means, please help yourself and use those and spread those as you will.

So we’ll put links there to Dan thurman.com as well as to Maggie and Dan’s Tik TOK profile. So you can see this as lots and lots of fun. My friend, we just appreciate you and your mission and your heart to serve people. And just make the most of the talents you have to make the world a better place. And that totally shines through. And, and we wish you the best.

Ep 114: Top Secrets to Effective Speaking with Vanessa Van Edwards

RV: (00:06) 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: (01:03) I am so excited for you to meet Vanessa van Edwards. We shared the stage at what I believe is the largest speaking event in the world is the, it’s the biggest one that I know of. It’s called the global leadership summit, and we got to share the stage. And you know, most of you know, I’m, I’m a nerd for technical speaking and built my career coming out of Toastmasters. And she got up and talked about her book captivate and some of the concepts that she studies as the she’s the founder of a company called the science of people. And her book is called captivate, the science of succeeding with people and she analyzes and studies body language and interpersonal communication and human behavior and relationships. And it was just so practical and applicable to everybody. The audience went nuts. I was, I was also tracking book sales. RV: (02:02) So I haven’t shared this with everybody. I was watching book sales with there’s three different tools that we’re using to monitor that. And I was watching Vanessa’s book, which was selling apparently from what we could tell was the top selling book from all the speakers who were there, which is exciting and also a little bit nerve wracking since our book was also for sale. But pretty sales. You got presales. Yeah. I’m I’m I’m sure. I’m sure. So anyways, the other thing to know about her in addition to being this bestselling author she’s very much into data, which I love and, and research and science and analyzing you know, her craft, but she’s also spoken obviously at the global leadership summit. She’s spoken at South by Southwest Google, Facebook, and she has a Ted talk as well. That is called, you are contagious. That also is gone viral. So she’s got over a couple million views on that within just a few years. So anyways, you’re, you’re talking to a pro and I was like, gotta have her, you guys are gonna love her. So welcome to the show, Vanessa. VV: (03:14) Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to talk and dive in. RV: (03:17) So I want to start with your actual work, like what you actually teach, because it’s super relevant to our audience. And you know, we’ll put a link to your Ted talk. You are contagious in the show notes. But can you give us, you know, a little bit? So, so a lot of our audience speaks all of our clients speak. We teach them that the spoken word is the number one marketing tool. There is. So whether it’s free webinars or free speaking, like I spoke for free 304 times, that was how I started my career. In that we eventually turned that into an eight figure business all by speaking for free. But you study a lot of, you know, a lot of your craft relates to speaking and you analyzed Ted talks. What are some of the things that you learned from the viral Ted talks, the successful Ted talks and then the not so viral ones? VV: (04:16) Yeah. You know, I was really intrigued as a speaker on why some Ted talks go viral and others don’t. And what I, when I was searching on the Ted website, I typically watch a Ted talk every day at lunch. I found that there were Ted talks, you know, like Simon Sinek, Tedtalk has millions of views. And I noticed, and I noticed when I was on the website, that there was a very similar talk that came out the same month of the same year. It was released the same on the same year on ted.com, a very similar topic, both 80 minutes, long excepted. Simon’s had millions and millions and millions of views. And this other top had less than 40,000. And I wondered why these were both experts, relatively unknown experts before their Ted talks, by the way. Sure. But something about Simon’s talk, it made it explode. It went viral. And so we decided to analyze thousands of hours of Ted talks. We looked at every Ted talk in 2010 and we split them up based on view count. So the most popular Ted talks versus the least popular Ted talks, RV: (05:19) You looked at weight, you looked at every Ted talk since 2010 in 2010. Oh, in 2010. Wow. Okay. VV: (05:30) I’d still be doing that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And also by the way, this was maybe four or five years ago now. So we looked at every, to every Ted talk that was released in 2010, where there’s a limited number that go on ted.com and we didn’t know what