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This weeks guest is Steve Sims. Do you know anyone that’s worked with Sir Elton John or Elon Musk? Sent people down to see the wreck of the Titanic on the sea bed or closed museums in Florence for a private dinner party and then had Andre Bocelli serenade them while they eat their pasta? Well, you do now. Quoted as “The Real Life Wizard of Oz" by Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine, Steve Sims is a best selling Author with "BLUEFISHING - the art of making things happen”, sought-after consultant and a speaker at a variety of networks, groups and associations as well as the Pentagon and Harvard – twice!Links: website: https://www.stevedsims.com/ FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/stevedsims/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/stevedsims/Welcome back to the fuel your legacy podcast. Each week we expose the faulty foundational mindsets of the past and rebuild the newer, stronger foundation essential in creating your meaningful legacy. We've got a lot of work to do. So let's get started. As much as you like this podcast, I'm certain that you're going to love the book that I just released on Amazon if you will, your legacy, the nine pillars to build a meaningful legacy. I wrote this to share with you the experiences that I had while I was identifying my identity, how I began to create my meaningful legacy and how you can create yours. You're going to find this book on kindle amazon and as always on my website, Sam Knickerbocker. comWelcome back to fuel your legacy and today we have an incredible guest. It's cool the more people that I've had on the more notable people that I've been able to have on which is always exciting. So today, we have Steve Sims And he was here in Utah a few months ago speaking at a conference for, for some people who are looking to, to understand what he does, I'm excited to bring it on. Because understanding the ROI of relationships is, I think key and everything and there is so many of the most successful people that I know that I listened to that I associate with, say relationships are the new economy, right? That's the new currency is how well do you know somebody? So, Steve, he's a speaker and author. He's the founder of bluefish, direct founder of boot camp marketing, and it's your coach and real and he's been called so this is the best thing is when people title you as things because the titles other people give you end up being some of the most wonderful ways to market yourself because you just, it's just raw. So he's been called the real-life Wizard of Oz according to Forbes, and Entrepreneur Magazine so that I mean That's a that's quite a glowing compliment to be called The Wizard of Oz. What? What pen brought that on? Where'd you get your start? And what was your childhood like? And why are you doing what you're doing today?Wow. Um, first of all being called the villain like Wizard of Oz is a double-edged sword because let's be blunt, the Wizard of Oz was a fake.You kind of go, Oh, that's very nice. And then you go, Oh crap, and they called me a fake.So I like to take it on its face value that I am the guy that can less little get you through the journey. So I class myself as an educated man. But I don't believe the school had anything to do with that. I left. I left school at the age of 15 and ended up working on my father's construction site. And I didn't have any future didn't have any hopes didn't have any goals. We didn't live in a world of the internet where we were bombarded with what the other half was living with or what they had. So I grew up ignorant. And immune to all of the luxury and stuff like that. But as an entrepreneur, you don't become an entrepreneur, you are an entrepreneur. It's either your left-handed or your right hand is just, it's just one of those things. And I remember growing up, conflicted, disgruntled, dissatisfied, and all of those things that have everyone going, Oh, you've got a DD and oh, you can't focus and you can't concentrate. It wasn't the fact that I couldn't focus I couldn't concentrate. I wasn't being engaged. And nothing was excited me. Nothing was challenging me. And entrepreneurs, we need to be challenged. We come alive. When we're challenged. And as a bricklayer, I was being told this is what you do, and then you grow old and then you die. That was my life. And it didn't make sense to me. I left the building site, and not knowing what I wanted to do, but just know Do it but just knowing firmly that wasn't what it was. I ended up selling cakes on the back of lorries. I ended up being an insurance door to door salesman. And if anyone's ever seen me, can you imagine me knocking on your door an o'clock at night trying to sell you life insurance. It didn't go well. I ended up getting a job in Hong Kong by completely lying on a resume. I lasted 24 hours and I was fired.Now I was just trying anything to get to something that would challenge and excite me. And I found it in the funniest place. I ended up working on the door of a nightclub. And it was a great position. It was a great pedestal for me to watch the world I was able to watch humanity and to see how they handled themselves how they spoke to others how they interacted, you know, like bar staff is some of the best communicators in the world. You know, they'll talk to someone in a business suit, and then I talked to a group of girls are Guys completely differently within a split second you know they are very good at altering the way they communicate with the different people based on a split second assumption of your attitude, the way you dress how which you look out for you, all those kind of things as a doorman no one wants to talk to a doorman because they're there to punch you in the head. You know, no one wants to talk to him. But I was able to watch them and I would stand on the door of nightclubs and go, I want to be that person. I want to be that group. I want to have them as friends. And so then what I started doing was trying to find a way that they would talk to me as a person and not as a dormant and because I knew where all the parties were and all the best events where I started getting extra tickets and going up to my regulars going Hey guys, I know you like a good night. Did you notice a premiere going on on Friday? Are you going? Now we're not we don't know how to get in. Well, let me make a phone call. Maybe it again for viewing I started becoming this fixer. This, this guy that knew. And the only reason I did it was not that I was a social butterfly far from it was because I wanted to give the people I wanted to talk to a reason to talk to me. It was a Trojan horse. If I can talk to you about getting you into a private body, I can talk to you about what makes you successful, how you had things, why you change, and they always say you are the combination of the five people you hang around with. Well, it was fine. I was hanging around with five bikers. So that wasn't going to get me very far in life. So I had to change my circle when I did. It just started is that before you knew it, I went from getting people in the parties to throw in the parties myself to suddenly being associated with some of the biggest events in the world. From fashion weeks to Grammys to Kentucky Derby. Ferrari's Cavalier no classic Elton John's Oscar party, I became associated with the grandest most often Skylab fluent event on a planet, and therefore my clients were those people, all those people should I say? And then I started marketing them and branding their products you know, I know people coming to me going hey, I've got a company that sells lipsticks, you know, how would you do an advert? And I will I don't like your advert because you're marketing to the wrong people. And I suddenly start became a brand and so on for these companies. Two years ago, I got asked, Hey, would you release a book on the rich and famous people you deal with? And I said, Now I'd bet I'd be dead by cocktail hour. So then they came back to me this will okay. Would you buy a book on how fabric Live from London can now be working with Elon Musk and the Pope? And that made sense to me. So we released a book, not thinking it would be successful not put any marketing behind it. It didn't do well in the first couple of months and then it took off in the third and since then, I've been doing podcasts and speaking engagements all over the world. I consult for Entrepreneurs of all levels. I have an online course called Sims distillery that helps people learn how to communicate. And it's just grown and I've become my brand. So, from bricklayer to dealing with the meanest, most affluent people in the world to now being an author, speaker, and coach, it's a very interesting journey.Yeah, I love it. And so funny how different and different people come into their passion, different ways. And some people I had a guest on a little while ago who she found her passion, really through, it was something that it was her passion as at a young age, then she lost sight of it or she was dissuaded from it. And then she circled back to her passion. And I love one of the things you said, Well, actually, it's kind of a kind of both in hand in hand, you don't become an entrepreneur. You either are one of them or not ones, as a movie, and it's okay not to be an audience. corner, sometimes because I work in the entrepreneur world where I'm actively seeking out entrepreneurs. And, and so the assumption is by a lot of people that I just think everybody's an entrepreneur and everybody can do it. And I just want to work with everybody. And the reality is, I don't know what the percentage of