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Day: 007 Date: Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2020 Note from Aimee J.: It’s a brand new day for possibilities. What are you going to do with it? Topic: 5 Second Rule Action: When you find yourself having an instinct to do something tied to a goal or something important to you, count down from 5 seconds. 5-4-3-2-1-Go! You then need to push yourself to take action towards that goal. 5 seconds that’s all the time you have before your brain shuts down your instinct. Affirmations: You are so supportive. You are kind. AND You are Awesome. You are Loved. You are Needed. And most importantly, YOU ARE ENOUGH. Resources & Links: Resources & Info for Donations for Australia Wildfires ; @APinchOfKerala Mel Robbins 5 Second Rule Article ; Mel Robbins 5 Second Rule Book ; Your Personal Hype Man ; Alexa Skill: Your Personal Hype Man ; Your Personal Hype Man on iTunes Let’s Connect: Leave a Voicemail ; E-mail Aimee J. ; Aimee on Instagram ; Aimee on Facebook ; Aimee on Twitter ; Aimee on YouTube ; Aimee on LinkedIn ; Aimee on TikTok ; Aimee on Snapchat ; Aimee on Pinterest ; Transcript: Good day family. It's your personal hype man, man, Aimee J. and thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast. For anybody who's confused, you are listening to your personal hype men and not chasing dreams. We will not be having a guest on today. Uh, it is Tuesday, January 7, 2020 another day of possibilities and amazingness that can happen. And I'm excited guys. I'm excited now for the first six, six days, uh, I guess we should be doing it today too, of the year we talked about gratitude and three things that we are grateful for it. We're building it as a practice for ourselves. And so, um, in hindsight today should also count. So we're doing it for a week. We should do it today. So what are three things I am grateful for? Cause I would never ask you to do it and not do it myself. Three things I'm grateful for. One, I'm grateful for the first responders in Australia. Guys, if you don't know what's happening. Australia, it's crazy out there. Fires, fires, fires. I think it's raining right now, but this is a lot of damages. A lot of smoke. It's a lot of danger right now. Shout outs to the first responders who are there helping risking their lives to take care and rescue people. God bless you guys. I'm, I'm grateful for that. Cause I do know some people in Australia, thankfully they're safe, but they had family and friends who were not. So if not for them, they wouldn't be out of danger right now. So shout outs. I'm grateful for them. Even if it doesn't have a direct combination to me, I am grateful for that. Number two, I'm grateful for my mom's cooking so she can throw down. It's amazing what she can do. We've, uh, we're, we're trying to do a, we'll see what we can do, what I can convince her to do. But if you're interested in following my mom's culinary skills, check out the Instagram @apinchofkerala and uh, we'll see if, if a lot of people sign up, we'll start doing stuff early. But you know, she's talented, she's good, she's good at not just Indian food. She can throw down for American food too and even like healthy foods. So I am grateful for her for that ability that she has. Number three, what am I grateful for? Um, so you have to think, sometimes you gotta think, Oh, I'm grateful for um, Funkos. I just got a new Funko, I'll share it on the interwebs tomorrow. Um, I just love those things. They are awesome. They made collecting action figures. Cool again, and just my, my childhood is there. I got, I dunno, you know, I think I have like one, two, three, that's just too many Funkos to count, but I am grateful for them and I love it. I love it. They make me smile. They do awesome shout outs to the creators of Funkos. What are three things you guys are grateful for? That's important? Check that for yourself. Answer that question for yourself because your day will be brighter. You're starting off on a positive note. Okay, so do that. We were going to do it together for a week. I don't want you to stop tomorrow. I want you to keep doing this exercise and I'll check in periodically, but this is a positive thing that will help you turn around your mental health and it will turn around your outlook for life and for the day. So do that. The other thing, are affirmations, which we'll talk about in a bit, and then today, what I want to talk to you guys about is the five second rule. We're a week into the new year. How many of you are struggling with your goals, struggling with your goals? It's, it's a common thing. You're not the only ones. I'm sure you've heard percentages of people who give up. There's an increase at the gyms. I'm sure that'll decrease soon it's just human nature for us to quit. It's easy to quit. It's hard to keep going and I want you guys to keep going, so I'm going to help you. I'm going to help you. I'm going to talk to you guys today about something I think a brilliant woman has done. Uh, Mel Robbins. She is now a talk show host. She is a motivational speaker. She's phenomenal. She wrote a book. She's a writer too. It's called the 5 Second Rule and it's easy to do. What it does is it helps you with your goals and it helps you with moving forward when you're stuck. And so the idea is, if my goal is say to go to the gym, because that's the easiest one, right? I want to go swimming. And I'm like, ah, my instinct is to go to the gym. I have this feeling I want to go to the gym, but I don't. But the moment I have that instinct, what Mel Robbins says to do is count to five within five seconds, you need to move and go to the gym or else you're not gonna do it. Your brain is going to shut that thing down. Think about that. Every time you have an instinct to do something towards your goal, your brain is shutting it down. After five seconds, you have this gap, this time period for you to accomplish what you need to do. But if you don't do it within that time period, it's gone. Right? So within five seconds, I have the instinct to go swimming. I need to go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and get up and I need to go. Cause if I don't get up, make an action, a move towards my goal of swimming, getting up, going, get it ready. You know, whatever the case is, I won't do it. Right? So what I want you to do is, and Mel has a post and I'm going to link to it in the show notes for those who are on the podcast. Alexa, folks, go to your personalhypeman.com and find this episode. The notes will be there. There are five parts to this one. You have to have, you have to have an instinct. You want to do something, but right. There's a moment or a feeling for you to do something. And so that's, that's one part. The second is it's tied to something. Mine was a goal to go swimming, right? Yours could be anything, right? But it's tied to something specific that you were trying to do, a purpose that you're trying to do. And so the next one is that you have to push yourself within those five seconds to do it. It's not magic. I say one, two, three, - 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and you do it. You have to within yourself, push yourself to do it. If you don't, it's not going to happen automatically saying the magic words, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Go will not make it happen. It's 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Go and you go as soon as it hits. Otherwise you're not doing it. You're not doing it. And she says, you know, the last one is you actually have to physically make a difference. Make a move towards what you're trying to do. Picking up a piece of paper writing. You know, if it's writing a book, it could have been just like picking up the pen, getting in front of your computer, that kind of thing. So think about that as you guys are working on your goals. If you've already had a setback, if you've, you've already fallen off the wagon. Whatever the case is, it is not too late. It's never, never too late for you to get back up. Okay? All you have to do, take Mel's advice. Count 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Go and do it. And do it. It has worked for so many people and she talks about, and again it's in the, it's in the blog post, you guys can read about it. It's tied to, it's tied to science, it's tied to science and is something that is neurological and it is within the brain about you doing it. And she talks about actually the science of it and the rules of why it is this way. And so check that out, but you can beat it. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Go. All right. That's all you have to do. So I want you to do that today. There's something you're struggling with. I don't want to go, I don't want to type, I don't want to, I don't want to first stop saying I don't wanna but if you're going to say it 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then do it, do not hesitate, then you have to do it. Okay. That will help you. Yeah. Not a guarantee. You're more likely to do it, but you got this. All right, you got this. We're a week into the new year guys. We're a week into the new year and here you are listening to this podcast one, you're so supportive. You are so supportive of people. Look at you supporting me. That's fantastic. I appreciate it. You've already put a smile on my face. You are a kind person. You are awesome. You are loved. You are needed. And as I keep reminding you, you are more than enough. As you are who you are the way you are. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You are enough, alright? So till next time, tomorrow when we tune in again to have this chat, guys, remember, Don't Stop,Keep Chasing.

