Podcast appearances and mentions of ryan dice

Welcome to a new episode of Business Lunch! Roland Frasier and Ryan Dice dive deep into the changing landscape of media, newsletters, and information consumption. They analyze a recent article about the newsletter era, discussing how AI, unique perspectives, and audience-centric approaches are reshaping how we consume and create content. The episode explores the challenges facing media businesses, the role of AI in content curation, and strategies for creating valuable, irreplaceable content.Highlights:"Create content that somebody doesn't want summarized because they want your point of view.""If you can be summarized, you're pretty commoditized.""We're getting away from the branded house into hyper-specific, hyper-individualized content.""Nobody really wants to learn how to do something anymore; they just want it done.""Define yourself by the audience you serve, not the products you sell."Timestamps:00:00 Introduction 03:26 The Newsletter Era: A Media Transformation07:38 Challenges in Current Media Consumption11:49 The Rise of AI and Content Curation15:12 The Importance of Personality in Media19:25 Protecting Your Content in the AI Age22:09 Beyond Email: Owning Multiple Communication Channels25:08 Creating Irreplaceable, Unmissable Content27:27 Levels of Information Consumption29:45 Future of Media and Audience EngagementCONNECT • Ask Roland a question HERE.RESOURCES:• 7 Steps to Scalable workbook • Get my book, Zero Down, FREETo learn more about Roland Frasier

In episode #2684, we delve deep into the value of podcasting, particularly from an M&A perspective as our guest, Ralph Burns, discusses purchasing a podcast and its impact on business.    Don't forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube!   Check out more of Eric's content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil's videos (Neil Patel YT)    Connect with Kasim on Twitter and Connect with Ralph on LinkedIn   TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) Today's topic: How I bought a podcast, The valuation of podcasts, The risk of being overtaken & more (00:13) Ralph shares his experience of buying a podcast and the valuation process. (02:28) Ralph talks about negotiating the price of the podcast with Ryan Dice. (04:04) Ralph discusses the value they derived from the podcast in terms of business leads and revenue. (06:10) Kasim asks Eric and Neil who they think could potentially surpass them as top content creators. (07:12) Neil explains that larger brands and a shift in content strategy can pose a challenge to their dominance. (09:01) Neil shares how they shifted their content strategy to focus on technical and complex topics to drive revenue.   Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more!   Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:    Single Grain