entrepreneurs are, but it's not a high percentage of people who are entrepreneurs, there's a high percentage of them. There's a high percentage of people who are not entrepreneurs who liked the security, as the certainty, as the safety of working for an entrepreneur,and that's fine. That's fine. There's you know, we got three grades at the moment. And it's like me moaning at you because of your height. You know, you have no control over your height. Okay. So you either are an entrepreneur or you're not. There's a lot of one trip owners out there, they look at it and think, Oh, it's a sexy life. Yeah, I'm an entrepreneur, but they can't handle the two o'clock in the morning not being able to pay your bills on Friday or the fact that you all out on the front line, an entrepreneur is a guy that jumps off the cliff, and then builds a parachute on the way down. And there are phenomenal intrapreneurs I think every entre, we had a quick discussion on this before we went live. A good entrepreneur needs to surround himself with phenomenal intrapreneurs These are the people the love that life until the last bit where you're your next on the line, and that's fine. I'm surrounded by phenomenal intrapreneurs that are creative, driven, push it and help support me be on the front line. So I believe there are great entrepreneurs, but the one tripping is not too flaky and they fall by the wayside very quickly. And so how would you help somebody if they're sitting there listening to this and they're not sure who they are, what where they fall in that maybe just because of lack of experience, lack of Discovery a lot of people who listen to this they're their stay at home moms are people who have been basically sacrificed their life for for the love of their children or for other people. And so they've never really gained the experience or tried out the different positions, you could say. How would you help them kind of look at their life and say, Well, what about me? Where would I fit in these categories? Well, first of all, as an entrepreneur, you are mich broke, rich, broke, broke, rich, rich, rich, broke rich. It's a Helter Skelter over life. I don't think any entrepreneur, given the vision chart of how they're going to be over the next few years, whatever, optionally go, Oh, yeah, I like that. Because entrepreneurs will get laughed at spat at ridiculed Elon Musk musk. He said it to me ages ago. He said they laugh at you before they applaud. Now, if you're not the person that can stand being hated, ridiculed and laughed at the maybe you should be an on an entrepreneur. If you don't care, and you want to be challenged, maybe you're an entrepreneur. But it does come down to that final line of are you willing to take it on the shoulders, finances, because a lot of the times we've lost, we've lost as entrepreneurs money, and we've got it, we're up against it. And then all of a sudden, at like five o'clock on Friday, we're going to pay payroll, and we're running all of our credit cards to do that. We've all been through it. The life of an entrepreneur is not sexy. It's not something we chose is something we are.I love that I think that's so beautifully put. And if you go back and listen to it, and just ask yourself, hey, where do I fit, you know, it's okay. You might be as creative as, as eager to create in your life, different things, but maybe you don't have the wherewithal to have people ridicule us. That's something that I, I think I always had inside of me. But it for me, it took a while to expose that because of the social programming, that you should care about what other people think it took me a while to ultimately say no, I like in my heart. I don't care what you think about me. I'm going to do, what I feel confident doing and what I want to do, regardless of whether you think it's a good idea, anybody, right?Yeah, it gets really, it's very hard to run when you got someone sitting on your shoulders. And so careful about what you do, care about what you solve, care about what you do, but don't care about someone's naysaying opinion. you'll usually find that the person sitting in the corner going, Oh, look at Oh, he can't all watch it. That person's never going to be your client and let's be blunt, never amount to anything. Because people like to sit in the corner and tell you you can't do something because they don't want you proven the diamond Quit to do it themselves.Yeah, that is something that I completely agree with. And I tell people that I work with often had one, one woman a few months back who had asked me, and well, because she was thinking about working with me, she said, Well, I don't want to waste your time. And I saw her Look, I don't let people waste my time. Yeah,yeah, not exactly.twice on me. And if you rescheduled twice, you go in the hopper of people I might call once every six months. It's just not committed to their future yet, but you may be in the future like I don't allow people to waste my time. That's not how this game works. So I love that. So moving forward, something else that you said that I think people needs to understand. And I want to add some specificity here because this is I believe, key in this phrase, especially if you're listening to Gary Vaynerchuk. Or there's a lot of people I think Gary Vee is probably the highest one that says as often it's just you have to add value, you have to add value, you have to add value to others. People before you ask for value in return. And I think that that's true. to a point, right, just adding value, there's a lot of ways to add value in people's lives, right toilet papers valuable. Somebody guiding you a Walmarts valuable like there's a lot of value that you could add. But what love what you did, you added value with the intention that the value add was intentional too, as you said, a Trojan horse to get something out of it not that you expected or that you are going to do a tit for tat type expectation of something out of it. But you are very intentional with how you are adding value to whom you are adding value so that you could get around certain individuals. And please speak to that as to why that's so important that the intentional adding value rather than just random value addingyou got to be laser focus today because we're in a world of mass distraction. So you've got to be Short and sharp to the point while creating something that benefits you as well. Now, I agree with you about you've got to add value. I also agree with you that there are multiple different levels of value. But you've got to go to the value that gets as close as it possibly can to the core of the individual. So, you know, I've worked with very affluent people, very powerful people. Not always very famous people. So you can go to these people and you can say, Hey, I know you don't know me. Get that out of the way. That's always a good one to get out of the room straight away. I know we haven't met I know we haven't been introduced, but there's something that I would like to do with you. But before we get into that, I'm aware that you support this charity. I'm aware that you have got a new book coming out. I am aware that you're promoting your media brand. I'm aware that I've got an idea after looking over this, how I can help you get more reach, get more input, get more donations to get better. Marketing getting better, and show that you've paid attention to? Okay? You may well turn around and go all this and they may turn around and go, Well, actually, we've got a marketing team that just actually said that to me. And I've said about what and they've come back to me and they've gone, hey, we've done now I've gone right. That's, that's brilliant. But it shows that you focus and As the old saying goes, they won't care until you show you care. Now, in that conversation, if you dissect what I've just said, I've got out of the room that you don't know me. And when I say you don't know me, you may know my name. You don't know my credibility. You don't know my reputation and your right. reputation and credibility in today's counts. Okay, so I've got that you don't know me. You don't know me, you know my name, but you don't know me. I've also made it clear that I want something from you. If I say to you, I need a tip. 10 bucks. But before we discuss that I want to talk to you about you're going to know straight off the bat I need 10 bucks. So I like to get it out of the way that hey, I need something from you. I've got something I want us to do. But before we get into that, and then you go into the reason why you need to keep me in the conversation because I'm here to benefit you. If you go in with that, they know you need something. Why do they know that? Because you told him quite bluntly, I need something. So there's no, there's no sitting there going, what is this guy after? I've just told you I want something. And she allows the person and relaxes easy-going, Oh, well, he wants somebody to bang on a minute. He's bringing something to me first. And that is a good one to get out of it. So that's how I enter into every conversation, whether it be dealing with the Vatican, whether it be dealing with Richard Branson, I always say hey, I need something but before we get into that, I know you're doing XYZ and go into that route. I love that I love this to me. It's a simple four-step process.Making every conversation intro sample where you're building rapport credibility, and you're building that now. Don't fall on yours. And don't, don't be scared to fall on your face say get as big of the nose as possible. But on the other hand, do your research, right everythingis important.Yeah, every client that I meet with, I have them send out a fill out a