Ep 47: Expert Tips for Marketing, PR, and Personal Branding with Julie Solomon | Recap Episode
RV: (00:00)
Hey, welcome to this recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. Today we are breaking down the interview with our good friend Julie Solomon. This is the three and three AJ and Rory bringing you our three highlights and Babe, I’m going to let you lead us. Your leadoff batter today.
AJ: (00:16)
Yeah, well I think the first thing is what an amazing gift it is to be able to see a friend as well as a client actually live in their gift and Julie’s interview is such, her living into her gift, she is just a wealth of knowledge when it comes to getting brand deals and just being proactive and knowing what to do. And I’m telling you what, if you haven’t listened to this interview and part of your income plan, your revenue plan is getting brand deals, listen to it. I get that as anywhere in the possibility of that something I’d like to be generating revenue from. Not just getting free stuff but making money. You have to listen to it. But I think all of that is to say one of the things that was really surprising to me in this interview and I didn’t expect for her to really talk about was the importance of confidence and how for a long time she didn’t have it because no one, Julie today, you wouldn’t think that she ever struggled, struggled with confidence.
AJ: (01:18)
And I love the context of what she talked about this. And I think this is really relevant for anyone who is out there trying to build a personal brand. Because at some point I know that you have asked yourself, should I really do this? Can I really do this? What are people gonna think? Or what if I tell people, and this just doesn’t go anywhere, or am I going to look too self-promotional? Or what if, what if? What if and I know that for many of you listening, that is the exact thing that is holding you back. It’s not your ability or capability. It’s nothing to do with that is your own mice mindset of can I, should I, what will people think if I do? And she really breaks that down and talked about how, you know, she was watching everyone else and there was this little voice inside that kept getting bigger and louder and bigger and louder.
AJ: (02:11)
And for years she ignored it and pushed it down. And then she talked about the, how she had a, a group of people who really loved where she was doing what she was doing for them and maybe didn’t want to see her explode out of that position and break out into her own. And I think confidence is so much of our own, our own mindset and our own belief, but then it’s also compounded by the people that we surround ourselves with. And so she spent like 10 minutes talking about this concept of confidence in a really unique way. And I just think that’s a, it’s a really unique thing to talk about when it comes to building your personal brand because you’re going to have to have, not a little confidence but a lot of confidence because there’s gonna be some naysayers and there’s gonna be some people who don’t want to see you succeed and who don’t agree with your message and you better have some confidence to back it all up.
RV: (03:03)
Yeah. Well, I, I thought that was powerful also. And like you said, it’s interesting to see our friend do that, who we know is this like, you know, amazing, confident person you know, proactively or practically one of my favorite tips was just if you’re pitching yourself for TV, do it on video and what a simple tip. But she, you know, really helped with that mindset of, of, of putting you in the frame of mind that a Booker or you know, like a producer is in and how they’re trying to think about shows and things that they’re putting together. And I also thought, you know, so, so that concept of just show people what you’re able to do. This was specifically for TV getting booked on television shows. That made a lot of sense. Like why wouldn’t you pitch in the format or the medium that you’re pitching for?
RV: (03:54)
I think you could also play that too if you were trying to pitch yourself for a podcast for like a major podcast production or a radio show, you should pitch in the medium that you’re, you know, you’re going for. So I thought that was super relevant. Relatedly. And this is something that we’ve found to be true for us as well, that it makes sense to start local before going national. You know, get those local television appearances cause they really need the content, particularly at the local level there. They’re trying to fill their calendar with meaningful stuff and you also don’t have to travel, which is really nice and you can do a lot of local gigs and almost become like a regular in your, on your local TV market and, and really build up the kind of real that you would need before you then go out and pitch to national.
AJ: (04:42)
Yeah. I think part of that is related to confidence in what Julie talked about is these people who are booking you, they need to have confidence that you are going to be good in this visual medium that you’re going to be showcased in, in this case that you’re referring to is TV. But it’s like they need to see that you’re not going to be stumbling, bumbling around and that you’re comfortable in front of TV. And she said even doing podcasts like this where it’s a visual medium and you’re having a conversation and you know, even if it is just like this or in the context of Rory interviewing Julie, she that that works. But people need to know and they need to have a confidence before they book you. And put you on there that they know what they’re going to expect.
RV: (05:21)
And I think so the second tip for me and for you was the same was around micro-influencers and I thought this, this was a healthy mindset shift.
AJ: (05:29)
Yeah. So I think that there was two big things that for me that were kind of like, huh, Oh yes. I’m talking about, and this is not the second or third time throughout the summit that I’ve heard people talk about the value of the micro influencer. And she talked about how there’s a huge misconception out there that you have to have hundreds of thousands of followers to get brand deals. And she goes, that’s just not,
RV: (05:51)
I mean I thought that I thought that
AJ: (05:53)
I was getting more money for brand deals and I had what, seven, 8,000 followers then my friends who had hundreds of thousands of followers and who were only getting free gifts versus actual paid money. And it all came down into positioning and messaging and audience awareness and how to pitch yourself and how to book yourself at this concept that there is a huge value in engagement more than followers. And she said for the micro influencer engagement has to be high. She goes, doesn’t it? It doesn’t matter about your follower counts. Sometimes it’s just how loyal and how engaged all the four are the followers that you have.
RV: (06:33)
Yeah. You know, I was thinking about this the other day that you know, you know, social media is so, it’s so like public or it’s like superficial. It’s what you see. The parallel for me is in golf they say you drive, you drive for show, but you putt for dough. Well your social media count is like a drive. It’s all for show. But I was thinking about somebody who has a 300,000 let’s say it says 300,000 followers. If they get a 1% you know like engagement rate, let’s say on 300,000 you’re talking about was the 10% would be 30,000 is that right? 10% would be 30,000 so 1% would be 3000 so would you rather be someone who had 5,000 people on your email list or 300,000 followers. And I think most people would say, Oh, I want $300,000 and I probably would too.
RV: (07:27)
Cause I think I could turn that into more email lists. But the reality of the actual reach there is about the same that maybe 10,000 people on email is, is worth having several hundred thousand followers on social because of the algorithms and what small percentage. And you know, what she was saying is your engagement rate when you’re a micro influencer is it’s easier to keep it high because you don’t have to have so many people engage with something as you have more and more followers. It’s like the content has to be so good that not just a small subset, but like a huge chunk of the audience has to really like it and engage. And so that’s just, again, to the perception of all of this is understanding, you know, I think the perception is really, really important. There’s value to perception, but also being able to appropriately to, to value the, the, like the monetary aspects of that and what’s that worth. And brands are intelligent, right? Like they know that and they know that somebody that, that gets, you know, a 10% engagement rate on a few thousand people is worth a lot and they know exactly who they’re seeing and they know exactly what type of people are seeing those. And you know, a lot of times too, you don’t have to pay as much for a micro-influencer as you do for a macro, you know, or a major influencer. So,
AJ: (08:48)
Or, it depends on how you pitch yourself according to Julie.
RV: (08:51)
Yeah. Well, I mean positioning, but positioning is always a part of it, but I think you, you have to go out and do the work and that, that’s probably to me, the third thing here is just her mindset.
AJ: (09:07)
Don’t sit back and wait. Yeah. She talked a lot about how all these people get all these followers and then they go, where’s my brand deal?
RV: (09:16)
Yeah. Where’s my money?
AJ: (09:17)
There’s like, I’ve done all this work. My job is to put out the content. My job has to get the followers. Why am I not getting this attention? Why am I getting these deals? Why am I not getting this? And the short answer is well, cause you’re not actually going out and asking for it. You’re actually, you’re not actually doing the work to go out and attract it and actually put your, literally put your content in front of them in a very direct way. And she talked about how on Facebook and Instagram, like DMS matter, she goes, DM these brands like actually get the conversation started there and then she talked about how on Twitter it’s more for media. She goes, if you’re really trying to get into media then be researching those media outlets on Twitter. But if you’re really trying to get in touch with brands, Facebook and Instagram as the way to go. And DMS is a really simple, easy way to start. No excuses, which I know is your big last thing is this concept around no excuses, but it’s not waiting around for people to come to you. It’s not this concept of build it. And they will come, no, build it. And then go invite them to come, go knock on the door and say, come tell them what you have inside, not build it. And they will come. That is not a real,
RV: (10:29)
It’s not a real business model. Yeah, you gotta be proactive. And that’s, I think that’s another misconception again, that I had, I just kind of think, Oh well, I’m sure all these people with millions of followers, like people just come to them and to have Julie go, no, you are proactive. You’re, you’re promoting your marketing, you’re your engaging, you’re networking, you’re reaching out to people and go, yeah, that’s the real, that’s the real work of getting a brand deal. And most people aren’t willing to do that work. And it’s like, it’s a classic example again of the real truth from behind the scenes being exposed from somebody who’s, who’s out there doing that. And I just, I love that about her. And I love her special snowflake syndrome. I just think that’s the coolest, I just think it is because, because we all think we’re special snowflakes, right?
RV: (11:19)
Like we all listened to it go, yeah, that doesn’t apply to me. Or yeah, I don’t need that, or I’m, I’m too smart for that, or I, I don’t need that really do that. It’s such a niche. Tiny audience on my end won’t work for my industry. Or the other thing is is is we kind of go, Oh well you don’t understand how hard I have it. You don’t understand like what I’m overcoming. You don’t understand that I have to deal with compliance or you don’t understand like in health care you can’t, you know, no one will just do this cause it’s healthcare. Or like there’s all this stupid stuff that we tell ourselves and it’s not that there aren’t certain kind of things that need to be navigated around, right? Like compliance for financial and the financial industry is a real thing. But it’s not the excuse to not do it at all.
RV: (12:07)
And what we do is we jump to, we take things that are our challenges and we turn them into excuses and we just go, Oh, because this is a challenge. Someone laid this down. I’m going to use that as my excuse to get out of it. And ultimately to be successful in anything like getting brand deals or building a personal brand or doing any, anything significant, you have to just move past the special snowflake syndrome and go, yeah, there’s nothing special about me. And there’s nothing special about the people who’ve been successful other than they didn’t buy into special snowflake syndrome and they worked, they did the research, they believed in themselves, they built a confidence, they made a presentation and they made it. They made it happen. And you know that, that that’s the secret. Like that’s the key. Like brand builders can teach you all the formulas and the frameworks and the structure and the order and the sequence and the logic. And you know, we have all these things get that can really help shortcut a path, but you still have to walk the path. And,
AJ: (13:08)
And I think just to like make it really clear, a special snowflake syndrome is actually give the definition that Julie gave.
RV: (13:16)
Giving yourself an excuse as to why your circumstances won’t allow you to achieve something you really want.
AJ: (13:22)
And I think we all battle that in some area of our life. It doesn’t matter if it’s building your personal brand or your finances or your fitness or your marriage, or friendships or family relationships, whatever. We all battle that in some arena. And what she is saying, well, that’s the thing that’s holding you back. And I love what you just said too. It’s don’t let the challenges you have become the excuses you make. Just because it’s a challenge doesn’t mean there’s not a way. Just don’t want to become an excuse.
RV: (13:53)
So listen to that. Julie was preaching it and she was doing fantastic job. So go listen to the words from her mouth. And thank you for staying. Stay in a part of what we’re doing. We’ll get to next time.
Ep 46: Expert Tips for Marketing, PR, and Personal Branding with Julie Solomon
RV: (00:01)
So Julie Solomon is my new next door neighbor, best friend or neighbor bestie, they just moved to Nashville recently and we got the chance to work together like six or seven months ago and got to know each other a little bit. And I just adore this woman and I adore her story and her heart, what you’re gonna hear all about. And she’s already never home in Nashville, so I don’t actually get to see her that much. Even then. Now she is here, but you know, the official, let me give you like the official so she’s a seven figure entrepreneur and she hosts a podcast called the Influencer Podcast, which is an incredible podcast. So she’s been an expert in marketing and PR and personal branding. You know, her whole career. She’s been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post people magazine, but her podcasts, literally has gotten millions of downloads. She has listeners in like 170 countries. And so over the years she’s worked on campaigns for people like Dave Ramsey or Lenny Kravitz. But in the last couple of years she’s gotten to interview, you know, Amy Porterfield, Marie Forleo, Rachel Hollis, people like that. And she’s just awesome. And I, I knew when we put this together, you had to, you had to get to meet her if you didn’t already know her. So, Julie, welcome, welcome to the show.
JS: (01:21)
Yes. And thank you so much for having me. You know I love any more soul of time that I get with you. So it’s amazing to be here.
RV: (01:29)
So tell us like your, tell us a little bit about your story, right? Like it seems like one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you is cause it seems like you sort of started behind the scenes promoting everybody else and then you stepped forward and became the personality. Is that an accurate
JS: (01:49)
Yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. And I think that partly due to confidence and partly due to just knowledge and experience and then how, you know, how, how I saw that I could really show up and serve people I’m a two part in and why and why I was kind of behind the scenes and then went in front of the scenes. So I started well growing up I’ve always had a knack for connection and you know, loving to talk to people. I’m a very curious person. My mom was a medical sales rep growing up that, you know, so that, that knack for marketing and sales and just kind of doing that. I, I saw it, you know, around me. I came from a line of realtors, you know, so just that knack for really kind of being that being that people person being someone who wants to serve people kind of in that, in your face capacity. It was always around me growing up and majored in marketing and communications. Started my career in New York City as a publicist. So that was kind of, I remembered at one point in college, I was watching some kind of like red carpet, like Golden Globes or something. And I kept seeing these women in like black dresses with like little walkie talkie things behind the celebrities, like walking them around. And I was like, what is that? And I kind of looked into it and it was a publicist and I was like, I want to do
RV: (03:13)
Laura bodyguard. It couldn’t use the potty card, but you went to publicist route, route.
JS: (03:20)
And so I, you know, and I think at the time it was, it was a little bit of, I knew that I could probably do that very well. I, you know, I’m, from what I just said, I love people. I was always really good in terms of integrations. Really organized type A, did well in school, could stay on top of my stuff. And I think at the time I probably didn’t realize it, but I might’ve really wanted to tap into more of my visionary stuff, but I wasn’t confident enough to do that yet. So it was a lot easier just to kind of like sit back and in play that integrative role, which ended up serving me very, very well. And so women,
RV: (03:57)
Let me talk to you about, I want to stop you on that part because, cause I want to get into some of the tactics, particularly in publicity because the, that’s like I think something you’re really good at and always have been. But before that, tell me about the confidence issue because more and more as I have learned and gotten to meet entertainers and celebrities, you’re married to one a and an actor, a very successful actor. And it’s, it’s like the confidence really matters on camera and really believing it. And then also the confidence to just like start your own thing and go after it. So what, what was the point where you made the pivot from going, you know, I, I don’t have the confidence to, I’m ready to take the leap. So, so what was kind of going on in your head that was the limiting belief that was holding you back? That you kind of like something happened, he flipped the switch and you, you went for it. Do you remember much about that?
JS: (04:54)
Yeah, I just, somewhere along the way of growing up, I cultivated this belief system in me that as a woman, in order to be accepted, I needed to s to stay small and quiet and just cute and just kind of like stick to my little like box kind of thing. You know, it’s dream but not too big speak, but not too loud, you know, you don’t really want to be a big deal. And so I kind of allowed that to hold me back and you know, I would, I’ll, I’ll be a publicist for the people, but I’m going to stay right here. And so I would always kind of like dabble in this idea of wanting to all these kinds of creative endeavors, if you will. Always wanted to write a book, but I didn’t have the confidence to do it. So I became a book publicist, you know, I always wanted to have these creative endeavors that didn’t have the confidence to do it.
RV: (05:48)
It goes to the people, but you were never the person.
JS: (05:52)
Exactly. So it was kind of like in some way I was like feeding off of their energy, kind of felt like I was a part of the cool kids club, so to speak, but didn’t really have the confidence and the self and the I think the, not that necessarily the self awareness, but I think it’s, it was just purely the confidence to really step into that and say, I don’t have to believe that story anymore.
RV: (06:17)
Wow. And I, I mean, I know for sure you know, I still to this date have these moments where I really struggle with, I know for sure somebody is watching right now or they’re listening and they’re going, holy crap. Like that’s me. Like, I, I’ve wanted to pursue this dream. I know I have a mission I, you know, I feel called by God or I feel like this is why I’m here. But they don’t have the con like they’re up against that block and they’re, they’re probably watching or listening because they want to do it. And, and this helps them feel close to it, but making that leap. So what do you remember what happened that like, cause that’s a big time limiting belief. Oh does he know that you were carrying that? Like oh women are supposed to sort of play small. Were you, you were aware of that and then how did you break free of it?
JS: (07:05)
I mean I think that if I, to get really honest with myself, I do believe that there was something in here that was telling me like, cause I also at the same time I had this small voice inside me that was longing for more, that wanted to pursue more, that was curious about gangs. And it just kind of kept getting louder and louder and louder. But I also knew that by staying small and not really taking action on those things that I wanted to take action on, you know, I wasn’t being authentic. I wasn’t really living authentically. And so, you know, it’s kind of that idea of my beliefs became my thoughts like which became my feelings, which became my actions, which became my results. And so that’s just kind of what I allowed myself to stay in. And then it wasn’t until I mean it was a while.
JS: (07:50)
It was probably about almost seven or eight years into me doing PR. I had at that point had met Jonathan, had moved to Los Angeles and that, what was the other thing too? I think that at that time I was also surrounded by people, at least what I kind of look back on now, that they might have been a little afraid to kind of lose me in their life. And so they didn’t really want me to grow either. And, and I kind of allowed that to be like a really easy excuse for me not to grow as well. But once I met my husband to is so about just supporting my dreams and letting me go and, you know, having that path and holding space for that it was a multitude of things. I think it was I moved,
RV: (08:37)
He’s a good piece of arm candy too. It’s, it gives you confidence and they, when they land a good piece of arm candy,
JS: (08:43)
Yes. He’s not, he’s not too shabby to look to look at. And I, I got that zest in New York, you know, I was around so many different types of people and different types of industry and cultures and so I got this zest for it but didn’t really have the confidence to like drive it home myself. And once I moved to La and met John and we had gotten married and we were pregnant with our child that’s when it really started happening. I had been doing the PR thing for about seven or eight years at that point and I was just kind of getting to this really stagnant place. Like I was hitting that ceiling. I wasn’t inspired. I had, mind you my PR work, I got to do a lot of really awesome things. I got to work with a lot of incredible authors and thought leaders and we’re part of really amazing projects.
JS: (09:29)
So you know, my work there, I don’t want to kind of just shy it away because I did learn so much. I learned a lot about business, a lot about marketing, a lot about, you know, being an entrepreneur. But I would even see some of these people, even the, the old CEO of my publishing house was Michael Hyatt and he even left the company to then go off and do what he does now, which is this massive entrepreneurial company and machine. And so even watching people like him, I was like, man, like people do this and it works out. Like people really do follow that, you know, and really listen to that. So if they can, like, why can’t I? It’s kind of that idea of if you spot it, you got it. So so I started kind of again and it was slow because I had this limiting belief, took some time to kind of retrain.
JS: (10:17)
So I started kind of dipping my toes into blogging, which was kind of my side hustle at the time. And I started out as a lifestyle mommy blogger. I was writing content, I started to acquire brand deals. I started to really use my, my expertise and my technique of pitching to pitch myself for media, pitch myself for, you know, paid collaborations with companies and really use my expertise as a publicist to kind of help me along the way. But again, I found myself kind of hitting that ceiling of like, you know, lifestyle and fashion. Blogging really isn’t my passion either. I love to write, but fashion is not really a passion for me. Like I’m not as passionate about it as some of the other people that I see or talking about this or that or whatever. So I kind of got back to the roots of like, what my why was like, why do I want to do this?
JS: (11:09)
What, what problem do I really solve for people and how does that align with my why? And that’s when I kind of went back to the, to the, to the connection piece and the communication piece and the marketing and PR piece and tried to figure out ways to kind of merge those things together. And so I thought, well, maybe, maybe I’ll start blogging about marketing and PR and branding. And maybe help these bloggers and youtubers and content creators that are now my people years that I’ve met through this blogging space. And that’s what I started doing.
RV: (11:42)
One of the things that jumps out to me about that too is, is just like the people you were around had something to do with with it. And that is so true. It’s like you’re either around a group of people are holding you back or you’re around a group of people that are pushing you forward. And when we started brand builders group, you know, we were very clear on like, all right, we’re gonna, we’re gonna support people and help them, you know, get clear on their positioning and figure out what problem they solve and who their audiences and their primary business model. But the thing that’s come out of it, which we never really saw is the community of all the people that come to the events. And it’s just like this rabbit, like quick friendships that are developing. And it’s like, it has nothing to do with anything we’re doing other than just putting the people together.
RV: (12:31)
So I, I think that networking thing is, is powerful. So I want to talk about the publicity thing cause I don’t think people understand it and I don’t think I even, Eh, do a great job of it. But what is your mindset like you mentioned pitching and a that like when you think about publicity, like getting PR. So if somebody’s watching and they’re like, okay, well I want to watch the ban but I’ve never been on good morning America and I’ve never been featured in Huffington post and I’ve never been whatever. How do I do that? What is your like mindset and process just in terms of ground, how do you get PR who gets selected to be interviewed? You know, like what’s that all look like?
JS: (13:15)
Yeah, I mean I think the first step, and I think this goes with, with whenever you’re trying to cultivate any type of audience for what you do, you’ve got to know who you’re talking to. So that’s the first step. Because you want to make sure that you’re pitching the appropriate outlets for what you want to talk about. So a lot of it is research on the front end. Like if you, if you want an article in Forbes magazine or forbes.com or Huffpost, you first have to figure out what, what am I bringing to the table, what is the content that I’m going to be sharing and who does that content for? And then once you get clear on that step, the next step is, okay, now who is the editor or the freelancer or the writer who serves this content in this audience. And a lot of times you can find that through Google. You can find it through Twitter, you can find it through going to Huffington post or going to forbes.com and going through the articles and see who was the contributor for that piece. And you can reach out to them directly and say, Hey, I have this idea. This is who it’s for
RV: (14:15)
Through Twitter or Instagram or like
JS: (14:17)
Through linkedin. Yeah, I mean in this day and age, when I first started PR in 2007 there was no Twitter there. Facebook was kind of really early in its, in its beginning there was no Instagram. We literally had media databases. There was one called Cision that costs an arm and a leg that people had subscribed to for a year to get it. And then you might have gotten lucky if you, if you googled back then, but now in 2019 I mean honestly if someone comes to me and says like they can’t find a contact, I usually kind of think I have to call them, call them out on that excuse because we have more information available to us now than we ever have of, you know, it’s like sign up for the $20 a month on linkedin. Right. Like get the email, you know, it’s not that challenging of, of a, of a thing at this point to find a contact or to find someone who may know someone a little bit of work.
RV: (15:09)
Are you shy? You’re not in, you’re not shy about approaching. It was like if you’ve done, if you’ve done the research and you know that this media outlet produces this kind of media and this is the writer or the interviewer that covers segments just like this, and, and, and I can talk and provide value to that audience, then you just basically like straight up send him a linkedin message or a tweet or a DM and you tell them, I know you write on this. I know you serve this audience. That’s who I’m an expert in and here’s the content, you know, I’d love to like, is it that simple?
JS: (15:43)
It is that simple. And a lot of times you can actually take, if you’re someone who has a blog, for example, you can take a piece of content you’ve already written and repurpose it and send it to them. Say, yes, you know, I sent this out. We got a lot of feedback about my audience. It really served them in this way. These were the, you know, this is what we hit on. This is how it helped them. This was the call to action. Okay. And I think that it would fit your audience. This is why I already have it written. If you want to read it, let me know your thoughts. I’m happy to tweak it for you. Let me know. You know, if you need anything else or if I need to help you pull together something else to make it happen or responsive to this.
JS: (16:16)
Oh yeah, they’re responsive. I mean even the other day I there’s a company called create cultivate that have conferences all over the country that target my ideal audience, that target my ideal woman and I’ve been wanting to be a part of their conference for a while, kind of put it on the back burner, saw something that came up the other day and it reminded me and I literally found an email, sent it to them and said, you know, hey, I’m going to be in La for a couple of weeks. I would love to have coffee. And I also know that you have some conferences coming up. This is what I’ve been doing this year. These are the topics that I’ve been speaking on. I would love to come wrote me back the next day and said, we would love to have you at our San Francisco conference
RV: (16:53)
And this is just like send an email, lay it out and just,
JS: (16:58)
Yep. And you may, again, there is a little research on the front end. I don’t want it to sound like it’s just, you know, I mean, and I’m also going off of the basis that you are someone who actually has valuable content to share. Right? Well going off of the basis of that
RV: (17:11)
You have something worthwhile bring them. Yeah.