Join us as we welcome internet marketing titan, Perry Belcher, to the AM/PM Podcast! Listen in as we journey through Perry's remarkable career path - from humble beginnings before turning to digital marketing. Perry's illustrious career even saw him get a personal call from none other than Jeff Bezos himself, a short story you don't want to miss!   The conversation continues with Perry reflecting on the rise and fall of his business and partnerships. His journey, marked by selling health supplements to launching a digital marketing business, and finally starting the Driven Mastermind and the War Room, is an insightful one for any entrepreneur. Our chat also covers the importance of joining a mastermind group, the benefits it can bring, and how it can help you gain a broad perspective of different industries.   Lastly, Perry shares fascinating insights about the role of AI in business, specifically in copywriting. From reducing labor costs to crafting compelling headlines and stories, the potential applications of AI are far-reaching. He also discusses misconceptions people have about AI and the opportunities it presents. Tune in for a riveting discussion about the intersection of AI, E-commerce, and internet marketing. In episode 365 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Perry discuss: 09:22 - Success in Real Estate and Selling 16:45 - Running Successful Events 23:30 - The Value of Networking and Collaboration 29:55 - Selling Event Recordings for Profit 34:19 - Cash Prize Incentives for Speakers 39:00 - Leveraging Email Lists for Business Success 42:06 - Artificial Intelligence And Its Impact On Internet Marketing 53:21 - Other Mindblowing AI Capabilities 57:27 - AI's Role in Various Industries 1:07:38 - Follow Perry on Facebook for Updates 1:09:46 - Kevin's Words Of Wisdom Kevin King: Welcome to episode 365 of the AEM PM podcast. My guest this week is none other than the famous Perry Belcher. If you don't know who Perry is, perry is one of the top internet marketers, probably one of the top copywriters in the world today. He's got his hands in all kinds of stuff, from newsletters to AI, to print on demand to funnels, to you name it. In marketing, Perry's either got tremendous amount of experience in it or he's heavily involved in it right now. We talked some shop today and just go kind of all over the place on some really cool, interesting topics. I think you're getting a lot from this episode, so I hope you enjoy it. And don't forget, if you haven't yet, be sure to sign up for the Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter. It's at billiondollarsellerswithaness.com. It's totally free. New issue every Monday and Thursday. It's getting rave reviews from people in the industry and some of the top people in the industry as well as people just getting started. So it's got a little bit different take on it and just a lot of information. Plus, we have a little bit of fun as well in the newsletter. So hopefully you can join us at billiondollarsellers.com. Enjoy today's episode with Perry. Perry Belcher, welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. It's an honor to have you on here. How's?   Perry: it going, man, Dr King, esquire at all. I'm doing great, buddy, I'm doing great. I'm just trying to survive this hot, hot, hot summer that we're all having, you know.   Kevin King: Well, you're out there in Vegas. Y'all had floods, right. I was seeing some stuff on TikTok, like some of the casino garages and stuff were flooding.   Perry: Yeah, there were some floods out here, so it's been. We got like years worth of rain in two days or something like that, they said, which we could stand. It didn't hurt. But the hot weather out here is just the way that it is. You get used to it after a little while.   Kevin King: Yeah, it's the same in Austin. It's like 108, I think today, and I know you know, football season just recently started and everybody's complaining that they're doing a game. One of the first games was in the middle of the afternoon, like 2.30 in the afternoon and like man, half these people are going to be dying out there, you better have some extra medical. You know supposed to do these things at night in Texas during September.   Perry: My kid did in the middle of the day and he had some days that they were kids passing out, you know. So I don't miss the heat in Austin. I'll take the heat in Vegas instead. It's different kind of heat to me.   Kevin King: Yeah, it's not. It's more of a dry heat, not that, not that human heat that we have here. I'll take it so for those. There's some probably some people listening that don't know. They're like who's this? Perry Belcher character? I never heard of this Perry Belcher guy and if you haven't, you've probably been living on a rock in internet marketing, because Perry Belcher is one of the living legends out there and when it comes to internet marketing, it's not just he dabbles on Amazon, but it's Amazon's just a little piece of what he does. He does a ton of other stuff. So, and you've been doing this since you're like, you've been an entrepreneur since you're like I don't know, three years old. I heard you selling hot dogs. I mean, you've pretty much done, everything from run from selling hot dogs to running, I don't know jewelry, pear shops or something, to having little kiosk in the mall, to crazy kind of stuff. I mean, just for those that don't know who the heck you are, just give a little bit about your background.   Perry: Sure, I'm world famous in Kazakhstan. I started out, you know, I grew up really poor in little town in Kentucky, paducah. It's a sound of dead body makes when it hits the floor. And I'll as soon as I could. I stayed there until I could drive. I could drive a car. I got the heck out of there and went to the big city, nashville, you know, and I got into, you know, early on I got into retail and I owned 42 jewelry stores. At one time when I was really, really young, before I was old enough to buy beer, I owned 42 jewelry stores. Isn't that crazy? That's crazy. Not that I didn't buy beer, but as long as I was legally buying beer Exactly. You know. So I was in retail. I went out of, you know, eventually I made three different runs and retailed it, Okay, and then I got into manufacturing. I found I really enjoyed manufacturing Great deal. I still do a lot of manufacturing, as you know and then along, I guess about 1997, for those young whippersnappers that were born about then that are on in your Amazon crowd right In 1997, they invented this thing called the interwebs and Jeff Bezos started a store called Amazon and I sort of got. I sort of got all caught up in the web thing. And you probably don't know this story. It was a true story, Kevin. I got a call from Jeff Bezos when I owned craftstorecom, so this was in probably 1998 or 1999. I got a personal call from Jeff Bezos wanting to talk to me about buying craftstorecom and rolling it into the Amazon family. And then they were only selling books, they were bleeding I don't even know $100 million, a quarter, or some crazy number. And I'm like dude, you're, I'm reading about you, you're losing money, I'm making money. You know, I think you got this reversed. I probably should buy you. I swear to God, I said that. Yeah yeah, I said that that was about best I can figure about a $750 million mistake.   Kevin King: Well, it's funny you say that, because I mean we go back, we're old school when it comes to way, before you know all this internet marketing craze. We were doing old school marketing, you know, by by putting a postage stamp on an envelope and sending it out. And I remember I have a couple of similar stories back around that same time, early late 90s, early 2000s. The guy at MySpace had just started somewhere around in there and those guys reached out to me. I had a newsletter, an online newsletter going at the time, and they reached out to me to do something and I turned. I just ignored them. I was like what's this MySpace thing? I never heard of it.   Perry: I did the same thing with Jim Barksdale. You know who that was. Yeah, yeah, barksdale wanted to buy one of my companies and I blew them off, and he was Netscape you know they also used to do back you might remember this back.   Kevin King: I had several different websites and to get traffic back before there was Google and all these. You know, this SEO and all this stuff is basically as Alta Vista and you know, I love that, I love that Yahoo and all these guys and you could just just by putting stuff in the meta tags, you'd rank, you know on top of the crap out of yeah. You put a text down at the bottom and all the good, all the good, all the good all the good, all that kind of stuff. But I one of the things, what you might remember this there is what's called ring sites. So in order to get traffic, you go to some guy would figure out how to get people to his site and then it would be like next or previous, and you'd hit a button and it would go to the next, previous, and then we had a newsletter that was doing about 250,000 emails a day back before can spam and all that stuff and to get traffic to it. You know, we were getting on Howard Stern Show when he was on terrestrial radio and we were doing all kinds of crazy stuff. But I was working with a site called BOMAS B-O-M-I-S and they had one of these ring sites and we they were like one of our top sources of traffic and I just remember there's two guys there running out of their apartment or something. I talked to one of them. This is like probably around 2000 or so, ish, 2001. He said, hey, you're going to be dealing with me from now on. My buddy is moving on. I'm like all right. I said James is moving on. I said, ok, cool, what's he going to do? He said I don't know, some sort of encyclopedia or something. I'm not sure what he's going to do. He's got some some crazy idea. Turns out it was Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia. I was actually working with Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia before he was Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia. Isn't that crazy? It's crazy, I mean the stories that we can tell from the early days of the Internet.   Perry: When I look back, I just can't. You know my buddy's favorite saying, and I've adopted this I can't believe how stupid I was two weeks ago.   You know like you. Just you just realize you know just the boneheaded stuff that you did when there was so much opportunity. The first domain I ever bought this was like just when domain registrations came out I bought formulas, the number four you oh wow com, the most worthless domain anyone could ever own, when I could have probably bought internet.com Pretend to buy anything and I bought the most boneheaded stuff. You know.   Kevin King: Well, you remember the guy that he got in early he bought was at sex.com or something for, like you know, 10 bucks or whatever it cost to register it back then before there was a go daddy, yeah, and remember the fight like 20 years ago over that domain because it became like the most valuable domain on the entire Internet or something. Remember that huge fight about that.   Perry: It was. It was crazy, but I know there's been a bunch of those stories. Man, I've got some friends that really did well buying domain real estate early on. I bought a lot. I mean I've, over time, I still think domains are a bargain. I really do Most. For the most part, I own stuff like sewing.com and makeuptutorials.com and diyprojects.com. I still own some big stuff that we operate and I own a bunch of other big stuff that we don't operate and you know I'm buying after markets.   Now I bought conventions.com for a little over $400,000 two weeks before COVID Boy. That timing was extraordinary. You know what could go wrong. Conventions are impervious to depression and so anyway, yeah, so I started buying. You know I got a manufacturing and I immediately saw the benefit of online selling because you could cut out all the different layers of middlemen in the in between the consumer and the manufacturer. So I've been a manufacturer selling direct to consumer for a long time. And then I got. I got in business with Ryan Dice. After I got in a lot of trouble, almost went to jail in the supplement business scares me to death to this day. You know I lost everything I had, almost went to the clink, and when that all got settled out I went to business with Ryan Dice and we he turned me on really to the information selling world.   Kevin King: How'd you guys meet up? Was it at some events, or did you just meet up? Yeah, we met up.   Perry: Yeah, I'll tell you, the story is pretty funny story. So we met at a Yonix Silver event. We went to dinner with, you know, all these millionaires, you know in the room, the millionaire mastermind people, and we went to this big dinner and we had like 20 people at the dinner and when the check came it was like, well, I only had a salad, well, I only had the soup, and you know they're all dividing up checks and crap. And I'm like, come on and Ryan looked at me and I looked at him. He said do you just want to pay this bill and get the hell out of here? And I said, yeah, so we split the bill. And that's how we became friends, how we met. And then, you know, when I we knew each other through Yonix and then when I got in trouble in the supplement business, I mean, I had loads of friends when you're, when you're now and when you're when you're netting out half million dollars a month and you're flying all your friends on private jets, the Thomas and crap on the weekends, boy, you got lots of friends, you know. And as soon as the money ran out, well, guess what? The friends ran out. You know, you know everything was, you know. Nobody knew who I was. Then, you know, and Ryan called me and said hey, man, I got this business in Austin. It's doing a couple million dollars a year. If you'll come help me run it, I'll give you half of it. Oh, wow, and we did $9 million in the first seven months.   Kevin King: And that was a digital marketer. For those of you that don't know, that's correct.   Perry: Yeah, it was called touch tone publishing then, but eventually we rebranded it became digital marketer and then out of digital marketer came traffic and conversion summit and out of traffic and conversion summit came the war room mastermind and we ran all three of those for years. And digital we sold a TNC to a Claire and Blackstone Blackstone group about four years ago, I guess. Then I sold my interest in digital marketer to Ryan and Ryan, roland, richard about two years ago and then we dissolved war room about a year ago I guess they were going a different direction and and Kossim Islam and Jason Flylon I started driven mastermind so but yeah, it was a great, great run with. Those guys are super good, guys are super, super smart and we were business partners for 14 years long time. It's a long. That's a you know outlast a long time.   Kevin King: That's a long time in this business longer than all my marriages, almost divine, you know. So going just down. We'll talk about some of those in just a second, but just down that back what? What got you in trouble in the supplement business was it claims that you just didn't realize you couldn't be. Yeah, what was the it?   Perry: was kind of a combination. I was. I was legitimately a pharmaceutical manufacturer. We were an FDA pharmaceutical manufacturer. I got all the licensure and all that I got in trouble with the state had nothing to do with the federal. They called in federal, they called in DA, they called in everybody, like guys. Everything he's doing is correct. But the state took issue to some claims and what ended up happening? They realized that they had not. The thing is, once the state gets their tentacles into you and have your money, you know it's really hard to get rid of them, right? They're like a tick. But. But at the end of the day, the only thing that that that they actually that stuck was something called ways and measures. So that meant that my equipment wasn't precise enough to put the exact amount of product per bottle. So let's say it says it's two ounces right, mine might be 2.1 or 1.9 ounces right, and that's there's. There are state laws about that. They're called ways and measures laws. They're governed by the people who manage gas pumps, if you could believe it. But out of everything that they originally said that I was doing, they dropped everything else and that was the only thing that actually, at the end of the day, was it? But I had to settle it and they got all my money and all my stuff and left me three million dollars in debt. And when, when I went to Austin and we hustled hard, you know, for a couple of years, and I paid all that off, I didn't file bankruptcy on it and it was hilarious because I threw a Perry's broke party. Yeah, about two years in, when I got to zero, I got back to just broke. I wasn't three million dollars, right. I threw a giant Perry's broke party as maybe one of the most fun parties we've ever had. It was a little you're in.   Kevin King: Austin's, you do that out at Willie Nelson's ranch. Because, I was tapes, remember he did that when he got in trouble for seven million bucks and he did some sort of big ass fundraising party out. He has this like old ranch out West of Texas, west of Austin that's. It's got a studio lot on it, basically an old.   Perry: House. Then I just had it right over the house and we had a big pool party and, oh my Lord, so many drunk people. It was a lot of fun, it was good time, so I got a lot of friends at Austin and you'll talk digital marketer.   Kevin King: the conference from like. I think the first one's a few hundred people to what the? Now it's five, six thousand people, or yeah, we get the biggest internet for if you're an internet marketing, yeah, just in in general, it's not just Amazon, it's like across the board, it's the biggest one out there, I think.   Perry: Yeah, before the year before COVID, I think we had the biggest year was seventy two hundred. Oh wow, seventy two hundred, seventy eight hundred, I can't remember. They thought we were going to ten thousand the next year and they rented the Coliseum in San Diego instead of the hotels. And then, of course, covid yeah, and it was just a you know, two or three years we had sold just prior to that. So have we not have sold that first year of COVID? I think was probably around a five million dollar loss, but they had clear and had insurance for it, fortunately. So I don't think they. I don't. I don't know the exact damage, but I know it would have probably wiped us out and we've been because we had a refund. Tickets with In the venue would not have soft to hook and I was a big bunch of crap when it comes to running conferences.   Kevin King: I mean, I do my billion dollar solar summit. You do your events now, like you do. You've done the couple AI summits, you've done the Perry's weird event or whatever. You do quite a different things. You have the Whatever, whatever, whatever. You done like three of those which are fascinating. You do, you know, you have the driven mastermind and you're involved with digital market and our space. There's a ton of people it's almost gotten through Events for Amazon sellers, like everybody. Everybody in their dog wants to have an event and the vast majority of them suck. There's like seven people there they can't sell tickets that are losing their shirt. Very few of them actually make money. What is the key actually, if you want to do an event or you're thinking about that to actually making these things work, is it the long term play you gotta have? The upsell is at the.   Perry: Well, events, events are very, very much an uphill battle. That's the reason. When you go to sell one, they have a lot of value. If you go to, if you build an event to a thousand, two thousand people, it has a lot of value in the exit market because once an event hits a certain inflection point, they're insanely profitable. So you're so, like digital market, we lost money On TNC for probably the first four years that we did it. But the way we made up for it, we filmed all of the sessions and we sold them as individual products. So we built all of our. We had a thing that really made that thing magical, because every session had to be good enough to sell as a product. So it made the event itself, you know, great because you had to have executable do this, do this, do this, do this. It couldn't just be a fluffy talk, right. Every talk had to be good enough to sell as a product when Ryan and I were doing them. So for the first three or four years we didn't make hardly any money, but we generated a lot of product out of that. We sold throughout the year. So we, you know, we did make money a couple million dollars a year From the product sales and then over time, as the attendance goes up, the ticket prices tend to go up. You start at really low ticket prices and you ratchet ticket prices up as the event gets bigger and bigger, bigger, and you start taking on sponsors and we basically got to the point by the time that we sold. You don't really want to sell right, because the sponsors were paying for 80 90% of the cost to put on the event. Tickets were you then over a thousand dollars a ticket? We were selling 7000 tickets. You didn't really need to sell, you know, because you the event was paid for by the sponsors. The ticket sales money was just free money. And then whatever you do at the event, you know in sales is even more free money. But when you look at companies like Clary on the by these things, they don't care about the product creation, they don't care about selling at the event, they only care about tickets and they make a lot of money on hotel rooms. So they so in when, when they're promoting they got a lot of cash, so they'll buy all the hotel rooms in downtown San Diego a year before we, right before we, now we announced the dates, they buy all the rooms and then when you're buying your room from bookingcom or American Express or whatever, you're actually buying that ticket from Clary on, because Clary on in a lot of cases bought all the rooms in the city for $120 a night and then a year later you're paying 350 on AmEx and they just pay AmEx a commission, a 20% commission.   Kevin King: That's different than the way when I do like for a billion dollar so much in order to not have to pay you know, $3,000 to turn the Internet on in the ballroom, or to have to per day, or from not having to pay for the ballrooms or this or that. We have to do guarantees. Rather than buying the rooms up front, we have to guarantee that we're going to put 50 butts in the in these beds or whatever. If we don't, we get penalized, you know, yeah, right.   Perry: We did a little bit different model. Yeah, we did, we did too. You still have room blocks, you know, and the killer and the killer in the convention businesses contract negotiation and room blocks. You know, if you can get room blocks down, we did one recently at the ARIA and I didn't have a room block anywhere because the ARIA surrounded by like eight hotels within walking distance, so there's no reason to book a room block. Everybody could stay where they wanted within that complex and the room blocks Everybody could stay where they wanted within that complex. And then we got together and it didn't. It didn't create the problem, but you know they get you. Would they charge you more for F&B? So they, they're going to get you right. So I've got my own event center now I've got a 50 person event center. I think we're going to expand to 100 people and and I really prefer having smaller workshops anyway, they're they're more intimate, they're more effective and if you're going to sell something else to the attendees, the smaller the room, the higher your conversion rates will always be if you're offering something to the attendees.   Kevin King: That's true, yeah, so then you took it from there to the mastermind you did the war room for a long time and I know my buddies, Manny  and Guillermo, at Helium 10. They joined the war room about two years into working on helium 10. They said that was the number one life changing thing that they did.   Perry: They killed it to that.   Kevin King: I don't know the numbers, but I know it's. I see what he's spending and what he's doing, so I'm like it's some serious numbers. But they they attribute that to war room, because there was some. Y'all did one event and I think it was in Austin, actually around 2018 ish, and it was all about system. Whatever the talk was on that one, because they're quarterly, they were quarterly deals. I think it was all about systemizing and getting out your way and like cutting all the riffraff. I don't, but they said that was. It was game changing for them and made them tens of millions of dollars. So, but to join a war room was what 30 grand, I know driven was what you have now which I've been driven 30 grand.   Perry: Yeah, I've been to.   Kevin King: I've been to driven. I went to the one back in July which was excellent out in LA and and I love going to these. Those of you are listening. You know this is not an Amazon conference. A lot of us go to Amazon conferences, but I think the best conferences for me are actually the non Amazon conferences, because I go into something like a driven where there's yeah, there's a handful of Amazon people there, but there's also a bunch of Facebook people. There's also a bunch of domain people, there's SEO people, there's people that you know just have some sort of a shop in Baltimore that you know do internet marketing and you, you meet this range of people and for me it's brainstorming sessions. I'm uninterrupted. You know if I'm watching stuff online, even the recording of that, you know I got phone calls coming in, the dogs barking. You know wife's nagging, whatever it may be. You're interrupted. But you're sitting in a room from nine to five, obviously not in the room. You're sitting in a room From nine to five listening to people, these people talking a lot of it. You might already know, some of it may be new to you, but you're just in there. One guy says something, perry says something, and then Kazim says something, and then Jason says something, and whoever else the speaker says something, you start going. If I put all these things together and I can do this for my business, holy shit, this is freaking incredible. And so that's. These people look at me. And why the heck would I pay 25 or 30 grand to be in some sort of event? And if in the Amazon space, I personally wouldn't, because I'm going to be the one delivering most of the value in a lot of cases. And so why would I pay to join something? They should be paying me to come to it. But when you go to something where it's a cross section of people in the marketing world that all think like you but they do different things, I think that's the most valuable thing, would you? Would you agree?   Perry: I think honestly, I think in a good mastermind and that there's that good being in parenthesis and a good mastermind. I don't think you can lose money. I think it's almost impossible. I've made money in every mastermind I've ever been in you just, I like the idea of the diversity, right. I might learn something from a guy in the funeral industry that can be applied to somebody that's selling weight loss, right. You never know. And you know my benefit. I guess I've been around a long time, like you, kevin, I've been around the block a bunch and I've been fortunate enough to work with like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of businesses Pretty intimately in the, in the, the war room and now driven setting, and you know I get to see what's working and what's not working from like a 10,000 foot view inside all these businesses. So for me personally it's a great benefit that I get to learn something from really diverse. You know I learned the other day I was talking to a friend of mine, a client, that that they're in the, they sell online, that you book an appointment, you know they call you in, whatever, and they're in an industry that I have no interest in, no knowledge of, right. But they figured out that if they once somebody's booked an appointment, if they put a zoom, a live zoom, on the thank you page with somebody sitting there going hey, kevin, so glad you booked your appointment. By the way, jimmy can take you right now if you want, right. That one thing those, those people are coming in that way, or converting nine times higher than the people who book a normal sales call. And the beautiful thing now is.   Kevin King: You can do that with AI. There's tools with AI where you could actually, when they fill in that form I'm registered, I'm Kevin air dot AI and all that yeah, several and one that you could actually and you could put in you upload a spreadsheet or tie it into. You know, through an API to your, your cell system, that Jenny is available and it can actually, as I'm typing in, kevin King it's in the background recording a video with with Perry saying hey, hi, kevin, this is Perry. I glad you just signed up. Jenny's available right now. It's all automated and all like holy cow how to help her is just sitting around it and you know the conversions on that go through the roof.   Perry: Oh, they're nutty and but that's something I learned from a person who's in the like the the trauma they. They serve trauma psychiatrists, that's their market and I'm like I would never know that in a million years. Right, but but how many other businesses or clients of mine could that one tactic be applicable to? The answers? A lot, right, so you. So, when you go into those rooms where you know to be in driven, you got to be doing at least a million a year, but I think our average is around seven million a year gross and, and some you know up to, you know there's there's some hundred million dollar Folks and big players in there. There's some big players there, but you but nobody's stupid, right? You're in a room full of really, really smart people when they're basically telling you what they're doing. I joke about. I get paid for people to tell me. I get paid for really smart people to tell me what they're doing. That's really working and what I right, what a great gig I got right. But, yeah, we've been doing it for a really long time there. Those groups masterminds are hard to keep together and Keep happy and all that there because they are, because they're intimate, people share a lot of details and sometimes you have personality, kind of little things. This is crazy nutty stuff. That happens that you, the only problem with those things are just, they're a, they're a bit to, they're a bit to manage and you know that, as far as the 30 grand goes, or 50 grand, or 70. I know a lot of people charge. I know a buddy mine charge is 70,000 a year. You know we act like that's a lot of money but everybody's got an idiot on their payroll that there's a more than 30 grand to, I promise you. Everybody does. Everybody has a dodo on their payroll that they should have fired a long time ago but he brings the doughnuts or something and you don't farm that. Would you rather have that dodo licking stamps four hours a day or would you rather, you know, have access to some of the smartest people and your peers and you know really Really that? Keep you accountable, keep you on your toes and keep you up to date, because we do a call every week along with the meeting. So I I'm not pitching it down, I don't. This is sound like I'm hey, go buy my thing, but no matter what the industry you're in, get into a mastermind group. If you can, it'll one that you can afford.   Kevin King: You know ours is out of reach for most people because they're they're not because it's they can afford it, because they just don't meet the minimum sales, like you said, like you know, if you're at a one million and you said the average is around seven, you know, for 30 grand a year, all you need is one, one little idea, one thing, just you, just the ROI could be immense on just one thing.   Perry: I've heard a hundred times and I got all my value for the year within the first two hours. The first meeting yeah, you know, I've heard that so many times because this Kevin King gets up and talks and says something really smart and you go. Well, that was worth it, right, I got. I learned a thing that I didn't know and and, like you said, when you're doing, the beauty is the reason we don't take people that aren't doing a lot of money yet. It's hard to ROI. But if you're already doing let's say you're doing seven million a year and you get an idea that gives you a 5% bump, right, let's 350 grand, yeah for an idea. And you, you know, you're in for a year. You're in for 52 calls and four live meetings and Intensives and networks and private calls and all kinds of stuff. It's you know and I'm not saying for us, just for any man mind if you get a good mastermind, you can't lose money if you, if you have a good enough business already that you can ROI.   Kevin King: One of the things that you do that's really cool too is, like you said. You know, with digital market and I agree that you know you're recording it, turning it into content you do that now. Well, you'll do a Like that, the weird event you you straight up say, hey, come out to this thing. Yeah, it's gonna be a hundred of you here, but I'm recording this. I'm gonna turn this into a product. Yeah, you turn it into six products. You know, and I didn't with my billion dollar seller summit. I didn't used to record those, but now that's half the prop. That's where the actual the profit is. It's actually in recording it and then selling it to the people that didn't come. But one of the cool things that you do, like it driven and some of your other events your AI event you did this. I think you do it. Probably pretty much everyone I've ever been to is at the end you say get the kick the cameras out of the room, turn everything off. Let's grab a bottle of wine. You sit up with the stage. You might bring a couple other your partners or the couple other speakers and it's just two hours, three hours. They're just shooting the shit of Q&A and, yeah, stuff that comes out of that Alone pays for the entire event.   Perry: Yeah, the unplugged we've we've been doing unplugged forever because at the end of most events, you know, you still have unanswered questions and I don't want people to have unanswered questions. But also some people just don't want to talk about, they don't feel comfortable talking about the particulars of their business on camera. Yeah, so you know, if they because you know, sometimes a lot of my students are also Gurus, right, and you know how gurus are they don't want to tell you that. Well, they don't want to tell you that they're having a hard time making the lease payment on Because they're pretty ill, hurt their image, right, I talk about all of my screw ups and Almost going to jail and going broke and all it, because you know it's real, that's the real of people. But but a lot of the guru guy, well, I can't say that because it was just destroying my image. So I like doing unplugged sessions a lot of times because they people feel a little more comfortable talking about their challenges and Without feeling like it changes their position. And I think sometimes, just, you know, people don't want to ask their question on a microphone in front of a thousand people for fear of embarrassment. And what if my questions? A dumb question. So when you're just sitting down Slugging back a beer and you know chatting they feel more comfortable asking the questions. They probably should be asking it we I've done that as a policy for a really long time. We do wicked smart and we do unplugged, and those are the two. You know we always ask for the best idea in the room, and that that was a funny story.   Wicked smart was invented the first year that Ryan and I did Traffin conversion summit. We programmed three days worth of content for a three-day event and At 11 o'clock on the third day we were out. We'd have anything else to talk about. We actually we had miscalculated our time and we have anything else to talk about. So we went to lunch and we said man, we got to fill all afternoon. What are we gonna do? And and and I don't know if Ryan or I are together, I think we pretty much together we came up with the idea let's just challenge people to come up and tell us the smartest thing They've learned in the last six months and how it affected their business, and let's give whoever gives the best idea. And I think the first person that came up, ryan or I won Jeff Mulligan's, a good friend of ours and he's from as a former boss tonight lives in New Hampshire and he always says wicked smart, that's wicked smart, you know. And yeah, and the first person came up and they did their thing was whoo, that's wicked smart and that's stuck. And that's how wicked smart got started. But we never did unplugged. I used to do unplugged with Andy Jenkins at Stompernet years ago when I would. I used to go speak for them every now and then and one of the things that I did was really, really cool was called unplugged and we just Andy and I, would sit down on the edge of the stage. I don't, andy was brilliant. I don't know if you ever knew him or not. He was absolutely a really really brilliant guy and he and I would sit on the edge of the stage and talk to people for hours. You know it was a lot of fun. So I kind of picked that up from Andy.   Kevin King: Yeah, I do that at the billion dollar source. I'm not do a hat contest, so the last day, what well? I do two things. I incentivize the speakers to bring it, so I put a cash prize on the speakers. So, because I don't want them doing the same presentation they just did it three other conferences or same thing they talked about on podcast I want them to bring their a game, so I put a five thousand dollar cash prize on the first and twenty five hundred on second. It's voted on the last day. I'm ineligible. I always speak last, so I'm ineligible.   But all the other speakers that I invite after the last one spoke, everybody votes On who they thought was the best speaker, deliver the best value, and then that person gets five grand. So it's become like an honor to do that and then, as a result, everybody is bringing next level stuff that they normally wouldn't talk about. Because, and then I publish the list of the and you know, if there's 15 speakers I Public, I start at number 10. I don't show number 11 through 15. I want to embarrass somebody totally, but I start at number 10 and go backwards and announce them up like it's. You know, like it's a billboard top 100 or something, casey casem or whatever and it works really really well because Everybody's. If you're not in the top 10 of a speaker, you're like you know you didn't do so well, you didn't resonate, and then you're not coming back if you need a spelling of my name for the check. You've been involved in AI for like seven years before. It was the cool thing to do, I think probably six yeah, probably six years.   Perry: I got. I spoke on AI at the largest TNC, that one before COVID. I spoke on AI and showed Jarvis and Well said labs and a bunch of those before Anybody or anything, and and everybody in the room was just blown away by it and I feel certain they didn't do anything at all when the dog, you know. But I was using it for copywriting and we were building services For and like this AI bot that were it'll be after this Heirs, but but this AI bot, you know, we're really concentrating more on the business models that you can apply AI to. So the first AI bot summit was all about Opening people's minds up to it, so they understood what it was, understanding how to use the tools and and really just grasping this. One thought of If you had 10,000 really smart people willing to work for you 24 hours a day for free, what would you have them do? That's always my question, because with AI and a little bit of robotics, that's what you have. You have an unlimited amount of Robotic slaves to do your bidding right, whatever you want, and they don't take breaks and they don't break up with a boyfriend and they don't sue you for, you know, workplace compliance issues and all that stuff and, and you're gonna see, I think it's already happening. It's just people aren't exposed to it in mainstream yet, but Corporate is projecting like huge profits over the next few years as they Diminish the amount of workers, physical workers they haven't replaced with AI Elon Musk whether you like him or not, you know, cut the workforce at Twitter by 90% and arguably, the experience for the end user hasn't changed.   Kevin King: Yeah right, yeah, it's, it's your event back in just to tell a quick little story. Then we'll go into this. But your event back in April. You're showing some business uses. You know you're talking about the army of 10,000. You showed something about a. You know here's a building, the payroll of this building and use AI and the payroll goes from I don't know some crazy number of a million dollars a month to 86 dollars a month or what some exaggerate there.   Perry: It's the Empire State Building and the payroll. The daily payroll in the Empire State Building is about I I'm gonna paraphrase, I don't remember the numbers, but it's about a million dollars or more a day and the average worker output 750 words of text a day in white collar America. So if you translate that into the cost of open AI to generate the same 750 words, it's about 42 bucks, I think yeah, it's like you know it's it's in 42 I mean for all of them, not for one of all of you know 42 bucks or 92, but it wasn't much.   Kevin King: It was less than less than 200 dollars, I think, to generate the same amount of work product one of the things that you talked about there were newsletters and like how AI can automate a lot of newsletters and and I'm a I'm gonna disagree with you a little bit there on where you can actually have. I think at that time you may have changed your tune now I'm not sure. But you're like let AI do all the writing, do everything. You can just put these things on autopilot and I think that's definitely possible, but the quality sucks and for the most part, unless you're just assembling links. But if, but, but. What you said there actually about newsletters got me thinking. It's backed on that same thing we're talking about earlier bringing this all together. Here is where, about going to events. It's like you know what I used to run a newsletter in the late 90s and early 2000s that we that had 250,000 daily subscribers. We crushed it as using that as a lead magnet to sell memberships, to sell physical products, to sell everything. What, if you know? And this Amazon product space, everybody's always trying to build audiences and they're always like go build a Facebook group, go Create a blog post and you, as you know, the most valuable asset in any business as your customer list, your email list, your Custom list and be able to use that when you want, as you please. And you can't do that on social media. You have no control with algorithms on Facebook, you know, have no control over how many people see your LinkedIn post or or anything. But with an email list or a customer base database, you do. I was like, wait a second, what if we took newsletters and did this with physical products and actually to build audiences? So if I'm selling a dog products and I happen to have sustainable dog products, I'm like what if I build an audience? A dog, the dog markets half of America. That's too big. Well, if I niche that down to some people who ends dogs and sustainability, create a newsletter for them. I'm not trying to sell them anything. This is not a promotional email from my company saying, hey, look at our latest product, here's our new things. But it's more of a about the dogs, about dog training, dog tips, food tips, whatever. And then occasionally spreeking on some affiliate links To test things or you maybe even get a sponsorship. So make this thing self-sustaining and when you're ready to launch a product, you have an avid, rabid, loyal fan base to launch that product to as like this is the way to actually build things. So we I started looking into it Devoured everything you you showed about newsletters. You even set up a special tele I think it was telegram Newsletter channel, devoured everything in there. I went out, devoured everything in the newsletter space for three months, like everything is like. I already know this stuff, but I want to re educate myself on the latest tools, the latest strategies, and I just launched one In August, august 14th for the Amazon space. That's that I already have an audience there. Let me figure this out. Let me, like, figure out what are the best tools, the best systems, and then I can spread this to across multiple industries, multiple things, and that's what we're doing now and it's hugely Successful so far. And and AI is a part of that. But I'm not letting AI write it. AI is more of the, the creative side. It's how it it will rewrite something. If I'm trying to think of a headline, I'm like what's a better way to say X, y, z? I'll type in what's a better way, you know, to say we're ten ways that there are funny and catchy, in the tone of Perry Belcher, whatever it may be, to say this you know, give me all these cool ideas and then I mix and match, or sometimes it nails it, or I'll write a. I do a six you, you talked about this and one of your things the six second video, and so the beginning of every one of my newsletters is a six second, basic six second story. It's a personal story About me. It's something about me meeting Michael Jordan, spending a night with him in a sweet and Atlantic City the day before the night before he first retired, and you know it's crazy. Stories are about my divorce or about you know, so you're a naked girl on the balcony. I know it's, it's edgy, crazy story. But then I tie that back into the physical products and I'll use AI sometimes, maybe to help tweak that. Or if we got it some scientific document from Amazon about how the algorithm works, I'll use it to read the document, summarize it and then, you know, rewrite it with a human touch and add personality to it. So that's where using AI in other industries. I think it is brilliant. Most people aren't getting that right now. Most people just think of it as this is a threat to my job, this is a threat to you, this is the terminators coming to kill me and take over the world.   Perry: So what about? Everything's a conspiracy theory.   Kevin King: Yeah, I mean AI. I was just had just had a chat in August, so it's my father's 82nd birthday and I was sitting there for an hour explaining AI to you know, an 82 year old and a 79 year old in their mind was just, they're just was blown. They're like how do you know all this? This is, this is like science fiction movies or something, and like this is what you can do with it. And most people don't understand that. What are your thoughts on on AI right now and how people are misunderstanding or misusing and what are the best opportunities out there?   Perry: Well, circling back to your newsletter thing that the AI sucks for newsletters, it depends on the kind of newsletter you're writing.   Kevin King: That's what I said. If it's a link, newsletter or something, you can do it.   Perry: If it's a, if it's an aggregated or what you call a link newsletter, what I call a curated newsletter, they add as a really good job at writing basically a tweet and then linking to the article, and you do that like eight or nine times and you got a newsletter. But did you see the one?   Kevin King: the hustle, I think it's. They did a study. Like people are saying that. I don't know if you saw this from the hustle, but the hustle actually hired a guy, he went out and he did Let me see if I can fully automate a newsletter 100% AI so they had their programmers do some stuff and they put it out. It was about the nineties. So they would take today. You know, if today is, you know, April 6th, no, august 6th 2023, they would do August 6th 1993. What happened on that day? You know? Jurassic.   Perry: Park, the whole movie.   Kevin King: But the thing is it was repeating itself. The way it was writing was like all it was just you got to have, you got to have ins that.   Perry: Do a final review. I mean you got to have a human still, do a final review. Yeah, we've got a system. So Chad, my partner Chad, built a software system we're about to launch actually it's called Letterman and it we manage 18 newsletters a day through it and we do it with three outsourcers.   Kevin King: And the way that we do it is we hand out the we handpick what we're going to talk about.   Perry: So basically, we have a bunch of API feeds that tell us these are the stories that are trending about this subject today, and then our guys can go in and just hit, click, click, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, no, delay, delay, delay. So maybe for a future issue, and then it's going to pull together those links and drop them into our software and then the software reads the article and then writes a like a tweet, that tells them to go, that compels them to go read this article. The call to action is compelling them to read the article. Right?   Kevin King: So that's SDO, then something really. It's a. Or is it a newsletter? It's a newsletter.   Perry: So this all goes into a newsletter and basically like, for instance, financials, a great example. The capitalists is ours and we want them to be able to get the gist of, like the Wall Street Journal and three thumbs swipes. And even though we're only writing, there might be 10 links in here. Right, we're writing like 140 characters on each link, compelling you to go click the link, and AI is writing that.   Kevin King: Okay.   Perry: And then they're going over and reading the actual article on the original source, right, okay, so so it's expanded.   Kevin King: It's an expanded judge report or something. It's exactly what it is.   Perry: It's not. It's not even kind of like it. It's exactly what it is Now the opposite. That's only really useful if you have a news worthy topic. Yeah. News or financial or something that's not for entertainment, financial entertainment, sports, politics things that change every single day. But if you're in the Amazon space, you got to think about it more like a, a magazine.   Kevin King: That's what I do, yeah.   Perry: So what we'll do there is find a feature article or three features. Three feature articles is even better. So we'll, let's say, for instance, my things on Amazon, and I'm talking about optimizing the perfect Amazon listing, right? I don't know whatever, but I'd go find three, the three best articles I could possibly find on that subject anywhere in the world, feed them into the AI, have them read all three and then write me a new article. And oftentimes the way we keep it interesting, we have characters, ghost writers created that right in the style of whomever right. So, but I mean really detailed. But one of the things that we found, Kevin, that's killing right now that you might find is our email list. I'm on a mission to get my email list to never send a promotion ever.   Kevin King: That's what I'm on to. I'm on to yeah.   Perry: So the way I do it is by sending out content, so like Perry might send out an email. You're doing it every day right now.   Kevin King: I get an email from you every day on copywriting Big, long email right. Yeah, big long. No, I save them. They're valuable. I mean, some of them go into my swap file.   Perry: It's a subtle.   Kevin King: It's a subtle like you're staying top of mind. You're doing it. Dan Kennedy does it right now and there's a couple others. He's doing that with Russell, but I and they're valuable. You can just read that and never do another thing. But it's you're staying top of mind and then you'll put in something OPS, remember the AI summits coming or whatever that stuff works.   Perry: But what's about to happen with those lists and we're doing another list right now is, once you open that thing about headline writing right, I can fire off a straight up promotion to you.   Kevin King: Yeah, you're segmenting based on what I click and what I do open and read Instantly.   Perry: So you're opening reading my article, right? So you just read my article about headlines and then the. Then you close that article down close that email. The next email in your queue is from me going hey, fibs, copywriting course is 50% off today. Great deal, and you're already so pre-framed to that. The open, the open rate on that second email is like 70 to 80%. Yeah, yeah, we're doing that.   Kevin King: We're going to do that in the product space, where we will watch what people click and if they're always looking on the docs and story, we'll start feeding them more docs. And there's a tool out there, there's a what. There's a tool that does this for the AMA right now, that that does newsletters, where it automated it watches everything and automatically get basically creates a personalized feed in a newsletter we want to Instagram.   Perry: We basically want to Instagram the newsletter business. So if you're only opening dots and stuff, then we want to deliver dots and stuff to you. If you're only delivering lip plumper articles, then we want to deliver a lip plumper off offers to you and and make the newsletter more lip related.   Kevin King: If that's your thing you're into in a makeup space, we're talking about it for newsletters, for you know Amazon sellers, but you can do this for physical products. You can do this for any industry and then leverage off of that. You see that they're always by clicking on the docs and ads. Then you start driving them to your print on demand docs and t-shirts, or you start driving them to Amazon to buy docs and bowls or whatever it's there's a guy that sells drones on Amazon.   Perry: You should have a drone newsletter. You know. You absolutely should have a drone newsletter. We say when, when Perry and I are talking about newsletters there's a big misconception in my mind.   Kevin King: Maybe you have a little bit different take on it, but so many people have what they call a newsletter. You go to their website you know the drone maker, sign up for our newsletter and the newsletter is nothing but a promotional email. It's like hey, we just announced two new parts. We just announced this to me. That's not a newsletter. That's a good one. That's not a newsletter.   Perry: That's a good one. You're not going to get deliverability on it either I mean a newsletter provides value.   Kevin King: It's like 95% value, 5% promotional. It's valued, something you want to get it to where people look forward to getting it, not, oh God dang. I just got another freaking email from drones. Or us Delete, delete, delete. They like I got to open this because they may have some cool tactic in there on how to fly my drone, you know, or in heavy winds, or whatever. Whatever it may be. That's where you got to be thinking when you're doing this, and AI is a great tool. And I always remember something you said when just as a quick aside here, it's a quote I often re-quote you on this and credit to you but you always said, when it comes to selling products on Amazon, people don't buy products on Amazon. They buy photos, absolutely, and so can you talk about just for the Amazon people.   Perry: Nobody can buy a picture. Nobody can buy anything on the internet. It's impossible. All you can do is buy a picture or something that's. Or if you're writing copy, you're creating a mental picture of a thing, right? So yeah, I'm a big believer in product photography being a giant piece of what you do and making something that's demonstrable. If you can actually show how it works in a 30 second video clip, I think that's different than anything. You know that works more powerfully than anything, because you've got to, and design I think you're seeing now is becoming more and more important the quality of your design, because we don't have any way to trust companies, right? You don't really have a way. It used to be the old Dan Kennedy world and Dan at the time was right. You know, ugly sells and pretty doesn't, right? The truth is today, pretty outsells ugly, and that's just. We've proved it eight times, eight times over. Pretty outsells ugly, and especially if you're selling a physical good, right? So don't skimp on the amount of money you spend on photography and photo editing and all those things. I was in was in Kevin interesting thing I was in Guangzhou, China, and I went to this illustration company. They do illustrations, you know. Have you been to? You've been to Yiwu before? Yeah, I've been able. Ok, so you know, upstairs in Yiwu, like on the fourth and fifth floor, it's all service companies, web companies, and I found a company up there and they were doing watches so they would take a watch. You can't take a good enough photograph of a watch for that photograph to actually work in a magazine. It's an impossibility. So what they do is they take a picture of the watch and they pull it into an illustration computer and then there's a program just for jewelry that has all of these textures and paint brushes and all that and they actually build the watch on top of the photo. They build an illustration of the watch and if you ever pick up a magazine and really look at, get a magnifying glass and look at the picture of the Rolex on the back right, you can see where there's an illustration piece cut here or there. You don't see any of the photo. They completely overlay it. But sometimes it takes these guys two weeks to set on illustrator and replace every little pixel dot. Everything is a vector and then they send that off and that.   Kevin King: But now AI can do a lot of that.   Perry: Yeah, I don't know how much I would trust it to do that, but yeah, it probably can. It can certainly enhance the photos a lot. You're seeing AI photo enhancement become a really big deal. Have you seen that thing that takes? I mentioned it at AIBotson. I'm trying to think of the name of it now Topaz.   Kevin King: Yeah.   Perry: Topazai. Well, you can take your old video footage and it'll turn it into 4K footage. It looks pretty doggone good. I mean, you take an old piece of footage that you shot 10 years ago and you run it through there and it'll give you a whole face lift and make it really appear to be a 4K footage.   Kevin King: Yeah, as Remini does that for photos, you can have some old photo or even something you downloaded, some stock image you downloaded online. It's kind of low res because they want you to go pay for the high res. Just download the low res, run it through Remini and it'll upscale it. And upscaleio is another one. There's a bunch of them and some of it's like holy cow. This is amazing stuff.   Perry: Another year from now, probably most of the things that we're using services for now will be you know you don't have to. We're making a lot of money right now in the Philippines by our outsource company uses AI to do things for people. So if you wanted an illustration of a product or whatever, you could send it to man. We're going to charge X for that, but we're actually going to use tools that cut our labor time down by 80, 90%. We haven't got it to where we can cut it all the way out yet and we still hire art directors. You know, really, but it allows you to, instead of hiring 30 B minus designers and you know an art director, you use AI and you get three or three or so, three or four really high level art directors and you don't need all the carpenters anymore. Right, and if you've seen the way they're building houses now, with the brick laying machines and all that all the carpenters, all the framers that won't be a profession in another 24 months.   Kevin King: Well, that's the scare I think that general public has when it comes to AI is like, well, it's going to take my job and so I don't want that, but look what happened in the industrial revolution, look what happened when the wheel wasn't been it. People will adapt and if you don't adapt, you're going to get left behind. And I think right now, one of the biggest skills if you're listening to this and you're, you know, in high school or college or you're young and still trying to figure you need to learn how to do prompting Prompting. I think good prompting versus okay prompting can make a world of difference with AI. As this gets more sophisticated, being good at prompting is going to be a major skill set that's high in demand. Would you agree with that?   0:55:51 - Perry: I think so. It's funny though, you know. Now you can go to open AI and say write me a mid-journey prompt. Yeah you know this and use this camera lens and this but you don't want the camera lens.   Kevin King: That's where photographers and artists right now are.   Perry: You kind of don't. You can actually have open AI right the mid-journey prompt for you. It's crazy and a lot of people are doing that and I think that's. I think prompting is going to become easier and easier, but it's still going to require imagination.   Kevin King: You know.   Perry: No, no artificial intelligence engines ever going to be able to replace imagination. You know it's not going to happen. So I think that we're we're we're fine for, you know, a good long while. I don't see it being a problem, but there's good money to be made right now with just arbitrage. You know how it is, kevin. You've been around this business long enough. When, anytime, a market is inefficient, that's when all the money's made, right, and right now you got people who need things done. Nobody wants to work, right? So you know AI is just filling the slot perfectly, so we can offer services. Now that used to be. You know, like. We'll do unlimited video editing for $2,000 a month, right? Well, we're doing 90% of that video editing with AI. If we were doing it by hand, we'd have searched $10,000 a month, right, and the end of the day, the customer doesn't care. The customer's getting the desired product delivered within a timeline. They don't really care if you did it yourself or if a robot did it. And if they do care, well, it's probably not your kind of customer, right? So all the stuff that you guys go through of writing product descriptions and all your SEO, your keyword loading and your product photo enhancement and all the stuff that you do, I'd say within a year, probably. Right now, if you're studious you can do 90% of it?   Kevin King: Yeah, you can, but within a year. I mean, it's been a big thing. I just was in another mastermind with a big Chinese seller. He does $50 million a year or something. He's based in China and sells into the US and he said that AI has been a leveling ground for the Chinese sellers.   Perry: Yeah, of course.   Kevin King: Because now they used to, you'd have all that broken English and stuff on listings or they couldn't understand the culture to write it in the right way. And he said with AI, that advantage is gone for Westerners, so you got to step up your game and now it's in. Still, you have an advantage in branding or innovation or some other areas, but it's leveling the playing field for a lot of people.   Perry: Yeah, we found it. We found with Mid Journey packaging design.   Kevin King: Yeah.   Perry: It's been. Packaging design mockups have been amazing. We've come up with some really great packaging ideas that we wouldn't have come up with and for the most part you can send those over to your factories in China and get a reasonable.   Kevin King: When people are doing that for product. Now they'll come up with a product idea like, hey, I want to make a I don't know a new dog bowl. You'll have the AI create. You know, they'll give it some parameters. It needs to be this, it needs to be slow the dog down from eating or not slip on the floor, whatever Right and have the AI create a hundred different models of it. Just boom, boom, boom. Use 3D illustrations, put that into a tool like PickFu, let people vote on it and then, you know, have the top couple. You know, go to molding and make prototypes and then do some additional testing. You couldn't do that. That's just what you can do. Now is just some of the times, sometimes almost mind boggling.   Perry: And robotics have really taken down molding costs.   Kevin King: Yeah.   Perry: Back when you and I started, you know I want to custom mold for this. Well, it'll be $100,000. Now you know, six grand you know, whatever it lasts, you know, depending on what you're molding, but it's crazy how cheap molding costs have gotten.   Kevin King: So we're almost out of time here. Actually we've gone over, but just real quick before we wrap up. What are? What would you say are three things out there that you're seeing right now that either hot opportunities that people need to be paying attention to, or three big, or maybe even three big mistakes that people are making when it comes to trying to sell physical products to people.  