form where I get all their social media links so that when I'm sitting down with them, before I meet with them, then I know what things we have in common, what things I can support them with and what things I can't, the things that I can't support them with, I'm probably not going to bring up in our conversation, because that would be like shooting yourself in the foot. To understand who you're talking to understand where you can add value. Don't take on somebody that you can't add value to just because you want to be around them. Be clear and make connections where possible. And too many people want to be the everyman everything guy It's just not. You're not supposed to be the everything guy. You're supposed to be good at what you do. Oh for me, you know, I've got a brilliant gardener that I speak to absolutely every single week about my garden, but I'm not going to have him do my taxes. It's not a problem to turn around and think this person is good for that, but not good for that. Yeah, exactly. I love it. So what would you say? When did you because I know it's a journey. And we kind of talked about this, but what was there an exact moment where the light bulb clicked. You're like, Man, this is what I want my legacy to be.Oh, I don't know if I even know what my legacy to be. And I have heard I've heard that question come up a few times before but I'm kind of in the fight and on the journey and enjoying the view. And I haven't. I have some very basic principles. I want to be crystal clear. I want to be in possible to be misunderstood. And I don't want people to be confused. Now, if that ends up being my legacy or ends up being sketched on my tombstone, I'm happy about that. But there's a lot of people that plan for things. And for a lot of people, they need to plan. But I plan to seconds after I've jumped off the step, and I find that I only become good when I get going. And everything that I have ever started a shit. I know the first time I do anything, the first time I do an interview, the first time I did a podcast, the first time I wrote a pushbike The first time I tried to do a business meeting, every single one of them was rubbish. But you need that rubbish to be yet golden. And I have learned that so if I wake up one morning and go, I'm going to do a podcast I'll do a podcast. It'll have a crappy already. We do have a bad signal, it has a terrible microphone. Everything I try I try differently. And so legacy wise, I don't know if I found my thing yet. I just know what I found is an elf. And I'm going to promote a good friend of mine called Joe polish. He openly talks about elf businesses easy, lucrative and fun. And if what you do can be those three things, those three things, keep doing it. I have had lucrative businesses. I've had lucrative projects, but they've been stressful and they ain't been fun. They made me a lot of money and I bought a new motorbike and I've had great fun doing about great finances doing them, but they ain't been fun. So I now try to find elf projects and elf businesses. And I would say now for the past three or four years with my brand coming out of bluefish did I'm in an elf momentum at the moment and I'm enjoying it. Where is it going? I don't know. But as long as itself I'm stayingwith it. Awesome. I love that I never heard that acronym but I think I will start asking myself what in my life is falls in that category? And what is health? Yeah, that stuff that doesn't for sure.Absolutely. Joe polish. You said some very intelligent things. He's also said some very stupid things because he's a weird individual. But yeah, he's given me some incredible nuggets which have helped my life.That's awesome. So now if you were to say there was like one story or one point in time where you decided to stop caring about naysayers? What was that one, that one moment where you're like, Okay, I just, I just don't care? Or I'm doing my thing.I listened to the worst person in the world and that was myself. And I went through a very, very dark month. My life I had been I was about eight years into being the man that can about eight years, I had some of the richest clients royalty caps in the industry, you know real power players around the world as clients send me hundreds of thousands of dollars so I just a night out or weekend away. And I woke up one day and I thought to myself, Oh my god, you know, I've got to change. I don't know why, but I just thought I had to. So I took all my earrings out and I covered my tattoos by wearing long shirts and you know, I thought to myself, Oh, I have to be a bit more pronounced. Now. I have to be a little bit more British. You know, just everything about me changed. I started wearing suits now anyone that knows me knows I'm on two wheels forever. And I bought a car. I bought a vintage Ferrari to try and impress you. I bought a $50,000 odham up watch. I went to Donna Monaco, and I throw a kickoff party in my suit with my Ferrari with my watch. And I came home, and I got the photographs of that event. And I realized this was the first event in my life that I hadn't shown up to this avatar of who I wanted to be had this pretend Steve Sims. And it depressed me and I got drunk and I was drunk for about three days. I didn't know what had happened and I realized that I had listened to all my subconscious all my inadequacies, all of my self-doubt. And I had become this shield, this persona, this alters ego. And luckily it was my wife that said, Look, people don't buy the suit and the car they've been buying this you for years, they've been sending you money as this quirky guy, the comm spell and anyone that's ever got an email from me knows I can't spell but it didn't stop me write a book. Don't focus on your inadequacies. Don't focus on your weaknesses. Because you end up with incredibly focused, targeted weaknesses. They don't get any better focus on your unicorn. So I realized that I sold the car immediately. I got rid of the suits. Funnily enough, this was in the late 90s. I wanted to keep the suits because they were nice suits. I put them in my cupboard. And it was about three years ago in Los Angeles, I gave them away to goodwill, and I'd never worn them. never worn them since that day, because I felt they were toxic. No, I like putting on a nice suit. But it was never those suits. He ended up going and buying different suits. So that was my dark time when I listened to my doubt, and my inadequacies, and since then it's a case of Hey, this is me. Now I've got an I know you're in Utah, but as far as La is concerned, it's a bit chilly and I've got off No shirt on, but there's a black t-shirt underneath and that's where I'm showing up as me every single day. If you don't like it, we can part ways and we'll all be fine but I am never going to use a single second of effort to be somebody I'm notso that was my tongue fineyeah i think that's often the hardest person to get hundred silence right you can get to the point where you tell everybody else to go screw themselves but being able to tell yourself to go screw yourself as you talk and lean into your uncertainties lean into your your your fears and you say look, I'm going for it regardless that sometimes it's the hardest thing to master as far as like financially going from the different areas. I mean, going from a bar bouncer having lost your job in different areas. How did you spend, how did you make that transition from from employment into employer or entrepreneur financially because I mean, you alluded to this to at the beginning where you're rich, you're broke, you're rich, you're broke, you're rich, broke, broke, broke, broke, broke rich. Like I understand that happens. And I think that's one of the bigger fears of people who are thinking about making the jump. And so how did you level that? How do you handle it with your wife? I don't know if you have kids, but like, how did you make that? an okay thing for them.I have to stop my bank account from becoming my barometer to react. And it took many years, but the thing that would happen was I would have a ton of cash in the bank, and I'd be like, oh, I don't need a try. I got loads of money. And the money goes quickly, especially when you've got a nice house and you know, you got payments and I do have kids, I have private schooling and before you know it that starts whittling down fast. And then you go crap, I got no money, and then you go and get into stressful deals and projects that you shouldn't have got into but you have done now because of the checkbook. So you're going from candlelight, you know, fire to beach fire to the beach. And it's, it's bad. And as I say, I was using my bank account to dictate me. And it was the tail that wags the dog. The smartest thing that happened to me was when I suddenly started realizing that I was pathetic at certain things, and an entrepreneur wants to be great at everything. The Smart entrepreneur realizes, you know, we're not, we're great at one or two things, but the rest of it, we may be adequate, or maybe really bad at, okay. So as an entrepreneur, I realized that my wife was detail-oriented, she would come to me and she'd be like, Well, look, I've looked at the spreadsheet, and I'm like, Well, I don't want to look at spreadsheets was the bottom line. Because that's how I vision things. So then we realized that I can steer the car, you know, I can be the big powerful engine that can make it go fast. But I need other people to help me. I need a good set of tires, I need a good set of brakes. I need a good steamer, you know, and I suddenly started finding those people. And I can go, Hey, we need to send this person a great brochure. Get someone to design the brochure, hey, record