No one wants to lose a job because they quoted a higher price to a prospective client than their competitor did. But in trying to avoid that, we often risk undercharging, just to make the sale.

There’s nothing wrong with charging more, but the key is in how you go about selling your proposal and proving that you’re worth the cost. By shifting the conversation from what the client wants to what they’re looking to achieve, then you can start pricing on the value that you’ll provide to them.

Brennan Dunn has helped over 14,000 students and freelancers learn how to increase their rates to charge what they’re worth, earn more money and work with better clients.

Rich: Brennan Dunn is the founder of Double Your Freelancing and helps teach freelancers and consultants how to earn more money and work with better clients. His best selling course, Double Your Freelancing Rate, has helped over 5,000 students increase their freelance rate. His free pricing course, Charge What You’re Worth, has helped over 9,000 freelancers and consultants charge what they’re worth.

Brennan, welcome to the show.

Brennan: Hey, thank you, Rich.

Rich: Alright, so Brennan, you seem like just the man to talk about pricing. How did you find yourself giving expert advice to other freelancers and consultants?

Brennan: It was really accidental. So I had bootstrapped an agency and got it to 11 employees, we’re doing a few million a year in revenue, and before that I was a freelancer so I didn’t really know how to price. I was just kind of reverse engineering what I made as an employee and kind of chose an hourly rate and went from there.

But as I grew this business and kind of surrounded myself with other agency owners and started to really read about the theories around pricing, I realized the issue I had was that I was selling myself and my team as a commodities and we were a web development company. So I was selling programming and coding and everything else, and I didn’t really know how to respond to people questioning paying our $100/hour compared to someone else’s $10/hour.

So I really wanted to better understand the psychology around pricing. So when I started out it was freelancing at $50/hour, which I thought was great. I did the math and multiplied that by 2,000 and it told me I’d have a six figure revenue. Completely ignoring all the overhead that comes with running a business.

But as I grew this agency, I got it to the point that I was billing out my team at $10k a week, per person. Which is a pretty big jump from $50/hr individually. And nowadays when I individually consult – which I don’t do that often – it’s upwards of $20k a week. What I like to think is I’m giving my clients a better product and they’re paying a premium for that.

So what I’ve learned and has become my expertise is understanding how to quantify the value that you deliver to your clients. And how I got to engage in discussions like this was, I started a software product called PlanScope and it’s a project management tool. And for support you usually expect people to call in with bug reports or whatever else, but people started to write in with questions about advice on how they could charge more or get more clients.

And I realized firsthand that a lot of people were canceling their subscription because they ran out of clients. So that’s how I got in the training business, I guess. But yeah, it’s been a wild ride ever since I started doing that.

Rich: Alright. I think we’re definitely going to have to dig a little deeper there, because I feel like we went from billing $50 an hour to billing out for $10,000 a week. So it’s interesting, you did web design – that’s what I do during my day job – I know that most small businesses would love to charge more. But they’re afraid that they’re going to lose business is they do. I know that I’m not competing just with the guys down the street , but all over the world, including people charging pennies on the dollar. So what do you say to people that have objections like these?

Brennan: The entire sales process really needs to change. I can give a lot of really good ideas for the listeners, especially on how to kind of shift the way that you sell to facilitate that. But the problem is, when you’re selling yourself as a commodity – when you’re saying, “I build websites” or “I can set up marketing campaigns” – you’re basically establishing yourself as a commodity.

So if your title is “freelance web designer”, why should someone pay you what you’re asking for when there are people all over the world who can subsist on a lot less than we need to subsist in the Western world on, and how do you compete. If they’re web designers and you’re a web designer, why should they buy from you? It’s the same thing if I wanted to refuel my car, why would I go to the gas station that’s 10x as expensive as the one across the street that’s selling it for only $2.00 a gallon.

The product needs to change. And what that means is what you do when it comes to everything from qualifying a new lead all the way to issuing a proposal. What needs to change is basically what you’re proposing to do. What most of us do is we’ll say, “I’ll do this, this and this for you,and for all of that I will charge you either this much money or this much an hour.” And that’s typically what most of us do.

What I do differently though is I really dig into why they need that website. So what actually is making them willing to spend money on a website? Why are they firing whatever they have now and looking to hire a new website? When you look at it like that and when you start discussing with prospective clients about why it is they’re looking to do this, you start to learn about their business and their business needs and kind of where the website they have currently fits into their overall sales funnel? And what the deficiencies they believe are happening as a result of that site?

When you start to shift the conversation away from what it is you’re doing and more towards what it is they’re looking to achieve, that’s when you can start pricing really on the value that you provide to your clients.

Rich: Alright, I love the idea of that, and I’d like to think that I do that for my clients. And I ask them questions about what success is going to look like and why do they need to change it. My concern is, we get to that point where I have convinced them of the reasons they need to make a change, but at the end of the day I’m still selling them a website or social media consulting or whatever it may be.

How do we keep them from taking a look at what we’re providing – even if they get that we understand their business model better than anyone else – and not just compare apples to apples?

Brennan: Shop around with it, yeah. I do things differently, and one of the things I try to do is I don’t try to sell a website consultant project. What I try to sell is what I call a “roadmapping session”, which can also go by discovery, or whatever you want to call it. It’s really just a preliminary product that is a low financial risk product that I can offer, where I can immediately demonstrate that I’m capable of giving them value.

If it makes more sense, I can walk through an example.

Rich: I would love that, because we actually do discoveries here sometimes. And we also do something called a “digital marketing action plan”. And I guess on some level those are low risk, but I’d love to hear from you some specifics.

Brennan: So I’ve actually got a student who had a lead come to him that they had ran a rehabilitation center that drug addicts and such would go there. So they came to him wanting a website. What most of his competitors do – and what he would have done – is started talking immediately about the website. And yeah, they might talk about the business aspects, but for the most part they’re focused on what it is we need to do and what it is that needs to get built.

And what he did differently is he really dug into their business model. So the website generates leads and them the leads go to your sales team, so he really tried to figure out how many leads they get currently and what percentage of them close. So he started with that, with “what is the customer value?” If you have a patient that comes in and they’re on a bed, what is the value of that patient? And he found out from them it was about $30,000. So he then went on to the next thing.

He asked how many people they typically needed to talk to before they got a patient, and they talked to about 10 people. So they have a 1 in 10 conversion rate, so simple math, a lead is valued at $3,000. So from there he worked from the things they can’t control. They can’t control the price, they can’t control how effective their sales team is. But one thing you can control and have influence on is how many qualified leads they actually get.

So what he ended up selling them was more leads. He sold them really a website that the only job and purpose of that website was to generate more leads. Regardless of features or framework or anything like that, if what was being proposed to do didn’t get them closer to that goal, they wouldn’t do it. So ultimately the end result was a better product. They got a better website because the website was focused on the business objective that the client had, which was getting more people who need rehabilitation to put their name and number in a contact form. Apparently their existing website had the contact form kind of buried somewhere in the footer of their site and they just weren’t getting a lot of leads.

So when he went to go to propose to them, he used a tactic that I call, “price anchoring”. The idea is that before you name your price, you anchor that against what I call the “upside” of the project. So if you can generate for them a minimum of one, new lead a month. Which isn’t a lot, but one, new lead a month they’re currently not getting, basic math would say that’s a $36,000 payoff in the first year alone. That’s $3,000 a week x 12. And that’s how he sold it.

He wasn’t saying, “I’m going to build your website and here’s what it’s going to have, here’s what it’s going to do, here’s what it will cost, here’s how long it will take. Instead he was starting with, “Here’s the problem you have now, you have a rehabilitation center that is very dependant on having a website that generates qualified leads. And the problem now is that the website you have now is a website that is not hired to generate leads, it’s hired to be a website.”

So he started with what is the problem that the business has. The problem is they don’t have enough leads. The solution is to get more leads. He offers what he will do, which is basically his prescription for getting new leads for the. Basically by the time he was able to present his cost – and I think he charged something like $15,000 – that $15,000 anchored by $36,000+ in the first year, that’s ultimately what made it so he came in as a lower risk.

So a lot of it has to do with risk. A lot of it has to do with if I think you’re technically capable but I don’t think you’re a sure bet for solving the problem that I actually have. I want to hedge my bets, and the way to do that is I want to expose myself the least amount financially. So by coming in and selling a product that is inline with their business objectives, he’s lower risk. Which ultimately means he can charge more. And that’s exactly what I do, that’s what I’ve been doing and that’s how I’m able to get people to pay me upwards of $20,000 a week just to write code and write email copy for them because I’m not selling code and email copy. I’m not pricing myself at the myself rate for services, I’m pricing myself against what I realistically believe that I can achieve based off of where they are and where they want to get to.

Rich: Alright, and you’re doing that in part with that anchoring you talked about where we try and determine how much each lead is worth and then we feel we can move the needle – in this case by 1 more lead a month – that’s worth $36,000, so suddenly they’re paying for this website in less than 6 months.

Brennan: That’s right. And I’m pretty clear about the fact that I can’t come up with a realistic path toward delivering a ROI, if I can’t become an investment, then I’m going to pass on the project. Or, I’m going to figure out how to make myself an investment first. But if I can’t, why would I want you to spend money on me and not get a payoff?

Rich: I feel the exact same way. I don’t want somebody spending money on me just because they like me. I want them to spend money on me because I’m going to make them many times that back.

Brennan: Exactly.

Rich: This sounds great in theory. And I like to think that I’m maybe not an A student but a B student at this, but here’s something that I know a lot of our listeners are going to run into. You have this whole conversation and explain to them how you’re going to make all this money for them, and then maybe you get to the point where you start talking numbers and in your mind you’re like, “This is a $15,000 value”, and they’re like, “I’ve got $1,000 to spend.” Is there a way of finding out up front – that doesn’t derail the sales process – what somebody can afford to pay?

Brennan: Absolutely. That’s part of qualification. I’ve had people call in who wanted a YouTube clone, basically the ability to upload videos. And it seemed to us like a very big, valuable project, it wouldn’t be cheap to build a YouTube clone. But ultimately 3-4 hours into it, we discovered that their budget was something like $500. And we were like, “Yeah, we just wasted each other’s time.”

So one of the things I started doing is figuring this out when qualifying. Clients don’t want to tell you their budget because they believe that if they say, “Hey Rich, I’ve got a $100,000 budget”, that you’re going to come back with a $99,000 quote. And you don’t want to give up your rate because if you say that early on, it’s kind of like when you look for cars and you call all the dealerships, you don’t want people to do that.

So what I do and what’s worked really well is I say something like, “Is your budget at least x?” And what that allows me to do is, is this a big enough project that I’m willing to actually go through that rabbit hole of a sales process. Because if it’s over $15,000 for instance, then it’s a worthwhile project for me. But if it’s not that, then it isn’t worth my time to even pursue this project. And the benefit of that is, I’m not really exposing hourly rates, weekly rates, anything like that, and they’re not giving me their budget. I’m just asking them if it’s over x, and if it is, let’s keep moving down this funnel.

Rich: Alright, that makes sense. And how early on into the process do you do that?

Brennan: Immediately. So when I get a new lead, I ask 5 questions. The first thing I ask is what is the business objective of the project. So I want to understand if they wrote in wanting a new website designed I’ll ask them to tell me about why they’re replacing the website you have now if you they one. And if not, what business problem are they hoping this new website will solve?

And the second question will be, “Is your budget at least x?” And I also ask, “Do you have that liquid?” Meaning, if they need to go and raise money, I don’t want to go through the whole sales process hoping that they can later on get investors to pony up. I also want to typically know are they the sole decision maker on this project? Are they the ones who ultimately will sign the checks and agree to basically be my client? Because I don’t want to work with committees. I don’t want to deal with 5 different voices all vying for my attention. I don’t know if you’ve been on projects like that but they’re not fun.

Rich: Oh, maybe one or two in the last 18 years. I love trying to design a logo by a committee. That’s awesome.

Brennan: Yeah, exactly. So the budget, the business problem, then when are they looking to get started. Is this something that they’re looking to do yesterday, are they looking to get started 6 months from now or are they just shopping around.

And finally the last question, “Have you ever hired somebody like me before, have you done something like this in the past?” And that will help me understand how much I need to educate them and set the expectations early on in that sales process.

So I’m not only getting information that’s valuable to me – because one of the things I do after this is I send them a document and a link to my calendar saying lets book a 30-minute free consultation – immediately I turn the tables where it’s often the client interviewing us and I try to make it that I have a prescribed way of doing work. I have a prescribed way of running my business. And I instead, in a weird way, am the one interviewing them. I’m not doing the open ended things where the client can often get into the natural rhythm of doing what they do best, which is interviewing people about roles or whatever.

I take a lot of control over the sales process, I start that with these qualifying questions, so I have a very clear way of kind of moving people through the sales funnel.

Rich: I think that’s really cool Just to kind of recap this, we’re looking for the business objective, we’re looking for a budget, asking if you’re willing to spend x or more.

Brennan: I’m not asking for what’s your budget, I’m saying do you have a budget above x. Because again, I know they don’t want to give me their budget early on.

Rich: Right. Ok. Are you the sole decision maker, when is your start date and is this your first rodeo? That’s basically what it comes down to. And if they pass our gauntlet of fire, then we send them a link and ask them to schedule something, and we send them a document and we kind of schedule something. And we basically take control of the sales process.

Brennan:   That’s right. And a lot of competitors I’ve noticed are really bad at replying. We’ve gotten new work just because we’re fast at replying to new leads. Just getting a stock, templated response over to people. For all they care, It could be an autoresponder that you send out. Just by doing this, it immediately establishes that we’re professionals – I have a very professional way of doing business – and I’ve done this before. I have these questions ready to go because I’ve done this. This is what I’ve do.

The big risk for a lot of people hiring freelancers especially is, is this person going to flake out? Are they reliable? And the more you can prove to them through the way that you take control over the sales process that you are reliable, the more likely they are to hire you and to pay you a premium.

Rich: One of the things I learned when I was taking ballroom dance back in the day – that’s a whole other story – is that whether I make a mistake or my dancing partner makes a mistake, it’s my fault. And that’s not a sexist thing, it’s that the man leads. And to be a good dancer the man has to give good frame. And I feel that during the sales process – and what you’re explaining here – is you’re giving good frame. So as we’re leading somebody through the process, they feel comfort, they realize that you’re an expert in this, and that alone can help win you the business,

Brennan: To be honest, that’s why people like buying products or services. Because products have a defined way of appearing and working and functioning and everything else. When you’re just buying somebody’s time, that’s risky. There’s no guarantee that if you hire a web designer for 20 hours that you’ll get anything of value.