What's going on everybody? Hey, this is Coulton woods and I want to welcome you to another episode of learning from the experts, and once again, I have a freaking awesome expert on here today that I'm excited for you guys to get to know and your story and learn some freaking sick stuff from. So here's the deal. I know how frustrating it is as an entrepreneur to waste countless hours sifting through wanna be experts who never actually helped me in the end. Then to learn years later that there was an expert who really could help me 100 times faster than learning on my own. I have created this podcast to save you time and money while taking you on a journey with me as I learn from and interview real experts who can actually help you grow your business. My name is Coulton Woods and you're listening to learning from the experts. Awesome Josh! I'm excited to have you on here. I have Josh Forti on here with me today and he's going to drop some knowledge bombs, some truth nukes. Steve Larsen would like to say, but first off, okay, Josh, not everybody knows you, so let's, let's hear your story a little bit more. Coulton, the man, I appreciate you having me on here dude. It's an honor and I'm excited to get rockin' and rollin'. How far back should we go? Where do you wanna start? How'd you get started? We'll back up to the origin story. Born in Wisconsin at age one, moved to La, lived in the suburbs of La for 10 years and then moved out to this little itty bitty farm town in the middle of nowhere of Indiana. So culture shock, right? I'm 12 years old from there, grew up on a farm and had no social media experience and all, like I had dial up internet. I didn't have like texting or Internet on my phone until I was 20, so I mean, like really out in the middle of nowhere. And so I went and, you know, I'm a farmer and had a bad year in the farm community. I was planning on being a farmer my whole life. That was my goal, my mentality and had a bad year in that. It was like, dude, I gotta go do something else. Like I didn't realize the risk that was involved there. So I wanted something a little more. Started college for a semester. Absolutely hated it. While in college I got a job in insurance sales and kind of the requirement, the reason I was able to get that job was, hey, you're in college, you're going to finish it. Well, I was arguing with my professor one day and he was like, you're here because you want to be successful. And I'm like, oh no, that's not why I'm here. You don't need college to be successful.  And he goes, was, why the heck are you here? And I'm like, well, that's a good point. And so literally right there I got up, stood up and said I quit and walked out and walked out of the Bursar's office, quit my classes and left. And so when my boss finds out like three or four days later, she's like, you've got three months to figure out what you're going to do.  And either start something else, right? Sign up for more classes or figure out what you're going to do with your life basically or else you're done. And so I'm like, all right, well I'm gonna figure something out. So I'm pretty broke at this time and I'm looking around and I'm like how do I make money? And so we're sitting there, she's got some pretty big clients and we're at this sitting in the office of a huge company. I mean probably over $100, $200,000,000 a year at least. I mean, they got factories all over the world, right? And so he's like, sales are down and, and stuff, even though the demand for our stuff is at an all time high. And I'm like why is that the case then? He's like all the sales are coming in online and they weren't there, they weren't in that online space. This is like two years ago. And I'm like, we'll have you like tried like running ads or like being online or being on social media. And he's like, no, I can't remember exactly what he said, but it's something along the lines of like, that doesn't work or influencers, something is a fad or something like that. And I'm like, alright, well I'm broke and you're telling me that people are making money online. Right? So I go home and I just started googling it and I'm like how do I make money? How do I make money? How to make money? And long story short...  how old are you at this point? 20, 21, 22, so probably 22. I'm trying to think. Maybe this was right before my 22nd birthday I think maybe. And so I'm like googling and I'm like how do I do this? And so driving for Uber comes up and I'm like okay, that's not online but okay I get it. Flips and stuff on Ebay and craigslist and stuff. I'm like all right. And so I started doing that and just like looking around and I find facebook ads and I find a ecom and I'm like watch this. I'm sure there's a Webinar of some sort and they're like if you could just do this and this. And I'm like yeah. So I like jump in and I've spent... I just had to put it on a credit card because I didn't have any money and I spent like 800 bucks on a set of a website and econ website had someone to do it because I had no idea and like five or $600 on facebook ads. And I didn't make any sales, I tried to sell Harry Potter books because that was the only thing. I was like my friends all like Harry Potter. So maybe they'll buy it. That's awesome dude. I know. So I'm like broken out at this point and now I'm in debt and I've never been in debt before my whole life at this point. And so I'm like freaking out. And so I'm still trying to pay this off by flipping stuff on craigslist because I was driving for Uber. Then one day I meet this kid on instagram, he was like 16 years old, he's got 50,000 followers and I'm like, is this guy famous? Right. So I go and I literally googled his name and I'm like trying to figure out if he's got rich parents or if it's famous. I can't find him anywhere. And so I just messaged him and I had three questions for him. I was like, number one- are you famous somewhere else? Number two, are you making money? And number three, if so, how? He messages me back and I can't for the life of me remember who it was and I wish I would have written it down, but at the time I wasn't in entrepreneurship so I didn't know that that's what you did, right? I remember him telling me, he's like, I post cool stories about stuff that I do. People tell me what they want me to sell them. I go and I sell it to them and they buy it and I'm like, there is no way it's that easy. Right? Like how? And so I'm like thinking about this and think about this. And then I had this light bulb moment and so I messaged him back because I knew I probably only get like one more question before he ignore me. And then I'm an annoying instagrammer and I was like, Dude, you pay for ads? And he's like, no dude, they just tell me what they want. And I'm like, light bulb moment! This is amazing, right? I'm like, you don't have to have, like how do you grow without paying brands? You're not paying for your followers, they're all real. And so that was like a big light bulb moment for me because I'm broke at the time and you know many, I don't know where you, the listener are right now if you're, you know, are broke or maybe just started out. But like the thought for me and a lot of people that I run into is like the thought that me and a lot of people run into like, the thought of running ads is scary. Right? And it's like I don't know if I'm going to get an Roi on that money. And so I was like, if I can grow an audience and figure out how to grow an audience without having to pay for ads, that's game over for me, like I'm all in. And so I started looking around, looking around and I ended up buying a course. Once again, didn't have the money for it, only had like half of it, but I put it on a credit card and I was like, all right, I'm all in. And there was an instagram course and I don't want to bash on the course. It was, it was a good course, I think it was thorough in what it taught, but it wasn't anything like exceptional. I think a lot of people think that if it was not an exceptional or amazing course or whatever, it's not worth their money. The thought that like you have to have like this big drawn out course that needed to be super awesome in order to get results. That's not true. Like this course was average, mediocre, but it was thorough. And so I just did everything the course said. So I bought it on a Friday and I was like, all right, I'm going to do this from Friday when I get off work til like Monday when I go back, I'm gonna go through this whole course. That's exactly what I did. And so I started doing literally everything that the course said and I want to say, and this is kind of more like on the mindset issue side of things. My parents always taught me how to work hard and like my parents were not like, I don't have money and I don't come from a wealthy family or whatever, and not money savvy, but if you grew up on a farm, you know how to work hard. Right? And so I was like, I'm not gonna quit and I'm going to find new ways to make this better and I'm going to get my money back out of this because I've got to make my money back. And so I did everything that it said. And then some. And I tested different things and I opened several different accounts and I tried it. I tried it and it took me months to actually see results out of it. But fast forward seven months, seven months later, and I had 80- 100,000 followers on instagram just off of just doing it consistently. And for the first two or three or four months, so many people give up and I'm like, dude, I spent all my money and went and did that over this. And I didn't see any results for three months. But I followed through and I finally figured out how it clicked and so that's kind of what started me into this whole social media game was instagram and some 16 year old kid who said I don't pay for ads and I make money and that's what's lead into now, and I'm sure we'll get into that, but about 5 million followers that we've grown for myself, for clients on social media, between instagram and facebook. That's actually actually super impressive. One thing that I've kind noticed too is you say you came from a farming background, first off, that's freaking sweet because you weren't just given a phone when you were 12. So you've only been in this game for what, 4 years now? No, not even- three years. Three years. Yeah. So probably about three years ago is when I started googling this whole thing. And then I remember, October, November- that's what I want to quit classes would have been been around this time. And then I started on instagram March 1st or March second, two years ago. So it'll be coming up on three years this coming March is when I started on instagram. That's incredible dude. But I think the key to that is you didn't stop. Like most people, they don't see the Roi in like three, four, five, six months and they're like, this is not happening. I'm done right when they're at the edge of just hitting the gold mine, you know? And so I think that's a huge lesson for us to learn as well- you just got to keep pushing through it and then it will happen. If I could just stop you right there- just because a week or a month or a year has gone by means literally nothing if you're not actually working because like I have people that bought into the same course and they're like, well, I've been trying for six months and I'm only at 6,000 followers. How are you at 80,000? And I'm like, because I worked a job where I worked nine hours a day. I had a 30 minute commute each way, roughly 20 to 30 minutes. Right. So I'm like, there's 10 hours of my day that's gone. I had to be there at 8:00 AM. So I would wake up an hour and a half before I had to leave and for an hour I would work on instagram. My entire lunch break was instagram my entire time after that. And I had a girlfriend at the time. I wasn't married but it was constant. It was always, I didn't go to movies, I didn't go hang out with friends, I didn't go to parties, I didn't go to events. I went to church, I went to work, I went to Walmart and that's it. And when you do that people are like, well, you know, I have this. I'm like, dude, two years, two, three years of your life, you sacrifice for a lifetime of whatever that is. And I know Russell talks about that a lot too, so. Yeah, it's totally true. I've even talked about like when I served my repair business on the podcast and I've told you a little bit about it, but I started out and it was just a little here, a little there, not much. And then a year later I literally have a brick and mortar and I'm just busier than I could be, but I stuck with it, you know, like I just kept it going, pushed it out more and more. So. And then the other thing I want to point out is I feel like I've noticed this trend- I don't know if it's the farm thing or what, but a lot of killers out there I feel like they grew up and their parents just made them work so they've learned how to work. But with that being said, my dad had me outside working. I learned how to work outside, but not only that I learned how to enjoy my work even though most people hated it. I'm sure you learned the same thing. Like farming. It sucks when you're a kid. Right? Nothing like bailing hay, dude. 100 degrees outside the heat is blaring down on you. And then after you're dog tired, you got to go into the Hayloft and you've got to put it all into the barn and it's hot. There's no air you can't breathe. It is the worst. Yeah, no, absolutely. See, yeah, you learned some hard work, but that I feel like for me it didn't translate too much into like the online work. I had a really hard time with that at the beginning. Interesting. Then I went to college and I feel like that actually opened up my eyes that I could actually accomplish more things than I realized. And I'm sure you probably realized that even with like the one semester that you went to, like, Hey, I can actually do all this stuff. The biggest thing that I learned from college or that I was made aware of is that there's actually monetary value in the information that's in your head. But afterwards I would go and I look back at that and I understand now that there is monetary value in this stuff and I learned that through business. But I will say that there are certain elements of the college experience. I went to a community college. There was definitely valuable in that mental transition process for sure. That's interesting. That's cool stuff, dude. Well, Hey, I want to ask you some more questions here. We know that you were not just given this, it wasn't just a silver platter. Here you go. What are some of the hard things that you went through? What are some of the things that people go through as they become someone like you or they build their business like you did? So first off, the first little roadblock that everybody runs into, I think, I feel like less people run into it now just because more people are in the online space and people that are serious in this kind of like get into it. But if you're a complete Newbie, like I was, have no online friends, for sure you're going to run into this is nobody watches you at the beginning, right? Like no one. And I did a webinar yesterday. I actually showed a screenshot, like my first I used to try to publish on Youtube right when I first got started, like I had no money, so I was like literally taking the lamp shades off of lights and setting them on either side to try to get better. I got four views. The first facebook group I ever launched in the first month got three members, right? Like nobody cares. And so I think that at the beginning was really difficult. Thankfully I just liked to talk and so I'm like, well, if nobody listens to me, Dang it, I will listen to me, you know what I mean? Put my voice out there. So I think that was really, really difficult for me. And I think it's difficult for a lot because when you see that the person you're following is getting a thousand views and you're getting 62, that's a really big mental block. And so I think that was more of like an overall difficult thing. And then once I got into it, dude, I'll tell you the worst day of my life, I'm telling you the worst day and I've been through some crap in my life. But something I would not ever want to go back to December, I think it was 29th, 2016, so this is coming up on two years ago, not too long ago, my first webinar ever and we hired a guy, paid him the package, was $25,000 and I didn't have the $25,000 at the time. So we took out a payment plan on it and put down 15,000 up front, it's all the money I had. I think I had like my business partner and I combined. Mind you, we're both paying for an apartment. I don't have a job at this point. I think combined we had like $2,000 and I make it count. We put down every penny on this guy to help us build our webinar. And we were convinced that we had a good course. It was on instagram. We had grown probably over a million, 2 million followers probably at this time. So like we knew what we were doing and we told him, we're like, we're going to get a ton of people registered for this Webinar. And he didn't believe us. And I was like, no dude, you don't understand. Like we have a lot of followers on instagram, like we will push traffic. And so we went through and we worked as hard as we knew how. I talk about learning how to learn. Like I didn't know how to learn at this point. I didn't know how to receive that level of information, but I was giving it my all and this guy should've told us up front that we were not the right fit, that he didn't want our money. Like he should've said no. It was clearly obvious that we were not a good fit. But we went through and so we built this webinar, 2,700 people registered, zero ads spent. So this was a warm audience from Instagram. So it's not truly warm, but it's a warm audience. 1000 people showed up for the Webinar. Actually thousand and four. We maxed out the room and people couldn't get in. One sale. One sale? Hundreds of emails of- F you! Go to hell. You're never going to be successful. You're a scam artist. This was the worst webinar ever. Can I get an hour of my life back? You should pay me to do it. I'm talking the lowest of lows, like I would pay $100,000 to not have to go back to that day, right? It was that bad. And so I'm like going through this process, I bawled my self to sleep that night because we worked so hard and I was like, I owe $15,000 to this guy now, right? I put down $15 and 15 that was supposed to come from this webinar. I only made one sale and everybody hates me. And so at that point when you're in that moment, that's a defining moment for people's lives. And so when people are like, Josh, you know, it's easy for you to do blah, blah, blah. I'm like, no, no, no, no. That's a misconception that it's easier when you have an audience and I don't want to scare anybody away from trying to build an audience. It's the most amazing thing ever. The amount of lives you can change, but everything you do is in the spotlight when you're in the audience and especially in business. The next day I wrote up. Wrote a very long email and I did a live stream apologizing to everyone there and I said, look guys, I'm really, really good at social media and I know what I'm talking about. Clearly I don't know what the heck I'm doing on webinars and I'm sorry. Right. And so we offered a followup training with no pitch for free, just sat on there for an hour. We just broke down on strategy and we turned that into a good scenario in the sense of we gained a lot of respect from the people that actually followed us, but everybody else hated us. I mean really truly hated me at that given point. And so when I see people like Logan Paul and his controversy was like millions, I can't imagine what that guy's going through. So that was the worst day of my life up until that point and still to this day, like in business, just awful. And so that was a mental game right there. Big Time. That is huge. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think that's just something that people actually need to see and hear because it's so true. Yeah, it's not easy, but as long as you just keep going and you push through. There was guy named Hyrum Smith who I listen to from Franklin Covey. He said pain is inevitable. Misery is optional. Yup. I totally agree. You could have just taken that day and blamed that guy for the rest of your life and never done anything else and just ended up getting a nine to five and not grown an audience after that because you feel like you failed or you push through it just like you did and you made it happen. That's awesome dude. And I think the other thing with failure in that lesson specifically, and I love what you said there about blaming that guy because that's your initial reaction. Believe me, like the first thing that I did the next morning, because I got on Voxer with that guy and I said, here's what happened. We got issues, right? Not blaming that person and turning that into a learning experience- a lot of good, but mentally it has messed me up for future webinars and stuff. It really did. Even I did a Webinar just yesterday, dude, like you hit that Go Live button and you are in terror. Right? And you're freaking out and then when you can hit done, you're in terror because you're like, is my inbox about to explode my, about to make no money. You know what I mean? That happened, right? But you learned from that experience and you have to go through and let that experience go and not hold a grudge to that person and really learn from it and truly become that person. And if you only look at it from a financial standpoint and you only look at it from a business standpoint, you're going to have a really hard time with it. Look at it from a life standpoint. When you look at it from a wow, look what I learned from a non financial standpoint, it makes it a lot easier. And like you said, you don't have to be in misery over it. I've been through a couple of situations I can think of. One that was just, I couldn't really hold a grudge against that person for doing what they did and pretty much screwed me over on my entire business. But I look at it now and I'm like, man, I learned a ton from that and I'm glad I actually went through it then instead of later on. So yeah, totally. Just learn from those experiences. Let's get into social media. All right. Tell us some stuff. We want some gold here, some truth. You have to understand from a pure growth standpoint on social media, there are literally only two things that matter and I know people are like, what are the three secrets? You're probably looking for me to drop some hacks and we can get into that. I'm happy to do that, but excuse me, if you listened to Russell Brunson about funnels, he talks about the different elements of what makes a successful funnel on social media regardless of the platform, regardless of the message, whatever. There's only two things that matter and that number one is the story and how you deliver that story, like the content piece of it. Number two is exposure, right? Those are the two things you're going for. And so what you have to look at from a core element is if you don't know what your message is slash what your story is, then you can't get exposure on that story, right? And so the Hashtags, you use a facebook ad, you run the interviews that you do, all that is getting the exposure to your message. And so once you have that, I suppose we've gotten people that have had told the message, they'll get thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of views on their instagram profile or their facebook page or whatever and nobody will follow. And then you've gotten people that have gotten like 10,000 views on their facebook page or instagram page and like half of those people turn into followers. What's the difference? The difference is your content and your storyline behind it. You've got to give people a reason to follow you. And the only reason that makes you different or unique than anyone else is your story. And so when you have that story, and I work with personal brands. People that want to grow an audience. If you're not doing a personal brand, then there's a storyline behind whatever it is that you are trying to grow. Look at Nike. Look at Maverick by Logan Paul, look at these big huge econ stores, the ones that make it are the ones that have a storyline and the ones that really build that brand around it. So I would say those two things are the things that you need to focus on and everything that you teach and everything that you learn. It only applies back to one of those. You're either getting more exposure and I'm talking purely from a growth standpoint, not a monetization sample, but like from a growth standpoint, it either ties back to your message and story or it ties back to the amount of exposure that you're going to get. One of those two. And what do you think would happen if you kind of went off from your story into a different area? Like what if you broke from what you normally teach what you do? I just had the thought come into my head that if someone's got this story or this following and this is kind of like what they're teaching and this is what they're in,Russell Brunson in funnels, and he were to go somewhere else, like what would that do, do you know? So I would say one or two things. If you're breaking, if you're moving into something else and it's part of your storyline, then you're fine. Right? But what if you're not focused on that one, I guess? Right? Exactly. Why do you follow someone? Right? You follow someone because number one, you follow a story because you want to know what happens next, right? But you follow a specific story because of how you relate to that story. And so if this story is all over the place, are you really gonna follow it? Think about if I'm telling you a story and I'm like, dude, let me tell you this. One time I was at the beach and all the sudden we were eating ice cream and oh dude, when I was over here on this grass. You'd be like, wait, what happened? What happened to the beach? Right. I'll get back to that here in just a second, but dude, this grass. I was mowing this grass. You'd be like what are you doing? You know? And so if you're straying all over the place and you're hopping from this to this, this is really hard for people to know what it is that you're about and the story that they're trying to follow. So if you're straying from that, if you're straying from whatever it is and you're jumping from thing to thing, I try not to and people think they have to have it all figured out right away, you know? Right? If you're authentic and you're real and you put forth your passion and your why is why you always lead with why, then you can have different elements of the story and like your core audience will know that you're trying different things, but you've got to have that core message in that core story along what you're doing. And so for me right now, and I was sharing this with you before the podcast, there was a point not too long ago, six, seven, eight months ago when I was about to just dip out, I was done. And the reason you don't always share that, but the people that you do share that with, they go, okay, well they understand the process because they know your big vision. And so when you're like, Hey, I'm leading with this vision of I want to make the world a better place by providing people with information that's going to change their life. I'm all about education. And so for me right now, the vehicle, I'm using social media, that's what people know me by, but my core audience knows that my vision is to make the world a better place and change the world through education. That's what I've told my audience. And so every live stream that I'm signing off on is, go out, think different, make the world a better place. You know, James Lives. And so if I were to jump from social media and let's say make a shift to PR or make a shift to funnels or whatever that is, and that was my focus, my core audience that's actually going to follow and buy from me, as long as I tell them that storyline process, they're going to know, okay, he's shifting vehicles but he's still on the same route. But if you just jumped and you don't give them context, if you just jump and you don't share that story and you don't lead with that overall vision of what you're doing, then it's impossible for them to know what's going on and they're not going to fall. Yeah, totally. I think that helps a ton just to know kind of what the focus is on. A confused mind will not follow because they don't understand it. If it doesn't make sense to them or they don't get that emotionally attached to it, then they're not going to care. Think of it this way, right? Imagine you were following an instagram account. Instagram account was all about sunsets. You love sunsets, you love the beach. And I follow one. I think it's actually called that sunsets and it's beautiful pictures. You're following it for that reason, right? If all of sudden they went and deleted all that content one day and started posting pictures of themselves, are you going to continue to follow? No, of course not. And I actually had this example, I did that and I was building an instagram account. We had, I don't know, probably 100,000 followers or so. And it was a luxury account, like houses, beautiful cars and things of that nature. And I was like, dude, I want to be famous, right? Because at this point I hadn't really grown my personal brand. I was like, what if I just post some pictures of me up there? So like every now and then I would just throw up a picture and first off the engagement drops, like 90 percent, right? Like nobody likes it, engages on it. And then the random people that do, there'll be like Who the heck is it? Who are you? Like, why is this on my newsfeed? You know? And they'll literally just comment on it. They don't want it. It's not what they signed up for. And so people, you have to remember that the thing that you use to attract people is oftentimes the thing that they're going to remember you for and follow you for. And so that's why there's nothing inherently wrong about driving a Lamborghini or going off and having a ton of money sitting in your passenger seat for some reason, right? But if that's the message that you're putting off and that's what people are following you for, then that's the type of person you're going to attract. So as soon as you switch that up and you don't have that anymore, they're not going to follow you. Right. So like imagine if Tai Lopez stopped posting pictures of cars and girls and you know, things like that, like one of his core audience that, whose life he's changed continue to follow him. Yes. But with the mass majority of people that follow him, would you still be Tai Lopez? Like you wouldn't because that's what they follow him for, you know. So it's really important to just understand what are you using to attract people and is that really your core message? Which is why you'll, I mean, you might see me in a Lamborghini, but you're never gonna see me using Lamborghinis to attract millions of followers. That's not my style. Yeah, totally. No mine either, right? Because I don't think lamborghinis changed the world. They're awesome, but they're not going to go make the world a better place. Exactly. Right? You can have a good time and I'm all about having fun and a good time while you're working hard for sure. Is there any last one golden nugget that you want to drop? Let me drop a few golden go bombs here. Do you want to focus more on instagram or folks who are on facebook or general? Which one do you think is the better one at this time right now to be focusing on or both? Instagram, depending upon how your audience uses it. Right? Instagram drives a lot of traffic or can drive a lot of traffic. There's less buyers on the instagram platform now. I'll get to that in just a second. It's much easier to grow on instagram and you need to cultivate and nurture your audience a lot on instagram. It's hard to do that in an automated way. So instagram is a very time consuming platform, but it can be a very profitable time, which is one of the biggest problems. And actually the reason that I just got out of the instagramming, is because a lot of my clients, especially these bigger names, like they expected an automated solution because that was what they're used to, you can do that on facebook because you can place ads and do that content. You can't do that on Instagram, right? It's much more difficult. So from a standpoint of monetization, if you want to drive a ton of traffic and you don't want to have a personal brand and you don't want to spend a whole lot of time on it, great. You can go to Instagram, you can post some viral photos of entrepreneurship and grass and that's great. If you want to actually cultivate an audience, if you want to be on instagram platform, you're going to need time. Time is what goes into it. Now. That's evolving. Now on facebook. On the other hand, buyers on facebook, the same person, and this was back early 2017. So it's probably different. Instagram's got a really huge shift in 2018. But at one point the same exact person on instagram and on facebook was eight times more likely to buy on facebook. Then it was on instagram. So they see an ad for the same thing on the two platforms, they are eight times more likely to buy on facebook. So now you go, okay, well why the heck then would I even spend any of my time on instagram and it's because traffic on instagram is like 10 times cheaper than it is on facebook. So for those of you that are in the paid advertising space or are in the space of marketing, what we will do is we will acquire the initial customer or the initial follower I should say on instagram and then we will drive them to facebook as fast as we possibly can. So let's say you didn't want to grow an instagram page yourself, but you wanted to capitalize on traffic because it's cheap, right? So I'll set up a page and my only goal on that page is to get people to either opt in or really just hit the page. And here's why, I ideally would like them to opt in to our freebies, but I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever pay for an ad on instagram where I'm selling something. I'm always giving it away for free from shout outs from other influencers unless I'm going to do a super longterm deal with them. But if it's like I'm buying 10 jobs from them, I'm sending them to a Freebie offer, I'm putting a facebook pixel on that page and that facebook pixel is specific for that instagram audience. I'm going to go buy $3,000 in shout outs from an instagram influencer. I'm going to get literally tens of thousands of visitors to visit that page because they're doing swipe up. Like we were getting clicks for. I think we were getting Webinar registrations at one point for eighty three cents. We paid a thousand bucks and we got two or 3000 impressions to the page that we did the shout out from but now that facebook pixel has fired thousands of times, so you've got a lot of good data and as long as the quality of the account that you're buying them from has good quality followers, we typically buy story shout outs rather than post shout outs, photos with the swipe up. People are actually watching and engaged. Now I have an audience facebook pixel to go retarget on facebook and I can create lookalike audiences off of that. So I have a wired my 5,000 impressions for pennies on the dollar compared to what I would have paid for an initial 5,000 impressions on facebook and now I can just go retarget on there. And so from a paid advertising standpoint, that's a great strategy. From an organic, it is easier to grow fast on instagram. It is easier to grow loyal on facebook. That got interesting fast, more loyal on facebook and just the following mainly on instagram. That's really interesting because I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong, your audience probably don't want to be like celebrity influencers and majority of them, yeah, I'd say probably a majority of them there, they're just looking to kind of grow probably. Yeah. Mainly just kind of grow a little bit of their, uh, let people know a little bit more what they do. Not like. Exactly. Number one tip I can give for you guys, if you don't have a facebook group, you need to open one. Now. We just got an amazing testimonial back from Steven actually outside of publishing the facebook group that we helped him create and grow is the single single greatest thing that has driven his business forward. So you know, when you, when you understand that, like you need a face book group and you do it in a and for those of you that are watching on a podcast, you probably won't be able to visualize this. But if you're watching on the video, like imagine your social media as a circle, your facebook group needs to be at the center of it and everything needs to revolve around that because facebook group is the most interactive and intimate a social media platform for two reasons. They get to know you because there's an instagram stories which are great, but it's going to bring you the highest level of Roi because you can do live streams in there. You can make posts in there and 90 percent of the content in a facebook group is not your content, but you get credit for. Right? So if you have an engaged audience, they're publishing tons and tons of content. Your benefiting from that. And so if your focus is on growing rather than when you're on podcasts, be like, yeah, check out my website or check out my youtube channel or check out this. Or you just send everybody to the facebook group, podcasts, youtube channels, twitter, instagram, email, snapchat, wherever you're at. If you send everyone to the facebook group, then they, number one, see that you're awesome because you got all these members in there, they're all interacting with each other. Number two, they actually consume your content. I go in there, I go live. Yesterday I did a live and in the first like four hours I got 1.7k views in the first hour. Two hours, right? And so they watched, they consume, they interact, they engage. So do that. And this is once again coming down to exposure. Alright, my, the single greatest thing that will drive your business forward without a question is interviews and live streaming. Right? So really even talking about publishing on his podcast, I did that exact same thing except I did it on facebook live, that's only difference. And the reason I did it on facebook live is because number one, I didn't really know about podcasting when I first got started in entrepreneurship. I thought podcast were for losers. But I went and did it on facebook because that were my audience was. And so I would go and if there was a facebook group, I would go to the admin and I would say, hey. I started with one number, just like most of you will start with, I'm not that special, but when you get your first 100 members, 200 and 500, whatever you got, but once you hit that thousand number mark, you got leverage. So you can go to these facebook group owners and anybody else that has between one and 5,000 members, I hit him up. Or if you have a really good skill that a lot of people need, facebook group owners love that. All right, so you can teach something. Let's say you're really good at, I don't know, seo. You're really good at designing funnels. You're really good at anything, any skill that could potentially go find facebook groups of your ideal audience and you might be like, well why would they let me in there? I'm like, dude, it's your ideal audience, it's also their ideal audience. The more value you can provide to them. And I sat on interview after interview after interview, after interview and that's what blew me up. And then on top of that I live streamed for like 170 something days straight every single day. I did a live stream and so all the sudden I was getting tons of massive exposure and I was telling my skillset with a little bit of my story to each one of these places and luring them in and then they would come back and think about it. What's the first thing that you do when you see a live stream that somebody else is interviewing, you can click on their profile. You're going to go, where the heck is this dude? Right, so you go the profile, you've got that whole entire profile optimized for the link to your group and a call to action and all that, and then you've got 176 days of nothing but live streams. They're going to go consume that content and that is more of my story. That's more my storyline, so now I actually give them a reason on top of that 30 minute snippet, I give them a reason to come follow me and so this is true, like if you're trying to grow a facebook group or a facebook audience of any sort, exposure is your best friend and you get exposure through interviews and leveraging other people's audiences that already exists. I've never spent a single penny on ads. That's huge man. All this is huge. Why do you follow someone? You follow someone because of their story. You can be like, oh no, I follow so and so, because they're really good at photography. No, you follow that person because they told a story that got you interested in their photography because there are 10,000 photographers out there, but you follow that one, right? Why? Because of their story, so you got to have your story in whatever it is that you teach, and on top of that, you got to get exposure to that story, so go tell that story to tons and tons and tons and tons of people. That's the biggest thing, I want to end with this for you. Then I'll turn it back to you. People are like Josh, there are only so many ways I can share my story. People will eventually get bored of it. All I want to tell you to do is go look at Gary Vaynerchuk instagram page. Okay? And it will be like, what? I'm like, dude, the guy says the same five things over and over and over and over again. Give value, give value one, right? Hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle. I want to buy the New York jets. It's five or six things, said a different way. You know, I value young kids. I value. It's the same thing, but you love him. Grant Cardone's the same way. Tai Lopez, the same thing. Russell's a little bit better about getting interesting, but in reality it's really just the same stuff because people need to hear it different ways and people are fascinated by it and so when you can go and you say it and you tell your story, I've told the Webinar story 20k times. It's the same storyline, but I tell it a little bit differently based on the audience, so if I know that one audience is a little bit more beginner, I use more beginner terms and if I know they're a little bit more advanced, I use advanced terms. If I know that they're real estate agents, I'm going to tell things that are only pertinent to real estate agents. Right, and so just tell your story over and over and over again and remember, most people are only going to hear it once or twice. Most people are not actually consuming every piece of content you put out and the ones that are, they're regardless. They are not going to get sick of it. Like I listened to Russell, his salesforce blog where he went to salesforce blog, 12 minute vlog I have ever watched in its entirety. Why? I knew exactly what was gonna happen. I was like, dude, this guy's going to salesforce, his competitor I want to know. Right? He's going to tell that story 10,000 times and I'm probably gonna watch it 10,000 times. Why? Something that I'm interested in. Right? So tell your story. It's so important and don't be put into this little box of like, oh, facebook ads are the where it's at, or you don't listen to me and go, well, Josh says to only do instagram. No, like go, go, go get exposure. Right? Like I didn't stop at facebook groups. There's a funny story about how I got a lot of exposure and people don't think it's possible. I got interviewed twice on grant cardone's show. I've seen it, I've seen it. He promoted the our instagram course during the first 10 x growth con on his website. You know how that came about, we did not pay for those interviews. I literally added Grant Cardone on snapchat and I sent him a message and every day for like a week, I sent a period to bump my snapchat the top of his feed. All right. Because I'm like, dude, if I can get in front this guy like major exposure and guess what? He replied and my message was something super simple. It was like, hey grant, I know that you are looking for an instagram person, right? Because I did my market research, got to know that and I went and I was like, I know you need an instagram person. My business partner and I are really good. We got proven course, x number of followers. Would love to help you out in any way that's possible. His message back to me was so short and simple. It was, this is awesome. Would love to have you. Call this number and gave me a number. I had no idea who I was calling, right? Can you give me a name? Nothing. And it was intended up being Robert Syslow, which is director of video marketing and so now I've got Robert's number. We got down there and we're like, this is awesome. Because I sent them a message on snapchat. Why? Because I was looking for exposure. Just little things, little things, dude. I think that's the biggest, like false belief mindset that people have is like, oh, I can never get big enough people to interview or they don't ever want me to interview them or actually let me do it. You know what I mean? Nowadays is so freaking easy to get into somebody's circle. It really is. What's the big main point for them? Right. I can't offer a grant cardone exposure. Right. Or at least at the time I couldn't. Maybe I could a little bit now, but like I couldn't do it, but I found the one thing that I did, He was actually probably my first start in entrepreneurship because I was in sales. He's one heck of a guy, let me tell you, so you find out one thing and if it's not in your wheelhouse, figure out a way to make it in your wheelhouse. Or for example, there was a guy by the name of Jason Stone, we used to be more friends when I was more in the instagram game. He's a big Instagram influencer. So when I first started out back when I had 100,000 followers, this guy probably had like 3 million right? Between his accounts. The biggest one was probably like 1.5 million. So I'm reaching out to this guy and there's nothing that I can offer him about instagram, which is the only little thing that I know. So I'm like, how do I go and how do I get ahead? And so I literally would just watch every one of his stories, every one of his live streams looking for that thing. And I'm like, what is it that he needs? What is it that he needs? And then I found out that he said one day he's like, right now we are thinking about getting into youtube and kind of want to do this stuff. And I was like, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding. So I went to Jose who is my business partner at the time and I was like, dude, you know, Youtube, right? And he's like, yeah, we know some stuff. I was like, who do we know that we could connect with Jason? And so we found, I forget, I don't even know who it was, but there was some video editor guy that had like a bunch of experience with youtube, Tim somebody I think. Anyway, so he reached out to Jason and send him an email and were like, dude, Jason, big fan and I'm talking about making videos. And then we're like, hey, saw on your story that you're looking into youtube, would love to connect you to our buddy over here that does this. Sure he would hook you up with a sweet deal as a referral, blah, blah, blah. Would that be interesting to you? And so he emails back and we kind of go back and forth and that's how we struck up a friendship and got to know him. And then at the event he sees us and he's on stage. He's like, what's up guys? We got pictures with him and that's how we got into his circle and now we get some good deals. It's is little things. It's not like you were huge or big influencer. No! I was a nobody. And I wouldn't say this though. And I want to say it with caution. I would super not recommend reaching out to grant cardone if you have no results. Don't waste is his time. Right? But Dana Derek talks about the dream 100 strategy and that's basically what this is more or less. I'm a big fan of the dream 100 strategy. I am not a big fan of it as an actual business model because it's not consistent. You don't drive consistent traffic that way. And so if you're trying to build a balanced business where you can know numbers, dollar in dollar out, I don't recommend this, but I recommend it in addition to that because it can bring additional massive amounts of exposure. That's just for me and take that advice more or less as you will, but when you're at the beginning, reach out to a person that you can directly affect that has an ideal audience in your area. So I made friends with Arnie guesty early on. He wasn't that big. It paid off well. But also early on I made friends with Jason Stone. I could offer him nothing. Virtually nothing, right? I had no experience compared to what it was. So I found that thing. Don't start by going, I'm going to dream 100. Gary Vaynerchuk, you got nothing to offer that guy, dude. Like I'm sorry, but start with someone. And then as you work your way up, go bigger and bigger and bigger and then every now and then once you kind of have a feel for what you're doing, take a shot. Right? I took a shot on grant Cardone, did not expect it to pay off. It did! It changed my business, right? Moved it forward in a direction. Jumpstarted a lot of things. Got of a lot of exposure from that. But I didn't depend upon that for my whole business model. I didn't go like we're with greg cardone, let's take out loans and go this and do this. I used it to drive my business forward and moving forward. And now grant cardone knows who I am and so does Robert and all that. I've been on his show. I want to say thank you so much for being on here and dropping as many gold nuggets as you did. I know my listeners will get a ton out of this and anybody who waches in the future- this is huge man and this is stuff that's going to stick around for a long time too, the stuff that you shared wasn't just like, oh, this is what's happening this week, no- it's stuff that's going to be sticking around for awhile. Sure. It changes, but the principles are all there, you know? Yeah. And on that note, I think it's really good to remember when a new platform comes out ike when I started on Instagram, there's a lot of hacks or tricks to get ahead, as any platform develops. And you look at the big platforms right now, facebook, instagram, youtube, like those are your three big pillars. When you understand that leg, they all function the same way more or less. None of those three platforms produce their own content. Okay? All of them are driven by users, meaning the longer they'll user stays on the platform, the more money that they make. And the thing that brings or that keeps people on platform is a good content. Instagram is not your enemy. People are always like, oh, the algorithm. I'm like, no, the algorithm actually would work amazingly in your favor if you actually put out good content. So understand that if a new platform emerges and evolves, yes, there's going to be hacks and tricks to get majorly ahead and to capitalize upon that. But there's also a lot of risk and there's also a lot of confusion on that. However, a lot of the social media strategies that we talk about here has very little to do with the platform. The basic stuff I don't want to waste your guys' time on like make sure your profile is optimized. That stuff is common sense guys. Right? Use your mind and think of, Hey, I'm doing my business online. I should probably look like a business owner. Right? There are certain logical things that you should do. But above and beyond the logical things, it really is like three or four core principles, whether it's in marketing or whether it's in this and I love the 80/20- rule the further along and getting business and the more I realized that it's applicable, 20 percent of this stuff drives 80 percent of the facts. Right. And at 80 percent of stuff that you do is basically worthless. When you double down on that 20 percent, I just hired an assistant actually long ago, actual full time and I pay her 40 hours a week, the whole nine yards. I'm a legit company now. Letting go of that outsourcing stuff, I felt like my business was going to fall apart. There's no way I could possibly outsource posting on instagram. I could never teach someone my skills of being able to do it. It's not true, you know? The same thing is true in social media. Eighty percent of the stuff that you guys are worrying about, like my live stream got cutoff 30 minutes in and I wasn't able to wrap up. It is not going to change your business. Stop worrying about that stuff. People are not going to unfollow you because one live stream of yours got cut out or because you accidentally dropped your phone or you accidentally made a slip up. You know what I mean? That just makes you look normal, it's happens. I think it's actually good at certain points or different times. And I think that there's a balance between being real and being professional. Social media is typically that place to be a little bit more real. As soon as you click off of social media and you enter that funnel and you enter that Webinar or you enter that sales call or whatever it is, you need to be very professional. Right now you're running a business, social media to relate, you can get away. People see me all the time and they're like, Oh Josh, you get on live streams or whatever with your shorts and your this and that, and you're just so real and authentic. I'm like, yes, but if you talk to me in person, you do what you say you're going to do. You don't mess up and you follow through. If I'm paying you money, you do your job and if you're paying me money I am going to do mine. I don't go, oh, it's okay. No, like we're running a business here, right? Social media, and this is where I think a lot of people get it wrong. Social media is just a marketing tool when you're using it for that. Right? And so people are like, oh no, it's my lifestyle and I want to be all truly authentic in this. If that's how you run your business, you're probably not going to get very far. So use social media as the tool that is designed and don't become obsessed with it like I did at the beginning. Don't make social media your reality because once you make social media your reality, a lot of your life falls apart and I've seen it happen to a lot of people. It's happened to me in certain areas, so be careful with it, but it's very, very powerful. Wow. Well, thanks again so much Josh. I'm going to wrap this up. This is a little bit longer of an interview. Thank you so much for taking your time and spending it with everybody that's going to listen to this and the followers. Thanks a ton. We'll talk to you guys later. Are you looking to jumpstart your business by learning or getting help from the real experts. Go to LearningFromTheExperts.com to find preapproved experts that I've handpicked for you! Please don't forget to let me know how I'm doing by subscribing, rating and leaving feedback.  

