Ep 456: Building Your Referral Based Business with Barb Betts
AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand Podcast. So excited today to have a good friend, Barb Betts on the show. And before we get started, and before I introduce her like I always do, I wanna let you know why you should stick around for this episode and also if you should stick around if it’s for you. But today is one of those episodes where it doesn’t matter who you are, where you are in your personal brain journey, what your business is, if you’re a beginner, if you’re advanced, it does not matter. This is an episode for you. This is universal. It is applicable to every single human because we’re gonna be talking about the power of relationships. And if you do relationships well, how you can use those to grow your business through. My favorite thing in the world, referrals. And it doesn’t matter.
AJV (00:50):
I don’t care what business you’re in most business today, regardless of what you hear out there online is not because somebody found you on a Google search. It’s not because they heard you on a podcast or on Instagram. Most business still today, yes, in 2024 is still done by referral. It’s because someone said, I know who you should meet. I know who you should go to. And that is because you have a great reputation. ’cause You have a great business. And also mostly because you told people about what you do. And please tell your friends, right? Those are referrals. That is the power of it. But referrals only happen when you have great relationships. And so if you wanna grow your business without having to spend paid traffic, money, or advertising, and you wanna have some good freeway of growing your business, then today, right now, this is the episode that you want to listen to.
AJV (01:41):
So now let me introduce you
AJV (02:27):
She is the CEO of re collective. It’s a boutique brokerage in Southern California, although I am trying to recruit her to Nashville, Tennessee. So we’ll see how well that goes
BB (03:08):
Oh my gosh, aj, thank you so much. I, I can’t tell you how much that introduction means to me. And I agree a thousand percent with every single thing you said. I love it when I’m actually talking to someone who gets it, and I don’t have to convince them to understand why they should listen to this message. So I’m so excited to have this conversation today.
AJV (03:27):
Yeah. You know, I think one of the things that I notice all the time even internally at Brand Builders Group, but also through a long time of doing sales training in my former life, is like everyone knows that getting referrals is a powerful part of your business. But yet there’s this hesitation, there’s this reluctance sometimes for people to do the hard work of asking for referral. And somehow we convince ourselves that meeting strangers on the street or on the internet is somehow easier or better than actually getting referrals from clients, friends, family, or whoever. And so I’d really love to talk to you about, like, as we kind of get started, is a a little bit about the mindset around, even if we know that getting and asking for referrals is one of the fastest ways to grow our business, why don’t people do it? Like, what’s the hangup here?
BB (04:19):
Yeah. Well, I love that. And it is, it is a thousand percent true. And I, you know, I’m in the middle of writing my first book, which I’m very excited about. And as I’m talking to these publishers, I’m telling them like, you know, every single business book out there, every single business book I’ve read, no matter what strategy hack, no matter what system they’re teaching somewhere in the book, it is bound to say at the end of a chapter. But you know what, it’s actually all about relationships. But no one actually tells you how to do it, right? Like, they all know that’s the foundation of every successful business, but very few know how to focus it and make it a priority and and really leverage those relationships. So to your question, what I would say is the issue is that people look at, well, if I’m going to leverage a relationship or ask for a referral from a friend or family member, I’m crossing that line.
BB (05:15):
I’m being salesy. I don’t wanna be pushy. And what I always say is, you will never be a pushy salesman if you’re making it about them. Number one, pushy salespeople make that about themselves. And the reason you are not comfortable asking for that referral, the reason you are not comfortable asking your friends and family is because you haven’t been given permission to do so by yourself. You haven’t built that relationship to a point where you have absolute permission to ask that referral. That’s really what it comes down to. Once you have that permission, once you’ve built up enough in that trust department with that person, you will have no problem calling up AJ and saying, Hey friend, I need your help. Can you do me a favor? And then it just becomes this natural byproduct. ’cause You know, you’ve built that relationship, a real relationship to the level where you get comfortable asking,
AJV (06:13):
Okay, so I love this. So I think this is really important ’cause I think a lot of people talk about building relationships in business, but no one really says, well, what do you mean by that? Like, what is a real relationship? And how do you know when you’ve crossed that threshold of now I have permission to go and ask for help, ask for referrals? Is it like a timeframe? Is it like, is there like some like checklist we can do here?
BB (06:40):
Oh my gosh, that’s so great. So first it starts with the foundation of what I describe as real relationships equal referrals, right? You’ve gotta have real relationships. What does real mean? Well, real is relatable. You engage, you are authentic and you listen. That’s how you build a real relationship. You’re relatable, you engage, you’re authentic, and you listen. And when you do that with enough people over time, you start developing those real relationships. I want you to think about any relationship you have right now, whether it be a friend, whether it be a family member, whether it be your best clients. You probably can go through that framework and go, wow, I’ve done all these things. I am authentic with them. I do engage with them, I do listen. And then it comes down to when you, when you talk about when are you ready to ask for that referral?
BB (07:31):
I like to te teach a simple framework that talks about how you have to make deposits before you make withdrawals. So I talked about that trust account. Right now, there’s no scientific formula, there’s no check the box, but it’s a feeling that you just know. It’s that feeling when you open up your phone and you’re not afraid to text AJ and check in on her and ask her for something or ask her for help, where you’re not afraid to pick up the phone and make that call to that person. And how you do that is you focus on making deposits. And once you’ve made enough deposits, it’s just like a good old bank account friend. You can’t go to the ATM if there’s no balance there to withdraw any money. And so that’s, it’s the same way with relationships. If you have not built up a balance in that, that relationship account, you can’t take any withdrawals.
BB (08:14):
You don’t have permission to ask. And it’s, it’s the, it’s the self-awareness we all need. I do it too, in my career that I came from, before I developed my keynote speaking career and my all my passions to do this, I would open up my phone to text a client and I would look and the last time I text them was a year ago. Hmm. So even if I wanted to ask that client to help me out with something I didn’t have permission to, and I knew it, versus my best clients who I engage with all the time, who I am there for them all the time, I have no problem. Again, calling up AJ and saying, Hey friend, I need your help. Can you help me with something? So really comes down to real relationships and building up that trust account.
AJV (08:58):
Okay. So this is a great topic ’cause I hear this all the time. It’s like, well how many people can you honestly do that with? You know? And it’s like, I even think about myself. It’s like, yeah, it’s like most of the people that I would probably go to to ask for referrals, I’m like, eh, it might have, it might be a minute since I’ve actually last engaged. You know? And so I think a lot of that is like, what are some tips of going like, Hey, here’s how you set up. Like these are the relationships you invest this amount of time in. Not, and again, not to get referrals, but it’s like, hey, these are vested relationships that I’m in gonna be intentional about. And what, how often should we be engaging and what does that look like? And, and then honestly just some ideas around efficiencies of going, when there’s so many things vying for our attention, how do we kind of put some blinders on and go, this is what I’m gonna do with this group of people.
BB (09:48):
I love everything you said. And it does come down to having a system, which is why I built the RELATE framework. And the relate framework starts with the relationship foundation, the relational mindset. It goes into establishing trust, leveraging your network, authentically engaging, taking thoughtful action, and then executing effective systems. That framework is the system. Now, we clearly in this short time in a podcast do not have time to go through the system, but I wanna focus on that LI wanna focus on how you leverage your network. Mm-Hmm.
BB (10:36):
So these are not just a bunch of information you’ve compiled over time inside that network, you have a bunch of people. And you’re absolutely right aj. We cannot focus on all the people the same way. We can’t stay in contact with all the people in the same way. And I have lots of strategies where you can stay in consistent contact for those, if you will lower level people in your database. ’cause What I teach is a ranking system. I teach you to rank your database, rank your relationships, just like we rank restaurants on Yelp and open table and do reviews. And it’s a simple five star system. Hmm. So once you develop that five star system and once you rank those relationships, then I teach a frequency formula for staying in contact with them. Because let’s face it, if I am one of your best clients, you should be in touch with me frequently.
BB (11:26):
If I’m one of your best relationships, you should be in touch with me frequently. And so when I teach the five star system, I teach also a simple frequency formula of five star people. Those are your advocates. Those are your walking talking billboards. You are in touch with them at least once a month. And please understand, these are not five minute phone calls. These are not long drawn out messages. These are simply aj Hey, thinking about you today, how are you and Rory doing? I saw you went on a Disney cruise. How was it? Looks like it was a blast send. That is a connection. Point four star people. These are your raving fans. These are the people that really love you, but they’re just not quite those, you know, referring type people that are constantly sharing you everywhere. Those people you’re in touch with every 60 days, three stars.
BB (12:17):
These are the people that you’re connected to. Those people you’re in touch with every 90 days. Two stars and one star is, two stars are your acquaintances. Every 120 days. And then one star. You can’t have a mailing list. You can have a bunch of information you’ve collected over time from potential clients and customers, but you don’t really know who they are. Mm-Hmm. Those people. That’s your mailing list. That’s your drip campaign or whatever other kind of marketing campaigns. So if you follow that and those advocates, those people that are most likely to refer you if they’re hearing from you 12 times a year in an authentic way where you’re looking to connect and deepen the relationship and you’re making it all about them, I promise you, when it comes time and you need something, you’re gonna be comfortable asking.
AJV (13:03):
Yeah. I love that. And I, you know, it’s interesting because I read somewhere that you, you had mentioned it’s like most people aren’t comfortable asking for referrals ’cause they’re not comfortable with themselves.
BB (13:16):
Yep.
AJV (13:17):
So, well, and I do think that’s true and a lot of, like, as I think through some of the people that I’m like, if you just asked for referrals, your business would be so much, you know, better in terms of how you feel about how things are going. It wouldn’t be so stressful. So what do you mean by that? It’s like when you think about if you’ve got a reluctance to ask someone for help, right? And in this instance for a referral, then there’s probably a disconnect with yourself. Like, can you walk us through that a little bit?
BB (13:41):
Yeah. It’s the r it’s the relational foundation and the, and the foundation of that is that you cannot have an authentic relationship with anyone else before you have an authentic relationship with yourself. And the reason I say that is because you have to know who you are. You have to know the value you bring to the table. You have to be confident in what you are delivering is something that people need. When people say, I don’t wanna ask my friends and family for a referral, I always turn it around on them in this way, let’s say you are an insurance agent and you don’t tell your friends and family that you need them to connect you to people who need honest advice, good, good plans, not gonna rip them off all the things. And then their friend goes and gets insurance from someone else and gets mistreated, isn’t well taken care of.
BB (14:36):
God forbid the accident happens and they don’t have the coverage they need that’s on you because you weren’t confident enough to ask the friend or family member to en you know, engage with you to deliver that referral so that you could take care of that person. So it all comes down to the confidence within ourselves and, and how we show up. And honestly, aj, most people are taught to show up as a salesperson. Hmm. They’re not taught to show up as who they are, which is why I love the work Brand Builders group does because it teaches people to understand who they are, to understand that they are their marketing department. It is your personal brand is the marketing of the future. And so you can’t have that be a strong marketing department if you don’t love who you are. Hmm. So it all starts with building that authentic relationship with yourself before you can start developing with others. It’s why the first chapter in the book is all about, we gotta shore up our house first, which is us before we can put any kind of system to work.
AJV (15:36):
Yeah. You know, that’s so true. And I can think of so many instances in my life where people have asked me for referrals, and it comes from a genuine place of I know I’m gonna do a fantastic job for them. Like, if, if you refer them to me, I will take care of them. Right. And it gives me a lot of confidence because, you know, the truth is, is people are asking for stuff all the time. Mm-Hmm.
BB (16:45):
I could not agree with you more. It all starts with us. It all starts with what we’re doing, how we’re doing it. Loving yourself, knowing that you are really good at what you do, and that you’re gonna take really good care of people because that’s who you are. And then the rest just kind of falls into place from there. But we gotta fix who we are first. I went through a very, how I kind of stumbled honestly across this is I went through a very authentic journey with my hair. Go follow me on social media. You’ll see all about it. And the next thing I heard from everybody was, Barb, you’re so much more confident now all my friends, you’re so much more confident now. And I’m like, I didn’t just put this hair on my head and become confident overnight that person was in me, that I had to learn to love that person. I had to let my own walls down. And you know what? I am more confident calling people now. I am more confident walking into appointments. I am more confident on this podcast as a result. But it’s because I fixed my relationship with myself first. That frankly, I didn’t even know I had a problem with
AJV (17:47):
No, I love that. And I think that is for mo for the, for the most cases. And I bet for the majority of people, the reason you don’t ask for referrals is probably one of two reasons. One, you don’t, you’re not completely convicted and what you’re doing or how you’re doing it, right. Because if you were truly convicted then you would be like, I can’t not. Yeah. I can’t not. Yeah. And there’s so many examples. But you gotta do that deep work. And sometimes until you do the deep work, you’re like, oh wait, what I do is awesome. Yeah. What I do is amazing. And I think a lot of people don’t give themselves enough opportunity to go, no, I do a great job. I do a better job than most. And that means something.
BB (18:30):
Yeah. I, you know, it’s interesting you say that because when I think back to my sales career, there’s so many times early in my career where I’m like, I should be helping more people. I’m really good at what I do. Why am I not helping more people? And I realize it’s ’cause I’m not asking for business. You know, people aren’t lying awake at night deciding and wondering how I’m doing in my business. You think they are, but they’re not. And most people want to help you. That’s why I love in my dialogues, I teach, can you do me a favor? I don’t know anyone who would call me that. I have a real relationship with always that foundation where if they say, Hey Barb, can you do me a favor? Then I’m not gonna be like, absolutely. What do you need? How can I help
AJV (19:13):
Ask? That’s so true. So I think that is like, that’s probably half of the people and then I think the other half of the people genuinely just don’t know how to ask. Yeah. Can we talk about that for second? We absolutely can talk about that. Let’s say you’re that person who goes, I know I deliver a bombshell product or service. I feel great about it. But I don’t really know how to ask. So I don’t, it’s like I want to, but what do I do? What do I say?
BB (19:40):
Well, let’s start with one foundational principle that we haven’t talked about yet. When you are asking someone for business, you are not selling to them. You are selling through them.
AJV (19:51):
Mm. That’s good. Like
BB (19:52):
One thing I wanna talk about, because that’s another reason people are like, well Myer, whoever it is, I don’t want to sell to them. I don’t wanna be a salesperson. You’re not, you know where I came from? I came from the real estate world. I have plenty of friends, family, and clients who are never going to sell their home because they love the home they live in. I’m not calling them to get them to sell their home. I’m selling through them to leverage their network. So when you’re reaching out to that person, it’s, Hey friend, hey aj, whoever it is, and you use those magic words. Can you do me a favor? When you say, can you do me a favor? You instantly have their attention. You instantly have their wanting to help. Then you say something to the effect of, can you do me a favor?
BB (20:36):
You know, and tell them something about what’s going on in your world. Like tell them why you need their help. Tell them you have a great new product you need to roll out. Tell them that the industry is in need of this. And then say something to the effect of when you come across. Because then you’re not making it like, I need that referral right now because Right. How have you ever been in front of a financial advisor that are famous for this, where you sit in front of them and they have a piece of paper and at the end of the appointment they slide it over and say, can you give me three names and phone numbers of people that could use my services?
BB (21:14):
Let’s not do that. But when you say, can you do me a favor? When you come across, insert what you want, you have to be specific about what you want. You can’t just say someone who needs insurance. You’ve got to be specific about what you want. When you come across someone who has a business and doesn’t understand how powerful their personal brand might be, who wants to leverage who they are, who wants to find out all the goodness about them, then I would love you. And then here’s the magic words. Don’t use the word referral. I have seen this time and time again where you say, I need a referral. And no one even knows what it means. How to do it. Like, do they have to be qualified? Do they have to be ready to go? Do they have to be ready to buy?
BB (21:57):
No. I just want you to introduce or connect me to them. Don’t say both words
AJV (22:48):
BB (23:00):
I always like to be clear, a referral is when I teach and train, I use the referral. Every other word. A referral is what you want for sure. Internally, it’s
AJV (23:09):
Not what you ask for is
BB (23:10):
What you ask for. And can you use the word referral? Absolutely. There’s something now if you’re talking to another business owner, they’re gonna know exactly what to do. But when you’re talking to this everyday person in the street, they’re like, how do I do it? When do I do it? And the other thing is, some industries are very locked tight in their rules and regulations. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (23:41):
So do you think it’s best to get quality referrals? Do you think it’s best to do it like on a phone call in person? Do you think it’s okay to do it in a text, an email? Like what are some of the mediums that’s most successful?
BB (23:56):
Love that. It goes back to my philosophy of any way that someone can respond to you. Hmm.
AJV (24:01):
That’s good. Meaning.
BB (24:02):
So I call, so when I’m teaching people how to do their activities and how to do their, you know, connection, strategy and their frequency formula, I always say outgoing connections. You’ve got to use your telephone for what it’s meant to be. Outgoing messages. Like you initiate the phone call, you initiate the text message. But here’s the other great part. We have so many other ways in today’s day and age. We have Facebook messaging, we have Instagram messaging, we have video chats, BombBomb, like there’s a million different ways you can do it as long as they have a way to respond to you. So for instance, I’m a big personal note gal. I believe in handwritten notes. I believe in the power of them. It’s another strategy I teach where I teach take thoughtful action. But they can’t, I don’t ask for a referral in a note.
BB (24:46):
Mm-Hmm.
AJV (25:14):
I think that’s so good. And I think that’s true. It’s like if you call someone and you catch ’em completely off guard and they’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I’m not ready for this. But I think again, all of that is just having a plan and a system which just takes some thought and some intentionality. Well,
BB (25:28):
It’s having a real relationship. ’cause You know them. So I always use the example of my best friend in the world as a kindergarten teacher. So if I’m doing my lead generation calls, if I’m doing my connection plan at Tuesday at 10:00 AM and I call her, she’s gonna answer the phone ’cause I’m her best friend and she’s gonna be like, are you okay? Because she would know that, why would I call and bug her Tuesday at 10:00 AM Mm-Hmm.
AJV (25:52):
That’s good. I think a lot of that she’s get, again, back to when you know someone, you know their communication habits and preferences and you know what works. Yeah. But I think that comes back to that real relationship of referrals aren’t technically from strangers, they’re from people, you know. So then here that leads to another question then. So if you don’t know someone exceptionally well that they’re a client or they’re a friend or a family member, like how do you go about generating, you know, potential referrals from those people? It’s like, do you have to be BFF with these people? Like do you have to be clients with them? So what’s kind of the dividing line there?
BB (26:32):
The dividing line is that that’s why you apply the connection strategy. When you apply the connection strategy. When you are being in consistent contact with them. You don’t ask them at that nine the first time you message them. You don’t ask them for a referral. You’re just simply trying to make their day. I have a mindset of your outgoing connection plan when you are doing your, if you will, see, to me, lead generation is not just asking for business. You’re gonna ask for business when the time comes and the time’s. Right? Mm-Hmm.
BB (27:10):
So you’re gonna respond back and be like, oh my god, Barb, it was so great. The kids had such a great time. And then you might say something like, Hey, how are you? Like, I always teach people, sometimes we are not taking the opportunity to ask when they’ve given us permission to mm-hmm.
BB (27:49):
Thanks for checking in. Hope you guys are doing well. Great. You log that. I’m a big tracker of activity. I’m a big believer of you cannot measure what you do not track, which is what I teach in the effective systems category. You’ve gotta track what you do. And so you’re gonna track that as a connection. Great. You made a connection to aj. Then 90 days later, if you use a good CRM like I teach you to 90 days later it’s gonna pop back up and tell you guess what time to connect with AJ again. You’re gonna connect with AJ again and before you know it, you’re gonna start showing up in their life so that you get that permission to ask for the business. But layered in throughout that entire process and throughout your entire database is a concept of you’ve got to be marketing to them.
BB (28:31):
There is still good old fashioned marketing. You’ve gotta have valuable marketing in front of them that positions you as the best in your industry. Because I believe that people do not do business with you till they know you like you and trust you. Everyone knows that. But what people don’t understand is there’s a gap between like and trust. Just because someone knows you and likes you, they don’t necessarily trust you as a professional till you give them a reason to. So layering And it’s like, it’s like a layering plan. It’s like a farmer. They don’t just, you know, water and get, you know, crops. They have to fertile this. They have to create the soil, they have to aerate it, they have to lay the seeds, they Right. It’s a layering effect. Yeah. So this system, relationship marketing does not work overnight. It, that’s number one does not work overnight. But what I can promise you is you start doing this now and you do this enough over time, you will get to the point where you have to do nothing else. Which is when you know you’ve really made it. It’s when your business feels good, you love doing it. You love who you’re doing it with. And so you can get to that point with, with, if you will, I wouldn’t say strangers, but people that don’t know you as well as you might know your other people. Yeah.
AJV (29:41):
And I love that. And I think one of the things that I kinda wanna circle back to, ’cause so much of what you’re talking about is as the person who is trying to generate business, you really have to know exactly who you wanna be introduced to. Yes. You have to know who you wanna be referred to. Like everything you just said, it’s like you can get to the point where you love what you do all day, every day. And you love who you do it with. Well, you know what, you get to create that. Yeah. Like if you’re getting referrals from people that you’re like, man, I just want 10 more people like you or 20 more people like you. It’s like they likely know them. Yeah. So it’s like, but we gotta know exactly who it is that we’re looking for. And I don’t think most of us spend, spend near enough time going, these are the demographics and psychographics of my ideal client. This is who it’s easy for me to serve, it’s natural for me to serve. It doesn’t even feel like work. But then I think the other part is, I think often many of us have so much scarcity mindset that we take any lead, any referral off the street. Yeah. And then we’re miserable. Yeah. And we have built a business full of people that we’re like, man, I I I don’t love this. Yes.
BB (30:44):
Well, I always say when those people come up in your database and you like want to avoid them like the plague, they’re not a relationship. You need to move them down in your database. But you are so correct. You have to know exactly who you are talking to and exactly what you want and what you said about I just want 10 more of you. I use that all the time. I always say, you know what, good people, no good people. Mm-Hmm.
BB (31:26):
Can you duplicate yourself? Who else do you know that’s just like you? And I promise you that works. ’cause They do know good people just like them. And then they also know that the other people that they’re not gonna refer you to because they’re not nice humans. Right. And so I think knowing who you are, and that’s why I love the work that Brand Builders group does, is that it really does help you niche down to who that ideal client avatar is. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t serve people on the peripheral. It doesn’t mean that they, if they fit a little bit outside of the demographic that they’re not still gonna be great clients. But it does help you get laser focused in who you’re looking for and asking for. For sure.
AJV (32:05):
Well, and for the person who’s being asked, when you’re clear, it makes it so much easier for me to go, I know exactly someone that you need to meet. I know exactly who you need to talk to. I just, like, as you were talking, I was thinking about two recent experiences that I had in different, you know, business, you know, kind of association groups. And both of them happened probably within a few weeks of each other. And this one woman was doing like a general ask in like a, a group setting for referrals. And her business was hyp hypnotic weight loss. And she was talking about how it’s like, this could work with anyone who has had problems of, you know, historical problems, of trying all these different fad diets and they just don’t work. And she was like, so anyone that you know who was looking to lose weight, I would love, I would love to hear from you.
AJV (32:58):
And I thought to myself, I know like a thousand people who’d like to lose weight, but it’s like, I don’t know anyone that would probably be like hypnosis. I wanna try that
AJV (33:47):
She has most likely put herself second for far too long. She is working and she is pulled in many directions. She has gone up and down with her weight for her entire life. This is someone who has struggled with it since childhood. She went on and on and on. And literally as she was talking, I was like, I know two people you have to meet. Like I have two people that I need them to meet you. And it was like Ashley was talking, it was like, I almost got emotional of going like, if you could genuinely help this person, I know it would be life changing for so many people in our lives. And the first one I was going, I mean maybe, but I don’t know. And this, and it was like, they were very similar conversations and they were both kind of non-traditional methods. But the second one, she was so clear on her and she, the way she described the person, it was like she was describing this person I know in my life. And I was like, how do I get them in touch with you? Like, what do I do?
BB (34:45):
She painted the picture in your brain. She painted the picture of someone that you know, and that you are absolutely crap. You have to be specific. You cannot be general. Because generality is going to get you nowhere because I’m not gonna be able to think of that person. I hate the word anyone.
AJV (35:11):
Maybe, maybe. I don’t even
BB (35:13):
Know if he has a business. Right? Like yeah. It, it definitely being specific. And then again, this is all about planting the seed. This is all about, you know, the person may not know someone right now, but you’ve now planted that who in their brain so that when they do come across that person, they’re gonna be like aj. The number one thing that, again, the valuable marketing, developing the trust, everything else that I teach gets you to, is top of mind awareness. Yeah. You wanna be the first person they think of in the category you serve. If you can get to that point with enough people, you, I promise you will have more business than you know what to do with and when you can figure out, and this is a whole nother conversation for another day, but when you can figure out who those referring type people are, like barbettes, when you get enough of me in the world who’s a natural born referer and connector
AJV (36:00):
Promoter. Promoter, yeah. You need promoters. Listen,
BB (36:04):
I just have to know who you want and I will connect you with more people than you probably not can handle. ’cause We all want more business, but you’re gonna have a very successful, thriving business. And it gets down to my number one outcome I love to create for people. I always say that salespeople, people in sales, whether you’re an entrepreneur, a business owner, or just on a sales team, most people love what they do. They love serving the client they love providing the value and transforming someone’s life. I don’t know any salesperson that doesn’t love the product or the service they sell. Mm. Most salespeople hate how they have to do it. Mm. They hate the generating of the leads the way they think they have to do it. And when you start learning to love building relationships and having all of this communication and conversations and everything that I’ve talked about and you love what you do, then you have a business that you wake up to every day and you are ready to serve, you’re ready to go. You live a better life. It’s just a better way to do business. It’s a better way to live your life.