we would find. Right. We were looking at all the variables. I was looking at color of clothing. I was looking at entrance. I was looking at smiles. We actually clocked the number of seconds that they smiled. And we found that the biggest difference, the biggest you could actually see it when you put these talks side by side, was that the most popular Ted talkers used an average of 470 gestures, 465 gestures to be precise in 18 minutes, whereas the least popular Ted talkers by view count, use an average of 272 gestures in 18 minutes, almost half. VV: (06:21) And when I looked at this, I realized there were sort of two things happening. One is hands show trust. They show intention. We like to see hands, right? The moment we can see someone’s hands. We feel like we understand them a little bit more, but the second thing was even more important, which was when we know our content exceptionally well. We can actually explain it on two tracks. We can explain it with our words, but we can also explain it with our gestures. And so the very best Ted talkers, it was like they had a two track talk, they had the verbal talk and they had the gesture talk. And what was amazing about it was that it allowed you to have sort of these memory hooks when someone said they had three ideas and they held up the number three, the brain would actually wait, you’d wait to hear all three. And that would also help you remember those three. So I think what was happening is that the really memorable, amazing Ted talks just make it easy to be understood. RV: (07:22) Interesting. And so would you say that Bernay Brown and Simon Sinek and you know, Jan pink? Yeah, sir. Ken Robinson, do they all pass that test or are some of ’em outliers? VV: (07:38) No. Everyone passed the test. The only kind of odd outlier in our data that we looked at was Jamie Oliver. So there is no, yeah. The chef. Yeah. Yeah. So what’s really interesting is most really charismatic speakers. They use hand gestures in a purposeful way. So if they’re talking about something big, they show you how big it is, beach ball big, or is it, you know what ball would this be like? RV: (08:06) Like a Sumo, a Sumo, VV: (08:10) How big is it? Or is it really small and little and just between the two fingers. Whereas Jamie Oliver, his talk is so passionate that he’s actually just making gestures for no reason. He’s just shaking. So that one, I found a little distracting. Now he had a lot of gestures cause he was literally just, he would walk off, he was pacing the stage and just kind of move in his hands. That was the one exception where I thought, Hmm, I think that we, we like the purposeful gesture, the distracted gesture, make someone look out of control. So whenever I teach hand gestures, I like to teach on a spectrum that purposeful is what we’re going for. Jazz hands is not what we’re going for, or even I created some hand monsters in my career and I feel very bad about this. So I taught this research and a couple of students in one of my classes, they thought that I meant like modern dance. So I saw their speeches after my class. And then they came on like this today. I want to talk to you about a big idea. And the sun is going to come out. I mean, it was like, it’s bitsy spider, you know, RV: (09:21) Dan just like interpretive dance, like full VV: (09:24) And so purposeful is good, but like we’re not talking modern dance. I think that with Ken Robinson and Bernay Brown and Simon Sinek, they probably didn’t script out their hand gestures. And I don’t think that we should necessarily either, but we should be so comfortable with our work that we’re able to understand it and explain it visually. RV: (09:43) So gestures. So that’s really interesting. Cause it’s like, what you, where you saw the pattern, wasn’t the type of gesture or like, yeah, it wasn’t like the type of gesture. It was the volume of gestures. And basically twice as many. So that, that, that tells us that that humans are, are nonverbal, which we kind of, we know instinctually, right? It’s like, of course we’re nonverbal. So for an audience of people who are speakers or aspiring speakers or potentially speakers in addition to gestures, are there any other big kind of salient discoveries that you would point to and say, Oh my gosh, if you are speaking a lot, here’s another thing that you really need to know. Like you can’t miss this. And I know, you know, in captivate you talk about voice and you talk about facial expressions. Like in the book, you go through a bunch of different ones, but w VV: (10:43) For many speakers, the book I’m going to give it to you. RV: (10:46) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us one. That’s not in the book VV: (10:48) Book. Is there, if you want to read it, that’s great. But I want to give one, that’s just for speakers. Cause I love