If you wanna know how I've launched all my content, I ripped the audio from my presentation at Russell Brunson's Inner Circle... Hey, what's going on, everyone? It's Steve Larsen. You're listening to Sales Funnel Radio and I'm excited for this episode. What I did for this episode is I wanted to rip the audio from the presentation that I gave at the Inner Circle. We just barely had the Inner Circle, and it was packed. It was one of the bigger groups. It was a bunch of fun, just absolutely loved it. I thought I'd rip from you guys the presentation. If you don't know the way that those presentations are handled, everybody gets up and everybody speaks, but the way it is ... One of the reasons I like this Mastermind so much ... I've seen others, I've watched ... What I like is everybody's very giving, and so what we do is we stand up and everybody gives something incredible to the group; either something that's working, some cool hacks, something that's cutting edge, something that's just jaw-dropping, "Oh, my gosh! That's incredible." You know what I mean? Then, at the end of it there's an ask and you ask, "Hey, these are the things I'm struggling with. Could you guys help me with X, Y, and Z?" That combination between the two where you've given before you ask is amazing. We obviously see that in selling to our customers and selling to everybody. The more you can give, obviously, create this feeling of reciprocity, well, it's no different inside of the Inner Circle. What I did is I ripped the audio from my presentation. We only have 22 minutes, it's really, really fast, so I would love to dive more deeply into this at some point, as this is a topic that I've been obsessing over recently. Anyways, this is cool stuff, and this is how I launched my podcast. A lot of you guys continue to ask me those questions... If you have never heard the episode 60 and 61 of Sales Funnel Radio, it will walk you through my content strategy, how I handle it all, but I think you'll like from the standpoint of, as far as how I stack together my episodes when I launch my shows. This is super powerful. I've had a lot of students now who are actually in top-rankings of iTunes with their podcasts, because of the same strategy that I teach with these, so this is powerful stuff. Know that there is a lot of data behind it, there's a lot of success stories behind it. I know the strategy works, this is how I launched my own stuff. Anyway, take notes if you were thinking ... Especially, if you're going to do a blog, or a podcast or whatever, it doesn't matter if you're going to do a podcast or not. This is any type of content strategy, as far as what do you say? What are you doing? How do you call your shot? How do you become the guru on the mountain without being perceived as an idiot or a jerk or self-centered? This is how you do it, and I'm excited for this episode. Anyways, we'll cut over to the show here and this is the audio again of my presentation to the Inner Circle. Thanks for listening. I spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today, and now I've left my 9:00 to 5:00 to take the plunge and build my million dollar business. The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. Hey, I'm excited for this, though. I have waited so freaking long to be a part of this group. It's cool. I'm like a combo of really introspective moment, look back, and like, "Yeah," at the same time. That's what I feel like, anyway. It's been a long road, though. When I first saw that email come in from Russell I was walking through the basketball gym, and I started reading the email. I'm like, my face as I'm reading it goes like, "Oh, it's from Russell," and that's when my face starts going, I was like, "No!" I stopped and I responded to him that the Inner Circle is closing. I was like, "Don't close, I'm on my way! I don't have $25,000." I showed him the email like six months ago. He was like, "You know it was an autoresponder, right?" I was like, "Yeah, I know. I just needed to ..." because I didn't see that. Anyway, so it's a good email, though. [inaudible 00:04:01] I could show you some day. I want to show you my support team for how I got here. This is my support team. That's Maya. I call her Thigh master, because her thighs are like the two-year-old 12-ounce steaks. Do you know what I mean? Chewy thigh. Anyway, she's the Thigh master. That's Brnley. I call her Pack and Play, because she will randomly dive at me off of couches with no warning. Anyway, she's awesome, playful. Here's my wife. I call her Princess Babe. That's been the name in my phone since we dated, because ... well, duh. The whole thing started though when I was ... I really wanted to go to Funnel Hacking Live in 2016. I had no cash for it. I started bootstrapping my way there and I started trading funnels for plane tickets. Funnels for hotel nights. Funnels for event nights. Things like that. I remember I was riding my ... I was riding ... Do you know those city bikes in San Diego? You can rent them or whatever, slide a card in. What money I had, I did not want to go and actually spend money on a cab. We were living off loans. I had been building funnels for companies and making them successful. I just hadn't charged for stuff yet, I was just trying to make my story... I was staying on the other side of San Diego, and I had my luggage over my shoulder riding my bike over to Funnel Hacking Live through the city, around the bay. That's how I did it. As I was riding the bike over there, I was like, "I'm going to do whatever this man tells me to do, but I will never publish." That was the sentence that came out of my noggin. I was like, "I'm never, ever, ever going to do this publishing game. I do not want to be one of those publishing people. I will not become a character on Facebook Live. I'm not doing any of that. I'm not doing it." The first- Character in a comic book. Right? The first day ... Right? I know! Then the first day, and part of it was because I was voted the nicest kid in high school in my graduating class, but it was because I was shy. I had this near clinical fear of adults and massive anxiety; huge insecurities, I've dealt with a lot. Even into my early 20s. It's true. That's why I was like, "I'm never going to do that." The first thing he says is, "Everyone should start publishing a lot." I was, "Crap! It's the thing I don't want to do!" I gave a lot to get there. We take the picture. Two day later I was interviewing here, and two days after that graduated, two days after that I was sitting next to The Man. I'm seeing Russell going on the camera, "What's up everybody?" Then, he's over on podcast, "What's up everybody?" Then on blog typing, "What's up everybody?" I'm like, "There's something to this publishing thing. I've got to do this." Since then, I want to ... I didn't ... I spent three hours trying to figure out the question to ask you guys on Wednesday. I realized, sitting here, you guys already answered it. I was like, "Dang it," but I couldn't believe how many of you are not publishing, because I started with, not just with no email list, there was no list. No one knew who I was. I want to show you how I launched these two podcasts, because today we should cross 160,000 downloads. It's freaking nuts. It's the content strategy behind it. I'm going to show you guys real quick the strategy behind it. I just want you to know that it works. Here is, as of six weeks ago, six people I brought through, they're in the top, if not 100, then 25 for the MLM category in iTunes now. I'm going between number one and number two on Stitcher. Darn you, [Simon Chan 00:07:24]. I will beat him. I'm number six in that category. Then, if you look at the Sales Funnel side. I want to show you how I did it as a seriously shy person. Everyone of you have to do this. If you guys have massive businesses with these cool audiences, you are sitting on a goldmine. I want to show you real quick how I did it. With Sales Funnel Radio, the way I started it, that was when I started about a year and a half ago. There's been no ad spend on any of these. Can't spend it profitably yet, so I'm not. Anyways, if you think about this is the concept I came up with as I was launching this. I was so scared I didn't know what to talk about. I chose not to talk. What I did is I thought, I'm going to reach two levels up at all time. If I go through and I say, "If this I me and my level of influence as a brand new person, and there's someone who's a little bit above me, someone who's a little bit above me," and it's like C-list influencers; people who have sway. People with lists... You think through, "Oh, my gosh. There's someone above them. Someone above them. Then there's Russell Brunson. Wow!" Let's say it's Tony Robbins, which in my mind I've switched now. "The Pope!" We got at the very top ... Who's at the top? Batman. Okay? All right. You think through that. I thought, "What if I get other people to do the talking for me and I just provide the platform?" I'm just the platform. It is ridiculous what it has done for me. The Dream 100 comes to you when you are able to boost their status. I started getting a whole bunch of people to just get on my show. This is the pattern that I used to launch that first show. My very first episode wasn't even me talking. I was so scared. I was like, "Who's two levels above?" Then when I felt like I had reached up, I reached another two. I reached another two. I didn't want to be ... and it's no hit against John Lee Dumas, but that's all he does; interview, interview, interview. I don't want to get asked just interview questions. I also want to be seen and positioned as an expert when I do, so I lace in podcasts with myself and what I'm learning. I was sitting with a student in Dallas a little bit ago, a month ago, and we were chatting. He goes, "What are you going to do on episode 157?" I don't know, I'll figure that out when I end 156. He was like, "Well, aren't you going to run out of things to say?" I had this realization. You think I already know what I'm going to talk about. The huge secret is that you're learning with me. I can't batch four months of content, because I don't know if I'm going to be able to scrunch four months of learning into that amount of time. That's not my style. When I saw ... Anyway. When I saw [Peng Joon 00:09:53] do his thing, I was like, "Oh, we're super close to that already." I got six people. We have the sweet concept machine that's been moving and just a few tweaks and we're super close to what he's been doing. This is how I launched the first one. The second one I did, this was amazing, was, I thought through ... If you think through what the perfect webinar script is, it's not just for webinars. It is the basis of persuasion. What I started thinking through is, oh my gosh, what if I just took the first part of the perfect webinar script and I write an ordinance story for the audience I want to be buying from me later. The audience that I believe will listen to me. This is in an MLM space, and I took some concepts that everyone believes you need to be successful in that space. "Talk to friends and family. Lose all your relationships." I go through and I just  rocks at them as hard as I can. I literally wrote a webinar script and I wrote an ordinance story, the three more stories for the secrets and I turned them sideways; so episode number one was the ordinance story, episode number two was this story only for secret number one. The next episode's only the story for secret number two, only secret number three. Then, that let me go through ... By then, they're so freaking sold, so sold. I haven't even sold them anything, but I have tons of people who reach out to me consistently. Many of you have already. You're in here. They're like, "I listen to your podcast. It's amazing. When are you going to ask for my money somewhere?" I'm like, "Well, you just wait." Anyways, this is what I thought, is what if I combined them? That's what I've been teaching to my students lately and it is killing it. They're all over on iTunes and because what they've essentially done is sold their audience on why they should continue subscribing and listening. I combine them. Instead what I do, is I say, okay the first five episodes is going to be literally a sideways webinar. The next after that, I go through and I call my shot publicly and I say, "I have not done the thing that I'm here to show you that I've done yet. Instead, I want to show you that I'm just a few steps ahead and I will document my entire journey, both the successes and the failures. You won't want to miss this. If you don't want to go through the same pain yourself, follow me and sidestep it." It is crazy what happens. We're not at 3,000 or 4,000 downloads a day, but we're about 800-ish now. It's been awesome what that does. It's ridiculous. People feel like they know you so well when you get vulnerable with them. I talk about all this stuff. I talk about how shy I was as a kid. I talk about Russell was going, "What's happening you guys? What's happening guys? What's happening guys?" I learned this and that. It's really cool to see if you take the standpoint of a reporter and become the expert in front of them, crazy what that does. Here's the funnel that I kind of made up, but it works super well. I went through and I figured out, on all the end of my podcasts as well ... I'm going to hurry because there's something I want to ask you guys. I create this ridiculous bait. Something that is so insatiable and I say, go to blah-blah-blah.com and check it out. It's a free course, and when they go opt in, what they're actually doing, on the very first thing is my ordinance story again, that's the first video. Then I tell them, if you opt in, I'll give you this cool free course. Thank you so much. It's like a 72% off  on the thing, still, it's crazy, crazy. I haven't sold anything to them yet. I pre-frame the crap out of them, though. Over the next six days, it's essentially a product launch funnel. They don't know it. "It's a free course," but it's a product launch funnel. Underneath every video is the option for them to go learn and experience more from me. It just goes through my webinar registration page and I sell. My best sales, my best customers, my best advocates, Dream 100 people, future affiliates, all come from my podcast, not my ads. My hardest customers come from my ads. Anyway. That's super cool. I have a four-and-a-half-hour course I created on this.  Which as a gift to all of you guys, I will give it to all of you. It's super cool, if I may say so myself. It's pretty epic. It blows me away. I'm like, "Holy crap! A lot of you guys aren't publishing." I didn't even know how to get as big as you have been without doing this stuff. I'm excited for you to plug that in. If you have any questions, ask campaign. Can I ask really quick, you just ...them, like, "Ha!" Your hardest customers come from your ads. Your easiest customers come from your content ... Anyway, it just makes you think the frame they go through. It makes me want to take all my crappy hard ad customers and shove them to something like a podcast so that they become good customers and then we sell that at that point. Anyway. That's- Well, what I realized ... I studied Ryan Holiday like a beast. When you think about it, what controls public opinion? Publications do. Right? All of our ideas, our cultural ideas, come from the news. Whoever controls content, controls ideas. What I'm doing is creating ... I have the funnel going, which is awesome and it's doing really well, but I'm creating a content machine that can go through and it is repurposing the crap out of everything that I do to the nth degree. I've figured out I spend about $20,000 a month in hard cost in just my content machine only, because it spreads the ideas. I'm trying to change the MLM industry. I will not do that on my own, so instead I create mini-me's, teach them how to do it as well. When we are the only ones talking, the highest ranked on iTunes across blogs and everywhere, we affect ideas and belief. That's what I'm doing. Real quick, I want to ... I got to go. The reason this works is because story amplifies value. When you think about your offers, your offer has generic value inside of it. This American flag, what's the material cost for this flag? $20? Meaning retail value, probably about $20, maybe a dollar to actually manufacture. Watch. This certificate is from a senator ordering that this flag be flown on the White House for me specifically. Now, how much value just got added to this? It's worth way more than $20. I'll not trade it for that either. Isn't it interesting? Most the reason why you can't sell your thing for what you want to when you start doing things on a..., "Oh, my gosh. They just don't believe me." It's because your story suck. They don't understand yet. There's already inherent value in the flag, but what amplifies and explodes on multiples and exponential curve is story, because story gives context. Just one more thing before I ... I got to show you what I'm stuck on, because ... Dark example, a man walks down an alley. He shoots another man, and he dies. Context, it's a war zone. Shifted everything. Story creates context. Context amplifies value... Anyway. Is that helpful? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Freaking, geek out on this stuff like crazy. It's the fastest 22 minutes of my life. Oh, my gosh. I already talk fast, I'm winded. Okay. Wow. Thanks for listening. Yeah, please remember to write and subscribe. Hey, you want me to speak at your next event or Mastermind? Let me know what I can share that would be most valuable by going to SteveJLarsen.com and book my time now.

Sergey Galyonkin was just trying to fix a problem at work when we accidentally revolutionized the way we understand video game sales. We uncover the fascinating story behind Steam Spy, the people who use it, and the insights it gives us.  Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.video Become a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyer Funded by 4,197 Patrons.   -------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPTION; Danny: Hello and welcome to noclip, the show where we bring you the stories about the people who play and make video games. I'm your host, Danny O'Dwyer. Okay, I'm going to talk about European law for like 30 seconds. And I want you to trust me that it'll be worth your while. All right, 20 seconds, I swear. Okay? All right. Earlier this month, GDPR or the General Data Protection Regulation was introduced to law by the European Union. Its purpose is to protect people like you and me from the increasingly intrusive ways that our personal data is being used against us. The ramifications are already being felt with websites and online services around the globe scrambling to change their privacy policies. You've probably noticed all the emails about this in your spam box. So while all this has been going on, Steam, the biggest online marketplace for video games, has introduced a new privacy policy of their own. Valve, the company who runs Steam, had previously set it so that every person who had a Steam account had a list of all the games that they owned on their public profile. Sort of like a bookcase showing all the digital games you've collected. The new setting made it so that all of this, the bookcase, the collection, was automatically set to private. No big deal, right? It seems like a pretty sensible change to make. But sadly this has had a knock-on effect that has made an incredibly popular and useful data tool all but useless. Steam Spy is a website that used this public data to calculate game sales. You could type in a game's name and in an instant see everything from how many copies its sold to the countries its most popular and how often those players who own it, play it. Over the years this service has proved itself invaluable to people like indie developers trying to market their games, reddit users trying to learn about the industry, and games journalists mining for data. Steam Spy did something that was pretty important, it opened up a tiny window into an industry that had always been notoriously secretive about sales. Perhaps even suspiciously so. So, why did Valve do it? Did it have anything to do with GDPR? And what knock-on effects will it have on the industry? Welcome to noclip, Episode One, The Steam Spy. Sergey Galyonki was born in Lugansk in the USSR, a city located on the border between Ukraine and Western Russia. His family moved to Poltovwa, closer to the center of Ukraine. And it was here that he played his first video game. Sergey: My godmother, she used to work for a huge computer center, you know like a secret type of building, you know, so you can't get in unless you get a y'know pass or something. But because I was a kid, they would let me in with her. I was, I don't remember like, seven or eight. And she let me, she would take me to you know to her job and she would let me play with computers. And they didn't have many games, it was you know they were mostly to do with statistics and stuff like that, but they had Tetris and they had Kingdom Euphoria. And back then I totally hated Tetris. I didn't play it much, but I mostly played Kingdom Euphoria, which was a text based strategy game. Danny: Text based strategies appealed to Sergey. From a young age he enjoyed solving problems. He'd spend hours making small games on a programmable calculator. You see, the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s had restricted access to most type of electronics. So the computers available to consumers was limited to Soviet manufactured machines, or expensive black market imports from the West. Sergey: I didn't play many video games until like maybe age of nine or ten. Because we didn't have any. We had only like you know those old Soviet arcades. But then the Z Spectrum came to our country and it was a revelation. It actually was the first mass computer in Soviet Union. Not just in Ukraine, in whole Soviet Union. And I bought the first one, not I bought it, my father bought it for me. And I actually assembled the second one myself. Because you could buy you know the scheme, you could buy everything, you know separately. And just solder it. And it was fairly easy back then and I saved a bunch of money, do it. Danny: Using his ZX Spectrum, Sergey would create games for himself. He didn't enjoy programming in BASIC, he found the code too restrictive. So instead he opted to program using Assembly Language. His love of programming continued through his teens and when it was time to go to university, he chose to study Computer Integrated Systems, with a focus on Neural Networks. Ukraine has always been ahead of the curve when it came to developing algorithms. For instance, the first Neural Networks used to detect fake dollar bills were prototyped in Ukraine. Sergey continued his education and worked a bunch of jobs. He did page layouts at a local newspaper, he spent some time at a game studio, focusing on edutainment. Eventually he'd find himself moving to Kiev and taking up a job at a games distributor responsible for selling games for some of the biggest publishers in the world. What were some of the popular games in the Ukraine around that time? Any stand out in particular? Sergey: Well, I mean, it's the usual, except for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. We were not distributing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a different company. But you thought about S.T.A.L.K.E.R., right? That was the most popular game in Ukraine and I guess it's the only, see a lot of people, I guess playin' it. From our products I would say World of Warcraft was the most popular game ever. I mean, it was selling like hot cakes. That was just literally crazy. You know? We couldn't get enough of it, y'know? Into stores. That was unbelievable. Danny: Was there any games that were very popular in the West, that just were not popular at all in the Ukraine? Sergey: A lot of like, intellectual properties that are not familiar to Ukrainians were not selling well. Like 50 Cents video games that, y'know nobody, knew about 50 Cent back then in Ukraine. So didn't really sell well. Also was an awful game, to be honest. Danny: Not many copies of Blood on the Sand sold in Kiev? Sergey: Yeah, yeah. Danny: Sergey's greatest love was programming. He'd continued to code during his spare time. But there was something about the distribution business that excited him. Again, he was problem solving. Learning how customers made decisions and using data science to find answers. Well, that and simply watching people. Sergey: I enjoyed it immensely. Because you learn a lot about how people behave and how people consume games, by just doing a little distribution. And I sometimes, I would just spend like half a day in a store, one of our partner stores, just talking to people and trying to understand how they behave, you know how they're looking and products on the shelves, how are they buying, how they're making decisions to buy, and that helped a lot because, I mean, I like looking at stats and the numbers, but unless you talk to people it's sometimes really hard to understand how they actually think, y'know? Danny: Sergey would eventually take what he learned in distribution and bring it back to the world of development. He spent two years at Nival Interactive, creators of the Blitzkrieg series and the developers of Heroes of Might and Magic V. He enjoyed the job and life was good. Sergey was married now, he had children. But something bubbling under the surface in Ukrainian society was about to come to the boil. A few days after Valentines Day in 2014, the Ukrainian revolution would see rioters clash with police throughout the capital city. The tragic shooting of unarmed protestors would lead to the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian invasion of Crimea, and the eventual war in Donbass which continues today. A frozen conflict taking place on an area half the size of the country. A proxy war where Russian funded proto-states fight Ukrainian government forces, thousands dead on either side. Sergey: I was in Kiev at the time. My family was still in Lugansk, so we had to move them out of the war zone. And, yeah. But me and my kids and my wife were in Kiev. Danny: Was it a difficult decision to leave during the war? Sergey: Well, not really. I mean, when people are shooting outside of your apartment, it's kinda like a natural decision. So, yeah, no. The moment they started shooting, y'know, in my area, I just packed my family and we left. A lot of people don't realize how, how the stuff affects game developers as well. I mean a friend of mine he was still living in Lugansk when the war started. And he would drive to his office and he would like he would hear bullets just flying past his car when he would drive to his office. And it continued for like maybe a week until he's like I'm crazy. There's a war going on and I'm going to a job making video games. So he left after that. But I mean, because it happened all of a sudden and you know you see it in the movies and you expect it to be like in the movies but it's not. It just, y'know, it's a new type of war. You don't see a lot of tanks just rolling in. You don't see like, you don't see the front lines. It just, it's just, people start shooting. So he left and a lot of people did around the same time. Danny: The conflict led to an exodus of Ukrainian Game Development. 4A Games, developers of the Metro series, relocated their studio to Malta. Sergey and his family left for the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The reason was simple, it was the closest country him and his family could move to without requiring visas. As it happens it was also one of the 20 or so global locations that developers Wargaming had offices. The Belarusian developer responsible for the wildly popular World of Tanks. Sergey: Yeah, Wargaming is an amazing company. It's huge and Wargaming is really different from any other companies I've ever worked for. And I've worked for Eastern European companies, not just for the Western companies. Its culture is really something. It's a conflict-driven company. Yes, you're expected to shout at other people in discussions. You're expected to disagree. You know like every time I go to a meeting with my friends at Epic, it's usually I agree with you, I respect your opinion, but in Wargaming you would start with the but part, y'know? You would not do any formalities. You would say well, this idea is incorrect because this and this and this and I don't like this because this. And it really saved a lot of time in discussions, because people know that everyone respects everyone, otherwise you would not be working, y'know? At the company. If you don't respect other people. And that let people express opinions kinda in a more aggressive way. We're getting also, it's really interesting because, the core gaming audience, people that don't usually play video games. So you look at people that play World of Tanks or World of Warships, they are over 40, most of them have families and kids and sometimes they have grandchildren, y'know? And they don't know much about other video games. And they don't consider World of Tanks or World of Warships to be video games. They just consider it to be y'know their hobby. Like they would consider fishing to be a hobby. And that is both amazing and really demanding. Because you know it's a different audience, gamers are used to certain rules in video games and gamers are used to change. And gamers are used to a lot of stuff being taken away. Like people do not complain when Call of Duty releases a new game every single year. You essentially have to re-buy it and they take away all of your progress, when you buy the new Call of Duty, right? Danny: Yeah. Sergey: Well imagine doing that to a bunch of 60s years old people, you know? Every year. They would probably not like it, right? On the other hand, you hear a lot about in online gaming. And while World of Tanks players are not, not the most pleasant bunch, they are way more polite than your average kids in Call of Duty. So that, likewas never a huge problem in World of Tanks, every time people come and talk about we are free to play game, you're supposed to have a toxic audience. Well, not really, I mean if you're 60 years old you probably know how to behave yourself, right? Danny: Sergey worked as a Senior Industry Analyst at Wargaming. Helping the team find in-roads into different markets. Aside from their core Wargames, Wargaming published games from other studios and even worked on experimental games, under different brands. Think mobile games about managing a coffee shop. It was varied work that Sergey found interesting. In the spring of 2015, like so many others in the international development community, Sergey took the annual pilgrimage to the Gamers Developers Conference in San Francisco. Here he attended panels, networked with other analysts, and met old friends. One panel he attended was presented by Kyle Orland, a journalist for the technology website Ars Technica. Kyle had created a program that could pull user data from Steam and using it he was able to calculate video game sales. He called it Steam Gauge. Kyle Orland talking at a conference: I'm Kyle Orland, I'm Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, and this is Analyzing the Steam Marketplace, using publicly derived sales estimates. Now I've been covering the game business for a little over a decade and anyone covering this industry, or following it, one major annoyance is the lack of reliable specific data about sales of games. Now it's not like this in most other entertainment media. It's just not a problem. Nielsen, for instance, provides ratings literally overnight for TV shows and makes the headline numbers very public in publications like Variety. Theaters and studios provide box office estimates every weekend for movies. There's billboard charts for music, there's The New York Times Bestseller list every week for books, et cetera, et cetera. So what do we have for games? For games we have this. This is what NPD, a US tracking firm sends to the media every month. It's a top 10 list based on their sampling of US retail outlets and now electronic sales. If you pay a lot of money you can get more details than this. You can get every game that they track and actual sales numbers, but people who get those numbers are contractually prevented from sharing them publicly. And NPD is pretty strict about enforcing it. You get occasional leaks. Danny: Back in Cyprus a few weeks later, Sergey was doing market analysis for Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars. Wargaming was publishing the game and Sergey was trying to determine market data around 4X Strategy Games. However, his VPN was down and he didn't have access to any of his data. It was then that he remembered Kyle's talk. Sergey: Well it was end of March, 2015 I was still working for Wargaming and the funny story behind Steam Spy that my VPN was down and the office was closed for an extended holiday. And I needed to look up some numbers and I didn't have access to my data and I like, well I need this data, because I have nothing else to do. And I was just came from GDC and I remember the presentation by Kyle Orland from Ars Technica, about Steam Gauge. And I said well, how hard would it be to recreate that? And he didn't give any y'know instructions or anything how to do that, but I mean you have internet it's fairly easy. So I spent couple of evenings writing it and by Monday I had all my data, I wrote my documents, required for the office, so by the end of Sunday and I was like, I was stuck with essentially Steam Spy. Without any interface. And I was like, well maybe I should just add interface and open that up to everyone. Danny: Sergey added that interface, gave it a web presence, and shared it with the folks who listened to his video games Podcast. Right away he saw indie developers flooding to it. This tool, something he was calling Steam Spy, was democratizing data in a way the PC market had never seen before. What Steam Spy was doing was incredibly clever. The Steam marketplace was the biggest online retailer for PC game sales and by default user profiles were public. Sergey's algorithm would poll data from between 60-70,000 profiles a day and using that extrapolate total game sales. It didn't poll every single person on Steam, but with enough data points his algorithm could get to within a few percentage points of accuracy. When NPD produced its top 10 charts, all that that was highlighting was which games were the most popular. But Steam Spy, with its repository of data, was far more powerful. For instance, you could look at trends and see how must more games sold when they went on sale. Or you could use the data to see how popular baseball games were in Portugal. Unlike NPD which just told you a specific thing, if you had an unanswered question about PC games sales, Steam Spy could help you get to the answer. Sergey had developed a tool for market researchers in the video games industry, but it seemed everyone wanted to play with it. It wasn't long before the games press started posting articles using data they had gathered from Steam Spy. Reddit was full of threads about games that were secretly incredibly popular. But it wasn't just hobbyists using it. Indie devs now had access to a powerful market research tool. And even large publishers were using Steam Spy. Were you at all worried that, I mean you were just using the Steam API, right? To pull this stuff? Sergey: Yeah, yeah, I was, I checked the rules. I mean I'm not a lawyer or anything, but I read the Uler, I actually read it. And I didn't find y'know that I'm breaking anything. They changed the Uler after that. But back when it, I launched it, I was not breaking any laws. And I guessed well, I mean, anyone can estimate anyone's sales, right? That's why we have a lot of research companies. And you have super data, you have Usuy, you have NPD. They all do an estimate and they all the publicize them y'know, online and it is completely legal. Anyone is allowed to do that. As long as you're not stealing someone's, y'know financial information, you are allowed to do estimates. Danny: And you weren't surfacing any individual's information, were you? Sergey: No, of course not. No, European laws about user privacy are way more stricter than American laws about user privacy. So all information from the beginning was already itemized. I was never storing anything that is, can be used to identify a user. Well, but coincidentally, it was mostly y'know gaming journalists, small indie developers, gamists, y'know, game enthusiasts, trying to understand how the market works. I was, after started adding more and more professional tools, into Steam Spy, like Cross Audience research, playtime distribution, and stuff that I felt is useful to me. And I've seen that the audience has shifted towards more professionals. And it's been, it's been interesting talking to people that actually use Steam Spy, at different conferences. Intel uses Steam Spy. Tencent uses Steam Spy. Electronic Arts uses Steam Spy. Ubisoft, Activision, you name it, I don't know a single gaming company that does not use Steam Spy right now. It became a tool that a lot of people in the gaming industry use, because it's not great, but it's good enough. And if you look into any other tools available, you know like SuperData Arcade is an amazing tool. App Annie is an amazing tool. But the precision is actually way worse than Steam Spy's precision. And accuracy is way worse than Steam Spy's accuracy. And people still use it, because having information that might be 50% off is still better than having no information. Danny: One of the things that Steam Spy did great was validating the market. For instance you could use the tool to see if fans of a certain genre bought lots of games in that genre. So, for instance Sergey found that MoBA players rarely played more than one MoBA. So during the height of DoTA2's popularity, when every developer under the sun was trying to make the next big MoBA, they were trying to sell to an audience that largely didn't want one. Sergey: On the other hand, you look at Survival Games, like DayZ and you see that people that enjoy survival games actually buy a lot of survival games. And that you know that makes it safe to launch a new survival game, like Conan Exiles for example. Y'know you look at the market, you realize well people will buy your game and you make leap of faith. People looking into trends obviously and it's harder to do with Steam Spy unfortunately, I'm using different tools myself, when looking for trends, but Steam Spy is decent at this. So you could look into what's growing y'know how games are changing what people are playing now verus what people were playing last year. If you look into audience for playing on battle grounds, you'll see that while some of them are coming from so that's good, a lot of them are, haven't never played anything before. So they are newcomers to the genre and it means that a lot of them will not leave the game because that's the only game they ever played or played in recent years. And that makes it really hard to compete with and Fortnite on the market, unless you're willing to do something radically different. And that's why I believe it's, a lot of innovation is gonna come from, y'know. People doing Battle Royale but in an unexpected way. Danny: I'm European. I grew up in Ireland, I lived in London for a few years, eventually found myself in California and now live in the woods on the East Coast. And one of the things I've enjoyed throughout my life, moving from country to country, is understanding the preferences of different people in different parts of the world. As it turns out, Steam Spy is really good at highlighting the types of games that certain countries like. I asked Sergey, what were some of the most interesting geographical trends that he came across. Sergey: Well my favorite part is the German admiration of anything that has similation in it. Like the farming simulator, anything that has to do with simulation, really. They will play it. Farming simulator is a phenomenon. And it was developed in Switzerland, but is mostly played in Germany. And you talk to anyone in America and the fact that they have a trolleybus simulator they have a trash garbage trash simulator. And people buy it and people play it and that's just crazy, but that's, that's how people in Germany particularly like to spend their time, y'know. Japan, back then was obsessed with zombies. Anything with zombies would sell really well in Japan. Danny: Was there any stuff that was very popular in America that just was not popular in Europe or vice versa that you kind of saw? Sergey: Well America is such a huge market and when Steam Spy started, was still the biggest gaming market in the world. So everything that is popular in America was pretty much popular everywhere else. So they have a, well back then they used to like royalgames and open world games. Not as much, like French people do not enjoy open world games as much as Americans. But French video gaming companies like PBSoft it's selling games they make recently, right? They only make y'know open world games. Danny: Steam Spy was cracking open the sales data of thousands of games. As somebody who worked in the games press, I couldn't imagine this was something that publishers were particularly happy about. The gaming audience is savvy. It cares about consumer rights and it's quick to react when publishers do things that take advantage of them. Steam publishes some data themselves, like concurrent live players. But the amount of data that Steam Spy was surfacing was on a whole other level. I had to imagine that publishers must have been lobbying Valve to do something to lock out Steam Spy. I asked Sergey if he had ever talked to Valve during any of this. I just wanted to know, what did they think of it all? Sergey: I used to, when I worked at Nivall, I used to work with them, because we published games on Steam and when worked at Wargaming, Danny: Right. Sergey: We also published some games on Steam. And they used to reply fairly quickly. But every time I would mention, well I would not write from my corporate email, of course I would write from a personal email, every time I would write about Steam Spy, they would just shut down. They would, I mean it would just literally, shut up and not reply to any of my emails or any of my communications. And I have couple of friends working there, not on Steam, on the Dotter team and it's the same situation. Every time we discuss something, you know like, gaming related or something like that launch plans or something like that, they talk, anytime I mention Steam Spy, they just shut up. I guess it might be an uncomfortable topic for them. Danny: Why do you think that is? Sergey: Well, I feel like Valve is a company that has no leadership. It has no management structure. So there's no one to make a decision. And they only make a decision when everyone agrees to that decision, or everyone on a team agrees to that decision. And there is no consensus about Steam Spy, I guess. And no one is senior enough, like in any other company you would have a head of whatever, head of Steam, come up and say, well that's my decision, we'll shut it down or we will let it go and everybody will, okay! I might disagree with that, but I will, y'know. I can live with that. Any time they make any decision, you will sit and wonder why did they make this decision? Every time they make something new, it feels like a compromise. Y'know what I mean? It doesn't feel like they are making any bold, unusual decisions and it's, to me it has been a probably the biggest disadvantage in the last several years, because they stopped experimenting, they stopped doing something really unusual or bold. Like I mean the trading card game in 2018, really? Danny: It's difficult to measure the effect that Steam Spy was having on the games industry. He heard anecdotally about games that were funded through market research derived from Steam Spy. He saw publishers like SEGA bring many of their classic games to PC once they saw there was market for them on Steam. But one of the big trends that Sergey noticed was how his tool allowed indie developers to more accurately price their games. Sergey: I feel especially if you're a young developer it's really hard to put a price tag on your game. You always feel like you haven't made everything you wanted to. You haven't achieved everything you wanted to with this title. So if you're releasing your first game and you feel like well, maybe I should just price it 9.99 because that's a no brainer. But actually your game is worth maybe, y'know 29.99, because if you look at the last games at that price points when they were released they were priced higher, so maybe you should price your games higher. Maybe your game is unique and it has no competition and it has no comparison points. And if it has no comparison points, maybe you should price it higher, because it's something unique that people are willing to pay more money for. People are trained to expect triple A quality from $60 titles and for $50 titles even, but you go below 50, you go to 40 to 30, and people expect it to be an indie game, maybe rougher on the edges, y'know, maybe y'know, better graphics than y'know, $5 game, but they expect it to be an indie title. They are willing to forgive a lot of quirks if the title is actually fun. This is the biggest fear of any game developer I believe. You're making something, you're sitting in a pretty much in a dark room, talking to no one but other fellow developers, from the same company and you always think well, maybe I'm not relevant anymore. Maybe people don't want to play city simulators and I've just spent four years of my life developing one. Maybe people want something to play something different. And maybe I should just under price it and put it for 9.99 and hope that well, maybe if I don't make a lot of money at least people will play it, y'know? Danny: Steam Spy ran for three years, helping indie devs price their games, helping large publishers do market research, helping journalists find sales figures, helping redditors prove their point. That was until a few weeks ago, when Valve flipped a switch. On April 10, 2018 Valve pushed an Update to every user's Profile Privacy Settings Page. Up until now if you created an account, your game ownership data was public by default. People could set this to private, but most didn't bother. Steam's update flipped this entirely. Not only would new accounts be automatically set to private, but it switched every account on the system to private, too. Without this data Steam Spy could not work. And Sergey quickly announced that the service was dead. At the time the update went live, the EU had just pushed through a new regulation on data security. GDPR or The General Data Protection Regulation was created to add new protections to user's personal data. As soon as it came through, online services around the world were changing their End User License Agreements to be in line with the law. Some services were having to push updates to get in line. One game, Monday Night Combat, would eventually have to shut down, as making the required changes to their backend would cost more than the game was bringing in. Everyone assumed that this was just Steam doing the same, falling in line. But after a few days, Sergey realized it had nothing to do with it. Sergey: Well it's not really related to GDPR, the latest change was not related to GDPR, because GDPR requires companies to do a bunch of changes to appoint a person responsible for User Privacy to change default settings, to change privacy settings, for underage people, under 18, and Valve did nothing. Like that. Valve still displays your friend list, your achievements, your groups, your screenshots, are publicly on your page. The only thing they hid were games. And GDPR actually does not require that. GDPR requires to hide everything else, that is still displayed. I don't believe it was linked to GDPR at all. I thought that it was like that when they made the change. But after looking into it, I don't think it was related to GDPR. Danny:  So if that's the case, then it must have been related to what you were doing, right, because is there anything else that's happening, that people are pulling from game data? Sergey: Well, I don't know, I mean, it's on one hand it's nice to think that Steam Spy was so disruptive they decided to shut it down. But it's really easy for them to shut it down. They just have to drop an email to me and I will stop it. I guess, bunch of companies are doing similar stuff to what Steam Spy does. Only keeping it to themselves. Or I've heard of other companies that charges like a thousand bucks per month for accessing the service that does this, similar to Steam Spy. Has a little bit more options, but mostly similar. And maybe they were unhappy about those guys and the only way they saw to shut it down was just shut it down completely, so no one could use it. I guess that's, that's one way to do it. But yesterday they shut, well they didn't shut down, but they made some changes, rendering the Store API useless as well. And the Store API is the API that provides information about the game price, game developer, like the basic stuff. Like genre and so on and a lot of sites were using that and it's now unavailable to them and I mean, what they did, they improved the store's privacy, or what? It just feels really odd to me. Danny: Without access to games lists and with the Store API changes, Steam Spy was unable to poll the data it required. This was a seemingly insurmountable problem, but Sergey, Sergey likes to solve problems. And in this case he used machines to solve the problem for him. Sergey: I no longer rely on information provided by an APT at all, I use a bunch of other parameters. As it happens I have an unfinished PhD in machine learning and topic my thesis was using unrelated, using loosely related information to predict economical outcomes. And that's what I'm pretty much using for the new algorithm of Steam Spy. My algorithm that I developed when I was still thinking about taking a science pass. And it works more or less. Danny: And this is probably like maybe it's a stupid question to ask because it's incredibly complex, but what is the machine learning doing to try and figure this out, if it's not pulling from statistics or from data and creating statistics out of it, how are you coming to these numbers? Sergey: Well, the thing is that, it is kind of hard to explain. It takes a really huge sample of data like I would say, maybe 15 million data points, and it goes through processing trying to filter out the data that is proven to be irrelevant and trying to amplify the data that is more or less relevant. Then it feeds it into a Neural network. And that Neural network does its magic. And the problem with Neural networks is, Neural networks tend to over feed. Neural networks are great for recognizing images, but are really bad for predicting outcomes that are outside of what they are recognizing. So, if you feed an image of a man to a Neural network and say, it's a man and you also feed an image of a dog to a Neural and say, it's a dog, Neural network will be able to distinguish between this man and this dog, but it's going to be really hard for the Neural network to, if it sees a woman. It will not understand if it's a, y'know if it's a man or a dog, because it does not fit into any of those categories. And in case of our Steam Spy, we're trying to predict well the game is, the Game A has 10,000 owners, the Game B has 20,000 owners, Game C doesn't have 10, doesn't have 20, it might have 30, it might have 40, please do an, predict that and Neural networks are really, really bad at it. But that was my PhD, testing this. Is preparing the data in a way that lets Neural networks actually work with this type of tasks. And it works more or less. It's not perfect, I'm not, I'm still not happy with it, but it is, it works. Yeah, based off of what I've heard from developers and I have a sample of maybe 100 games, y'know that provided me with actual data, it seems that for most of them, for maybe 95% of them, that used Steam Spy, it was within 10%. Give or take. So actually pretty good. For some of them, it is violently inaccurate. The last 5% I mean I've heard about a game that was the difference was 15 times. That was just staggering to me. But for everything else it seems to work. Danny: Steam Spy started while Sergey was working for Wargaming in Cyprus, but during the intervening years he moved around quite a bit. In early 2016, him and his family swapped Nicosia for Berlin as he became the Head of Publishing for Eastern Europe for an American company in the online shooter space. This company was responsible for some of the biggest shooters in the early 2000s, but they were struggling to find audiences for their suite of online games. One of those games was a third person MoBA called Paragon that would eventually shut down. Another was a remake of their classic arena shooter, perhaps you've heard of it, Unreal Tournament. And the third was a survivalcraft game that had been in development for the best part of a decade. It had sold well on launch, but the game was designed to be very malleable. With Sergey and Steam Spy's help, the team looked at the market research data and decided to take a swing at putting in a Battle Royale-style game mode. Seeing as Sergey was working with the headquarters in America so much, he would eventually move him and his family to North Carolina, to become Director of Publishing Strategy. The American company was of course, Epic. And the game was Fortnite. Sergey: Yeah, I was part of the team. I was part of making the decision and obviously we were looking at Steam Spy data to see how the genre is evolving. And with talking about Fortnite, original of the Wolf Fortnite, that's the reason I joined Epic. I visited Epic several years ago, they showed me Fortnite and I was blown away. I mean, that was a game that you could make into anything. It is so flexible, it is, I mean, well it didn't have Battle Royale mode, but it had several PBB modes back then. Experimental PBB modes and people you saw 50-versus-50, right? It is actually, well the idea for them all. You know, two teams building castles and fighting each other, was actually back then, in the original Fortnite. Obviously not 50-50, versus, smaller teams. But still. And Fortnite to me felt like a, y'know like a mold, you could make it into anything. Danny: And I mean even when you talk about Fortnite, it's like we don't know 'cause it's on the Epic, Epic launch, right? So we don't know how many people are playing Fortnite, we don't know how many people are playing World of Tanks, actually now that you mention it, either. So your games have been surprisingly hidden behind this. Sergey: Well, I'd have to, I mean have access to all the data, but somebody else could. Both of them have APIs that you can access. For World of Tanks, there's bunch of services, statistics services for World of Tanks. And there are several services for Fornite statistics, as well. So you can see the numbers. Actually, it's just Epic is a company that doesn't like to brag about numbers and when we publish numbers we, we've felt some pushback from, y'know from the gaming audience, because they felt like, well, we just were viewing them, gamers, as numbers not as people. And we are really sensitive about that. I mean we're trying, we're always trying to do the right by the gaming audience. So we decided to do it less. It not completely stop it, but just do it less often. After I was, I decided, I actually decided to shut Steam Spy down after all those changes, because I didn't feel like continuing. We also had a huge outage at Fortnite at work and I felt like, well I don't have enough time to, y'know do my day job. I also like to sleep sometimes. This didn't leave a lot of time for Steam Spy, but I thought I've received maybe, 200 emails from people using Steam Spy, asking for me to continue and I felt like, well I mean, yes it makes sense to do so, y'know, people really like it. And that's when I heard all those amazing stories about y'know peoples, companies starting a publishing business because they now were able to see the statistics for game that offered for publishing company getting small indie company from barely getting financing from the German government, because they were able to prove that well, the gamethat they were trying to make is gonna sell. And it did. It was really good. So I felt well, it provides a lot of fire to the market and I like that. And I'm not doing it for money or anything, I mean, at my current day job, I am well provided for. It's not that. It's, it's, the fact that I believe that informational asymmetry, asymmetry of information is unethical, in any business transaction. And Steam Spy is designed to remove informational asymmetry from business transactions or from any discussions. The gaming publisher, the big gaming publisher, have access to more information than a small gaming publisher or a small developer. Then if you're trying to sign a contract with a small developer, you can abuse your power. You have access to more information to get a better deal. That is not gonna be beneficial to the developer. And we've heard these stories about that so many times, y'know even before Steam Spy, like publishers abusing power or big developers abusing small developers. And having this removed actually helps the market whole. Danny: And do you feel like you're doing a service to the world of video games? Sergey: I feel like I'm doing more good than harm. In this case, yeah. Danny: My sincere thanks to Sergey for talking to us this week. You can learn more about Steam Spy and look up all your favorite games by visiting SteamSpy.com. You can also throw Sergey a few bucks a month for his efforts, by heading over to Patreon.com/SteamSpy. Thanks for listening to this first episode of noclip. We hope you enjoyed our first story. If you have any feedback or tips you can hit me up on Twitter @dannyodwyer. Or send us an email, podcast@noclip.video. Oh, and hey, if you liked the show, maybe subscribe, tell a friend, or leave us a review on iTunes. If you enjoyed this Podcast but you feel like your eyes are missing out, a friendly reminder, if you want to watch some high-quality video game documentaries for free, head over to YouTube.com/Noclipvideo. We recently traveled to Amsterdam to tell the story of Horizon Zero Dawn. And to Canada, where we filmed a documentary series on Warframe. All of our work is crowdfunded, so if you like what we're making, please consider becoming a patron of noclip. We have bunches of fun rewards, including early access to this Podcast, behind-the-scenes videos and much, much more. Head over to Patreon.com/Noclip to learn more. We'll be back with Episode Two in just a few weeks and we'll be focusing on a game. One of my favorite games, in fact. A game from my childhood. And the creative team who left Lionhead to make its spiritual successor. Whatever happened to Theme Hospital? Find out in our next show. Thanks again, see you then.