So the more you can productize how you sell and what you’re selling, the lower risk you are and the more likely that person is to continue moving down that funnel.

Rich: So Brennan, just a clarifying point; so when somebody reaches out to you and you ask them these 5 questions, is it via email or is it on the phone, or does it make a difference how they first reached out to you?

Brennan: Most of my referrals and leads that come my way come via email. But we have gotten them over the phone, like when I got my agency we got calls all the time. Most of them were pretty low quality. If they’re calling in as a result of reading about us in the local paper, that’s probably not a good sign.

But even if it’s over the phone, we would ask the same thing. When I was shopping around for a lawyer I remember one of them basically set up a profile for me in their CRM during that first call. They actually billed me for that time. Looking back it’s impressive that they did, but just for that initial call out of the blue to see if it’s a good fit between me and them, they had my address and they sent me an invoice.

Not that I’m recommending all of you do that, but just having a structured way of doing things is always better than being loose about how you sell.

Rich: That makes a lot of sense. Now I have a question, what’s your opinion of RFP’s? Do you respond to them?

Brennan: I do not do RFP’s and I do not do job boards. All the leads I work with are either direct referrals from people that have either gotten work for me in the past, or people that I consider part of my ecosystem, and that’s a whole other loaded topic. But the way that I booked work with my agency was we did a lot of educational marketing. We did seminars – not a lot of webinars back then, we do them nowadays – and the purpose was, when you think a lot of how sales works, a lot is persuasion and selling somebody on yourself, then the tail end of the sales process is the details and the negotiation of what we’re going to do and how much it will cost.

So one of the things we did is we did is we – at scale – accomplished that early part of the sales process. We showed people that we were experts at what we did. We taught seminars on getting started with internet advertising, or why you should build something custom versus buying it off the shelf. We did a lot of this and we built up our audience and we had thousands of people locally in our audience who would refer more work than we could handle, so we got a lot of referrals in that way.

There’s also things that I’m doing nowadays for my new company – my new agency – where I have lead magnets out there. Kind of like whitepapers or email forces that move people through the funnel, and ultimately the goal is to book a short consultation call. So all the clients I work with for the most part, I’m not competing. It’s not like I’m going out there and competing over a project that somebody has listed with a bunch of other people.

Most of the clients who come to me do not always realize that they have a problem at first. My goal initially is to help people see the opportunity for hiring somebody like me. That’s what I do early on and at scale through things like seminars and webinars and typical content. And then when they’re at the point where they have a project, that’s when I kick off everything I just covered. So I don’t do RFP’s, I don’t do any of that kind of stuff.

Rich: Alright. So I know we’re running out of time, but I do want to kind of follow up. So at this point we’ve qualified somebody, now we’ve got this 30-minute agenda. At some point if we like them and they like us, there’s got to be a proposal. Do you have any tips for writing a killer proposal that closes?

Brennan: Yup. My template for my proposal is this, I start with a “why you’re here”, so that’s where I talk about the problem. A great proposal reads a lot – to be honest – like a sales letter. Direct marketers perfected this stuff back decades ago. The idea is to keep people moving and to keep them reading the proposal and to really immerse themselves in what you’re saying.

So I cover “what is the problem”, and I flip that problem on its head to find a solution. So for example if the problem is you’re out in the rain and you’re cold, the solution is not an umbrella, the solution is to stop being cold and wet. So I paint a picture of what tomorrow could look like for their business after that. And I do a lot of this because my sales discussion early on is all focused on them and their business.

And then what I do next is I basically present my offer, which is “how do I plan on bridging where they are now with where they want to be?” And then I talk about ultimately giving some social proofs. It’s the typical “problem, solution, offer, overcoming objection and social proof.” So, what objections might they have, and you should be able to – from talking to the client – you should have an idea of what sort of objections might they be thinking as you present your offer? You want to cover those objections immediately, if possible.

And then one of the things I also do – which I haven’t really talked about yet – is I provide packages. So don’t just give one price. I’ve already anchored the upside early on in the proposal, and the solution is based on hard numbers that they’ve already given me, and I’m really just throwing it back in their face. And then finally at the end I present different pathways that can accomplish my offer.

So usually I try to think – going back to the rehabilitation center – the thing he came to us for was a redesigned website, which ultimately became offer A, a website whose only purpose is to generate more leads for you and your business. However the only issue with that is you’re contingent upon the amount of traffic that you’re getting. So it’s not going to increase your traffic, it’s not going to do any of that. It’s just going to optimize the traffic you already have.

And the second option is a more expensive option, but it’s option A plus paid acquisition, content marketing, all the things that increase that amount of traffic that ultimately goes through the funnel of that website. The visitor to lead funnel. So ideally you want to offer different options because you want people to not say, “Do I hire Rich, yes or no?” You want people to say, “Do I pay Rich this much or this much.” Have 2-3 different options so that they compete against you versus just assuming that it’s a take it or leave it sort of thing.

So having options is probably one of the best things that you can do, if you’re not doing that already. And then since I kind of have an idea of if I think option A would do one lead a month, what kind of opportunities stand to be made if I can double the amount of qualified traffic than they’re getting now, and what would that mean for their business. So some anchoring happens there.

And that’s it. So I let them basically understand that I know the problem that they have, I paint a picture of where they want to be – which is where they told me they want to be – I present how I think we could get there, I overcome their objections, I offer social proof and present a micro case study of something that I’ve done similar and the result of that. And then I present my packages, my different ways of accomplishing that offer.

Rich: Brennan, that’s awesome, awesome stuff. I’ve been taking notes furiously, I’m sure a lot of our listeners have as well. I want to give them a reason to go check you out online and check out some of the stuff that you have, where should we send them?

Brennan: The best place is doubleyourfreelancing.com. Actually if you go to the first link under the “Most Popular”, there’s a 9 lesson email course about basically what we just talked about in depth. And it covers figuring out the financial upside, writing proposals, and it’s totally free. So that’s probably the best way to kind of learn about this framework more in depth.

Rich: Alright, that’s awesome. We’ll have those links, as always, in the show notes. Brennan, thank you very much for coming on and sharing your expertise in this area.

Brennan: Thank you, Rich.

Show Notes:

• If you’re a freelancer or consultant and you liked what Brennan had to say, check out his website for more information on how you, too, can earn more money and work with better clients.
• Brennan’s best selling course has already helped over 5,000 students increase their freelance rate, check it out for yourself!
• Learn how to charge what you’re worth with Brennan’s free pricing course.
• If you’re looking to gain control and run a better business, Brennan’s project management software may be just what you’ve been looking for.
• When not hosting this podcast, Rich Brooks is the fearless leader of flyte new media, a web design and marketing company in Portland, Maine. You can follow him on Twitter and see for yourself if he’s really as funny as he thinks he is.
• Have you gotten your tickets yet for the Agents Of Change Digital Marketing Conference? What are you waiting for? There’s still time to get your earlybird tickets now!

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Perhaps you know and appreciate the value of a good blog these days, but just aren’t a great wordsmith. Maybe you have a great personality but just aren’t having any luck getting that to show through on paper. Why not consider making videos instead?

But there’s a lot more involved than just creating a great video. You need to figure out how to create momentum for your video within the first 24-48 hours to give yourself a real advantage over your competitors. Finding creative and successful ways to shine a light on your content and get it out there is the key to video success. Think titles, descriptions, tags, and cross promotion, among other things.

Steve Dotto has parlayed his 15+ years of nationally syndicated TV show experience into a wildly popular YouTube channel where he continues to educate and entertain, while also focusing on helping others grow and monetize their own YouTube channels.

Rich: Steve Dotto is Canada’s most respected geek. For over 15 years as host and executive producer of Dotto Tech, a nationally syndicated TV show. Steve has entertained and educated millions of Canadians on all aspects of technology.

YouTube is Steve’s new network of choice, where he serves 2 communities, a traditional “how to” and productivity stream – which follows his TV tradition – and a new focus on learning the keys to growing and ultimately monetizing a YouTube channel.

Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve: It’s a real big honor for me to be here.

Rich: Awesome, I appreciate you taking the time. I’m kind of curious, you were doing the broadcast thing, how did you move from broadcast to YouTube?

Steve: Well, my TV show was a “how to” computer show. Back in the day, we showed you how to flash your modem to upgrade from 26.6 to 50 kB per second. So that sort of content broadcast on national television is questionable value this day and age. So about 4 years ago our show reached its “best before” date, and we stopped doing the show. And to be fair, the whole broadcast space was being changed and completely disrupted by YouTube and the online community.

Now I didn’t immediately decide that I was going to go into YouTube. I kind of wandered in the wilderness a little bit trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had been doing broadcasts for 25 years, I was ready for a change. YouTube eventually drew me to it.

The biggest thing about YouTube for anybody coming from a traditional medium background or traditional broadcast background is the direct connection to your audience, which you never had. Content creators in television have access to the network or their sponsors, they don’t have access their audience, So suddenly having access to your audience and having your audience become your real customer, that was an epiphany.

So that started about two years ago for me. And once my eyes were open to that potential I got excited, because I could have relationships with new people, and I could basically try and recreate the success we had on network TV and try it on YouTube. The other big surprise is I thought I’d be just significant in Canada where my show had aired, but in fact now the Canadian marketplace is only about 7.5% of my overall audience. You grow internationally, which has been another eye opening experience for me.

Rich: That’s great. And I can barely even tell that you have a Canadian accent anymore, so there’s that.

Steve: It’ll come, it’ll come.

Rich: I am also a big fan of YouTube and online video marketing, but there seems to be this barrier of entry for many small business owners. So I’m sure you’ve heard this before, people don’t have the time or know how or they don’t have the camera to do online video marketing, what do you tell them?

Steve: You know what I think it is? I think it’s none of those things. I think if we really boil down and sit down and lay them down on a couch and ask them what they fear is, the size of the marketplace and making YouTube measurable. Because YouTube is so vast and the numbers for success seem to be so huge, that the average small business person doesn’t see how they fit in that equation. They don’t see how their product is going to fit with millions of views, so consequently they disengage. They just feel it’s too vast and they’re going to get lost in all of that noise.

What they really need to understand – and the most important thing to respect with YouTube – is that every person viewing your YouTube video, it’s an intensely personal experience for them to be viewing that video. So it’s actually a much more intimate exchange than you think. Just because the marketplace is vast doesn’t mean that the connection is not intimate. So for most of them, the will isn’t there to overcome any of those small, technical hurdles in this day and age because they don’t necessarily understand the engagement value that YouTube will bring to the table. I think if we can get past that, then all of the technical things can fall into place pretty quickly.

Rich: Alright, that makes sense. So when you or when anybody is sitting down to decide what they’re going to make a video about, what are some of the basics for creating valuable content and where do you come up with your ideas?

Steve: Well for me it’s a little unfair because I’ve now built a community where people are telling me what they’re interested in. So paying attention to what my customers or viewers are saying is kind of #1 for me. Seeing how different videos perform and then kind of following that theme.

I think for the average small business person, as they’re looking at establishing some sort of a business strategy, the thing that they are probably going to really consider is what’s the stories that they tell the most. What are the things that they say over and over again to their customers or to their clients or to their staff or to whoever it is that’s their constituency that they’re thinking about delivering this content to.

And once you come up with what those stories are, figuring out how that narrative is going to fit in video will give you the path that you want to carry through. The thing is, you can’t be too concerned about the success of any one video or not. Videos – for me – are just like blog posts now. You’ll write a blog post, I bet, that you realize is not going to reach a large audience, but it’s something that is important for you to share and important for you to document and to have that there to maybe refer back to in the future. And videos can perform the exact same function.

They are a richer, more vibrant form of a blog post. A lot of us aren’t great writers, a lot of us find writing to be an arduous task, and when we start layering in the extra communication models that we have in video – especially if you use desktop video with a simple webcam to record your face – being able to add your voice and inflection. The raise of an eyebrow, the tilt of the head, the smirk or the frown. All of those things just constantly add context to our content as we’re delivering it, which makes it that much more rich, more valuable and that much easier for our audience to consume.

We’ve become a video consumption society. We communicate far better in video than we recognize, and it’s almost become second nature. Coming from the TV industry, there’s a lot of hubris in the TV industry that nobody else can produce. The kids are producing great video on YouTube and you and I and our colleagues are producing wonderful video, if they’re paying attention to their content and are good communicators.

So the whole idea is just basically getting inertia on your side, put them out and then start to build it. It’s almost like the field of dreams, build it and they’ll come. But the first stage is to start building and start recording and to get the first bits of data up online and ready to publish.

Rich: Steve, I think that’s great advice. I just want to reiterate something that you said, maybe 2 things. One is, don’t worry about the success of just one video. And that’s so true, and I know that a lot of people when they get started on any platform are so timid that the entire world is going to see this one tweet and judge them on it. That’s just not how it works, especially at the beginning when you literally have no audience, you don’t have to worry about screwing up so much.

And the other thing you said – and I’ve said similar things – treat your videos almost like blog posts. You’re creating an army of videos out there and that army is going to do your bidding and help you reach your wider audience. So don’t worry about the performance of just any one video or blog post.

Steve: And let’s take that a step further, let’s take it into your own performance in the video and how you produce. You and I just came back from Social Media Marketing World, and one of the overarching themes of that conference was context. They kept talking context. All of us are going to take away context into our own space and kind of internalize it.

When I took context away from that conference – here’s the way I see it play out – there’s so much content online that everything I say has been said by somebody else, and they can find it because of how powerful search is. My audience doesn’t care about that. My audience wants to see the same content that somebody else might be sharing, but they want to see it through my lens. They want me to provide the context that puts it in place for them. It’s part of their consumption process. That’s the value that content creators have in the marketplace, is providing context to something which is already there.

A million people show you how to use Evernote. Why do you follow me? Because they like how I show them how to use Evernote. And part and parcel of that is my personality coming forward. I’m not polished, I’m not clean, I’m not perfect. If we consider how we like to consume video, we don’t want to see someone there letter perfect staring at the screen delivering the content like it’s a speech and they have an iron rod shoved up their tookus. If they stumble, if they make a mistake, if they rephrase themselves, we want that because it’s an organic connection that we have.

Don’t worry if your videos aren’t perfect, don’t worry if you misspeak and then correct yourself. Let your personality come forward, because that’s what creates context, that’s what creates a real engagement with the audience.

Rich: And also, your personality is one thing that your competitors cannot really steal from you. It’s always important to put your voice out there, even if other people have said similar things in the past.

Steve: Yes, absolutely. It’s not about that, it’s about the connection, And video is the best place to have that. In my opinion, it is the best place to have that.