what you think will be great. And then get someone to write the copy to translate your vision into what someone else can meet. So, Claire, my wife became good at managing and handling me. And she was like, what, okay, and so what we came up with, we came up with the 10 grand credit card. Okay, which started in my late 30s, maybe 39. Oh, yeah, realtor. I hadn't quite hit 40 at the time. But she said, okay, you're gonna have three credit cards, because no matter where you travel in the world, Sometimes, you know, something can happen to a credit card, and it screws and or, you know, they try to send you a verification code. But of course, you're in a foreign country, so you're not getting it, you know. So we have three credit cards. And she said each one of those credit cards has got 10 grand because no matter where you are on a planet, if you've got 10 grand, you can get a couple of hotel nights and you can get a flight out of it. Or you can pay a hospital bill, you know, 10 grand is a great instant support number. Okay, so she said you got three credit cards for 10 grand,you add a bank account, and she kicked me out of the bank account, I could not go and see how much money I had in there. Now, this is what happens. You stop reacting to your tail. You start looking at someone and going okay, is this a project I want to accept? Is this a client I want to be doing and in focusing on the client and not focusing on the checkbook. You get to accept deals that make sense and don't motivate your bottom line. You start we at you reacting with your stomach in your head and not with your with the fear of how much money's in the bank. You take better deals. And when you take those better deals, you start solving the problems that the client has. And then he starts reaffirming the knock-on effect by stop looking at the bank account was monumental to me. And my wife would just say to me, oh, how's it going? What's your pipeline? Like? And she would talk to me in my language, you know, are you busy at the moment? Well, things are starting to get you to get a bit quiet. Oh, well, maybe there are some opportunities for you to use that time, which was code for the bank account that needs replenishing. But she wouldn't tell me that because then I don't get the wrong kind of deals. So a good entrepreneur needs good support around them. If you are good at designing things but crapper doing invoices and the first time I realized how bad I was at doing an invoice was when I undercharged someone by 10 grand. And I had to pay 10 grand for that trip. Okay, now, do I go to the client and go, Oh, I made a mistake? No, I just paid 10 grand to learn the course, that I should never do invoicing again. And that was the last time I ever did an invoice. I've never done an invoice soon. I have no idea how to get into QuickBooks. I still don't know the potent passcode to get into my bank account. I don't need to it's not what I specialize that it's not my unicorn.Oh, that's so cool. I've talked to one other person who was very similar. He did door to door sales. And he just said Look, when when I decided that I want to stop looking at my bank account and just as long as I'm making more transactions or whatever, I'm helping more people than everybody else. I know I'm making more than anybody else. And that's got to be enough. So Yeah, there's value in that for sure. So how could we if we wanted to get connected with you, or if we had a business that we want to do to help us with? How would we get in touch with you? How do we get in touch with your, your, your book? Your Sam, sorry, your sim distillery, how do we get in touch with some of these tools to help usgrow? What we did an online course that should give you the basics called Simmons distillery.com. There's one aim in Sims. Sims distillery.com is my 16 part course that hopefully will help you get the first steps if you don't want to jump into their bluefish in the art of making things happen, should give you permission to fail and dream bigger. If you want to get hold of me. I'm not hard. I'm at Steve de sims.com. But you can also find me on Instagram, Facebook, all of these places. We've even got a free Facebook community called an entrepreneur's advantage with Steve Sims. So there are loads of ways you can reach out to me if you feel as though you want me to answer help with your company. That's nice. But I would suggest you go through those other ways. First you look at the book, do that do your homework first, you may find by doing that, you actually discover other questions that you would have come up with other you come up with, you wouldn't come up with a view to jumped into me straight away, and I want you to be as productive, productive and as powerful as possible. So it's usually best to get the book, get the seems to Sylvie? And then can I get used to my mentality, you may find, I'm not your best choice, I may not be the best person and only you are going to decide that but you're not going to know they should go through the first steps.That is so true. I'm redoing a training system for a lot of my business partners and our leaders. We're talking about what should be in there. It's like it's all in there. If they come and ask me a question before they've done their research or something and I don't even know what they don't know. But I do know what I've already put out there so they haven't taken it down. of the free content that's already there. I like there's not a lot we can do for them. And so I love that you said it that way. Agree, go do those, those things that he's already prepared for you and if you like him, then reach out and get and get to know him a little bit better. So we're at the pretty much at the end here, but I have two more sections here. So the last one is a legacy on rap. Sorry, the first one is a legacy on rapid-fire. So I'm gonna ask you five questions, looking for one sentence answers to go through these and just kind of fast, fast fast. Are you ready for this?I'm ready.Okay. So what do you believe is holding you back from reaching the next level of your legacy today?dream bigger, but I never want to stop dreaming people hold themselves by not dreaming big enough. And as far as I'm concerned, the bigger the dream, the bigger the achievement.Agree. Awesome. So what next one is what is the hardest thing you've ever accomplished?What the story I told you getting over me You can be your biggest advocate you can be your biggest success your biggest asset but sometimes you can be your, your largest devil and your biggest delta. So try and kick that little monkey off your shoulder.Awesome. And then what do you think your greatest success to this point in your life has been?No carry? I have no care about you laughing at me when I fall over. Just stick around to see me get up again.Amen to that. And what would you say is one secret the wave has contributed most to your success.My dad is probably one of the biggest on educated men on the planet. big thick Irish bricklayer fella. And I remember as a kid, he put his hand on my shoulder one day, for no reason wasn't even looking at me. We were just walking down the street. And he said to me, son, no one ever drowned by falling in the water. They drowned by staying there. Now at the age of 14, I thought I'd swallow the fortune cookie or something I couldn't understand where the bloody hell this came from. But you know that is often stuck with me and now and then I fall over quite often and I go, right. It's my decision whether when I stay here and drown, or I get up so I would give him that credit.Awesome. And what are two or three books that you'd recommend to the fuel your legacy audienceblue fishing, the art of making things happen by me Steve Sims obvious one, Dr. Zeus because I find that they got a lot of stuff in there that people don't realize how powerful anything by Jay Abraham because all of his methodology and style, critique sales techniques from the 80s are actually more powerful and impactful today. And if I can give you the fourth one, anything that allows you to dream, anything that's kind of like science fiction, espionage, spy novels, john Grisham, anything that makes you kind of dream in your head That's good because the difference between us an AI is AI can't dream, create an action act, it can only deliver what you asked for. So start meeting things that make you dream and take you to a world beyond your imagination.That's so interesting. I've never heard anybody put it that way, the difference between us and AI because that's a, if you don't follow the technology that's coming up quick, big difference, like AI is going to be able to replace a large percentage of what humans are currently doing. And the question is, but what do we do with all that free time as you're right asked you an It looks like you have a little bit of free time. What are you going to do with that? And that's a real question to be asked. Millions of people are being put out of jobs daily, across the world because of artificial intelligence or some form of robotics. And if you're not thinking how can I then go create more value for the world and give back then you're going to be sitting there doing nothing? pretty quick.A great, greatyeah. So here's the last one. Question. It's my favorite question. I excited to hear your answer. I don't know what it's going to be. But we're going to pretend that you've died that you're dead. Okay. 210 But okay, no, no, it's 200 years from now, six generations from now. So your great, great, great, great, great-grandchildren are sitting around a table, and you have the opportunity to kind of listen in to the conversation that they're having about