This is one of the biggest lessons I've taken right from the desk of Russell Brunson Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now here's your host Steve Larsen. Steve Larsen: What's up, guys? Hey, I'm thinking here that I'm going to change up the intro music to this thing at some point. I'm excited. I can't believe that we're going to hit episode 100 in a few episodes here. That's ridiculous to me. I can't believe how fast that time has gone first of all or that I've had a hundred things to say. I just hope that you guys look back at each one of these episodes and you might think, "Hey, those were great episodes." I'm sure there's one or two where maybe something was weird or whatever, but I just appreciate the loyal following this show has. Just a big shout out to all of you guys. It's Christmas time and I'm not sure what faith you are and that's obviously not the purpose of this podcast, but we celebrate Christmas. We're putting up Christmas lights. It's getting cold outside. Been with my little girls and my little one just turned four and I have another two year old, and then my wife is three months pregnant as well. Super excited for the new arrival... Anyways, I always love this time of year. It's been a lot of fun. A little more focused on family time and things like that. It's been a whole lot of fun. Tonight we're putting together a gingerbread house and it was just one of those like cheap kits from Walmart. The thing totally collapsed like five minutes in. We ended up just trying to make this massive pile of sugar and candy and nastiness. It's actually a whole lot of fun. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. My little ones just whenever my back was turned kept like sneaking over and grabbing like big old handfuls of icing and like just stuffing it in their face. That is so nasty. Oh man. Anyway, it's a lot of fun. Hey, this has been an awesome last few days. Obviously not just family wise, but also with you guys. Big shout out to those of you who joined me on my last live funnel build. I've been doing those pretty regularly. For the next while, it's going to be pretty much every Saturday. As I build out whatever funnels I actually need, I just might as well flip the camera on and you guys can watch and ask questions while I'm actually building it. It's been a lot of fun. The last funnel that I just built was an application funnel. Honestly, the application funnel is probably one of my favorite ones to build besides the webinar funnel, free plus shopping funnel, eCom funnel. I like them all. Membership areas. I like them all. Honestly, what's cool about the application style funnel is how much it actually has an effect on your business. I think it was Frank Kern that said that there's really three things that every business needs ... Actually I think I've sent this list before as well, but whatever. He said, "Number one, you need to be having ... Just charge higher prices." He said, "Number one, you need to have higher prices. Just charge higher prices." If you just raised your prices by 10%, I doubt that anyone's going to leave just because of that. If they do, so what? You lose one or two, but the raised price of everybody else more than covers what they left with. You know what I mean? Most people are not going to bat an eye at all. You know what I mean? Prices go up. Everyone kind of expects that. Same thing with yours. They should go up. You should just charge more money. Figure out how to charge more money... That was his number one. Number two what he said was that you've got to have somebody in the backend calling all of your current customers to sell them a high ticket thing in the back, whatever that is, a five grand, 10 grand, 15, 25 grand thing, whatever it is in the backend. Whatever you're selling on the front, all those customer who are buying, just have somebody calling and selling those big things in the backend. A lot of the Inner Circle from Russell Brunson is always shocked at how fast that doubles their business. It's fun for me to read and hear about a lot of the comments because they'll be sending messages to Russell and whatever and be like, "Oh my gosh. Why aren't more people just selling something high ticket on the backend? It will double everything." I know. Those messages come pretty frequently as we tell people to do that kind of stuff. Figure out what you can sell that's high ticket in the backend and then the third thing he says is that figure out how you can sell things not on the internet. In reality, I mean the internet is fantastic. It's really, really cool, but when it comes to big sales, the internet's really not that effective for it. You got to change the selling environment, whether that's on the phone with those high tickets sales in the backend or direct mail or whatever it is. Somehow figure out how to sell not just online. It's funny because a lot of the data that's out there that we've seen shows that. That those who have both online elements and offline elements to their funnels actually make more money, rather than those who just stay online. Anyway, kind of fascinating. It was probably about two and a half years ago. I was getting ready to become an officer in the Army. I was in the ROTC program. I had already gone through basic training and gone to that fondness and actually really enjoyed that. Well, we wanted to do like a cool little charity run. What we did is we got together and we decided that we would do this 5K warrior mud run. This mud run was ... I mean it was awesome. It was totally legit. Anyway, it was awesome. We had literally like flame throwers actually. We had all sorts of like these dummy M16s laying all over the place. They had to run and sprint around with this stuff and climb these massive walls and jump through stuff. I mean it was really fun. It was legitimately quite a massive operation to pull off. Well, I was getting good enough with ClickFunnels at the time and ClickFunnels had been out for a little while at that time now. I guess this was ... No, this was about ... Holy crap. Yeah, that was about two and a half years ago. That's crazy. ClickFunnels had been out for a little bit at that time. I was getting good enough with it and I already had paying clients and I was traveling all over the place filming gurus in their events. Then I would go edit the video and then make a funnel for the video. That's kind of what I was doing at that time. It was before working for ClickFunnels or anything. I decided like how cool would it be if I built an event funnel for this mud run? What I did is I went and I put together this funnel and I kind of thought okay, on this very first page, there's a point to all this of course, on this very first page, we'll sell the ticket. We'll them what it's about. It was for a charity cause that would connect wounded soldiers. It would reconnect wounded soldiers with their families whatever hospital they were being kept in. It was a really awesome charity that we did it for. I mean it was so fun. It was so fun. The first page is sold the ticket. The second page told them more about information, things like that. When it was all said and done, I flipped basically the entire event funnel and we raffled off like rifles, like M16s and stuff, right, or 15s. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. Really, really enjoyed the whole thing. You know what's interesting is we had 650 people, 650 people show up. Three new stations. I got on TV because I was one of the main guys running it. I was in charge of huge portions of the program. It was over like 70 people and then another like 50, 60 over my actual unit. I mean I was super busy at the time, but it took me 30 hours, 40 hours to really polish it up, make it look awesome, but I built this sweet event funnel. 650 people. We raised a lot of money. We gave a lot to charity and it was just an awesome time. It would not have been possible without ClickFunnels. Now again that was before I worked for ClickFunnels and that was before all of that happened. What's funny is when the mud run ended, a lot of you guys know that story that I was really poor. I didn't have money to go to events. I didn't have money to do that stuff. I was trading tickets for funnels, right? I was trading airline tickets. I was trading event tickets for funnels. I was just bootstrapping. I was just finding a way. I knew that I needed to get there. What's funny because like two days after that whole event funnel ended, after that mud run ended, I went to San Diego on another person's dime because I was building funnels for him, and I went to the first funnels hacking live event. It was literally five days ... From the time that event was over, the mud run was over, I was hired at ClickFunnels like a week and a half later. I mean it was really, really fast. The whole thing was crazy fast. Maybe two weeks later, maybe. Anyway, it all went really, really quick. What's been interesting is I have always had ... What I'm trying to get to here is I'm trying to portray a lesson that has always been ... It's never been illicitly stated while sitting next to Russell, but is certainly a strong lesson. He might have said it once or twice. I can't remember, but like I had always thought ... Now think about the Frank Kern quote, right? Number three, how can you sell besides online, right? I went to Russell's event and he gets on stage and he's got the sweet event funnel obviously that he sold Funnel Hacking Live 2016 with. I go and I stand and I'm watching this stuff and I'm like, "Oh my gosh. This is so cool." I see him pitch certification and I was like, "I've got to get in this." I didn't know how, but I was like calling my bank. I was trying to get loans. I knew I would be better off ... Again this was like a few days before I got hired, certainly a day or two before I put the application in. Anyway, it all happened so quick. It's crazy, crazy fast. All of it. Anyway, Russell was selling at his event. Lo and behold, right? Not online. He found another way to sell besides online that he was selling at his own event obviously. Of course, he would. As I've progressed sitting next to him, what I have learned and noticed and we have implemented and put in place and I've done myself in many other places and especially in another industry really strongly, even in this one, is I have learned that everything you do as a marketer revolves around events. Your ability to create events. What is a webinar funnel, right? You're creating an event online through a webinar funnel, right? You're putting together an event online, right? It's the same thing. Auto webinar funnel. Now you're mimicking one. You're trying to make them feel like it's a live event, right? Now anytime that you are putting anything out online ... Russell's book launch. That was certainly an event, right? We built an event around it. When we had the Viral Video launch, we literally said, "Okay. We could just make this video and we'll just put it out there." We're like, "How can we make this more awesome. Oh my gosh. What if we actually rented the Boise State Stadium? Yeah. All right. Cool. What else can we do? Let's get Gary V. there. Oh my gosh." They're like, "Oh, let's get all these influencers there. Let's send out these really, really cool invites to get them there also. Oh, let's do bubble soccer." You know what I mean? We created an event around the launch. Okay? Every single time we have ever launched anything big or one of those big players like that, every time we've always put an event around it. What I've learned and what I've implemented on my own and a lot of you guys know I'm heavy in MLM, in the MLM industry and in other places as well, I have done that very thing and it's ridiculous what it does when you start putting all those kinds of events. Literally the only reason for this episode is what I'm trying to tell you to do is like figure out ways to create events around your marketing. Put these events around your marketing, whatever you're launching, any funnel you're putting out there. If you've already launched something, it's not that you can't create an event either. Again even though it's already launched or put out there, toss another bonus or two in there and call it something special as they buy the original product that get the other two with it. You know what I mean? You can figure out how to do that, but just have an eye for it... The whole thing is about you creating events. Okay? Sorry. There's two other places I'm trying to take this here. I was in Dallas two or three weeks ago. Holy crap. That was like three weeks ago. Time's moving. Oh my gosh. Anyway, I was in Dallas a few weeks ago and I was sitting down with ... He's the guy who created I believe ... Don't quote me on this, but I believe he created the company Travelocity. Huge guy, right? I mean extremely successful, right? Another guy who had done half of a billion dollars in sales. Another guy that runs all of the events for The ONE Thing. I can't tell anymore than that. [inaudible 00:13:29] Crap. Whatever. Anyway, but it's interesting. I was sitting there will all these guys and it was interesting listening to all of them. I could not believe how fortunate I was to spend an entire day with these individuals. I was sitting in Dallas. It was the day after I spoke. I happened to be there and I thought I might as well stay there and listen to what they had to say. I was sitting there and I was listening. There was this basically the equivalent of an event funnel that they had put together to help launch a certain product that they have coming out. They showed me the video and I'm being tender with this, okay, as I say that. I'm not trying to make fun of it or anything like that, but I lost so much interest after 30 seconds. I couldn't believe it. I could not believe how bored I got. It was like an awkward kind where I was uncomfortable to be sitting there continuing to watch this six minute video or whatever it was. I was like, "Ah-ah." It was the kind of video where I was like, "Oh man." There was like a billion things in red flags screaming through my head on what is wrong with this event video. Again not trying to throw rocks here. I'm just going by comparison. Okay? Here's another example. Have you ever seen the event funnel video that T&C puts out for their event? It is so boring. Oh my gosh. Again I'm not throwing rocks to the dude, but there's an art to this thing. Okay? All it is is Ryan Deiss standing up saying, "All right, guys. It's that time of the year again. We're going to have T&C and there's going to be this many people and this is what we're going to talk about." Okay. Now contrast that experience with the videos that Russell puts out about his event. Okay? If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go to funnelhackinglive.com and watch the video from this last year and you can even watch the previous two years also on that very first page up on the header. I know because I was heavily involved in the construction of it. Up in the header, up at the top there. You can watch it and just pay attention to your emotions. How do you feel as you're watching those videos? I'm filled with hope when I watch them. Huge hope. I'm filled with this enabling power. I feel like I can go take on the world when I watch those videos. I am not kidding. You guys will laugh at it, but Russell and I literally will play that video on ... We have listened to that over and over and over and over while we're sitting in the office working. We love the video that much, which might sound kind of weird. Anyway, that's what I'm trying to say with this whole thing is that think and feel your emotions while you're watching your own sales videos, while you're watching your own event funnel videos, while you're watching any of the videos that you put out there. It's all about emotion. You know what's funny about this podcast and what I've noticed about it, when I first started this podcast, the structure for each episode was very different than it is now. Well, not very different, but it's evolved. I would tell story for like 60% of the time and then I would give like some kind of tip or content piece the other 40%. What was funny about the whole thing is people kept saying, "Please give us more tips." I think people kept trying to tell me like, "Stop doing 60-40. Do like 20% story, 80% tips and tricks." I think I did that for an episode or two and it just felt weird. There was no story behind it to help it actually sink in. Funny enough, whenever I would do the heavy tips and tricks type of episodes, everyone forgot that crap anyway. Unless you wrap your marketing messages in stories, unless you wrap your events in stories, unless you are publishing stories, no one's going to remember what you're saying anyway. Story is what drives emotion straight into the heart where we remember the tip or the fact or whatever it is. Just that one little golden nugget. What I did when I was in Dallas is I said, "Okay." I'll try to say it nicely. I was like," Hey, great job on the video. Can I just show you this other one by contrast?" I pulled up Russell's video and we watched it. At the end of it, they were like, "Oh my gosh." I was like, "I know. What did you notice?" He's like, "Well, Russell's not talking about the event himself." Right? He's not talking about the event itself. It's a ton of testimonials. It's a ton of people talking about how much ClickFunnels has changed their life. It's a ton of people telling many stories and many epiphany bridges all over the place for this one overarching epiphany bridge story. That's it. What I'm trying to say here and what I'm trying to invite you guys to do is that I'm going to be building an event funnel this next Saturday. You guys should get this episode by the end. If not, that's totally fine too. Just know that I'm building a lot of funnels over the next two Saturdays especially as I prepare to leave ClickFunnels, which I'm super sad about still, which might confuse a lot of people for me to say that. I am quite sad about it. I've had many freak out moments. If you want to watch me build my next event funnel, go ahead and you can to salesfunnelbroker.com/live. Salesfunnelbroker.com/live. That's going to be kind of my HubSpot place for any funnels that I'm building live in the future. You can keep checking back there. If something's already gone through, there might be bit and pieces of replays, things like that. Anyway, there'll be stuff on there for you to go check out. Anyway, that's all I was trying to say with this is that when you think about the three things that Frank Kern says, right, just charge more money, have someone calling people in the backend and find a way to sell in other environments, well, one of those ways is events. I can tell you from personal experience, I've got a lot of people, 650 people, to my first event ever doing that. That's crazy. Now granted obviously I didn't do it on my own. I had a team. I can't take full credit for that, nor would I try to. However, we've built a lot of event funnels and events is marketing. Events is marketing. All right. Go think through the next event that you're going to put out. It doesn't have to necessarily be something physical. It can be totally virtual. It could be online. It could be whatever, but create events. Events naturally create urgency. They naturally create scarcity because it'll never happen again, which is like the biggest two tools that you have as a marketer. All right? If you want to come join me on the next funnel build that I do, go to salesfunnelbroker.com/live. Guys, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Appreciate the involvement. I batch record pretty much all these episodes. For me, I feel like I haven't put an episode for a while, but I know they've been dripping out to you pretty consistently, which is great. I have an awesome assistant for that and I will be interviewing her shortly, so that you guys can find out who she is. She does an awesome job with my podcast. Anyways, guys, you're all awesome. Appreciate you and get out there and crush it. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your prebuilt sales funnel today.