AJV (37:07):
I love that. You know, and one of the things that you said certainly earlier that you just made me think of is knowing how to ask of the medium. Like as you were just talking, it’s like I was literally putting myself in the shoes of how often I get asked for stuff. Like, Hey, do you know anyone who you know builds websites can do blah, blah, blah? You know, all the time. Right. And I, one, I’m a promoter as well. I love to refer good talent because I know it’s really hard to find really great talent. And you know, it’s like made me think about this story I just shared about like these two, you know, totally similar but polar opposite examples and the first one. So they were just like, yep, you just give me names, emails, and phone numbers. And I was like, probably not doing that.
AJV (37:51):
But the second one when she was like, Hey, and I, I literally approached her and said, I do know someone how, how do I connect you? And she goes, actually, it’s never good to just connect someone that you think needs to lose weight. And I was like, that’s great idea. Don’t, I should not do that. So what, what do you do here? And she goes, I have a great strategy. Just tell me who they are. I will connect them on Facebook. I will tell them how much you were talking about them today and say, I was so impressed with the way that AJ talked about you. I looked you up on Facebook and wanted to connect. I’m like, I am. It’s brilliant. And it made me think about when you really know what you do, love what you do, you’re convicted in what you do and you know who you’re meant to serve. It’s like you also know how to approach the person. And it took so much pressure off of me. All I had to do is give the name and say Yep, that’s the person on Facebook that that’s them. Yeah. And she said, I got it from here. I’ll let you know. Yeah. And I’m like, could not be easier in the world. And that’s, I think a part of it. You’ve gotta make it easy for me to give you a referral.
BB (38:52):
Yeah. It’s, it’s so, you’re so true. That’s why I love the introductions and I teach in my world, I teach people just, you know, introduce us in a group text message and I’ll take it from there. Right. It very simple. I’ll take it from there. Just open up your phone and say, Hey aj, hey Barb, you guys need to know each other. This is who AJ is, this is who Barb is. I’ll let you two take it from here and let me do my work from there. It’s my job to then take it from there. It’s not send ’em to a website, have ’em fill out a form, have ’em take a questionnaire and then blah, blah blah, blah, blah. No, it’s as simple as find the mechanism to make the introduction. And if it is something as simple, ’cause you know, weight loss I would agree is something very personal.
AJV (39:30):
BB (39:30):
It’s kind of like me texting AJ going, aj you know what? You really could lose some weight and I’ve got the person for you. I know that sounds awful
AJV (39:40):
But I love that. It’s like, you know, it’s like it made it so easy and simple and I’m like, well that’s all I have to do. I probably could think of some more people. Right. And it’s like a lot of that is the easier it is that you make it, the easier it is for me to just go ahead and take action. Yeah. Right. And so I know that we’re almost outta time here, but there’s like two other quick things that I wanna talk about because I do think this plays a huge role and a lot of like how we just functioned today. And you mentioned it earlier when you said like, you know, Facebook and, you know, different social media. So how, how does social media play a role in the building, maintaining of relationships, but referrals? Like how does that all work together? What do you see?
BB (40:21):
Social media is the biggest gift given to anyone in sales in modern times. You’re just not using it effectively. Hmm.
AJV (40:27):
Love that.
BB (40:27):
First thing I recommend is you go through your list of relationships and you make sure you are connected to and following and friending every single person in your ecosystem. And then you start paying attention and then you start having conversations. I I, when I teach social media, I in the authentically engaged section of Relate, I always tell people there’s two ways to do social media. One is of course posting and posting reels and things like that. And that’s great to find people you don’t, stories is where you wanna live. For the people that you do know. Stories is the most effective way that I know that you can broadcast to your entire list of relationships in one conversation and stories, if they’re done correctly, start conversations. And I can’t tell you how many conversations, outgoing connections, dms I have done through stories. It is powerful because it’s the best way to stay in touch on, stay in touch with someone in their life.
BB (41:26):
‘Cause They’re sharing it and someone can stay in touch with you in your life and know what you’re doing on a daily basis. I always say the simple strategy of document your day, what do you do from morning to night? Four or five stories. It will start conversations you never could have imagined. So social media is a gift. It’s a gift if it’s used effectively. And it has to be a system. It has to be something you do consistently. Nothing that I have said is going to work if you do it one time. People are like, well, I did the referral thing, I did the introduction thing, I asked and I got nothing. I’m like, oh great. You did it one time. Yeah. I called them once a year. I haven’t called them in 13 months and they still haven’t given me a referral. I don’t understand why doesn’t work like that.
AJV (42:10):
Well, and I love that too. It’s like, and I think there’s so much of this is such a mentality shift, right? It’s a mentality shift of do you believe that your product or service actually helps other people? And if you do, then it is a requirement of you to tell people about it. Right? It it like, and it’s like, I I think that’s a mentality shift. I think what you just said is a mentality shift of like, social media is a gift. I cannot tell you how many people I hear on a daily basis. Like, social media’s the devil, it’s the devil
BB (42:45):
Because how you’re using it, it’s,
AJV (42:46):
Yeah. And I love that. It’s like if you treat it like a business tool, then it will help your business. Right? And it’s like, if you’re only following a bunch of like horrible newsfeed, well then it probably does feel like the devil, right? It’s, but it’s like all about how you use it. And I love that this approach of like, it’s a gift. It’s a way to maintain relationships, stay in touch with people, start conversations. So I, I would love to hear from you like what are some effective things to be posting in this relationship maintenance kind of realm?
BB (43:19):
Yeah. Well, I always say back to what you were saying, people are telling you everything you need to know online. The question is, are you listening? Mm. Are you going to social media to listen and engage? Are you going just to social media to promote yourself?
AJV (43:33):
Love it. There’s
BB (43:34):
A huge difference there. So what can you post? Well, you need to make sure, and, and you’re gonna love this because this is all goes down to your personal brand. Social media needs to be 90% about you as a human who happens to do blank. Mm-Hmm.
BB (44:23):
Yeah. And then when you get into the evening and the morning time, it’s a little bit more of your personal life. And when you start showing off what you’re doing in a thoughtful way, that’s when people start to get obsessed with what you do. And they learn very clearly what you do. And then if you a adopt a real strategy, and there’s plenty of really great social media experts out there and gurus that teach this, but if you adopt a real strategy where you’re actually creating content for your ideal client, now you’ve got this whole mechanism to generate other leads. ’cause I am not saying that relationship based marketing is the only way to do business and that you should drop everything else that you’re doing. I’m saying that you should get to the point where you don’t have to do mm-Hmm.
AJV (45:01):
BB (45:02):
But everything in business works if you do it consistently. You just have to do it consistently. So if you do a real strategy to start attracting some other business, some if you will, cold, not really cold, but people you don’t know, strangers, to your point now you’ve got this really healthy balance of focusing on relationships and driving some attention to. ’cause If I promise you, if you jump into the reals world and you know who your ideal client is and you position it correctly, I’m seeing some significant growth in businesses using reels and social media and combining it with talking to the people that you already know.
AJV (45:38):
I love that. And I think, again, everyone who’s listening, it’s like if you, if you’re one of those people that’s like, oh, I hate social media, it’s like shift your mindset around though this is a business tool. So treat it like one. All right, last question and the, the last couple of minutes we have here, and I think this is I think this will be applicable to a lot of people, and I, and I hope that this is helpful, but one of the things that I hear a lot is, well, my business is new, so I don’t have any clients to ask for referrals from. So what do I do then? So what is your advice to the person who’s in a new endeavor? They maybe don’t have any clients yet, and they’re going, yeah, I’d love to have a referral based business. But they’re, I don’t have any of that tangible proof yet. I don’t have any longstanding clients. What’s your advice to them?
BB (46:30):
You absolutely do have a database. ’cause You have a list of relationships. I don’t want you in any way, shape or form to think anything I said is just for past clients. It’s for your list of relationships. It’s for the people who already know you and like you. So that’s the first thing you’re gonna do. You’re gonna create a database of people that know you and like you, I always tell new business owners, the best way to do this is think about your getting married or think about your daughters having a baby or whatever it may be, or your holiday card list. Like who would you send an important thing in your life to? That is your database. That is,
AJV (47:05):
That’s good. I love that holiday list tip. It’s like they’re on your Christmas card list and you’re on, they’re on your database. They,
BB (47:12):
You, you have, I hope you’re not sending Christmas cards to random strangers. That would be weird. So you have a list of relationships, start there. That’s a
AJV (47:20):
Great place to start.
BB (47:21):
And what I want you to do is simply rank those relationships by level of relationship even though that you have not done business with them. Just who do you know the best in your life Down to who’s like, eh, that’s my husband’s colleague at work, their family. Mm-Hmm.
BB (48:08):
Mm. But I promise you, the foundation of people that already know you and like you and love you as a human or loved you in your past life are gonna be the first people to trust you if you give them a reason to. But you have to start giving them a reason to. And you also need to call those people, those five star people and just be honest with them. Be honest with them. Hey, I need your help. You know, I’ve started this new business. This is who my ideal client is. When you come across someone, can you introduce, start asking the question. You’ll be amazed if they loved you for who you are. They’re gonna love you for what you do now. And some businesses that might take more time, don’t get me wrong. Some businesses you just became, you know got your series seven and you’re gonna be a financial advisor. Well, yeah, before I refer you, someone with a million dollar portfolio, that might take a little bit more time. Yeah. But if you start laying the foundation now, you will reap the reward in the end. But you’ve gotta start with that list of people that already know you and like you. And then remember what I talked about? The gap. That gap you’ve gotta close into trust.
AJV (49:09):
Yeah. This is so good. This is so helpful. And if you’ve been a hermit for the last three years, it’s time to come out of your shell.
BB (49:21):
Be a secret salesperson.
AJV (49:27):
I love this. Barb, if people wanna connect with you where should they go? And I know that you have this awesome lead magnet. We’ll talk about it in a second. And if you guys are like a lead magnet, it’s like, yeah, if you guys want to get some really awesome free stuff, you can sign up for that. It’s a free lead magnet. But before we talk about that, if people just wanna like, follow you, get to know you, like, where should they go?
BB (49:49):
Instagram’s my jam. I love Instagram. I’m on Instagram every day in the story. So just my name at Barb Betts, also Facebook, of course, LinkedIn. I’m on all the platforms underneath my name. I love new conversations. I love talking to new people. So as they say, I know this is, I gotta figure aj, we, we together need to figure out another way to say, slide into my dms. Like I cannot stand that, but I totally appear in my dms, surprise me in my dms. Oh, wow.
AJV (50:20):
Yes. That’s awesome.
BB (50:22):
But yeah,
AJV (50:24):
Well, I would second like, follow on Instagram. What’s your Instagram handle
BB (50:27):
At Barb Betts?
AJV (50:29):
At Barb Betts. And we’ll put that in the show notes. I follow you on Insta, so I, I would highly recommend it. And then as I mentioned, there’s also this awesome free resource that Barb has made available. And if you go to barb betts.com/authenticity you can sign up for this free, awesome resource. So, Barb, tell us what it is.
BB (50:51):
Yeah. So it starts with back to that first pillar of the foundation, of the framework, the relational mindset. And it starts with, you can’t have an authentic relationship with anyone else. So you have ’em with yourself. So it’s my authenticity blueprint that will get you on your way to building that authentic relationship with yourself and goes through my framework on how to do that. So you can start showing up as the real you and start impressing and infecting everyone with all your goodness so that they’re compelled to work with you.
AJV (51:16):
Love that. So go to bar beds.com/authenticity. This has been a fantastic conversation. All of you should have a little bit of a new renewed enthusiasm for getting out there and getting referrals. And a stick around for the recap episode. We’ll talk more about it there. And we will catch you next time on the influential Personal brand. We’ll see you later.
Ep 449: Celebrate, Save or Cancel: When To Retain and When To Let Go | Shana Lynn Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
Do you have a membership or a community in which retention is a key driver in your business? If you do, this is a I would say a training, a conversation, a recording some tips, whatever you wanna call it. But this is some information, some education that I think will be vitally important to you. So I have a great friend who has a, a community and retention business, and I just had the opportunity to have her on the influential personal brand podcast. And the conversation veered intentionally or unintentionally, I’m not sure, to this conversation of cancellations and retention when it comes to communities and memberships. Now, this applies to any sort of customer, but this is a, a specific conversation for memberships and communities that you must listen to. So here are a couple of things that I think stood out about this idea of cancellations and reputation.
AJV (01:08):
So first and foremost, if someone requests to cancel their program with you, you have likely already lost them. And I know that there are lots of companies out there who require, who mandate a call to cancel. In fact, I was sharing this on the podcast. I am trying to not cancel, but downgrade a service that we subscribe to. I can’t do it. It’s, it’s actually not possible online. You have to email in which the email says, we’ll get back to you in four to five days. Or you have to call a, you know, one 800 number between the hours of nine and four. And it’s like, I, I don’t have time to do that. That’s why, that’s why I’m on this online thing and you’re gonna get back to me in four to five days. Like, that’s insanity. We think that’s helpful. We think that’s a retention effort.
AJV (02:00):
What that is, is that’s a customer satisfaction issue. Just because someone wants to cancel doesn’t mean they’re not willing to refer your business or come back at a later time. And I’m not saying that we should just let everyone cancel. That’s not what I’m saying. But what I am saying is that there’s an opportunity to go if someone is trying to cancel. There has likely been something or a series of some things that have, could have been fixed and prevented. And if it got all the way to, they wanna cancel, the save percentage is probably going to be low because the work should have already been done. The work the preventative measures or us catching it, that should have happened prior to this cancellation request. And at this point, they don’t really wanna have to talk to someone and explain themselves and do whatever else is what we think being helpful in an effort to save can also just be a really big fat annoyance.
AJV (02:59):
And what was a great relationship is now tarnished by a poor ending. So let’s talk about some things when it comes to cancellation. Number one, if you start with the beginning in mind, IE onboarding and what it’s like to be onboarded into your company or to your service or products, that changes everything. And people need to know what they’re buying. So step one this is, I think this is really good, is don’t assume people know what they bought. You have to tell them and then remind them. So don’t think that people know exactly what they bought. They don’t often, or they only know a piece of it. So we have to remind them of what they bought. That’s our job. That’s a part of our onboarding and our communication and our marketing. But that’s the first thing, is they have to know what I’m buying into.
AJV (03:50):
And they should know upfront, if and when this is no longer working for me, what do I do about that? Ideally, they’re reaching out to you in a proactive effort of how do I fix this? How do I change this? Not how do I cancel this? But we need to make that clear upfront, but not just upfront. It needs to be clear throughout the process. So a part of onboarding is helped to ensure that one, they know what they bought. The second piece of onboarding is knowing that you can help them. They need that reminder and that confidence of you’re in the right place that we can help. We have the expertise, the content, the information, the support to help you. The third thing is they need to know that they can do it. That other people have come before them and have done this and that they can do it too.
AJV (04:38):
And then last but not least, they need to know what is the next best step? Or what is the next right step for me in this process for me in this journey? Like, what do I need to do next? And I can think of so many tangible examples of this in so many different ways. So we subscribe to a bookkeeping service for Brain Builder’s group, and I’m constantly sending messages saying, can you just please tell me what is the next thing for me to do here? It’s like, I will send a notice or a letter that I got and they’re like, oh, well, you know, that needs to be, you know, updated in the, you know, portal. And I’m like, what portal?
AJV (05:27):
I need to know my best next step. I can think of other little things of like, and this is, I’m trying to make this applicable to any business, like doctor’s office, right? My six year old got bit by, apparently there’s a bug called a kissing bug that is attracted to your mouth. And he was playing in the leaves and got bit, and the stinger was lodge in his lip, the entire left side of his face, swed up, swelled up, up, swelled up. I’m gonna go with that one. And it was like his mouth was so swollen that he is like, he could hardly talk. And I’m like, on the phone with a doctor and they’re like, yeah, we just want you to wait. I’m like, no, I don’t. I don’t wanna wait. Like I need you to tell me what to do.
AJV (06:11):
And he was like, well, just give him some Benadryl. How often, like, this is serious. Like, I want to bring him in. I want that stinger out. And it’s like, finally I’m like, okay, I need you to give me a plan right now before I go to the ER because I’m that mom. And he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Give him a Benadryl every five to six hours and put an ice pack on it until the swelling goes down. Thank you. I need to know the best next step. Our customers, our members, our community needs that too. Not just on day one, but on day 30, day 60, day 90. They need it continuously, right? So those things are important. And if we start the membership off correctly, then it’s a higher likelihood for success in the middle, which means we have a higher likelihood of retaining them at the end.
AJV (06:57):
And so those are things that are really important. Now, in the event that someone does say, Hey, I wanna cancel. How should we handle that? How should we treat that? And this is what blew my mind with this conversation with Shannon. And she goes, I want you to think about it in three different ways and and approach this and address it in three different ways. One, you have to make it easy to cancel. You have to make it accessible for your community, for your clients to cancel. But that doesn’t mean you have to give it up on a silver plate either. It’s people need to take responsibility if the program isn’t working for them as much as you need to take responsibility. So think about cancellations in three different ways. Number one it’s a celebration. Meaning you’re canceling because you got every single thing that you needed from this program and that you’re leaving on a victorious high note of, I might come back one day, but even if I don’t, I’ll be sending tons of other people your way.
AJV (07:53):
‘Cause This was a success, this was a victory, and congratulations. We wanna stay in touch. We wish you the best. So the first type of cancel is somebody who’s like, I got everything I needed for now. I might be back one day, but I have to cancel for now. That’s great celebratory, right? That doesn’t mean they won’t still send you business, refer you, recommend you. That’s a win. That’s a win. Two the person who’s going, I’m just not using the program. I’ve given up on myself. I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if it’s for me. That’s the person that we wanna talk about saving. All right? That’s the person who’s going. Like, it’s not that the program isn’t working, it’s not that you don’t like the program, it’s that you have lost confidence in yourself. You have not made it a priority.
AJV (08:39):
You have not scheduled a time, and perhaps you’ve gotten lost, confused, demotivated, or you’re just feeling insecure about what to do, how to do it, and if you can do it, those are the people that we want to encourage to get on a phone call. Those are the people that we wanna go, Hey, like, we can help. Let’s help you get reengaged. Let’s get on a phone call. And let’s get a plan together. Let me reinvigorate you, reinspire you and reinstill a solid plan that you can follow from this day moving forward. That category of people is who you wanna have phone calls with. And then there’s a third category of person who goes, this is not a fit anymore. I’m not using it. Don’t like it, don’t want it. I just don’t want this anymore. And it doesn’t have to be negative.
AJV (09:26):
It’s like, Hey, I have had a life event that is precluding me from participating at this time. I cannot do it. Or, you know, I I’m cha I’ve changed my mind. Like, I don’t want this anymore. And I think there’s a, a fine line between, hey, you made a commitment and you signed an agreement and I don’t wanna do this anymore. Versus I don’t wanna do this anymore because there’s been, you know, a co-occurring trigger or an event in my life that is causing some distance between my ability to do this. And we need to be able to discern that where people are owning their own commitments and accountability. But what we’re also going like, like it tarnishes the community to have people in it that don’t wanna be there, don’t like it, and aren’t happy. It also ruins our opportunity to ever be a place for them to come back to or to tell other people about it.
AJV (10:20):
And I do believe in personal accountability and personal commitment. And if I sign an agreement and give you my word, I’m gonna fulfill it. And at the same time, there is a time and a place where I’m going, this is not what I thought it was.
AJV (11:01):
But we also need to make it as easy to cancel as it was to sign up, right? So there’s these different categories of people who are requesting to cancel that you really need to think about in order to go, how do I utilize the resources on my team, right? How do we utilize the energy of our team? But to do the same thing for your community and for the person who is considering to leave or is ready to leave. And those are very different categories, but to go back to keeping the beginning in mind of if you start right, the likelihood of success is higher and the higher the successes are, the more likely you are to retain them. So is it a person who you are trying to celebrate save or do they need to cancel? And as you look at your retention strategy and your
AJV (11:52):
Cancellation process, consider these things when looking at your ability to create a culture of a community who wants to be there, a team who loves what they do and loves talking to your community, but also members of your community who will tell others about you even when they’re not there. And how they leave is a part of that. If they leave on a high note, that’s what they remember. If they leave on a low note, that’s what they remember. So make sure that when they leave, they leave on a high note.
Ep 448: Retain Your Customers With the Beginning In Mind with Shana Lynn
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is AJ here, and I am so excited to introduce you guys to a new friend that I have. And, but before I introduce her, I want to remind everyone who this episode was curated for and why you should stick around. I think it’s always important for you to know as you’re listening what you’re getting into and who this was really designed for. So today we’re gonna be talking about community and retention. So in other words, this is for you. It doesn’t matter who you are. It does not matter if you have a coaching program or a speaking business or a membership, or you are a professional services provider that has, you know, a, a book of business. Doesn’t matter if you are a product company, you have clients, you have customers, and I bet you would like to keep ’em.
I bet you would like them to stick around and buy more and not leave and go to your competitors. So when you think about community, uh, yeah, there’s online communities, there’s offline communities, but we all have a community. It’s just are we treating them like a community? So today is one of those rare episodes that it does not matter what you do, what industry you’re in. I really believe this is for you, although we may talk about it more specifically in some areas over the course of the interview, but it’s for you. So stick around. Now, let’s introduce you to our awesome guest today. Uh, Shannon Lynn, I am so excited to have you on the show today. Uh, and just for those of you, uh, who don’t know, uh, you’ve got somebody who has over 10 years of retention and community expertise. She’s a podcast host, she is a speaker, she’s a consultant.
Uh, and I would also say she is someone who has built amazing communities with retention, not only for her and her own business, but for a lot of really well-known personal brands. And I’ll let her share those with you if she feels comfortable, um, or keep it secret. But this is someone who is not speaking from, oh, this is what you should do. No. It’s like, no, this is what we are doing and this is what is working. So, Shanna, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, friend. I’m excited to be here. I am so excited to be here and to help our audience get to know you. I would just love for them to say like, get a, get a quick high level overview of like what have the last 10 years looked like for you as you’ve been in this business, and then this industry of figuring out keys to building a community that stays in retaining and retention. Like, I would just love to know one, how did you get into it and then what, what has it looked like over the last 10 years to get you to, to where you are today?
That’s such a great question. You know, it started actually when I was in college. I was a part of this honors program and you had to do a senior thesis for undergrad. And I had this amazing professor and she handed me this advertising age magazine that was talking about social media and online marketing back in 2007. I was like, oh, this is really fascinating. And so I actually did my thesis and wrote a paper on online marketing in virtual reality communities back in the day. It was second life. There was no metaverse or anything like that. And that ended up in the paper, which got me on stages around the country to speak about it. And then I ended up with a job at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. And we took that medical center to be the very first medical center that has social media policy.
We launched online communities for their cancer center, life flight, all sorts of communities for them. And then it wasn’t long after that that I was supported by my wonderful chief marketing officer and um, you know, really just had peace from God himself to go out and adventure and start my own consultancy. And that was in 2012 when I became a full-time consultant and I started working with businesses, really traditional businesses to take what they were doing offline with their brand and bring it online and merge those two communities and create consistency. And so that led into managing a lot of online communities as we built them and then ultimately starting my own online community. And then this, uh, guy in the industry, a lot of people know Stu McLaren, who is a, um, membership expert, kind of tapped me on the shoulder and he said, Hey, we’d really like to have a strategic mind to come help us be our director of community and take our community to the next level.
So I worked with him for a few years and started teaching in-person workshops and got to train community teams and leaders for some of the best memberships in the space. And going back, you know, I look at all that and I’m like, wow, it’s this combination of, um, online marketing, which I believe a lot of what we do after the sale is actually just marketing as well and community building, but my own internal desire because as a kid I went through a lot of tragedy and I didn’t have a community. My mom didn’t have a community around us. We really didn’t have community when we needed it. And so I truly believe that when people have a place, a community where they are fully known, that they show up more fully in the world and it’s just, it’s something that we all have a core need for. And so it’s developed into really teaching business owners to create those spaces for people so that we get the best of people and people have that place where they can show up fully as themselves.
Oh, I love that so much, uh, so much. And I think that’s even grown in its, its need since, uh, the pandemic of people just naturally being isolated. And I don’t think people have really acclimated back to real relationships, real community. And I think that’s why one of it’s, it’s not the only reason, it’s one of the big reasons I really wanted to have you on the show. It’s let’s stop treating people like customers and start treating them like people and Exactly. Uh, like does and and realizing like you have community all around you. Do you see it? Right? Are you treating it like it?
Yeah, and I think the thing that I love about merging retention and community is that when we build really strong retention systems, because I know people hear community and they think really fluffy and they think Facebook group, which is not what we’re talking about by any means. But then I usually come in with systems and data and they’re like, whoa, wait a second. Like, I thought you were a community person, but having strong retention systems in your business, which are those systems that um, are everything after the sale, how do we help people actually get a result? How do we help people actually make progress and how do we keep them on that customer journey with us beyond the initial sale? All of those systems, they shouldn’t be automating things to alienate people. They should actually be creating space for human to human connection. And so when we’re all afraid of AI and everything that’s gonna happen, I actually embrace it. I think it’s wonderful because there’s lots of things that it can do to create space for us to do the unscalable activities that really make a difference.