you, your life and your legacy. What would you want your great great great, great-grandchildren to be saying about you? 200 years from now.He lived by his standards and not others.Simple as that simple as that.And it doesn't need to be any more complicated. I love it. Thank you so much for your time, Steve. I'm just grateful and honored to have you here on the show. And if there's ever anything I can return the favor to you. I'd love to do so. Thanks. And love to if you ever back in Utah. I love to meet up with you.Hold to a panel. Thank you.Yep, no problem. We'll catch you guys next time on fuel your legacy.Thanks for joining us. What you heard today resonates with you please like, comment and share on social media tag me and if you do give me a shout out I'll give you a shout out on the next episode. Thanks to all those who've left a review. It helps spread the message of what it takes to build a legacy that lasts and we'll catch you next time on fuel your legacy.Connect more with your host Samuel Knickerbocker at:https://www.facebook.com/ssknickerbocker/?ref=profile_intro_cardhttps://www.instagram.com/ssknickerbocker/https://howmoneyworks.com/samuelknickerbockerIf this resonates with you and you would like to learn more please LIKE, COMMENT, & SHARE————————————————————————————————————Click The Link Bellow To Join My Legacy Builders Mastermindhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/254031831967014/Click here to check out my webinar as well!————————————————————————————————————Want to regain your financial confidence and begin building your legacy?In this ebook you will learn:- The 9 Pillars To Build A Legacy- Clarify you “why”- Create Daily Action Steps To Launch ForwardWant Sam’s FREE E-BOOK?Claim your access here! >>> Fuel Your Legacy: The 9 Pillars To Build A Legacy————————————————————————————————————

- Bears report to Training Camp- Tarik Cohen talks "dynasty"- Will Mitch take the next step?- Bears "chasing great" in 2019- Happy birthday Sweetness- Cubs call up Ian Happ- Bryant expects to play Friday- Bryant putting up crazy numbers since mid-June- Blackhawks convention starts Friday- Are the Hawks a playoff team?- Can Kirby Dach make the roster out of camp?

Fun and games Friday: Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?? Play along in the car!Why Sam can't stop buying stuffed animals.What happens when the non-athletic Murphy gets a chance to throw the softball with his daughter Phoebe.

Here are the show notes from this episode: May Hypnosis Training is sold-out, and June is too! We’ve opened up the November 2018 training, so look here… Melissa Tiers did an amazing job teaching for us at the University of Toronto! And we had it videoed for her too… Hats off to Mike Mandel for doing an amazing MINDSCAPING training on the Friday… Are addictions just habits that are driven by anxiety? We think so. Most people just stop the addiction when they’ve had enough, although people are told they’ll have to deal with it for their whole lives… Mike’s mentor Derek Balmer turned alcoholics into social drinkers… People get addicted to a dopamine release with their smart phones and squeezing blackheads… People in the AA program keep on saying “I’m an alcoholic” and reinforce the problem at the level of Identity! It’s all about self-directed neuroplasticity and you’re rewiring your brain! What’s the benefit of the addiction? Find another way to get it… Stop! Push the picture down and away, and then re-script. The result is new neural pathways! The Meta Pattern is the same as ADAC: Associate – Dissociate – Associate – Collapse! Setting up the Awesome Anchor! It’s Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic, and you can stack it up with resources! The 100 Day Challenge begins Saturday May 12th, so make your life awesome! Videos for 100 days on our Instagram Channel…#MMHAwesome We will be awarding significant prizes to those who post and follow along! The tattoo anchor! The picture turned out wrong…Horrible, but funny, so stack those positive anchors… Virtual  Gastric Band treatment? You still have to change what you eat. We don’t prescribe, diagnose, or treat disease, and we’re not telling you what to do; just what we do. Empowering Question:  How will you use all the awesome and free Brain Software material to have an awesome and fantastic life? Empowering Metafive: Henry O’Hagen and the missing childhood Ending: The MMHA Theme Music (Thanks Greg McColl!) Please leave a rating in iTunes, and send us your questions for future episodes!  You can either email them as text or record them using your phone’s voice recorder and email us the audio file! Email address is info(at)mikemandelhypnosis.com

The 6 Steps to using Content Marketing to create your Personal Brand Intro:                          Welcome to the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast, where you'll learn how to do business with and market to the LGBT community in an authentic and transparent way. We're talking about an $884 billion lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. We'll help you grow your business, gain market share, and impact your bottom line. And now your host; she teaches straight people how to market to gay people, and gay people how to market themselves. Your professional lesbian, Jenn- with two N's, T. Grace.   Well hello and welcome to episode number 78 of the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I am your host, Jenn Grace, and today we are going to talk about personal branding, content marketing, and being an author all in six simple steps. So content marketing, personal branding, authorship are completely intertwined in what I want to talk about today. You don't have to have one to do the other, there's no kind of contingency on any of them. But what I want to provide to you today are basically six steps into providing a framework for all of this to make sense. So I want to talk about taking an inventory of what you've already done, strategically coming up with some kind of content plan, mind mapping your ideas, putting those ideas into an outline, planning and scheduling your time, and then getting it done. So that is what we're going to talk about in today's episode, I hope you enjoy it.                                     The last couple of episodes that I've been sharing with you have been around planning to become an author in 2016, and talking about confidence, and the most recent episode we talked about the five fears that new LGBT authors have and how to conquer them basically. So I'm kind of going along the theme of authorship in this episode, however it's much bigger than that, and what I mean by that is that the topic of today's podcast is around content marketing, and it stemmed from my second week's class with the authors that I'm working with right now. So as I mentioned in the last podcast, they are working with me from February 1st through April 30th, and each week we're going through a lot of information almost to probably an overwhelming degree for a lot of them. But we're trying to cover a lot so they can ultimately have a book at the end of the ninety days that we have together. And one of the things that I was talking with them about in the last week is about taking an inventory of the content that they have, and how they can basically apply that to potentially their book and telling their story. So as I was thinking about that, I was thinking how can I share this information, and not really what I talked about in the author program itself, but kind of how can I share information around content marketing bigger and more broadly? So basically what I want to cover is content marketing kind of from a big picture level, and how you can use that in your business. So in building your personal brand really. So one of the things that I have been doing for a really long time is working with businesses around content marketing specifically. And content marketing is a little bit of a buzzword and kind of has been a buzzword for a couple of years now I would say. But really when we're talking about content marketing, it's around blogging, and podcasting, and writing for other people's blogs, guest posting, putting out newsletters, and being on other people's podcasts as being interviewed there, and doing videos, and all these types of things that basically are content that you're putting out to the universe. So if you're building your personal brand, you have to find what you stand for. So if we're looking at- and this all kind of ties together in terms of authorship. So as part of your personal brand, you could absolutely be an author. You don't have to be, but being an author is certainly going to help you catapult your personal brand.                                     