Steve Larsen: Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. So here's the real mystery. How do real MLMers like us bleed and cheat, and only bug family members and friends? You want to grow a profitable home business? How do we recruit a players into our downlines and create extra incomes, and still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives? That's the blaring question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. Hi you guys doing? Super glad to be here. I feel like it's been a while since I've published. Really, it's only been a week, but super excited to be able to get this out. It is definitely cold here. We've had a lot of ... Anyway, it's been really, really chilly here in Boise Idaho. That's where we live right now. My wife and I are both from Denver. Now, it's funny because last year there was a ton of snow here comparative to how much they usually get, but compared to Denver, where my wife and I were from, it was nothing. Everyone was calling it snowmagedon, and all the stuff, and there's barely any inches of snow on the ground, and we're like ... Anyway. There was a five foot snow storm once growing up. Anyway, been all over the place. Been lots of fun. Well, as such, it's been very lively here in the Larsen home because I believe since it's been so cold, a little bit of wildlife has been trying to move in. So we've had some mice, which is totally disgusting, and I've never had to deal with that problem ever. It's been very lively with my little four year old and two year old, and we've been running around. Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, but it's been fun, and I've enjoyed being able to go and just spend more time with the family. You know what I mean? I hope you guys do too. Hey, I wanted to touch on something here that I think is one of the major reasons why stereotypically MLMers have a hard time recruiting. Okay? Now, someone asked me this question yesterday actually. Asking, "How do I get my people ... How do I just even get like the base team, the core team, the team of people that I wish that I had to go run my MLM with me?" And I was thinking about the answer to that question, and I was thinking about how I've done it. Guys, just in the last week alone I've recruited 20 people. All through automated systems, or at least, so far right now, they're all on the phase where they've been automatically filtered. I should call it that, and they've applied to join my downline. I told you guys about that. that system that I have running, and it does amazingly well, and it's very, very exciting and I think it does so well because I always tell everyone in my downline when they join, to get all my systems because obviously I want them to be successful because of course, it makes me successful also. So why would I not? Right? It's gone really, really well. I've actually enjoyed going through just tons, I mean, awesome stuff with this team that I have, and it just ... Rock stars. I mean, guys the quality of individual, and I'm not comparing people ... I feel bad. Please don't think that I'm judging people at all, right? But there are certain times in a person's life where they're going to be better at business than others, right? If they have the actual time to focus on a business. If they want to do it, rather than me trying to convince them. If I have to convince somebody to join my downline, they're the wrong person already. Okay? Now, I was super sad, a person that I know, that I've come close with decided that they did not want to join, and I was like, "Gosh." I was actually hurt by that because I just have so much respect for this individual, and I was very, very sad about that actually, and I'm sure you guy's have all been there as well because I knew that that person would be successful with it, if they just wanted to be coachable or trainable with it. Gosh, it stung. It did sting. But if you have to convince somebody to join your downline, you shouldn't want them anyways. Okay? What are you going to do? Are you going to put a cattle prod behind their back the entire way, and force them to do all the things it takes? No. It takes a very motivated individual to be successful in anything, but especially in MLM. Anyway, interesting stuff, right? so I was thinking about this person's question. "Hey, how do I get these people, right? How do I find more awesome rock stars? How do I find rock stars?" And that's honestly ... I was really excited she asked that because it's the entire ... That's all that my chorus that's coming out in January, January fourth, that's the date. January fourth. That's all my course teaches. It's how do you find and recruit rock stars on autopilot? Right? How do you actually get those kinds of people to come to you? A lot of people treat the MLM game as if they're hunters. They track and they trap, and they ensnare, and they grab, and they hold, and they strangle, and they get people, and those are the actions that define what they do to go recruit people. That's the wrong way. You're not going to get ... you think you're really going to go get an A playing team like that? No. You have to flip the table. You got to flip the cards. It's a totally different game. It's not like you're playing the wrong hand, you're playing the wrong game. Okay? I mean, it's like anything else, right? It's all about becoming attractive. It's all about creating offers in a way that makes people come to you, right? What I really wanted to point out in this episode is that ... Okay, this is one of the biggest lessons I've learned. When I was sitting on my couch like four years ago now, almost four years now actually, almost exactly, I realized that I had been going about MLM all wrong, and that I was doing the hunting method. Right? I was a hunter, right? And I was hunting and I was saying ... I was tracking, and tracking, and ensnaring, and trying to ... What are the three magic phrases I can say to get somebody to join my downline at any time. That kind of garbage that you see all the time inside the ML Ministry from other educators and stuff. I think it's garbage. It's dumb. Are you kidding me? Are you really going to force somebody into success? It doesn't work. I mean, the amount of effort that's with it, it is not passive income. Oh, my gosh. It is not passive income. All right. 20 people recruited in the last week, and they're all for recruiting, doing crazy stuff also. That's nuts. That's nuts. I didn't beg any of them to join. They are motivate. They're fired up. They're killing it on their own. Why? How did that happen? It's part of what I realized when I was sitting on my couch, 2:00 AM in the morning four years ago. It was freezing. It was a winter time, and I was reading this ebook and I realized that I was doing it all wrong. Then I realized that I needed to create value, okay? I learned, and I don't remember if it was from what I was reading or what, but what I learned is that in some way shape or form you're going to purchase your customers. Okay? Understand that. You're going to buy them somehow, whether you're going to buy them through ads. So, some money or you're going to spend time creating relationships. Right? So, time or some other value piece that you put out there to get them to come to you. The time, value, or money. I mean, something like that. You're going to spend something in order to get attention. Okay? If you think that you're not going to, you're kidding yourself. So think through. Like, "Okay, how can I actually start being successful in this MLM game?" Right, and I'm excited to go through and teach you those kinds of things. That's exactly what I've created and put together, and I'm excited to show you what I've done in order to do that, and that's what the Secret MLM Hacks course is all about coming up, and I think I just spoke in a huge circle right there. But, I'm excited for you guys to go through that because it teaches ... Start thinking that with your MLM. Okay. What's my plan? Am I going to buy my customer? Meaning, am I going to spend money on ads? Whether it's on Facebook, or YouTube, or I don't know, wherever. Am I going to buy my customer through my time? Now, it's going to be hard, especially in the beginning phases of an MLM, to not spend time. Right? You should spend time mentoring, creating leaders, creating ... I'm not trying to ever take the networking out of the network marketing. Does that make sense? I'm not trying to take the personal touch out of this game. That's not how this works. It does require a little bit of personal finesse with each other. Obviously, you have to develop as an individual, which is trust for anything, so I don't have to point that out. Or am I going to put pieces of value out there. Now, I chose that third one. I chose number three. I want to put pieces of value out there that create relationships, so that people see what I can offer, and I don't have to spend so much time on the front end recruiting people. I can focus on training the ones that are actually joining. Does that make sense? That's how I struck ... I did that on purpose. I structured it in a way to do that. So what I did, is I went and I found the top people who were in the industry, and I found a lot of the content pieces that they had put out there, and I figured ... I was like, "Okay, I see what this guy's doing, but I actually think I could recreate that, and better." So that's what I did. I married up several different concepts and things like that from different gurus that were out there, and I re filmed it, and I put it out there for free, and the response was insane. I could not believe how many people were messaging me. the weirdest thing happened. I put it out there out on the open web for free, I was just trying to help solve problems, and then one day somebody messaged me and they said, "Hey, what's your downline? I just want to join it. If this is the kind of thing that you're doing." It was something like that. If that's the kind of stuff that you're doing or if that's the kind of systems you have or whatever. Like, I really want to be apart of it. And I was like, "What?" It took me back, but then that started going faster, and faster, and faster, and people started joining, and people started coming in like hotcakes and bringing their friends in because suddenly I was answering some big questions for them. That was my whole value ad. I was just trying to answer legitimate questions. I was trying to actually be very, very valuable. Stuff that they should have paid for, I was giving away for free. Right? That's one of the ways that I created the relationships with it. So that's all I wanted to say. When you think through your MLM, when you think through the business opportunity you have, ask yourself, what is my upline telling me to do right now? Are they trying to have me buy my customers through money? Do they want me to spend money on ads? Through my time, which is what most of them do, or by putting value out there that solve actual problems, which most of them don't teach that. Start thinking through, like ... and it's fine. If you want to do it some other ways, I'm not telling you not to do it, but I am telling you that there are other ways, and start thinking through what legitimate problems you can solve in the marketplace. What are those problems? What can you actually go solve? I'm not telling ... It does not have to take a lot of your time. You could actually just go and record little content pieces. I'm sure you have a phone. There's a mic feature on your phone most likely, right? There's probably a camera, and you flip that camera sideways, you answer some questions, start publishing, and putting stuff out there, pretty soon you're going to start finding like minded people who want to do what your doing. Who see the issues that you see. Who see the problems. I guarantee you it's the reason why you're still following me. What is this, episode 40, 41, something like that? You're still following me because you're resonating with the things that I'm talking about, right? You are literally walking through the very thing that I'm describing right now. Okay? I want you to think about how? How did Steve Larsen do that to me? What are the beliefs that I had ahead of time about his thing that I've realized are wrong? Hm? I want you to do that. I want you to start thinking through like, "Hey, what are the beliefs that people are having when I go and start talking to people about my opportunity?" Are they saying, "Oh, it's a scam." Or, "Oh, it's a pyramid scheme." Or, "Oh, that's a ..." whatever it is, those top concerns. Right? They're going to give you a lot of surface level concerns. It's your job to look a little bit deeper. Find the core, real reasons why they're saying what they're saying. Maybe they failed an MLM before. Maybe they wish they could be in it, and they just don't know what to say, or maybe they wish they could be in it, but they're afraid of how their family or friends will look at them. Right? Or maybe they want to be in one, they're looking for something. They just don't really understand what a comp plan really is, or how it works, or how they actually get paid, or how I'm going to make money? Whatever it is that you get passion about solving, solve it for free, put it out there, and I guarantee you ... Maybe I'm not allowed to guarantee, but ... Insert legal disclaimer here. But you're going to get people to come to you, and they're going to come and it's going to resonate with them, and they're going to say, "Oh, my gosh. Yes, thank you. I get it. I see what you're doing. What's your opportunity, right? And whoosh, Oh, my gosh. You just flipped the tables. Why?" Because you contributed to a relationship before asking for a sale. That's why. You got to do that. If you don't do it, if you don't contribute to a relationship before asking for the sale, that's like asking for someone to marry you on the very first date. Let alone maybe you didn't even go on a date, you're just walking up to strangers. You wouldn't do that. That's ridiculous. So how come we're not creating relationships before we're asking for sales? I understand it's one of the easiest reasons why. You can just go straight to friends and family because you have relationships with them already, but it's scary to do so. Again, not telling you not to do it, but if you feel confident that it's not going to mess anything up or be weird or whatever, okay, totally fine, but understand that you need to contribute to a relationship. You've got to solve problems. You've got to have a little bit of likeability or whatever it is. Sorry, likeability or whatever it is. Attractability somehow, or perhaps a little bit of attraction to you because what you're doing is you're developing trust with that individual through your content. Okay? If I have a hard time knowing what kind of episode I want to put out there, I don't publish. I want this to solve actual problems for you that you should be paying for. Okay? Whether or not you join my MLM, totally fine with that. This is not a pitch fest. I'm not here to talk about that, okay? I want purpose. If I even tell you the name of the one I'm in, it will kill the goose. So I'm never going to tell you the MLM I'm in. That's why it works so well because it follows rule number one, my rule number one, which is they come to me. Okay? Oh, my gosh. When you do that and when you teach your downline to do that, huge problems get resolved. Stereotypical to the industry kind of problems get resolved because now I'm not tracking and trapping, right? I'm attracting. I'm solving legitimate issues without ever asking for the sale. Now, some sales personnel will probably tell you that I'm being ridiculous. I get it. I know. You're right. I probably could be a little but more aggressive in certain areas with it, but I've learned over experience that I'd rather do it this way and get a little bit fewer recruits, but really high quality ones. Does that make sense? So I want you to start thinking through that. I want you to start thinking ... Because this is one of the biggest secrets to true duplication. If you can teach people how to do what I'm doing right now, which is what I teach my downline to do, it starts to actually duplicate for real because now they're going and solving other people's legitimate issues as well. And you know what? Let's say I get someone who's like, "Ah, Steven. I wish I had a podcast, but I just can't get myself to do it." You know how much ... Everyone talks about MLM, how it's business opportunity wrapped on a personal development course, right? MLM is a lot of personal development. Well, that's not just MLM. That's all business in general. I've had more personal development through the active entrepreneurship and business than any personal development course out there ever. Right? So I get excited when someone say, "Gah, Steven, I don't know if I can create lead gen stuff. Steven, I don't know if I can create X,Y,Z. Ah, I'm nervous about this or whatever." I get pumped about it because I know now what to work on with them. I know where to move with them. I see a person in action. I see a person with desire, okay? That's one of the biggest issues with old MLM models. You're trying to go get people to buy something who had no desire at all in the first place to do it. That was one of the reasons why I stopped doing door-to-door sales. It's not that it wasn't great. I was good at it. But I realized, wait a minute. I'm waking up every single day trying to convince people who were not planning to spend money to spend money. Who are not planning ... Not that it's not possible. I did it. I was good at it. I was a telemarketer too. I was really good at that, but instead I wanted to flip the switch. I wanted to be able to change the game. Where I could put stuff out, and start having them find me. Okay? Again, I know. I could probably be a little more aggressive and pull people and be like, "Hey, this is my thing and I'm going to close you," and I'm still solving problems, but I just ... It's not worth it to me. So I don't it that way, and whatever your MLM is start thinking through how you can do that, and how you can apply it to your thing. How you can apply it. What can you do to start flipping the tables? If you're having a hard time recruiting people, take what I'm going ... Okay. Please raise your hand right now and say, "Steven, I will be coachable for this next sentence." Okay? All right. Here it is. If you're having a hard time recruiting people, you're probably not valuable enough yet. Now, I don't mean as an individual. I don't mean as you as a person. I'm sure you're an amazing individual, and that's not what I'm ... I'm not saying that you're the bane of the existence of the planet. That's not at all what I'm saying. I'm saying that you're not valuable enough yet. Meaning, you have not solved enough problems for another person or you've not created enough of a relationship, or you have not gone out and actually shown genuine interest in the other person, and they can tell that you're looking at them like a number. Okay? That's where the game will fail. Learn how to become valuable. That is worth more than any check that you could write yourself. Learn how to become valuable in the marketplace and it will serve you forever. Anyways, that's all I got for you guys. Okay? Anyway, I ... You buy your customers somehow. Don't expect not to. You won't get anybody. So somehow you buy leads, whether it's your time, your money, or your value, and figure out which one you want to do and then marry it. Get good at it. It's just like anything else. You'll suck at first, and that's fine. Just like anything else, and you'll get on the bike again, and you'll fall and you'll scrape your knee, and you'll get bloodied up a little bit as you do it, and that's fine. It's part of the journey, and it's part of the purification that comes with entrepreneurship, which is amazing. It is so fun. It's my favorite part of the whole thing. One of them anyway, but anyway, that's pretty much it. That's all I got for you. Figure out how you're actually going to buy, quote-unquote, buy your customers. Money, time, or value, and get to it. You will see how funny ... You'll know when you hit it because you'll have struck a pain point and people are going to come flooding to you. That's exactly when I knew that I had struck it directly on the pain points that people were feeling, and I knew that I could go help them. Anyways, that's it. All right, guys. Have a good one. Talk to you later. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback for me. Do you have a question that you want answered live on the show? Go to secretmlmhacksradio.com to submit your question, and download your free MLM master's pack.

Welcome to episode 377 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Let's talk strategy. I'm excited about this because now's the time guys. Not necessarily because this is gonna be the thing that changes your life in 2018, but because right now, this will make your social media time less stressful. This is not one of those big, grandiose, you know, 'this is the only way you'll see success next year' kind of episodes or kind of conversations. What it is, instead, is 'here's what you need to do to make your day-to-day less frustrating.' Now, as you've heard me talk about over the last month, now really is the time to be thinking about what's been happening and what you want, moving forward. Not because it's the end of the year, but because I'm guessing there is some goal that you have for the next 30 days or for the next 12 weeks, or for the next 12 months, that you'd like to see happen. And if you want to see that happen, you've got to be doing the work and looking at what's worked, and what's not worked. So that's what we're gonna talk about today, we're gonna talk about the fundamentals of building a strategy, and I'm gonna let you know about a way you can dive deeper that's 100% free. We're actually gonna be doing a live free training on this in December in just, like next week, so I want to let you know about that. So details about that will be on the show notes page for this episode and of course, at the end of this episode, I will remind you. Now, the other cool thing is, what you're going to be putting together here, is the fundamentals of nearly every training we're gonna have in Backstage next year. So now is a great time to join us Backstage, especially if, it is the end of the year, you're looking for your 2018 mastermind setup. And 2018 coaching support. Great time to look at BAM, because we do have a couple spots open for next year. There's one-on-one support with me, you get a private area of the forum that's just for you and I, so you have access to me literally all the time. Now, I don't answer at all hours, but you get a much faster response there than you would just about any other way. It's really the only way to get direct one-on-one support from me that doesn't involve me actually managing your strategy for you, with our team. So, that is the way to go if you are looking for the support throughout next year, hitthemicbackstage.com is the place to go to learn more about that, and of course the BAM level of Backstage. Cool? Alright, let's jump in, because there's no time like the present.   Where are you right now? Alright, so I kind of hit on this earlier, I've talked about this on Facebook live recently, but the first step is really knowing where you're at right now. What kind of traffic are you getting to your website? What's the demographic of the people who are currently liking your page, or currently following you on Twitter? What kind of engagement are you currently getting on Instagram, or whatever the networks are, for you? What are you currently sitting at, as far as connections on LinkedIn? So look at your numbers. Also, when you're going through this evaluation, look at your profiles. Make sure that you're updated. I know for me, I often sort of realize, 'hey, I haven't added something," or "hey, I haven't asked for recommendations lately on LinkedIn," or "I haven't updated my Facebook pages about information in a really long time." So come in and do that when you're looking at these numbers. Evaluate your foundations. Review everything, see what needs to get done. And I'm not saying you have to necessarily do that all right now, you can wait and see what your plan is gonna be, but definitely, make note of what's there, and maybe what's not 100% serving your goals. But that's really the place to start, because without that information, without that foundation stuff, without looking at, "hey, I've got this going on right now," it's hard to look at where you want to go, but also, how you're gonna get there from the sense of 'maybe you're paddling up a stream that is not gonna get you to your destination.' Alright? Alright. Number two, and we talked about this last week. I can't say it enough and trust me, this is me telling myself this as much as it's me telling you, as much as it's telling me, every single client I have, who do you want to talk to? Know your clients. Spend some time reviewing who your ideal client is. Getting really familiar with where they are. Because guess what guys? This changes. This evolves. This can shift. You also learn more about who you like working with. Maybe who you thought your ideal client was, going into 2017 is not who you want to be working in 2018. And really, that ties into our next one, which is 'know your plans.' Maybe the ideal client you had in 2017, that was perfect for one-on-one consulting, is not gonna be your ideal client going into 2018 where you really wanna focus on online courses, or a group mastermind, or whatever it is for you. Because the ideal client for one-on-one support is not necessarily the ideal client for group support or for a DIY solution. Or even a 'done for you' solution. So, make sure you're really clear, especially if you're shifting- I know a couple people who are looking at putting out physical products, maybe a planner, maybe a book, maybe a workbook, maybe support materials, as far as a product side to their business. Well, guess what? That's gonna be a different ideal client. So again, revisit this 'who,' and also look at your 'what.' Look at what you're gonna be doing, what you're gonna be releasing, what you're gonna be sharing, because if you don't know these three things: You don't know where you're at right now, so that you're aware, you don't know your who, so who are you talking to? And you don't know your what, which is whatever it is you're going to offer them, we literally cannot build you a strategy. We cannot say, "here's the kind of content we should be running." We can't say, "here's how often we should be emailing them." And we certainly can't be saying, "hey, these are the kind of networks that they're engaging on and this is the kind of copy they're gonna respond to, and here is the audience we need to target for our ads." It gets real hard to build ads when you don't know your 'where,' you don't know your 'what,' and you don't know your 'who.' Like, impossible. Some, like me, would say.  So I want you to look at that. And I want you to actually write this down. If you're a computer person, write it into a google doc. If you are a pencil and paper planner, write it down in your notebook. If you're like me, and you're a scribble kind of person, big ass post-it notes on the wall, way to go. Whiteboards, whatever way works for you. My friend Brandy Lawson over at FieryFX did this a couple of years when she was looking at her 'who,' who her ideal clients were. She actually went in her kitchen, and she's got cabinets, obviously, and she took post-it notes, and she designated three different cabinets as, like, "I love them," "they're all right," "they need to go." And she wrote all of her clients' names down on post-it notes and she put them in those boxes. So, get creative. Whatever way sort of fires you up to do this. After she told me about this, we were talking about it, and it was like, "well that was a lot of clarity, sort of seeing it right in front of me." Like, "oh, well, yeah, that's- having to look at that name and say, 'okay, I need to make a choice.'" So get creative. Put yourself out of your comfort zone. Push yourself out of your box. I actually have a date in December on my calendar, where, instead of being in my office, I'm renting the conference room in my office suite for an afternoon so I can do my planning outside of my space. Now, that' pretty simple, it's literally down the hall from my office, but it's not sitting behind my computer, getting distracted by my emails, getting distracted by Facebook notifications, whatever it is, it's getting me outside of that space. So mark some time on your calendar to do the same. In fact, mark your calendar for two times. The first time being for December 6 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time, or noon Eastern Time. And the second time being later that week or two weeks later, whenever later that month works for you, because on December 6, I'm going to walk you through this even further. We're gonna take this to the next level, because we're actually gonna lay out what your strategy documentation should look like, how far, what kind of things can be put on it. We're gonna walk through building an editorial calendar and breaking that editorial calendar down into social media updates, understanding how long ad campaigns need to run and at what frequency and at what kind of lead time. We're gonna figure out all of that stuff and we're actually going to outline what your strategy needs to entail, so when you take that other day, you are working through a system to actually lay out your plans. We are not going to do it for a whole year, but the process is the same. We're basically gonna look at what a 30 day strategy would be, for the sake of time. When I layout year strategies, it honestly, when we do it for you, done for you service-wise, it takes weeks, days, weeks. So yeah, we're gonna look at 30 days. But it's the same process, whether it's 30 days or 365 days, okay? Reserve your spot now. Plus there'll be some really great follow-up emails after that workshop, sort of reminding you, 'hey, here's what you need to do, here's some other resources for those things,' so check that out. And if you want to get ahead of the game, and you want some support from me on this, I do have, we opened up super, I decided not, okay, let me pull this back. I, in my own planning, for 2018, have decided to take June and July off. You'll still get podcasts, Backstage will still run, things like that. But I won't be doing any kind of client work. I won't be doing any coaching, I won't be taking any meetings, the only calls that I'll do in June and July are with our five BAM members that we have, because we max out BAM at five people, so that's it. Other than that, I will be not working. To make space for that, I decided to go ahead and work this December. Something I usually don't do. With that said, I decided to open up a few more one-on-one spots with me. As of recording this, we have about four left, I think two of them are before this December 6 date, and two of them are after the December 6 date, if I remember correctly. So if you want some support on that, signing up for one of those is a really, really, really good idea. I will link to that in the show notes episode of this, show notes for this episode as well, because that's gonna be really helpful to get some outside perspective. Somebody to push you and say, "okay, and what else? Okay, and what else?" And someone for you to ask questions to. Okay? Alright, that's all the things- definitely, this is one of those episodes you're gonna want to go to the show notes page, thestaceyharris.com/episode377 because you'll find the link to the strategy webinar, and the link to get one-on-one support, and of course, the link for Backstage and BAM if you're interested in joining us for that. Okay? All the things today, guys. This is a big one. This is gonna be, this is one of those things that's going to change the way your day to day runs, and now. Not come next December, but this December. Okay? Alright, that's it from me, I will see you guys on the webinar. Thanks for hanging out with me today. Have a good one.