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Programa 135 con muchas novedades y con muchos títulos muy esperados a punto de salir. Meta Quest 3 llega y parece que lo hace con intención de dar un golpe al mercado de las VR. Y el resto, te lo explicamos nosotros. ¿Te apuntas? Si te gusta el programa déjanos un like o tu opinión y si no te has suscrito, al hacerlo nos ayudas muchísimo!! Actualidad y videojuegos con buen rollo!! Visita nuestra web: http://sectorgaming.tv Únete a Discord: https://discord.gg/QX9P6DM4 Nos puedes ver en: Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/sectorgamingtv YT: https://www.youtube.com/c/sectorgamingtv FB: https://www.facebook.com/SectorGamingPodcast/ Nos puedes escuchar en: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1kmzuU1aGBHbKqAz08qOoP Ivoox: https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-sector-gaming_sq_f1921985_1.html Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9deba130-2100-4547-b998-c7c5b26a2ea2/sector-gaming Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sector-gaming/id1517561335

Jerome and special guest Jonathan Cronstadt dive into how Jonathan achieved a "double unicorn" exit from Kajabi. Through two foundational elements - relationships and delivering value - and fate, Jonathan went from working with Joe Polish to achieving a $2 billion valuation. This conversation focuses on the idea that success is not a destination but a journey of joy and fulfillment. They discuss the concept of hedonic adaptation, which states that any reward will have diminishing returns over time, and how this affects income growth. Jonathan also discusses the tricky balance between financial freedom and hard work, risk-taking, commitment, and dedication to one's goals. They share personal anecdotes about their journey to illustrate the price of success and what is needed to reach it. This episode is an inspiring reminder that financial freedom is achievable with hard work, support from family and friends, mentorship, and meaningful investments in oneself. [00:01 - 13:15] From 6 Million to a 2 Billion Valuation: J Kron's Journey to the Double Unicorn Exit The two foundational elements of Jonathan's success are relationships and delivering value Joy comes from the pursuit, overcoming of challenges, and playing the game Success is a journey, not a destination You will never know the price of success until after you've paid it The pursuit of fulfillment is more important than financial freedom [13:16 - 23:32] The Cost of Success: Risk, Time, and Effort to Reach Your Goals Financial freedom is having the means to live life how you want it Success comes with a cost, which may be measured in years, risk, time, and effort Taking accountability for circumstances is essential to move forward Investing in yourself is vital and requires hard work and discipline [23:33 - 35:46] From Think and Grow Rich to Joe Polish: John's Journey of Finding Mentors and Taking Risks for Success How Jonathan met Steve James, who taught him the importance of sales Moved to Arizona to be mentored by Joe Polish in marketing Other mentors include Matt Beak Holmes, Tony Robbins, Mike Cans, Ryan Dice, Perry Belcher, Ron Frazier, and Kenny Reeder [35:47 - 43:09] How Watches Represent a Symbol of Achievement There is valuable wisdom available for very little money Social media is a voyeuristic, narcissistic dream that people use to show off their highlight reels People don't love you for who you are. They love what you have Watches are an aspirational purchase that can be passed down to the next generation  [43:10 - 54:53] Closing Segment Friendships should be about how excited we are to talk now Perfect happiness is found in making progress toward a worthy pursuit Happiness equals progress Accountability comes from producing, not consuming. Quotes: "With each level of challenge, there comes a new hurdle that you've got to overcome." - Jonathan Cronstedt "You will never know your price of success until after you've paid it." - Jonathan Cronstedt "No matter where you are, there's always going to be a path that is appropriate for your budget." - Jonathan Cronstedt Connect with Jonathan! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cronstedt/ LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to explode their business growth by sharing this episode or click here to listen to our previous episodes. Dreamcatchers is an inclusive organization that targets people's interest in being more instead of a certain demographic. We have people from all walks of life at many different ages. Find out more at www.dreamsshouldbereal.com. Find out more about Jerome at www.d3v3loping.com or www.myersmethods.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lo Más Caliente | 4 de abril del 2022 – Detalles de los hermanos de Grand Theft Auto 6, el E3 no va pero ellos sí y Jim Ryan dice mucho sin decir Puedes escuchar “Lo Más Caliente” de Yo soy un Gamer en: Apple Podcast, Spotify, Anchor, iHeart, Google Podcast, Audible y Amazon Music. Como dato adicional, Frankie López "Hambo", graba estas noticias a las 4am todos los días para que salgan en diferentes programas de radio: Molusco y Los Reyes de la Punto por la Mega 106.9FM @lamegapr (Puerto Rico) y El Flow por Mix 98.3FM @elflowdemiami (Miami). Fuentes: https://www.3djuegos.com/noticias-ver/221209/playstation-defiende-su-nuevo-ps-plus-que-contara-con-200/ https://www.3djuegos.com/noticias-ver/221205/tras-la-cancelacion-del-e3-2022-pc-gaming-show-y-future/ https://www.hobbyconsolas.com/noticias/filtraciones-gta-6-comparten-nuevos-detalles-supuestos-protagonistas-prologo-juego-1039013 ___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Únete a nuestro Patreon y ayúdanos a crear contenido awesome: https://www.patreon.com/yosoyungamer Todo sobre videojuegos en un solo lugar: https://www.yosoyungamer.com #Gaming​ #YosoyunGamer​ #Videojuegos​ #Gamer​ #PuertoRico #youtubeislife #subscriber #youtubeguru #youtubecontent #newvideo #subscribers #youtubevideo #youtub #youtuber #youtubevideos #florida #orlando #podcast --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/yosoyungamer/support