Rich: I think a lot of us would like to get as big an audience – and obviously valuable audience – and a well qualified audience, but we want to get more people watching our videos. What do you do, step by step, to get more people watching and engaged with your videos, Steve?

Steve: It’s not rocket science. It’s actually straightforward, good, social marketing. All of the things that you teach in this podcast and we learn from other social media specialists come into play when we start to position them with YouTube. The big thing to understand about YouTube is it’s a social network it’s not a broadcast platform. It’s a social network first and foremost. And that all changed 16 months ago when YouTube changed the rules of engagement in the community section from being able to post anonymously to having it attached to a Google profile of some sort.

The comments area is essential. So for me, the most important part of growing my community, is my community knowing that I’m actually part of that community, that I’m willing to be a leader in that community. So every day begins the same way for me now, in social media. But I don’t spend time on Twitter, I don’t spend time on Facebook, my social media platform of choice is YouTube. I go into the comments area and I respond to each and every comment – every single one – on my YouTube channel. And I think that alone, one person at a time, has grown my channel.

To give your audience some context, when I started nearly 2 years ago I had nearly 800 subscribers that were leftover from my old TV show days, and today we’re closing in on 72k subscribers. So is that a big number? No, Is it a big number? Yes. That’s the thing about YouTube, you have to measure your success based on your own criteria and not on somebody else’s. There’s lots of people with way bigger markets than mine, and there’s lots of people with way smaller, and they’re all valuable because I got my community that I’m supporting and that’s #1. It’s one community that I support and that’s important to me. So I’m the exact same size as everybody else because I have my community.

Rich: I like that, that’s very cool. And that’s great for getting more engagement, absolutely. But let’s say we want to get found, we want people to search us on YouTube. Teach me some of your ninja SEO tricks when it comes to YouTube search.

Steve: Here are the most important criteria for making your video found in ranking and search. The first most important thing is to understand the contract you have with YouTube. YouTube is a simple partner. They want you to produce content that you say you’re going to produce, so the title is the most important, single factor in being found. It’s reflecting what’s in the content of your video is #1. When YouTube sends somebody to watch a video, they watch very closely to see how it performs. They want to see that that person stays on that video for a good percentage of time and they especially like it when that person responds, either thumbs up, thumbs down or comments. It doesn’t really matter, they want to see a response to that video or even a subscription. All those things mean that YouTube assumes they were correct in recommending that video, in search or in their recommended YouTube videos, and they’re likely to do it again. It’s building trust within the YouTube franchise, that’s #1 we have to pay attention to.

I don’t worry about length of video. People say, “You should make your video 2 ½ minutes. It can’t be more than 3 minutes on YouTube or you’re dead in the water.” That’s a load of crap. You make your video the length it needs to be to tell your story. If you’re like me and you do “edutainment” rather than pure education, then your video is going to be a little bit longer because you’re going to be adding little asides and humor here and there to keep engagement going which takes a little bit away from the content, but it works in my space.

So don’t worry about the length but worry about the content. Deliver exactly what you say, don’t promise something because it’s going to rank well in search and then not deliver it just to get the view. You have to be an honest player. Once you’ve done that and gotten the decision that’s in the content of the video – creating great content hs to be a given – then your title is the most important factor. In the title, keywords count still. Old school SEO counts, but you want it weighted towards the front of the title. Because if your keyword if you’re doing a video on Evernote, get the work Evernote in the first 2 words of the title, because that’s what’s going to rank and search. Don’t worry about your branding, don’t even put your branding in the title, it will never rank in search.

The next important thing is to do a good description that contains your keywords and putting them in the description. And YouTube tells us the tags are important, but I don’t believe them because it doesn’t seem to make the slightest difference, but I still do it. So tag even though you don’t see the value – add the tags.

The next most important thing is what happens when the video is launched. So if you’ve created a good video, it’s well titled and it’s ready to go, then you have to prepare it for launch after you massage it a little bit to take advantage of it when it is successful. And ny that, I’m speaking of creating some calls to action within the video to get people interacting with your video. I don’t like the begs up front of telling people to give you a ‘like’ or a ‘thumbs up’, instead ask a question, “Let me know what you think about what we’re talking about, comment below.” And then honoring those comments by engaging with those comments, create some sort of natural interaction.

It’s perfectly acceptable to ask for a subscription, which you can do by using annotations – which is an interactive layer that lays over the top of YouTube videos – but annotations are only available on desktop. YouTube has recently changed and given us a new tool called YouTube cards, which we’re still figuring out how to use, but they allow us to do calls to action asking people to sign up for our newsletter or subscribe to the channel or go to one of our merchant sites or fundraising site. A lot of different ways that we can engage, but make sure that you take advantage of all those engagement tools that are appropriate for your content.

Once you’ve got the video ready to go and published, the next most important thing – as far as I’m concerned – is creating a good thumbnail. I don’t like just taking an image from the video and using that as a thumbnail, especially not if you’re brand building. Because when people search, they’re going to start seeing a whole series of videos listed in YouTube, and in the sidebar when they’re watching you want your videos to be identifiable to start to create some social proof immediately. That way even if they’re watching somebody else’s video, the fact that you’re appearing in the sidebar or you’re appearing in search regularly with your branding included, then that creates the social proof and trust and eventually people are going to click on it.

Over 50% of my new views come from YouTube suggested videos. One of the big reason I think is because I have consistent branding on all of my thumbnails. They see this Dotto guy there so many times that they just think that I‘m part of the infrastructure no matter what. And eventually they click on me and watch me and decide whether they like me or not.

Rich: So let’s take a pause right here because I want to recap what we’ve got so far. So we create this video, we make sure we give it a good title with our targeted keywords at the front of the title. Now it sounds like you actually changed your titles midstream after a little bit of testing. So we can change our titles, we can go back and take old videos and refresh them with new titles. Is that what I’m hearing?

Steve: The only thing you can’t change is the video itself. So definitely refresh the titles, give them a little spray of Febreze and freshen them up if they’re not performing.

Rich: Nice. Next we want to come up with really good descriptions, again getting our keywords in there. You say you’re not sure about the tags, but still put your keywords in there. One thing that I’ve heard about the tags – but I haven’t done enough testing to be sure about this – is if you keep on using your branding in the tags, that that influences the suggested videos. Which will give you a better chance of having your videos as suggested videos rather than your competition. Again, I haven’t tested this, but one of the YouTube newsletters that I belong to mentioned that.

Steve: That seems very reasonable and that is a good reason. I almost forget to add it so I’m making a note myself.

Rich: Also have calls to action to get your audience to engage and have kickass thumbnails. For example, I was checking out Steve’s YouTube channel before we got on the call today and I suggest everybody who is listening in today go over and take a look at Steve’s YouTube channel for a great example of how to create thumbnails for your videos.

Ok, so that right there takes us up to the launch. Walk us through your steps after you launch the video and press ‘publish.’

Steve: The first 24-48 hours of a video’s existence is crucial. If you can generate momentum right out of the gate, you’ve got a real advantage. One thing that we all need to respect and understand about our video is that even though we create a good video, the YouTube gods are not going to smile upon us and give instant viral success. It doesn’t happen that way. What happens – if you created great content – is the start of the work. We often think we created a great video and that’s it, job done. You have to shine a light on your own content, you have to push it out there, you can’t rely on anybody else.

So the first thing that I do as soon as I publish a video, I write a good description, I post it to YouTube – of course it’s cross posted to Google+ – I go and I comment, and then I take my post and I cross post it immediately to my own blog. Because at the end of the day – although YouTube is a great partner – they aren’t me. I want the content to live on my blog, I want to drive people to my site so that I can ultimately ask them to sign up for my newsletter and get on my mail list.

At the end of the day, I still need you on my list in order for me to consider that video to have been a success and converting you into one of my followers. Even though you’re a subscriber, even though you comment, even though you’re engaged in my online community, I want you on my mail list. That’s where success starts. So I post that video into my blog and do the call to action and have you subscribe to my newsletter. I also get the addition proof and authority from having lots of views of the video on my site, and then I take that blog post that I’ve created on my own blog site and I cross post that into all the other social platforms, starting with Facebook but making sure that I’m referring back to that post in all of the other platforms.

And then whatever you can do to support it. If you want to do paid promotion of posts, go ahead. Spend money and promote your post on Facebook. If you’ve done that make sure that your thumbnail is Facebook friendly, so less than 20% text. That’s something you kind of have to plan for in advance. But now start pushing it the way you would push any other great piece of content out into the marketplace. Inviting your friends to have a look at it, whatever it takes to shine a light on that content, that’s your job for the first 48 hours or so of that video. Comment on it, reply to every comment and just support the heck out of it.

Rich: Alright Steve, so you put the video out there , you’re cross posting to Google+, your’re cross posting your blog. When you get to social and you start sharing this, are you sharing the link to your blog, to Google+ or to YouTube?

Steve: Always to my blog.

Rich: Always to your blog, ok. And you’re doing that because you want to build your own email list, not necessarily just generate subscribes for your YouTube channel.

Steve: Yes. Untimately my goal is to generate subscriptions to my email list. Then they’re part of our business. That’s when they can become a customer rather than just a viewer, right?

Rich: Absolutely.

Steve: And here’s one thing that I have been playing with and I don’t know if it’s benefiting me but it seems to be working – although the Google+ community is a little split on it – but instead of just posting my YouTube embed code from my YouTube feed on my blog post, I started posting an embed code you can grab from Google+.

If you go to your Google+ post, you can click on the carat and grab the embed code and then embed in your blog post. And then the whole Google+ post, all of its social proof comes in as the post.

I’m thinking that that is kind of doubling down on authority for the fact that now it’s seeing the Google+ . And if they’re watching the video, now I’m getting the Google+ play as well as the YouTube play. I don’t know if it actually works that way, but if it does, wouldn’t that be special?

Rich: Alright, let me just reiterate that to make sure I wrapped my head around it. So, you create a YouTube video and share it on Google+. Then when you go to embed it on your blog you’re not actually embedding the YouTube code, you’re embedding the Google+ code, and hopefully getting the benefits of both of those platforms and all the social proof that come along with them.

Steve: Exactly. Now maybe one of your people knows a little bit more about Google+ and they can comment and let us know whether or not this is just folly or if this is actually going to be beneficial, but it’s what I’m doing currently and it seems to be working but I can’t tell if it’s really working.

Rich: Alright. Some of these things we never will know, we just kind of get a sense of whether we think it’s going to work or not. This has been great stuff and hopefully you have inspired a number of listeners to finally get off their tookus and start creating some videos. But I know you’ve got a lot more to share, where can we learn more about you online?

Steve: Dottotech.com is my site. Come there and sign up for the newsletter, we do lots of webinars where we teach productivity and social marketing skills, specifically around video, YouTube and soon to be in the webinar space. Dottotech.com will give you a good idea of all of the sorts of stuff that we cover. We do an awful lot in the productivity space, too, around Evernote and Gmail and all those sorts of tools as well.

Rich: Steve does have a lot of great stuff to offer. We’re going to have links to all of his great stuff in the show notes, so be sure to head on over there. Steve, thank you very much for your time today, I definitely appreciated it.

Steve: Rich, I appreciate the opportunity to share with your audience. Thanks guys.

Show Notes:

• Head on over to Steve’s YouTube channel for great productivity and “how to” advice, as well as tips for growing your own YouTube channel.
• Don’t miss out on all the great stuff Steve is sharing at his website, and don’t forget to sign up for his newsletter!
• Dying to know more about the charismatic host of The Marketing Agents Podcast? Rich Brooks is the fearless leader of flyte new media, a web design and internet marketing agency in beautiful Portland, Maine. He is also the brains behind the Agents Of Change Digital Marketing Conference. He also fancies himself a clever tweeter, prove him wrong and follow him on Twitter.
• Don’t miss out on this year’s Agents Of Change Digital Marketing Conference being held on September 25th. Early bird tickets are on sale now!

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With so many brands and businesses jumping online in an effort to find their audience amongst all of the social media platforms available these days, how can you find an edge over your competition?

The key to successfully finding your online audience won’t happen overnight. You need to create content that appeals to potential customers on a personal level. Insert some of your personality into your online presence, be honest with your audience and give them valuable content that they can chew on.

Ryan Hanley knows how to successfully help brands and businesses find their audience using content marketing and social media marketing, tell their story and win the battle for attention online. With a little patience and a few of his creative tips, your business can also experience an increase in online focus.

Rich: Ryan Hanley is the head of marketing at TrustedChoice.com, and the managing editor of Agency Nation. Ryan is also the author of Content Warfare: How to find your audience, tell your story and win the battle for attention online. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan: Rich, I’m so happy to be here, man. Looking forward to it.

Rich: Alright, awesome, we’re glad to have you on here. So we talked a few weeks ago – you and I were chatting a little bit – you started off in business in something that many of us would consider boring. Tell us a little bit about how you got started and how you started to separate yourself from other people that were doing what you were doing.

Ryan: So I’ll fast forward the whole history to I tried a bunch of careers and big corporate things didn’t work. I was living in New York City with my wife and my father-in-law made me kind of the offer you couldn’t refuse, like mafioso style, to come work for his independent insurance agency in upstate New York, in Albany. It was small for a tier 2 town and a 15 person business on Main Street New York, could be anywhere in the country.

I was 26 years old and I did what all independant insurance agents do when they’re in the sales role, is they buy a pair of rubber soled shoes and they start pounding the street. I’m walking into business, I’m harassing family members, doing all the things that you have to do to try to sell insurance to start to make money. And I found I was getting the pants beat off me left and right by men and women who had been in the business for 30-40 years. I’ here a couple months in, young looking and sounding and people just aren’t buying from me.

So I had kind of a light bulb moment. I heard a mortgage professional say to a real estate agent – so 2 centers of influence for my business, those are 2 places that I could get really good business from – I heard them in passing say, “Let’s connect on LinkedIn.” And I had no idea what LinkedIn was at this time. I don’t have a predisposition to social media, I didn’t even have a Facebook account at this time.

So I said if these 2 people are there, it’s like this little light bulb went off , there are conversations happening online that I’m not a part of, and these are people that can send me business. So to cut to the chase, I went to LinkedIn and started studying it. I was up that night until 2am plowing through LinkedIn trying to figure out what this tool was. And I realized very quickly it’s the people that create content that win and get the attention. And that kind of set me on the path. I decided to start a blog and start writing. You can ask me more questions about that and I can go into more detail.

