Category: SELLING

Ep 218: Optimizing Your Amazon Book Sales with Naren Aryal

RV (00:07):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
Well the man you’re about to meet was introduced to me by a good friend, a trusted long-time friend. And then I just found out that Naren and I are both DU alumni. So we both went to the university of Denver and his name is Naren Aryal and he is the CEO of a company called amplify publishing and also mascot books, which are hybrid publishers. They do a lot in the nonfiction space and we’re going to talk about what hybrid publishing is and when does it make sense for people and you know, just kind of like how it works, but Naren is someone that we’ve started recommending to our clients if, if they are in the space of looking for kind of like hybrid publishing, but he’s got degrees obviously from the university of Denver, but also from Virginia tech. And he, it’s just really cool to that. He’s also a lawyers by, you know, so he’s got that training and background and he’s the author of a book called how to sell a crap load of books. So that is something that we all care about and there, and I had a conversation a while back and we started diving into some Amazon stuff that he was sharing with me that I had never heard before that I thought was super fascinating. So anyways, Naren welcome to the show. Hey,
NA (02:09):
Thank you, Rory. Great to be here. And yes, my book is how to sell a crap load of books and it underscores the importance of a, a catchy title. So there you have it. Yeah.
RV (02:20):
Yeah. Well, so I want to start with the conversation about hybrid publishing and what is that exactly? Cause I think when people think of publishing, they understand traditional publishing and like, okay, you know, literary agents and book deals and flying to New York and, you know, Simon and Schuster and penguin random house. And there’s that. And then they also understand self publishing, which is you go Amazon create space or whatever, or just like printing a book off at Kinko’s and you know, you’re an author, what is hybrid publishing and how is it kind of different from those two things?
NA (02:57):
Great question. So hybrid publishing is a hybrid between the two options that you just mentioned. And specifically what that means is we create and there are other companies that do this other than amplify. We create books that are on par in terms of editorial quality and book packaging, and provide our authors the experience that they would otherwise get from a large publishing house in terms of marketing and distribution under a slightly different model maybe not slightly the model is, are authors contribute to production related costs, but in exchange the author since they’re contributing to production related costs get the lion’s share of royalty split. So in our case, it’s 85% to the author and 15% to us as a distribution fee, which is typically just inverted from the splits that you’ll see at a large traditional house.
RV (03:57):
Yeah, so the author’s keeping 85%. You guys are getting 15%, which has a pretty spot on with the inverse of how it would work with traditional, but then they’re covering some costs out of pocket upfront where you wouldn’t normally have that with a traditional publishing. So they’re just covering the cost of like getting the manuscript edited, getting it printed, like what are all the, what are the costs here that we’re talking about?
NA (04:21):
Sure. So the costs are editorial. So sometimes we’ll work with folks that need a ghostwriter. Sometimes we’ll work with folks that give us a fully edited manuscript. So there’s editorial, anything from, or I needed coaching to various levels of editing to proofreading. So editorial is one bucket and then the other bucket is design related. So cover design, interior design. And then the other piece of it is production publishing related costs. So, you know printing of books we do eBooks and we do audio books. And then the last piece of it is warehousing and distribution. So you know, we, we have a fulfillment center from which where we ship books to retailers, invoice them collect. So the author doesn’t have to really worry themselves about that piece of it. And I said the last one, but there’s, there’s one other, we also offer a host of marketing book, launch, author platform development related services, and those are on a LA carte basis because, you know, some folks have PR folks that they’ve worked with before, some people have a social media or a website developers.
NA (05:34):
So whatever the project requires, we can sort of backfill and offer those services as well.
RV (05:40):
Got it. Yeah. Well that, even that in and of itself is pretty educational just to be just even knowing, like, what does it take to write a book? You got editorial design publishing, warehousing and distribution marketing, and then you know, in like platform development. And I think a lot of people don’t even realize those are like the big buckets. And so then and then now with hybrid publishing, you’re saying that you can get some of the kinds of things. Like, I, I think, you know, when you think of self publishing, obviously you’re covering all the costs, you’re keeping all the royalties. But you also are not getting any of the distribution. Like you almost never see a self published book on an, a, on an airport bookstand or in, you know, Barnes and noble or, you know, featured on I mean it never, almost always never on a bestseller list or something even because they’re not like index properly. So talk to us about how does distribution work and why do you need a hybrid publisher or a traditional publisher to do that? Like, why doesn’t that happen with self published books and sort of what’s the advantage of having that kind of distribution?
NA (06:53):
Yeah. So let me say this first about self publishing. I’m a big fan of self publishing today more than ever authors are successful at self publishing. The problem is today more than ever authors are self-publishing. So there’s just a glut of content out there, and it’s just very difficult to get any sort of traction in terms of a marketing and distribution specific to your question about distribution. Most self-publishing authors go by means called print on demand. So if a retailer is interested in a book and they learned that it’s print on demand they just won’t carry it. That’s just the bottom line. And so we don’t do print on demand. We publish some number of books, print, some number of books, and we use the distributors that Barnes and noble for example, uses to get stock into their store.
NA (07:42):
And we do so under you know, terms that are per industry standard. So for example, you know, we use Ingram as one of our distributors. Everyone knows Ingram. And if a Barnes and noble wants to bring in a book, they’ll go look at Ingram’s database and they’ll see, oh yeah, we can get it directly from anger. Might have to go through a publisher and author. It just makes makes it easier. There’s less resistance to going through normal channels. And, and that’s, you know, that’s the advantage of working through somebody like us is we’ve got those channels established. We got relationships with book buyers and you know, our books are, as they say, sold, wherever books are sold. You know, just because you may have a deal with a large publishing house, you know, the chances are shelf space is still limited and it’s growing more limited by the month. And so, you know, you just have to be creative in terms of where your book is being seen by your potential readers. And, and we really try to have a strategy for each and every title that we work on to soy.
RV (08:45):
And when you say book buyers, okay. So you say there’s relationships with the distributors like Ingram, which makes, which makes sense to me to go, okay. If, if I hope if I have a bookstore, whether it’s Amazon or Books-A-Million, or it’s a local bookstore, it’s just easier for me to source all the titles. I want to carry in my store from one place versus 50 or a hundred different places. So that’s, that makes sense as to go, okay, I go to Ingram and say, Hey, these are the titles I want, or we’re selling books in these kinds of categories. Can we, what do you have in that category? W when you say the term book buyer, that’s a funny term who are you talking about when you say we have relationship with book buyers?
NA (09:29):
So places like Barnes and noble, you know, they have buyers for specific categories. And, and so if you can, you know, get your book in front of those buyers. Sure. It would, it’s available via Ingram, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to get consideration. So if you can somehow get your book in front of a a person that is making a buying decision that’s always better than not. There’s no guarantees that that will result in your book being at Barnes and noble coast to coast from day one, that’s unlikely. But it definitely does help the odds.
RV (10:01):
Yeah. So in other words, you know, the contacts at these places, Books-A-Million Hudson, whatever, like whoever like Eve the, the bookstores and then independent, even independent bookstores.
NA (10:17):
Yeah. We’ve been doing this a long time. So this is our 19th year in business. So, you know, you just get to know folks, right? I mean, you mentioned Hudson news. We have two, three books there right now on the, in the airport market that that’s a little different in that it’s a pay to play it’s, co-op marketing dollars that, that we need to spend, but, you know, we know those folks and we also know, you know, the, the, the iconic, independent bookstores across the country as well. You know, those help, if you got, have a good content that is going to drive traffic into a store that’s a prerequisite, but having those relationships really helps as well.
RV (10:57):
And so you’re just helping, you’re helping the books that you publish, like your authors actually get Barnes and noble to say, yeah, I want to carry that, that title at our store on our website. And that’s what you’re talking about. If you’re self published author, your book probably isn’t even carried by Ingram. And if it is, there’s nobody at Ingram calling on, Books-A-Million saying, Hey, you should put X number of, of these copies in your inventory.
NA (11:25):
Yeah, that’s right. And I don’t want to make it seem like it’s easy because there are far more books being published than there is a space. It’s not easy, but there, it’s more likely if you, if you have a partner that has some relationship.
RV (11:43):
Yeah. Okay. Of course. Yeah. So I love that that’s super helpful. I just, I think, you know, I noticed that people like you are in the industry, almost like for someone who’s not in the industry, we don’t even understand like the basic flow of like how these things work and all the different people that are involved in the supply chain of actually getting a book on a shelf. So that’s, that’s super helpful. Now, one of the things that’s fascinating to me is whether you’re a traditionally published author which we have been twice, like our two biggest books were both traditionally published, but a lot of people don’t know this. We also are self published author early in our career. We really several self published titles. And then what y’all do is hybrid publishing one of the places or at the end of the day, no matter how you publish, a lot of the sales are coming through Amazon. And in most cases, and you were sharing some ideas with me about things that you can do to kind of optimize your, your books representation, or, you know, just presentation on, on Amazon, which I think applies whether you’re self hybrid or traditionally published. Yeah,
NA (12:58):
For sure. It’s critical.
RV (13:00):
So, so can you talk us through some of those just ideas of like cause like for me I’ve never even like paid attention to it really. I just kind of let my publisher throw up whatever they throw up there. And I’m not even sure how much access or control I have. I know that some of our brand builders group clients, you know, when they self publish, they got full control to go in there and like change, copy and do different things. What are, what are some of the biggest things that authors should be paying attention to in terms of optimizing their Amazon profile?
NA (13:31):
Yeah. Great question. So it really is a sales pitch opportunity. Getting somebody to your Amazon book page is important. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to convert that somebody into a buyer. And so there’s some things that you can do to increase the likelihood of that happening. First you mentioned copy you know, you have to write to your potential reader, you have to write copy that is going to make your potential reader hit that little buy now button. So clear and concise copy need to speak to why this is important for your target audience. If you have testimonials, you should put them in the copy. And then, so that’s on the, on the copy. There’s some beyond that. We like to really spend a lot of time thinking about the categories where the book appears.
NA (14:22):
And there’s a real science to that. So, you know, Amazon will give you a three for hardcovers three categories, and these are genres sub-genres sub sub genres. And so what we like to do is come up with two that makes sense that are closely aligned to the book’s content. And then we like to come up with a third one that is you know, maybe somewhat ever reach in terms of the alignment between the books, content and the category. And we do it, we did that with the third because maybe it’s less competitive. So you just have to keep in mind how many titles there are, and I’ll give you an example, right? We have done many, many leadership books or know presently. We’re doing a lot of diversity and inclusion titles. So some of those categories are just filled right now with some, you know, big titles.
NA (15:11):
And so, you know, your ability to get to rise on the best seller list on those subcategories is just a little bit harder. Whereas if you pick a third that is less crowded you know, your likelihood of getting a orange or yellow ribbon that says Amazon bestseller is increased. So those are some things to keep in mind in terms of the listing itself. And then the other thing that you and I talked about is Amazon ad words Amazon ad words are a fantastic tool. I will say that generally advertising for a book is not something that works. And, you know, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll routinely talk to older authors who recall advertising in the classifieds in the New York times, for example, and, and they’ll say how effective that was. And so that doesn’t work of course today. But what does work is advertising on Amazon? And so there’s a couple of suggestions that we’ve got in terms of Amazon clicks pay-per-click campaigns. So,
RV (16:11):
So, so basically what you’re saying is Amazon has its own self-contained universe for running ads just throughout their website. Their banner ads have images of their various products, similar, similar to how a Facebook has its own ecosystem for that Facebook and Instagram, and similar to how Google ad words would have like Google and YouTube areas. Amazon has its own. Amazon is its own universe for running ads, and you can just buy that placement.
NA (16:42):
Yeah, that’s right. And so how it works is two ways people go on on Amazon and search for books, right? And so let’s say you have a book on leadership or remote work. This this is applicable to a project that we’re doing right now. We do a lot of post pandemic, remote leadership type books. And so if you go on Amazon right now and type in, you know managing remotely it’s likely that one or two of our books will show up as books that follow into the guidelines that you’ve typed in. So that’s one way, and you’d be surprised how effective this is. The other way is let’s say there’s a remote leadership bestseller national bestseller, and we know the title. And so what we could do is we, if we have some book that is in a similar category, we will use book a and by that search term. So when somebody buys book a, they’ll see our book B as a suggested a title that they might like, because they’ve demonstrated an interest in the subject matter.
RV (17:49):
Interesting. And you’re saying, you’ll buy the same title of book a or just the term,
NA (17:55):
No, we’ll buy the w we’ll buy the title of okay. As a comp title. So anytime somebody buys book a, because we know bill K and we think that the readers of book a would be interested in, in our book B we’ll buy the title.
RV (18:10):
Interesting. Yeah. So then yours would show up kind of above, and then they’re directly underneath, and then Amazon searches to see those sales kind of track together. And so it’ll start to organically, like recommend people who bought people who bought this book, also bought this other book.
NA (18:25):
That’s right. That’s right. And so particularly with non-fiction titles particularly with thought leadership titles this is an effective way to, to advertise and, and the analytics you get from Amazon are fantastic. They’ll say you spent $200 on this campaign. It directly resulted in, you know, $350 in sales.
RV (18:49):
Hm. Yeah. And that is that part of your Amazon author page that you see that like in author central, is that where you do that?
NA (18:59):
We have we have a Amazon account where all of our authors are in our authors do have Amazon central or author’s page. But we do it from our overreaching account.
RV (19:11):
Okay. But if you, so if you theoretically wanted to do this yourself, you just have to whatever search on how to start an Amazon addict, Amazon ad account, and then you, whatever you go in there and you have to input some creative and a headline. And how much does it cost for a click? I mean, I know it’s all over the board, but is it, is this a dollar, a click? Is it $10 a click?
NA (19:31):
It’s pretty cheap. It’s surprisingly cheap. So you know, any, anything from two to $10 a clip.
RV (19:39):
Okay. and, and that’s, that’s interesting. So, and then when they click that, do they go to your author page or do they go to the book? Page?
NA (19:52):
Book. Page.
RV (19:53):
Okay. And is that like a, when you’re talking about like writing the copy and the categories, that’s all focused on like the book page itself, not the author page. Correct. Okay. All right. I gotcha. So in terms of Amazon, are there any other obviously, so the category thing is interesting and there’s, I dunno if there’s got to be thousands of categories, maybe tens of thousands of categories. And so you guys are monitoring how competitive each category is, and then you’re making recommendation that, and that’s one advantage that you have with a hybrid publisher or self-publisher is you can actually, you get to choose which categories you want to index your book for in Amazon, right? Correct. Yeah. So that’s one thing we do not have that advantage, at least we haven’t or are the clients that we know of that have worked with publishers. They select that for you. So you don’t, you don’t have that. But the and then obviously, and then I’ll even the copy. Like you don’t have this, this is one of the things that’s really powerful. I think about hybrid publishing and self publishing is you just, you have more control in general. Like you get to decide what words you want to put on the back cover of your book or what words you want to use on your, on your Amazon page.
NA (21:15):
Yeah. And, and to that point I’ll just point out that you know, whether you self publish, go with the hybrid publishing company or you’re with a traditional house and, you know Rory, you know, this, the author must be engaged in marketing. And so some folks have this notion that if, if I get a traditional deal, I can just turn over the marketing to somebody else. It doesn’t work that way. So that should sort of factor into your thinking in terms of publishing pathways.
RV (21:45):
Yeah. Well, I’d like to what you’re saying, it’s like that one is a simple one, which is if you’re not willing to do the work don’t publish at all, like it, doesn’t it traditional publishers, aren’t going to do more marketing than that, a hybrid publisher. And obviously if you’re self publishing, there’s, there’s nobody else. There’s nobody else there to do it. Like it comes down to you. So I, you know, on that topic, Narren like what do you think are some of the big differences that separate the successful authors from the unsuccessful ones in terms of what they do to launch? I mean, obviously they have to be engaged. I think the idea of just going like, well, Hey, my book is up and, you know, I maybe hire a PR firm is one thing. But beyond that, what are some of the activities that you see the authors doing that are more controllable in terms of like directly driving the sales of their book?
NA (22:41):
Sure. So I think a baseline is you have to have fantastic content. You have to have good content that really resonates with your intended target market first. And so in order to have that, you have to really have an understanding of your target market. Many times I’ll hear from authors saying they’ve got a book that they that they’ve written and everyone will, everyone will love it. And so that’s when I immediately think to myself, great, you don’t know your target market because saying everyone is going to love it, that doesn’t work. So you have to do the work in terms of figuring out who you’re writing for and why they’re going to care. And then the other thing that I would say is it’s important to have, of course, as I just said, good content. But the book has to be a piece of a of a larger content plan, right?
NA (23:29):
It’s gotta be supporting your social media, your blogging, your op-eds your speaking, your consulting rarely is a book enough to persuade a person who has never heard of you to go out and buy your book. So those authors that understand that a book is a part of their overall platform and understand that it takes a lot of work to cultivate an audience and readership before the book actually comes out. Those are the ones that will reap the rewards of all that could flow from a positive and you know, a good book project.
RV (24:14):
Yeah,
NA (24:14):
Sounds simple. It sounds simple, but you know, you just kind of put in the work to gain trust of your potential readers and you know, have them invest time in you before you make an ask of of them to buy a book.
RV (24:30):
Yeah, yeah. That, and I think the there, there is a whole conversation there around just like building it out and there’s, I’ve heard different, I’ve heard different, different statistics on this before about like how many times somebody has to, has to hear your name before they actually buy something. But, you know, I’ve heard is like as high as 17 times, whereas like they have to see your name 17 times, whether it’s your social media feed in their inbox, you speaking at their event on someone else’s podcast on a local TV show, like, and they just have to like, hear your name and then they see you in Amazon. And they’re like, oh, you know what? I think this, this lady looks cool or this guy looks cool. I think I’m going to try this. I don’t know if you’ve, if you’ve heard any exact data on that, that’s always been, I’ve always heard just kind of very loosely cited statistics around that. But I do, I do very much agree with the concept that it’s like, you know just to what you said, rarely is it like, I’ve never heard of you. I see your book, I’m going to buy it. It’s usually more of like a culmination of, I’ve been hearing your name and now I see it and like, okay, I’m gonna, I’m going to give this a shot.
NA (25:47):
Culmination is a great word. And it’s fitting here because you’ve demonstrated that you are an expert in a particular field. You’ve introduced content that the potential purchaser finds worthwhile the potential purchaser has invested a time in your thoughts. And then at that point, you go in with your new book, just work.
RV (26:16):
Yep. Well, I love it. So y’all, if you ever want an introduction to narrow and I mentioned, so he’s one of our preferred Vitor providers here. You know, every author we work with is at different stages of their platform. You can always email us info at brand builders, group.com info at brand builders, group.com. We’ll gladly connect you directly to Narren. Of course you, you can find him in his company where, where do you want people to go near? And if they want find you directly.
NA (26:44):
Sure. If you go to amplify publishing.com, that is our thought leadership division, where we publish business political policy leadership type books, again, amplify publishing.com. And then we also have another imprint called the mascot books, [inaudible] books.com. And there we publish across various genres, everything from children’s titles to cookbooks to fiction. But I think, you know, most of your audience are in the brand building and thought leadership space. So amplify publishing probably would be a good source. You can feel free to email me. It’s Narren and a R E [email protected].
RV (27:27):
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. We, we are mostly like, I would say in that thought leader space, but now they’ve been around a few years. We, we have some cookbook authors, we’ve got some diet books, we got some children’s books going on in there. And I actually would say among my circle of author friends, I feel like there is an a rising interest in doing children’s books that correspond with their business books. So they, they release a business book and then they’ll take that same, you know, core principle and they’ll make a kid’s book out of it, which I’ve always thought was interesting. I think my first book take the stairs would lend itself really well to that. And I was just like, maybe I should one day do a kids’ book, but anyways, that’s great. As always, you know, you can email us info at brand builders, group.com.
RV (28:12):
We can connect you directly as well. And Narren thank you for being here and thanks for what you do. I think you know, it’s, it’s, it’s really, really empowering to know there’s an option like you out there. I know for years early in our career, one of the biggest things that we struggled with was self publish or traditional publish. You know, and we have a, one of our courses is called bestseller launch plan, where we talk about all the steps that have to happen to like orchestrate a really great launch. And one of the stories that we talk about is just how much of a conundrum in this internal battle we were having between self-publishing and traditional publishing and hybrid offers offers you a lot of the best of both worlds. And so it’s, it’s a really, really good option. And so far we’re enjoying working with you and, and looking forward to having more of our clients go your way.
NA (29:03):
Well, this is fantastic. Enjoyed it. Thank you for the invitation and looking forward to working with a lot of reclined.
RV (29:12):
Awesome. We wish you the best.