talking to audience and speakers. So one thing that I noticed not only in the Ted speeches, but also in working with students is the really, really powerful speakers use the stage as a content aid. And this is a really advanced technique, but once you get it, I think it’s, it’s like you can immediately apply it, which is you want to know where you’re going to plant. And that’s really important. Where are you going to deliver your first line or your first impression? So your first impression happens either the moment the lights turn on at the moment you walk on stage, the more purposeful you all are with that plant. Like I’m going to walk right to the center of the stage that makes your walk more purposeful. I noticed that speakers who don’t have a plant, they kind of wander onto stage. They kind of wander and they’re a little awkward and they, then they don’t quite plant. They kind of, they kind of pivot back and forth. Whereas Vickers who walk out to that plant, that’s one of the reasons why that Ted talk red circle carpet is so brilliant is it just gives speakers. A piece of confidence is this is where you stand. RV: (12:00) Can you explain that? Not everybody knows about what the red dot mean, like what it is. VV: (12:04) Yeah. So in Ted talks, one of the secret ways, I think that they’ve had so much power with their videos is they have a small red circle. And I think that every franchise of Ted talk, they have to have a red carpet on stage or the requirement. And they even have a measurement that they like it to be. And it’s actually a brilliant Lee measured carpet. I think of the red, that circle carpet when I speak without it, like when I just do regular speeches because it’s a plant. So you have someone who walks right out on the stage, they plant in that red circle and then you’re not supposed to leave that red circle. So they really don’t like you to leave it for the cameras, for the lights. I think that Mel Robbins and her Ted talk, she not only left her circles, she actually walked out into the audience was very fair. VV: (12:51) It was a very, you know, avant-garde move and she wasn’t supposed to do it, but I think it worked for her. So the first thing is to know where you’re going to plant have an imaginary red carpet for yourself. And then you want to use the stage as a transition for your content. So for example, okay, I tend to deliver right in the middle. I typically go right to the middle when I speak. And then when I’m talking science or background, I typically go to the left side of the stage and I plant and I deliver the stuff. RV: (13:21) When you say the left side of the stage, are you saying stage left or the audiences left stage left? So to the right, the audience is right stage left. Okay. VV: (13:33) So I, I stand there and then when I’m pivoting or transitioning topics, I literally show the audience. I’m doing it with a physical movement. And then by the end, they know when I’m on the right side of stage, I’m usually telling a story, I’m doing something fun. I’m leading an interaction when I’m in the center of the stage, I’m delivering something super important. And I usually save my super important takeaway challenges. Remember this for the center of the stage and my science and background the other side. And I’ve noticed that it helps people as they take notes. I’ve noticed that helps with attention. I’ve also noticed you have certain people, you know, very warm people who like the stories better. And so everyone needs moments where they’re going to tune out and audience is going to tune out. I would rather it be based on their learning style, but not based on their learning style, I’d rather choose it. So what I’ve noticed is very warm people who love stories and examples, they perk up when I get to the right side of the stage and my science heavy, my high competent folks, my data heads, they perk up when I get to the left hand side. And usually everyone perks up for the middle. So it’s a, I, that’s one of the really big things that I think excellent speakers do to help their audience. RV: (14:48) Yeah. That’s, what’s interesting about, you know, using the stage, but in Ted talks, you can’t because of the red dot, but they force you to plant and be powerful by having that confined space. I think yeah, that’s super interesting. Is there, is there anything you did on the marketing front related to your Ted talk that made it go viral? Like VV: (15:10) Oh yes. So I, I really, you know, it’s a little, it’s a lot of pressure when you study Ted talks that go viral, then you give a Ted talk pressure. You have to then give a viral Ted talks. I was very nervous about it. And the first thing was the title and I argued with them about this, by the way, like we went back and forth on this a lot. Now it’s kind of funny because it’s your contagious, which