JS: (17:15)
Right, exactly. But it’s a lot of the times, again, it’s that fear of like, well what if no one gets back to me? What if I email the wrong person? What if I hear crickets on the other end? And that may happen and you know, you have to kind of go into it with, with, you know, for every 10 pitches you send out, you may get five that actually respond to you and then three out of the five that you actually land and hey, that’s three more that you would not have if you would have never reached out to begin with. And you can craft, I mean,
RV: (17:44)
We have a good ratio that’s not like, that’s not like you’re making a thousand calls and you’re going to sell one person. I mean
JS: (17:51)
Exactly. And it’s actually easier now more than ever because when I was doing meaty, yeah. You know, back then that that was before, you know, dotcoms had really blown up and there were more traditional editors that were on, you know, there were employees of the company, they were on staff there. They’re looking for contributors, they need the content. They don’t have a team and a staff of writers anymore. So they love it when you come and you hand them everything on a silver platter, you have it curated and you’ve done your homework. Like take a little time to read what these writers that you’re pitching to are editors that you’re pitching to have you actually written, give a little time and a little feedback to them so they know that you’re being serious about what you’re offering.
RV: (18:33)
Yeah. So I love this. Now I know I want to talk to you a little bit about like national TV cause that’s the thing like, oh my gosh, you know, like people think media and they go, good morning America, the today show. Yeah. Like, you know, is it, when is it realistic to do that? Like should you wait, should you just go for it? And you know, I know that you’ve, you know, you’ve, you’ve worked with people who are on those, you know, have been on those outlets and what does it really take to sort of catch the attention at that? Like huge, you know, major national scale,
JS: (19:09)
Right? Well there’s a couple of ways that you can go. But specifically for TV, there’s kind of a little niche here. Like there can be instances, again, depending on the climate, you know, of our culture. So if, let’s say if your, if your topic is politics and you’re coming out with something fall of 2020 during an election, you may have a better opportunity of getting a national television spot, depending on what that topic may be. So the seasonal approaches can change certain things with television, hot topics, folks can change certain things with television. But you know, traditionally speaking, if you’re someone that wants to hit a national television spot, nine times out of 10 a national television booker or producer is gonna want to see something from you that is on camera, right? Whether that’s, you know, a local television spot, you’ve done what they’re, that’s youtube interviews that you’ve been on, any kind of local media, they’re gonna want to see how you are and in your dynamic on camera if they’re going to potentially put you on camera.
JS: (20:11)
So the first thing that I would always tell clients of mine in the past is that sometimes you do have to start small to kind of build up your reel and build up your deck, go to your local television station and you know, pitch them, start small and kind of build it up. Reach out to dotcoms that have digital television shows or digital and interviews there, things like that. Anything, even something like this, you know, where they can just, they can see you on camera, they can see how you’re dynamics, they can see how, how you flow your dictation, all that kind of stuff that will go into effect. So that is the first key. Those are the kind of the two folds there. You could go off the bat and national media and see what happens depending on the topic and what not. Or what I always say is build up the deck and build up the real, and then you can have a real that you just send out and then they can see for themselves.
RV: (20:57)
Yeah, I think that’s, that’s the big thing that I learned. You know, I’ve, I’ve had a few major national appearances, not a ton, but I is remembering that TV is a visual medium and whatever you’re doing, the more you can make it visual and just if, even if that’s just you as an interviewer, ultimately to attract eyeballs, you have to do something that’s interesting visually. The other thing I remember is it goes by insanely fast, like a five minute segment feels in real life. Like 10 seconds. I mean, yes. So, so I think that’s great. All right, so I’m a little bit kind of, oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah.
JS: (21:36)
Is that, and no one ever really thinks of this. If you’re pitching yourself for TV, you can always do a pitch on video. So they see lar, we’ve actually had some pitches come through on video for us for the podcast, which was great because we got to hear the person auditorily. We got to really kind of hear their passion and how they were and how they really sounded. So video pitches can work really well as well.
RV: (22:03)
What a simple, yeah, what a simple thing. A, I love that. I love that. Okay. So I, I want to, I want to get to, you know, kind of also on the line of pitching his brand deals. Yeah. you know, this is a thing we have a saying around Bram Ram builders group where we say, you know, there’s a lot of people out there unfortunately who are Twitter rich and dollar broke. They have lots of followers and they don’t, but they’re not converting it to money. And it’s amazing. You know, we’d meet these people with a million followers and like they have no income coming in and you know, we teach all these different business models and you know, as you, as you know, you’ve been through our training and we try to help people figure out one. But when it comes to brand deals, like I go Julie, like Julie is she, she’s the master and I know you have your course pitch at perfect, which is killer course for people on this space.
RV: (22:56)
But can you dislike, talk to us a little bit about what is, what is a brand deal? What’s the likelihood of getting one, you know, how much do they actually pay? I mean I know if you’re tiger woods or you’re Michael Jordan, but like if you’re, if you’re a person, how many followers do you need to have to get one? And then what’s the process of actually of actually getting one? Cause I think like national TV, we all SORTA sink. We sit around waiting going, what do I have to do to make somebody find me? And I’ve really appreciated your outlook, which is like, no, that’s not how it works. Like you Kinda, you gotta go get it. So can you talk about it?
JS: (23:34)
Yeah. And actually I love that you bring this up cause this is the entire reason why we created pitch it perfect was that when I was starting out, I didn’t have, you know, compared to a lot of my friends who had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, I had way less than 10,000 followers and I would pitch a brand and I would make, you know, three times more on a brand deal than they would. They would actually be accepting gifted product. And I would be over here making five, $10,000 for the brand deal. And so I would have these women predominantly that would come up to me and say flat out, you know, they would say, no offense Julie, but how is it that I have a hundred thousand followers and you have 7,000 followers and you’re waking, you’re making way more money than me.
JS: (24:14)
And I’m like, well, I know how to pitch myself. And so that’s when I said, I really need to create something that can support these people that are interested in doing this and having it be a really good source of a, of a revenue stream for their business. So we created pitch perfect under, under that pretense. And since then we’ve had thousands of students go through it. But with, with that in mind, well, one of the biggest issues that we see from people that come into our program, one of the biggest things that they say is, I thought that I had to have a certain amount of followers in order to get a brand deal. But now I know that that’s not true because I’ve gone through your program or I thought that brands were just gonna come to me when I was ready to work with them, you know?
JS: (24:57)
But now I know that that’s not possible. And that’s the thing that really kind of letting people know that there’s no brand ferry that just falls from the sky and is going to give you a brand deal. Just like with anything like you, you’ve, you’ve got to go out. If it’s something that you really want to make a model in your business and kind of part of your revenue stream, you’ve got to get your ducks in order and kind of go there. So there’s kind of certain tiers. First off, I will say that there’s really no set number to start building that relationship with a brand brand. Love what is called, you know, micro influencers, which is anyone that has 10,000 or less followers. We’ve had students that have had as little as 300 followers that have gotten brand deals. So what we really talk about is you want to get in there from the beginning to really start the relationship.
JS: (25:42)
It’s kind of like a marriage of sorts. You wouldn’t go to someone and marry them most likely the first night that you meet them, you want to warm the relationship up. You want to go on a few dates and really kind of get to know the person and see how you can support one another. Same thing goes when you’re working with these brands. So it’s really about coming and approaching, asking them certain questions, you know, how you know, what is it that you’re looking for? What is your bottom line? What are the new products and services that you have coming out? Who are you trying to target? What is your current budget in your marketing plan? Do you even have an influencer budget? Do you even pay influencers or do you only do gifting? Really asking these kinds of questions on the front end.
JS: (26:21)
It’s gonna kind of help you save a lot of time in organized. So there’s no quite follower number. But I will say that mostly, you know, you get those 300 to 500 follow a 300 to 500 influencers that have that number of following that get brand deals. But I would say mostly I see any anywhere from 2,500 followers and up, it’s really about the engagement rate. So brands like to look for an engagement rate of at least 4% or higher. Now obviously, typically the smaller your follower number is, the higher your engagement rate’s going to be because you’re not going to have as many followers there that need to engage with you. So that’s why they really do love micro influencers that you may only have 2,500 followers, but if you’ve got a 25% engagement rate in 25% of those 2,500 people are seeing it, you could actually outweigh someone that may have 10,000 followers, but only 0.03% of their followers are seeing their content. So it’s really about, we really like to focus more on the engagement rate and getting your engagement rate strong, as strong as it can be. Then the following number per se. So you’ve got your micro influencers, then you have your macro influencers.
RV: (27:33)
Who are you talking to? Like if you’re going to go, I want to deal with Nike, like who are you trying to get ahold of? Is it the senior vice president of marketing or is there like a person that may be,
JS: (27:46)
Yes. So it, it depends a lot like a company like Nike for example, they are going to have this farmed out. You know, their in house team is not going to be dealing with pitches from influencers all day long. They’re going to be sending it to an influencer marketing company, a PR company, you know, there’s kind of a bunch of different umbrellas of how that can unfold. So the first thing, again, you have to go back to the research. Linkedin is a really good place to start researching some of the, you know, who’s the PR Rep and just asking them, hi. You know, I’m so and so. This is my website. This is what I do. You know, I’m really wanting to build a relationship with Nike who is the best contact, you know, that works with the influencers for you guys. Simple as that. I mean, it’s really just getting out there asking the questions,
RV: (28:30)
But just find somebody and ask them who’s the right.
JS: (28:34)
Exactly. Deeming brands on Instagram works very, very well. Facebooking brands, sending dms on Facebook to brands works really, really well. And linkedin and Twitter is really good for media. For brands, I would say Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram are going to be your best bets.
RV: (28:50)
Oh, interesting. So Twitter, you say that again. Twitter is good for media. Yes.
JS: (28:54)
From media. Yep. And then Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin is better for brands and then the companies that represent the brands, the PR companies and that sort of thing. But a lot of times with Nike, you know, if Nike has a $10 million marketing budget, they’re not going to go. I mean, no, mostly they’re probably not going to go to micro influencers and they’re not even going to go to macro influencers. They’re going to go for the celebrity endorsement deals. We’re going to say we’re going to get so and so.
RV: (29:21)
What’s the realistic, what is the realistic version? Right? So let’s say somebody is watching and they’ve got 7,500 followers or maybe 25,000 followers, you know, and there you, you know, but they’ve never done a brand deal. What size company would they look and, and then like how much does a reasonable amount to expect? You know, it’s like, you know, celebrities get millions of dollars, but what does just, you know, kind of a person get,
JS: (29:52)
Yeah. So again, it also depends on like how full Tom are you going into it. So for example, I’ve got a girlfriend of mine that has 250 ish thousand followers. Influencer marketing is her full time Gig and she makes anywhere between 30 to 50 grand a month off of brand deals.
RV: (30:07)
Okay. Say that again. So she has 250,000 followers. Yep.
JS: (30:12)
And she makes about 30 to 50 grand a month off brand deal. Okay.
RV: (30:17)
Gotcha. So, so posting content on social is her full time. That’s her full time job. That was her job. And, and what do they kind of like? So what does that, that’s probably several brands and then would be, what do they normally ask for? Like what do you have to do for them?
JS: (30:33)
Yeah, so it depends on the assets. It depends on kind of what they’re typically it is. It’s a, it’s an Instagram, it’s a static Instagram post, so on your feed it is brands really love Instagram stories because of the swipe up feature and they can, they can see how many clicks are going and it’s a lot easier to kind of equate into, into follow for them to really see what their ROI is. So they really like Instagram stories and like Instagram is their main focus. Facebook not Twitter, not so much. They may ask for some Pinterest stuff depending on who the brand is and what their focus is. And it also depends on, you know, what is the brand’s goal? And this is one of the questions that I always tell my students to ask when they’re reaching out to brands. Are the brands focused on conversion or are they focused on awareness? Because that’s also going to factor in on how much they pay you on who they choose to work with on why they’re choosing to work with them. So that’s another big thing. If they’re looking to convert dollars, there may be some influencers out there that for whatever reason they don’t convert really well, but they have a huge platform for awareness. So it really kind of just depends on where, what is, what is the goal of the brand and then they can align with the influencer that way.
RV: (31:46)
So the other thing is while we’re on this topic, this is awesome. This is so enlightening I guess is a world that I know nothing about. Like it’s very eye opening to me how this is how this works. And it’s also very simple and sort of straight forward. It’s like, oh, you know, you just go do it. But what about influencers paying other influencers? Does that, are you seeing, like, do you hear of that happening much? That’s a, a growing thing.
JS: (32:14)
Yeah, it, it used to not mean, I mean when I first started into this industry of blogging in influencer marketing, which was 2013 ish, it that wasn’t happening as much, but now that influencers are essentially becoming their own brand, they’re creating their own products and services and getting it out there. You definitely see that happen more and more. And in the, in the online course creation industry, you would see it a lot with you know, launches that that affiliate launches that people would do or they would come on board and kind of do a co launch and support one another that way. But I’m seeing it now more with influencers. You’ll have an influencer who has a products coming out and now see it out to other influencers to support that. Or even the brand may put some marketing dollars behind that influencer to then use to kind of see it out that way. The other thing that the brands are doing are also white listing Facebook ads. So they will ask for an opportunity, what does that mean? So they will basically take the posts that you do for them and then they will sponsor it. So they will pay the money to sponsor it as an ad and then that will run for a certain amount of time time. So obviously if the brand is doing that, then they’re going to be saturating you even more, which means more money in your pocket.
RV: (33:28)
Hi. So that, so you do a, like you create a post on Facebook, like a video of like a product review or something like, Hey, I love this microphone. It’s amazing microphone
JS: (33:39)
And that’s sponsored. So you’re getting money in your pocket to create that piece of content for the brand and then the brands going into your Facebook ads and they are putting money in and promoting that post. Exactly.
RV: (33:53)
Yeah. Interesting. So you don’t make any money off of that, but they’re paying you to create it and then they’re exposing you to a bunch of people.
JS: (33:58)
Right. And what I say is to take it one step farther to say, yeah, you can boost my posts, but if you’re going to be doing that, we need to have terms. And limitations because you’re essentially oversaturating me to my followers and I need to be compensated for that.
RV: (34:13)
Yeah. So you’ve kind of worked that, worked at an a, this is so, so interesting. I mean, I think the thing of all of this, this is just, yeah, it comes back to that original piece about the confidence and just the siting. Like, you know, I’m going to do this. So I have one little, one last little thing I want to ask you about before we do that, where do you want people to go to connect with you and follow you? You’ll, we’ll put a link to your website and pitch it perfect in in the, you know, recap, show notes of this, but is there where, where’s the best place to find you?
JS: (34:48)
Yeah. So if you want to learn more about that, that specific skillset of pitching [inaudible] been talking about today, you can go to pigite perfect.net and then if you want free resources on an array of things including pitching, branding, marketing, I of course have the influence or podcast and you can find [email protected] or iTunes, stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. And then my website is just Julie solomon.net and there is where you can learn more about me. I have a lot of free resources on there as well. And then of course it links to the various other things that we’ve talked about today too.
RV: (35:23)
Love it, love it, love it, love it. So we’ll link, we’ll link all that up as well. So the last thing I want to, to have you talk about is when, when, when you came here, you came to Vaden villa, you, you were, we did a two day strategy session with you and John was there and loved it, loved meeting you guys. And I think we became friends out of that. But the, there was something that you said that has stuck with me ever since was you, you have this thing, I just, I love this so much called special snowflake syndrome. And again, I think the thing that just sticks with me from, from you is just that decision to just go and just freaking do it. Can you, can you just land the plane by talking to us about what a special snowflake syndrome. How do you know if you have it, what, what, what is the problem with special snowflake syndrome? And then just like what do you do about it?
JS: (36:23)
Yeah, I know being diagnosed with sss can be detrimental to your, to your overall success. And again, it comes back to that confidence piece. So really to me, special snowflake syndrome is just an excuse. It is a way in which we use certain circumstances to keep ourselves small, to limit ourselves and to make up excuses as to why we can’t achieve something. So an example would be, you know, I, you know, I don’t, I should, I shouldn’t have to worry about sales and marketing, but I’m the influencer. I should just be able to cope. Did to create my pretty content and to post it on Instagram and to do my Instagram stories. I shouldn’t have to learn about business. I shouldn’t have to learn about strategy yesterday. I have to learn about this finance syndrome or this finance stuff. And it’s like, well no, you’re in special snowflake syndrome.
JS: (37:13)
They’re, you know, you think that you’re just this special snowflake who doesn’t have to worry about certain things or it doesn’t have to figure out certain things. And also that idea of when we kind of get into a little bit of that idea of I’m, I’m powerless or I’m helpless to something, right? Like, I just can’t grow no matter what I do. Or I just don’t have enough time to figure that out. Or there’s no way I’ll ever have enough money to invest in myself. I just can’t do that. I’m not like everyone else. It’s like, no, you’re in special snowflake syndrome. You know, the, we all have the same amount of time of day. We all choose to use it, how we choose to use it. It’s really goes back to that accountability piece that you really have to start being responsible and accountability for the, for your own beliefs and for the decisions and choices that you make. Because really at the end of the day, the only thing that you do have power over is yourself and your thoughts and the truth voices and the beliefs that you choose to have. You are actually kind of powerless to everything else outside of that, but it’s that idea that, you know, I’m so different. I’m so unique. Woe is me. No one can understand me. No one can, can understand what it’s like to walk in my shoes. Therefore nothing will ever work for me. That’s the special snowflake syndrome.
RV: (38:31)
I love this so much. Suck it up. Yeah. Is Great. Great. Great. Well Julie, thanks for sharing your story. Thanks for your inspiration. Also, you know, your strategic clarity and your tactical clarity but just kind of your, your mission and I know you’re, you’re inspired to help people get their message out. So it’s been, it’s been wonderful having you, as always, we’ll continue to promote you and thanks for, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.
Ep 43: Get Started with Ed Tate | Recap Episode
RV: (00:01)
Welcome to the special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. Man, I love Ed Tate. I’m so glad that you got to meet him and I’m excited to break this down for you. It’s sort of fitting that I’m filling in for AJ doing this recap just by myself, but because I’ve known Ed for years and, and in fact I’ve known Ed longer than I’ve known AAJ and he was one of my early mentors and you know, we honestly hadn’t had a conversation about the business about like how to grow your business and build, build a business in recent years because we just kind of become friends and usually catch up about friends’ stuff. And so I am honored that we got to see us to do that with you here as a part of the podcast. And so this is our recap, right?
RV: (00:51)
So what we’re doing is, is I’m going to share with you the big highlights, the big takeaways, at least that, that I took away from this interview, especially again, having known Ed for so long. And I think hearing his mentality and his outlook on business affects me differently now than when I first started. And the first thing that he said that really stuck with me that I think is super important for you, right, is he said, there is business in every economy as long as you reach outside the walls every day. So what he’s saying there is, look, the economy’s always changing, right? Sometimes there’s great market economy, sometimes there’s down economy, great Mark is bad markets. Yeah, sometimes there’s like a virus that breaks out and that affects the world. Or sometimes there’s a natural disaster, a tsunami or a, you know, there’s wildfires.
RV: (01:51)
Like there’s political elections, there’s Wars, there’s all of these things that are constantly happening in the world, constantly shaping the market or the landscape, new competitors, new technology, et cetera. But, but what he is saying is so critical and it’s like, if you don’t believe this, I don’t know how you can succeed longterm. And what he’s saying is that you have to believe and you have to know that there is business in every economy, every market, every, every condition or circumstance by which the world can be operating or what’s happening around us in the world. There is always business to be had because if you are an expert, if you really know something that can help people, people are always going to struggle with problems. They’re always going to struggle with motivation. They’re always going to need somebody to help them grow and develop and improve, whether it’s great economies or bad economies.
RV: (02:54)
And the key thing though is that you have to be willing to reach out. You have to be willing in all markets, good and bad to tell people about what you do. And I think Ed said something like, you have to have 20 different ways that people can find out about you. And I think that is is true. You need to have lots of ways that people can find out about you. I mean, generally speaking, we love to, you know, one of the things we do at brand builders group is we help people get really clear and phase one, you know, so we’ve got these nine essential phases. And the, the in phase one brand identification we talk about, you know, getting clear, we talk about getting clear on one message, you know, one audience, one business model and one medium. Meaning that those are your primary focuses, but almost always you can repurpose the content that you’re doing and ultimately in many different places and as long as you’re just repurposing things and spreading it across multiple mediums where people can find you.
RV: (03:59)
Like you got to have a lot of, a lot of you’ve got to have a lot of fishing poles in the water so to speak. Like you got to have a lot of, a lot of things out there. I remember hearing a speaker one time say you need to pump intellectual property out into the market as fast as you possibly can. You need to publish everywhere as much as you can. Publish audio, video, the written word, the spoken word, like publish on social media and white papers and blogs. And I don’t think he was advocating to say, look, it, you have to do all of these things to be successful. What he was saying is the more that you can systemize and habitualize and, and operationalize the idea of your ideas, getting out there, your outreach, your message, your movement, your, your brand, you’ve got to get it out there.
RV: (04:51)
And if you do that, you’ll survive in any economy. Like there’s, there’s businesses that do well in every economy. And so that was just a fresh reminder for me. And I think really just important because, and it is also to every experience level, right? Like some of you that are our clients, right? Like you might be listening in and maybe you’re earlier in your journey and you think, Oh my gosh, you know, I’m competing against all these more experienced people. But I’ll tell you on the other side of that, I’ve got tons of friends who’ve been in this industry for 20 to 25 years and they’re battling because there’s all these new people coming up into their fee range and stuff, and so they’re having to kind of battle to stay at the top. So everyone is battling, so to speak. But as long as you are believing in what you do and you’re pumping out content and you’re helping people, you can win and in any, any market.
RV: (05:48)
So that’s, that’s really good. The second thing from ed, which I thought was related to this, and I never actually heard him say this before, is he has this, this philosophy that he says, never put up a zero. Never put up a zero. In other words, on any given day, you can’t let the sun fall without having done something productive that moved your business forward right there. That even if you don’t make a sale per se, right? Like, even if you don’t get a contract, even if you don’t get a new customer, you should always, you should always go for at least one new piece of business every day. That’s what he was saying. I thought, I thought that was powerful. And it’s interesting because we used to teach sales so much and it’s been almost two years since I’ve taught sales specifically and it’s going to be a little while before we get back into teaching some of that.
RV: (06:44)
But to hear Ed talk about, Hey, don’t let the day end without getting a new piece of business. That’s a great mentality or mindset. But, but, but the part that I really loved was that he followed that up with at least get a new appointment. Right? If you can’t get a new customer, at least get a new appointment. If you can’t get a new appointment, at least get a new contact to follow up with. So there’s, there’s something that you’re doing on any given day that that is advancing the business. There is, is, is some marketing acquisition that you’re doing. And even if you can’t generate the revenue, you should be getting appointment. If you can’t get an appointment, at least talk to somebody new every day. And again, I haven’t been able to talk much about this over the last couple of years. And so it was interesting to kind of have someone else talking to me about it and was really, really good reminder.
RV: (07:40)
Now the last one I think honestly, I think is the most important one. I really do believe this and this take away [inaudible] one of the reasons I believe it’s true is because when I look at people like Ed, I see this habit in their life. [inaudible] When I look at our most successful clients, right? Like people who we help at brain builders group and I, and, and you know, we’ve had some really great wins in the, in the last year we’ve had, we’ve had clients hit number one, Amazon bestsellers. We’ve had people get on the today show we’ve had people grow their, their, their social media followings by over 50,000 people. Like we, we’ve had some clients that have really had some massive wins just here in like our first year of working with people. And you know, I see this to be true in them.
RV: (08:35)
And then when I look in my own life, I see this to be absolutely true. And when you hear it, it might sound like a marketing ploy, but it’s really not. It’s if you could just like put your, put your defense mechanism down for a second, like put your wall down for a second and just, just hear this Ed said, is you have to invest in your dream. You have to invest in your dream. Like you have to spend money on your dream. You have to spend time on your dream and look, even if you never buy anything from brand builders group, that’s totally fine. But understand this truth. In fact, Randy gage said this to me one time when I was younger and this always stuck with me. He said, you should, you have to be the number one investor in your own dream.