Ep 205: How to Start a Keynote Speaking Career with Shep Hyken| Recap Episode

RV (00:02):
Welcome back to the influential personal brand podcast. This is the recap edition of the episode with Shep Hyken. It’s your man, Rory Vaden. I’m rolling solo today on the recap, as you know, AJ my wife, our CEO at brand builders group. My business partner is a run and gun and a hardworking woman and mom of two toddlers. So we don’t always catch her, but I am excited to walk through this recap of what I’ve learned from Shep Hyken. And I’ve learned a ton from Shep Hyken over the years. I do every single time that I talked to him. And of course, you know, the focus I would say of this whole conversation ended up being like how to start a keynote speaking career. Shep is in the professional speakers hall of fame. He’s the New York times best selling author. And you know, here’s one thing that we probably don’t say enough directly, that we should is like, if you want to be a speaker, join the NSA, the national speakers association, like it’s ridiculous because people like Shep are walking around there and you know, so many of the people that we have on this show just walk around the halls and you can just like meet them and build relationships with them and the national speakers association.
RV (01:20):
So just a special shout out to y’all unpaid advertisement, voluntary promotion of NSA. It’s been such a huge organization for me, such an important point of my life, of our career and just encouragement. And you get you learn, you know, from really, really amazing people, which I, I have always. And you know, it just took me a back a little bit on memory lane, listening to the Shep, talk about how did he build his career in a lot of ways, very similar to how we have built ours, but you know, here’s what it boils down to. And even if you don’t want to be a keynote speaker, I would say, you know, this, this is it. Wasn’t specific to keynote speaking. It’s really specific to marketing any, any personal brand. And I’d say specifically in like a B2B environment business to business but really just marketing yourself in general.
RV (02:14):
So here’s, here’s my very first takeaway. Okay. here’s what shep’ said. He said, find a list of people, tell them what you do and get really good at doing it for them. Find a list of people, tell them what you do and get really good at doing it for people. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. And at a high level, that’s what this is. I remember hearing Larry, Winget say one time, he said, you got to have a really good product and you got to ask a lot of people to buy it from you. And if you’re not generating revenue, it’s because one of those things is broken. You either don’t have a really good product or you’re not asking enough people to buy it from you. And chances are, it’s a little bit of both, if not a lot of both. So Mike, if you’re frustrated and you go like, Hey, my side hustle is not working my business.
RV (03:08):
Isn’t growing dah, dah, dah, like you can’t blame brand builders group or your marketing agency or your social media assistant. If you’re not doing those two things, if you don’t have a really good product or if you aren’t asking a lot of people to buy it, that is like, that comes down to, to you. That is your fault. That is your responsibility. That is your decision. Like it comes down to you. You gotta make sure those two things are happening. And how do you have a really good product? Well, that’s, that’s a bigger conversation. That’s a lot of what we’re going to help you with a brand builders group. We have our captivating content curriculum, which is where you create true original IP thought leadership and intellectual property. We have world-class presentation craft, which is all the mastery level mechanics of preparing it for the spoken word.
RV (04:02):
But then when you go, how do you get a lot of people to buy it? That is, you know, a lot of the other curriculums we teach around marketing, but like one of the things that Shep said, that’s so simple as that LinkedIn is the new telephone, especially in a B2B environment. If you’re selling something business to business, which means, look, if you’re a personal brand, what are the things that we sell B2B business to business simple. You’re calling on companies for sponsorship deals. Usually it’s companies who sponsor you, not individuals, companies have big marketing budgets. They will pay for impressions. Without having to hold you accountable for specific results, they just need awareness. They’ve got money set aside for that. So that’s a brand deal. If you’re selling consulting, you typically consult with companies, you coach individuals, you consult with companies. If you are trying to sell keynotes, right?
RV (04:54):
That’s a B2B thing. It’s typically a company or an association or an organization is gonna hire you to speak. And if you’re selling B2B, like you gotta be crushing it on LinkedIn. If you’re not on LinkedIn, like, what are you doing? I literally just got off the phone with one of our longtime friends, brand builders, group clients, his name’s Ian. And he has been following our formula to a tee doing a weekly five-minute video every single week, week in and week out for two years. And two years ago when he was posting his videos, you know how many people were watching them for six, eight, like 10 views, three views, 14 views, 25 views two years later because he followed what we told him to do. Save the best for first teach what, you know, give away everything you have for free in one bite sized chunk and all random miscellaneous order and do it week and week out, hit the schedule no matter what be consistent.
RV (06:01):
He’d been doing it for two years. His average video now on LinkedIn, 8,000, 10,000 views, he’s doing multi-six figures as a side hustle. Like he’s making money on as a side hustle more than what most people make in real life. Just from inbound leads coming from the fact that he’s been following the system, teaching what he knows adding value to people’s lives give first. And if you’re in a B2B environment, do it on LinkedIn. Look, the number one reason people hire you to speak is because someone has seen you speak. It has never been easier than it is now too. To show people what it’s like to hear you speak. You can push a button on your phone, hit record and post it, show people what you do. Show them that you have a good product. And if nobody’s hiring you guess what? It’s either because you’re not showing enough people or what you’re saying, not that good, right?
RV (07:00):
It’s one of those two things. There’s a good chance. It’s a little bit of both. Maybe a lot of both, but, but LinkedIn is, you know, the B2B world there. Everybody has gathered in one spot and you just, you gotta be consistent and you gotta be, you gotta have quality and you just gotta keep on it. And and, and this has never changed, right? Like it never will change. It takes a lot of work to build a good product and a lot of work to tell a lot of people about it. And you gotta do it consistently. But if you do it for a couple of years, you’ll change your life. You do it for a couple years. It’ll change your life. That is something that we told the in few years ago, three years ago, it took them a year to believe us.
RV (07:41):
Then he started doing it. Two years later, changed his life. Like you can do the same thing, but you have to start. You have to start now. You ha you cannot wait. Now you, is it discouraging to go? Well, I’m starting from zero. Yes, it’s discouraging. We had to start over three years ago, we had to start on zero, zero emails, zero followers, zero connections. Like I spent a lifetime. I spent a career 15 plus years building something. And then I had to start over again. Zero. It’s very discouraging, but it’s the old Chinese proverb. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is right now. Right? So plant the tree, do the work, build the reps, dig the ditches, build the infrastructure and give, save the best for first. Give, give, give, teach everything, you know, for free one bite size chunk and all random miscellaneous over order and hit the schedule consistently.
RV (08:44):
And you do it. You’re going to showcase that what, you know, people are going to love you. And eventually a bunch of people are gonna show up. So you can shortcut that by doing actual sales, rather than marketing and content marketing, and actually picking up the phone and calling someone or sending a messages and send an emails and doing all that. But at the end of the day, find a list of people, show them what you do get really good at doing, doing it for them. Number two, takeaway from my conversation with Shep, which was kind of a modification of something that he said, but it reminded me. It made me think of this, which is why you don’t really market a speech. You, you market your expertise and then you deliver it in a variety of ways, or, you know, even a better way of saying it.
RV (09:34):
Like, you know, we say at brand builders, like one of the big mistakes that people do is they market the, they market the solution. They market the answer. You don’t want to do that as much. You want to market the problem. You want to be an ambassador of the problem. You want to promote the problem you want to celebrate the problem you want to sell. The problem you want to agitate the problem by talking about these are the problems. This is what people are. You know, this is what people do wrong. If you do that, people will buy from you. So you’re like, you’re marketing the problem. I mean, think about this way, right? Like if I start talking about the solution, the right way to do something, most people won’t even understand it or connect to it because if they understood it or they connect it to what I was saying, they would have already done it.
RV (10:20):
They wouldn’t have the problem. So what they do understand though, is the problem, because that’s the thing they have now, the problem is what’s right in front of their face. The problem is what is like damaging their life, what they’re struggling with day in and day out. And so when you talk about the problem and they hear you talk about the problem, they go, oh yeah. Like, this is me. This is what I, I, this, this guy, or this guy gets me. They understand me. This is what I’m struggling with. And if you can demonstrate that you understand the problem, clearly the people will hire you because they’ll automatically assume, you know, the solution. So you don’t just market your speech. You, you market your expertise. And, and I would say the first step of that is marketing the problem, celebrating the problem. You know, talking about the importance of, of what it is that you do.
RV (11:13):
I, I remember another hall of Famer at NSA is a guy named Nito Cobain who is, you know, very, very smart. One of the wealthiest people that I probably know, he also started high point university in North Carolina, which is amazing university, very entrepreneurial minded. And one of the things that Nieto said one time, this was a private group that he was talking to. There’s probably, I don’t know, less than two dozen people in the room is he said, you know, if somebody hires you to come do a speech and then they never hire you again, you missed the mark. Because if someone just hires you to come to a speech, basically just entertainment. You’re, you’re basically just a talking head for an hour. But if you’re a real expert, if they view you as an expert, if they view you as having the answer to their problem, they’re not just going to hire you for that speech.
RV (12:09):
They’re going to try to find ways to bring you into their business over and over again, because you’re demonstrating an understanding of the problem and understanding of the solution. And they are hiring you for your expertise, not hiring you to deliver a speech. If somebody hires you for a speech, you’re just a spot on the agenda. But if someone’s hiring you for your expertise, now you’re an essential part of their business. And that’s how, you know, you have real expertise. Not only do you have real expertise, but that the marketplace views your expertise because they want a relationship with you on an ongoing basis because they understand the value of your expertise. They trust that you have it. They know that they need it and your, the door, the person that they’re choosing for that. So repeat business, deeper business long-term relationships. Those are indicators that you’re really an expert in that you’re marketing yourself as an expert, and that people understand you as an expert.
RV (13:12):
Now, you know, you may say, well, no, I don’t care about that. I just want to do speeches. That’s fine. Like, but nonetheless, when Nieto talks, I listened closely any time that anyone’s super successful talks, I listened closely. And that has stuck with me. And, and that’s a little bit of like, what Shep was talking about here is you, you don’t market your speech, you market your expertise, you market a problem, and you market your ability to solve that problem. You know, the problem I’m solving is not, you need a speaker, hire me to speak the problem that I’m solving. Is there something going on in your business that is a breakdown, and you bring me in to come talk about how to move past that that’s the real value, right? And, and even when you look at the price of a speech, you go, if you’re just hiring me to come talk for an hour, then you’re just paying me for an hour of my time.
RV (14:07):
That’s going to be hard to have a lot of value. If you’re hiring me to help you solve a problem, then the value I’m bringing is not the value of the hour of my time. It is the value of solving that problem inside of your company forever into the future. That has a huge value, right? So, so that’s, you know, when we talk about breaking through she Hans wall and finding your uniqueness and marketing the problem, like all this stuff ties together. Long-Term and then the last thing which came from shep, which was super simple and super powerful and, and, you know, he’s, he is an expert on the customer experience. So it makes sense that we naturally couldn’t have a conversation without stumbling into this at some point, which where it was, he said, you have to realize that every single interaction you have with the client shapes their opinion of you, every single touch point, every single interaction that somebody has with you, your website, your brand, your team, your marketing, collateral, your emails, your social media, your podcast, hearing you on some other, other media channel, every single interaction shapes their view of you.
RV (15:28):
And you gotta be mindful of that. And you, your team’s gotta be mindful of that and your copywriters and your graphic designers and your video editors. Like everybody has to be super mindful of that. That is creating the customer experience. So what experience are you creating for your prospects and your customers? What energy are you giving off? Is it uplifting? Is it inspiring? Is it positive? Is it trustworthy? Is it credible? Do you follow through on the promises you make? Do you do what you say you’re going to do? Are you adding value? Are you giving first? And, and I loved, you know, tactically, what Shep was saying is create a journey map, create a, create a journey map around just going, what is every single touch point that a client might have with you and plot the entire process it’s big and it’s long, and you go, we got to optimize each one of those touch points to maximize the customer experience.
RV (16:27):
Make sure you’re responsive. Make sure you’re, you’re quick to get back to make sure that your emails, your voice, your energy for yourself, your team, your website, your salespeople, your videos, that they are all in alignment with the values of your company and with the reputation that you are wanting to build every single touch point, day in and day out. And that’s why we keep coming back to you every single week as part of this podcast, which hopefully if you’re loving this, would you do me a favor and just tag someone and share this with somebody who you think needs to hear this this episode or any of our other episodes. We want these to be touchpoints for people and, and we want them to be valuable to you, and we want you to keep coming back. So we’re striving every single episode weekend and week out to make it more valuable. Let us know how we can do that. Also leave us a review on iTunes and all these things that we talk about is super helpful to us and create your customer journey, map, optimize your interactions and keep showing up, keep adding value. Keep coming back. We’ll see you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 204: How to Start a Keynote Speaking Career with Shep Hyken