Yeah. So let’s talk about those. Uh, I wanna talk about like what are the unscalable activities that sometimes don’t get the necessary time, love and attention that are needed that actually build community and retention? So what would you say are some of those things?
Yeah, so back in the day it was always handwritten notes. That’s what I wanted to do. I loved it. I wrote handwritten notes to everybody and I still do, you know, um, send a lot of them. If you’ve been in my world, you probably have received one of those
I can’t wait to support you in that. It can be that simple. But even when we can’t personalize everyone, we can still send a video message at a mass scale that feels more personal and more connected and opens up dialogue with those that are willing to enter into it. So that’s like a simple example of how to do that. Another example is, we’ve talked about your program before. So inside of your brand builders group, you have these mentors, these coaches that are supporting people at a much smaller scale. Now people love group programs and creating, creating them because they think, oh, I’m just gonna continue to scale it and my profit margins are just gonna continue to increase. But what they don’t realize is that as the program grows, it gets harder and harder to get people results. Mm-Hmm,
And so when you take, um, that scale and then you can leverage team members like coaches or mentors that can come in and create an intimate environment within a larger scale environment can create more customized really di guidance and direction, it’s not customizing the content, it’s just guiding them to the next best action step for them. That’s one way that you can really scale that kind of connection, scale, that kind of intimacy. And then one other way that I recommend a lot is with Zoom calls. Everybody’s familiar with doing Zoom calls now. And if you aren’t doing, you know, onboarding or welcome calls for new customers or um, new cohorts of people coming into your program, it’s something that I highly recommend. But Zoom actually has a feature called breakouts where we get to break them out into smaller groups so that they get to connect more with each other. ’cause it’s not always just about connecting more with us.
Hmm, that’s good. Especially when you have tons of people coming on of there is a limit to how much you can just do when it comes to one-on-one welcome and one-on-one onboarding without needing more human capital to constantly do that. Which again, it’s hard because like you need constantly, every new member actually does create, or every new customer creates the need for another, you know, employee. But doing them in, uh, breakouts, I have never thought about that. So like that’s really important because then it’s not so reliant on you and the company, but it’s now it’s building community within the community.
Yeah. And that’s what makes community really sticky, right? It’s the, there’s the connection to you, which is often what builds the trust that gets them in. Then there’s the connection to your team which expands. It’s you passing that torch of influence to your team members and then there’s the, the connection to each other. And that’s actually what keeps people around because as your community grows, their connection with you is gonna feel, it’s gonna feel not as powerful, but hold on. Okay, we can edit that out, that as your community grows, it’s gonna feel not as powerful, not as close that connection with you. And so it’s really important that they’re expanding their connection to others within the communities that they remain sticky.
I love that so much. And that should be a relief to everyone who is listening of going, it doesn’t have to be all you, right? It’s like you, you’re building a community that should build community and then it’s, it takes the pressure off, right? It’s like, ’cause I, I, I believe, at least for all of the businesses that I know, it’s like no one wants it to be just about them. It’s like they want it to go beyond just my face, my name. But the only way you can do that is if you have systems and processes and people, right? You have to have a community that can do that without you. Um, and I love that so much, that whole group onboarding concept. I literally just wrote it down, I was like, note for team note for BPG
Yeah, it, I think a lot of people immediately think about things like losing a customer cancellation process. Uhhuh, that’s where we wanna try and get ’em on a call and save ’em. And at that point you’ve already lost them. You know, if you’ve ever tried to do those cancellation calls, which you know, I’m not against offering them, but if you’ve ever tried to do them, your recovery rate probably isn’t that great
What that identifies for us are our drop off points. And for 90% of communities, it’s in that first month, that’s where you lose people. Yeah. So crazy, isn’t it? And it’s the easiest thing to really systemize is the onboarding. And so, um, we do recommend to have things like action plan calls, which are those group calls where you walk them through maybe three key steps that then they go into breakout groups to work on. We also recommend, you know, having those personalized video messages. There’s um, a community leader that I work with that has 14,000 members. She has scaled her team in order to do small groups of four, four members and one coach on an onboarding call. And they get, I think four offerings of those in their first 90 days of, of membership. So that those first 45 days are really important because people have bought into whatever you have sold them.
And then immediately they have buyer’s remorse. They’re distracted by whatever the latest Netflix series is. And so our job of selling actually doesn’t stop. It only increases because now we’re actually hitting their pocketbook. So all of the things that we had them buy into before, we need to be res solidifying for them. And now they also need to feel acclimated to this culture. Hopefully we have a strong culture in our community. So we have to really get into, there’s four pillars of community that I teach to build on. And the first one is cause. So we really have to solidify why are you here? And not just why is this community exists, but why is this important for you? And then building the culture, which are the beliefs, the behaviors and boundaries that help you fit within this community. And when people have those, they feel like I know how to show up and they’re more likely to engage.
So if we can really make sure that we’re focused on those first 45 days, that is the most important thing to focus on. And then our next goal is how do we identify people who are no longer engaging with us? How do we identify people who maybe bought our book and never took the next step to do our mini course or whatever that next step is? How do we identify people who maybe participated in the first couple calls but we haven’t seen ’em in 30 days? And then that is the other place where human connection can really be valuable because um, anything automated is just easy for them to ignore at that point.
I mean, my mind is reeling already with ideas of programs that I pay to be a part of our program of going, oh, I see how that was really helpful, or, I see how that was really annoying, even though I know what they’re trying to do. And I think one of those things that you said is if somebody is requesting a cancellation, trying to get them on a call, it’s like you’ve already lost them and the save ratio is gonna be relatively low. So I have two questions. One around onboarding and one around this cancellation process. So I’m gonna start with the cancellation first. ’cause I feel like people struggle with that and they’re like, Nope, I’m gonna make ’em good on calling me and I’m gonna turn ’em around. Um, so in the, I guess like instead of me asking, I’m just like, what would you see is successful when it comes to once someone to cancel, what is the best opportunity to go? How can we turn this around without forcing or mandating a call and any insights for anyone listening? Like, hey, well what do I do when someone says, Hey, I wanna cancel ’cause I don’t want ’em to cancel. What do I, yeah.
So a lot of this comes down to your cancellation process and um, for some of my clients, they use my recommended cancellation process, which can make it hard to track saves. And here’s why. Because we treat the cancellation page like a sales page and we have a cancel video. So when they request to cancel or when they are, you know, looking into canceling, they’re gonna be taken to a page that has a video on it. And that page is going to be really getting them to think introspectively about why they’re leaving. And we say a few things. One is like, hey, if you’ve made the progress that you’ve came to make and, and you’re leaving, you’re graduating, that’s amazing. We wanna celebrate you graduating and we can’t wait for you to share your story with us. Your testimony with us when you, you know, submit the form below, but hey, if you’re leaving because you have stopped participating, you’ve given up on yourself, I just wanna give you permission to come back.
Now you can click the button on this page and you can schedule a quick start call and we will get right back in it with you and find the best place for you to get started. You know, or if you’re leaving, ’cause this isn’t a fit for you, maybe you’re not interested in doing X, Y, Z anymore. So we kind of walk through like the different reasons that we know people typically leave, starting with the celebratory one, right? And then the, oh, I’ve given up on myself one, and then the, no, this just really isn’t a fit for me anymore. So we resell them essentially on the value by relating to where they might be in the journey. And then when they go to cancel now legally, because of all the way all the states and things like that are done, I’m not a lawyer.
This is not legal advice. However, I’ve done a lot of research on this
And so when they click that form that all they have to do is enter their email address, but we ask them some other questions as well to get some insight. And we also offer them a call, Hey, if you would like to share more about your experience or if you’d just like to get some additional support to see if maybe this could be a fit for you, then you can schedule a call with a team member. Very few people actually schedule them. And those that get on those calls are usually people who are they, they’re leaving because of self-doubt and they kind of come on the call with that kind of mindset and you are able to recover them. Yeah,
I think that’s really good because I think for anyone who would request a call, they’re going, man, it’s not that I really wanna cancel, it’s, I’m not using it. I feel like I’m not getting my money’s worth. I’m not sure what to do. I’m not confident that I can do.
Ep 445: What To Know If You Want To Be a Highly Paid Professional Speaker | Shawn Hanks Episode Recap
AJV (00:03):
You need three things to become a highly paid professional speaker. And we’re gonna talk about each of those three things right now. First and foremost, you need amazing content and an amazing speech. That’s the barrier to entry. It is no longer about just having great assets and a great sizzle and you know, we assume that because you’re well known or that you know it’s a hot topic, that you’re going to be good. Now it’s like we need proof that you have amazing content and that you’re an amazing speaker and some of the assets we’re gonna talk about that will help support that. But we live in a day and age that people can go online, on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok, just go to Google and find clips of you speaking. They better be good. And the content needs to beuh powerful and engaging and innovative and original.
AJV (00:56):
So let’s just stop with that. You have to have amazing content. It needs to be clear and it needs to be actionable. And you’ve gotta be great on stage just because you have great content. Making videos behind a camera like this doesn’t always mean you’re a great presenter on stage. That’s an art, that’s a craft, and it needs to be honed. So let’s just start with this, that you must have amazing content and you must be a great presenter on stage. Those are two things that are a given in order to become a highly paid professional speaker. Now, assuming that you have those two things, ’cause you’ve been working on your content for years, and that you have been honing this craft and you’ve been speaking, which you don’t become a great speaker the first time you speak FYI that is something that happens over the course of time.
AJV (01:41):
So speak as much as you can. Speak for free, speak for money, just speak, speak for speak. For groups of three, speak for groups of 3000. You need the practice. You need to figure out what what parts of your story do people remember? What makes them laugh, what makes them think? Where do you need pauses? Where do you need a little bit more humor? Where do you need a little bit more seriousness? Where do you need slides? That only comes with practice. And so the more you do it, the better you get always. Now, second to that the prerequisite is you got to have an amazing speech and you have to have amazing content. There are some other things that help you enhance your ability to become a highly paid professional speaker. First of all, you have to know, categorically speaking, what topics are evergreen topics that are naturally going to allow you to increase your fees over the course of time. And what I mean by evergreen topics is it does not matter what market we’re in, what economy we’re in, what company it is, what industry it is, that there are some categories that are always going to be requested when someone is looking for a speaker. Some of those,
Speaker 2 (02:58):
This is not all of them, but some of those categories that are evergreen that also allow for highly paid speak speeches would be leadership. There is always going to be a need in associations, education, government, corporations, for there to be a discussion around how do you become a better leader of people. Now, within that category of leadership, there’s communication, there’s management, there’s all other types of things, but just think about leadership is a category. Another one would be culture. No matter what culture is always gonna be a part of a conversation. Teamwork. How do we work with others as leaders, but also as employees? That’s top down, bottom up. But teamwork would be another one. So if you think about like large, widespread, categorically speaking, those are three categories. And like I said, they’re not the only ones, but those are three categories that are always going to be requested that allow for your fees to grow without you ever leaving that category.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
If you think of some of the most high pay professional speakers out there like the, the Mel Robbins of the world, it’s like there are components of what she is talking about where it is, you know, overcoming, you know, fear, right? But a little bit of that is overcoming fear to do something right, to be a leader, to make the sale, to ask for the thing. You’ve got people like Tony Robbins, right? And his is about empowerment. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a leader or a frontline employee, but there are some general conversation topics that are always going to allow for you to grow within that vertical and increase your fees. There are other evergreen categories of speeches that will always be needed and requested, but doesn’t allow for the same fee intensity for it to grow as exponential.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
And I’ll give you a quick example. Can you tell me 10 different social media speakers who have fees of $40,000 a keynote, maybe likely not. That is a, a topic that is considered, you know, important, but it’s probably more considered of like a 5,000, $10,000 speaker, not a $40,000 speaker on social media versus I could list you 30, $40,000 speakers right now in leadership. Tons of them. Now, it’s not saying that the content for social media isn’t important, it’s just that it doesn’t allow for that same fee exponential increase as some of these other categories. So social media that would be an example. But other evergreen categories that are important, that are always going to be important would be sales
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Customer experience what we used to refer to as customer service, branding, marketing. Now again these are high level categories and those are evergreen categories, but don’t allow for the same fee growth as maybe a leadership, a culture a teamwork type of topic. So the first thing you wanna look at is how does my content that I believe in that is unique and niche to me, fit within one of these categories that are gonna allow me to have fee increases over time? And whatever it is, it’s like, how do I weave in components of culture, leadership, and teamwork into what I’m doing so that I fit within that request as those are always going to be highly requested topics for events. Doesn’t matter what the event is. So how can what you do also weave in some of those elements so that you fit into those categories outside of that video is the silver bullet.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
You have to have amazing video, a demo video. So I’m gonna just talk about some of the key bullet points of what you need here. One you’ve got to have a five to seven minute speaker demo video. If you’ve got some, something really original, something unique, maybe 10 minutes, but five to seven is the sweet spot that event planners are looking for today. It needs to be short and punchy. You cannot have a one camera shoot, right? So you’re looking for a two or three camera shoot minimum to get the different angles. What angles do you need? You need closeups on your intimate stories. You need wide screen so you can see the power of the stage. You have to have audience shots. People need to see audience reactions in your footage. If you are telling a joke and no one is laughing and there’s no footage of the laughing, how are we supposed to know if it’s funny?
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Maybe we didn’t think it was funny until that the, we like, oh, okay, the audience loved that meeting. Planners need to know the audience loved that. How do they know that? You show the audience in your footage. Audio quality is key. You’ve got to be clear and concise. Same thing with video quality. You won’t, you don’t want shaky footage, blurry footage, those you can’t use that. You can’t use that. You need to have three to four different speeches in your demo video. It cannot be you on one stage in one outfit. So you need at least three to four different stages with you in at least three to four different outfits. So don’t wear the same outfit on every stage. And then you’ve got to answer the question, why are you the expert that I should spend money on to bring to our event?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
And that needs to be answered in the first 15 to 20 seconds. That’s that I need that credible validation that I know what I’m talking about and I’m worth the investment that I’m asking for. Then needs to immediately jump to stage footage. So that’s the video. A speaker press kit. Here’s some of the key things that you need in a speaker press kit. A great headshot, a high rise headshot that really shows you today, not 10 years ago, not five years ago today. Make sure it’s eye catching, original, really enhances who you are and make sure it’s high res your bio. This is your unique positioning. Again, you’ve got to say, why am I the expert? Why am I different? Why should you hire me? And that needs to be in your, your speaker bio. Then you need your keynote description. Think about it like this.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
What you’re trying to describe in this keynote description is what are people buying when they buy this program, when they pay you whatever, you know, $15,000, what they’re paying for is what you have written on that page in your video. It’s this is what you’re buying, right? And then it’s how are you going to deliver that? Some of that is just bullet point takeaways, right? It’s like, here’s what the program is about. Here’s what your audience is going to leave with. And that’s, they’re people are making a 15 to $50,000 decision on a five minute video and a one page description. Think about that. It needs to sell and it needs to be really well positioned. It needs to reach the heart and the core of who this is for, what it is for and how we’re going to achieve it. Right? That is your keynote description.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Then you need reviews or testimonials. If you can organize them by industry. So if you are being submitted to speak at an insurance association, make sure you have lots of insurance testimonials. If it’s a, a real estate right event, make sure you’ve got real estate testimonials. So try to customize and, and organize those by industry if you can. But what’s most important is we need to know these are real people. So what’s their headshot? What’s their name? What was their position and what did they say? AJ was the best speaker, not as impactful. AJ was the best speaker we have hired in the last 10 years. I have never had so many people request that we bring her back as I have had with this event. Right? That’s the type of thing that you’re looking for. So be really intentional about what you’re trying to get across with your reviews and testimonials. And the last thing I would say when it comes to becoming a highly paid professional speaker is at the end of the day, you have to be so good at what you do, your craft, that other speakers are willing to tell meeting planners and bureaus about you. So be so good at what you do, that other people tell others about what you do. And that is how you become a highly paid professional speaker.
Ep 444: What You Should Know About Working with Speaker Bureaus with Shawn Hanks
AJV (00:00):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the influential personal brand, AJ Vaden here. Have a long time friend who is on the show today, Shawn Hanks. I’m going to formally introduce him in just a sec, but I want you to know who this episode is for and why you should stick around and listen to it. Number one, this is for anyone who is on the path to desiring to become a highly paid professional speaker. That’s who this episode is really built for. If you want to speak occasionally, probably not the episode for you. This is built for the person who goes, I have a message to share, and I have a passion for sharing it on stages all over the world. I want this to be the primary part of my business, and I wanna be a highly paid professional speaker.
AJV (00:53):
If that’s you, this is an episode you cannot absolutely do not want to miss. Now, what are we gonna talk about? We’re gonna talk about what it takes to become a highly paid professional speaker, and most importantly, how do you get on all those stages that you so desire to be on? ’cause There’s lots of different ways to do it. And working with a bureau is one of those, which we’re gonna talk a lot about today. It’s not the only one, but it is one that definitely helps pave the path. But in order to do that, there’s some things you gotta do before you get on those stages. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to the CEO of Premier Speakers Bureau. Shawn has been in the Speakers Bureau world for almost 20 years, if not over 20 years. He was also the most recent past president of the International Association of Speakers Bureaus, which is just a real fancy word of saying he knows a lot about this industry.
SH (02:02):
Dallas Cowboys. Oh, Dallas, Tyler and I went to a game last week. We watched them beat the Rams. Hey, it’s, it’s fun. Cowboys are great until they’re not, and it just breaks my heart every year.
AJV (02:13):
Oh, I love that
SH (02:36):
That’s fun.
AJV (02:37):
We don’t have a deep passion for it. But my four year old got himself a pair of football gloves, like, you know, like I love
SH (02:47):
It.
AJV (02:48):
But
SH (02:48):
Yeah, probably receiver G gloves. Yeah,
AJV (02:50):
Receiver G gloves. There you go. That’s what they called. I don’t even know. But he sleeps in them.
SH (02:55):
Love it.
AJV (02:56):
He wears them to basketball practice. He wears them to school. He wears them everywhere his goes. I’m like, you’re gonna have the softest, most moisturized hand
SH (03:20):
Yeah, they’re two great teams. Eki.
AJV (03:29):
So funny. Alright, well now we gotta talk business. We gotta talk business. So Shawn, help everyone get to know just a little bit about you and premier speakers. Like for those who are listening, who are going what, what’s a bureau? What do those people do? What is a bureau? What is Premier? And how did you get into this industry and how have you stayed in it for so long? Yeah.
SH (03:53):
Well, thank you aj. It’s great. Always fun to see you and your energy comes through the screen. I love that. Bureau is, if you don’t know what a speaker’s bureau is, join the crowd. I didn’t know what a speaker’s bureau was in October of 2000, 23 years ago. Let’s not do the math. I didn’t know what a speaker’s bureau was. That’s an old dusty term. That essentially means we do speaker representation, right? We are the organizations that especially larger conferences, corporate groups come to a speakers bureau to say, Hey, I need to have four slots and these are the types of content I want to fill. This is what I do want. This is what I don’t want. Premier in particular, and you mentioned IASB, which is a great organization, international Association of Speakers Bureaus. I am plugged into that group.
SH (04:39):
So I, I probably know more about speakers bureaus than I should except for doing market competitor research. But we, it’s a small industry. There’s about 120 speakers bureaus. Most of those are very small. You know, one, two person shops that really started doing event management and then event production and then slid into the speakers bureau world. ’cause They really enjoyed being the liaison with the speakers. But, and they’re probably four to five that are significant in size and, you know, would, would own a significant part of the industry. PSB in particular, we, last year we worked with about 2000 events. We have nine agents on our team. They are siloed. So we have one agent who only handles healthcare, right? So when a healthcare client calls or a hospital he can speak with, you know, he, he understands their pain points, he understands their jargon.
SH (05:34):
So we, we have been intentional at Premier. We’ll celebrate 30 years next year. Congrat of building congrat. Thank you. Thank you. Building what we call sectors. So we have one agent that only handles education. We do a lot of work in the K through 12 arena. And if you call from a school district or any kind of education group, you’re always end up talking to Carl because he understands what your pain points are. He understands that in particular, you always pay net 30. Most groups don’t do that. All those little intricacies that, that you can really glean from working with the same types of clients over and over again. Expertise, ultimately. But our job most people assume our job is to just book speakers. And that is the end product. I always say our, we are in consultancy more than anything else.
SH (06:18):
And really risk mitigation. When, when a large corporation calls us or a large association and says, Hey, this is the type of speaker we’re looking for, or often it’s, here are the three types of speakers who want, we need a headliner. Who’s going to capture attention? We’re willing to spend X number of dollars, then we think this is going to be a hot topic. Let’s call it ai. I mean, that’s a hot topic for today. We need someone on the stage who can cover that content. And then we want someone who can do this and, and check these certain boxes. They, and they most often call us with very specific criteria of these are the things they don’t, most often don’t have a name. They’re not calling to say, we want AJ on this date. Right? they’re calling us and the consultancy is really what we’re selling.
SH (07:01):
We’re risk mitigation. They may book four speakers this year. We worked with, we booked 2000 events last year. So they understand we aren’t going to book a speaker for them and with them. Who isn’t going to be literally world class. I mean, just show up, crush it, be amazing, you on stage. So there’s no risk in, I’ll say that ideally there’s no risk in working with a bureau because we’re bringing them the cream of the crop. And we’ve done all of the hard work of selecting from the, the thousand speaker submissions that we’ve seen in the last year. We have found, gleaned the, the 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 that we know are going to be amazing. And that ultimately that’s what a speaker’s bureau is. We’re we are here to service our end clients when we say clients. And that’s the term of art in our industry.
SH (07:50):
We are talking specifically premier speakers bureau. We are talking about an event planner. Mm-Hmm.
SH (08:40):
They select from that list and probably come back to us. So we massage that ultimately, but at the end of the day, it turns into, is the speaker available on this date? Yes. We go to contract with the end client, go to contract with the speaker. We have nine of those agents. We have five people on our event logistics team. They grab the event, they do all of the event logistics in turn, I’m sorry, they do all the speakers event logistics, airfare, car service, all of the details to get the speaker from home to the event and back. And then we have a full accounting team. We collect all the funds, guarantee all the payment to the speaker. So the, there’s very little risk for the speaker. We do work on a commission structure, so they’re paying for those services. But, but ultimately solving the problem of what content do you need on the stage Event planner, that’s where it starts.
AJV (09:29):
Yeah. So I, I love that you said that ’cause I haven’t heard that. So clearly stated, it’s like we’re risk mitigation for our clients. Mm-Hmm.
SH (10:14):
Assuming the speaker is with the, the right bureau. And when I say right, every, every company ha ends up with a clientele that looks like them as a company, right? And whether that’s intentional or unintentional premier has been blessed with a lot of organic growth over the years. But much of that is the, the, the speakers that we select to represent, attract a certain type of clientele, right? So then we go find speakers who are attractive to that type of clientele that that grows. So our client base somewhat intentional, somewhat just by the nature of how business works, we over time end up with a certain type of clientele. And then we are looking for speakers to service the, those groups of, of clients. So it, there is a step there of, I have seen many times, and we’ve been guilty of it, we say, Hey, we, this, this speaker is very interesting.
SH (11:03):
We think it could be a good fit, but we end up misaligned ’cause we don’t have the right clientele to select them. But when there’s a great marriage there a speaker working with a bureau the opportunity there is Speaker X. If you get in front of 10 event planners, and I say in front of, if you’re email, if, if you have contact with 10 event planners and two or three of them book you, right? Let’s say you have 30% close rate, well, we can put you in front of a hundred event planners or a thousand, 10,000 is a big number. But so it at that, it’s just the, the scale of opportunity. Even if that close rate goes down, you still have massive opportunity. There are assumptions with alignment there, obviously, but when it works well, it really, it it’s a scale that most speakers are not able to build on their own or choose not to.
SH (11:56):
I mean, ultimately, I mentioned all of our staff with 24 people on our team, it, for a speaker to go hire someone, okay, I want you on the phone all day, every day talking about me to clients. I need someone to run a business. I need, you know, maybe ACOO so like manage all of this and I need someone, an account like it’s staffing up becomes a significant amount of overhead bureaus. We do sell services and provide services to speakers. But that it eliminates for most speakers the requirement of having a full back office.
AJV (12:27):
Yeah. That, you know, what I’ve always said is just being honest, we’ve always had a love hate relationship with bureaus. Yep. ’cause We are salespeople. It’s like we’ve always found ourselves. It’s like we’re great at pitching ourselves and getting ourselves on stages until you run into a slew of clients that are like, oh, we love you would love to book you. Let me contact my bureau.
SH (12:50):
AJV (12:51):
You need to contact the bureau. I’m talking to you right now. Yeah. And it’s like, but I think that’s one of the benefits for speakers is just understanding there is a whole world of clients who will not book you without going through their bureau because of that risk mitigation process.
SH (13:06):
Right?