RV: (09:27)
Like, if you wouldn’t invest in you, why would anyone else, you know, I think about shark tank, like these people who go on shark tank and they’re asking for all this money. And one of the questions the sharks always ask is they say, how much money have you put in? Because they want to see that you believe in your own dream to the extent that you’ve put your own money. And that’s what winners do. That’s what ultra performers do. That’s what multipliers do. That’s what influencers do. That’s what hall of fame speakers in New York times bestselling authors and world champions of public speaking and, and you’ll huge celebrity followings. They invest in their own dream. And I think so often we’re reluctant to invest in our dream because either we think it’s stupid or we’re not sure it’ll work out. Or you know, honestly, sometimes we’re skeptical because we feel like, Oh, I don’t want someone to take advantage of me.
RV: (10:18)
And it’s not that at all. Like, look, doctors spend more money than anybody else in their education, right? Like they spend tons and tons of money on education. It should be no different for entrepreneurs. It’s just that your education happens in a different place. It doesn’t happen in a traditional school because traditional schools aren’t really set up. Most traditional schools, there are some, but most of them aren’t really set up for the entrepreneurial environment for like a small business environment. That’s just not the way the institutions are typically structured and most of the professors and things don’t have that kind of experience. So but it’s the same truth. It’s the same path. And so that’s just a question to think about, right? Is are you investing in your own dream? Like are you actually willing to put your own money where your mouth is? And if you’re not, then that should tell you something.
RV: (11:16)
You know what? What I think it says is I think it says this is a still a, this isn’t even a dream. This is a fantasy, right? This is something that is like this figment of your imagination that you kind of would love to be. It become true, but you haven’t actually backed that up with commitment. You actually haven’t gotten to the point of believing that maybe this could be a reality. You haven’t stepped forward with dedication, you, you, you haven’t actually added the element of even making this dream a possible reality. The moment that you invest right moment, you say, all right, I’m going to put some money in and it doesn’t have to be your life savings. You don’t have to mortgage your house always, right? Some people do that. You don’t have to do that. I’ve never been the guy who’s is mortgaged my house.
RV: (12:04)
I’ve always been the guy that was like, all right, I’m going to go generate some revenue. I’m going to go acquire a customer and then I’m going to invest most or all of that right back into the business and get the next one and then reinvest and get the next one and keep my lifestyle low, right? While we invest in the next thing. And, and that’s, that’s why brand builders group is set up. Like, look, I’ll just go ahead and share this with you. I know people see brand builders group and they see, Oh, you guys work with Lewis Howes. And Julie Solomon and Kevin Harrington from shark tank and Suzanne Hendricks, right? Like she’s got a million followers like, and people think or, or Mike Johnson from, from The Bachelor, right? So, Mike recently was one of our clients came to one of our events, right?
RV: (12:52)
And people see that we’re working with these and they assume that everything we do is expensive. One of the reasons why brand builders group is set up the way that it is is yes, we do some very high level one-on-one stuff for some high level entrepreneurs. These are people that make real money, right? They’re, they’re high six figures, seven figures, multi seven figures, eight figures. We have clients that have nine figure businesses. Like we have clients that do hundred million dollars in revenue in their, in their real business, and then they’re building their personal brand. But we will always as a company be set up to offer a low price point product. And we like our lowest price point product at this point is a $99 a month subscription. And the reason is, is because when I started my dream, I didn’t have any money.
RV: (13:44)
Like when I started, when I, the first time I said, I want to be a professional speaker. I didn’t have any money. I spent like the last $600 I had flying to take a humor course from Darren LaCroix, who’s one of ed Tate’s good friends and they’ve been business partners and joint done lots of joint ventures and things together because I identified humor as a place that I needed to get better. And that was like such a huge amount of money for me. And so brand builders group is always going to have something for people who are just starting out. And you know, at $100 a month, it’s gotta be something, right? If it’s $5 a month, it’s not enough to make somebody care. It’s not enough to make somebody show up. And, and frankly, I, I firmly believe that the education that we are providing to people is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that is available for $99 a month.
RV: (14:39)
And again, I’m not, I’m not making a sales pitch here for our service. I’m, I’m trying to illustrate this point though, that the people who break through the wall believe in themselves and, and one of the ways you know that you believe in yourself, like you have to give yourself a chance. And in one of the ways that you know that you’ve actually given yourself a chance is that you put some money in. Like you went to a conference, you’ve read some books, you’ve taken some classes you’ve learned from some people. And that is something that, like I said, I have done, these are our most successful clients have done. And I don’t mean with us, I mean with they got to be successful before we ever even saw them. They were investing in all sorts of things. So you got to invest, you got to believe in your own dream.
RV: (15:25)
You got to at least be willing to give yourself a shot to give yourself a chance and say, you know what, if there’s one thing I’m going to invest in, if there’s one thing I’m going to put my money and it’s not real estate. It’s not a market, it’s, it’s not. It’s, it’s in me, it’s in my brain. It’s that I’m going to say that the most valuable asset that I can invest money into is my own brain, my own mind, my own personal development. And that is something that winners do and we believe it’s so much that we will, no matter how famous our clients are, are. And no matter how big our client roster is, we are always going to have something. For those of you that are just starting out, no, our goal is going to be to escalate you, right? Like our goal is going to be able to help you learn enough that you can make money so that you can reinvest that into doing more with us because we want you to grow and we can’t, you know, we can serve you at a deeper level, right?
RV: (16:20)
Like our virtual training is, it’s education, it’s education directly from me and AJ and all of our senior strategists, but we know ultimately our goal is to get you into a one on one coaching environment with one of our strategists and to get you to our live events because we know that that’ll serve you faster and in a deeper way, but not everyone can start there, but whether it’s with us or whether it’s with somebody else, you’ve got to invest, right? Like you’ve got to place that bet on yourself. Don’t be afraid of losing. Don’t be afraid of failing and don’t be afraid of being taken advantage of someone. I can say firmly, I’ve, I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on my own education and there are certain types of education that are better than others. There is no doubt about it, but I have never invested in any program where I didn’t at least learn enough to get my money back.
RV: (17:19)
Right? Like there are some where it’s like, man, that that experience could have been, they could have charged a hundred times what they were charging and I would have paid for and I would’ve got my money back. And that’s what we strive to do at brand builders group. But there’s never been one course that I bought that I didn’t at least learn something from or one conference that I went to that I didn’t at least get a great idea from. But you got to take that shot and no one else can do that. And, and if anyone else gives you the money, it’s not the same. It’s not the same as you betting on you, right? So again, I don’t care who it’s with, but if you have this dream, if you have this calling, if you have this message inside of you, then you have to take a chance on you believe in yourself, make that investment of money and time and work. Never put up a zero and believe that if you just do all of these things day in and day out, ultimately you, well, when that’s all for this one brand builder, we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 42: Get Started with Ed Tate
RV: (00:01)
Yeah, there was a time when I had a dream the first time I had a dream to be a professional speaker and I didn’t know exactly what that entailed. And one of the first people I encountered on that journey is the man you’re about to hear from Ed Tate, who now at this point we have known each other for coming up on 15 years and he is wild to think about that cause this, this man literally knew me like at the very, very beginning. He and I were actually in the same toastmaster club and he had just won the world championship of public speaking, which was the biggest thing that I could ever imagine at that time and was one of several people who mentored me. He is also a certified speaking professional. He has really been a corporate trainer and keynote speaker for you know, the last 20 plus years and he’s fantastic on stage. He’s also an executive coach and does a lot of like kind of presentation coaching for media and you know, people who present like a winning high stakes presentation. So anybody who has like an important presentation, whether that’s a keynote or just like presenting and he has a fascinating journey that I think is different from a path that you, you may, you may hear about often. So so glad to have you old friend. Welcome back and thank you for being here.
ET: (01:22)
Well, thank you for inviting me, Rory. I really appreciate it.
RV: (01:25)
So at Brand Builders Group, we study reputation, you know, that’s our new space. We like that. Our little pivot from, you know, everything was all about discipline and now we’re all about reputation, which are kind of connected. But you know, when you just hear that word, you know, like you’re someone I think of just as a great reputation. Everyone knows you’re a great guy, you’re gonna kill it on stage every single time. But when you hear the word reputation, what do you think about, like what is your definition of it? What are your personal philosophies on building one and, you know, how important has it been in your career? And, and just give us like a little bit on that
ET: (02:02)
Reputation. I think it’s that mental space that you possess in someone else’s head. That’s what a reputation is. You know, when we think of, you know, the, the tried and true examples, McDonald’s, you know, I’ll or FedEx, et cetera, FedEx just rang my doorbell just a couple seconds ago. They have specific reputations and you know, I think the worst reputation you can have is like no reputation and that is be the best secret that no one’s ever heard of, you know. So I think that’s one of the challenges Here’s something else to consider as well. You know, like you mentioned, I’ve been in this business, there’ll be, it’s actually 19 years this year and you’re doing this professionally.
ET: (02:44)
Condoleezza Rice said you never wanted to be the past, anything, you know, and, and I think that you’re constantly want to evolve. You, you constantly want to develop your brand. You constantly want your brand to stay with the times and the relevant, if you will. So in my particular case I got my start my jump by winning the world championship of public speaking and we can talk about that like a little bit later on. Okay. That helped my career and then I became a CSP, a certified speaking professional, that helped my career. I was in this space called making managers into leaders. So for example, my customers or my clients, they know me it with that brand in that particular space. Does that make sense what I’m saying? So far? Yeah. And I’ve, I’ve constantly tried, like your company is evolving into a new space. Okay. You’re into brand building, right? Right. Okay. You are disciplined before or that was the brand before you’re evolving because the marketplace says this is something that you need to do. And I think this is something critical for all of us
RV: (03:46)
And be the one that compete. Okay.
ET: (03:52)
Well number one, like when you’re starting out, you know, what is your brand? You have to establish your brand. And then number two is you got to get the word out in terms of what is your brand. Cause if you don’t I think the worst thing you can have is saying this sameness as the enemy of any presenter or any company when you look and sound the same like everyone else. And that’s a Patricia Fripp Buddhism if you will. Then no one that no one’s going to recognize you.
RV: (04:18)
Huh. Well I think that’s really interesting because I think a lot of people who are just starting on their personal brand journey, like they either are doing the work of figuring out who they are and what their brand is about. Or there’s some people who immediately jump into like telling a bunch of people but they’re not totally clear on it. And, and it’s like you have to do both. You know, we say the reputation formula is results times reach equals reputation. So I think that’s, I think that’s interesting. So I wanted to ask you about how you got your start as a personal, it was building your brand and one of the things that I think is, is you very unique about your, your past. I mean we have the world championship push. I want to hear about it. I want people to know what that is. But you also worked for a company doing other people’s content first and that’s a model that I think is really good for a lot of people that not enough people talk about everyone thinks I got to create my own content, I got to like build everything and do it all from scratch. And you know, if I remember correctly, you sort of started and spent a fair bit of time like teaching other people’s content. Okay,
ET: (05:26)
First. Yeah. Why? I worked for a company called career track career track at the time was the largest public seminar company in the world and I worked for them for exactly 18 months. So it was, it was part of my strategy to get experience and I wanted to like a, there’s a friend of ours, his name is Darren Lacroix and he says stage time, stage time, stage time. I wanted to get a lot of stage time, so that was my purpose. That was my strategy to get a lot of stage time and I did that for exactly 18 months. Then I worked for another company called them like leadership and we would get leadership programs and I did that for like another two years, but it was a strategy that a got me a great deal. That was a stage time number two. It also got me a lot of credible customers and that can actually put on my resume, if you will.
ET: (06:14)
So, you know, for example, glaxosmithkline, Johnson and Johnson and Nielsen, Nielsen Ratings Company, you name it. Like if you go to my website, so who’s who of Corporate America? Well, because I worked for this other company, I was able to legitimately claim that I actually work with those particular organizations. It gave me the other, the third thing is that for me, it gave me, it may be bulletproof onstage. I honestly believe this to be true and I know you have the same skill. There’s nothing on stage that can happen that I can handle. I got that experience by working for career track. For example, one, I’ll remember one particular client in particular a, the postal service in Dallas, Texas. Okay. And it is my first day leaving corporate America. Okay. It is my, this is my first Gig after I’ve left Corporate America, I’ve left this really nice paycheck. Okay. And seven o’clock in the morning and I’m passing out workbooks. I, I pass on a workbook to those good old boys, six with five of biscuits, shy of 300 pounds. And he just stands up and he yells, I don’t want to blank be here now. Blank is not the word he used.
ET: (07:22)
Anyway, immediately skew security comes in, they’ve got guns, Poles. And I’m thinking to myself, what is the, I can call my boss and still get my job back cause I’m thinking, well what in the hell have I gotten myself into? So apparently something had happened over the previous week and they, they were like this heightened alert, if you will. And the fact that this guy was yelling, they were just, you know, security was hyperspace sensitive sooner when they called the boss and the bosses, this woman she is, she’s not even five feet tall with high heels on. All right. She says, what’s going on here? They explained what was happening. So the good old boy, the boy, this woman and I, we walk out in the hallway now you got to see this. I’m watching this. This guy is huge. She’s this little tiny woman and this is back in the day when they had the Motorola flip phone and remember that I was like, you know, like a star Trek.
ET: (08:11)
So she said, Huh? She says, you’ve got two choices. Choice number one, you can go back there and shut up and listen to this guy for the rest of the day. Option number two is I’m going to call your boss and tell them what’s going on. So she whips out her a flip phone. She starts dialing a number. She says, I got one more digit. What’s it going to be? Hmm. Wow. Guess what he did? He went back in there and he shut up for the rest of the day. Now I did my program and the guy walked up to me and he apologized and said, you know, I apologized to you. I really needed to hear this. But the lesson I learned was this. It’s always your stage that woman taught me, no matter where you are, it’s always your stage, you know. So again, going back to the point, there’s nothing on stage that can’t handle, I love Dallas,
RV: (08:56)
A postal service because they, you know, I learned many, many lessons about being on stage and again, nothing that that can handle on stage. Yeah. Well and, and I think what that’s, that’s, that’s interesting and just a great model. I mean that’s, that’s the whole point is I want people to have their eyes open to her. You can start by working for someone else. You know, that’s a, that’s a good way to like kind of build up. And it’s real common. I if I remember right, I think Tony Robbins did that. I think mark Sanborn did that. He’s another hall of fame speaker. Mark St Horn. He was, he worked for career track. Laura Stack worked for career track a w as what if like a career track was called the crew track mafia cause it was actually basically
ET: (09:33)
Out of Colorado and does ward. There’s a lot of people who are actually in the speaking hall of fame today. Got Their start working for someplace else. Now the flip side of this is this do it only for limited amount of time. And what I mean by that, it is so easy to do it for, you know, for years and years and years. When I started doing this, I knew specifically 18 months, I literally quit 18 months to the day regardless of how popular I was with the company because I, I saw other people be there for eight nine, 10 1115 years and I didn’t want that to happen to me because I realized if I did that I would never be able to start my own business,
RV: (10:13)
Which is what you wanted to do. So some people may be okay with that, but like if you have the vision, then it’s like you’re using it as a stepping stone deliberately. Exactly. How did you make the, tell me, how did you, how did you make the leap? Like how did you actually start? I also happen to, you were being very highly paid in a corporate environment. That’s not an easy thing to walk away from the, and then when does toastmasters show up on the scene and like what, what does it mean to be the world? I mean you are literally the world champion of public speaking and there’s probably a lot of people that have not actually heard that term before. So, so walk us through like that transition of what it felt like to leap and how you did it and you know how to toastmasters fit into that. Okay, so I’m a, I’m going to tell you a story that you haven’t heard before. Okay. How I got started with this in the first place. A number one is I’m a stutterer. Okay. And there is no cure. First
ET: (11:10)
Salary. And when you grew up in a neighborhood where your stutter, guess what kids are, they’re horrible. You’re absolutely horrible. So my dad was in the military and we would move to a new neighborhood almost every 18 months to two years. So we’re moving to Chicago and I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. So one thing I did in preparation to move to this new neighborhood, because I didn’t want the new kiss and know that at the start or cause they’re gonna make fun of me in school. So I read newspapers out loud. I used to practice in the mirror during the summer. Kids usually like to play basketball. And that was really good at doing play by play outside doing basketball. I was so good that the other kids would give me their names and I would just do that.
ET: (11:50)
But it was a way for me to actually practice speaking. So how do I get started in this is I don’t want to be made fun of by kids. That was my motivation. I happen to go to a high school that had an a a TV station. I was a news anchor for four years. I went to a college that I actually got a job as a disc jockey. I was a number one disc jockey, my entire four, not a college station and actual radio station. And I did that. So these things prepared me for not looking back on it. In hindsight, those things prepared me. So when I actually competed for the world championship and the year 2000, those things prepared me. At the time I wasn’t executive, I was actually working for the Denver Rocky Mountain News. I was their, their, their training director and they were very, very supportive of me at that particular time.
ET: (12:35)
Now for those of you who don’t know what the world championship is, it’s a year long competition, 25 to 35,000 contestants and in the year 2001 the entire thing, Rory knows about this cause he’s been on a big stage a couple times twice. It is. And I want to tell you this, I, Hey, don’t make it on the stages as remarkable. You know, it’s absolutely remarkable. And most of you, if you follow Rory, you know how good he is on stage. You know, I like to say too, anybody can win at once. It takes a real man to lose twice.
ET: (13:14)
Okay. You keep going with that story. Okay. Anyway, so then your next question, how to make that transition. I, I literally, I told my wife, I said, I really want to try this. I said, I think this is something I really, really enjoy it and really good. The fact that I won the world championship, I got like a lot of the media attention right away. People dear old started approaching me, et Cetera for the first time. So I was at the right place at the right time, et cetera. So I got a lot of attention. I also knew that this was temporary and it wouldn’t last. So I I, I relied on my business acumen skills. I said to myself, this is something that I actually have to promote. I have to market. I just can’t wait. I can’t just sit back and wait for the phone to ring.
ET: (13:59)
So it was combination of taking advantage of the opportunity, which would tap into me and also marketing myself. You and I, you know, this is a term of endearment. We’re sales dogs. And what I mean by that is we both know how to sell. We both have know how to market, you know, we don’t have to close deals, we know how to close business, et cetera. So I’ve made a decision. The decision was like, if I could not make the same type of income I was making in corporate America, this was going to be a hobby. I was very, very clear about that. Being on stages, addictive. People love it, they love the attention, the adulation. But for me is I have a family. I got to take care of my family and if this ft I can’t make the same type of income that I made before then I was going to go back to corporate America. I went to my wife and I told her, I said, it’s going to take me a year to get this off the ground. Just give me a year. And if, if I can’t get it off the ground, I would go back to corporate America. So after a year we still weren’t making the income that we, that I was accustomed to. Now at the same time,
RV: (14:58)
I don’t hear as fast though. Like that’s, that’s, I mean that’s fast.
ET: (15:03)
The way I looked at it, I didn’t have a choice. It was just like it was going to be a year or not. Now I also told my wife, I says like your, your lifestyle will not change. Fortunately for me, I had a lot of money in the bank. I didn’t have to work for four years if I didn’t want to. Wow. I said, your lifestyle will not change. So if I can’t make this happen in a year, I will interview and I had a reputation in the computer industry. I’ll become an executive again. And that’s what happened because of the income wasn’t there. I interviewed, I did kind of cheat a little bit and what I mean by that is that I told the company that I am not going to start for six months. So I actually bought myself an 18 month window and that was a point where I started to see that the income was going to match my previous income. And then from that point in time I never looked back.
RV: (15:45)
So what were you doing like, like I think this is the thing like it’s interesting to hear you say this was one of the reasons that I wanted to have you beyond the fact. Interesting side note, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this. I tell a lot of our members and stuff that I s I studied 20 years of world championship footage, I graphed all the presentations. I measured the average number of lasts, the amount of time to the message, how many times they hit the message. And a lot of people think of Darren. Darren was like my humor mentor, right? And people think of him as the funniest, but your speech has the most number of laughs. I know. And a lot of people don’t give you credit for that. But
ET: (16:26)
So back, there’s a book where they actually documented the number of laughs of links of the labs, et Cetera. So I’m number one. I always pull that over him. Every time I see him
RV: (16:36)
There it is. So, but, but so you won the world championship. And I think what I want people to see is, you know, you might think, oh, something happens like that and that’s how you become a speaker and all of a sudden you’re a speaker the rest of your life. So it’s kind of like I want, I want people to be in touch with both the reality of you, you it, even doing something like that, you still have to promote yourself and also be in touch with the reality that even if you don’t do it, you know, and like I, I guess that would be an example. Although I got, I got pretty close that you can still build this, you can still build the career without it. What matters is not so much the trophy, it’s, it’s, it’s the process and the hustle after that. So what were you doing to get clean?
ET: (17:20)
Okay. So I’m going to jump ahead seven years because the experience I have is not a normal experience. And that is, again, I got media coverage, media attention right away. I got, I got an agent, I got speakers bureaus, I got training companies. That’s not a normal,
RV: (17:40)
Not anymore particularly these told about that time. It really did kind of like, it happened instantly
ET: (17:46)
And I also was smart enough to, I constantly had to market myself as well, so I can’t, so that happened that there was a seven year window, Rory. I literally didn’t have to pick up a phone and then we had to the worldwide economic crisis of 2007. So I want to pick up my stories from there. I lost it all. I lost the agents, I lost the training companies, I lost the consulting firms. They all went away. I had a half a million dollar business and it went to two zero in two weeks. Okay. A person I called up at the time was mark Sanborn. Mark Sanborn. Is he speaking hall of fame? I’m pretty sure your, your followers know who he is. You’d just Google him. And I explained to him what happened and and he said, ed, what you need to do is let go and let God, and he says, you need to get your hustle on.
ET: (18:33)
You know, you need to let this go. Because I was so distraught, you know, and I was like, Oh, poor, poor, pitiful me pour for filled pedal for me. And then I called up another friend of mine and her name is Lisa Joe Lansburgh. And again, I was about to cry this, this about the had this pity party, right? And she said to me, she says, ed, I can’t talk to you now. I says, what do you mean at least Joe, you went to my best friends, you know, why can’t you talk to me now? She says, I just found out my next door neighbor, they’re little, they’re four year old and their five year old daughters have been assaulted. Can’t talk to you now. In that moment it was like, you know, there are significantly more important things in the world than you losing your business.
ET: (19:17)
These little girls have lost their childhood, you know, and they’re never going to get that back. And my pity party was literally the over that day it was over and I said, and just like mark Sanborn had advised me, get your hustle on. So every day I have this philosophy, never put up a zero. And what I mean by that, every day, reach outside of these four walls and tell somebody about and ask for business. Now am I successful every day? No, but you know what? I like my chances, you know? And actually that was that philosophy. Help me make it through. Starting from scratch. 20 think about 2007 2008 worldwide economic is the, the, the Great Depression of our lifetime. It’s never, the economy’s always your economy and there’s business and every single economy, as long as you’re willing to reach outside of your four walls every day. That’s what I learned.
ET: (20:12)
So guess what? I still do that to this day. I’ve just closed a deal yesterday. You know, a coaching client yesterday. Guess what? I reached out every single day. Never put up a zero. Now, there are times when I put up Zeros. Yes, absolutely. Here’s the key. If you don’t, if you, if you, if you do put up a zero, don’t beat yourself up. Sometimes you know your schedule doesn’t work out so you can’t reach outside your four walls. Start a new wedding straight. So that was my mindset. That was my philosophy. But that’s like, that’s like maybe you’re putting up a zero in terms of a client, but it’s never, it’s never zero in terms of
RV: (20:48)
Effort. Like you’re exactly, you’re always making that. You’re always making that call. You’re always sending that email. You’re always making that out. Yeah.
ET: (20:55)
New when something there’s, you could do one thing every single day. If you do one thing every day, let’s, what is it like 260 business days? That’s 260 outreaches. If you just do one activity a day, guess what? You’re going to, you’re going to get some business. If your readings out once a day for 260 business days, you’re going to get business. You’re going to stumble across the business.