What is the future of funnels...? With meta-verse coming, what should we be focused on now!? Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. I'm back with my co-host Josh Forti. How you doing, man? Josh Forti: I'm doing awesome, man. How are you? Russell: Doing so good. We just recorded a new episode for you guys. This one's all about funnels and I think it went in a different direction you thought it was going to go, didn't it? Josh: Yeah, it did, a little bit. It was super good. Russell: …because the question was like, "What is the next funnel? What's the thing?" And it wasn't a funnel thing, it was something different. So, I think this is an episode you guys can enjoy. Josh: It's tough. Russell: It's been so exciting for me, I literally woke up at 5:00 AM every morning this week because I'm geeking out on the thing that you're going to learn about. And hopefully, it'll help you guys with all your funnels, no matter if you're running a webinar funnel, or a book funnel, or a challenge funnel, or whatever, doesn't really matter. This principle, you can overlay on top of all of them and it'll make them all better. So, that said, should we queue up the theme song? Josh: Let's do it. Russell: Let's go. Josh: Now we got to move into.. I want to move into funnels, dude. This is a topic that continued to come up. So kind of a back story. When we're preparing for this episode, guys like, Russell hit me up and was like, "Do you want to do a podcast together?" And I was like, "Yeah, what do you want to do it on?" He's like, "I don't know, find something." And I'm like, "oh, all right." And so- Russell: "You tell me." Josh: I do what I all always do and I go to the community and I'm like, if the community tells me... I loved Poland's presentation at Funnel Hacking Live it's like, "Ask, go ask your community. What did they tell you?" And so, that's what we did. I went to my Facebook group and I went on my Instagram and luckily, I have a pretty engaged following that will give us lots of feedback back. And this theme that kept coming up was funnels. And obviously, this is your world. But it was interesting because I've been talking with several different higher level people that are like, "How are all the funnels, they made tens of millions of dollars or whatever?" And it's like, "This funnel's not really working anymore. This funnel's kind of working here. This type of funnel is working." And so there's like, I feel like we're in this phase of funnels are almost evolving, where it used to be that you could run an ad to a webinar and sell a 9.97 product, and make a million bucks, and high profit margins, and you can make it work. But I was talking to Dan Henry the other day and he's like, "Dude, I can't even make that work anymore." And he's like, "And I'm brilliant at ads." And like Sam Ovens, I was talking to him the other day- Russell: Dan Henry, "I know everything." I love Dan. Josh: And Sam Ovens was like, "Man, we're probably going to shut down our front-end $2,000 program and we're going to transition up and evolve the way we do funnels." And so, funnels are the thing, obviously. They're going to be around forever, they've been around forever, you popularized them. But I want to go and take this into two parts and see where this goes. But number one, what is the foundation of funnels? What are the things that like... it doesn't matter how it's executed, the funnel itself, this is the thing that works. Because I think a lot of people get confused that... Whenever I talk to a lot of my students that are building funnels, they're like, "Should I do this type or this?" And I'm like, "The core essence of funnels doesn't change," so what are the core essence of funnels? And then two, what is the future of what that looks like rolled out with technology? Because I mean, I know it's not here yet and one of the things we'll talk about, but- Russell: Metaverse. Josh: We got Metaverse. And my wife was like, "Oh my gosh, ask Russell. If I want to be able to walk into Metaverse and Russell's going to be right there being like, "'Hey, do you want to buy my funnel cake,' click this button and you go into a portal. Instead of another page, you enter a new world that is Russell's world, that'd be so cool." But let's start with the foundation of funnels. When someone is building a funnel, when they're looking at it, what are the core pieces that they're actually looking at? Take us back to the foundation of that because I think a lot of people miss that or forget. Russell: Yeah. So, I'll take you back in history back in time so back to my beginning. Think what example I have sitting here on my desk that I can show you. So, the core, the thing you have to understand why funnels are essential, and why they'll always be here, comes back to my favorite Dan Kennedy quote of all time which is, "Whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins." This is the foundation but... Everything else you have understand- Josh: Like 7,000 speakers at Funnel Hacking Live all said that. Russell: Yeah, because it's the thing. In fact, you'll see, if you look at the... And maybe we'll get into this. My next move, what's happening next year for me? I'm looking at this, all ties into that as well. Why did I buy Dan Kennedy's company? Why am I doing these things? And I'll show you it's literally to solve that exact same question. So, when I got started 20 years ago, people didn't have offers yet they just had a product. So, you would be... Just say a book, like, "Okay, here's my book," and I would just sell a product, and that was what I was selling. And it worked for a long time and then guess what? Everyone else is like, "Oh, dude's making money with this product, I can make a product," they make the same product. Now you got 10 people selling a product that's similar. And so, then it's harder to compete because now you're no longer a unique thing, you are a commodity. And anytime you're a commodity, the person with the lowest price always wins. So, as soon as everyone's doing it, you got to drop at the bottom and then you lose your margin and then life sucks because if you don't profit what's the point of what we're doing? So, there's the first phase. So, then the next phase is like, "Okay, well I got a product, everyone's got the same product but how do I turn this from a product into an offer?" That was the first evolution. It's like, "Hey, when you buy my book, you also get my book, but you're also going to get my video course, my audio course, and then my checklist and my..." And all of a sudden you make something truly unique again where it's like, not just a product, but this is my offer that's specific, unique to me, that nobody else has. So that was the next evolution. And we got really good then in making offers that were sexy. It's like, "Oh yeah, everyone's selling this, but mine, if you get mine, you also da da, da, da, these other things." Right? And that's where this whole offer development started happening. In my mind, probably 15 years ago is when this became the thing that we all focused on. And whoever had the best offer was going to win because ads didn't ship that much. It was just like you're competing so now you're competing with six different people or 10 different people. So because that, Google ads AdWords cost went up, because there's 20 people bidding on the same keyword versus just you, initially. Now you're coming in, you make a better offer. Then you get the lion share people buy from you because your offer is the best. That was kind the next phase. And then of course the market evolves. Everyone gets smart. Everyone starts making good offers. Now it's like, maybe they're unique offers, but they're all good offers. Now it's like the market's getting fragmented up again. And so this is where the evolution now of funnels started happening where... And it was before. We didn't have one click up-sales back in the day. But the first thing was like: you buy my potato gun DVD, fill in your credit card, you buy it. The next page, you're like, "Do you want the potato gun kit? Cool. Get your credit card back out and fill it out again." And they'd fill out all the credit card again. Josh: Dang. Russell: But even with that, there's no one-click up-sales, man, like 15, 20, 30% people would buy the second thing. And all of a sudden, I'm selling a potato gun DVD, but I'm making 200 bucks on the back of the kit and nobody else selling potato gun DVDs was doing. I could outspend them all. So even though costs me more per click, I was able to get all the clicks because I made way more money than anybody else. So I was able to dominate the market. And that was kind of the next phase. And what's interesting is that depending on the market you're in, depends on where this is. For example, I'm in a fun phase where I wanted some side projects. So I'm launching a couple supplement companies. The first supplement company launched is called Zooma Juice. It's a green drink company. And some of you guys know, I actually worked with Drew Canole and his team back in the day on Organifi, and helped them launch that when it first came out seven years ago, and helped him build an actual funnel. And what's interesting is because of that... The green drink market is sophisticated. I went and funnel hacked, probably, 30 green drink offers before we built Zooma Juice. And all of them have pretty advanced funnels. Everyone's doing the best practices pretty well. Second company that we are starting, I acquired a bone broth company. And so I took... Got bone broth company and went funnel hacked every bone broth offer. And that market's new. Nobody had a funnel, not one. They have an offer, they have a product, that's it. And I'm like, "I'm walking into virgin funnel territory." We'll be the biggest bone broth company on the planet in like 30 days? Because there's nobody who understands any of what we're talking about. We'll outspend everybody 10 to 1 because we understand the funnel structure. So depending on what market you're in, some markets haven't even evolved to the funnels yet. Some have, that's exciting. If they have, it's like, "Cool. We got... We can funnel hack. We get good ideas of what's working." If it hasn't like, "Man, you can bring all the stuff we know into these markets and just dominate and destroy them all." It was funny, as we were buying, I was funnel hacking the bone broth offers, I was like, "There's literally not single upsell, order form bump, email sequence. Like nothing." I was just like, "This is like, oh, embarrassing. Almost too easy." That was next phase though. And then to your point, initially it was like... In fact, I remember 10 pre-click funnels. Almost every funnel was the same. It was a video sales letter order button order form upsell one, upsell two, down-sell, down-sell. Thank you, basically. That was what a funnel was. In fact, if you look at, before we launched ClickFunnels, the first T and C event, Ryan Dice and Perry, and they had this whole team event talk about, "Here's the funnel." And they had a funnel and there's only one. And it was just like, "This is the five steps of every funnel." And it fits. It was like trip wire. They had these five steps like trip wire, profit maximizer, and they five or six... They had a name for each page. And it was like, "This is the funnel." And in reality, that was the funnel. There weren't funnels. It was like, "This is a funnel. This is kind of the one." And at the time when I was writing The Dot Com Seekers book and we had been playing with different ones, but there wasn't a lot of this thing out there. Was just kind of like, for the most part, there was a funnel. After ClickFunnels came out and it gave people the ability to create things fast and start innovating, creating ideas, that. And then I was like writing all my ideas in the book and people are doing stuff. It started evolving quickly. Last seven years have evolved where now there's been like a million different funnel things come out, from webinar funnels, auto webinar funnels, high funnels, low ticket funnels, trip wires, SLOs VSLs, challenges, paid challenges, free challenges, challenges to a webinar challenges to high tickets, a webinar to high ticket. There's a billion variations that come from that which probably gets people overwhelming. And so this os what I want to tell them because, this kind of comes back to your first questions, what is it? The reality is, it's going to be shocking for most of you guys, what funnel type you use doesn't really matter. They all work. The thing that matters is the offer. You still have to make the sexiest offer. That's still the most important. We acquired Dan Kennedy's company and we're doing this merger. And like I've spent I podcast episode this morning driving to the office. I've been up every single morning at 5:00 AM because I'm so excited. Because we have a fun, we picked a funnel on structure, we have all of products. I spend a week every morning at 5:00 AM, from 5:00 till like 7:30, when my kids are getting up, in there writing the page for the copy and the offer, and then tweaking and tweaking. That's the thing. The sexiness of the offer that gets people in is the key. So I can get them in, I can use this to get them in a webinar, in a challenge, in a free plus shipping. It doesn't matter. It's like the offer is the thing that puts people in a momentum. And the thing that I'm selling, I could sell it in the webinar. I could sell it in the challenge. I like there's I could sell in all the different funnels. It would fit in all of them. I'm picking the one that I'm using because I think it's going to go... For like the launch campaign, it the one that'll probably get sells the fastest, but it'll work in all of them. And So it's understanding that, it's still coming to the core fundamentals. The funnel structure is the sales process. All of them will work. You just got to figure out better way to sell. Like that's the harder thing that people are missing. Josh: All right. So let's talk... I want to dive into that offer. When you say specifically here... Because I think, and this is just from coaching with a lot of people, the questions that I get asked when I talk about this type of stuff. You talk about the offers, the sexy thing, but how does the offer affect getting somebody to opt in? How does the offer affect my ad? How does the offer affect the training? I don't show my offer until the end after the whole thing. So how does that affect every other step of the funnel? Russell: Okay, great question. So if I can see one here. Right, sorry. I had all the examples here a second ago. Oh, well. I'll just tell you the story. So when Dan Kennedy started his newsletter, in the Dan Kennedy company, the newsletter's the foundation of everything. And we could do a whole podcast episode just on psychology of the original GKIC, when Bill Glazer was running it with Dan. But the newsletter- Josh: Sounds like a sexy topic. Russell: Yeah. It'd be really fun, actually. I love... In fact, it's funny because I spent so much time with Bill Glazer geeking out about. I knew their business really well. And when that they sold it the very first time people bought it and didn't understand the business. And I saw within weeks of them destroying the foundation, I was like, "You guys literally don't know what you bought. You should have asked some questions before you wrote a check that big anyway." But the core is the newsletter. And so I had a chance to go back in the archives. I literally... they gave me, "Here's Google drive. Everything's ever been created." So I'm like, "This is... It's insane." for nerdy Russell, everything Dan's ever said is in this drive. And most of it, no one's ever seen before, so I'm freaking out. But the newsletter started back in like 1995 ish. I was like 15 years old when it started and it was just a newsletter. That's all it was right. It's like a product. That's how they sold it. And from '95 till I think I was probably 23, 24. So, 2004, 2005 ish was when Bill Glazer bought out the company from Dan and kind of ran it, and then they launched it. Instead of a newsletter, they launched it as an offer. And the offer at the time... I still remember the day it happened because I got like 400 emails from my Yanik Silver and all the different gurus at the time. They all started emailing about this Dan Kennedy offer. And it was called the most incredible free gift ever. And in fact, internally in the company called the MIFGE offer, M-I-F-G-E, the most incredible free gift ever. And what it was, it was like, "Hey, when you sign up for magnetic marketing net letter, what you're going to get is you're going to get..." I think it's like, "$639.93 for the money making material from Dan Kennedy himself." So it was like, "We'll give you all this cool stuff when you sign up for the newsletter." And it was the bribe. It's kind of like, if you guys remember back in the day, sports illustrator. It's really hard to sell sports illustrated issues. So what they would do is they would have TV commercials were like, "Here's sports illustrator, 12 issues year about the best sports. When you sign up today, we're going to give you..." And then they had their version of the most incredible free gift offer. It was this huge football clock and the sports illustrator swimsuit issue. That was the MIFGE offer for sports illustrator. And so Dan had their... They had their MIFGE offer, and they went from having five or 600 subscribers at that time to... Bill built it up to over, I don't know, 10, 15, 20. I don't know how big it got it as peak, but 10,000 plus members. And it was because they took a newsletter and they made it an offer. And that's how they launched initially. And so the MIFGE is how they did it. Now, fast forward to Russell gets access to all this stuff. I'm like, "This is amazing." So I'm trying to sit... I sat down Monday morning. No, sorry. It was last Saturday. Saturday. I wanted to write... I didn't want to do all the pages in the offer. So I have some of my team do the upsells and down-sells. I was like, "The landing page, this is mine." I want to write because I want to make sure I get the offer right and everything. Because this is... everything hinges on this. The landing page is broken, nothing works. And so I went and I funnel hacked. I every newsletter, sales letter, I could find throughout time. I just went deep in my archives, way back machine. People I knew who publishing newsletters, looked at every variation of theirs for the last 10 years. I totally geeked out like Russell does. Funnel hacking. I want to understand how people are structuring their newsletter offers. Gore's got a ton of them. So I'm looking at tons of them and everyone I looked at, I come back to like the Dan Kennedy one I'm like this offers just not sexy. More like $630 of money making information sounded cool in 2003. But today, it's like every opt-in, people are giving a thousand dollars worth of free crap. It wasn't that sexy- Josh: Right. Inflation, baby. Oh my word. Russell: Yeah. And then I'm like, "Now my funnel nerds are going to go and they're going to sign for this newsletter, and they're going to get this newsletter from Dan. He's talking about direct mail and faxing. And they're going to be confused and they're going to cancel." I have this weird opportunity. I was like, "This is just not the right thing." And I was like, "How do I make this sexy excited? How do I get myself excited to email about it?" And then Dan's email. I got to get affiliates on board and other people. How do I make this sexy so that I can create the noise? So that when there's an ad, there's a good enough hook in the ad that people are going to click? Because if the ads like, "Old marketing, grumpy marketing genius is going to give you 300 or $639 money making material for free when you join this newsletter," no one's going to click on that. The hook sucks now. It was good in 2003, horrible in 2021. And so I'm like sitting there and I spent three hours just going to yourself. And I was like, no matter how I tried, the offer just didn't feel right. And I explain to other knight, I was like, "I know I wouldn't click and I know I wouldn't buy it. And I don't want to even email my list tell them about it because it's not that exciting. How do I structure this in a way that's going to be really exciting?" And so that the problem. This is where I got stuck at. Right. And then, after about three hours of it is when I had the light bulb, I was like, "Oh my gosh." So all of the current Dan Kennedy customers, they love Dan. They're obsessed with them. And actually, this is a fascinating step. You'll appreciate this. Have you read a thousand true fans? Josh: Yeah. I love that book. Russell: It was crazy. So Dan's company was sold initially like 10 years ago, from Bill Glazer sold it. In the last 10 years, they haven't bought a single ad. So that's the attrition of the company, that's been happening. And I'm acquiring it like, "Oh, let's buy some ads." But what's crazy is 10 years since they bought the last ad, there are almost, to a T, it's like 990 something active paid subscribers still on a newsletter a decade later, without any ads at all. A thousand true fans. Is that crazy? Josh: That's insane. Russell: Really? Josh: And you're one of those true fans because you bought the whole company. Russell: Yeah. I thought that was a fascinating side note. So anyway, that's crazy. Like Dan's people love Dan. They love him talking. If they want Dan, but they need funnels. And I'm like, I don't want to come and be the guy who acquires the company and just starts emailing his own offer. I need them to.. I need to indoctrinate them to want it. So it's like, they're going to read Dan's newsletter and how do I bridge that to ClickFunnels? And I'm like, my funnel nerds are going to read his newsletter and be like, "I don't understand. This isn't..." They need it. They don't know they want it yet. If I can indoctrinate them for a while, they'll be like, "Oh my gosh, I get this," but it's going to take a while for them to really respect it enough that they'll get it. I was the same way. First time I heard Kennedy, I was like, "This guy's old, boring, and doesn't relate to what I'm talking about." And after I went deep in, I was like, "Oh my gosh, everything he says is literal. He's handing gold nuggets out." And I was just like, I didn't notice them. Now I'm like, "Oh my gosh." And so I was like, "I need this bridge." And some people know, when I first joined the Kennedy world, we actually launched my first print newsletter right afterwards. It was called The Dot Com Seekers Journal. It morphed from The Dot Com Seekers Journal to eventually call it, The Dot Com Seekers Labs. And then it became a Funnel Report and then it became Funnel University. So I actually ran a print newsletter for 14 years. We shut it down two years ago, but 14 years I ran a print newsletter. Josh: Yeah. I remember when you shut it down actually. Russell: Yeah. And I loved it, but I just, anyway... There's reasons like the person who was publishing it, she had a baby and she retired and all these things. I was just like, "Ah. I'm, I'm focusing ClickFunnels. Don't even worry about this right now." So we shut it down. But I loved that part of it. And I was like, what if I create an offer where the concept, the story, the hook of this whole entire thing is like, "Russell bought Dan company and they're coming together to give you two things like the best foundational direct response in the world. Plus the best in the marketing, the cutting edge, the new things are happening. So you can have both sides. So you understand the foundation you need to be able to survive Facebook slapping you and all these things happening and media shifting and changing. But you also have like what's working today so you can capitalize on things in real time." What if we took those two worlds together? The baby. And so instead of just being like, "You're signing for the new, from the Dan Kennedy newsletter," what if it was like, "Dan Kennedy, Russell Brunson?" Two different newsletters. You get two newsletters for the price of one. I was like, "That's the offer. That's the hook. That's what gets affiliates excited, to get ads excited, everything gets excited around this offer." And then, every mornings at 5:00 in this morning, or 5:00 AM every morning this week, I woke up and I'm writing copy for this page of like, "Okay, here's the hook. They're coming in. And there's Dan and there's Russell." How these things are coming together. And the story behind that, how it worked and then the offer instead of just like, "Here's $697 worth of free stuff," it's like, "you get two newsletters. You get the best direct response, best of Russell, every two weeks." So you get one in the mail and then 14 days later, you get the next one. And you're getting both of these. You get the old and the new but you only pay one price. You get both for the price of one. And then you get all Dan's bonus, all Russell's bonuses. Now becomes this like insane offer where, now, it's like, "I'm excited to mail my list." We bought Dan's company, you get all my best stuff in this to get, and it's this combination. And then affiliates will be excited. It just... And maybe the hook bombs, I don't know. But it gave me the energy, just like, "Okay, now, this is exciting and sexy." And so I can turn that into webinar where it's just like, "Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson coming together to literally blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever." Like, "Opt in here to find our webinar," and people would opt in because the story, the hook is exciting or I can do a challenge like, "The seven day challenge. Me and Dan are going to go through how to destroy your business and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And in the end, I'm selling a newsletter or it could be a VSL telling the story with a newsletter or could be... all of them work. The book is the secrets of story. Josh: Well, what it sounds like... Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it sounds like you just created this story about the offer. And now that you know what the offer is, and there's a reason that that came together and like, "That's what it is," now, you understand the story behind that. I'm trying to think of it like an analogy. For example, Disney world. That offer is so good. You're literally going into a different world that pretty much sells itself once you put it out there. And so once you have the story, once you have that idea around what the offer does and how it's unique and how it's it's own unique thing, then you can just take that and then it fills the rest of the funnel. Because everybody wants that thing because now the offer itself is so good. And I think one of the problems that I had, man, for so long is, I was trying to convince people that they wanted my thing be... Or convince people that they had this problem, and then that they wanted this thing, and then I would make them an offer on it. And they wouldn't get to... they wouldn't even know about the offer, or what the offer did, or like anything about it, until like forced or like right before the offer. And they'd be like, "And then I've got this offer? Boo." And because of that, there was no story around it. There's no congruency with it. And so then it was like, "Oh, I didn't even know. That's what I was here for." And then I would like try to sell them something and it wouldn't sell. And I feel like that's the problem that got solved right there, is like first you created the offer and the story around the offer and you made it sexy. And then that made everything else on the funnel super, super easy, because you were just pointing them back to that. Russell: Everything, the funnel plus all the ads. Because now the ads are fun. "Why Dan Kennedy came out of retirement? Dan Kennedy almost died. What's he doing today?" All a sudden, all these hooks that tie into that. "Why did Dan Kennedy partner with the owner ClickFunnels? Why did... Is it true that ClickFunnels was built off the back of all Dan Kennedy principles?" There's so many stories I can tell now that are hooks. That'll grab his people in or my people in or... And then the landing page. And then... It creates everything. And the people that the best in the world of this, and they also make the most money, is Agora. The good Gora publishing. They're selling newsletters. That's all they sell. Right. But every single time they have these insane stories like Porter Stan's got... I think maybe not still, but for like a decade and a half, the highest of all the Agora divisions. I think he'll do like 1.5 or 2 billion dollars a year. Like these are big divisions. Porter's letter one. And, the story was like, "The railroad across America." And it was talking about like, "The original railroad, how it happened and all the people made money along the way. And this is the next railroad that's being built. It's the digital highway and all this stuff." And that offer was selling a newsletter. But it's the story behind it that became this thing that built a billion dollar company. And they're good. They're so good at figuring out the story, those kind of things. And I think sometimes we're like, "Hey, I've created a course in the passed. You should create a course too. I made money. It's going to be awesome." And then like, "You should buy my course creating software or whatever." Like, "That's not the thing." We're so bad at telling stories. We brag about our result. We tell them making the same result and that's it. It's like, no, that's not the key. It's the story. It's the entry. It's the... We want to be entertained. We want to be courted. We want to be... that's the game we're playing in marketing. And so when you figure that out... The offer is actually sexy. And then why is that sexy? The sexiness is not just, "You get a bunch of crap." The sexiness is the story about like how this was created. Josh: Literally what it does that. Russell: That's the fascinating part. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Catherine Jones. One of her favorite things is, "When your stories become their stories, then your solutions become their solutions." and that's literally what this is. If you can tell them a story where they like it and they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing," then, go and do it. So for example, Harry Potter world. The story, it... My wife freaking loves Harry Potter world. I mean, that was her thing. When we went down to Funnel Hacking Live, it was like, we were going to take a half a day just to go to Harry Potter world. So we showed up and then it was like, "Hey." Miles is like, "Dude, the buss is leaving for Harry Potter world." There wasn't much convincing that has to be done. The story is, "Oh my gosh, Harry Potter world's amazing. It's Harry Potter. I want it" She wanted that thing because of the story that was leading up to it. There was no, "What's Harry Potter world? Is it any good? What's this?" It's like, "No, it's Harry Potter world." And you're like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I want it." That's like the story with that. So that's super, super interesting. So where do you see the future of funnels going? Because obviously there's a lot of changes coming with ClickFunnels and ClickFunnels 2.0, which, oh my gosh, I'm so excited. Gusting. Gusting hits me up. Probably... Dude, he probably hits me up once a week and is like, "Hey, guess what? ClickFunnel 2.0 is awesome. And you don't have it." And I'm like, "I heard you. Stop." Russell: He actually built out the magnetic marketing funnel hub right now for me, which is cool. Josh: So, yeah. So anyway, but what's the next evolution? And we don't have really have too much to talk about metaverse and where that goes. But we're entering this new world. I mean, the world is changing very, very, very rapidly. COVID is one of those things that we thought the internet was a big deal, and internet marketing was a big deal, pre-COVID, and then we watch zoom blow up by like 3000% or something like that. And they ruin zoom for us. But anyway, so where are things going that people should be paying attention to and going actually studying and understanding about the future of funnels? Because one of the things that I've been really, really focused on and we're kind of getting dialed in, is community funnels, Specifically, I think for me, one of the things that I've noticed is that it's very, very... It's getting increasingly harder to sell things unless you have a community that's tied with it. And so like for me, one of the things we're focusing on is how do we build funnels inside of our community where our community actually becomes part of the funnel? Which is kind of a cool concept. What do you see as those future things of where funnels are headed, where the big opportunities are going to be? What's the next add to webinar to a 9 97 course? You know what I'm saying? What's the future? Where we're heading? Russell: I hate to make it sound simple, but if I come back to the fundamentals we talked about the beginning of this call. Like Dan Kennedy, whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins. So you look at it through that lens. Went from a product, to an offer, to a funnel. And now with the funnel, I have more ways to make money. And then, from there, the next evolution was like from funnel to value ladder. Right now, it's like, I have a break even funnel and move people up a value ladder and that's how I may lose money or break even on my book funnel, but then my webinar funnel's going to make money or vice versa. Right? Josh: Right. Russell: That was the next phase. And I think, for me, where I'm playing because I'm trying to play for the next 10 years. How do I win this game? We're doing well. I want to.. How do I get a point where, Shopify, or Salesforce is like, "I want to write you a check for 20 billion because you're such annoyance." The way I'm going to do that, for me, is... and it comes back to why did I acquire Magnet Marketing? Why did I buy Brad Callin's company? Why am I doing this? Because I'm not looking at breakeven funnels anymore. Breakeven funnels, awesome. I'm going one chair back or I'm building breakeven businesses. So magnetic marketing, the only gold magnetic is to break even. The entire company, the value ladder, the coaching, the everything. So every penny made side of magnetic marketing be dumped back into ads, want 100% of the profits dump back into ads. So this company's blowing up. And I get now all these things dumped into my value ladder for ClickFunnels. Like that's it. Voomly doing 40 million a year? Why do we acquire that company? Tons of lead flow. Now, right now there's... it was 10 million dollars a year net profit. All that money now is being dumped directly into lead flow as a breakeven business, to acquire customers for ClickFunnel. So I think it's going deeper. It's looking past... from product to offer, to funnel, to value ladder, to how do I buy or acquire or create something where the only goal of this entire business is just get customers for free that can put into here. And I thing, for me, that's the next level is just like that thought. Josh: You just blew my mind, dude. Holy cow. You're creating an ecosystem, but in a very specific way. It's interesting, as you just told that out, just, "First, it was this. Then, it was this." The thing before it didn't change. That's still part of it. Russell: It's both the same. Yeah. Josh: Right. But it's kind of that next evolution, that next piece of where that comes out. That's fascinating. I think a lot of people need to just really rewind that, go listen to that clip again and let your brain sit on that. Russell: That's how I'm playing the game. Yes. Hopefully I'm four step ahead everyone else, but I'm all for showing that with you guys. And so I just... Again, for everyone to start thinking that, because it's going to get harder. It's going to get more expensive. It's going to get more... We've seen that this year. Ad costs have gone up. It's not going to get cheap. It's not going to bounce back down and be cheaper. It's going to keep doing that. The people who only had a product back in the day are out of business. People only had an offer back in day, they're out of business. People don't have a funnel are out of a business. People don't have a value ladder out of a business. So it's just thinking ahead of that. Metaverse or whatever next step is, doesn't really matter. It's the principle still is the same for me. For 20 years, whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins. Josh: Wins. Russell: How do I do that in a way that serves the customers, brings them in and then... I'll end on this, because it back to what you said. And I did a podcast on this. It's in the facts I got from Dan Kennedy. After the company sold last time, he was super mad at the company that had jacked up his brand and his legacy and stuff. And so like he sent this 25 page facts, like all the things to do to fix it. And there's one paragraph where he said, "There's difference between why customers come in and why they stay." He said, "People think they're the same things." He's like, "No, no, they're different." Why they come in is because they see the hook of like, "Ooh, the scene." They come in from that. They stay for something different. And you have to understand that. So like I had my inner circle meeting, right. Everyone paid 50 grand to be in the room. We had a hundred entrepreneurs in the room and I told them. I said like, "Well, you guys all because you want to learn funnels from Russell." But I'm like, "The reason why you came is not why you were going to stay here. The reason I get sick year, after year, after year is because of the community." That's it. That's why I sat in Dan Kennedy rooms for six years of my life is because the community built and I wanted to be around these people. I came for Dan stuck for the community. And I think that you start understanding that, that's how you get these people to come in on a front end, but they stay and they buy over and over and they stay on continuity. They stick because it's like.. They come in from a hook, but they stay for the something different. And so really understanding that and then weaving everything you're doing like you're doing now with the community funnels, which is perfect. Josh: That's amazing. That's amazing. All right. Well I think that's a good ending point for that topic. Russell: There's episode number two of our hangout today, which was amazing.