AJV (13:07):
Right. It’s that they wanna know that you’ve gone through the ringer with the bureau too before they put you on their stage. And I would say that’s, I think that’s, it’s a huge benefit of just going, if you have a great relationship with the bureau, one access is a big deal. Like, you’re gonna get access to people who would never book you direct. They’re just not gonna do it. It’s not what they do. Right. But then two, it’s like if you don’t have relationships with bureaus, even if you’re not exclusive you’re gonna be competing with ’em. Right. Right. That’s true. And those have, that’s that established relationships where even if they like you, they know these other people really well. And so there’s pros and cons to all the things, but I think a lot of people who want to be highly paid professional speakers, they want to do it now
AJV (13:57):
And there’s a process of how do you raise your fees and how do you get to become that person who is booked on stages where people are calling you, or bureaus are calling you versus you calling them. So I’d love to hear from your perspective of, you know, booking 2000 events last year is insanity. Right? That’s so many. That’s so, I mean, that’s what, four a day for three and a half a day. It’s a time. But also being in the industry for so long, like what are people looking for? And so I wanna talk about this in three different ways. Sure. What are they looking for in terms of the content? Like what’s trending, what’s hot, what’s, and I think there’s just evergreen. Like people are always gonna want leadership. They’re always gonna want culture. There’s always, there’s always some of those things, right? But then there’s new topics like ai, right? Yeah. So I’d love to talk about content. The second is, what are the assets that a speaker needs in order to get booked, right? So we need demo video, but any footage isn’t good footage, right? So like, what type of
SH (15:01):
Footage?
AJV (15:02):
And then also like a speaker press kit or a website. Like what, what’s the formula of this is the set of assets you need if you’re really going after this. And then the last thing is, what does it take to work with a bureau? Sure. Because I think that’s important. So let’s start with content. Like, just thinking of, you know, some people have great ideas, but are people gonna pay 10, 20, 30, $40,000 for an hour? Right?
SH (15:29):
Yeah. And that’s a great question. You, you, you described it perfectly, aj. There are certain elements of content that will never grow old. Leadership is one of them. Teamwork your right culture and how we see that play out in the market is often a client will call and say, Hey, we need a speaker who I mentioned AI earlier, as we sit here in November of 2023, that’s a hot topic. It, it may not be two years from now, but it is today. And I’ll come back to that in a second. But often they’ll say, Hey, even if you’re an AI speaker, we want you to, to hit on ai. We want you to be the expert. Ideally, you’ve written a book on it. You, you’ve been on tv and they’ve put your name aj a expert in ai, right? But the reality is they also want you to hit on some of those evergreen topics.
SH (16:19):
So event planners will say like, oh, we want that AI speaker to be great. Can they also hit on leadership? And, and so there is kind of this combination of your content. But that isn’t, say you do want to be known for something. Now what that thing is, social media eight, 10 years ago was the thing. And I remember so many speakers saying, I have to overnight reinvent myself as a social media speaker. The problem with that is, the next day, you know, you have, let’s make up a number a thousand speakers who overnight became experts on social media. So there immediately becomes a glut in the market. But there was opportunity there. The problem is, if you’re chasing content in that way, it is really hard to read what’s in the future, right? Like to guess. Okay, where’s it gonna be in a year?
SH (17:08):
I’ve always encouraged speakers, yes, be smart, leadership, teamwork, culture. There’s some content that will never grow old. The thing that you’re gonna care about in three to five years. ’cause We’re talking about what you guys do at brand builders. Like, figure out what you were great at and like, you own it, but you gotta live it, right? So if you’re picking something because you want, you hope, it’ll just capture the market. My my argument is you’re going to hate that content in six months. ’cause You’re, you’re trying to fall in love with something that you don’t love, right?
SH (17:58):
And make that your own. Now be smart, obviously. It, it, DEI was a very hot conversation topic and keynote topic two years ago last year. But we’ve seen a number of DEI speakers, DEI speakers start to see their business slow. Because a a lot of companies will say, we had that content last year and they haven’t devalued it, but they can’t do that content every single year. So they, the, the rally the market, there’s less opportunity for that specific content. So you mentioned culture that is an, an evergreen topic, very clever gifted DEI speakers will, will pivot. And they don’t change their content significantly, but you rebrand it instead of DEI, it’s culture. And those are the same things, but how you brand it matters matters in the market over time. So that’s a long answer to what is the hot content out there.
SH (18:53):
You define three that will never go away. And you as a speaker have to lean into those and be able to answer the question, Hey, is there some leadership content in everything you do? Yes. You have to be able to honestly answer that with a yes. And then frame your content. You know, again, if it was DEI last year, you read the room and say, Hey, the opportunities are lessening for that content. Okay, I’m gonna reframe it as culture. The same with social media. You know, like I said, 10 years ago, overnight we had a thousand experts, but today we haven’t been asked about a social media speaker in probably five years. So you have to know that content has faded. And I will say there are, and you guys probably unpack this a bit with brand builders, there’s certain content that is viewed, no one sits down and defines this, I don’t think in a spreadsheet.
SH (19:45):
Leadership content, you can be a $40,000 leadership speaker. You will never find, well take that back. It would be very difficult to find a $40,000 social media speaker. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (20:57):
I think that’s so, so important. As you were talking, I was thinking about speakers like Eric Wall, right?
SH (21:05):
Amazing. Yeah.
AJV (21:06):
Yeah. He’s an artist and does his artistry, but it’s woven into a more articulate message with content. Mm-Hmm.
SH (21:25):
Yes, he’s amazing. He’s terrific gymnast
AJV (21:27):
Balance and productivity and making it all come together. But yeah, he does acrobats and it’s like, that’s entertainment, but the content is just as good,
SH (21:37):
Right? Yes. Versus if you ask the person when they walked out of that, you know, there’s a thousand people in a conference room in Vegas, Hey, what did Dan Thurman do? They would probably, they would tell you some cool stuff. He can do things that I could never do physically on a stage. But that’s only to capture your attention. It’s kind of the concede or the trick and the thing to teach you something. If you’re leaning on the thing to be the thing, then, then you’re a gymnast. That’s right. If you’re just using that to communicate an idea, Uhhuh
AJV (22:22):
That’s so that’s such the key part of it in that entertainment aspect. It’s like you’re only using it to catch their attention, to deliver the great message. Now, we talked about a co ’cause I thought that’s really fascinating. Something that you said, it’s like categorically speaking, there is a, you know, perceived price value on certain categories of confidence. Mm-Hmm.
SH (22:56):
You go.
AJV (22:56):
That’s true. That’s very true. And so I, I would love to talk about, did I miss any, ’cause we said leadership, we said kind of culture we said teamwork, I threw in sales, but I don’t know, I believe that’s evergreen. Like, everyone’s looking at how do we keep revenues top line high, bottom line high. Are there any other categories that you’re like, yeah, these are evergreen. People are always gonna be asking for these types of speakers?
SH (23:22):
Yeah, I, that’s a great question. I, those, those you just described, and sales is definitely one. And I, I, I would pause for a second to describe the, the types of the buyers that are coming to speakers bureaus most often. Are you, you touched on this earlier, are larger corporations associations. Yeah. There’s a, I think the last number was like 26,000 associations out there. Not, no, not all of them can afford a $40,000 speaker, but they are all required by charter to do a conference. So, right. They’re all doing a conference on some level. So those are the types of clients who are most often working with, with speakers bureaus. So we, we do our, our data points are within a certain type of buyer. There are certainly other buyers out there who, that we don’t, we don’t bump into. But th those that you hit on are, are, are those described really well?
SH (24:14):
And, and sales is corporations will do a sales training or they’ll, you know, they’ll bring in their sales leaders. Associations don’t lean heavily into sales because unless there are a specific type of association, big picture sales would be probably a, a, AB option for them. And there are a lot of options beneath that. But leadership, teamwork, culture, those things that especially in the association world, the only thing these people have in common, the 5,000 people in the Vegas Orlando Ballroom, is that they’re all in one industry together. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (25:11):
What about customer experience?
SH (25:15):
Yes. That is content that we, that we would book from time to time. That is not I wouldn’t say that would be a content where this is a home run every single time. And customer experience, customer service, those would almost be interchangeable. I do, I like customer experience is a better, it’s better terminology today. Customer service was definitely at five to 10 years ago or some amount of time ago, I would say. That does, if that is your only content, you are bumping up against a, a ceiling on some level. Now what that number is, is a guess, right? But you, you, you won’t find many customer experience $50,000 speakers, but you can find quite a few at 15, right? Or 12 five.
AJV (26:00):
So, fascinating. I love this conversation. Last question because I’m like, whatcha gonna think of, what about like marketing or branding? Mm-Hmm.
SH (26:08):
AJV (27:17):
No, I think it’s really good because it’s, again, back is like, I’m just kind of like listing these out, like these, these higher level evergreen topic categories, leadership, culture, teamwork and you can differentiate and position within those high level categories that really at the end of the day, it’s like you’re wanna your fees to grow. It’s like, it’s gonna have to reach things on that more general widespread nature of leadership. Sure. But then, yeah, you can have an amazing career in the sales, branding, marketing, customer experience space, but there’s, there’s gonna be a ceiling at some point. Unless you can figure out how do we weave that into one of these more overarching categories, something
SH (27:56):
Larger
AJV (27:57):
Or culture leadership. But I think that’s really important because sometimes just knowing that helps a lot of like how you position and if you don’t know those nuances of the industry, you’re stuck before you even get started. Because that’s right, it’s nuanced. And I think that’s really important. So I love that in terms of like content, just categorically speaking. And I think that’s really, really important. Now, let’s talk about assets, right? Mm-Hmm.
SH (29:02):
Yeah. Great. Great question. And the s starkest thing you’ll hear me say today, AJ, hopefully is when, when speakers say to me, man, every time I walk off stage, you know, like they tell me I’m the best speaker ever, or I crushed it. I always, hopefully I don’t always say it, but I do think, yeah, congratulations. Like that’s what a professional speaker should do. Like, if you’re a professional speaker, you should never say, yeah, I laid an egg today. I mean, it’s gonna happen, but killing it on stage is the barrier to entry to be a professional speaker. You said that, well, I’m being redundant, but that is, that is the expectation. If you’re being paid $15,000, that that’s a significant amount of money. But also if a company is putting their 500 employees in a room for sitting idle, idle by product productivity standards for an hour, the cost to the company is literally probably another 15.
SH (29:55):
And depending on the size, could be hundreds of thousands of dollars for that hour. So be amazing that we said that be amazing. Assets are the thing that the, I I, I try to frame it this way, instead of just thinking them as marketing, you get to answer questions that you will never get asked because they’re gonna make a decision about you without asking you certain questions. Mm-Hmm.
SH (30:45):
We’ve had three middle aged white guys in a row the last three years. Ah, we don’t wanna do a fourth thing. Like they really do have to nuance and start to compare and contrast. Well, this speaker is 10% funnier. I mean, that they make up, they have to measure things. And the first part of the job is to eliminate options, right? So they’re looking for things to go, okay, well this speaker says they’re the most amazing branding speaker ever, but their video looks like it was shot 10 years ago. Like that, of course. I mean, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t buy a, you know, if, if your person you’re buying a car from drives a, a horrible car and knows nothing about cars, and you go, I probably don’t know what they’re talking about. So if, if you, if you have an expertise, obviously you gotta crush it in that expertise.
SH (31:27):
But headshot I’ll come back to video. ’cause I video’s the, the silver bullet in, in the speaking world. I’m convinced of that a professional headshot. And, and I always suggest to speakers or lean into, it’s easy if you come out of the corporate world or you’ve had success, you built a company and sold it, you’ve always been branded as a certain thing in that space, in the speaking space, what you’re selling is, I can get on your stage and communicate an idea maybe better than anyone else for 60 minutes or 50 minutes, whatever it is. So you have to change your mindset from I built this company, that’s who I am. It being very biographically focused. Think about the event planner who’s sitting in their cubicle considering four other speakers. They’re, they’re looking for something a little bit different in that biography.
SH (32:20):
It’s not just essentially a, your Wikipedia page, right? It, it really is like, how are you bringing your expertise to my room of 500 people who may or may not want to be there and moving the needle for our company? Still not sure about this. Oh, sorry, Siri just heard me. But the, the, so keynote description, so headshot, no brainer, 300 DPI, great high resolution, spend money on that. If you, if it’s a friend with an iPhone that’s not gonna cut it. I mean, you spend money on it. Selfies, brand build southeast, yeah. Selfie aj, you and call aj. She can help you out. I’m sure they can. Brand builders can assist with that. Oh, it’s so funny. The keynote descriptions are something to, to, to harken back to. We were talking about it earlier, own a certain piece of content. But a keynote description is ultimately your describing what your brand is, and one or two words, colon, you know, here, here’s a short description of how I’m gonna move the needle for your team.
SH (33:22):
And then a, a description of what they are buying. I mean, all they’re buying a product. We’re buying, we’re paying you money to, for 60 minutes to come communicate an idea. This keynote description describes how you are going to, what that thing is and how you’re going to do it. The title describes what it is. The keynote description describes how you’re going to do it. Don’t be afraid to have two or three versions of, it’s almost disingenuous to say, okay, sales colon, whatever that thing is, and this is for, you know, it companies and then the same thing. But for healthcare companies, that doesn’t scare off buyers. They want, if they’re a healthcare company and you, you have a keynote description describing your content in their space, that’s a good thing. They, that tells them, you know, enough about the healthcare industry that you have content, that you’ve taken your content and specifically built it for their audience.
SH (34:23):
Right? That’s a, so don’t be afraid to have two or three keynotes that look similar, but are targeted towards different types of organizations. So keynote descriptions are important. Reviews are are crucial because, and I I jokingly say this, often it, you know, if you, if you have a, I’m gonna use Magic Johnson. If you know Magic Johnson and he says, I AJ’s my buddy, she’s the best speaker I’ve ever met, you’re gonna love her. That’s awesome. At a dinner party. And that would impress me. I’m a huge basketball fan. Event planners in the moment that they are buying are not impressed by big names. Remember, risk mitigation, the most valuable thing from a review point of view in that buying moment is someone like me in my chair took, used you as a speaker and you crushed it and they wrote a review saying, Hey, I brought speaker X in.
SH (35:22):
They crushed it on stage. Yeah, they move an needle. These metrics, whatever that is, so big names are great. I would drop one or two on my website. Way more importantly are is event planner. Stacy from Prudential is very valuable when Steve at Allstate is considering you, right? Because these are lateral competitors and they’re saying, we tried it, it worked. So they’re gonna try it. Also video, we touched on it a little bit. I can’t tell you how often I’ll get a video because I’ve got so many friends and buddies that are in the speaking world. They’ll text me a video, Hey, here’s 60. You know, here’s a a clip. Man, this, this joke I told, or this story I told crushed, right? I watched the video. No, it doesn’t because they are remembering. And I, it breaks my heart. I I hate to say no, it doesn’t.
SH (36:13):
But they are remembering the audience reaction. You know, aj, you’ve been on a ton of stages. You, you have a joke or you have a story that you know always works, right? You remember it. But if, if you don’t have video of the audience reaction, so I, as a viewer sitting at my desk watching a video, if I can’t see the audience react, then you just get whatever you get from me and I’m probably distracted. So audience reaction is one element that speakers very well paid professional speakers forget to include that in their preview videos. Mm-Hmm.
SH (37:05):
What’s the best length of a video? Yeah, probably five to seven minutes. If you’ve got a couple of really killer clips that push it to 10, just know that most event planners are considering, you won’t watch 10 minutes, but they’ll skip through a video. But it needs to punch and it needs to, if you’ve got two or three stories that are your fastballs, include those in there. And I would say one little hack that I always suggest to speakers is, your video is never a finished product. If you know you’re gonna tell that story often on stages Mm-Hmm.
AJV (38:06):
Yeah. So I’ve got a question for you specific to this video thing, which is how much of the video should be you on stages? Because a lot of the videos I see today are more like sizzle commercials and they have mm-Hmm,
SH (38:38):
Right? That, that is a great question because it’s a moment in time question. A few years ago, a couple of speakers realized like, everyone’s videos look the same. And this is generalities, but pretty close. A few years ago it was pre covid, so we’ll call it five years ago, some speakers said everyone’s videos look the same. And they started to do some videos and I can mention names and we’ll talk about ’em offline. I loved it. They kind of reinvented the, the sizzle reel or the preview video world. And it became the videos that we’ve all seen now and been a part of probably helping make, which is you follow them to the stage and they’re standing and they look at the camera and say like, this is gonna be great. And you watch them walk on stage and crush it. That total overnight it elevated the, the, the expectation from the viewer side of the videos because it used to be, okay, I’m probably gonna do some talking head to introduce myself.
SH (39:32):
Here’s three clips of me on CNN and Fox News, like, you know, quick Clips. And then here’s three clips of me speaking. Now we kind of have almost movie production quality videos, right? I I think the market has adjusted to that, where a large number of speakers have that more kind of movie production. So it, it’s like the rubber band thing. I think it will stretch and pull back and event planners, they do, they’re a cynical bunch because we make them a cynical bunch because I always say hyperbole is the, the natural language of our industry. Like everything is the best ever. Every speaker’s the best ever. Like, so they, they could,
AJV (40:10):
Everyone’s an expert. Everyone,
SH (40:12):
Everyone’s an expert.
SH (41:04):
No. but I, I would say if I had $10,000 to invest in my video tomorrow and I was a speaker, I would lean heavily into production. And then do put you, you want to answer the question, why are you an expert? Why should I give you 60 minutes of my people’s time? You wanna answer that in the first few seconds. So if you’re on CNN and they have, they’re holding your book up and it says you’re an expert, definitely include that. But you wanna answer that question in 10, 15 seconds and then get to you on stage speaking and not to dig in to be boring with it. But a couple of basic items are you want more than one camera. You want one more than one scene. So if it’s you wearing the same dress or the same suit in all three clips, the question, you’re, they will, the event planner will never say, have you done this a lot?
SH (41:59):
Right? But you’re, you’re implying to them, I’ve only done it once ’cause all three clips look the same. So that’s why if you’re watching a great speaker’s reel, you’ll notice that they jump around and show themselves sometimes even during the same story. Here’s me on stage at this conference and here’s me on stage. Part of that is just communicating. I do this all the time and I’m amazing at this and here’s a couple of different versions of me doing it. It helps the flow of the video video. So you, you want multiple locations. You want multiple, you know, attire, changes to communicate. This is something I do regularly and I’m great at it.
AJV (42:39):
Hmm. Those are so good. And, you know, to, it’s easy to make long videos. It’s hard to make short ones. And so making sure that’s just a, a key part of that. And I love like just all the s assets that you talk about, like, I think people forget of like how important it is. Like I say this all the time, it’s like, I love your headshot. Who is that
SH (43:05):
It’s you in college,
AJV (43:07):
Well, I be able to recognize you when I go find you online. And I’m like, wait, is this the same person? I don’t know. Did I, did I type the name in wrong?
SH (43:50):
Yep. Great quality, professional speakers. The stuff that we, we’ve touched on multiple times. The two most frequent ways. I get that question a lot. I have a lot of friends who are speakers. Honestly, I have a lot of friends who are speakers that we don’t represent because we aren’t the best home for them. But the two best ways to connect with Premier Speakers Bureau or any speakers bureau at this point is referral from one of their key speakers. We have out of those 2000 events last year, we probably booked about 600, 650 speakers. So a lot of those speakers we booked a couple of times. Mm-Hmm,
SH (44:43):
That moves the needle for me because I know what their litmus test for great is. And so that’s a great way to open a door. The last two speakers that we have, premier has signed exclusively, and we could unpack that another time. Which means all of their business comes to Premier, have been started as referrals from other people that are trusted speakers of ours. So that, that’s a, it’s proven to be the case. The other way is to take business away from a speaker’s bureau. So we, we have that core client base that I told you that, that most often we know like they’re gonna come back to us ’cause we serve them really well. We take great care of them, we answer the phone the first time it rings. We are good at best when we talk to them and they say, Hey, actually, you know, thanks, I’ll talk to you in a month and we’ll do business together, but my CEO saw this person speak and told me to go book them, and I did that that, that happens once.
SH (45:39):
Okay? That’s how life works. And CEOs say, go book a speaker and then they know it’s risky, but the CEO told ’em to do it. When that happens three or four times, that alerts us to that speaker is a, is attractive to the types of clients that we work with, right? So that quite often we will start a conversation with them. And many times over the last 23 years, that has ended up in a very strategic long-term, mutually beneficial relationship. But it started with them proving themselves by the way they proved it was they took business away from us, meaning clients that we value said, yeah, that’s somebody that we’re interested in. Most often, those two things connect up. Yeah. And the speaker we trust says, this person’s great. And we go, yeah, we’ve, we’ve heard that from clients too. At that point, it’s, it’s almost a no-brainer, but that, I wish that the easy answer was press this button and this thing will happen.
SH (46:35):
All of those things are nuanced and they all come down to relationships. Being great on stage is a starting point. Event planners will, being in love with how you do your business, if you’re a great speaker and are pain to work with, you won’t, you won’t make it, you won’t make it. You have to approach your business as Aer with a servant heart. Like I am coming to, to offer something to the people in this room, starting with that poor event planner, Stacy, who’s probably a mom of two kids and has three other jobs and is rolling the dice on this event. And if something goes wrong, she takes all the blame. She’s your first customer, right? Make her life amazing. Take great care of her. You’re gonna be amazing on stage. But if you do that a hundred times, the universe will love you. The market will love you. There’s no easy answers, there’s no easy fixes. It is just hard work, aj you know this, you and Rory did this. It’s hard work. You build a thing over time, and if you do it the right way, you look back in 10, 20 years and say, I’m proud of the things that I built.
AJV (47:41):
Amen. Preach it. I love that. And like, the underlying message that I hope everyone heard is like a part of the path of working with bureaus is that you actually already have to be on stages, right? Yes. Their job is to get you on the first stage or the 10th stage. Their job is to discover you after you’ve already been doing this long enough and good enough that other people are willing to tell other people about you. Which means that it starts with you, it starts with you
SH (48:13):
Perfectly said,
AJV (48:14):
Perfectly said, and you’ve gotta be the one to get on stages. And I, and it’s like back to everything in life. It’s a trusted source, referring someone is how business is still done. Regardless of how many things have gone online and how business has evolved, that has never changed, which is the power of a trusted referral. Mm-Hmm. And this is no different here, Shawn. Perfect. Thank you so much. You’re the best. This is so you and this is gonna be just so rich for everyone who takes the time to listen to it. And for those of you who are listening, if you guys wanna connect with Shawn, it’s Shawn Hanks. You can find him on LinkedIn. But if you wanna learn more about Shawn and his role and everyone else at Premier Speakers, just go to premier speakers.com and again, premier speakers.com. I’ll put all that in the show notes and if you wanna catch the recap episode of this then stay tuned. And if not, we’ll catch you next time on the influential Personal brand. We’ll see you later.
SH (49:17):
Thank you.
Ep 439: The Secrets of Building an Amazing Affiliate Lead Generation Machine | Matt McWilliams Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
One of the greatest secrets behind Brand Builders group’s success in the last few years has been affiliates. Um, we should hit eight figures this year. We’re right, we’re, we’re right on track to hit right around eight figures in our first and five years in businesses will be our fifth full year in business. And affiliates are a huge part of that. They represent over 60% of our revenue as a company comes from affiliates. It’s some, something around that number. And we simply would not, we would not exist at Brand Builders Group if it weren’t for all of our affiliates. And if you know much about the, the start of, of how our company started, we unexpected suddenly and unexpectedly exited and sold our last company and started Brand Builder’s Group. And we didn’t really have any plan whatsoever to do that. And yet we had a friend named Lewis who, uh, reached out to us, asked for some help, we started helping him.
RV (00:58):
And he was the one that said, this is what you were born to do. I’m gonna tell the whole world about you guys. And, uh, even though we had no audience and no platform, ’cause we had sold it, we, we previously had, but um, all of it was gone, uh, you know, very, very suddenly. And so we didn’t have that platform. And Lewis said, that’s all right. I have one and I’m gonna tell the world about you. And so right from the beginning, roots of our company, we, uh, you know, the, the arrangement was have us on your podcast and then we will pay you a referral fee for everyone that we meet from your show. And that is like the origin story of Brand Builders Group. And so affiliate marketing has been built into our DNA and we love it. We believe in it.
RV (01:47):
It is, I think, one of the most magical forces on the planet. It’s, it’s incredible. It is such a win-win. And if you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, just to catch you up, what the, what, what It’s referral marketing. It’s referral marketing. It’s basically to say, Hey, if you’re a client of ours, um, if you refer us to another client, we’ll pay you for that referral. And part of our philosophy and our strategy at Brand Builders Group is something that we say to turn your customer force into your sales force, turn your customer force into your sales force. I mean, think about that. How many salespeople do you have? If you’re a small business, you probably don’t have many, and there’s a good chance you are the leading salesperson if you’re the owner, the founder, the the entrepreneur, right? If you’re the CEO even. But how many customers do you have? You know, probably lots, maybe, yeah, dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands in some cases, tens of thousands. What if every single one of your customers was a salesperson? That is how you wanna do customer experience. That is how you want to create your product. That is how you want to, to create your offerings, is you want to do such a great job
RV (02:58):
And you wanna overdeliver for the people in front of you. And I think so much of the world is out there chasing thinking, oh, I need to have millions of new followers, and they’re trying to make mo money selling to strangers on the internet instead of the real secret of making money. The real secret of growing your revenue. And the real secret of building a business quickly is to serve the customers you have in front of your face in a better way, in a deeper way to overdeliver for the people who have already trusted you. And then if you do that, those people should want to and likely will tell their friends and family about you if you do an extraordinary job. And so, but, but, but too many small businesses are out there just chasing new customers all the time, that they’re overlooking the people right in front of them to go, how can I overdeliver for these people?
RV (03:48):
The way that we say it is, don’t forget, right? Don’t be so busy chasing the width of your reach that you forget about the depth of your impact and serving people in a deep way. Now, if you can pay your customers to do it, that becomes affiliate marketing, is to say, I’m gonna pay you for telling people you know about us, about our business. And we have built that into our business model. We have a very open 10%, uh, lifetime referral fee on all strategy services that are purchased from us that, uh, come from anyone that our clients ever refer us to. So many of our clients, this includes people like, you know, Lewis Howes and Ed, my lead, and, uh, people who have big platforms, they make more money from us than they pay to us. And that is just because they have very large platforms.