RV: (21:16)
Yeah. Well, so talking about keynote, so it sounds like, you know, for awhile, that’s interesting. I didn’t actually realize you did sort of have the fantasy of sound like for a little while, for a little while. Like it was in a way, I guess back in those days it was w you know, there’s an element of the world championship that is a little bit like American idol. You know, it’s a big for people in that space that know it. It’s, it’s a big freaking deal. You know, and we traveled the world for five or six years after speaking to groups. That was how we saw the world. And that was a big part of how I started my career, even though I didn’t I didn’t when I came in second for, for the record.
ET: (21:53)
But Rory, here’s the point. It wasn’t necessary that you want. Yeah. They, some people still treat you like a world champion. They saw you on the big stage and you were smart enough to leverage it. And that’s the lesson here. You know, actually, you know what has actually meant more to my career than winning the world championship is being a CDSP. And here’s the cool part about being a CSP. A CSP is everyone who’s listening to this, you know to this broadcast, they can become a CSP. There’s only one person who wins a world championship every way. It’s not the trophy, it’s the metal. You know, I gotta I have a metal right there that says I’m a CSP. You know, I’ll only word that one day. You know what, it’s, the CSP actually has meant more to me and more to my career then than the trophy and then winning it. So you were able to leverage it. You’re proof. What I’m saying is that that puts you on a platform and you ready to deliver that platform.
RV: (22:52)
That is the point that eds no, I, I totally get that. And that is, you know, I never really thought about that. Yeah. The only one person gets to be a world championship, but to CSP that Ed’s talking about is called certified speaking professional. It’s the highest ranking earned designation that is available through the National Speakers Association, which is sort of the governing body of the speaking profession specifically. Ed and I are both CSPs and you, you, you know, they try, they have to, you have to, they audit like all your clients and all this stuff. So, so on the topic of speaking, just since that’s sort of like the world that we play in and we live in, where do speaking gigs actually come from even today? Is it, is it, is it the outreaches that, like if you go, okay, I got so many speaking gigs on my calendar, like where do they in, in real life, where do they come
ET: (23:46)
From? How do you, how do you get them? Is it called outreach or what? So it’s a combination of things. And I’m sure you teach this to your followers, you know, it is a combination of you know, writing leads to wealth. Okay. So it starts, it starts with writing, you know, so like a, if you have, you know, if you have a podcast, if you have a newsletter, et Cetera, whatever your intellectual property is, make sure that you get it out to the world. So writing leads to, well, so like that’s, that’s one form of outreach. Another form of, I’m a salesperson, so I’m sold a half a billion dollars worth of computers in my career. I have no compunction whatsoever calling cold calling companies. Now that’s old school and I know how to do it. And we do that on a regular basis. We also have marketing campaigns.
ET: (24:35)
And what I mean by that is, so for example, I have an assistant, so my assistant, she has access to three of four different databases. We, we on Mondays we go through these complete databases. We, we identify organizations that have putting on conferences, et Cetera, where I would be a good fit. And then when, what we do is we identify those particular individuals and then we started an email campaign to them and we send out three emails that go out over six weeks where people respond to them. We we, we send them information about us and we get into conversations. And then for the people who don’t respond to us, we put them in the, into the pot for next year. So that’s part of our process. So we have a system that we use every single day that we make sure that something from our organization is going now.
ET: (25:23)
And right now we’ve got, we’ve got like pretty much on an automatic process. So you have to have some type of system where there’s, you know, and using technology, using people. However, whatever type of system that you have that constantly sends out who you are, what your brand is, publishing your brand. Cause I think it’s a killer for you not to do outreach in some form or another. You don’t have to do cold calling. That’s my super power. I’m a former C level executive. I think I can call, I can get on the phone today and call a c level executive Cole, because I’ve been in her position, I’ve been in his position. Does that make sense? And this the thing I’m inviting people to do. What’s your strength? So for example, with me, I suck at social media except linkedin. I’m damn good at linkedin.
ET: (26:10)
Linkedin has made me thousands of thousands dollars. I haven’t made it. I haven’t made a quarter from Facebook. Okay. So Facebook doesn’t work for me, but you know, use the tool or use the channel that works for you. That, that would be my advice. Now, am I going to ignore Facebook? Of course not. I got to figure it out. You know I want to leverage youtube more. I want to, I want to do live streaming more. So these are things that I need to get better at. These are rope. These are roadblocks for me today. But you know, if you interviewed me a year from now, Rory, I’m a, I’m a figure it
RV: (26:44)
[Inaudible] yeah, I think it’s a, that’s an interesting distinction too. I think there’s a lot more people who are in the brand builders group community that are good at social media and are wanting to be a speaker. Then there are speakers and that don’t use social media. And I think it’s interesting, the speaking world is one that social media certainly helps just because it’s an avenue to pump your intellectual property out there, but a lot like I would, I would venture to say a lot of the busiest speakers I know the highest paid speakers do not have a huge social media presence. And if it, I mean there are some, when you get into the celebrity level of speaking basically, so there are certain social media people who become celebrities. This is the j Shetty’s of the world right now. Mel Robbins, Rachel Hollis, of course, Rachel wrote a book that sold millions of copies sold and Mel Robbins Jay Shetty would be a good example. Gary Vaynerchuk would be a good example. I like that. But that’s the rare, rare exception. Most of the people who are making a living as a speaker, it’s not really coming from social media per se. It’s more from being out speaking, just introducing, showing videos of them, talking and like getting them in front of the people who book, who book meetings.
ET: (27:59)
Well, once thing I did is I invested, I have this phrase, invest for your interest. So I you’re like in the middle of the economic crisis in 2007, 2008, I did something counterintuitive. I actually spent more money on coaches and investing in programs than I did the previous decade. Counterintuitive. The reason I did that is because the world as I knew it in terms of marketing and promoting myself no longer existed. It didn’t work and I needed fresh ideas. I also needed someone to hold me accountable. So one of the programs I enrolled in, and it wasn’t to coach anybody, it was for me to learn about marketing is I became a certified girl marketing coach. And here’s one of the things I learned from that is I have, I did not have enough channels in terms of people finding out about me. I had a website, I had a business card, I had a, a, a one sheet package and that was it.
ET: (28:56)
I only have three ways that people could ever find out about me. Guerrilla marketing and says you must have a minimum of 10 and I’m going to say today you got to have a minimum of 20 social media is only one. It’s not like, oh I’m on Facebook, I’m on this. None of that. No, no, no, no. That’s just one type of channel that’s only, that’s on the van. Only counts as one. What are different ways that people can find out about you in terms of your business? So I think one of the things that, you know, again, I’m going to call them ordinary everyday people, you know, non household names. What you need to do is you need to have multiple channels in terms of how people find out about you and your, and your company is perfectly positioned to do that for them.
RV: (29:38)
Yeah. I mean we, and we teach those of you that are watching, that are familiar. When we teach the con the content diamond is a big thing that we talk about, you know, creating one piece of content, just tearing it apart and repurposing and all these different outlets and, and so forth and so on. But I agree with that. I, I remember I heard someone say one time they said, you need to pump your content out into the world as fast as possible and as many mediums as possible, every which way you can. You can get it. And it’s just, it’s just a matter of people knowing about you. And, and that became one of our taglines at brand builders group was like, if, if people, people don’t know about you, they can’t do business with you. I love, I love what you’re, what you’re saying there Ed.
RV: (30:23)
So buddy, we could go on and on and on about this stuff. I think this is so fun for me to walk down. Some of it nostalgic. Where should people go connect with you if they kind of want to follow you and, and, and see what you do and, and you know, just stay plugged into what you have going on. You can, you know, the easiest is this like Ed tech.com EDTA t.com and you can find my, you know, Facebook and all my social media. You can find it from there. So if I’m not promoting anything, so if you want, you want to hang out with me, find going to connect me with me. Just go there. Yeah. Well, and I mean, when it comes to presentation coaching, I mean, I still to this day, like, you know, the world champions when it comes to the mechanics of speaking from the platform, the world champions are, they’re the best.
RV: (31:09)
It’s not the hall of fame speakers necessarily. It’s not the highest paid speakers. It’s certainly not the celebrities. It’s not the New York Times bestseller. It’s not the politicians, the people who win the world championship or compete at that level have studied this craft. I’m into a science and, and they’re amazing at teaching. And that’s, you know, and for me, that’s you, you know, Darren Lacroix Craig Valentine. I think Mark Brown would be in that. David Brooks. Those were some of the legends, you know, specifically on the art of speaking. And so I just really appreciate you brother, and I appreciate the reputation you’ve built and, you know, thank you for supporting us along the way and, and we just, we wish you all the best. Thank you. And, and youtube my friend.
Ep 33: You Are Your Audience’s Fiduciary with Jordan Harbinger | Recap Episode
RV: (00:00)
Hey brand builder and welcome to the special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast, joined by my wife, CEO brand builders group, J Vaden here to bring you our top three, three and three. Today we have the same three, so we’re going to share,
AJV: (00:15)
Well, not entirely the same.
RV: (00:18)
We never see anything exactly the same. That’s part of the fun of doing a show with your spouse.
AJV: (00:22)
Maybe the same three categories but they’re quite different points on the categories.
RV: (00:27)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I’m like always go listen to the episode. It’s, it’s
AJV: (00:31)
Especially if you think you want to have a podcast, be a podcast host, grow your podcast, monetize your podcast, or do anything with a podcast, you should listen to this one.
RV: (00:43)
There’s not many people bigger than Jordan in the podcast world, and I mean that’s the first thing that jumped out about too is you’ll see that even as a guest, he’s extremely direct. He’s very pointy and sharp. They used to teach when I was in radio coaching, they used to say that all the time. You need to be sharp.
You need to be pointy. And you need to be opinionated and he does a really good job of that and all these other things that we’ll talk about. But I think if I had to classify one big overall theme to his success, and Agee and I talked about this, we both listened to it separately and came to the same conclusion. UI think it’s the way he thinks about his audience. Yeah.
AJV: (01:21)
And his guests.
RV: (01:22)
Yeah. So, so the mindset that he has, you know, the word that he used that really resonated with me as fiduciary. To be a fiduciary of your audience’s interest, meaning that the whole point is you put the audience first, not the guest, and that means you do whatever it takes to provide value to the audience, even if it means you’re asking tough, difficult questions, which I felt, I was kind of surprised by that. I think a lot of hosts don’t actually do that. They don’t, they don’t necessarily think I’m going to challenge the guests for the benefit of the audience.
AJV: (01:59)
Yeah. It’s really interesting because we went to go see this amazing movie that I highly recommend too, anyone to go see, but especially women. We went to go see Bombshell and Charlise Theron and Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie, they were just phenomenal. It was incredible. But here’s what it really made me think about is that Jordan has this legal background and it really comes through in the way that he is so pointed and he is so direct and he does feel like he has this fiduciary responsibility.
And the whole concept of, Hey, having guest on isn’t to make them like you more. It’s not just to, you know, boost their ego so that you can get closer to people that they know, whether it be politicians or high level CEOs or people in Hollywood. It’s no, it’s to provide a good interview and to provide the answers to the questions that your audience wants to know.
AJV: (02:53)
And I felt like that’s really a unique take on what an attorney does. An attorney has a legally binding fiduciary responsibility to the person they’re representing. In this case, he’s saying, the person you represent is your audience, is not the guest. It is not the guest. And as I was listening to his interview, it made me think about Megan Kelly and specifically Charlise thereon who plays Megan Kelly and this movie bombshell. And they talk about this big, you know, Republican convention where she got a lot of hate.
You’ve got a lot of haters. But she was committed to asking the hard questions. It wasn’t about rubbing shoulders with the presidential nominee. And It wasn’t about getting more people and more viewers for a show. It wasn’t about making people like her more or her being seen side by side with a potential future president. It was about asking the hard questions and providing the answers.
Her audience wants to know and she got a lot of hate for it, but you know what? She got an amazing interview and ask the hard questions and didn’t back down. And she provided information to her audience, which is what Jordan is. His whole message is about as a podcast host, it’s to provide the necessary information to your audience and your audience are the listeners. It is not about rubbing shoulders with the guests and that is a really different perspective.
RV: (04:15)
Well, and I think, too, it also shares, that’s where courage comes in as a podcast host because you go, well, I mean that’s a lot. It takes a lot of courage, especially if you’re interviewing influential people to to ask the difficult questions so that that’s an interesting parallel with Megan Kelly. It’s great. Yeah. I didn’t know you were going to say that. We didn’t talk about that and event spontaneous stuff going on in Wifey’s brain.
AJV: (04:39)
I really love that. I think it’s really interesting for this whole concept of the fiduciary responsibility to the people you serve and in this case it’s your audience and it’s not just to have people on the show to highlight your show or try to be famous or whatever it was. No, it’s verified, interesting and relevant information that your audience wants. And I love that.
RV: (05:02)
The next thing that he, that he said that I think is truly different from a lot of podcast hosts was his level of preparation. Oh my gosh, it’s insane. It’s crazy. Like he actually reads the books of the people he’s interviewing. Like, thank you Jordan. That is tremendously difficult. It’s awesome. I mean it’s awesome, but, but the thing that really hit me hard about that was that he said, look, if you’re not doing that level of preparation, then there’s nothing unique about your interview of that guest.
Meaning that if you’re asking the same surface level questions that every interviewer is asking, there’s no reason for them to listen to your show versus to listen to any of the other hundred interviews they have done. It’s the preparation that you’ve done that allows you to know very specific, pinpointed things you can ask that are of interest to you, which he also said, which I think is important, is have people on that are interesting to you, but also that you you’re able to know this is what my audience would want to know specifically from this person. Not just the general stuff that this person says all the time to everybody.
AJV: (06:10)
Yeah. Well I love, I loved all of that cause I think it really provides a lot of insight. It’s like if you’re going to ask the same old questions, why listen to your interview, I could get this from anyone. But it’s doing that deep research and deep dive into that individual, their life, their content, whatever, that gives you the insights.
But that’s not what I loved about that particular section of this interview. What I loved is about why he did it. And he said, listen, I’m not exceptionally funny. Like Conan O’Brien was his, his example. Ellen DeGeneres would have been my example. And he said, I’m not exceptionally funny, like even somewhere on the list.
But he goes, I’m not exceptionally famous. I’m not this, I’m not that. And he said, so what was going to be my competitive advantage? He said, I needed a competitive advantage that set me apart from all the other podcast hosts. And I love too as as many successful people say the real genius behind that was his girlfriend.
RV: (07:09)
Yeah. Now his wife. Yeah. And, and he has a new baby.
AJV: (07:13)
I had a new patient, but I love that he said, I’ve got to find my competitive advantage in the podcast space and this is his competitive advantage. And I think that’s really relevant for all of you listening. It’s, you can’t just have guests on and interview them today and expect you’d be any different than all the other thousands and hundreds of thousands.
RV: (07:31)
I think a lot of guests, a lot of podcast hosts don’t even think about that. They don’t even think about the question, how is my interview with this guest different from all the other, the interviews that this person has done. Yeah.
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AJV: (07:43)
I just think it’s like, it just made me think, it’s like what is your competitive advantage? And this was his chosen path of, Hey, no one else is doing this. That’s for sure. Spending 10 to 20 to 30 hours of research per guest. Yeah, that’s crazy. But that’s his competitive advantage. So what’s yours? I love that.
RV: (08:04)
Yeah. And, and you might be sitting there asking the question, how in the world does he have that much time to spend preparing for the guests? Well, it’s because podcasting specifically ads and affiliates. For those of you that have been through phase one where we talk about the five ways to monetize a brand ads and affiliates is his primary business model. So this is his one way that he makes money.
Like it’s the primary thing that all of the things point to and that’s why it’s one of the four things you have to get clear on in phase one is what is your primary business model. Now specifically if you’re looking at hosting, whether it’s podcasting, but I think this would also apply to hosting a YouTube show or a Facebook watch page or a TV show, any type of show hosting of the day. This is really great because he talks about there’s really only two effective to monetize, and this really clarified for me because I’ve heard people talk about both, but they presented as there’s only one way.
RV: (09:03)
It’s either this or this and he’s saying, no, it’s, it’s one of these two. There are two. And so I’ll talk about the first one because the first one I think is more representative of the, of the podcast, like the, the, the former podcast I used to host. And I guess we can drop a little bit of a hint here. It looks like we’re going to have a future podcast coming that I’m going to be hosting that’ll be in this vein.
And here’s what it is, a general mass audience appeal show. So, so that’s the first way is like if you’re going to sell ads and affiliates, if that’s going to be the way you monetize your following, then you, it’s all based on how many people are listening, which means you need to talk about the topics. That’s a huge, yeah, everybody is interested or there’s a huge total addressable market so that you are attracting a bunch of bunch of people and you’ve got to have a strategy for constantly growing your reach because the more people listen, that is the more money.
And I think that’s what we all think of, which historically has been sort of the broadcasting and media model, right? It’s like all the major CELT, television, cable television networks. It’s like you need to have something that gets the most amount of people watching. But then the other way to monetize I think is actually more representative of what this podcast that you’re listening to is an example of. So I thought it’d be good for you to hit that right.
AJV: (10:28)
Narrowed niche topic in which you only talk about and try to promote your products and services. So it’s like you’ve got to monetizing ways of, you know, making sure your podcast makes money. You’ve got selling ads and affiliates, which is that mass broad general appeal podcast which Rory just talked about, yeah.
And then you’ve got this very specific narrowed niche audience appeal, which is more like the influential personal brand podcast and which we’re not trying to get tons of ads and affiliates even though we’ll take them. So spread the word, but it’s more about introducing people to what we do. It’s our products and services and how to grow and monetize. Your personal brand. So this is very representative of a very niche audience with a very niche service that we offer versus appeals to all humans or at least the majority and which you can sell tons of ads and affiliate.
RV: (11:20)
And I think this is really important for you to be clear on because people who have podcasts struggle with this because they’re constantly going back and forth between the two. It’s like, Oh my gosh, I need to get more listeners for my show. I should talk about these topics. I have these guests. Oh, but I, I’m not big enough that I have advertisers. And so I really need to focus on selling my services, which are really very narrow and niche and they don’t apply.
And so you’re like stuck in this conundrum and you never become effective at either strategy. You need to kind of say, all right, this is a mass appeal like mass market audience or this is a narrow niche. And, and this is if it’s narrow and niche though, you better have a product or service to offer for sure, which is a ton of what we run into with a lot of our clients.
RV: (12:06)
They haven’t quite got that far or they’re not clear on, they’re not clear on what their offer is and they’re not, they’re still not clear on who their audience is. And that’s, you know, those are the four parts of phase one. It’s what problem do you solve? Who do you solve before, how do you solve it and how do you make money solving it like that.
Those are really key. But the other last little thing on this is, is hopefully a little bit of permission for those of you that are in more of a narrow niche, which I think as time goes on, that’s more of what happens because, because as a medium has been out a longer and longer time, most of the mass market stuff, it becomes harder to kind of enter into that space because you’re competing against people like Jordan or Megan Kelly or you know, huge, huge, huge brands and huge companies.
RV: (12:48)
But you don’t necessarily need to have 5 million downloads a month. You don’t necessarily like your worth in. Your value as a host isn’t tied up. And how many downloads do I have? It’s in what love to what level of value and, and knowledge and depth am I servicing my audience and their specific need. And the better you are at doing that, than likely there’s more money showing up in your bank account, even though you may not have tons and tons of followers.
And I think that’s really important in your mind to get clear on and understand, just so you even know what metrics to be caring about and looking at and which ones not to. I agree. So there you have it. Anyone that is a host, go listen to the show. That’s what we’ve got for you today. We’re so glad that you’re here. We hope that you’ve enjoyed it. We’ll catch you next time on the three and three recap on the influential personal brand podcast. Bye. Bye.
Ep 32: You Are Your Audience’s Fiduciary with Jordan Harbinger
RV: (00:06)
Hey Brand Builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview. As always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit.
So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brandbuildersgroup.com/podcall We hope to talk to you soon, called into personal favor to bring you guys.
Jordan Harbinger. Jordan is really become one of the podcasts celebrities of the day. And it’s been so inspiring to me because he has hosted a top 50 iTunes podcast for over 12 years, and he didn’t just do it once. He did it twice, he had a show then he switched and started over. And now he’s the host of the Jordan harbinger show, which gets 5 million downloads a month.
So, you know, he’s been a talk show host, he’s a former wall street lawyer and he’s just really an expert on social dynamics and just kind of communication in general. And I just, I am just amazed at what this guy does and he’s been a friend and a supporter of me over the year. I’ve learned a ton just from watching him. And so I called in a favor to see if he would share some of the secrets to just some of the truth about what it takes to build a monster podcast.
RV: (01:50) So Jordan, thanks for being here. Hey, thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it. And I gotta say, I love that shirt. I’m going to forget one of those. Yeah. Well we’ll, we’ll see. This is, this is a dad shirt. I know you have baby coming here soon, so it’s perfect. I’m about to become a dad. Let me know where to sign up.
I call this the dad pocket cause this is like the pocket you never use until you become a dad and then all of a sudden like you use this pocket all the time for just like bottles and wipes and all sorts of stuff that you get to look forward to the pacifier pocket. Yeah, I’m in. So well you to me are just like one of the models and the great success stories I think of the age that we live in.
RV: (02:36)
And you know, seeing your rise in the podcast world, but especially what’s inspiring is seeing you rebuild. And that’s something that we know something about. We’re, we’re rebuilding Brand Builders Group is now, you know, really just hitting our first year and you know, so we’re in a reinvention stage ourself.
And one of the things that we learned is that building a reputation is more than building a business because you can rebuild quickly if you have reputation. And so I wanted to just hear, you know, since we study reputation, like what is your definition of reputation or when you think about reputation, like what are your philosophies about it? How do you build one
RV: (03:17)
What have you done to create just the overall reputation that Jordan harbinger has?
JH: (03:23)
So that’s a really good question because I never spent a ton of time consciously thinking about reputation. You know, I originally thought, well, I’m teaching people how to network. I should probably walk the walk because otherwise it’s disingenuous. And I also thought about, well it’s the internet and I’ve seen people who do shady things and word travels really fast. Or if you do something that’s not so good, but you’ve done a hundred things that are good, what do you get known for?
You know, you get known for the shady thing and especially if whatever it is that you’ve done that’s negative is in direct opposition to what you’ve been doing, that’s positive. It tends to massively override that stuff. We all know the story of like Tony Robbins bullied someone
JH: (04:15)
It’s like the overriding thing that you think of when and it’s what everyone talks about. So instead of just thinking, avoid doing bad things and stick to doing good things to build reputation, what you really need to do is start thinking about how do I best advocate for people around me and for me as a podcast or as an interviewer, that means be an advocate for the audience of the show. So it becomes really easy to turn down dirty money, so to speak from, let’s say there’s an advertiser that wants to come on the Jordan harbinger show and they want to do like gambling ads, right?
Or there’s a company that’s like, Hey, we sell these hair loss pills. We don’t have a clinical study, but we’re going to pay you 35 bucks CPM. You if you’re not, if you don’t have an overriding principle, you start going, Hmm, that’s, I could use that money.
JH: (05:02)
And then, but on the other hand, it looks like this, but on the other hand, it’s only a short run. But on the other hand, you know, you start doing that. But if you just think, what would I do if I had a fiduciary duty to my listener or my customer as I would if I was a lawyer, I have a client attorney, client relationship, you can’t go, well, I really need the money, so I’m going to advise my client to do something against their interest.
Did you can’t do that? So I just start thinking, what if I had, what if the listener was my brother or something like that. What if I had a fiduciary duty, which is literally what fiduciary means, you know it comes from, it’s probably a Latin thing there. What would you, how would you behave? So then it becomes really easy to turn down stupid stuff that’s shortsighted because you go, Oh well I would ruin that relationship if I did that. And that’s the most important thing in the business. So I just want to do that. So I love that.
RV: (05:49)
That’s a great, that’s such a powerful parallel. And con just you as the post, you literally view your role as a duty
JH: (05:58)
To the audience, not to the people you’re interviewing to the audience listening. That’s a huge difference. Actually. It’s funny cause I, I tried to make it more general for our conversation here, but I see this mistake happening a lot among among influencers, but especially among podcast interviewers because they go, Ooh, I want to be famous. That’s their number one sort of priority. So they start interviewing like boring you tubers that nobody cares about. A singer that was popular in the 90s that they’re not even interested in. They have this really sort of aha gee, that’s cool conversation.
And then they pushed it out to their list and they’re like, look, here’s me standing next to some TV star from the 90s and it’s like, look, I’m famous to it. It’s totally self serving. Your audience eventually get sick of that. Or you have someone on who is a celebrity and you start soft balling them because you’re like, Ooh, if I do a good enough job, soft balling them, then we’ll, I’ll be friends with this person and then they’ll connect me to their friends.