Dice Roll will be looking for four on the bounce when he contests the Winter Championships Final at Flemington on Saturday. Trainer Nick Ryan joins Michael Felgate live from Headquarters

Another great discussion with another great person! The topic of Emotion is so vast and important to us as people, and I hope that it is important to you as well! Be sure to follow Dice Populi on Twitter and catch all their episodes on Spotify, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts!

You can’t argue with a story. And that’s why digital marketing legend Perry Belcher leverages storytelling to make sales. So, what makes people buy when they’re under the influence of story? And how can we harness an understanding of storytelling to sell real estate? Perry is the cofounder of DigitalMarketer and the cocreator of Traffic & Conversion Summit. A serial entrepreneur known for his expertise in digital marketing and copywriting, he is a prolific author and sought-after consultant in the realm of growing an eCommerce business, driving web traffic, and increasing conversion. Today, Perry runs Olympus Peak Media, a digital marketing and membership company with 5.5M annual readers and a client roster of 500K. On this episode of Founders Club, Perry joins Oliver to share the DigitalMarketer origin story and discuss how his background in retail contributes to his success in eCommerce. He offers his formula for building a business around a domain name, explaining why he sees web addresses as land and where to go to buy available domains. Perry also describes his ‘peel the onion’ approach to writing headlines and weighs in on the top tools for writing copy that converts. Listen in to understand the relationship between storytelling and sales—and learn how to apply the story arc for effective real estate marketing! Key Takeaways [1:23] Perry’s background in business Retail, manufacturing, eCommerce and digital marketing Partner with Ryan Dice on DigitalMarketer [6:50] Perry’s insight around domain names View as real estate (buy and register for 10 years) Build site with content to increase value [13:26] Resources for buying domain names Registercompass, JustDropped and Undeveloped Use NameJet for domain auctions [19:16] Perry’s formula for picking winning domains Product people need Over $100 Hard to find in local market Don’t sell on Amazon [22:31] The DigitalMarketer origin story Met partner at mastermind Made $9M in first 7 months [28:07] The relationship between storytelling and sales Creates connection with consumer Make promise, tell story + call to action [35:57] Perry’s explanation of the story arc Set the scene Introduce characters ‘Story cliff’ [43:19] How to adapt the story arc to real estate History of home Imagine… [51:12] Why story is key to persuasion Puts prefrontal cortex to sleep Reptilian brain releases happy chemicals [1:03:40] Perry’s ‘peel the onion’ approach to writing headlines Figure out what customer really wants (the WHY) Make replacement offer, not improvement offer [1:09:30] Perry’s favorite online tools and software Hemingway app to write to grade level Natural Reader reads copy back in human voice Trello for storyboarding [1:12:20] What Perry is investing in right now Business of human capital Trained and managed outsourcing Connect with Perry DigitalMarketer Olympus Peak Media perry@olympuspeakmedia.com Connect with Oliver Big Block Realty Oliver on Facebook Oliver on LinkedIn Resources War Room Mastermind Traffic & Conversion Summit Roland Frasier EstiBot GoDaddy Escrow.com Registercompass JustDropped Undeveloped Domain Marketplace Frank Schilling NameJet Yanik Silver Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari Significant Objects Perry’s 21-Step Sales Letter Formula Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs John Paul DeJoria Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini Hemingway Editor Natural Reader Trello