Rich: Yeah, I love that. It’s the people who create content that win. I think that’s pretty interesting. Now I’m not trying to belittle your job choice at all, but for many of us, insurance doesn’t seem like the most interesting of all industries and I think that’s what keeps a lot of entrepreneurs and small business people from jumping in. This idea of doing content marketing that no is is going to find my topic interesting. What do you say when you hear people talk like that?

Ryan: Well the goal isn’t always to be interesting. The goal is often to educate. Insurance is incredibly boring and I’ve dedicated my career, the work that I do today is actually helping 23,000 independent insurance agencies nationwide that do this stuff. I’ve gone from this single location, kind of doing it for myself, to now I help a much larger group of insurance agents do it. So I’ve been in the industry for about 10 years now. Insurance doesn’t need to be interesting, because when someone has an insurance need they often have a question. So you want to make sure that if you’re in that “boring industry” – and there are ways to make your business interesting even if your industry is boring – at the very basic level at the very beginning of your content marketing, it’s be helpful, educate.

This is the thing that Marcus shared and preaches from the top of mountains. It’s answer questions. Simply answer the questions that you receive every, single day, and that is at a very basic level something that you can do in a “boring industry” and start to reap immediate benefits. Even if you’re in an exciting industry you should be answering questions, but in a boring industry it’s almost a must.

Rich: Alright, so you decide that you’re going to start answering people’s questions. I think for a lot of people listening now, there’s still this “yada, yada, yada” moment like in Seinfeld. You say create content and then suddenly I’m getting more business, but what’s that middle part?

So when you decided that you were going to create a blog? How did you come about with that idea, is blogging the right platform for everybody, what exactly is the process of starting this idea of content marketing for your business?

Ryan: So here’s exactly what I did, I said I realize the creators win attention online. So on LinkedIn – especially at this time, it was 2008, 2009 – there was no LinkedIn publisher platform, so really creating content on LinkedIn or even Facebook for that matter was incredibly difficult. Any time of long, valuable form, you needed a place to create it first, and then you use these platforms as more of distribution and conversation tools.

So I went to my father-in-law and I said I’d like to start a blog so we can start to capture some of this stuff that’s going on online. And he said, “Absolutely not. I don’t want you to do that, I want you selling insurance. It’s a waste of time, no one buys online.” And that was pretty common for 2009, especially in small, local businesses.

I was lucky enough to get him to agree to let me create RyanHanley.com. So RyanHanley.com – which is now my marketing website – started as me branding it “the Albany insurance professional”. I was very transparent from the beginning and I said, “I’m young in my career but I’m learning every single day. Every time I learn a new insurance coverage, I’m going to write about it on this website so you can learn about it.” If I’m selling this stuff and I barely understand it, there’s no way you understand it.

I have to sell insurance to pay my bills, and at the beginning, nobody was contacting me through my blog. I was using the free WordPress theme, it was very basic – although today is would probably be considered a nice design because it had a lot of white space – but I was posting 2-3 times a week and having to do it 9, 10, 11 o’clock at night, because I have to do the work of insurance all day long. But I’m starting to write about it. “What is auto insurance? How much should your deductible be? What coverages cover rain damage or water from above?” And I’m just answering all these different questions, and mostly I’m just working them through in my head.

In the beginning for the first 6 months nothing happened. So the “yada, yada, yada” is, it takes time. The thing that aggravates me in our industry is when people skip from “here’s how you start” and “here’s the results”. There is so much in the middle, and there are very few campaigns that generate significant results in a short period of time, The people who do that, most of the time have pre-established audiences or they have lots of friends in the industry who are able to get them in front of people.

If you’re a small business and you’re building up your local presence online, there is a significant period of time that it’s going to take you to really start to get traction, and for me that was 9 months. The first account that I ever sold was 9 months after I started blogging. A woman contacted me and wrote her home and auto with me because she read read a bunch of articles. So 3 times a week I was just writing and answering questions, talking about different things, sometimes I’d write about mistakes that I had made. And she said, “I love what you are doing, I appreciate it, I would like to do my business with you.” So that was great.

That started to happen more and more often, after about 18 months. My father in law came back to me – because now in the Monday morning meetings I’m starting to say that people are contacting me through my website – so they wanted me to do it for them.

Rich: So it took you about 9 months – and quite honestly it’s interesting that you say that – because I notice the same thing with my own blog, with my Twitter accounts, with any online marketing campaigns that I was running. And campaigns may even be too strong of a word, it’s just when I was doing stuff. It wasn’t at the beginning that I saw immediate results it was over time after putting in the work – going to the lab, so to speak – that’s when things started to pay off. So I’m glad that you had a very similar experience and I think it kind of takes a little bit of the weight off.

For some people listening they’ll say, “That’s great, because I’ve been putting in the work and I haven’t seen immediate results, so I know that my time will come.” For other people they may say, “Forget it, I don’t want to put in that amount of work.’ We’ll separate the weak from the chafe.

Share with us some of the things that you learned during that 9 months and beyond, about what makes for an effective blog post and what maybe doesn’t. What are some of the lessons that you’ve found out that really make your content work for you and turn into interesting leads?

Ryan: There are 3 specific pieces that I’ll give you, especially for people who are writing for business. So if you are a lifestyle entrepreneur and you’re selling yourself and your personality, there may be a few more. But if you’re writing about a “thing” like insurance or auto sales or auto repair or something like that, here’s how I would order them.

The first is be very direct and tell people exactly what you’re doing. Today I’m answering the question, “What is New york State short-term disability?” Bam. There’s the title of your post. The article is about New York State short-term disability.

The second is be very transparent about why you’re doing it. This is a mistake that I see people make all the time and they never ask for the business. I’m writing this article to educate you insurance buyers so that when you’re ready to make a purchase, you choose me as insurance provider. The reason you’re writing this blog post is to educate them, but ultimately to gain their trust and to win their business. So put that right out in the open, don’t be sneaky about it and try to slip it in the bottom or put your phone number at the top and assume they’re going to call you. Bam! Right in the middle of the article you can write, “If you’re convinced that I’m a provider that could be a solution for you, pick up the phone and call this number, I’d love to talk to you. So be very transparent and honest in why you’re doing it, why you’re creating this content.

And then lastly, I would say to interject little pieces of who you are into it. It doesn’t mean you need to do an expose or talk about your food choices (unless you’re a foodie). I used to drip little, tiny things about the fact that I’m a Buffalo Bills fan into my articles, because it says something about me and I found that people related to that. And I write little things about my kid or other little pieces of my personality – little snippets – just so people know that there’s a human being behind the writing. So very direct, answer the question in full, don’t leave them wanting more in an educational blog post. Give them the solution, give them the whole deal. What’s most likely going to happen is they’re going to realize they can’t do it for themselves. Be very transparent and honest. Ask for the business. Tell them why you’re writing it. And then in small doses, insert yourself or your company in a very personal way so that the people feel like a robot didn’t write it, a human being wrote it, and they have something to grab ahold of.

Rich: I think that’s awesome information, and I just want to kind of add to that. I run my own ad agency and get a lot of people who want to write for me. Write for my clients, create blog posts for us, and they’ll often send me examples of their work. And so often – even when it’s well written, as in it’s grammatically correct – I get bored after about 2 paragraphs. What I’ve discovered about some of the best writers out there, the problem is they’re selling their work to everybody.

When you’re creating your own content and you’re talking and adding a little bit about your team affiliations – for me it’s the Patriots, I’m sorry, it says something different about me that I choose a winner – but it also starts to give people a picture about who you are and it really does add personality and keeps you away from another generic article about New York State insurance, or whatever it may be.

Ryan: I’d like to give you a very tactical campaign that anybody can copy, I want people to copy, and I’m going to give you a crazy stat that’s going to blow your mind.

Rich: Hit me.

Ryan: What I’m about to tell you, I have explained to 67 different audiences and groups ranging from 50 – 200 people. Not one person has copied this campaign. It is about as inexpensive as you can possibly be as far as content marketing goes, and I guarantee that without a doubt it will make you money in less than 9 months. No one has ever reproduced this.

When my father in law came to me and said, “I want you to start blogging for The Murray Group.” They still had a postage card website that in 2011 still said, “copyright 2002” on it.

It was 4 pages and it was attracting 72 hits a week to the home page and the page that was “contact”. And the reason those 2 pages and not the other 2, is because those were the only 2 pages with the phone number and the address. So the only people that were finding this website were the people that already knew us, which kind of defeats the purpose of your website in most cases.

So I knew I was in trouble and I had my work cut out for me. I got the blog redesigned inexpensively to WordPress. Are you familiar with the movie Pulp Fiction, Rich?

Rich: I’ve seen it 12 or 13 times.

Ryan: In the movie Pulp Fiction – for those of you who haven’t seen it – Uma Thurman’s character snorts heroin, bad idea. John Travolta’s character doesn’t want her to die because she’s the bosses wife, and if she dies then he dies. So he takes an adrenaline needle – and whether you believe medically or not that this is possible – he jams it into her chest and she comes bursting back to life. That’s what I wanted to do with my website.

So I created something called the “100 insurance questions answered in 100 days” video series. An awful name for a campaign, but it describes exactly what I did. I took the entire month of December 2011 and I contacted all our clients, mostly through email, some through Facebook, and just said. “If you could have 1 insurance question answered what would it be?” And I got 147 responses. I boiled it down to 100 to have a nice, clean number (and some were completely wackadoo), and on January 2nd of 2012 I began recording an answer to every single one of those questions via my cellphone camera. I posted them to YouTube, 2 minutes or less. “Hi, my name is Ryan Hanley and today we’re going to answer the question, ‘What is New York State short-term disability? If you have a question or you’ like to do business with us, here’s our phone number.” That’s it, done.

I did that every, single day for 100 days. Just in the time period of those 100 days, counting the calls that we got that referenced those videos, we made $5,192 in net revenue. So that’s not sales, that’s actual net revenue, bankable dollars.

Rich: Sweet.

Ryan: In the last 4 years we’ve made almost $100k, just from those 100 videos. Just from putting in 100 days worth of work, it took me on average between 18 and 25 minutes to record, publish and post that video. If you’re a novice, give yourself 45 minutes. So 45 minutes of time once a day for 100 days and you immediately net yourself this profit.

And I’ll tell you why I guarantee it works. Because you are providing Google with consistent, straight forward value. You’re answering the questions that are most important to your clients and you’re doing it on a consistent basis and you’re making it very easy to digest and to move on.

It is absolutely, 100% the one thing that I would tell people to do. You don’t have to do 100, you can start with 20 and 3 months later do another 20. No one has ever dedicated themselves to replicating 100. I’ve seen people do 20 with decent results. But answering client questions and making them incredibly easy to consume is the #1 thing that I would do in any business in content marketing.

Rich: That;s awesome. Now you did those as YouTube videos, so let me ask, what was some of the promotion behind these videos? In other words, did you take the videos and embed them in your blog? Did you do any sort of Facebook marketing to support these videos? Did you repurpose them and post them straight up to Facebook after you were done with them on YouTube? What other specific tactics did you use to kind of get the most out of that campaign?

Ryan: So at the time, facebook ads weren’t what they were today, and I just wasn’t really comfortable with them. But I did promote on all the social channels and I did embed on our site. Now the thing a lot of people say is, why would I re-embed my site and would I use something like a Wistia that’s only on my site.

Here’s the deal, it doesn’t matter where someone finds you and transitions from acquaintance to someone who’s actually giving you their attention, It doesn’t matter where that transition happens. So in all those places – especially for local businesses – make sure that they have the ability to contact you right out of that spot.

So I got people who said, “Oh gee, I just saw your video on Facebook.” He called me from Facebook because I would always include my phone number and Google+ post of of this nature. In a post like this, include your phone number. In the YouTube video, include your phone number. Because if they watched the YouTube video, I don’t care if they come back to my site and become web traffic. I want them to pick up the phone and say, “Hey Ryan, I’m interested in learning more about what you do.”

So I shared them all over the social channels and then once a week I would take whichever one seemed to be the most popular, and I would email it out to our clients. And those people would come in and share and comment and stuff. Again, it was slow at first, but by the end of the 100 days people were super into it. Now it just became, “Is he going to get to 100 or is he going to get burned out?” Because I’d write, “Holy crap, 67 in, I’m dying!” I would let people know, and it was the truth, it was exhausting.

But the amount of money we made, the amount of publicity that our business got from this, it is exponential compared to the effort it took to produce it.

Rich: And I’m assuming that you’re still generating new business from this because those are still 100 videos and 100 blog posts that are out there answering people’s questions.

Ryan: I didn’t tell you this part of the story. So my wife works there, and my sister in law and my brother in law. Over the course of time I was there – I’m not anymore – I produced over 500 something, she still calls me almost every day and says, “Hey, I just signed a new internet account, ha ha ha!” It’s a big joke because I don’t get paid anymore.

Rich: But there will be money in your inheritance, so it all works out.

Ryan: I’m going to keep my fingers crossed in that one. But yes, that’s the thing with content marketing. And as much as I love social media and all these different internet marketing and relationship building tactics, but I always come back to content. The reason is, I think of every piece of content I create as a salesperson working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for me. Remember, sales isn’t always “get them to sign the dotted line”. A big part of sales is relationship building, information, education, entertainment. There’s all these different parts to sales, so not every blog post needs to take them from having no clue who you are, to a paying customer. But in every case I think of them as performing some part of the sales role, and the best part is they work all day and night.

Rich, I’ll tell you this, the #1 time for inbound, contact form submissions was 6:00-8:30 at night at the Murray Group. So that was the #1 time that we actually received inbound submissions, and that was because you work all day, you eat dinner with the family, you go home and turn the TV on and pop open your computer and look at your mail. You say that you’re unhappy with your new insurance bill and you take to the internet and if you were within 50 miles of Albany, New York, you found The Murray Group.

Rich: Ok, that’s awesome. That’s a great story, And if you can do it in insurance, I’m sure other people can succeed in other industries as well.

So Ryan, you shared a lot with us today, I know you’ve got this book that recently came out. Where can we learn more about you online?

Ryan: So, ryanhanley.com is the best place to learn more about me, my podcast. I try every form of medium. so you’ll find videos and texts and all that kind of good stuff. And the book – if you’re interested in that – just go to Amazon and type in “content warfare” and you’ll find every version of it that you could possibly want.

Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have those links as always in the show notes. Ryan, thank you very much. Great interview, I really appreciated your expertise today.