JH: (06:53)
Dot dot. Dot. I’ll become more well known in Hollywood. I don’t care about that stuff at all. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s not that I don’t care at all. I should take that back. I care this much, this tiny little piece. Sure. Everybody wants to be liked. Wouldn’t it be great if I became friends with Corey Booker or Howard shields or Elizabeth Warren or fair trade, whatever, or you know, you can put in any name of any celebrity or politician that you want. Wouldn’t it be great if they like me?
Yes. But what would be even better is if my audience still trusted me, so I have to again, take that fiduciary responsibility and if it’s a question of shoot, well, if I ask her about his DNA thing that she did that was really embarrassing, she’ll like me less, but the audience will respect it because they’re wondering the same thing.
JH: (07:41)
The calculation is really easy when you say, I have a fiduciary duty to the listener because otherwise you go, Hmm, they won’t like me as much. Do I want to do this? Well, if you only think about the listener and you forget the rest, then you actually create a better show. Your audience trusts you more and you know what people respect you when you ask them questions that they know you want to hear and that you don’t soft ball.
Then like, yeah, cool. If you’re interviewing Quintin Tarantino, he’s going to have a temper tantrum if you ask him about gun violence. But if you have on somebody who wants to generate trust with your audience as well, which is kind of the point of doing an interview, if you’re selling a book or running for office, then you should be welcoming tough questions and you have to do it in a way that’s fair.
JH: (08:21)
Of course you have to do in a way that’s well researched, but your responsibility is to the listener, not to yourself and becoming more well known online and not to the guest and trying to get them to like you. That’s short game. Let’s talk about that. So so in terms of being the host, right, cause that’s, I think one of the things, you know, one of the overriding questions is how do I get people to listen to my show? Yeah.
That starts with having a great show, which is a great host. And what do you think makes a great conversation? Okay. So we have the backdrop of fiduciary responsibility to your audience, but how do choose which questions to ask? How do you determine which guests come on when you’re just like in the heat of the moment doing the interview? Like is there anything in your brain internally, Jordan that that makes you go, Ooh, I want to, I want to know more about that or these are the questions I’m going to do or not do?
JH: (09:12)
Like can you, can you just walk us through like your mindset on that? Sure. So when I’m, when I’m looking at guests booking, I don’t look at which guest has a higher public profile. I mean there’s some of that for sure. But usually it’s like what book did I read that I’m interested in? And I try to pick things that I’m interested in because I know I’ll do a good interview based on that.
Then secondarily I look for things that the audience will be interested in. The reason that that’s secondary is because I can’t really fake being interested in something. Also trying to predict what your audience is going to be interested in is kind of like a dice roll. And so if I’m thinking, Oh, I really want to have on this pop star because they’re really hot right now, my audience will love that.
JH: (09:58)
They can definitely tell. I don’t care because I’m sort of, it’s hard. Again, it’s hard for me to fake enthusiasm and I think other people who do, they think they’re doing a great job, but the audience still can smell it. I mean humans are smart whether they’re listening or watching, and if I’m thinking about what I’m interested in, there’s always going to be some sort of decent overlap in what the audience is also interested in.
Right? Cause I’m, I’m more or less a geeky, normal guy and so if I interview somebody who got kidnapped by Al Qaeda in Syria, which is one of my recent episodes, there’s going to be like 70% of the audience that goes, all right, I’ll listen to this. Especially if they know that I only do really interesting stuff. Most of the time they’ll give it a shot. Even if they’re thinking photographer, that kid kidnapped by Al Qaeda, I’m not.
JH: (10:45)
Why? What do I care that doesn’t affect my life? People will go, well Jordan only interviews people that are interesting. So I’ll get that person on my enthusiasm then becomes contagious. The audience really gets involved in the story and then they like it after all. So I routine what you want and what I routinely shoot for is I’ll have, like I routinely had somebody on Chelsea handler, she’s kind of a very controversial comedian. Some people hated her and I thought she had an interesting backstory.
I don’t really care for her necessarily her current political views or whatever. But I, I liked her backstory cause she grew up in this very unique way and made something of herself really early on. She’s very driven. So I’m looking for the audience saying things like, and this is kind of a little goal saying things like, I don’t like her but I’m going to listen to this.
JH: (11:30)
And then after the show going, I still don’t really like her but great interview or I like her a lot more now than I did before because you want to make somebody appealing. And the way that you do that is by being interested. So you have to be interested in them first. You can’t predict where the audience is gonna go unless you’ve done some sort of crazy internet targeting, and again, you’re still going to be wrong.
You know, I just, people always go, how did you decide where to pivot and where to take your interviews? And the answer is my own curiosity within limitations. You know, if I could talk about North Korea all the time, I probably would do too many episodes on that and people would go, okay, this guy just talks about North Korea all the time. Who cares? So I have to have like some railings around the edges of the arena, if you will, some boundaries.
JH: (12:15)
But I’m not always trying to push the envelope on those things. Or I should, I, sorry. I am always trying to push the envelope on those things and do shows that might be a little bit outside my comfort zone or the audience’s comfort zone. But I’m not going for shock value. I’m not going for the Supreme amount of celebrity in limelight.
Because when you do that, especially if you have a new show, you’re commoditizing yourself. Like if you go, all right, I want to interview entrepreneurs, and then you interview all of the same people that every other host has had. You’re not interested. You just feel like you need to check them off your list. Your audience is going to cue your, you just phoning it in and you’ve become a commodity. You’re another podcast or another influencer, another interviewer that’s doing the same thing as everybody else.
JH: (13:00)
There’s no, there’s nothing about it that makes it more interesting, right? I’m not sure if you’re a comedian, you have your own brand of humor, but if you’re a journalist and you get, there’s a reason journalists always want to be first because as soon as somebody else gets a story, nobody really cares about the other.
The second and third version of the same thing. So you have to bring something unique to the table and usually that’s your personality, but when you’re first starting, I mean, I’ve been doing this for 12 years. For the first eight years, my personality was not that freaking interesting. All right. It’s still a work in progress. So like for the first few years when you’re learning to be a performer, if you’re, let’s say you’re a singer, you probably sound a lot like your voice teacher. You probably sound a lot like other people in the choir, you know, if you’re a guitarist, you asked that.
JH: (13:47)
So like how’d you get past that time? So time, just time, time and practice, right? Like, look, I’m sure there’s somebody like Jim Morrison who’s played the guitar and then for the first few years they sound like everyone else and then really quickly they branch off and they’re doing their own thing or like a David Bowie type figure.
But if you can really dig to the bottom of everyone’s talent, like any musician, just to relate it to that, there’s definitely a five to 10 year period for most musicians where they sound exactly like everyone else who plays the guitar because they’re learning the chords, they’re learning all the different techniques. They’re learning the notes, learning the risks, they’re learning how to play standing up, sitting down. They are singing along to their favorite songs. They’re not writing that much new stuff, man. You know, like it was a Vici who’s an electronic music artist that has since passed away.
JH: (14:32)
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. Super well known electronic artists, his, and in the documentary they talk with him and they say, I mean, he says something along the lines of, yeah, I just spent years remaking other people’s music. I made a new track every day and I just remade all the stuff that I could.
And then when I was finished, I’d remade everything. Then I started making new stuff and I thought, that’s a really interesting creative process. And I bet you it’s not that far away from a kid who picks up a guitar at age 12, starts playing stairway to heaven and then graduates to whatever sort of new rock he’s playing. And then one day goes, what if there was a song like this and then starts playing? It’s like, I should write this down. But that’s like five to 10 years into the game.
JH: (15:15)
They don’t pick up a guitar and go, let me write a new song right now. They’re trying to figure out how to hold their hand this way and hold their other hand this way and not mess it all up. Well on one thing that even comes out of that, that that may be like obvious to you, but I actually think is not that obvious to people, is that you as the host are a performer. Like you are a part.
You’re not just, you’re not just ahead regurgitating questions like your personalities and active part of of it. And that’s what people are, even though it’s like you have guests every week, they, their listeners really become bonded to you more than anybody. They do. Yeah. Your Larry King told me, Hey man, don’t talk too much during your show because you’re there every week. So I went through this curve that was good and bad advice, right?
JH: (16:01)
Because of course, back in his day, he might’ve been one of the three interview shows that was on the radio. So of course, you know, let the guest have their moment in the sun and I still do that, you know, I still want them to do that. I think a lot of hosts, most hosts in fact talk too much, but you have to play a part in it because again, if you’re not preparing a lot and you don’t have a unique perspective, there is no reason for anyone to listen to you because you’re a commodity.
You’ve commoditized yourself. So me not being hilarious and funny or anything like that, me having a normal sort of no BS personality, I’ll crack a joke here and there, but I have to outwork everyone. That’s how I became a lawyer. I’m not talented or as any kind of genius.
JH: (16:43)
I had to outwork everyone and that’s what I do on the show. I’ll prepare 10 or 20 hours for an interview, sometimes 30 if it’s a really big guest that has a lot of material in a long career. Wow. In 10 to 38 hours doing the prep and people can’t even believe that, but it’s like, what other competitive advantage do I have? I don’t have a James Earl Jones voice. I’m not Conan O’Brien. Funny. I don’t have Howard Stern’s pull when it comes to guests and a huge audience and a staff of 20 people in the back room typing funny jokes to say to me that pop up on a monitor. Right. I don’t have that.
What I have is the, the work ethic that says, you know a Jordan, you got Daniel Goldman, you know the founder or the creator, the idea of emotional intelligence. He’s got three books, read those three books, read those three books and then when he shows up, I want him to say, wow, you know this stuff better than I do cause it’s been awhile and that’s exactly what happened.
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JH: (17:35)
You know, he goes, can we took a break? And he goes, I think you know my work better than I do. Cause it’s been so long now. Granted it’s been a decade of change since he wrote that. So you don’t expect him to remember it, but that’s what you want. You don’t want them going, well that’s really how this works. That’s not really how that works. Thanks for reading the Wikipedia and or the back of the book and then showing up. You want to show up with so many notes that are so well organized that you barely have to look at them and you want to tell them something.
Let me put it this way. I have a little checkbox in the back of my brain where I light up when the guest says, I’ve never thought about this that way, but now that you mention it, that’s a good point. I’m going to use that or some variation of that. I want to have this content down in my head so well that I’m plugging in something to something else that they have that they didn’t even see that connection. Or I use a metaphor that they’d never thought of
RV: (18:28)
And I love this cause that’s just like what you’re talking about, you know, to use the take the stairs metaphor. You know, that was my first book, which has been out a while now, but it’s like the real story of the work you’re doing behind the scenes that nobody sees. They just assume, Oh well I got on a podcast network or I had a bazillion Twitter followers or whatever. And it’s just like that right there is, is the difference. And nobody wants to hear it. But that is so I think that’s so powerful.
JH: (18:58)
Hey, you know it’s funny you said nobody wants to hear it. It’s so true. There was a eight year period. I’m a slow learner. There was an eight year period where, or seven I think where I didn’t read the book or do that amount of prep. And I remember my wife, she, my girlfriend at the time, she goes yeah, I mean are you prepared? Are you ready?
And I’m like, man, I’m fine. And then I had Robert Green who wrote the S the laws of human nature or 48 laws of power, like really, really prolific, amazing author wrote mastery. Just a really genius level creator. There aren’t that many authors like him now who write 800 page books and you know, you could read it, it could have been twice as long. And I had him coming on for the seventh anniversary episode of the show and I thought, okay, I better not screw this one up.
JH: (19:46)
He said, why did it take so long to schedule this? And I remember going, well, I thought it would be a waste of time for you. I wanted to do it really well. And he said, well, I’ve done a lot of media. This was really well prepared. You did a good job. And I was so lit up and stoked. I said, okay, what’s the difference between the way I did this one and the way I did the other ones? And the answer was, I read the book recently and I thought, okay, well I can’t just read the book for every interview. My wife goes, why not? And I go, well, it’s too much work.
And she goes, yeah, but you want the show to be really good. That’s like your number one priority. Why don’t you just figure out how to read the book? And I went, Oh yeah, I guess I should probably do that. So then I started figuring out ways to read faster, you know, get the Kindle and the highlighter. And then it was like audio books and then it was like the audio player. Get a customized one, it goes really fast and pause is real, you know, that kind of thing. So I have this whole system where I can read really, really fast and it’s not speed reading. It’s like audio listening. I just you, you have to work up to it and there’s all
RV: (20:42)
Or whatever. Yeah.
JH: (20:43)
Yeah. But like silences are removed by this other app that’s not the audible app cause the audible app can’t do that. And like it’s really, it’s like 1.9 X and not two cause two’s too fast. But 1.75 is too slow. There’s a whole thing that I got right that I do and it depends on the narrator and all this stuff. So I take the notes though on another device so I don’t have to pause. There’s all kinds of stuff that I’m doing so that I can do that work. But there’s just no shortcut for doing the work.
And I see other hosts and they’re like, Oh I don’t even read the book. I have my assistant read it and then they send me talking points and I’m like, they’re missing the good stuff because the good stuff is not summarized. Rorys book take the stairs, the good stuff is this little between the lines sometimes literally details that other people ignore.
JH: (21:27)
So one case in point, I read a book a long time ago, I can’t remember the author and she was like an infectious disease specialist and she was African American literally, you know, and she had been adopted from Africa but I didn’t know that. I just knew she was a specialist in this field of medicine.
I read the book and I’ve read, I’ve read the dedication and it says like to mom and dad, my life would’ve been the same. I’m like okay, nothing special there. And then the back, the epilogue, not even like the thing at the end that’s not even written by the author was like her bio and it was like her extended bio, sorry. It’s like she was born in Africa and then her family to give her up and then she worked at, she was at this icon convent. Then a white family came and brought her to Canada.
JH: (22:07)
And so she grew up with this really unique, multi-racial kind of background and is now an infectious disease doctor in Africa. And she’s like, but for this amazing opportunity, I wouldn’t have had the chance to like leave this place, go there, get a medical education, now I’m giving back. That’s the whole story. Not Ebola or whatever.
That’s a, that is a prop. The real story is her life leaving this, this place, going to the Western world, realizing how much she had and then giving back. That’s the story. But you don’t get that when you read frickin Blinkist and you get a five bullet point summary or you have your VA read it for 20 bucks and then send you a one sheet. You don’t get the story, you get the data. Let me ask you a practical question. So, so I, I love this. I love the work.
JH: (22:56)
I’m sure what people are going, it’s like, well if I spend all my time preparing for the interview, how do I make any money? Right? Like that’s a lot of time to prepare. If I do an interview every week or two a month or something. So, and I think that’s kind of a question Mark for people is how do you make like how do you actually make money?
Like yeah, so podcasting is not a good way to make money and when people try to like, I’m going to throw that out there, you know a lot of people will sell you the idea that all you have to do is start a podcast and watch the dollars roll in. And that was never the case. It’s not like, Oh you can’t do it now. It was never the case. And you can do that in addition to other personal branding things that you’re doing.
JH: (23:44)
Like I know you talk about like books, you talk about other methods of influence. Doing a podcast is a really tough way to make money. Let’s, can we talk like real numbers here? I’ll just do something that the average podcast has 149 downloads per episode. That’s a fat act from libs in which as a hosting company, you don’t have to write that number down because if you have 149 downloads, no advertiser will touch you. Let’s say that you are so good that you get 50 times 50 times.
That’s a huge multiple. You get 50 times the average audience. Now you’ve got 74 50 that’s probably backwards. Very one, you get 74 50 per episode. Okay, well you’re paid and CPM, which is dollars per thousand downloads. So let’s say you have two ads in a show and you’re getting a really good CPM of 25 bucks for each of those ads.
JH: (24:39)
That’s a pretty darn good CPM. So now you’re really getting 50 CPM again cause you’ve got two ads in your show. Congratulations. Let’s assume you sold those ads yourself cause otherwise you got to give your ad sales agent a cut, which could be up to 50% but let’s assume you use them yourself. You get 100% of that. Okay, great. So now you’re getting 50 times 7,450 so you’re really, let’s round up to 8,000 cause you’re so good. I’m going to be generous and that’s how many downloads an episode you’re getting. So you’re getting 8,000 so you’re getting eight times $50 per episode.
You’re getting 400 bucks per episode. That’s when you have 50 times plus maybe more like 55 times the average audience and you sold two ads yourself, add a generous CPM, you’re getting 400 bucks. That’s the high end of what you are going to get after doing a show for several years, most people will get less than half of that. What is that going to pay for if you don’t live in sub Saharan Africa and not a whole lot, right? You are not
RV: (25:38)
In a week. If at one a week at that level you’re talking about 1600 bucks a month, so you’re talking, you’re like, you’re not even at, it’s like 20 grand a year.
JH: (25:48)
Yeah, you’re paying your mortgage if you’re lucky and you don’t live in a big city and you don’t live on the coast. If you’re lucky, and that’s after year, you’re going to have to build up to that. You’re not going to launch with 74 50 you’re going to get that after maybe a couple of years or something like that.
RV: (26:04)
Now if you now on the flip side, like, like all media companies, it’s very scalable. So for you, if you get to, you know, if you’re getting 5 million downloads a month that you’re talking about a million downloads an episode it depends cause that’s historical. That’s right. That’s historical. But maybe a hundred, a couple hundred thousand downloads an episode, right?
JH: (26:29)
So, so if you’re to, again, to put numbers to it, if you are in the top 1% of all active podcasts in any, anywhere in podcast land, you have 35,000 per episode. That’s the top 1%. So think about that. Let’s say you got $35,000 per episode. Let’s say you still got two ads. You still sold them yourself.
You get to keep 100%, it’s 35 times 50 that’s 1750 per episode. And you do that times four, 7,000 bucks a month, that’s real money. But that’s after you get in the top 1% of all podcasts. You can’t really, you probably aren’t going to get rich on that either. Okay. So this takes me to my original question.
RV: (27:14)
Clearly advertising is not the fast path to cashier. So how do you make money doing this?
JH: (27:21)
So you end up with this interesting dichotomy, right? If you, or a sort of conundrum. Maybe if you don’t want add money, then you have to talk to a very specific audience. So let’s say you’re the guy, my friend Clint, he teaches dance studio owners, how to cleanse salt, salt, salt, salt to Saltzman. What is his last name? He’s from Australia.
RV: (27:45)
Australia. Yeah. Yeah. I know exactly what you’re talking about. Like, and it’s funny because even as you say it, I’m like, I know one guy that teaches dance studios, owners like how to get clients and it’s Clint and he’s from Australia, right?
JH: (27:56)
Yeah. And he’s like a super lovely guy. Okay. So he’s the right man for the job. So if you are that guy and you’re talking to dance studio owners, then cool, good. It looks like I’m out of focus here. Let me fix that. If possible. How do we fix that? So breaking bad is really weird. I’m just going to go ahead and ignore that and see if it fixes itself. So you’re, let’s say you’re that guy.
Now, your entire audience, maybe you’ve only got like 800 people listening to each episode of your show, but all 800 are dance studio owners somewhere in let’s say North America. Well, wherever globally that are on your email list, they’re interested in generating clients. Those people might pay $5,000 or $1,000 or $500 for your product. That’s a system of let’s say, generating leads for dance studios online. You know, you’ve got a customer base, so that’s a really good way to start making money. But you have to have a unique niche if you’re just, you know, this is driving me freaking Oh you got it.
JH: (28:58)
I think that was a little schmutz over the lens and I just wiped it. So if, if you are in, if you’re, if that’s your audience, then great, right? You’ve got to be the leader. But if you’re like, Oh, this guy Pat Flynn, who is a really good friend of mine, you probably know him too. If I’m like, Oh, this guy Pat Flynn teaches people how to make money online doing X, Y, Z, you’re not going to want to join that niche because it’s you and eight bajillion other people. And Pat’s going to like dominate that and you’re going to have a hard time collaborating with other people because you’re stepping on their toes and you have no experience. So you’ve got to find a unique niche. Talk to them in a way where they’d know, like, and trust you. And then you’ve got to have products and services to help them.
JH: (29:37)
But then podcasting’s not your business. It’s lead gen for your book. For me, podcasting is my business. I’m depending on scale, but I have a quarter million downloads per episode. That didn’t happen overnight. It happened and over 13 stinking years.
Okay. So like to get that level of advertising and then put four ads in each show, cause my show’s over an hour long and that’s, you can get away with that. And I do three a week now it’s a BI. Now it’s more than a full time job. It’s more than just me working here and the scale works. But generally it’s not going to happen. But here’s the, here’s the problem, here’s the conundrum. You can’t go, Oh well I’m going to talk to the specific dance studio owners or like landscapers for people that live near a forest like Rory, right in the background there, your jungle.
JH: (30:27)
Like if you want to talk to that audience, you’re not going to get a broad audience. That’s really huge because there’s one in a hundred or one in a thousand people care about that niche. One in a thousand people own a dance studio and want to get new clients or karate dojo and want to get new clients. That is not everyone.
So you can either appeal to a specific nation, create products and services for that niche or you can try to appeal to everyone. And do something that’s more general and is going to scale, but you’re never going to be in a situation where you appeal to gym owners in North America and everyone else. You’re not going to be able to do both. Well, so you have to choose because if you choose to scale, you got a long road ahead of you. If you choose products and services in a specific niche, you might get there faster, but you will never get to the point at which you are scaling. [inaudible]
RV: (31:20)
But that’s not your business. That’s a, it’s just a, it’s just a marketing medium, podcast marketing medium for the business, which is how that’s historically how we’ve, we have, we have used it.
JH: (31:32)
Correct. Yeah, that makes sense. And so people need to be aware of that. Like people don’t really seem to get that. They’re like, I want to make it huge. Why? Well, I want to get leads from my coaching business. Okay. Then those are two di almost diametrically opposing forces, right? Like, yes, you want to be recognizable all over the place. But also I want to appeal to pet store owners.
And the East coast like, whoa, whoa, who are you talking to? Because if you start talking to quote unquote everyone or like one of your episodes is generally interesting and then one of your other episodes each week is only in that niche, you’re just going to piss off everyone, right? Like the people who want to hear about comedy are going to get annoyed with the people who want to hear about how to make a pet profitable dance studio. So you have to choose. You cannot try to be both. And everybody that I know who starts to show that they’re consistently trying to do this and they’re failing.
RV: (32:21)
Well Jordan, thank you for the honesty and the transparency of just what this takes. I could talk to you forever, like there is so much here. Obviously people can, can find you on the show. Where Dell is there. Where do you want people to go to connect with you if they want to learn more and they want to hear about all your,
JH: (32:40)
Your wild and interesting guests that you have. Share Jordan harbinger.com. It’s the Jordan harbinger show. You can find it anywhere that you listen to podcasts. And of course I teach people networking. It’s not a business. It’s a free thing that I do cause I, most of my business that I get is corporate. I’m, I teach security personnel and special forces and stuff. I teach them like relationship development and nonverbal communication skills and spy stuff generally so that I give away some of that to [email protected] and you can see the course at the top there.
It’s all, everything I do is free for the end user. It’s, it’s, it’s an ad model, but I don’t put in too many ads cause I don’t have to anymore. But I look anybody who’s interested in topics that are going to affect your life in some way. I do worksheets for every episode because I want people to apply something from every show. So it’s not just like fluff, it’s like take this, plug it into your brain and use it. So hopefully people are interested in that. And I think your audience seems pretty smart, so I’m excited to hear from them. Yeah.
RV: (33:41)
Well, buddy, thank you so much. Thank you for being a fiduciary for your audience. I think that’s, that’s going to be like the big thing that resonates with me was just at the end of the day, it’s like there’s not a ton of money here for a long time, and there’s a lot of wrong ways to do it, and there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of ways to get absorbed into the crowd and into the noise, but if you do what is interesting and you do what serves your audience, it sounds like that’s, that’s your, your special formula. So I love it.
JH: (34:09)
Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Ep 29: Expanding Your Brand Beyond Your Wildest Dreams with Michael Stelzner | Recap Episode
RV: Hey Brand Builder. Welcome to this special recap edition of the Influential Personal Brand. We are talking about our top three takeaways from this interview with my very good friend Michael Stelzner from social media marketing world and which I will be speaking at. If you’ve missed that in the interview. It’s an amazing, really amazing event and so I’ll let AGA kick us off. We’re, we, we had the same kind of three big takeaways, so we’re just gonna we’re going to really nail those for you.
