Elite Marketers Private Podcast

Overview:

Steve Brossman is on a mission to demystify the path to achieving six-figure earnings as a PodGuest without the hassle of hosting your own podcast, or pitching.

Based on a blueprint that has been meticulously crafted over three years, discover how 70% of your income can be secured before the record

About Steve

His journey has seen him speak across 15 countries, being a 9 times best-selling author writing, and training over 55,000 entrepreneurs and professionals. Today, his consultancy extends from small businesses to multi-billion-dollar corporations, making him a sought-after strategist in innovative ‘micro sales enablement strategies.”

Takeaways:

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

It's, uh, we are, we're here for the Elite Marketers March, 2024 edition.

And, uh, first up we've got Steve Brossman and Steve's on a mission to demystify the path to achieving six figure earnings as a podcast without the hassle of hosting your own podcast or pitching.

And so it's based on a blueprint that he's been meticulously, he is particularly crafted over three years.

And what you're gonna discover is how 70% of your income can be sourced before the record button is even pressed.

Creating value and establishing your work well ahead of the podcast episode itself.

So you probably don't need a introduction to, uh, to Steve, but you know, he's been, you, he's Yeah.

Spoken across 15 countries.

You know, he's, he's a bestselling, you know, author and Yeah.

And a, and a veteran of marketing.

So with that being said, I'll hand the reins over to, uh, Steve Brossman.

Thanks, buddy.

I'm, I'm gonna cram about eight weeks of training into 30 minutes.

Have I got the share screen happening?

It's all working.

Yep.

No, excellent.

All working.

Cool.

The interesting thing is, and I was never a big podcast person.

I don't drive long enough to listen to a 10 minute podcast, so I've never been a big fan of them, hosted my own for a while.

But, uh, when I decided to move my business in January 21, middle of Covid to America, went to one networking event, had one introduction, and then between networking and podcasting just being guests, it went from zero to six figures in under 10 months.

And every year since I've been doing over six figures just from being a podcast guest.

And I thought that's how people did it.

One of my clients came to me when she first started.

She said, I've been paying to get on podcasts and I haven't got a client in three months.

Scott was saying, Hey, listen, I've been on a podcast or two and I've got nothing from it as well.

I looked at what other people were doing, I thought, here's why.

But it's time to take it seriously, because last year, recent, it was just released that 89% of marketers actually said they're gonna increase their emphasis and spend on audio content.

And I've been in video marketing since 2008, and for the first time ever, the state of video marketing report was actually called the State of Audio and Video Marketing Report.

So the big boys are gonna pay a lot more attention to audio marketing.

It is a forgotten frontier, but it's a tsunami that's really going to hit down on us.

So most people, I'm going to not stop for q and A here, and we'll do it at the end.

Most people get on a podcast and expect to make their money generally one way.

And that's get on.

And they're all told to do one thing.

Share your story, share your knowledge, give them a call to action and send them somewhere, which is hopefully sooner or later they'll get in my funnel and they'll buy something that's very linear.

You might as well get on your knees, put your hands together and pray, because that's about as much as you're gonna get from that.

And it is just the wrong way about going about it.

Not saying you can't, I've been on, I've done podcasts and I've had people buy my program.

I've got one that's still paying me and they're paid me over 70,000 just from being a guest on a somebody's podcast.

Then there's pass on.

That's referrals.

But the big ones are here.

That's partner and promote negative is even when we go to the mountain.

That was interesting.

So how did some of those happen?

This happened in December last year on a pre podcast call.

And we, in our training, we spent two weeks on how to maximize the pre podcast call.

So we chatted, they said, wow, I think we can do more than just 'cause as well choreographed, well, more than just a podcast.

How about we organize a workshop for my people?

That would be great.

90 minute workshop.

There was 30 there.

We netted.

I personally netted 20 2K.

We co-created a new product together, which is now selling around two to four per month.

Then we actually recorded the interview, and from the interview, two people took up one of the programs and there was 10 K there.

So that pod cast alone generated 30 plus just from having the right conversation with the actual host itself.

One of our students in February booked a 60 minute workshop from the pre guest call.

There were 25 people and she knitted 16,000 before the podcast was even filmed.

See, most people think the, the pre-chat is all about microphone check, what are the questions?

Et cetera.

Now you do your homework and you get on, you get the host excited to work with you.

If they don't do that, then they're excited to promote you.

And the energy through the podcast is so much higher because you excited host and that energy will actually drive the sales or connections through.

Once I launched in America, here is just some of the podcasts that I've been on.

One square here, we had a connection, his VA was sent me to say, Hey listen, see if you can get Steve on.

He'd be a good guest.

I said, no, I want to talk to the boss.

We have a collaboration.

We filmed one of the videos today that will take the collaboration partnership to Seven Figures in August.

And that was from a connection pre podcast getting through to some of you will know some of these people here to being positioned alongside for me.

These are the gods in my world.

So that's what it can actually do for you.

One of the things that we teach people to do that if you are having a chat with the host, there's a nice little sequence we do instead of, and these are banned from the vocabulary of anybody that does our training.

They said, what is it that you could speak on?

You will hear, and you've probably heard over and over again, I'm sure none of you have ever used it.

I can speak on this.

I am passionate about this.

Have anybody heard that?

Yeah, I'm passionate about this.

I can talk on this.

That's basically saying wheel outta soapbox.

I'm just gonna jump up and down.

The formula that we use is, Hey, listen, we have a system blueprint roadmap or something for this.

This is how we work with people.

I am going to give your people and we talk about the three key things that they are going to get, the difference it's going to make in their life and or business.

And word it in a way that they will think and they are going to run back to you.

Thanking you for having me on.

So the goal is to make the host feel and look like the hero.

Not, hey, it's all about me.

It's how can I elevate and edify you in front of your people and build the energy through the podcast?

I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that in a second.

But in the beginning, if you say, this is how I work with people, I'm gonna pull out three key things that are gonna be of high value to your people.

Then they'll look at and say, wow, that probably deserves more than just a podcast.

Some of my people might need that.

How can we work together beyond the podcast?

That's the actual goal of the pre-chat, to start that conversation.

How can we go beyond, just because the podcast is a coat hanger for collaborations, it's not the end result.

So the thing is your bankable story now, Scotty, you're a well noun copywriter.

How much time effort do you spend on creating the story, the narrative of the copy that you are doing, versus how much time and effort did you put into crafting your story for the podcast?

Yeah, interesting.

Like, like on a sales letter versus a podcast.

Yeah, I'd, I'd spend a lot more time on a, on a sales letter than I really think about for a podcast.

Yeah.

Yet you can, and some of your copy generates significantly more than you probably get on a podcast.

But that's the thing most people get on and just blurt.

They tell their story as if it's about them.

We break it down.

It is not your signature story.

It is not your brand story.

The signature story and the brand story is about me.

People say build your brand story to build rapport.

Why don't you build a story, create excitement, engagement and enrollments.

You can, your bankable story needs to be memorable.

It's unique, it's clear, it's memorable.

It needs to be desirable.

It cuts to the chase in the first 30 seconds.

The person needs to get into the JLM effect.

The just like me.

Wow, that person's just like me.

I bet they can empathize with me because they have gone through it.

You don't tell the big story.

You tell the just like me story.

You start there and you've got them from hello.

Then you go through the struggles just like them.

Then you have the aha, authentic, helpful, and actionable.

Aha.

And then it's like, here is the breakthrough that I've created that will shortcut and deliver results.

And then you go into the last phase of here is somebody that I have helped with those.

So then you have the, then Harry Met Sally Effect.

I want what they're having.

So you start with the wow that's just like me, very clear and direct path to wow, I want what they're having.

And when you get that as your bankable story, it will be bankable.

See, most people will tell their story.

It's almost like a buyer.

And I say, wow, they've had an interesting life.

Hmm.

And walk out the door.

That's it.

They tell a story.

Whereas when you turn that into a bankable story and use the framework that we've created, it's very, very bankable.

And no surprise, we create a blueprint around your bankable story.

So when it's memorable, desirable and referable where somebody says, I remember this person, you've gotta talk to them.

It's how do you want people to talk about you?

What is it that you have other people say about you that's memorable?

It's desirable.

And when it's referable, that's when it's leverageable.

So that's the framework that we teach on your member, your bankable story.

When you can do that in 90 seconds.

So Greg, we've done the introduction, blah, blah, blah.

Tell us a little bit more about how you got to here.

Bang, your bankable story comes out, the audience are listening.

And that's gonna be two or three of the key things that I'm gonna share with your people as we get through here.

And you sl you lead into building the energy flow during it and you can actually guide the conversation when you've got your, your act together.

Now, quickly, 60 seconds on this.

There are three relationships in a podcast.

You need to look after all of them.

There of course is the host and the guest.

Your job is to excite the host before you get on.

That's the pre-chat.

They're excited.

They might be doing some more work together and they'll get on and say, Hey listen, I've had a great chat with, uh, with Brent.

He's got some fantastic thing.

I can't wait for him to share this information 'cause I know you're gonna love it.

That's because you've done your job, right?

Not, Hey, today we've got Dan.

Hey Dan, just tell 'em about yourself.

Well you mate, who do you want to introduce you?

Yeah, not gonna happen.

So you build that relationship and you keep it going throughout.

Then there's you and the audience.

And it's your job to invite the audience in as well.

It's a three-way.

Coffee chat.

They're just not saying anything.

And you say, Hey, ha Murray, this bit is just for your people.

I've, I've got this just for, if you're at home listening to this or traveling, get a pen out and get ready to take these down.

'cause this is just for you.

Now what you've done then if you've given them a surge of oxytocin, that's the belonging drug.

And it's like, wow, I feel a part of this now.

I've gone from being a spectator to being in the match.

That's crucial.

You don't want people just to sit back and be a spectator and walk out the gate at full time.

You want them to be a cheerleader.

You want them to actually feel as if they're the MVP s**t.

I've been spending too much time in America.

The best and fairest, best on ground.

You want them to feel as if they're the best on ground.

So it's your job to cultivate the relationship with them.

The big missing one is the relationship between the host and the audience.

Now, Greg, you'd know from all the fantastic work that you do in this particular area here, here, here, and I had to really make that up.

Yeah, a funny fella, you, you, you know, from all the fantastic work you're doing this, that, this, this and this.

So I've just elevated and edified Greg in front of his audience.

So Greg's got a surge of dopamine.

It's like, yeah, it's cool.

Um, I brought, I put him up and the relationship between him and his people go up because they say how he's talking about our peop how Greg, in a really cool way, Greg must be pretty hot.

So when you've got all of that and you've got the oxytocin, the dopamine, and the happy hormones flying around, the energy is brilliant.

Now again, big fault people wait to get to the end and hope they're gonna ask me.

So how do they contact you?

What have you got for my people?

And most people will say, I've either got a book in for a discovery call that's death.

B, download my free report.

That's basically my throwaway piece of crap.

So crap.

So I can get your email address and spam the hell outta you.

There is no energy there at all.

It just drops.

What you do and we teach, is you seed a compliment.

You give some great value, and I'm sure, Brent, that your people are gonna get some great value out of that.

And Brent's gonna say, thanks so much.

I I know they're gonna love it.

Hey listen, I've got that and I've got this tip and this tip and this tip in a special download that I've got just for your people.

We're gonna go look, we'll talk about that at the end.

So then you are starting to build the anticipation and energy of your special thing you've got for them.

And you'll mention it a couple of times.

So it's a natural energy flow to finish, click enter your details, download.

It's like, well, I, I want that.

Yeah, I, I want more of this.

So you've gotta create that flow so that the next step is a logical and a seamless one.

Your talk and your bankable story needs to follow this exact framework.

You might wanna write this down.

It's to take the audience viewer or listener on an emotional journey where in the end, in their mind, they make a logical decision to take the next step with you.

So you are taking them on that journey and it's a logical next step in their mind.

Of course, I've gotta download it, of course I've gotta book the call.

It's value, it's a flow through.

And you do that with the actual relationship Trinity heading into the last bit.

How do we all put it into place?

This DNQC sales formula is based on some science, neuroscience from one of the companies that I work with in America.

It's the order of insights, information and question.

You have it in the right order, you get the people to come along.

This is the basis of all of our sales work.

And you should have it in every conversation.

There's the data, you give some information.

Most people will then give some more information, some more information, some more information.

And we say, be the prize, not the professor.

Excite them, don't educate them.

Inspire them what it would be like to work with you.

Not inform them what you do.

So when you give a nugget of information, and Dan, let me share how this works.

One of the people we work with just recently implemented the DNQC formula.

They're on the road, they took a call and they thought, well, I don't have anything in front of me.

I'm just gonna go through the DNQC, give some information, tell a story, quantify it, confirm.

I'm just gonna go through that.

And they nailed a $10,000 gig sitting in the car following this framework.

Now that's what I just did, gave some information.

And then the next one is narrative.

Tell a story that brings the information to life.

That story needs to quantify.

And I told you that this person used this sitting on the side of the road, all they could remember was DNQC.

I've just gotta give some information, tell a story, quantify it, and then confirm.

And they did that two or three times through that confirmation is, I've given some information, this person got this result.

Now I got down here that I haven't got.

So Grant, if we were to do that same sort of thing in your business, could you see that working for you?

Now if we were to do that, I'm just rushing through, if we were to do that, what sort of a difference would it make?

Money, time, whatever it is.

Let's quantify on a monthly basis, what would that mean to you?

Oh, okay, let's just say it's 10 KA month.

Fantastic.

Is that a priority of yours right now?

Or is it something that you can leave?

No, it's a priority.

So when you deliver some information, you show how other people have used it through.

They were struggling with this.

Here's a piece of my system that we did to help them.

And here's the quantifiable results they got.

Let's quantify the results with you.

Would that work?

This is on a one-on-one basis.

And is that something that's a priority of yours?

If you do that and we do it with our blueprint and write on it, if you do that two times through the conversation, you've put money in their pocket, they've confirmed that it's a priority, how the hell are they gonna say no when the money that you are put in their pocket, when what we call it is the agreed implementable value.

Not the box value, not the but wait, there's more.

You get more calls, you get more useless videos you get back in the old days, more DVDs.

We've got a big box and you try and push up the value of the box.

That's where the pushy selling comes from.

But when you've done the DNQC and the agreed implementable value is significantly greater than the box value, which is the cost, it is so hard for them to say no because they have worked with you to quantify and confirm.

They virtually have to say, no, I'm an idiot.

I don't believe what I just said.

And you do this even in a podcast in a guessing situation.

So Jane's asked me a question and I've given a short answer.

In fact, that's something like when we worked with this person, this is what happened.

This is what the results that we got.

And you know, Jane, I'm sure your people would love those sorts of results, wouldn't they?

So vicariously through the host, you are getting the audience to confirm and they're probably saying, yeah, I'd love those results.

So when you follow DNQC in all of your conversations, sales presentations and whatever is hard for them to say no.

And it's so, so seamless, so effortless to be able to flow through that way.

And everybody says, tell a story.

Tell stories when you insert these stories, the hero or horror stories.

And it could be a horror stories, because I remember a lady that I, you know, worked with, she went to five of my five years, she went to my free events, didn't implement a thing, and I said, that's it.

No more.

You've got to do this next program in two weeks.

She got five high level clients and we worked out that if she'd have done that five years ago, we'd have put an additional $140,000 in her bank account.

Now that's a horror story.

It's like, well hey, how many of you would like to get, you know, throw away $140,000, get off your bum and do it now.

So the, I've thrown basically a heap of frameworks at you that when you have them in place, you can think on your feet, you can deliver your bankable story, you can answer some questions and go through a flow that is really selling the value, the agreed implementable value of what you do by telling that story and quantifying it and then getting the audience possibly through the host to confirm that's exactly what it is.

So I've thrown a heap in, if I could, if I wanted to, I could actually, okay, I, I've got time to go through this.

This is basically the six figure podcast map.

Here's how you do it.

It all starts with the podcast.

And as I said, that's the coat hanger for everything.

If you go directly to the audience and think about the audience, which is good, then you are possibly trying to sell a unit one at a time.

You might have two or three people download something, eventually buy from you, and they may refer, and it's okay to have people pass you on.

I've got one guy that's so bloody excited, he's back out again.

He introduced me to 25 separate pod just referring me on.

So when you have excitement, energy, and a bankable story, it's easy to get passed on and referred on.

But if you wanna look at the leverage side, it's how do we work with the host?

Start with the pre-chat.

You can excite them through the actual podcast itself.

So they could promote for you whether they're promoting your events or they can be an affiliate.

And, and the key thing is, a lot of people get fixated on the biggest list.

What's your audience numbers?

I had one lady early last year.

She came come to me and said, Steve, I don't have a big podcast, but I think you would be perfect for my people.

And I looked at it, I said, yeah, sure.

And we did the, the pre-chat and she said, oh, you need to do a workshop for my people.

They will love this.

And we did a deal that I would do an upsell and that, and she was an affiliate for two more of my events in the next six months.

And she generated from a podcast that didn't get any more than 100 downloads on any episode she generated in six months, $18,000.

You don't have to have the biggest in the best if you've got the framework and you've got the mechanism to capture it.

So we created an event for her people.

She was an affiliate, affiliate and off we went three speaker bureaus now and one next week is running an event and selling her program, which will include my podcast profits.

I don't sell it.

She's paying me a set amount per head of everybody that does her program.

And once they finish, they then come into mind.

So we're creating programs and products together that other people are selling and including mine as well.

So when you broaden, how the hell can I work through this in a different way, really broadens the scope on, no, I don't have to just get on and do a good talk and hope somebody goes to my my lead magnet.

But you do have to do the work.

I bet.

And I would dare Scott with his copywriting to just get in there and say, I'm gonna do this.

I'm gonna do this sales letter in one go.

I'm gonna do it in one hour because that's how people treat podcasting.

But if you treat it seriously and you do your homework and you prepare well, there's no reason why everybody, if they've got the good products and products and programs to sell, that's, that's crucial.

That's a given.

If you've got the good programs to sell, then you, there's no reason why you all can't be a six figure podcast.

If you are a podcaster, most of this will transfer across as well.

See, you've got somebody come in, you have that pre-chat.

Wow, you've got some great things to say.

Oh wow.

How about we do a partner deal?

And how about I host you?

How about I promote you?

How can I can be affiliate for you?

Anything that you sell from here, I'm gonna do a fantastic job because now I know how to pull this out of you a lot better so that you don't sound sleazy and we can sell more of your stuff on my podcast.

Would that work for you?

Great.

So when, and John, you've got a phenomenal system with your podcasting and guesting and everything all set up, leading them into what you wanna lead them into.

You know, it's not about the podcast.

Your system on the backend generates the money.

My people are now getting it.

They realize it's not about the podcast, but you do a damn good one.

You'll get exposure everywhere.

But it is about what you can do to leverage it.

So I'm going to jump off screen and answer questions.

Yeah, that, that's, uh, that's great Steve.

Thanks.

Thanks he for that.

I guess my first question is, if you're, if you're being a podcast, are most podcast hosts, are they open to having the pre-chat?

Because yeah, like most, in my experience, you usually don't have a pre-chat, but do you find most are quite open and keen on a pre-chat?

Depends how you'd coach them.

And, and How do you do that?

How do you set, how do you set that up?

Oh, if I tell you that I've gotta kill you.

No, it's, it's very simple.

Most that I work with do, it's got a booking the other day.

Say, Hey, love to have you.

Let's have a 15 minute chat before we get on.

Hey.

Yep, thanks.

I'd love to jump on your podcast, Scott, wouldn't it be great if we had a quick chat beforehand so I really understand more about your people and I can deliver some really great content and really make it valuable for your people.

Does it make sense?

We have a chat.

Yep, Yep.

It's not about me.

It's how can I deliver better results and value for you and your people?

And then Scot just says they'll p**s off.

I don't care about my people, I'm just filling in time.

That's virtually what they have to say.

No, I don't care about my people.

So when you craft it that way, it's about you and your audience.

And there'll be some, some people say, no, not a problem.

Send over your questions, send over this.

We've got a pretty relaxed format.

I'm fine.

Yep, that's fine.

Yep.

Yeah, yeah.

Nice, nice.

So a any, any anyone else got got questions?

Yeah, quickly, Steve?

Mm-Hmm.

Do you research their audience so you know how to pinpoint and target certain people?

How, how would you know how to say, Hey, hey Greg, this is gonna be great for your people.

Well, if you don't know Greg, how would you know For each, every podcast pre-call is if it's a 20 thou call.

Some may be, some may not be.

But I treat them all with the respect of finding out their audience.

If I'm looking for podcasts to go on, I don't start with the host, I start with the audience and their pains, who has the audience and the pains that I'm gonna add best value to then okay, they're the, I do that research first.

There's a whole bucket load of people that talk to these people that have got the pains that I solve.

Then I work with them.

I probably do a little bit of a listen, but if you are looking at probably earning maybe five, 10, $20,000, would it be worth 30 minutes investing Apart from that, there's no cost.

You don't pay anybody anything.

You spend a little bit of time researching, you send them a video before you connect with them, you stand out and then that makes a big difference.

Yeah.

So what, what's the video?

What's the video you send before?

Like what is it just like a positioning video, a a framing video.

Like what's the, the structure there?

Yeah, I don't need to get on a hundred podcasts a month to make a bucket load of money.

So two or three, four maximum is fine for me and it's generating some, some good deals.

And I will send a personal one.

I use Bon Juro and I'll just send one off and uh, I've got two Johns here, so I might as well use John.

Hey John, I'm really looking forward to our chat.

There's a couple of great things I'm gonna share with you.

I've had a look at your people and I've got some really cool ideas that I'm gonna run by you on what we can actually have in the podcast.

So I'm looking forward to talking to you on Thursday.

Cheers.

Now that just puts you the top of the tree.

You've done your homework, you've taken the time, that should take you no more than two minutes.

Click open, type in their email record, it hit send and off it goes.

Now that two minutes is a good investment that gets them as excited as, and one of the first things they talk about, Hey Steve, I've got your video.

That was really cool.

Thanks for that.

Breaks the ice and you build the relationship before you get on.

So yeah, Nice, nice Is that, I gotta tell you that Josh, Josh is the master at doing that.

I have finally got my butt kicked by somebody that does it 10 times better than I do.

And you Do that for the host, you don't reach out to their audience Specifically?

No, that's the host.

That's before we actually get on, that's the, the pre-chat.

Get them excited so that we want to do some work with them or they want to do some work with us or find out more.

He's like, you're you're different.

You, you stand out.

You are not just, here's my resume, here's my questions.

You ask those, I'll answer them and off we go.

It's, it really helps you do you really stand out.

So what, what I hear Steve, and, and you didn't pay me to say this, but jump on and dote Steve's six week course.

It's only an hour or whatever, a a, a week.

Like, just jump on and do it.

It's phenomenal.

So what I'm hearing you encouraging all of us in business to do is to build not one night stands, but long-term healthy marriages for an entire lifetime.

And it's the quality of the host to you relationship that really matters.

It's a big lever that you're putting under the host and the audience.

That's the, that's the game in Town.

Yeah.

I'm going to go back the other way and thank you for endorsing the, the, the fast track program is building a long-term relationship is actually your own podcast.

Okay?

It's a slow burn, it gradually builds, but when you are going from somebody else's group to somebody else's group and being personally introduced to them, so it's like a mystery date.

You'll pick the type of person you wanna have a date with, but you go in, you work with that group, that audience, but then you can actually move on to the next group an audience, and then the next group an audience and the next group an audience.

So to me it's, unless you've got a system like John where you, you you churn and you, you do the, it's a brilliant system.

It's a more leverageable way to get in front of more people being introduced as the expert than having your own and actually building your own list unless you, you build it fairly rapidly.

So the interesting thing now the value in podcasting versus social media is just getting disparate because you get at least 30 minutes to talk to somebody and, and connect with somebody in a podcast.

You get seconds as you're flying by, you are introduced as an authority and an expert on social media.

You're just basically jumping up and down saying, Hey, look at me.

You are people turn up to see and listen to you.

Whereas on social media, generally you're an unwanted guest passing by a ship in the night.

So the value of spending time curating your podcasting strategy is far in excess of, unless you're doing paid ads and things like that far in excess of just trying to curate social media and being at the whim of the algorithms, which can change change at any time.

I would rather be introduced to a group of people as an authority and I've got at least 30 minutes in front of them then jump up and down on Facebook and say, look at me.

Yep.

Yep.

Beautiful.

That how Good distinction.

Great distinction.

Yeah.

Thanks Steve.

If you do have any other questions, I'll very quickly and only once say I do group programs.

I got one starting again shortly.

I do a boardroom, which is a 12 person.

The next one is only about creating your bankable story and that's about it.

Yeah.

Based on this topic is basically group and very, very small intense groups.

Yep.

No, that's, You find my email and everything in the Yeah, and, and Platform drop drop it in the, in the chat there too, Steve, just so it's easy for people to, to reach out to you.

We've just sorted it out.

I had, you can get one of my back pocket guides.

I'll put that in first and then I'll just put, I'll just type my email in.

Yeah, No, perfect.

That's, uh, that's, uh, that's awesome.

Any, any other, any, we've probably got one more.

One last question for, for Steve, if anyone's got one.

I've Got, I've got one.

How many of you are semi-regular Yes.

On podcasts.

And does anybody here have their own podcast?

So one is Jane, I think you were nodding to when I was you have your own podcast 'cause recall that any other ones have I have a podcast and I'm on podcast about twice a month.

Recently I just signed a two hour deal to speak to the podcast host's company for, for his monthly Oh yeah.

Ol one's on more podcasts than hot dinners.

So we know that.

Yeah.

And, and that's, and how's this, what I was saying today resonate with you because you are an experienced person in this field.

I was saying Jane.

Yeah.

I mean, me experience, it makes sense when you have a framework that is easy and replicatable.

And I guess the gift that you've given me today is understanding as a host and as a participant that the setup is as important as the delivery of when you're on the podcast.

So yeah, that's really resonates.

Thank you.

Oh, cool.

Thanks Jane.

What, what percentage of your revenue, Steve, is done via relationships you build through the podcast as versus the leads you get as a result of the podcast?

I've gotta say 10% only would come from revenue generated during the actual podcast.

In sales.

From, from people who hear the podcast reach out to you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, yeah, they may reach out and then sooner or later we may do something.

So, but as far as if I was to say how many programs, coaching programs, consulting gigs do I sell as a direct?

Yep.

Saw you here, let's have a call, buy now.

One call later.

That would only be 10% people.

I had one guy heard me on, I just got this last week, Steve heard your interview on marketing speak, loved what you said.

Would you be open for a collaboration?

And that's turned into quite a decent collaboration.

So I guess you could call that a direct result from that.

But 60% is generated from the conversations before the actual podcast goes to air or it's recorded.

Nice.

Yeah.

60% is done because it's a great door opener.

Hey, yeah, I'd love to be on your podcast.

Or Hey, would you like to be on my podcast?

It's, it's a phenomenal door opener.

And a former client of mine does very similar to what John does, but different.

He scours LinkedIn connects with people, forms a short relationship and says, Hey, would you like to be on my podcast?

They're carefully curated that they will become a client and he's got a digital marketing company.

They do the questions, they have a chat at the end and then goes back to him and say, Hey, listen, what you were saying the other day when we did this, I've got a couple of ideas for you.

Do you want to get on a call 30% conversion into digital marketing clients just from the podcast chats?

Yeah, No, that's, uh, that's awesome.

We've got Aldrin who's got her hand up.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I really enjoyed that.

Thanks Steve.

And I've done some stuff with Steve too.

Is he does a great job.

Always.

My question is around do you turn down many podcasts because there's literally like millions out there, right?

And I, I get approached just about every, every day almost for to be on a podcast.

And it's interesting, recently I had some kids from a Pakistan school that, that have reached out to me and now I'm getting all these kids coming forward and they just love it, right?

And I really wanna help them.

However, do you, you know, how, how much do you feel the people that come to you wanting to interview you and, and do you turn a lot down?

I do the right podcast for the right reasons.

Now, if they were Pakistani kids and I wanted to help them, and it was because I wanted to help them and it was outta my heart, I would do it.

Not because somebody asked me to do it.

And if I've got the wrong people wanting to do just a, a, a bastardized type of podcast, then I would turn them down.

And because I haven't put myself on platforms and those sorts of things where people will find me, it's generally word of mouth or my positioning that people will come to me and say, Steve, we'd love you on our podcast.

So I'm probably not in your situation where I'm getting that, that many, that I have to turn them down.

But when I get to the point of this is not a good fit for me, we will work with them and tell 'em, Hey, no, this is not a good fit, but gee, go and talk to Olin because she's got so much time on her hand, she'd love to do a podcast for you.

Thanks.

So that's why you're getting them all.

Oh, That's, that's great.

So, uh, yeah, we've got some, we got some great comments happening in the, in the, in the chat.

Craigs, you said, I've been a podcasting the past, past few months.

Great.

Around awareness, around my newly published book, which is a great book, by the way.

Get Craig to intro himself later.

But Craig, um, just sold his bus, sold his agency for an eight figure sum and he's gonna be presenting at, at a future, at a, at a future Elite Marketers event.

So, yeah, so, and he said, need to start putting some programs together.

This approach, this approach makes complete sense.

So, and Alden said, I love online shows and interviewing people.

Did two shows yesterday and Alden's gonna be doing a lot more.

'cause I I'm gonna be sending all the, all the ones I don't wanna do across to Alban as well.

So can you just drop your, your email in the chat, Alden?

Yeah, We'll, we'll just post it out, out there.

Overview:

This podcast discusses how to leverage AI to create effective email marketing campaigns. The host explains that email marketing has a high return on investment and is a powerful way to build authority and generate sales. He outlines a process of using AI to quickly create reports and other content that can be used in email sequences to engage and nurture leads. The key is to make the emails sound personal and tailored to the recipient, with the AI handling much of the heavy lifting. The host also emphasizes the importance of doing upfront planning and structuring to make the content creation process efficient.

Takeaways:

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

Okay. Welcome everyone. This is session two. The, uh, that I'm going to take you through now in terms of, yeah, how to leverage AI emails, basically to book your calendar solid is what we're going to be going through, yeah, be going through today. So let me just get that up. So how to leverage AI emails. I'll just take you through some real basic stuff in terms of why, you know, why email it generates according to litmus.

com. Email generates a 36 to 1 ROI. When I originally built my business, I built it on email marketing. It's, it's, I'm quite passionate about it. I think there's no better way to, to build authority. And also to generate sales, you know, to generate sales. I just find email is, is incredibly, incredibly powerful.

I've done multiple six figure launches. It's a low hanging fruit and it's the fastest path to the sale. And, uh, you can see there that the ROI is, you know, 36 to 1 email versus 6. 50. Let's say social media. Obviously, social media, the advantages is you've got incredible leverage and you can pump advertising into it and all of that sort of thing.

But email clearly leverages all your social media. So there's I won't take you through my, uh, testimonials, but there's some testimonials there. So, um, people don't, people don't do it. Like even marketers, I was taught, I talked to a marketer once. He's like, Oh, it takes me two hours to write an email. I generally, even without AI, it doesn't take me too long.

If I'm writing for myself, I can run it fairly quickly. If I'm writing for a client, it does take longer. Cause you got to put a lot more thought and research and all that sort of thing. We'll think that list is dead. Nobody buys. There's going to be, you know, worried about rejection. And there's two, there's two mistakes I see people making.

One is they do the scorched earth and the second one where they just blast their list and then it's not, it loses its value. And the other one is that they, you know, they just send love letters and they never sell anything and both, both fall apart. So yeah, so, so with A, one of the biggest problems is it doesn't sound like, you know, it sounds like a bot, right?

So it doesn't sound like you. So I'm going to show you how to actually. Make it sound like you today. So it's, it's quite, it's quite personal and where you're doing the 10 percent in the beginning, you're letting the AI do, you know, whether it's 80 percent or 70 percent or whatever, but a fair bit of the heart heavy lifting, and then you're coming at the end to sort of, to tie the, you know, to tie the loose loose ends up.