Welcome to episode 370 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. So recently I was asked to give a 15 minute talk at an event. I was like, "Okay, so 15 minutes, what do you want me to talk about?" They were like, "Oh, well like digital marketing." I was like, "Okay, more specifically." And they were like, "Search engine optimization." I was like, "Okay, more specifically." They were like, "Social media." I was like, "Still gonna need us to narrow that down for 15 minutes." So what we came up with was the one thing you can do right now, to improve your digital marketing, also known as your online marketing, but really this applies to anything marketing. Your marketing in general, your social media, your content, whatever. This one thing will make all of them better, so that's what were going to talk about today. Before we jump into that though, I want to remind you that this show is brought to you by its big brother, its natural upgrade, it's next step, and that's Hit the Mic Backstage. Hit the Mic Backstage is a one stop shop for all things social media marketing, trainings. We also have some email marketing trainings, and video, and we have an entire podcasting course. So it really is the place to be. If you love this show, and you want more of it, come join us at Hit the Mic Backstage. We've got two brand-new trainings that come up every month. They're either updates to previous trainings, meaning that all of the trainings in there are actually reflective of what's happening in social media now, and not two years ago when this community launched, or earlier than that. So join us, hitthemicbackstage.com, we do have a couple spots left for the VIP level, as of the recording of this. That may not be true when it airs. If it isn't true, you can get on the wait list for the VIP option, and join us in the regular community in the meantime, which does give you access to me in the two private communities we have. One right on the website, and one over on Facebook. So there's lots of ways for you to connect with me, and the rest of the Backstage peeps. Also, hitthemicbackstage.com is the place to go. So I will see you there. Let's jump in, and let's talk about this one thing, one thing you can do to improve your digital marketing right now. Are you ready for it? This could be the shortest episode ever. Are you ready? Now? Take stock of what you already have. Seriously, the biggest digital marketing mistake I see people making, social media wise, content wise is, "If I just do XYZ, that'll solve all the problems." So they keep building on this total lack of a foundation. They say, "Oh, I saw at a conference that Instagram Stories, that's what I have to do. So I'm gonna do that. Oh, I saw that Facebook Live is where it's at, I'm gonna do that. Oh, I saw that podcasts are the only way to go. I'm gonna do that. Oh, that's not working, so I'm gonna do two episodes a week. Oh, that's not working so I'm gonna do two episodes, plus a blog post, plus a video, plus a whatever ever, ever, ever else." Here is the real talk. Before you add anything else to your marketing plans, be it online marketing plans in general, be it just your email, be it in person networking, be it any part of your efforts to get customers, look at what you already have. Look at what's happening in those places, right now. Meaning, say okay, so I've got an email list of XYZ. I've got this many likes on my Facebook page. I have this much traffic going to my website. These are the kind of things that people are doing. If you can't tell me any of that information, then you need to take a big step back before you add anything else. If you can't tell me how many visitors you're getting to your website right now, make sure you have Google Analytics installed. If you can't tell me what they're doing on your website right now, make sure you have Google Analytics and something like Hotjar. I use TruConversion, or Lucky Orange, or any of those kind of tools where you can actually see how people are engaging with your website. You can see how they're working their way through these pieces of content, and where they're getting stuck. I love this for sales pages. Heatmaps and things like that, I love them for sales pages, because I can see where people stop. So I know exactly where I lost you, if I lost you. That's really powerful. If you podcast, make sure you're looking at your download numbers. If you have an email list, which if you're listening to this show, I'm assuming you have an email list. Don't just look at how many people are subscribed. How many people are actually reading your emails? How many people? And not just opening, because that can not always be 100% reliable. I'm talking about clicks. How many people are actually going, "Oh, this is really great information. I'm going to engage with it." That gets really tough if you don't have any clicks. This is why I don't put the entirety of my content in an email, because I don't want you to read it in your email. I want you to read it on my website, because then I know you're actually consuming the content. So that's why there's a click, because I want to see a click. An open, it's a grayer area as far as the stat. If you click, I know you actually clicked. Then I can see what you are doing on the site. I can see how long you're there. I can see, again, are you reading the podcast show notes, or are you listening to the episode? I can find all that information out. So look at what you already have. Now, when I said this was going to be the one task, I did not say it was going to be an easy task. This one task really is a lot of little tasks, but it's the most fundamentally important part of your marketing. Again, I don't care if you're talking about email, or content, or social, or whatever else. You have to look at what's going on right now, before you can build on it. Before you can improve it. Before you can make it better. Before you can evolve it. So take stock of what you have right now. When I'm talking about looking at these numbers, when I'm talking about looking at your email list numbers, and your website numbers, and your social media analytics, I also want you to look at what pieces do you have already there. Do you have an email list? What kind of content are you putting out? What social media channels are you already using? So actually make a list of what all of those places are. Then start diving into the appropriate stats for whatever location, or tool, or whatever you want to call it is, and say, "Okay, is this providing value?" If it's not, don't worry about it for right now. If it is, why is it providing value? All right, now how can I utilize the information that's working here, and maybe make some of those places that aren't working work? Or, let me dive into further about why they're not working, because if they're not working because I'm not using them effectively, that's one thing. If they're not working, because they're not the place that I can connect with my community, then I don't care if I can fix it, because if my community is not there, there's not a lot of value. This is something I bring up a lot with our corporate clients especially, because we have a couple of corporate clients who are B2B. We'll have conversations with them and it's like, "Everybody is talking about Facebook. Everybody is talking about Facebook." And I'm like, "Great, no one is buying your, insert really technical B2B kind of thing here on Facebook." Maybe it's insurance consulting. Maybe it's some sort of telecommunications stuff. Maybe it's business based web solutions. The people who are making those buying decisions, are not making those buying decisions when they're on Facebook, even if they are on Facebook in their regular life. So spending a lot of time on Facebook, not a hugely beneficial activity. On the flip side, if you are selling baby carriers to stay-at-home moms, LinkedIn is probably a colossal waste of your time, when it talks about going directly to consumer. Now there may be a value there when you're talking about building relationships with retail people, retail distribution, or event planners who do baby gear events, those kind of things. But when we're talking direct to consumer sales, no. That's not the best use of your time. So then you look at what are your goals. Right? So you kind of see what I'm saying here. I want you to take stock of exactly what you're doing. This is a really great time of year to do it, because we're kind of coming off that summer slowdown, going into the fall pickup, before we go into sort of the holiday season, and things like that. So now is a really good time to take stock and say, "What do I want to do differently in Q4? What do I want to do differently in Q1 of next year? Where do I want to be spending my time?" When were looking at things that work, that are just on point, "Well great, how can we replicate that, and if it's not the best use of my time to do it, how can we outsource it?" So again, we're just taking stock of what's already there. We're not looking for the newest, greatest, latest, hottest, sexiest, cure all, silver bullet, magic pill solution. We are looking at what we already have built. This is something I'm actually working on in-house right now, is a content review. We're looking at, so what episodes do you guys really love? What episodes did the people who listen to the show really not seem to care about? The reason the three things episode has lasted so long, is because they're one of our most downloaded episodes. We have a lot, a lot of people who only listen to that show everyone, which is fine, but they're missing this show. So I like you better. So know that it's about figuring out what is going on right now. Initially, and for a lot of you, it will literally just be about figuring out what are you doing right now. You would be amazed by how many conversations I have with people, where they can't tell me if they have a specific schedule for email. They can't tell me how frequently stuff gets posted to their Facebook page. They can't tell me if anybody has used their Twitter account in the last month, 6 months, 12 months. 24 months in some cases, because at some point it was handed off to a VA, and it kind of fell through, and I think she still does it, but I'm not sure. No, that's a solution. That's not gonna get you to where you need to be. So again, taking stock of what's happening right now has got to be the first step. From there, looking at how is it working. Or, is it not working, and how can we change it? So that's it. That's the one digital marketing thing I want you to do right now, to improve your marketing. Again, I think digital marketing, because this applies to social media. It applies to email. It applies to your content. It applies to your Facebook groups. It applies to your Twitter chats. It applies to you, "Should I have a LinkedIn profile?" It's the first step. It's why when clients, if you book a one-on-one call with me, if you go to thestaceyharris.com/1on1 and you find a time on my schedule, and you go to book it, I ask you for the URLs for your major social media channels. I don't ask that just because I'm gonna go look at them, although I am gonna go look at them. They're a key part of me researching before the call. But it forces you, before our call, to take stock on what you have, and where it is. I am constantly, constantly surprised, by how many people tell me, "Oh, actually have three Instagram accounts." Or, "Somehow I have four Facebook pages." Seriously guys, regularly this happens. So taking stock can be a really valuable thing, to make sure you're streamlined. To make sure everything is updated. To make sure everything is current. To make sure everything is working, and if it's not working, what needs to happen to let is go. Or make it work, whichever one you choose. Okay? All right, that's it. Again, if you want more of this kind of content, if you are looking for more support when it comes to social media, and email, and podcasting, and content, and blogging, and video, and all of that stuff, if for no other reason than accountability, than someone saying, "Hey, how's that going?" Be sure to join us inside of hitthemicbackstage.com okay. I will see you Backstage, and I will see you next Tuesday for another episode of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Have a great week.

Welcome to Episode 338 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Wrapping up February we're going to talk one more Facebook ads episode. Full disclosure, this will not be the last episode we ever have on Facebook ads because this is literally a humongous topic. Just the last one for right now, we're wrapping up February. I want to talk about some Facebook ads mistakes. These are the three most common and, in my opinion, the most fatal Facebook ads mistakes you can be making. I'm not saying you necessarily are making them but maybe a friend is and you want to tell them about this. We're going to break this down. I want to keep today really short and sweet because I want you guys to take some action on this stuff. I'm going to make this really, really quick and dirty. Are you ready? Well, maybe not dirty but quick. Let's kick off with my biggest Facebook pet peeve. Okay, that's a soapbox. If you know me at all you know what's coming. Boosted posts. Yes, the boost button is easy, it's right there. Facebook tells you all the time, "This post is doing so well you should tell more people about it. Here, here, here, hit the boost button. All the cool kids are doing it." Just say no, just say no. Now, the boost button can be fantastic if you have a goal in mind for that boosted post. If you have set a custom audience before and so you have somebody specific that you can send that boosted post to. However, most of you who hit the boost ... Okay, let's say this. Most people who hit the boost button are doing it because they're afraid of the ads manager or because they don't know what to do but somebody told them Facebook ads were a good idea. They're sick of their reach being nothing and so they hit the button. Then they spend 10, 20, 50, 100 bucks and they don't actually know what impact it had. Mostly because they don't know what impact they were hoping it would have outside of people seeing it. That can lead to frustration, wasted dollars, and deciding that Facebook ads just don't work which is simply not true. If you're going to use the boost button know why and know who. Why are you hitting the button is our call to action in there. Do you want people to engage in the comments? Do you want to drive traffic or something? Why are you hitting the boost button? Then know who's going to see it. Have you built a custom audience with your email list? Do you want to send it to your page likes? Even if you're sending it to your page likes make sure you fill out that demo information of age, gender, and location because, guess what, there are tons of people who like your Facebook page who are not actually in your target market, who are not actually in your ideal client avatar. We don't care if they see the post. We care if the right people see the post. Make sure that you are filling out that targeting information when you set the budget and boost the post. Do not just hit the boost button and say, "Well, I run a Facebook ads now, that's so exciting." No, that's not exciting. I want you to run good Facebook ads, okay? That's number one. Number two, and we talked about this in the last two episodes, you have no budget or you have no call to action or you have no clear idea of who you're talking to. I'm kind of lumping this one all into one because we have kind of touched on it in the last few episodes. Being unclear with any one part of the strategy behind your Facebook ads is going to leave you leaving money on the table. I don't want that to happen. I don't want to see you saying, "Stacey, I spent $200 on Facebook ads and nothing happened. You said that they were going to work and they don't work." They don't work when you don't know who you're talking to, when you don't know what you want them to do, and you don't know how much you're going to spend. What happens is then you go, "I'm just going to do $20 a day, that's fine." $400 later you're like, "What happened?" Set your budget, know who you want to see it. Guess what? That who you want to see it may not be everyone who likes your page, may not be everyone on your email list. It might be a look alike audience to your email list to help you grow your Facebook likes. It might be you are targeting people who have been to a sales page before and you want to say, "Hey, hey, hey. You didn't buy that but there's this." It won't necessarily be the same group for every ad. I'll be honest with you, when we run ads we run them to several different groups with varying posts so that we can hit whoever it is we need to hit with different kinds of copy. If you are on my email list or you like the page you're not necessarily going to see the same ad that somebody who is not at all familiar with me, like a look alike audience is going to see. Know who it is you're targeting with each ad set and, big picture, how that all fits together.  Okay? That's number two, you're unclear on any one part of your strategy; budgeting, targeting, any of that. Call to actions, tell them what to do, guys, just please, just tell them what to do. Number three, you take a set it and forget it attitude to Facebook ads. Now, Facebook ads has rolled out some really cool stuff, we talked about it earlier this month with these automated rules. If you haven't joined us on Facebook Live this month you've probably not yet heard me talking about this. This is why you should check out those Facebook Lives that I've been doing. I will actually link in the show notes to the Facebook Live where we talked about this specific change. We also covered it inside of Hit the Mic Backstage in our training we did this month, all around what you need to know with Facebook ads right now. This is a really cool thing because it is allowing us to be a little less hands on than we have been in the past as far as obsessively watching our Facebook ads. Once you start a campaign and you have a few ad sets and you have different ads, you need to pay attention to how are these performing. Quite often I'll have three to five ads inside of an ad set. By the end of the first 48 hours I can turn off two of those ads because they're just not performing as well. I run into a situation where I have five ad sets in a campaign and two ad sets are just killing me, they are just not performing at all. I can turn off those ad sets. There's no reason for me to spend that money if they're not performing. Don't set it and forget it. Some of you are taking this a step further and literally never looking at it. One of the things I want you to put on your calendar whenever you start a new ad campaign is when the end date of that ad campaign is and the next day I want you to put time on your calendar and go and review that campaign. You're actually going to dig through the stats, the conversions, the clicks. Who saw the ad, how they engaged with it, if they did convert or not, how it increased your Facebook likes, if that's the case. Whatever it is that's happening I want you to review that. If one campaign did better than another campaign or one ad set performed better than another ad set. If ad B did really well for set A then pay attention to what ads are connecting with which different audiences. That's going to help you make more educated decisions in the future. Hands down, for me the biggest mistake we're making in Facebook ads is not learning from them. Not paying attention to what happened during the campaign, not paying attention to what happens once we wrap the campaign so we can make better decisions in the future based on the information that is right in front of us. Okay? All right. Again, this is our last of our February series, All Around Facebook Ads. I had a great time talking ads with you. I hope this month helped. If you have more questions, and I am almost certain you do, Hit the Mic Backstage is the place to be. Like I said, we had that brand new training this month where we talked about what you need to know about with Facebook ads right now. We just re-launched the Facebook ads trainings inside of the Facebook guide which is set inside Hit the Mic Backstage. Not only that, well we have the private community where you can get my eyes on your numbers, on your ads, on your offerings, on your opt-in pages. You can ask me, "Hey, this isn't working and I don't know why." Guess what, sometimes it's not the ad so much as it's the landing page. We can talk through that in the private community. That is your access to me, my expertise, my opinions, all of that good stuff. We sure to join us, hitthemicbackstage.com. I will see you backstage. Resources Join us inside Hit the Mic Backstage Connect with Me Connect with me on Facebook Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes or Stitcher for a shoutout on a future show

Welcome to episode 336 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. As promised at the end of last week's episode, I'm keying off a whole series of three Facebook Ads-related podcasts. We're going to start today with one of the fundamental questions, which is, "Should you even be using Facebook Ads as part of your launch?" I want to bring this up because, A, I know a lot of you are launching, a lot of my clients are launching. We've been doing a lot of one-on-one calls with people who are going through launches and who want Facebook Ads advice. We know that this is a massive time of launching. We're a little bit into the new year now, it's time to stretch your legs. Get those things that you've been working on creating rolling out. That's awesome. I'm so excited because I love seeing what you guys are creating and offering. The question then comes up, "Should you even bother with Facebook Ads?" Most often this question comes up because of budget. That's where I want to start with. A lot of people ask me, "Well, I only have X amount of dollars to spend." Maybe it's $100, maybe it's $500, maybe it's $1000, is that really enough to run Facebook Ads? Here's the reality is, yes. $100, $500, and $1000 are all enough to run Facebook Ads. You do not have to have a $10,000 budget to run a successful ad campaign. Here's the caveat, though. Your successful ad campaign is going to look different than somebody who has a $10,000 budget. Also, your targeting is going to need to look different. You cannot the target the same size group when you have a $100 as when you have $10,000. You just can't. You have to be more specific. You have to be really, really tight with your targeting. You're not going to get 5,000 people on your list for $100. Make sure that you're paying attention to your expectations. Make sure you're paying attention to your targeting. Don't let budget stop you from creating an ad campaign. You can absolutely run a successful campaign with a small lower budget. That's really, for me, in my opinion, that's really one of the biggest benefits of Facebook Ads, is that you can run a successful campaign at any budget. It really does, it allows you to do things on another level that we haven't always had the opportunity to in the past. When we think about advertising days gone by, when the extensive advertising was billboards and commercials and things like that. Yeah, no, $100 budget is not going to get you real far. However, in the land of social media, $100 budget will get you a whole lot further than it would in traditional media. Yes, even if you have a small budget, you can absolutely run a Facebook Ad campaign. Here's the thing, though. You need to pay attention to that targeting and to the goal. Be really, really clear about how you're spending that budget. For me, when we have clients who have really, really small budgets, let's say $100. One of the things we'll do is instead of running an ad campaign to a cold audience created through interests and things like that, we will run an ad to a lookalike audience with half of our budget. Then we'll run a retargeting ad with the other half of the budget. Now, $50 will not get you a ton of opt-ins. However, will you then talk about a retargeting ad to your email list, to the people who have been on the page before. You start to get narrower and narrower with those warm leads, you're able to do a little bit more. We'll actually run retargeting ads to people who have been on the list and spent time on the website. Saying, "Hey, here's the opportunity that we're giving you," whatever the offer is, and actually go right for the sale from there with that other half of the budget. That has been really, really powerful for maximizing the profitability of a small budget. However, if you're just looking for straight up list growth, you want to get people on a challenge or a webinar or whatever, and you're confident that you can sell them there without a retargeting ad, and you want to throw all of your money at the beginning. Again, your target's got to be solid. You have to know exactly who you want to get in front of. You're not running ads to men and women all over the world between the ages of 18 and 65, and hoping that it shakes out. No. You're going to be out of your budget in a matter of minutes. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration. You're going to blow your budget really quickly and to a really, really unqualified audience. Run the ad to people who are going to care. Build a custom audience, build a lookalike audience. Things like that are going to get a lot, a lot farther. Okay? All right. Number two thing to consider is really your expertise. If you're somebody who has no idea what they're doing in Facebook Ads, it just freaks you out. You're not comfortable, you want no part of it. First of all, why are you not at Hit the Mic Backstage because that will help a lot. Number two, then no, don't worry about running ads during your launch. Focus in on your content marketing, your affiliate marketing, your networking, your speaking, whatever other pieces your doing. Your organic social media, whatever other pieces you are using to fill your program, your client list, whatever it is that you're selling, you're launching, use those. Don't worry about Facebook Ads because in all likelihood, you're probably going to spend quite a bit of money and get very little results. You just simply don't know what you're doing. That's okay. That doesn't make you bad, it doesn't make you dumb, it doesn't make you ... You can have a successful launch without running Facebook Ads. It is possible. It's just going to look different. You got to make up that space other places. If it's something you're totally uncomfortable with, especially if this is the first time you're launching this program, or the first time you're launching at all. Then, no, don't worry about Facebook Ads. They are not required for program sales success. They are not required for launch success. You can absolutely find the results you want without them. You just have to hustle in other ways. Okay? The other side of that is if you're completely uncomfortable with the idea of creating ads, you've no idea what you're doing, and you have a decent size budget, instead of throwing the money at the ads yourself, hire someone to help you. Hire a consultant, a social media strategist, a Facebook Ads expert. Somebody who knows what they're doing to maximize your budget, if your budget allows that. That's a great way to get the results without having to know all the stuff. Without having to be comfortable on Facebook Ads. If that's something you're interested in doing, connect with me, I have a whole list of recommendations for you, people who do a killer job with this stuff. All right? All right. Again, if this is something you're completely uncomfortable with right now, and you want to do it, join us backstage. That's what that space is for, okay? The thing I want to wrap up with is really that if you are saying you can't do Facebook Ads because of one of the two reasons I mentioned, your budget's too small, or you have no idea what you're doing. No. Not excuses. You can absolutely have success with a small budget. There are ways around not knowing what you're doing. Learning, outsourcing, there you go. On the flip side, Facebook Ads are not required to be successful. They are not required to see any real results. They do not have to be part of your strategy. Now, do I encourage them? Do I use them? Have I been successful with them? Yes to all of those questions. I think Facebook Ads are fantastic. It's one of the best paid advertising opportunities for solopreneurs, and micro business owners like you and me. Absolutely, but they're not required. You don't have to do anything. Okay? Don't get stuck on this idea that you won't see results if you don't do this, because it's simply not true. Okay? Okay. If you want to learn more about Facebook Ads, the best, best, best first step is to go to thestaceyharris.com/episode336, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. There is a image there that you'll see that says, "Facebook Guide and Checklist." Click on that, put in your email address, and I will deliver that to you. You will also have the opportunity to take advantage of a $1, 7-day trial and to Hit the Mic Backstage. I would encourage you to take that opportunity, if for no other reason then you can use that seven days to ask me questions in the community. Watch the brand new Facebook Ads training videos we have inside of the Facebook Guide, which sits inside of Hit the Mic Backstage. You don't have to stay on after the seven days. You don't like it. It's not a fit. You've gotten what you need from it, fantastic. Send us an email, we'll cancel it. You won't renew. You love it, you want to stay, you want to be a part of this community, that makes me super happy. You will automatically renew at the regular membership price. Okay? It really is that simple and that really is the next best step for finding a way to make Facebook Ads work for you. Okay? Okay. I feel like I've said okay a lot this episode, so I'm going to go. I will see you backstage. Resources Join us inside Hit the Mic Backstage Connect with Me Connect with me on Facebook Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes or Stitcher for a shoutout on a future show

Welcome to episode 314 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. I'm really excited today because I'm going to empower you to really look at your Facebook page objectively. I'm going to walk you through the three things that I really want you to be doing whenever you assess what's happening with your profile on Facebook and by profile I should say page because remember we're using our Facebook pages for marketing and not our Facebook profile. Basically I'm going to teach you to DIY a Facebook page review. I love, love, love talking about reviews. We actually do them once a month inside of Hit the Mic Backstage. Every month we do profile reviews so members leave me a link and we review absolutely any profile. Basically, what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through the steps I take and the three major things I look for. There's definitely other things I look for but these are the three biggest missteps I see people making and so I want you to DIY yourself an objective look at your page. Okay? I want you to look at this and look at this from the perspective of somebody else's view, how it would look to a potential customer, how it would look to a potential client, a new lead, somebody who doesn't know who you are, doesn't know what you do and has just found your page or maybe they just got to your page from your website but they are not super clear on who you are. Ready to jump in? DIY Facebook page review.   All right, up first we're going to start right at the top of the page with your graphic. With the new Facebook page layout rolled out over the course of the summer, I say over the course of the summer because seriously they trickled out to people but pretty sure everybody has it now. With the new review, you see we have a larger unobstructed cover image. We've got our profile photo which is also a little bit larger to the left and then we have a massive call to action button. I want you to look at these three pieces first and foremost because here's the real talk, that's the first thing anybody sees. It's a huge, huge opportunity for you to connect with your audience, for you to connect with the people who are landing on this page. Make sure that that image is an image that tells me who you are as in an image of you if you're a personal brand. If you're not, a very clear logo or a team photo something like that. The thing to consider though is the bulk of the time that I see this image is going to be after I hit the like button and when you share status update or when I see an ad from your page. Make sure that as good as this image looks in this, air quote, "full size," make sure it also looks good in the smaller size which you can get really clearly in looking at that status box just under the like button where you would post the status. That gives you a better idea of what it's going to look like in the feed. It looks good both ways. It's eye catching both ways but make sure again it's you, okay? Especially for those personal brands. Most of you listening to the show are freelancers and coaches and any infopreneur space or providing services and when I buy something from you or I hire you for something, it really is about you so don't hide. Use that photo space to connect, okay? Also with that photo, make sure that when I click on that photo, the description isn't blank. Point me somewhere. Learn more about theStaceyHarris.com/about, that's what mine says because I want to use every opportunity to drive them away from Facebook and to my website because Facebook is distracting. My website is fairly focused on what I want you to do. Make sure that you're taking every inch of real estate that you get to point them some place, to get them to do something. The same is true with that cover photo. Again, we have a large, unobstructed cover photo. I'll actually put the sizes in the show notes of the episode down the resources section so you can actually create these. Canva is a great way to do it. If you have Photoshop and the expertise to use Photoshop, use Photoshop. I often create quick ones in Canva. In fact I just recently created one for the new free podcasting training that I'm offering. That's the cover photo now and guess what? I made that cover photo in Canva. If you look at the show notes page for this episode and you look down at the opt in at the bottom Facebook ads, I created that in Canva. Don't think you have to hire a designer. If you do not have the wherewithal to do that or the connections to do that, don't let that be a barrier to prevent you from creating something or really using that space to drive something somewhere to drive traffic to taking a specific action. Use that space. You can absolutely create something simple in Canva. You can actually create something really gorgeous in Canva or yes, hire a designer it that's what you want to do. Use the space. Okay? Use it. Then, make sure that that cover image ties in with that call to action button so for example, as I mentioned, the free podcast training is what's in the cover image on my page right now. When you hit that sign up button it takes you right to the actual lead page that you sign up for that training in. See how clever that is? It really is about making it a no brainer for people but also the description for that cover image also includes a link to that same lead page. If someone clicks on the cover image, I'm still able to point them to where I want them to go. I'm still able to get them to take the action that I want them to take. It's not about over-complicating this. It's not about making this more difficult than it needs to be. It's about keeping it really simple and really clear. Here's a free podcast training. Sign up. It's that simple. You can do this with an opt in before I had the podcast training up there I had just a straight up promo for Backstage. It said, Hit the Mic Backstage and then there's a little [blog 00:07:05] about what it is and the cost and then there was that sign up button. Again, super, super simple but tie it together. This is such a common misstep so really use these three pieces in conjunction. Really use these three pieces to be a really strong initial touch point for you and the person looking at your page whether a lead or a potential client ... A lot of you are speakers. A lot of you are building JV partners, an affiliate income. When people look at whether they want to hire you to speak, when people look at whether they want to partner with you, when people look about whether they want to have you on their podcast or have you write a guest post for them, these are the things that we're looking at so make sure you have your house in order and that initial touch point is so important because not a lot of people are going to scroll real far. Some people may literally only engage with that image that's in your profile, that image that's in your cover and maybe your like information or that first post or two that you have on your page. Maybe sure you're using this real estate. Okay? Number two. Don't forget your about information. Again, especially when people are looking at hiring you or they are looking at hiring you to speak or they are looking to purchase something from you, they are digging into who you are. Maybe you've wet their beak and they are excited and they want to know all the things, they might actually venture into your about area. Make sure that it's updated. We actually did a profile review several months ago now in Hit the Mic Backstage and I was talking about the about area for somebody and I went and showed them my about area as an example because they hadn't filled theirs out at all. I realized and I probably shouldn't tell the story but I'm going to. Mine was horribly outdated, horribly outdated. I referenced programs that didn't exist anymore. I didn't have any mention of Backstage which is a huge part of my business. I had to go through and update it. Make sure you do that especially when you're DIYing your Facebook page review. This is a good time to clean the house so make sure the phone numbers are updated, the address is updated if you have a physical space or a mailing address. Make sure that your descriptions are current, your links are current. Make sure all of that stuff is there and easy to consume for your clients or potential clients and all of that. Edit that page info, check out that about area make sure it's up to date. Yes, this is a mistake I'm totally teaching you guys out of experience. I was so embarrassed in doing this for review but you know, I'm all about transparency guys. That's what happened. Also, make sure that you have regular times to go check in with this stuff. Make sure that you go in and update this information whenever there's a change. Recently we moved from Arizona to California and so I need to update the address because our mailing address is different now because we have a California mailing address now. My phone number stayed the same but my address has changed so I need to update that there. Make sure that you do that stuff. All right, we started with our cover images and profile images then we talked about our about area. The third thing I want you to evaluate is your actual content. The best way to do this is not to scroll through your post and look at that reach number. That is not the best way. What I want you to do is I want you to actually go into your insights. I want you to actually go in and look at your reach and your page views and your likes and how people are engaging with your videos and your post and the action people are taking on your page. The people who like your page, are they your target demographic? Because if they are not, then you've got a whole bigger problem you need to deal with. It's not going to matter how good a page is, how engaging your post are if you're talking to the wrong audience, jump into your insights and actually look at these things because no profile review is complete without looking at the analytics. This is something that we don't get to do when we do our profile reviews in Backstage and that's why we have a how to use your insights training inside of Backstage because you have to look at these numbers. You have to see how your content is actually doing and that reach number or how many likes it got is not always an indicator of how your content is actually doing. Make sure, make sure without any doubts you're looking at these insights regularly and really digging deep into them whenever you're doing a profile review, whenever you're breaking down your page and its ROI and how it's performing and how it's delivering as far as part of your marketing strategy. Okay? The things I really want you to pay attention to is I really want you to pay attention to the people and making sure that you're talking to the right people. Don't only look at who your fans are made up of but also look at that people reached and people engaged because often just because your fans are totally on track you'll find that the people reached are slightly off track. The best example of this that I've got is I had a client who booked a one on one call with me and she didn't really understand her insights. We dug into her insights together and what was really interesting is in looking through her insights she was telling me this is who our target market is and I don't feel like this section of them are really on Facebook. I think they are out of the age range. When we looked at it in fact, not only were they a huge section of the people who like the page, they were the most engaged of the audience and the most commonly reached but they had kept writing content that was to a demographic that was a little bit younger because they were so convinced that they weren't able to reach this older age group on Facebook. When in reality, that's exactly who their Facebook audience was. Knowing who this is, knowing who's engaging with your page, who's actually seeing the content from your page, who actually likes your page, it's going to be hugely informative in how you write your copy, the kinds of call to action you create and how you use it. Because oftentimes you'll find that you'll reach two sections of your audience but you don't reach them in the same places. You reach them in different networks or you reach them with different copy. Pay attention to that. The other thing I want you to look at is I actually want you to look at your content so actually look at your post not only will it tell you when your fans are online and the post types that are doing well but you will actually see all your post published down below and you can look at the type of post it was. If you did any targeting with it, the reach of it, the engagement. What I think is interesting here is play with some of that targeting, customize your audience especially if you're one of those groups that's again talking to two different maybe age groups with the same page. Maybe look at, "Hey, this isn't going to speak to that group so let's target to this smaller demographic and then we'll have another post that we target to this other smaller demographic instead of one post that tries to speak to all the people." Then you can go look at these numbers and you can see what performed well, what connected with people. You can see what types of content or posting from the perspective of a link or video or a photo. You can see the topics that are really connecting so use this information to really, really look at, "Hey, this is what's actually happening." Not just the reach, not just, "Oh, this is how many people Facebook tells me this post actually gotten in front of." No, look at how they are engaging with it. Look at all of the information. You can actually click on the post and you'll get even more information like the likes, the likes that happen on the post versus shares, comments, comments on the post versus comments on shares, shares on the post versus shares from other shares. You can also look at clicks. You can actually see if people are clicking the links because often they won't comment or like a post but they will click on the link and in a lot of cases that's the goal. You may think, "This didn't performed really well. It got a big reach but no one is engaging with it but everyone clicked the link," not everyone necessarily but a lot of people clicked the link so it did performed well. Okay? This is why digging into the insights is so important because that's not information you're going to get from just looking at the front of your profile and saying, "Oh it reached 2,000 people, fantastic." Okay? All right. That's it, that's really what I wanted to pay attention to. The front end, make sure that top of your real estate those graphics are on point. Make sure you keep your about area updated and make sure you are regularly digging into your insights. If you have more questions or you want my eyes on your profile, be sure to join us Backstage. This is the exact kind of stuff that I built that community to do. We do have an entire training on how to use Facebook insights which is hugely popular and not used by enough of you so come check it out. All right, hitthemicbackstage.com to see how you can join us inside of the community and check out the brand new ... It's not so brand new anymore I guess but I'm still really excited about it, the really cool private community right inside of our site. Okay. I'll see you on Friday.

