In The Trenches

Tom Schwab is the founder of Interview Valet, a podcast booking service. So if you’ve ever wanted to get interviewed on a podcast, Tom and Interview Valet can help. In today’s conversation, Tom and I talk about the art and science of podcast - specifically in terms of how we can use podcasting to market and sell our products and services.

First, we begin with the state of podcasting. This includes what's happening in the podcasting space right now, from the types of podcasts people are listening to, to how people are consuming podcast content, and more. Personally, I view podcasting as a subset of content marketing. Content marketing, as the name implies, is using content to get traffic, leads, and sales. For instance, if you're an author, you'd want to use content marketing to build an email list so you can grow your exposure and book sales. There are big changes happening in the content marketing landscape, including a big shift toward audio and video content in the form of podcasts and video consumption on YouTube (thanks, in large part, to the increasing speed of connectivity and proliferation of cheap technology). So we discuss these macro trends and how they’re impacting the value of podcasting from the perspective of being a podcast host, as well as being a guest or interviewee on another person's podcast.

Second, we talk about how podcasting can be used as a lead generation tool. Specifically, if you want to generate traffic, leads and sales, what do you need to do to make that happen? Tom Schwab walks us through his process, including types of landing pages you need to create to turn traffic into optins, why we need to think about mobile optimization, and much more. The best part of this conversation: Tom brings a bunch of interesting statistics and analytics to support (and challenge) common opinions about podcasting and it's value as a marketing medium.

• The state of podcasting (what's happening in the market place as of 2018)

And much more.

• Secrets to get on your first podcast

• interviewvalet.com

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Whitney Johnson is a speaker, podcast, and author of "Build an A Team," published by Harvard Business Press. In "Build an A Team," Whitney explains her "S curve" framework - a methodology for understanding competence and mastery in the context of personal and professional development. Whitney Johnson developed her "S curve" framework and methodology when she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund, along with Clayton Christensen (author of the one of my top 11 books for entrepreneurs). Using the "S curve," you can better facilitate the development of employees (and yourself) - and it's even a great tool for identifying and hiring amazing employees. The following are four recommendations from Whitney on organizing yourself and your team to reach a state of optimal challenge:

1. Are you taking on market risk or competitive risk? Be willing to play in the spaces where others aren't playing. Taking on market risk is good; taking on competitive risk is bad.

I brought Whitney Johnson onto In The Trenches to share her process for hiring, firing, and developing an organization that keeps employees improving and growing.

• How the 'S' curve impacts your business, whether you know it or not

And much more.

• Diagnostic Tool - to see where you are on the S curve

• Whitney Johnson's Diagnostic Tool

Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes

Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Kim Walsh Phillips is the CEO of Elite Digital Group, a direct-response social media agency. Kim has helped her clients bring in more than a billion dollars through direct-response marketing. She is author of “No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Guide to Producing Measurable, Monetizable Results with Social Media Marketing” with Dan Kennedy. I met Kim at an event we both attended last year. At that time, she shared a way to rapidly grow your Facebook Page to more than 10,000+ 'likes.' Normally, I'd ignore this advice because I'm not a big proponent of social media (I think it's fleeting and doesn't produce ROI near what you can get with email marketing or content marketing, but I digress). However, Kim showed me how she then turns these new fans into customers. And she backed it up with numbers. That piqued my interest, and I decided to dig deeper. What I found was that Kim has a system for building an audience on Facebook and then generating sales from that audience. So while this is a more 'tactical' broadcast than is typical, I wanted to share it because I figured some of my readers and listeners could find value in this process.

• Kim's step by step process to grow your Facebook audience

And much more.

• Sumorank.com - how to find what content is being shared

• www.elitedigitalgroup.com/kim-walsh-phillips

Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes

Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Hey everyone, welcome back to another broadcast of in the trenches. I'm excited to have on the call today Jack born who's the CEO and founder of Deadline Funnel. Deadline Funnel is automation software that lets you add urgency to your marketing funnel so you can sell more in less time. In today's call, we talk a about Jack's origin story (how he got into software in the first place as a non-technical founder) and how Deadline Funnel software works. However, the majority of our conversation is focused around this idea of adding urgency to your marketing funnel, and how you can do so in an ethical and honest way. I've written a lot about urgency and scarcity on this blog and via my newsletter, often in the context of launches. I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that you need to leverage these psychological principles if you want get the most out of your launch or any marketing campaign you run. However, one of the questions that always comes up is how can we introduce things like urgency and scarcity, especially when dealing with digital products or productizes services that are not, by their nature, limited. So this gets into the realm of business ethics. How can you and I use urgency and scarcity in an authentic and transparent way, and still reap the big rewards? Well, in today's conversation we get into that and much more.