And it's, and it's coming across as quite personal throughout that process. The two biggest bottlenecks, people don't know what to write about, number one. It's like, what do I write about? The other one is a blinking cursor syndrome, staring at a blinking cursor. Can't put, can't put pen to paper sort of thing.

So yeah, my AI journey, I rejected it initially. I thought, yeah, like I thought the world's going to be flooded with crap content. Then I got into Jasper. I was, I was, you know, quite keen on Jasper until I tried ChatGPT. And, uh, yeah, for the last, I don't know how long, but yeah, probably 12 months or so, I've just been using ChatGPT as my primary AI sort of tool.

So this is, this is the, yeah, it's all part of a larger strategy, right? So, I call it, you know, the PDF strategy. So obviously you got your email list. There's nothing new there. You know, people come through networking past clients. You want to put them on your email list and build that relationship. And then they're downloading report.

So what, one of the big benefits we've got now is previously it was quite difficult to create reports, but with AI. We can create them on super speed. So the whole idea here is that we're having, we can create multiple reports. So let's say you're a social media agent, say you're a digital agency, right?

You can have a report on Facebook ads, Google ads, yeah, SEO. Automation, copywriting, funnels, you know, like there's probably six or seven different avenues. So what you can have within your email sequence is you're constantly sending out great content. People are downloading, people are downloading the report.

And then afterwards you've got niche emails. So if I download a report about Google Ads, Number one, you can grab my phone number at the same time. So you can call me up and say, Hey, did you get that Google ads report? Yes. Great. What, what did you like it? And then that can then, yeah, segue into a position where you can book them into an appointment and make, make a sale.

And second, you can send them several emails then just about Google ads, which you know, is their bleeding neck right now before putting them in the main part of the funnel. So it allows us to segment the list and enter the conversation that's going on in their customer's mind, in the customer's mind, because.

You're not downloading a, you know, a report on Facebook ads, unless you're actually interested in Facebook ads as such. So, so, you know, two steps in this. Number one, uh, you know, in terms of the downloads, nothing new there. It's a pretty standard download sheet. And then for the sake of booking appointments, then we're going in, here's a download, and now we encourage them to book an appointment.

I find this works way better than sending people just to, at the end of your email and saying, hey, go and book an appointment. Just the fact that they download the report and they hit this page, they're far more likely to actually respond, book an appointment from this, this page from, than from a, than from an email.

So, so in terms of what PDFs to create, I use. AI to come up with these so you can put it into AI and basically say, Hey, I'm, uh, you know, let's say, let's say Jane, I sell property investment education or education on renovation. This is all about my business. You could load a PDF up there about your business and say, what reports would you recommend that I create?

And then it'll come back and then you can choose the best type of type of reports. Yeah. How do I, how do I create a, you know, a PDF, for example? So, this is, let me, let me just, this is where we get to the sort of sexy part. I'll move away from the presentation and I'm just going to bring across from my prompt here.

Act is a world class copywriter. If you want to name a particular copywriter, that can also be useful there, who specializes in creating white papers and checklists for the marketing niche. Your task is to write an outline for a report based on the following title report, And this is, this is where, what, what you're, what you're doing here is, and I'll, I'll, I'll show you to actually identify this, you know, the, the structure here.

You're going in, kudos to John Hubbard for teaching me

about this little process, the, the sad face to smiley face process. So what, so what we're doing is we're looking at this. From a, you know, from a, from a report process. And what I might actually do is rather than, rather than use the, use my example here, I might might use a volunteers example. Does anyone wanna wanna be a volunteer?

No. Everyone's nervous. What about you, John Hubbard?

Oh, what am I gonna talk about though? Yeah, we could do one for, for Rob's business maybe. Yeah. So, so what's a sad face? Like, and this is, what's the title of the report? Firstly, maybe let's do one for property development. How to find a, a joint venture partner, a JV partner. So it's a sad face is no JB partner.

Yeah. Right. Happy face is JV partner making, you know, 100 K plus sort of thing. So, so, and we can do this as a, like a really simple one for, for the sake of advantage. So we could even just have three steps in this, right? And then sub steps. Underneath that, what would those, what would those steps, what would those steps be?

So the first one might be that you've got to work out what, which part of the development project that you want, let's say, let's say you're looking for a money partner. So which, which part of the funding of the project. That you need funding for. Yep. So, so it'd be, would it be like find a money partner?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You could, you could do that. It depends which way you want to go with it. If you want to go a little bit higher level, cause essentially the JV partner is the money partner. So that's essentially the, uh, you know what I mean? So the first step might be work out what you won't need funding for, might be the first step.

And then the second step might be something like, you know, put, put together an IM, an info, an information Information memorandum, so you can present to them. And then the, the third step might be put together a heads of agreement. A heads of agreement. Yep. So, and then you've got put together heads of agreement and then that's sort of pretty much when they said the sub steps underneath that identify what you need funding for.

What's the sub steps? Oh, actually I've picked the wrong one. This is one that I would normally, this is the one I would normally walk Rob flux through. So I'm, I'm, I really should. Yeah. I'm not going to have the expertise to put this one together, Scott. Why don't I choose another one instead? Yeah, go for it.

Yeah. So why don't we do no testimonials and, and lots of testimonials. So what's, what's step one? Step one would be a testimonial request. Yep. Step two would be a, the pre testimonial positioning. Let's call it step three, testimonial interview. Testimonial interview. And then you might do, you know, maybe deployment.

So sub steps under testimonial request? Yeah, it would be a list of candidates. Yep. And then it might be prep. So a list of results or client results, maybe. That's your client results. Yep. Yep. And then write testimonial requests. Yeah. And step two. Step two prepositioning would be, would be writing the request and reminding them of their results.

So you can put that in the top one. Yep. That's fine. And then the, that all go in the same one, Scott, probably. And then the last one would be, you could only have, you only really need two subs, subsets here. The last one would be all of the. The free interview information. So what they, how, what they need to do to look good on camera.

And testimonial interview. Would be question prep. Yep. And then would be the, the order of the interview questions. So essentially a script. And deployment? Yeah, deployment then would be sales pages, emails, pre call sequences, let's say, and then repurposing for social media. Okay, great. So we've got, we've basically got here, so this is the pre work you want to do if you're creating, let's say, a report, right?

So you're getting very clear. And this, this could be the same with, if you create, if you're writing a book, if you're writing a report, very similar, very similar, similar process. So then what we're doing is we're taking this from chat GPT, as you can see here, and you'll see here, title of report. So we're going to pull in what we're going to call it.

John. Maybe how to get more clients with testimonials or something like that. Yeah. What would you say is the biggest benefit of that process? Yeah. Just outline. Um, How to get more clients with testimonials, I think that's good. And then we're just cutting, we're just cutting this in here, right? So step one is Testimonial Request, here.

And then step 1A is List of Candidates. So we're going to go, explain that generates a List of Candidates. And then Step 1B, List of Client Results, and then Step 1C is Write Testimonial Requests. So we're just pulling this in, but it's the thinking that, the thinking that goes in beforehand, which is just so valuable, rather than just jumping in and, and doing it.

And Step 2, Step 2 is Free Testimonial Positioning. Oh, it should say Pre, mate. What's that? Pre, not Free. Oh, Three. Yeah, free as in free as in so it's positioning the testimonial before the interview. So we're getting them to say the right things essentially. So maybe just call it testimonial positioning.

Yeah, you can do that. Testimonial positioning. And then we're going to pull this across and go writing the request and pre interview information. Pre interview information is step two. And then we're going to delete all of these and go to step 3, which is testimonial interview. For the sake of this, we might just stop it at three steps so we can Get into the sexy part and just go question prep, question prep, and order of the interview questions.

That will be 3B, and then we'll just go step 4, conclusion, recap what we've told them, encourage the reader to implement, summarize action steps. So there's that, there's the, that initial one, so Axelworld Class Copywriter, and so we're going to get an outline. So we click here and we get an outline. Looking good.

And by getting it to give us, give us an outline, we obviously know it's on track, but it's also, obviously, it's thinking that and it knows, it's showing us it knows exactly how to write it. So now we're going to go, now that we've got the outline, we just jump in and we go, Axelworld Class Copywriter specializes in creating white papers and checklists for the marketing niche.

And write section one, and you put what it is, or write, yeah, let's say the introduction, write the introduction to this report. Now this is great, right? In terms of. In terms of the introduction is, yeah, it's good copy and everything, but it's not really personalized to John. Okay, so it's not, it's not really personalized to John.

So this is where we're going to open up Otter and hit record. Do you want to talk, John? Just make sure it's picking it up. Yes. Can you hear me? Yep. Can you be close enough? I'll try. I'll talk loud into the mic. Yeah. So, uh, so what, uh, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to ask you the question. So we did the intro.

So step one, if you just want to talk us through step one, You know, over sort of 30 to 60 seconds and just hit on all those hot points. Yep. All right. So, so can you just under highlight it, mate? It's just a little bit hard to see. Thanks. Step one is the testimony request. So the first thing is just identifying your best candidates from your clients.

So you want to think about the broad desires and the pains that are representative of your target audience. So you're looking to match that by, by finding someone in your. Client base that's representative of that. That's going to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Cause what you're trying to do with the testimonial is have it as a custom led marketing version of a, of a piece of marketing.

So it's, it's the same, same rules apply to any other piece of marketing. It's just coming from your client. So what you want to do is just go through, nominate the clients that have got those stories. The second thing we want to look for is people have got big quantifiable results. So, uh, Ideally you want something you can wrap a number around.

So X amount done in X amount. Yeah. So X amount of dollars made in X, X amount of time, for instance, is a good one. Or, you know, let's say you're a sleep coach. So many hours of sleep saved. So what you want is a big concrete quantifiable result. So they're the kind of criteria. And then what you want to do is once you've nominated those people is you want to not list their results.

So you want to go back through sometimes that requires a little bit of research or something, or going back through your notes and having those results on hand. So when you reach out to them in the next step, you can actually quote those results to them. So you're not having to leave the job. to the interview to do that.

So then you do the testimony request. So that's about having a structured way of reaching out so that you're not putting all of the pressure on them to do it right now and following guidelines and a template for doing that. So you make it really easy for them to say yes and also don't. Kind of risk the relationship in the request, and then you make it very clear to him in the request that all the, all of the workers on you, all they have to do is show up and answer questions to an interview and that's it.

They're not going to have to go off and write a 50 page testimonial kind of thing. So then comes to step two, which is the testimonial position. I know, stop, stop there. So we're just doing step one at the moment. Thanks for that. That's, that's, that seems good. So we got, uh, we're going to copy and paste all this one.

That's where we started, isn't it? Step one is a testimonial quiz. Yep. It didn't say quiz, but yeah. Yeah. I can't remember quiz, but I think that's where we started. Isn't it? It was. Yeah. I reckon. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you can go through and edit it. I find the chat GPT does pick it up pretty well, even if it's, Even if it's, uh, you know, even if there's, there's some spelling, what was it?

Testimonial request, I think. Request. There's Candace here. So what we're going to do here now is we're going to go act as a world class copywriter specializing in creating white papers and checklists for the marketing niche and write section one, one for this report. And we've got here, or write step one, testimonial report, right?

Step one. Testimonial request. This report, testimonial request based on the following transcript. So chat, chat GBT has told us what we need to say, then we're, then we're saying it. So what's going to come out is going to be quite authentic to John, but it'll be It'll be authentic, but he won't have to write it.

So it takes him, took him like two minutes rather than taking, you know, an hour or so, you know, for what most people would take to write it. So we punched that in and this is based on your knowledge, right? Your unique expertise, all of that. Yeah. All of that sort of thing. So it's very, very authentic to you.

And the same, the same thing applies. If we're writing, yeah, if we're writing email, yeah, if we're writing emails, if we're doing any type of copy, if we combine the transcript, right thinking up front, yeah, and combine the transcript so it brings our, brings our personality into it, then it comes in and it's quite authentic copy that comes out of it.

Can you notice your words in there, John? Mmm. Yeah, that's done a good job. Yeah, so it feels like, it feels like you is, is essentially, is essentially what we wanted to, what we wanted to actually, yeah, to, to be, to actually be able to, yeah, to do. So let's, and this is the same thing, the same thing applies to, to email, right?

So, If we jump in here, we, we jump in and we say we want to create an email about what do you want to, let's say we, let's say we just picked step two, right? And we say we want to, we want to write an email about providing pre info, pre interview information, right? Providing pre Interview information. I want to read it off as transcript and then feed the transcript back into ChatGPT.

Act as if you're a world class copywriter. Yep, yep. That's it. And provide a three to five bullet I should cover in the transcript. So, we're going to do that. And we're going to go just in pre interview information. It's basically sort of giving us an idea of what to. What to do in the, in that section.

That's what that is. And the next thing is, we're going to say Greg, to exit world class copy and write an email of approximately three to five hundred words about, yeah, about pre interview information. And John, if you just want to talk about, go through steps one to four or one to five really quickly, and then we'll drop the transcript in, in here and turn it into an email.

Ready to go? Yeah, yeah, go for it. Yeah. So the first thing is you want to make clear to them the objective of the interview and you're trying to make it so you're not trying to conceal that it's about your selfish purposes. Obviously they know you're going to use it to promote your product or service, but you can also position it as helping or inspiring other people in the community.

You want to give them a really clear idea of what to expect. So give them a bit of an overview of the process. I, you're just going to have to turn up and answer questions and it's going to take. 30 minutes and it's just going to be on a, on a Zoom call, for instance. And this helps them to understand what's coming up so that they're less likely to be a no show.

Then you want to give them an idea of the types of questions that you're going to be asking, but you don't want to give them a list of the questions in advance. Otherwise, they're going to be very robotic because they would have practiced their lines and, and there's nothing worse than a wooden insincere.

Testimonial. So you give them the highlights of what you want to talk about and you just inform them that's going to be really casual conversation. So you, you say, for instance, that, Hey, I'd really love you to talk about X, Y, big X, Y, Z result that we got together, because I think that would be a great benefit to the community for instance.

And that way you're narrowing the focus of the interview, not to be very broad, but to be on the specific quantifiable result that you achieved together. Then you give them some tips on. How to share their story. What I would do there in that part would actually be tips of how to look good on camera. So I would typically appeal to their own vanity there.

And I would say, Hey, listen, people judge a book by their cover. You need the camera height at eye height. You need to be about an arm's length away from the camera. And, you know, you want to avoid that awful up the nose shot, for instance, of having the camera too low. So I would, I would want to have them looking their best on camera because they, They're essentially presenting your brand on camera.

And lastly, I would just give them the details of the call and the link. Yep. No, excellent. So what we're going to do is we're going to, in here, you said ready to go. Let's look for that. Just thinking where we started. I think there, wasn't it? Yeah, I'm pretty sure you said ready to go. And then I said, go for it.

Okay, good. Now we're just going to drop this in here. No, it looks like it's composing the email to the client. I think it's got, yeah, it's gotten confused and we can feed it back. And we can say, actually, pre invitement, here's the email, please make it a, make it an educational email, about this methodology or something.

Yeah. About this methodology. I think you might have to click this on it. You got it. Yeah. About this methodology, please make that and submit, and that should come back. That's done the same thing again. Done the same thing. So chat GT's playing up at the moment. I don't know if anyone else has noticed it.

Has it? Yeah. Been playing up. So normally that would come back and it, it'd be quite a, uh, yeah, it'd be a, it would offer a solid foundation, but we needed to, uh, yeah. A, a, a solid foundation to base it off. Please make about this methodology. To go out to a list of prospective clients who are interested in using testimonials to get more clients.

Interested in using testimonials to get more clients. And then failing that you might have to write, do not write a testimonial request. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Doesn't, uh, yeah, that's done it. So that, that's, that's essentially it. And then it's very much in, yeah, in. Yeah, based on John's knowledge, his expertise and all that sort of thing.

It's all, you know, it's all based on as a, as a foundation. So, so that's it. That's essentially it, you know, what, what we basically, um, yeah, what we, what we've basically done is it shown, okay, how do we write emails? And how do we actually then, then have the reports all in our own voice so we can build a system like this, which we can use to book our calendars, which can be done now because rather than writing a report costing thousands of dollars or taking days, we can do it at super speed and fast.

far more cost effectively. So these sort of, these sort of approaches with email are far more practical than they were many years ago. So, uh, with that being said, um, we're 1243. So I'll, I'll just open it up for, uh, for any questions and then we'll go out into a quick breakout. If we've got, we've got time, no questions.

I still think the idea of getting to record the. These, you know, thing and transcribing it's brilliant anyway, at the end of the day, cause that's the hard part is getting their voice, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, the, the transcription is like super valuable and, and now with chat GPT, where you can add the PDF as well to get it in there, yeah, in there, in their voice, most people would know about, would know about that as well, but yeah, it's, it's very, uh, yeah, it's very powerful from that, from that sort of perspective.

Also, I think that interview crisis. Is really valuable for a client to that you, that you do with clients, Scott, because it's very hard for someone to often start with a blank page, but you taking through that someone through a structured process is very easy for them. And then it's very easy for you at the back end as well, just to churn out stuff.

That's ready to go for copy. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Having that, that front end stuff where you're doing, like, if you think about it. You could, you can, you can map this sort of stuff out quite, you know, quite quickly. And then you can create sort of four or five reports for the business. So, yeah, no, that's, that's, that's awesome.

Overview:

It’s hard to be consistent on social media, but AI has changed all that. Discover how it can be used to engage with your audience across Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter while ensuring each interaction feels personal and genuine.

With a profound understanding of market dynamics and consumer behaviour, Audra's passion for marketing is matched only by her expertise in leveraging the latest technological advancements. Her strategic use of AI in digital marketing has made her a trailblazer in the field. With her at the helm, zindo+co has emerged as a powerhouse of marketing wisdom, offering a plethora of resources for entrepreneurs looking to make their mark in the digital world.

Takeaways:

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

Well, here you go.

I just checked in.

Yeah, I got the, got the recording.

Recording started.

So, Audra, I actually met Audra, I was actually on one of her her events last year and then we had a, then we had another chat.

And Audra's got a real profound understanding of market dynamics and consumer behavior.

So she's got a passion for marketing, which is matched only by her expertise in leveraging the latest technical technological advancement.

And she has a strategic use of AI in digital marketing, which has made her a trailblazer in the field with her at the Helms, Zido and Cove has emerged as a powerhouse of marketing wisdom, offering a plethora of resources for entrepreneurs looking to make their mark in the digital world.

And today what she's gonna be walking us through is how to use AI to automate social media while still being authentic and genuine.

Whether it's on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

She's gonna show us how to do it.

So, uh, I'll hand the reins over to, uh, you aud.

Here we go.

Alright, are you guys ready?

So, I don't have a fancy presentation.

I'm more of in the weeds.

I wanna show you what it looks like under the hood and see if you guys can take this back and use it.

Now, I know you guys, many of you guys are agency owners, have been marketing copywriters for a long time.

Just to give you a quick update, I've owned an agency since 2009.

So I've been in the industry a long time.

Worked with startups, work with Fortune 500 companies.

I told Scott the last handful of years what I typically do with clients.

I've kind of moved outta services and I will go into a company and I'll take their p and l and I will find money.

Is it developing new products?

Is it changing the systems, changing staff?

What does that look like?

And that has kind of become my sweet spot from that level.

But then AI came on the scene.

I was like, wait a second.

I may wanna dig back in here a little bit and see what I can do with it.

So, very success, uh, exciting technology.

And I've been doing a lot of tinkering and testing.

I know enough to be dangerous, meaning I know enough technology to be able to get into the weeds.

I think become coming up during 2009, back in that day, we are, we're seeing a little bit more.

As generalist, we can do a lot of different things, right?

Many of us have, you know, a couple lanes that we, we consider as our superpower, but we really can run the whole gamut.

So I have dug into AI and I've got a podcast.

I'm building GPTs.

I am testing con, you know, writing different kinds of content and just really pushing the limit to see how do we bring that in one as service providers inside of a company or even some of the smaller businesses.

How do you actually utilize that?

So last time Scott and I talked, we went down that rabbit hole of what else can you do with AI?

And really exploring where that's going.

And I have built some automations for social media.

Now we all know that between, even at an agency level or a client level, none of us are posting consistently enough going through the data, you know, seeing what's converting, what's not converting and RINs and repeat.

It's just, it's a very hard process.

We all know it's very labor intensive.

So I was like, you know what?

I wonder if I could automate it.

Maybe there's a way that I don't actually have to be the one doing this day in and day out.

So I use a platform, excuse me, a lot of talking today.

I use a platform called make.com.

Are you guys familiar with that?

It would be like Zapier or Patty.

It's an automation tool that you can go into and see, set up different types of automations.

So about four or five months ago went down that path of what can I use if I look at AI and I look at my day-to-day tasks, what can I use or what, what kind of automation could I set up to make this happen?

So I don't physically have to be the one doing it or I don't have to pay somebody to do it.

So I built out an automation in make that uses a different, we'll we'll do a tour, but just conceptually, so you guys get it uses topics and tones of voice.

And then I wrote a prompt that says, I want you to create a LinkedIn post.

I want it to be about this, this, and this.

And then I want you to go to my LinkedIn in post and I want you to post it every day at 10 o'clock in the morning.

So I started that about five months ago and I've really just let it run.

And it's more of testing, right?

I want it, I want some feedback.

I wanna see if, does anybody respond?

Is the algorithm throttling me?

Am I getting any growth from my followers?

And I also did it on Twitter and I did it on my Facebook pages.

So you can't do it on your personal profile yet, but you can do it if you have a business page.

So I have an Audra business page and then I have a business page, a company business page.

So I set it up on all of 'em.

I made the prompt a little bit different for each one of 'em and I picked some different categories as to what I wanted to write about.

Now when I first turned them on, it was crap.

It was, it sounded so much like ai, it threw in way too many emojis.

And I kept having to tweak it a little bit.

Okay, it's saying this, okay, it's got too many bullets, too many this, okay.

It dropped off halfway through the conversation and I've had to just kind of massage it to get it to a place that it sounded a little bit more like a human and also sounded a little bit more like me.

So it's been a great experiment.

Now I was looking at the data yesterday to kind of recap so I'd be able to share with you guys with Twitter and, and let me go ahead and share, actually, let me stop for a second and see, yeah, Integra map was a better name where May came from, who the hell knows.

But are you guys using, you know, just even a show of hands, are you guys using social media and AI together or are you just, so you're writing it and then posting?

Or does anybody have any automation set up where you're not touching it, it's just doing it by itself?

No.

Yes.

Heaps and heaps.

Okay, so Tim's, Tim's on it.

The cool thing about it is it gets, it accomplishes a couple things.

One, it allows me to free up time to work on something else.

Yes, I need to show up at, if I wanna build a brand, I need to show up on social media.

Doesn't mean I have to be the one doing it.

Doesn't mean I have to sit through the painstaking stuff of having somebody else create the social media.

It just needs to be there and it needs to be on brand, it needs to be value added and sound like me.

How it gets there I think is irrelevant.

At least for me.

It is.

Some people may have some issues with that.

I currently don't.

And looking at the data on some of these platforms, it's showing that it's not mattering.

So let me go ahead and share my screen.

My Facebook, my LinkedIn for example, it, so about kinetic marketing, when you search data start, yeah, I hear somebody, but I don't know what they're saying.

Oh, Oh, just try on silence.

Just bear with me for one second.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

I thought they were talking to us.

Okay, Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that should be silenced now.

Yep, No worries.

Alright, so Make is a tool that you can get in, you can set up, I mean I have many, many different automations, but we're gonna try to stick with social media here.

So make is a tool that you can get in and you're almost building a funnel.

You know, you start with an opt-in, you send them to a landing page, they take advantage of the offer, they opt in, you, you know, upsell them, downsell them, whatever it is.

When you're building an automation, it's almost the same concept of what you want them to do step by step.

So if I look at my, and if I'm going way too fast, 'cause I know I just jumped like right in the deep end with you guys, please holler with questions or anything.

When I jump into my automation, I have an initial setup.

And what this initial setup does is it says, I want you to connect to my LinkedIn page, here's the name of the page.

And I've given you a variety of topics that I want you to talk about.

So for me, I picked personal development, course marketing, mindset, entrepreneurship, and ai.

And what I want you to do is I want you to cycle through them.

So I don't wanna, I don't want you to talk about any one of them more than once at a time because I wanna be able to add variety.

You could have two topics, you could have 50 topics, whatever you want the tool to cycle through.

So I've set the stage of what is kind of the kind of content I want us to focus on.

The next is I need to pick the ti, the tone of the voice of the, what I'm gonna have you write.

So my tone of voices are persuasive, educational, engaging, and relatable.

And again, I only want you to use it once and I want you to cycle through it so it continually, you know, works through each one of them.

So it doesn't sound like the same thing every single time.

Now I have had to edit the prompt a few times and try to get it closer and closer and give it different instructions.

And I'm gonna show you kind of a cool trick.

And then I give it kind of the tool.

I set it up here and there's lots of videos out there make, if specifically has an AI assistant now that you can go into saying, I'm trying to set up an automation for my Twitter account.

That open AI writes it and it will actually set up the scenario for you.

Now you still have to know how to program it, but once you get inside of it, it's, it's actually not that bad.

Once you get the hang of it, if you guys get stuck and you decide, do you wanna do it, I'm happy to walk you through it.

So I've set up my topics, I've set up my tones, then I, I've gotta be able to say, okay, what do I wanna do with OpenAI?

I've just connected my API to this account.

I want it to create a chat.

I'm gonna use Model GPT, and then I want it to act as a moderator of my LinkedIn page.

Then it's going to go on as a user.

And I've written a prompt here.

So I want you to write a post.

I want you to rotate through the topics.

Use exactly one of the tones and personalities.

The entire post should consistently maintain the tone.

But do not write the name of the tone.

Oh, I had an issue where it would say persuasive tone and they're writing the post underneath it.

So you'll find that you've gotta massage it.

You know, at the beginning when you set these up, you do have to check on them, delete them real fast if they sound like crap, or go in and edit them.

But as you work through this gets easier and easier.

So then I give it some examples of what I want it to do, and then I give it some requirements, keep the same tone, introduce and explore one concept related to what I gave it.

I want it to give insight, but I also want it to provide actionable strategies in the post.

Then I want to ensure that the content is t tailored for LinkedIn audience, right?

So we wanna make sure that it's in the right context for the platform that it's on.

Do not use emoji emojis and hashtags.

Now I did have it trying at the beginning, trying to add in a couple, and it was like the whole post was emojis.

And I was like, I just gotta remove it 'cause it's, it's not cutting itself off.

Stick with the context, limit the characters.

So I say no more than 2000, but a minimum of six 50.

Structure it with bullet points, single sentences, short paragraphs, right?

Because I want it to show up as if I, the human wrote this.

Then if you know what we're talking about, follow practical tips, conclude with a call to action.

We're doing it for engagement and in a pers persuasive style.

So I've written that.

And then you go through and you just connect your LinkedIn, right, just like you would.

So if I follow the sequence, right, I've set the parameters of what they can talk about.

I give it a tone, I gave it the prompt, and then I say create it and post it on LinkedIn.

So then let me add my LinkedIn page over here.

All right, so if I go to my LinkedIn page, I'm about from a, let's look at some data.

I'm at about 66 followers, which isn't bad, but it's not great.

And again, I'm doing nothing to build this, build this.

So like I said, I started posting about five months ago, the first probably two months, maybe 60 days, 90 days, lots of emojis, a little bit different per prompt.

And I wasn't crazy about it.

It didn't feel like me, it didn't feel organic, it felt too chat, GBT.

And so what I did was to try and get it more in my tone.

I actually downloaded all of my data from LinkedIn and it'll allow you to pull down your post.

And I uploaded that to chat GBT.

And I copied the prompt that I've been using and make and I said, help me rewrite this prompt so it sounds more like me.

And through a couple iterations, that's where I've gotten to where with where it's at today.

So if I look at the data and I think, okay, is it helping me?

Is it hurting me?

Is it, am I even growing?

What is happening with this automation post?

I post once a day and I post seven days a week.

So if I go into the actual data, let's say for the past, let's look at the year, right, because I was not posting.

So if I go back five months, it's probably right around here.

So you see where it's dropped off on September 3rd.

So from this way to the end, I've been using automation this way.

Back was me manually posting when I would get into LinkedIn and post, sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't.

LinkedIn's not a good business generator for me.

My audience really shows up for me on Facebook, but I still know the value of using this platform.

Some days I did really good.

No, so it's, it's up and down, but it was still consistent right up except over here where there was crap.

But I've seen quite a, you know, bigger highs and lows or bigger highs I guess since I've set up the automation.

And I think it has to do with consistency and the content that chat, TPT is actually writing.

So if you look at, I have had a hundred dollars or $1,100, 1100% increase for the year based on impressions, which is pretty good.

Again, I'm not doing anything.

And then engagements, let's see if we can look at that again.

So we start September 3rd.

So about right here where it falls off, look to the right, how much higher the spikes are and versus to the left where I am manually creating that content.

Pretty different.

Now if we go to, I think that's all you could look at here.

Yeah, so if I go to my page, just so you guys can see what a couple of 'em look like, posts are getting pretty good profiles.

It's consistently growing.

I think when I started it, I was maybe at about, I don't know, 5,000 something and I'm almost gonna hit 6,700.

Again, no outreach on my part, no posting on my part.

Now I do get on and respond to somebody.

If somebody posts a comment, absolutely I do get on and maybe a couple times a week just to read what the AI is written just in case it's incongruent or incomplete.

Like this one, which I found yesterday, but I left it for an example.

So it starts to write the post.

Imagine a world with no obstacles, okay?

Personal development isn't just about reading.

Self-help books.

So it's in plain English, it's not hard to keep up with.

It doesn't sound like chat.

GBT wrote it, start with a mi, a growth mindset.

You may have heard the phrase, the only thing standing between you and your goal is the story you keep telling yourself.

Okay, I would say something like that.

So it starts to go through the bullets and then it stops at this one.

Something you have to be aware of when you set stuff on autopilot.

Now, typically what I would do found that I would go and I would edit it.

I would probably remove that and add a call to action or add a, you know, what other things, what other personal development things are working for you or something like that to tie it to the rest of the message.

But the this happening is so rarely that it's, it's so rarely.

So I don't worry about, you know, I'll go ahead and clean it up and just rinse and repeat and let it keep running.

I'll give you another example.

Let me let it go back today though.

There we go.

Now some of these were me actually posting that I was looking for something like this.

I did create that and I did create that one.

Here's another one, Chad, TPT wrote, isn't it true We're all on a journey of self-improvement.

Whether you realize or not, personal development isn't simply about ticking things off a bucket list, one vital, often overlooked, here's why.

And then it goes into a whole list very nicely formatted.

Makes perfect sense.

So the next time when you're setting goals, remind yourself it's not just about the finish line.

I mean it's actually so it's getting better and better.

Every little bit of iteration that I do to the prompt allows me to start getting better results and you know, nicely formatted, clean, simple, easy to read post that I didn't have to take any time to write or post or anything else.

And like I said, my growth continues to grow day over day based on this content constantly showing up.

Now the cool thing is it gets better.

So if you don't like the prompt I, what I've done a couple times is take the prompt that I'm using and I can go into chat GPT and say, I'm using Make, and I've set up an automation and you are posting to LinkedIn for me, here's the prompt I'm using, here are the, here's what I don't like about it.

Help me update it.

And we will constantly iterate it until we get to a place where it sounds like me, it's talking like me.

You know, it feels more congruent with who I am as a human.

Now is that perfect?

No, none.

None of the AI stuff as of right now is perfect.

But is it better than the resources that we've had access to a year ago?

Absolutely.

So it's definitely worth giving a try.

And you write each one of these a little bit differently, right?

What I say as a prompt on LinkedIn is going to be different than say my prompt on Twitter.

On Twitter I want short and punchy and you know, very different type thing.

Same setup.