RV (04:45):
But even in our own community of, of like clients who are new, we actually call our affiliate program BBG for free, BBG for free. And the reason we call it BBG for free is we tell our clients, look, one of the fastest ways to make money from being associated with Brand Builders Group is just by referring friends and, and client, you know, friends and family and like other people who are mission-driven, messengers and aspiring speakers, authors, coaches, small business owners, professional service providers, you know, uh, direct salespeople. We, that’s a lot of our market, uh, or corporate executives who are wanting to like, rise in the ranks and build a personal brand. Well, since we pay a 10% lifetime referral fee on all of our strategy services that, uh, are purchased by anyone who our customers refer us to, that means if our customer, if our one customer refers us, 10 people who all bought at the same level that they bought, like at the same, you know, we have a couple different levels and tiers of our membership program and our, our various services.
RV (05:48):
But if you referred us 10 people who all signed up at the same level, you signed up then because you’d make 10% on each of those 10, that would add up to a hundred percent of what your service is, which means you would get your BBG for free. So we call that program BBG for free. And many of our clients get their BBG for free. They pay for their whole membership here, or they subsidize their own membership by the fact that, you know, they pay us whatever they’re paying us, but then we’re paying back to them on anyone they’ve referred us to. They can do that on day one before they have a website, before they have a book, before they have a funnel, before they have a sales team, before they’re doing live events, before they’re out there doing keynotes or have you even written a speech?
RV (06:29):
So our clients make money quickly. So this is, I think, the greatest secret that has been the secret to our success so quickly in growing our revenue. And it’s a win-win, right? Because if, if it starts with you though, it starts with you overdelivering for the clients that are in front of you, right? With us, it just so happened that Lewis Howes was our very first, you know, client or became our very first client, um, and it was going, how do we overdeliver for Lewis? How do we add so much value to him that he wants to tell us? And the idea is to overdeliver for the customers that are in front of you in such a big way that they want to tell you about their friends the same way they wanna tell their friends about a great movie they just saw, or a great restaurant they went to.
RV (07:20):
Even you wanna be so good, you wanna do such a good job that even if you didn’t pay them a referral fee, that they would refer you anyways, because that’s what friends do, right? Friends share good things with each other. If you see an amazing movie, you want to tell your friends about it. If you go to an amazing restaurant, you wanna tell your friends about it, partly because it makes you look cool because you found something really awesome. And you know that when they all love it, they’re gonna thank you. That’s how business should be done. Business should be done, especially small business. That’s how small business should be done. Small businesses can’t compete with the Fortune 1000 on advertising spend and employees and, you know, buying, you know, buying traffic and building these extravagant ad campaigns. But what we can compete on, and we can, we can win against the big companies, is by over-delivering through a customized experience for the people that we’re working with to where they become so, so, you know, uh, so loyal to us that they would refer people now when we pay them to do that, um, which is, you know, amazing.
RV (08:26):
Now in some industries, there’s actually, you can’t do it, right? Like I think in healthcare industry and then, you know, some financial, like financial services, there’s, there’s certain industries that there’s so much regulation because of what you’re selling. You, you can’t do it. But I mean, and, and most of the industries you can. And it’s, it’s amazing, right? Because it’s like everybody wins because you service your customer really well, which is where it starts. It doesn’t start by them giving you referrals. It starts by you over-delivering to the people who are right in front of you. That’s how the cycle starts. You overdeliver to them, then they refer a friend to go, I had such an amazing experience with Brand Builders Group, they blew my mind. They’re, they’re changing my life. They’re, they’re helping me make this dream come alive. And it’s, it’s fun and it’s exciting and it’s, it’s, you know, academic and it’s proven and it’s researched and the the people at the company are amazing and the people in the community are amazing and the people in the community are winning, right?
RV (09:21):
I mean, that’s, that’s one of the things that we’ve got going for us right now. Uh, last week we had our 24th client hit the Wall Street Journal, or USA today bestseller list, and we hit, hit the New York Times. We’ve had two of our clients hit the New York Times bestseller list this month. We’ve had eight clients hit the New York Times. In the last 12 months, we’ve had six clients have Ted Talks that have gone viral with over a million views. We have nine clients who’ve grown their annual revenue more than a million dollars a year. Now, are those results for everybody? No, they’re not. We have hundreds of clients, but it shows you the magnitude at which our clients are winning. And it’s because we’re not teaching gimmicks and tricks and hacks. We’re not cheating the system. We’re not trying to shortcut What we’re doing is we’re teaching people the proven methods of doing the hard work it takes to add value, to exceed expectations, to automate trust, because you’re over-delivering.
RV (10:16):
And that’s the secret. The secret is to do the work that other people aren’t willing to do, uh, to take the stairs. As I said so many years ago, in my first book, uh, that hit the New York Times, that broke through the, broke me through the wall, was this idea of do the things other people aren’t willing to do. So it starts with you making a commitment, making a resolution, making a decision, and taking an action to go, I’m gonna love on the people in front of me, and I’m gonna turn my customer force into my sales Salesforce. So that’s what it starts with, and that’s the psychology, uh, uh, of it. And then all you do is you put money behind it. And in our case, we do a simple 10% lifetime referral fee. And we’re transparent about it, we’re open about it, we tell people about it, right?
RV (11:00):
It’s disclosed in our website, like, this is how we do business. And so, um, when we recruit affiliates, part of what we’re doing, I think that’s working really well, which is what most people aren’t doing. When most people try to recruit affiliates, they try to recruit famous people, and they go out and they try to get like, you know, big celebrities with millions of followers. That’s not wrong to do, right? That’s not like bad. It’s just hard. It’s difficult, right? Like, how are you gonna get the rock to promote your stuff? I mean, like, what’s your strategy there? I mean, good, good luck, right? And you and everyone else, and you’re competing with companies who will literally pay the rock millions and millions of dollars to let you know his have his face associated. So you think he’s gonna post about your thing because you sent him a free sample.
RV (11:49):
Like, you know, it’s just, it’s just, it’s not impossible. It’s just not very possible. Um, so that’s what most people do when they’re chasing affiliates, is they’re chasing people with like large platforms. It’s the same idea that that small businesses are, are they’re chasing width. Everything they’re doing is, is reach. They’re trying to expand wide. That’s the whole mentality, right? Is I need more followers, more views, more impressions. Those things are not bad, but they’re not necessary to make more money. In fact, you can waste a lot of time chasing those things and overlooking the money that’s right in front of you, which is to go deeper with fewer people. Um, and so the way that we do that is even with affiliates, we’re not trying to find affiliates. We’re trying to find customers. And then once we find a customer, we’re trying to make a customer love us so much that the customer turns into an affiliate.
RV (12:43):
And who is more likely to refer us a celebrity that knows nothing about us or someone using our product, and which endorsement is truly more authentic and genuine. Someone who’s being paid to say something or someone who’s actually paying their own money, their hard earned blood, sweat and tears, cash to buy your product or service, and they’re spending money and they’re going, this is worth it. It’s worth more than what I’m paying. These people are amazing. They’re changing my life. And you go, that endorsement is, is worth more frankly. I mean, in, in some ways it’s worth more, it’s more authentic, it’s more legitimate, it’s more genuine for sure. And the thing you gotta realize is that most of us, most of you, you don’t need hundreds and thousands of new customers to have the greatest income year of your life. Most of us need a couple dozen customers, a couple dozen of our, our greatest customers.
RV (13:44):
Like our our best perfect customers would, would, you would have the year, the best year of your life income-wise. So you don’t need celebrities with millions of followers. You don’t need millions of followers to make millions of dollars. That’s the law of AJ Vaden. That’s what we, we call it the law of AJ Vaden, because she says that all the time. And AJ has now been the co-founder of six different multimillion dollar companies, two eight figure companies. She’s had four years where she’s personally produced over a million dollars in revenue and she’s never had more than 10,000 followers. How does she do that? How does she do it? Because her strategy is to land and expand. Her strategy is to go deep, not wide. Her strategy is to do relationships and reputation and knowing that reputation precedes revenue. And that if you overdeliver, then you will win.
RV (14:33):
Because most people don’t overdeliver. What most businesses do is the least amount of e effort to acquire a customer, and then they go looking for the next customer. That’s what they’re doing. They’re now, and, and if anything, where they spend most of their time is on marketing and sales. And once they land the customer, they forget about the customer and they just move on to try to find the next customer. That’s not the, that’s not the strategy. At least it’s not the strategy that works for us, right? I can’t say it’s, it’s not the right strategy, or it’s not the best strategy. But, but the secret to how we’ve grown these large businesses in just a few years with no venture. We’ve got no private equity. We’re not venture backed. We have no outside investors. We have no debt. We have no bank loans. How do we do that?
RV (15:16):
It’s by helping people
RV (16:09):
So first of all, make it easy for people to agree to be affiliates. So make it easy for them to say yes. How do you make it easy for someone to agree to be affiliate? First of all, over deliver for the thing they’re paying you for. Second of all, over deliver for things they’re not paying you for. Ask yourself, how can I, what other ways can I add value to this person’s life? What other way can I help them? Right? What people can I introduce them to? Do they need vendors? Do they need employees? Do they need team members? Do they need speaking opportunities? Do they need podcast opportunities? Like, uh, who, who are they looking for? How can I introduce them to people? How can I, how can I give them advice, encouragement, uh, how can I cheer them on and, and give them, like, you know, celebrate them.
RV (16:55):
Those are things you can do that cost nothing. And then, and then also it’s like, what, what services can I add to people’s lives that maybe are just things that you don’t even offer for sale, but you do it for people to help them? Like, so one of our brand builders group mantras. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. So find those people and over deliver. The other part is serve people who have the same audience as you, but who have a different offering than you, right? This is part of making it easy for them to say yes, serve audiences who have the same, or, or, you know, try to, try to pick, when you looking at affiliates, look for people who have the same audience as you, but a different offering from you, right?
RV (17:42):
Amy Porterfield is a great example of that, right? So she’s a client of ours who became a client first, then became an affiliate kind of at the same time. But, but really she was a client first. We were, we were, we were serving her first. We were adding value, um, first as friends, then officially informally as a client. Well, Amy has our audience, but Amy doesn’t sell one-on-one coaching Amy teaches, she, she, she has course, right? She has courses, but her flagship course is a course on helping people create courses, right? So her primary business model is teaching. Uh, so selling courses, you know, digital Course Academy is her primary thing, right? And she does that. She’s had thousands, tens of thousands of students go through this program, right? So she has a great course on helping people, uh, teach them how to launch courses.
RV (18:27):
So her business model is different from ours. Our business model is not courses. Our business model is membership one-on-one coaching. We’re nurturing our community all the time. We have live events, right? We have pay for hotels and people fly in and like, we pay for food and catering and coffee. Like we have a, we have a, a human like interactive in-person experience. And then we do one-on-one coaching over Zoom. That’s what our strategists do. And then we have a training, we have live trainings constantly. We have 10 live trainings a month that are virtual, um, that, you know, I lead two of them for our community. So it’s a very heavy, you know, human experience. And it’s not as, it’s not as much digital or, or automated. So it’s not that one is better than the other, not they’re, they’re both good, but they’re different, right?
RV (19:13):
So our people can benefit from her stuff, her people can benefit from our stuff, and we’re not, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re both trying to serve the same audience, but we offer different things. So that’s a part of what you wanna think of. It makes it easy for people to say yes, you know? So you wanna find who has your audience, who has the same, who’s going after the same people as you, but they do something different, right? Like if I’m ACPA, right? And I’m doing, I, uh, let’s say I’m looking for small business owners. I wanna maybe form alliances with insurance agents who sell, like employee benefits and stuff, because we’re going after the same person, but we serve different, we, we, we have different offerings. We serve the same audience with different offerings. That’s part of how you make it easy for people to say yes.
RV (19:58):
The second key to to having affiliate program work is make it easy for them to market You. Make it easy for them to market you, right? Part of the reason why we do so well is we don’t ask our affiliates to do 50 email blasts and do these open cart, close cart launches, like the all between specific dates. That’s not bad to do. That’s not wrong to do. A lot of affiliates do that. That’s great if you can do that and you can get people to do it for us. All I have to be is a podcast guest, like any other podcast guest. And I just, I just, you know, and, and their, their mind is blown when they go, how does this work? And I say, just invite me on your podcast like any other guest. And they go, and that’s it. I said, that’s it.
RV (20:36):
And then we will build you a custom link. We build a custom landing page for each podcast we’re on, and we say, the only URL we’re gonna give it on your show is that link. And when we do that, everyone who comes through that page, we pay you a 10% lifetime referral fee on all strategy services that we sell to those people. Boom, there it is. And they go, you’re kidding. It’s that easy. It’s like, it’s that easy, right? Make it easy to say yes, then make it easy for them to market. And then if they say, well, are there emails I can send out? Sure can. I’ll write the emails for you. Here you go. You wanna post on social? I’ll give you assets. Here you go. You wanna know what ad you wanna read an ad for us on your own podcast and get affiliate fees?
RV (21:17):
Here’s a script for it. You don’t have to use it, but it makes it easy. Like you create all the assets, you create all the materials, you do all the work to make it easy for them to say yes, and then make it easy for them to market. And then the third thing is, make it easy for them to make money. Make it easy for them to make money. Make it easy for them to get paid. And you do that by having a great product, by having proven funnels, by having digital, you know, dashboards and metrics that you can tell them, you can estimate for them on the front end. Hey, if, if you send an email to this many people, this many people open it, this many people come to our free training, this many people watch this, many people buy, and this is how much money you’ll make.
RV (21:52):
Like if you don’t have those metrics dialed in, you’re not ready for an affiliate program yet. I don’t think like, I mean, you could do it more casually, but like not a large scale one. And we go, why do people refer us? Hopefully, because first of all, we’re awesome at doing what we say we’re gonna do. We’re over-delivering for them as clients. But second, we make it easy for them to say yes. We don’t compete with what they do. We do all the work of creating the assets for them. And then we send a massive passive mailbox money. We just go here, click this link, set up your bank account and we’ll wire you money every month. And boom, it’s on autopilot. And we’re sending out massive passive mailbox money to our affiliates. And that is my goal. My goal is not to go, how can I get something from them?
RV (22:32):
It’s not so much what can I, you know, what’s the least amount I can do to get them to refer me? I’m going, how can I constantly overdeliver for them in a way that they wanna say nice things about us, they wanna help us, and I’ll pay ’em on top of it. Massive passive mailbox money. So guess what happens? People are flooding to invite me on their podcast, right? They’re flooding us to invite ag on their podcast. They’re, they’re talking about us without us even being there and using their own affiliate link, because that’s how this works, right? And so start with your customers over deliver, build relationships before you need them. And that is how you build an incredible, amazing life-changing referral fee affiliate program. One of the most powerful dynamics in all of small business. Make it happen.
Ep 438: How to Get Affiliates to Promote Your Product with Matt McWilliams
RV (00:02):
Hey, at Brand Builders Group, you know that we say the more specific, the more terrific. And you hear people say The riches are in the niches. We say you’re most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. And one of the things that I love about Matt is I have now known Matt, I don’t know, probably for 10, maybe 15 years, but Matt McWilliams is, if you ask me, who’s the expert on affiliate marketing, he’s the name that I think of. He owns that space. He has worked with several of my friends as their affiliate launch manager. Some of our clients, you know, this is people like Tony and Dean Tony Bins and Dean Graziosi, shark Tanks, Kevin Harrington, who’s a client of ours, Ryan Leveque Lewis Howes, obviously Brian Tracy Michael Hyatt’s a close friend, Jeff Walker’s a friend. And Matt has r has run launches for all of those folks.
RV (00:55):
Stu McLaren, on and on and on. And so a lot of the people I know and respect, they have hired Matt to help him run affiliate launches. And we’ve never done an affiliate launch per se at B B G, but our whole business model is more of an evergreen affiliate model where we pay people a lifetime referral fee when they refer people to us. But we’ve never done an affiliate launch where we have lots of affiliates all at once. But I know the power of it, and I just don’t know that much about how to do it. So I thought, let’s get our friend Matt in here to like drop some value bombs and teach us the affiliate game. So brother, welcome to the podcast. All
MM (01:33):
Right. Thanks for having me, Rory. And I, I love that. What was it you said that the, that your biggest something is in the, your previous pain point. I can’t, how did you word that?
RV (01:40):
Yeah, that’s one of our, that’s like our flagship thing, is that you’re most powerfully positioned Yeah. To serve the person you once were. Mm-Hmm.
MM (01:47):
RV (02:19):
Yeah. Did you
MM (02:19):
Trademark it yet?
RV (02:20):
MM (02:23):
The, alright. Trademark Roy Vaden. How about that? There
RV (02:25):
You go.
MM (02:26):
Yeah.
RV (02:26):
So the people you work with are obviously well known, right? And when you hear that, you go, well, yeah, of course everyone’s gonna promote for Tony Robbins and Dean Azizi, but like, talk to us about why do you need affiliates like e even if you’re small, even if you’re new, and can you really get them? And, and, you know, I wanna kind of hear a little bit about the why and the when. Like
MM (02:51):
Yeah.
RV (02:51):
Why do you need them and then when is the right time to go get ’em?
MM (02:55):
Well, I mean, first of all that yeah, people do promote for Tony and, and we, you know, promote for Jeff and promote for Stu and, and we help them, you know, two x their, their affiliate program and you know, Michael Hyatt, we helped him almost four x year over year when we took over. And, and while those are certainly easier, I mean, 90% of our clients nobody’s ever heard of, you know, because they’re in the parenting niche. And there, you know, it’s funny, when we’re in like a certain niche, I I always tell people this, when you’re in like a certain niche and you have that celebrity in your niche, so like Jeff Walker in internet marketing product launches, Stu McLaren in Membership world. I say go to Target. I call this the target test. You wanna know how non-famous Stu McLaren is outside of his little niche, go to Target, ask a hundred people. If they’ve ever heard of Stu McLaren, you’ll be lucky if one of them ever has.
RV (03:44):
Hmm.
MM (03:45):
You know, I mean, in in your niche, you know, you are famous in building brands and you’re famous in, you know, productivity kind of in your past life, right? And you’re famous as a speaker, but again, you’d be the first human may go to Target and ask a hundred people out, you know, go to a target in, you know, Columbus, Ohio, and you’d be lucky if one person’s ever heard of Rory Vaden.
RV (04:03):
Well, even Tony Robbins, like at Target. Yeah.
MM (04:05):
You know,
RV (04:05):
Might
MM (04:06):
Be five. Might be
RV (04:06):
Five. Yeah. Maybe five or 10.
MM (04:08):
Yeah. And, and, and he’s, you know, this larger than life person or Dean Grazi who’s sort of, and so yeah, most of the people outside of their little niche in the world, and even sometimes in their little niche, you know, we’re working with the, you know, people that are, you know, they’re not a lot of times seven and eight figure businesses. They’re people you never heard of. And this is working for them. And in fact, it’s one of the best ways to get known because the reality is you know, I I I say this a lot of times, like it’s never been harder to get noticed and therefore it’s never been harder to stand out. You know, there’s a, a, a correlation between the two. If you go back a hundred years ago, you know, no, most people outside of presidents and, you know, like a few politicians weren’t known out of their, before the advent of radio weren’t known out of, outside of a 10, 15 mile radius.
MM (04:55):
You know, it was almost impossible. The the problem with that is because now it’s easy for everybody to get their 15 minutes. It’s easy for everybody to go viral. It’s easy for everybody to get 10 million views or even, you know, a hundred thousand views that it becomes almost impossible to stand out. You know, there’s more content uploaded since you and I have been talking on YouTube than either one of us can consume in our lifetimes. So think about that, how hard it is to stand out. And so affiliates are one of those ways when you’re breaking into a niche, this is how I did, I mentioned back in 2005, we tried everything else. Now, this is before the advent of social media and, you know, targeting and all those things. But we tried all the stuff you do back in 2005 to break into our niche, which, which was the insurance world.
MM (05:37):
And it wasn’t until we started an affiliate program that we began to get some traction because, you know, couple things. Number one, you pay after the sale is made. So you, you pay only per for performance. You know, you pay later
MM (06:28):
And we’re still trying to figure things out. We don’t have to worry about targeting, which can take months or even years to figure out your affiliates do it for you. And what happens with affiliates is sometimes they will market to their list and you will discover niches or pockets of niches that you wouldn’t have thought you could profitably target. But you realize, oh my gosh, we had 12 people buy this week that are moms of, you know, such and such, right? We moms of special needs children. We never thought our course would be good for moms of special needs children, but you know what, maybe we could target them. And so you start to learn things. Obviously, you know, one of the biggest benefits is just the fact that the, the leads are warm. You know, the prospects are warm. The reality is, very few people woke up today thinking, you know what I need to do?
MM (07:17):
I need to buy so-and-so’s product. Or they’re scrolling through Facebook because they wanna see their niece’s new. I wanna see my new, you know, baby I didn’t think nephew. Now why? I had to think of, was it a nephew or niece
RV (08:16):
Wanna, so just some of the reasons why it’s great. I talk about, I wanna talk about that part right there about landing on the page. So, so, you know, let’s assume that you get affiliates is most of what’s happening in the affiliate world, like your world is, is that still today, like you’re recruiting people to basically promote some type of free training, either a free lead magnet or a free webinar, or a free, you know, like if it’s a Jeff Walker, it’s like a free video, like a little video, mini video course. Is that pretty much what’s happening is you’re still just promoting, everyone’s promoting to something for free, someone’s adding value, and then they’re selling something at the end,
MM (08:55):
Not necessarily in your world, you know, kind of in the, you know, if I think of your clients, yes, that’s the norm. Probably 97% of the time. It’s going to be a free report, a free webinar, a free, you know, launch sequence type thing. You know, like you said, the three video series, something like that. Other options, you know, if it’s a software could be a free trial, you know, that’s obviously a good entry point. One of the things we’re seeing that’s working really well with some of our clients is a free training, you know, free webinar with a backend. Make sure you claim this free trial of this software. ’cause We’re gonna show you how to use it on the webinar. You know, and that works really well because it, you know, now gets them into like using the software and if we can get ’em to use the software they’re gonna stick around, you know, seven times outta 10. And so there’s all types of things there. But yeah, I mean, there’s direct to sale, there’s direct to call, there’s all types of things. But yeah, in brand building world, typically it’s gonna be to a, some sort of a free resource or Okay. Video series or webinar.
RV (09:58):
And then is most of what you’re doing, like, you know, like when I think of affiliates, I tend to think of more information products, like mm-hmm.
MM (10:28):
Yeah, I mean, again, it’s all over the place. Retail products, obviously the commissions are lower, but they’re, they’re more commoditized. And you’ve got a lot of, you know you know, brands that spend the majority of their time promoting things that are retail products. And yeah, you might only make 10% of a $57 purchase, you know, five 70, but multiply that by a thousand people. You know, you’re making close to $6,000 for Facebook post. You know, that’s not a bad way to make some money, right? It’s really all over the place. But again, in, in your world, typically it is gonna be to a, a higher priced, you know, course or, you know, coaching. And we have some clients that are killing it with, you know, $24,000 a year coaching offers where we pay the affiliate of flat $3,000. And, you know, well that’s not a very high percentage, but at the same time it’s $3,000. You know, typically the higher the touch, which is we consider touch, meaning my time. So when I coach somebody for an hour, it costs an hour of my time. That goes into the cost of goods. So obviously the higher the cost of goods, the lower the affiliate commission’s gonna be. So the higher the touch, the lower the commission is gonna be. And that’s accessible.
RV (11:43):
That’s how brand Builders group works, right? I mean, this is how we built brand builders group so fast. We pay a 10% lifetime referral fee to any of our clients who refer someone because we’re, we do one-on-one coaching and live events. I mean, it’s, it’s so people intensive. It’s non-scalable. It’s not digital. Exactly. It’s completely the, the, the low margin human experience trying to pay people well and recruit ’em because we, we try to, we try to know people one-on-one and it’s less about like the courses and stuff. And and so it’s a lower percentage, but we just pay it forever and it just goes on mm-hmm.
MM (12:25):
Yeah, exactly. And that’s just normal and that’s expected. So when I promote something as an affiliate, ’cause it’s, you know, there’s a lesson by the way. If you’re gonna start an affiliate program, spend a little bit of time promoting something as an affiliate first just so you have the understanding of how it works. And, and a lot of times, like for me, the reason I’m a much better affiliate manager than I was my first five years. And, you know, to be clear, my first five years I built a program from scratch to more than a million dollars a month and had won affiliate managers of the year twice. But I’m still, I was 10 times better by 2014 than I was in 2000, you know, 10 because I became an affiliate and I started seeing things and I started going, I don’t like the way, you know, that works.
MM (13:08):
Like, I hated it as an affiliate not getting a leaderboard every day. You know, it drove me nuts. Like, did, did the thing I did, did yesterday, did I move up the leaderboard? Did I move down? I wanna know. ’cause I’m competing against my friends and I wanna beat them and I wanna win a better prize. And so we invented the live leaderboard back in 2013. Now it’s, most programs have one, you know, it’s just become ubiquitous because, you know, somebody got tired of the way that the norm was and changed something. And so we see things as an affiliate that drive us crazy. And so we address those, or we quite frankly can copy things from other people. I mean, I give all credit in the world to Danny Ney because in 2014, I was promoting him and he said, Hey, I’d like to get on a call with you.