So if we're talking about content marketing as it relates to personal branding, and really building your personal brand, it's really a matter of identifying what it is that you want to talk about. What is your niche? And of course starting with the obvious of what's your business? So what is it that you do? I know that there's a lot of business owners listening to this, so it could vary. You could be an accountant, you could be a financial advisor, you could be a consultant, you could be a motivational speaker; there's just a bunch of things that you could be doing. And I know for myself that when I started off my business, I've been in business since 2004, but it's absolutely morphed and changed shape a variety of times over the years. And this most recent iteration of my business being a professional lesbian began in November of 2012. So I'm going into the fourth year here, and in doing so everything I've done to this point has really been around content marketing. And I don't necessarily- I wish I could say that this was really intentional in the beginning, but it really wasn't intentional until probably about a year, maybe a year and a half in, where I realized that your personal brand stands for so much more. So if you are beginning your kind of personal brand journey now, you can be looking to get a domain name that has your name as the domain name. So for me I have www.JennTGrace.com. And a side note, a funny little fun fact is that I could not get www.JennGrace.com. So I had to throw the 'T' in there to make sure that I could get something as close to my name as I could. And it is my name obviously, but I really would have preferred Jenn Grace, and not sounding so formal with the 'T,' but alas I wanted to make sure my brand all matched, therefore I had to go with the Jenn T Grace on everything. So that's kind of how that happened. But I would encourage you to make sure you have your domain name. I know that most of the people that I work with right now already have it. There are times- I'm actually working with a client right now who cannot get her name no matter how hard we tried. We even tried to negotiate with the person who owns it via GoDaddy and they're not willing to give it up even though they're not using it. So there's a lot of variables with that kind of stuff. But you can do- depending on what you're doing, like if you're trying to build a platform for speaking you could do- put 'Speaks' at the end of it. So I could do www.JennGraceSpeaks.com for example. Or you can do JennGraceAuthor. There's a lot of different variables, but you really want to try to get as close to your name as possible and make it simple for people to find.                                     So that's just kind of a small simple tip in terms of having a home base if you will to drive people to. So if you have your website and it's not your name, that's fine too. If it's your business name, and you want to start putting out content, then as long as you have a place to bring people back to, that's the end goal. You don't want to be posting all of your blog posts just on LinkedIn but not on your own website. You want to make sure that you're driving people from social media, from the interwebs to your website so you can work on getting people to subscribe to what you're doing and all that kind of stuff.                                     As I had said I was not completely intentional about it when I began. I really began wanting to do this podcast, so I was having a couple of conversations in one day with some really amazing people and thought, 'Wow they have such brilliance to share. I need people to be a fly on the wall to listen to this conversation and hear their great wisdom.' And it was shortly thereafter that day I was like, 'That's what I need to do. I need to do a podcast so I can interview people, and I can talk about these really interesting things, and really just allow people to kind of see the inside look at all of what makes these LGBT leaders and allies amazing people. So it did start off with just a podcast and then I realized, 'Alright so if I'm going to do a podcast, I'm definitely going to have to do some blogging here,' and then the blogging turned into writing a book, and the book turned into creating videos, and it all kind of transpired from there. But one of the things- and this was what I wanted to talk to you about today is really just trying to take an inventory of all of the things that you've done in the past that could tie into your personal brand. So if you're looking at your career path. So you may have had three businesses by now. Just because business number one doesn't have anything to do with business number three, the common denominator there is still you, and you being the brand. So if you may have worked for an insurance company, and happen to be a rock star, and you got a whole bunch of awards for what you were doing, but now you are running a fitness empire. Yes, the two of those things have nothing to do with one another in any way, shape, or form, but the common piece there is you. So how can you leverage the fact that you were an award winning insurance agent maybe, and now you're an award winning fitness guru. So it's a matter of trying to find ways to marry the two of those, and the first place to start is by creating a list of all of the awards that you've ever received based on what jobs you held, what roles you were in, what business you happened to own at the time, and all of that kind of stuff.                                     From there what I would recommend is gathering articles. So I guess we can say that was number one. Number one is what are the awards that you've won, and gathering all that stuff. So number two would be looking at any articles that you've been featured in. So thinking about articles in the newspaper, or a magazine whether it's industry specific, or whether it's a national magazine, or a local newspaper versus national paper; going in and trying to find all of those places that have either focused on you specifically, or they have mentioned you, and start that list. So now you have two lists going.                                     So the third one would be is blog posts. So where- if you have guest posted on other people's blogs, where has that been? Do you have a concrete list of all the places that you've contributed? Make a list of that. Same thing with podcasts. So if you've been interviewed on other people's podcasts, write it down, get it in a list. So at this point- so we're basically looking at a variety ways, a half dozen ways of gathering places that you've- taking an inventory of all these different places that you've been published, or you've been talked about, or the awards you won, the articles, the blog posts, the podcasts, all these different places. This is all kind of the foundation for what could be a content marketing strategy. So a strategy- it has to have a strategy behind it. You can just start saying how great you are on social media, or how great you are on your website, and only doing that. So it's just one piece of the puzzle is getting the inventory of this stuff.                                     The other thing I would say in terms of taking inventory is reviewing your website copy; so any of the writing that's on your website whether it's the 'About' page, or maybe it's a 'Services' page, or your 'Home' page. Grabbing all of that information too, and just reviewing it and seeing what type of content you have there, is there opportunity for you to weave in some of the other things that we talked about? Is there a way for you to weave in articles, or blog posts, or podcasts and make them very natural in part of that conversation? So reviewing your website, reviewing your blog content. So are you getting the most mileage out of your blog content? That is a huge, huge question for so many people. Or are you getting the most mileage out of past newsletters? Are your past newsletters currently blog posts? Or are blog posts into newsletters? So if you're going to create a piece of content, find a way to use that piece of content in 1,000 different ways. There are so many different ways that you can use it, may as well leverage all of it. So to me, if I'm going to work with a client and I'm going to convince them that they need to spend their precious resources on sitting down and spending two hours on writing a piece of content, and they're a very busy CEO that needs to be focused on sales calls and all kinds of stuff, and that two hours of time is really valuable to them. I'm not going to just say, "Hey thank you for writing this 600-800 word piece of blog content," posting it on the blog, and then just leaving it at that. It's far more than that. It's looking at that blog content and saying, okay how can we re-purpose this? Can we pitch this to a publication as some kind of guest post? Could we talk to other people in our space and say, 'Hey I have this interesting information, is this something you want to put on your post?' Or oh the newsletter is going to come up in a couple of weeks, can we put this information in the newsletter? Of course all of these different scenarios you have to modify the language a little bit, but the substance and the meat of that information remains the same. So if you're talking about a specific topic, maybe the intro and the outro of that topic change a little bit based on the audience, and where it's going, and if it's an article versus a newsletter versus a blog post. In looking at it that way, yeah we're going to have to change the content a little bit to make sure that it resonates with the audience. So yeah we'll have to change the content a little bit to make sure it resonates with the audience, but ultimately it's re-purposing that one blog post that you may have spent two hours on, and putting it in six, seven, eight different places to really start to gather and create more traffic to your website, and ultimately the hope would be to convert leads once people get to your website. So convincing them that they should pick up the phone and call you, or to download something, or reach out to you.                                     