You pick topics, you pick tones of voice, you rotate through them, then you will pick your prompt just a little bit differently.

So here's draft a Twitter post.

The post should be engaging, thought provoking, adhering to the following guidelines.

So I tell it a character count.

I want spaces between the sentences.

Do not use quotations or hashtags.

Don't add any external links.

So again, you're, you're writing the prompt based on the platform.

I mean we are already creating content specific to each platform.

We're going to give your the same type of direction.

So if I go to, oops, wrong one.

If I go to Twitter, I'm gonna see the same kind of thing.

Effective marketing isn't just about selling products, it's about sharing stories that capture hearts.

Remember people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Engage, relax or relate, evolve.

Very simple, plain English, not heavy unlocked by, you know, really driven by some of these silly words that AI keeps going back to.

But it's written in a tone that sounds like me.

I would say many of these SIGs, if I took the time Twitter, I post every two hours and 10 minutes.

Again, I'm not posting, but the AI is posting for me.

So let me stop sharing.

So you guys ask me questions, tell me how I can help.

I'm curious about make.com.

Yes.

I've not not used it at all.

Could you maybe just go through like one of those basic flows?

Yeah, absolutely.

Basic One, that'd be amazing.

You wanna see it or you want me to just talk through it?

Yeah, whatever's easiest.

Probably see it and just, okay, just like super, like if you were just gonna put together a new automation for a new, there was a new social media platform tomorrow called, I don't know, jojo, and you had to create a new process.

What's your high level approach?

Yeah.

Okay, so let me, let me kind of back it up for a second.

When it comes to make, what I want you to do, okay, as an agency, we sit down and we map out step by step by step.

We need to set up an email campaign, a welcome series, what is email one, what is email two?

And we'll walk through that.

You would do the same thing for this.

So what you would sit down and say is, what do I wanna automate?

What task can I take off my plate?

I set up an automation on here where I published a newsletter about AI once a week.

And what I found was I was spending like four hours on Thursday gathering the data, having to review the article real quickly, find out if it was worthwhile of adding, then doing a summary, then adding it to the newsletter.

It was taking me way too long.

I was like, this is a free newsletter.

I do not wanna spend this kind of time doing it.

So I went here and I set up an automation that said I need you to go out.

I even tried with Google alerts, but Google Alerts gives you everything, all the crap, all the stuff that is irrelevant.

It all shows up in there.

And I didn't wanna have to filter through it.

So I said I wonder if I could set up an automation that went to, because it seemed like I was getting my articles from like 10 blogs, right?

Amazon's blog, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI.

So there was like, you know, a handful of them that I was going to every week to find out what they did, what they didn't do.

And then I would have to summarize the article and then write something for it.

So I said, well let me put together a bot and I'll give you an example here.

So what I did was, I mean I had to do some research on it.

Chat TPT and I went back and forth.

So I explained the situation to it as to what I was trying to do.

I said, help me set up an automation that will collect this for me.

Bring it in, summarize it all and just give me the end.

I just need like a paragraph.

Tell me, give me a headline, gimme the summary of the article and, but explain it like I'm a fifth grader because a lot of this AI news that's getting published, some of it's pretty technical, I don't wanna read all that, I don't wanna learn it.

I'm a marketer.

So what we, what I did was I set up an R Ss feed.

Anybody can do this, right?

Many websites have an RSS feed available.

You can just go there and do a search on it.

It'll give you their link.

So what I said was, okay, I want you to grab this link and I want you to return no more than 10 articles at a time.

Most of these big brands don't publish more than 10 articles a week.

But I kind of set a limit 'cause it can get jammed up if you try to do too many too fast.

That's it.

I just said bring me in maximum 10.

Then I'm using a third party tool called Scraping Bee.

What Scraping Bee does is it goes down and it scrapes a website and it brings a data back.

That's it.

Super simple.

You can do it to analyze websites, you can do it to summarize websites, you can do it to collect your competitors.

Scraping bee's been around a while.

There's a few other competitors out there that'll do the same thing.

But, so I told scraping b, I want you to go out, I want you to collect the body right of the article and I want you to collect the title and I want you to bring it back.

And then I want you to stick it in chat, GBT.

And I want you to summarize the article in one paragraph and explain it like I'm five.

So you go read it, you bring it back, you tell me what it says, okay, you guys with me so far?

Okay then after you do that, I want you to stick it in a Slack channel.

So I created a Slack channel in my company, click Slack channel and it's called News and Updates.

And I just want you to stick it in there and I want you to give it a title and I want you to write the summary and I want you to gimme the link to the URL that you summarized.

So now when I run this, it summarizes the articles, sticks it in a Slack channel.

So all I have to do now when I go to do my newsletter, excuse me, I just read the summary, summary paragraph and then I realize, okay, this article's worthwhile or it's relevant.

Let me go read the whole thing or gather the whole thing.

Or this isn't for me and I don't need to waste any more time on it, it's done and I can just click yes, keep, no, no, no.

And it co really saves me time from having to go out and find it to sort through all the Google alerts and I immediately know something that's gonna be relevant for the newsletter that I'm producing.

So what I would say when it comes to make, what you gotta think about is what am I trying to automate?

And if you can tell it what you want to create, it will tell you what kind of tools you're going to need to make that happen.

Now what they do have, which is super cool, zap now just for comparison, Zapier is much easier to use than Make is Make is a little bit more like an engineer brain.

I mean there's sometimes I have to say this is too much, I'm gonna go drink wine and I'm gonna go come back tomorrow 'cause I can't figure this out.

But there are a lot of smart people out there that can help you figure this out.

I've built quite a few, what do I got?

50 different scenarios in here and, and I just stopped because I didn't know what else to create right now.

But Zapier's a little bit easier, but it's more expensive.

This account that I have now, I don't know how the money equates differently in different countries, but I can run 10,000 scenarios a month, which I never have ever hit.

And I've had this account for like three years.

I pay nine do, I mean it's, it's nothing for the amount that it does.

Just considering all the social media posts for me it's $9.

So I have, you know, I have our assess feeds I can create, here's a sexy one, hold on, hold on you guys.

Let me see here.

It will create a blog post from you for you.

Let me find Scraping Bee here.

Now Scraping Bee is having an issue, so I had to stop it for a second.

But what it will do can get it to take a keyword from a Google spreadsheet or excuse me, A URL take a URL from a Google spreadsheet.

It goes to Scrappy Bee.

Scrappy Bee Reads, the website comes back, tells chat, GPT what it is, sends it to this chat, GPT, which then describes it in one sentence, adds that one sentence plus a description back to the Google sheet.

Let me go to the Google sheet so you guys could see it.

This is called new AI tools.

So let me open up a window here.

I know I'm way in the weeds here so if you guys, if you want me to stop you better cut me off Scott.

Sorry guys.

But it's so fun when you figure out how to do this stuff.

I really appreciate it.

Like it's, it's really deeply useful to kind of see how you're thinking through it.

Appreciate it.

Alright.

Okay.

Yeah, my brain is, is a dangerous place.

It's like, wait, what if we did this?

So I have a site that I list AI tools on, again, taking too long to collect them.

That's why I'm not seeing it.

'cause I'm on the wrong profile taking too long to collect them.

So I wanted to find a way that I could send a bot out to gather the information and bring it back and populate a spreadsheet so I didn't have to do it.

So I built a spreadsheet.

Okay, gotcha.

Come on over here.

Okay, so the only thing I had to do was collect the URL.

You guys can see it, right?

Yeah.

Okay, so I, I gathered the URLs that I wanted to have and then what it would do was it will give me, hold on, lemme go to the sheet.

There we go.

It.

So I have, okay, we have a name, we have a URL, then it created the slug for the URL because at when I finish all this, I'm gonna have it actu automatically create a draft on face or on WordPress and save it for me because I use WooCommerce to create the products.

So it puts it in draft on WordPress and I don't have to take it over there from here.

So we got a name, we've got a URL creates a slug for WordPress.

I picked the category that it's going to go into, right?

What kind of tool is it?

If there's an image on the website that is based on A URL, it'll actually bring in the URL for it.

Any kind of tags, if I was using what kind of pricing it has, is it free?

Now this is all, if it's available, if they can, if the S scrapy B can access it on the URLI provided, then I say write a description so it read all the data on the website.

Then it created a description for me.

I have nothing to do with these.

Then it wrote a short description because if you, anybody's used WooCommerce, you know you've got a product description and you've got the long one when you create products.

So it does both.

I don't wanna have to deal with it.

So it wrote the long version, then it wrote the short version and I'm kind of playful with things.

So I use emojis, I'm sarcastic and all that kind of good stuff.

So I wanna make sure that I tie that into my brand and my voice.

So then I can take it from here and then go back to the make right.

So what we said was, we start with that Google sheet.

We said start with the URLs that I gave you.

Go out to scraping me, gather the data, put it in here, write a description.

So you're an ai, e-commerce SaaS assistant.

I want you to summarize what the website does.

Use emotion, invoking language, highlight the product benefits.

It takes that, it writes the short description, the long description.

Then it comes back and it posts it all back on that spreadsheet that I just showed you guys.

Here's the short description, here's the long description.

And I could tie in videos and stuff like that.

I was more just a lot of this, I'm testing a lot of it.

I'm building, tweaking, building and finding out what tools I can use to kind of deploy out there on a regular basis.

I've written blog posts with this where I just give it a keyword, it writes the rest of the blog posts, then creates a WordPress draft and sticks it up.

There are some pretty, and I think I'm just like a, I'm a baby when it comes to this stuff.

Some of the automations I've seen people create just crazy good.

They do have quite a few templates.

So you can actually go in and say different scenarios.

I wanna Google form that can post to telegram.

I want, I mean there's hundreds and hundreds of them in here.

And like I said, they can get pretty complex depending on what you're trying to do.

Now, right now we have to use third party tools like this because AI hasn't gotten to quite, I'm gonna stop sharing.

AI hasn't quite gotten to the place where we can do it all within A GPT or with a third party tool like relevance or bot press or any of that kind of stuff.

But it will come, right now we're talking about agents.

I don't know, has anybody heard about agents yet?

And how, how those are gonna be, I am like holding on for agents.

So what agents will, what we're gonna see, at least my prediction and probably in the next 12 months or 18 months right now, kind of think of we're we're building, you know, we start with our chimpanzee and then the person that could stand up, right?

And then the, I mean we're like evolving through this evolution of ai.

chatt PT is a two-way conversation.

I ask you a question, you give me an answer.

You have access to lots of data patterns, frameworks.

You give me back the response as to what you think I'm looking for.

The sky is tells you it's blue.

You know, you're able to con not, it's not, we're not conversing.

We're asking, we're asking, we're putting in a prompt.

It's giving us a response.

Now we've got GPTs and GPTs are a little bit to like the next step where we can say, okay, you have access to all of that data, but now I need to give you some of my stuff because I want you to talk more like me.

I want you to answer questions more like me.

I want you to, I wrote a book and it was in, you know, I wrote it after you were indexed and you don't know anything about it, but I want you to respond to my people with my stuff.

And that's where GPTs come in handy because we can upload our content there and then we can create our own little personal chat bot that we could share.

But it stays within that little universe.

Now there are third party tools now, or if you're using open AI's, API, we can take, actually take that out of there and put it in an iframe on our website or a chat bot or anything like that and expand the amount of content or the amount of information we program these with.

So they have access to, so they're not just going off their database, but they're also going off of things that you've specifically told it.

You want it to respond.

So if Scott asked this, this should be the response, even though I know you have 10 other answers, this is how Scott would respond.

And therefore that's why we've uploaded that data.

And I've, I mean I've seen some amazing case studies.

Authors are uploading their books and then creating a chat bot.

So it's interactive.

So you wrote a book and maybe you're reading it and you're like, you know, a, I don't know what you meant with this concept on page 82.

What is this?

What are you talking about here?

Well, because I uploaded my book to my chat bot or my G fancy GPT, it can say, well she meant this or this is what it means.

And go into complete conversation with them.

And I mean, I could give you guys a hundred different use cases, but the point is, the next evolution, which we're all starting to see a little bit of the like super tech people is agents and agents are on chat.

Bot does a task that sends it to the next chat bot that sends it to the next chat bot that sends it to the next.

And then I guarantee you in the next like 18 months, we're gonna see billion dollar companies.

These unicorns come about with three people because company only needs the innovator.

They probably need a CTO, right?

They're gonna need somebody that can be in charge of this technology and probably a CMO.

That's it.

Because I will be able to build my own agents that one person handles marketing and it's not a person.

One agent handles marketing, then I have a freelancer, then I have a video editor, then I have a, and we're a little ways away from that.

But people are already building out these agents.

They're very clunky, lots of bugs.

We're not quite there yet, but it's coming.

And that will be the next iteration for businesses.

Mm-Hmm.

That's, that's a big, that's a big bang to uh, to, to finish with.

I think the whole, and I think it's something you mentioned Roscoe at the, the last live event is that yeah, we're gonna have a billion dollar companies with yeah, less than, less than five staff, which is, which is huge.

Yeah, no, that's, uh, that, that's awesome.

So we might break out.

Thank big thanks to Audra and if you just wanna drop some comments too, just in terms of what you thought of the presentation just for, for feedback for Audra.

But I thought it was awesome.

You've got a incredible brain with all the AI stuff and Yeah.

Some of the stuff you're doing is, is phenomenal.

So we might just go into breakout rooms now and we will Yeah, just brainstorm how can we actually use this technology?

We'll have about, probably about five minutes just how can we use this technology, oh, sorry.

Technology in our business.

No, no, that's all right.

That's all.

No, all, uh, all good.

We will, uh, be back in the, where is my breakout going back out there.

That's good.

We'll back soon.

Overview:

As one of America’s leading behavioral management specialists, James became fascinated with how beavioral management could be used to simplify a person’s ability to persuade just about anyone. More than 25 years of research and application across a wide range of industries led to his development of BRAIN GLUE ™, a power tool used by the world’s most persuasive professionals from Steve Jobs to Warren Buffett to Snoop Dogg, and more.

Takeaways:

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

So welcome everyone, and today we've got a couple of super exciting sessions.

The first up is Mr.

James I.

Bond, and, uh, James, one of the, is one of America's leading behavioral management specialists.

Years ago, he became fascinated with how behavioral management could be used to simplify a person's ability to persuade just about anyone.

He's worked with the likes of Warren Buffet amongst others, and with more than 25 years of research and application across a wide range of industries, has led to his development Brain Glue, which is a power tool used by the world's most persuasive professionals.

From Steve Jobs to Warren Buffet to Snoop Dogg and Moore.

You're in for a treat.

I interviewed James on a podcast recently and my head was just bouncing around with like, uh, brain cells were bouncing around like popcorn.

So, uh, uhoh, welcome, welcome, James.

I'll hand the reins over to over to you.

Great, Scott.

Nice to be here.

Thank you.

I always think, you know, it's oh oh seven, but I'm oh seven.

Nevermind.

What can I say?

Okay, you all see, can you see this?

Okay?

Yep.

All, all clear.

So here's the question I have for everyone is, could changing the name of your product or your sales pitch by using Brain Science multiply your income?

You bet it can, and I'll show you.

I wrote a book called Brain Glue, which covers this.

We go through this and I'm gonna talk about some of the elements of Brain Glue.

Now, first, I'm, and Scott said, I'm one of America's leading behavioral management specialists.

I work with a who's who of American business.

I'm originally from Montreal, by the way.

Uh, Canada, I'm love to show you a simple way to boost the selling power of your products, your ads, your social media posts, your pitches, your slogans, using brain triggers that activate the emotion centers of the brain where decisions are made.

This is actually quite, quite profound.

Yes, my book is a finalist as the Best Business Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, because it's blowing the minds of so many people in advertising and marketing and entrepreneurs.

It's one, it's a reader's favorite five star award winner.

And Jack Canfield, one of the richest authors of all time, who sold 500 more than 500 million Chicken Soup for the Soul Books and more than 60 other major bestsellers called this book Mind Blowing and has forced everyone in this company, all the marketing people in this company to read this and to apply it, not just to read it.

By the way, as he explains it, if you're in business and you don't know this, I believe you have a massive in a disadvantage and you probably don't realize it.

So this is a revolutionary way to simplify how we influence, persuade, and sell by tapping the behavioral patterns that are ingrained inside us.

Everyone on this page, or every and every or every image on this page has brain glue elements in it, okay?

So brain glue, when you start to understand it, you start to go like, oh, and then you start to recognize it in other areas.

Okay, so let me see here so I can read this.

So our brains are already programmed to recognize specific phrases and patterns.

So this, I could see this.

So anchoring our products and ideas to something already stuck inside our listener's brain will also trigger an additional part of their brain.

The same region where images are processed and decisions are made.

And that's why Brain Glue is able to simplify your ability to persuade and sell just about anyone by amplifying your message.

So it sticks in the brain, your listener's brain like glue.

So let me talk first about how I discovered this, and then I'll give you examples of how this applies and how it works.

Okay?

Now I said, how did I discover Brain Glue?

I started an advertising agency in Montreal.

We built it up and then eventually won some of the world's biggest clients, Kraft Foods, Timex watches, Avon Cosmetics, Seagram's or World Headquarters is there.

And I had an opportunity to win the anti-drug campaign in America.

And I came up with, because of my connections and of all the work that we did, and I had an opportunity to win the anti-drug campaign in America.

And I came up with powerful, logical reasons why you should not do drugs.

And then I saw the ad that lot that I lost to, and it terrified me.

Okay?

When I saw the ad that one, I realized this is emotional selling, not logical selling, and it's infinitely more powerful than anything I knew how to do.

It was a guy holding an egg saying, this is your brain.

Then he cracked the shell and dropped the egg into a sizzling frying pan with exaggerated sizzling sound pointed down and said, this is your brain on drugs.

And he questions.

It was, it was pretty scary.

And I realized, I don't know, emotional selling and emotional selling is not something they teach in school and there are really no books on it, et cetera.

I mean, there are some things that are superficial, but nothing that really explains how to do emotional selling.

So I love three by five cards.

So on a three by five card, I wrote the words Your Brain on drugs.

So I'd remember the ad, and then I put a box next to my computer and I called it a passion box.

And every time I saw an ad or heard something that was emotional selling, it could be from, um, a, a quote that somebody had.

Every time I saw something that was emotional selling, I put it in the passion box in the hopes that eventually I'd be able to figure out how emotional selling works.

After a little more than 10 years, I'd moved from Montreal, Canada to Southern California.

It's a lot warmer here, I'll say that, but I think it's 50 below here in Montreal now.

But anyway, but 10 years later after I moved to Southern California, I met John Gray at a major convention and John Gray was telling me about a book he wrote, men, women in Relationships and people who read the book loved the book, and they said it changed their life.

It was profound as far as a relationship book was concerned, but he couldn't sell a lot of books.

He only sold a few thousand books and it was really frustrating him.

So he decided to change the name of the book to Men Are From Mars, women Are from Venus, and tweaked the Content a little.

So it referred to Men Are From Mars, women from Venus.

Throughout the book, what do you think happened almost overnight?

He sold half a million copies than 1,000,002 million and 5 million.

He went from 20,000 copies with men, women in relationships.

When he changed the title of the book, he sold more than 50 million copies of the book, all because he changed the title could simply Changing the titles be all he needed to Explode Sales through the Roof.

Absolutely.

So when I got home, I looked at, you know, my, I dumped my passion box on the bed and I discovered that it's a metaphor.

You know, men are not really from a different planet.

Some of you women out there probably think we are, but we're not really from a different planet.

It's a metaphor.

And I realized that like dropping an egg into a sizzling frying pan, that was not a brain, it was an egg, but that was also a metaphor.

And I realized that metaphors is one of 14 brain triggers at the heart of emotional selling.

I started applying this, I've applied this personally to more than 161 companies, but hundreds of companies have applied this and I had tremendous results.

But my results, I took a $2 million construction company and these three partners that had, it took 10 years to reach 2 million in sales in one year, I took them to 10 million and then they reached 32,000,002 years later by applying this, I had a tech company, it was about to be shut down and they had 21 million in sales in one year.

And sorry, in 18 months, I took 'em to 66 million in sales by applying this.

And then I had, you know, small businesses and people that are startups use this too, because it doesn't require money, which is really great and it helps you explode your revenues and the power of your marketing and advertising because it uses brain triggers.

But I helped two women with a struggling button website that generate their highest income ever and a lot more people.

So their 14 brain true of brain glue tools, and I'll take you through a few of them here.

Let's start with rhyme.

So there was a mom and her son with no business experience, okay?

And they watched the TV show Shark Tank and they went like, Hey, it would be fun if we can create a product and maybe, you know, become successful and get on Shark Tank and get investors to invest in us.

So they were thinking about it and then they came up with this idea and they said, you know, my mom was ha the mom was having difficulty going to the bathroom.

So the doctor said, get a stool that raise raises your feet above six inches off the ground and it will really help you because it changes the shape of your body.

She tried that, it worked really well.

And then they realized, why don't we start a sell a product that ha is a toilet stool, okay?

But they didn't like the word toilet.

We don't wanna call it toilet stool.

My wife said maybe you should call it the stool Stool, but I don't think that works, just by the way.

Okay?

But so they said, I, you know, they said, I don't like the name toilet, toilet stool.

What's another word for toilet?

Well, and I'm assuming 'cause we're from America, okay, Australia might have different terms for it, but it was potty.

You know, it's a potty.

And then if I'm sitting on that, it's almost like I'm squatting, what don't I call it the Squatty Potty.

They went from zero to a hundred million dollars in sales in less than two years.

And so here's a simple question.

If they called it the toilet stool, do you believe that sales would've skyrocketed the way it did?

No.

There's something about the name Squatty Potty that resonates.

So when we take a look at rhyme Squatty Potty is a good example.

We have famous Amos cookies that took off like gangbusters with a guy that had virtually no money.

OJ Simpson, uh, the celebrity OJ Simpson was in a murder trial.

And the attorney said at the end, if the glove doesn't fit, they had a glove for the, uh, you know, for the, uh, murder.

If the glove doesn't fit, you have to acquit.

And the glove got him off.

The, the phrase got him off from an almost certain guilty verdict in a murder trial.

That's how powerful rhyme is.

Give a hoot, don't pollute is used, was used, it uses the term ri well, excuse me, it uses rhyme and sun sense elevation.

Hoot, hoot, hoot competitors to Wonder Bread.

Wonder Bread invented sliced bread and became dominant in America for more than 10 years.

And then competitors came up with this phrase, the whiter your bread, the quicker you're dead, relating it to a disease that was common there called GRA and Wonder Bread.

When people stop using Wonder Bread, almost overnight, they went from dominating the industry to almost bankrupt because of this phrase, the whiter your bread, the quicker you're dead.

So brainless simplifies how you use rhyme to sell your ideas and products.

So here's a rhyme exercise list three words that relate to your product or idea, then list all the words you can think of.

You know, you can use AI at chat GPT or whatever else, but come up with all the words you could think of that rhyme with each of those words.

And I bet you'll be able to come up with interesting phrases here.

Here I did it with brain glue.

So for me, brain glue.

So it helps you with a slogan, helps you with the product name, helps you with a pitch.

Oh, pitch, I like that.

I found Switch your pitch if you wanna get rich.

Okay, there's my first phrase.

Then I said, I want a more sophisticated phrase.

Well, so what does brain glue do?

It helps boost the trigger, the emotion, the passion, the desire.

Ooh, desire.

So, you know, brain glue helps you light the fire of desire in your buyer.

You hear how that works?

It resonates, doesn't it?

We have products like Squatty Potty, Reese's Pieces in America.

There's Elf on a Shelf, there's Famous Amos Give a who don't pollute.

Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker.

Zig Ziglar was fam became famous with phrases like, you wanna have an attitude of gratitude.

Excuse me, you wanna avoid stinking thinking.

See how that works.

So, so then we have trigger words.

So you guys know billionaire Richard Branson.

What does billionaire Richard Branson, Madonna, and Olive oil have in common?

The word virgin.

Virgin olive oil.

Okay.

Madonna became a blockbuster of fame with the song like A Virgin Touch By for the Fairy.

First Time, I don't even remember the song, but it's great.

That song helped her become a blockbuster.

And Richard Branson, Richard Branson dropped out of high school and borrowed money from his dad so he could start a magazine for the music industry.

Eventually he decided to start a record company and he came up with the name Virgin Records because he figured that'll really get people's attention.

He was able to win people like the Rolling Stones and a lot of other groups.

And he realized that the word virgin is really a powerful word.

It's a brain trigger.

And so he started getting, uh, trademarks for all these other businesses.

He has Virgin hotels and he has Virgin Airlines, he has Virgin Galactic, et cetera, because he recognized the power of a trigger word.

There's a product in America called Blue imu, which is anti arthritis cream.

And their ads always go like this, blue imu, it works fast and you won't stink.

And I remember watching a TV show while the TV was on next to my computer while I was doing work.

And he says, blue emu it work fast and you won't stink.

Turn my, what did he just say?

And you won't stink a trigger word.

It gets your attention and it helps them turn into a blockbuster of success.

How about the word stupid?

Would we use the word stupid if we're describing someone?

And yet, if you're in sales, one of the terms we have is kiss.

Keep it simple, stupid.

And because they have that trigger where it's stupid, it makes it easier to remember.

James Carville held, helped Bill Clinton become president of the United States with a phrase called It's the economy stupid.

That's what we wanna focus on.

And it's amazing.

I talk to people in large groups and I say, it's the economy and everybody's, almost everybody goes stupid.

'cause they still remember the phrase that was used in his political campaign.

It's a trigger word.

Warren Buffet and I work with Warren Buffet's team and had lots of fun with them.

Warren Buffet loves these types of trigger words and types of phrases.

And he, one of his famous phrases is, only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.

Okay, basically he's saying, only when times get tough, do you discover who's really competent.

But doesn't it resonate more when he says, only when the tide goes out to you discover who's been swimming naked.

So here's our trigger word exercise.

Choose one of these trigger words.

Dirty, naked, stupid ass badass, vomit, stink, ugly, sex dark.

And then take a product or description and add that, add one of those or many of those to you to that, and watch what happens.

See if it becomes more resonant.

Let me give you some examples.

You've probably seen the movie or heard of the movie Dirty Dancing.

Okay?

It became famous and successful because of the word Dirty.

Dirty Harry movies were massively successful in America.

Certainly it's the economy, stupid, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

You know, famous movie, the Ugly, okay, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly became massively famous.

Virgin Airlines in America, we have Vagina Monologues.

It's a story of what women have to go through.

And if she called it, if she called her, it's a play off Broadway.

And the MHBO has a series now called the Vagina Monologues.

But if she called hers women, what the, the, the, the difficulties that women have to go through, you think it would be as successful as the Maggi Vagina Monologues?

I'm not sure I would name my product that, but she did and became massively famous.

A big Ass Fans was created by Carrie Smith.

It was actually a fan company.

And he ran an ad and he was joking around and he said, why don't I call it the Big Ass Fans?

And it became massively successful after he started from nothing after 15 years, he sold the company for 500 million.

I know this guy David Bayer, BAER, and he has an advertising training company for advertising companies.

And so I said, you know, you're Bayer, that's a great name.

You should change the name of your company.

The Bear Naked Advertising.

Okay, bear Naked Advertising.

Don't you think his, he has a partner.

His partner loves that name, but he's not crazy about it.

Whatever.

So, but I think that's a really good name.

But so what's your trigger worded product or idea?

Name?

Okay, next is Metaphor.

So men are from Mars.

Women are from Venus, you know, is a metaphor.

Men are not really from a different planet than women are, but it took his book from 20,000 to 50 million copies with that metaphor, the television show, shark Tank.

It's not a tank full of sharks, although it probably feels like that on television, but it's, you know, a a metaphor works.

Dryers became massively successful with the name Rocky Road Ice Cream.

And it's interesting 'cause you open up Rocky Road Ice Cream, it's got rocks in it.

No, it doesn't actually.

Rocky Road is chocolate ice cream with nuts and marshmallows.

But the name Rocky Road is like a, when you open it up, it's bumpy, like a rocky road.

When it rains, it pours turned Morton salt to, into a dominant consumer salt company.

And they, this, over a hundred years ago, they started this concept, when it rains, it pours.

It's the first, it was the first salt that was unc clumpy.

'cause salt used to be clumpy and they still dominate.

Even though so many competitors have unc clumping salt, you know, their, uh, their metaphor when it rains, it pours, has helped them become a monster of success and dominate the industry, the salt industry.

So Paul Tran created an electric razor for man's private areas.

Okay?

So he wanted to come up with a name for his product that made it easy to understand what the product does.

But he didn't wanna offend people.

He didn't want something offensive.

So he was thinking about it.

And then he came up with this metaphor, which is actually the name of the product.

He calls it the lawnmower.

Okay?

The lawnmower.

How's that for the name of a product?

Okay.

And it became a monster of success.

He's generated way over a hundred million dollars of success.

In fact, he changed the name of his company to Manscaped.

Okay?

We're gonna landscape a man with a lawnmower, okay?

For growing and body grooming.

But it stands out from the crowd because he uses a metaphor.

It's a lawnmower, it's not a lawnmower, it's a shaver.

No, it's a lawnmower and have lots of fun with that.

So let's say you wanna persuade someone.

I was trying to persuade a friend to have a more open mind.

Okay?

So here's how you develop that.

So what do you say to a person?

Well, so what works best when it's opened?

An umbrella, a parachute, a book works better when it's open.

A computer, a 10.

Let's pick a parachute.

So your mind is like a parachute.

It works best when it's open.

I said that to my friend and he went, Hmm, okay, okay.

He was much more resonant, he was much more, you know, effective positively by it.

Because I put it together in a metaphor like this.

It's like you're, you know, you're so d Dharmesh Shaw is the Chief Technology Officer, the CTO of HubSpot.

He has this great line, okay?

If you wanna hide a dead body, put it on page two of Google, okay?

For all you, all you guys.

Okay?

So what did he basically say?

He said, page two of, you know, we want, we, you need to, if you're gonna promote on Google, you need to get to page one.

'cause nobody sees page two.

You know, you're actually hiding if you're on page two.

So let's see, what else?

If you wanted to hide something, you put it on page two.

Okay, what do you hide A dead body?

That would be fun.

So he came up with the phrase, if you wanna hide a dead body, put it on tape, page two of Google.

And he uses that as a way to promote why HubSpot is very important, because it helps you get to page one of Google.

You think that's a good one?

Metaphors can also be visual.

And there are lots of ways to make metaphors visual.

How deep is the mud?

Well, it depends on who you ask.

We all go through the same stuff differently.

And this image kind of shows, you know, that, or there's an ad for Tabasco sauce as a fire extinguisher.

I guess that's a fire extinguisher.

But by using that visual, it helps them make their point that it's really hot.

It says hot.

It's so hot, you need a fire extinguisher.

So here's a client I work with.

I've done this with lots of clients.

It was a martial arts equipment company and one of the, so we worked with them and got 'em to develop a product.

One of the biggest problems that martial arts people in martial arts industry have is they have so much equipment that it doesn't fit in a backpack.

And so they have to carry two backpacks or carry out, you know, carry separate bags and everything else.

So we got him to create a backpack that's super large that could hold all this stuff.

And then he created a, a slightly smaller one that fits on the overhead compartment in airplanes, okay?

And he created this ad and he called it the Travel Locker.

And I'm like, what's a travel locker?

This is so critical when we're advertising, you know what?

He said?

Well, we put all these things, it's got pouches and pockets and all these definite features in it.

I said, let's stop.

When you're running an ad, you can, you only wanna do one message.

You don't, it might have multiple benefits, but you wanna pick one benefit and focus on that.

This is his ad, not mine.

I'm gonna show you my ad in a second.

Okay?

And I said, so you forgetting, you're forgetting something.

Okay, the Travel Locker, what's the number one most important feature of this bag?

It's that it's large.

You created a large bag.

So I changed the name of the bag and I called it the Beast.

A backpack So big that it holds all your gear.