right now in our current state of the world, it’s getting a lot of use for a different reason. So that ended up working in a different way. And you’ll notice that there’s a lot of comments, recent comments where people are like, I really felt this talk was about something else, but I really liked it. So anyway, in the beginning I wanted a command. I wanted a title that was a command. RV: (16:00) I have a bunch of people worried about contracting COVID that are buying the captivate book and just sitting at home, reading it. VV: (16:08) It’s okay. It’s perfect. Actually, captivate sales have been up a lot in COVID. And so I want, I wanted a command. I wanted to have like a you or like a personal pronoun. So I really wanted to have like a, you are contagious or you are confident or you can do it or you are powerful. I wanted something that was a command because I noticed that a lot of the Ted talks that were out there weren’t, they were very intellectual. They were very much like the future of leadership or how thinking will change the future of humanity. Like, there are a lot of like, talks like that, which is fine, but I just wanted to be a different rant. I wanted to have a different thing. So I wanted to use the word you, I knew that. And I wanted RV: (16:54) I analyze titles by the way or only the gestures and like the actual presentation. VV: (16:59) I didn’t, I did, we didn’t formally analyze titles. No, I should. I, that would be fun. That would be a really easy one to do actually with like just put them all in a big spreadsheet, look at them. That’d be super interesting. So yeah, so that, and then once it came out, not only did I share it, of course, across socials you know, YouTube has been a big driver of our business. I’ve been on YouTube since 2007 when people thought it was like, you know, a joke. And one thing that we’ve learned is playlists are really important. So we did a huge campaign on the backend to get my Ted talk, not embedded in websites that I didn’t care about as much, but to get it on people’s playlists. And so we reach out to influencers, but also just friends who watch a lot of YouTube videos and ask them to put it on a relevant playlist with other videos that we thought people would like along with our sock, with the right search engine title. VV: (17:52) So for example, I reached out to a friend of mine who has a podcast, and I asked him if he would add my video to his playlist called human behavior hacks. And he was like, sure. And then it was immediately placed contextually. So I know on YouTube, your best, you have two options for your, for your game. One is search and YouTube search is very different than Google search. We use a tool called H refs. And so when I’m titling my blogs, I use H refs for Google when I’m titling my YouTube videos and my keywords, I use H reps for YouTube because they have very, very different search. And so I knew what kind of YouTube search that I wanted for the video, but I also knew what I wanted it to be related to. So the second thing that you really like for you to, to elevate your game is watch this next or when your video is listed alongside another video. And so it’s critical to have YouTube algorithm know what other videos people would like. And so I had a list of a hundred or more videos that I thought were the perfect audience for my Ted talk. And so very quickly we were able to scale and we got thousands and thousands of views and then millions of views based on, I think, the placement of relevant videos. RV: (19:12) So when you found a hundred, a hundred videos, a list of a hundred videos that you thought were like your perfect audience, did you just reach out to those people? Did you reach out to those people at all? VV: (19:23) Not typically. Actually a lot of them were other Ted talks, but I wanted to be on the same playlists as those videos. So for example, like if I really liked Allan Pease LMPs is a wonderful author about body language and he has a great Ted talk. He also some great stage talks that have millions of views. I didn’t need to reach out to Allen because his videos are living out other people’s playlists, but I did want to get on to people who listed Allen’s video in their playlists. Does that make sense? So how did you, RV: (19:55) How do you know who, which people have Allen pees on their playlist? VV: (20:00) You can see it. So when you watch his video, you can see, it’ll say like, this is recommended for you. And then you can see that it’s actually within someone else’s playlist. RV: (20:09) Interesting. So just on the video itself, which is like a video you’re probably watching, cause you’re interested in it anyways, you would just go, Oh, okay. I see like other this other recommended video lives on, so, and so’s channel. And so that person is featuring this kind of