RV (00:07):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon. I love
RV (00:55):
When I get to introduce, to introduce you to some of my long lifetime or career long friends, and that’s what we get to do today with Shep Hyken Shep is one of those people who is amazing. And he truly is out there as a leader in his niche and his vertical and this entire industry. And a lot of people say, they’re speakers. And I know if they’re really speakers by whether or not I speak on the same stages with them. If I lose events to them, if I say, who did you have last year? And Shep is one of those guys where it’s like, oh yeah, we’ve had Shep. We’ve had him. We loved him. He’s here next year. Dah, dah, dah, dah. So he is a, in the professional speaking hall of fame. He is also a New York times and wall street journal, bestselling author.
RV (01:40):
He is a customer service and customer experience expert. And this is the author of several books moments of magic to a loyal customer, the cult of the customer several others. And anyways, we’re his here gonna share some war stories about how do you actually build a real speaking career? How do you, how do you actually sell, write and sell books? And and then also I think, how do we create a better customer experience as speakers, authors, coaches, financial advisers, small business owners, let’s call it for our customers. So anyway, Shep, welcome to the show, man.
SH (02:17):
Hey man, it is so great to be here, Rory. You’re awesome. I’ve known you for, I’ve known you for years. Many, many years. I was a kid. I was like, you were in the program when I first met, you know, you were running.
RV (02:31):
I was a volunteer that I was, I was, I was I think the first year I met you, I was the chair of the youth program because Eric Chester was like, you know, leading the thing or sometimes I got volunteered through it. But anyways man. Yeah. It’s, it’s great. So, and I would love to hear about your start to little bit. I think that would be helpful. You know, people hear these terms, New York times, best-selling author hall of fame speaker. Right. And it’s like, well, It happens overnight, right? Yeah.
SH (03:00):
It takes 20 years for it to happen overnight, but it happens. Yeah.
RV (03:04):
So how did you get, how did You get started? Like how did you get your first gigs? Like what did you charge? And you know, like in the very beginning, how did it come together?
SH (03:13):
I’m going to tell you everything, nothing will be held back. I’m going to speak a hundred percent from experience, no opinion. I want to give you data and information and if it works for you fine or not fine, if it doesn’t, but it worked for me or if it didn’t work for me, I’ll tell you that as well. So I’ve been doing this for quite a while. I don’t have gray hair that you can see, but 1983 was the year that I started my business less than a year out of college. And what had happened is go back gosh, 10 years, even before I graduated college, I was about 12. I started a birthday party magic show business. And from there I grew into working in nightclubs and eventually corporate events and other types of private parties, maybe for adult parties. But the point is, is I had a background in performing.
SH (03:59):
Now. All that meant is when I saw a couple of motivational speakers shortly, like I say, less than a year out of college, I thought I could do that. I, I, I don’t stage before. I, I, I, I think I could do that now. I just have to something I have to write about something and I don’t know what it’s going to be yet. And, and so understand that my parents taught me some great customer service skills when I was younger, like saying thank you, calling people up and asking them how they liked the show and getting specific feedback to make the show better. And I had no idea that was all about customer appreciation, process improvement, getting feedback, but that those are tenants of customer service. So I saw Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins and we all made, I hope most of us know who they are Zig since passed away, but Tom’s actually out there still kicking.
SH (04:46):
And I bought two items that night. I bought a set of audio cassette tapes and some of your audiences too young to know what that is. And there were eight of them. It was called see with the top, it was total motivation goal setting. I also bought a book how to master the art of selling. And I believe it’s still available today. And I read that book in about three days and I listened to those tapes over and over again, over the next maybe three, four or five days, I was immersing myself in Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins. And I went to the bookstore and I bought every, I went and I said, what am I interested in? I bought like three or four books in the entire, the entire bookstore business section was maybe six feet. It’s one shelf. That was it. There wasn’t racks and racks of books.
SH (05:32):
And I was drawn to the customer service experience books. So that’s how I decided I wanted to do this. And that’s how I, I kind of chose my topic at 22. You’re like early twenties, actually 22. When I saw them, I might, I did had just turned 23 when I started my business. Okay. And when I graduated college, I was asked to go to work for the family business, which they own gas stations and they own I mean, it was a small chain of station, so it was kind of a cool job. And I would go from station to station, a little dirty, getting, doing audits, going out in the, you know, checking the tanks and all that with the meter stick anyway base that was in June when I started full-time and in September they said, Hey, we’re selling the company.
SH (06:18):
I went, what am I supposed to do now? So I stayed with it for a short time as they won some things down. But that was it. I mean, a few months later I’m without a job, but that’s okay. I mean, I never really thought anything of it. I just thought this is all part of life and this is what you have to do. So when I went to the bookstore, I’m attracted to like in search of excellence from Tom Peters. And I believe Waterman is his name. And then I saw a couple of books by Ron Zemsky and Carl Albrecht on customer service. So I bought these books, read them. I said, this is it. And how am I going to get clients? And this is to your point, this is how I really got started. I went to the bookstore, I mean, to the magazine store.
SH (06:55):
And I bought every magazine. That was a business magazine, which was like, you know, there weren’t that many, I can’t remember what they were business. We, whenever they were, if they had a full page ad, I thought they’re big enough to be selling something. They probably got a Salesforce. Then maybe they need a speaker. And always the phone number was never the right phone number, take it to headquarters. It was like a call center. I went to the library. There was no internet back then. Remember you wouldn’t remember, you weren’t even born back then,
RV (07:25):
Were you? I was born in 82. So I was [inaudible]. I’ve
Speaker 5 (07:32):
Been in business almost as long as you are. That’s
RV (07:35):
Right. That’s right.
SH (07:38):
Anyway, I tore out all the full page ads. I went to the library and they had these directories. Some of them were on microfiche. Some of them were actually in big volumes of books that I can open up and find out who the current president C you know, executive VP of marketing, you know, all of the salespeople
RV (07:56):
To get clients, but you looked at it as like they’re advertising for, for them to become a client of yours. I love this. So you look them up and you’re like, this company must have some money. And so you, and so you look up their contact information every day and you could
SH (08:11):
See their sales and, and it was, you know, so I went to these directories and I made this list. I call it the target 100 and I made a list of a hundred companies. And I said and by the way, it took me, I don’t know, month and a half to go through. Because even though I said, I’m going to make 20 calls a day. You might only reach two or three people. And there was voicemail. There was no email. It was just, it was, it was, and I put everything in little file cards and I had my little tickler file and
RV (08:40):
CRM,
SH (08:41):
Like, yeah. So there wasn’t such a thing as CRM. Now I did get my first computer. One of my clients was Epson EPS. When they make printer, they also made computers and I, the guy wanted me to do a regional sales. So I went and did the meeting in exchange for expenses and a computer. And I remember my, my first database was floppy disks. All of the A’s were on this disc. The B’s were on this, this, this, oh, wow. Yeah. And so
RV (09:12):
Sorry. So you just called these people up and, and you said, you just said, Hey, I’m a speaker. And you just said, I’m a speaker. I speak on customer experience. And, and, and then you just, and they said, what’s your fee. And you just gave him some number and that’s how you start
SH (09:29):
It. And I don’t mind, you know, I share, I would tell you, I would share my number. It was $500 for a speech. And my goal was in 1983. Remember I’m only 22, just turning 23 if at the end of the year. So this is about, I would say the official start date of my business was I mean, I ramped up a little bit. I had everything ready to go, but August 1st was doors open. Yeah. And so for the next five months, my goal was to get at least two speeches. That would be a thousand dollars a month. I remember my living expenses with apartment and utilities room and board was about 11 or 1200 bucks a month. I had some money in the bank, not a lot. I said, but if I could make a thousand a month, I can make it through this year.
SH (10:12):
If I could make 2000 a month by next year, I’m in the profit zone. And I wanted to double every year. So I learned this from Zig. I created a ten-year plan from age 23, the age 32. Okay. And I hit that plan at around age. I’m going to say right around age 30 or so, I hit my mark five or six years. Yeah, well maybe more like eight, eight years, but it took eight years to where I’m ma so I had a thousand, 2,004,000, so 4,000 and then 8,000. And so it’s like, then I got a hundred thousand gross than a hundred thousand net. And then eventually my goal was a quarter of a million a year in income. And then when I hit that, I had to reset my goals. So that took me to age just under age 40. So now I had a goal for my next decade of my life.
SH (11:01):
And by the time I hit age 40, my goals were starting to change from 100% financial to lifestyle mixed with financial. I even had my wife tell me one day, chef, you’re doing really well. You’re working so hard. You’re never home. And one day you’re going to come home and nobody’s going to be here. The house will be empty. There will be no furniture and you will be on your own. And that was a big eye-opening, you know, whoa. I need to get some balance in my life because I was churning and burning. And but the part I was burning was my life was my personal
RV (11:36):
And all of this just comes from basically finding people that have meetings, contacting them, letting them know that you’re available to speak on X topic, which has not changed. Like it has not changed in 50 years. It’s, it’s, it’s the same thing now where you doing some speeches for free early on?
SH (11:58):
I, you know, I $500. It’s almost for free. Yeah. But, but I would do anything. I mean, it wouldn’t
RV (12:05):
Be considered that today, but back then, I mean, 500 bucks was still like $500,
SH (12:10):
Like making 1200 or 1500.
RV (12:12):
I mean, it’s still something. Yeah.
SH (12:14):
Yeah. And so yeah, the short answer is yes, I would do free. So between 1983 and 1988, I was really rogue on my own, no support. Nobody told me what to do about anything I had. I had found Dottie Walters, which is a name from the past, which you may or may not know. She was very involved in the national speakers association. She had a speakers bureau and she had a directory of other speaker bureaus. And somehow another, I came across her publication. So I bought her book. And so I was learning about the industry, but I was really out on my own, but in 88 I joined the national speakers association. And this is a, this is definitely a plug for NSA national speakers association in that even if you’re a coach, a consultant, even an accountant or a lawyer, if you go with the idea that all you’re going to do is learn how speakers market themselves. It’s the exact same way that every what I would call entrepreneurial and for lack of a better term, I’ll call it a practice type of business would market themselves. Yeah. There’s a lot of advantage there. Right. Anyway. And I would
RV (13:20):
Say too, when we, we S we talk about this a lot, that both, whether you’re cause a lot of our clients are financial advisors, they are accountants, they’re lawyers, they’re chiropractors, they’re whatever is that. And, and as a speaker cause, cause, cause our story about how we started would be very similar. We called out of the phone book, the yellow pages phone book, and we went and spoke for free. But even to this day, the fastest way to take, we tell, we say to clients the fastest way to go from being a stranger to a lifelong fan is a one hour presentation. And so if you just go deliver, I mean, in financial services, they call this the like dinner seminars they’ve been doing that for decades. It’s still work.
SH (14:04):
It does. And you know what, if so over the years a transition from me making those calls to my assistant, making most of those calls doing nothing, the only people I would talk to is if it was set up in advance is an appointment to talk to someone. Not because I’m a that was just seemed to be like, it’s hard to not know because
RV (14:24):
You’re a prima Donna, even though you are, but that’s not why
Speaker 5 (14:28):
You did it that way. It’s not because it’s
SH (14:30):
The same way. Right? It’s positioning you, you know, the guy who’s groveling for money is probably not the expert you want to hire well and it saves you time. Yeah. And, and you know, it was, it was efficient by the way, in the beginning, when I didn’t have an assistant, I just doing this on my own. I would be really, really busy and then nothing. So what did I do here? And that nothing time I would get back the phone and smile and dial, and then I get really busy again. And then when that war wore off, because I couldn’t make phone calls and it was really hard to, to stay and do calls from on the road compared to what you do today. You can’t, we didn’t have a cell phone back then. So anyway, what happened over time is yes. I transitioned to my assistant making most of those calls today.
SH (15:13):
It’s a little different. I mean, my business today is tons of word of mouth. I am, I don’t consider myself just a speaker. If you ask me on the airplane, what I do for a living, I’m not going to say I’m a professional speaker who, you know, but we can get, well, what did you say? I w well, I would ask you a question. Have you ever walked away from a business or gotten off the phone and you thought, wow, that was an incredible experience. That was amazing. Those people are just unbelievable. And of course, you’re going to say, yeah, I go, well, that’s what I help my clients achieve. And it begs for how do you do that? And I said, well I actually write books and hundreds of articles on customer service and experience and companies hire me either to speak at their events, industry events, corporate events, or my trainers go out and deliver training. We have online on demand, virtual video based training, you know? So then we get into the how tos, but we want to set up like, yeah, I totally understand what that concept is before we get into how I do it. But I love that guy. That’s a cool, I love
RV (16:14):
That of going to the average person on an airplane. If you say a speaker, they go, oh, that’s cool. And they would be like, I can never hire you. I don’t know anyone who needs like, but if you go this amazing customer experience and they would go, you should work with my friend. Cause they S they suck. Or you, you would like these people because they really like, you know, customer experience. That’s great winds up
SH (16:35):
A conversation as opposed to a, because sometimes, oh, I’m a professional speaker. Okay. I don’t even know exactly what that is, but it sounds good. And I’m just going to start reading my book again. And by the way, I prefer if they would read their book and that just all
RV (16:49):
You have to do is tell them you’re a pastor or you sell insurance. Or if you say like, Hey, I, I raised money for political foundation. Then they stopped talking
SH (16:58):
To you. There you go. And we won’t say which one, if we can find out who they love, then we go the opposite direction, no matter who it is. So I can be conservative. I can be liberal, whatever it takes to get them to leave me alone. So, but all kidding aside today I’d even said it, you know, we’re coming out of the pandemic, right? And we need to spend more time doing the direct interaction we need to get back in front of our clients. That’s not going to happen by hoping the phone’s going to ring. It’s going to happen because we’re emailing more. We’re going on. Linkedin. We’re finding people that whose titles and their companies match up with my criteria. We’re asking them, Hey, we’re just connecting with people that you think would be interested in my content, you know, or you and I were talking about our annual reports that we’ve created from studies, by looking at different parts of the population.
SH (17:52):
Mine is on customer service and experience. So last year we created the achieving customer amazement report. And we went out and did a study of a thousand consumers, you know, weighted to the census of the U S and we’ve got great insights. That’s what we send to our potential clients. They go, wow, this is pretty interesting. What would you like to talk about it and how it applies to your business? No charge. I would just like to learn what you do. You learn what I do, and maybe we work together. Maybe we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’re all friends when it’s over. And the LinkedIn is the new telephone. And it’s great because it seems like the response, first of all, you can send out a lot more queries through LinkedIn or, or make more potential connections. The percentage of getting responses are much higher, you know, based on the effort you put in, I might make a hundred calls in a week.
SH (18:40):
And I’m lucky if I talked to 10 or 12 people, and I’m lucky if it goes 12 people, maybe one of them, maybe two could be interested. And if I can amass a group of about 20 people that might turn into one or two speeches of those people that are really interested. So I actually had, at one point we tracked every number and that’s so important to track what works and what doesn’t work. So as I learned from going to the national speakers association conferences, when I make those calls, there are certain questions that I want to ask that qualify them for me. Now, I got to know my industry pretty well. So I would ask, do you hire professional speakers? And if they say, no, what’s a professional speaker, then we know they’ve not paid for one. I’m happy to explain it to them, but I’m very quick to get off the phone because I don’t want to make a two-step process in the sale. I don’t want to convince them they need to spend money and then convince them it’s me. They need to spend, I just want to find out if they go, yeah, we’ve hired speakers. Well, tell me who you’ve hired. And sometimes they’ll tell me, well, we brought in our best customers. Well, that’s not a professional speaker, but if they say, yeah, we brought in Rory Vaden, or we brought in, you know Scott McCain or Jay Baer, all my friends, I knew
RV (19:52):
Awesome. They got at least 500 bucks. If they’re bringing, if they’re pulling in those guys, they got at least 500 bucks,
SH (19:59):
Right? So, I mean, the time I got to NSA, true story, I was charging a thousand to $1,200 a speech in 1988. And when I joined NSA. So you remember I did magic as a background. I was still doing some magic shows, but I said to myself, as long as they’ll pay me the same thing as it is to speak, I’m happy to do that magic show. So for a thousand dollars, that’s a great gig for a magician. But as my fees started to go up, not a lot of people willing to pay a thousand bucks for a magic show. So I, when I joined NSA, I found a mentor. His name was Phil Wexler, still around, just as birthday, the other day, same as mine and Phil. I went and we did it. I recommended him for some speeches. And he said he was going to send me a commission.
SH (20:45):
And he owed me quite a bit of money. And it isn’t like he owed me money, but he would have paid me that money. But I said, before you write the check and send it to me, would you keep it? But I want a day of your time. I flew out to San Diego. I spent an entire day with him. And when I came back, I tripled my fee. I said, no more magic shows. And I became laser focused on just what I wanted to be hired to do. Now, could that have happened a year or two earlier? Sure. But it doesn’t matter. I was doing pretty well. Anyway. I was booking 150 dates a year. Things were good and I was making a thousand, 1200 bucks a speech. So I went up to 3,500 and never looked back. It was a little scary right away because I lost all of these clients that were used to paying me lower amounts of money.
SH (21:30):
But with by the middle to three quarters of the end of the year, I was making a gross wise as much I’d made the following year. And of course, you know, now we’re, we’re in that sequence. So it worked out real well. But the point is, that’s what I did to get started today. It’s, it’s content marketing. I really think of myself more of a media company than I do a professional speaker. And I do have a business versus a practice. Now, the speaking is like a practice. If I don’t speak, I’m not getting paid, but I’ve got trainers out there delivering my content. We’ve got influencer activity where I’m hired for several months to tweet, write articles. You know, we’ve got all kinds of, I have seven different streams of income that help offset, you know, areas that might get hit hard by a pandemic or by an economic downturn. Yeah.
RV (22:25):
Well, and I think it’s just an interesting shift in general. Like, you start out going, Hey, I want to be a speaker and you, you and I have this in common. I think there’s less and less people today. Maybe not, maybe that’s not right to say, but it’s not like, oh, I want to be a speaker anyways, you and I started going, I want to be a speaker. And then it kind of has it evolves to more of like, I’m not marketing myself as a speaker, I’m marketing my expertise of which I can deliver that to you in a variety of different mechanisms or mediums or, or outlets. And do you think that’s a necessary evolution that that happens or do you think there’s power in just going, Hey, if you want to be a speaker, just market yourself as a speaker, go knock that down. And just, that is what, you know, that’s what you deliver and that’s, that’s the only thing you do.
SH (23:16):
So a great question. And I think the answer really lies in what you want and where you are in your career. If you are an executive who worked as a high level executive fortune 100 company, and you’re at about age 55 or 60 and ready to hang it up whoever that executive is, he, or she might say, I had a lot of experience. People are willing to pay a lot for that. I’m done with the corporate world. I’m going to just go out. And this is kind of like my retirement you career, then it’s okay to have that practice. And I’m totally cool with that. You may be in that world where you’re, this is what you love more than anything. And I say, go for what you love. And if you can make a living at what you love and you actually have stability in it.
SH (24:00):
Great. What concerned me is that I know we’re not invincible, so you always have to worry about, am I properly insured either through life insurance, health insurance, you know, business interruptions, insurance, that kind of thing. But you also need to realize that, you know, you’re not in control of, you know, a pandemic shut people down for a year. You know, I know people that had the leave, the speaking business because they never did. I thought they were successful, but they didn’t save anything. And they weren’t prepared for a downturn. Well, maybe they think, oh, how long could it last two or three months? I was kind of thinking we’d be back in March. Oh, well you backed by September. Right? I didn’t realize it would be September 20, 22, right. Or whatever it is when he went. But anyway, I digress. So to your point, the question is where do you want to go first, 2000 nine 11, 2001.
SH (24:55):
Was it, was it? Yeah. And when nine 11 hit nine 11, 2001. Yep. Yeah. So in December of that year, I’d already signed up to spend the weekend with needle Cobain. We all know Nieto in this, our industry, he’s a guru. And one of the exercises he had us do is an amusement park exercise. And he says, draw your business. Like it’s an amusement park. Now I started in 1983. This is 17, 18 years later. Right. My amusement park, I thought of it in terms of like six flags. There’s that big stage, the main stage where they had that show. And then as you walked out, there’s a gift shop kind of like even going to a Disney, you know, going on the ride and then you have the little gift shop. And then my amusement park had nothing else around it that was in the parking lot.
SH (25:38):
But then I looked to the guy next to me and he was drawing an attraction here in the corner. And another one, I go, what is that? He goes, this is a mastermind group that I put together of my top clients. This over here is a membership group. I created that has, you know, 500 members that are paying me X number of dollars a month. And he had these four or five attractions. And I looked to the guy next to me, same kind of thing I want, okay, what are they doing? They’re bulletproofing themselves from having this as part of their business being wiped out because they have other areas. So I quickly pivoted, if you will, I hate that word because like you turned your back, but I was flexible. That’s the word I showed flexibility. And that I said, I know what I’ll do.
SH (26:20):
I’m going to create a training program from my speaking. By that time I’d written no, maybe two, three books. And so I went to a course designer. I found a freelancer and for about 3000 bucks, maybe 3,500 bucks a week, much more than that. They wrote my training for a two hour, half day full day and gave me ideas for multiple day programs. And then I went out and did my first full day training program. I hated it. It was like, I got to talk for a little bit. Then I have to let them work. And then I got to listen to a lot more that keynoter. But the brilliant thing was I started hiring other people to deliver this content because it was written with the idea that a person who could just pick up a facilitator guide, study it and go do it if they knew what they were doing.
SH (27:04):
And that started the second phase of my business because we were in my mind, one terrorist attack away from the annihilation of being of going to a hotel to have a big meeting, because nobody was going to put their sales people on an airplane or send them to a hotel where, you know, somebody could detonate a bomb and wipe out their company. And I know that sounds morbid, but that was the way I was thinking one terrorist attack away from the end of my business. But as a trainer, I could send trainers to their offices. They could have a training room and my people could train their people. And that’s really what started the expansion of my business. So I, you know, what’s right. It just depends what you want to do, but realize as you get into business, you know, Rory asked me how many people I have working for me,
RV (27:51):
How many people you have working for you about half of them.
SH (27:56):
But seriously, when you want to get into doing this, you start to hire other people and you can hire freelancers, but you’re still hiring a force. And you want to try to, you have to keep motivated. You have to meet. It’s a totally different game. I enjoy that game. It’s fun to me. So that’s where I am today. We’ve evolved to I have seven ways that I make money speaking, sending out trainers on demand, video based training selling books when they come out, by the way, new book coming out, I’ll be back how to get your customers to come back again and again that’s book sales influencer role where companies now hire me just to have me tweet about them, write articles about them, because I’m considered a thought leader in my space after all these years sponsorship, if you go to my YouTube channel, you might see a little ad sponsored by whoever the company is. It’s sponsoring me that month. And we have them sponsor my blog, my YouTube channel, my podcast, et cetera, et cetera. And, and so we’ve got packages for that is that six. And then, oh, number seven is special projects. Like we’ll do special video projects or consulting type projects for companies. So interesting, but it started with
RV (29:07):
One, it started really as a speaker at the speech. And then, and then you, you expanded and turn that expertise into something else. Wow.
SH (29:15):
Well I love
RV (29:18):
That ship. I mean, this is, this is super interesting and I think powerful for anybody out there, you know, going okay, how do you get started? Cause to me, you know, you did this in 1983. You know, I would, I would say for me, I did this really, I feel like between 2006 and 2000 and, and maybe 12, 2 13, and there’s not that much difference. And there’s not that much difference from today. It’s like, you got to find some people who need what you have, let them know you have it and then do a really good job delivering it. And like was pretty much that’s all there is. And then you just do it over and over again. And then at some point you get other people to do it, to do that, to do all of those same parts. Yeah. If you want to, if you want to go that route. So it, I think it’s, it’s super encouraging. And yeah. I wonder where do you want people to go ship if they want to connect with you or like learn more of what you’re up to?
SH (30:17):
Sure. Go to hike and.com pretty easy. H Y K N. There’s lots of free resources. You know, I give away pretty much everything I have. From there you can find my YouTube channel, but it’s, you know, I have 600 videos on YouTube. People watch him chairman meetings. My goal is the more you give, the more you get, they come back and give you information, you know, book you to, to share their information.
RV (30:42):
Well, and I’m, I’m curious to know, okay, so what is you? We didn’t really get into the customer experience stuff too, too much. But what would you say is one great customer service tip that personal brands could do immediately just to like, whether it’s love on their clients or love on their team or like when you go, okay. When I think of like all the speakers, coaches, consultants, practices out there, this is like a small business tip that you go, oh my gosh, like, this is a, you could just do this right away and it’ll make a, make a huge difference in your, your expense.
SH (31:17):
Well, I’m going to give you three. One is kind of strategic and this must always happen. One is a bigger project and one is something you can do right away. And I’ll do them quickly recognize that every interaction that you have with the customers, an opportunity for them to form an impression about you. So manage that interaction. It’s called the moment of truth. I can go on and on about that one, but you get the ideas. You need to see what every interaction is now. That’s number one. Number two is how do you look for those interactions? Create a journey map of every interaction that your clients would have of you from the time they might see something in a website, search on Google to get to your website, how they get to you, you know, do they reach out to you via email phone and the whole plot, the entire process, all the way to where they book you, and then what happens after the booking or what happens, where they buy you or after the sale. And so that’s number two. And that journey, map process is going to take awhile because you think you got it. And then you’re gonna find more and more and more, every little tiny interaction counts. And number three, just return people’s emails and phone calls immediately. And you’ll see what a difference that makes you can do that. Starting this moment.
RV (32:29):
Huh. That’s funny. That’s a big one for AIG. She’s super big on responsiveness. Just even you let them know, Hey, I’ll get to you. Like I saw your email, I’ll get to it tomorrow. Like yeah.
SH (32:40):
You know, it’s holiday weekend. I’ll call you first thing Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever it is. Yeah. Which
RV (32:45):
Is interesting. Cause like, you know, I think of all the people we hire that are vendors, contractors for the house, for the business. And it’s like, the number one thing is like, are they staying in communication with us? So that’s really great. Well, hyken.com. Y’all we’ll put a link to that. You can follow him, get a lots of awe. I mean his, his depth of knowledge and expertise around the customer experience, you can see a super powerful chef. Thanks for sharing. What I think is probably the, not so often shared story about how you got started in this career and have built everything that you’ve become, man. We wish you all the best.
SH (33:17):
Thank you, sir. Great to be here.