You think that's a better ad than this one?

Sales exploded when we did it.

We ran retargeting ads.

Here's the CNN.

Okay, so you see in the top right, the Travel Locker ad, and here's the Beast ad.

Okay, which one do you think stands out more?

This one or this one?

Okay.

The beast.

The backpack's so big that it holds all your gear sales exploded because I simplified the metaphor of what we're simplified the message and, and created a metaphor.

It's not a beast, it's a backpack, but still it works.

So metaphor, exercise, my product or idea is just like, what?

And start with the craziest idea possible and then you can come down, okay?

But be as crazy as possible.

My book makes you feel better.

Well, chicken soup makes you feel better.

Why don't I call the book Chicken Soup for the Soul?

Take Drugs and your brain gets fried.

What else gets fried eggs?

So let's have an egg frying and say, here's your brain.

Brain glue is like a naked man running through your backyard.

So you can't, whoa.

You see that?

That's what brain glue does.

It gets, you know, it makes your, whatever your product, service or idea is, jump off the page.

So for all of you, my product or idea is just like, what?

And then the last one I have here is sense elevation and anchoring.

And this is an important one to note, they all are, but how do you like someone to steal your idea and get rich while you starve to death?

Would you like that?

Would that be fun?

Not right.

So, so post serials competes with Kellogg's and the head of post cereals decided he wanted to come up with a unique product that's totally different from what Kellogg's has and everything else.

And he can dominate the marketplace.

So he decided to come up with a, a little cake that has jelly inside it.

Uh, you know, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries.

And you put it in a toaster.

And he called it country squares.

And three months before he launched it, he bragged to the media, we're launching this product called Country Squares.

They started showing the product and people were amazed.

But the head of Kellogg saw the, uh, the, uh, article, the interview that he was on and went, oh, that's an amazing product.

We guys, guys and they got all the people in the company.

We gotta make that product.

We gotta make a product just like that.

But he came up with a better name, okay?

Using brain glue type tools.

This is what he did.

He said it pops out of the toaster.

So the name has to have pop.

And uh, Andy Warhol was famous back then.

The, the, uh, pop artist.

So the word pop art was really powerful.

We call this anchoring in, in brain glue.

Okay?

You're taking something that already is in the mind and just slightly tweaking it.

Pop art.

So he called it Pop-Tart, of course, like a competitor.

He launched it one week before Country Squares got launched, of course, right?

They sold out, they sold out so fast.

It's became the biggest selling product that Kellogg's has ever had.

Okay?

It sold out so fast that he actually ran ads saying, oops, we're sorry.

We, we ran out a product.

Just hang on and product will be available soon.

Nobody bought Country Squares.

They waited for Poptarts to become available again.

And then sales exploded.

Poptarts, as I said, is the largest selling, or has been the largest selling product that Kellogg's has.

And within six months post stop selling country squares 'cause nobody was buying them.

How'd you like to invent something or come up with an idea and your competitor steals it from you, you, and makes a fortune and you don't, okay?

So if you're in advertising and you don't know brain glue, you have a disadvantage.

Brain glue simplifies all this.

Naming your product service or business boosting the impact of your ads, your emails, your social media posts, your presentations, persuading others, even juries as you saw, and political voters, all this by making your ideas sticky.

And so to learn more, the book Brain Glue is available on Amazon and at major bookstores.

But the, I go back to the question is, could changing the name of your product or your sales pitch by using Brain science multiply your income?

And the answer is absolutely yes.

So I hope that was interesting for you guys.

Scott, was that okay?

Yeah, that was, that was awesome, James.

I've got, uh, heaps and heaps of notes and uh, you know, like I I say every time you talk, the the popcorn goes off in my, in my brain.

So, uh, you like, do you like that metaphor?

I love it On your ears.

I'm learning, I'm learning.

So, uh, yeah.

So, so we might open the, open the, uh, stage up for, for questions and see what, see what questions everyone has.

Sure.

Hey, can James, do you use everything all at once?

So the rhyme, the trigger words, the metaphors, or do you just use one of those strategies?

That's a really good question, and I'm gonna give you an answer with this.

Typically, you only need one, usually, but I'm gonna give you an ex a product that use several and okay, so brain glue.

So Rocky Road Ice Cream uses three, okay?

Rocky Road uses a metaphor because it's not really a rocky road, okay?

It's a bumpy, it's bumpy ice cream.

But the second thing it uses is literation.

I didn't have enough time, so I couldn't do more of these, but alliteration, which is a repetition of sounds, Roro, Rocky Road, Marilyn Monroe in America, we had Chevy Chase.

You know, we have Coca-Cola, PayPal, best Buy, TikTok, you guys know TikTok.

If they call it the Chinese social media platform, you think it would be as successful as TikTok.

So alliteration is another tool.

And then the third tool they used was humor.

Okay?

And it works this way.

Rocky Road Ice Cream was invented during the Great Depression.

And the Great Depression in America was called a Rocky road.

And so the concept was, we're all on a rocky road anyway.

We might as well have Rocky Road ice cream.

And people would laugh when they heard that.

So it had humor too.

So you can use multiple brain triggers, but you don't have to because most, many of these men are from arts, women from Venus.

It's not, I guess it's kind of funny too, uses humor.

But it's, you know, so the the, the answer is yes, both ways.

You could use one, just one of these and have tremendous success, or you can have multiple of them.

I had a client, we were doing a turnaround of the client, and they were under tremendous pressure, okay?

Including the owner of the company.

So I said, I know you're under a lot of pressure.

Remember this pressure creates diamonds.

So we help you go from stress to success.

So what did I do?

So pressure creates diamonds.

I'm illiterate, you know, I'm using a metaphor.

And then stress, you know, we help you go from stress to success.

That's alliteration.

A repetition of sounds.

So, so stress, success.

And by saying that they all went, oh, okay, that sounds like fun.

Okay.

You know?

And you know, especially if you're doing a turnaround, if you're ever doing a turnaround on somebody who's in trouble, people are so stressed that they don't have creativity.

It stress shuts down creativity in a lot of people.

And so that's why I would tell jokes all the time.

I'm a terrible joke teller, but I would tell jokes all the time, and then people would just keep repeating the joke to me.

I had one, I was turning, doing a turnaround of a company, martial arts equipment company.

And I said, so a man was hiding in the main, a maintenance man was hiding in the maintenance closet.

And whenever people would come up, he would open the door and scream supplies, you know, instead of surprise supply, you know?

So all year, every time I'd look inside somebody's office and they looked really stressed, you know, a glass window, and I'd look inside and they're really stressed.

I don't know if we didn't have product, or it was, it was some kind of problem, I'd open the door and say, Hey.

And they'd look at me and go, oh, supplies.

And they tortured me with the, the, the punchline for the joke.

But they remembered it and it changed their body language.

You'd see them go from stress to suddenly smiling and laughing, you know?

I mean, it just changed everything.

And when they did that, they became more creative.

And so, yeah.

So I know it's a long answer, but yeah, you could, you can use just one of these and then have tremendous success.

Or you can use multiple of them, you know, but you don't have to use multiple of them.

Yeah, No, that's, uh, that's great.

And I think Tim, Tim has his hand up for a question.

I do, I do.

Presumably it takes a, a relatively brave business owner to kind of go, yes, I'm gonna run with this kind of unusual idea in terms of presentation, because this is not what we'd normally see in advertising.

What are some examples of where it hasn't worked as successfully, where, you know, you're trying to be creative in a funny or something and it doesn't work.

It doesn't hit the, it doesn't hit the mark with the audience.

So in America, we have an ad that was got milk, okay?

And it was trying to improve the milk industry.

They spent a fortune, they had famous actors in it and everything else, and people loved it.

There are lots of competitors or lots of other industries that said, got milk, got cake, got whatever.

Okay.

They thought it was really successful.

Business Week in America, had an article about 10 years ago that said, got milked, 385 million sales still continued to decline.

And what it's, it was a terrible marketing campaign.

And yet you, I have books on Got Milk and in Milk mustache with famous people, famous actors and stuff with mustaches on famous athletes and stuff.

People think that's successful, but it's not successful because it doesn't sell.

And so that's why what you wanna have, you know, you wanna, if you're gonna come up with a name for your product or a pitch for your product, it, it talks, and I'll go back to the one I was talking about with, uh, with the Beast.

The backpack's so big that it holds all your gear, you know?

I mean, it's still, it's, you still have to let people know what the product does, what's so good about the product, okay?

It's like Squatty Potty, you know, you laugh Squatty Potty, what's that?

Oh, it helps, you know, you explain what it is, you raise your feet when you're on the toilet, it's really cool.

And it helps you actually go to the bathroom better and people go, okay, from that point forward, they understand what Squatty Potty is.

They may not buy it, but they understand it like, huh?

Like the, uh, you know, manscape, like the, uh, the lawnmower, okay, I never bought it.

If I, if I bought it, I would not share it with my friends.

Let's start there.

Okay?

But I'd probably share the name, I'd call my friend, you know, I, I could see myself calling a friend and saying, Hey, guess what I just bought?

Oh, what'd you buy Jim?

I said, I bought the lawnmower.

Oh, you have to mow your lawn.

No, no, no, it's a shaver for man's private areas.

I could hear him start laughing and go, Hey, Mary is talking to his wife or girlfriend.

Guess what?

James just bought the lawnmower.

Oh, he has to mow his lawn.

No.

And then suddenly it spreads like wildfire.

So, I mean, let me go back to the guy, bear, da David, David Bear, you know, bear naked advertising.

I think it would be tremendously successful because it would grab your attention, but also because the word naked has lots of different meanings, deeper meanings, you know, naked doesn't mean he's standing there naked.

You know, naked has a second meaning.

And the meaning is that it, maybe it's honest, it's, you know, it's the essence.

It's the bare, you know, it's the bare bones of it.

And so it makes it more powerful.

But yeah, you have to, you know, it has to be a po Well, except for the whiter bread, the quicker you're dead, if you wanna drop a competitor, but I mean, in most, in most cases, you still have to address the positive benefits of the product.

Now, I'll give you a good example.

There's a type of, I forget the name of the car, but it says, shoot, I can't remember the name of the car, but it's a brand of car.

It's in from, uh, from, uh, I'm going, I'm getting old, what can I say?

But it, it just says, oh, I'll see you in a Kia.

A Kia Motors.

Okay, see you in a Kia.

Well, the problem is they're in a competitive marketplace.

It's not saying anything positive about it that goes like, oh, well what's so great about I Kia, it just says Sia in I Kia.

And so I believe, and I know this because they've sort of changed their advertising, they could, they would do much better if they came up with a trigger word or a phrase or whatever else that actually gave you a reason why you wanted Kia.

You know?

And so see in a Kia, yeah, it rhymes.

Okay, great, great.

But it doesn't make me wanna buy a Kia.

And I think that's, you know, the Kia car, it doesn't give me any reason why.

And so you have to remember that you need a reason why somebody should buy.

I'm amazed by how many people I say I talk to, how many businesses I've worked with, like tons of businesses.

And I do work with the US Small Business Administration.

So I'll get like 300 to 500 business owners at a time.

And I ask 'em two questions, what are you competing with?

Or what are the alternatives to your product or service?

And why should somebody buy from you?

But you're not allowed to use the word price or quality.

So tell me why somebody should buy yours instead of somebody else's.

And I'm fascinated by how difficult it is for people to answer that question.

You know, they have to take a few minutes and think about everything else.

If you're in advertising, you wanna understand like what makes this product different from everybody else?

Or milk, you know, the got milk campaign.

Why should somebody drink milk if they said something like, uh, there are certain enzymes in milk that aren't in other vitamin C, you know, people take milk because of vitamin C, but you can get vitamin C in, in, you know, in all kinds of other products.

But so why should you take milk?

Because milk has certain enzymes in it as well as vitamin C that are catalysts that make the vitamin C work more.

So it strengthens your bones much more than other vitamin C tablets.

I'm not, I don't know if that's true, but I'm just saying that if I said that, then you're going, oh, now you're giving me a reason to buy the product.

Okay, you're going, oh, okay.

So that's interesting.

It's like Gatorade, you know, I mean Gatorade, if you're an athlete, you use electro electrolytes.

And so Gatorade says, you know, we're focusing on, if you're an athlete, your body uses up its electrolytes and it needs more electrolytes, and Gatorade is better than water because it has electrolytes.

So it's actually giving you a reason why you should buy.

That was a long answer, Tim.

I don't want you to have an accent while you're Driving.

Yeah, no, that's okay.

That's okay.

Just a follow on question from that.

'cause it's all product examples.

Do you think this works equally in a service based sector?

Say an accountant or a lawyer does it, you know, like that Absolutely.

Like the rest, A marketing company like the rest of us here.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I think that's why you gotta, you know, you gotta come up with a, a, um, a pitch that explains something about your marketing company is different from everybody's market, everybody else's marketing company.

And so that you start, and here's how brain glue works.

We're logical, most of us are logical.

You start with a logical reason why, and then you apply a brain glue tool.

That's the emotional trigger.

Okay?

But if I ask you why, Tim, why should somebody hire you instead of another?

Well, you have two, you are competing with two things, right?

Why should somebody hire you instead of doing it themselves?

That's one thing you're competing with, right?

And then why should somebody hire you instead of another company?

By the way, just by the way, whenever you're talking, 'cause we had an advertising company, past, present, future is very, very important to ask a client, okay?

So you start with past, have you ever, when you're sitting and talking to a prospect, have you ever worked with an advertising agency before?

It doesn't matter if they say yes or no, you say, well, what worked for you and what didn't work for you?

Okay.

And be aim, be, uh, you know, prepared in case they say, well, nothing, everything worked fine.

Well, did you know all the media that exists?

Did you know this and that?

Everything else, okay, well maybe we didn't know all the media, okay, blah blah, but so past what worked for you?

What didn't work for you in present tense?

Are you using an agency now or are you doing it on your own?

It doesn't matter what they say.

You say, well, what's working for you now?

What's not working for you now?

And then you go to future, the ideal situation, what would that look like If you had a, an agency working with you so you can actually get what you really wanted, what would that be like?

And they're basically telling you how to sell them.

I want Seagrams in Canada because Exactly for that, because I wa I was used to walking in and showing my whole portfolio and hopefully something will resonate.

And talking about some of the concepts that we focused on, how you going?

Seagrams is the first one that I went that I went into call you today.

And I didn't.

And I didn't do that bum.

And what I did was I, I asked past, present, future.

I said, you know, like what?

So I said, what worked for you and what didn't work for you?

And the first thing he told me, the buyer for Avon, for uh, Seagrams was, you know, we spent between 50,000 and a hundred thousand dollars for the bottle and label design because to us that's very important because it has to have an image that works in advertising, but it also has to have an image that works on the shelf.

And so, you know, for us it's always annoyed us because people don't appreciate how important the bottle design, the label design is that it's gotta be photographed really well and it's gotta look great in ads.

Well, we had done a catalog for a lighting manufacturer and I said, oh, well we work with a lighting manufacturer that had glass lamps and you know, we had the glass and plastic lamps and we had to show the texture and the translucence of it and everything else and, and the shape of the glass.

We showed him one sample and he went, oh, I wish I had known you guys a long time ago.

We're hiring you guys.

We're gonna give you tons of work because we love what you do.

I was like, it was the first client that I didn't show my whole portfolio.

I sort of went, well, I can show you more of my portfolio.

And he went, well, you can if you want to, but you don't have to.

And I went, okay, fine.

I was tortured because I was so used to showing my whole portfolio, but I just showed him one sample and he was, it was a client.

It's because he told me how to sell him.

And that's why you Yeah.

Awesome.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

That's good ideas.

Yeah, No, that's, uh, that's, that's awesome.

Yeah.

Thanks so much, James.

Overview:

Grant will be revealing how to build marketing assets, not just campaigns.                       

In the vast landscape of marketing, where many are chasing the fleeting allure of campaigns and short-term promotions, Grant Thom stands apart. With over 35 years of international advertising and marketing experience, Grant doesn't just create campaigns; he crafts enduring marketing assets.

While the majority of marketers are fixated on the immediate returns, Grant's vision is rooted in the future. He understands the real power lies in building assets that not only generate revenue today but continue to do so long into the future. It's not just about the money today; it's about creating a legacy of value.

Takeaways:

Grant's approach is a breath of fresh air in a world dominated by the next big campaign or promotion. It's a call to think bigger, to see beyond the immediate, and to build something that stands the test of time.In this transformative session, Grant Thom will challenge the status quo, urging marketers to shift their mindset and embrace the new paradigm of building marketing assets.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

Yeah, welcome everyone to the October 20, 23 edition of Elite Marketers.

So today we've got a couple of great speakers including Grant, grant, Tom and Zach Mason.

And first off the rank is, is Grant.

So what the, the reason I wanted to bring Grant in is, is I had a, a couple of sessions with him earlier in the year and not only does he have like, just such an extensive experience in branding and marketing, but he actually thinks of, thinks about things from a different level about actually building assets and not just generating revenue today, but also looking, looking into the future.

And that was, that was what I was really yeah, interested in him really sharing, daring with us.

And he's gonna explain why most marketers are really missing the mark and how to cra craft, you know, marketing assets that are valuable and saleable and often they're actually, you know, hidden and lurking within our business anyway.

So yeah, with that being said, I'll hand the reins over to, uh, Mr.

Tom and he will, you know, take us, take us from here for the next 30 minutes or Something.

Thanks, Scott.

Thank you very much.

And let me just get up and running here, right?

So I called today's speech the Unfair Advantage.

So Judith, I apologize, she met me on a early meeting and I gave this presentation before, so she's received notes and I think we can hear Stella.

So anyway, so basically what I did was, Scott, was we just went and sort of unlooked at at all his assets as, as to what he is got.

And so we've, we, I've just turned this into a little bit of a, a presentation for today.

This is something that I've done personally myself, and this is something I've done with a few clients, but it's a case of just looking at, at all the assets that you've got.

Now, when I talk about assets, there are two types of assets.

You've got those kind of assets that you like.

It's a building, it's, it's a bit of software, it's a bit of intellectual property or it's basically some of the stuff that you've created that can be utilized as a, as a form of an asset.

So one of the things that, that we look at is how do we take things to market?

So lemme give you a bit of background to myself.

So my name's Grant Tom, I'm a brand scientist and where it comes from is that it's 35 years of, of running a digital marketing agency.

I ran six in six international countries.

I sold them all off in 2019.

Basically I've worked on about 4,000 accounts in my lifetime.

And so where I look at it, what I really enjoy the most is brand.

And the brand has multiple values.

There's about 3000 topics around brand that is really quite cumbersome and that's why it is like a mental Rubik's cube.

But what I really help with business owners is to help them to stop leaving money on the table by getting their brand right from the beginning.

Because ultimately at the end of the day, when you want to exit the business, that's ultimately your fifth gear, that you can leverage more money as long as the brand has got its right reputation in place when you're trying to exit a business, that's the last or the wrong place to start fixing a brand.

If you come to work every single day, then start making your brand become prevalent and, and prominent.

And a and a and a brand is not a logo.

A brand is about of reputation that people remember you buy and, and be able to distinguish you by as to, to the value that you're given.

What I also do is I uncover brand hidden values in the sense of what we're gonna talk about today.

I unleash the power of ai.

So I've created an AI bot with the view to help businesses to, to, to unlock and create competitive analysis at a very low cost.

And then basically enhancing the brand secret sauce.

And every business has a secret source.

It comes down to its people, it comes down to its touch points, it comes down to how it interacts with the customer in order to ensure that, that you're giving the very best experience.

At the end of the day, I also work with investors who like to look for businesses that are making money so I can raise capital to fuels your success.

And also because I've worked in six countries, I've got quite a vast leverage on my network as well.

So that's sort of what I bring to the table.

And with the bot, we call it Einstein, not ei, but AI as to what it is.

And it basically, it, it's a very good prompt with the view to help businesses to do a competitor analysis.

So if you have a look at our website, van scientist.com, it works basically on the paid chase GPT version where it, we found it to give its very best test results.

So there is a version there for doing a competitive analysis.

So you, if you had to choose say, five to 10 of your competitors that are doing what you do, and you want to try and find where there's a point of difference and basically you can run it through this.

And basically what a prompt really does is that it starts the question, you end the question because you know your your co your business best and basically it will sort of give you a lot of answers.

I use chat, GBT is a brainstorming tool as brand sciences.

We call it a co-pilot with the view to basically that you, you're not working alone or having to think from yourself, but you can really just really just explore.

And the fact that chat GBT has now been able to explore websites as well.

Now that that's just gives a, an a advantage.

But basically in business, any kind of business, it doesn't matter what kind of business it is, there's basically nine key areas to a business in the sense of where you get your, your suppliers from to the key activity to your resources that you need with you to put a value proposition, be it a service or be it that it's a, a product.

And then of course with your, your customer relations to that, your channels of communication or distribution to your customer segment, what you already sit with.

But all businesses face a couple of things from the top.

We've got the trends on the left, we've got the competitive environment from the right, we've the marketplace and at the bottom we've got the economic environment of what we're trying to channel in all nine areas, I'm able to go and find branding opportunities with the view to put it together.

Now not all, all businesses need to apply branding all nine.

So When did you start doing engage ai?

What time?

Okay, you got that Scott.

Alright, but I Don't see Anything now.

Okay.

And then basically, so when I talk about the unfair advantage, it's this area over here that I look at.

So basically this is your business.

This is what happens in the backend that people don't normally see.

And this is what the area where your customers see it the most and what I call the unfair advantage.

And the unfair advantage is very much in the sense of your customer, how you deliver it to your customer, where the revenue really sits.

And what I call it, the unfair advantage is that you've got upteen amount of opportunities with the view to bring about understanding of where it is.

All customers have a problem, nine outta 10, they've got a problem that you, they wanna buy a solution from you.

And so therefore you is your opportunity to create the marketing, to create the asset, to create the, the brand with the view to get that reputation with the view to engage.

Now in all kinds of businesses, there are seven levels in which businesses are serviced.

So we, Jane mainly sits on number four.

I think there's that book code is the enemy of great, I think it's Phil Collins, I think it is, is the author.

But we, we know that to go from good to great is quite hard.

But most businesses sit at a number four where they're floating, they're good.

And number three, it's average to you.

You look at someone's investment, you say you bought something, how was it?

Yeah, it was, it was good, it was okay, you know, whatever the case was, it is what it is.

It wasn't fantastic.

We know when we get to number two and number one when we, we disappointed or really we've had a bad experience, I call it sucking nine times outta 10, you're not gonna go back to them.

You're going to go and find someone else.

That's just how it is.

There are a few businesses that are great, number five that are great.

And so from that point of view, you know, you, you, you, you, you, you've got an expectation and they deliver and you really just love what it is.

But if you were to, to take a trip to London, for example, and we had to go choose a, a top end hotel and we walked in and, and it wasn't great.

Let's say that the bed wasn't made, there wasn't towels and the the dustbin was still there, but you, it's a five star hotel, you really wouldn't say it's an excellent experience.

So the chances are when you're booked into a high end hotel, you're rarely expecting excellent kind of experience all the way going through.

And so one of the things is that it comes down to the delivery as to how people anticipate what your brand is, as to what your service level is, as to your touch points as to how you scale them or do them a little differently to that of your competitor.

And so that's the, those are the opportunities of unfair advantage that you have with the view to try and find areas where you can add more to what you're doing at this point in time.

When you get to awesome, awesome is an incredible place to be.

It's extremely hard.

So I'll give an example.

Uh, we had at the, in, in Dubai and I picked up by, uh, a Rolls Royce.

I got taken there by the, by the time I got to the front door, they knew who my name was, they knew my partner's name, they took us straight to the elevator, they took us up to the 27th floor and we had great high tea and we had a lady play in the hop, but they knew everything about me by the time I got to the building.

And I can turn around and say, well that was an, an awesome experience in the sense that normal hotels that I go to, normal buildings that I go to, they don't know who I am.

So I would regard that as an awesome experience.

But the one thing is, is that when you're at number seven, number six or number five, you just need to make one little mistake and very quickly you're gonna fall, fall to a three, to a two, to a one.

And when you're down there, you work damn hard to try and get up against.

So if you ever read the book of Good to Great, we'll tell you how hard it is to sort of maintain a, a good, to a great experience and from a great, excellent experience and how we as as consumers or purchases are quite satisfied with good to average.

But at the end of the day, we would love to see great experiences coming to us, and so therefore your customers are expecting the very same experience from yourself.

So the idea that I was talking about with, with Scott was that when we look at a particular business, whatever the business is made up of, or whatever the business does or whatever role it is, whatever category it plays in, it's basically around a brand.

And that brand has a couple of key fundamentals in the sense that it's got a data in the sense of its customers in the sense of its database, A CRM, which is very, very important in the sense of its attributes as to how the business runs.

Naturally the revenue that this business creates is, is of most interest, especially if you wanna sell this entity at one stage.

So what kind of revenue is your business maintaining?

And naturally the investment that you make in the sense of software as to what software do you utilize that makes this business robust, that makes this business flexible, makes this business adaptable, is very important to the, the foundation as to what this business is made up of.

But naturally there's also a lot of the other stuff as well in the sense of goodwill.

Now goodwill is a, a, a strange subject in the sense of heart's calculated, but nine to outta 10, if you've got customers that are staying with you, there is a lot of goodwill that is sort of maintained and naturally patents and trademarks that you go and create with the you that are are, are attainable to you, that are personable to you, that are valuable to you are are sort of the, the makeup of what your service would be to your delivery as to what it is.

And, and not to say that everyone needs a trademark and everyone needs a patent, but it's, a lot of people have a secret recipe or secret sauce as I like to refer to it as, as to what it is and how they, they go forward and what they put together.

So nine times outta 10, what happens is we sit with a situation where we've got the goodwill, the patent, the trademark, the the brand, the software, the revenue, that is the business that actually goes to the customer base at the end of the day, that's where the problems already sit.

We are, we are there to supply a solution to the problem that they may have.

And so basically we always want to take businesses that go to market and one of the things that we spoke about with Scott was to turn around and say, well, how do we unlock other ideas, other aspects of your business that you may have?

So for example, I I let's call the paper jets as other ideas.

So you may go and say, listen, we, we do this already as our main shift business, but what we could do is add this as well to to our service offerings so we have another idea and we can have a another aspect to it.

So in Scott's business, for example, we spoke about that he is got so much content that, you know, he could write a, a series of books or of training models, he could go and create like a, an another opportunity where people are buying his workshops.

And once again, depending on how those are, are generated and reved, you know, it's a case of just going back through the archive.

So what I did was, in the agency world, you know, you, you spend so much time coming with ideas that don't really go to market, but they are relatively good ideas.

How can you dig back into your archives and really just unravel what you can bring to the market again and, and revisit.

And so the thing that I look at is what I call pinpoint, pinpoint pivot with the view of of going forward.

So I like to do this with a team because I, I don't think that it's done by one person alone, but if there's a team that could be gathered, a pinpoint is basically to gather your team to brainstorm revenue opportunities, revenue, other areas that the market would be willing to buy or pay for the inventory is to take stock as to what you've already got in the sense of your archives.

What you've already got is business talent.

So what you've got is knowledge that you can leverage to these to get these ideas to market.

The visualization is to determine how will these ideas add value to the customer?

Because if it doesn't add value, what's the point of you going for, for the whole exercise and how does it add value to your business?

At the end of the day, opportunities, there's always been lots of opportunities in every single category.

And so once again, if you are working in a particular business, there's a, a thing that I call spare capacity.

So for example, you're having staff or whatever the case may be, and they're not working full eight hours or they could work like an extra two by putting more projects onto to, to the the, to their plan that this is where you look at and say, well, well let's, let's explore opportunities to source and apply the right people to support and launch these concepts.

But the one thing you gotta be careful about doesn't go mean.

You need to go hire more people to get your idea.

If you don't have it in your natural realm, in the natural expense and something that you want to go and source, you've gotta realize that it's gonna cost you money and you hope that you're gonna make it work.

So before you do anything, the the last one is test in the sense that you've gotta test that this is what people want, that it's got the correct metrics because if you can measure it, you can manage it, it's ultimately what you can do.

And so therefore you can add value and, and as you build it.

So what I like to use as, as, as as pivot is, is a form of how do you get your ideas to expand in the sense of your, the business that you're already running.

Not all ideas might be that fruitful, not all ideas might be that valuable, but once again, it, it expands to the repertoire of what you want to do.

Now the biggest thing that I find with business owners is that they come to me and they want to have an investment or they want to get someone to buy in or they're looking for a silent partner or whatever the case may be.

And it gets very, that's that it's extremely hard to do.

And, and from an investment's perspective, it's extremely hard 'cause the investor only has got one thing in mind is that he, when he puts his money in, he wants to know that he is getting get X multiple back and he doesn't really wanna sweat or stress about the business that it can maintain or deliver where it goes forward.

So one of the things that I've always done is to look for opportunities that go to market with a view that you can actually highlight as intro factor.

So one of the business I had bought was a storage business that was a document storage business.

And basically, especially in Australia, you had to keep documents for like 15 years and this was before the, the whole cloud thing really took off.

And what happened was we started to do with pick, pack and dispatch and pick, pack and dispatch was something we noticed from an online shopping is that that was becoming morbid.

A lot of people didn't have the warehouse or the facilities to be able to deliver this.

So what would happen is people would have an e-commerce store that place an order.

Our warehouse would receive the order, we would take it out of a box or out of A-A-A-A-A crate, put it in an envelope, put a an address on it and send it off as to the instruction that we were given.

And so what we did was after a period of time we found that the business was doing extremely well, but it was a hassle factor for us.

It wasn't really our main focus.

And so what we did was we sold the business and the money that we got came back to the business, but we still owned the building.

So we were still getting the rental from the business, but we weren't having to sit and stress about the business going forward.

And what that did was with people who paid us for the ideas that we had or the, the, the intellectual property that we had generated and take to market that was creating revenue that someone wanted to buy.

We were able to channel money back to the business.

And by taking money back to the business, you were becoming more cash positive and becoming more cash positive gave you more opportunity to create more marketing for the actual thing that you really do for the actual function that you really do.

And so once again, even though you might have an association of those ideas, there's many ways of selling them off in the sense that you could license them, you can franchise them or you can sell them outdrive depending on what the entity is as to how you go.

And therefore the choice of the branding is very important because if it's related to your mother brand, the main brand, then it gets very hard to to defrag your business because then people take a, a chunk of your business.

But if you've created a, a reputation or a brand of that idea and someone wants to take it off your hands and it's giving you a good multiple back, it's a good way of create getting cash injection.

And by getting cash injection, you get the main core of the business to be able to grow without having to borrow money, pay off loans, pay off investors, and with the view to create an opportunity of of getting things to market.

So the thing that I always look forward to is how does a business unlock its value?

So with Scott, for example, you know, Scott's been writing for over 20 years.

He is relative written for multiple clients, multiple strategies, multiple documents.

How do we put them into silos?

How do we put them into ideas that we were able to take to market with the view that they'd become revenue streams and by that revenue stream let them grow up to become an asset or an intellectual property of its own right that can be leveraged, that would unlock more revenue.

That at the end of the day that when you get to the ultimate business that you want to retire from, that you were then able to get it to the very best that you could with the least amount of debt or borrowed money coming into the business.

So ultimately that was an idea that we got, I dunno, Scott, if you wanted to come in here as to anything else that you were referring to on your case as to how we looked at things, but that's basically the, the model that we were exercising and what we were just trying to demonstrate today as the, the unfair advantages to what people have as to what they can utilize.

Yeah, I I I think once one of your strategies, and I haven't haven't, I've been on holidays and, and in a, in a bit of a catch up mode, so I haven't gotten to it as yet, but one of, one of the strategies you discussed Grant, was really making a list of all of the assets within your business and really focusing on, you know, on those, you know, on those assets and building, you know, building those up so you're not just, you know, you're not just creating cash flow today, you're creating assets for the future.

Correct?

Very much so.