content. And then you, so it was more like you didn’t contact Alan, you contacted the person that had Allen’s video on his channel VV: (20:33) And they never get contacted. Allen gets contacted all the time. Plus Allen doesn’t own his YouTube, his Ted talk. So it’s not even on, he couldn’t even control if he wanted to. So I don’t need to bother Alan with that. He’s a busy guy, but some of the people who created these amazing playlists who love looking for relevant videos on body language or human behavior or psychology, those are my people. And I love reaching out to them. And they’re also thrilled when I reach out to them. So that’s how we’ve grown our YouTube channel quite a bit since from the beginning. RV: (21:04) That is fascinating. What a super awesome tip. Well, and this is kind of what I wanted to get into as well was a little bit about how, how you’ve built such a great business, because it’s like once you, you know, have a bestselling book and you’re speaking at GLS and you have a viral Ted talk, like you’re checking off a lot of the marks of like pretty big time personal brands, which is, which is super exciting. Clearly the Ted talk has been huge. Is that how GLS found you? Do you know, did you ask him? VV: (21:36) I didn’t ask them. I think that they just knew about me from YouTube. I think they found me from YouTube. So I dunno if that was my Ted talk or other YouTube videos that I had. But that’s where they came to me from seeing those videos. RV: (21:49) Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to me, to this day, the number one cold way that we book high paid speaking engagements is someone will say, I saw your video on YouTube VV: (22:00) A hundred percent, same as in here, RV: (22:03) Which is crazy. Cause you, you, you know, it’s almost like people put YouTube and Twitter in the same category in terms, and it’s like, they’re completely different, like completely different purposes, completely different audiences. Yeah. VV: (22:14) Yeah. And the way I like to think about it, and this is what I, what I try to talk to my students about is Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and even LinkedIn, our social media platforms, YouTube is a search engine. And that’s how you have to think about it. It’s yes, it’s relatively social, but it is a search engine. So you need to think about it just like you think of Google, you just study your keyword, just like you do for Google. You need to think about your content, like little mini blogs. RV: (22:44) Yeah. I mean, and that’s the other thing like literally is that content on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, the older it is the less valuable it is on YouTube and Google, the older it is the more valuable it is. Like it’s, it’s a complete inverse. That is such a, it’s such a key distinction. I, YouTube is something I’m loving you talking about this. Cause I feel like I’ve ignored you tube, like my entire career. And then, you know, we had a few thousand subscribers and then when we exit our last company that was gone. So, you know, like we had, we’re starting all over and YouTube is the one that I’m going, this is the one that we have missed the boat on. This is the one that drives like real big time revenue, big time credibility. And it sounds like you agree with that. VV: (23:36) Yeah. I completely agree with it. And the good news is you got time, you know, it’s still the wild West on YouTube. I think. I actually think it’s less tapped even than online courses. You know, I got into YouTube in 2007. It’s older. I got into my first online course in 2011, 2012. And even now I feel like online courses, a little bit tapped. I mean, there’s just a lot of opportunity there, but RV: (23:59) Launching an online course, VV: (24:01) Launching teaching, hosting. Yeah. Online courses, you know, like some of the boat has sailed, but like it’s, it’s an, it’s an existing ecosystem, right? Like it exists. You can tap into it, but you really got to work. It YouTube, I think is a lot of low hanging fruit. I think you have time, even though it’s an older, it’s an older beast, the way that people, the amount of video that people are consuming. And the, the bond that you build with people when they watch a video is incredible. And as a speaker and as a, as an influencer, someone who wants to change behavior or change minds, it’s like, you’re getting permission to go into someone’s bedroom, email box, you get to their desk, not as intimate, a YouTube video, you get into their bedrooms, even a podcast, you maybe get to their kitchen or their gym, but a bed is usually YouTube. I don’t mean that in a, in a weird way, but like, it’s so intimate when you’re with someone and you’re sharing a story that they really feel like, wow, I know her. I cannot tell you how many times I’m walking down the street