So another piece of this is thinking about the strategy for your content. So I just said it's kind of like step one. So step one is basically taking an inventory. So step two is more of what- how can I strategically use this information? So we just talked about how you can use your website content, your blog content, newsletters, podcasts, all that kind of stuff is intertwined, and really kind of in harmony to drive your end goal. But in terms of a strategy, one of the things that I did- and I know a lot of authors who are doing this now, is when I started writing on my blog in November of 2012, it was really starting off with the podcast, but when I started writing I knew I was going to use the information at some point somewhere else. And again I didn't really- I wasn't coming from a personal branding side of things. I wasn't trying to figure out how to build my personal brand. All my goal at the time was to help educate people, and it's still a huge, huge part of my goal is to educate people on LGBT stuff. But I knew as I was writing these blog posts that I would do something with them eventually, and it wasn't fully thought out, but in hindsight, and something you could learn, is that if you say, "My end goal is to have a book by the end of 2016. And I write to my blog twice a week," maybe it's once a week, maybe it's once every two weeks, maybe it's once a month. Whatever the frequency is, so you can put that content together each week as you go throughout the year so by the time you get to the end of the year, you have all of the content available, you basically just have to marry it all together into something that creates a book. So if you're talking about one topic that goes in with the second topic, you're going to have to create- going in and adding paragraphs and making sure that the flow is right, and making sure that the chapters flow well. But the beauty is that you would have all of that information to work with rather than sitting there in November saying, "Crap I said in 2016 I'm going to write a book, and now I have to write 30,000 words. So it's a matter of really thinking strategically; instead of having to write 30,000 words at once, how can I write thirty blog posts that are 1,000 words each and marry them together into a book by the end of the year? So it's really thinking from a big strategic level of how to do that. So as I mentioned in my first book which is, 'But You Don't Look Gay,' and it's The Six Steps to Creating a Successful LGBT Marketing Strategy. What I did is when I first started, the first half of that book really is a lot of information about who the community is, the buying power of the community, some of the bigger marketing tips of understanding why people use the rainbow in their marketing, giving some data, and that kind of stuff. All of that information was taken from past blog posts. And again, I didn't have the strategy at first for how I was doing this, so it was completely disjointed when I started working with it, but the content was all there. So I probably had I would say 15,000 words to work with probably at the very least, and I was able to move things around, and really just bridge these thoughts together, but it was a little more cumbersome because when I was writing it to begin with, I wasn't writing it with an end goal of, 'I'm going to put this in a book.' However probably midway through 2013, I guess maybe it was even in early 2013, I had the thought of creating a series of blog posts that all tied together in one topic, which happens to be the six steps. So I think when I was doing it I had created five steps. So it was what are the five steps to creating a really good strategy? And I would write it saying, "Okay so this week we're going to talk about step one of five," and I would write a blog post about it, sometimes it's 600 words, sometimes it's 1,000 words, and then I would say, "Come back next week and we'll get into number two. And then we'll get into number three." So it was a series that lasted over the course of five weeks, and that one- that information is the second half of that first book. So it was so easy because I had already written it with a natural flow from chapter to chapter essentially. So because I had that in mind of, 'I'm going to make a book, like this is definitely going to be the foundation of my book,' it was really, really easy to take those blog posts that really already flowed well together, and putting them in the second half of that book.                                     So going a little bit further along, I created my second book in 2014, and that one is, 'No Wait, You Do Look Gay,' and it's The Seven Mistakes that Prevent People from Being Able to Sell to the Community. And that one was very artfully crafted over the course of probably ten months, maybe a little bit longer, of here's all the things that I want to include in this book, and oh by the way I have six months of blog content that I have to come up with. Let me make sure it's both. So in essence, somebody could go to my website and go through every blog post I've ever written, which is over 400 at this point, it's probably closer to 450, which would be a total pain in the ass of having to go in, and try to find things, and sometimes it's logically setting up for the next thing to read, but most of the time not, and not intentionally, just how the website's structured. Or you could just buy the book for $10 and make it easy on yourself, and have it laid out beautifully for you.                                     So I guess the thing that the book has that the blog posts don't have is there's additional content and context for building the business case, and building the business case for this book itself. So from that standpoint, this is something that anybody can do. So I know that I've been talking about authorship, and really becoming an author in 2016, but you can totally be tag-teaming this approach. You could be working on a content marketing strategy, and working on a book at the exact same time, and using that same information in both places. And of course for- I don't know if it's an ethical reason, I don't even know what to call it. You don't want it to be completely identical. So I made sure that when I was writing both of the books that I'm adding a little more information in the book because I want people to feel like they're getting a value from it. In the grand scheme of things, you can probably figure out 85% of it on the website itself without ever having to get the book, but again it's the convenience and the ease of having the book to look at, and to guide you through the process.                                     So if you already have content, and going back to that inventory of taking an inventory of where you've been seen, but then also things that you've produced, there's probably a good chance that you have the foundation- a big foundation of being able to put a book together in a relatively short period of time, because you already have a lot of it, you just have to start putting it together like a puzzle. So in terms of the content marketing strategy- So there's taking the inventory, and then there's having a strategy for what you're going to do with that information. And the content marketing might flow into a book, maybe you don't want to write a book, and that's fine too. I think that a lot of people have it in mind that they can sit and just spend an hour and write 600 words for a blog post, and that doesn't have to do anything else, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.                                     So if you do want to go down the road of creating a book, and again this is probably applicable if you're just trying to figure out a content marketing strategy. The third step would be figuring out basically what your outline would look like. So if we think, 'Hey we started at the top, we took an inventory of everything we have, and now we have these stacks of stuff that we can use and they're all over here on this side of the desk, and now we are strategically looking at what we want to do with this information whether it's just producing on the blog- I guess podcast too, on the blog or podcast, or producing a book with this information eventually. The next piece would be coming up with an outline. So even if you don't want to write a book, it still would be in your best interest to have some kind of road map, or some kind of outline to follow, which could be part of the overall strategy. But having some tactical road map that basically says, 'Okay on Tuesdays I'm going to write communication tips, and on Fridays I'm going to write marketing tips. And every other week I'm going to do an interview.' So that way you at least have an outline for what you're trying to accomplish. And I use those examples because when I started my blog I was writing twice a week, and I'm not going to lie, it was a lot of work. But now four years later I have 450 blog posts that are just kind of out there in the universe, and when someone goes to Google and they're looking for something around LGBT and marketing, a lot of times I'm the one that shows up because I have so much information out there for it. But you can save yourself a lot of time and headache if you come up with an outline. So I was doing my Communications Tuesdays, and every Tuesday I would write something about a faux pas that people say or do, or a term that you might not want to use, or one you would prefer to use. And then on Fridays it was very tactical and marketing driven. So what's a step to launching a successful strategy? What's step one? What's step two? And those were always on Fridays.                                     