MM (13:50):
And he, we got on a one hour zoom call and mapped out my entire promotion of his launch on a spreadsheet. And then he sent me the spreadsheet and I went, oh, I get what he’s doing. That’s the principle of commitment and consistency, right? Outta Robert Seal D’S playbook. Right? He’s holding me accountable to what I said I was gonna do versus me just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll do that, that, that. And then there’s no documentation. And so we stole that idea from Danny. We started doing the exact same thing. If you look at the way we do it, if you look at one of my calls and one of his calls, you could overlap them and they’d be exactly the same. And so be an affiliate first. And when you do that, you’ll start to, to see those things that,
RV (14:27):
Well, how do you do that? Like, how do you, how do you find affiliates or how do you find affiliate opportunities? I mean, obviously your friends, right? Like they go, Hey, I have a book coming out, or I have a course launch. I mean, I guess that would be one way, but like, how do you find affiliates?
MM (14:43):
Let’s talk about the first one. How do we find like things to promote ourselves opportunities?
RV (14:47):
Sure.
MM (14:47):
I say, look around at your desk, you know, your virtual desk might be your computer. What sites do you log into? What software are you using? What tools are you using in your business? You know, you said it best, like your biggest area of, you know, strength is where you used to be weak. The, the be the best place for you to serve your audience is from the place where you struggled 5, 7, 10 years ago. You know, for me it’s now 18
RV (15:33):
Basically just promote the tools you love. Like find like the tools,
MM (15:35):
Promote love. Mm-Hmm.
RV (15:37):
Yeah. Promote the thesis,
MM (15:37):
Promote the brands that you love. Promote the, again, and it can be as simple as, okay, if I have a friend who says, who comes to me and, you know, they’re relatively well-known and they’re launching a book in a year, and they say, who do I need to talk to about, you know, yeah. Obviously us for selling books through affiliates, but who else do I need to talk to? Who, who on earth am I gonna recommend other Roy Vayan? I mean, literally it’s not, I, there’s, I mean if’s no reason.
RV (16:01):
You’re smart, you’re not gonna for sure Uhhuh
MM (16:03):
And so the fact that you have a referral program, all that does honestly, in my opinion, is kind of make it more top of mind. Mm-Hmm.
RV (16:10):
MM (16:11):
And to your stand, you know, from your standpoint. Let’s flip to the other side. When you send me that PayPal deposit for, you know, a good chunk of money, I go, huh. You know, I wonder if there’s anybody else I could proactively think of, right? Instead of just waiting for people. Come, you know what, I’m gonna reach out to a few people. I’m gonna reach out to my friend Brian, who I know has a launch coming up in eight months. And just say, Hey, do you need anybody? If so, I’d love to introduce you to Rory, and it takes me 20 minutes and two of them say yes, and I make a bunch of money for 20 minutes of my time. Like, what else could I do with 20 minutes of my time to make that kind of money? Probably nothing. So that’s the finding, you know, like finding affiliate programs to promote side. Many of those can turn into two-way relationships. I was just talking with one of our coaching clients the other day, and I
RV (16:59):
Go,
MM (17:00):
There we are. Yeah. I was talking to my friend the other day and one of our clients and introducing her to some other clients and I said, you know, here’s why these clients would be good partners, because they have your audience and you have their audience. So the question we ask and we wanna find affiliates is who, who already has my audience? So if you get a software that’s for course creators and coaches and somebody over here that teaches how to create content for course, you know, course creators and coaches to match made in heaven, let, let’s get those two people working together. So the simple formula, let’s, let’s say take a book. Let’s just take a book for example. I call it the Amazon Rabbit Trail because Amazon makes this super easy for us. We pick one book that we think is similar to ours.
MM (17:48):
That’s exactly what we did, did for our book. It’s, you can do this for products or anything. I’m just using a book as an example. And you look that book up on Amazon and you see, when did it launch? I wanna find a book with a launch date of, in the past three years. So I look and it says it launched in January of 2018. I’m not gonna use that one. Let me think of another one. All right? I look at the other book up, it launched in February of 2022. I’m gonna go to Google and I’m gonna look up all the search results from about one month before and one month after that launch date. ’cause I want to find specifically people who promoted, who interviewed, who did whatever for that launch period. Not that wrote about the book nine months later and said how good it was.
MM (18:29):
That that’s not who I want. I want people who promoted this book launch. And I’m gonna look those people up and I’m gonna reach out to them and I’m gonna say, Hey, this, I’m gonna give you the gist of the email here. Hey, I saw that you promoted such and such book a year ago. I’ve got a similar book coming out in nine months, and you wanna do this plenty of time in advance. ’cause People’s promo calendars fill up. I’ve got an, I’ve got a similar book coming out in a few months. It’s different in that it covers this, this and this. You know, whatever the specifics are. Can I send you a copy? Would you be, or would you be interested in having me on your podcast? Or would you be interested in promoting it as an affiliate? And it’s a very brief email.
MM (19:09):
We don’t write a 10 sentence, 12 sentence email. ’cause What do you do, Rory? When you get a long email from somebody you don’t know asking you to do something? You delete it before you even read it. So it’s a very short email with a specific call to action. And that’s how we find affiliates. The same is true for products. You have a product, what are some similar products? You have a coaching service. What are some similar, you know, things like what would other people, what would they have bought that is similar to yours? And it doesn’t have to be if you offer a coaching service, you don’t even have to reach out to affiliates of coaching services because people who bought courses or books or whatever joined a mastermind about this topic might have also, or might also be interested in your coaching service. So you reach out to those people who are affiliates for those products and ask ’em if they would like to promote you mm-hmm.
RV (19:56):
MM (20:02):
That’s what we do. Yeah.
RV (20:03):
If I don’t wanna do that, I go, I get an affiliate manager and I say, Hey, go recruit me some affiliates. Yeah. And then we share in the, we share in the pay together, right? Yeah.
MM (20:11):
I mean, like right now, I mean, you and I have been on, you know, for 20 minutes or so. I mean our team’s, you know, we have multiple people on our team right now finding affiliates for our clients. You know, obviously we have a huge database of people that have been affiliates in the past, but we’re breaking into new niches all the time. Like I, we’ve got a client in the parenting niche right now. We’ve never done anything in the parenting niche. Now there’s a little bit of overlap with the entrepreneurial side. So we reached out to our entrepreneurial affiliates about this parenting offer and we got a few and done had success with it. But now we’re kind of in that phase where we need to go out and find people who’ve promoted other parenting courses. We got another one that’s in the health and fitness niche. Her summit is, she’s doing a virtual summit. It’s all about getting off sugar. I don’t have a list of people for that. So we’re doing what I just said. And yeah, it’s extremely time consuming. And yeah, to your point, you know, there’s two types of people in this world. People have more money than time, and people have more time than money. And people who have more time than money go do it yourself. Like it’s, you can execute on this. It just takes a lot of time.
RV (21:11):
Mm-Hmm.
MM (21:55):
Well, again, the easy way you just said it, you know, hire us,
MM (22:44):
You know, any of the myriad of CRM slash shopping carts slash funnel builders, et cetera, et cetera. You have a built-in affiliate tracking system in there. It’s pretty, it gets a few clicks and it can take you as little as 15 to 20 minutes to set this up. Like it’s really easy, thankfully, if you are not on a system that has a built-in affiliate program. And I would venture to say I’ll put it this way, we’ve worked with 70 clients over the last eight years. And I’ve only had one who didn’t have a built-in affiliate tracking system in their software. I had two that they had a built-in, one that I didn’t like. So we used a different one. So three out of roughly 65 to 70 clients did we have to use an external thing. So again, it’s very rare.
MM (23:32):
There’s 50 good ones out there. Typ, you know, I don’t even wanna name ’em ’cause it depends on what platform you’re on, but depending upon what, whether you’re on WordPress or this or that, there’s plugins, there’s softwares, and I’ve never had one Rory that, and I’m not super techie. People are like, oh, you gotta be super techie. Like, dude, I don’t know how to edit my own WordPress posts. I have to message a teammate to do the thing that I want him to do because I don’t know how to do it. I barely can function on Google, you know, sheets and, and you know, stuff like that. And I literally just learned the other day how plugins work on WordPress. All right, so it’s 2023 and I can make these things work. They’re super easy, thankfully. So
RV (24:15):
What I hear you saying there is that a lot of the built-in functionality that come with the off the shelf tools, so whether it’s like for, for us, we’re, we’re heavy Infusionsoft Keap users, right? So we’re, we’re big fans of Keap. But a lot of our clients use ActiveCampaign. They’ll use ClickFunnels. Yep. They’ll use Kajabi, they’ll use HubSpot.
MM (24:38):
Everyone you just named has that built in.
RV (24:40):
Okay. And, and then I’m not as familiar with SamCart, but you’re saying that SamCart has, has it built SamCart I think of more as like a e-commerce, like a store? Is that not the way kind
MM (24:51):
Of is? Yeah,
RV (24:52):
Kind of is. It’s more like shop like I think of it as more like a Shopify
MM (24:55):
Not exactly. It’s it’s shopping cart. It’s
RV (24:58):
A shopping cart.
MM (24:59):
Now keep in mind I haven’t been, I haven’t logged into SamCart in seven years, so it might have changed, but I know it has affiliate tracking. ’cause We, we have an affiliate program that we promote that uses the SamCart link. You know, so, so,
RV (25:10):
So you guys are kind of tech agnostic in that way. Like you can grab, you can, you can work within, you’re just, you’re used to seeing all the different systems. And I,
MM (25:18):
I say all the time I’m platform agnostic. Yep. Uhhuh, I don’t, I mean outside of, and I’m not gonna say who it is publicly. There’s one and it doesn’t matter. There’s one that we can’t stand because the tracking doesn’t work properly.
MM (25:57):
I mean, it’s a eight minute process. 20 if there’s some nuance to it, like, oh, we told this person we’d do something different or what I don’t, you know, I can’t even think of it. Occasionally if you get some, you know, like big, big payments, we will pay those in a different manner. But usually it’s a download upload, right? I mean it’s download to a CS v, upload the CS v, it pays them. Now this is one little thing, and I’m getting a little bit advanced this why you hire people like us. ’cause Then we do this, we then send emails to all of those affiliates. You go, but PayPal sends them an automated email to Pauly sends ’em an automated email that says, you know, you made, nobody reads the automated emails. Right? At least I don’t, and I don’t very many people do.
MM (26:38):
We send ’em a personalized email that says something like, Hey Tom, thank you so much for supporting Amy this month. Just wanted to let you know we’ve got a PayPal deposit on the way for $8,226. You know, that’s pretty awesome. You know, that that’s, you know, you made 14 sales and people loved the webinar and we’ve, here’s three people who responded already saying they love the, the course, you know, that you referred, and by the way Amy’s big summit’s coming up in four months. Would you like to support it? ’cause What’s a better time to ask somebody to support something that you’re doing than when you just told ’em you’re sending ’em a boatload of money. And so that little extra step that I have never seen anybody outside of us. And I’m not saying nobody’s doing it. I just have never seen it. I have never seen anybody else take that one little extra step on those payment things. And, and it works every time. I mean, I would say one third of those emails get a response like, absolutely sign me up. I’m in for whatever you got going on.
RV (27:41):
Yeah. And man, I just, you know, I just have to say like, one of my favorite things of, of like, of my whole life is sending out our check the checks every month to our affiliates. I mean, we give them massive passive mailbox money. Yeah.
MM (27:54):
I mean,
RV (27:55):
We have several affiliates that have earned six, like six figures from a podcast interview with me. Like it
MM (28:02):
That’s crazy. You
RV (28:03):
Know, tens of thousands of dollars from one podcast interview and they’re still getting paid. And it’s, it’s such a fun thing to do. There’s like a part of it. That’s the
MM (28:13):
Right attitude. That’s the right attitude to have, by the way. ’cause Some people are like, oh my gosh, you’re gonna keep paying the affiliates. No, I mean, you’re, you’re re not only are you rewarding them, not only is it the right thing to do, but they’re gonna return in kind because every time you send one of those checks, they’re thinking, like I said earlier, Hmm. I wonder what else I could do to refer business to Rory. That’s
RV (28:32):
Right. That’s what I want. I mean, I, I have found that one of the best ways to make friends is to send them checks every month.
MM (28:48):
Buy me love
RV (28:50):
Well man, this has been awesome. I in, in the spirit of affiliate links, I want to give out an affiliate link for you all to meet Matt and to learn more about what he’s up to. So I’m gonna give you the link here. So the, the, the link is brand builders group.com/affiliate guy. So that’s what Matt McWilliams, he goes by affiliate guy. So brand, so brand builders group.com/affiliate guy. If you do that, Matt is gonna give you this download. I’ll let him explain it a little bit. Yeah. But it is called How to Get Your First a hundred Affiliates Free Report. And that is exactly what, if you’re getting exposed to this for the first time and you’ve never done it, you need, and affiliates has changed Brand builders. I mean this has, we’re an eight figure business in five years. And like the secret is affiliates, like this is the thing that we do. We send out money every month now we do it in perpetuity. So it never goes away. And that helps, that helps. Part of it helps people continue to refer people to us. Yep. But anyways, anything you want to tell ’em about that. So brand builders group.com/affiliate guy, how to get your first a hundred affiliates free report?
MM (30:01):
Yeah, it’s just, it’s got 15 places, you know, defined affiliates. A few, one of which I covered today. A few of which you probably never even thought of. I mean, again, it depends on your niche. We’ll show you how to work with like nonprofits and how to, you know, how to work with your friends, how to work with even competitors. That’s probably my favorite one. Like, you just have to read it because the working with competitors one when I was in the, the music business, you know, music construction business, that completely changed our business. I took one affiliate program for about one and a quarter million, over 6 million. And about half of that growth was working with competitors in some pretty cool ways. So we covered that in the report. You got some templates in there for emails you can use to reach out and all kinds of goodies. So yeah, go grab it.
RV (30:42):
That’s really cool, man. Well Matt, so great to see you. Thank you for making time and so great to talk to you. Really appreciate this. We haven’t talked enough about this. This is a key, key part of growing the business. So all the best my friend. Thanks Rory.
Ep 435: 3 Secrets to Getting Publicity | Paige Dungan Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Let’s talk about how to get attention for your book launch or your product launch, or your company launch, or whatever it is, and specifically how to get traditional media attention and how to get other people to feature you or your work. And this is sort of timely, right? Because right now I am launching we are officially launching a brand new podcast series that’s a total side project, but I have created a podcast called Eternal Life. Seven Questions Every Intelligence Skeptic Should Ask About Jesus of Nazareth. And in this case, it’s a total side project. It’s just looking at the logical historical, archeological, practical, rational evidence for the story of Jesus of Nazareth, and how as a logical person, I’ve come to believe that. And so we have, we in its 15 episodes, and they’re free, which you, you can go look at it right?
RV (01:01):
On Apple or Spotify. Right now it’s, it’s now finally up. And that is something that I have created that is really for my two boys that in case something were to happen to me, if I, I didn’t, I was not around to explain to him how daddy has become to believe in the historical accuracy of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, right? So let’s say I wanted to launch that. Now I’m not actually launching it. My, like, I’m not doing a traditional launch. There’s no book attached to it. There’s no revenue stream attached to it. It’s a total give back. But if I were trying to, I would go, okay, what are the things that I need to do to get attention for that podcast? And that’s what I want to talk about here. Okay? Not just, we can use that as an example, because it’s a real time thing going on in my life that I’m, you know, semi or quasi launching.
RV (01:57):
So these, these principles will apply a hundred percent to you launching anything, whether it’s a book, a podcast, a company, a product, et cetera, a nonprofit, anything that you’re, when you’re trying to use traditional media to get the word out, okay? And number one is super simple. You have to connect your expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. Connect your expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. This is the first of these three major publicity secrets. So the news, the news, you know, remember that the metaphor of news, if you don’t know this, news, NEWS originally began as an acronym, not a metaphor, excuse me, as a, as an acronym. It stands for Notable Events, weather and Sports. That’s what news stands for. Notable events, whether in sports. So still to this day, that’s what the news covers. Notable events, whether in sports specifically, if you’re not a, if you’re not, you know, talking about the weather or you’re not talking about sports, then what you’re talking about is notable events, or that’s what the news is talking about every day, right?
RV (03:08):
All the major news channels are talking about notable events. What is notable? Notable is notable. It’s remarkable. It’s worth remarking about. It’s unusual. It’s, it’s, it is unexpected. It’s different. It’s, what’s everyone’s talking about is captivating people’s attention. So the news, the news is not really interested in reporting accuracy. Unfortunately, the news makes money from attention, right? So they latch on every day, news channels, latch on to whatever the trending topics are in the world that have people’s attention, wars, diseases, economic collapses, you know celebrity stuff, like anything. That is the thing that people are talking about. They’re trying to ride the wave of attention. And so that’s what they’re doing, because the more that they do that, the more attention they hold, which means the more eyeballs they have, which means the more they can sell to their sponsors, and the, and the higher the packages, the higher the, the, the higher the impressions, the more money they can get from advertisers.
RV (04:15):
And so they’re playing not a game of accuracy, right? The news is not playing a game of accuracy. They’re playing a game of attention. Once you know this and understand this, then you go, great. If I wanna be featured in the news, I have to think of it as a highway, right? Think of it as like all of the trending topics are the interstate, and here you are, right? And just, you know, using me as an example, go, oh, Rory’s got this new podcast about eternal life. I gotta go. How do I somehow connect? I have to, I have to create an on-ramp for connecting my expertise into the flow of information and attention. This sort of attention superhighway that everybody is talking about. That’s what you have to do. You have to connect your expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. If you can do that, then they’re gonna feature you.
RV (05:10):
Like when we launched our trends and personal branding, national research study which by the way, you can go download [email protected] under free training, or under brand builders group.com in our free trainings. Those are, those are downloadable. Also AJ vaden.com, she has it on her website as well. You can download that free training. Well, the day that it came out, the day after it came out, I got a call from Good Morning America, and I was, because there was a, a notable event. There was Victoria Secrets. The company made this major announcement that they were, they were going away from supermodels as their, as their spokespeople. And they were, they had instead selected personal brands, like they were taking recognizable people. And there were, you know, people from different women from different walks of life, but it was a major strategic shift that the company announced.
RV (06:08):
And they were saying, we’re, we’re banking on personal brands and we’re going away from the angels. You know, this, this women dressed in scantily clothing. So when we released a study, we, we happened to release a study right at that exact moment that was about how the trends in personal branding, national research studies showed that people are more likely to trust individual faces, then they are company names. And so it fit. And so they had me comment on, on that story on Good Morning America, right? That’s an example of connecting it into the news cycle. So if you want to get on television first of all, you’re gonna have to be prepared to pitch, or someone’s gonna have to pitch for you. But you have to think about, or, or the radio, right? Or, or anyone who’s, who has a big blogging platform, who’s blogging about current events, or even videos that go viral are often connected.
RV (07:03):
I mean, they’re trending topics, right? So they’re often things connected to things that are happening in this. You know, the nation’s conscience, Tom, Tom Hanks used to say, if you wanna make a hit, you have to enter into the nation’s conscience. So you have to ask yourself, what is everyone talking about? And then you kind of ride that wave by just figuring out what is the connection point that on-ramp is what your pitch is to producers. Producers are looking for interesting and new ways to cover the stories that everyone else is talking about. So if you can connect your expertise to what’s happening in the news cycle, they’re much more likely to say yes, right there. The news is not that we released a new national research study. The news is not that you have a book coming out. The news is not that I’ve launched a new podcasts, that’s news to me, that’s a notable event to me, but to the rest of the nation, that’s not news.
RV (07:54):
And books come out, you know, hundreds of books come out every single week. That’s not a notable event in the grand scheme of things. The notable event is whatever people are talking about. And all you have to do to figure that out is turn on the news and watch it for 30, 30 seconds. You’ll see there’s, there’s typically only a few stories that are dominating the headlines. Or pick up a newspaper scan, you know, scan the web, the, the major news outlets and see what the major headlines are. You just gotta pitch the, the producers of those networks, those channels, those outlets to say, Hey, I’m an expert on personal branding. I want to tie into this. You know, if, if, and, and if I wanted to get attention for, if I wanted to get mainstream media attention for my new podcast, I’d have to do the same thing.
RV (08:37):
Now I have zero desire. That’s not a part of my strategy nor my plan to deal with that. And part of that’s because I didn’t write a book on it. And, you know, I, that’s not the goal, right? Is that it’s, it’s, it’s a resource I’ve created for people to genuinely go study in an objective way, the data and the evidence that supports the narrative of Jesus, of Nazareth as being a deity, right? So I’m not trying to sell anything. I don’t need a bunch of urgent national attention. I’m putting it out there in the world. I’m letting people know about it, but I’m not like, you know, all in on trying to like promote this thing. So that is publicity secret number one, connect your expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. Publicity secret number two, become the media. Become the media.
RV (09:25):
And, and by the way, this is a recap of the, the the interview that I did with Paige Dungan, who is, is one of our, one of our implementation partners for pr. And we talked about, you know, if you’re looking for a PR person, go listen to the episode. I shared how you can get in touch with her. And she’s one of the people that we recommend for that service. And we have a, we have an affiliate relationship with her, and, and she’s great. I’ve known her for years, right? So we, there, we talked about, and this is true, is become the media build your own media platform. This is what we teach people how to do at Brand Builders Group. We teach you how to build your own audience. And you do that on social media, on blogging, podcasting, YouTube you know, whatever outlets you have.
RV (10:07):
And you know, if you’re, if you’re a brand builder and you’re one of our members, you know that we teach something called the relationship engine. And there’s a technique as part of that called the content diamond. These are the strategies, these, these techniques that we teach that you know, what is a relationship engine? A relationship engine is a digital automated ecosystem that we build an infrastructure around whoever the messenger is that pumps their content out into the universe as fast as possible to automate trust and capture, you know, and, and engage in lead capture. So that is how you start to become the media. You’re producing content, you’re producing videos, you’re producing audio. If it’s, you’re producing short form videos, you’re producing the written article, whether it’s on LinkedIn, pulse or Medium or Blog. If you’re following our content diamond strategy, you’re doing all of those things.
RV (10:57):
And most of all, you’re then converting those, you’re using that media to draw in attention and awareness. And then you’re using lead capture conversion to build your email list, your text message, opt-ins you know, direct message automation is a big place where we’re doing a lot right now. And so then you’re building this audience, and you are the media because you’ve built your own audience. The media is anyone who’s who, anyone who creates content for an audience on a regular basis. So there’s several things about this. First of all, when I launch a new podcast, I don’t have to beg anyone for favors. I can just go into my list and I can just write a, write a message and hit send. And boom, I could tell tens of thousands of people that I have a new podcast out. I can announce it on our own podcast, right?
RV (11:45):
Which is kind of what I’m doing now. And I, and I mentioned in, in some other places to go, Hey, I’ve got a new podcast. If you wanna listen to it, go listen to it. Eternal life. Seven Questions Every Intelligent Skeptic Should Ask About Jesus of Nazareth. It’s my story as a skeptic going through the evidence and the history to go what ev you know, how can any of this be trusted and believed? So there’s two parts of be being the media. The first part is obviously that you’re building your own audience. And when you build your own audience, you can announce stuff to them. And that’s why publishers and literary agents and, and speakers bureaus and, and places like that, they wanna get ahold of creators who have access to their own audience because they can teach ’em how to monetize that in, in various ways.
RV (12:33):
And that’s what we teach people how to do both, how to build their audience, and then how to monetize that audience, how to add value to them in exchange for money, right? So there is obviously that part of it that you’ve built your own audience. The other part though, is that when you become the media, you understand the pressures, the desires, the demands, the challenges, the opportunities of having to create content regularly, right? There’s some beautiful parts about that. ’cause You go, man, I get to inspire people. I get to, I get to talk about the things that I think are, are, are important to me and are important to my audience. And then there’s some challenging parts of that going like, oh my gosh, like, you know, it’s, it’s another week. I gotta produce more content. I gotta have another video. I gotta have more articles.
RV (13:18):
I gotta have more insights. I, I, there’s, there’s this need, this engine, this, this engine that you have to constantly be fueling with new content. Well, when you understand that, it helps you relate to the rest of the media world in general, right? Like every day I get people sending books to my, you know, office and, and pitching me emails on, you know, sending me dms, trying to get on our podcast and all this sort of stuff, right? So I’m, I take the role of a producer and vet to go, does this person have anything worthwhile to say to you? To my audience, to our audience? Is it worth me putting them in front of you? Are they gonna add value to the conversation? If yes, then I say yes. If no, then I say no, but it’s not so much that they’re gonna pay me and I’m just gonna put ’em in front of you.
RV (14:07):
That doesn’t do me any good. I have to create content that’s useful for you, that’s relevant to the audience that we are building. And once you do that, you go, oh, that’s exactly what the, the producer on the Today Show, or Good Morning America, or Oprah or Fox or CNN or whatever the outlet is, they have to do the same thing, right? So they need, they need you as much as you need them. That’s something you gotta understand about media. They need you as much as you need them. They need someone to help them produce content that is worthwhile to be consumed by their audience, but they also need to make sure that that content is relevant to be consumed by their audience. So they’re both desperate for you, and they also have to filter out the right person. So it’s not so much about who’s the smartest or who’s the most famous, it’s who has the most relevant bit of expertise for my specific audience at this specific moment in time in history.