AJV: Yeah. So, and a lot of our different interviews, I, you will hear much discussion around social media as it pertains to your personal brand. And one of the most fascinating things that I really thought was, well, fascinating interview with Michael Stelzner and how he talked about how organic reach on social media is dead.
RV: Oh boy.
AJV: But I thought it was really just really cool how he talked about how most people don’t associate YouTube as a traditional social media site. And that YouTube actually offers really unique algorithms to play your videos based on who clicks on it, who actually watches it, how long they watch it, and then what they do after they watch it. And then we’ll actually promote your video to more of people on YouTube based on those things. Whereas other social media sites, we’ll not do that.
And that was a really interesting thing how he talked about. You’re going to go all in like don’t forget YouTube is still a thing and since it’s been video-based and everything else is going video base, they were kind of way ahead of the curve there. And then just the whole concept of all these different things that people are talking about constantly to grow your organic reach and he’s there going, well, good luck.
RV: Yeah. Although I thought that was a good, yeah, like YouTube is interesting. It’s not really kind of classically social media,
AJV: But it is.
RV: Yeah. And, and it, it’s, I, I never really put that together that YouTube is the only platform that really shows your content aggressively to people who aren’t your subscribers. And I think, you know, a big part of his message there was just extending your reach outside of social media. So you gotta be getting people off social media, which we’ve been talking about always.
You cannot be dependent upon social media. You’ve got to get those people off of social media and onto your email list, onto your podcast, which she talked a lot about was focusing on his, on his podcast and then also text message. Now, you know, you see a lot of the big players moving aggressively with into the text message opt in space as well. So you got, it’s like you can’t not be on social media but don’t, don’t depend on it.
AJV: I don’t think that, well we say we say this quite a bit is you know, you can be Twitter rich and dollar poor. And I think that’s a lot of what he was saying. It’s like it’s not that you shouldn’t do it. Just don’t think that most of your sales and conversions are going to happen because of your social media reach. And this is a kind of something that you brought up just very quickly there, but he talks about his email list.
RV: Yeah. So this is the second. The second thing in addition to your organic reach, basically being dead was how important email still – still to this day, how important email is to classified information about his own “classified” private, just between him and us and several millions of you.
AJV: But I love this because you hear from marketers all the time that email is dead, email is dead. Well, not so much at me. He said that’s how much 60 to 70% of his sales come from email marketing. Crazy. That is a lot. And then he was like, but we don’t send one or two emails. We have six months of promotion with a team of 20 that are leading up to his big event, which is his primary business model, which is coming up in just a few months. But we’re talking about 60 to 70% of a very healthy multimillion dollar business coming from email marketing. Which a lot of those leads best came from their podcast and all these other arenas.
But I think that is just something that, at least with our clients, we hear a lot about. It’s like when we ask them about their email list, it’s a, it’s not very big and it doesn’t get a lot of attention and a lot of focus on how do you capture emails. It’s more about how do you get followers and how do you get engagement on social media?
And we forget the real way of monetizing all of those people that you’re spending all this time, money and resource to attracting them on social, is actually getting their email so that you can market to them. Regardless of what these independent platforms are doing and when their algorithm changes, your contacts don’t. So it’s just the power of email and email marketing, which we promote. But it was so good to hear some real numbers and real results from somebody
Watch the Interview with Michael Stelzner here
RV: Was so big. Yeah. Forced to be reckoned with in this space. And I think one of the big, the big light bulbs that came on for me that right had never really thought about was that he sends 60 to 70 emails just promoting this one event. And in my mind I go, well, I could never send, I would never want to send that many emails to my list. They’d get burned out. Like they get sick of hearing it and he said, no, no, no, no. You don’t just promote the event 60 or 70 times. You take one aspect of the event and you highlight it and you, you teach something about that one little aspect.
And I was thinking about our events, how, you know, most of our events are divided into six main sections over two days. It’s like we could send one email for each of those six sections and talk about, here’s one great tip and then here’s all the things you’ll learn about this section at the event. And if people don’t feel like they’re just getting bombarded because they’re not just getting bombarded, they’re, they’re getting educational information as a way of also learning about why they should buy and why they should come to me.
AJV: Good news for all of you and thanks to Michael Stelzner, all of our clients will now be getting 10 times the amount of emails that they’re currently getting. Prepare yourself. Set up a rule to put us all in a folder. The emails are coming, but yeah, I know that’s such a great point. It’s not that they’re all promotional, but it’s breaking down each speaker, each segment, each takeaway, each special events, it’s being useful and educational, but 60 to 70 compared to our six or seven.
AJV: Yeah, we got some email writing to do.
RV: Yeah, for sure. So, and then the last thing to me was just his whole mindset about how we thought about events and Aja really highlighted a share the big takeaway that you had from that. Cause I, I liked the parallel that you, that he said that you really latched onto about the book.
AJV: Oh yeah. He said that a live event is kind of like having a book. You don’t really make money at it, but it’s all the spin off that you get from that book or from that live event that you make money on. Like we say a lot, a book is just a really big business card and you’re not going to make, well most aren’t going to make your entire fortune from, or a living even from your book. But what you will do is it will raise your cache and your credibility and your awareness to a level that you can charge more.
So you get more speaking or training or consulting, you get booked more to do this. You get the sponsorships and the ads and you get all the things that come along with having a book and especially a bestselling book. But it may be, it’s not the book that’s gonna make you money. He’s saying the exact same thing happens with a big event.
RV: This is a good way of thinking about it. And I’ve never really thought about it that way. Are you? You know, I think I’m, you know, you can, I think a book is a good parallel because you can make money. It’s not that you can’t make money, it’s just that you’re probably not going to make your riches from events. There they are a step on the path. And then where he said you actually make the money was from the recordings with things you sell at the event
AJV: Recordings was an option. But it’s a, you know, like I’ve gone to several Tony Robbins events to even have the mindset of how much money you spend to go into an event. It’s not bad. It’s you, they’re selling coaching, right? They’re selling their training program, they’re selling their mastermind. It’s all the things you sell.
RV: Yeah. And in our case, you know our primary model, like our primary service offering includes events, and we actually give, we include the recordings for our monthly members that come with it. So I thought, you know, it’s interesting. I think we’re doing events very different from everybody too, is we’re not just because we’re not trying to make money, we’re not trying to make, yeah, we’re just very much proves this point. Yeah.
Well, you know, there’s always, there’s always, there’s always next steps for people and stuff, but anyways, the last little thing I wanted to highlight that was on this event topic was that he said that having a big name speaker won’t make your event unless it’s Rory Vaden that you hired to come keynote, other than Rory Vaden as your keynote speaker, a big, a big name is not going to make the event. I think a lot of people don’t really, I think a lot of people don’t understand that they would think differently.
AJV: I agree. And I want, I think it’s, I think there’s a couple of things. If you are in the business of hosting live events or you think you want to host live events, even if they’re small workshops, this is a must listen to interview. And then if you think that if you get this big name and they will come, he is saying, not really. It maybe a small percentage, he said, but not enough to pay for the expense of it.
And we actually know other people who have spent really big money and they ended up losing a lot of money on their event because that name didn’t attract as much as it needed to for the expense. But in general, it’s not like you don’t want to not have big name. People just don’t think that’s going to be what makes your bed, that’s not going to save you. That’s a good way of saying it was a great interview. And if you’re in the live event business in any capacity, you’ve got to listen
RV: Absolute must, must and podcasting and social and you know, you can check out the event. We’ll put links to that. I am speaking and social media marketing world this year, which is is great. And so yeah, there’s a lot of insights from a very big powerhouse. One of the godfathers of the industry. Check out the full interview, and as always, stay tuned here for your top three and three from myself and AJ, we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 28: Expanding Your Brand Beyond Your Wildest Dreams with Michael Stelzner
RV: I am so excited to introduce to you someone that maybe you’ve been influenced by, but you may not realize it. Michael Stelzner is one of the biggest personal brands in the space, truly like one of the godfathers of this whole industry of, of influencers and social media and digital marketing. And it’s really interesting because we’ll talk about this. He always put the brand first of the, of, of the company. So social media examiner is the company. He’s the founder of it. They have a massive platform which we’re going to talk about. They run, well, one of the biggest, if not the biggest events in the space, social media marketing world. I’m actually going to be speaking at that. Next year in 2020.
So depending on when you hear this [inaudible] also, they have a tremendous podcast that he is hosted for 10 years. Again, one of, one of the first in the originals. And so this is somebody who has done it as scaled a company, has scaled a brand and I know you’re going to absolutely love him. If somebody that I’ve just gotten to know personally, he’s been a big help to me as an advisor and a friend and a mentor behind the scenes. And so it was like you guys, you’ve got, you’ve got to hear from Michael directly, so thanks for agreeing to come on the show.
MS: Hey, it’s my pleasure Rory.
RV: Yeah. So just can you give us an like a, a background on the platform of social media examiner? Like how big, I mean, cause you guys have huge blog, huge social, huge podcasts, huge events, a huge email list. Like how many people do you reach every month?
MS: Ah, well I can tell you that our social media examiner, the blog has been around for 10 years. We just had our 10 year birthday 85 million unique people. I’ve hit that blog since we launched it, that’s about 12 million probably in the last 12 months. And then the podcast is at 20 million downloads on it over seven years. And you know, the monthly metrics when you go beyond things that are easy to measure, like podcasting and blogging are a lot more fuzzy. Right.
We’ve got half a million fans on Facebook and a half a million fans on Twitter and nobody really knows what the reach metrics are. They’re not as good as they used to, but I would arguably say at least a million people a month, probably more for sure are consuming our stuff. And then we have 360,000 people that get emails from us three days a week. Linking out to our YouTube channel, our podcasts, our live show, our blog, and all the other crazy stuff we’ve got going on.
RV: Wow. That is just, that’s amazing. Thank you for being willing to share those numbers with us. I think, you know, a lot of the people here, you know, aspire to have a platform. I aspire to have a platform that’s that big for sure. And I think it also, it helps to have the perspective of time, like seven years, 20 million downloads, but it’s been seven years. Like it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen overnight. Like you’ve been at this a long time.
MS: Right? Yeah. And you know, that’s kind of the key I think for anyone who wants to be known is to be consistent and to be working it. Because there was a day when I started where I was a nobody. I didn’t know darn thing when I started, you know, I didn’t know anything about social media marketing when I started social media examiner. It was just relentless work, interviewing experts, bringing their knowledge to my tribe.
Then eventually people started looking to me as a leader and before you know, it all of a sudden they were calling me though leader. And it just took a lot of time. Along the way a lot of people dropped off, started focusing on other things and I just kept going and eventually you can say I became kind of the leader.
RV: Yeah. I mean that is interesting. You know you know, when I was on your podcast, we talk about she hands wall and the focus and breaking through and being known for one thing, like you have stayed really true to social media specifically. And, and you became, you know, like you said, I, that’s the way you just described that was perfect. It was like I went from interviewing leaders to a leader, to the leader. And so
MS: I suppose by the way, let’s just be clear, right? Because I don’t necessarily call myself that perception. I’m a marketer. Let’s be honest. Perception is reality in the eye of the beholder, right? So very important lesson that I’m,
RV: I would say that about you. Yeah,
MS: You said that and I appreciate that. And that’s all that really matters, right? In the end is what other people think. And
RV: Yes, what Rory Vaden says, that’s what matters in the end is what’s as, right. So one of the things that I have always loved about you because I, what you just said about perception is so true. Like it’s, you know, we have a joke around Brand Builders Groups that we say at least half of what we teach you is actual substance is about producing actual substance because there’s unfortunately or fortunately so much of it is perception driven, but you are data-driven. And over the years I’ve seen you, you know, put out like the social media, this annual report, the annual report that you do. It’s like people should pay $10,000 and you just give it away. It’s, it’s insane. You’re so data-driven and I, and I love that about you. Well, you always that way or like did you like
MS: Pretty much, I mean I have a master’s in communications. I publish stuff in journals. You know, like, ah, that was based on research studies and stuff. It’s just, I think, I think I’m one of those rare people that’s creative and analytical and there are some people that are super analytical and some people that are super creative. I’ve got this weird mix of both. And I think that’s what makes me kind of unique in my space because I can get super creative and I can get super and I can flop back and forth.
RV: Yeah. Well, so let’s talk about the analytical piece for a second. Just cause I know you’re like watching the trends, you’re watching the numbers. Is there, what are some of the most compelling statistics that you’ve seen maybe like in the last 12 months or so that you think people really need to know about where it’s like if you, if you don’t know this, like you’re in trouble because th there’s some, these are the data. This is a dumb data points that are like there.
MS: Yeah, I’ll tell you a qualitative and quantitatively. Okay, here’s the deal. Video is everything. Qualitatively, you all know this because Apple invested billions in launch and Apple plus Disney invent, invent invested billions in launching Disney. Plus there is a war going on in the video streaming war because everyone knows that what people watch video as their primary consumption vehicle now over anything else, they will bend watch hours and hours of video. They won’t necessarily do that with reading anymore. They’re just not reading.
People are not reading as much as they used to. They will listen for sure with podcasts and stuff, but the only do that typically when they’re in a in motion, you know, or they’re doing something, but when they’re home and they’ve got nothing to do, they’re going to be watching video. And that is a signal that’s qualitatively saying something. Now, when I, when I add that with the quantitative data, we have research from our industry report that people can find it.
MS: Social media examiner.com that shows that marketers are all in on video and video is becoming very, very important. Mark Zuckerberg a couple of years ago, predicted that video would be the primary vehicle of communication on the Facebook platform. We’re already seeing this happen on Instagram. Half a billion people are watching Instagram stories every single day. So when you have the 15 second vertical video on Instagram stories and you have live video and you have LinkedIn native video and dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. You just realize everything is moving towards video consumption. And if you want to influence people, you need to create video because that is a mega trend.
RV: It’s overwhelming to create video on all these PLA like it’s, it’s, it’s a little bit daunting to be like I gotta do a freaking Facebook live and a YouTube live and an Instagram story and I got to do it at LinkedIn and like they all are holding you hostage to like being on their actual platform doing it. Like is there any, anything that we can do to like just manage the, like the workflow and the production of all of that?
MS: Start somewhere first and just get started today or tomorrow and decide where it’s going to be. Maybe it should be Instagram if that’s where you know your audience is hanging out. Maybe it should be, LinkedIn does not need to be alive. I would start with stories because the easiest thing to start with, you pick your phone out of your pocket, you pull up Instagram stories. You don’t need to look pretty or well manicured. You just record something and you call it done and you see if you get a reaction and then if you get a reaction, you do it some more and you do it some more until it starts serving a purpose. And once you decide what that purpose is and you achieve that purpose, then you can start diversifying. Right?
So for example, at social media examiner, we do a million different things, but we’re a media company and we have tons of employees and we’re filming and creating content all over the place. But it took us years to get here. We started somewhere and then we eventually moved somewhere else by expansion and then move somewhere else and move somewhere else until you get to the point where it’s really obvious where you should be.
RV: Can you, are you comfortable sharing how many employees you have?
MS: Yeah, I have 20 full time employees. I have 39 contractors that are regular. And then I have another 30 seasonal contractors. And then I have 200 more volunteers that participate in social media marketing world that does not count vendors that are on location at our conference. And stuff, but it’s a pretty good sized team.
RV: Wow. yeah, so videos, everything is interesting. I remember seeing that coming, you know, you’ve been talking about this for a while. It wasn’t like it just came out this year, like you were way, way ahead. And one of the things that we did when we were looking through your, through the report was we moved to a full video profile on Instagram where even our quotes are videos, they come across as video texts because it’s plus, it’s just like nobody sees it if it’s not, like, if it’s not that, it’s like they’re not showing it to anybody.
MS: Well that’s thumb stopping, right? Because it’s moving instead of still. Right. And there’s just something special to video. But in particular story in video I think is the magical side of it really. If we’re intellectually honest, you don’t just use video for the sake of video, use it for the sake of telling some sort of a story.
RV: Yeah. well, so that’s good to know. I mean, it’s like you have to get on it. Like you just have to figure, I’ve noticed you’re coming more in front of the camera personally, which we’ll talk about probably here in a little bit too. So I want to pause the video piece. I want to come to the audio piece because the Social media marketing podcast UMaine it is like always like number three in all marketing podcast in iTunes.
Like you go in there, you see there’s all these huge podcasts and it’s like consistently right there in the top three. What do you think you do differently when it comes to podcasting that has, has caused it to have such like staying power?
MS: First of all, I vet my guests and I make sure that I don’t just let anybody on my podcast, I have a lot of friends that have a lot of books and they all want to be on my podcast. A lot of times I just tell them it’s not a fit because I’m curating for my audience. So the first thing is I want to make sure that I’m getting the right people on the show to maintain that level of quality. The second thing is I always have a half an hour pre-call, you know this Rory will meet with the guest and I will negotiate the topic.
That way when they show up for the interview, I know them better and we know exactly what we’re talking about. Even though it doesn’t sound like that at all. Like my daughter is like what? You know, like this stuff is not just coming off the cuff. I’m all, no it’s not. It’s prepared and that is what leads to a higher quality show. The last thing is I always put myself in the position of the listener and if they say something, the guest that’s like an acronym that nobody knows or they went by it really fast. I say what? Hold on a second and I don’t let them go. And you know this firsthand?
RV: Yeah, they really well like you stop and dig and halt and challenge and question.
MS: Yeah. And it’s not like I’m trying to challenge the question. I just want to understand. Right? Because I know that my audience wants to understand, and I’m doing both you, the gusta service and the audience a service because a lot of them tell me, you literally asked the question that I had in my brain.
And and that I think is part of what my audience really, really loves about the show and it’s just an interview show, but it’s very much focused on tactical, tactical stuff. And I think that’s just been my tried and true rested P from the beginning rather than just bringing a bunch of people on and shooting the crap. That’s just not how I roll. You know, we’re here to, to learn something. And I think that’s what people love about the show.
RV: Yeah. I mean, yeah, the, the, the prep that you do. I mean, I’ve done hundreds of podcast interviews and it’s just like between the prep that you do on the front end and then the, the way that you hold that line of quality and you know, both leading up to and during the episode is, it’s like there’s, there’s less than a handful of people that actually do that.
MS: Thank you. I think that’s probably why it’s survived as strong and as long as it has.
RV: Yeah. Well one of the things about you also, it’s interesting like usually when I interview somebody for our audience, I’m picking them because they do one thing really, really well. And that’s something that we teach people to do, right, is just like have focus, focus, focus. You know, you, you do podcasting while you social while you’re doing this reports really well, but your, your primary business model, like the way that you actually make money is mostly from the event, right?
MS: Correct. Okay. So like more than half is from the conference and the rest of it is from online training stuff that we do or our professional organization that people belong to.
RV: Gotcha. So social media marketing world is this event and, and y’all, if you’ve never been there, it’s, it’s amazing. Like there are so many people, there’s so much knowledge. Like it’s a buzz. It’s, it’s, it’s not even like a community. It’s, it’s like I dunno. It’s like an empire. And, and, and the, the, the thing that’s crazy too about your event is usually the people who are teaching are the ones like sitting in the audience. So, so a lot of the people, if you go to other events and it’s like you’ll see, you know, somebody teaching on this or that or whatever, those people are in the audience at your event. Which is
MS: And just period behind the curtain. Is that what you mean?
RV: Right, yeah. Like the speakers stay, they hang out, they’re there, they’re all networking. There’s all these like private meetups that are happening. And yeah,
MS: We designed it to be very social because obviously it’s called social media marketing world. And we knew that people that are in this space are by their very nature wanting to interact with each other. Cause they often sit behind the computer by themselves and they don’t get a chance to hang out with people that are like minded. And I had been going to other conferences and I just noticed this was missing.
The only thing they would do is they’d go into a club and that would be the only chance to get together and you couldn’t talk to anybody because the music was so darn loud. So I’m like, Hey, let’s build opportunities for people to connect and let’s build this in such a way that we highly encourage the speakers to hang out, you know?
And we don’t really have a green room like other events do, so the speakers can’t retreat to it. We engineered it that way. But what ends up happening is these speakers walk out into the hall afterwards and they’re, they’re surrounded by 30 people and they just go for another half an hour and they love it, you know? And it’s like the audience loves it. They love it because it’s accessible. They can get to people and it’s just something unusual. And I’m, I never could have imagined it could’ve gotten this big. It’s really, really kind of one of my big accomplishments.
RV: How many people are you expecting?
MS: Well, we had 4,700 people there last year.
RV: Wow. I think last time I was there it was like 2300 or something.
MS: So we don’t know exactly cause it’s still too early. We’re still a couple of months away, but we’ll probably be at least 4,000. I mean it could be more, you can never tell what the event space, you know. But we’ve always grown every year. So it’ll be at least 4,000, maybe 5,000. I honestly don’t know, but it sounds like a lot, but it is still got this intimate flair to it. So we try very hard to make sure even though it feels huge to not make it feel that way when you’re actually there.
RV: So when it comes to events, yeah, this is another thing. Our, our team knows this when we started this is our back with our, our former company. But you know, when I kind of started as a professional in this industry, we started by doing events. We were putting on public seminars and you know, we did that. We traveled to a new city every month, every four months for like five years.
And I got to the point where I was like so burnt out on hosting events and doing events and I call it name tags. It’s like anytime you got to print name tag it’s like, I don’t want to print name tags. Like but I feel like events are making you know, in some ways I’m a comeback or, or, or whatever. What do you think that people should know if they want to put on their own event? And you know, some of our clients do. Lewis puts on one big event every year. I feel like that’s kind of becoming more of a theme where it’s like there’s one big event. How do you make an event profitable? Cause you could spend a lot of money.
MS: It’s not easy to do. We spend many, many, many millions of dollars to put on our event. But the key to, first of all, you have to acknowledge and understand that people want experiences. It’s like the, the thing that everybody craves now because they’re all stuck on their devices. They want to be together. It’s, it’s especially in millennials, they pay a lot of money for an experience, you know, that’s, that’s like kind of the center of what they want.
So to put on a good event, you need to ask yourself, what can you model that has a really good experience. We modeled Disneyland and we look at the experience of the people at Disneyland and how there’s people greeting you and that everything is clean and taken care of and polished. So that’s what we do. But what, what somebody else needs to do is just ask themselves, okay, how can we create an experience that people will talk about?
MS: Take pictures, want to be part of next year? And as far as making it profitable one of the best ways to make an event profitable is to sell the recordings to the event. Because the actual event itself is, it’s very hard to be profitable. You need to have big scale for it to be profitable. But you could have an upsell on the recordings of the video or you could sell the recordings of the video to the people that couldn’t make it to the event. We have many, many thousands every year that buy the recordings from social media marketing world and that is a big source of profit for us.
RV: Gotcha. And how do you price it relative to the price of admission?
MS: The price. Okay. So the vert, we call it the virtual ticket and it sells between 300 and $700 depending on when they buy it. The physical ticket sells between a thousand and $1,600 when they buy it. So the idea is, you know, it should be a maybe 25% to 35% of the cost because the whole reason typically people go to events where there is teaching is for the content. Right?
But there is obviously that experience that they’re truly paying for, right? That chance to meet you face to face, all that kind of stuff. And if you do really good with the recordings, you can still get lots and lots of people. We do not broadcast it live. It’s just about 10 days after the event. We email everyone and all the recordings are available for them to watch.
RV: Yeah. I mean, you guys have so many breakout rooms and stuff. That’d be crazy to try it.
MS: I’m simultaneous things going on.
RV: Yeah. so that’s interesting. So promoting the event, right? So I think it was like if you have a video course or you have a membership program, it’s like, okay, you know, you’re going to do a podcast or you’re going to build a funnel. You know, people are going to be nurtured through a sequence and they’re going to buy. I don’t feel like you see that as much with events. Events are very hard to sell. So how do you, how do you sell an event particularly like you know, at this point your events are there. It’s not a cheap, it’s nothing to go
MS: Hotel and flights. You’re talking $3,000. Right? So the key thing is going to be to sell an event is to figure out a price point. And to figure out where your audience is. If it’s a local audience and it probably could be obviously a few hundred dollars, you know, if it’s a smaller event, you have to have enough, you have to charge enough to obviously cover, cover your expenses.
In an ideal world, an event you treat like a book, right, where you’re not going to make money on the event, but the event will lead to other opportunities. That’s how you have to think about it, right? Like a lot of things we’re going to make money on books either, right? But it leads to other opportunities. So I’m promoting the event is just all about getting the right people to the event. And w we do it for like six months straight, you know what I mean?