There's a lot of hype about what it means to build a personal brand, but in reality there are a few simple things that anyone can do to establish themselves as an expert in their space. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, BlitzMetrics CEO Dennis Yu shares the simple process he says anyone - from successful CEOs to younger professionals just getting started in their careers - build a strong personal brand. Dennis is a master at building easy-to-follow, repeatable processes, and his approach to personal branding is no different. In our conversation, he breaks it down in a way that anyone, regardless of their marketing or technical skills, can follow. Some highlights from my conversation with Dennis include: Personal branding is really just a sum of stories that you collect that you sequence together. Four or five years from now, personal branding won't be a thing because it's just what we do as part of communicating, as part of marketing, as part of growing, as part of operating. Dennis's approach to building personal brand involves the creation of a series of one-minute videos that are lightly edited in tools like Apple Clips and sometimes in Premier or Lightweight Aftereffects or other tools so that they can be distributed then on LinkedIn, on the blog, on Facebook, on Twitter. Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner is a great example of someone with a strong personal brand because he obsesses about creating content to answer peoples' questions and solve their problems - but he's also an influencer because doing this has built a very large audience.  The secret to creating effective one-minute videos is to share stories that are empathetic, that are educational, and that bring people along in a sequence towards an overall mission that anchors your personal brand. When Dennis works with clients to create a personal branding strategy, he starts by building what he calls a "Topic Wheel." Then, he identifies experts in those topics and does one-minute videos with them. The videos aren't about him - they are about the people he is interviewing, who are all recognized experts. The Topic Wheel has three rings - why, how and what. Why is your mission, how is how you do things (educational content), and what is your offers. This is very much like a circular sales funnel. The outside layer of the Topic Wheel - the why - is personal branding. There are many tools that you can use to create one-minute videos, from Apple Clips to the Adobe Suite, regardless of your skill level with video. Once you've created your video, think about all the different ways you can reuse or repurpose your video, and distribute it out across a variety of platforms. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the BlitzMetrics website Visit Dennis's personal website Connect with Dennis on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn more about the exact formula Dennis uses to help his clients build their personal brands. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast, my name is Kathleen Booth and I am your host. This week, my guest is Dennis Yu, who is the Chief Executive Officer of BlitzMetrics and the author of Facebook Nation and, and, and I could list so many other things. Conference keynote speaker, expert on personal branding, Facebook, et cetera. Dennis Yu (Guest): Kathleen, you're too kind. Dennis and Kathleen having a blast recording this episode Kathleen: I was so impressed reading everything that you've done, when I saw your bio. I was really excited that I got to meet you in person a few weeks ago at DigitalMarketer, so thank you for joining me for the podcast. Dennis: Thank you. Kathleen: Before we start, I have a really important question. I was reading your bio and I saw that you have run 20 marathons, but you have run a 70 mile Ultra. What were you thinking? Dennis: I know, what was I thinking? It's my first one and my last one. I said to myself after running all these marathons because you know the thing is, it's a slippery slope because you run one and then you do more and then people are like, "Oh, you should run this Ultra marathon because you're gonna have this spiritual experience." I thought, all right I'm up for that and I ran a 70 mile race. It took me 12 hours. I set the course record. It was just outside of Microsoft's headquarters and when I finished, it was so bad that I had to be put in a wheelchair and wheeled to my gate at SeaTac airport because my legs were so stiff. Kathleen: Oh my God, I was gonna say, when people talk about spiritual experiences, all I can think about is when you're dying and you see the light. Dennis: Yeah. I didn't get a spiritual experience, I got a lot of pain. Maybe I didn't see past the pain, who knows? Maybe I needed to run 100 miles. Maybe that's what it needs to be. Kathleen: Oh my God, I am so impressed because you talk about how people run marathons and then they wanna run more. I ran one and only marathon the year I turned 40. Dennis: That's smart. Kathleen: I was like, I better do it now or it's never gonna happen. It's a good thing I did it because after that, I was like, no way, I'm too old for this. I'm glad I did it and I checked the box. That's awesome that you did that. Building A Personal Brand One of the reasons I was excited to have you on the podcast is that as part of the presentation you gave at DigitalMarketer's Agency Training Day, you touched on some of the work that you do building personal brands. You actually have a really cool process behind this. I think a lot of people talk about personal branding, but I've never heard anybody actually express it almost as a definable process. So I just want to dig into that and learn more about it and hopefully come away with an idea for people who are listening who might be interested in building their own personal brand, what goes into that? Dennis: Yeah, a lot of people think personal branding is this Tony Robbins, keynote speaking, motivational figure head who's doing the private jet and mansion lifestyle. I think personal branding is really just a sum of stories that you collect that you sequence together. If you're an agency, if you're an entrepreneur, it's not that you're showing only these highlight moments of the figurehead. It's the sum of what your people are doing, of your customers, of anyone that you engage with, someone you just had lunch with and they said something that's interesting and you pull out your cell phone, you say, "Kathleen, wow. That was so awesome. Can you just repeat that again? I want to share that on social." So you need a process to do that. So we're here in Miami and the last couple of days, we've been capturing one-minute videos for a fintech company that provides loans to small businesses. The kind of marketing they were doing is the kind of stuff that you'd expect that they would do. We go the CEO on camera. Literally, I was holding an iPhone and I was recording the CEO, asking him, "What's your favorite restaurant here in Miami? Tell me about your parents and the kind of business that they started and how that influenced you to run this particular kind of company. Tell me about what kinds of things stress you out at night." Then we drove to different small businesses, one is a pet store, another one is a food truck, another one is a computer repair place in the strip mall, and we interviewed these people, asking them about their why, how, what. Then I would put all of that in the bucket of personal branding. In fact, you know how a lot of people are talking about influencer marketing, content marketing, social media marketing? Now, those things have expanded to be so big that they mean nothing. It's just like digital marketing has expanded to be so big that you really can't define it anymore. Just like the phone was 50 or 60 years ago, or the internet was 20 years ago. It started off as this niche thing that people were specialists in and once it becomes so big, you can't really define it. I think personal branding is in that teenager stage where now everyone wants to do personal brand until the stage where, four or five years from now, personal branding won't be a thing because it's just what we do as part of communicating, as part of marketing, as part of growing, as part of operating. Because we see that's where things are going. We have everything we do, from a client standpoint or from our own internal operations or how we train people, encapsulated as one-minute videos. Everything's a one-minute video. For example, one of our guys this morning recorded a one-minute video on how to quickly see all of your tasks inside of Basecamp. In one minute, he said "Literally, did you know if you press control K plus whatever, it immediately shows you this screen with all of your tasks of the day and your schedule?" I'm like, "Pssh, I didn't know that." Or a one-minute video about this restaurant that's two blocks around the corner and how awesome it is. That's cool, that's very specific. Personal branding isn't this, I aspire to climb Mount Everest or I want to live a life of riches and make six figures every month. It's individual stories of other people, and thus our approach, which I think you find interesting and other people do too, is that we have a particular process on how we collect one-minute videos. It has to be particular because all of our work is being done by young adults. So these are 22, 23-year-old kids, if you will. I'm over 40, so I know younger than 40 is a kid. They go through our training. Maybe they served four years in the military and now they need a job and they wanna be able to make 35 thousand dollars a year, whatever they were making before, right, because they have a kid now or whatever it might be. We have everything check listed out, it's not that it's about personal branding, it's that the collection of one-minute videos. So instead of saying personal branding, I'll say the collection of one-minute videos are lightly edited in tools like Apple Clips and sometimes in Premier or Lightweight Aftereffects or other tools so that we can distribute then on LinkedIn, on the blog, on Facebook, on Twitter. Then amplify them for a dollar a day to be able to drive views, leads, and sales. That is mechanically what we do. It's not about me trying to motivate other people. We have a number of high profile personal brands like entrepreneurs that are billionaires. We have some of these guys as clients and boy, it's very shiny. But that is not what personal branding will be in five years from now. It'll be so defacto that anyone who's doing any kind of marketing, by definition will be doing personal branding and social media and SEO and all of that, not as separate functions, but they're all now the same thing actually. Personal Branding v. Influencer Marketing Kathleen: Yeah, it's very interesting. I have so many questions for you from what you just said. The first thing that comes to my mind is it's fascinating to me to have this conversation at this time because you use the word influencer earlier. There is this really interesting evolution of what it means to be an influencer now, especially with people from younger generations who grew up with Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook. They're very comfortable being in front of an audience and being very personal. Their definition of privacy, I think, is different than other generations. So I guess my first question is really, how do you draw the line between influencer and personal brand? Dennis: I don't like the word influencer because it's got that taint, look at me, I'm an influencer. You might as well replace that word for thinker. Oh I'm a thinker. I guess you're not allowed to think, Kathleen, because I'm a thinker. I'm an influencer and you're not. I even wrote an article on Influencive, which is the site for people to talk about being an influencer. The title of the article was Why I Am Not an Influencer. I think it got 23 thousand shares. Kathleen: It's like a dirty word now, especially after the Fyre Festival. Dennis: I tagged Michael Stelzner, who is one of my mentors. He is the guy in social media marketing. He runs social media marketing world, he's the founder of Social Media Examiner, he's got the biggest blog, biggest conference, makes the most money, has the biggest audience of anybody in the world of social media marketing. He told me how he was not an influencer and really he was a servant leader and how he does everything to take care of his team. I thought, wow, he is the exact opposite of all these people that are beating their chest. Look at me, look at me, look at me, it's all about me. Yeah, I would define him as an influencer because he influences the behavior of other people. He has the biggest audience, so by definition he's an influencer because he has the best education. His approach has been to be an influencer in the world of social media marketing to actively do research and find out every day, what are the things that people are searching for? What do they care about? He is so scientifically in tune with the data of what an audience wants that that's how he was able to grow Social Media Examiner to getting millions of visits per month on the site. There are a lot of people that are social media consultants, there are a lot of people that have a blog, lot of people with podcasts. We had an episode on his podcast, I think it was ... what was it called? He even chose the title because he knows what people want, so he came up with the title, What Marketers Really Need to Know About the Facebook Algorithm. The thing got 50 thousand downloads in the first month. I thought, holy moly. Mike and I chatted for half an hour and he got 50 thousand downloads. People are wondering, wow this guy is so big, will he interview me? I hope I'm next. Oh, will he let me speak in the Social Media Marketing World? That's what all of the moths are doing when they come to the flame. I ask him, because we spent the day together after Social Media Marketing World? After all that kind of stuff, he and I just hung out. I said, what question do people not ask you? He said, "They don't ask me how I was able to grow Social Media Examiner from nothing to the largest property in this space. The answer is because I use the data and I create content that satisfies that because I look at what the search engine queries are." 2% of his traffic comes to the homepage for Social Media Examiner. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: The other 98% is on every little micro-topic like why is my Facebook ad disapproved or how do I make a video or how do I use my Google Analytics and what's a good bounce rate? Those micro, micro moments. I define him as an influencer because it's not the tip of the iceberg of him speaking on stage in front of seven thousand people. It's his conference, so he can do that. It's the stuff beneath the water in the iceberg of lots and lots and lots of little stories and his process. Where he and I have massive alignment is we have deep process. The way he runs that conference that has seven thousand people, the way he organizes volunteers, how he trains them, how they come in a few days before, how they line up and they wear name tags and they know exactly what to do. Every single part of the process. You guys run and event, so you know what I'm talking about. The level of detail that's required. Can you imagine being a conference organizer? If you were to approach influencer marketing or personal branding the same way that you run a hospital where there's lots of processes and there's lots of detail. I think personal branding and this influencer marketing thing will have to evolve from witchcraft and Ouija boards and voodoo dolls to actual established processes for how you become a doctor, anything that requires an actual process like running a factory. I believe that's where we'll be in five years, but right now, people can get away with nonsense because there's not a lot of accountability. So it's easy to say, oh personal branding, well what the hell does that mean, right? You can't say hell, that's not good. What the heck does that mean? Kathleen: You can say hell on this podcast. Dennis: All right. Kathleen: Yeah, there's a lot of throw it at the wall and see what sticks. This is the sense that I get, then there's also a lot of copycat like oh, I see so and so doing this and it seems to be working, so I'm just gonna do that because that must be what works, because it worked for them, right? Dennis: Yep. Kathleen: I think in some cases that can work. Somebody might have stumbled upon a good tactic, but I think the thing that I've at least observed with people who talk about wanting to build their personal brand but then they don't really do it is they don't have a plan. Therefore, they're not consistent with what they do, so there's a lack of follow through. There's a lot of one off, here and there things, and ultimately that prevents them from getting traction which is why I thought your approach was so interesting to create the process because when you have the plan, you at least have something to follow. Then you know if you're on track or off track. Dennis: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Kathleen: I was gonna say, you mentioned in the beginning, meeting with the CEO of the fintech company and getting him to do one-minute videos. I'm really curious to know if you find any sort of, again going back to the idea of a generational divide, is there any kind of reticence, especially amongst the more established business leaders you work with, to get as personal as you're looking for them to get? One Minute Videos Dennis: Yes and no, because if you broad brush with the stereotype and you say, "Oh, those people under 30, they were born with a phone glued to their hand and Snapchat and all that." Actually they're digital nomads or whatever you want to call them. I don't think that's necessarily true. At the 40 thousand foot level, yes. Three days ago I was in Denver and I was with the CEO of a new company, it's my buddy Mark Karloff, he does MNA and buys himself billion dollar companies. I wanna say he's 56 or something like that. I said, "Mark, for your company, we're gonna have to make these one-minute videos to help explain what it does." It's the Hoover for law firms to be able to serve, it's called Proof Serve, you have to serve people documents, right? That's what happens in the world of the lawsuits, right? A lot of law firms have to do the serving in different states. He wanted to get more law firms to enroll and I said, "Well, you need to collect one-minute videos of the paralegals and what they do day to day because they're the ones who are choosing who's serving. You need to talk to the different people that are doing the serving so that you know that they are legit and not these crazy people that just signed up. You're trusting them to deliver your documents for you. It's an important case, you can't afford these documents to get lost." Collect one-minute videos so that people can see how real it is, so they can see that there are other personal injury attorneys that are doing the exact same thing, that they trust in their neighborhood, to collect at it's scale across all of the hundreds of customers that he has. Because other than that, what would you do? You'd create a glossy commercial or you're do a website. You'd sign up for InfusionSoft or there's all these marketing technology, but those are all ways that I believe people who, whether they're old or young, they try to hide behind the technology instead of connecting with people directly. I don't think that's an old or a young thing. Are people willing to connect at a human level to show empathy because they really care about their employees, because they really care about their customer? I think that you have a spectrum where the people who are 40 plus are actually more likely to really care because they're more likely to be more mature, they have more business experience, but maybe they don't understand exactly the mechanics of having to press record. The young people, maybe they make more video, but they are less likely to make video that is uplifting other people, that is sharing deep knowledge based on experience. If you're over 40, like you and me, you're gonna have a lot of stories. We have a lot of experiences to share and it's not just take a look at this food that I'm having, that I'm at the beach. Two days ago I stayed in this penthouse in Miami downtown on the 50th floor. I made some videos from the top. If I was a 20-year-old, I would more likely make videos showing how amazing this penthouse is. But instead, I made videos showing how this looks glamorous, doesn't it? Look at this view, all the way out to the ocean, there's South Beach, and there's downtown. Do you know this is an Airbnb that I paid $200.00 a night for and it's paid for by the client? Did you know that I flew here on Southwest airlines and I sat in the middle seat for four and a half hours all the way from Phoenix? I didn't tell you that, did I? Do you wanna know what it's really like? Do you wanna know some of the things that I struggle with in growing my company? That's exactly the opposite of what you'd expect of someone who's out on a balcony and overlooking the ocean in a penthouse at the 50th floor, right? Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah, that's so much more real. Dennis: [crosstalk] between older versus younger, it's not that the younger people are more willing to make video. It's who can share stories that are empathetic, that are educational, and that bring people along in a sequence towards an overall mission that anchors your personal brand. So anyone who's going into personal branding and I have to ask them, "Do you have a mission that's bigger than you, that's authentic? Not just because you want to help the world in some vague way, but you want to help small businesses save on their tax bill. You want to help local university students overcome crack addictions because their parents left them." It doesn't have to be some Mother Theresa kind of thing. We all have some kind of bigger thing that we're doing, like us, we're training up young adults. A lot of them that maybe they didn't go to college, where they just graduated from high school or that they came out of the military and they just had a kid that popped out and now they have to work. They're not trying to be a CEO, they're just trying to pay the bills, right? When you tie your mission to that, it's a lot easier to then build a sequence. If the personal brand is just look at me and my food, it's pretty shallow because you can't build a whole story around it, you can't get all these other people around it, you can't build the infrastructure that's necessary, what we call the topic wheel. What you saw when we were DM in Austin, we explained the structure of the topic wheel, about what anchors your brand are all the different topics and the topics move out to the individual stories of all the people you're connected to. Start With Your Mission (and Build a Topic Wheel) Kathleen: That's fascinating. So I love the idea of starting, if somebody's thinking they want to build their personal brand, of starting with figuring out what your mission is. Once someone has been able to successfully identify that, you talk about the topic wheel, the question I think people listening probably have is then, are all my videos about this mission or is it just a certain percentage? How does that fit in to this topic wheel? Dennis: The topic wheel allows us to all be humans, because there's something that you might do to make money, but you also might like to boogie board at the beach, you might also like Italian food, you might also have a parent who is disabled, you might also have a particular hobby, right? We start the topic wheel with six topics, we call this why, how, and what. So on the outside, we have different people that are telling stories around six particular topics. One of my topics is education, so Doctor Karen [Freeburg] is one of the people in my topic wheel because she is authoritative on education and we have lots of stories around that, we made one-minute videos around that. There's other people in education that are part of that particular topic. Another topic of mine is digital marketing and I'll put in people like Ryan Deiss because he's authoritative in the world of digital marketing and I've got plenty of interviews with him, where we've made one-minute videos where I'm not trying to get him to talk with things about me, although he has, but I'm interviewing him like a journalist. It's not about me, but it's about his knowledge and his experience, and I'm making it about him. Maybe I'm interviewing Tony Robbins or maybe I'm on CNN talking about the Facebook controversy or whatever it might be. Those are all different topics that are not to show that I am an awesome person or famous, but to precede the authority because I am spending time with people that other people recognize are legit in that space. When I make one-minute videos with these people and I boost it out there on Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and all this, that allows me to re-market for my topic, all the way into my product which is when I can sell courses on digital marketing, I can sell packages on implementing the things we talk about. The idea of why, how, and what is, why is your story, it's your passion, it's a particular moment in time. It could be when I was 18, I dropped out of high school and I wanted to be a professional athlete working for Nike. True story and I have a one-minute story talking about that and how eventually, they didn't except me, but then we got Nike later as a client to do digital advertising for them and how I learned that what the 18-year-old Dennis thought Nike would be like versus the 40-year-old Dennis was completely different. That Nike was this big corporate and it wouldn't have worked out for me as an athlete because it's long travel on the road. I guess I do a lot of travel on the road, but if your career only lasts a couple years as a pro athlete versus a 20 year career as a digital marketer. So those stories, the why stories are the outside ring of the topic wheel. Then move to the middle ring, which is how. Expertise, tips, how to do stuff, checklists, right? Remember, Kathleen, you saw all these checklists that we were showing, like how do you [crosstalk] manager? How do you get a drive in golf down the middle of the fairway or how do you tie your shoes with one hand or how do you juggle the ball? How do you do all the things that you know how to do, especially when you interview these other people who are experts. They've got tons of how do you do a very specific thing, right? So you're marketing from the outside of very specific stories. Not just, oh I was once really sad and now I'm successful, but specific things that had happened, specific moments in time where you point the camera, you can follow the scene of what happened, right? The beauty of the Pixar is that they focus on specific scenes. So the why we market to the specific scenes of the how, which are specific, let me show you how to do something very useful, like a recipe. Let me show you how to make my brand of chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts. I really like macadamia nuts. Kathleen: That sounds so good. Dennis: I know a lot, for example, about how to make a perfect batch of popcorn. I have a movie theater popcorn maker in my kitchen. Kathleen: That is so cool! Dennis: Do you ever walk to the movie theater and you're like, "Mm." You're almost willing to watch a bad movie just to eat the popcorn, or no? Kathleen: I, 100%, think that popcorn is the highlight of the movie. Then, so I have to ask you one important question then, this is a slight digression, but are you an add the butter oil to your popcorn person or are you a eat it as it comes out of the maker person? Dennis: Yes. Whenever people ask an either or question like do you want to eat the fish or do you wanna eat the burger? Yes. Kathleen: Yeah, I like adding the extra butter, myself. Dennis: Yeah, I add the extra butter to the popper, then when it comes out, I actually have the movie theater quality bags, right? I wanna simulate the whole experience. I've got a butter pump and I'll pump the butter in there too, on top of that. Kathleen: Dennis, you're a man after my own heart. I'm all about the extra butter. Gotta do it. Dennis: See? So then when we get together, maybe just outside of Baltimore, we can make some popcorn together. I'll ship you a popcorn maker, you'll see what I'm talking about. I'll show you how to do popcorn the way Dennis likes to do popcorn. Kathleen: I love it. I love it. Send me that one-minute video. Dennis: I'm gonna make a one-minute video, yeah. Yeah, and then we're sharing expertise on how is this different than microwave popcorn, which is garbage. Kathleen: Yes. 100%. Dennis: Yes, very different, and how movie theater popcorn tastes so good because it has coconut oil, did you know that? Kathleen: I did not know that. That's interesting. Dennis: If you try to use olive oil or butter, the flashpoint is so low that you burn it and that's why movie theater popcorn can go so high because coconut oil has a really high flashpoint. Kathleen: Oh, interesting. Dennis: We could make several one-minute videos about microwave popcorn and then you'd come away from that thinking, wow, that's really cool, I didn't know that. So I'm sharing how. Then I get specific again, into the very center of the onion tootsie roll, multi-layer thing, into the what, which is how you sell. See, conversion is about ... We all understand conversion, buy my stuff, it's on sale. The thing ends on Friday, it's got these many features, it's better than the competitor, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There's only a limited quantity, but all these different ways of trying to get people to buy, right? All the things that you say, features versus benefits. That is the what. Everyone understands what. The trouble is when they get to marketing, they're so eager they can't help themselves. When they're supposed to be making why content, they somehow end up selling it again and they pollute the whole thing. It's like mixing chocolate milk and Coke together. I like both of them, but I'm not going to drink them in the same can. It's nasty, right? Or we ask them to, let's make a series of how videos. So around your product or service, maybe you're an agency, you wanna get more clients, you do additional marketing. Okay, talk about how you set up PBC Canvas. Talk about how you optimize, talk about how, but do not ... Resist the urge to start selling because that's the what. So if you keep these things separate from the why to the how to the what, then you actually have a funnel, which is a circular funnel. That's the topic wheel, it's every day content meaning you don't have to keep replacing it. It doesn't go stale. I believe if you do it right, from the very outside are all these people that you're interviewing. That's personal branding. The outside layer of your topic wheel is personal branding. Personal branding is not some separate thing about ... I was thinking, it would be fun Kathleen, we could rent a Lamborghini, how about? You and I, we could rent a Lamborghini for one day and just make all kinds of silly videos and drive around real slow. Kathleen: That's like Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians and Cars Drinking Coffee. That's what he does. He does a different car each time and they just drive around and talk. He has a whole show that is just that. I love it. Dennis: Yeah, this is my garage. There's many ways of doing it. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: But that's the superficial kind of personal branding. That's look at me and look at my lifestyle. If you have actual depth, if you have a structure, you have a process, then you're gonna build the topic wheel because it's the personalities that are the outside that are sharing knowledge, that are organized by topic. The topics then go to the very center, which is your company, your figurehead, the product you sell, whatever it is that you're trying to monetize. When you link why to how to what, you use the what to fund all the why and the how, so it's a self-funding funnel. Because all the people that do personal branding, guess what? It costs money, just like SEO costs money. It costs money to produce video, it costs money to edit, it costs money to put traffic against it, right? So what's gonna pay for that? Kathleen: Right. Dennis: Are you just gonna spend money for the heck of it? Kathleen: Yeah, exactly. Dennis: I don't see ROI off of this. I ask any of these people to do personal branding and they can't answer this question. I say, "What's the ROI of your personal branding?" They can't answer the question. Why not? Kathleen: That's a great point. Now, that was a really fantastic explanation of the topic wheel. I think that gives everybody a very clear framework, at least, within which to begin to break down what are they gonna talk about on video. How To Create Your Videos Kathleen: So I feel like there's, what am I gonna talk about? Then there's making the video, and then there's distributing the video. So let's talk for a second about making it. Earlier, you mentioned a couple of different tools and my ears perked up because I started to experiment with making videos and I'm gonna just say, I am the least technically competent individual on the planet when it comes to video, but I discovered one of the tools you mentioned, which is Apple Clips. I think it is the best thing since ... I was gonna say since sliced bread, but I don't actually like sliced bread, so I think it might be better than sliced bread. It is the greatest thing ever. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the types of tools that the average person out there can use to do this and produce a decent looking video. Dennis: So, there are 30 different tools that we use. Kathleen: Wow. Dennis: But that's a mix. We organize them into people that are just everyday people like you and me. Intermediate folks that are specialists that have maybe a year or two of training. Then we have our pro level, the full Adobe Suite, where you're doing things in Premier and Aftereffects. That's pro. I don't think any of us, unless that's what we do for a living, we have 10 people full-time as pro video editors. They are doing things according to standards that we have. But should you and I be learning how to do that? No. Kathleen: No. Dennis: You and I should be learning how to use Apple Clips and Otter.ai and the different video tools built into Facebook ads manager, through transcription. We should be pushing things out to fancy hands and Fiver for lightweight editing. Some of the editing that you can do, for example, Apple Clips allows you to transcribe live and it's pretty accurate. Kathleen: I did that last week and it blew my mind. Then I didn't realize you could also go in and edit it's live transcription so that if it messes something up, you can correct it. It was so easy. Dennis: There are apps that are built into Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook has 10 different tools that are part of Facebook Mobile Data Studio that allow for editing for free. Adobe has Adobe Express. There's lot of these tools and every day, I get three or four more tools that people say, "Hey, try this editing tool. On your app, it'll add these really cool filters." I even bought a ton of apps on my phone that will add motion, that will add just super cool effects, that you can lose hours of your day downloading dozens of these different apps that do different kinds of things. I would say just use Apple Clips and one or two other ones, and not- Kathleen: I think that's great advice. I may or may not have spent six hours last week downloading apps and doing exactly what you just described. Then I discovered Apple Clips and that rabbit hole ended. Dennis: A lot of folks, I know will say, well I'm not a video person. They're secretly afraid of all these tools, like I don't really have time to learn all these different tools. You know what? You have something called an iPhone in your pocket, okay? When you hit video and you hit the red circle to record video, that camera is so smart. The way it does multi point filtering and focusing and light, that if you literally do that and you have decent sound and you don't point it directly into the sun, then you will get good enough video that you can pay $5.00 or $10.00 that someone who's a pro can do the editing for you. I've learned this the hard way because I've probably spent 100 hours, 200 hours of my time playing with all these different apps and figuring out exactly which effects I like from which app. That's a waste of your time. With that said, Apple Clips, Otter.ai, the native tools inside Instagram and inside Facebook Ads Manager, that's all you need to know. The pro stuff, for example, at TNC, I flew in one of my friends from Facebook to speak. Same thing at Social Media Marketing World, I brought three other people to speak at the conference. I had professional videographers that I flew in that recorded on expensive equipment, everything miced up properly, everything sent off to our VAs in the Philippines, that do the video editing. So we do understand the pro side, but you gotta know when you're doing a lightweight video that's just walking along do a cell phone style video at the beach reflecting on some thought that you had, versus on stage, speaker reel, high authority, in front of 10 thousand people giving a keynote address. You're not always using one tool. Sometimes you need a butter knife and sometimes you need a chainsaw. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. I love that you just mentioned all those specific tools because I'm totally gonna go out right after this and check them out. Dennis: We have a guide, I'll give it to you. Kathleen: That's great. Oh yeah, a link to it in the show notes. Dennis: All the cool videos and then how they fit into our process. Just because you can use a tool, doesn't mean it's worth anything because you've gotta figure out how it fits into a process with all the other tools and who does what because it's unlikely that one person knows how to do everything. So then take the finished video and turn it into an ad and write copy against it in a headline and to be able to look at the performance of it and to be able to go back and re-shoot. Usually whoever is the one recording the video is not the one who's editing the video. So that requires a process step. Anytime something's gotta move between different people, it requires a process step, right? How to Promote and Distribute Your Videos Kathleen: Yeah. Now assuming people figure out a way to get these videos made, whether they make them themselves or they get help, they're gonna wind up with all of these one-minute videos. How do you then ... What is your process then for getting them in front of an audience because obviously that's the objective? If the tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, it doesn't matter. So can you talk a little bit about that? Dennis: So once we've gone through video production, which could be as simple as me doing a video on my iPhone and automatically saves to my Google Drive. By the way, that's my little secret, everything goes to my Google Drive. I also have Dropbox and I have the Apple, whatever that's called, the iCloud. I have everything saved multiple places because I'm paranoid about losing it. Whether it's as simple as that or whether it goes through complex editing because it's speaker footage from multiple cameras, like a professional interview. We then distribute that in multiple formats. We take the long format, so it could be a 40 minute interview, and we'll put that in landscape format on YouTube on a channel. Our buddy, Matthew Januszek, who is the CEO of Escape Fitness, he's interviewed all the top names in the world of fitness. It could be Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lee Haney, the CEOs of 24 Hour Fitness and Lifetime Fitness. All the people because he's the guy. He does professional interviews. So the full length episodes, we'll show on YouTube. Then, we take one-minute snippets that are square, just the highlights, think of it as like movie trailer compared to the movie. The trailer's only a minute, it shows you all the big explosions, all the big scenes, but you don't really get the whole story, just enough to tease you, right? You know, movie trailers. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: Then we put the movie trailer on Facebook and we boost those through video views to build re-marketing audiences, to then sequence them to other pieces within the topic wheel. We take vertical, 15 second commercials, and we put those on Instagram as stories. We take the same one-minute videos that I mentioned on Facebook and we post those to Twitter and we can promote those posts. We have an annual bid at three cents of engagement, we never select Twitter's automatic thing because they'll bid it to $2.00 and spend all your money. We also will post it organically to LinkedIn, to our profiles. That way, you can create one piece of content, chop it up into 30 or 40 other little pieces of content and be able to use it across all your different channels and obtain multiple, multiple value. Gary Vaynerchuk posted something on LinkedIn a week ago, showing how he does that in his content pyramid. It's the same thing that a lot of us that are prolific agencies do on behalf of our clients because often you can't get the client to do this everyday. If you put it as part of their process and teach their support people, every time they repair that HVAC and get the customer right there, saying, "Oh, how is it?" That's obviously the best time. Wedding photographers, get them right then when they're happy, when they just got married, don't try to get the feedback two weeks later and get their review later. Try to get it right then. If you can't build it into the process, then you have to collect it every three months or every six months and you try to collect it all at once, with multiple people and you can chop it up. The odds are, it may be, Kathleen, you and I were expert interviewers but we're not going to be able to get 60 minutes of quality content because it takes 15 minutes to warm up. In the middle, they'll say some things that are good, but are you gonna force someone to sit through a 60 minute video to be able to catch those pieces in the middle? No, you pull those out and use those as carrots. Kathleen: Yeah. Now, how often should somebody be posting these videos? Dennis: As often as you have good content. So I think of Facebook, you can get away with once per day, maybe twice per day. If you're in news and media, sports media, you can do maybe six, seven times per day. The Washington Post and some of these other local news guys will do 40 times per day, local sites, 20, 30 times per day. But most brands, once per day. But don't feel like you have to post once per day. What we'll do is, maybe we'll be at Social Media Marketing World and wander around in the hallways and interview a lot of people, just for one-minute interviews, not some scheduled thing, but just by walking around in the hallway, we'll run into people that we know. We'll collect a bunch of one-minute videos, all in one day, and then sprinkle them out over the course of several months. So I was on CNN in Atlanta, talking about the whole Facebook controversy and Russian interference and senator we run ads, the whole congress thing. I was in front of three and a half million people, live, where they were, in the studio, asking me questions about all this Facebook nonsense. I made the most of that because I got that four and a half minute clip and chopped it up into a few different pieces. I'm now able to recirculate that as different pieces of content, and I've taken some of those highlight components and I've sprinkled them in to my speaker reel, to our company mission reel, to other reels where we're teaching about personal branding. If I can mix and match from all different kinds of videos that we have an reassemble that. Do you know the analogy of Mexican food, Kathleen? Kathleen: No, tell me. Dennis: You can take meat, cheese, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and rearrange it into a chalupa or a tostada or an enchilada or a taco or a chimichanga or whatever it is, but it's the same ingredients, but just in a slightly different format, right? Kathleen: That's so funny and very true. Dennis: So that's what we're doing with our ingredients. So the wrong materials come in, meaning like the 30 minute interview with the client, right? Or you're doing it on behalf of a client and you're interviewing the customer and you have a continuous shot of 30 minutes where you're asking them a series of questions and saying, "Hey, don't worry about what you're saying because we're going to edit out the good pieces or whatever it is. If you stumble, just pause for two second and restart, and then we'll chop up different pieces and we can reuse those pieces into whatever combination that we want." So we think about the Mexican menu or the Chinese menu, you now have the ability to produce any kind of marketing material that you want. So a sales piece about a new product that you have, maybe you could reuse stuff that you already have. 80, 90% of what you have is what you can reuse and then the 10% is the stuff specifically about that new product. Then you don't have to create all this stuff from scratch again. Maybe it's because I'm lazy, but when we do this, it's like I don't want to have to keep redoing things about who we are and what we've done and who our best customers are. For example, when we first got Nike as a client, I thought that was incredible and making videos out there at the Nike campus, interviewing the executives at Nike is stuff that makes us look highly authoritative, but it also looks good because I can quote them. I can bring them to speak on stage like at the Adobe Summit where Nike says, "Hey, yeah, we use Blitz for social analytics." Well, how awesome is that? In front of the other people who are using Omniture, saying oh, yeah, Omniture doesn't do that. It's Adobe Analytics now, but oh yeah, we use Blitz for social analytics. I can reuse that, I guess we could call it a testimonial, but I can use that snippet in so many different places. Think about things that have been said to you, that have been said about you, that have been said about IMPACT, about your business partners, about the people that you have met. Think about all those amazing situations, imagine if you could wave a wand and you could reuse them anytime, anywhere, how powerful would that be? Kathleen: Well, and it certainly sounds like, from what you're saying, that it's making me realize, there are probably a lot of businesses that have a ton of gold nuggets in their B roll and in their video archives and it's like, half the battle is keeping it organized and knowing what you've got in there so you know when to pull those pieces back out and incorporate them. The other half, really what this is telling me, is that if you're gonna be serious about this, especially if you're gonna do it as a business, it probably makes sense to invest in in-house video expertise because you really just need to incorporate this into the fabric of your everyday life within your company. Outsourcing Your Video Process Dennis: Amen. You don't have to be a big agency, big budget, big team, or a big marketing group. We literally started with hiring VAs from the Philippines as $3.00 an hour. So you hire one person full-time. Do you know what that costs you for a year? Kathleen: No. Dennis: $500.00. Kathleen: Wow. Dennis: So $500.00 a month, Kathleen, for someone who's working for you full-time, 40 hours a week, college educated, a real human, they care about you deeply, they're better than Americans in the standpoint that they are loyal, they will stay with you, and they're happy, they're joyful, and we will send them stuff at the end of the day, say 5:00 PM, you know it's the other side of the world, so their time zone's upside down. When we wake up in the morning, it's ready. Kathleen: That's so crazy. That's the part that I think is actually kind of cool about working with folks in Asia is that if you're organized and you can get stuff to them at the end of the day, it's freaky how fast you can move. Dennis: Let me tell you my secret which is not so much of a secret anymore. There are one million Philippino's that do digital marketing at onlinejobs.ph. When I found this site 10 years ago, I could not believe my eyes. I said, "Wow, I can hire this guy at $1.50 per hour? Why don't I just hire this guy for fun, just to see. It's only $1.50 per hour. I'll buy him for like 50 hours, just see what happens," right? Kathleen: Right, can't hurt. That's a good tip. Side note, I absolutely love the people from the Philippines. I spent a lot of time there. Before I went into marketing, I did international development consulting and my last year that I did it, it was right before I had my son, I went to the Philippines, I think six times. That is such a cool place and the people are some of the best people. Dennis: We go there twice a year and it's just incredible. They love us and I love taking them out because I feel like I'm a big shot. We'll take them out to eat to the nicest places in Manila, send them off on a full day massage. I'll look at the bill, like we'll go to the nicest restaurants, right? Even Makati, which is the most expensive business area. Kathleen: That's where I used to stay. That's beautiful, yeah. Dennis: We're doing the penthouse thing and they think we're ballers. At the end of the meal or at the end of whatever it is, we'll go take them out karaoke. We have seventy in the Philippines. I'll look at the bill and I'll work it out, that's like four bucks a person. All right. Kathleen: Let's do it again tomorrow. Dennis: Yeah, maybe it's five bucks or whatever it is. I'm thinking, wow, you could live like a king for nothing. You could have an entourage, if you wanted to, I'm not saying do this. But you know this Kathleen, for $200.00 you could have six guys with machine guns follow you around the entire day as bodyguards. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: I've wanted to do that just for fun because I go there twice a year with our people. I was thinking, it would be cool if I had six guys with machine guns, all dressed up, walking with me as I'm walking downtown. Then have a couple people that follow me around with video cameras, just to see what would happen in the mall. This people think this guy walking in the middle here must be a celebrity. Kathleen: Yeah, this brings us full circle in our conversation because it goes right back to the very beginning where you talked about if you were in the penthouse standing on the balcony and if you were an influencer, you'd take a picture of yourself with a glass of champagne living the life. Instead, you were very real about, I flew Southwest. Your Philippines example's great because that's where you could be like, "This is just how I roll." Dennis: Yeah. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: I love it. I could literally sit here and talk to you all day, but I'm sure you have things that you need to be doing and I want to be respectful of your time. The last two questions I have for you are questions that I ask every guest that comes on this podcast and I'm really curious to hear your response because you do know so many people in the world of digital marketing. Today, when you think about the concept of inbound marketing, company or individual, who do you think is really killing it and doing it well? Dennis: Nathan Latka. Kathleen: Ooh, there's a name I haven't heard before. Dennis: Oh, you need to look him up. I think he's number one or number two in business podcasts on iTunes. Kathleen: How do you spell his last name? Dennis: L-A-T-K-A. Kathleen: Okay. Dennis: I first met this kid because he signed up for one of my podcasts or webinar like 10 years ago. He's just some 17-year-old and I'm like, "Who is this punk?" He kept hitting me up. I saw that he had started a company that did Facebook ads and Facebook apps, and he grew it to millions of dollars and he sold it. Then he started to take his money, invest it in other companies. He would go to a taco truck, for example, and say, "Hey, I'm willing to write a check right now to buy your business. Let's make a deal." Then he started turning the camera on, then he wrote his book that became an actual best seller. Then he started interviewing all the people that were entrepreneurs and running SaaS companies and asking them about their revenue and their conversion rater and their cost per conversion and their lifetime value and all their stats. How much revenue, how many employees they had, what's their turnover, and turned it into the dominant podcast for SaaS entrepreneurs. Now he's on TV all over the place. I think we had lunch, I think it was three years ago, we were in Austin. He was living in downtown Austin, one of the high rises. We were remarking about Donald Trump and how Donald Trump, whatever you say about Donald Trump, who cares what your politics are, he knows how to get your attention. Kathleen: Yeah, he sure does. Dennis: Gary Vaynerchuk knows how to get your attention. I consider them the same person. Dennis, what if I became the Donald Trump of digital marketing? I'm like, "You know dude? You're exactly the kind of guy with the personality and the shine and the intelligence and the speed to be able to do it, but just like with Donald Trump or Gary, you're gonna have a lot of haters." If you're willing to deal with the haters, you will kill it. You are so good. That's what he did. The next day, I saw on Facebook, all this commotion and it was Michael Stelsner and the other folks saying, "Who does this Nathan Latka kid think he is?" He sent out this email to his mailing list of all his customers saying, "You know what? If you don't engage on my emails, I'm gonna delete you from my list." All these influential social media people are saying how dare he do that? He can't do that. He can't be saying things like that to his customers. He can't be saying that to Michael Stelsner. He did. He's like, "You know what, Michael? You don't like my stuff, you can leave." I'm like, Nathan, dude, I know we talked about that, but I didn't think he'd actually do it and he did. Look at how successful he is. Kathleen: That's cool. I can't wait to check that example out because I get a lot of interesting answers when I ask this question and it's always really fun to discover somebody completely new. Dennis: Look at his videos. It'll just be a minute, you're in line at Whole Foods and you open up and do a search on Facebook or Google or YouTube, and you're like, "Okay, I'll just watch a little bit of this video." Then before you know it, you've lost two hours watching his videos. Kathleen: Oh dangerous. So in other words, don't watch them when I'm under a deadline on something, I guess. Dennis: I'm warning you. He's so good. Full disclosure, he's a client. Kathleen: Well, thank you for alerting me to him. That's gonna be an interesting one to check out. Now, the other question I'm interested to hear about from you is digital marketing is obviously changing so quickly. Technology is fueling a lot of it. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself on the cutting edge? Dennis: I don't. I know it's kind of a flippant answer because you could say, "Oh yeah, but I know your network and you know these people and these people and these people." Here's my little trick. When I was a younger man, I thought that I could work harder than everybody and keep up with the news and read harder and work harder and I've since discovered, since I turned 40, that I can't do that. So all I do is I associate with the smartest people out there. So the reason I go to conferences is not because I want to be on stage or because I'm trying to get more clients or because I wanna be famous, it's because I want to hang out with the people that have that knowledge so that if I have a question, I know who I can chat up and they will answer my question. So I don't at all pretend like I'm somehow the most knowledgeable person about everything going on in digital. You and I know there's so many different thing and so many different niches, it's just, even if you had 500 hours in a day, you couldn't keep up with all the things that are going on. All the different tools for video editing, no way I could keep up with that. But I do know that if I have a question about anything, I can literally pick up the phone and I know who to call and I know I can get the answer. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: So that's my secret. It's not what I need to know, it's who I need to know and that list of who is my topic wheel. So the people that pay us money, the people that we've worked with to be able to create influence is also who I count on for my expertise. So the way I make money is also the way that I'm able to educate. Even if I didn't make money off of these people, I would even pay money to hang out with the people like Michael Stelsner and Nathan Latka and David Burg and Ryan Dice, but we're being paid by these people. Isn't that incredible? Kathleen: That's a pretty great gig if you can get it, I'll say. Dennis: Yeah. Kathleen: Yeah, for me it's my podcast. That's why I do this. People who listen, know I am always saying I would keep doing the podcast, even if nobody listened. Thank God, people do, but I learn so much and today is a great example of that. I feel like I've learned so much from you, so thank you. You Know What To Do Next Kathleen: If somebody is listening and wants to learn more about you or Blitzmetrics or has a question about personal branding, what's the best way for them to find you online? Dennis: They can go to blitzmetrics.com, of course, and they can also look me up on LinkedIn, but please do not friend me on Facebook. I've been at the five thousand friend limit for the last eight years. Don't ask me for a blue check mark, don't ask me if your ads were disapproved, but absolutely, if you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn or go to my website, happy to chat with you there. Kathleen: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Dennis. If you are listening and you learned something new or you liked what you heard, of course I'd love it if you'd give the podcast a review on iTunes or the platform of your choice. If you know somebody who's down kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because they could be my next guest. Thanks so much Dennis. It was great chatting with you. Dennis: Thanks Kathleen.