RV (15:06):
And that’s why someone could turn you down to be on national TV today and three months from now, everything can change in the news cycle, and you can make the same pitch and they would have you on. So when you become the media, you understand that, right? Like I’ve, I’ve, I, I’ve watched a lot of our clients do the same thing, right? A lot of our, a lot of our clients are the biggest podcast hosts in the world, and they get on these kicks of certain things like you know, Tom, Tom, Tom and Lisa biu, so they’re clients of ours. And Tom Tom’s a good example of this Tom’s podcast. He kind of like goes and kicks where he, you know, suddenly he wants to talk to anyone who’s talking about like, health and longevity or some, you know, anyone who’s talking about like you know, like crypto or Bitcoin or like any of you know, the metaverse kind of stuff.
RV (15:53):
And, and that’s just because he’s interested in that. And so in that particular moment, somebody who would’ve said no to as a guest six months ago, he might say yes to today. So you go, well, how do I know when to pitch him? Simple? Pay attention to what he’s, what, what he’s promoting. And, and then you have to, and then you have to check all the boxes, right? So you gotta pitch him the right message at the right time for his audience, what he’s interested on, and then you gotta have the credibility points that he’s interested in. So every different media outlet has different criteria for those. It’s not just about who’s the smartest, who’s the most famous, who went to the, you know, the most prestigious school. It’s a combination of all of those factors unique to their audience. So if they say no to you, don’t take it too personal.
RV (16:34):
It just means you weren’t the right match. You weren’t the right fit for what they’re producing at this time. It doesn’t mean you should never pitch them again, but it does mean if you’re gonna pitch them again, you need to pitch a different angle to a different, a different, you know, a different hook to a different thing going on in the news cycle. And when you become the media, when you’re producing your own YouTube show, your own podcast, your own blog, your own Instagram channel, your own LinkedIn feed, and you start featuring other guests and, and filtering content. You understand better how the media operates and what, what they’re looking for, which makes you a better guest. You also know, like, what are the things that are credible, right? Like, someone sends me an email that’s 18 paragraphs about why they’re coming to the show.
RV (17:18):
It’s like, I can’t, I’m not even gonna look at it, because the idea of reading 18 paragraphs is overwhelming. So it’s just a no, right? On the other hand, if someone that I know and I trust really well sends me and says, Hey, Rory, you should meet this person. I think they’d be great for your podcast. Here’s three sentences on ’em and a link to their website, and I click on it. I go, oh, website looks awesome. They look credible. They’ve got a book, they’re credible. You know, they, they’ve got some, you know, maybe some social media following whatever. They have these indicators that go, yeah, this person is legit. Great, let’s have ’em on. And it’s that simple. So the more you produce media, the more you produce content, the better you will be at understanding how to get on other media outlets. So that’s publicity, publicity secret number two.
RV (18:00):
And then publicity secret number three. And this is the biggest secret of all this. One’s the magic. This one is, this is the one that, that has built my career. This is the one that if you go, how did Brand Builders Group go from zero to eight figures in five years with no investors, no debt, no bank loans, no credit cards. Like how did you guys do it? It would be this one. And it is something that I call the relationship switchboard. Well, that’s the technique. Let me tell you the principle. Here’s the, here’s the principle, and like, write this down. Okay? Seriously, if you are driving, like pull over and write this down. If you’re running on the treadmill, stop for a second. You’re gonna wanna write this down. This is one of our flagship BBG Brand Builders Group mantras. This is one of the things if you became, if you were to become a member of ours and you were to become a paying client, which by the way, if you’re curious about that, if you go to free brand call.com slash podcast, free brand call.com/podcast, you can request a call with our team and learn more about what that would look like.
RV (19:05):
Well, if you became one of our monthly paying members, you would hear us say this all the time. Ready? Write this down. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. What do I mean by that? I mean, invest in helping the people that you might one day need help from long before you ever need help from them. That’s what I mean. So how have we built this company so quickly? We’ve built it through affiliates. These affiliates who have who, huge audiences. How did we get to these people? Especially, you know, when we started Rambler’s Group in 2018, we did not expect to start the company. And when we sold our last company, we sold, we lost everything that went with it. All of our social media, our podcast, our email list, our whole team, we were sitting on zero, baby Zero starting over.
RV (20:05):
This was only a few years ago for us, right? How did we get back to, to where we are so quickly? We built relationships with affiliates, we built relationships with people who have large platforms. How did we do that? Well, we paid attention to who had something going on that they were launching, and when they had something going on that they were launching, we showed up and we offered to help for free. We said, Hey, I see that you’re launching a book, right? This is how I met Gretchen Rubin. This is, I always tell the Gretchen Rubin story because I love Gretchen. And she’s, you know, I guess I would call her a friend. Like we go back and forth a few times a year, but we’re not super close. But we’ve built a relationship. She’s been a, been a big supporter of ours.
RV (20:48):
She’s been on this podcast, she’s been on our summit. She lets us YYY you know advertise that, that she’s been a guest, things like that. And you know, how did I meet Gretchen? I said, oh, look, Gretchen has a book launch coming out, and when she has a book launch coming out, I say, Gretchen, I have some friends who have some very large podcasts. Would you be okay if I pitched you to see if they would have you on their show? Right? Not for money for free, right? I do PR for Free Brand Builders Group. We have a full-time person on our team that does free pr. We only do free PR member to member, though. We, we, we offer it as a free service for people who are active members in our program to help them get booked on the shows of our other active members.
RV (21:33):
We do that for free. You can’t buy it. It’s, it’s a, it’s just a, it’s just a value add that we do. It is also my number one prospecting mechanism and tool that I do to build new relationships. And I call it the relationship switchboard, because I keep track of everyone I know who is the host of a media outlet, right? Most of them are podcasts, right? They have great podcasts. Some of ’em are, are huge bloggers, some of them are top talkers, some of them are are YouTubers, some of them are in national tv. But I just keep a list of everyone I know who has a large platform. And then I keep a list of everybody I know who’s like AVIP guest. And all I do, a huge part of my time is just connecting these people to one another. And so I just go, if somebody, if somebody I know is launching a new show, like this is a good example right now.
RV (22:29):
Dr. Josh Ax, who, you know, we’ve been sort of casual acquaintances over the year. We become really close in the last couple years. We become really close friends. Part of that is because he’s launching a new podcast and he’s wanting to meet a bunch of people. And I go, dude, I got you. Like, I can get you access to like 30 major VIP people who I think would be a great fit for your show. And I’ll do it for free. Why? Because it helps Dr. Axe, it helps my other friends, and it, it helps me. I get caught in the crossfire. Now, a lot of it is it work for me? Yeah, it’s a ton of work. Do I get paid for it? No, I do not get paid for it at all. $0 zero now. But here’s another mantra I wrote about and take the stairs.
RV (23:12):
And this is another life philosophy that is true. You always get paid for how hard you work sometimes. Now, oftentimes later, always. Eventually, you always get paid for how hard you work sometimes. Now, oftentimes later, always, eventually. That’s spending your time on what we would call and, and procrastinate on purpose. My second book on things that are significant, what are things that I can do now that create more time or money tomorrow? Well, connecting people is something I can spend time on today that multiplies my influence tomorrow because it builds my reputation with both people. And I have nothing to gain from either per se, like no specific ask nothing, no money. It may never come back to me from those specific people. I’m simply going, oh, you need guests for your show. Let me give you access to all of these VIP guests that I have that are friends of mine.
RV (24:04):
Or if somebody is a guest and they have something they wanna promote and they suddenly launch like a new book, a new course, a new program, a new company, a new nonprofit, whatever. And I go, Hey, are you looking to get the word out about that thing? Let me introduce you to 30 friends I have who all have big platforms. Now, I know for you, when you hear this concept, you might go, oh, well that’s great, Rory, because your clients are, you know, all these famous people and Amy Porterfield and Ed Millets and Louis Howell and Eric Thomas’, and yes, but they didn’t. How did they become clients? They became clients from me doing this for them, right? This is how I build relationships with people. Save the best for first, give, give, give, give without expectation of receipt. I do this for people. I’ve done this for many people who I’ve never gotten anything from return.
RV (24:55):
I’ve helped some people get booked on shows, podcasts, like dozens of shows. They won’t even have me on their own show. Am I bitter about it? Yes.
RV (25:50):
And I could say, Hey, here’s a new podcast that I launched. You know, if I wanted to, I’m not gonna do this. ’cause I don’t wanna do a huge podcast tour for it. At least not right now to say, Hey, will you have me on your show? And they go, of course man, because I’ve been talking to ’em every week for three years, helping them get on shows and helping people get on their shows. So that’s the relationship switchboard. It doesn’t have to be media. That’s how I use it. I use it a lot for media. I also use it for speaking, right? I take all of my past speaking clients and all my friends and, you know, clients who are speakers who are in up and comers or in, in or around my fee range. And I go, Hey, you should meet this person.
RV (26:30):
You should meet this person. ’cause My clients need speakers, and my speakers need clients just like my hosts need guests and my guests need hosts, and I wanna get caught in the crossfire. So do I do it because something good will come out of it for me? Yes. But when I don’t know, I don’t keep, I don’t keep score. I, I don’t, I don’t let, it’s not about having people owe you one. It’s just about going, how can I add value to the community? How can I add value to the, the shows that I’ve been on? How can I add value to the guests who’ve been on this show? And how can I add value to the clients who’ve had me book on their stage, have me come speak on their stages, and how can I add value to my friends who are really good speakers, who I really believe in to help them get on stages?
RV (27:11):
This is the answer. And I get caught in the crossfire. I’m constantly in this interchange between awesome people. And what happens is that tends to cycle up. You tend to get around better and better people and bigger and bigger and more and more influential people, more and more people of notoriety. And it’s, it’s an upward snowball, just like everything we do with the relationship engine and building your own media platform. It’s about automating trust. It’s about saving the best for first. It’s about building relationships before you need them. It’s about give, give, give, add value. And it’s trusting that you can’t outgive God.
RV (27:50):
You can’t, you can’t outgive God. You can’t outgive the universe. You can’t outgive like, you know, Zig Ziglar said, help enough people get what they want and you will get what you’re, you want. And I have found it to be absolutely true. Now, I’m not always in a one-to-one relationship. There’s some people that I’ve helped a lot more than they’ve helped me, but then there’s other people who have helped me a lot more than I’ve helped them. But in total, I have received a massive amount of blessing far beyond the work that I have done to help others. But I’ve done a lot of work to help others. And so that blessing seems to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And even if not, you end up getting to play a role in shaping the world, right? And that’s awesome, right? I, I love, I love it when two of my friends or two of my clients get together and I go, yep, I connected them and they made magic.
RV (28:40):
They made magic happen. And I go that, that interview would’ve never happened if it weren’t for me. And I, I can take quiet credit for it ’cause it’s true. And I can be so proud that all I did was connect these two amazing humans and they made a little piece of magic for the world. And that’s all we wanna do at Brand Builders Group. We want to shape the voices that shape the world. That’s why we’re here at Brand Builders Group, right? We’re not trying to make a, you know, bazillion dollars. We don’t care about private jets. We don’t even care about being famous and selling lots of books and speaking on stages. I mean, those are good things. We’ve done a lot of those things. We wanna make an impact. We want to shape the voices that are going to shape the future of the world.
RV (29:22):
That’s why we do this at Brand Builders Group, and we wanna have a hand in it. And so that’s why we work with Mission-driven messengers. And that’s also why we turn clients away. There are some people where we go, yeah, sorry, we can’t help you ’cause we don’t believe in your message, right? No offense, we just, we don’t, we don’t, we don’t believe that that message lines up with what we think makes the world a better place. And so we’re not gonna do it. But if you are a mission-driven Messenger, and you do genuinely care about making the world a better place, you should probably think about joining our community because we have big things happening, big things happening. On that note, I, it would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to two of our brand builders, group clients hit the New York Times Bestseller list.
RV (30:04):
Just recently this month we have had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 clients this month. Eight clients who have become USA Today and or Wall Street Journal bestselling authors. And we have had two clients, Nicole Walters and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who have become New York Times bestselling authors. Two this month, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon wrote this book Forever Strong. This was the number one selling book in the nation. She hit number three on the New York Times. But she as a came to one of my private brand mastery events only about six months ago. And followed our system to AT no hacks, no gimmicks, no tricks, just adding value, working her butt off following the system. And you know, her book absolutely crushed. It was the number one advice, how to book by unit sold. It was number three on the New York Times but the, the, the highest selling book in the nation last week.
RV (31:08):
So congratulations, Dr. Lyon. That’s the eighth time that a Brand Builders group has hit the New York Times in the last 12 months. So we’ve hit the USA today in the Wall Street Journal with eight different clients this month. And then we’ve had eight times that we’ve hit the New York Times in the last 12 months, two in this month alone with Nicole Walters and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. And these are just people doing work, adding value. What are they doing? They’re, they’re, they’re they building relationships before they need them. They are becoming the media. They’re building platforms, they’re creating content, they’re adding, they’re automating trust. And then when their moment comes, they connect their expertise to what is happening in the news cycle. That my friends are the three biggest secrets of publicity. And I hope that helps you if you are a Mission-driven Messenger, and I hope we get to work with you one day soon. Until then, keep coming back. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast.
Ep 434: How to get Publicity for Your Book Launch with Paige Dungan
RV (00:00):
Well, if you’ve listened to this show for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard us talk a lot about book launches. Book launches is one of the things that we do really, really well. As of this recording, we have helped 17 different clients become New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestselling authors. We had two clients last year that pre-sold over a hundred thousand copies before their launch date following our system. But what we do is we help people come up with the sales strategy for how to sell the books, and then we help make sure those, those books sales happen in a way that get optimized and reported in the most optimized way for the bestseller list. What we don’t do is PR and we get asked this question all the time, who do you recommend for pr? Do you have someone for PR that we could talk to that can just like, just focus on getting you booked on shows and, and all that kind of thing?
RV (00:53):
So we’ve, we’ve worked with lots of people. We’ve talked with them, but today I want to introduce you to Paige Duncan, who’s a longtime friend of mine, and she is, her team is who we recommend for this service. And so we’re gonna talk about doing book launches, PR specifically for book launches, because this is a part of Paige’s expertise. So she was the head of PR and Talent at Success Magazine, which is where her and I met. So one of our brand builders, group clients bought the company. He asked me to be an interim editor for like a year. Paige was there. I met her immediately, was like, oh my gosh, this woman is awesome and good and smart and sharp and all the things. And she’s been in this industry for 15 years. She’s, she has sort of developed a very specific niche around PR for book launches. She’s been credited also with landing multiple authors on many of the bestseller lists, and she’s just super innovative and, you know, knows how to get an author attention in a crowded marketplace. So, Paige, welcome to the show friend. Woo.
PD (02:02):
Great. Thank you so much. It’s like we’re just grabbing a coffee today.
RV (02:06):
Totally, totally. So let’s talk PR for book launches. Yes. what do you think authors who are moving into this world, whether, whether they’re doing it themselves or they’re working with you, or they’re hiring somebody else, what do they need to know, like about getting media attention today for their book? Yeah. Like what are some of the big things where you go, man, I have to tell every author this over and over and over and over, and so we’re gonna tell ’em all right here one time, get it recorded.
PD (02:40):
Yes. Yes.
RV (02:41):
And
RV (02:41):
They’re gonna, they’ll come to you knowing, knowing this.
PD (02:44):
Yes. The number one thing where I tell all of the authors I work with is, the media actually doesn’t care about your book
RV (02:53):
That statement, what a great way. Can we cut? We need to cut that for social media. That’s the clip right there. The media doesn’t care about your book.
PD (03:03):
They don’t, and it sounds harsh, but here’s the thing that I, then I follow that up with. The media doesn’t care about your book yet, because what they have to understand is who you are, why you are the authority or expert in this space, and you have to build that trust with them first as an individual or as a company. Then they will care about your book. Mm-Hmm.
RV (04:22):
Mm-Hmm.
PD (04:51):
Exactly.
RV (04:52):
So what do you, how, how do you go about building that, you know, relationship and trust with the reporters?
PD (04:59):
Yeah. There’s two approaches that I teach. So number one is a approach that works really well, and that is you pitching yourself as a source to one of their stories. So if they, if you see them writing stories, let’s say about TikTok and all things happening at TikTok and your book is about the effects of social media of today or something like that, you simply find their email address and you reach out letting them know you really enjoyed their TikTok story on X you share a little bit of background about yourself and just leave it at, I would be happy to be a source for any other future articles you’re working on. You’re simply offering them, because journalists and media need sources every time they put out a piece of content, it’s part of the credibility of journalism. And they’re always desperate to find an expert to share a quote, share another perspective. And it’s a baby step in getting your name, like in quote, roundups, or like I said, if they just need you to come and give like an alternating view on that topic. And so what you do is literally Google search news stories about your book and your industry and what’s trending right now, and reach out to those reporters.
RV (06:15):
Got it. Uhhuh,
PD (06:16):
The second part of the so
RV (06:17):
Hold on, hold on. That I wanna hear, I do wanna hear, hear the second one, but, so, so when you say you find their email address, okay. So I love what you’re saying. So you go mm-hmm.
PD (06:54):
Easy. Yeah. Yeah.
RV (06:56):
How do you find the contact information? Like
PD (06:58):
What’s
RV (06:59):
The, how do you go about
PD (07:00):
That? That, this is my favorite part, Rory. ’cause You get to be a little bit of a spy in the best way. And so there’s a couple ways you can do this. Let me start with the free to like the page. Yeah. So the free way to do this is actually like Wall Street Journal and some of the outlets will list an email button for their journalists. So some outlets, but that’s probably a 20% Right. We’ll share the email upfront. The second thing you can do is you can find them on social media. Right. If you know their name like Rory Vaden, I’m gonna put ’em on Instagram. You can also start a relationship on social. Like if you cannot find their email free and you still wanna do free, find ’em on social. Yeah. And again, just serve them, interact with their content and message them there.
PD (07:46):
The third way you can do is you can pay for like a rocket reach or email lookup platform. Right. That can find their email. And so that’s a wonderful way, if any of you are in sales, you know about these different, and, you know, platforms that will help do a reverse email lookup. But then the last option is you can actually get a PR C R m. And so this d r m literally lists the database for all journalists and media unit talent bookers. And it allows you to be able to put in like an, a company like Forbes, like the media brand, Forbes, and it pulls up all the writers and what beats they cover. And the recent agencies, we almost all PR agencies have one, they do have cost effective solutions, though also if you’re just a one-on-one looking to have this access. But if you know you’re gonna go out and you’re like, at PR is my focus right now, this is, I’m going all in. I would suggest looking at the PR C R M because it will take, save you a lot of time compared to the free version to be able to find exactly who you need.
RV (08:52):
Is that, and is that like is that like Cision or something else that you’re talking about?
PD (08:57):
Yep. It’s like Cision. There’s one called MuckRack. There’s a cost effective one called Prowly. You’re exactly right. It’s any of the
RV (09:05):
Prowly,
PD (09:06):
Uhhuh
RV (09:10):
. I haven’t heard of that one. Uhhuh.
PD (09:54):
Too,
RV (09:55):
Way. ’cause Not only do you have to, you have to figure out who you gotta figure out what topics are they writing on, who is writing on it. Mm-Hmm.
PD (10:17):
It doesn’t work. And it’s too long. And I love what you’re saying before, and I wanna hop back a minute, to your point, Rory, of serving them, I always tell people, what problem are you trying to solve for the reporter? That’s what they wanna know.
RV (10:29):
Yes.
PD (10:29):
Like, what is the problem? How are you solving it? That’s news. And so, to your point on the communication, I always, always preach no longer than 250 words in your first email. It sounds super short, but all of my editor friends have told they get over a hundred to 150 emails a day of pitches that literally on top of every other news thing that come into the inbox,
RV (10:53):
Wow. They
PD (10:54):
Are not gonna read no longer do you just send that a press release. You’ve got to really build that relationship. And then the art of crafting a pitch is more critical than ever now. For sure.
RV (11:06):
Yeah. And it isn’t, it’s an art and it’s like anything, I mean, it’s, it’s like, are you likely to open your mailbox and mm-hmm.
PD (11:45):
RV (11:46):
PD (11:47):
Number two is tapping into what you just said as well, is serving them content. So becoming a contributor to their outlet and serving them with their expertise. So this works really well. Like, let’s take Fast company for example, right? And you are an expert in kind of business and innovation and even like team structure and management, reach out to the editors and share your story idea, right? Don’t ask them if you can be a contributor ’cause mm-hmm.
PD (12:37):
And nine times Outta 10, because they are desperate for content. Because teams are leaner than ever at all of these media brands, and there’s just not enough of them to create content. And so if you can really provide value as a contributor, also known as a bylined article, right? You get your name listed on Fast Company’s website, and if it’s picked up in print, the magazine, and you start to build that relationship of credibility with that brand serving them. So when you do go in for an ask for your book, you’ve already provided them immense value mm-hmm.
RV (13:20):
Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean I, there’s a couple things there going on. One, I love like treat it like a date, right? Don’t show up and ask to get married. Like, Hey, I wanna be a monthly contributor, right? Like, let’s go on a, let’s go on a date. Let me pick, you know, here’s an idea for a story. Mm-Hmm.
PD (13:42):
Yes, yes. Easy. Yes. Rory. And so many outlets are literally calling and needing it and quality content because like I said, they just don’t have the manpower to produce it anymore. Yeah. Unfortunately.
RV (13:55):
And just to pause, like a little side note here for you listening, if you’re a speaker or an aspiring speaker, you know, with speaking business is another thing that we know a lot about and have a lot of success with, and teaching people how to get speaking gigs. And we say, Hey, the number one reason you get booked to speak, which will never change, is because someone has seen you speak. That’s the, if you wanna be a speaker mm-hmm. You gotta go out and speak, but the number two way to get booked to speak is because someone has read something you have written. And you know, like a lot of speakers become speakers because they start writing. One is a book, which is much harder in longer process than you just start cranking these articles, you know, a couple times a week. And you know, I I, I think of, you know, I’ve got a couple friends, Dory Clark, Matthew Mayberry, like they have really built a great speaking career at a lot of it started from writing these articles and it’s almost better, like not almost better. Mm-Hmm.
PD (15:11):
Yes, it’s
RV (15:12):
Way more valuable.
PD (15:14):
It is. Ryan, I’m so glad you brought that up, because it leads to a much longer lifecycle right. Of promotion and opportunities for you doing this strategy. And like you said, it requires some upfront work, but nothing like, if you’ve already written a book, this is a walk in the park, right? This is nothing of your time. And the beautiful thing is you can pull elements from your book can serve as that content generator for years for you to pull from, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with what you’re writing about. Mm-Hmm. And you can
RV (15:43):
Find
PD (15:44):
Ways to thread the content together for soft promotion. But that is one strategy we help do immediately out of the gate, especially during pre-sale, right. In setting up those relationships and starting to build that awareness. It’s a great strategy to start, honestly now, like even if you haven’t thought of your book idea, just incorporate this into your media outreach plan.
RV (16:07):
Yeah. The the other thing that it does is it becomes a huge networking opportunity for you because you become a member of the media. Mm-Hmm. You go from trying to be mm-hmm. In the media
PD (16:15):
To
RV (16:16):
Being I am a, I am the media. Yes. And now you can network with pretty much anybody you wanna know because they, you, you’re in control of who gets mentioned in in that. The, the other thing I wanna mention here is on, on the, on the topic of like getting booked to speak from this mm-hmm.
PD (16:32):
RV (16:33):
And, and for beginners, you also don’t need to, it doesn’t have to be Forbes or entrepreneur No. Or fast company. Like those are the huge ones. But when you were saying they’re spread thin, the ones that are spread the most thin are the, like, trade industry journals. They gotta produce a magazine every month or every quarter.
PD (16:54):
Yes.
RV (16:54):
They’re begging their members to write an article. Nobody wants to do it. And yet, if you are in an industry or a vertical and you go, it’s easy to get those writing jobs and it’s literally, it may not have 500 million readers, but it’s gonna have a thousand of your perfect readers. And that’s, you know, that’s a really big key. You, you think
PD (17:18):
It is key, Rory, that is the other element of this. Make sure you’re contributing to where your target audience is, right? Mm-Hmm.
RV (17:51):
Create
PD (17:52):
A greater opportunity through those smaller publications.
RV (17:56):
Yeah. That, that’s the other thing is like, you’re never gonna get Forbes to send an email. Like even e even if you’re James Patterson, they’re not gonna send an email out about your book. No. But, but if you, if you have some relationships with some of these smaller ones, and that’s part of the deal mm-hmm.
PD (18:41):
I think that first mistake is that people do not plan PR the same way that they plan on writing a book. PR is always like an afterthought. Like, they’re like, oh crap, my book comes out in 60 days. I don’t have the sales I wanted. I need to do, you know, like, now is the time to start. No minimum, I beg you authors to start at least six months out because in media news cycles, it can take that long to place impactful stories. So the ones of the bigger outlets, the bigger podcasts, right, the bigger articles you need that longer lead time. And that’s probably the number one pain point that I see when authors come to us, is they’re scrambling. Right? And it doesn’t have to be that way. The second thing is, I always recommend you plan for a year strategy also, not counting pre-sale, but from when your book launches following that year. Because so many authors, and you’ve seen this already,
RV (19:37):
You’re saying post public, you’re saying post-publication,
PD (19:40):
Post pub, all the way through your year anniversary, have a robust media plan. ’cause Too many authors I’ve seen, they do amazing presale and amazing that first month of pub and then their media just like drops off and they’re, you know, it’s just sprinkled throughout, but it’s a sprint, right? And you need to continue that sprint. And so when you’re looking at planning, of course you wanna bank many of those large episodes as you know, in pre-sale. But it’s just as important to continue that momentum, especially through that first year. And keep your eye on the media and focus on the pr part of the book as well, because that’s where you’re gonna continue to reach new audiences and garner new attention and continue to bring that sales momentum going instead of letting your sales dip and then trying to inflate it back up with media like three months later.