Ryan: Rich, it’s my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Show Notes:

• To learn more about Ryan, his content marketing strategies and check out his podcast, head on over to his website.
• Don’t miss out on all that Ryan shares about content marketing in his new book!
• Dying to know more about the charismatic host of The Marketing Agents Podcast? Rich Brooks is the fearless leader of flyte new media, a web design and internet marketing agency in beautiful Portland, Maine. He is also the brains behind the Agents Of Change Digital Marketing Conference. He also fancies himself a clever tweeter, prove him wrong and follow him on Twitter.
• Don’t miss out on this year’s Agents Of Change Digital Marketing Conference being held on September 25th. Early bird tickets are on sale now!
• Want a chance to interview Rich for episode 100 of The Marketing Agents Podcast? Let him know!

The post How to Create Interesting Content in A Boring Industry – @RyanHanley_Com appeared first on .

The key lies in giving the students not only what they will need tomorrow to be successful, but to also give them the strategies they will use for years to come to improve their job performance and advance their careers.

Dr. Mary Beth McCabe is the lead faculty in Marketing at National University. She has developed a concentration in Mobile and Social Marketing as part of their MBA program, and shares in this episode some of the areas she feels are vital to the students taking this course in order to ensure future success in the field of Marketing.

Rich: Dr. Mary Beth McCabe is the lead faculty in Marketing at National University, the 12th largest private, nonprofit in the United States. She is currently developing a concentration in Mobile Marketing & Social Marketing as part of the MBA program.

Dr. McCabe had been an adjunct faculty at UCSD Extension at San Diego State University, and received her doctorate in Marketing from the United States International University. Her online marketing experience began in 1993, after 15 years of selling TV and producing radio programs, when she opened her own marketing firm.

She has completed projects for more than 4,000 businesses, instructing more than 5,000 marketing students worldwide. She is passionate about what’s the next marketing challenge. Mary Beth, welcome to the show.

Mary Beth: Well thanks, Rich, it’s really a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Rich: It was great, we ran into each other again at Social Media Marketing World and just reconnected, and I was really excited to hear what you were talking about in class, and that’s why I invited you on the show. So let’s jump right into the questions.

As I was taking a look at some of the material for your classes, when I was in college (jamming out to bands like Pearl Jam and The Grateful Dead), there was no concentration in Mobile Marketing and Social Media. In fact, come to think of it, I don’t think there was any email either. So can you give us a rundown of what the concentration is like, the types of prerequisite and what students learn when they’re done, assuming that they didn’t fall asleep in class?

Mary Beth: That’s a really good point there. So the typical National University student is somebody who may not have been your traditional 4-year college right out of high school student. So most of what we’re teaching are practical applications of theories. And I would imagine that many of our students would be the typical person that’s listening to this conversation. Many of the students in my classes do own their own business or are the marketing manager for a small company, and they want to get their degree from an accredited, reliable, responsible university with a really good reputation.

So they selected National – which is on a different schedule – we’re on a 1-month schedule, so each course is only 4 weeks long. This fits in with a lot of people’s time commitments. But to get really down to what you asked, was what are they learning. And to answer that I had to really figure out about 3 years ago, what was mobile marketing and how do we teach it. And then what should we call it. There were a lot of choices that I had, so I really wanted to narrow in on the mobile part, but I also knew that social was going to be important. So we call it a concentration in mobile marketing and social media. It’s a 5 course – so it’s 5 months long – and they do that as part of their MBA program so they can get their entire MBA with the mobile concentration in about 18 months.

The mobile courses are using a brand new, never before seen textbook that I wrote with a couple of coauthors who are really experts in the mobile marketing industry, and that’s what we are teaching. Not just from a theoretical point of view how to actually do what needs to be done to make a business have a mobile friendly, mobile enabled, mobile useful presence, and it’s really taking off. We’re in our 2nd cohort right now, the 1st cohort completed their degrees and are out there working. Now the 2nd cohort is underway and the 3rd will be starting again this fall.

So they’re small classes because we find that really works. To really narrow the answer down, Rich, they’re learning things that they can use tomorrow in their selective field of business and get a practical application right away.

Rich: Alright, so you mentioned before, these are nontraditional students. They may be people just like me who have started a business or who are working in a business and they’re looking to fit mobile marketing and an MBA into their busy schedules. Very cool.

And so, if I’m in that class, are these labs? Am I learning how to do mobile coding, am I learning apps or am I learning more about the strategies of how I can use mobile marketing to enhance my Agents Of Change Conference or my flyte new media company, or what?

Mary Beth: The latter. So this is not a technical or coding course of study. However, what we do teach is the strategy that any business needs to know in order to survive. So we give the background of why it’s important and also the strategy of how to be successful. We are teaching on a learning platform that’s interactive, so they are taught on live chats. Wherever you are in the world you can access the course, from any corner of the world.

Rich: Interesting, So you mention that you’re actually writing a book with 3 people, what are some of the other books that are part of the syllabus that you teach?

Mary Beth: We use the Groundswell book, Charlene Li’s. In fact, just before we got on this conversation, I’m reviewing the social media course and we are transferring it this weekend from the e-platform, called eCollege, into the Blackboard platform, Collaborate. Which is a much more advanced and more mobile-friendly platform. So we are walking the walk along with every other business out there. We found that we needed to adapt our courses, so we’re bringing all 1800 courses at the University’s School of Business over with the last 3 months over to this new platform.

The other course that I mentioned, Groundswell, we’re also using (Erik) Qualman’s book, we use Cindy Krum’s book also as a supplement to our book. We had Mobile Marketing For Dummies, which was part of the original plan to use that because Michael Becker is also teaching with us, and he’s the author of that textbook. But we’re also looking for other books, too, to supplement.

We’re also looking for items that maybe some of the audience may be writing to include as part of our curriculum. We want to be the freshest, most current curriculum out there.

Rich: Awesome. Well, we’ll try and create links to all the books you just mentioned. As well, if people are listening now and you’re reading a book that you think would be valuable, make sure that you drop it into the comments.

So as people are moving from the real work into your classroom – maybe they’re going for their MBA – what would you say some of the misconceptions are about mobile marketing for the average entrepreneur who you’re seeing now in your classes?

Mary Beth: That’s a really good question, thanks for asking. the typical student when they first get into our course they think, “ Wow, we’re going to make an app now.” And when we really sit down and talk to them about what it is they need, usually that ‘s the last thing on the list. So they need to be doing many more things before they get to the step of making an app. So that’s the first misconception. But thanks, that was a really good question, Rich.

Rich: Alright, well good. Thank you. So if that’s not where we want to start, where do you think most entrepreneurs should be starting as they’re developing their mobile marketing campaigns and strategies?

Mary Beth: What they need to start with is their consumer marketing. Who is their audience? There is a prerequisite for the course and it’s an intro to marketing, it’s a marketing management class. We use the (Phil) Kotler book, which a lot of people may know of. It’s kind of a doorstop, but we do use the most current version, and they do keep it up to date.

But the point is, coming to our program, you really have a basic understanding of marketing. And we want you to continue that by focusing on your customer. And the same things that you learn in the basic courses, we continue to build upon here. And those include marketing research and marketing social and the real basics of marketing strategy that we need to identify – such as a “SWOT analysis” – where are our strengths and weaknesses, where are opportunities and threads.

As they build their consumer knowledge they will realize what elements of mobile their customers are actually using. So that’s why I’m saying they may not need to have an app, maybe they connect with their mobile customers in other manners initially, before they consider what else they need to do.

Rich: So give me some examples. What are some ways that you think that entrepreneurs and small businesses should consider as ways that they can engage their audience through mobile?

Mary Beth: Well, I think one thing that people are not doing enough of right now is video. And I see video as a real underused tool. So there are a number of platforms that you can post our videos and make them mobile enabled and promote those as ways to connect with audiences.

Just as examples we know that YouTube is the #2 search engine. But are you as a small business and someone who’s wanting to learn more about digital marketing, are you using YouTube in the ways that your audiences on the go can connect? Things like “click to call” on your website, these are some real basics that are being overlooked.

And just to put that into perspective, just this week I’m getting my mobile website up to speed, so not everyone has got theirs done yet. You’ve got to be responsive.

Rich: We’re obviously big proponents of mobile friendly websites, and I often field calls all the time, “Will you do a mobile app for me?” And we don’t do mobile apps within my company, but very often I ask people and get to the bottom of it, and it turns out there’s no need for them to spend all that money on a mobile app when their website is either already mobile or could be made mobile for a fraction of the cost and will have a much better reach than a mobile app ever will.

So there’s a lot of ways that people can start small with a mobile website. I love the video idea, I think that’s great. We use video here at flyte – not as much as we should – but I also like the idea of the “click to call”, and one of the easiest things to do is just to make sure that you don’t have pictures of your phone number on your website, you actually have the html text. Which then on most devices make it a clickable number that then people can call you.

Mary Beth: Can I give you an example of a guest speaker that we had recently?

Rich: I would love it, yes.

Mary Beth: We had Michael Ahearne, who’s the head of Waterfall, one of the top SMS companies, they’re one of the best ones out there. He came on and did a guest lecture, live, with our students and gave us a perspective from a practical point of view of how companies can be using SMS. And the students in the class got to practice live and see how things worked from a business perspective and how easy it was for them to really create that SMS campaign idea. And that’s a tool of mobile marketing that so few businesses are using.

Rich: So do you remember any of the specific examples of the students in the class and how they were using that during the lecture? Or perhaps another example that Mr. Ahearn brought up that you could site for us? I think for a lot of people who listen, they know what SMS marketing is but they don’t really know how it all works.

Mary Beth: One of the things that I can just remember off the top of my head is a contest. So you can create a very rich media contest using SMS campaigns, and you have instant credibility, instant access to this pool of your most avid customers. So there’s a certain percentage of people who are just going to look at your website, then there’s a certain percentage of people who might engage with you, and then there’s the core customer. Those are the people who are really going to be valuable for your CRM down the road, and engaging with them in an SMS manner. And we of course teach the ethics of mobile marketing in our courses, in the first week.

One example I’ll give you is a Domino’s Pizza in the area had 1 day last July where you couldn’t call in for a pizza, you could only send via a mobile app. So that was the only way that you could order a pizza that day. And they had a special offer and they were very, very successful. So some companies might want to try that as a chance to engage with their customers who some are mobile only these days.

Rich: That’s interesting, And also, for the rest of the people, you’re also training people to use your app or text messaging or whatever it might be.

Mary Beth: That’s right. So when I mentioned ethics before, I really want to stress that one of the things you get with an academic program – more so than you would on a typical 1-hour webinar – is we go in depth. We go deep because we know that everybody’s had a chance to learn something. We dive beneath the surface and discuss ethical issues that do come up with regards to the technology, and those include privacy and security and just being good stewards of the industry.

Rich: Very cool. So one of the things that I was wondering when I was listening to you talk about your students, obviously mobile and social are changing so much dramatically and quickly, how do you balance teaching them about what’s going on today versus teaching evergreen tactics when it comes to these mason technologies. What is the balance there and how do you put them in a position where they can go off into the real world and succeed?

Mary Beth: That is always going to be a struggle. I haven’t found the perfect balance, but I am looking at it closely. I know that they’re best suited to have the tools that they can use tomorrow, but I’d also like them to know this fits into the role of business, the role of what they’re going to be doing 5 years from now. And maybe they’ll be the CEO of a company by that time and what will they need to know now that they can use later.

I haven’t got the perfect balance, but I’m always giving them something new at the very beginning of class. And out classes are only a 2 hour chat, the rest of the course is in discussion boards, in assignments, in group projects that they work on, and we often use case studies and we also some short quizzes and things like that.

Now in the social media course – just to take off on that a little bit – they do have to create their own Twitter page, they do have to create a blog, they do have to create a Facebook page for their business. They have to do these in the course itself and they have to show the instructor what they’ve created. And at the conclusion of the 5 courses, they actually put together a mobile and social marketing plan, and they present it to their classmates and professor and if they work for a company they can bring in their CEO and have them listen to the presentation.

Rich: Oh, that’s interesting, Then they actually walk away with something tangible that they can put to use in the real world.

Mary Beth: That’s exactly right. And I’ll give you one example, one of our students in our first cohort worked (and still works) for National University, and she took her program and her project and applied it to a university that we own and she did her project on that University, and now she’s still doing that project for her job.

Another student works for a company called, Metropolis, and they are a pet grooming business in Solana Beach, California, and she did her project on the retail store. A year later and she’s still applying the things she learned. We brought her back and she did some testimonials that will be posted on YouTube shortly, just to reinforce what she’s learned. So whether it’s a large university or a pet store, these examples are coming out.

Rich: It’s good to see that the students are putting this to good use. So what marketing organizations do you think are doing a good job of educating future marketers outside of your university?

Mary Beth: Well, I have to talk a little bit about The American Marketing Association. I’ve been involved in their collegiate relations program and there are 350 universities that have a chapter. It is a great feeding ground for the professional chapter. They are supporting those students at the local level in a big way by giving mentorship, by giving scholarship, by giving hands on, practical experiences at a reduced cost or no cost.

This is really exciting to me, so I just wanted to point out that if someone’s listening here and they happen to be a student – no matter what part of the country or in Mexico – there’s a local American Marketing Association in your area, and there’s likely a student chapter that you could join, and it’s transferable to whatever sity that you might move to. So the idea is you would have this on your resume when you’re going out there seeking that next job and you can talk about whatever experiences or internships or mentors you were able to develop during that time period.

We have a conference coming up on May 8th that’s all about “Causes” and the American Marketing Association is sponsoring it and it’s all nonprofit organizations, which many in your audience might belong to that group of business owners.

Rich: That sounds great. And we’ll have any links that you want to share with us, probably the May 8th date will be behind us by the time we launch this, but if you have any resources we’ll be happy to share those as well.

A quick question, is The Marketing Agents Podcast yet a part of the curriculum over at your social and mobile marketing class?

Mary Beth: Rich, that’s making me smile. At the Social Media Marketing World Conference, I sat down with a lot of the podcasters and got coached and mentored and I created my first 3 podcasts during that conference. I really think this will be the next part of our curriculum and I am ready to introduce it. I think this is a key learning experience for our students as well as small business digital marketers.You have a proponent here of getting out there and sharing your knowledge in bite size pieces so that you can develop a following.

Rich: Alright, sounds good. Now listen, where can we learn more about you, your course or anything else you’d like to share online?

Mary Beth: Well, our university is the 12th largest private non-profit in the United States, our website is nu.edu. You might know a graduate already, there’s 150,000. I personally started Sun Marketing in 1993, my first clients were advertising with banner ads. So Sun Marketing has transitioned to kind of a hispanic-focused marketing agency, but we also do a lot of mobile and some other things. As I mentioned, my website is just today being transformed, and I’d love any feedback. So if you’re listening to this in May about this time, it should be looking better. So please let me know. It’s sunmarketing.net.