• How Jack got his start in software

And much more.

• www.deadlinefunnel.com

Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes

Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Alexa Bigwarfe is the founder of WritePublishSell.co, Kat Biggie Press, a book publishing imprint, and creator of the "Women in Publishing Summit." Alexa began her professional career in counter terrorism and Homeland Security, but due to the demanding nature of the job, she decided to stay at home with her two children. Shortly thereafter, she found out she was pregnant with two twins, who were diagnosed with a rare disease. She lost one of her children shortly after birth, which prompted her to write and share her experience to help other grieving mothers who suffered from the loss of loved ones. Through her blogging, she connected with a community of other writers, and she published her first book "Sunshine After the Storm: A Survival Guide for the Grieving Mother." From this collaborative effort, she received many inquiries from aspiring authors who wanted to publish a book. So Alexa started a book publishing company, Kat Biggie Press, and began to offer book production and marketing services. As things picked up, Alexa decided to run a virtual summit to generate new business. Unfortunately, it flopped financially, only making back 10% of her investment in the entire campaign. So she tried again, with her second summit. This was, in her words, another disaster. But Alexa didn't quit - she knew there was great upside potential if she could get a virtual summit off the ground the right way. So she started to prepare for a third and final shot at growing her business, and that's when we connected. In Alexa's own words: "And then Tom came into my life right as I was getting ready to do number 3 and the results were quite different..." In fact, not only was this summit profitable, unlike the first two campaigns she ran, but she generated 207 sales (and counting, as sales are still rolling in) of her All Access Pass, and launched a group coaching program, all of which led to just shy of $20,000 (which doesn't include additional client work she's received as a direct result of her successful summit). In today's discussion, we dig into her story and go behind-the-scenes of her campaign, including what worked and what didn't...

• How Alexa got her start in publishing

And much more.

• www.writepublishsell.co

Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes

Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Charlie Wallace is the founder of guitarmasterymethod.com, an online guitar lesson company that supplies online lessons to guitarists all over the world. Through GuitarMasteryMethod.com, Charlie has helped tens of thousands of guitarist around the globe improve their guitar skills.

• How Charlie got started playing guitar, and his transition into the business space of teaching guitar

And much more.

• www.guitarmasterymethod.com

If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Dr. Jordan Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist and the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, and many scientific papers which have been cited literally thousands of times (according to Google Scholar Citations). As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize, and his classroom lectures on mythology and psychology, based on his book Maps of Meaning, were turned into a popular 13-part TV series on TVO. I first stumbled across Dr. Peterson's work via his Maps of Meaning lecture series on YouTube. Within minutes I was hooked, and proceeded to binge watched more than 24 hours of these lectures, which use the story of Pinocchio to articulate the way in which you and I act in the world, the deeply biological origin of "meaning" and "sacrifice," and how we can better navigate the world through understanding stories, meta-stories, and archetypes. If you had told me two years ago that my favorite videos on YouTube would be a professor's university lecture series on YouTube, I would have called you crazy. But that's a testament to Dr. Peterson; how he can take topics that could be seen as otherwise mundane or cliche, and turn it into a compelling narrative that gives the best Hollywood films a run for their money. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Peterson’s YouTube channel, Jordan Peterson Videos, which features his university and public lectures (including his recent 15-part biblical series), has over 1 million subscribers, with 10s of millions of views.

• Dr. Peterson's morning routine

And much more.

• Jordanbpeterson.com

If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Travis Phipps is the CEO of Battle Bridge Labs; a digital marketing agency who works with several large-scale companies. In this episode, Travis dives into how he built his agency, the various business models he’s tried, some Facebook features he thinks are game-changers, and lots more.

• What led Travis to his current business

And so much more.

• Battle Bridge Labs

If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

David Kadavy is the bestselling author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. He is also the host of the Love Your Work podcast. In this episode, David and I talk dig into how his curiosity has led him down some unexpected paths and opened the door to knew opportunities.

• Why David felt compelled to write his book, The Heart to Start

And so much more.

• David Kadavy's Website

If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Warren Hogarth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Empower Finance; which includes the Empower app. In this episode, we talk about Warren's time at Sequoia Capital, the criteria he uses when determining what companies to invest in, and how his new app can save people thousands of dollars each year by allowing them to take control of their finances.

• What led Warren to work at Sequoia Capital

And so much more.

• Warren Hogarth's Empower Website

If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.