MS: So for us it’s a massive undertaking to promote it and we use all of our own media to promote it, but it’s the primary source of revenue for our company. I don’t think a lot of other people have that kind of opportunity. So you might want to just, you know, set your goals a little lower than what you think because it’s really, really hard.
So if you want a thousand, maybe go with 300 for the first one, and then if you need more and then you’re sold out and then boom, you’ve got a sold out event. But no matter what, it’s going to be harder than you realize to sell out an event because it’s really hard for people to commit cause it’s a complex sale. They got to, they got to check the dates, they gotta check the flights, they gotta check the hotels. There’s
RV: Just so much to it, you know this, right? Yeah. I mean it’s, it is, it is. So, I mean it’s, it’s crazy. So, and when you say promote it, okay, does that just mean you’re telling people, Hey, we have an event, here’s the website that you go to. I mean, what, what, what, what is it, what is that? What are the details of, you know, cause like one of the reasons I like things like courses or whatever, it’s like, okay, there’s a registration page and then there’s a, there’s a video and then there’s a sales page and you buy a, events are much more complex. Just like you said.
So I have five full time marketers on my team working for six months straight. Just to give you some perspective. Okay. They’re doing everything from email marketing and we probably send 50 to 100 emails. They’re doing Facebook advertising, they’re doing organic social media posts. They’re doing ads on our existing media properties that we have. They might be doing, bringing speakers on live video to
MS: Do stuff. I’m bringing on speakers that are going to be speaking at the event, you know, and I might plant in what are you gonna be talking about the event, like we integrate all the media into kind of the purpose of driving people to go to that event. And then we also have to get affiliates lined up and get them to promote the event and to get the fans excited about the events we have to do contest and promotions.
Like we just did share your story kind of thing where people created videos and it was my story from social media marketing world and then the winner got an all expenses paid trip. There’s stuff, I mean like I’m just scratching the surface man. It’s deep and it’s wide, but it’s our core business model.
RV: I mean that part is that, that last part is not one that I really have heard that much. So you did a, you did a deal where you invited people who were your last year’s attendees to walk? Walk me through that exactly
MS: Called, it was called my S M M w story. And it was a promotional contest that we encourage people to either in writing or in video create like a two minute video or a written thing that shared their story. And we were going to pick a grand prize winner, which was a give them a free ticket travel and hotel. We refund their ticket if they already bought one. And the second prize was just a ticket. And we w the grand winner was a guy named Roger who’s a plumber.
He told the story about how he came to social media marketing world and his business was about to go under and now he’s like the leading plumber in the world and he’s speaking on stages over the world about plumbing, you know, and and he met the people at my conference, like Daryl ease from YouTube and others and that led him down the path to YouTube. Now he’s got this huge following and it was really awesome. And it was, he had the hashtag on it, but the goal was to get people to talk about our event, use the hashtag so that it looked as if they were evangelizing for us, which they were, and then we were going to pick the best one and reward them with a prize.
RV: Well, I love that. Did you do that every year just to [inaudible]
MS: Oh, that’s a new idea this year. Did it work? Well it didn’t because we unfortunately promoted it the week of Thanksgiving. So an idea of where we would have gotten started a little earlier and we also found it was hard to get people to create videos. So we’ll probably give it a little more promotion earlier next year.
We had, we only had like four videos and two writtens and it costs us thousands. You can imagine just in prizes. So we didn’t actually see ROI on that. But we, interesting hermit, you try stuff and if it works you keep doing it. If it doesn’t, you try something different.
RV: So what, so what do you think really moves the needle? Like what actual like what
MS: Email? 70% 70% of all of our sales for the conference that we can track come from email. The rest is word of mouth, which is just good old fashioned people telling people.
RV: Now when you say email is that I’m sending you an email to say, Hey, there’s an event coming up. Click here to buy it. That’s it. Except we do it.
MS: Do you know 70 times and each one’s a little different. Like, like here at one email might be like, Hey, you know, you need to do more with Instagram marketing and here’s some interesting statistics and you know, the best way to learn about Instagram marketing is to go learn from the people that are doing it well, here’s who’s doing it. Come learn at their feet link. You know what I mean? That kind of stuff.
So we just come up with a thousand different angles and we write different messages. You know, another one might be a keynote announcement. Right? You get the idea. So the idea is any, anything that we can tell a story or talk about, that’s part of our sequence that happens every single week over the entire six month promotional campaign and multiple times a week sometimes.
RV: Yeah. So that’s, so that’s really powerful cause, so basically you’re just taking like one little sliver of what someone’s gonna learn and building one email around that. Yeah. Flushing some content around it and then leading, tying it towards buying the event. So you’re not like, you’re, you’re not just, you’re not just sending 50 emails that say, come to San Diego on these dates.
MS: Now they all kind of are part of a theme and build the story. And then the ones that really perform well, we turn them into Facebook ads or turn them into organic content that dah dah, dah, dah.
RV: And do you think like how is having the big name speakers, is that still like a pretty big part of why people are coming is like the big keynote speaker or whatever.
MS: It’s not the keynote speaker. Cause as you know, most of our speakers are keynoters, you know, like we had other events like yourself.
RV: Yeah, you got me, you got me, you got me stowed away in the breakout in the breakout room somewhere. I don’t want to workshop. We’re diving in.
MS: Yeah. So it is definitely the the key to it all really is my podcast because people listen to these people every week on my show and then they realize that they’re all there together. You know what I mean? So, and they realize, wow, I’ve actually sampled some of Rory and some of these other people. And it’s like, I want to learn more from them and this is their chance to come and learn from those people. So it’s all kind of intertwined.
RV: And then the ads that you’re running. Okay, so, so same thing as like, is it just an ad for [inaudible]?
MS: It’ll be more like a remarketing ad. Like, Hey, you need to convince your boss, we’ve written a letter for you. Go here. You know, so somebody who didn’t buy, we’ll send them an ad that says, here’s something we wrote to convince your boss, or we’ll send them another ad that says, not sure the content will be good. Go here and watch the sample.
RV: Interesting. And then those, you’re driving those back to your website just on like hidden yeah. Special pages. Yeah, exactly. Aha. So they’re not available. It’s like public pages
MS: Public. You just don’t, it’s not necessarily there. You know, the, the website is, you just got for the event, it’s got lots of pages, so they might’ve missed it.
RV: Yeah. interesting. And then you have a, and then and then affiliates. So you’ve got, you’ve got people out there send an email blast to their lists and stuff. A lot of them are the speakers to be honest
MS: With you. You know, they’re the ones that have the skin in the game and a lot of them just, you know, cause we do not pay our speakers. Which is another surprise surprise. But they come because they really do find a lot of value in what happened, what they get out of it. You know, they get, they get the right kind of audience out of this event that helps their business. So a lot of them choose to be affiliates and a lot of them let their list know about it on whatever method they choose to do it, like their podcast or whatever else.
RV: Oh, you’re not paying giving keynote speakers. Like even we’ve never paid a speaker ever. Really not even like the big headliner person. They’re coming because of the value.
MS: You’ve never paid guy Kawasaki, we’ve never paid, you know, all the big names that we’ve had. No, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll cover their flight. And their, their hotel and stuff. But we’ve never paid a speaking fee ever. And it’s really kind of our secret sauce because the moment we do it, we’ve got to pay everybody.
RV: Well yeah. And that’s, and that’s where it’s like, it really is hard to run the event and the, if the profit goes upside down is speakers
MS: And she can get away with that. It’s a lot harder when you’re a small event,
RV: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Cause it’s like the reason the reason you come is because everyone’s going to be there and you know, when you’re smaller red, it’s just, it’s just really, really, really hard. But I think even before our former company, the way that I originally started was just doing a free, I just did a free training. I invited people to come and then it was just like in the knee, sell, sell, whatever you have to sell. Or
MS: There are, there are keynoters out there where their whole business model is just keynotes and that’s how they make money. And those keynoters like Sally Hogshead for example, will sometimes take one on paid gig a year, you know? Yeah.
RV: Or if that’s like me, that’s me. Yeah.
MS: Or you know, and, and it, but it’s gotta be really a perfect match for their business model. Right. So, so, and it’s really like you’ve got to have a good relationship with those people. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. But there are, there are bazillions of speakers out there whose business model is to get in front of crowds, are willing to do it for free because they make their money by selling consulting, you know? And that’s really where the bulk of the speakers come from, is that the ones that are, you’re getting a sample of their value and then the hope is that you become a customer.
RV: Yeah. Well I think that’s a good way, you know, for our audience listening is you gotta be thinking about what speakers would be interested in speaking to my audience because it’s a, it’s a win win. It’s a win, win, win for everybody.
MS: Gotta be a win win. If they don’t want to be there, you don’t want them. And that’s it. You know? And, and, and let me tell you the idea that a one speaker is going to make your event, it’s just not true. You know, even Gary Vaynerchuk who spoken at my event, who never does free events has done free events for me. You know, so, but, but the reality is even him alone, there are not, they’re not really have a material impact one way or the other on my business. And he is really the biggest guy in our world. Yeah.
RV: I mean, that’s interesting to hear. Like that’s just that, that, that, that name. Well, and in some ways it’s just [inaudible]
MS: No, as I’m a big event, if you’re a small event, it could be a huge thing for you. But if you’re a big event, you know, yeah, maybe a couple hundred people might come more, but that’s probably, it’s really hard to measure. You know, you can’t just pin it on one person and that’s where a lot of people get it wrong. They just say, if I could only have Seth Goden or if I only have Gary Vaynerchuk and it’s just not how it works.
RV: Yeah. Well that’s, I think that’s actually encouraging is just to go like create an experience. Right. You know, don’t build it, don’t build it just around one personality or speaker or whatever and pin all your hopes to that. Cause there’s a lot of people who do that. They’ll go pay 50 grand to get a speaker and then it’s like, crap, that didn’t help me sell more tickets at all and now I’m broke. You know, like I spent all my money on that, that, that thing for public of PR, particularly for public events. It’s like corporates, a little bit of it.
MS: That might be true with musicians and athletes and comedians and all that kind of stuff. But definitely not with your everyday kind of speaker, you know.
RV: So speaking about personalities, I want to talk about, open this conversation with you because you know, I think it’s like people heard of social media marketing world and social media examiner and social media marketing podcast, but it’s like the, you have your, you have your little icons and your graphics and your visual identity. None of it is built around Michael Stelzner his face.
You’re not even, I mean, you’re the voice of the podcast, but my face is not on the cover art. That’s true. Yeah. You’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, it’s, it wasn’t built around your face. Why did you do so? So why did you do that originally? And do you think that that has made your enterprise more valuable or less valuable? And do you plan to keep doing that in the future? Like that, that whole conversation is a big one.
MS: All right. First and foremost, I was very well known before I started social media examiner in the world of writing. And it was all about me and my name and my name was everywhere. This was before my face logically made sense because this is when blogging was around and people didn’t put their face. It was before social. And I had that fame and I decided I didn’t want any more of it.
So when I started social media examiner, I knew it was never intended to be about me. It was to create a movement. And you can’t create a movement with a face. You create a movement with a concept. Right? So the idea that social media that I could create a movement of people that wanted to understand how social media works was far more important than Michael Stelzner because people want to be part of a movement.
MS: They don’t want to be part of a person, you know? So I was creating something that transcended the individual. Now that did hurt me a little bit in the beginning after I got to a certain level of fame, because when I came out with my second book launch at first people were like, who the heck is Michael Stelzner?
They know social media examiner. But that turned out to not be a problem because my audience didn’t know who I was because my name was on every email that went out from the beginning. And but over time, you know, I just didn’t want to make it about me and I knew that if I made it about someone else, it would grow faster. So what was the second part of the question?
RV: Well, so that’s what you did early on. Has it helped you or hurt you and do you plan on doing it going forward? And why or why not?
MS: So. So at this point, about two years ago, I started putting my face out there a little bit more when I started a documentary called the journey, which has been retired. We did that for two seasons and it turned out people really actually liked hearing from me and seeing me and my quirky nature on camera. But I decided I’m done with that. My, I’m doing something brand new as of right.
Today I just launched something brand new, which you saw. I only put my face out there with an intent and with a purpose. So me, it’s like I don’t want to be more famous than I already am. I feel like I, I, I, that’s not going to service me. I’m not selling me. There’s nothing, there’s no advantage to the business to necessarily having my face out there more because we’re already so quite successful.
MS: But I’ve got something new that I’m going to be launching a course. So I strategically decided that I was going to create a series of videos to show the world that there’s some knowledge that I have that they may not be aware of. And I launched that very first video today and it was very well received. I was shocked actually. I published it on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn and the comments were like, Whoa.
And I’m getting text messages from friends and like it’s just a four minute video showcasing some of my knowledge and I’m going to be doing it for a couple of months here just to kind of set my audience, set the message to my audience that Hey, I have something to teach you and then when I’m ready to sell the course they will hopefully say, okay, I’ve learned so much from Mike for free. Maybe I’ll go check out his course.
RV: So how do you think, how do you, if somebody who’s just starting out, yeah, right. You know, you said there are certain advantages to building it around your face. That’s the thing about a face too, is it, it’s your face. It’s, it simplifies the sale cause it’s like if I like you, I buy from you. If I don’t like you, I don’t. But if it’s a company, it’s like there’s a little more exploration of like, do I really trust this brand? Right? But if somebody’s just starting out, how do they know if they should lead with their face or if they should build it around a brand?
MS: It depends on what you’re selling. If you’re selling your knowledge, lead with your face, if you’re selling a product, then you might want to go either way, right? So if you’re selling a widget, then you just have to ask yourself, do I want to build a brand that will help me accelerate the widget? Or do I want to build a personal brand that’ll accelerate through the widget?
Because maybe my story about the, you know, look at all the shark tank stories, right? It’s about the person, right? And some of those persons are naturals, right? Where it’s like, Hey, you need to come on QVC. You need to be the one to sell it. Right? But not everyone’s like that. So that’s Jeff. If you’re a natural communicator and you have that energy and you can bring that content and it comes naturally, then use your face. If it doesn’t, then create a brand that’s a brand that doesn’t involve your face.
RV: All right, so let me ask you if the entrepreneurial side, cause I was actually surprised to hear this really. So I was surprised. I was surprised to hear this. I want to from the entrepreneurial perspective, because even though I’m like a personal brand guy, I mean it’s our whole business, right? Is helping people build brands around their face. I’m also an entrepreneurial guy and so I’m interested in equity value. I’m interested in, in resellable value and I feel like, you know, there are things like trafficking conversion that were sold that have high values. To me, social media examiner has a lot of value because there’s less of a question about whether or not this enterprise will succeed without you, which means it’s a sellable asset versus if it’s built around your face.
MS: Well that’s a huge upside to having a brand that’s not your face. Absolutely. Yeah. So I, I just, so that was my intent in building the thing. I mean, honestly, I didn’t, first I didn’t feel comfortable cause they didn’t know what the heck I was talking about. And secondly, I thought I could build a brand and I could get out of it if I wanted to and it would still potentially live on.
RV: Right. And I feel that’s true, right? Like I think it’s, I mean if you, I mean other than a different voice on the podcast, I think it’s like somebody very much could by social media examiner and there’s like this machine that produces events
MS: Every year. We’re not for sale, but it’s true. That is a huge advantage. And you just have to ask yourself like, what do you, you can go either way. You can start with a personal brand and you can spin off a product which a lot of people have done, right. Lots of people have done that.
RV: Lots of people, celebrities do that all the time. I mean, that’s what [inaudible]
MS: They did. And that the advantage of the personal brand is it can be a huge accelerant because you become the influencer that builds that product. The flip side of it is you could be a company that spins off a personal brand. You see this with CEOs all the time, Richard Branson, right? And all these other CEOs, Steve jobs, formerly, you know, of Apple. And you know, the, the soak can go either direction. You could be, you could come out from behind the brand like I did or you could be the brand.
RV: Yeah. So, well that’s interesting cause that’s, that’s, that’s what we would say too is like, it all depends on what is your long term objective and you know, what are your, what are your strengths and your weaknesses and stuff. So it’s, it’s not a, it’s not a black and white answer for everybody. It totally depends on your situation. Okay. Well very cool.
So I have one more little question I want to ask you before I do that. Where should people go if they want to, you know, learn more about Mike Stelzner and you know, social media marketing world. And, and
MS: So first of all, if you have room for on your listening podcast for more podcasts, check out the social media marketing podcast. If you go to social media examiner.com you’ll find everything you’ll find social media marketing world, you’ll find our YouTube channel social media examiner.com. Okay. All right.
RV: We’ll put links to that. Of course I’ll go into the show notes and everything and I’ll be at the event which I’m excited aside about and looking forward to seeing you again in person, my friend. The coming back to the data. Yes. Okay. One of the things that’s painful for everybody is that the organic reaches is dying on social media. I feel, I mean, true, it is dying and it is really, really frustrating cause people have invested a lot of time and energy at the same time. It’s hard to complain. It’s like it’s free. What are the kind of big trends on the horizon that you think personal brands should be paying attention to in order to maximize their organic reach on social, you know, beyond video or is there anything else? Is it just like, you know, video is the answer.
MS: The idea of maximizing your organic reach is kind of a dead idea. So instead of what you need to do is you need to figure out on social, because it’s just, it’s gone and it’s not coming back. You can pay, which is if you’re willing to put a little bit of money behind some of those organic posts you can pay to get those in front of people, which might be smart depending on what your objective is. So do not be shy about putting money behind your organic posts and turning them into an ad. Beyond organic.
I really feel it’s important to diversify beyond social obvious social, like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn into other platforms like podcasting, like YouTube, which a lot of people don’t think of when they think of social and also the written word. So there are still people that read email, there are still, and there’s a lot of people that just send emails like Chris Brogan’s a great example of that, right? He puts out a weekly email w w and he doesn’t publish that content anywhere else. So those are things that you can do to nurture and grow an audience that kind of are your own. So you don’t have to be at the mercy of an algorithm
RV: And you don’t think you, YouTube doesn’t count as social media because it’s not an algorithm. Meaning they’re, they’re going to show it, right?
MS: Can it have an algorithm? But most people don’t think of YouTube when they think of social. They think of YouTube as a distribution vehicle. Okay? So you can link to your YouTube videos through all these other mediums, right? So you can say, Hey, go watch the video here on YouTube.
And if you’re lucky, some of those videos will take off in search or suggested video. But I, in the same way, podcasts, you could argue, have a search function inside the Apple podcast directory. You got to promote the podcast, right? Everybody knows that who has a podcast, you’ve got to promote the podcast. You do the same thing with your YouTube videos. You treat it as a, as a source, you know, not at the destination. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s just where the video lives is what I’m,
RV: But but, but basically like you post something on Facebook, less than 1% of whoever follows you is going to even that you post something on iTunes, a podcast, all of your subscribers get that. If they are subscribed, it shows up in their feed. And you’re saying YouTube is more like that and less like Facebook your subscribers,
MS: Right? But the key thing is to, yes, to grow the subscribers. But the difference between YouTube and podcasting is that not all of your subscribers will see the video. Youtube will reveal the video to your subscribers selectively. And then they’ll look at how many people click on it. And then what they do after they click on it. So what YouTube will do is if you can get them to click on it, which is a good thumbnail, and then they’ll watch it cause YouTube is looking for retention time, then they’ll show it to more of your subscribers and then they’ll show it to non-subscribers.
So there’s a huge distribution upside on YouTube that you do not have on any other platform. Also, remember YouTube videos can work for years. That does not happen on any other social platform. You’re lucky for 24 hours on everything else. So there is that big upside and you can email, you know, that link to YouTube in the same way you might tell everybody to go listen to your podcast with links to Apple and Google play and Spotify. So it’s just one of those things you got to promote.
But, but the upside to YouTube video can be huge because if you can get a video optimized, then it could deliver
RV: For years. I love it. Well there you have it. Some of the biggest ideas from one of the biggest brands in the space, Michael Stelzner, everybody check out social media marketing world. The event, I will be there. If you’re listening to this before that time for this year, and any year in the future, I can tell you for sure. It will be amazing. So follow Michael, check them out. This is one of the, the, the, the native sources that I learned from social media examiner. So, Michael, thanks so much for your friendship and your counsel and for all your wisdom and, and ideas today, my friend.
Ep 21: How To Produce A Winning Infomercial with Kevin Harrington | Recap Episode
On today’s recap episode, we break down the core lessons and extract the golden nuggets from our interview with the original “shark,” Kevin Harrington. Kevin is a true American legend in the world of business, investing, marketing and sales. He is the original “shark” on the hit TV show Shark Tank, the creator of the […]
Ep 20: How To Produce A Winning Infomercial with Kevin Harrington
Speaker 1: (00:01)
I am so excited to introduce you to this is one of those people where it’s like if you ever sat next to him on the airplane, you would have hit the Jackpot and the lottery and you, you might not realize you were sitting next to. But Kevin Harrington is a man that people literally try to strategize how they can get close to, um, he has become a celebrity in the world of entrepreneurs and inventors. You probably recognize him. He was one of the original sharks, the original shark, the first shark. Uh, I believe that was selected to shark tank, which has now been super successful. He is also one of the founders of, of infomercials and as seen on TV, like he’s one of the pioneers of that whole movement. He actually is the cofounder of entrepreneurs organization, which my wife and I are members of.
Speaker 1: (00:50)
I’ve spoken at several of their events, um, around the, uh, around the globe, around the country in my case. But it’s an international organization. And, uh, he has seen over 50,000 pitches, um, launched more than 500 products, generating $5 billion in sales. Um, he also is the creator of the secrets of closing the sale masterclass, which is inspired by Zig Ziglar. So He, uh, Zig Ziglar wrote a book, secrets of closing the sale. It’s just been rereleased with him and Kevin Harrington. Um, obviously zig has been passed away for seven, eight years now, but a was a mentor to me personally and also, um, to Kevin. So Kevin, thanks for being here. Uh, thanks for making time, Rory. Thank you. Great. Great to be here and thanks. It was a very nice introduction. I appreciate that. Thank you. What man? Like, you know, it’s one thing to talk about personal branding and brand builders group.
Speaker 1: (01:46)
That’s what we do, right? We help people build and monetize their personal brand. But really what we study is reputation and reputation as is. How do you build a reputation, how do you become trusted? And of all the people that I know that know the most people, I think you’re near the top, like of, of every like super influential person that I know you already know them and I know that your Rolodex goes far, far beyond that. So, and yet, you know, you’ve been in the world of sales and marketing for years and years and years and sometimes reputations go south in those industries. Uh, when you’re an investor and an entrepreneur, you know, those, sometimes those deals go south. There’s a lot of conflict and there’s fallout and you know, when you get to be your level of celebrity and notoriety, I know that, you know, people sue you for no reason and you know, so what is your philosophy on reputation in general? Like if we just start there, like you have been able to keep such a solid reputation over the years, how do you think you’ve been able to do that? I appreciate that. I think, and I’m going to go all the way back to the beginning because
Speaker 2: (02:59)
I think you need a foundation of, um, of, first of all, I think my foundation that I built my business on is, is respect for entrepreneurs, number one. And so, um, when you watch shark tank, there’s Mr. Wonderful. Uh, and, and I, and I always ask people, do you know why he calls himself Mr Wonderful? Because nobody else will. Okay. He calls himself that because nobody else feels that he may be. Mr. Wonderful. And actually I joke this, this is all kind of joking about O’Leary, Kevin O’Leary, but we used to on the show, we’d say he was the bad Kevin. I’m the good Kevin now. Like why, you know, I’ll take that they, you know, I wasn’t the one that came up with that the rest of the sharks were and, and it’s because when somebody would come out and make a pit, I wasn’t there to tear them down and rip them apart and tell them how stupid their idea was.
Speaker 2: (04:02)
I wanted to empower them even if I wasn’t going to invest. Because entrepreneurs are in a delicate situation. They, they’re fighting against coming home to their family, to their wives, to friends and talking about how they’re giving up their job. They’re investing their life savings into their idea. This is not an easy task. This is, this is a tough situation and you know, to, to have a full time job but be spending money on patents and on this and on that and going on shark tank to try to get, you know, an investment from a shark. This is what it’s all about. And I think today there’s more places to go to get funding. You can do crowd funding and yeah, you can go on shark tank, but that’s very difficult to get on. But I think going back to day one, when I got started, I was knocking on doors when I was 15 years old driving a bicycle cause I didn’t even have a drivers license getting the door slammed in my face.