And you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or any other platform. One of the newer platforms I’m having fun with right now is Periscope. I’ll share with you that that’s something I’m going to be teaching the students to do livestreaming as well as the podcasting, which you mentioned.

Rich: Ok, that is some great stuff. I look forward to checking you out on Periscope and all of those other place. We’ll have all those links in the show notes. Mary Beth, thank you very much for your time today.

Mary Beth: Rich, its been a pleasure. Thanks so much for letting me share what students need to know in order to survive. And not only students, we’re all students in this world today. Thanks.

Rich: Absolutely. Take Care.

Show Notes:

• Want to interview Rich on The Marketing Agents Podcast episode 100? Let me know!
• Grab your early bird ticket to The Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference Now!
• To find out more about National University, where Mary Beth teaches, check out their website.
• You can follow Mary Beth on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook.
• You can also check out the newly updated webpage for Mary Beth’s marketing company. She’d love to hear your feedback on the new site!
• Interested in learning more about the American Marketing Association, or in becoming a member? Check out their website.

Mary Beth mentioned the following books that are used as part of her class curriculum:

• Marketing Management – Phil Kotler
• Groundswell – Charlene Li
• Socialnomics – Erik Qualman
• Mobile Marketing: Find Your Customers No Matter Where They Are – Cindy Krum
• Mobile Marketing For Dummies – Michael Becker

Transcription for this podcast provided by Jennifer Scholz Transcription Services.

The post What Are They Teaching Students About Mobile & Social Media Anyway? @marybethmccabe appeared first on .

Have you ever felt like you’re stuck with where your business currently is and are in need of a push in the right direction? Maybe you’ve been searching for other like-minded and driven people to inspire and drive you to restrategize and brainstorm where you want your business to be in 1 month, 3 months or even a year, and what steps you need to take to get there.

Perhaps a Mastermind group is exactly the type of environment you’re seeking. Think of it as a networking group of like-minded entrepreneurs all struggling with different roadblocks in their businesses, but who also bring creative energy and ideas to share among the group in a supportive way. Using different platforms such as live hangouts, online forums and in person meetups, Masterminds offer daily support and encouragement from peers that are all seeking advice and wisdom from others that share the same mindset and drive for success.

Dean Patino runs the Mastermind group associated with Entrepreneur On Fire, as well as his own business dedicated to helping entrepreneurs generate recurring revenue for their online businesses.

Rich: Dean Patino runs the Fire Nation Elite Mastermind for Entrepreneur On Fire, founded by John Lee Dumas, to help tribe members start, grow and monetize online businesses. In addition to that, he recently launched Fire Starters Company with products and coaching to ignite entrepreneurs to monetize your online businesses to the next level.

He’s been an entrepreneur since 1987 with his own business named, Baseball Classics, as well as a sales professional in the technology industry for over 25 years working for companies such as Oracle and HP.

Dean, welcome to the show.

Dean: Rich, its so great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rich: I am really psyched. It was great meeting you out in San Diego, I learned a lot in that Mastermind and I couldn’t wait to sit down and find out how you do it. So let’s just start with you’re running Fire Nation Elite, this is kind of a paid networking group for a limited number of people from Fire Nation. And I want you to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s how it works. This is the group that grew up around Entrepreneur on Fire. How did your role in this group come about?

Dean: Well, it all started when John first announced that he was going to have this Mastermind for Entrepreneur On Fire – named Fire Nation Elite – and I would say he announced that somewhere around early 2013 or so. I knew I wanted to be in it right away, so I applied for it and I did have a conversation with John for about 15 minutes or so. And of course I was prepared to “ignite”, John Lee Dumas-style.

It was so great talking with John the first time, he’s just as energetic personally speaking with him as he is on his great podcast, Entrepreneur On Fire. So I joined the Mastermind in July of 2013, I was one of the first members when it opened up on July 1st.

After about 9 months or so, John’s Entrepreneur On Fire business was growing so rapidly with Podcaster’s Paradise – and of course John has many other offerings – that he just didn’t have as much time to put into the Mastermind as he would have liked to. So he tagged me and asked me if I would run the Mastermind for Fire Nation Elite for him, because he saw how active I was within Fire Nation Elite. And I was of course delighted to do so and it’s been a great combination and connection ever since.

Rich: That’s great. Now you and John together led the Fire Nation Elite Mastermind that I attended before Social Media Marketing World. Why do you feel that Masterminds are so valuable to entrepreneurs?

Dean: Oh my gosh, Rich. It’s a complete game changer for so many reasons, we could talk for hours literally about why it’s so valuable for folks. But I will say that there’s nothing more important than when you want to do something and you’re around like-minded people. And that’s for anything in life. And of course when it comes to having a Mastermind, that’s what it’s all about, it’s like-minded people where you’re sharing great value to help each other get to the next levels that you’re aspiring to do.

So the #1 struggle across the board – and we just had a session and it was so great to meet you out there, Rich, in San Diego a few weeks ago – the #1 struggle that came up with everyone that was on our hot seat during our meet up was the mindset. It wasn’t, “I don’t know how to do this”, it was always something to do with the mindset. So being within a Mastermind and to give you that support was so important. Typically you’re not going to find it outside of a Mastermind for whatever it is you want to do in life.

So that to me is a key reason, and probably your listeners have heard this many times as well, “mindset, mindset, mindset”. But boy, it’s absolutely true, I can tell you from firsthand experience. But yet there’s a lot of valuable things you get as well. You see what everybody else is doing, new ideas, all that kind of good stuff as well. It really all adds up.

Rich: And that’s an interesting thing, with mindset. So I just want to second this. I saw a lot of people around the group that were very able to help other people kind of get unstuck and had great suggestions, and then all of a sudden they’d get in the hotseat, and they seemed to be struggling with the same things but they couldn’t see it themselves until somebody pointed it out.

So sometimes we’re almost too close to our own problems and we need one of these like-minded people to let us realize or let us see what’s really going on.

Dean: Isn’t that the case again, Rich? It’s such a great point you bring up. And this again just applies generally throughout life, that of course it’s always so much easier to be objective than to be subjective.

Rich: Absolutely. So I’m sure a lot of people are excited about the prospects of Masterminds, but maybe they don’t understand some of the logistics. So Dean, share with us how do you put on a Mastermind and how much prep work is involved on your end, in terms of bringing everything together.

Dean: Well, the #1 thing for putting together a Mastermind is setting the tone for the culture that you’re going to have for a Mastermind. And definitely people have made all kinds of income with Masterminds. Again, ours is a Mastermind – you can call it a membership site kind of thing. I was actually just talking to Chris Luck. I don’t know if you know Chris, have you met him before?

Rich: I don’t know that I have.

Dean: Chris Luck – what a great guy – and I just recently introduced him to John. Chris, between 2007 and 2013, made over $25 million from membership sites online. So again, there’s a lot of income, recurring revenue that you can make when you start and form your own membership community/Mastermind. To me it’s just, those terms are interchangeable.

So the culture is so important, and that’s what John and Kate – Kate Erickson, John’s partner – started with Fire Nation Elite. Having a culture about abundance, about giving. And it wasn’t about being secretive about what you’re doing. It’s not if I learned something or if I found out something, I don’t want to tell anybody else. It was the opposite. And John and Kate have certainly led by example that way.

So to me, it’s having that kind of culture to start with. This is a culture of abundance, we’re here to support each other, help each other and that’s rule #1. And then from there, in terms of involvement, I want to continue to foster that culture and of course I want to really embrace it right from the very beginning.. I’ve been running a Mastermind since July 1st of 2014, so it’s coming up on a year. And we’re getting ready, of course, for the next year coming up so I’m talking with John and Kate and planning that because we want to continue to enhance it.

The other things in terms of my involvement with resources, you want to of course provide those kinds of resources. But before I get to that, you want to have a place for your group – or tribe – to be interactive. When Fire Nation Elite first opened up, there was a private Facebook group, and it was so great. Rich, it was almost like a Twitter feed. There were so many people in there so excited and so much interaction across the board.

But we also had a forum in another site, and that was great because there was topics you could talk about, but it just didn’t compare to where people would spend their time compared to the private Facebook group. So that was important so we’ve been keeping it that way ever since and we closed the forum part out. But within that other area where the forum, to grow it or monetize it, all kinds of different documents and tips. So it’s important to have those kinds of resources and continue to grow. To me it’s like a multimedia library that you will grow and continue to add to.

The other thing that’s really important is to have at least once a month where you have really a Q&A session for the members where you can take the questions that they have whatever the main topic is within that group and answer those and spend a good hour with those, and those are live. Google Hangout or whatever type of technology somebody wants to use for that. We do that once a month with John and Kate, we call it a Fireside Chat. But we took it to the next level by not only John and Kate sharing everything that’s going on – the latest and greatest with Entrepreneur On Fire – so all the lessons learned, especially when it comes to monetizing, which of course is a business and everybody is so interested in that.

We’ve also added a “hot seat” to it. We take one member a month and we put them on the hot seat with John and Kate. Consider it 30 minutes of intense coaching, and boy is that popular. Because not only does that member really appreciate it, as you can imagine John and Kate are are giving really great actionable advice holding your feet to the fire about it, but the other members learn so much from them as well.

So that’s really been a huge, huge success for us. And then the other thing that John and Kate have been doing before I took things over and I’ve continued this, is I have a special guest come in once a month to talk about a topic. Some expert comes in that’s an entrepreneur – and of course Rich, we’d love to have you come in.

Rich: I actually have been on once before, I think it was the Mastermind thing. We talked about marketing, but yes, anyways, I’m sorry to interrupt.

Dean: That was perhaps with John and Kate before I started running it, but I definitely want to have you coming in this year, so we’ll nail that down. And again, you talk about a topic of your expertise. So we had Dane Maxwell in, he talked all about mindset and it was a very emotional session. Dane is so powerful and so giving of himself. It was a very emotional session for Fire Nation Elite. And again, these are live hangouts. So it’s me and that entrepreneur on video and everybody else is watching it, and of course participating via chat.

We’ve had Pam Hendrickson in. She was Tony Robbins right hand executive for about 18 years, and she’s got her own successful business since leaving Tony, you can imagine what she brought to the table. We’ve had Tim Paige in from Lead Pages and all kinds of other great people like Ryan Lee who earns 7 figures a month, which is a crazy number.

Rich: That is a crazy number.

Dean: Chris Luck, he’s going to come in again. So to bring in a special guest once a month for an hour on a topic that’s relevant to your group is really another big win. But I want to go back to the Facebook group for real quick in terms of the involvement.

So I’m doing all those things and managing all that and setting those things up and I’m running the Fireside Chat, which is really the once a month Q&A with the hot seat with John and Kate. So I’m really hosting that. But the Facebook group, that’s what people are so excited about as well, because they want that live interaction. They have a question and they want to ask it, they want to get an answer soon. They don’t want to wait a week or a month, they want to find out what the answer is if it’s a question about growing their list or whatever it might be that they’re stuck on, some product idea, a logo, a tagline.

So the community is typically very responsive but that’s what my job is as well is to make sure that I’m providing my counsel and my expertise as well as making sure that there aren’t any posts that go unanswered. I want to make sure we keep things active and also very day – Monday through Friday – we feature one of the members. They give us a call to action or a number of different things, but we spotlight them and call them the “Elite Entrepreneur Of The Day”, and they’re pinned at the top of the group for the whole day.

But we also do “social proof” days 6 days a week. Monday through Saturday, each day we pick a different social proof topic -and it might be Facebook – if people want to get some comments on their Facebook page and some shares, that’s on Friday. If you’re a podcast you want to get reviews and shares on there, comments on your show notes page – that’s on Wednesdays – so on and so forth. So we have these “social proof” days and so we have a lot of great things to offer amongst other types of activities that we also offer as well that are live events, in terms of coaching, training, things like that that happen within Fire Nation Elite.

Rich: That’s awesome. That’s a lot of great information, Dean, and I want to kind of summarize that. But before I do, I also just want to clarify something. So sometimes when people hear “Mastermind” they think of kind of what Pat Flynn described during his presentation at Social Media Marketing World. Which is basically a very small group of people – 2 to 5 people, maybe a little bit more – getting together on a regular basis and kind of talking about some of the things that you’re doing.

But when you talk about Mastermind, you’re talking more of a Mastermind as a membership group. And this is where we bring, what is there, 100 members of FIre Nation Elite?

Dean: Yeah, that’s where we cap it off. We’ll be somewhere usually around 75 -100, depending on where we’re at. And John hand picks every person. Our culture is so strong, so it’s really something. Rich, you experienced it first hand. So you can see we’re not only all like-minded, but we all treat each other with great respect. We’re really nice and polite and really fun to be around. And John hand picks everybody.

Rich: Absolutely. And I got a lot out of that . So for people listening, there are different types of Mastermind type groups, yours is almost a Mastermind on steroids quite honestly. I mean, you guys do an amazing job with yours. I just want to kind of summarize some of the things that you said talking about how to make these things work.

One is setting the culture, and you guys do it by having John actually interview your potential members. Foster the culture, in terms of all the things you’re doing on a regular basis. You have regular Q&A sessions focused on a specific topic, you’ve got the hot seat where you’re kind of focusing on one person’s problems or issues or struggles. And then you’ve got the special guest. And then you feature members, every weekday you’re featuring a new member. And then you’ve also got social media proof going on where you’re working together to increase social proof of certain things, maybe Facebook, podcasts, blogs, or what have you. And of course this network of yours of 100 people is that much stronger because you’re all working together. Would you say that’s a good summarization?

Dean: It is. And we even offer more than what you listed there. We even offer more. We even had more than that but we pulled some back. We’ll test some things out, of we believe they’re going to be popular, we’ll put them out there and John and Kate and I collaborate over it ahead of time. We’re always looking for feedback from the group, constantly. I’m typically surveying the group just as I speak with them, not necessarily posting surveys within the group, to get the feedback and see what programs would be important to them.

So we have additional things as well. One that I’ll share as well that has been very, very popular is our “FNE Office Hours”. So we do that now every other week for an hour and a half. You come in and get coaching and ask the questions you want, anything else if you just want to come in and say “hi”. Whatever you want to talk about. And that is extremely popular.

Rich: That’s very cool. Now let’s talk about a couple other things that I saw when I was at the fine Mastermind. One of which is this concept of the “hot seat”. Tell us a little bit about what goes on when somebody is on that hot seat for 30 minutes.

Dean: Well, the hot seat is when we just dive right in to the main problems that they’re struggling with. And really, almost every time – and I mean 95% of the time – it has to do with not being able to monetize their business or monetize it to the level that they want to go to. And it;s mindset, really, that’s holding them back. It’s not that they don’t know how to do something, though of course there are always new techniques and things that maybe they don’t know about. But they can learn them, these are all smart people, they’re well educated and smart people, they’ve been successful throughout their career. It’s really their mindset that holds them back.