Welcome to Episode 313 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. All right guys, so last month in Hit the Mic Backstage I answered a very common question by doing a training all around free challenges. We see these all over the place, they're a huge list growing opportunity. Basically, what they are is a challenge to actually grow your email list. You're providing value for your audience, you're getting them engaged right from the start, and it's totally free for them. All it costs is an email address. Usually this up sells to some sort of paid program or coaching opportunity, something like that. It doesn't have to I guess but generally speaking I like to do something on the other side of that opt-in, right? That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the three things you need to know about running a free challenge to grow your list. All right, let's do it. Thing number one that you need to know about running a free challenge is getting people engaged is critical but keeping them engaged, that's where the money is. Here's the deal. A lot of times we shoot ourselves in the foot by feeling like we need to deliver an epic amount of value. Here's the deal. I'm really, really happy that you want to increase your value and you want to provide your audience with this killer, killer information. Real talk, they can only do so much. Okay? They only have so much time in the day and because this is a free challenge you have to factor that into where you fall on their priority list. They've got to deliver to their work or their business, and their family, and their friends, and themselves, that's a lot of cups to fill up. You want to make sure that they have a reason to spend time with your challenge for the duration, whatever that may be. Now, that is going to directly impact what that duration is. Meaning you don't want to have a free challenge that's 21 days long because again, real talk, it's hard to keep somebody engaged for that long when there's no financial investment on the table. Think about how many courses you've paid for and fallen off hanging out with it way before 21 days rolled around. Make sure that, especially when you talk about something you're not financially invested in, you're not sort of trying to prove that it was a good investment, think about that when you factor in their attention span. Length of time but also the day-to-day of it, keeping them engaged from one day to the next. Making sure that you are giving them a reason to keep opening those emails, keep visiting the site, whatever it is that you are doing. Number one, yes, getting them engaged is absolutely critical but keeping them engaged, that's where the money's made, that's where the difference happens. Really, that is the most important decision you have to make when you get started. Number two, there are a lot of decisions to make and I want you to make them all before you start marketing. There's a lot of things you've got to decide. You've got to decide length of time, what kind of content it's gonna be, what problems are you gonna solve? You have to figure out all of this stuff. How are you going to deliver it? You have to figure out all of these things. We dove deep into that stuff inside the training, inside of Hit the Mic Backstage. If you want to sort of break through those questions I give some input on how to suss out those answers. The reality is, is too many of us fall into the trap of, "Okay, so I know I want to run this challenge around X,Y,Z. I'll just build it as I go." That makes it really difficult for us to do a good job of actually engaging the audience. It makes it really, really difficult for us to actually share the value we're trying to share because we get so focused on creation. We get so caught up in simply building and making sure that this thing is a real thing that we miss out on the opportunity to really say, "Hey, I'm here for you.  How can I help you? How can I support you? This is why I want you to take the next steps, this is why you're doing this. This is why you're staying in the room and staying engaged." Don't skip through the planning and jump right into, "Oh, I've got this idea. I'll just figure it out as I go." Take a step back, map out the email sequences. Map out the up sells. Map out the delivery methods. Map out what content you want them to have delivered. I'm not saying you have to come out of the gate with the primo super shiny offering. What I am saying is I want you to come out of the gate with the foundations of a valuable, consumable, engaging challenge. Have the decisions made already around is there going to be a Facebook group, how you're delivering the content, what that content is. Have all that stuff prepared because some of the best value they're going to get is from you actually showing up, you actually being available to them. That can only happen if you are able to be 100% in deliver-ability and outside of that creation space. Factor that in, make sure that you make time and you give it the attention it deserves. That is absolutely 100% a lesson I learned the hard way so please don't relive it because it sucks. Okay, guys? All right, buzzing right through this list, number three. Market this like you would any other program. One of the biggest mistakes that I see people making when it comes to these challenges is they take a really laid back approach to marketing it. They don't gut out their end run Facebook ads and share it in their group, and talk about it in their speaking engagements, and reference it in their content. They're not talking about these things all the time. Whether you're running this as a one off challenge and it's 100% live and it's just for this short period of time. Or you run this an an Evergreen thing and it's a standard opt-in on your website and people can get in any time, either way you have to market it. Sometimes we jump ahead to, "Oh, I'll just wait and I'll market the actual program I'm selling instead of this challenge. Really, the challenge is going to convert much more frequently to that paid thing than a cold ad is, than a cold sell is. Even a warm sell at the end of speaking engagement. You can say, "Hey, I want you guys to take the next step with this. Here's a free three day challenge I have. Text the code blah, blah, blah to X,Y,Z and here you go." Then sell them from that because you've given added credibility, you've given added value and you're going to convert at a much higher rate. Give this the same marketing attention, the same marketing investment. Not just financial but time-wise that you would any other program or offering in your business. It deserves that attention, it deserves that priority. Again, going back to sort of step two where I talked about make sure you're out of creation mode, make sure in addition to creation time you also have marketing time. You also have space for you to sell this, share this. Get people invested in it before they ever walk through the door. That's so, so important and it's something that I see so many people missing, all right? There we have it, out quick and dirty three things episode. We're going to start trying to keep these a little bit shorter. I want it to be super consumable for you guys and I want to see you taking action. If you're ready to take action on this and you want to take it a step further and you want to dive deeper, head over to HittheMicBackstage.com. You will find inside of Hit the Mic Backstage an entire 30 minute training dedicated to this. Plus, we have the brand new private forum which is so amazing, so much better than a Facebook group. I'm so excited about this. It is such a powerful way for you to engage, not just with me but the other members, and really get the feedback you need, the feedback you want on your challenge. Come through and work through it with us, that's what that space is for. Get feedback on your landing pages, get feedback on some of the copy in your email sequences. Get feedback on your Facebook ads, learn how to run the Facebook ads for it. Really take it to the next level by giving it the, again, the financial and time investment it deserves to really run at a next level epic for you. Okay? All of that stuff is inside of Hit the Mic Backstage so join us once again, hitthemicbackstage.com and it's going to be super fun. I'm excited to welcome you backstage, I can't wait to see you. If you're already a member and you missed that training go check it out right now, okay? All right, I will see you guys on Tuesday. Resources Join us inside Hit the Mic Backstage Connect with Me Connect with me on Facebook Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes or Stitcher for a shoutout on a future show

Welcome to episode 308 of Hit The Mic with The Stacey Harris. All right guys. It's 308 and today we're going to talk about online summits. Humblebrag here. I get asked to do a lot of these online summits, virtual summits where an organizer brings together 5, 10, 15, 50, it just depends on the summit, experts in their industries and does video interviews, audio interviews, and then offers them sometimes for free, sometimes paid, but usually the ones I get asked to be a part of are a free short term thing and then there's a paid upgrade, so you can get the recordings or extended trainings or something like that. Here's the deal. They're really common. I notice they're making a resurgence now. They had gone down a little bit in frequency, I noticed, for a while, and they seem to be coming back. They can be really valuable, both from a listener participant perspective as well as a host perspective, as well as a guest expert perspective. They can be, in some situations, so today I want to talk about if they're worth it or if they're a waste of time. I really want to talk about that in three ways. We're going to start with from a participant perspective, then we're going to talk about from a host perspective and then we're going to talk about it from a guest expert perspective because it really does have different checklists for each one on whether it's worth it for you or not. I want you to realize that all of the things that I mention here, all of the things that I talk about in this space, these are my opinions and it's not the case of every summit, good or bad. Be cautious whenever you go into these situations where you're going to be partnering with someone, or where you're going to be learning from someone, or where you're going to be bringing people in because that is a representation of your brand. Remember to evaluate these situations on a case by case basis, but let's dive in. Cool? Okay, so first we'll talk about as a participant, online summits, worth it or a waste of time? It depends. Yes, that's going to be the answer for all of them, but it depends. They can be worth it if, big if, you have the time and there's something specific you're trying to learn. I think in your first, I don't know, definitely in your first year, maybe in your first two or three years, depending on how you're moving through your business and what space you're in, it can be really easy to fall into a habit of literally saying "yes" to everything when it comes to learning. Every free program, every free opt-in, every free eBook, and maybe even a lot of paid programs and paid summits and paid downloads and things like that. It can get really easy to be like, "I need to do all the things so that I can be successful because so and so is doing this and they're teaching so they must have it all figured out. I've got to do it. It's the only answer." I want you to really pullback on that because there legit is such a thing as too much information. There is absolutely such a thing as too much info and here's the deal. A lot of that information is useless not because it's bad information, not because the people who are teaching it are trying to pull one over on you, but because you spend so much time in this cycle of consumption that you're not taking action. Make sure that you are consuming information that's actually going to move you forward because you can take action on it. Before you sign up for another online summit, make sure that there are people who you respect participating and there is content you actually need to learn and implement right now and if there's not, but maybe there's this one training and you were like, "I just know at some point that information's going to be valuable," here's the deal. That information, it's going to roll back around. When you need it, it'll show up and if not, then make a note of the person and when you're ready, search them out, but yeah, you don't have to consume all of it. It really does depend. Now, on the flip side, maybe you open up this online summit email from either the host or one of the participants who's promoting it and you're like, "This is absolutely exactly what I've been looking for. I am so glad I got this email. Thank you universe for this showing up in front of me this week." Sign up, add the times to your calendar, treat it with the respect you would give an in person event, show up, engage, and then take action on it. Schedule a time to actually implement the things you learn, identify the sessions that you actually need to go to, schedule that. Schedule all of it and treat it like you would an event of any other kind because that's where these things are actually valuable. That's where these things actually move the needle, make a difference in your business, is when you use it, when you take action on it, and so as a participant, online summits, worth it or a waste of time? It mostly depends on you. I know, it sucks, but the ball's in your court on this one. Take it on a case by case basis and make sure there's something that you actually need to use and then make sure you use it, okay? Number two, online summit, worth it or a waste of time to host? Here's the thing. I've never hosted an online summit for one very important reason. They are a tonne of work. Like, a tonne of work when you do them right. Meaning, you research and get the best of the best experts that you can, when you have a clear idea of who you're serving and what you're doing, when you have a really solid marketing plan that you have the money to execute and the time to execute. They're a tonne of work. They're like launching any other kind of event. They're like launching any other kind of product, really, and so make sure that you are ready for that. Yes, they can do amazing things to grow your list. Yes, they can do amazing things to grow your revenue, depending on the structure of it, but they're also a big investment on your part. Time and money wise. Be ready for that because it's something that I think not enough hosts go into online summits being aware of and I have participated in some where the host was totally ready for that and full on knocked it out of the ballpark. They did a fantastic job and I've been a part of some online summits where both as a participant and as a guest expert, ball was majorly dropped because they just weren't ready for what it was going to take to put something like that together. Be ready. It can absolutely be worth it as long as you give it the time, energy, and money you would the launch of anything else. That's key. Again, it depends. I know it's frustrating to hear that but it does. If you're thinking about hosting it, have a really clear reason why you want to host it, what you want to get out of it, what you want to deliver, and then, map it out like any other launch. Get the help you need, get the resources together you need, start inviting people. I always suggest starting with your network. I'll be honest, I don't think I've ever ... Yeah, I've never participated in a summit and I don't participate in many, but I've never even given half a thought to participating in one where I didn't have some relationship with the host, whether I'd been on their podcast or we know each other through a networking event or whatever it was, they were a client, I was a client, something like that. Tap your network first, get the best of the best, lay out your plan, do it right. Give it the attention it needs. Number three, and our final spot, and what I suspect most of you want to hear. Online summits worth it or a waste of time, to be a guest expert? Guess what, guys? It depends. I know. I know. You now want to chuck whatever it is you're listening to this podcast on right out the window but it really does depend. For me, the deciding factor always comes down to three things. Is it the right audience? Do I have some sort of relationship and respect for the host? Is there space on my promotional calendar? I get asked to do a lot of these where it just runs into something else I'm doing, either a big push for either my Backstage, or I'm already promoting something else through an affiliate setup or I am chilling in my audience because I have just launched something or I'm gearing up to launch something on the another side. A lot of them just run into scheduling conflicts. That's why flashing back to if you're going to host one, start asking people early because they need to know. I get a lot of these emails where people are going to do it next month, like they're throwing together this summit and it's like, "No. My promo calendar for next month is already figured out." Be aware of that as a host, but if you're seeing these invites and you're like, "I don't know where that would go but I really want to do it because of the exposure," because it's always about the exposure, then no, the answer is it's not going to be worth it because you're not going to be able to give it the energy to promote it, you're not going to be able to give it the space to promote it and you will always feel rushed and crowded by it. That's just not a good place to lead from from a sales perspective. However, if you're saying, "Yeah, this fits perfectly in this window where I didn't know what I was going to do and this is going to be great exposure, I totally respect the host, it's dead on as my audience," then absolutely. Then do it. It can be a great way to grow your list, it can be a great way to share value, it can be a great way to maybe make some affiliate revenue, again, depending on what the model is, and it can be a really great way for you to practice. Not so much practice, so much execute the presenting of your materials, especially if you want to be a speaker or you want to get into podcasting, or you want to get into doing webinars. This can be a great way to get comfortable doing exactly that, trying material, trying on timing, things like that. Be aware of that because it might be a no brainer yes, it might be totally worth it. Again, for me, it comes down to having a relationship with a host, having the room on my promo calendar and knowing without a doubt that it's my audience. I think that that third one is the most important. Is this audience going to be filled with the people who you want to be talking to? On the flip side of that, because you're probably going to be asked to promote it to your list, are the people on your list a fit for this summit? Because if they're not, you might have a hard time. I do have a segment of my list that I sometimes share this stuff with instead of my entire list because maybe I'll have something else going on for the entirety of my list so that can be something that can be really valuable to do from a list segmentation perspective. Again, you have to be able to answer those three questions to find out whether it's going to be worth it or a waste of time for you. I've absolutely found there were summits that I hoped would be really fruitful and were a total waste of my time and then there have been summits that I've been a part of that were just awesome, they were fantastic. There was great value, there was a perfect audience, and it did great things for some targeted list growth and funneling to some specific offers I had. Again, with all three of these things, whether it's worth it or a waste of time is really up to you deciding on a case by case basis what your business needs are, what your business availability is, and what your schedule looks like. Okay? All right. I hope this was helpful. I would love to hear from you, so come on over to the Facebook page and let me know if you've been a part of a summit, if it was worth it, what your experience was, and I'd especially love to hear from those of you who have hosted them and the impact that that had on your business because again, I've never done one, because I just genuinely have zero desire to put that time commitment into one. Honesty, guys, that's what you get on this show. Also, if you haven't joined us yet, Hit The Mic Backstage, next Tuesday I'm doing a live training all around growing your list with free challenges. This is going to be a really killer training. I get this question so often, not just in the Backstage community, but from podcast listeners, talking about free challenges, how to run them, if they can be evergreen, if you have to run them live, how to market them, how long they should be, and we're going to cover all of that live, so you can get your questions answered as well next Tuesday. HitTheMicBackstage.com. Make sure you are there. It's going to be awesome, and full disclosure, you can literally cancel anytime. If you just want to check out this one training, come, join us, check out the training, see what else is in, enjoy 30 days in there, and then cancel. There is a button on the side in the menu that says "Manage Your Membership." You send us a note let us know that you want to cancel and it gets cancelled. It's really that easy. There's zero risk in being a part of it and you can get in for this really cool training. I'm so excited for this training. Okay, guys. I will see you on Friday. Resources Join us inside Hit the Mic Backstage Connect with Me Connect with me on Facebook Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes or Stitcher for a shoutout on a future show

Welcome to episode 306 of Hit the Mic with the Stacey Harris. Real talk time, guys. How many of you are having a little bit of a tough time getting back into social media? Summer can sometimes mean we take a little time off, we slow down a little, and one of the things that can sometimes fall through is social media. Or maybe in September you launch, you hit that back-to-school vibe, launched a program, so you were feeling a little burned out, took a little time off, and now you're still trying to get back into it. You're not alone. Actually, I get this question a lot. Today I want to talk about the three things I want you to do when it's time to get back on track with social media, because it's not bad to step back. It's not impossible to get back into it. However, a lot of times the most painful part is the stress we put on ourselves about, like, "Why isn't this done? Why am I not doing this? This has to happen and I haven't done it. I suck." Then, now you've just attached all of this negative garbage to doing it at all, and so we continue to not do anything with it. That goes longer and longer and longer, and it gets harder and harder and harder to get back into our mojo, get back into being social, get back into community building, get back into providing a real value. Yeah, magic word there, "value."       Here's what I want you to do, three things. Let's start off at the top. Number one, reevaluate what you were doing. Step back. Look at your strategy. Look at your clients. Look at who you're attracting. Look at your community. Look at your ads budget. Go through and evaluate everything. Clean house. This is something you should be doing pretty regularly anyways. I try to touch base on my strategy about once a quarter, ads budget maybe a little less than that just because it's laid out beforehand what I want to spend around launches and things like that. Look at all of the pieces and make sure that all of the things you were doing feed your goals right now and feed your goals moving forward in the next quarter, in the next six months, however long you want to look at. I tend to look at like 12-week periods when I'm doing this evaluation because any longer than that and my brain goes blah, which is a technical term for brain-fried. I like 12 weeks. If you haven't read The 12 Week Year yet, definitely do that. We actually reviewed it over on the Biz BFFs podcast, Brandy Lawson and I, and she and I have both started using that in her businesses. It's a really cool way to break down the overwhelm, and it may help you stay more consistent on social over time because you're looking at that strategy at 12-week chunks and not, "I have to do this forever." Again, look at your strategy. Look at what's been happening and look at what needs to be changed or executed on moving forward, because that's going to be really the difference maker for you in actually getting stuff done. Step one, reevaluate your strategy. Number two, get started. Update your graphics. Update your bio. Update any links. I find a lot of times, especially for clients who go into maybe a post-launch lull, I call it the launch hangover, and they kind of disconnect, what I'll find is they'll hire me to come in and do a consult and I'll be looking at their stuff and I'll say, "Why am I linking to a sales page that doesn't work any more in all of your bios?" They'll go, "Oh, I forgot to change that after the launch." Clean house. Check your bios. Check your photos. Check your links for your call to action buttons on Facebook, your pinned post on Twitter. Make sure everything that's there, you're linking your bio on Instagram. Make sure everything that exists is really feeding whatever your goal is for that next 12 weeks. Maybe that's sales growth. Maybe that's another launch. Maybe that's community building. Maybe that's e-mail list growth. I think I said e-mail list growth. Whatever. It just needs to be serving that goal for you for the next 12 weeks. That's what's important. Again, updating your profile photos, making sure that it looks something like you look now. This is something I'm super guilty of and I promise I am working on. We're going to take some new photos here soonish. I'm working on it, guys, I promise. You need to make sure that all of that is updated. Check your strategy, and then of course clean house. Then the third step, and what we're going to spend the most time on today, is really then start doing stuff. The best way to get back into it is to simply get back into it. Maybe that's putting some calendar dates for Facebook Lives. You actually schedule it into your calendar just like you would a client call or a webinar or anything else. Give it that same level of importance. You're not going to promo a webinar and then just not show up. Do the same thing with your Facebook Lives. Say, "Hey, we're going to go live on Tuesdays at 11:00," and then show up on Tuesdays at 11:00 and go live. Schedule time into your calendar to set up your social media foundation. Reevaluate what your other people's content pieces are. I've mentioned a few times that I use Feedly to manage all of the blogs that I pull content from, just the sources I love, because having to search for them all the time is just not happening. I've got some topics that I pull from, and then I've got actual blog links that I pull from so that I can make sure that I am getting the best of the best out there for you guys in the other people's content and content curation stuff. There's got to be time for you to do that. Until you make time, if you're not in the habit of doing it, it's going to really hard to do. I find myself even doing this. We had a crazy summer. I'm not nearly as far ahead as I like to be on content, on social, on any of that. I've actually got my default calendar showing on my Google Calendar. I'm literally looking at it right now. It's right in front of me right now. It's got my social media time, my education time, my e-mail time, my content curation time, work on my Mastermind time. It's got my e-mail times are in there, the time I work on Biz BFF stuff. It's all actually in my default calendar, and that's actually showing on my schedule right now because I'm out of the habit of being in that structured schedule where I know I work best, where I know I get the most done. If you're getting back into this, put that social media time back on your schedule right in front of you all day. If you use a white board or you use a paper calendar or you use a Google calendar or you use the iCalendar on your iPhone, I don't care what you use, but I want to see that on your schedule, because that's going to be the difference maker. That's going to be the, "Hey, this actually happens." Actually get it on your calendar and then execute on it. The same thing with your engagement time. Like I said, I have social media time on my calendar. I actually have it in a couple of places because those are my times to go in and check in. This summer, in all of the craziness that happened in my private life and in moving and all of that stuff, I have kind of been ridiculously MIA from any of my Facebook groups that I network and I market in. One of the things I've been working on this week, because transparency, it's the way we roll here, is evaluating those Facebook groups, really going in and saying, "These are the ones that serve my goals for the next 12 weeks, these are the ones that don't," staying in the ones that do, leaving the ones that don't. Over the next couple of days, now that I've done that, that cleaning of house, I'll go in and do some reintroducing, some posting, some commenting, some connecting, and some networking so that I can be a part of the community again, because right now I'm not. I'm just member. I'm not a part of the community. There's a big difference there. That time is actually showing on my calendar right now because I'm out of the habit. It has to be on my calendar so that it actually gets done. The same is going to be true for you. Put it on your calendar and it will actually happen. From there, execute the strategy. Get in and do these things. Share your content. Share your old content. Look at your tools and making sure that your queues are full, making sure that maybe your other people's content resources need to be updated. Get in and do this stuff. The first two steps are a lot of evaluating, a lot of looking, a lot of seeing what's what. This third step is the most important one. The first two steps don't matter if you don't do this one. Get in and start doing stuff. You see that calendar schedule pop up, you go, "Oh, look, it's time for me to get engaged on social media. It's not a time for me to be distracted by something else. I'm going to stop what I'm doing and I'm going to go do that. I'm going to set the timer and I'm going to execute." That is where getting back into it is actually getting back into it. Until you take that step, the worry, the angst, it's going to stay. Here's the deal. When you get back in when you start taking action, don't announce, "Hey, I know I've been gone for a long time, but I'm back now." No. Just start posting, because here's the deal. Ego aside, a very small portion of your audience is going to realize that you were ever gone. Yeah, I know. It's a kick to the ego, right? It's true. Don't announce it. Just like if you've not posted an e-mail or a blog post or a podcast in a couple of weeks, don't announce it. Just start doing it again. From an e-mail perspective it will probably get you some unsubscribes because people will have forgotten who you are. It's just the way it is. In most cases, they'll just think they missed the e-mail. They'll just think they forgot about it. Just get in there. Just start doing it. Don't announce a big to-do. "I know, I've been gone for so long and I'm sorry, but it'll never happen again." No. Just do it. I'm super guilty of doing this on Snapchat. I'll miss Snapchatting for a while, and I'll be like, "I haven't been using Snapchat much." I've realized that like once a week I was posting this, "I know I don't Snap very often," which is dumb. Now I don't do that. I just Snap when I Snap, because it's not a primary network for me. Don't announce it. Just get back into your habits and execute your plan. That will make a much bigger impact. Remember, actions mean more than words. Especially true on social. Okay? All right. That's our show for today. If you want some support in keeping yourself active on social, if you want to ask some questions as you review your strategy, the best place to do that is Hit the Mic Backstage. It really is the next step for this show. It really is the extension of what you get here as far as trainings, partnered with some actual connection with me and with the people in the community. Head over to hitthemicbackstage.com to join us in the community. You can start right now for $40 a month and absolutely no long-term commitment. It's very cool. You can cancel any time. It's super easy. We're actually in the process right now of making it even easier, which is pretty cool. Join us inside of Hit the Mic Backstage. I cannot wait to have you as part of the community. I will see you on Friday. Resources Join us inside Hit the Mic Backstage Connect with Me Connect with me on Facebook Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes or Stitcher for a shoutout on a future show