Speaker 2: (05:01)
And, and so I learned the hard way. I learned my father was a bartender, saved up enough money to open up his first bar, Harrington’s Irish pub. And I started working in his bars and restaurants when I was 11 years old, 40 hours a week. So I, I, you know, worked hard, had to prove myself, had to pay my own way through high school, through college. So I looked at entrepreneurs as people like myself. I was in the trenches building and hustling to become successful. So when they come to me now asking for help and advice, I put myself on their level saying, what would I have to do if I were in their shoes pitching me now the investor that is risen above the, the, the ashes sometimes because that’s, you know, in the 500 products plus that I’ve done more than 300 of them bombed and they lost all my money. So, uh, you know, it’s, it’s not so easy every day. And I, and I say Winston Churchill had, it’s a great Chang success is being able to go from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm. Okay. So, uh, you know, it took me awhile to figure out, hey, I just failed. I’ve got to learn from that and, and, and go to the next step. But that’s what I do.
Speaker 1: (06:28)
I’ve gotten to know you. Uh, you know, we spent a bit of time together here the last couple of years, which has been awesome. And I think when I look at you as an investor, as a shark, I remember thinking after the first time I spent, you know, like a full day with you, it occurred to me, yet you’re not a, you’re not a shark at all. I remember you saying that you, you don’t even try to negotiate for a good deal. You negotiate for a deal that’s good for you and for your other partner because your, I remember you saying that, you know, your philosophy was not, where can I get the best deal? It’s one where everybody has a fair deal and everyone is motivated, um, you know, to, to, to win. And that spoke a lot to me. It was a very profound thing where I was like, wow, what, what a different way to approach negotiating. And I think, you know, in terms of your reputation and you know, over time, I think that’s what people are probably drawn to because they know that you’re, you’re fair. You, you’re, you’re fair.
Speaker 2: (07:29)
And I think I appreciate that. I think, um, when I go back to the early days, I met a gentleman named Arnold Morris. At the Philadelphia home show and he was slicing through Coca-Cola cans with the Ginsu knife and mufflers and things. And I cut a deal with him and put him on TV. Now Arnold said to me, Kevin, um, and he had his signed contract for the good shoe and the, and the knife sales, but he said, I’ve got other people that this is amazing what we’re doing. If I bring you other deals, can I get compensated? I said, absolutely. We put an addendum to the contract. He brought Billy Mays and he brought Sandy Mason and Wally Nash of some of those you may recognize and some you might not, but we did hundreds of millions and billions in sales that came from these projects that Arnold Morris brought. But he got compensated on all of it.
Speaker 2: (08:23)
And so on his, literally his deathbed, the week that he was passing away, he kind of knew it was coming close and he reached out and his wife said, Arnold needs to talk to you. And I said, oh my God. And she says, Yap, he’s getting very close. She’s, he had a stroke and this and that. And she’s, and I said, well, what does he want to talk to me about? And I’m absolutely, I’d love to talk to him. She said, he’s got a deal. He wants to pitch you. Okay. I’m like, you know, here is, I mean this amazing because he had to get this last feel out of his system before he could pass. I mean it was unbelievable that the, the way it went down, but you know, Arnold was an amazing man, did great things for many people, but these insults, so people say to me, you know, how do you keep getting all these new products?
Speaker 2: (09:18)
I said, I’m getting these products from people I’ve been dealing with for 30 35 years in 2025 years, 10 and 15 years. And people I dealt with two months ago. So it’s, it’s the roll of decks factor. As you mentioned, Rory, this is what creates a lot of magic for all of us. As you know, I call it the Golden Rolodex. And this is part of becoming, you know, it as you’re branding yourself and you know, get back to the concept of personal branding and things. Creating a golden Rolodex is, is, is an important step in that process.
Speaker 1: (09:52)
Yeah. Well, and, and so one of the other things I wanted to ask you about just, you know, as I think about what can I ask Kevin that I can’t ask anyone else is you’ve sold more on TV than anybody. I mean, I don’t know anyone. It would be only a few people in the world that you could even say has been involved with selling as much on TV. So I’m interested
Speaker 2: (10:14)
a couple that are up there in the same ranks, but I, I know, I never want to say I’m the top guy because there’s some pretty successful guys out there, but I’m right there in the top five for sure on a global basis.
Speaker 1: (10:28)
Moved a lot of product on TV. So one, I’m interested in understanding TV, like in terms of, you know, a lot of people that are building a personal brand. TV is like this holy grail of like, oh my gosh, if I could get on TV, it’s like Tony Robbins is on TV and Dean Grasiozi is on TV. You know, like you said, like Billy Mays and, and all of these like people who become these celebrity workout people, they, they do infomercials. So one is how does that business work? Like how does that happen? How does someone get their clothing line on QVC? Or how do they get their, you know, Dean Grasiozi has a book, right? He does an infomart. Like how would a person go about doing that if they said, you know what, I think I’ve got a program I could sell on TV. Like how do you do that?
Speaker 2: (11:17)
So, so let’s, let’s, I’ll step back a second. Cause it, it’s there, there’s a couple of different angles there. You said, how do you get on QVC? How do you get on TV like infomercial? So two different scenarios. But the bottom line is this TV has been very powerful for many, many years. For me. I started back in the early eighties when I was watching a just got cable TV and I’m watching discovery channel. It was actually channel 30 of the 30 channel package. And so I went to all the channels, ESPN and 24 hours sports and movies and HBO and MTV Music. I got to ESPN sports, I think I mentioned. Um, I got to discovery channel and there was nothing on the channel. There was actually just bars on the screen. So I called the cable company and they said, we as a cable company delivered to you what we get from discovery and they only deliver us an 18 hour a day block.
Speaker 2: (12:17)
Six hours a day is nothing cause they’re a startup channel. They can’t program 24 hours a day. So I went down how to deal bought that six hour block from discovery, not only locally, but I did an international deal. And so for a number of years I had exclusive rights to discovery channel a six hours a day. Okay. Now I was putting in my, I was putting Tony Little Jacqueline Lane, George Foreman, you know, all these different types of products, fitness juicers, you know, kitchen gadgets, whatever, right? And so we had an amazing success for many years putting people on TV. But the way it works is this, there’s all this sort of like downtime with all the TV networks and cable networks. There’s only a handful of places that won’t sell infomercial time, CNN, and, and I think, let’s see, CNN and ESPN, those are the two that you will never see a 30 minute infomercial on.
Speaker 2: (13:20)
But Discovery Channel lifetime, all the other channels of Bravo, we buy tons of time from all of them. So what you do is you buy a block, a 30 minutes slot, maybe you pay 5,000 for it, two thousand ten thousand whatever the number is. In the early days I watched it isn’t maybe 2000 to 10,000 is that a reasonable number for, that’s for cable broadcast. You can buy, for example, in Nashville, Tennessee, you could buy 30 minutes on broadcast television. On Saturday morning, we’ll probably gave $100, right? 30 minutes on Nash on, on, uh, that would hit all of Nashville. Okay. I’m in Tampa, Florida. I can buy time here for as little as $500 for 30 minutes slot. And, and you can even go to cable. The cable guys have some of their own local cable options for even less, maybe $200. So, so now you, by that time you produce the video that sells the product and now that when that airs, it’s, it’s got to generate more than the cost of the time in sales to make money, obviously.
Speaker 2: (14:36)
So you mentioned Dean Grasiozi, he goes, he goes into Tampa, Florida and says to his media buyers buy $20,000 worth of ads. And he’s expecting, now he’s selling his book, but he’s also driving people to a seminar. So his is a little bit different. Hey, buy my book, come to the seminar there. You know, his liquidation comes when people show up at the seminar and he sees how much, you know, sales he’s making from there. But that’s, that is his model is buy infomercial time, drive people to a seminar, upsell them into masterminds. But the fitness people that you see, like the Tony Little’s, when we’re selling the gazelle, for example, we spend 10,000 and media, we want to sell 20 to $30,000 worth of puzzles during that slot. That’s, that’s how it works. You look for at least a two time multiple of sales to the cost of the media. So if you spend 10 grand the media, you want to see 20 plus thousand in sales coming from that time. By
Speaker 1: (15:48)
amazing though, I am all over the country. Now. When you say the media, is that like buying the commercials to promote the show or that’s just buying like the 30 minutes?
Speaker 2: (15:57)
That’s just fine. The 30 minute block, you don’t need commercials to promote an infomercial. It’s a standalone sales piece. So yeah. So Saturday morning, let’s say we, we bought that $800 slot in Nashville on a broadcast station on Saturday morning. People are up there just going from channel to channel to channel on their cable box or the TV and they, oh, wait a minute, let me see what this guy, Dean Grasiozi Phil was talking about. Oh yeah. Well that’s pretty interesting. So they tune in, they get hooked, and this is why you need a good pitch or you need a good presentation in that infomercial because you’ve got to be able to hook them, grab them, and now they’re listening and now they’re going to take action. Hopefully. So you bought that time for $800 in Nashville. You’re hoping to get 1600 to $2,400 in credit card orders from that time. Bye.
Speaker 1: (16:53)
That is so amazing. I mean, it’s so interesting to me because it’s like this is the original webinar funnel. It’s just like buy traffic, drive people to a a one hour Webinar, do a presentation, deliver some value, make an offer, get it to buy. It also blows my mind where he’d go, why are infomercials always late at night? The reason infomercials are always late at night is because one night Kevin Harrington was sitting in his hotel looking at the discovery channel and found out that there were six hours in the middle of the night that nobody else bought and you went and bought it and that that became the homicide. That was the downtime. So can you talk about the, the, um, talk about the pitch a little bit for like, because you know what, there’s, there’s a difference between like selling to a person. You know, in our former life that was something that we used to do.
Speaker 1: (17:44)
We used to teach people to, you know, our, the, our former company used to do like one-on-one sales coaching. That’s very different than selling on a Webinar or selling from a stage or selling on an infomercial where you’re selling one to many. Um, so what do you think are some of the key principles there? Because the other thing, particularly with TV is I have to think like people are flipping their coming and going, so they may not be sitting watching the 30 minute block. They may only be there for like two or three or five minutes. I mean so exactly how do you construct that? Like what? Let’s say you went and bought the $800 cause that’s reasonable. Yeah. So now I have $800 how much do I need to spend on producing the show? Like the 30 minutes and, and what, what I put in that 30 minutes that I can use to like, you know, market my, my book or my Info, my video course or my seminar.
Speaker 2: (18:41)
So great question. Now you have to understand that you’re, you’re, when we talk about producing the show, you’re not producing it just for that $800 by you’re producing it to build a media schedule that might be two three, 400,000 a week in media. That’s generating. See that’s if you’re, let’s say you’re spending 200,000 a week on $800 time slots like Nashville time slot, right? So now you’re, you’re running hundreds of spots that each one is monitored and needs to perform at a two to three to one ratio, sales to media costs. Okay. So, so you say upfront, Dean, I talked to Dean about his show that he did with Larry King for example. I said to Dean, how long did it take you to shoot that show? And he said, Kevin, he said, you won’t believe this, but I shot that show live in 30 minutes.
Speaker 2: (19:44)
And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I sat down, I, you know, I, I, Larry King is a professional, he’s been doing interviews all his life. I’m a professional. We talked a little bit first before we rolled the whole day. I gave him a couple of questions if he wanted to ask, but we just went live and boom, we got it. He said, we did some more footage just to have some more, but I mean that was sort of a live to tape. Turn the cameras on and film it now he had to do editing because he had testimonials. So he had the one day shoot filming with Larry. Then he had testimonials, then he had editing, but then he also had one other big costs. What was it? A fee? The Larry King. Okay. So Larry King, he’s probably, and this isn’t coming from Dean, so I don’t want to make, I don’t want to say, oh, Dean told me this, but if I had to guess, Larry probably gets anywhere from 75,000 to 100 grand to shoot that show.
Speaker 2: (20:44)
Plus he gets a percentage of you show. So what do you note now? What did Dean’s spend? He shot one day at Larry’s office. He shot a dozen testimonials. He shot, he had to do the editing. You have to pay Larry some money. He probably spent all in somewhere between 150 and $200,000 to shoot that infomercial. And that was a pretty easy one to shoot. So, uh, but he, he knows that the credible Biddle credibility of Larry is going to take this thing to a pretty good point. And, and so he’s now crushing it. He’s, I mean, I’ve seen his schedules in my local market where he’s running on three simultaneously at the same time, at two o’clock in the morning. Now let’s see, what am I doing watching it two o’clock in the morning. I as a business, I’m in the business I have to tune in.
Speaker 2: (21:44)
But I get logs from monitoring services of when these are errands. So I don’t have to actually be there live at 2:00 AM. But I get along from a company that says, okay, dean ran his show 122 times last week and here’s where it ran. I can get that information so I know where he’s running about how much he’s spending. Cause I know what those slots are worth. So if I can do a report and say, okay, Dean ran 122 times, he spent 350,000 in media last week. Okay. I mean that tells sophisticated the industry is and, and by the way, this is how people then decide whether they’re going to knock somebody off. Okay. They, they cheat somebody out there running a lot of media. They know what’s working because it’s bringing in, nobody’s running 350,000 in media. If it isn’t bringing back a return on investment, you don’t mean you find out on 10,080 or whether it’s working, you don’t roll it out to three 50 unless you’re getting that return on investment. Uh Huh.
Speaker 1: (22:51)
So, and, and, and this is like, who are you? Oh, you said you’re, you’re either calling a media buyer and you know, at that scale, but if you’re doing local, you’re just going to go to your like local cable channel or like you just,
Speaker 2: (23:04)
yes. Yeah. I mean, so like it, it’s, it’s no problem. Me Or you like I could call my local Tampa TV stations, you can call your local national stations, whatever. Um, you know, we can, we can all make a couple of phone calls. It’s on the rollout when like when I said Dean’s doing three 50 a week. When we did the Gazelle with Tony Little, that was a over a million a week in media span, generating over 2 million in sales a week. But that was hundreds and hundreds of slots. If you’re spending $1 million at 8,000 for some 800 for others, somebody has to monitor that and they have to buy it. Then there’s a traffic department that it goes through because you’ve got to, you buy it, then you send the tape, you’ve got to have an 800 number that’s tagged to that specific station so that when the sales come in, you know what 800 numbers tracked to that station. There’s all kinds of things happening behind the scenes, so there are media agencies that are in the business of buying media to the tune of if it’s 300,000 a week, 500,000 a week, $1 million a week, whatever it may be. Right? So that’s the important thing.
Speaker 1: (24:24)
The essence is really fascinating. I, I’ve never understood like the monetary, but even even going, okay at two to one ad spend, basically on revenue. You could do the same thing with Google ads or Facebook ads and you know, whatever is say, okay if I’m going to, I’m going to put $50 in in terms of Facebook ads, I need to make sure that $100 comes out before I go and spend 10 grand on Facebook ads. And so you’re looking for a two to one to three to one ratio. Um, so what about the content itself? Okay, so what needs to happen in that 30 minutes? Because again, I don’t the medium of that different, I mean it did TV. Yeah, maybe it’s not TV, maybe it’s a Webinar, maybe it’s on stage, but like what goes into the content?
Speaker 2: (25:08)
So, so now in the old days, and I, and I, cause there have been a few changes in the industry for 35 years. Infomercials worked pretty well, but there’s been a little bit of a disruption because there’s a lot of people that have cut the cord from cable and aren’t, you know, aren’t watching TV. There’s been a decline in DVD viewership has been pretty substantial. It’s a 50% decline in TV viewership in the last 10 years. And so the question is, where did these viewers go? Well, you just mentioned it. Facebook, Instagram, they’re, they’d gone to digital outlets, right? Google, youtube, et cetera. So, so now [inaudible] and there’s also another issue. 30 minutes is, is a long time. And let me explain the structure of a 30 minute show. There’s three 10 minute pods in a 30 minute show. Each one of the pods has a three step selling system that I’m going to call the teas, the please and the seeds all within each 10 minutes he’s police sees he’s police sees these please seat you, tease them with an attention getting problem. You please them with solutions to the problem, benefits to the product or service, magical transformations, some kind of demonstration maybe. But magical transformation is a very powerful please. You see a before and an after, right? And then you see like by having a irresistible offer, so t’s with attention getting problem please by solving the problem with magical transformations and cs creating an irresistible offer. And you do that three times in each 10 minute segment of the 30 minute show. So that’s kind of the blueprint for producing an infomercial.
Speaker 1: (27:07)
Wow, I love that. And so it’s really just a 10 minute it really, all you’re doing is creating a 10 minute and then you’re just repeating
Speaker 2: (27:14)
the same. You don’t actually, you, there are some people that actually just do one 10 minute repeated three times. I don’t like to do that because if people sense that, but the formula, yeah, so I mean what we’ll do is you can tease please and seeds, but you just use different testimonials and you know, it might be the, it’s going to be the same seeds, the same irresistible offer in all three closes, but you don’t necessarily have the same content teasing and pleasing along the way.
Speaker 1: (27:49)
Wow. That is so interesting. I mean, that’s such a simple process, but it also very sophisticated in terms of knowing the, knowing the dollars in which markets are producing. And, and it just, it blows my mind though, how like this is, even though people might not say it, this was the genesis of webinar funnels a and video. Any, you know, any, any modality of selling on camera? Like this was where that started.
Speaker 2: (28:16)
I’m going to give you a good example of something that we learned quite a bit on. Uh, a guy came in my office one day to do a, he had a fishing lure and he’d been watching Tony Little and George Foreman and Jacqueline Lane and all these great things we’re doing. And he, he puts this lawyer in front of me. He says, Hey, this is the most amazing lure you’re gonna want to do this. And I said, why is it so amazing? And he said, I have a pad and said, all the words hit the water drop straight down. Mine hits the water and it’s reverse rig to swim away like a wounded fish. And so I said, I’d love to see that in operation. We went out and showed how it was swimming away and fish were attacking this floor. We had this big hog draw, 20 foot long fish paint that we cast the lure in and saw some amazing demonstrations, catching fish that lures, we’re going straight down regular lawyers dish when just watching them drop, the flying lore went in and they’re chasing it around and biting it and catching fish.
Speaker 2: (29:14)
So, um, when we first tested the show, we ran on a lot of cable networks and the media buyers called back and said, the show didn’t work. I don’t think fishing’s going to be a good category. Um, it’s not successful. And I said, let me get some demographics. I want to see where the orders came from. You know, fishing is, you know, may be, it’s not some universal, we found La and New York, it didn’t have any traction, but in Missouri, in Ohio and Michigan and various areas where there was lakes, it was crushing it. So people aren’t in New York City going out and fishing every weekend. But in Kansas City, they would love to go fishing on the weekends, the lakes and places around. So now we stopped running cable. We went back in. So our cable for, you know, 10 grand in media is generating 5,000 in sales.
Speaker 2: (30:09)
But when we went and targeted local markets like Nashville, Cincinnati, Duluth, Minnesota, we were doing five to one on our buys because we were crushing it in these local markets. So we decided we’ve got to stay away from the coastal communities. This is not fishing lore because first of all, this young lords are generally kind of fresh water and, and, and in the, in, in New York and La, they’re on the ocean. We don’t even have a product yet for that. But in the central parts of the United States, we crushed it. This product went on to do 500 million lures at a dollar a piece, 20 to a pack, 20 bucks for 20 lures, $500 million in sales because we tracked it and focused on buying time where it works.
Speaker 1: (31:02)
Wow. Um, Kevin, I could talk to you all day about lots of stuff. Uh, we are out of time. Uh, where did, should people go? I know you have, you know, the secrets of closing the sale book was Zig Ziglar just came out. Uh, you have your secrets of closing the sale master class, which, you know, maybe we’ll put a link to or we’ll, you know, we’ll audience when you open that class up where else, but where should people go to connect with you and you know, if they want to stay in touch.
Speaker 2: (31:28)
Yeah. My, my website’s a great place because we have some free reports and some free books and chapters and things. It’s Kevin Harrington. Dot. TV and Harrington spelled h a. R. R. I. N. G. T. O. N. So Kevin Harrington. Dot. TV is my website and I’m got a lot of good content there and you can see some videos and see some things we’ve done over the years. But we also, I’m actively still looking for great products, great relationships. I sit on several, uh, board of directors of public companies and, um, I love doing that and, and helping, uh, you know, I invest money, I help raise money. Definitely am available for, for entrepreneurs looking to take their business, their idea, their service to the next level. It’s a good place to start. Kevin Harrington. Dot. TV.
Speaker 1: (32:20)
I love it. So last little thing. At some point in your journey, uh, you must’ve bumped up against some walls. I, I know that it’s been several times, right? Uh, and it’s, uh, it’s a long way between the guy who was on shark tank and you know, that kid that was knocking on doors and there were gotta be several setbacks. And, and my guess is there’s somebody listening
Speaker 2: (32:40)
right now who is trying to build a reputation either as an entrepreneur or an influencer, and they’re probably in one of those darker times. What would you, what would you say to that person right now? So it’s a great question. 25 years ago, I was sitting with $100 million business. We’re doing 2 million a week in sales. We had 10 products. And one day I was thought I was on top of the world, walked into my office on a Monday morning and my CFO said, I got terrible news. The bank just grabbed $2 million out of our account to apply as a reserve against future returns and chargebacks. Um, and, and I said they allowed to do that and said in the contract they have every right to increase the reserve and just grabbed the money out of our account. Okay. I’m like, wow, I can’t believe that actually signed that.
Speaker 2: (33:33)
But when you get those big thick documents, when you get a merchant account somewhere in there, it, you know, they basically tell you no more and grab the monies that are coming through for processing. And so we were technically out of business at that point. I went from, you know, being the king of, of infomercials, you know, to potentially being at the bottom of the barrel. And because that 2 million was my working capital, I didn’t have 10 million sitting in the bank. Okay. I was a young entrepreneur. I had, that was my cashflow. That was my payroll. That was my media dollars, my inventory dollars. Basically, we couldn’t make payroll that week then. And the bank, you know, whether they knew what they were doing or not, they didn’t care at the time. Now we figured out a way to get around some of this. We, we, we, we, we, we pulled a lot of great advisors to the table because they technically put us out of business and it was a very demoralizing time of my life and we had to do some massive things, you know, to make that all happen and save the company.
Speaker 2: (34:39)
But we ended up pulling out of it, coming out smelling like a rose. But the only thing I can say is this, is that I all my life, um, have looked to mentors and folks to be part of my team. And because in the early, early days, I tried to do it all myself. I realized I can’t do it all with Michelle. I, I’m not the operations guy, the finance guy, the guru of finance. But I brought in Gurus of finance. So, um, one of my guys went up against the bank and knew how to kind of get them to come to the table. We ended up getting 1.6 million of that 2 million back. So we did give him 400,000 but we saved the day, got some money back. We’re eight, but took 30 days to pull all this off. So, uh, the bottom line is, is that this is kind of what I do now for entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2: (35:37)
I’m a mentor, I’m a coach, I’m a consultant, I’m an advisor, I joined boards, I joined advisory boards that the right kind of opportunities. I’m out there looking for great companies to be an advisor to because sometimes I’ve seen people make the same mistakes with things that I was confronted with in the past. And I can show people, entrepreneurs how to deal with these things without letting it take you down. So bottom line is you, you’re not, you know, Kinda need to know that there’s a good group of people out there that may be available for you to be mentors in your business. And I, you know, just like I started off talking about how Zig Ziglar was a mentor to you, Rory, to me. Um, absolutely. I’ve had Richard Branson helped me with some digital things. At one point, I went to Necker island, hung out with him for a couple of days. My father mentored me. Mark Burnett mentors me. Yes, I’m, I’m a successful entrepreneur. I’m an original shark from shark tank, but I’m a product of many other mentors that have helped me become what I am. And I think that’s, uh, I’m the first to say that I couldn’t have done it all my on my own. And I, and I, I look to outside resources to help me manage my entities and my businesses and hopefully folks that are out there can, can learn from that too.
Speaker 1: (37:03)
I love that. That is so cool. I think, uh, that’s been the big surprise for a j and I with brand builders group. It’s turned into such a community of people supporting each other and getting to learn from people like you. It’s just incredible. So thank you for your inspiration and your story and your friendship and, uh, we wish you the best.
Speaker 2: (37:23)
You Bet. Take care of buddy. Good being here today. Thanks.