So basically the more market share that you have, the more that you've got, the more appetite you have in the sense of what you've built gives you that opportunity with someone that wants to acquire you by them acquiring you.

The, the, the formula's simple.

They want to get you at the very best price because they want to pay themselves back as quickly as possible.

The more assets that you've got in the marketplace and the more revenue streams that you've got, naturally the higher price that you can charge.

But the more, the faster they can try and get their money back, you know, selling a couple of business, it all comes down to the PE ratio that someone's prepared to pay as to how long that it's gonna take for them to pay themselves back from the working of this particular business.

And so therefore, you know, the goodwill, the patents, the trademark are all extremely valuable assets, but how you apply that to your category, to your knowledge, to to the team, to the talents that you've got in the, the team that you've hired to the opportunity in the marketplace where people are still wanting more or need more in order to solve their problem or make it fully fledged.

So another example would be a client that I worked on, he was, they were medical supplies and so basically they were selling things and they were just naturally just bringing on more and more elements.

So the one guy that he started to take on dentistry and he started to bring in dentistry equipment, eventually he was doing so well that someone offered him to take his dentistry off his hands and he did so with the you to go buy more stock for the hospital side of things.

That was the bulk of his business was the main draft of his business eventually.

So it's ama it's a, look, I'm giving you just very bland examples at this point, but I think from a a an agency perspective, from a a creative perspective, we sit with multiple opportunities and talent to market.

And so therefore they can be revenue streams or they can be sellable assets that come back into the mothership that basically helps to create more leverage, more exposure, more marketing going forward.

No, I think that's, I think that's great.

I'm just wondering, grant, like if you were working, let's say I don't, I don't know if we could do a quick case study, would you be happy to do that?

Yeah, I'm happy to try.

Yeah.

Does anyone want to volunteer for a, for a case study on, on their business?

J James?

James, yep.

So James has a, or James maybe you can, you'll be able to explain it better than I And for Penny and for a PAM grant.

Yeah, well I couldn't, like, I've a digital marketing business that's been going for about 20 years in various forms core business and where I repeat revenue comes from is from doing Google advertising, but we also offer content writing, social media, content, websites and, and similar services that most of us off.

So I'm open embarrass me.

Well, is that a case of embarrassed you, James?

It's a case of just unlocking where there's opportunity.

So for example, you might find that your, your core business, which is around being making business Google friendly in the sense of, of getting the best return of the investment is sort of the, the big flagship that you sort of go under.

But at the same time, building the websites might be one of these, these paper jets putting a workshop together as to how people should apply their business with the view to, to get the very best out of their Google rankings.

And their, their, their ad spend is another workshop that you can basically put to, to together.

So you can put those kind of workshops further.

You know, you've got multiple assets that people are wanting on a regular basis, how can you put them into different channels, into different reputations?

They don't run by you, but at the same time, if you've got enough disturbance or you've got enough gain or you've got enough market share of it that someone says, you know what, can I buy that from you because it's easier for me to buy from you than for me to go create it myself?

Then you find that someone who might find that he's got more interest in that subject than what you have and you want to focus on something else or something new comes up that you want to pivot, but you're now lumbered with these other assets that you've got is an opportunity where you can do it.

But the thing that you've gotta look at is how do you get this to become a revenue stream?

How does this become a mini business within the business?

How do you get to a point where it's got the goodwill, it's got the software, it's got the revenue, it's got the data that when someone buys it, it's not an idea.

It is something that's fully fledged working that I take it and I know that I'm, I'm prepared to pay for it, but I know I'm gonna make money from it as well.

One of the, one of the things that we had done, it took us quite a long time because of the relatively little staff availability we had, is that we have completely systemized everything we do around Google ads.

I mean there's, you know, this, it's, it was a huge effort.

So I had considered that that the process of how to, how to onboard and manage an ads client might be a saleable product.

And the other thing that we've developed, which we haven't actually taken to market yet, is a service called website concierge.

Mm-Hmm.

Where we will actually sit with a client and write a complete specification for a new website build so that they can give that to their preferred developer and we will act as the intermediary between them and the developer to make sure that they get what they're expecting and the developer doesn't try to shortcut or hood wing or come up with any excuses for not doing what's required.

So those, those are a couple of things I, we have I think are a little unique.

Yeah.

So for this, let's say to your concierge for example, that could be one of these paper jets, but basically how would you take it to market?

How can you get its revenue stream?

How can you build it to a point that someone said, you know what, I'd like to just take it off your hands and you're quite happy to let it go because you know, you've built it and, and you've done something the same.

Again, if you look at all the, the, the, the, the, the systems and process that you've come up with on Google ads, you might break them into industries and say, alright, I've got one for the jewelry industry, I've got one for the property industry, I've got one for the, and you go to to market with those and you can say, Hey, who would like to buy this from me?

Once you've actually made it, when you, when you haven't made enough revenue and you haven't got enough customers or database around it, it's very hard to sell any entity.

But if you've really got the market share of it or you're really attaining the market, or you are onboarding the market share at a really good rate, that is the very best time to then let it go for a premium profit that you can then go and go back to the things that you really want to do or the things that are of interest that, that are coming in your space.

There's always new things being invented or training, which is part of the trend.

And so in those cases you might find that you need to pivot just as much as what your businesses or, or your client's businesses are pivoting and therefore you want to put your interest into that space, but you wanna unlock the assets that you've already invested in.

You don't wanna shut them down.

So you want to try and make sure you're always building them to the best that you can in the sense of its brand, in the sense of revenue, in the sense of its data because that is valuable to someone else who would rather pay for it than try and do it again for themselves.

Yeah, Fair call.

Yep.

No, that's, that's that, that, that's excellent.

That's excellent.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Grant a, any does anyone Thank You.

Thank you Grant, I appreciate and thank you Scott for giving the opportunity.

Yeah, yeah, no, you're, you're welcome.

And, uh, does anyone else have any questions for, for Grant or would you like to ask him a question specifically about your business and how you can, you know, how you can turn what you've done into, into assets?

What about you, Tim?

You you would've built some automations and stuff there that are, that are pretty powerful.

I Got a few there.

So yeah, just thinking about the applications of kind of, you know, either creating this assets that we can then kind of onsell or, you know, putting some, you know, trademarks and stuff around them.

So interesting.

Specula actually we like this, this kind of layered thinking grant.

It's pretty good.

Could, Could you, could someone like, could someone like Tim for example, grant, he's built out all these automation sequences, right?

I mean I guess it's the same with what, with what I do as well, but let's say you did build an automation sequence out for a plumber or something in Canberra that could easily be applied to plumbers all over Australia, all over the world.

What are your thoughts on that?

Very Much so intellectual property is the, the, the, the best diamonds that we can create in the sense that if there's something that other people need and you can license it or you can franchise it or you can, whichever way you, if you still want to hold it or just let it go completely, whichever the, the price point is that, that you feel is the economic number at the end of the day is the way that you've gotta think about it.

The thing that you've gotta remember is that, let's say for example, you get to the end of the day and the end of the day is you want to now sell this business and you turn around and you say, oh, I've got this and I've got that, or whatever.

There's a good chance that someone's gonna come in and says, you know what, I'll just buy the two jets, the two top jets.

I'm not gonna buy the rest, let, let them fall by the way.

So I'll offer you X for that.

Then suddenly that those, those, those assets can just fall by the way, and you don't really get anything for them.

But I think what the point about where this idea comes from is that, say for example, you had an idea of, of some system and software and you were doing it for plumbers and it was running around the world and, and it was giving you a licensing fee that you weren't running yourself, but you, you owned it, it was yours, but you were getting a revenue from it.

It's a revenue that you're not having to look after that much and therefore you can go concentrate on something else or pivot your business to something else or bolster an area where you would like to do more, but you don't have the funds right now and you're hoping to get more sales.

And so therefore you're putting a lot of emphasis on sales to say, come on guys, get me to this revenue so that I can reinvest the business to do x.

Where sometimes you can just unlock value that you're prepared to, to license off.

So it's a case of just thinking as assets rather than a, a full entity, a full co compliance of one business that has multiple elements to it.

It's actually something that, you know, I just, for what I'm doing, I, I've actually sort of gone down in that rabbit hole a little bit and really builds out around, in this case around go high level a bunch of systems based on the last thousand odd companies we've automated.

You know, that that, you know, it's not just the, the software, I mean software's just just the software, right?

But the systems that we then deploy in, which includes all the automations and all the emails and all the text messages and all the copy and everything kind of becomes a system that if you bought it outright, you know, you might be spending $20,000 to have it bespoke built or 30,000 bespoke built, but can license that product to that customer for 300 or 200 or 400 or 500 bucks.

Yeah.

Which makes it both more accessible to the client, but also then increases the stickiness because if they go, they lose access to those systems, which you've then licensed to them.

Sure.

And They could do that, you know, websites, you could do the same thing, you know?

Yeah.

You get access to the website, but it's not at a, you know, it's at a sort of fractional cost of compared to building all up front and if you go, you lose access to the website.

Yeah, very true.

You know, one of the things we've gotta look at amortization in the sense that, you know, Warren Buffet always said that, you know, if you're making business only when you're awake, then you've got yourself a job.

But when you're making business when you're sleeping, then you've got yourself a career.

So I think it's those kind of things that you've just gotta look at those assets as to who wants them, who needs them, and who's utilizing them for their aspect of their business.

That co culminates into to annuity income is the best way to try and unlock.

But at the same time, I find too many people holding to too many things for too long and at the end there, there's, there's just not enough appetite to wanna buy it and therefore just falls apart where you can actually unlock the value as you go along.

And as things trend and change, how Do you, how do you carve up your business too?

Grant, like you talked about, for instance, like, you know, like maybe having a different company name or something like that.

So if someone wants to buy you and you don't wanna sell one aspect to your business, but you wanna buy the other one, sell the other one, how does that work?

So from a logistical perspective, So all you do is you, you don't create multiple companies because that's just expensive, but what you do is you create multiple brands and then if someone wants to take the brand, then they take the brand, they take the software, they take the, the, the data, and they go and put it into their structure as to however they want to do it.

And it just comes out of your structure.

But to go and run, run multiple companies, that's just expensive.

And I dunno if that's a good idea, especially if you don't know what it's gonna do yet.

You know, if for example, you've got something that is just incredible and the revenue's ridiculous and, you know, it just helps, it makes good sense to separate it.

So for example, one of the businesses that, that I run in is that when I had the agency, I owned the building and when I owned the building, well, I didn't own the building in the agency name, I owned the building in a separate and I charged myself rent, you know, type of stuff.

So basically I was my own landlord, but I was charging myself rent.

But if I wanted to sell the building, I could sell the building from the company and the, the agency wasn't affected.

If I wanted to sell the agency, the building wasn't affected.

So it's just things of how to set it up.

So it's a case of when to, in this case, when it comes to assets and ideas and, and products, I would just create sub-brands around it and say, oh look, this is our triple A plus version.

And, and, and, and not try and not attach your name too embedded into the brand because then, then it does destroy your brand every time you, you take it away.

Yeah.

Yeah.

James, Yeah, just further to that grant, about 10 years ago we sold off our web hosting and web development business that we had at that time.

Yep.

And what we did was we didn't sell the company, we sold the business part of the business.

Of the business.

Yes.

So, and, and the, the only issue that we had and, and it was very successful, it was, it was a very good transaction.

What we, we found out as part of the process was that the, the purchases lawyer reminded us that we had the name medically trademarked for web development.

So we couldn't trade us under the name of Mely for two years.

We, we had to register another trading name, which was a little unfortunate, but it, it wasn't too much of an inconvenience.

But there's, there's an, and I do a lot, one of my biggest clients is a business brokering firm, business brokers and valuers.

So I've worked with them now for about six years.

So I know the business very well and, and there's a big difference between selling a company and selling the business of a company.

So you've, you've gotta, and, and seriously, I mean, this is an unabashed recommendation that dealing with the business broker for this kind of things is gets you a lot more input in what, what legally and structurally you can do.

Sure, absolutely.

I totally agree with that.

I think when it comes down to the, the, the sub-brands is that you've gotta choose those names carefully.

If your intent is to let it go, and you never know when it's got enough value that you can save.

So let's say for example, we've got paper jet number one at the top and someone came and said, listen, I'll take off your hands, but it's worth a million to me.

You know, you've just made yourself an extra million.

You say, look, I'll take the million.

I let it go.

I've got other things to, to, to concentrate on you, you would take a million.

But if someone comes to you and said, let's not give you 20,000 for it, and you say, but it's making a hundred thousand a year, why do I want 20,000 for it?

No, I won't do that.

You know, type of stuff.

So it comes down to making sure that you're always on the ready to let it go, but you ultimately need to always ensure that you are, are, are trying that every day that you are working, you are always making sure that you've got talent, you've got people you're paying, how do you get the very best out of them with the view to create multiple assets going forward to a marketplace that needs these solutions.

Yeah, No, that's, that's.

Overview:

Meet the marketing maestro who's turned LinkedIn into a goldmine. Zac Mason, the ingenious founder of the Metabolic-Recomp-Method, has garnered a jaw-dropping 2,232,638 impressions in just one year. But it's not just about fitness; it's about leveraging LinkedIn to its fullest potential.

Zac has cracked the code, attracting top-tier CEOs and Entrepreneurs not just for health transformations, but for strategic business collaborations. His secret? A blend of sharp marketing strategies and an understanding of the LinkedIn landscape.

Takeaways:

Automatically-Generated Transcript:

Zac Mason, and he's really turned LinkedIn into a goldmine for himself where it's actually generating, you know, he's, it, you know, like basically the reason why you wanna listen to, to Zac is he can show you how to add five figures a month to your, you know, to your bottom line via LinkedIn.

He's a founder of the metabolic recon method and actually a fitness expert, but he's garnered a jaw dropping 2,232,638 impressions in just one year via LinkedIn.

He's attracting top tier CEOs, entrepreneurs, you know, you know, via, you know, this module.

So it's gonna be revealing exactly what he does, his processes, his systems, if you go to his LinkedIn profile and I encourage you to follow him 'cause you'll see, you know, some of the unique things he is doing.

But he's gonna open the link to us now.

So yeah, I'll hand the reins over to, uh, to Zach.

Thank You Scott.

It's awesome to, to uh, go and be able to share what I'm doing.

So I'm just gonna share my screen.

Can everyone see the Google doc?

Yep.

Yep.

Okay, perfect.

So yeah, I decided to put all this in a Google doc, so if anyone wants it at the end, I'm happy to send it over.

And yeah, basically what I'm gonna share is what I have done to get over 2 million impressions and that's helped me generate six figures in my business or organically.

I haven't ran ads for many years because I got the s***s with them and said I hate Facebook and decided to go organic.

And using LinkedIn has, has helped me do that.

So basically 95% of my customers come from, or clients come from LinkedIn, so I'm just gonna show you what I do.

And these days I try to keep it as simple as possible so that I can repeat what works over and over and over and you'll, you'll see why.

So basically these impressions here is, you know, the past 365 days.

So it was a little bit higher when I first spoke with Scott, which is why it's 1 million.

But anyway, just to show you that, that is real, and I've broken down this into three pillars, basically.

The first one being profile optimization, second one being your network expansion and three being the content optimization.

So yeah, nothing too fancy, but let's get into it.

So the first one I wanna talk about is profile optimization.

And I dunno if you've seen this meme, but it's pretty funny.

A lot of people loved it on LinkedIn, but the, the thing I wanna point out is that a lot of people are, are, are just, you know, putting on this facade on LinkedIn and it kind of looks a bit silly when really there's this kind of gap in the market right now for LinkedIn for just people being real and being themselves.

So, so I wanted to point this out and which one is better?

I would say just, you know, being exactly who you are and what you are on LinkedIn is gonna stand out a lot more and more moving forward with all the bots and AI and everyone copying each other.

So here's what I did to optimize my profile and by no means do I have the, the best profile in the world, but it, it's obviously working for me.

So basically the first thing you want to do is have a, a profile picture that looks clean and stands out and is recognizable across multiple platforms.

This has kind of helped with me, so like YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, every single platform.

I have the exact same profile photo and I haven't changed this one for several years, so it just becomes, yeah, easier to recognize.

So you've got my before and after shot there, mate, when I had dyed my beard brown, Oh, sorry, what was that Before you featured section?

Oh, righto.

Yeah, my, the, my before and after when I had a different colored beard.

Yeah, the banner or obviously matters, but I see a common mistake with LinkedIn banners is that people don't optimize it for mobile.

So you wanna make sure whatever's in your banner can be instantly read and seen on a, on a mobile view.

And I'm basically like, I don't love this banner, but I'm just driving it to my most recent lead magnet, which is the, the train less small muscle checklist and telling 'em to, you know, get the link in the bio.

So clear cut call to action and then using a business blueprint picture is a bit of, you know, authority to help with that.

Then you've got your name, obviously it should just be your name, not have a bunch of higher efic, cryptic letters in there that, I don't know what means just looks really clean to have your actual name and not nothing else, then your bio statement.

So I just keep it simple, say what I do and then drive, again, drive the call to action to download the checklist.

Then you've actually got the link that you can pop below, you know, your business name and location so people can click that and it takes 'em straight to a website or whatever.

So I just have my landing page where people can opt in and download that.

And also it's, it helps to have the creator mode turned on, but they say that it helps, you know, get, get more reach for content.

I don't know how true that is, but you do get some extra features like the, the followers sort of connections.

And I do think, I can't see it on my end, but I'm pretty sure if, if you go to my page it'll say follow it won't say connect.

And if you want to connect with me, you'll have to actually tap the more buttons and do that.

So creative mode is, is definitely good if you want to get more eyeballs on, on your profile and in your content and below that you'll see the featured section.

This is really important because you can showcase what you do or any particular offer that you have.

So as you can see, I've just got client results there.

So that, that's the first thing that people are gonna see and it, and it makes it very clear about what I do.

Then we've got the about section, it's kind of hidden so people aren't gonna see this, but I still think it's worth putting in a really good about section that in a way kind of tells a bit of a story, not so much just, you know, this is who I am, this is what I do, gimme a call.

'cause everyone's doing that and it's kind of boring and that's not how you would sell to someone if you met them the upcoming event.

You wouldn't just say, hi, I am John, I do this book a call with me.

That would be really weird and awkward if you did that in person.

So I try to think, what can I say and do?

That is something that I would say and do a real life and that's what I put in my about section.

There is top skills below that.

So I guess it's an opportunity to put in your skills, not that anyone really caress too much, but may as well may take advantage of that.

You obviously wanna put your business experience in there.

So I've just put what I do for how long and a couple of YouTube videos below, if people wanna click the, it'll take 'em to YouTube and they can watch 'em.

Now there's also the education education section, which I guess may as well make the most of that if it's applicable.

And then for some reason the most important bit is recommendations is all the way, like at the bottom.

So I think it's important to, to ask, you know, your top clients and put recommendations, that's what I've done.

And, you know, slowly accumulating those over time.

It's great because it's, you know, it's, you know, you can see it's a real person.

People can click on their profiles.

I've even had some clients message former clients and say, Hey, I saw you work with Zach, how was he?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that, that was great.

So that's pretty much the profile optimization.

The only part I didn't really talk about was the activity, which shows, you know, recent posts, but there's, you know, everyone has that, so it's not really that important.

So we'll move on to, uh, network expansion and so we don't wanna be like Vincent Vince McMan, but anyway, I thought that was a funny meme.

So currently there's a connection limit of 30,000 and that's where it's important to then focus on followers because if you just stop, you know, connecting with people at 30, you can increase your followers to unlimited.

So that's, that's the benefit of I think using the creator profiles, you can then focus on having followers beyond that point, or you can delete connections that aren't relevant.

So people who are just not within your niche, not within your market, not within your country or whatever it is.

So at the moment I have my VA who will delete anyone from like India, the Philippines, countries that will never ever buy my service.

I get them to go and disconnect so that I can open up room for new connections for people who are within my niche area.

And this is like a daily activity because LinkedIn has become more and more strict over the years.

Like when I first got into LinkedIn over two years ago, you could add a lot more people, like stupid amounts, you could add like two to 300 people per day.

Now it's like a hundred people per week maximum.

This is why it needs to be like a daily repetition so that you are making the most of the capacity that we have and just adding, you know, the highest quality people that you think could use your service or product.

So adding 15 to 20 targeted people per day using Sales Navigator.

So I do recommend paying for the premium service so that you can do all these different filters.

You can put in a whole bunch of them and really dial in specific people that you want to connect with, which is really handy.

So I use Sales Navigator for that.

And it's also good to be aware that if you do exceed those limits, you will get a warning.

And I, I don't recommend getting too many of these warnings because if you do, it'll put marks on your account.

If you do eventually get restricted, it can make it more difficult to get your account back.

I have been restricted twice for different reasons.

The first time was because when I was testing ads, my ads manager had a problem with his account, which looked suss, so they, they restricted me as well for like a week.

That was annoying.

And then more recently, which I'll explain in a minute, I got restricted for three weeks just because I had too many strikes in my account just from testing too many different things.

And I guess in a way I kind of took the p**s a little bit and they said, no, like we're gonna restrict you.

And it was a bit of a hassle to get my account back.

So yeah, definitely want to stay within the, the limits of what LinkedIn spectrum us these days.

And so, yeah, one thing with network expansion is engagement.

So it's one thing to get engagement on your posts, but more and more LinkedIn is rewarding people who are actively engaged on other people's content and within that, within their post too.

So for example, one thing that's that's helped a lot to grow the follower base, you know, to get anywhere from five to 30 new followers a day is by engaging on other influencers posts.

So for example, Alex or Mosey, he'll put a post out, I'll go to his, his content, genuinely read it and, and if I have a genuine comment, I will put that there, you know, instead of just saying like, good stuff with a thumbs up.

Like, yeah, cool.

But the problem is a comment like that is that nobody else is gonna engage with it and there's no interest for anyone to kind of pay attention to you.

If I'm putting a, a crappy comment.

So if I do put a comment, I'll try to make it either expanding on what someone has already said or adding my own opinion or adding just something of value so that if somebody else is going through Alex or Moses's comments, they're gonna stop and read my one.

They might go to my profile, they might follow me, they might read my content.

So it's almost like treating, try to treat every comment I put almost like a new post.

So like if you post once a day, that's great, but then if you go and comment on 10 other posts, that's almost like you've posted 10 times.

But if it's a crappy comment, it's not really gonna be the equivalent of what a post would be.

So what I do is I make a list of all the top influencers who are in my niche.

So Alex is one, Simon Sinek, grant Cardone, maybe Gary Vanerchuk.

It depends, I change it up a little bit.

But I try to find people who are, who are really within my target market, so that as I'm engaging with them, my face is popping up and I become familiar.

So I follow them.

I turn on the notification bell so that if Alex posts, I can see, I get a notification.

So I can go there and try to be someone who comments as early as possible so that as he racks up 50, 100, 500 comments, my comments more likely to get seen.

Then I'll go through and I'll engage with other comments under Alex or Moses' post.

So if someone puts a really good comment, I might engage with that person.

And that's, you know, in a, in a way that's a connection or a touch point.

And if I see that that person is genuine and they use LinkedIn often I'll go to their, their profile and I might follow them and then engage with their content.

So now I'm not just engaging with the comment that they put on Alex's post and now go onto their profile.

They're gonna get a notification saying, Zach viewed your profile, I might comment or like on one of their posts and they get multiple notifications.

So I'm just building this exposure and, and repetition with, with these people.

And yeah, I just repeat that every day.

So I, I try to do the influencer engagement around the time or before I post my content so that LinkedIn sees, okay, Zach's engaging, he's being active.

Then I post my content, which we'll talk about in a minute, and that helps me to get eyeballs back on on my content as well.

Then we have like dms.

So the dms on LinkedIn is, is great because you can softwares to automate it and use AI to do this stuff.

I did test this quite a lot recently and I was sending up to 150 messages per day, which is like the maximum I could do.

I just wanted to see what happened.

Not a lot happened and it actually resulted, I think, in me getting restricted because I sent way too many messages, but I just wanted to see what would happen.

So that was a, a test that didn't go to plan, but I, I do know people probably more in like the B2B space who generate a lot of success doing like these automated messages.

For me, the fitness niche is probably not ideal, which is why I don't do it anymore.

But I think if you are keeping the limits much lower, like if you're doing 20 to 30 messages per day and you were actively changing up those messages so that it doesn't look like you're sending a thousand of the same message, you could keep your accounts safe doing it that way.

And also getting the software to do it slowly so it's not like super spam, like getting it to send a message once every 10 to 15 minutes, not every second minute.

That could be another nifty way to do it.

But yeah, again, I, I've tested this.

I can't say that, you know, sending bulk dms necessarily got me much business, but I do know people who have got a lot of business from us sending, you know, bulk dms every day.

It's just becoming more high risk because so many people are doing it.

Another thing that I find is worth doing that does help is sending a message to everyone who follows you.

So if you get a new follower, and this is something that my VA does, they'll just say, you know, Joe, thanks for the follow, or Hey Bob, thank you for connecting.

That's it.

No pitch, no nothing, and just leave it there.

And then I'll let my content do the talking so that when these people already, they see that I've already messaged them, messaged them, and then they'll reach out and I can see, oh, okay, this is someone that I messaged 12 months ago and now they're reaching out because they've seen my content.

And that's done all the, you know, the pre-selling, which leads us into the content optimization pillar.

So I, I'm a big believer in posting daily, if possible, again, consistency is what matters.

So if you only posted once or twice a week, that that's probably still okay.

But posting daily is gonna help with exposure with fami familiarity, it's gonna give you more data.

So for me, when I post every day, I get to see pretty quickly what worked well and what didn't.

And the more data I get, the better my content gets.

And one way to get, you know, good at posting content is to follow the trends and see what's already working.

And I found that checking this software we hunter with Twitter is a great way to see what kind of topics, themes, or things that are happening in the world right now.

Like what's timely will pop up on Twitter because you can look at anyone who has like a massive account and it'll show their recent posts and how much engagement and reposts they're getting that can give ideas on what content may do well on LinkedIn.

But with that said, I've found that the, the content can vary quite a lot.

So I can put a, a 62nd video on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and they all get different engagement and they all get different impressions.

So, you know, whatever you create, whatever I create for LinkedIn, I'll also post it everywhere else that I'm maximizing that effort that went into creating it.

But it's also interesting to see over time what does better on LinkedIn is gonna be different to Facebook and different to to Instagram or whatever other platforms people are using.

And the types of content that have done really well for me, it's probably a bit hard to see from the images, but the best posts I did this year was actually just a, a viral video of a, of lady deadlifting a heavy weight.

There was one that did even better than that, but it didn't make it in this, this list here, which was actually a, a, I think it was like an 80-year-old gymnast lady and that got like 200,000 impressions.

Now that's cool.

I got a lot, a lot of impressions.

I can't say that post brought me any business, but getting that surge of eyeballs on my profile did help boost my exposure and, and, and followers.

So mixing up a little bit of viral content definitely helps to grow following.

And the more followers you have on LinkedIn, the more credible you look, the more people kind of pay attention to you 'cause you know you have more eyeballs, it brings more eyeballs po.

The second post style or posts have done really well for me is just texts and images.

So, you know, putting either a picture of myself that's relevant to the topic or even like a graphic so you can kind of see if I zoom in here.

So this post did really well.

I was just talking about burning off belly fat, but I put a graphic of like a belly and then like showing just like an arrow pointing to it and that that did really well.

Whereas if I put a picture of like an actual human belly, it would've got flagged because it's considered like nudity for some reason.

But a year ago that didn't matter.

You could post anything and it would do really well, but now they're like really cracking down on stuff like that.

Graphics work really well.

Polls still do well if it's, you know, relevant to a particular topic or something that, you know, might be super easy to answer, like do you work out on the weekends or anything that's relevant to to your niche tends to get good traction on on the polls.

And I'll typically do a poll maybe once a week and, and maybe on a weekend when, when people aren't using LinkedIn as much because they're not in their normal routine like a Saturday or Sunday, I'll try to leverage what LinkedIn is like pumping out more.

So like polls and carousels.

LinkedIn tends to favor those types of posts over texts and images or, or videos.

So I'm, I'm always trying to work with the algorithm when it's like disadvantaged for people actually using the platform.

Videos can do really well.

I've had some that have blown up others that haven't done well, so they do have the potential to, to do well, especially if they're shareable and it's something that can be like viral.

Then if that gets reposted, that helps a lot to uh, drive more, more impressions and engagement.

Carousel posts are are pretty awesome.

I've had a couple that have, that have done like over 20,000 or even have 40,000 impressions just by sharing really, really simple like basic tips, stuff that people just didn't know about food.

Like, you know, if you eat a slice of pizza, it's the equivalent of doing this many steps.

Like stuff that is really simple but is not well known.

If you can make it very easy to like visually see and people will just swipe through and if it's helpful then people will repost that and it becomes like a, a good pillar piece of content.

So often I'll use a carousel to get ideas for a lead magnet.

So I'm currently doing a lead magnet, which will be done soon, but I tested that first with a carousel and it got like, yeah like 50,000 impressions and I'm like, okay great, I'm gonna turn this into a lead magnet 'cause I know it'll get leads 'cause I proved it through the post.

Also important to put some kind of call to action, whether it's, you know, download my thing, link in the comments or follow me or go to my bio and download it there.

Or even just asking a question like putting a pss and just being like, you know, do you agree?

What's your thoughts on this?

If it's relative to the, to the content that can help increase engagement already mentioned.

Yeah, engaging with influencers prior to posting, but also once you post, don't just turn off the app, like stick around for a little bit and engage with people who comment 'cause that'll help as well.

Just keep the engagement going.

Have a good question there on that one.

Zach, have you noticed a significant difference by engaging with an influenced the influencer list and content before you post?

I mean that's, I mean that's a strategy I haven't seen before in terms of content, but you know, clearly you've got it there for reasons.

Yeah, Yeah, I, i it depends on the content.

Like if, if LinkedIn likes what you're posting and you're not flagging and putting any, like stuff in there that link, like we never know exactly what LinkedIn likes and doesn't like, but you can kind of see in that first 30 minutes what your impressions are doing.

Then think if you engage prior, that's gonna benefit you.

And I have seen like I've engaged with a bunch of people and then some of those people will come back and they'll engage with my posts.

But yeah, it depends on, on the timing.

Like some days I just don't have the time to sit here for 20 minutes and engage before I post or my VA's already done it, but she did it an hour ago, so I'll post an hour later and it might not be as fresh.

So yeah, it's, it's not like some strict rule, but I do think it helps with just getting a few more eyeballs.

But there's something else I'm gonna talk about in a minute, which can help as well with just improving the quality of a post that you've already kind of talked about, already posted.

I wanna talk about engagement pods because they were a big thing and I have tested them out, but I've completely cut them out now and that's because I realized that as you can see from this picture here, you can have like 600 to a thousand hearts and likes and whatever, but only 2000 impressions.

However, if your post is good, I can get, you know, 2000 impressions with 24 likes.

So sure this one looks better and nobody can see the impressions.

Only, only you can, and this, this isn't my post on the left, this is somebody else's that I, that I know of.

They use like a link boost service that you go into these pods and the AI bots just engage with everyone's posts as if it's you and then they do the same back view.

You, it's like a bunch of robots just communicating with each other and it pumps the engagement up that you can see.

But that doesn't always translate to actual eyeballs, it just translates to fake.

They're not fake accounts, they're real accounts, but they're people that are never gonna buy from you.

Anyway, so yeah, I stopped, I stopped doing that 'cause I thought it was just, it looks kind of silly and yeah, you don't actually need a whole lot of likes to get good good impressions on, on your posts.

And the reality is ultimately the people who who are gonna buy from you don't always engage.

So I would say the majority, if not like 90% of all the people who have, who I'm currently working with and have coached, they did not like my posts.

They did not comment on my posts, they did not share my posts.

The people who do constantly engage my posts never have reached out to buy anything.

So it's this, yeah, bit of a catch 22.