So that’s really what the hot seats are all about. Diving into big things, but then flushing it through with the mindset. So for example when we did the hot seats in San Diego during the annual meetup we had for Fire Nation Elite, the first thing we started off with was, “Give us your 30, 90 and end of year goals”. Because then that’s going to show us really their progress and where they’re looking to take their business, or lack thereof if we don’t see that. And then we’re all digging to find out why that is, or if they’re providing goals that are so weak we know that’s not going to lead to the monetization that they want. Then we want to dive in and help and go through that.

So that was kind of the first place we started. And then the next thing we jumped into was, “What’s the #1 struggle you have? What’s holding you back from whatever it is you want to accomplish in your business?” And then I wanted to know about what the monetization plan was, what’s the latest, newest monetization plan you have? We know in a business you can have one product – which is great – but then you need to have multiple projects and continue to innovate. This is what I’ve seen time and time again. And what the successful people do is you’re innovating, you’re not stale with just one product. You have additional things you’re offering, either things that compliment your flagship product or just new ideas and new things to make sure that you’re serving your customers as best you can.

So those are really the main areas we go through within the hot seat, and you’ll notice again it’s focused on having results that are going to lead to monetization. Because again, that’s the #1 struggle. Most people aren’t monetizing to the level they want to be at.

Rich: That makes a lot of sense, and I saw that time and time again in the fact that the first issue a lot of people were struggling with was that mindset issue. And I saw people who were extremely talented but not sure how to put that talent to use. And I saw other people who were extremely successful, but literally didn’t seem to be doing what they truly loved. And just by talking through this they were able to get some of the clarity they were looking for. That was kind of my takeaway.

And the other takeaway that I had, and I’d like you to comment on this, I often got more out of helping someone else or making a suggestion when somebody else was on the hot seat than when I was on the hot seat. Do you see a lot of that when you’re running these Masterminds?

Dean: I believe so, yes. I think that’s very consistent, Rich, because you just have a different paradigm shift that goes on. You’re looking for a different point of view. However I will say this though, when somebody is prepared for the hot seat they’re going to do really well and be able to be just as good that way as the other way.

But when you come in and you’re not prepared to answer what your goals are and how you’re going to get there, then that #1 struggle should be more along the lines of , “Hey, I’m stuck with trying to figure out how to do X, Y, Z.” Maybe it’s a process oriented thing or something like that. then that’s really what the #1 struggle could be, because then they could learn that or have somebody else do that for them once they understand it. But when you’re not prepared, it’s really mindset, that’s what comes up.

Rich: Alright. So what I’m hearing is, you reach out to people beforehand, you tell them what the expectation is for when they sit in the hot seat, being ready to go through all these different things that you’ve listed out; 30 day, 90 day, end of year goals, #1 struggle and how to monetize the business.

Dean: Well yeah, that’s how we did it for Fire Nation Elite’s Annual Meetup. Now John and Kate have a little bit of a different approach, because there’s different ways to come at this. But that’s the way that I like to come at it, is more of a structured approach. And where I get that from, Rich, is again with the 25 years of selling software for the tech industry and to Fortune 500 accounts, I’ve been trained to be very structured. So I can’t walk into – for example – to some type of planning session with our VP of Sales and say, “Ok, well, in the next 30 days I’m going to learn some new demo.” They’ll be like, “Ok, what are you going to do to sell in the 30 days?” It’s real detailed and specific, it’s quantified and that’s what I wanted to flush out right up front with the 30, 90 and end of year goals, because I can see if they’re wishy-washy goals.

For example, a wishy-washy goal could be like, “Well, in the next 30 days I want to have 3 blog posts up and running.” Well, ok, that’s great. But how does that lead towards helping you reach a monetization goal? Just like for me, I need to be reaching a selling goal. How am I going to achieve closing a million dollars in sales unless I list out specifically what I’m going to do. So that’s what I like to see in the 30, 90 and end of year goals is something that’s going to lead towards monetization, and what that game plan is.

So somebody might say, “For my 30 day goal I want to have 30 new leads. ANd of those 30 new leads, I hope to convert 10% of them into buying product X, Y, Z. My 90 day goal would be to close $20,000 worth of new business online because I’m going to be having a campaign around X, Y, Z product line. And by the end of the year I want to surpass x amount of income.” So that’s what I like to see, and adding that structure to it really helps people achieve it when they have that vision of what they need to do.

Rich: Alright, good stuff. I have a lot more questions, I’m sure I could have you back on the show to ask those kind of questions, but let’s wrap things up right now. Where can people find out more about you and maybe the fine Mastermind online?

Dean: Ok, so for me they can just send me an email, dean@firestarterscompany.com. I’d be happy to answer any questions they have about an online business, be it starting, running or monetizing it. They can also go to Firestarterscompany.com, and we also have a podcast as well. But they can catch me at any one of those places, and of course we’re on social media and all that good stuff.

As for Fire Nation Elite, they can sign up to get their 8-minute interview with John Lee Dumas. It used to be 15, now it’s down to 8.

Rich: He’s so efficient, that John.

Dean: Its FireNationElite.com. You’ll see there’s information there about Fire Nation Elite and you’ll see where there’s a place for you to click to sign up for your time slot with John. And the next set of members we’re going to be bringing in – we do it once a quarter – last quarter we brought in about 25 new members. So that’s going to take place later this month in April.

Rich: And I’ll just say that from my personal experience – because I’ve now been to 2 fine events – that the people that are part of this group are some of the most supportive, forward thinking, focused individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. They’re amazing. And if you do have the opportunity and you think this is going to be good for you, this is the right group to check out and you definitely want to go through the application process.

Dean: Thanks, Rich, we love everyone in Fire Nation Elite. They’re just wonderful people both personally and professionally, they’re just outstanding.

Rich: And it does get back to that whole idea of you are the average of the 5 people you hang out with the most. So if you surround yourself with a powerful networking or Mastermind group, you’re only going to take your game to the next level.

Dean: Yup, that’s a Jim Rohn statement right there. The average of the 5 people we spend the most time with.

Rich: That’s awesome. I didn’t know who it came from, but John says it all the time. Dean, I wanted to thank you for your time today and being so generous with it. Thank you again for being on the show.

Dean: Thanks, Rich, great to be here.

Show notes:

• Got a burning question for Dean? He’d love to hear from you! Email him at dean@firestarterscompany.com.
• Check out Dean’s website to learn how he’s helped guide entrepreneurs towards generating recurring revenue from their online businesses.
• Interesting in learning more about Fire Nation Elite Mastermind? Maybe you’re thinking of joining this impressive group? Check out their website – and don’t forget to apply for an interview with John Lee Dumas!

Other Stuff:

• Grab the best price ever and support the digital feed of The Agents of Change. Good only through 5/1/2015!
• Like what you heard and are desperate to know more about the host? Rich Brooks is the fearless leader of flyte new media, a web design and internet marketing agency in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder and brains behind the Agents Of Change Digital Marketing Conference. He also fancies himself a witty tweeter, follow him on Twitter at @therichbroooks.

The post How to Grow Your Business with Masterminds – @top5percentinco appeared first on .

Digital marketing is key in this day and age. But how do you translate what you and your brand really are into what your audience will find interesting and compelling? Online video may offer a solution.

Once you learn executable steps to discover your brand’s personality and market it across platforms in a way that works with the current trends of bringing stories and personality across, the possibilities are far reaching. Learning how to attract customers with effective content marketing versus just an obvious sales pitch can make all the difference.

Amy Schmittauer is the founder of Savvy Sexy Social, and has been helping brands find and show off their personalities online in order to grow awareness and increase sales as part of their social media marketing strategies.

Rich: Amy Schmittauer is the founder and face of savvysexysocial.com, a resource helping brands develop and execute a social media marketing strategy to grow awareness and increase sales by showing off their amazing personality online. You must bring your own personality.

Leading the charge in video blogging for business, Amy has grown a following that for the site has amassed more than 1 million video views and become a vital reference source to her video content market consultancy and professional speaking career.

She is a proud beagle mom, coffee addict and she shares most of her life via video and on Twitter, and I can tell you she’s also great at karaoke. Amy, welcome to the show.

Amy: Hi, Rich, that I am. I should totally add that to my bio, shouldn’t I?

Rich: I think you should. Even though we did it in a closed room, I will always have that memory burned into my brain, my ears and my eyes.

Amy: I could have gotten shy about it, but I was like, “No, I just gotta show up now, so let’s do it.”

Rich: As far as I know – I don’t think I ever told you this – I don’t think I’ve ever done karaoke before.

Amy: You hadn’t, you told me. I told everybody, “Listen to Rich, it’s his turn and he’s never done this before.”

Rich: Yeah, it was a little crazy. Anyway, before I got on the Skype with you today I was checking out your site and it’s completely video driven. How did you decide to focus on video as your main channel for marketing?

Amy: So I’ve been on YouTube for sometime long before I got into the marketing industry, but when I was making that decision to leave my job and work for myself, I knew I needed a platform to share my ideas with people who may want to work with me. I saw that there were already some really cool people out there that were eloquent writers and I thought, “You know, I could definitely blog”, but what I have that others don’t is the ability to edit a really good video.

So that was it, I decided if I’m going to differentiate myself I need to dive into video and just talk to the audience like they are already my own. And by doing that I think I was able to differentiate myself a little bit.

Rich: Alright, that makes sense. Now, we talk to a lot of small business owners and the people who market for them, and the thing that I think they feel is holding them back from doing video is it seems hard. Also, they may not be as savvy, sexy or social as you. What do you say to these people?

Amy: I say that if you pull out your handy, dandy smartphone you probably took a video recently of your dog or child doing something cute, and that’s really all this comes down to. You pull the camera out when something is happening, and when you do that, the best kind of videos happen.

We all have video, full HD video in our pocket. So that’s what I say to people. I don’t want you to come to my website and want to learn about video editing and think I’m going to tell you to go out and buy this fancy camera. I was dragging my feet kicking and screaming to buy the fancy camera because I loved proving the point that I could use this really great, little digital camera or phone or flip cam, whatever was cool at the time, to create a video to talk to my audience and it didn’t have to be this expensive venture.

This is not video production, we’re talking about content marketing, we’re talking about just having a regular connection with the audience and being able to talk about your ideas and continuing the conversation. That’s it. It’s not a sales video, it’s not for your “about” page, it’s not for a sales page. You need to think of it as this is content marketing, so really anything you have is a good tool to get started. You should just get started with what you have and prove to yourself later you need the fancy stuff.

Rich: Alright, so it’s kind of like when I was thinking about getting a bike, I ended up buying a cheap, used 10-speed just to see if I had it in me. And what you’re suggesting is people just get started rather than worry about having the perfect setup and the perfect lighting and the perfect camera.

Amy: Yeah, because most people will absolutely worry about those things. And it’s a couple of things. First of all it’s just worry about the prestige of your brand and by dumbing down the equipment your brand isn’t reflected as well on camera. That’s just not true, because there are not enough companies using video well.

The other thing is that people are just using equipment as an excuse to not get started. They go, “Oh, as soon as we have the budget and the lights and the camera and the green screen and a fancy suit, then we’ll start with video.” But those are all just excuses. If you think that you need all of those things to get started then you haven’t been paying attention to video today.

Rich: Ok, but you’re saying things like, “Just turn the camera on and start creating content”, and what does that mean to the average small business owner? Unless I have a beagle shop, am I really just going to tape my beagle and put it up to YouTube and think I’m going to make sales, or how do you kind of decide what is going to be content that is going to engage your audience and ultimately lead to sales?

Amy: Well, you certainly need a plan. I mean, we all need a content marketing plan. You’re not just going to want to publish just anything, But I think when it comes to that barrier to entry of, “When can we get started with video?”, some of it is a planning problem. And that’s fine, you should absolutely have that in place. But the other side of it is just that you’re not used to using a camera and you’re not used to doing this side of content, so it’s an excuse to not get started.

So you need both, I think you need to just turn the camera on and practice and use it and see what you can create. But you also need to have a game plan, you need to know why you’re posting what you’re posting on a regular basis, so that you won’t drop the ball or say, “Oh, we just won’t do it this week.” When you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, your call to action at the end is more clear to both you and your audience.

Rich: Ok, do you have some sort of editorial calendar that you use so you kind of stay on task and make sure that you’re creating content that your audience would find interesting or valuable?

Amy: Yes. I opted for a strict schedule every week and I just decided to post 3 videos a week – Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday – and I also have a podcast that comes out on Fridays. That’s my editorial calendar. And I’ve built in structure which is huge for making sure that you stay on task, because when you look at just one piece of content a week, you’re looking at 4 or 5 blank spots in any given month and that can still be overwhelming.

When you allow yourself to sort of structure things out and give yourself a guide to be able to fill in those blanks, it’s a lot easier to actually execute. So in my example where I have 3 episodes per week I have a structure of savvy Tuesday, sexy Wednesday and social Thursday. It can be a public structure or it can be just for you. It really doesn’t matter. But that theme tells me what i’m going to talk about that day.

So today is savvy Tuesday for me and I knew I wanted to post something that is a business tip, something business-related. So a video I did with Natalie Sisson about having freedom in business is what I posted today. Tomorrow is sexy Wednesday, so that’s going to be more about making the conversation more fun for you online. Maybe your business isn’t that fun to talk about, what can we do to make the conversation more sexy? Sometimes it’s a content tip but sometimes it’s just a design tip. Maybe there’s something like candid.com that you can be using to create some really gorgeous Facebook content, so that’s what we’ll do then. And then social Thursday is always a media tip.

So those are just the parameters that I’ve put up in place for myself that structure things out and make it so much easier when I have that idea and I know exactly where it’s going to go on the editorial calendar and the next available slot, and that makes it a lot easier to execute.

Rich: And I’ve also discover that sometimes having that structure ironically gives you more freedom. You know you have to have something done, but you also don’t have to have something done. And you just tend to stick to that schedule and it’s a lot easier.

Amy: Exactly.

Rich: So I’m listening to you, I’m totally convinced that I want to do video. What should I consider before I get started?

Amy: Well I think that’s the first thing is just what does your audience want to know. And I think people think about this to a certain extent, but not all the way through, because your immediate reaction is probably to go to a product and think, “What do they want to know about the product?” And you should just assume that they don’t know who you are or what your product is, so they don’t even know that they need it. Really just use what everyone else in the world is using, and that is Google. And that’s why YouTube is so amazing for video content because it’s owned by Google and there are people all over the world just searching for little bits of information, and maybe that’s stuff that you can help them with.