Welcome to episode 297 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. All right guys, 297. We're going to talk about something that I feel like a lot of social media people are afraid to talk about, and that's the three things you must know about hating your social media. Sadly, many of you e-mail me and tweet me and send me notes on Facebook and things like that, and let me know you hate social media, and you hate doing it, and you hate everything about using it at as a marketing tool. I want to take a look at that, and tell you what you can do to make it better, maybe let you off the hook on a couple of things, and really establish the idea in your mind that you can like your social media. It can be cool. It can be great. It can be fantastic. It can be powerful. It can be connected. It can be engaging. For as long as you hate it, your audience is probably going to feel that you hate it, which is not generally something we tend to want to engage in in any way, shape, or form. That's why I want to talk about the three things you must know about hating your social media. Let's start with this. Number one thing you must know: Take a step back. I want you to really look at your social media objectively, and that's going to mean turning off your computer and stepping back and really thinking about a couple of things. One, what do you hate about your social media? Don't just tell me you hate doing it. Don't just tell me you hate Facebook. Tell me what it is that rubs you the wrong way when it comes to social media. Is it a lack of engagement? It is that you feel like it's not working? Is it that you feel like you're doing it all the time? What is it specifically? I want you to actually write this down. What do you hate about your social media? Then, I want you to tell me what you love about your social media. Is it that it's connected you to really amazing people? Is it that it's a great tool to help you grow your business? Is it that you just super love Snapchat like me? What is it that you love about your social media? Write down both of those things, love and hate, because that's going to give you a really clear picture of where maybe some changes need to be made. That's what we're going to talk about step two, so I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but once you have that brain dumped out you will probably feel better just instantaneously because you're not going to be twisting yourself about. You're not going to be twisting around this idea that it's this thing you have to do, and it's this thing you hate, because now you know exactly what you hate about it and exactly what you love about it. We can make less of what you hate, and more of what you love. The next thing I want you to do as far as stepping back is really remember why you're doing this. I don't mean, "Oh, because it helps me get clients." Why do you want to get more clients? What change are you trying to make in the world? What impact are you trying to have on people's lives? What freedom are you trying to create in your own life? What are your revenue goals? What do those goals mean for you and your life and your family and your business? Think about your why's, your big picture stuff, and then go back to that list of things you love and hate and think about the things that you could more of on the love list and think about the things maybe you could mitigate on the hate list to make it worth it. Or, to step away from completely. Then, I want you to turn your computer back on, and I want you to take a really honest look at your numbers. What networks are you on? Write those all down, and then tell me what's happening on each of those networks. By me, I mean the piece of paper you're writing all this down on. What are your Facebook numbers look like? What are your Twitter numbers look like? How many people are engaging? What clients can you connect with conversations that happened on Twitter or Instagram or whatever? Where can you see your funnel growing because of Facebook ads or whatever it is? Think about what's working in social media, because that's where we want to focus our energy. That's where we want to create more of that, and once we know what that is, it makes it really easy for us to dissect it. Now, the reason I want you to start with stepping back is this: Most people who tell me they hate their social media hate it because they don't actually know what's happening. They feel like they're throwing a ton of time and or a ton of money at something that's just not working. When they step back and they look at what they love and what they hate and really why they're doing it, and then they look at their numbers, which is something, unfortunately, almost none of you are actually doing, you can see the impact it's actually having as far as as getting you to your goals. Or, you can get a really frank look at the fact that it's not working, and you can figure out how to change that. All right? That's what I want you to do first is I want you to take that step back. The second thing I want you to do is I want you to focus. Again, a lot of the people who tell me they hate their social media are trying to do one major thing wrong, and that's be everything all the time in all the places. That is really hard to keep up, and it's really hard to do successfully on all fronts. Instead, I want you to go with the two and two method. Meaning, you have two primary networks, and you have two secondary networks. That's it. Again, two primary networks. This is where you're going spend your time each and every day. This is going to get priority attention. These are going to be your bread and butter as far as community and connections and engagement and content. Then, two secondary networks. Support networks. Maybe they support your brand. Maybe they are networks you're trying out. You want to see how they fit. Maybe they're networks you really love but maybe you don't have a massive audience yet, i.e. Snapchat. For me, anyways. What is it? Two primaries and two secondaries. I want you to focus all of your energy there. Stop trying to be on every single network that pops up. Sometimes chasing the next thing just causes us to leave the thing that's working. That's not to say that you're not going to have to change and evolve, and that new networks don't have any credibility, but let's not all of our monkeys in the new basket, okay? Let's keep some of your monkeys in the baskets that they like. I don't know why we have monkeys in baskets. I am not the metaphor queen. If you listen to "Your Biz BFF", the podcast I do with my co-host and business partner Brandy Lawson you know this, but monkeys in baskets is what we're going with guys. Back on track, speaking of focus, I want you to focus on, again, those two primary networks and those two secondary networks. In addition to that, I want you to have focused social media time. Again, a lot of what I hear from people who tell me they hate their social media is that it's a time suck. That they're spending all of this time on Facebook. I always really love when clients tell me "I spent three hours yesterday on Facebook, and I don't know what I did." Then I go and look, and I don't any comments. I don't see any posts. I don't see any engagement in groups. I don't see any activity at all. That's because they spent three hours lurking and clicking and not engaging. I want you to have scheduled social media time with focused tasks. Meaning, you're going to say I've got two hours a day to do my content curation and scheduling of the foundation for the week. Then, each of the rest of the week I have two, three, maybe four fifteen minute chunks of time, and each of those chunks of time have a very specific task. That task may be to engage on your page. That may be to re-tweet. That may be to respond to messages. That maybe to answers questions in a group. Whatever it is, it's focused time to do a specific task. That way, you really start to see the impact each task is having on your core following, your engagement, and your bottom line. That's what really matters, right? Again, focused time in focused places. We're not being everything all the time to all the people everywhere. No. We're spending the right time in the right places presenting the right brand and answering the right questions for the right people. It's as simple as that. I know it's not that simple, but it really is simple. Once you embrace the narrowing, you will see growth. The third thing I want to talk about that might help you not hate your social media anymore. Outsourcing. Now, outsourcing can look like a lot of different things. It doesn't have you be you hand over a fat load of money and the entirety of your social media every month. There are so many other options. You can hire somebody who, like me, is a strategist and does strategy consulting where you work with someone and they build you a strategy, and you, and possibly your team, go and implement. You can book a one-off social media coaching session with someone like me or someone else that does a one hour coaching and you work through strategy. You work through some of your blog, some content suggestions, how can we make this better? Maybe they review your numbers and give you some feedback. I have a lot of clients actually who have started doing monthly one hour calls with me. Once a month, we sit down for an hour, and we do an honest evaluation of their social media. They have somebody who runs their social media alongside them, or in some cases they're DIYers and they're doing their social media on their own, but it helps them to sit down with a strategist once a month and say, "Here's where I'm at. Here's where I want to be. What can we do differently? Here's what I'm loving." In a lot of cases they start with, "This is what I'm hating. How do we fix this?" That's a really good way for you to outsource your social media or outsource parts of your social media and get some external feedback and get some external advice on what needs to change. Again, this doesn't have to look like one thing. It can look like lots of things. Maybe it's you outsource just the foundation part, and you handle the engagement. That's what a lot of our management clients really like to do is we take care of the boring stuff, the stuff that has to go out, the content curation and things like that, and then they handle the part where they're talking to their community and they're building relationships and they're having a good time doing that. That's the part they like, but it gets possible when you have a really solid foundation. Or, you could be talking to somebody who's full on handling everything. They're doing all of your social media management. That's another outsource option that comes in at a range of price ranges and it comes in a range of skillsets. Interview a lot of people. If they're not willing to answer every single one of your questions, run immediately in the other direction. If they're not ever willing to explain anything to you, run immediately in the other direction. In some cases, it comes down to maybe hiring a strategist to help you find a manager who can execute the strategy they've built for you. Again, this can look like any combination of things that works for you and your budget, but I encourage you to get some outside support. If you just hate your social media right now, you're just frustrated with it and it's not doing what you want and you don't like it and you have to see a change, book a coaching session. There's so much we can accomplish in an hour, and sometimes just talking to somebody for an hour and getting some positive feedback and getting really honest about what's working and what's not working and where you need to be focusing and how you're wasting your time and getting some outside perspective on that can make a massive difference. Book a one-on-one session with me or with someone else and get that clarity so that you know what your next steps are. Again, this doesn't have to be a huge time investment. It doesn't have to be a huge financial investment. It just has to be you moving forward in a positive space with your social because, trust me, for as long as you hate it, your audience will feel it, and it will continue to not work. That is just going to increase your frustration, not your bottom line. Okay? All right. That is episode 297. In case you don't get the e-mails every Tuesday, which you totally should, I have big news. Episode 300 is coming up. It is just a few episodes away now. A little less than a week. It's a week from Tuesday actually. We're going to do a live episode for episode 300 where I will be also unveiling the brand new Hit the Mic Backstage site and membership community for ... Well, the membership community's not brand new, but the membership site where all of the stuff lives is going to have a brand new look. Come check that. Head over to TheStaceyHarris.com/episode300, and you will see the invite page so that I can e-mail you a little reminder and let you know that we're going to be live.    Resources Join us inside Hit the Mic Backstage Sit down 1 on 1 with The Stacey Harris Episode 300 Invite Connect with Me Connect with me on Facebook Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes or Stitcher for a shoutout on a future show

Guess what, guys? Facebook's making some changes. I know. Try and contain your excitement. Don't worry. I'm breaking down the three big things I want you to know about today on this episode of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. These are changes that I think are going to actually be really amazing changes. The first one we're going to talk about is all about ads. The second one we're going to talk about is all about your page as a whole, and the third one we're going to talk about are some new video metrics that are beginning to be coming out. Good, good stuff. You ready to jump in? Let's do this. First thing's first, some ads changes are coming, and really mostly from a how users experience ads kind of place, how we interact with ads, with other people's ads, but I want to talk about how it's going to impact you as somebody who runs ads, okay? By the way, in the show notes for this episode over at thestaceyharris.com/episode290, you will find links to all three articles about these changes right from Facebook, if you want to check those out as well. I'm going to be giving you some of the information, and then we're going to talk about how it impacts you as a business owner, but if you want to read the whole thing straight from Facebook, head over to the show notes. There are links to all three articles. Okay? Let's jump in on this.   We're talking about how we can control our ads. As somebody who uses Facebook, and has ads in the timeline and on the right-hand bar all the time, I get why a lot of people turn their ads off. However, Facebook has created a way to not have that happen, so now your ad blocking software that you're using with Chrome or Firefox, maybe Ad Block Plus, or there's another ad blocker. There's a ton of them. They might not be working. You might see your Facebook ads popping back up, and as somebody who runs Facebook ads, I'm not entirely against that, because that's going to mean my cost will go down, because there's going to be more people who ads are being delivered to. However, with doing this, Facebook is also giving users the ability to control the kind of ads they see. When we create Facebook ads, we often target interests. Those interests are created from our user side by based on what we've clicked on, or read, or watched, and sometimes those aren't entirely accurate when it comes to what our actual interests are. It may be that you were Christmas shopping for your friend, a new, I don't know barbecue set. I'm making things up now, and so now it's attached to your profile that you have an interest in barbecuing. You may be a vegetarian who lives in a studio apartment, and has never once in your life touched a barbecue. You can see how these interests might not be always accurate. Here's the deal, though. Facebook now is going to let us go in and edit those interests, meaning we can stop getting the ads that are targeted based on gifts we've purchased in the past. Also, maybe you've had your profile for a really long time, and your interests aren't the same as they were always before, and so there's some stuff in there that's older. That's going to allow us to do that. Here's the thing, though. I know what you're thinking. At least one of you listening to this show is thinking, "Awesome. I will just go in there, and I will delete all of the interests, and then no ads will target me." Here's why that's a terrible idea. What's going to happen is you're still going to get ads. You're just going to get really poorly targeted ones. It's worth going in, and cleaning up this list, and making sure your ads are relevant for you, because I will be honest, I have purchased things based on ads because I have found out about something I didn't know about. Most of the ads I've purchased from are probably retargeting ads, which is why I love re-targeting ads. God, that's a whole other episodes. Go in and pay attention to these, and again, from the perspective of a business owner, this is allowing us to really make sure that our ads are getting in front of the right people. This is why knowing your ideal clients, knowing your target market, knowing your target persona, whatever you want to call that person who is buying from you, or listening to your show, or consuming your blog content, or watching your videos, or whatever, is so important. Now we're getting an even better way to target them, and an even more accurate way to get in front of the eyeballs we want to be in front of. This is really cool. From a user perspective, I would go in, and I would update these, because that's going to be really, really cool to be getting more accurate ads in front of me, ads of things I actually care about. Also, again, from a business perspective, we're going to have that accuracy. Also, you may, may see your cost going down a little because ads are being delivered to more people, because those ad blockers are not working. I know Ad Blocker Plus has already tried to announce a workaround, and Facebook shut down that loophole a couple of days later, so I suspect this will sort of be a back and forth between them, volleying this ad blocker on, ad blocker off thing back and forth, for probably quite a while. As ad blockers have become more and more popular, we're seeing more and more sites find ways to get around people using them, either by producing the ads anyways, or in some cases, just locking us out of the content altogether until we agree to either pay or turn the ad blocker off. Pay attention to that, and see what's happening. From a business perspective, this is not a bad thing, because it's going to allow us to get into the newsfeed. That also highlights how important it is that your ads really be of a high quality. It's really highlighting how valuable it is for your ads to be a seamless experience with the other content around it. Make sure your ads are something worth looking at. Make sure your video ads are worth watching. Make sure your link ads are worth clicking, because that's going to do a lot, a lot of good, as far as people not being interrupted by your ad so much as happy to engage with it. Okay? All right, so that wraps it up. Again, if you want to read the whole article from Facebook, you can do that. They had a posted it in their newsroom. I have a link to it over in the show notes page. All right? Next up, let's talk about ... All right, so let's talk about your Facebook page. Some of you may actually already be seeing this. I know some of our members and Hit the Mic backstage have started seeing it, I want to say a couple of months ago. I finally got it, I want to say maybe a month ago now. It's really, really great. They're rolling this out a little strangely, though. They're not rolling it out page by page. They're rolling it out user by user. Once you see this on your page, you will see it on all of the other pages. The best I can describe it is, it's a big, big upgrade. We still have our cover image. That cover image is the same size, but now our profile image, instead of sitting over the cover image, will sit to the left of the cover image above sort of a menu of about, photos, whatever it is specific to your page that you have. If you have the shop section on your page, that'll be there. If you have a services section, that will be in that menu. Right under the cover image, you'll see the like. If you have your message button showing, you'll see that, and then you'll see the more button that has like as a page, and report your page, those kind of options. You'll see underneath the cover image, and all the way to the right, you'll see a big, blue button, and that's your call to action button. Whatever call to action you have, contact us, shop, learn more, sign up, whatever call to action button you have will be there, giving it major, major highlight. Right under that, you'll see the page category, if there's a review or ratings enabled on your page. You'll see that star rating there. Then you see an option to search the posts of the page, which I think is really, really nice, and then you see the information like page likes, and check-ins, and hours, and stuff like that. That's center, so just underneath the cover image, but on the left column under the cover image, is where you'll see the timeline, the newsfeed, the actual posts and content from the page. I think it's a much cleaner experience. I think it's a big, big upgrade. I really like it, but what I want you to realize with this is now you have an entire unobstructed cover image to take advantage of when it comes to sharing some sort of information, and tying that in with a very, very well-placed, eye-catching, easy to take action on call to action button. I want you to make sure that you are utilizing those two pieces of those page to really make sure you are driving people where you want them to go, whether that's a website, or contacting you, or watching a video, or whatever it is. I want you to make sure you're using this real estate, because they are giving it to you in a big, big way now. This is rolling out slowly to everyone. I believe the official roll out in the US is still happening. I know that if you're in the UK or Australia, I don't think you're getting this until a later in the year, but it's coming. It's coming soon, so yeah, you're getting more prominent buttons, and that's really, really what I want you to take away from it more than anything. The cover photo is still displaying on desktops at 828 by 315 pixels. The profile pictures are now 160 by 160, so make sure that you have updated or optimized your content to speak to those sizes. Again, the cover image is staying the same, 828 by 315, and then your profile photo, which is now to the left of your cover image instead of sitting on top of your cover image. It sits to the left, is now 160 pixels by 160 pixels. The other thing to consider when you are creating your cover image is not just how it looks on a desktop, but how it's going to look on mobile. Make sure when you're doing things like pointing to the call to action button that it's still going to work in how it's going to look on mobile. Remember how many people are consuming this content on mobile. A lot, so make sure it's optimized by both user experiences, okay? All right. Let's jump into the third thing I want to talk to you about today. This is actually the thing I'm most excited about, because I know a lot of you are getting more and more into Facebook video, and using Facebook video not only in Facebook live, but uploading, I should say, uploading produced, gorgeous video. Metrics is getting an upgrade. You're now going to be able to understand the audience and the engagement of your videos a little bit better. Let's break down what is getting added. First up, audience demographics. You're actually going to be able to see who of your pages are actually watching your videos, and how long they're lasting. When you go into a video, and again, the link to the actual post from Facebook is in the show notes, and they've got great photos inside of that post of these different breakdowns. Check those out, but you're actually going to be able to the age, the gender, and the geographic location of those top viewers, so you can really see who is actually paying attention. A lot of times, I talk about insights and the value of knowing who's liking your page, but then also, the value of knowing who is actually seeing your page, and the demo information of who's actually engaging in your page. This is just that next step, because now it's getting as specific as, who is watching your video, and to what point are they watching it? You may have your target audiences watching five, ten, 15 seconds of a video, but it's actually a slightly different demographic that's consistently watching all of your videos, all the way through. That's an important piece of information to know when it comes to creating your videos, because it may adjust how often you post. It may adjust who you speak to. It may adjust how you speak to them through video. It may also adjust how long your videos are, so pay attention to these demographics. Again, top audience demographics, but then also the engagement. You're actually going to be able to see how engaged, and at what points they're engaging. You can really be expanding what works, and removing what doesn't. It's really giving you all the information, if you're just willing to dig into these metrics, because this is a lot of incredible value. By video engagement, what I'm talking is reactions, meaning likes, loves, wows, all the reactions we have now. Also comments and shares, so if you're getting to a point where you're just dropping some serious knowledge, people are loving it, and suddenly you see a massive increase in shares. Suddenly, everybody's sharing the video. You know that A, maybe you want to get to that point a little sooner, or you want to do more of that, because it's really not only getting your audience fired up from a point where they're still watching, but even better, they're telling their friends that they're watching, and they're telling them to watch, too. That's really, incredibly valuable for you. You can also see what the viewing habits are, and what kind of views you're getting from shares and from cross-posting. That's going to be really valuable if you're cross-posting in any sort of joint venture or partnership, and you're cross-posting to multiple pages, or maybe you're somebody who is a blogger, or content creator, or a freelancer for a major brand, and you're cross-posting on your own stuff and their stuff. This is going to tell you what kind of information you're getting from there as well. What I love is we're also able to see from the video views who's watching it with the sound on, and how many people are watching it with the sound off. You can really see the value of, do I need to invest in and get started with, on these recorded videos, having those captions? The answer may very well be yes. I know that's something I'm working on for my own stuff, because it really is impactful. Pay attention to this information, because again, once again, analytics will give you a ton of information. We see a lot of questions come through for me that are about when to post, and what to post, and how long to post, and a lot of it is educated guesses based on who your ideal clients are. Beyond that, looking at what you're creating, and seeing how they're engaged with it. All of the answers sit in knowing who your ideal clients are, and then testing things, and then reviewing the data. Reviewing the data is often skipped, so don't just ... Testing stuff doesn't matter, if you don't look at what happened as a result, okay? Pay attention to that stuff. All right. If you want to learn more about these changes, and how to make the most of Facebook, and how to really maximize your impact that your Facebook page is having maybe in the midst of some serious organic reach drops, then be sure to join us at Hit the Mic Backstage, over at hitthemicbackstage.com. This really is the place to be to keep up with social media, to get your questions answered, to stay confident and clear in knowing that you are taking the right steps right now, not the right steps from five years ago. Okay? All right. I will see you on Friday. Resources Join us in Hit the Mic Backstage A New Way to Control the Ads You See on Facebook, and an Update on Ad Blocking Changes to the Look of your Page New Video Metrics Connect with Me Get YOUR question on a future episode Email me at hello@thestaceyharris.com Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes or Stitcher for a shoutout on a future show Get the Facebook Ads Checklist + Guide

All right, guys. 287. In this episode we're going to talk about the 3 things you need to know about social media in August of 2016 because today is August 5th, 2016, the very first Friday in August. There are some things happening. I know that social media is one of those things that can feel incredibly difficult to keep up with. It can feel like it's changing all the time and there's new services and there's new opportunities from old services and there's new networks and there's new things on old networks. It can be really overwhelming, but not if you have a go to resource and that's why I built this show and that's why I built Hit the Mic Backstage, the membership community. It's so that you could have a resource. In the spirit of that, we're going to be that resource today. We're going to talk about the 3 things I really want you to be paying attention to in August. Not all the things, just the 3 things that I'd like to see you paying attention to right now.   Let's get started with the biggest news right now that you're probably hearing about in all the places, Instagram stories. There are a few schools of thought when it comes to Instagram stories. Some Snapchat lovers are quite angry about Instagram stories, saying that it's a total rip off. Some are saying, "I didn't really want to do Snapchat, but now I can get that same purpose happening in a network I'm already using." Then there's people like me who are like, "Awesome. Look how Snapchat is being taken seriously as a competitor and they're seeing that this is really working and so there's making other option to do it. That's really cool." I fall in that camp. I think Instagram stories are very cool. I am still absolutely using Snapchat, of course it's only be a couple days. I don't see myself stopping using Snapchat because I do have different connections on Snapchat than I do on Instagram. However, much like we saw with something like a Meerkat and a Periscope, where Meerkat we had to build a new audience and that took a lot of effort, and where Periscope we already had our Twitter audience built in, or with Facebook Live where we already see we have our Facebook audience built in. I think that Instagram is going to be a great option for those people who were not feeling Snapchat, were not wanting to go over there, were not wanting to build an audience some place else. I will absolutely still be using Snapchat because, again, I have an audience there, but for a lot of my clients that I've talked to already about this who are just starting to get into the idea of maybe doing Snapchat or who have started Snapchat very loosely in the last couple of days and they have really sold Instagram audiences already, I'm saying, "Hey. Let's use Instagram stories." Again, I don't think that Instagram is going to be a Snapchat killer. I think that we've seen a lot of innovation coming out of Snapchat in the last honestly 8 months to a year. We've seen them make massive, massive changes to the user interface. We've seen them make massive, massive changes to things like how the service works, like introducing memories. I think we're going to see more of that innovation come as a response to this. We're seeing them partner with Bitmoji. I was thinking about it earlier, that's the one thing that I really miss in Instagram stories is I loved Bitmjoi integration. It's a really fun way to personalize a story with some fun graphics. I don't think this is going to be the killer that maybe people are thinking it is right now. I think we're going to see Snapchat hammer back in a really cool way, which the social media nerd in me is very excited to see. Amy Porterfield recently talked on a Facebook Live about Instagram stories and how she couldn't get into Snapchat, she never felt comfortable there, but she's really excited to use Instagram stories and then I watched one of her Instagram stories where she did a behind the scenes in her office. The exact kind of content I would expect to see from her on Snapchat, but it was an environment she was already comfortable in and she made a really great point in that Facebook Live. Sometimes as business owners, we have to make decisions and for you, it may be the decision of, what do you have the capacity to take in? Where are you comfortable spending your time? Where have you built your audience? Where is your audience responding to? Show up there. That's what's most important. I'm a big proponent of not trying to be all the places all the time. Instead, be in the right places at the right time. That's going to get you a lot further a lot faster. Yes, Instagram stories, amazingly cool, but I don't necessarily think they're going to be the end of Snapchat. If you want to see more about Instagram stories, I did a brief talk about Instagram stories on Facebook Live yesterday. I will link to that in the show notes so you can watch that if you'd like to watch the replay. If you want to dive even deeper, there's going to be a Instagram stories update to the Instagram training page inside of Hit the Mic Backstage next week, because it's only the 5th. Next week. You'll see that the week of the 8th. That's just a really great example of when something happens and so there's a bonus training in the community. Be sure to check that out, HittheMicBackstage.com. Number 2. We talked about Instagram stories, let's move to number 2. Facebook page changes. Some of you may be seeing a change to your Facebook page. Here's the thing. Not everybody can see it yet. This some things Facebook has been rolling out and testing for quite a while now. I think my first Backstage member probably mentioned that they had it 4, 5, maybe even 6 months ago. I just got the new layout. They're doing it a little differently. They're rolling it out by user and not by page so, for example, I have it now so all of the pages I see are now in this new format versus some pages being in the new format and some pages being in the old format, which I think is a really smart way to roll it out because, from a user perspective, I don't have to go back and forth between the way pages look. However, I really, really, really am excited for them to roll this out for everybody because I think the new page layout looks so much better. If you head over to Facebook.com/TheStaceyHarris, that's my page, you'll see a snapshot of what it looks like now for those of you who don't yet have it. I'm hoping that they continue this roll out and they maybe speed up this roll out, however I appreciate that they do it at the pace that they do it at because there are a lot of users to roll it out to, but I'm really excited for you guys to see it. It looks amazing. It looks so much better. I'm really excited about this new change. It is going to mean some changes in your graphic sizes when it comes to your cover images and the way things are placed, but we also get a much bigger call to action button now. It's right under the cover photo and it's quite bit and it's quite blue and it's actually stands out which I really like. Our profile images are no longer going to sit on top of our cover image. We now have a round circle profile image that sits just to the left of the cover image. That side bar that you see on the right currently is now over on the left so where you see your page like and your page information and your videos and all that stuff is now on the right side of the page, so your eye goes right to content, which I really think is going to think a big, big help as far as getting people engaged with content on the page when they visit the page. Again, if you head over to Facebook.com/TheStaceyHarris, I will have a snapshot over on the Facebook page of what it looks like right now for those of you who maybe have not seen it roll out to you yet. Cool. All right. Let's wrap it up with number 3. Number 3 is not a change or a new network or anything like that. In fact, it's really all about planning. I know a lot of you listening are service-based businesses and a fair amount of people listening are product-based businesses and all of you need to plan for one thing, the holidays. The time to plan for the holidays is not during the holidays. The time to make those plans is now. Especially if you're in a product-based business that perks up at the holiday season, maybe you're selling gifts or calendars or ornaments or holiday fare or whatever it is, the time to be planning what that needs to look like is right now. Figuring out your ad strategy, figuring out your budgets, figuring out your creative for your ads, figuring out your content. Make sure that you are taking some time to figure out what the marketing needs to look like through the holidays now. I think it's really easy to want to be in the moment and stay like, "I'll worry about that. It's so far away. It's only August," but, dude, it's August and, in a lot of cases, you're seeing people who are already starting their holiday shopping. You need to be on top of what's happening for your customer base. Are they people who are early shoppers? I know a couple of you who listen to this, because you've emailed me, create custom gifts, so custom jewelry, or etched glass, or paintings, those kind of things that people very commonly give as gifts. I'm guessing you need those to be ordered in the next several months, not in December. Now is the time to get your audience primed. Maybe they're not somebody who usually shops early, but they need to be ordering early from you. Let them know that. Start talking about it in your content. Start talking about that in your social. In a big, big way, you need to be planning what your social media's going to look like over the holidays. What needs to go out, what doesn't need to go out, what's going to be your ads focus. I know there are at least a couple of you where this is your big time of year. This is your big income generation time. Make sure you're taking advantage of that and you have built out your marketing plan like you would for any other launch. For another section of the audience who may be a little more like me where you slow down over the holidays, you also need to plan for that. I've talked about it a lot on this show. A lot of people have heard me talk about this. I take December off, so my content and my social and all of that stuff, it doesn't stop, but it needs to be done before we get to December so I'm looking at that. What needs to be done for me in the next few months to make sure that my business can maintain and even grow while I'm not working, or at least not working very much. That's the holiday planning I'm doing right now. What content needs to be created? What social needs to be created? What stuff needs to be scheduled? Are we going to have any automated stuff happening as far as challenges that are all through automation in my email service? What's going to be happening? How am I still going to continue to drive traffic to Hit the Mic Backstage? I also know that Hit the Mic Backstage does not tend to be a big Christmas gift, although that would be super cool. Super cool Christmas gift to give to your team members or your biz bff. I'm just saying, but I also know that that means I don't want to be trying to run Facebook ads up against everybody and their brother trying to sell Santa Hats, so I turn my ads off. That also means that I would rather have a big October November before that December ads blitz, but really it starts in November, where my cost per click and my cost per conversion goes way, way up. I have to figure that out right now because that stuff's going to need to be rolling very shortly. Whether you are somebody who gets really busy during the holidays or you're somebody who goes completely quiet during the holidays, the time to figure out what needs to be done is really right now. In August, that's what I encourage you to do. Do some planning for the holidays for December and make sure that your business is set up for that lean time or that really busy time. Just to recap before we go. Number 1, Instagram stories. Be sure to come over and watch the Facebook Live where I'm talking about Instagram stories as well as join us backstage for the walkthrough of Instagram stories. Facebook changes. Head over to the Facebook page and you'll see a screenshot of what the new look is and let me know on that post if you have it yet, because I'm very curious. Number 3, holiday planning. It needs to be happening. This is the month to start figuring that stuff up. Okay? All right. I will see you very soon, on Tuesday in fact. Have a great weekend. 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