We want more impressions and more eyeballs so that our potential customers can see our posts, but that doesn't mean that the people who are actually engaging are gonna buy from you.

That's just based on my experience.

There is a repost feature where you can literally repost what what you've already posted.

I'd say it's a bit hit and miss.

I think it only works for absolute top content that that did really, really well.

Otherwise, if it didn't, like if your, if your post got a hundred impressions and then you repost it later, it's not gonna get a thousand impressions, like I might get another five.

So yeah, it's kind of hit and miss with that.

And, and one thing that's that's worked extremely well for me is putting out direct offer posts.

Not too often, but you know, maybe three to four times a month depending on how much other content I've posted and if, if I do want to bring on new clients.

So yeah, putting out a direct, well written post with all the, you know, the copy ticks, all the copy boxes and then putting that direct offer about what it is you're offering, how it works, and then telling the people to, hey, message me a specific word.

You know, it might be message me metabolism, message me, weight loss or whatever.

And it gives them an easy step to do.

And then you start getting these, you know, inbound messages.

So I, I did a post recently that got me, I think it was around 40 or so inbounds within seven days from one post.

Are you, it doesn't happen all the time.

Sorry, sorry.

Are You doing that to a lead magnet or are you doing that to a tail Offer?

Oh yeah, for this particular point, like, yeah, an offer to work with me on one-on-one.

Okay.

So it's like, hey, we're gonna do a program 17 weeks, you know, if you're interested, blah blah, and we'll have a chat, but on every other post I'll put, you know, download my lead magnet or I'll ask a question.

So I'm always trying to put some kind of call to action, maybe not every single post, but at least every second post.

Like if I put up a video that's about solving a problem or belief shifting, I'll say, if you wanna learn more, download my, my lead magnet links in the comment.

Otherwise, yeah, direct offer post couple times a month is a great way to harvest the, uh, people who you've been warming up through your content.

Another thing is on content quality, a lot of it is driven by above the fold.

So I've highlighted in this box here, so your headline and below that, before it gets to the see more part, this is like the most important thing because if this doesn't hook someone and get them curious to read more, then they just won't.

But the good thing is you can change this.

So if you post and you can see the impressions aren't really doing a whole lot, you've got this kind of window of around about 30 minutes or within 30 minutes to come in and change that and see if that makes a difference.

If it doesn't, it could just be that the topic is not relevant or hot or the image isn't really stopping the scroll or LinkedIn for some reason doesn't like it again, like we don't know LinkedIn's algorithm, but it is quite different to, to Facebook and, and other platforms in terms of what I actually write about.

What I've found does well is practical solutions that people can do immediately.

Like, you know, here's one way to solve X problem like today, leave shifting posts.

So focusing in on a belief that needs, that can be shifted for someone to get results or to to work with me.

Objection handling style topics.

You know, it could be, I'm, I'm, I'm too busy right now, but then, you know, telling a story about why we're, we're always busy and if we're gonna be busy in the future, then how's that gonna change?

Social proof is obviously really important.

I, I found that social proof posts don't, for me, don't get a lot of engagement, but typically people who have worked with me have seen them and that's played a role in them trusting me and reaching out going stories do really well, whether they're personal story, client story or even a story just to get a point across or shift a belief or teach a point like how I, how I did kind of posts are important.

Like documenting like, you know, here's 3, 5, 7 things I did to go from A to B.

Those do really well and if and if they're displayed very neatly and easy for the I to track along, that definitely helps.

And I've seen a few other influencers that just crush it with like visually pleasing posts, even if the topic isn't, you know, amazing.

If they make it easy to read, then they get a lot of engagement.

And then just funny stuff like could be memes could be something that demonstrates your personality so you don't just look like some picture perfect LinkedIn kind of resume type of profile.

I think that's gonna be more important moving forward is actually showing personality because it is getting a bit robotic.

Hence my point here on trying not to be like a robot and put comments like this where it's just like, check us out, blah, blah blah.

Like this type of comment or content is just absolute rubbish, but there's more and more of it popping up on the platform.

So don't do that.

Or at least I don't do that.

I think I already mentioned this.

Yeah, engages aren't necessarily buyers, but the people who buy do read your content, otherwise they won't trust you and won't buy a release not from me.

And newsletters, I found the newsletters are an interesting feature, but why I really like them is for one reason is they email all your subscribers.

So currently I've got like 4,900 subscribers.

So if I put out a newsletter might only get like 300 impressions in the feed, but it sends out 4,900 emails.

So I might get 1500 to 2000 people actually open this post in their inbox because that's a feature of newsletters.

So yeah, if it didn't have that email function, I wouldn't even waste my time with newsletters.

However, because it's got the email function, I see it as another way to, you know, if I put out an offer post tomorrow I'll just copy and paste the offer post into a newsletter and now another thousand or 2000 people are gonna see that offer that they didn't see in the feed.

So that's a really cool way of doing that.

And uh, yeah, that's kind of everything I do in the simplest, shortest form.

So thanks for for coming and please don't send me a sales pitch after connecting with me.

That's, that's great.

Zach, I, I think one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because you know, you're not a LinkedIn, you know, person as per se, but you're doing it real time and I think that's so valuable is just seeing what you're doing now and what's working and the things that really stood out for me with that presentation was similar to what Tim Tim said was, you know, like, you know, going out to, you know, those influencers and really building the engagement for them to get a following, treating every comment, you know, you make as a new post.

And also the newsletter, I didn't realize it emailed all the subscribers when you did a newsletter, so, but with that said, is there any, any questions for uh, yep, Stella, I unmute myself.

Hi Zach.

Do you find time of day actually affects the engagement at all?

Because I know there's a lot of to and froing in terms of when you should be posting in ideal times, but I've always been a believer of consistency is best.

What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I've, I've found that posting like at a, at appropriate times does help typically for me, somewhere between 7:00 AM to to around lunchtime after that all the US goes to sleep.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of eyeballs that, that get missed.

And then in the afternoons, not a lot of Aussies are sitting on LinkedIn just scrolling around.

So my kind of window, I just use this time converter thing to refer to it.

But I find, yeah, for, for me it's, it's somewhere, you know, between this kind of window because that crosses a lot of different time zones.

Mm-Hmm.

I haven't, I haven't tested doing like, 'cause you can schedule posts later in, in, in the evening when I'm asleep.

The problem is though I'm not online and I'm not actively engaging.

So I tend to not like to post unless I'm using the platform at least for 30 minutes later.

But yeah, I do find the time does matter.

It's just, you know, when are most people gonna have a chance to see the post?

And that's gonna be when most people are awake.

But if you only work with people in a certain area, it's a matter of, well when do those type of people most likely use the platform?

But the good thing is if you post regularly and then you use a software, like I think it's shield, it'll, it'll collect analytics and it'll kind of show you when, what times you get the most engagement Mm-Hmm.

On your posts or the most impressions.

I haven't used this software for quite a while Mm-Hmm.

But last time I used it, it does give somewhat helpful data and a lot of the influencers use it too.

So could, could be worth, worth looking into.

What What was the, and just, oh, sorry, I just have one clarification question.

You mentioned earlier too that when you've got a new connection or a new follower, you actually send them a DMM that's not automated.

You've actually got your VA doing that each one individually.

Yep.

Just to clarify.

Yep.

Yeah, so hey, hey, thanks for the connection.

Yep.

Okay, perfect.

Good.

Thank you.

What, what was the other piece of software, Zach, that you had?

You mentioned where you look at what Oh, influencer posting.

I know it was mentioned there earlier.

What, sorry, what influences called tweet?

Tweet hunter.

Tweet hunter.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Sorry, yeah.

Tweet hunter.

Where did I put it?

Tweet hunter.

Yeah, that's, that's for Twitter.

Just to get ideas.

You can see what's getting the most traction, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just to see, okay, like look at the dates like 5th of October or 7th of October, Alex EY posted about X, Y, Z and it got this many, but like, it doesn't mean it's always gonna be good.

I'm just looking at what, what's recent and what did really well on Twitter.

'cause that can potentially be a hot topic that's trending on LinkedIn.

Do You think that, I mean you're in a, you're in a space, I guess fitness, it's, it's got a a very broad appeal right?

To a, to a lot of people, right?

It, it affects everybody like sleep and breathing and fitness in some capacity.

How do you, how do you think that impacts your results as opposed to something let's, let's be honest, it's a lot more boring, like marketing automation or products, you know, or websites.

Who else is on the call here or you know, podcasts, John, I'll pick on you as well or writing a book.

Do you think that makes a, a difference in terms of like kind of the the level of engagement that you're gonna get?

I think yeah, every industry's gonna be different, but it's how, it's how you make it relevant.

Like, I'm just pulling up this guy.

He, he's into marketing and crushes it, but if you see the type of content he puts up, who is this?

It's really Okay, sorry.

Yeah, He, he's a, he is a marketer.

He has a, he has a business page, which absolutely cranks, I don't know how he does it, but usually a business page on LinkedIn is complete rubbish.

His one is off the charts, but also his personal profile is great too.

But he just puts out like, you know, thoughts, opinions, ideas that are related specifically to marketing that other marketers and copywriters can relate to.

And he is built up quite a massive following doing that.

And there's, I've seen this across multiple different kind of formats.

Like there's, you know, different types of founders and CEOs who, who really talk about very specific things that are so technical in, in a niche that it, it's almost irrelevant for me to comment on, but there's a huge following behind it.

So I think it's, the more you kind of spend time on the platform and, and understand like where the gaps are.

Like you can't really do that unless you spend time on it.

But when you do, you can see that there often is a little bit of a blue or ocean within your niche.

There can be related back to what you do.

So like if you talk about websites, sure, if you just jump on and talk about generic stuff, it's not gonna probably grow too quickly.

But if you talk about, you know, specific problems with websites others can relate to, then you're gonna get an engagement and more eyeballs.

So yeah.

I hope that answers your question, but It does.

Yeah.

Zach, Can I just ask, when you are inviting people to connect in the first place, do you normally just put no message with that invite?

Or do you put a very specific connect request message?

I don't put a connection me connection message.

No, You don't just, just hit the button that says invite connects and that's it.

That's it.

I, I've tested it a long time ago and I didn't, for me it didn't make a difference.

But hey, if there was something really specific, like if I was, you know, B2B and, and, and there was a particular thing that I know a company needed, I might say like, you know, Hey I saw you do such and such reaching out for this reason.

But in my context it's kind of irrelevant, but there is a use for it.

I I just don't do it.

Yeah, Yeah.

I I think there's a strong use case for personalizing a connection message.

'cause what's happening, well my, my team are instructed if there's no message with it, delete.

'cause it will say, hi, I see that you, we know some of the same people.

I think we should connect 'cause I wanna sell my s**t to you basically is the subtext.

But if some effort's been put into it and it's been thought through, even if that connection request has been automated, then my team are trained to Yep, we'll accept that.

'cause it's been thought about.

So, but you, maybe you're right Zach, whether it's B2C or B2B might make a difference and it might make a difference industry by industry.

But yeah, I'd, I'd highly recommend something intelligent as a connection request.

Yeah, I think if it's relevant it's good.

But for me a lot of the time it's not relevant.

Like what am I gonna say?

Oh hey, I can help you lose weight.

It doesn't really Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

No, I get it.

Yeah.

And, and and not, not all of us are are a LinkedIn celebrity, like Zach either.

So, But the thing is, when you hit your maximum connections, like you're not gonna be sending connections anymore.

Yeah.

So it's once you hit 30 k, like no one can send you connect, like people can send you connections but you can't accept them The color.

Do you go through and color your connections and go, don't wanna work?

Yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah.

It Or they only gauge.

I mean I've, I've tried a few that when I've had people who, you know, send a thanks for connecting message and you know, the response back is spam.

I'm like, that's really good reply, you know, but hello?

And then I'm like, well you're a d******d clearly far off.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I I think it's worth calling the people that you know are never gonna buy from you.

So, you know, anyone from Pakistan, I delete anyone from any country that I know will never buy from me.

I delete and I also delete other fitness people 'cause they're never gonna buy from me.

So, but yeah, I, I think it's, if it's worth paying like getting a VA to do that, I wouldn't do it myself 'cause it's just a waste of time.

But more importantly now it's just about, you know, following the right people and, and hopefully getting them to follow back so that they're in your world and they're seeing the content.

Yeah, that's, That's, that's great.

That's great.

So, so I think we might just do a quick round the room and we won't go into breakouts 'cause I wanted to keep that going 'cause I could see there are a lot of, there are a lot of questions there, but it'd be good just to do a, a quick round the room and and see what takeaways there were from, from that session.

John, John North.

What was your biggest, biggest takeaway from Zach session?

Got the Mute off the whole conversation.

My, it, it's interesting what it's sort of come to.

'cause I mean I think the biggest thing with LinkedIn is, is engagement in, in messaging.

I mean I've always made money outta messaging because if you target the right person and did do a decent message, you'll get somewhere.

I just spoke to someone this morning in New York I've been talking to for like three months on LinkedIn.

Finally book employment.

But, um, you gotta be careful with that LinkedIn jail.

Like, I lost the profile two, two times in, in four weeks.

And the last time I lost it, I resigned myself.

I was not gonna get LinkedIn back again.

And so I deleted it off all my LinkedIn profiles and everything and then I, they gave it back to me.

So, but if you paid for premium, less likely to get banned I think.

I think, Well they said to me, you are gonna stay restricted.

And I was like, what are you talking about?

They're brutal.

Hey, they're brutal.

They wrote me and once said, you're never coming back.

That's what they sent in an email to me.

You're never coming back.

Yeah, they, They said that to me and then I reached out to a guy who, you know, taught me all this stuff the last couple of years and he got his team to write me an email pretty much pleading in.

Very, Yeah, yeah.

At least they respond.

Right.

At least they respond if you reply back and create a ticket, the hard part is when you're banned, you're three difficult to create a ticket so you can't log in.

Yeah, no.

So as well on Facebook, but if you can keep asking questions, then they'll, they'll respond back.

And I think the last one I've got, I bought had written up for sure.

But at the end of the day they actually will respond back to you.

So I think if you get banned, don't think that it's like Facebook where you're never gonna talk to a live person.

You can actually get someone to help You.

Facebook is, is fantastic these days.

You can get an Instant reply.

I get instant replies on Facebook within five minutes.

Yeah, they're great.

LinkedIn's horrible.

You might gone the other way maybe 'cause for the Facebook used to be really bad.

Oh, I think so.

It is great.

Yeah.

Mm.

How, How about you Scotty Baker?

What was your biggest takeaway?

Doing 10 posts, like commenting on influencers because I notice I'll, I'll see someone's great comment and then go and follow that person based on that.

And the amount of effort that it takes to put something good together seems to be the return on investment might be as equal as trying to create your own via commenting on stuff.

So that, that was good.

And also the, the different images that I can't remember the carousel, I've noticed some of the creatives I follow, I I read them.

I just know that they're gonna have something really cool and I read them through and often take screenshots and read 'em a couple of times.

So yeah.

I've forgotten how much I like Those, so Yeah, I like that.

Yeah, no, that's, that's great.

And, and Greg, Greg Smith, I know you are big into, into LinkedIn, what was your biggest takeaway?

That doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

No, that not true.

Is that, and I'm, I'm making that up.

No, that was really awesome.

Yeah, there'd be a couple of things in terms of the, the use case studies that I think that we need to nuance and be careful about.

But Zach, that was great stuff and, and I know that some of the, the really big influencers in LinkedIn are using exactly that strategy, commenting on the influencers post.

And I'm aware of a multimillion dollar deal being done out of that strategy.

Comment, comment, comment, comment, comment, edify advocate, edify advocate.

And eventually I came back and they said, eh, the LU my colleague said I'm blah blah, blah.

And they said, right, we need to have a conversation.

So great strategy really worth digging into.

And it's a reminder for me that that's one of the things I don't do as well as I could.

So well done Zach.

Great, great stuff.

Was that the big influencer directly who reached out to them?

Yeah.

And did the deal, not someone who was following Deal, not done deal is in the process of being done, but it's multi-Million dollar, multi-million dollar deal.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

No, wow.

Wow.

No, that's that's awesome.

That's really, really good.

Did Tim, did you put your hand up there for A second?

Yeah, I, I did have another question and now I've, I've completely sort of lost it because, you know, Greg's comment about, you know, going, you know, building that influencer relationship even potentially or the, the dream client relationship if even before you connect with them.

I think my question is, and I think Zach, you mentioned that you've got an EA who does a lot of your stuff.

Does do they do the commenting as well and, and what have you done to train them to capture your voice in, you know, doing those comments and or posts?

They were, they were doing it for a long time and it was very difficult to train someone in the Philippines to talk like me.

So I just decided that they shouldn't do it anymore because you know, if you see the same comment from me just saying like, amazing post, absolutely excellent top work, it's like, ah, this people are gonna think I'm an idiot.

So I just said to 'em, look, no more comments but go through.

So I've give them the influencer list.

Currently I've got 21 influencers on my list.

They go through and they engage, they just dislike, love, whatever the little symbols are on all their posts.

And they'll go through all the comments and they'll engage with every comment who has a title, who is someone within my niche in my target market.

So if they say CEO, business owner, you know, director, whatever, they'll like it.

And then when I get time, I come back through and I'll add the comments myself and that way I can see what they're actually doing if they are doing the work.

And then I add relevant comments that would be like me as if I actually said it to them in person.

And that's, that's another reason why I stopped using the, the VAs to comment 'cause they were using chat GPT to make the comments.

I know John North has posted that and obviously you can edit the chat GPT comment, but I find if I put a comment that's like, as if I would actually say it, then it's more genuine and people are more likely to engage with my comment versus if it's just some big blog of paragraph that looks hard to read and you can tell it's not genuine, it's not gonna do as well, You definitely don't want a conclusion to your comment.

Right.

The chat GBT conclusion.

Yeah, Well I just, I if you know, someone puts a good post and I don't, Jeremiah three observations of your post at conclusion.

Yeah.

Put that.

Yeah.

And I think the other way to go, Tim is we, we, we have what we call pos, so human beings that plug in and plug out of our clients' profiles to do that commenting, but they're onshore, they're Aussies or Palms or Yanks and they're they're doing that work.

Yeah, we just plug 'em in for an hour a day, unplug 'em hour a week, whatever it happens to be.

And we leverage chat GPT, but never, ever.

Yeah, that's the, that's the automated comment.

Just post that.

Oh my god.

No, no.

Personalize it, nuance it.

Bring bring your business life personal experience to the comment and then it starts to come alive.

Yeah, a hundred percent.

That's that, that, that, that's excellent.

So yeah, so I think that's a wrap for, for today.

So next events coming up, we've got 5th of October at 1:00 PM we'll have a 60 minute networking session, and then same again, 8th of November at 1:00 PM So if you want to whack them in your, in your diary.

And then the 23rd of November is the live one, I dunno.

Yeah, Dan's um, put that in the, in the chat again for, for that one.

The one day in Sydney.

And this will be uploaded to the portal.

Don, I think you've spent, like, you've spent dozens of hours I think, haven't you uploading all the videos to the portal.

So do you wanna give us a quick update?

About a hundred hours?

Yeah.

Uploading, cutting it up from the past For four years, cutting up and transcribing it.

Yeah, so one of the things we do is we send out the podcast alert every week to someone's replay.

But you can also, once you fill out that form, you get access to everything else.

But there's, there's over 60 presentations in there alone of all going backwards.

And they can search it, you can ask the ai the questions, you can do all sorts of analysis on that stuff.

So yeah, you need to play around in there really.

There is a video that we send out that we did last time that's that I think everybody got as well that would help understand how to do it.

But yeah, basically and also people who said that they were gonna create content never sent it in.

So if you fill out the form and said you wanna create content, you actually need to create the content now.

And I've just got a complaint, please, Scott, on that advert for the 23rd of November, right?

Almost in the center of the frame.

There's some old balding bugger right in the middle of that photograph with a blue shirt on.

Man, I wouldn't go just 'cause of that photo far Out.

Who's that?

Is that you?

Oh, it could be.

I Might have issues with his onboarding, Plug it into Midjourney and say change this guy.

Give, gimme a full head of hair.

But I sent you, I put a, I put a link up there for the no space article, which has got all the, what the platform can do.

So yes, I need you to consume that stuff.

Otherwise we did in isolation.

There's a lot of stuff there.

Well, you know, I don't know how many six, there was over 60 videos that we chart off, so Yeah.

Yeah.

So, and if you, if you're having any trouble logging in or whatever, just yeah, just let us know.

But all those assets are in there and this one will be uploaded to their, uh, there shortly as well.

So I think that's, that's a wrap.

Overview:

In a digital world, Oksana Koriakova brings a refreshing and highly effective approach to brand engagement and client acquisition through direct mail. Her innovative strategies stand in stark contrast to conventional digital methods, proving that creative and personalized direct mail campaigns can open doors that emails and digital ads cannot. Discover how to craft compelling direct mail campaigns that grab attention and get you the meetings you desire.

Takeaways:

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

Excellent.

So for session two of the December 20, 23 edition, we have Oxana Cova.

So we've had, we've just had Bill on, and Bill's obviously shown us, you know, the high tech cold email sort of world.

Now, Ana's gonna go back to the, the, take us back to the low tech, low tech world.

But then this is something I'm, I'm particularly passionate about because I've got into, like, really big companies using low tech strategies, like Ana's gonna gonna share with us today.

And Ana is, is a wealth of knowledge in this area.

She's, she's a practitioner.

I've seen some of her strategies and her ideas, and she's, yeah, they're, they're, they're, they're really quite remarkable.

So, so without further ado, I'll hand the reins over to Oxana to share what she's, uh, to share all about the how to get meetings with anyone in the offline world.

Fantastic.

Good to see everyone, guys.

I, I know quite a few people and thank you, Scott, for the opportunity.

Why should it, why you should listen to me.

I always, when I present, I start with a joke and when I came to Australia, I didn't speak one word of English and it was a big problem.

Now I have a bigger problem, I can't shut up.

I also know I didn't also didn't know anyone.

So, and I've been here for 21 years.

I got about 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, about 70 recommendations.

So I'm very transparent.

Growing up in communist Russia, I guess I never realized that this is a talent that I have.

You know, we didn't have one of the same, we didn't have money, so we need to think.

So I learned to think very creatively, and this is probably my bigger, biggest muscle and I've been in marketing for hundred years, and I love it.

I love every day of it.

I love the challenges.

And I run the merchandise company for the last 20 years.

Covid came and killed my business two years ago, but I'm very resilient growing up in, in Russia.

So I'm excited to share the, my tools, and it's quite interesting listening to Bill and his knowledge.

I'm thinking if they're reaching 5 million people a day or 1 million people a day, they can reach all Australia in a week, then what do you do after?

Quite interesting approach.

But I guess I start in sales when I was seven.

My parents bought the first cast.

So my approach into marketing, I love it just as a tool, but the end result for me is always, does it, is it gonna be, does it bring sales?

Like what's the ROI?

And being in the merchandise industry, it's quite challenging.

20 years ago was very different.

And I just wanna also show you that I just recently become a finalist in Australian Marketing Institute Award, and I use direct mail as my case study to show how, you know, my business survived during Covid and Thrive during Covid.

And the, and I didn't have any money and we would not meet anyone.

So I actually, when crazy, I maximize it.

I multiply what I normally do with direct mail during covid and achieve amazing results without, without spending, you know, a lot of money.

And everything I share the strategy is actually, it's everything that I've done for myself or we've done for the clients.

So I don't share hypothetical hallucination marketing story that, you know, somebody said, if we have data, let's look at data.

But if we only have opinions, let's go with mine.

So I'm a data-driven marketing marketer.

So everything I share with you, it would be, you know, with ROI and messages.

Why I love, so, and I give you example that most of the people, I'm in a very commercial price driven kind of industry.

So I sell drink bottles, mugs and umbrellas and all that stuff.

But I love 5 cents Marketing because it's just like a book.

It's have a, you know, you can drop it on the floor and data shows, if you can engage children more senses with your marketing, the stickability of your brand increases dramatically.

Because let's face it, I'm not sure what's the current benchmark for opening rate for the emails.

And I just learned something about one reply, but I can tell you that nobody can get a hundred percent opening rate, but direct mail can do that.

If, if I sent every single of your box, a hundred percent of you will open the box.

So, and with the emails, it's a noisy place.

People are overwhelmed, we're fighting for attention, we need to stand out.

So nobody has 875 unopened postcards.

So if you wanna use this as a tool in your marketing, this can be very interesting.

So I'm gonna share my screen.

Um, share.

Yeah, so here's my, lemme see.

Is this full screen?

Scott?

Yeah, you, your screen's showing up.

It's at the bottom.

It's got another freaking water bottle.

Imper.

Okay, so I hear this.

Yeah, so this is the title of my presentation.

I call it not another freaking water bottle.

You can say not another pan, not another, whatever the thing is, whatever widget that out there.

And with a full disclaimer, I do sell the water bottles, but all idea of this presentation is if we wanna open doors, if we wanna stand out, we really have to stop doing boring stuff that everyone else is doing.

And we really need to use our creativity and talented copywriting and talented email, email people to actually create something different.

So this is, and I'm gonna show you examples, the physical examples that you, you know, that you can see.

So one of the direct mails, I got this little box and I say, think outside the box and inside it's got a pink brain, right?

So this is, this is something that, that's very different and sort of will make the point why we different from another merchandise supplier who could happy to sell you anything.

Or you can actually, if you just wanna buy the cheapest widget on the market, you don't really need a, you know, we're not a good match because I'm all about strategy and coming up with creative ideas.

So I'll cover a few things.

Normally with the product, we use it for four in the four different categories.

It's number one is acquisition, right?

So whatever people do, why do they buy merch when they go to the trade show, they're looking for acquisition.

This is what I'm gonna be covering today because having a meeting with anyone opening the door, most of the cases it's acquisition.

We wanna acquire the new client.

The second channel that you use a merchandise.

And anything that you can smell, touch, and taste, it's attention.

So what is your retention strategy?

How do you get your clients by more often?

How we can make them sticky and stay with us longer?

The third one is retention.

Do you actually have tools in your business that help people refer you on regular basis?

And my favorite one is surprise and delight.

So I have a surprise and delight strategy.

I call it planned randomness, where we have structure, what do we do with every interaction to collect the data.

So we use it in the next 30 days, 90 days to surprise and delight the customer.

And because we collected it prior and they already forgot about it, for them, it's very random.

But for us, it's very planned.

This is why I call it PR planned randomness.

I'm gonna give you example of how I open very big doors for ourselves, because sending someone a catalog or sending someone a little widget pen with my log or it's not gonna, not gonna achieve what I'm trying to achieve.

So I created the campaign and I come up with idea.

I don't know how this would with my talent.

So let's say I wanna get, let's say Scott is a, a marketing manager for p and o cruises, and I want, I wanna catch his attention.

So I created the card and the card saying, are you looking for fresh marketing ideas?

And I, and then at the back, it's got information, our creative minds ready to meet you, and I will send this box to Scott and obviously I need to collect the postal address, I need to make sure he's the right person, he's a decision maker.

So it's a lot of research calls before we start doing the mailing.

And obviously Scott can't be in Argentina because I'll be sending him lemons with, with this package.

So this is the campaign for the Sydney marketing managers because it's include fresh fruit.

So it will come and get delivered on the day to make sure.

So then Sorry, are, are we, look, were you, did you have, did you have it on the screen or you were just talking about it then?

Because we are, we're still looking at the why sticky screen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why sticky?

So I'm just giving example how I, the sticky campaign.

Ah, yes, yep.

No, all good.

Right?

Good.

Yeah, so good question.

So, so this is, the cards that I sent was a direct mail campaign for the, for the acquisition.

And this card came with the lemons.

So then a week later, so I don't really talk about myself much while, while I'm sending you the message, then the next week we'll send them another card with a message saying, we will make sure that your marketing campaign would not go pear shape and the message, and then obviously we're going to send it with the payers.

So second weeks, Scott already thinking, who is this person, why they're sending me the fruit?

Then the next one will come with the card saying, we're passionate about marketing.

And obviously it's come with a passion fruit, but it's, it's continued to the card number three.

I never needed to set all four of them because I had a meeting after two.

And the last one is the card saying we've got all your marketing needs covered with the cherry on top.

So, and it comes with a, with a box of cherries.

And is this real fruit that you're sending them?

Yes.

And Now I'm showing the real fruit.

Yeah, this is the real fruit, real pears.

This is why I say it's very important that you send it to the people that if you are in Sydney, you send it to the Sydney people.

It's very targeting campaign.

So, so it was pears, passion, fruit cherry.

What was the first one?

First one was a lemon.

We, we have some fresh ideas.

We have lemon.

Can I make a suggestion?

Yeah, yeah, we can.

Only because you're sharing screen at the moment.

You're only a tiny little thumbnail, so we can't see what you're holding up very well.

Okay, let me see now.

Okay, do it again.

Ah, That, that's why I was just looking, I was looking at the screen.

Yeah.

Ah, Sorry, sorry.

Okay, so the first one, so I thought, okay, how do I think differently?

How do I open the door to the big decision maker by the name of Scott?

I want him as a client because he is my, he's a muscle to the, to the buy and merchandise worth of 200,000 a year.

So I'm not sending him boring catalog with the umbrellas mugs and bottles and t-shirts.

I'm sending him a card saying we have some fresh marketing ideas, sending him a box of lemon.

Next one.

Have you ever had a marketing campaign go in pear shape?

So it's okay, but you obviously had the wrong team.

Maybe you didn't have a right copywriter, maybe you didn't have right strategy.

So I'm gonna send it with a real fruit, five apples, right pairs.

Next one was, we are passionate about marketing and if you didn't guess I am very passionate about marketing.

It came with a passion fruit.

And at the back say, we have a team that help you with X, Y, z.

And the last one was, we have all your marketing needs covered with the cherry on top and it comes with a box of cherries.

I never said that I sell drink bottles.

I never said I have a merchandise company, but I took Scott on the journey and he goes, I'm curious to meet.

So I opened the door and I, I never actually need to sell all 4, 4, 4 of the boxes.

But what you need to think about for this kind of campaign, you need to know what is your cost of acquisition, right?

Because this is, this is let's say about $150 cost of this campaign.

Just, just the delivery.

Like if you're gonna be delivering, it's $25 time four, but I never look at it as a cost because I know my life value of the customer that I'm trying to get.

So rather than big numbers, it's very, very small numbers.

So it's very direct approach.

So, and I think David Ogle always said, you cannot really bore people into buying your products.

And doesn't matter, doesn't matter what you sell, you, you can, I think Jane Carro said that the recent event in cans, she was in TV and they were, they needed to sell washing powder.

Like how boring is the washing powder is the product.

It's not a sexy product, but she said, but the people who use the washing powder are not boring, so let's shine all the lights on them.

And in terms of how do you think, how do you come up with these ideas?

Then I had bias agents saying, what can you do for us?

How can we create campaign like this?

And I think humor in, in my opinion, I think Monroe said, if, if the man can make woman laugh, he can make it to do anything.

So if we just break the serious of serious in business and you know, we have titles, positions, if we just connect in the human fund level, I use it for myself.

So I make this my market, my target audience is female, so I'm, everyone I meet, I give them my business card, but I also give them this cell filer.

And it says, for cool and fun marketing ideas, keep us on file.

I've been doing it for eight years and keep doing it.

Every time I give it to the person they smile.

Six months later they remember me, they post on LinkedIn about it.

It's, it's so effective and so simple.

Then when Covid came and killed my business, so remember hand sanitizers were more expensive than alcohol and was very shortage of that.

So I make little instead of hand sanitizers, I make Ani sanitizer.

My name is Ana, so it's Ani sanitizer.

I take a piece out of myself all the time and it works.

And then I add your brand doesn't save hands.

So I literally just send direct mail.

And during covid times this what I did then I also made this little tool and I send it to everyone of my clients during Covid and I say, here's a little tool to help you with social distancing.

And yes, it's mid and half, so it's a tape measure mid and half.