Today's interview is with a fellow Success Insider called Ryan Deiss. Ryan Deiss is the founder and CEO of Digital Marketer.

Today’s guest is Geoff Woods from the podcast The Mentee. There is a change of direction in the podcasting world, ever since Serial, where narrative podcasting has become more popular. We are still at the very beginning of the bell curve of podcasting’s popularity because we’re still in the realm of the early adopter. Many people still don’t know what podcasting is. There is going to be an increasing need for podcasts because it will become more popular and the professionals are realizing it. There are narrative journalists who did that as their profession who are bringing that talent and skill set to the podcasting world. With that, you’re starting to see podcasts coming out with incredibly high production quality and budgets for production as well. You don’t have to do that to compete moving forward, but recognize that the quality is going through the roof and if you want to stand out you have to do things differently. Geoff’s approach Geoff started recording the conversations with the incredible, high-level people he was spending time with as a way to document his journey from employee to entrepreneur. He got feedback from the listener that what they really wanted wasn’t necessarily just an interview but that they wanted to hear private conversations that were genuine, that actually led to results in his life. His podcast is a mixture of the conversations he was having, interspersed with his own narration about it. As he documented his journey over the last year, there were times where he felt compelled to share his thoughts and document his journey and carrying a recorder everywhere enabled him to do that. He says he has only used perhaps 5% of those little moments in the podcast but it aids in the rawness and authenticity of his podcast. It shows the true emotion, including fear, that he’s going through but also when the lightbulb comes on in his head too.  Advice for narrative podcasters Recognize that you need to document every interaction not only for your own retention but also in case there is a snippet of gold that you can use for the podcast. Also of course ask for permission to use what snippets you choose in the podcast. You have to document it and form some system of marking the date you talked to them, what you talked about and moments of gold. When you start a podcast or a blog, when you do anything that puts you in the position of being a reporter, you end up doing something that creates an immense amount of value for yourself. This is why Geoff started his podcast. Not only to add value to other people (which was his number 1 goal) but also to give a way to add value that was unique, and get in front of the people he wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. If you were to walk up to those people and ask to pick their brain, the chances are the answer will be no. However, when you put yourself in the position of reporter, all of a sudden you are giving value to them because you have a platform and are giving them exposure. Everyone wants exposure. It feeds the ego. Regardless of how big their podcast is, this is true. Some people will ask you how big your podcast is and how big your reach is, and that’s ok, but most people will just want the exposure. Take Damon John from Shark Tank for example. The odds of getting him to have coffee with me, he’d likely say no. Geoff recognizes that if he wanted to get in touch with those kinds of people, he needed to step his game up even more. Using a brand like entrepreneur.com behind his name gives him even better access to those kinds of high-level people. Therefore, he set out with the aim of becoming a contributing writer for entrepreneur.com for the specific reason of being able to network. When he found out that Damon John was coming out with a book, he recognized the opportunity, as a reporter for a major publication, to offer exposure to him for his book. It was an immediate yes, and he got to have the conversation with Damon that he wanted to have, turn it into a podcast episode and turn it into an article for entrepreneur.com which not only added tremendous value to him in promoting his book, but also adding tremendous value to Geoff from a credibility and traffic standpoint. It was a true win-win. Geoff is always asking the question ‘How can I add value? How can I help you?’ He knows if somebody is coming out with a book then they will be looking for press, so it’s a no-brainer. Hooks in the podcast to entice listeners Geoff also realizes that recording private conversations with some really influential people can be taken out of context. So what he’s started to do is narrate at the beginning of each episode to provide the context and frame the conversation. It shows people the goal, the mission and the stage of the journey that he’s on so that they can understand why the conversation is worth listening to. Then he adds a take-away so the listeners can easily find out what they can apply in their own life, and also a call to action. It’s a concept of opening loops and closing loops. At the beginning you can say something that sets up the topic. E.g. ‘the 5 things that are holding you back from quitting your day job’. This gives the listener a headline and something that grabs you attention and makes you want the answer. Then, however, they don’t get the answer straight away. They have to stick around to listen to the end of the episode so they will get the answer. Then, throughout the episode, before you give them the answer to that question, before you close that loop, open another one. You can add something like ‘before we finish this episode I just want to let you know that next episode we will feature a conversation with xyz and the secrets he shared about abc.’ Then close the original loop so that the listener does get that sense of closure. The basic formula: Open loop 1, open loop 2, close loop 1. Then in the following episode you address the fact of that open loop 2, but also open loop 3 before you close loop 2. It’s putting a chain together so that listeners are drawn on and on. This idea comes from Ryan Dice at Digital Marketer. This is something, a very specific thing, that Geoff thinks about when he’s planning his podcasts now. He asks himself ‘how can I tie these episodes together?’ so that strategically he can keep people engaged.

Something cool I discovered while buying Marshmallow Mateys for my kids… On this episode Russell talks about a new idea he had about opt-in's and why it's super easy. He then walks you through the steps you need to take to do it too. Here are 3 cool things you'll hear in today's episode: Why Russell only buys sugary cereal for Christmas. Why not every business is cookie cutter and you should use different tools to build your list. And see how you can start your own Almond milk making business So listen below as Russell walks you through his list building strategy. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I'm out in the snow the day before Christmas, and we're about to lay down some Marketing In Your Car. All right everyone, we've been hoping, we've been praying, we've been wishing, we've been dreaming of a white Christmas and sure enough, Christmas is tomorrow and today we woke up and it is snowing. We are having an official white Christmas. We didn't think we were going to get it, but we got it. I'm excited. I'm actually driving to the store because one of our family traditions for Christmas is, Santa brings every single kid their own box of sugar cereal. We usually eat super healthy all year round, but on Christmas day, we don't. That's a tradition we've had since I was a little kid. We use to do it when we were little kids, we would each get our own boxes. Santa would ask what we wanted for Christmas, it wasn't never I want a pony or a bike. It was I want Marshmallow Mateys, or I want Lucky Charms. Eventually it morphed into everyone … At first, the first few years it was all over the place cereals. Some people getting Cocoa Krispies, some getting Fruity Pebbles. It was all over the place. Eventually we all found out that the best is Lucky Charms. That became the staple. Then we found out that if you go to the generic brand, the Malt-O-Meal or whatever, you can get the big old bags of Marshmallow Mateys which are basically like Lucky Charms only it's in a huge bag at half the price. You're getting twice the cereal and Santa Claus is basically hooking you up for a lot longer. We'd each, by then… the last 10 years of my childhood, we'd each get our own bag of Marshmallow Mateys. The huge old bags, right? What we would do Christmas morning is, we would get a big old salad bowl out, fill the whole salad bowl full of Marshmallow Mateys. Then we eat out all the oats and not eat the marshmallows. If you ate a marshmallow you lost. We would eat the whole oats, and it's like an hour long process. By the time it was done, you got a big ole salad bowl full of milk and marshmallows, and it's pretty dang amazing. Then we eat those down, and that's Christmas. Christmas isn't Christmas without cereal. I'm going to get cereal right now for myself and my kids, and yes, Santa Claus is bringing me my very own bag of Marshmallow Mateys and I'm not going to share with the kids. It's going to be awesome. Anyway, I wanted to share with you, because I was thinking as I was driving here, I don't know if it's the same for you guys, but my brain feels like it's this track where it's always moving forward and looping things and ideas are coming in and out and every once and a while one's exciting. I had one while I was driving. I wasn't planning on doing a podcast, all of a sudden, this was like, “Oh crap, this is a good idea!” I'm going to share with you guys, and I'm going to be doing it. It's been interesting, a lot of people that I work with are trying to create lead magnets and all this crap. I feel bad because if you remember a year ago or a few years ago, Ryan Dice and Perry Belcher came out with this whole “This is what a funnel is. You have to have a lead magnet, then a tripwire, then a core offer, then return maximizer,” and all this stuff, right? Which is kind of true but kind of annoying because now everyone that I talk to is like, “Oh, this is my lead magnet. This is my core return maximizer offer,” and all these things, and it kind of drives me crazy because I don't know. I hate when people act like business is 100% cookie cutter because it's not. Everything's a little different. People are like, “Russell, how come you don't have your … Why aren't you driving traffic to a lead magnet? Why are you driving directly to your free book offer?” I'm like, “Because my free book offer gets three times conversion opt-ins as do any kind of lead magnet.” Someone else, one of our coaching clients last week, they had this really cool funnel that some people built for them and their lead magnet was boring. It was costing them $18 to get an opt-in. Then, their tripwire was not that cool. Their core offer … This is all based on their philosophy … was awesome. I was like, “Dude, get rid of all the other crap and sell the core offer. That's what people want. Why would you hide your sexiest thing, the thing that's going to get people to actually respond to your ads? Make that the offer.” He's like, “But I thought I had to have a lead magnet and a tripwire,” and all this crap. Anyway, so there's my little rant for the day. You don't. You've got to find the coolest thing that's going to get people to respond and that's what you lead with. Always. Sorry, that rant wasn't supposed to come up either, but there it is. Anyway, with that said, for me, I lead with my sexiest thing, so free book offers, webinars, things like that. After awhile, if you've been promoting something for a long, long, long, long time, it starts getting what we call ad fatigue, where the more and more people have seen it, it gets more expensive, so you have to change the ad, change the landing page, all sorts of the things, or what I like to do now is start putting in bridge pages, which are basically a squeeze page. A page to get somebody interested and get their email address and then we can follow-up with them and sell them the main things we want to sell again. The problem is it's kind of a pain to go and create all these op- in pages and lead magnets and all that jazz, right? I was thinking. This is what spurred this whole podcast. I was driving here and I was thinking about a blog post that Steven did. Steven is our blogger over at ClickFunnels. He was on an episode of Marketing  In Your Car. He's from Australia, he's awesome. He wrote this one, it was 14 Tools for Funnel Hacking. Something awesome like that. It was a blog post. I was like, “Crap, dude, that should be an opt-in page.” “Hey, who wants the 14 best tools for funnel hacking? Opt-in here.” They give me their name and email address. I redirect them to the blog. Now I've got them on my email list. I can sell them Click Funnels, I can sell them whatever else I want, right? I was thinking how easy is that? I don't even have to create this content. I can go to Youtube, find the videos in my market that get the most views and that video can be the opt-in. I'm like, “Hey, free video at Robert Kiyosaki, telling you why” blah blah blah blah blah, whatever. People opt-in. I send them the Youtube video of Robert Kiyosaki talking about whatever, and then boom, now I've got them on a list and I can start selling them my stuff. Isn't that easy? One of my big a-ha's I learned from Neil Patel when he came out here to Boise is that … I used to think he was writing blog posts based on keywords or whatever, and he's like, “No, I go to BuzzSumo.com, I search my keyword, I find out what articles are already being shared and I write another article almost identical to those.” I was like, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense.” Just go to BuzzSumo.com, find the articles in your market that have been shared 100,000 times and have 18,000,000 reads, and that might be something that people in your market are interested in, so why not just make this landing page offering them that blog post for your email address. Use the same title that they're already using because it's proven to work, and boom, now you've got these new lead magnets. I hope you guys got that because it's pretty powerful. I'm going to be busting out a crap-ton of landing pages here that aren't going to take hardly any time at all, and all they'll do is opt you in, redirect you to that landing page and then you'll be added to my list and I'm going to sell you cool stuff that you need and want. This works in other markets, too. Let's just say you're a brand new beginner. You've got nothing, right? Let's say you're like, “Hey, I want to be in the …” What's a cool market? You want to be in the almond milk making business and I say that because this morning I made almond milk, which is awesome. I've never made almond milk before but I did it and it was one of the coolest things ever. I don't think there's really a market for that, but let's just pretend like there was because there should be because it's amazing. It tasted way better than regular almond milk and it's not going to kill you because there's some ingredient in regular almond milk you buy at the store that will kill you all. Just FYI, learn how to make your own. It's really fun. You have to buy a $6 sprouted seed bag or nut bag or something. That sounds horrible. Anyway, that's the only thing you need is that and almonds. Anyway, it's pretty awesome. For a $6 investment, you can make your own almond milk. All right. Back on track, Russell. Sorry, my ADD brain is flying. The snow is not helping. The thought of Marshmallow Mateys is keeping it going. All right, so sorry you guys. I'm sorry I'm putting you through this. Back to focus. We decide we want to go into the almond milking market. We want to sell the crap out of people who want to learn how to milk almonds. First thing we want to do is go to BuzzSumo.com and we search almond milk and we find out that there's this blog post that they say has been shared 150,000 times about how to make your own almond milk. People are going nuts about almond milk. I go to Clickbank.com and I find four more products about how to make almond milk, almond cake, almond flour, almond blah blah blah and I'm excited. Then, I go to Click Funnels, I set up a really quick landing page that's called Almond Milking Secrets and then I'll have a little thing underneath it from Meet the Parents. It'll have that little clip where what's-his-name is like, “I can milk anything with nipples,” and then the other dude's like, “Well, can you milk me, Focker?” I'll have that clip underneath the thing so it'll be funny and will make it go more viral. I'll have an opt-in. Then, boom, I'll go to Facebook. I'll target almond milking people, and they see this landing page saying, “Hey, here's my almond milking secret.” There's this funny video from Meet the Parents. They opt in, boom, I redirect them to the exact blog post article that already has a billion views because you know that's what people want. I've got a follow-up sequence now where I start selling them almond milking products, almond making flour, almond making whatever else. Now I'm in the almond business overnight. Now people are buying. Now I can ask them what they want and I can make my own product. Boom, now I've got a huge business. You see how that works? That's for the almond market. Imagine if we did that in a market that was actually making some money. It'd be pretty cool, right? Anyway, I hope that helps because this is a strategy you should use no matter what. If you don't have a business yet, this is how you could start a business very, very quickly. If you do have a business, go out there and find all the viral, crazy articles in your market. Blog posts, Youtube videos and things like that, and just ask for name and email address. Share those with people and boom, you're in. There you go, guys. That's what I've got for today. Hope that helped. I'm jumping in to go and get my cereal and I will talk to you guys all again maybe tomorrow. Who knows? If not, we'll talk to you guys soon. Thanks everybody. Bye!