Ep 195: How to Dominate Your Niche with Chester Elton | Recap Episode

RV (00:02):
Chester Elton was our guest this week on the influential personal brand. And this is the recap edition of that episode. I am joined by my partner in shine, AJ Vaden we’re breaking down the interview because you know, we both know Chester for a really long time. We haven’t seen him in a while, but he was an influential person in our, in our life. And so it was great to reconnect and Aj, welcome to the show. Looking forward to getting your thoughts on this,
AJV (00:32):
Looking forward to giving you all my many opinions.
RV (00:37):
Yeah, so I think looking back at this episode, to me, it really was about how to dominate a niche. And that is something that chester and his writing partner business partner, Adrian have really done. They’ve, you know, they were the carrot guys and they carved out this like very specific niche that they have just dominated for decades at this point. And my first big takeaway, which is going to be something near and dear to your heart, AJ I know it’s just having proprietary data helps you dominate. And, you know, I look at when I look at some of our, the most successful like speakers specifically that we’d know, I think Sally hogshead and Jason Dorsey and I think David horsehager and Chester Elton, and it’s like these folk, Tom Rath, these folks have proprietary data that really is real data. And it really helps you kind of like define a niche. I also think of Michael Stelzner does this really well with social media, Chalene Johnson
AJV (01:46):
And the list goes on.
RV (01:47):
It goes on. So that was my first big takeaway. And I know obviously in the, not so distant past you lead our national research study trends and personal branding. And so I, I figured, I don’t know if that stuck out to you, but that was a big takeaway for me.
AJV (02:03):
Yeah, that’s that was my first point, probably in a little bit different context than you just shared. But I did, I literally highlighted this quote with that having proprietary data helps you dominate period. It helps you dominate. It helps you get on media and helps you clarify your niche. It helps you reach a new target demographics. It helps you with credibility. It helps you in so many different ways. It helps your content strategy. Like there’s countless ways that it helps. But one of the things that really stuck out to me that I thought was really important in this interview is that EBIT, it’s not just having the data. You have to understand the data and that data gives you credibility, but it’s not necessarily the data points that people remember. It’s the stories that people remember. And because you have what your job is as the owner of the data is to learn how to truly understand RVit and interpret that data to the general public, and then take that and create a story with that data that helps your audience.
AJV (03:16):
So to me, it’s like having the data is the given it’s the requirement, it’s the necessity. We’ve probably heard it 12 times this year. So far, that data is the new differentiator, right? It is the new competitive advantage. It’s like information and data and proprietary data is the new competitive advantage. But having the data really isn’t good enough, right? You have to understand the data you have to interpret. The data we have to do is take that data and create stories. That mean something to your audience, because it’s the stories that they’ll remember. And so, as an example from this interview, I thought these were some things that stuck out to me is that he had, they had a a hundred thousand people take this motivators assessment, right? And of that 18% referenced, severe anxiety at work. But by 2020, that 18% had turned into 30% of the workforce.
AJV (04:24):
But then if you just parcel that out and just look at millennials and gen Z, it was 42%. And the story that really started to form for me is, you know, our, our kids are the generation right after gen Z. So I’m like, well, gosh, what if like, if we don’t start making some serious changes, like what does that look like for my kids? And what you’re saying that we’re telling these young people who are graduating high school or college, or, you know, trade schools were saying, the moment you entered the workforce, almost half of you will experience severe anxiety.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
What, so
AJV (05:05):
Those are the things to me, it’s like, it’s the data, but it’s really the story that the data tells that I think you really have to own. So I know that was a long point. I’m like the other one’s shorter, but that was most significant to me. Yeah,
RV (05:17):
No, that’s, that’s good. I mean, it’s hard enough to get data and then it’s hard to interpret it and make it and make it applicable. And that’s one thing that they’ve done. And, and so I thought that was good. So the other thing that stuck out to me from this specific interview, obviously Chester and Adrian have sold, sold a lot of books and they’ve gotten a pretty sure portfolio is, is who they publish with, or have published most of them with. And just, just a good reminder, which we know. And we, we talk about and we you know, we teach people, but what publishers are really buying is your marketing plan. It’s it’s the, the author’s job is to sell the books. And we actually did our bestseller launch plan event last week at the time of get compared to this recording when, when we’re actually recording this. And one of the things that we said, which we’d never really said before, so clearly is that most authors build a book and then try to build an audience. And it’s extremely difficult. Like you have to build the audience first and then build the book for the audience. That’s how the book, that’s how the book becomes successful. And so anyways, I just thought that was a good reminder as always to, to just go, yeah, like a huge part of this is just marketing. Not necessarily who has the best ideas.
AJV (06:39):
No, I think that’s really good at that. Did not make it on my top three lists. So that’s, that was good.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
I didn’t even pick up on that,
AJV (06:47):
But that’s true, right? It’s like, if you have the audience then it can carry any product or service versus build the product and then try to build the audience. That’s really good. No, my, my second thing is probably just something that resonated with me stronger is that if you try to be too many things to too many people, you become nothing, right. If you become too many things to too many people, you become nothing. And I love this. And he said, it became really clear to Chester that the place where business people go, his audience with LinkedIn, and we’ve had this discussion in our house here recently
Speaker 3 (07:25):
About like, think about it. All right. So that’s probably
AJV (07:28):
Why it just really stuck out to me is that, you know, linked in is the place where this professional crowd goes to source information, find service providers, you know, do all the things. And it’s not that Instagram and Twitter and TechTalk and Facebook and YouTube, aren’t other really important platforms. That’s not what I’m saying. But I thought this was just really good is that you got to figure out where’s your place and what is the thing that you want to be to your people? And what place are those people going? And, you know, he said it was LinkedIn. So we went all in on LinkedIn and because they went all in on LinkedIn they got into this influencers program and because they got into this influencers program really, really early, they got more opportunities and then more opportunities and more opportunities.
AJV (08:18):
And to me, I think that just is, it speaks really, really clearly to a lot of our audience where it’s so overwhelming to think about, okay, I’ve got to create content for all these different platforms. And some of it needs to be original, some can be repurposed, and then I’ve got to do all these things and all these platforms, which is, I think is really important. Right. And I think you do need to be all the places, but it’s how much of you needs to be in all the places. And what if you just said, okay, I’m going to do what I need to do to make sure I’m spreading my content everywhere, but I’m also going to go all in on the one platform that I most resonate that my audience modes, my audience most resonates in, and I’m going to just like double down on that. And that was LinkedIn for them because they said, that’s where we found that business people go. So that’s probably also my platform, which is why it stuck
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Out to me that it was really just
AJV (09:08):
A great reminder of you don’t have to be all the places all the time and be all the things to all the people. Yeah,
RV (09:14):
No, I think, I think that’s, I think that’s true. I mean, for me, like, I, for whatever reason, I’m drawn to Instagram, like just the usability of it. We post stuff on LinkedIn on Facebook, but like I spend most of my personal time on LinkedIn and I think it’s sorry, did I say Lee? I said, LinkedIn, I meant Instagram. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas you’re, you know, you’re more on LinkedIn and I think, well, it’s interesting when
AJV (09:38):
It comes to personal I’m on Instagram way more.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Right, right. That’s really cool. But
RV (09:45):
Your voice as a content creator is more for LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, to that note, so this was my third takeaway, which it was powerful to hear him say this. Cause I’ve, I’ve thought about this before. And I’ve, I’ve kind of heard some studies, although they seem not super reliable, but that it takes four or five impressions for someone to buy your book. You know, and I’ve heard all sorts of numbers. That’s why I’m saying like, there’s a, for different studies quoted on this, but not in any that were totally authoritative that I feel confident repurposing here, but just as, as a kind of like a general you know, anecdotal, anecdotal kind of an observation that he was making, which I would totally agree with is that, you know, people have to see you in multiple places. Like it’s not just enough for them to be like, oh, I saw you, this, this one post from you over here.
RV (10:42):
Like that’s not really when they buy it’s when it’s like, oh, I heard you on this podcast. And now, you know, I just saw your book on a shelf and Hey, here you are. Here’s an ad for your webinar funnel in my feed. And oh, look, you’re speaking at my company’s event next month. Right. And it’s like, that kind of triangulation needs to happen to where you really start, I think, breaking through the wall and creating massive gravity. So, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like figuring out what, where you can, you can dominate well, but also when you do this, you kind of start to surround people. And just, just knowing that if people buy from you, they typically aren’t going to just buy the ferry first time they see you. It’s going to be more of like millennium, multiple impressions. I know. Talk about
AJV (11:28):
That. No, it’s, it’s kind of like it’s like you intentionally kick in not reticular activation. Right. You know, it’s like, it’s an intentional effort to spark an individual’s particular activation where, you know, and it’s a real fancy word that I don’t use very often activating
RV (11:50):
System. It’s like a, yeah, it’s a neurological, like a, once you become
AJV (11:55):
Intrigued with something, like if I was shopping for a new car and I’m shopping for, you know, and in a new Infiniti SUV and I’m looking at white infinities, the next thing I know, I’ll see white infinities everywhere I go. And it’s like, it’s like now your, your mind has like tuned into like, oh, I’m noticing something that I didn’t notice before. And I do, I do agree that being in so many places really helps nurture that. And and it’s like, y’all all go all in, in one place. But that doesn’t mean you ignore all the others. So the third thing that I wrote down was two parts. And he said, the most important thing is consistency. And we have heard that from every single person who has ever been on this show
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Or ever in the history of life and
AJV (12:36):
Conversation. So that is not new, but such an important reminder across the board where like, if you’re posting once a month on LinkedIn, or once a week on Instagram, like that’s probably not going to do it for
Speaker 3 (12:49):
You to get you there. Don’t be frustrated
AJV (12:52):
When it’s not working. Right. It’s like, you know what? I’ve had clients before. It’s like, well, you know, we built it and no one came well, that’s not really how it works. It’s like build it and then market it, then promote it and then put paid ads to it and then talk about it everywhere you go. And then maybe people will come. But I also love what he said is that so much of it is trial and error. So allow yourself the grace to try and fail and then try again. And then sometimes when, but it’s trial and error for each of us and that’s okay. Don’t think you have to have it all mapped out and have it perfect. The first time some of this just is figuring out what resonates, where do people go? What is your preferred medium? And it’s like, but you got to do it consistently enough to even have an opportunity to have some trial and
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Error. It was just a little bit of grace and have a little bit of patience.
RV (13:44):
Yeah. I mean, amen to that. The consistency from a lot of it is just sticking around. I mean, tester spin at this a while as, as have, as have we as have most of our friends, really good
AJV (13:56):
Content and being super charismatic
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And like all the things that Chester is. So yeah.
RV (14:03):
Well so that’s it, you know, you’re, you’re hearing it and I think it’s great when you hear some of the same things, cause you go, oh, it’s not just one person. This is really the truth. And that’s one of the things that I love about this show as a listener is, is just hearing the real truth from people who are really out there with top, top personal brands. And they share most of the interviews we do on this show are not what they talk about on other shows like these they’re the content they share with us is it’s not what they write about in their books. They’re kind of giving us the behind the scenes journey. So I love that. We’re trying to do that. Hopefully you love that. And if you do, you know, put a shout out for us on social that we can, we can connect with you personally, leave, leave a review. And most of all, just keep coming back. We’re so grateful for you. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.