This tape measure got me to channel seven and I sold 80,000 of the tape measures as result of that because many people thought it's a good idea.

I do find this stuff and I think this was hilarious during Covid, this is perpetual disappointment diary.

So basically every day, every day it's kind kind of got a funny quote.

And with during Covid, this is, this is was I think very hilarious.

So they said take two unseparable people to tango or easy come un easy go, who is gonna lose?

You know, like just a funny little messages that people, people just can laugh about.

So I'm gonna continue to share about sticky.

Then the next message is very sensitive topic.

And ironically, this is what I do for living.

I put people logos on the products.

This is, this is what they come to me for.

But I always say logos important.

And I think the bigger the brand is, the more important it is because they have bigger budgets.

So with most of the businesses or smaller businesses, they don't really have a budget to pay to put their logo on the stadium or on a singlet for, for the football club because they sell insurance.

It's great for the brand awareness, but I guess if we don't have a brand engagement, brand awareness doesn't really mean anything.

And also logos do not have any kind of emotions and meanings and putting your logo on the bottle.

I was recently on the marketing conference and I literally collected 23 drink bottles in one hour with a different logos.

It's not really, when I look at the strategy of direct mail and acquisition, everything we do, it's always have to have what is the purpose for now and what is the next step?

So rather than putting your logo on that, can we actually put the QR code on this product that's gonna take them to the landing page and this landing page gonna collect data because we're gonna give them two gold class movie tickets.

So suddenly we have a data, if we give out thousand items, how many people actually took action and the code?

And then, then we can measure, like if this campaign was $10,000 campaign, we can measure the ROI because we know what action people took.

I personally prefer, rather than putting logos on the product, I do what people names on the product.

Like we do this notebooks with their names because the people that I give it to, they already know me.

So it doesn't really, as in my logo, in my opinion, it, it will have a details at the back or you might do the debo very subtle logo on the product.

But it does not, in my opinion, and from my experience it does not.

It's just you become just same as everyone else.

So if we make it whatever we give, and it is a difference between promotional product and the gift.

And if we trying to do the acquisition and open the door, we really need to make it about that person.

So we need to find out what they like because otherwise, you know, given umbrella with your logo, it's not really a gift in my opinion.

It's a promotional tool, promotional product gift.

But it's different from the gift itself.

So we need to have, if for acquisition, it needs to be all about them with one clear message.

And we need to say to them what we would like to have next, this is our job to drive.

The next step is people will forget what you said.

People will forget what you did, but people never forget how you make them feel.

So I try to bring the feeling into each campaign that we create.

Like what's going to be the opening experience when they receive this box?

Can this box have glitter?

Can this box be in their favorite color?

Can we need to do a lot of research to actually to make it, to make it exciting for them?

Because you can't just simply send the widgets with your logo and, and say, give me a call now you know who I am.

It's, you're not gonna get any, any reply in, in this kind of scenario.

And I think it's beautiful.

We live in a time where we don't have gatekeepers.

You can literally, if you spend 15 minutes to research the person, you can find out if, do they, do they love golf?

Do they have five children?

You know, like, like talking more like you can, you know how to surprise and delight and, and open the door if you just put a little bit of time.

And I say victory loves preparation.

So you need to make sure that you'll do the strategy.

You have who is the people on the list?

And Seth Gordon talks about don't wait to be picked.

So if you wanna get some big fish, how many who is on the list and how do we strategically engage with them on personal level?

Next thing it's, it's quite interesting after coming after Bill who talks about millions of the numbers, and I talk about many of you as a marketer might be familiar with this formula, it's called Dunbar numbers.

So they say in typically every single of us have 150 people in our network that we have ongoing relationship with.

And me being me, of course I spend half afternoon sitting down with the note and seeing if I can remember and download all the names from my head of hundred 50 people that I am, you know that in my network because some of them you talk more often than others.

It's same with the clients.

Not, not all animals are equals, but some animals more equal than others.

So you have a different relationship with each client.

And I use this for direct, for direct mail campaign.

And I explained how, because quite often people asking me how much we should spend and or how much it's gonna cost.

If we imagine we flying 150 people from LA to Sydney and we're all on the same plane, some of them, majority of the people would be drinking water, 70%.

Then we'll have some people who will be drinking champagne.

Then we'll have probably 10% or 5% who get in blanket with their name on it and limousine pickup.

So basically same in your business.

So I separated on economy, class, business class, and the first class.

So when you do the direct marketing campaign, the activity of we sending, we sending them something, but you decide, is this person, my question Al always, I ask myself, if I see Scott on the street, would I buy him a coffee?

So if the answer is yes, why wouldn't I put something in the mail?

Like I send about, I'm like, I might as well buy Australia post franchise because this is what we do.

We constantly sending the mail out and I love it because I don't need to, I don't wanna see 10 people every week.

But if I do the direct mail and send 10 envelopes, this is, this is the, one of my skills is a maximizer.

This is me maximizing the time and opportunity.

And then if it's the right thing, that 30, 90 days that they remember me and then my job is what, what I'm gonna do in the, in the next mail in the next 90 days.

So you define, does this person worth a coffee for you because they don't know it's coming.

It's totally your acquisition campaign or if you, so, because if you send something as a two centimeter thickness through the mail, it's only costing you $2 40 for postage.

Plus, let's say you spend some money on a product, so it is literally a cup of coffee.

But if you exceed the two centimeter thickness, let's say if I air the sanitizer, it's become thicker than two centimeters, then postage goes to 10, I think 10 or $12, depends where you send it in Australia.

But then people say to me how much it's gonna cost and I say, it doesn't matter, this is my business class people.

And the question I ask myself, would I buy Scott coffee with a muffin or would I buy him lunch?

So, and then you have a VIP customers, then you said, okay, I'm happy to spend a hundred dollars or $200 four times a year to stay with them, to stay in touch with them.

So the list is very important.

The acquisition process is very important.

And another thing is very important that you have to think, you know, one of the principles start with the end or in mind.

You have to help them to navigate the next step.

You, if you're sending something, then you give the message, this is the reason I'm sending and I'll be calling you next week to connect or I'll be seeing you at this event.

The most important thing, if you use handwritten note or the card I created the card, it's, uh, on it just, I just wanted to say because then I print them in a bundle of 500 and I can use it for, just wanted to say congratulations, I wanted to say, nice to see you.

So it has a multiple functionality.

So I don't need to run around and looking for the card every single time does have my subtle branding.

But this is just a tool.

So if you have it all available, it's very easy to make it happen.

But again, you need to know what's your cost of acquisition, what's your long time value of the customer?

Because if you're trying to catch the big fish, you, you can't, you know, come up with a broken fish line and, and some breadcrumbs.

You need to have the right tools because you only really have a first or one chance and only chance to open this door.

You can't go, oh, let me try to write him another email.

Because the opportunity and your positioning, it's one, one only.

So I suggest that you spend 80, 80% of your time and research and finding the right people and doing your due diligence and finding who else know the person I was having lunch with.

Someone very high level, we try to get him to get your, to meet Arnie, right?

It's a big, you know, how, how, how, what are we gonna do to open the door to work with Arnold Ger?

We'll find a way.

So when I was meeting with Joe, because I did not show well, but I knew someone who knew Joe.

So I say, what should I bring to the meeting that will delight you?

Because then I can use other people and kind of stand on the shoulders of the giant because they already have a relationship with them.

So this, this is the done by number.

So, and again, 150, if you have a salesperson or if it's a BDM, this is probably what they cover in terms of nurturing the relationship relationship because these people also, if you have relationship with them, they help you to open doors to other people.

So I'm all about leverage.

So productivity is doing more in the less amount of time.

Leverage is actually doing less, more with a less effort.

So I, I wanna do as little as possible.

So I have plenty of time to do yoga.

So I create various tools and opportunities that give me the leverage to maximize the effort.

So just to recap about what I cover.

When we talk about opening the doors, just make sure it's all about them.

I talk about one clear message.

So do not tell them what the next step is.

Very powerful.

If you do write handwritten messages, you add the pss, PSS is the first thing anyone read.

So, and make pss very personal or make pss is your next step.

And then make sure you follow up.

I always give a example of doesn't matter what business we in, obviously people come to us because they believe we can help them to solve the problem than they have faster, cheaper, and with more fun.

Otherwise they'll try to do it themselves.

So then the concept is if I'm a Panadol that I wanna sell the Panadol.

And if I ask a hundred people, how many of you will buy Panadol next week?

Maybe 3% of people saying, oh, I'll buy the Panadol next week.

But majority of people would not buy Panadol next week.

They just need to wear, be aware that Panadol is available and I'm a Panadol and I'm better than another Panadol.

But they will all buy this Panadol in the next 3, 6, 12, 18 months.

So as a marketer, we just need to make sure we create the journey that when they are ready to buy the Panadol, we are top of mind.

And if you are top of mind, you tip of the tongue.

And when you use the product very strategically, it has to be strategic because it's needs to be useful for them because then they will keep it.

If they will keep it, they automatically remember you.

So this is if you want, if you want them to come back, I always say give them a magnet.

We need to give them something so they remember us and use the product.

And by using this product, they, they will associate with you and your company.

And this is actually our job as the, as a marketer to make sure they actually remember us.

It's not our customer jobs.

And I see it in real estate a lot because they so focused on the sale and the cycle is so long.

So the cycle is seven years.

So, but they need to have tools to stay in touch because if they don't, in seven years, the customer might go with someone else and then real estate agent get upset saying, why didn't you call me?

And the customer simply said, I didn't call you because I, I forgot about you.

So is the real estate agent, they need to have tools and it's a different kind of approach.

It's, it's a fine line between, between being persistent and being a pest.

You probably, real estate probably can call them after three months, six months.

But you can only do this awkward call.

Do you wanna sell?

No, I don't wanna sell.

Do you know someone, it's kind of, people would not be answering your, your phone calls.

So how do we make sure that we stay in touch, but very strategic and meaningful and not, not kind of corny way.

And to do that, we need to be different and do opposite.

Like now everyone doing Christmas, I say, why you use Christmas?

Whatever you do, gonna be lost in this big overwhelming time where so many cards, so many gifts.

Why don't you do it something in January, next year's a year of Dragon.

And I use this calendar, it says, I love this calendar, it says every year is 30 day is a holiday.

And basically I can create marketing Maybe maybe stop sharing and to show the calendar.

Yeah, Yeah.

This is the calendar.

So this is the calendar hold I stop share here.

So this is the calendar.

So basically the calendar says every day is a holiday.

I love it because I literally can create marketing campaign or Sunday, okay, not Sunday, they have a Swiss cheese day, okay?

Or they have head day.

So you can, if you're looking for ideas, people say to me, oh, I'm not creative.

So you just need to have the right tools or find the right people who goes, this will work for us.

And also it's need to be audience specific.

If you're working with the lawyers and they're conservative and they have this tone of voice, it's like in copywriting, you, you know, you're not gonna go over overboard with the emoji and the jokes.

You need to be, you know, specific to the audience.

So this calendar, by the calendar and see, oh, maybe you can create three campaigns, two campaigns a year to reignite the, the energy or to bring people, if you are offline, if you event organizes, you can collect data and bring it online.

But if you are online business, what can you create to reignite energy and bring your people together, taking them from offline to online.

So, and this is a great, one of the great tools that I use and I love it.

And they think this is all for from me.

Welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn, send me the message, send me the questions.

I'm on Instagram as well, and I leave you with, um, my favorite quotes.

And the reason I'm here, it's because of Scott and because of relationships.

So I'm not really marketing, I'm just good at talking to people and nurturing the relationship.

So if this is something that you are passionate about, I leave you with this quote, one of my favorite quote, if you believe that, you know, building is on relationships or make building relationship your business.

And this is all from me.

And that's, uh, that, that's awesome Oxana.

And there, there's a couple of big takeaways that I got from that presentation.

One is, I guess the power of one 50, the power of the, the whole one 50.

And I know I read a book years ago called power networking.

I, I, the name of the author escapes me, but it was a five plus 50 plus a hundred method.

And I think like that's like a really good long game strategy, which is, which is so undervalued, right?

Keeping in touch, keeping in touch, keeping in touch with people.

So that was, that was like a real aha.

And the other one was obviously getting in, getting in the front door, right?

Like the unique strategies with the fruit, which is really hard to ignore.

And I've, I've heard a lot of strategies over the day, over the years and, and use some of them, but never, never the fruit.

So what, what's the conversion rate on that Original?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's conversion.

Yeah.

What's a conversion rate?

Look, Con look, conversion rate is like, everything is simple.

Like when I share, I do a lot of, you know, mentoring and presenting on, on the panels and stuff.

It all depends how, because this is just a tool.

Like my conversion rate was 85%, right?

Because I have another ingredients to make an apple cake, you only need four ingredients.

But if you don't have a right order, if you don't have a right oven, if you don't have the right temperature, if you don't mix in the right order, you'll stuff up four ingredients, cake.

Yep.

So it's all about, you know, it's no point sending this fruit and spending a hundred dollars acquisition.

You know the difference between garbage letters and garbage, it's timing, right?

Are you follow up?

Are you somebody replying to you?

How are you step ahead?

What, what's the next conversation?

Do you have, I have 18 months strategy for the next step.

Next step.

But people just think, oh, can I have this mark in purple?

Of course you can, you can have it in purple and yellow and green.

It's, it's not gonna make any difference if you do not have a next step follow up, what's your offer?

Do you have all the tools to close the deal?

Are you a good salesperson?

If you're not, do some sales training.

Are you, do you have emotional intelligence, you know, intelligence kind of thermometer.

If you don't, you're probably gonna have low closing rate.

Yeah.

So This is A hundred percent, it's all about that overall strategy.

And I'll just open it up to see if anyone else has any, has any, has any questions.

Hey, Oxana, I love the QR code idea and I was thinking, would you put something on there like, you know, scan to win or don't scan this QR code and people are gonna scan it regardless.

Probably get a hundred percent possibility on that.

Yeah.

And then at the end of the qr, can you make it so like there's a different offer every month or how would you make them keep scanning it all Over that you, you are the digital guru, you can make million landing pages and, and track them.

I'm not, I'm not a big fan.

I think people are intelligent.

Like if you wanna make a joke, say not scan it, because especially after covid, everyone know you have to scan your code, right?

Like, you don't need to say open the Coca-Cola.

Like if you, if you wanna drink it, you should open it.

So here's the QR code.

I have a QR code on my umani sanitizer, but I, I not always put, but it's, it's, you can really track it, right?

Because you can create several landing pages and use quote for the copywriting, you know, which tagline work better and you know that here LinkedIn start here, there you should click Yeah, look at this from John.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

So I think yes you can, because I'm all about ROI like how we, because everything you can measure, you can improve if you don't know what we're doing.

If you give out thousand drink bottles and they all went, was it successful campaign?

We don't know.

They're gone with, oh, it's brand awareness.

I'm not Coca-Cola.

I don't need a brand awareness.

Brand awareness does not pay for electricity.

I need money in the bank.

So I wanna, I wanna ROI on the what I'm doing.

I think that that was another, and thanks for bringing my te bringing our attention to it.

Dan, that was another aha moment as well is where you make promotional products actually pre historically have not been very measurable, but this is a way that they can be, that can be me made, be made measurable and um, practical.

So that's, uh, that's awesome.

What.

Overview:

The episode discusses strategies for successful outbound email marketing. Bill shares how he scaled his company Athena's outbound program from 50 emails per week to 1.2 million emails per week with a low spam rate. He emphasizes the importance of targeting the right person with the right message at the right time. Bill also provides tips on tools for data, email infrastructure, warming domains, and best practices. Athena's outbound program now generates 46% of their $7 million in annual recurring revenue. Bill advises on how to approach personalization at scale using tools with deep datasets versus more manual hyper-personalization. He concludes by offering his expertise to help others improve their outbound marketing through tools like Apollo and Robots.

Takeaways:

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

Welcome everyone to the December 20, 23 edition of Elite Marketers.

So today we've got an interesting session because it, it's about how to get a meeting with anyone, and we're taking it from two very different perspectives.

So first we've got Bill with the cold email, and second, we're gonna have Sana, who's doing some incredible stuff with the whole offline, going with direct mail and that sort of thing.

So two very different, very different perspectives that will open our eyes on what's possible.

So, but starting with Bill, bill Curve was introduced to me by Scotty Baker, who's also on this call, is gonna be sharing how he built and scaled his cold outbound email efforts from 50 emails per week to 2 million emails per week with a lower than 2% spam rate.

So this engine contributes, you know, to greater than 45% of their total revenue.

And he is run by a team of two.

And scaling outbound email is hard.

And what he's gonna do, he's gonna share with us the tools to make it easy.

So you might not walk away with knowing exactly how to send 2 million emails per week, but you will definitely walk away with the tools to begin to build your own outbound program.

So, you know, as we know, the first company to ever make it to the a hundred million hub revenue was, uh, was Salesforce and they did it outbound.

So, uh, yeah, I'll, without further ado, I'll hand hand the reins over to you, you bill.

Alrighty, thanks Scott, appreciate that.

And thanks.

Uh, Scotty Baker, also for, you know, the opportunity to be here and introduce me to, to, to Scott, the host.

So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna introduce myself formally in a moment, but I've got some slides prepared, so I'm just gonna share my screen.

Gimme one, gimme a second while I get this all set up correctly.

So here's my screen.

Now, just let me Present it.

Can everybody see?

Can everybody see my screen now?

Is it loading up?

All right?

Yes.

Got it.

Yep, yep.

Alrighty.

So mastering lead gen with cold emails.

So let's dive in.

I'm gonna go through a quick introduction, outbound today, understanding your audience, crafting your message, some best practices, team and technology, what mastery looks like, how we or I can help.

And then we'll have some time for questions.

As Scott mentioned, I'm gonna try and do this in 25 minutes so we have, you know, time for q and a at the end and so forth, but I haven't time for this.

One other thing is I didn't get our team to help me with the design of this.

So it looks, I'm not the best designer.

This is all put together by me, so, no, no, uh, no jokes about the design, lack of, uh, skills.

So, so anyway, let's dive in.

So myself, I'm founder and CEO at Athena, we're a global talent platform.

So we align talent with opportunities.

So normally if you think of offshore teams, global talent, you think of Philippines, India, so forth.

We have big talent pools in Latin America, Southeast Asia, really around sales, marketing, product and engineering.

So that's, that's what we do.

Lots of, uh, customers.

I was recently ranked number one mentor at Start mate, which is Asia Pacific's leading startup accelerator.

Out of 150 mentors, I'm also an investor at Blackbird vc, which is the southern hemisphere's largest VC fund, an angel investor in humane.

You might have seen the technology humane, the AI pin that came out the other day.

I'm an angel investor in humane future, super atomic eight and more traveled all over the world.

I've got a cool little sausage dog you can see in this photo here.

Uh, people call me Doc, that's a fun fact.

My name's Bill, but people call me Doc.

So that's a little bit about me.

Why listen to me, as Scott mentioned earlier, I'm nearly word for word verbatim here.

Athena has scaled its outbound program from 50 emails per week in 2019 to 1.2 in 21.2 million in 2023.

Outbound email is only dying if you suck at it.

There's a lot of talk about outbound email dying.

So let's go through what it looks like.

So outbound today, outbound is harder than ever.

Today we're fighting against a lot of changes in the industry.

Google's cracking down.

Google doesn't like outbound email.

Google's one of Google's premier products is Gmail, and they like the user experience and the user experience of, of outbound email and spam is not a good experience and they don't make any real money from it.

So Google's trying to crack down and have high higher quality emails landing in the inbox.

So for people doing outbound email poorly, it's really bad news for people that do outbound email really well.

It's actually really good news.

So having said that, historically, our scale goes up, we get better, we get better at what we do at Athena in terms of our, our outbound and our result and our results go down.

That's because the industry is getting harder every year, every six months it gets harder with outbound, but still super viable channel, but not for the faint of heart.

So that's all the bad news.

Oops, excuse me, sorry.

But it still works if you put the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

That's where I'm gonna concentrate a lot today.

Those three things, you can do a million different fancy things.

There's a lot of infrastructure we can talk about.

People's preferred channel for brand communications is still email above anything else.

And if you put the right message in front of the right person at the right time, you're gonna win.

If you look at these three points I have for you, and you can kind of think of it like this, if you nail all three right person, the right message, right time, you have a client, if you nail two out of three, you have a lead.

If you nail one out of three or zero out of three, you're spam.

That's basically the, the, the breakdown.

So, so our story, it's a quick overview of our story at Athena.

So our journey kind of looked like this.

So as I mentioned, we started sending outbound emails, day one, week one Athena, and we sending 50 outbound emails.

A and today, now we 1.2 with 0.045 spam rates, which is insanely low.

We're really world class at it for a small company.

We're we're world class at at outbound, but we've been through trials and tribulations.

So we started spraying pre outbound using the wrong platforms, using the wrong strategy.

We scraped all the data ourselves, which means it was terrible data and terribly inefficient, and we killed our first domain.

So that was like the bad news that was getting it off the ground.

Athena IO is gone dead, never to come back.

We killed it.

Then we started to find our feet, we got consistent results.

Next, we found the right platforms, the right strategies, good data, and I've got a spelling mistake there.

But we started to see quality and consistent lead flow.

So that's kind of like stage two.

And then stage three, let's call it mastery and scale.

We killed another domain recently, actually we did, we're doing everything right apart from a couple small things and we, we killed another domain.

But we've rebuilt everything for from scratch with redundancy built into every step of the, the, the program.

We have new strategies and we have a really scalable, scalable customer acquisition channel.

So, but it's been a journey.

I'm gonna talk some of the highs and lows and some of the things to consider.

So, so that's a little bit about about us.

So the story today though, so going from 50 emails per week to 1.2 million emails per week.

Our historical revenue, this is not our historical revenue from day one of Athena.

This is our historical revenue from, this is all client revenue today and, and the acquisition channels.

So as you can see here, outbound attributes, 46% of our revenue today we're doing 7 million in annual recurring revenue today, USDA million USD, so 10 11 a UD million recurring revenue.

So 46% of that came from our outbound program.

And that's the, the, the, the automated stuff I'm gonna talk about in a moment.

And 27% of that came from outbound led by our sales team.

Let's just call that business development, as you can see there in purple.

So if you add those two numbers up, I don't like doing public math, but let's say it's 73%.

Our revenue comes from outbound.

So we're a small but fast growing company current pipeline.

Now this is, this is great and it's also a bit of a problem.

We've never had a marketing department because we've never really needed one, but we just hired our first head of growth and our first marketing team because we need to change the current pipeline because we're, we're a one trick pony and we leave ourselves a little bit.

We're best in class, we're world class at outbound, but it also means that if outbound something, something changed, then we might be left, uh, in a, in a rough spot.

So, but you, what you can see here though, on the right, our current pipeline, 73% of our revenue in our pipeline, which is about 5 million right now, 5 million in, in a RA in our pipeline today.

73% of that comes from outbound at scale, which is crazy.

And 12% comes from business development.

So that's 85% of our business comes from outbound sales.

So how do we get there?

So let's go back to that first thing that I mentioned, right message, right person, right time.

So let's start with right message.

What is a good cold email?

A good cold email has a strong subject line and good personalization.

So here's what I'm gonna talk about first is, uh, lemme just see these slides.

Yeah, sorry, I skipped a slide.

So first, starting with the subject line.

Now there's a million different ways to to, to test this subject line.

And anybody that's starting with cold email, you're gonna have a million different ab tests and I recommend doing that.

But the data shows from our two partners that we use.

One of them is the biggest in the world and one of them is at a very large scale.

The data shows that the best subject line in the world on average across industries is your company X, my company.

So Corp X, Athena, Tesla X, Microsoft, your company X, my company.

If you wanna start with outbound email, that's the world's leading subject line.

You'll also see variations of this subject line.

You would've had 'em in your, it had it in your own inbox.

But something that is a valuable idea to start with if you're gonna dive into cold outbound is to lean on this subject line heavily while you test your others.

So if you're thinking 80 20, maybe this is your 80 and 20 is your AV tests a thousand times from Sunday, you can ab test and you will probably beat this.

But on average, this is the best subject line in the world.

So this is something that can give you a foundation for a subject line.

So let's move on to the actual content inside of an email.

So there's two ways to talk about this and there's hyper-personalized email.

So hyper-personalized email has a personalized subject line and it has personalization in the first section of the email.

This is actually, I kind of was rushing a little bit with some of these slides.

This is actually not the best example.

Normally I would have the personalization in the first paragraph beneath Hi Christian in this example.

So, because that's, some of that is what you might see in the preview of the email, but in the first part of the email, you wanna have personalization.

So hyper-personalized might look like, Hey Scotty, great work.

I saw on the, we had a successful webinar last week, how that, I saw that you went to X school and that must be awesome.

I know you connected with this person.

And that real personalization that a human being has done.

There are now AI tools that can help with this, which we will go into maybe a little bit, but, but hyper-personalization is personalization that a human being sits down and researches their their prospect basically.

So that's one type of personalization.

And then there's personalization at scale.

So personalization at scale is using partner tools, which I'll recommend 100% to use.

A couple of tools we'll talk about shortly.

And these tools have their own deep data sets on prospects all around the world.

And in those, in that data you'll have, you can see here it says personalization, name, title, company, department plus four.

I mean, the partners that we use, they have 30 different, 30 different data points.

So to the, to the trained eye, you can kind of see through it that it's not personalized.

But at the end of the day, business is about solving somebody's problem.

So if you have personalization, if, if your email looks decent enough, but you're gonna solve somebody's problem, right?

Per right person, right message, right person, right time, you're gonna be, you're gonna be good to go here.

So there's major differences between these two types of two types of ways to approach copy inside of the email.

And they are as follows.

So hyper personalization is slower because as you can see, I've got in the brackets here, it's basically led by reps, SDRs, or account executives will hyper personalize their, their emails.

And normally this will be to the highest value prospect.

So these will be bespoke lists that you might've made yourself and you're really trying to personalize every touch inside of the email to try and get the highest warm reply rate.

So as you can see down the bottom here, highest warm reply rate for hyper-personalization, but because it's hyper-personalized, because it's slower, it's harder to scale.

It's kind of one-on-one, one to one, sorry.

So conversely, scale.

So personalization at scale is kind of led by the company or the program or the department, let's say.

So personalization at scale is faster, it's easier to scale, although it has a lower warm reply rate.

So what we're really looking for when we talk about success in, in outbound email, we're talking about warm reply rate, it doesn't matter, open rates don't matter, replies don't matter.

All you should care about is one reply rate.

Hey, this is interesting, I'd like to see a demo.

Or Hey, this is interesting, here's my credit card.

So personalization at scale, faster, easy to scale, lower warm replies.

'cause it's not hyper-personalized, but it's one to many.

So, so write person.

So that's right message, right person.

So I'm assuming everybody on the call here knows their ICP or their buyer persona, you know, whatever you wanna, you wanna talk about.

So, oh, all right, cool.

I'm selling to 30 to 45-year-old tech professionals in the Melbourne and Sydney, whatever.

I'm not, I'm gonna assume everybody has their ICP, their buyer persona down.

So if you don't, that's step one.

I'm not gonna talk about that on that, on today's score.

So if you've got your I CCP though, there's three ways you can go about finding the data of your I ccp.

One is your own data.

So you may have, everybody has a CRM, obviously in contact, so you have some of your own data.

But when, what I say here by your own data is you can build your own lists.

So scrape data, everybody knows the tools out there to scrape data, data, find people's emails, find people's phone numbers.

That's very painful, very slow, and I don't recommend it, but it's one of the systems you can use.

You can use your own data, you can next, you can buy data.

So buying data, the most typical platform really in technology in order to buy good quality data is ZoomInfo.

ZoomInfo is a listed company, incredibly expensive.

You know, they do a, they do things well.

They're very, very expensive and very enterprise.

So I wouldn't recommend Zoom info, I would highly recommend against it, in fact.

And the third option, which I would recommend is renting the data.

So data you rent.

So we use two platforms, which I'll talk more in depth again in a moment.

Plo.io is one and robots is the other.

So Apollo and robots both have the technology in order to, to schedule your campaigns.

So that's great.

But they also have their own data sets.

So this is from, this is from both Apollo and robot's websites.

So find and convert the perfect leads, find, this is Apollo.

Find contact, find contact, and close your ideal buyers with over 270 million contacts and streamline engagement workloads powered by ai, 270 million contacts.

So you've gotta remember what I mentioned earlier, when you're trying to do personalization at scale, and you're looking for deep data on 30 different data points on your, the perfect contact, Apollo has 270 million of the world's leading decision makers across all industries.

Grow robots on the top right has a hundred percent million, um, 171 million plus of the world's leading decision makers.

This data is cleaned, updated.

So when data bounces, when a, when an email bounces, it bounces twice, I believe it's just scrapped from the system.

So somebody's moved on, it's not Mark at Acmy corp anymore.

Mark's moved on to his next role.

So his email doesn't work anymore.

The system will pick that up, it'll kick the, it'll kick the email outta the system and you know, the data's clean.

So, so if we're going just back a step, you can find your own data, buy data at a very expensive rate, or you can rent data, let's call it renting data.

You'll pay for it, obviously, but let's call it renting the data of Apollo and robot.

So that's what I, I highly recommend.

So next we have the right time.

So I'm gonna go through this a little bit quicker, but right time, how do you know the time is right to reach out to your prospect?

Few indicators you can use, both Apollo and robots have hiring, currently hiring.

So for us, we do, we build global teams.

Offshore talent you think of like outsourcing, you know, that kind of stuff.

So they have currently hiring in their custom fields when you're searching their, in their fields, when you're searching their database.

So I can say technology companies, San Francisco, 51 to 200 headcount, currently hiring, I can use that, that that field.

Next is recently raised capital.

Both of the partners that we have, which again, robots and Apollo, I'm relatively certain, robots I think took it down for a little bit and I think it's back up.

But they have recently raised capital.

So obviously some of the best people to sell to people that have just had $40 million of cash pumped into their coffers.

So, so recently raised capital, recently purchased software.

So there's a few different tools that you can use to find out, okay, this person just bought, or this person just signed up to AWS cool.

They're obviously building the, the, the, the, the infrastructure of the technology platform.

I sell complimentary tool X to AWS great time to reach out to, to, to, you know, whoever the prospect is.

Live lead scoring.

So engagement metrics.

So both Apollo and robots Apollo do it better.

Lead scoring.

So if a lead engages with a, a lead magnet or your, your website email or whatever, you'll have live lead scoring.

And then market trends.

So everybody has their own market trends.

I don't know what they are in all of your industries, but knowing your own market trends.

So, so that's some of the ways in which you can get the timing right is just an example of, you know, lead scoring and, and behavioral stuff inside of Apollo.

But, but that's some of the ways that you can get the, the final part, right, which is the, the right time.

It's kind of the hardest.

But, but if we go back, success in outbound is, is very simple.

If you're doing the, the easy things, right, it's right message, right person, right time.

So that's a little bit on on those three points.

So it's some best practices with outbound.

So few best practices in, in order to have success, firstly you have to have a great email infrastructure.

So I won't go into the specifics about that.

I'll do one, I'll go through one slide in a moment.

But some real technical stuff that you just have to follow.

Basically a checklist, a couple of blogs or an onboarding, an onboarding manager and make sure that your email infrastructure is set up for success.

Otherwise, you're gonna land in inbox bamming boxes and the trash bin all the time.

Second is warming up emails as well.

So there's, you can either warm emails yourself, quite manual, quite painstaking, or you can use platforms and partners that, uh, will do the domain warming for you, which is pretty nice.

It's pretty cost effective.

It's a bit of a false economy to warm the email accounts up yourself today because it's pretty cheap and easy to do it, uh, through, through partners, but you can do it yourself.

Comply with sending limits.

So it is possible, I believe, to send 2000 emails still per, per email account.

So [email protected], I can send 2000 emails per day if I want, but that'll just destroy my domain reputation.