Something cool I discovered while buying Marshmallow Mateys for my kids… On this episode Russell talks about a new idea he had about opt-in’s and why it’s super easy. He then walks you through the steps you need to take to do it too. Here are 3 cool things you’ll hear in today’s episode: Why Russell only buys sugary cereal for Christmas. Why not every business is cookie cutter and you should use different tools to build your list. And see how you can start your own Almond milk making business So listen below as Russell walks you through his list building strategy. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I’m out in the snow the day before Christmas, and we’re about to lay down some Marketing In Your Car. All right everyone, we’ve been hoping, we’ve been praying, we’ve been wishing, we’ve been dreaming of a white Christmas and sure enough, Christmas is tomorrow and today we woke up and it is snowing. We are having an official white Christmas. We didn’t think we were going to get it, but we got it. I’m excited. I’m actually driving to the store because one of our family traditions for Christmas is, Santa brings every single kid their own box of sugar cereal. We usually eat super healthy all year round, but on Christmas day, we don’t. That’s a tradition we’ve had since I was a little kid. We use to do it when we were little kids, we would each get our own boxes. Santa would ask what we wanted for Christmas, it wasn’t never I want a pony or a bike. It was I want Marshmallow Mateys, or I want Lucky Charms. Eventually it morphed into everyone … At first, the first few years it was all over the place cereals. Some people getting Cocoa Krispies, some getting Fruity Pebbles. It was all over the place. Eventually we all found out that the best is Lucky Charms. That became the staple. Then we found out that if you go to the generic brand, the Malt-O-Meal or whatever, you can get the big old bags of Marshmallow Mateys which are basically like Lucky Charms only it’s in a huge bag at half the price. You’re getting twice the cereal and Santa Claus is basically hooking you up for a lot longer. We’d each, by then… the last 10 years of my childhood, we’d each get our own bag of Marshmallow Mateys. The huge old bags, right? What we would do Christmas morning is, we would get a big old salad bowl out, fill the whole salad bowl full of Marshmallow Mateys. Then we eat out all the oats and not eat the marshmallows. If you ate a marshmallow you lost. We would eat the whole oats, and it’s like an hour long process. By the time it was done, you got a big ole salad bowl full of milk and marshmallows, and it’s pretty dang amazing. Then we eat those down, and that’s Christmas. Christmas isn’t Christmas without cereal. I’m going to get cereal right now for myself and my kids, and yes, Santa Claus is bringing me my very own bag of Marshmallow Mateys and I’m not going to share with the kids. It’s going to be awesome. Anyway, I wanted to share with you, because I was thinking as I was driving here, I don’t know if it’s the same for you guys, but my brain feels like it’s this track where it’s always moving forward and looping things and ideas are coming in and out and every once and a while one’s exciting. I had one while I was driving. I wasn’t planning on doing a podcast, all of a sudden, this was like, “Oh crap, this is a good idea!” I’m going to share with you guys, and I’m going to be doing it. It’s been interesting, a lot of people that I work with are trying to create lead magnets and all this crap. I feel bad because if you remember a year ago or a few years ago, Ryan Dice and Perry Belcher came out with this whole “This is what a funnel is. You have to have a lead magnet, then a tripwire, then a core offer, then return maximizer,” and all this stuff, right? Which is kind of true but kind of annoying because now everyone that I talk to is like, “Oh, this is my lead magnet. This is my core return maximizer offer,” and all these things, and it kind of drives me crazy because I don’t know. I hate when people act like business is 100% cookie cutter because it’s not. Everything’s a little different. People are like, “Russell, how come you don’t have your … Why aren’t you driving traffic to a lead magnet? Why are you driving directly to your free book offer?” I’m like, “Because my free book offer gets three times conversion opt-ins as do any kind of lead magnet.” Someone else, one of our coaching clients last week, they had this really cool funnel that some people built for them and their lead magnet was boring. It was costing them $18 to get an opt-in. Then, their tripwire was not that cool. Their core offer … This is all based on their philosophy … was awesome. I was like, “Dude, get rid of all the other crap and sell the core offer. That’s what people want. Why would you hide your sexiest thing, the thing that’s going to get people to actually respond to your ads? Make that the offer.” He’s like, “But I thought I had to have a lead magnet and a tripwire,” and all this crap. Anyway, so there’s my little rant for the day. You don’t. You’ve got to find the coolest thing that’s going to get people to respond and that’s what you lead with. Always. Sorry, that rant wasn’t supposed to come up either, but there it is. Anyway, with that said, for me, I lead with my sexiest thing, so free book offers, webinars, things like that. After awhile, if you’ve been promoting something for a long, long, long, long time, it starts getting what we call ad fatigue, where the more and more people have seen it, it gets more expensive, so you have to change the ad, change the landing page, all sorts of the things, or what I like to do now is start putting in bridge pages, which are basically a squeeze page. A page to get somebody interested and get their email address and then we can follow-up with them and sell them the main things we want to sell again. The problem is it’s kind of a pain to go and create all these op- in pages and lead magnets and all that jazz, right? I was thinking. This is what spurred this whole podcast. I was driving here and I was thinking about a blog post that Steven did. Steven is our blogger over at ClickFunnels. He was on an episode of Marketing  In Your Car. He’s from Australia, he’s awesome. He wrote this one, it was 14 Tools for Funnel Hacking. Something awesome like that. It was a blog post. I was like, “Crap, dude, that should be an opt-in page.” “Hey, who wants the 14 best tools for funnel hacking? Opt-in here.” They give me their name and email address. I redirect them to the blog. Now I’ve got them on my email list. I can sell them Click Funnels, I can sell them whatever else I want, right? I was thinking how easy is that? I don’t even have to create this content. I can go to Youtube, find the videos in my market that get the most views and that video can be the opt-in. I’m like, “Hey, free video at Robert Kiyosaki, telling you why” blah blah blah blah blah, whatever. People opt-in. I send them the Youtube video of Robert Kiyosaki talking about whatever, and then boom, now I’ve got them on a list and I can start selling them my stuff. Isn’t that easy? One of my big a-ha’s I learned from Neil Patel when he came out here to Boise is that … I used to think he was writing blog posts based on keywords or whatever, and he’s like, “No, I go to BuzzSumo.com, I search my keyword, I find out what articles are already being shared and I write another article almost identical to those.” I was like, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense.” Just go to BuzzSumo.com, find the articles in your market that have been shared 100,000 times and have 18,000,000 reads, and that might be something that people in your market are interested in, so why not just make this landing page offering them that blog post for your email address. Use the same title that they’re already using because it’s proven to work, and boom, now you’ve got these new lead magnets. I hope you guys got that because it’s pretty powerful. I’m going to be busting out a crap-ton of landing pages here that aren’t going to take hardly any time at all, and all they’ll do is opt you in, redirect you to that landing page and then you’ll be added to my list and I’m going to sell you cool stuff that you need and want. This works in other markets, too. Let’s just say you’re a brand new beginner. You’ve got nothing, right? Let’s say you’re like, “Hey, I want to be in the …” What’s a cool market? You want to be in the almond milk making business and I say that because this morning I made almond milk, which is awesome. I’ve never made almond milk before but I did it and it was one of the coolest things ever. I don’t think there’s really a market for that, but let’s just pretend like there was because there should be because it’s amazing. It tasted way better than regular almond milk and it’s not going to kill you because there’s some ingredient in regular almond milk you buy at the store that will kill you all. Just FYI, learn how to make your own. It’s really fun. You have to buy a $6 sprouted seed bag or nut bag or something. That sounds horrible. Anyway, that’s the only thing you need is that and almonds. Anyway, it’s pretty awesome. For a $6 investment, you can make your own almond milk. All right. Back on track, Russell. Sorry, my ADD brain is flying. The snow is not helping. The thought of Marshmallow Mateys is keeping it going. All right, so sorry you guys. I’m sorry I’m putting you through this. Back to focus. We decide we want to go into the almond milking market. We want to sell the crap out of people who want to learn how to milk almonds. First thing we want to do is go to BuzzSumo.com and we search almond milk and we find out that there’s this blog post that they say has been shared 150,000 times about how to make your own almond milk. People are going nuts about almond milk. I go to Clickbank.com and I find four more products about how to make almond milk, almond cake, almond flour, almond blah blah blah and I’m excited. Then, I go to Click Funnels, I set up a really quick landing page that’s called Almond Milking Secrets and then I’ll have a little thing underneath it from Meet the Parents. It’ll have that little clip where what’s-his-name is like, “I can milk anything with nipples,” and then the other dude’s like, “Well, can you milk me, Focker?” I’ll have that clip underneath the thing so it’ll be funny and will make it go more viral. I’ll have an opt-in. Then, boom, I’ll go to Facebook. I’ll target almond milking people, and they see this landing page saying, “Hey, here’s my almond milking secret.” There’s this funny video from Meet the Parents. They opt in, boom, I redirect them to the exact blog post article that already has a billion views because you know that’s what people want. I’ve got a follow-up sequence now where I start selling them almond milking products, almond making flour, almond making whatever else. Now I’m in the almond business overnight. Now people are buying. Now I can ask them what they want and I can make my own product. Boom, now I’ve got a huge business. You see how that works? That’s for the almond market. Imagine if we did that in a market that was actually making some money. It’d be pretty cool, right? Anyway, I hope that helps because this is a strategy you should use no matter what. If you don’t have a business yet, this is how you could start a business very, very quickly. If you do have a business, go out there and find all the viral, crazy articles in your market. Blog posts, Youtube videos and things like that, and just ask for name and email address. Share those with people and boom, you’re in. There you go, guys. That’s what I’ve got for today. Hope that helped. I’m jumping in to go and get my cereal and I will talk to you guys all again maybe tomorrow. Who knows? If not, we’ll talk to you guys soon. Thanks everybody. Bye!

“EntreProgrammers Path of Destruction”     3:05 All right we’re live!   John joins us from Amsterdam.    The EntreProgrammers talk about their path of destruction, wherever they go.    14:15 The EntreProgrammers talk about the signups of the retreat. No takers, yet?   16:00 Some talk about Drip’s prepayment for the entire year. Here is some interesting talk about the subscription strategy.   22:00 The EntreProgrammers talk about the relevance of A&B testing in their industry, and A&B testing within Drip.    28:45 Josh talks about his client who is running advertisement from Facebook to a landing page. Josh think this is something worth testing.      33:00 The EntreProgrammers talk about the marketing stats and A&B testing with Drip. Josh talks about the different feature he likes to use. John mentions some of his testing strategy.    38:45 Josh talks about the difference A&B testing does with different or variant copy.    43:30 Josh talks about Ryan Dice’s strategy for marketing and funnel building. Josh talks about keeping marketing strategies simple.    48:00 Josh talks about building an audience with webinars.   52:00 John talks about a ripening period of an audience before they buy. John talk about the world’s best car salesman story.      54:50 John suggests that it may a year before Derick get more traffic.     57:25 Josh says to start simple. Josh explains his frustrations with some of his client’s marketing strategy.    1:04:00 John talk about what he would do in starting up an online  teaching business. John would come up with a 3 year plan, and eat ramen noodles, live in Thailand.  Build a couple of products to sell. Josh cautions against freeloaders who subscribe to free content.  Josh think that it may be difficult to build a huge number of dedicated audience.   1:14:00 John thinks that having a 3 year program and building an audience of 1000 true fans, will equal success.    1:15:00 Derick said he needs 1000 true fans. Derick has done most of this for 3 years and building an audience, and done tons of work. Derick thinks that John is dead wrong with the 3 year plan idea.  Derick finds it difficult to follow John’s 3 years plan and seriously cut expenses. He thinks it may be unrealistic for the majority of people out there.      1:32:00 John thinks that Youtube content could beneficial for business as apart of your regular business.  Derick ask if it was a mistake to have Watch Me Code as a separate website. Derick talks about his blogging days when he was working at Los Techies.     1:41:35 Josh think there may be a problem with those who are condition to expect free content. Selling to them may cause a revolt.   1:52:00 John thinks that you can be successful if your consistent producing content for 3 years. Derick says you have to be actively fighting  on the road on success, because people will active try to put you down.    1:56:30 John makes a good point that these things are achievable if you are willing to make a serious commitment. The EntreProgrammers talk about their experience in the early days with live efficiently.    2:00:00  Derick says he only want to talk about the reality that he lives under and not the theoretical circumstances.    2:08:00 Johns mentions that sometimes be dealt the bad hand in life maybe the best thing. Because it will be your driving factor to success. Meanwhile, Josh suggests somethings that Derick needs to do to up the audience numbers, and possible guess blogging.    2:15:59 John suggests that Derick should be the niche - RabbitMQ guy. Derick is going to appear on .NetRocks!   2:24:45 EntreProgrammers Podcast has been running for nearly 2 years.  Derick is trying to find something to help him grow. Derick feels burnt out.    2:32:00 Derick has issues with the Watch Me Code account for the subscribers. John think that Derick needs to build more content marketing.     2:34:10 Josh suggest that Derick go to ReddIt, Sumo, and find out what people are talking about.     2:37:02 Derick wants to fill a specific gap, with RabbitMQ and JS. Derick says he would fill the messaging and  architecture. Derick thinks he could get traffic for the area.     2:45:35 Josh suggest Derick do a pilot.    2:50:00 Josh think that different markets respond to differently to personalities. Derrick shares his plan for RabbitMQ. Derick says he does not know how acquire information and research what people are talking about. Josh again suggest to go to Hacker New and Reddit.    3:04 - The team gives advice to Derick   Thoughts for the Week   John -  The only thing that is guaranteed is failure   Derick  - Find your focus.  Remember success is built upon a massive amount of failure   Josh - Start simple and only add complexity when you see simplicity   Resources mentioned    Optimizely https://www.optimizely.com/   Reddit  http://www.reddit.com   Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com   Buzz Sumo http://buzzsumo.com

EntreProgrammers Episode 70 RabbitMQ Twinky    3:04 We’re Live! John is still on his expedition in Berlin…   5:45 Derick shares his sales report with is new launch of the RabbitMQ bundle. Josh asks about the break-down of the sales.   Derick has given away 8-10 full version packages 20 sales of the full package plus 8 giveaways 5  sales of the mid-level bundles 9  sales of the e-book Interestingly,  two customers were generous enough to full price, without using the discount code. Derick reports he is a couple hundred dollar short of his goal, but still impressed with the sales report.  Derick shares information about his follow-up strategy in the next two week, and  in another 14 days after.   15:24 Josh suggest a clever strategy with Derick, setting up a campaign that takes key content from the ebook and send an emails of small snippets of key information over several days. Then send a discount code for an upgrade. Derick mentions he may do a discount later on.    19:30 Josh mentions Click Funnels as an amazing way to track activity on your funnels. John mentions seeing DPD trucks from his apartment window.     20:24 Overall, Derick is pleased with his sales results and is confident in the sale post launch. John talks about those who have a subscription to Watch Me Code, but in interested in the RabbitMQ bundle. John thinks this will upset the customers or make them feel ripped off that they did not get a discount offer.     27:00 John suggests in the future that Derick create a Platinum Watch Me Code subscription that gives access to anything Derick produces that is also apart of a package or bundle. After this new information, Derick checks the subscription packages to see his Watch Me Code subscribers.     34:29 Derick talks about helping his SignalLeaf customers migrate to Libsyn. He is able to be an affiliate to Libsyn for the migration of his customers. Derick may create a screencast for the migration to Libsyn, not a promise, but may happen.    39:23 John talks about creating a type of tracking system for podcast. This system will track the  exacted sections of listens in the audio episode, add images to appear,  adding links to appear. Of course this embedded piece of audio would need a special type of player to provide the enhanced experience. Josh says this sound like QR codes for podcasts.    43:06 John mentions he use Overcast to listen to podcasts instead of using iTunes podcast app. Overcast is an iPhone app that enhances the listening experience of podcasts, by removing dead space, normalizing, and playback at different speeds.    52:15  Chuck mentions that he has several things happening to taking up his time, and he is not able to record videos and make content. Ruby Remote Conf. event is happening next week. Chuck has sales coming in, but not as much as he was expecting. Chuck has 30 - 40 people signed up for Ruby Remote Conf. Josh talked about the timing of the conference may have some things to do with the numbers of sign-ups.    1:04:05 Chuck is thinking about quitting freelancing. With the numbers is making, Chuck could possibly quit. Derick gives advice to freelance for the time he needs extra funds, or until things smooth over. John talks about only freelance for a high rate rather than taking on several jobs that may take up time at low rates.  Josh talks about ways to bounce back, with the story of Ryan Dice and internet marketing. John thinks that Chuck is in no danger with the numbers he is producing. John thinks he could move some things around to make ends meet.    1:21:31 John talks about his meet-up he had in Berlin. 7 people showed up, locals and distant travelers to meet up with John. John is going to do meet-up is all the cities he visited.  John talks about redoing some server stuff with Digital Ocean.    1:31:30  Josh has been tracking his work time during the week. Josh is trying to become the teaches pet, while taking Carlton’s course.   Writing = 20 hours John Carlton Copywriting Course - 2 hours     Josh has the talent of creating the connections with those he want to learn quality traits. Josh is also apart of a writing group where he is getting recommended for work.  Josh talks about meeting with Perry Marshall and thanked him for the 80-20 information he learn. Also, Perry is publishing a letter Josh wrote and working on a project with Perry.    1:43:15 Josh ask how the Entreprogrammers handle their vacation time.   1:53:00 John says that he never really full leaves work behind. He does have to deal with email, otherwise things will pile up.    1:56:30 The Entreprogrammers help Josh figure out his retainer model. Josh is thinking about moving from a project to project model.    Thoughts for the week   Derick - Temper your highs with knowledge that the lows are coming, and brace yourself against the lows that the highs are coming again.   Josh - To find your strengths, look at the thing that got you in trouble as a kid John - Don’t go off the rails  Chuck - Stick with call you believe. If you hold some convictions, stick with them.   People and things mentioned in this episode   ClickFunnels  https://www.clickfunnel.com/price-table   Overcast https://overcast.fm   John Carlton http://www.john-carlton.com Perry Marshall   https://www.perrymarshall.com/80-20/