RV (20:33):
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I mean, you gotta, you gotta keep building the brand, building the platform being out there. So are there certain, are there certain mediums that you think mm-hmm.
PD (20:59):
Right?
RV (20:59):
And it can, it can help, but typically you have to be more focused. If you’re trying to make a sale like a conversion, you’ve gotta be doing other stuff far above and beyond pr. But, but when you,
PD (21:11):
Yes.
RV (21:12):
When you just go, what, what are the mediums or the outlets in PR that you think actually do move the needle on book sales? Like somebody going to buy, not just hearing about it, but actually going to make a conversion.
PD (21:27):
Do you know what we’ve seen the number one medium that sells through PR right now, books specifically is podcasting. Yeah.
PD (21:34):
So podcasts, podcast, podcast, which I know all of your listeners have probably heard before, but it’s still the leading way that converts to a sale, specifically when we’re talking about books. So what I already say is, don’t poo poo any podcast that might not seem like up to your elevation of where you think you should be. Right? Like, let’s not be too big for a britches if they have a target engage audience, those are customers and they’re waiting to buy your book. So it’s like you have to level set what you’re doing with podcasting during a book launch. Like, yes, your end goal might be on your podcast, Rory, it may be on Lewis’s podcast, but let’s also look at the, just like trade media. Let’s look at the ones that still have similar target audiences and do as many podcasts as you can. ’cause That is a huge driver. The other one, Rory, and I know this can seem like a little bit of a stretch, but it still rings true TV converts to sales.
RV (22:34):
Hmm. And
PD (22:34):
So when I’m talking, but I’m talking about like nation national, right? So if you have a book, I mean, for example, anytime we have a client on today’s show or Good Morning America, it moves a thousand to 2000 books, right? Like it moves a significant number of books depending on kind of where you are known wise to the audience. So I know, and national can be kind of far out of reach for some people. And so what I say with that is like, don’t throw away the local TV station. Don’t throw away that opportunity thinking it’s too small for you because they feed up into the national station. So if you have interesting content and you book yourself on your local N B C, it is much more likely for you to get picked up nationally by taking that clip and sending it to the Today Show how you’ve already been on the affiliate and the reaction that you’ve had there. And it is a great proof point to then take to the national media as you pitch them for that opportunity.
RV (23:37):
Yeah. That’s also huge for your, for your speaker demo video and to put, you know, screenshots of it in your book proposal and in your PR to get yourself booked on other podcasts to show those clips of you on tv. Yeah. All of those, all of those things. Your, your media sizzle reel, the, the, yeah. Let’s talk, oh, one thing on the podcast is, you know, just to echo what you’re saying, you know, to, to become a Wall Street Journal, hardcover, business bestselling author, which is like one of the ma it’s the easiest major list to hit. Mm-Hmm.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
RV (24:11):
I say easy, it’s not really easy
Speaker 3 (24:13):
RV (24:13):
Like, you know, to hit the New York Times, you need to, to sell well north of 10,000 units in a week. But to hit the Wall Street Journal business list, it’s typically like a few thousand units, two or 3000 units. So you don’t need millions of people to buy your book in order to become a legit bestselling author, you know? Mm-Hmm.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
RV (24:33):
From a major, you know, reputable list. So if there’s a podcast and they have a thousand of your perfect person and you can get a thousand people to move and buy something like, that’s, that’s huge. Plus, you know, that’s, if you’re lucky enough to get on the Today Show, you might move a thousand copies that way. So, but that’s a thousand out of a bazillion people versus Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
You
RV (24:54):
Know, a thousand out of 5,000 because it’s your perfect audience. So I think that’s really good. You know, one I got one last question for you. Before we do that, I wanna let y’all know, so I mentioned at the start of the show, as you could see, right, Paige knows this space,
RV (25:43):
But in the subject line, I just want you to put book pr, that’s it. Just email us, put book PR in the subject line, send an email to [email protected]. And then we’ll have someone on our team connect you with Paige and walk you through, you know, the whole thing. So you can talk to her directly and her team and see how it works. And you know, I would say, you know, I can say this because I’m not in pr, we’ve seen a lot of people waste a lot of money on PR firms that don’t, they’re not accountable, they don’t have a good plan, they don’t do it, right. They do a total shotgun blanket approach. You know, they’re just sending out a giant press release and they’re not doing the kind of one-on-one follow-up work and building long-term relationships like Paige and her team. So, you know, it can be risky, risky business spending lots of money on pr. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
So, you
RV (26:32):
Know, make sure you’re, you’re working with somebody who knows what they’re doing. In this case we’re, we’re totally sure about that with Paige. So email us [email protected]. Yeah, of course, Paige. So one last quick question is on the tv, ’cause this is the, this is the dream, right? Good Morning America Today course show. You know, of
PD (26:51):
Course
RV (26:52):
What you know, I know you’ve, I know you’ve had that happen for clients when it happens, when you get the big national dream television hit
PD (27:02):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (27:04):
How do you get it? What, what are the series of events that led up to that producer saying, yes, I’ll do this. Like, I know it’s always a long shot, but what, what can we do to tip the odds in our favor for a big national TV hit?
PD (27:21):
The first is make sure you’re communicating with the right people. So both at today, good Morning America, c b s, they have specific book producers. So you need to make sure you’re a first talking to the right people. ’cause Too many times people just go to the general producer. That’s not their beat. You need to find the book producer and then to be able to, I mean, it takes a six month plus lead time. They book their spots for books six months out at minimum. So you need to give yourself runway. However, if you miss that window, what you wanna do is tie it to a breaking news or element that’s taking a conversation that’s taking place in society right now, whatever that might be. And you need to be able, again, they don’t care about the book. So you’ve gotta go in first starting with you as a tool and how you’re gonna solve this problem.
PD (28:17):
And it takes months of communication. Like to even, I have relationships with all the book producers and it takes us months of communication and understanding. ’cause There’s only so much airtime that the gift to books. And so you’ve got to be very strategic in how you communicate. And that’s by not spamming them with follow up. Right? What do you think? Do you like my book? How is this doing? What do you think? Right? Am I gonna get a spot like respect their inbox? So only communicate when they respond. You respond back and then give it a couple weeks. Don’t stay on top of it like it is your best friend because you will get blocked very quickly from the show. Mm-Hmm.
PD (29:07):
And again, just serve and interact with them on social. They get to see your name continue to pop up. They get to see your content, kind of psychological play, right? And just the power of how many times you’re introduced to them. And then if you’re realizing your pitch is not working, redo it. That’s what I think so many people are afraid of. They forget. It’s just like email testing, AB testing. Obviously they’re not biting over here. So do, is there a new research study out that you can tie that research into how it relates to your book that’s newsworthy to them? Is there a social trend that is happening that somehow ties into your book? Right? So have some type of element that it’s research-based or fact-based to go with your book and something that’s new and approach it that way if your first pitch isn’t working.
PD (29:59):
And then number three, it’s honestly not give up. So if you realize your book is just not hitting and coming through again, go back to this drawing board and reach out just as a source and an expert. I know it kind of sounds like being in a deb horse, but it’s relationship building. You’re retooling. You are not going in with thinking you’re gonna pitch and your book’s gonna end up tomorrow. You’ve gotta give yourself that runway to be able to do it. So the more you can connect with them on email serving and social, the more you can tailor your pitch to that six month timeframe and have it be something newsworthy and exciting. Or if it has a celebrity angle that you can tie to it mm-hmm.
RV (30:40):
PD (30:41):
More likely you’re gonna end up on national news. ’cause You have to think this is National Morning news is lifestyle, right? It’s lifestyle and news. So it’s talking about some politics, cultural elements, right? All of those. But also the second and third hour of those shows are heavily like health, fitness, books, wellness. And so that’s where you’ve gotta pitch your news. And the book editor sit is typically in that second hour or third hour of the morning show.
RV (31:10):
I love it. I love it. So many helpful tips, Paige. So I know practical, I’m so passionate.
PD (31:36):
Thank you.
Ep 431: How to Turn Your Personal Brand into a Worldwide Movement | Pat Flynn Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
So there’s a reason why Pat Flynn is a legend in the world of podcasting and just creating content and specifically creating community. And it’s the, it’s all the things that you heard on that interview. And if you didn’t listen to interview, go back and listen to it. I mean, pat is, I mean, he is one of the OGs of this space. He’s created this podcasting industry. He has impacted so many people, and you get to hear his philosophies. And that’s part of what I want to share with you now is what inspired me of what he said, like, what inspired me the most? Because, you know, it’s, it’s ironic that, you know, we titled that episode a, a after it, you know, we titled it How AI Will Reshape Customer and Member Experience. And I think the reality of how AI will shape that experience, if I had to summarize it up, is it will put more focus on the human elements, right?
RV (01:06):
Just like marketing automation and emails and things as, as automation comes in, creating automation in your business is not for the purpose of taking out or extracting the humanity of your business. It’s the opposite. You should be automating the routine things, automating the mundane things, automating the things that must be done as a baseline so that it creates the margin for you then to reinvest the time into the human experience, into the relationship, into the getting to know people, into transformation and changing people’s lives. And that’s what I think a lot of people don’t understand, or they, they do wrong, is they go, oh, I want to create, you know, some way to create massive passive income and not have to work or do anything for anybody. And, you know, maybe that strategy works, but I don’t, I don’t know of anybody that it works well for.
RV (01:59):
The people who I know are winning are people like Pat, who are going, I’m using technology tools, automation, AI in the future as a way of creating a great experience and then adding the human element on top. You know? So as you, as we think about what is going to take your business to the next level, and what, how do you turn something from a personal brand into a world changing movement? And what does that, what does that look like? And, and right now as I’m recording this, I am texting back and forth with one of our private clients, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who wrote this book that is called Forever Strong. And this is amazing. What has happened with this woman is amazing. So she became one of my private clients. She came
RV (02:59):
To my brand mastery event, which are these very micro group experiences that I lead in person. And we have usually only like five people there. And she came to one, several months ago, we were talking, you know, preparing and helping her with her book launch. Her book has taken off in, in an a way that like we’ve never seen. So she followed our whole system, followed our whole process, and everything we talk about is lighting the spark so that it will take off. That is what is happening with her book. Her book has been number five worldwide in all books on Amazon for almost a week straight for almost seven days. That is so insanely difficult. This means that she’s been selling, you know, well over like fif like between 1500 and 2000 units probably a day. Then the final numbers from last week are aren’t out yet.
RV (03:47):
But, you know, she’s moved a ton of books. She’s, I don’t know if she’ll hit the New York Times, but she’s certainly gonna be a New York Times candidate. And I was literally just talking we’re, I’m just texting back and forth with her as we’re talking about, you know, what’s working and the strategy for how we keep this going. And so much of it is ties into like this episode with Pat and going, okay, what’s working for Dr. Lyon in many ways is, is is very similar to how Pat has built his personal brand and his platform. And it’s, it’s like caring about people. Specifically. If you wanna know how to turn your personal brand into a worldwide movement, it’s understanding that you have to make it more about the message and less about the messenger. You have to make it more about community and less about the content.
RV (04:49):
You have to make it more about what you believe and less about what you’re trying to get people to buy. That is how you create a worldwide movement. That is how you create something that transcends your work, your expertise, your knowledge, and your vanity and your metrics and your profits and things, and go. And that is how you create something that becomes bigger than you. In many ways, it’s a matter of just setting the intention to have something that is bigger than you, that is greater than you, that is a purpose that is beyond just you, right? It’s more about the message, less about the messenger. What does that mean? It means that your personal brand and the content that you create is being created. Because what you are passionate about is wanting people to live a certain way, wanting people to act a a certain way, wanting people to change their life in a certain way.
RV (05:53):
And you care more about that. You create more about creating that change in their behavior and making that impact in their life than you do about you becoming famous and you becoming well known and you becoming, you having more followers, right? It’s not that having more followers is bad, more follow followers is good. It’s just saying for, to be a mission-driven messenger, it means that money is good, but money is subservient to the message. Income is good, but income is subservient to impact. You have to be more about the message and less about the messenger. And that is what these people do, and that’s what drives them, and that’s what makes them great, right? And I, I think Lewis Howes a great example of that Lewis House is, is, is someone who’s always just been so focused on helping his audience win, helping his audience succeed, and then Al also helping his guests succeed.
RV (06:53):
And he’s sort of come along for the ride, right? Like he’s the host that has come along for the ride. And now Lewis is this, this very world renowned, recognized, one of the most influential personal brands in the world, but it wasn’t because he set out on a mission to make Lewis famous. He set out on a mission to help people. The School of Greatness is about sharing and, and, and curating the greatest minds in the world, sharing their ideas for free on a podcast where people may not ever get access to that information, right? And so Lewis comes along for the ride. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon with this, this book, forever Strong is just blowing up. And man, I, I hope, I hope this, I hope we, we, we get good news that she hits New York Times. We got good news last week. So one of our other clients, Nicole Walters hit the New York Times.
RV (07:41):
She, she hit number nine on the New York Times. That was the seventh time that we’ve had a brand builders group client hit the New York Times in the last 12 months, seven times we’ve done that, right? People following our system and, and what is our system? The system is not gimmicks, right? The system is not gaming. The system is adding value, making a difference, creating a movement. And what’s happening with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is she’s teaching the whole world, right? She’s an actual, she’s an actual fellowship trained doctor, is she’s saying, we all think that we’re over fat, right? We think that we’re over fat, but we’re not over fat. We’re under muscle. And so she is starting this muscle movement, right? She calls what she does, muscle centric medicine, and she’s talking about what she believes. It’s not so much go buy my book, buy my book.
RV (08:33):
She’s, she’s, she’s passionate about educating people to go. The whole narrative has been about losing weight and cutting carbs and cutting calories and like reduce, reduce, reduce. And she’s saying it’s not about that. What really creates health is more muscle, right? More protein, more, more muscle. And so we all think we’re over fat and she’s teaching us, no, we’re under muscle. And then if we can build muscle, then all these other health benefits take care of themselves. And it’s, it’s a fresh, it’s a fresh message, but it’s, it’s about the message, not the messenger. And it’s, it’s about what she believes, not what she wants you to buy. That’s how you create a movement, right? And we’re just, we happen to be on the, on the behind the scenes, like inner workings on, on her actual team. And we have been for the last several months of preparing to launch this thing with the force it deserves.
RV (09:26):
And now we’re seeing it like catch and start to take off. It’s amazing. I mean, it’s blowing my mind, the numbers that she’s posting,
RV (10:13):
So the book gets caught in, in, in the groundswell of that, right? So the book kind of goes along for the ride. Her personal brand goes along for the ride. And that’s what happened with Lewis House, and that’s what happened with Pat Flynn with his podcast, right? He’s, you know, just been focused on the movement and the message. And, and I love what I love, one of the things that Pat said in the interview, again, go back and go back and listen to the interview. You just don’t get, you just are not gonna get access to somebody like Pat typically, you know, you don’t get that kind of access all the time. So it’s a powerful conversation. And one of the things he said, which I loved, he said, make each piece of content that you create a gift for your audience. Make each piece of content, you create a gift for your audience, right?
RV (11:08):
Is your content a gift for your audience, or is it something you do so you can grow followers? Is it a gift for your audience? Or is it something you put together so that you can sell people and get your hands in their pockets and take some money? Again, I’m not against money, I’m not against followers. We’re, we’re fans of money, right? We like money. We, we like followers, we need those things to make a difference, but it’s where does it rank in the order of priority? It’s is money subservient to, to the message, to the mission is serving your audience the priority? And then all the other things are subservient to that. So it’s not that there’s, you know, these things are bad, it’s just the order of priority matters. It’s about service, it’s about your audience. It’s about making an impact on the world.
RV (12:00):
It’s about going, what would I say if, if money didn’t matter at all, right? Like, what is the thing that I would dedicate my life to? What is the thing that I believe in? And when you’re creating content, the content is a gift. And y’all, I have one of these gifts for you, like, I’m, I’m gonna go, I’m, yeah, this is also a little bit off, off topic, but not really, you know, a few like a couple years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night, this very sobering thought, which was, what happens if I die before Jasper and Liam, my kids are old enough to have a conversation with me where I can truly explain to them the logical and historical and archeological elements of why I have come to believe that, that Jesus of Nazareth is actually a deity. Why he’s actually a messiah. How, what is the evidence that I have discovered through research and reading and exploration and critical thinking and challenging and, and, and discussing and, and, and, and, you know, all of these things that I have done in my personal life, not in my business life.
RV (13:22):
And it was a sobering thought to go, wow, I’ve spent over 20 years, almost 20 years of my life now in my personal life, exploring this thing that is not a part of my business and my personal brand and what I do professionally, but it’s really important to me to share that with my kids. And what happens if I died before my kids got old enough? And that created this deep sense of urgency, this deep urgency in me to go, I have to get, I have to get this recorded for Jasper and Liam. Hopefully nothing happens to me, right? I’m not planning on going anywhere soon, but like, if something did, this issue of eternity is so important to me, and there’s so much misunderstanding around it, and I’ve spent so much of my own time exploring the evidence for this that it is of tantamount significant importance to me, that my boys one day will get the benefit of all of that knowledge.
RV (14:21):
And I said, I have to create this. I don’t have a way to monetize it. I, right? And so all I did was I just driven out of this, this purpose really for them. And then, you know, we recorded it and it’s 15 episodes, and it was like, well, we can’t release 15 episodes on this podcast, so, you know, we need to start another podcast. And so we are launching this, this whole separate podcast series called Eternal Life. Seven Questions Every Intelligent Skeptic Should Ask About Jesus of Nazareth. What is this ep? What is this podcast? It’s just me sharing my personal life’s work of exploring the evidence, the logical reasons, the historical reasons, the academic reasons, the archeological support to go, how is it that a logical, rational person could ever believe in this idea of a human that was a deity, that was somehow a God who performed miracles and then died and re resurrected and came back to life?
RV (15:21):
Like, how does any rational person believe any of that? And, and that was the question I asked that caused this 20 year journey of me unpacking it to where I have come to the full conclusion that it is definitely what happened, and that there’s a mountain of evidence that supports it. And I’ve documented it for my boys, and I’ve decided to go, okay, why not release this to the public? Why am I telling you this? Because it’s a massive amount of time. I have no way to monetize it, right? I have no plan of making money. I’m not suddenly gonna build a personal brand around this idea. It’s just a project that was like, I have to share this and I’ll, you know, I have to make it and I might as well share it. So it’s a gift, right? And it’s a great example of, you know, when Pat said that you have to create, make each piece of content a gift.
RV (16:15):
It is a gift. I have no other benefit from that. Now, hopefully every piece of content that I create, everything around the four levels of influence and the psychology of influence, which is what my actual area of expertise is, and my actual business is about, right? Our business at Brand Builders Group, our team is about, you know, helping people become wealthy and well known, helping them make a bigger impact, helping them monetize their message and their personal brand, which is my actual core expertise, right? The content for that should also be a gift, right? But I have a reason to make that a gift, which is also that I get the side impact of having a way to monetize it. But even eternal life, it’s 15 episodes, it’s over 15 hours of content that I’ve had to create. It took me two years to build this, and I’m just giving it away for free.
RV (17:04):
It’s a gift, right? Not all of you are gonna wanna listen to that podcast. Some of you might, right? So, you know, make sure that you, you know, opt in here or go, go Search For Eternal Life is the name of the podcast by Rory Vaden. And it’s coming out soon, and it’s like within the, I think it’s supposed to come out this week, like by the end of this week. So it’s either out now or it’ll be out soon. If you’re on our email list, of course we’ll announce it. If you follow [email protected], I’ll, you know, I’ll be posting it there too, so that you can see it. It’s not the future direction of my personal brand, but it’s a gift, right? You have to make each piece of content that you create, it’s gotta be a gift. There’s gotta be a piece of you in it. There’s gotta be, you have to care. You have to give a crap. You have to have put time and blood and sweat and tears to go, I’ve created this for you and I’m giving it to you for free.
RV (17:59):
That’s the secret to content marketing, not which hashtags do you use and how do you edit and what are your camera angles, and what is your lighting and what’s the right hook? And how do you play the algorithm? To me, that’s not the secret, right? Those might be the secrets to GE going viral once in a while, but that’s not the secret to building a business and to changing the world. The secret to that is going create content that is, that matters deeply to you talk about the things that matter to you and create it as a gift to do the work of packaging it and preparing it, and then promoting it to your audience. And by the way, promotion is part of the gift, doing the work of telling the world about it. If I do all the research, discover the cure for cancer, but then I don’t do any of the work to tell the world that I’ve discovered it, the net impact of me discovering the cure for cancer is zero.
RV (18:57):
I haven’t affected anybody, right? So promotion is part of the gift. Promotion is part of the responsibility. Promotion is part of your privilege as the messenger. It’s part of your obligation, it’s part of your duty. It’s not just part of your job. It’s not just part of like, you know, the the price you pay to be successful, although it is that also for a mission-driven messenger, I have to reach more people because that’s part of my calling. Marketing is art, right? Promotion is a privilege. It is my duty. And so when you stand in that place, not the place of vanity going, I need a bunch of people to know about my stuff, but standing in the place of service to go, I have put some work into creating something that I think you’ll enjoy. Here it is. And I want that to get to as many people as possible.
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That is the difference. And that is what converts a personal brand into a worldwide movement. It’s that conviction, that clarity, that dedication. And you see this with the biggest personal brands in the world, right? You see this with Dave Ramsey comes to mind, right? Dave Ramsey. He doesn’t need money. He hasn’t needed money for decades. Like he’s still on the radio three hours every day. Why? Because it’s a movement for him, it’s a mission. He’s going, I know what it’s like to be broke and, and bankrupt and be upside down financially, and have somebody come into my home and take my daughter’s crib to sell it, to pay off my debt. He knows what that feels like. So getting another download on his podcast or another follower on Instagram or another speaking engagement or another dollar in his bank account is great. It’s not why he does it.
RV (20:51):
If he did, if it was why he was doing it, he would’ve stopped a long time ago. He doesn’t care about, it’s not that he doesn’t care about those things, right? Those are byproducts of the mission, of the movement of the cause. And, and, and those of you that are clients of ours at Brand Builders Group, you know, in our, you know, we’ve got 14, 14 courses in our, in our curriculum, 14 different two-Day experiences that we take people through. And our flagship first experience finding your brand, DNA, we take, we help you create a brand positioning statement, which is what problem do you solve in one word? What is your uniqueness in one word? What is your solution to that sentence or that that problem? In one sentence, what audience, what audience do you serve in one phrase, what one revenue stream matters above all others.
RV (21:38):
And then we also teach you something called the cause, right? The problem is what people are struggling with the cause is why they are struggling with it. So the, the concept of a cause inside our curriculum, our formal curriculum at Brand Builders Group, it’s a, it’s a semantics. It’s a, it’s a formal, it’s a part of our vernacular. It’s an element that we teach on, is that there’s the problem which people are aware of. This is the thing they know they’re struggling with, they’re willing to admit it. And so we use that in marketing because it attracts people. ’cause They see it and they go, yes, that’s me. But then we teach, we teach messengers and we help them identify the cause, which is the thing that their audience doesn’t see, right? The problem is what they’re struggling with the cause is why they’re struggling with it.
RV (22:20):
The problem is what they’re aware of the cause is what they’re unaware of. The problem is what they think they is. The, they think is their issue, but the cause is what their real issue is. Well, academically speaking in brand builders group curriculum and in our construct, in our paradigm, our semantics and our vernacular in our frameworks, the causes, everything that I have just said to you, it meets those academic criteria. Additionally, though, deliberately and intentionally, the cause we deliberately use that word as a double entendre, meaning it has two meanings, A double meaning. It has the meaning of all of those things I shared, but it also doubles as the cause for your life. It is the cause, the, the purpose of the messenger. It’s the reason why they have dedicated their life to doing this. It is, it’s the, the source of their inspiration.
RV (23:16):
It is their cause for creating their personal brand, their cause for digitizing and monetizing their reputation, their cause for writing a book, their cause for creating a speech, their cause for launching a membership or a podcast or a course. It’s their cause. It’s their reason. It’s their purpose. In addition to being the cause of the root issue that people struggle with, the cause of the messenger is to say, I’m going to dedicate my life to eradicating the world of this invisible enemy that is taking them down. Right? For Dave Ramsey is helping people be debt free for Dr. Gabrielle Lyes, for helping people to be healthy, right? For Pat Flynn, it’s for helping people to, to, to create more income. Rambler’s Group, it’s for us to help you create more notoriety, to help you become more well known. So you have to find a cause that is something that you would dedicate your life to, and the the, when the cause elevates and you become subservient to that, that is when there’s a chance for your personal brand to turn into a worldwide movement.
RV (24:41):
And when it turns into a worldwide movement, there’s a bunch of other wonderful things that come along and you get to come along for the ride, right? I get to go along for the ride. The book gets to come along for the ride, your business gets to go along for the ride, but not because that’s first, because it’s a byproduct of being more focused on the message than the messenger. More about creating community and not just the content, and more about sharing what you believe and not just what you want people to buy. So make your personal brand a cause, make it a mission. Make it a movement. We’ll catch you next time on the influential Personal Brand podcast.