So when I mentioned that we continue to scale, continue to get better at what we do at Athena, but we get worse results in the warm reply in relation to warm reply, it's because email, email warm replies and email deliverability continues to get harder because of a number of different factors from all the providers, Microsoft, Google, so forth.

So complying with sending limits is key.

If you have really good domain reputation and you have really good messaging, really good targeting and really good timing, then you can probably send 500 emails up to 500 emails per email account per day.

But I don't really recommend it because it's gonna be, it, it could get messy.

So if you want to be relatively safe and, and and comfortable, you probably want to have sending limits of 200 to 250.

And this is one of the reasons why outbound's getting harder, because if you did everything right previously, you could send a thousand emails a day, pretty, pretty comfortable if you did it, if you did it right.

But over time, that gets lower and lower and at the moment you're probably safe at 250 emails as long as you're doing things pretty well.

So complying with sending limits and then using subdomains, different domains and sub-brands.

So sub-domains, we'll talk about these in a moment.

So we'll talk about these in a moment.

And then rehabilitating domain reputation.

When it, when domain reputation gets bad.

So if you end in a lot of, if you, if your emails are ending in spam, excuse me, ending up in spam, then there's different ways that you can rehab your domain reputation.

So you pull the emails out of, out of the campaigns, prospecting campaigns, and you put them into rewarming sequences basically, and tools that you use to warm your emails up originally.

So these are kind of some best practices to buy.

So some of the technical stuff, the e email authentication records, D-A-D-K-I-M-S-P-F, these are the things, the technical things that I mentioned earlier.

They're all pretty much must haves now.

I mean, it says here that DA is highly recommended, it's not, it's must have.

This is all must have.

There's even a few other things, a few small other points you need to kind of comply with.

If you miss this step, you'll never be successful in any other, any of the following steps, which is like, this is like, yeah, putting your pants on and walk outta the house.

This is like step number one.

So email warming.

So this is kind of like a, a typical warming schedule days, one to three 15 emails at a 452nd interval days, four to 7, 25 emails, so on and so forth.

You know, over 30 days you can warm an email pretty, pretty comfortably.

And like I said, back in the past, even like four or five years ago, this was kind of a manual process.

There was some tools, but not really.

But now you can find tools and I can recommend a couple that are, that will take care of this for you for a small, a small cost.

And then going back to the sub subdomains, different domains and sub-brands, this is a typical subdomain excuse the quality of the image.

I just took a screenshot at moments ago, but McKayla at mail hive co.

So the, the male.is the subdomain obviously.

So what a subdomain does is it protects your main domain.

So we in the past had Athena, sorry, excuse me, [email protected].

That's cool.

Subdomains are cool.

What I recommend even more than that, I highly recommend is actually different domains.

So now we don't actually use subdomains, subdomains still are good, but even better is in my example [email protected], no.no subdomain.

It's a different domain, not linked in any way to your main domain because what you're trying to do here is you're trying to protect your main domain business as usual emails.

If you end up in spam and you get high report spam reports and so forth, obviously there's so many transactional emails to in, in running a business, if your main domain gets damaged, it just can turn into a total s**t show, as you can imagine.

So, so, so there's subdomains, they actually work.

But if you wanna get ambitious and like scale with the outbound program, you probably want to have different domains.

And then I'll talk about sub-brands later.

Sub-brands is like when you get to the mastery stage.

We'll talk about that in a moment.

So, so that's some of the best practices that you can kind of think about in terms of running a successful outbound program.

I'm gonna just quickly talk about out team and tech to give you a bit of an overview of what we're able to accomplish, what tools we use and who were, who we have in the team in order to, to make it happen.

So these are some of our team that we have.

We have basically three guys.

Scottie mentioned two earlier.

That was from like, uh, originally when we booked this, this, uh, this session had two people, two people managing.

We have three now.

So we have Tino head of sales.

Tino oversees things.

He doesn't put his hands on anything, but he's like strategy like myself.

We kind of are involved.

These are outbound manager.

He does more of the technical stuff.

He kind of manages the campaign.

So he is like a, he's a, he's a mid to senior guy marketing guy.

And then we have dlo, who's digital strategist, dlo lens, his experience where he can, so he's another mid, mid to senior guy.

So we have three people managing our program, really like two and a half, kind of with some oversight from Tino and, and myself.

And we're able to send 1.2 million emails per, per week our tech stack.

So we have Apollo for sending and for data.

So when I say sending and for data, so we schedule all of our, all of our outbound through Apollo and we use their data.

Their data is the best in the world really.

ZoomInfo and Apollo robots we use for sending and for data as well.

Their data is not as good, but they have more cost effective plans and better plans if you wanna be really aggressive and scale, everyone costs you anywhere near as much as Apol.

So we use a mixture of both and we use a mixture of both just for redundancy in case one of them, I dunno, anything changes.

We use warmly for email warming.

Robots also uses robots also has a, uh, a free tool inside of their platform for email warming.

But we use warmly 'cause it's kind of a little smoother SendGrid for once you get to our level, you, you use something like SendGrid to build upon your email infrastructure.

That's not really step one of an outbound campaign.

So you wouldn't really need to worry about SendGrid until you, you know, get some real momentum and then lavender for email copywriting.

So that's kind of like a tool to improve the way that you write copy.

Yeah, just a great tool for email, for outbound email that we use only a few slides to left.

So yeah, and our, our our, our output, so our team, our, our, our tools and our output.

So we send, yeah, one, 1 million emails a week now.

And then I wanna just quickly finally talk about what we think mastery looks like.

So we're getting towards the, the mastery stage of outbound email.

Our plans for 2024 is to continue to strengthen our infrastructure because that's core to us.

Use start to use tech for hyper personalization at scale.

So you'll remember I mentioned before the two systems of like writing the copy, hyper personalization, and then personalization at scale.

Thanks to the rise of AI.

And just thanks to, you know, technology at large, there's now tools that you can use for hyper personalization at scale.

They pull data points from all around the internet and then they pump 'em into LLS chat, GBT, the others, whatever, GPT from OpenAI and the others, uh, cords, the other one from Anthropic and and so forth.

So you can use hyper-personalization at scale.

Now we plan to build more sub-brands.

I'll show you what we do with sub-brands in a moment and then increase our capacity to 5 million emails per week and beyond.

Really, we've built a fully evergreen system and I'll show you how we have done it and what mastery looks like.

So what I just talked about, we'll get anybody, if anybody takes it really seriously and is really ambitious and kind of follows the, except you'll have your own process.

But if you follow the steps that I outlined, there's no reason why you can't send a hundred thousand emails per week through your, through your brand outbound emails.

What you won't be able to do is send 1.2 million emails per week per your brand because you'll tread on the same prospects too often.

You'll have to recycle too prospects too quickly and it'll just become too difficult.

So what we've actually done has, we've created sub-brands.

So every one of these brands you see here, Jack's devs named after my brother Jack Ziggy's tech talent named after my dog, Ziggy Higher React devs, global sales talent, global marketing talent.

These are beautiful sites, fully fleshed out domains, great user experience.

And we run outbound email through all of these different sub-brands as a landing page, talks directly to our, the, the, the ICP we're looking at, they reply and then we funnel, we, we, we, we fess up, we say, Hey look, we're actually part of Athena.

They come into Athena's sales pipeline.

And then we, uh, continue from there.

So this is like, uh, pretty high level stuff.

I've never actually told anyone about our sub-brand strategy because it's so kind of important to us.

But that's what we do.

That's how we got to 1.2 million.

And in order for us to get to 5 million per week, which will be around $20 million of pipeline generated per month, we'll do that next year and we'll have 50 sub-brands.

That'll, that'll be how we do it.

So pretty interesting stuff.

How, how we, how we do it, following on how we can help we being me, we being Athena, my company and you know, team and partners that we partner with.

We're, uh, I'm on the sales advisory board for Apollo.

I'm like a a, I'm on basically the customer advisory board I'm really close with with Apollo.

So if you want intros and priority deals that Apollo, I've got a Typeform that I'll dump in the, in the comments and you can, you can say, hey, yeah, I'm interested in looking into Apollo.

I've got priority, we're the biggest customer in all of robots is customer base.

So I have a great relationship, as you can imagine with robots.

And we have like priority, priority deals and, and, and packages that robots, I can get an intro to to robots if you want outsourced talent.

So if you want somebody in Latin America or Southeast Asia running your programs, normally you would save 50 to 70%.

Then hiring locally maybe a, uh, a mid-level talent for 13 to $15 an hour, um, senior talent that could run your program for $15 to $25 an hour.

We can do that.

And then consulting, this is not, this is external as well, but I, I know really great outbound consultants that I could recommend 'cause there's a lot of people that say they're good, but I know some that are actually good.

So I'll, I'll share a type form in the, in the, in the chat simple Typeform, if any of those four things are interesting, you can just tick yes.

And and I'll get in touch and help if I can, if not all good.

Hopefully, you know, everybody got some, some interesting insights out of the, the presentation and uh, yeah, next I'll throw it back to Scotty and we can go through, you know, questions if anybody has any.

And, uh, that's it.

So that's, that's, thanks for listening.

That's the, the presentation from my end.

Yeah, no, that was, that was awesome.

Thanks.

Thanks Bill.

And yeah, just so good to get it from you as a, as a practitioner who's doing such incredible volume in this, in this space.

So I mean, one, one question I had B2B, B2C, is it, I mean obviously it works very effectively for B2B.

What are your thoughts on B2C?

Historically, I think outbound is better suited to B2B, but if you have a, a decent lifetime value, then it can work for B2C because you'll be able to find the data, you'll be able to build the program.

But it works best if you have a healthy lifetime value.

So if you have, if you were, say you say you're Canva, the design tool Canva, you know, Australian design tool, Canva outbound would be terrible for the B2C business for Canva.

'cause they charge $8 a month, it's just not ever gonna work if they were doing B2B to try and win their enterprise deals, great tool for Canva.

So, but if you have B2C customers where you charge a high ticket item, it can definitely work.

Yep.

No, that's, that's great.

And I'll open it up to, to the, you know, to everyone see what other questions are out there.

One, one question from me, Scott, and thanks for that Bill.

You, you mentioned the, the standard deadline and you said your company X my company, have you got an example of what that type of headline might look like?

No.

So it's very simple.

So if I was prospecting to three heads of engineering, which is typical prospect for us head of engineering at SpaceX, for example, the headline would literally read SpaceX X Athena, their company x, Athena being my company.

Yeah, that's how, that's how, how you do it with the platforms that I mentioned.

They'll do it for you.

So you can, they have the data and you just put in the, the form the fields will say your company X, their company X your company.

But super simple just like that.

Hey Bill, what, what SMTP services do you use?

Do you use postmark or SMTP to go what's better?

Our team manages that, that's the technical infrastructure stuff that me as CEOI don't actually know the most recent up-to-date answer because there's a lot of changes in the infrastructure side of outbound as well.

So although we send 1.2 million emails a week, I actually can't answer that one.

Well, Dan, to be fair, um, okay, and, And I guess you wouldn't be able to answer the, what sort of DM a c tools you use to create the keys for, but I can No, no, but what I can do, if you send me, if you just put your email in the chat there, I can introduce you to our outbound team.

I do a bunch of mentoring at a, in like a startup ecosystem in, in a and I'm always introducing people to our team.

So I can introduce you to our team and you can pick their brains.

You can, you know, ever, if you've ever got any issues we like helping, we're happy to help.

So although I can't answer it, if you flicking your email, I can do an intro and the team will, you know, that they'll be able to help you out.

Perfect.

I'll just see it in each chat.

That was a, a great talk.

Thank you very much for, for what you shared, bill.

One, one of the things that I've always been a bit scared about with doing mass emailing is the, the spam laws in Australia because they are quite harsh compared to, to other countries.

And I remember a guy in, uh, Western Australia called Wayne Mansfield, I if you've heard of him, and, and he got fined $5 million for sending out a million dollars of, oh, a million emails.

I think it was.

They find him $5,000,005 for each email that they deemed spam.

And do you ever have issues with the, the legislation or, or by buying or renting lists so they cleaned or opted in so that they don't pass a spam and is it a bit of a gray area?

What's deemed spam in Australia and what isn't?

Yeah, that's right.

It's a, it's a really large gray area because the definition is prospecting is not illegal sales prospecting.

So prospecting is not illegal, it's kind of a little bit of a gray area, but spam is obviously illegal.

So the, the difference between spam and being a good prospector and good outbound sales is really comes down to those three points I mentioned earlier, right message, right person, right time.

So we, at Athena we have a 0.04% spam rate and that's super duper healthy.

So we'll never come into any real trouble with spam laws.

But if you downloaded a list, bought, bought a list from somewhere and had really poor targeting, messaging, timing, I guess then you'll have much higher spam rates and then maybe there'll be somebody that might come down on you.

But the thing is Apollo, the platform that we use, the one that I mentioned is the kind of industry leader.

I mean, they're one of the fastest growing tech companies in the world.

They just raise their series C or D you know, $70 million at a $2 billion valuation or whatever.

And they're not a hollow unicorn.

Like lot, lot of the startups in the last few years, they're a real business and they're growing incredibly fast.

And it's because this is an integral, integral, excuse me, part of business is outbound sales.

So as long as you're doing it well, you're protected.

But to be honest, I'm not a lawyer.

So if you've gotta create your own philosophy around how you do this stuff and your, your question's super warranted.

So if you feel like the risk is worth the reward and you feel like the gray area is is wide enough, then it's a great channel.

But there are laws, especially in the eu, so the eu, you can't really get data.

The platforms we use don't really, don't really like targeting the EU because of GDPR rules, which are much stricter.

So, like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but this is a, I mean the biggest companies in the world gotta use an example of Salesforce.

Salesforce have written books about this stuff, you know, first company to a hundred million a RRR Salesforce, 100% pure cold outbound.

But yeah, super good question.

Consult your, consult your, uh, consult your lawyer.

Okay, thanks.

Hey Bill, I've got a quick question just about your, uh, the talent finding talent to do this.

If we were to set up this system, I imagine that talent would need to be trained.

Would the consulting then be a, a, a requirement I guess to, to get this system built if we were to do this ourselves?

Yeah, so look, there's a number of different ways you can go about it.

So you can go about it, the trial and error way, and I'm sure you'll do fine and it'll be, you know, slower and bumpier and rockier, but you don't have to have any consulting, you know, fees and not that the consultants that I know are super expensive and what have you, but you can certainly get off to a start on your own.

So two different scenarios in which, you know, if you were to get somebody to come in and help you would be either getting somebody in who's, uh, junior or an associate level email marketer and having some consulting support with somebody who can kind of help you build the infrastructure and, and get off to a start.

Or the other option is you could have somebody come in who's mid to senior talent who has let's say four to six years of experience with outbound email.

Our team, for example, we've been doing this for Caesar, the guy that runs our, our program.

I mean he's, he's a, he's a mid-level guy and he's been running our program for two years, two and a half years.

And he could, he could build a program with his ice closed himself.

So there's kind of couple ways that you go about it.

And Is he, is he actually available for consulting or you saying you would get someone like that?

No, so w we've, we've helped a lot of our clients.

Like we've helped them, but we haven't had a con it's been informal and we haven't had a consulting agreement and it hasn't been super high touch on our end, but we've certainly helped.

But there are a number of recommended consultants that I know through the Apollo network and through people that I, yeah, I have a, a few consultants that I would go to.

I actually don't know their prices, but I know that'd be, you know, it'd be, oh we'll set you up for 2002 and a half thousand dollars a month for, it'll take eight weeks or 12 weeks.

So it'll look something like that.

But no, our team doesn't do the high touch stuff 'cause they're like, you know, got their own jobs.

So, No, thank you.

I really appreciate it and great presentation too.

That was fantastic.

Bill, can I just ask your question, who is your ideal client?

Yeah, so we have two, two ideal clients.

One is on the early stage, and that would be a startup founder.

So if we have a, in technology basically, so you might think of, uh, 51 to 200 employees.

So that's an early stage series.

A founder for example, who are, you know, trying to preserve their runway and, you know, hire global talent so they can save, you know, 50, 60% of their hiring costs.

So that's one persona.

And the second persona, we're trying to move upstream a little bit.

So the enterprise persona is 200 plus employees, series C or D you know, funding and what have you.

And it'll be like a, a hiring, like a hiring manager.

So it would be head of engineering.

So the most in demand, the most in demand talent that we can find is like bespoke engineers.

So like a cloud engineer, you know, senior full stack developers, so on and so forth.

And a hiring manager is normally somebody who they just want to get talent in yesterday.

So like, so when we go enterprise, we go the hiring managers and head of engineering, and then when we go find a, excuse me, earlier stage, it's like directly to the founder.

'cause you can normally get access to them and they're normally making those decisions, right?

Yeah.

Tom discusses his process for finding and managing successful joint venture partnerships to promote each other's webinars. He uses a freelancer to identify potential partners, qualify them based on criteria like their email list size, and approach the best fits. Partners receive 3 customized emails to promote Tom's webinar in exchange for him promoting theirs. Tom tracks results from each partner and provides referrals to other high-performing partners. His system aims to make the joint venture process predictable and beneficial for both parties. An interesting point was that Tom interviews prospective partners on his podcast first to build rapport before formally proposing a partnership.

Takeaways:

Let's move on to our next speaker, which is none other than the, the famous Tom Poland.

So Tom, I, I was chatting with Tom the other day and I didn't realize the extent of the amount of joint ventures he does and his process and all that sort of thing, but he, he literally coordinates a hundred plus joint ventures a year and within that he maintains quality control, um, of it.

And he is got a very special process where, where he goes on about c goes to create that quality control.

Like most people, they do a joint venture and then they just move on.

Mm-hmm.

And Tom's, yeah, 80% of the success is actually what happens after the joint venture is done.

So that's what John's gonna be sharing with us today.

So we can literally squeeze every, every drop out of the out of the joint venture.

Lemon.

I'll make you a co-presenter, Tom, and I'll hand the hand the reins over to you.

Thanks Scott.

Uh, so this is just put together for this meeting.

It's not, I've tried to lay it out in a logical order so you can follow it, but it's not a fancy pants PowerPoint.

And John, that was one of the most impressive presentations I've ever seen from, it's just so well thought out and so precise and so on.

The money, I'm guessing it's not the first time you presented on the subject, but kudos 'cause it was just, I think it actually is the first time we've presented that one.

But Thank you to, I've seen few of your presentations, so I, I I'm very happy with that.

I, I was, I was hoping it was about the thousandth times.

I wouldn't feel so bad about the amateur version I'm about to do.

Anyhow, the key points that I'm gonna make, which Scott wanted me to present on will be clear to you, but I wanted to give it some context first.

So since, um, I've been doing, I've been sourcing audiences for marketing events since 1995 and I've worked with banks and changes of commerce and all sorts of organizations individually owned, uh, subscriber lists.

For example, in the old days we would hire a conference center and we would fill the room with warm bodies from banks client list or an accountants client list, or one of our clients list and so on.

And it was always, it's always just been an exceptionally cost effective way to do marketing.

When I, uh, finished with that business in I guess 2008, I discovered webinars and I had, was tired of driving places and flying places and setting up bloody ad systems and having orange juice and receptionists and name tags and all that stuff.

So we just went to webinars.

We, I saw Gottowebinar, we signed up, still got the original contract, which is a hundred US a month for 4,000 seats.

So the grand, the grandfather clause prices if you like.

So these days, the context of this is I run a webinar once a month and we have multiple joint venture partners.

I call 'em O P N, other people's network partners sending their email subscribers an invitation to attend my webinar.

And at the webinar I struck my stuff a bit like I used to do in physical stages, except I'm standing in front of a screen and we've got a slightly fancier presentation happening behind me and we can flick it around and draw it and all sorts of things.

And at the end of that, the call to action, they to book a consult.

So it's a soft offer.

So our partners are pretty happy that we're not doing the whole again to steak knives and stacked bonuses worth half a million dollars, but the sky will fall on if you don't buy before midnight, they're happy.

We're not doing that.

It's just a soft offer.

So that's the context.

One webinar a month, multiple partners driving audiences to attend that webinar.

And why joint ventures?

Because the leads are free, we tend not to pay affiliate commissions.

We can if someone wants that, but our modus operandi is reciprocation.

So we want to be able to, uh, drive traffic to someone else's webinar or drive traffic to your five day challenge or drive traffic to your free book or whatever it happens to be.

We have all those things available for people to promote.

But plan A is always get people to the webinar.

And the reason for that is that the different lead magnets require people to put different skin amount of skin in the game.

The downloadable one page triple s as I call it, the short, shiny sharp thing, which is the one page blueprint or the one page master plan or checklist or cheat sheet, whatever else is really good for building subscribers, but it's not so good for getting people to pay money as a place for it.

Um, if you look at the other end of the spectrum from the short, simple, shiny one page thing, good for email subscribers growth, not so good for people paying money.

The other end of the spectrum is someone who goes out there on their website and says, look, book a time to talk with me about becoming a client with no pre relationship building or anything else.

That's a lot of skin in the game that someone's being asked to put in there when having never met the person or whatever.

So webinars sit somewhere in the middle, no one has to pay money to attend them, but there's time involved.

And so that's the skin of the game.

So we like, we use webinars as our primary marketing medium because it asks people to put enough skin in the game, but hopefully not too much.

If someone's prepared to spend an hour or 90 minutes with us and they turn up to the meeting, they put their hand up as being someone who's pretty seriously interested in that particular subject matter.

And that's why I like webinars in addition to the fact that I don't have to leave home.

And so if I go over that, that's why, uh, the leads are free because we are reciprocating promotions.

The leaves are high quality because we're asking for enough skin in the game, not just a a one page thingy.

And we can rinse and repeat this.

If we have a good OPN slash JD partner, I'll use those two terms interchangeable, then they'll be growing their email lists.

So a year later we can rinse and repeat.

We can do another reciprocal and we'll, we typically get about 50% of the response the second time summer promotes us, but it's still still significant enough to, for us to wanna do it.

So I think that gives us the context.

We don't promote a lot to our own list.

You can see here every 90 days we promote to our own list.

And the reason for that is that they will get sick of me promoting my webinar or my book or my my my thing after a while for start this, we get the honeymoon period, but we do get a really good response if we leave our list alone for promoting my staff just once every three months.

We tend to get a really good response to that.

In the meantime, we are promoting normally at least two partners every week of the year.

So something, uh, so, so that's, uh, probably every second year we add a launch.

Our launch for this year is starting next week.

And that's a pretty big deal.

We've got a lot of team members involved in it and we have, we might have 50, 60, 80, 90 partners involved with that, with one boom big thing.

But for the most part it's the steady monthly webinar.

We run a webinar.

It's relentless, it's predictable.

And that's what I like about it is that it's so predictable in terms of results, inputs equals outcomes and so on.

Any questions so far before we get into the JV system?

Not so much a question, Tom, but more observation that you've got your list largely to promote other people to.

Yeah, I think that's my, my Paradigm shift and look, I guess the approach, most people are building the list to promote their own stuff too, right?

I reckon everyone here Yeah, that's, that's why I build my list.

You're not, you're building your list literally to promote other people.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and we orientate new subscribers immediately.

They register for say something, say, let's say Scott kindly promotes my webinar and someone registers for that.

They're gonna get an email within I think 72 hours to say, Hey, thanks for signing up to, to the webinar.

We, we, we are on our email list now here's what you can expect.

If you don't like that, just unsubscribe here and we make that unsubscribe link top of the fold so it's easy and simple and quick for them.

But if you do wanna say subscribe, here's what you can expect.

We'll be providing you with probably around twice a week invitations to take part in completely free events or books or downloads from carefully curated partners.

Why don't you say subscribe and say if you like it sort of thing.

They get that orientation or induction email straight off the bat to say this is the deal to say subscribe.

You're gonna be getting a lot of emails from us from partners.

So I figured out that because there's a limitation of me being able to promote to my email list every 90 days.

90 days is almost a magical number.

It works well any, if I do it monthly, it's too much.

We, I'm subscribed to go up.

But if I do it every 90 days, it seems to be about right.

Ha, happy to share the document with you John.

Just might need a reminder.

So what I discovered is that we can, if we build the email list around the strategy and not build the strategy around the email list, there's a multiplication factor which is very significant.

And, and so we can promote a hundred partners a year, let's say 80 for whatever reason.

Some someone might step up or whatever.

So that's now 80 email lists that are promoting me.

That's a lot more than one email list.

I've only got one email list.

But so we get that and it's not 80 times because everyone who's been in marketing will know that as soon as you increase volume ratios decrease.

So if you have a webinar with 10 registrants, you'll probably get eight attended.

But if you have a re webinar with a thousand registrants, you'll probably get 300 attending.

The numbers might go up, but the ratios go down.

So be that as it may, marketing to getting my invitations out to 80 different email list versus one is a serious multiplication factor.

And that's the premise on which the whole JV system is based is your exposure.

If you treat your email list as an opportunity to promote other people's quality free stuff, uh, the right subscribers will stay subscribed.

Uh, the people that don't want that, they'll unsubscribe.

And that's fine.

And that's what I mean by building your email list around the strategy versus the strategy around the email list.

Almost all our, all our new clients are scared about that.

I'm gonna get a lot of unsubscribed.

I said you probably will, you're probably gonna lose about a third of your email list straight off the bat.

And you'll get emails from people saying, oh Tom, I didn't realize you were like those other people who wanted to sell me stuff.

How awful.

Okay, bye-bye and God bless you.

We always respond to people with courtesy and respect and say, look, no problem.

We understand and so on.

But it's this thing about we want subscribers who want content.

We don't necessarily want subscribers who just think I'm a swell guy.

That's nice, but we want them to want the content.

So we build those to meet, list that around that.

Yeah.

So that's hopefully explained to the rationale behind it.

Let me move on.

The problem with the JV world is that it's like the wild west without the sheriffs.

Someone stranger rides into town, shoots someone and then rides off into the sunset to find another town.

People do deals, but there's no quality control.

We've worked with hundreds of just, we've keeping very tight records for it two and a half years now.

And I think we've got 264 or something JV partners in that period of time.

Not one has ever said, shall we do a debrief?

Should we sit down after we've cross promoted and ask the question, was it good for you?

Not one.

I find that extraordinary and I've only recently started doing them probably in the last two or three years.

So I'm not suggesting I'm some sort of Mother Teresa of, of joint ventures, but it's joint venture world has tended to be random.

There's lots of cliques.

The the Perry Marshalls will promote the Brendan Bouchard or promote the Dan Kennedys who'll promote the whatever.

So you have this sort of high level clique going on, but um, how do you get into that?

We start at a lower level, work your way up, zero accountability, literally no follow up and depends on the level you're playing the game at, whether what your partner's support teams.

But some of them are incredibly unprofessional.

They just don't email when they do email and so on.

So what I've done over the years is broken down what is essentially a series of problems or obstacles to make this thing work really well, to get it so that the results are predictable.

So we know the numbers and the quality controller has to go into the pipeline to get a predictable quality result out of the other side of the pipeline.

So I've broken this down into three parts because any more than that, I start to lose people.

I'm just gonna resize the screen because it's not allowing me to scroll a minute.

I need to find the bottom of it.

There we go.

Okay, so prospecting, so this is, most of the system is handled by a freelancer or freelancers.

Um, most of our backroom people are in the Philippines.

They know how to follow systems.

They're incredibly loyal, they're grateful when they're well looked after and they, they stick around for year after year and we can pay them 8, 9, 10, $12 us an hour and it's pretty darn good money for them.

So it, it works in all sorts of levels.

So how we find JD Partners is we have a freelancer who gets five hours a week, not a lot, and she fills out this form and the form is here.

Nope, why isn't that showing up?

Try again and clicking on it.

Hmm, there we go.

So this is the, what I call the O P N assessment sheet.

And it self-manages the freelancer.

It's a little bit blurry.

I think the sheet increase the size of it, crystallize it.

Lemme see if I can increase the size of it.

Doesn't seem to want to go, oh there we go.

It's just leapt into life.

I need to resize it.

Sorry, I did have it set up but I need to reboot halfway during John's presentation.

So everything's gone a bit pear shaped since then.

So what our freelancer does is she goes, bear in mind we are looking for, we are looking for people who are already presenting webinars.

What we want to do is we want partners to promote our webinar.

We don't want to have to explain to a partner what a webinar is or why might be a good idea to run one And think what good marketing does is it puts an offer in front of someone who we are quite confident is already looking for that offer.

Selling is gonna go and convince someone that offer is a good offer.

But marketing does the work up front and find figures out what it is we want them to, to talk to, to accept and gives them that offer.

So we're finding the people, this is all about the due diligence.

It's all about pre-qualifying, um, pre quantifying prospects who want to promote, who will wanna promote our webinar in exchange for us promoting theirs.

So she'll go off and she'll search say the term business coach webinar and she'll probably get a million hits.

People are running webinars into our target market.

Uh, so our target market are coaches, consultants and trainers, people who have online courses they wanna promote and some SaaS developers.

So she can search, search any one of those terms and add the word webinar to the search to a phrase and she'll get millions and millions of people, right?

So that's not difficult what she then does.

Where's the scroll bar going?

So she'll, I just don't wanna get to column A anyway.

Maybe if I use tab.

No.

Oh here it is here.

Gosh, I think I have to make that bigger.

Looks like in Tom.

Sorry guys, I'm not good at driving these things.

Only want to tell me how I tab over to the other columns.

Normally I'll just click tab and it would fly over.

So she'll put someone's name in and she'll put the website in.

I am trying to get these knockout factors.

Okay, so this is the five knockout factors are good.

Okay, I've got them on the screen at least.

So she'll go ahead and she'll put someone's name in who's she's in the identifi as running webinars and she'll put their website in and then she runs them through these filters.

And the filters are, have they got at least one value offer, email, subscribe, opt-in on their website.

'cause obviously we only wanna work with people who've got email lists, right?

The second filter is do they target small business or entrepreneurs or solid entrepreneurs or people who are self-employed?

'cause that's our target market is small businesses.

Third filter is, you can see all the yeses here.

The wise standpoint Yes.

Offers business advice or training, not personal development.

And if I click on that, yeah and and also not offering a physical product.

Fourth one is they've run a webinar search for their name and the word webinar and do they feature themselves on the website?

So they're the five knockout factors.

If there's a no in any one of those cells, they go to a reject tab down here.

So we've found people who are running webinars into our target market, we've qualified them with the five knockout factors.

And then what we do is we quantify them and the quantification is a thing called JB Juice.

This thing here, lemme click on that.

So having confirmed that they feature themselves on the website, that they have an email list that they run, webinars and all these other things that offering professional business advice and not physical products and not products.

Then they go into this thing called JB Juice.

And JB Juice is an algorithm and it'll predict how many webinar registrants they're likely to be able to generate.

And it's not really the purpose of this to share about JV juice.

I did that at another presentation.

But you can go to jv juice.com uh, and have a look.

But essentially what you can do is you can go in and you can put someone's website into uh, JV juice, input the website, put their name.

This other data is just for the database so you can remember.

You click predict and it'll come up with a prediction.

And the prediction will give us estimated number of webinar registrants down here.

And our sweet spot is probably 50 plus.

It's, it's more likely people like Sherry Rosenthal, uh, Lauren Fogelman, you can see that we predicted they would be able to generate a hundred to 200 webinar registrants.

And so if one of these people, as the freelancer has identified that past all those knockout factors, they hit the sweet spot in terms of our prediction, then they get approached but they don't get approached if they miss any one of the five knockout factors and they don't get approached if they're scoring say zero to 50 here.

So we wouldn't contact for Joe.

Any questions?

Yeah, I've got one.

Tom, how many are making it through to that stage?

What kind of volume are you seeing over what kind of timeframe?

Yeah, it's a good question.

We, we used to, if people can get through the five knockout factors and I, I have to guess, I suppose that I would say 50% of the people we identify get through the night five knockout factors.

Okay.

And I would say about 50% of that.

So maybe a total of 25%, maybe 20% get through the algorithm.

Yep.