and people are like, I love your YouTube. I feel like you’re my friend. No. And that’s, that’s a very special thing. RV: (25:08) Yeah. I mean, that’s interesting. So Mike, Todd was one of the other speakers with us. Did you get to see his speech and tell us, yeah, I loved it. I thought it was so great. And so AIG and I are watching his sermon series on relationship goals and we either watch it in bed or the living room couch. But to what you’re saying, both of those are that’s where you, that’s very intimate, that’s intimate a space and at different locations. And I’ve never really thought about that. I’ve always thought about the podcast being right in someone’s ear, which is very intimate. But you know, you, you don’t make a date to listen to a podcast, but you will sit down and like, alright. Or have you ever seen the show? The chosen on YouTube? Oh my gosh. It’s incredible. It’s a, it’s a TV series. That’s only available on YouTube and it’s free, but it’s like, we make a date to sit down and watch something on YouTube. VV: (26:02) Yeah. I think that that’s the difference, right? Like when I am listening to my podcasts, I am always doing something else. And even if I wasn’t doing smells, I begin to sweat. I fold clothes. I do laundry. I clean up the toys in the living room. Like I’m always, I’m like, it’s a thing where my hands are free. Not with YouTube. I’m going to watch a video. It’s my ears and my eyes. And there’s not much else I can do. I have to be locked in with you. And so it’s just a much more intimate and fulfilling experience. There’s a reason I haven’t done a podcast yet. I mean, maybe I will one day, but it’s because I also know that I, the biggest, so in our business, our revenue is sort of split between speaking online courses and then a little bit like ad revenue. And we don’t do any paid search. We only have organic search. And I know that the best way for me to sell courses is to get organic YouTube search that turns into an online email subscriber. It then turns into a, a buyer of our video course. And so if I want to sell a video course, the best way for me to do that is being on video. RV: (27:03) Yeah. So let me ask you that. This is so awesome. Okay. So when you say organic YouTube search, most of that is just basically like optimizing your video as a blog post on YouTube. So you’re showing up in search and then in the description, you’re driving people to a lead, a lead capture, which is gonna then nurture like a lead magnet. And then that will nurture them for the course. When you do, when you sell courses, do you do mostly like a video? Do you do mostly like video sales letters, like a video funnel, like yeah. Three videos and then buy on the fourth video or do you more like a one long webinar kind of thing. VV: (27:44) So we’ve tested all of them feels like all of them we’ve tested the three videos to a purchase. We’ve tested a webinar to a 60 minute webinar to a purchase, which so 20 minute webinars, no purchase. We’ve tested a six email written series. We’ve tested, sneak previews, we’ve tested an audio training. The one that doesn’t work very well is three videos. We have too much dripping in the funnel too much, too much loss when we find that when people want it, they want it. So we don’t want to make them wait. So the best thing that we found is either an audio training for 60 minutes right away, or like a webinar for 45 to 60 minutes right away video. RV: (28:23) Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. well, where should people go if they want to connect with you and like learn more, obviously they can get the book captivate, which is awesome. We’ll put, we’ll put a link to your contagious. You are contagious, Ted talk, where else Vanessa, if they want to learn more about all the stuff you do. VV: (28:41) Yeah. If you want to see our funnel and action I recommend going to science of people.com/join. That will be whatever our latest in is. And so you’ll be able to see if he, you go to that, like sometimes it’s our likability training, which is the audio training, which also eventually converts into our big course or you’ll get our one of our webinars. And so that’s a really good way to get kind of acquainted with some of our materials and our free courses. But also if you are interested in sort of the funnel of the backend of how we build rapport and build relationships and teach to sell, you can all see it that way as well. Love it. RV: (29:17) Science of people.com/join. You can go there. We’ll link that up in the show notes, Vanessa, thank you so much. You’ve been so generous and like tactical and just is such, such actionable stuff particularly for personal brands. So we wish you very much the very best VV: (29:34) Gosh, I’m so grateful. Thanks for featuring my story and thanks everyone for listening. [inaudible].