Ep 194: How to Dominate Your Niche with Chester Elton

RV (00:02):
I’m so excited to introduce to a long time friend and mentor of mine named Chester Elton. We haven’t actually talked for years, but early in my career, I talked to Chester several times. AJ and I talked several times with jester and he’s been a huge encouragement to me. And he’s a great example. Him and his business partner, Adrian of, of owning and dominating a space. Specifically when it comes to workplace culture, these guys have created the space they’ve owned it. They have data from over a 1 million working adults. Chester is the co-founder of a company called fine mojo, which is a global assessment company. He is the author of multiple New York times and wall street journal best-selling books including all in the carrot principle, leading with gratitude, and then their newest one anxiety at work between all their books. Adrian Gosick is his writing partner’s name. Their books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold over one and a half million copies. Chester has been on the today show 60 minutes. He appears in major media all over the globe and it’s just a really, really amazing guy. And so you’ve got to learn, gotta hear some wisdom direct from the source. So gesture, thanks for being here, man.
CE (01:24):
Well, Rory listen, first and foremost. Thanks for inviting me. It’s always great to reconnect with old friends and, and thank you for those kind words. You know, I, I look at the work that you and AIJ have done the stories that you’ve shared your ups and downs. You know, you’re never down, you’re never out, you’re always taking the stairs, see what I did there. And and I, I just love your spirit and the way AJ building your family and building your career. So a delight to be here with you today. Yeah.
RV (01:52):
You know, this is this is a funny fact that people probably don’t know, but one of the most influential ways you’ve been most influential in our life is you told us directly, we need to start making children. And that conversation stuck with us. So emphatic, like in our mind, because you were like, you have to have kids, you’re going to love it. It’s great. The world needs more children from people like you guys and just you know, so thank you for that. Cause I think last time we talked, I don’t think I had kids. You,
CE (02:25):
You did not. So I’m so glad that you took my advice. You know, it is interesting and it’s so easy to get caught up in, you know, what you’re doing and you and AJ, I love what you do. There’s nothing wrong with that. That sometimes you put aside some of the things that really make life rich and important than meaningful, and certainly that has to do with raising a family. And, and I know you love being the dad, you got two kids now, you guys are doing your part so good for you.
RV (02:52):
Yeah, well, we’re doing it. And you know nowadays we’re trying to help people build and monetize personal brand, which of course, you know, met, made for an obvious conversation with you. I know that anxiety at work, you said is your 14th book. And you know, one of the things that we’re always trying to help people do is figure out their uniqueness and find a space that they can own. And I feel like you and Adrian have always been so consistent and you know, owning the culture space, but also data. Like when I think of you, another part of your brand that really speaks to me is just like research and, and science and and the data component of it. I wanted to get your thoughts on how do you, how do you approach a research project? Like for the average person who isn’t, you know, you’ve got this long background in researcher and now you have your own assessment company. Like how do you set about you know, just kind of putting your mind around the idea of conducting research and what counts as research and, you know, how do you just, you know, think about it.
CE (03:59):
Yeah. A great question. You know, we early on figured out that the data gives you all kinds of credibility, right? And so Willis towers, Watson graciously gave us access to their database and international database on employee engagement. And that’s a very rich area to mine. As you recall, we started our, our writing careers around recognition in the workplace. We wrote, you know, the character principle and, and a carrot a day. And the daily, you can have guys for a long, a long time. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, if you, if you Google carrot guys, we, we, we pop up. And so recognition was the space where we really, you know, cut our teeth and then it became very obvious to us that it wasn’t the recognition space that we were really in. It was really the culture space because we never met a great leader, a great team or a great culture that didn’t celebrate their successes.
CE (04:58):
And so we transitioned from being, you know strictly recognition to being culture and our landmark book. There was the all in how the best managers create a culture of belief that drives big results. And that really gave us a bigger canvas to paint on. And that’s where we started getting recognized, recognizes, you know, as leadership gurus and culture gurus with, with with the global gurus list actually, and HR lists and, and on and on because of the research, it wasn’t a feeling. It wasn’t like, oh, this looks or sounds right. It was rock solid data. And when your database gets, you know, over a million, which is way more than you need as you well know it gives you that credibility. Now, what we also wanted to do was say, okay, well, what proprietary you know, insights can we have?
CE (05:49):
And so we developed our own assessment called the motivators assessment. If you’ve taken like strength finders, that’s what you’re good at, or Myers-Briggs, that’s who you are. The motivators assessment, we felt sort of filled in the gap between who I am, what I’m good at and tell me what I’m passionate about. And that’s that Venn diagram that if I know who I am, I know what my strengths are. And I can marry that with my passions. Boy, that’s productivity, that’s joy coming to work and all the things associated with it. So that gave us some proprietary insights. And then as we, as we started to publish more and more around teams and leadership leading with gratitude was a book. Our timing was impeccable, Roy, our, we, we launched that book in, in, in March of 2000. We bought every available front of store space at airports because that’s where people buy business books.
CE (06:42):
We even said, if you buy this book, we’ll give you a pair of gratitude socks, because this book will knock your socks off. And literally two weeks later you couldn’t find, you know, a mouse in an airport. And while this is in March of 2020. Yes. And so, and yet, and yet the timing was also good because it was a time where people needed to step back and say, I know what I’m losing. What am I grateful for? And it gave us a great opportunity to get out there with leaders and cultures and saying, yes, I understand that you can’t do a lot of the things that you used to do before. I understand that life is more difficult in homeschooling and so on. And yet in all of this, what are we grateful for? So it gave us a wonderful opportunity to take a deep dive into an emotional connection, to gratitude and leading with gratitude.
CE (07:31):
And we have some wonderful stories and partners, well, our publisher at the time and still is our publisher Harper business. Adrian and his son had been working on a father, son project around anxiety. Anthony constant. His son had suffered from severe anxiety since a little kid. One of my sons also at that happened and took the project to Harper business. And they said, well, this isn’t, you know, you have no credibility in the self-help section. This is a business book. People are suffering from anxiety at work, like never before. So you wouldn’t normally publish a book every year. A book is a big project. Well with COVID not traveling, not speaking, we had the time we cranked it out very quickly. And this is by far Rory our most important book. Our favorite book is leading with gratitude. Our most important book is anxiety at work because it is so mission-driven because it fits neatly under that umbrella of culture. You can’t have a high-performance culture. You can’t be a high-performing person if you’re suffering from severe anxiety. So the two married up so nicely, and we’ve, we’ve, we’ve had a lot of fun and a lot of success. So did you start
RV (08:41):
In assess, did you do how did you build, did you build assessment around the anxiety work to create, like, or did you pull it out of the motivators assessment? Is that where you pulled the data out of
CE (08:54):
Excellent question and wonderful insights? You’ve clearly asked a lot of questions before Rory you’re, you’re good at this. But what happened is with the database and we’ve had over a hundred thousand people take the motivators assessment is we were able to parse out generational differences. What were the generational differences in motivation? And then as we looked at the really current and timely research around who is suffering the most from anxiety at work, it was obvious that for, and I’ll give you some numbers just really quick in, in 2018, about 18% of employees referenced some kind of severe anxiety in the workplace. So one in five, basically by 2020, the middle of 2020 that had jumped to 30% overall. When you look though at millennials and gen Z, you know, early twenties to early thirties, it was over 40%. It was 42%.
CE (09:50):
On top of that, you took specifically millennials and gen Z 75% said that they had left a job recently due to a mental health episode. So really the number one issue in the workplace generationally, we were able to see those insights through our motivators assessments about what matters to you. It’s it’s family it’s impact. It’s learning coupled with outside data that said, this group suffers more than any other. And it was really remarkable confluence of, of data stories, interviews, and then tools to deal with, how do I reduce my anxiety in the workplace?
RV (10:29):
Interesting. How did you build the motivators assessment? Like what, what’s the, what did you do? I mean, obviously you go, Hey, let’s build our own assessment. You kind of figure out this space, you go, Hey, there’s a test that does this. There’s a test that does this. We would like to have a test that does this. And then what do you do after that?
CE (10:48):
Well, you go find people that build amazing assessments. And that’s what we did. We, we contacted gene graves and Travis Bradberry who produced the emotional intelligence 2.0 assessment. And you’ll love the conversation. And this is, you know, building your personal brand, right? When you’re building your personal brand, what is your niche? Where it can, as you say, where can you dominate? And then what makes you different than everybody else? And of course, having proprietary data does that in a brilliant way. And so you’ll love the conversation though. So we called up Jane and Travis and we said, Hey, we’ve got this idea. And you know, it’d be identifying people’s passions. It’s, you know what motivates me, put your passions to work. We self-published the book around that and all the training and so on it. And they said, yeah, yeah. So we wait two or three conversations and it was not an inexpensive proposition.
CE (11:39):
I mean, if you want to do it well and have a third-party vetted and have it be a valid assessment, you’ve it takes time. It, and you want experts in of course, experts are expensive. So they, it came down to this and you’ll love this Rory because you know, it really does come down to personal relationships and everything you do, right. They said, okay, well, we have three criteria as to whether it will take a project on. And they are, these said, first is, is it interesting work for us? So think about that. They said, we get approached all the time to do stuff like this. So first and foremost, will it be challenging? And will it be interesting for us to create this assessment? And the answer to that is yes. Secondly, is we have to ask the question, will it help people like, will it be helpful?
CE (12:26):
Well, it helped change the world to make it a little better place. And as we think about what you want to do and how we could put this together, the answer to that question is, yes, the answer, the third question is by far the most important, and it’s this, do we like you because you’re going to spend a lot of time together. Right? And if we don’t like you, it just will not be worth it. So luckily they check the third box as well. And it took us about a year and a half to develop it. We had a third-party vetted, did all kinds of alpha and beta testing. And yeah. Now we’ve got this wonderful assessment that gives us incredible insights, generationally industry gender and so on.
RV (13:07):
I love that. I mean, I think that it, thank you for sharing that because it’s really helpful to go, you know, for me to sit down and create an assessment that passes all the likes, statistical validity and probabilities and margin of error and all that is like super intimidating, but to go, oh, like anything, you pay some money, you hire, you hire the person and you go out and you get it. You make an investment and you get it done. And then you have this proprietary proprietary thing. So I, I love that. And I love what you’re saying about how proprietary proprietary data helps you dominate. So you create this assessment, you’re measuring a bunch of people are taking it. You’re drawing insights from that too. You’re drawing insights from that to create the books. How do you actually sell the books once you have them? Because it’s like, I feel like everyone that talks about books, it’s really about how to get the book, deal, how to come up with the idea, how to write the book, how to publish the book, but nobody ever talks about like, what do you actually do that sells books? Like that gets a lot of people to buy. I mean, you sold one and a half million books. Like how do you do that? Yeah.
CE (14:22):
Yeah. Yeah. I think we’re actually about 1.7 these days. I’ll tell you, you say, how do you sell a million books? You sell them one at a time. You really do. It’s really interesting, you know, back to the personal brand, then we’ll circle back to how do you sell books? It’s really interesting. Like you say, you know, you just don’t go create an assessment by yourself. You, you find experts. You know, you live in Nashville. I live in Jersey, in Jersey. There’s a that look, I know a guy who knows a guy, right? You get your network. I know a guy who knows a guy who can, can do that for you. You know what I’m saying? And so you do your surround yourself with really good and really smart people. It’s the same thing in publishing, you know given that we’ve written 14 books now, we’ve, we’ve made every mistake humanly possible, and we’ve actually helped about a dozen people get published.
CE (15:13):
And so you do your surround yourself with great people. I’ll tell you a really interesting story about leading with gratitude. We always hire a personal editor to edit our books. As, as you know, we put the concept together, we’d go to the publishers. They buy the idea. They buy the marketing plan. Not only do they need to love the concept, they need to love, how are you going to go to market? In other words, they can print it. They can get you a distribution. They’ve got a PR team that can help you, you know, get on the various podcast and get on various shows. And so it’s really up to you as the authors to sell the books. And so what does your network look like? So, you know, we’ve got 625,000 followers on LinkedIn. We’ve got an internal newsletter where we have just under a hundred thousand subscribers within LinkedIn.
CE (15:58):
We write business books. So we place our bet on LinkedIn. If you’re a different kind of author, you might play place your bet on Instagram or Facebook or whatever the point is is that, you know, find your community, build that brand in the community, build your reputation and then build your followership so that when you put stuff out, people will view it. It’s, it’s so interesting that when you build your brand first off, and we did this with an ad agency in New York years and years ago, when we were writing all our books with, with carrots in the title said, what is your noble cause? You know, what is it that really is going to bring people to you? Is it, you know, breast cancer awareness, right? Is it autism? What is it? And for ours was creating great, you know, great cultures where people were excited to come to work, where they believed what they did mattered.
CE (16:50):
They made a difference. And when they made a difference, it was noticed and celebrated. It was that simple. And it was great. That’s a noble cause. Then the second piece is, are you, are you the spokesperson or the spokes in our case, there’s two of us. And are you likable and never underestimate likable? You know, are you really emotionally connected to your cause? Do people want to hear from you? Do they trust you? Do they like you? And so we were able to check that box, you know, Andrea and I both, you know, very passionate about what we do. We’re also passionate about taking what you learned in the workplace, into your personal lives, to your families, making families stronger and community stronger. So this that check the box. The third one was really interesting. They said, do you have a symbol that people can rally around?
CE (17:40):
And you think about, you know, breast cancer awareness, it’s the pink ribbon. And then how that has manifested itself, when you can get the world’s toughest athletes, NFL football players wearing pink cleats, you’ve arrived. Right? And it was very identifiable. And so for us, it was the symbol of the carrot, which we continue to use in our work. And so on. It’s very simple. The carrot is that is the positive reward for, for all your hard work. We even created a little mascot. And that was the fourth thing. Do you have a mascot? A nice to have, not a must have. And so we have Garrett the carrot. So wherever we go and we engage people, we, we, we, we give them a carrot or, or a small reward. Well, as you build that brand and you build that network and that followership, then it becomes easier for you to say.
CE (18:26):
And by the way, if you understand the data, if you listen to the stories, which are the case studies, that data gives you credibility, the stories are what people remember. Then here are the tools and you find the tools in our books. So you’re going to want to buy the book. So, you know, you, you build your followership with your podcast, with your newsletter, with your followership on whatever platform makes sense. You start making lists, you get known as an authority in your space. You build that marketing machine and it makes it easier to sell books. It’s a lot of work because selling books, as you know, that’s hard work.
RV (19:04):
And is the, is the assessment, how does the do people, is the assessment free? Does it come with the book? Is it cause like some of them you have to buy the book and it comes with the assessment is, is like how do you do it?
CE (19:16):
Yeah, we’ve done all of the above. A very, we first published the book called what motivates me, put your passions to work in the code was in the book very much like StrengthFinders and emotional intelligence, 2.0 later, we actually pulled the book from the market because it was, it was cannibalizing our training somewhat. And then it was simply online. It’s a digital version. It’s very, very scalable. We had the the culture works, which was our training company. We’ve now moved to strictly a data company, which is fine mojo. And there is a freemium model. So you can go on and you can take the assessment and we’ll give you a part of the data. If you want the whole report, you pay a small fee to get that. And then the work that we’ve really discovered is very helpful with the motivators assessment is in building strong teams as a team leader.
CE (20:03):
I understand my motivators. Then I understand the individual motivators. If each person on my team and each team member understands their motivators as well. Now, it becomes really interesting when you start to bleed into other platforms and distribution models, we’re working on a very interesting platform right now on can we tie a platform where leaders can come in, adjust their behaviors, do very specific things, log that online, to reduce anxiety, to build stronger teams. And we’re hoping to launch that at the end of end of July. Well, that’s where you’re making a huge difference. And that’s where you’re using your data and your insights to then change behaviors for the better to create better workplaces, stronger teams, better leaders. Yeah. I love
RV (20:52):
That. So I want to ask you a little deep dive about LinkedIn, because you guys do dominate. I mean, you dominate on LinkedIn which you know, is really smart for what you’re saying. It’s like, this is where my audience is and you know, and I feel like, you know, you’re more there like then on Instagram, right? So it’s like, oh, sure. Yeah. You know, you go follow what you’re doing on LinkedIn. And you’re like, oh my gosh, these people are celebrities on Instagram. Not as much your audience, isn’t there to the same extent. So how do you, how have you done that on LinkedIn? Like, I’m, I’m curious specifically about what has worked well for you on LinkedIn.
CE (21:31):
Well, yeah. And, you know, cause you grew up in sales and I grew up in sales. You have to place your bed. You know, if you’re trying to be too many things to too many people, you end up being nothing to everybody. Right. And so it became very clear for us that, you know, LinkedIn was the place where business people go and we write business books. So it was a bit of a no brainer early on in LinkedIn. Again, this is, you know, surrounding yourself with really good people. So I had a very, a very good friend who worked at LinkedIn here in New York. And he literally, we go to the same church and he came up to him and he said, you know, I love your books. I love all the carrots stuff and everything. He says, you know, I’m at LinkedIn, they’re starting an influencers program and you should be an influencer.
CE (22:11):
So we got in very early, you know, when there were only a few hundred, then it went to be, you know, over a thousand and then they paired it back. Which was really interesting if you weren’t, if you weren’t using your LinkedIn influencer platform over a certain period of time, they, they pulled it. Which makes sense. You know, if you’re not, if you’re not going to use it, why bother? Why bother? And that was a huge break for us. Now you have to be invited to be an influencer. You can make yourself aware it’s an invitation. So again, if, if you say, oh great, I for example, I had an author contact and she said, well, I would love to be an influencer. Can you introduce me? I said, yes, I can understand. It’s an invitation. And as I look at your profile, you have 1500, or maybe she has 2,500 followers.
CE (22:59):
I go, that’s not influencer status. You know, you’re not going to become an influencer. If you have 1500 followers, you know, half a million is probably, well, probably 250,000, but you get, the idea is you have to have a certain amount of gravitas. And then that influencer program was a huge boon to us because as they would start to pilot new programs, they would go to their influencers. First, when they started to do newsletters, they said, we want you to do a newsletter. Is it crate? What is that? How do you do that? Right. So they’ve coached you through it. And they said, the great thing about a newsletter is when you post something, it goes to your followers, right? And to a fraction of your followers, really a newsletter goes to your followers inbox because they subscribed to it. They asked for it. And we started with a newsletter once a month.
CE (23:51):
And I think we ended up, you know, early on with like 1500 subscribers. And then every month we would publish, they would grow. And then they suggested that we go to twice a month. I think once a week is too much. I mean, I, I want to hear from my wife at least every week, but for me, you know, every week. And so we went to twice a week, well, we just passed the year benchmarks. So we had what we went to twice a week and that we have like 18 newsletters. We’re just under a hundred thousand subscribers where our message goes right to their inbox. They encouraged us to do a podcast, which we do with anxiety at work, wonderful guests. They said, we’re doing a LinkedIn live. We’d like to do a LinkedIn live show. We did, we have a LinkedIn live show every Thursday on leading with gratitude that then we turn into a podcast.
CE (24:42):
And so, you know, it’s, it’s layer upon layer upon layer as you build it up. So we’ve got our followership, we’ve got our newsletter, we’ve got our LinkedIn live show. We’ve got our podcasts. I started a really just goofy thing where when COVID started, I just post a photograph every day of something I’m grateful for. And it’s amazing, you know, you get 30,000 hits on that and depending what it is, and, and I’m probably like you I’ll post something and it’ll, it’ll go phenomenally well and go, well, what was it about that that made it great. And I can never figure it out. You know, I’ll write this article for our newsletter. And I think that is genius. Like Cheshire, you know, you’re gonna love it. You know, there was a viral for sure, there’s a Pulitzer. There’s gonna probably be a movie deal, you know?
CE (25:30):
And, and, and nobody, and it doesn’t resonate. And then you’ll, you’ll do something. I’ll take you 10 minutes to write and you put it and people go nuts. So the, the point that I’m making there is so much of it is trial and error. The thing is to really be consistent. So, I mean, every day I’m posting some little photograph every two weeks, we’ve got a newsletter every week. We’ve got a LinkedIn live show every week we’re dropping on our podcast. And, and that’s what you get to do a lot of places. Now, as my friend from Texas would say, it’s a long road to a small house, circling back to how do you sell books? Often it takes four to five hits for somebody to say, yeah, I’ll buy that book unless it’s your friend that says, you know what, Roy, you got to buy this book and say, great, I’ll buy. Other than that, you know, they’ve got to hear about it on a podcast. They see it posted in the newsletter. You’re doing an interview on another podcast. You’re getting, you know, on and on. It’s about four or five hits. That’s why you’ve gotta be in so many places. And that’s why, what you put out has to be quality work again, why we hire internal editors to make sure that not only are we, are we on message, the product that we’re putting out is world-class.
RV (26:43):
Hmm. Gosh, that’s so good. It’s such a good, such a good reminder of, of just the reality of, of, of what it takes. Thank you for this gesture. Where do you want people to go if to learn about you guys and your work clearly you’re on LinkedIn.
CE (27:01):
That part’s easy. Yeah. you know, LinkedIn is, is where you can find us all over the place it goes to get on.com is our website with our latest podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, anxiety at work, I highly recommend it. You know, the thing, the reason we’re so passionate about this particular subject and why I really encourage people to go there is that only one in 10 employees feel comfortable talking about anxiety to their bosses. It’s the number one issue in the workplace. And if you can’t talk about it, you can’t solve it. Do you know what I mean? We’ve got to create safer places. So I really would recommend that you listen to the podcast. So many leaders, many of them entrepreneurs who you would never think of had a bad day in their lives have suffered from severe anxiety. And by them sharing their stories, it makes it safe for you to share your story and to build not just a better place to work, but to build a better life. So LinkedIn gods to can hilton.com our podcast, sign up for our LinkedIn newsletter. It’s all real positive stuff and listen to Rory Vaden and whatever he does or whatever he says, just do it because he’s a great advocate for not just building better brands, but building better lives and always a pleasure to be with
RV (28:16):
You, right? Oh, I’ll, I’ll always a pleasure. My, my brother is good to see you and we’ll be watching closely and we wish you the best. Thanks so much. Take care and be well.