So if we're looking at it from that standpoint, you can take route one, or route A, whatever we want to call it, and say, 'Alright I'm just going to focus on getting content out there. I'm not trying to do a book.' So pick a day of the week that you want to release your blog, podcast, whatever it happens to be, and pick a theme, and then go from there. And they don't have to tie together, but if you want to figure out how to use this for a book down the road, actually put together an outline of a book. So you don't have to have any of it written, don't get stressed out about, 'Oh I don't even know what I would write.' Just start putting together an outline of your thoughts, and from there you can totally create this outline that turns into your roadmap of, okay chapter one has to be on general high level who the LGBT community is. Chapter two can go into the more nitty gritty details of the LGBT community. Maybe it talks about the 'L' of the community. Chapter three talks about the 'G' of the community. Chapter four, the 'B.' Chapter five, the 'T.' Chapter six, okay now you know all this information, why is it important? I guess really think through what people ask you the most about, what are those common questions? What is your process and your methodology for how you walk a client through whatever product or service it is that you sell? Because that's really going to be the framework of what could be your outline to your book, and also an outline as part of your content marketing strategy.                                     You may be listening to this and thinking, 'I have never written an outline for anything, let alone a book.' So what I could recommend doing is mind mapping your ideas. Mind mapping is really just grabbing a piece of paper, writing down your central idea in the center of it, and then just branching off, drawing lines that come out from that center that are different pieces of information or topics around your business that you would want to talk about. And if you just go to Google and type in 'mind maps,' there are tons and tons and tons of information, and pictures, and how to's of actually creating a mind map. But it's really simple. Grab a piece of paper, write in the middle 'LGBT marketing,' and from there what are all the pieces that people would need to know about LGBT marketing? It could be the same thing for financial advisors. So if you're an advisor and you're listening to this, circle financial advisor, that's who you are, you're in the center of it. Who are the clients you work with? What are the questions they ask? Where are you doing business? All of the things that could be beneficial to your end customer to hear. Or maybe your end customer- maybe you're not trying to get customers, maybe you have a different goal of your book. But regardless, starting with the mind map, and then from the mind map you can create an outline because then you can start grouping things together. So even though it might look like a big, crazy, chaotic mess of information on a page, you might look at it kind of high level and say, 'Alright for some reason there's a lot of chatter about marketing tactics. Let me just grab all of those and put them aside in one place.' Or 'There's a lot of chatter about words that you shouldn't say. Let me put all those on this side of the page.' And then eventually it becomes really clear, 'Oh wow, there's actually a story arc here, there's a structure here. I couldn't see the forest through the trees before to see that there's a structure, but there's totally a structure.' So really from that mind map stage it's a matter of creating- it's going back to the outline. So you either create the outline first, or you use a mind map to help you create the outline. So those are kind of like steps three and four kind of combined.                                     And then from there you just plan and schedule your time of essentially how you're going to get it done. So if you decide that, 'Hey my outline has enough for fourteen chapters, I'm going to try to write 1,000 words each for each of these fourteen chapters. So now we have 14,000 words.' That's great but how are you going to do that? Are you going to block out time on your calendar? Are you going to reserve certain days of the week to focus on your writing? Are you going to write say every morning from 8:00 to 8:30, and when 8:30 hits, the buzzer goes off, you're done? Are you going to do it for four hours on a Friday? Are you going to focus one day a month? There's a million different ways you can do this, you just have to do it with what works best for you. For me it used to be focusing on writing for a little bit every day. I used to do usually between 8:00 and 9:00 AM, I would do my writing. And then once that was up, I was done, and I moved on. And now I really morphed into- by the time I get to the place where I want to write something, I have it in my mind pretty concretely, and it's just a matter of getting it out of my head and on paper. So I wrote a blog post- one of the January blog posts, I ended up writing it in like 21 minutes, and I do time myself just to see, whereas when I first started this about four years ago, that easily could have been something that took me three hours to do. So of course you basically- you get better as you go through. And it takes a while, there's a lot of process involved, but it's a matter of scheduling it and make time for it.                                     And then of course the last step would be if you're going to schedule it and make time for it, then you have to actually do the work, that's the big piece. So you actually have to get it done. So that could be just using a Word document, that could be getting a product like Scrivener, which is a product specifically for writing whether it's blog posts, books, whatever it happens to be. It's a really helpful tool, I happen to love it. I'll make sure I include a link in the show notes for that, and just as a side note the link for today's show would be www.JennTGrace.com/78 for episode number 78.                                     So yeah, so I know I just kind of spewed out a lot of information all at once, and maybe it didn't come out- I'm thinking as I'm talking it became more clear as I went along, but it's really what we're talking about, is the six steps to creating a content marketing plan that could eventually evolve into a book. Or the six steps to creating a book that could evolve into a content marketing plan. So it's really just those six steps of taking an inventory, creating a strategy, outlining and then mind mapping, or mind mapping and then outlining depending on what your process is. Planning and scheduling, and then getting it done.                                     So yeah, that I'm sure I have raised far more questions than I have answered, but I hope that today's episode gives you at least a little bit of a framework of how you can use content marketing in your business, how you can use it as part of your personal brand, how you can have that evolve into being an author by the end of 2016 if that's what you're trying to do, or if you're listening to this podcast and it's 2017, it's all still applicable. Everything I'm talking about is totally an evergreen topic, meaning this is something that you can do regardless of when in a period of time this happens to be that you're listening to it. So for anyone listening to this, I would strongly encourage you to reach out, whether you leave a comment in the blog post that this podcast is on, whether you comment on it in LinkedIn, send me a tweet, send me a note on Facebook; wherever you happen to be, I probably am too, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this because I really am thinking I would like to go into more detail on content marketing from a really big picture level, and just helping give you kind of that step by step advice. I am currently working with a fair amount of really large companies who I'm helping with their content marketing strategy, and it's something that I really love doing. And to be perfectly honest, I've never really marketed it. Like it's not something- like to me I'm teaching straight people how to market to gay people, and gay people how to market themselves. That is my tagline, I'm still sticking entirely true to that, but because my business is built on content marketing, I do have a lot of companies that reach out to me to say, "Hey, how did you do that? How did you build it? Can you build it for us?" And of course I would love to build it for them, because as long as it has some tie into what we're talking about in terms of the LGBT market, then it's a win-win for everybody, and that's kind of how I prefer to do things.                                     So anyway, if you want to reach out to me on social media, by all means please do. If you want to contact me, you can do so on my website. And if I threw out things that are not clear to you, please email me and ask for clarification, and I can certainly do a follow-up episode about this. And yeah, we can kind of go from there.                                     So I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and we will talk in episode number 79. Talk to you soon.                                     Thank you for listening to today's podcast. If there are any links from today's show that you are interested in finding, save yourself a step and head on over to www.JennTGrace.com/thepodcast. And there you will find a backlog of all of the past podcast episodes including transcripts, links to articles, reviews, books, you name it. It is all there on the website for your convenience. Additionally if you would like to get in touch with me for any reason, you can head on over to the website and click the contact form, send me a message, you can find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all at Jenn T Grace. And as always, I really appreciate you as a listener, and I highly encourage you to reach out to me whenever you can. Have a great one, and I will talk to you in the next episode.   [End of Audio 00:34:35]