Ep 187: Success in Publishing and Humility in Life with Tom Rath | Recap Episode

RV (00:02):
Welcome back to the influential personal brand recap edition with myself. I’m joined by AJ Vaden, our CEO and my wonderful wife and amazing business partner. What an awesome episode, you know, I didn’t realize that Tom Rath has sold 10 million books, that Strengthfinders, that book has sold more books than like any other book, except like the Bible and you know, like a couple, a couple others. Uwhat a fantastic conversation. UI’m always amazed, I’ll say this real quick about Tom, before we jump into the three points and,uagent I’ll go, go back and forth, but I’m always amazed at his humility. It blows me away that someone that has sold 10 million books and yada yada, yada, he, you would not know it. You would not even know it in the conversation. And,ubut anyways, super practical, you know, just a goldmine of knowledge and, and a lot of things we could have interviewed him before.
RV (01:04):
Well, we actually interviewed him before on other shows that we’ve done, but this one was very focused on selling books. And how do you sell 10 million books? And the first thing that my first takeaway, which to me was, again, it’s just, it’s, it’s so simple, but so profound was, he said, make sure your book gives people something to do. It gives them an action. It gives them a behavior because it’s like when people do a behavior in their life, it is, it is evidence of the fact that this book has changed their life. It becomes a talking point to all the people around them. And it’s like a manifestation of your ideas showing up in a pragmatic way. And that is just such a simple idea that it doesn’t seem like that could be a secret of selling 10 million books, but that was the number one thing. He was super clear on it. And he’s like, look, the books that sell a bunch of copies, the five love languages, books like that. It’s like they infiltrate our everyday lives as behaviors. So I know that’s super simple AJ, but like that, that hit me hard.
AJV (02:14):
Yeah. You know, simple as powerful, simple also isn’t always easy. I think one of the things that is really important and, and all of this for us all to remember, and it’s like, you know, Tom said it in this interview and we’ve, we’ve had other individuals come over to the podcast and said very simple very simply like the key to having a best-selling book is to become a daily part of your routine. Right. you know, Hal Elrod talked about this with miracle, it’s about, you have to be a part of your daily routine. And it’s the same thing. It’s like, you have to create this way that it becomes infiltrated in your life. And so I think with, you know, StrengthsFinders, it’s like how many people just go like base interviews off of this? Big, this is a part of their interviewing and recruiting profile.
AJV (03:00):
This is a part of how they find coaches. This is how they view themselves. Or these are my strengths. And then all of a sudden you’re told something that you live into. And I think that it’s not just give them something to do, but it’s also give them something that’s based in data has I think, and perhaps it’s, I have a natural fascination with data like I do, but it’s give them something that’s founded and real data, not just opinions, but this is it’s researched and it’s founded and it’s valid. And it’s not just an opinion. That’s like, well, maybe, but maybe not. It’s like, no, it’s like, I got asked these questions. I answered these questions. It ran a little formula. There was an algorithm and bam boom, people love that. They love to know that there’s the solidity and that there’s some sort of data founded in these opinions and it doesn’t have to be huge.
AJV (03:52):
It doesn’t have to be an assessment or a test or a quiz, you know, as we’re talking about StrengthsFinder, but you find the people that thing that just fascinates them. And one it’s learning about themselves, right. Who doesn’t want to learn more about themselves too, it’s being a part of their daily life. Right. So giving them something to do, it’s being a part of the routine, but then three it’s something that’s actually founded in more opinions than just one. And I think that’s a huge part of, you know, also being a reader of, you know, Tom Rath’s work and a user of it. It’s like, there’s a lot of power and not just giving them something to do and being a part of the routine that it’s not just one person’s opinion, right. It creates this credibility factor that allows you to buy more into it because it’s somehow more credible or more valid. And I think those are all things that we can do. Right. We’ve had researcher, Jason Dorsey on our show before who’s also a good friend. Uwe recently did our own huge research study because we believe in this so much, but I think there’s a lot of power and going give people real data.
RV (05:03):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s so that’s so good. You know, as you were talking, I was thinking about the books in, in our life or in my life specifically that that have literally like changed my life. There are things that have infiltrated behavior. Do you know Dave Ramsey, total money makeover clearly the Bible, the you know, a lot of people talk about how Hal Elrods miracle morning, that’s a routine T Harv Eker secret of the millionaire mind. I still read my millionaire, mind affirmations from his book, which was like 15 years ago. I read that book. I read those affirmations regularly. So, so, so profound. A second, a second. My second takeaway, which I think is kind of closely connected to the first is give them a reason to share. So like give them a reason to do, it’s like, okay, that’s what am I going to change in my life?
RV (05:54):
But then give them a reason to share. And like you were saying, AJ so many people use StrengthsFinders, like it’s baked into their interviewing process. Whereas like every single candidate, they interview every single leader that gets promoted. They all go through this training because it’s, they, it’s just, the book is designed in that way. And they end to hear Tom say, oh yeah, that that’s part of the plan. Like you, you, you make it shareable and you, you don’t just think about what is a great idea you think about how could I package this idea to where it’s more like transmittable and again, super simple. And I, I almost feel a little silly that like, I haven’t had that thought myself before, but what so powerful, so powerful.
AJV (06:41):
Yeah. I would just add on to a couple of these things since they’re very similar, but I think one of the things that makes things shareable and my personal opinion is anything related to human discovery. It’s where one fascinated about learning about ourselves. And then we’re fascinated about learning about others. Like what makes them tick? Or why does this person annoy me? Why do I like this person? How was this person so successful? How did this person ever get in this situation as a, as a human being, we’re fascinated with discovering things about ourselves, how we tick, how we think, how we act, how we react, why some people act and think one way why others are good at other things, why others aren’t. And I think that that’s a part of what makes something sharable is this the human connectivity part. And it’s something that not just StrengthsFinders does really well, but clearly does very well.
AJV (07:34):
But you mentioned this earlier, the five love languages, right? Like we all want to know like, well, what, what is my love? How do I receive love? And what’s my natural way of giving it. It’s very fascinating. And then you’ve got programs like fascinate and disk and the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs, and you know, there’s, there’s dozens you, something we use in our company called the culture index culture index just become shareable. Why is because it’s about the human experience. It’s about human connection, the human psyche, and who isn’t fascinated about learning about the way you tick and others tick. And again, I said this earlier, but I really mean it, like, there is a way for any topic, every book, any product to incorporate the share-ability factor by connecting it to the human experience, what other than potentially fiction, which also plays at our emotions, which is a part of the human experience that doesn’t allow us to learn more about ourselves and each other. We just don’t market it that way.
RV (08:40):
Yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s super insightful. Like cause yeah, all of those books, I mean, if I have one more person asks me what my Enneagram number is, I’m gonna to, flip out
AJV (08:50):
Don’t you just tell us, put it on the record? What are,
RV (08:53):
I don’t know what it is like I actually forgot. I think I’m a three, I’m either a three or an eight I an eight. You’re not a eight.
AJV (09:03):
I’m an eight, but I think your secondary or your third was an eight, but I’m an eight. Yeah.
RV (09:08):
Well I know that, I, I know that I’m a C in disc, I’m a C D, but anyways, that’s, that’s just like, how can we educate our audience about the human experience? I mean, that’s really good that people are absolutely fascinated with it. Yeah. So love that. My last takeaway, which was very tactical, again, something I would, I did not expect him to say all, all, all three of these big themes were so simple that it’s kinda like what I thought it would be much more advanced with split test everything. I mean, split test everything. And we just live in a world where you know, I saw Donald Miller post this on Instagram, like yesterday or the day before. He’s like, Hey, I’m working on a subtitle for my next book. Here’s three options. What do you think? Then you get feedback. You can run ads.
RV (09:57):
You can cert you can send a survey, like be an email. You can do all of these different things, but you’re just split testing and letting the data I know AIG is like, yes, I I’ve been harping on this, like use data-driven data-driven decisions. It, it reveals the path. Like it just, it takes a lot of the, the risks. The other thing that makes me th whenever, whenever we think of data, I think of oh goodness, what is Adam Grant’s book originals. And, and his whole book is, is that, you know, basically the premise of the book is it’s not that the most successful people in the world just take risks. They’re not all just gamblers or risk takers. It’s that they take calculated risk. So you have to take risks, but it’s calculated risks. And, you know, to, to your conversation about the data and the study that we’ve done. And, and to hear Tom say that is like, gosh, we, we, I want to be more data-driven
AJV (10:59):
I love that. And my third one is ever so slightly different, which is a, it’s a question. That’s a question for all of you who are listening. It’s what are you doing? What are you talking about? What does your content do to start a conversation? And I thought that was so brilliant in this interview, as he just said, it’s like, if it starts a conversation, then it has value. So what are you doing that lends itself to someone going, Hey, I’ve got a question for the group I’ve recently been reading or listening to, or doing a course. What do you think about, or have you done this? It’s like what to Roy said, it’s like, if I get asked what might Enneagram it, and it’s just, it starts a conversation. So what, what is it that you’re doing that starts a conversation? Because it will go viral again, it says lead in point to this human connection, human experience of interesting things that are applicable to all of us, right?
AJV (12:03):
It’s not for one group of people. It’s for just the group of people and who we are and humanity. It’s like, what are you doing that starts a conversation, such a powerful question. And one that we should all take some time, you know, just sit sitting with and actually delving in and going, okay, what is it that I’m doing, but actually starts the conversation. And what conversation do I want to start? And how does that connect with my personal brand? And to me, I thought that was one of the most powerful things. That whole interview,
RV (12:35):
Love it. Go listen to the interview. I mean, where else can you talk to someone about how they sold 10 million books? Not a lot of people have that and are willing to share as openly and generously as Tom did. So we hope you get value out of the episode and this one and everyone. So keep coming back here, we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 186: How to Sell 10 Million Books with Tom Rath

RV (00:58):
I am filled with joy to reconnect with an old friend who I never really knew that well, but I always found that he was so humble and gracious. Especially for his stature. You are about to meet Tom wrath and you probably will recognize Tom Rath. He has sold over 10 million copies of his 10 different books. And my favorite stat about Tom is that his book StrengthFinders 2.0 is the all time bestselling nonfiction book ever on Amazon. So, you know, we have a lot of bestselling authors, but Tom is the best-selling author. When it comes to non-fiction, of course, he spent over a decade at Gallup and you know, it was, it has been a senior advisor and, and a senior scientist there for years and years and years. He’s got degrees from the university of Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he’s written several books.

RV (01:58):

His first was, how full is your bucket? I interviewed him on my old podcast. When are you fully charged? Came out and he’s got a real passion for balancing productivity, with wellbeing. And you know, so we had a conversation about that and then we lost touch for a couple of years and we just recently reconnected and turns out he’s actually in the world of publishing among other things. He’s doing some leadership training, which you’ll probably hear about, but he’s in the publishing world and he’s helping other authors, you know, to do some of the things that he’s done. And anyways, just Tom is so good to see you and, and to be reconnected my friend, welcome to the influential personal brand.

TR (02:39):

Good to see you as well. And thanks for inviting me to join you.

RV (02:42):

So I only have one question, which is how do you sell 10 million books? Can you just give us the answer really quickly and like one sentence share with us secret?

TR (02:52):

You know, I think the reason that a lot for that number most likely is the way that a lot of the teams I’d worked with a Gallup over the years put together in addition to the concepts that went around the book about essentially focusing more of your time in the areas, we have the most talent over the span of a career. They were able to put together a pretty good application that in addition to just being a book and a concept, it gave people something to do. And so, I mean that, according to the latest numbers I’ve seen from Gallup looks like, I mean, maybe 10 million people have read that book, but I think over 25 million people have gone through that Clifton strengths assessment that goes with the books. And I think that’s really helped a lot of people to have a new lens into who they are and how they can contribute in different parts of their career.

TR (03:42):

And so it’s, it’s been fun for me to see that take on a life of its own. And it’s also been a really good learning for me around books and publishing where I think in, in this day and age where, I mean, it’s so much easier for any of us to just let the Netflix show play automatically. If you want somebody to really embrace and think about more learning oriented instructional type concepts, I think it always helps to give people something to do in addition to just something to read or listen to with the traditional books that you and I have been so used to.

RV (04:15):

Yeah. So I I’d love that. That’s fabulous. I mean, what what what that’s actually a very clear answer to. I was being kind of facetious, right. Tongue in cheek. That’s a very clear answer. And, and, you know, I think the assessment is, is very famous, right? I mean, StrengthFinders and, and, and that clearly 25 million people, how do you go about it? There’s, there’s two things. W you know, when I think of when I think of strength finders, which still to this day, I think it’s like almost every week sells, you know, 8,000, 10,000, 12,00 7,000 units every single week. I think of the research and I think of the assessment and those to me are two things that I would say are intimidating for authors, right. Let me just speak for myself and say, it’s somewhat intimidating to go. You know, if you don’t, if you don’t have that background of working at gala, or you don’t feel like, you know, assessments, what qualifies as valid and what isn’t, and, and, you know, are there, are there certain ways, and maybe we should talk about those separately research versus assessments. But you know, I, I’d love to just kind of hear your thoughts. I know you, you guys really started the whole Gallup publishing, you know, division while you were there and a number of the books, not just yours, but several others are really based in both research and then have, you know, other tools around them.

TR (05:41):

Yeah. You know, one of the things I’ve observed and I’ve probably like you, I’ve been a student of business and non-fiction books for 20, 25 years at this point. And I, and I speaking across all the books I’ve read and followed, I think the ones that I would say are true evergreens that sell year after year and decade after decade there, there are a lot of cases where it doesn’t require an inordinate amount of original or proprietary research, and it doesn’t require a lot of technology or a fancy website. I think a lot of those really timeless books that I think I’ve had some of the most influence on people, both personally and professionally, it’s about boiling down a few central or Seminole concepts. And then most importantly, giving people either a new lens to look through in terms of the way they act and think and behave on a daily basis or giving people something to do.

TR (06:38):

I mean, I look back at, I was just challenging a few authors that came to us and for one does to publish their book and said, you know, if you really go back and look, I mean, back the origins of mega business books, you start with one minute manager who moved my cheese, who moved my cheese was kind of essentially, it was like giving your employees a subpoena to say, you need to get ready for change and deal with it. Or you might not make it here. Right. And when we worked on how full is your bucket? I mean, that was the first book I ever really spent a lot of time on. And that was a, such a simple message. You got every time you interact with a customer or another employee, or one of your friends or your spouse, maybe it fills their bucket a bit, or it takes from it it’s rarely neutral or in between.

TR (07:21):

And what people at do. There was just an incredibly simple metaphor to help you think differently about each of your interactions with other people. And then when we worked on that book, one of the things I was kind of insistent on that people didn’t agree with me about it first was we had these drops that Gallup would develop, which was a simple note card. And it said, I it’s a drop for your bucket. And you just write in there, what you appreciated about what someone did during the day. And we put five of those drops in the back of every book and it costs another 30 cents or whatever, to put the packet in the back with all these drops, but that really caught on in public schools around the country. And so now you walk into almost any school district in America, I would say they have these walls with drops for your bucket.

TR (08:06):

And there’s a kid’s version of that book. And, and I don’t think any of that would have taken place if you didn’t give somebody something really simple to do. And so I think that’s just, that’s one small example of a book that caught on with something very simple that wasn’t entrenched in all of that research, and it didn’t require a complicated website or scientifically validated application, but I would challenge any author to try and boil their message down to something that basic. And I mean, you saw it with some of the activities and what color is your parachute? You see it with the five love languages it’s sold for year after year after year. I mean, I could go on about books that kind of sprint methodology and startups or lean startup where it’s, it’s a methodology essentially. And so I, I always authors to try and bring it back to something that basic that people can really latch onto and use with their teams.

RV (09:02):

Yeah. I, you know, it’s funny cause when I think about take the stairs, so one of the lessons that we use as a cautionary tale is my second book procrastinating on purpose, which I think is a much better book, a much much more original premise. Yeah, we did a Ted talk that did really well. It had a few million views, but it doesn’t sell as well as take the stairs, which is to me take the stairs is a much simpler book. It’s timeless principles. And yet to what you’re saying, I don’t think we did a great job necessarily with either of them in terms of like giving something to do, except the actual metaphor of take the stairs and doing things you don’t want to do. People do it even still, it’s been almost 10 years, that book has been out. People send me pictures, they tweet at me. Yeah. Took the stairs today in Minneapolis. And it’s amazing just the lifespan that, that has, like you’re saying not just an idea, but in action and exercise. So you’re, you’re saying it’s not so much about the science or the research methodology. It’s more about I guess creating some physical evidence in the person’s life that exists posts, reading the book versus prereading the book.

TR (10:23):

Yeah. I think that’s a really important thought in there or because my highest level goal with any book project I’m working on is that when someone finishes reading it, they do just one thing differently in their lives on a continuous basis. And I think even that’s a high bar, I most people put down a book before they even finish it. I think maybe a third of books get finished. And then if someone does finish a book, the odds of that actually changing their behavior might be one in 10. So, I mean, if you aim for something like that, and then you get a critical mass of people who start to have that conversation and share it with others, and there’s, there’s also something about the, share it with others because my, my second goal with any book would be that someone wants to have a conversation with a friend or coworker or colleague about it.

TR (11:13):

And so, and let me go back to health. Was your bucket for a second? We learned really early on when we started, but we poked. That was the first book we published is Gallup crest and w the whole time I’d been working on that book, the title I really wanted was why negativity kills. And so we agreed, we test everything at couch. So we put out 10 or 15 titles, got a big sample of people and said, what title do you like most, or suggest another one and an analyst who is working in gala at the time said, well, how about how full is your bucket? Cause it’s kind of based on that metaphor, I thought it was odd and quirky and probably wouldn’t work, but we tested it and it crushed the title I had up there about 10 to one. And so sure enough, that was the title that resonated with people. And so I would also encourage writers to do kind of basic AB type methodology testing to figure out what messages do people remember and maybe give them a heuristic that’s likely to change their behavior, like taking the stairs really early on in the process. So now nowadays we test titles before we write books

RV (12:19):

[Inaudible] and then the share it with others. Part is the talk, tell me, tell me more about that. So you’re just saying like, is there a, is there a way of thinking and approaching the project or is it, is it just as simple as that going, how can I structure this concept in a way that it naturally facilitates a transference to someone else?

TR (12:44):

Yeah. And that’s, I think in the most recent book I worked on it, we were kind of publishing and then put on hold for a bit in March of 2020, it’s called life’s great question. But it’s a book that has a, an inventory that goes with it and it allows each person to put together a baseball card of how they want to contribute to a team or a project or a company. And we gave people two unique codes. They kind of scratch off in the back of that, so that they can sit down with a colleague and have this discussion about how each person can contribute uniquely to a team. And they kind of, in that way, you have a one pager for each person in a room when you sit down as a new project team. And so that was an attempt to give people an opportunity to share that code and to have that conversation.

TR (13:31):

And so I’m always looking for ways to kind of build that in both practically and back to your point about procrastination. I think you need to find topics that people want to have those conversations about. So, I mean, I could write a whole book on mistakes with publishing and writing books based on my experience. But one of the things I learned was I wrote a book. I think it was after help was your bucket called vital friends. And it was all about how to make more friends at work or how to have better friendships at work. And nobody really wants to have that conversation and it’s a difficult conversation to broach with another person. Right. And so, I mean, even though that would put a lot of research into that, where there was an application with that, I think you need to have conversations that are easy to move around that a manager wants to share the book with somebody on her team or a leader just naturally talks about it when they’re out in groups and circles.

TR (14:24):

And just an example from this past week, I had a colleague out of this retreat center that we ran and he kept talking, I couldn’t stop him from talking about a book he read, I think it’s called breath. And it’s all about a lot of people are talking about that. I mean, it just permeated our conversations for two or three days. So now I’m going to go read that book and the next time I get a chance, right. So you want more and more of that, it’s kind of that, that’s what leads to evergreen books in my, his organic word of mouth more than anything else.

RV (14:55):

Hm. So, gosh, that’s so amazing. And you know, I think in, in the, you know, I, I think I’ve taken the stairs and I go, gosh, that’s, that’s probably the luckiest thing that we just did. Was we just, it was just that metaphor of like, you take the stairs and your family’s like, what are you doing? And you’re like, well, I read this book, you know, I saw this guy and, and and, and, and then, you know we have one of our friends is Hal L rod. He wrote the miracle morning, which was, self-published a self published book, you know, has sold 2 million copies because he gives people this, this morning routine that they go through, Dave Ramsey’s you know, seven baby steps for total money makeover of how to get debt free. And you know, another friend, oh, go ahead.

TR (15:43):

Well, I was just going to try and I was going to add one there, you’re talking like that. I mean, the number of people that have done that whole 30 diet, and I think it’s because it’s such a quick 30 day regimen, so it’s kind of a practice like you’re saying. Yeah.

RV (15:54):

Yeah. Well, and, and so, and then Donald Miller, StoryBrand, you know, it was his, you know, his new, his first business book and he created this SB seven framework, which is basically like a checklist that you would fill in and he gave a tool to go. Here’s how to come up with the words you need to tell your story. I mean, they really, there’s a lot of really great examples that fit what you’re saying. Let’s talk about assessments for a second. How do you go about establishing in an assessment? I mean, does it, do you think there are help? I mean, are there certain like academic rigors that you think somebody has to take or is it you know, is it, is it pretty complex or do you think it can be very simple?

TR (16:43):

It depends on what you’re talking about. And I’ve spent probably too much time thinking about some of those distinctions or my career where, when I first started at Gallup, I was working with my grandfather, Don Clifton. Who’d been kind of a leading scientist in the strengths and positive psychology field. And he put together thousands of interviews for jobs over the years. So I was like, what does it take to be a great teacher? What does it take to be a great truck driver? What does it take to be a great chef and all these different talents? And so the project I worked on with Don, when I started there, it was could we put all of his ideas together in one big inventory or assessment and pull together a way to identify the most common human talents across all these occupations that he’d seen.

TR (17:27):

And so really it was 25, 30 years of his work that went into the creation of that one big assessment. And as we put that together with a leading academic at Harvard and a guy at UCLA at the time we test it with college students, a lot of the star, but all of the scientists at gala and I were looking at what are the liabilities, these themes or categories to make sure they were statistically distinct when you looked at this factor analysis across that. And so there was a lot of real scientific and academic rigor and even more decades of conceptual knowledge that went into something like that. So that I would say is a big endeavor, millions of dollars and decades of research go into something like that. And that’s kind of a dedicated assessment, obviously companies and governments and schools use all over the world. Now, I think if you’re looking more at a, what I would call a quiz or a test that authors can put together to give people unique insights around a book that normally doesn’t require all of the testing and all of the rigor and the background and statistics and scientists and those pieces. And I’ve seen a lot of good tools people put together, but I’d call them tools or tests or quizzes that give people practical and unique insights without doing years and spending millions of dollars on R and D. That makes sense.

RV (18:53):

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we had, we, again, just, we had one called the focus 40 and take the stairs that it was, you know, just to quit is a quiz. People love that thing. I mean, it’s crazy. They take it and, you know, there’s only like five things they to that’ll come out and they’ll spit out some, you know, a couple of words of encouragement basically for, and it’s amazing people, people love it, but to your point again, it’s like, it’s something for them to do to help them apply to apply all that information. But so, so if you, if you really do want to go through the work of creating, you know, a statistically valid assessment, then you’re probably partnering with somebody who is a, is a data scientist or somebody who knows statistics and that kind of a thing.

TR (19:40):

Yeah. And I mean, aside from the StrengthsFinder work that I know a lot about and is involved with, there are a lot of really popular a set personality type assessments people use out there that don’t have that much science behind them as well, but yet I’ve heard people say they’re very practical anecdotally. I mean, really from my vantage point, if something gives you more confidence in what you want to do and more self-awareness, and, or it leads to meaningful conversations with other people about how they can develop and how you can work together, that has a benefit. So I, I’m always trying to put things to kind of the test of practicality. And one thing I do, I mean, one of my concerns is like you were mentioning, everybody loves these quizzes because they essentially turn a mirror around and help you to look at yourself in a different way. Right. but in a lot of the work I’ve done lately and some of the conversations I’ve had, I really like to challenge people to look in more of an outward direction and spend even more time thinking about what the world needs, how they can make a contribution to that. Because I think we’ve, we’ve spent a lot of time looking inward in some cases.

RV (20:55):

Hmm. Yeah. I I’m, I’m excited about that. I noticed. So the, the theme, so life’s great question. And then also it’s not about you, which is a brief guide to a meaningful life. These are some of your, your newest works, right. Are they, did, you said you paused it,

TR (21:13):

It’s not about you as an exclusive project with Amazon published on the first of 20 January 1st, 2020. And it was kind of a short, shorter story preview of the ideas in life’s great question. It was kind of a story book. Hey, all, it was all just story and life’s great question had the research and the application and that inventory I was telling you about. And we were launching the live screen question book in March, 2020, and it had just launched. And then everything hit with the pandemic. And so we just kind of stopped all of our launch and publicity and all of my interviews turned into conversations about what do I do now that I’m at home with five kids and how do I manage? And and so we, I just went with the conversation and what was relevant to people at that time. And I think once people get back into the world of work, we’ll kind of relaunch that and get back into it because it’s a tool that a lot of people who did get their hands on, it found some benefit and based on my experience. So it’s, yeah, it’s, as someone who’s studied the modern workplace and the relationship between people and their work for the last 20 years, it it’s been a complete realignment of everything I thought new and really fascinating to study and watch over the last 14 months.

RV (22:27):

Yeah. Yeah. Well on that note, I have, I do have one other question I’d love to ask you before I let you scoot off, but the where do you want people to go if, if they want to connect into you, I know you have your leadership retreat center that you’re doing in Washington, like in the DC area where do you want people to go to connect up with

TR (22:48):

You? Yeah, I’d encourage them to go to Tom rath.org where there’s info about all the books. And there’s the website for the tool I was talking about the inventory it’s called [inaudible] C O N T R I B I F y.com. And that’s the inventory where people can put together a profile of their big experiences in life and where they can contribute to others. And I I’d love to get people thinking a little bit more about what are the things that the communities and circles around me need, my customers need. And then how do you map back to what your talents are and what your strengths are and how you can put those things together to have a, I guess, a more meaningful and energizing career, which is the big target I’m always spending time thinking about.

RV (23:32):

Yeah, well, so related to that, I, I, you know, I wanted to ask you about humility. I mean you’ve sold so many books. I mean, you were a lead scientist and influencer Gallup you know, you teach at top universities, you know, invited to speak and all these places how do you manage to kind of keep the level of humility? I’ve, I’ve, I’ve always been so impressed at how gracious you are. And I, you know, especially, you know, when you’re in a world of academia and things, you mean, you just have so much notoriety, but you, you never come across as pretentious or you know, pompous or arrogant at all of, of all, you know, and so many of the people that I’ve ever met, it’s like, if, if somebody does you, you’d probably be on that list. So why aren’t, why aren’t you more of a jerk? Oh, I’ll work on it. The promise.

TR (24:34):

But no, I, I mean, I, I think I’ve, I feel like I’ve been, we’ve all had our challenges in life, but I feel like I’ve been pretty fortunate to be surrounded by really smart people who I’ve enjoyed working with. And I’ve got my, my kids are 10 and 12 and my wife who they’re, they, they do a good job of keeping any ego from being in check on a daily basis. It’s, you know, what I’ve observed over the years is I’ve spent a lot of time interviewing leaders of big companies and organizations. And some of the ones that I’ve admired the most over the years are the ones who try and keep themselves in the background and they really learn to thrive off seeing other people succeed. And I, I was mentioning this when you and I had a brief conversation before that in the last year, I’ve spent more time on publishing other authors and thought leaders and republished the book by the former chairman of the joint chiefs and Patty McCord from Netflix.

TR (25:34):

And I’ve actually enjoyed working on those books more than I’ve enjoyed working on books that I bothered lately. And I’ve probably been happier and taking more pride in some of their success. And I, I think that’s a theme that in the next 15, 20 years of my career, I’d like to do even more of that. And again, I think that, you know, I spent enough time, 10 years ago over the last 10 years, studying wellbeing to learn that if you want to increase the collective wellbeing of the world and of your family and society the best way to improve wellbeing is to not be focused on your own happiness and to just direct as much energy as you can outward. So I’ve been trying to practice that and live that over the last 10 years and it’s has been helpful.

RV (26:22):

I love it. I love it. Well, Tom wrath, my friends we’ll put a link to Tom rath.org. Make sure you stay tuned. Life’s great question. Of course, is the book that came out most recently that right before COVID March 20, 20

Speaker 2 (26:37):

Boy, you picked, you picked a perfect time

RV (26:40):

For that, Tom, thank you so much for your encouragement and support. And just for being here, my friend, we wish you the best.

TR (26:46):

Thanks for your time and good questions. There is fine.

Ep 173: Leveling Up Your Paid Traffic Acquisition Strategy with Eric Siu | Recap Episode

One of the things that I just love so much about podcasting is how much you learn as the host. It’s like, it’s one of the coolest things ever. I mean, the networking value of podcasts they get by itself is, is just incredible. But then it’s like, you get to talk to some of the smartest people in the world for free, right? I mean, it’s, you know, you’re, there’s an exchange. You’re helping promote them and stuff, but it’s like, I am blown away at how much I just constantly learn from our guests. And this episode was certainly one of those I’m breaking down. The, this is the recap of the Eric Siu episode. I’m going solo for now and covering for AJ on this recap, a special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. But man it’s just wild. And one of the things I love about personal branding, right?

And this whole space is this is such an emerging space. It’s like, it’s fun, it’s new, it’s exciting. Things are changing. It’s also difficult and frustrating because there’s, there’s so much to learn. And you know, my, my top three takeaways from this episode are really important because they tie in to something that has happened since I recorded this interview originally with Eric. Okay. So make sure you listen to the interview. Of course, if you can, if you haven’t, you know, we were talking about basically leveraging up your leveling up your paid traffic acquisition strategy. So in brand builders group speak, this is what we would typically call phase three, which is where we really create a lot of like scalable growth for a personal brand and, and there’s advantages and disadvantages to all different types of traffic. But with paid traffic, this is so important because here’s, what’s great about paid traffic, paid traffic is predictable.

You know, we divide traffic into three categories, there’s free traffic, you know, SEO, email, social media, et cetera, et cetera. Then there is paid traffic, which is a lot of what we’re talking about here, like buying, buying ads and things like that. And then there’s get paid traffic, which is our favorite type of traffic. Cause that’s when you get paid to be put in front of an audience and then you get to expose that audience to more people, which is like, you know, kind of the best of both worlds, but even in get paid traffic or free traffic, the bummer is they’re not predictable. Right? And so this is my first big point is you want predictable traffic, predictable traffic. And this, this is something that, you know, I think when people hear about traffic, we, we think of you know, we think of like, you know, it’s a lot of people wear it as a badge of honor.

Like I’ve never you know, all my traffic is organic or I’ve built my entire following without paid ads, which is, which is cool. I mean, that’s, that’s cool. It’s like, it’s cool thing to be proud of, but what I, and, and, and that’s the category that I have. That’s the camp that I come from and was raised in and have had to operate by, frankly for much of my career. And then realize, well, wait a minute, you know, I’m wearing that as a badge of honor, but is that holding me back because I’m not willing to invest in paid traffic because the only guaranteed type of traffic is paid traffic and it is guaranteed. Like I can guarantee that I can get you more traffic now, whatever organic strategy I teach you, I’m not sure I can guarantee that brings you more traffic.

And, and even though we know a lot about get paid traffic, I think it’s get paid traffic as some brand builders group is some of the best in the world at, at helping you not only get in front of large audiences, but get, get paid to also be in front of them and assess, especially over the long haul over the course of time, if you follow the things that we teach are going to build your reputation, and that’s going to be an upward spiral, that’s going to get you in front of more things, but it’s not guaranteed. There’s not a, there’s not a guarantee as to how fast or when and paid traffic. It gives that to you in the form of a guarantee. And this is a big mindset shift that needs to happen for maturing personal brands. That’s why we, we cover it in our high traffic strategies event, which is our advanced like mail marketing sales event digital marketing event, which we, we put in our phase three group of courses and curriculum.

But and this is the big, the big change is going okay. Well, even though it costs money, it is a, it’s a lever that I can pull every day to force growth, to ensure awareness, to intentionally accelerate my business forward. And so that’s why paid traffic is a good thing. And it’s something that a lot of us don’t think of it in that way. And maybe that’s a mindset shift for you. And I would say again for maturing brands, this is not something that we teach new brands. It’s not something we would encourage for new brands, because we definitely wouldn’t want you to do paid traffic until you’ve got all your other ducks in a row. And all of your, your funnel streamlined and your dashboards set up in your brand positioning clear in a, an unwell optimized website. And you’ve got keyword targeting going on on your, and you’ve got a content marketing strategy that is on, you know, running on autopilot.

Like those are all the fundamentals that have to be in place first and then paid traffic. Boom is fuel on the fire, but to get the most out of your paid traffic, you’ve got to have all that stuff set up first. But once you get there, then it’s like, yeah, we need to, we need to, we needed to pull the trigger on this. So predictable forms of traffic are super valuable and paid traffic is one of the best, if not the best form of predictable traffic, if you put money in the machine, it will send you more traffic, right? So that’s, that is the mindset of predictable traffic, which is related very much to paid traffic and listening to Eric talk, I think was just edifying and validating for, you know, I think an area of growth for me personally, and for our, our team company and where we’re at brand builders group.

And we’re, we’re really getting to this point now, right? Like the, our company has been around for a few years. It’s like, we’re, we’re getting stuff underneath us. And it’s like, let’s grow. Let let’s go. Let’s grow paid traffic. Here we come. All right. The second big debrief, which I think is the core of this interview is the, the importance and some of the tools around influencers marketing specifically. Okay. So the debrief, the reason this is in the debrief is because Eric shared two tools that you know, we have not used. Okay. So don’t consider them vetted and officially recommended yet by brand builders group, but we’re looking into them. Both because, I mean, because Eric said it and, and because they involve paid traffic. Okay. So here’s the tools he said, mighty scout mighty scout.com, which is for influencer marketing research.

And then, but sift tube, SIF like YouTube, but just to sift S I F T tube sift.com for YouTube advertising research. So why am I pulling these out now? Well, this is because of a massive change that has happened recently with the newest iOS update. And this is going to sound a little bit tactical. It is a little bit technical, and frankly, I, I, I don’t fully do geek speak, but this is from what our team is telling us and what our clients are saying. And the people we know that do, you know, speak geek, speak. There’s a massive thing that just happened that is going to affect the future of digital marketing, you know, in a big, big way in the immediate short-term future and potentially long-term. And that is this, that with the iOS update, they are now making people opt in to being tracked.

So if you’re on a mobile device, specifically iOS, okay, if you are using that operating system, right? So everybody with an iPhone all generations that when you’re on a site, whether it’s Facebook or it’s YouTube or wherever else, w you know, any other place that people run advertising and the past there’s been, you know, this kind of invisible tracking going on behind the scenes that was basically reported in the, I dunno, whatever, probably in the terms and conditions. And so by, by way of using this, these various tools, you’re consenting to have it in this happened well, for whatever reason that has changed and IO and, and the iOS update is doing away with that, which means that now people have to opt in manually to allow themselves to be tracked. Well, the, the, the, the data point that I heard this morning, again, I don’t, I don’t have the sources came from my, our internal team, right.

But these are really smart people that we work with. They’re, they’re saying that the, that up to as many, as 60% of people here, these are the people who have already had this change, rolled out to them on iOS are disallowing themselves to be tracked, which makes sense, right? These are like, when you go to the websites and it says, Hey, a pop-up comes up and Hey, we use cookies. Can we track you? Do you care? You know, and some numbers say, sure, I don’t care. I don’t even read it. Yes. But a number of people are waking up to this and going, no, I don’t want to be tracked. Well, the, when that happens, it dramatically affects and radically breaks down the ad tracking that we’re allowed to do using like cookies and UTMs and pixels. And these, these advanced terms that you hear of like passing through which all point back to going, okay, when I’m spending advertising dollars, I’m tracking to where, where are these buyers coming from?

Exactly. And, you know, letting letting like Facebook, as an example, run an algorithm to optimize, to optimize my advertising, spend to go find other people like the people who have bought. But if, if that, if the people who are buying are disallowing me from tracking them, then that disallows the informing to the Facebook algorithm that says, go find me more people like this person, which is, this is potentially huge. And you need to be aware of this, right? So, you know, consider yourself in the know of, for, you know, listen to this podcast and nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen, but from what I’m hearing and gathering, this is a really big deal and potentially a scary deal. For people who depend a lot on paid trafficking on, on, on paid paid traffic. So w w what, what does this have to do with influencer marketing?

Well, good question. Well, the reason that this matters is because as it becomes less easy to track the effectiveness at a granular level of, let’s say like a Facebook, yeah. Add it increases the value of, of spending money and advertising through an influencer, a specific person. Why? Because we know we can track every single thing that comes through that one link. Like I give one link to an influencer, I pay them, they post it. And everything that comes from that is trackable. It’s measurable. We know it came from that person. Well, we may not know about that, the end user data, but we know that all of the traffic came to that link. Well, that is really it interesting because it allows us to determine more, more naturally and more clearly the ROI versus some of these other tools like dumping money into Facebook or into you know, like YouTube or Google ads that it’s, it’s going to be harder and harder to track exactly where they saw the ad and who, and, and you know, how effective it is.

So that places up premium value on running ads through an influencer, because I can track for sure how well that is performing. I paid someone to promote this link. They shared this link, and either it worked or it didn’t which is just interesting because it kind of means that advertising dollars may flow in that direction. This is a, this is a potential trend that’s coming. It’s not here yet, but this is the kind of thing. And it’s good that you’re listening to the podcast. Right. And it’s one of the reasons I host the podcast is I’m interviewing people like Eric, who are very out there in the front of like the technical, you know, in the tactical world, seeing all these things coming and going, Whoa, how do we prepare ourselves? Cause this potentially alters the strategy. And the big thing you need to know now is going, Hmm, I need to really start looking at influencer marketing and going I need to find people that I can pay to just do a post for me.

There’s a lot less red tape. It’s a lot, you know, straight, more straight forward, but you got to find the people. How do you find the people while you could spend all day searching around online for them? Of course. And you’re going to go after the, all the big ones that everybody else sees, or you can, and, or you can use these tools like mighty scout and, and tube sifts. So we’ll, we’ll see how that plays out. But I guess just to share with you, this is on my radar. This is something that as the interim CMO for brand builders group, this is something that we’re watching closely, we’re paying attention and we’re going, you know what I think we need to wake up to, to influencer marketing and start looking at going. We may end up spending our advertising budget influencers rather than just dumping money into Facebook here in the near future.

And we’re going to be possibly looking at tools like, you know, these ones, mighty scout, et cetera, that have been mentioned to help us find those people. So that’s important. And then the last takeaway, you know, just real quick was the, the, what he said, the F he shared the four forms of leverage by novel Rob con two is like a world renowned early investor into several, you know, big companies and things. Uber four square, Twitter Postmates, things like that. So he’s, he’s kind of, you know, recognizes a very, very one of the smartest people in the world, I guess you would say. And he talks about the four types of leverage, labor, capital code and media. So labor is hiring people to do stuff for us. Capital is investing your money. Code is, you know, writing a code for a process.

And then, and then media, well, it reminded me very much of the focus funnel that we talked about all the way back in 2015, right? So if you look at the focus funnel from procrastinated, a purpose, or from the how to multiply time, my Ted talk it’s eliminate automate delegate, well, automate is basically code anything. You can create a process for today, multiplies your time in the future because the process is doing it tomorrow. Code is one example of automation. There are other examples there can be manual processes and, and, and checklists and workbooks and training manuals. Those, we would all consider those forms of automate, even though they’re not code or technology, but it’s really powerful to hear somebody like, Neval talk about this and go, wow. If he’s thinking that way, we’re really on the right track with the concept of multiplying time.

And then with labor, which we call delegate, right? Which is that it’s 80% done right by someone else is always better than a hundred percent done right by you. Why? Because it multiplies your time. It means they’re doing it instead of you doing it, which gives you margin to do something else without compromising the thing, getting done. That is a form of leverage. He calls it labor. We call it delegate capital money is one that we’ve all been aware of, right? It’s just, you know, compounding interest, let your money work for you when your money starts making money while you sleep. That is a form of leverage. And then I think the new one, which I hadn’t woken up to. So clearly until Eric said this even though he’s quoting and I hope, I hope I’m saying that name right. And of all, I don’t actually follow him.

But I, I, I might now his media, which is interesting, right? Because you know, I’ve described and I’ve heard, I’ve heard this described with money that when you invest a dollar, it’s like basically hiring an employee and then that is working if, when they’re invested to make you more money, right. So that person’s out there working well, media is the same thing. If I post a video on YouTube or I create a podcast episode that is now an asset that is out there working, it’s a form of multiplication. You multiply time by spending time on things today that give you more time tomorrow. So I’m building an asset right in this very moment, recording this, that somebody could be listening to years down the road drawing value from. And they’re just meeting me for the first time, but I’m leveraging an asset that I created, you know, today infinitely into the future indefinitely in the future.

That is super duper powerful. And then I would say, you know, another one that it made me think of is relationships. Relationships are multipliers. Why? Because as I develop relationships with people, okay, so this is like a new form of, of multiplication, not in the focus funnel and not something that Nepal talks about. But as I started thinking about this more relationships are a multiplier. Why? Because if I have a relationship with somebody and that person starts to multiply, that person’s influence grows. Now, all of a sudden as that person’s influence grows, mine grows too because of my connection to them. So this is where it’s like, you have to pour into relationships, you have to serve people and help people, which you should be doing anyways. But if you, if you can’t do it for like, you know just being a good person, you should also realize wow, that there is actual, amazing, exponential value in these relationships. So keep pouring into people, keep serving them, keep coming back here. We’re, we’re doing our very best to create consolidated ideas, tactics, strategies, and wisdom to help you multiply your message. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal

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

RV: (00:08)

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

RV: (01:05)

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

RV: (02:18)

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

ES: (03:02)

Thanks for the intro Rory. Great to be here.

RV: (03:04)

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

ES: (04:17)

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

ES: (04:56)

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

ES: (05:42)

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

ES: (06:27)

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

RV: (06:59)

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

RV: (07:55)

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

ES: (08:31)

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

ES: (09:10)

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

RV: (09:48)

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

ES: (10:39)

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

RV: (10:48)

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

ES: (11:07)

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

RV: (11:15)

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

ES: (11:31)

Sells and one down sell. Yeah.

RV: (11:33)

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

ES: (11:57)

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

RV: (12:34)

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

ES: (13:16)

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

ES: (14:01)

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

RV: (14:40)

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

ES: (15:03)

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

RV: (15:22)

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

ES: (15:45)

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

RV: (16:37)

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

ES: (16:48)

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

RV: (16:53)

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

ES: (17:05)

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

RV: (17:23)

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

RV: (18:13)

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

ES: (18:59)

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

ES: (19:38)

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

ES: (20:16)

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

ES: (20:54)

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

RV: (21:58)

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

ES: (22:33)

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

RV: (23:10)

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

ES: (23:58)

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

ES: (24:37)

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

RV: (25:36)

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

ES: (26:22)

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

RV: (26:30)

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

RV: (27:39)

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

ES: (28:35)

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

RV: (28:44)

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

ES: (29:26)

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

RV: (29:30)

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

Ep 171: Chatbot Automation and Conversational Marketing with Natasha Takahashi | Recap Episode

Whoa. My first thought on that interview is Whoa. It’s Rory Vaden. Welcome to the influential personal brand recap edition and breaking down this conversation that I had with Natasha Takahashi on chatbot automation and conversational marketing. What like this was crazy there were some really great takeaways for me, but like, of all the, of all the interviews that we have done of all the guests that we’ve had on this show, that one was probably the most unfamiliar to me. In other words, it was like a whole new world opened up that like, we’re not doing, we’ve never done. I I’ve been aware of, but not you know, that’s why I wanted to have her on. I thought she did a great job, really excited about her. And I think we’re going to be working together on, on some different things. And so I want to give you, the, my top three takeaways, but, but you know, the first thing I want to say, just make sure this is out there is that if you’re a beginner, this conversation, this topic to me is not where I would start.

This is like, if you, if, if, if you are, you know, baking a cake, this to me, chat bot automation is like the last it’s like one of the last things you do. It’s the sprinkles on the cake. It’s like, even after the frosting and the decorating and, and it’s certainly like long after the cake is baked. And, and I think that sometimes there’s this, this excitement over, how do I say nifty or advanced or fancy, or like cool, cool emerging spaces and technologies like this that people get really drawn to. Cause they’re exciting and they’re fun. And it’s like, Whoa, what is this? And, and yet I would go, yeah, this to me, these, aren’t the things that you do to make or break your career, right? You make your break, your career based on substance and uniqueness and positioning and expertise and a series of systems that are always working to grow your community and advance your message of which to me, I think this one is a great one and there’s a big opportunity, and this is an exciting one and an emerging one.

But you know, if this has happened to be the first episode you’re listening to, I would say that most episodes are not so much this, this tactical and technical, and this would be very advanced strategy. In fact, we would dump this into phase three, it brand builders. We, we take our clients through something called the brand builder journey, which is that we have one curriculum that is divided into four phases and each phase has three separate courses. And so we take people from like the very beginning of finding their uniqueness and their differentiation, their positioning and their business model strategy, all the way to growing an eight figure personal brand. This one would sit in phase three for us, which are our more of the like sophisticated tactics, tactical, technical, like really advanced technical things. But I love that stuff. Like I love to nerd out on this stuff.

And like I said, this was a new area for me. So conversational marketing anyways, I just want to give that one little disclaimer to you. And then, you know, just to dive into my top three takeaways, I think the, the, the first one was as much of a realization for me through Natasha’s coaching, which is that I have a bit of reluctance of moving into this, this automated, conversational marketing. I think conversational marketing is a really interesting term because like conversational selling, you know, in many ways is what selling is. Although not one to many, but one to one it’s very conversational. And so the idea of conversational marketing is, is fascinating because it’s kind of a new thing, but it’s really, you know, just human conversation. But anyways, perhaps you like me, or at least speaking for myself here, I’m resistant to the idea of trying to automate a conversation.

And I think what she helped me realize is that going well, it’s not really any different than watching a pre-recorded video of you, right? It’s it’s not it’s still me. It’s my brain. It’s my thoughts. It’s what I would be saying to the person. If I were there live very similar to how a video is, right? Like if somebody watches a video, I may have recorded the video months earlier. But if somebody were to ask me that question, I would say the same thing as I did then. And so a lot of times that’s what we do actually is people will write in and they’ll ask questions and they will take those questions and we’ll turn them into videos. And then it’s like, well, now we’ve answered it for everybody. Well, so I think if you’ve got a little bit of that, that roadblock, that’s at least how I’m thinking about this and going, okay, well, as long as I’m really writing this in my voice, and this is the process that I would take somebody through, if I were there, then it, it feels, it feels okay to me, like this is how I would actually engage in conversation where I think it could get risky is if I outsourced a script to somebody else and, and particularly didn’t have close oversight over it, because in that regard, I’m outsourcing my personality, right?

I’m, I’m trying to have someone else like completely peg this, this very difficult when you know, conversations are, are very personalized and they’re very much, you know, integrated with who you are. And so the idea of, you know, it’s even harder than like a ghost writer who you would hire to just write something, but then you would edit it. And it’s a one way form of communication. Whereas this conversational marketing is a two way. So you’re really like, you know, even outsourcing your personality in your brain, so to speak. So I think that’s where it would get risky. I think that’s where I would, I would send up a yellow flag of like, you know, Hey, some take some serious caution here is that you don’t, you don’t want to compromise longterm reputation for short-term revenue. That’s one of our values at brand builders group.

It’s in our mantra that we read at all of our team meetings is you don’t want to compromise longterm reputation for short-term revenue. And this is a place where I could see that people would, you know, kind of go down the slippery slope of doing that, but you can do both. And I think you can do them both right. And I’ve been able to rep many ways. That’s what I’ve been wrestling with and part of how I’ve been able to wrap my mind around going, yeah, I think we could deploy this. I think we could use this because we already do a lot of this. I mean, a lot of the scripts that we use, a lot of the content that we teach, even at our events are, you know, things that are being said by other people who were once said by someone else that we just scripted out and then operationalized it.

And so, you know, this is like a step, a step further down the path. But I would encourage you map it out, right? Like map out, or maybe do a couple conversations live, like actually do some live chats. See what the questions people are asking, write your own talk tracks, and then build it into a system. So that was the first thing, the second big takeaway. And this is a highlight that I just, you know, edified for me is much as any, anything and hope fully. You know, this is that the dollars are in the DMS, the dollars are in the DMS. Like when you think about how to monetize social media, people’s brain goes towards like, Ooh, I’m going to get famous, have millions of followers and get a brand deal, like a sponsorship deal, or someone’s going to pay me, do promotional posts.

Cause we see that a lot, right. Or we go, Ooh, I’m going to have lots of followers and I’m going to drive these followers to a webinar and then they’re going to buy on the webinar. And because they see that a lot, both of those are great things. We, we, we have clients that do both of those really, really well. We do a lot of that too, but I think when you’re first starting out, when you go, how do I monetize social media? How do I actually make money from any of this social media stuff? When, especially when you’re first starting out or if you’re servicing a niche and you just, you’re just not, you’re not playing content to the main stream where you’re going to have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers where you go, how do you actually monetize social media? You do it in the DMS.

The dollars are in the DMS. The way you make money is by in human conversations with the people who are engaging with you, specifically comments and DMS. Now, the reasons why I would say the dollars are in the DMS is because the goal here, not the goal, but, but I would say I’m not going to have a sales conversation typically in the comments section. So if somebody comments, I’ll probably comment back and then say, Hey, check your DMS. Or I just sent you a DM because now we can have private conversation, which I think has got to lend itself more naturally to a sales process. We actually have a process that we teach for this at pressure-free persuasion. It’s called the four F’s about how do you convert these comments into customers? Well, the very first thing we’re going to do it was moved that conversation out of the comments, into the DM.

So it can be private so they can share with you, you know, private information that you probably need in order to, you know, to persuade them to, to ethically persuade them and help them and serve them. So but, but what’s wild is people, especially newer people, ironically will spend some amount of time and energy trying to put together stuff for social media, which is like, it is a lot, right? It’s, it’s a lot of work to do it, especially if you’re running the content diamond and you know, the processes that we teach, that it’s a lot of work. And then it’s like, well, you’re not getting millions of views when you start out. Yeah. But you don’t need millions of views. You only need a couple of comments. And what you want to do is pay attention to the people who are commenting and move it into your DMS, pay attention to the people who are sending you DMS.

And people say, well, I already don’t have time for social media. I definitely don’t have time to deal with DMS too. It’s I would kind of say, well, then don’t expect to monetize your social media. Like if that’s what it’s about, maybe you shouldn’t do it at all. I mean, I think long-term there’s reasons to do it still, but it’s like, don’t complain about not monetizing your social media early. If you want to monetize your social media early, the fastest, best, most economical way to turn social media and followers into real money and dollars in your bank account is through DMS one-on-one conversation. So door not too busy for DMS. That’s like saying I’m too busy to stop and pick up a $20 bill that’s on the sidewalk. Like I don’t care if you’re bill Gates, you still probably would stop and pick up a $20 bill.

So that, that is how it is. And it’s a mindset thing. And for me, I used to always go, I’m just too busy for this. Like I don’t have time to like deal with all the social media stuff and comment on everything. Well, what you’re doing is you’re building a relationship and that’s what selling is. It is a relationship it’s based on trust. It’s based on service. So you’re going okay. If I’m going to convert this into dollars, it’s probably going to happen privately. And it’s, and, and especially if you have a high dollar offer, right? Like if you sell anything North of a thousand bucks in your new to social media, you don’t have a huge following or you don’t have a lot of trust or credibility online. It doesn’t mean you can’t make money doing it. It means it’s going to happen privately.

It’s not going to happen. Like, you know, here’s a link, everyone click and go to my store and buy, and I’m going a millionaire. It’s going to happen through human communication, which is how it has always happened. Social media is just a new Avenue. So the dollars are in the DMS. You’re not too busy for one-on-one conversations with people who are interested in you. Like if you’re too busy for one-on-one conversations with people, we’re interested in you, like, what are you doing like that, that they’re raising their hand. When somebody comments, when somebody engages, when somebody DMS they’re going, I like you. I’m interested in you. I think you’re cool. Like, I think you can help me. You you’re putting something here that is of enough interest and value to me that I’m not only willing to consume it. I’m willing to engage with you.

Hello. That is like a flashing bright light, like sales opportunity, referral partner opportunity like this, this is someone pay attention to. So, so, so I think this is really powerful because this conversational marketing is going okay. Maybe we can automate some of that. Particularly for those of you that do have large followings. Right. And I know some of you do have hundreds of thousands, millions of followers, and you’re going, okay. It really is a full-time job to keep up with this and go, okay, can we, can we, can we write some decision trees? And can we create some decision trees? Because I think that’s super powerful. So I think that’s one of the reasons why this episode is important is it helps you realize the dollars in the DMS. It gives you a way to do it manageably, but also a main, this helps you integrate with marketing automation.

You know, so you can, you can use chats to encourage people at based on where they’re at in your funnel. That’s amazing. Like talk about a hyper customized experience. We do something very similar with email, but it’s really cool to be chatting. The other thing, which was huge was this idea about being able to communicate across platforms, multiple platforms, even websites, and in the future, probably SMS to where you’re like centralizing one conversation with the person to where it’s not just like, if I send you emails, those are emails. If I send you Facebook messages or Facebook messages, if I engage with you on WhatsApp, that’s on WhatsApp. But like, if I forget, or I don’t have a good way of staying organized, or if multiple people are interfacing with you and we don’t all have context of what conversation is happening on the other platform, that’s really risky.

You can damage trust, right? That’s happened to me before, like we’ve created some automated responses and then, you know, this happened to me recently and I just feel terrible. Like one of our clients, we have a client who’s been a client for two years, but we weren’t connected personally on LinkedIn. And we had some automated LinkedIn messages going out. And so this person fit a search criteria that we were targeting. And I, anyways, they get into it, end up getting into what is more or less as an automated search with an automated conversation with me. And it’s like, they’ve been a customer for two years. That’s not good. That’s terrible. Right? Like, that’s the last thing I want to do. So but the cool thing is if you were able to have all the platforms, you know, this, this cross platform communication was super-duper powerful.

And so I think, you know, adding AI on top of this, it’s going to be a part of the future, the data that you can collect, connect from this and just the, you know, the cross platform communication, these are reasons why it matters. It matters. And there’s some risks, there’s some risks, but I think, you know, this is, this is really solid. And then my third takeaway, which Natasha said directly, which I think is so useful, is it, it can be very easy to get overwhelmed with the power of something like this. This happens very similarly when we teach marketing automation in general and you go, well, how granular do you want to be? You can get super, super granular and just go, just choose one use case to get started. Go. We’re just going to use this for customer service or just for marketing or, or just to talk to people who are already active in our sales pipeline or sales process.

And so try not to get overwhelmed, just choose one specific use case and go, let me try to master this one thing, get my feet wet, see how it goes, you know, try it out, watch the data, optimize, manage, optimize, and then go from there. But this is, this is pushing you, right? And it’s pushing me and this is pushing the future. And I think that’s one thing we want this podcast and everything we do at brand builders group to be is just to always be evolving and keeping up with the trends and not just going, Hey, this, this worked 20 years ago. It’s a balance of both principles, which are time tested, but also modern day practices, which sometimes are evolving. And so we’re honored that this is one of your sources of, of educating for those and, and vetting those two things out. And we’re just glad you’re here. So thank you for being here. That’s a little bit on automation, chat, bot automation and conversational marketing. One of the emerging areas for personal brands. Keep coming back. We’ll keep pushing the envelope. You keep showing up. We’ll keep delivering the goods. Thanks for being here. We’ll see you next time.

Bye-Bye.