So think about what are the pain points and struggles of your audience and how are they relevant to you. Are there things you want to be know for, be an advisor or an authority in this space? Answer those questions, use that guide to build out your structure and your editorial plan.

I know that businesses come to me to know how to market themselves effectively online. So social media and video and design and all that kind of stuff is what they would want to be searching for and I want them to find me when they’re doing that.

So when you think like your audience and what they’re struggling with and googling, this helps you through the process of building out what your content plan is going to be and what you want to be known for.

Rich: That sounds very important. And so again, we’re just focusing on the customer – or our ideal customer – and answering their questions, helping them solve their problems and basically establishing us as a credible resource for them going forward.

Amy: Absolutely, yes.

Rich: Ok, so now I’ve got some ideas, maybe I’ve even created my video. What do you do to market and promote your own videos?

Amy: I go through a number of things. First and foremost is that as much as I adore YouTube, I don’t want people to live on YouTube when they are experiencing my brand. Not all the time. It’s a great place to be discovered, but if I’m asking people to go check out my content, I’m not going to send them to YouTube.com. I want them to go to savvysexysocial.com, that’s my space, that’s an environment that I can control.

So every video that I create has a corresponding blog post, which means it’s embedded in there, there’s complimentary copies so not only can I rank and search for the YouTube video itself for its own tags and description, but I also have a corresponding blog post that can rank well and search additionally. So by having that blog post, now I’m ready to promote. Because that is where I want people to go, I want people to be able to watch the video on my website where I’m also talking about my products and services.

So then I go to the social media platforms that I’ve chosen to integrate into my strategy, mostly Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And each of those has their own sort of strategy. Instagram is much more relaxed because it’s more of a personal look into my marketing lifestyle, so that’s how I treat it . I won’t really market every single video there but I will add it in the bio. And then Twitter is a completely different story. Twitter is like a newsfeed for everything good happening on the blog and in social. So I make sure that I pump out a blog post at least 4 times in a day across all these time zones in a scheduler, such as meetedgar.com or buffer.com.

Then Facebook is where I also share content as well, and then I also have an email list that is so, so important to me. When you get to my website and you’re really trying to take that next step in getting to know my brand, you might not want to buy a product right away but I do want you to join my list so that I can have a direct line of contact with you. So those people also get an update from me once a week with all the content they may have seen or may have missed on the blog that week.

Rich: That’s so important what you just said, and it’s something that it seems like almost every expert that comes on the show talks about – even if you’re a YouTube expert or a Twitter lover – that it really is about building your email list. That really is where you grow your brand. And I would argue that the inbox is probably the most expensive or most valuable property on the internet, and if people give you permission to market to them there, that’s really the best thing next to making that sale.

Amy: Yeah, it’s so funny because somebody sent me a comment once on YouTube saying, “Hey Amy, how do I email YouTube and ask them for the email addresses of all my YouTube subscribers?” And I just thought, “Aww, man!” That’s the whole thing, you’re on rented space, YouTube pays you to use it, they’re not going to give you any contact information.

So that is why it’s so critical. It’s great when you can get Facebook ‘likes’, it’s great when you can get Twitter followers, it’s great when you can get YouTube subscribers. But the bottom line is, if something were to go away and one of those things were to just crumble or be nowhere near as effective as it used to be, what are you going to do when you lose contact with those people? So really getting people to have that next step in the relationship take place where they say, “Oh yeah, I do want to make sure I get all the information from her via email.”, so signing up for an email and there’s an incentive to do that. So thats why I want you on my website while you’re watching my videos.

Rich: Alright, but if I’m not on your website and I’m checking out your videos for whatever reason – I notice you have like 22,000 subscribers or something like that – that’s a healthy number of YouTube subscribers. What are you doing to increase your number of subscribers and do you feel that that’s valuable, is that something that we should be pursuing actively?

Amy: Sure, absolutely for a couple of reasons. What’s most important and one really good reason is YouTube search. If you want to be ranked healthily in YouTube search, you want to have a decent sized channel. Not in terms of numbers, just in terms of.engagement. So as long as you have a few more subscribers just coming every day or every other day, and you have a good audience retention – which means you’re publishing regular and the people who have subscribed are watching them and they’re not leaving immediately – that’s a good, healthy channel.

So you do want the subscribers because YouTube wants to see that you are trying to grow that presence because that makes them money in order to be able to rank well in search. I would say that growing my YouTube subscribership is not a Top 2 priority for me, it’s a nice thing to have especially for search – but it’s still somewhat of a priority.

But for that I would definitely think about how can you be collaborating with the great personalities on the platform already. How do you have a similar audience? Is there something that you can do to better their audience? See if you can cross promote in some way, because that’s been the best way for me to build my YouTube subscribership is work with people that have made that their priority to have a great number of YouTube subscribers and see how I might be able to give value to their audience to get them to cross over and begin that relationship with them where they subscribe to my channel and they watch my videos and hopefully get back to the website and subscribe to the email list.

Rich: Whoa, hold it, stop right there. Alright, so I want to dig a little bit deeper there.You’re talking about partnering with people that already have a big subscriber base on YouTube. Is that what I heard?

Amy: Sure.

Rich: Walk me through the process. Say that I’m a guy with 100k subscribers, how would you approach me, what would you do to help build your own subscriber base at YouTube?

Amy: You have to remember that this is all relationship building. So anytime that I’ve ever had the opportunity to present to somebody that has 100k+ subscriber base, it’s because I’ve built a relationship with them on and offline.

First thing, you have to show somebody that you have support for their channel. Just like when you get a cold email for something, it never feels like that person has the best intentions in mind. I’ve even asked people to make a video for my channel to grow their brand. And those people have been in my comments section, they share my content with their community online on a regular basis and they just show that I support this person and their content and I think it’s good stuff.

That’s the first indication that you are somebody that’s worth at least continuing this conversation with. But from there you really do need to allow yourself the opportunity to come up with that plan of action, that actual piece of value that is even going to matter to the creator after all the work that they’ve put into getting this audience. What could you possibly say that’s going to be interesting to their audience and make it a better experience for them on this person’s channel?

I mean, that’s a big thing to ask and say, “Hey, you should have me on sometime because I can totally talk to them about X.” And you really need to do your homework, know the person’s content and know that that’s something that could be a missing piece or a missing link to what they’re already doing. That would make a great compliment to it.

Rich: Alright, so you create this content and you hand it off to them. How exactly is that you leveraging that? Are you literally asking them on their channel to create a subscribe button for my channel on there as well if people want to check out more of my stuff?

Amy: Honestly, I think that you can get into the nitty gritty all you want, but most people on YouTube who hang out there and want to know other YouTube creators are going to see a link for that person in the description, that’s fairly regular activity for any time a collaboration takes place. There’s at least a link in the description, again it will also allow you to list the cast – or whatever you want to call it.

There’s a new section at YouTube that allows you to say, like, “This person was an actor, this person was a director”, sort of like a movie. There’s a credit section where you can actually list somebody’s channel directly or even a normal url. I could put savvysexysocial.com there and llink up to somebody directly.

But we also have annotations for that, there are interactive buttons that you can put on top of a video for someone to click to learn more. Annotations may really be going out of style at this point because with YouTube cards coming out – which are similar to annotations, just a little bit more sophisticated and mobile friendly – there’s a way to call action to another video or a playlist or whatever.

I personally wouldn’t say, “Hey, make sure people subscribe to my channel.” I would rather give people a more compelling action step such as, “Hey, by the way, I did a video about this. If you want to learn more extensively, click here.” They they’re on your channel, they’ll subscribe there if they like the content, and you’re getting more views out of it.

YouTube definitely weighs views and your audience retention, which gets watched more importantly than subscribers. But subscribers are definitely a good thing to have, of course.

Rich: Alright, so basically you’ve taken all the steam out of my next 17 questions, so thank you for that. Just as a mention, this morning when I was checking you out on YouTube I happen to see – I’m also subscribed to SPI TV, Pat Flynn’s channel – and I happen to watch the other day when he was doing the interviews on the Mastermind and we were in there – so it was funny when I saw in your channel also featured the video that I had watched, and you were also featured on that video and I thought that was cool. And I wonder if that’s the cast feature that you were talking about.?

Amy: It’s actually a playlist feature. So with any YouTube channel you should kind of take it upon yourself to move things around a little bit and redesign it. How a YouTube channel comes is a little bit boring. They’ll probably do what your latest uploads are and not much else. But you have the ability to create playlists. So for me that’s really useful because I create so much content on a variety of things. If you wanted to come to me and just learn about Facebook marketing, you can go to a playlist for that, because I will put all that content on one list. When you click ‘play’ it will literally rip through all of those videos at one time, if you keep watching they’ll keep rolling.

And then they’re all that relevant piece of content that you want. So that’s what makes playlists so nice is you can organize a YouTube channel to allow somebody to take whatever route they like. So that specific playlist is just called Featuring SavvySexySocial, those are any videos I have been in on another channel that you can see there on my channel if you were to visit. It sort of gives me just some social proof that I have been featured in other content on YouTube.

Rich: Fantastic. Amy, I’m going to combine a couple questions here. Just very briefly you mentioned annotations, you mentioned cards, can you give us a 30 second version of what the new YouTube cards are and maybe why we should be paying attention to them?

Amy: Yeah, this is really important because annotations have been on YouTube for so long – really since the beginning – but creators have been so irritated with them because they’re not the prettiest thing, they’re kind of weird and they don’t work on mobile, which is so, so important because if you can do ads on mobile now you should be able to do a call to action that’s effective.

What cards allow you to do is add an annotation to a type of item, it’s just going to be designed in one way instead of a variety of ways. And it will only show up for 5 seconds and its basically just a link to whatever you put there. You can do an associated website, which means you can link to your own website. That means you have to have verified that you own that website with your channel, you can never really link outside of YouTube unless it’s to your own website if you have verified it. So I would go to YouTube.com/verify if you have not linked up your associated website. So YouTube.com/savvysexysocial is directly associated with savvysexysocial.com, that way I can link to any page on that website, but that website alone.

Pretty much anything else you’re allowed to link to outside of YouTube is a crowdfunding platform and things like that. But the cards will allow you to link to something like that or link to a video or playlist on YouTube and just as it allows you to have a little popup come up in the corner and if someone clicks on it whether they’re on mobile or a desktop, a little menu slides out and it has a thumbnail – which is new technology we’ve never had on YouTube – which is great. Because we all know when we’re linking to something, having a little preview thumbnail is really useful and it allows that to happen all in the video instead of hiding in the description. It’s a more compelling call to action directly on the content.

Rich: That is fantastic. I definitely want to check it out, I have not played around with the cards yet. I definitely played around with the annotations over the years. How are you monetizing your videos.

Amy: So there’s a number of different ways. The content of course, the initial strategy was just to build my own consulting business, so that was piece number one. People are finding my videos there, reading and watching the stuff on my sight and thinking I know what I’m talking about and they want to hire me and work with me. So that’s one piece of it.

I also have online products that if you go to the website and you’re like, “Man, I really wish I knew how Amy was editing these videos because they’re very good.”, you can find a product in there that you can purchase for that. So that’s another monetization tactic.

YouTube, of course, also allows you to monetize your videos on their platform which is by having a Google Adsense account. So depending on your CPM and the number of views you have you can make a little bit of money there. But, it’s not that significant, especially if you don’t have hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

I definitely make a small amount of money from Google Adsense and it’s a regular amount of money. But when you only have 28k subscribers on YouTube and roughly 1,200-3000 on a really, really good week views per video, it’s just not going to pay the bills. So you have to keep that in mind and you really shouldn’t depend on the Google Adsense.

And then of course there’s really any monetization opportunity if you’re working with sponsors or affiliate opportunities, video is a way to deliver making those calls to action happen. So as much as you can open your mind to the opportunities of monetizing your business, then video can help you do that.

Rich: That’s some great advice. I just want to throw in a point on your previous answer about the associated websites and how you can only inke to them and a fundraising site. So, one way that I’ve gotten around that in the past is when I just use the ‘pretty link’ feature in WordPress.

Amy: Yes! I really hope that they don’t pick up on that and then start banning people, because I’ve been doing that, too.

Rich: Ok, good. Then you’ve never heard this, YouTube, if you see this.

Amy: I really hope they don’t find out about pretty link, because that’s a pretty nice hack.

Rich: Amy, I had so many other questions for you today, because I went through some of your videos and I want my listeners to know that there’s so many great videos that Amy has put up with aspects of social media and some hacks. For example, I just found out today how easy it is to stream your iPhone video to your screencast of your iPhone. So stuff like that, there’s so much great resources. There are a lot of questions I want to ask that we didn’t get to today that we just didn’t have time for, we’ll have to bring you back another time.

So for people who are super excited now about all this stuff with YouTube and video marketing, where do you want to send them?

Amy: Everything is available at savvysexysocial.com. I will say that if you did want to get a little bit more technical and learn about some equipment stuff, there’s a resources page that you’ll find very useful, with the camera and lighting and stuff I’m using.

And I’m really excited to be spending a day in New York and Orlando coming up at the end of this month for Savvy Sexy Social Live, where we get business owners in a room to create a video content strategy and content in the same day that you’re ready to execute on your own.

Rich: Alright, and as always, we’re going to have links to all of the kinks that Amy shared with us, and also a full transcript of the entire podcast. So you can listen and read along as you like, That’s all over at The Marketing Agents website.

Amy, thank you very much for your time today, it’s always a pleasure chatting with you.

Amy: Thank you, Rich, I had fun with you in San Diego and I’ll come back any time.

Show Notes:

• Check out everything savvy, sexy and social that Amy is doing over at her website.
• Using a scheduler to send social media updates is one of Amy’s helpful tips. Consider trying one of these:
  • Meet Edgar
  • Buffer
• Head on over to the resources page on Amy’s website to get more info about the equipment she uses and chat with her about that.
• Planning to be in New York or Orlando at the end of April. Check out Amy’s Savvy Sexy Social Live events.
• Transcription for this podcast provided by Jennifer Scholz Transcription Services.

Other Stuff:

• Check out 1 Day Business Breakthrough with Pat Flynn & Chris Ducker
• Like what you heard and are desperate to know more about the host? Rich Brooks is the fearless leader of flyte new media, a web design and internet marketing agency in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder and brains behind the Agents Of Change Digital Marketing Conference. He also fancies himself a witty tweeter, follow him on Twitter at @therichbroooks.

The post How to Market Your Business on YouTube – @schmittastic appeared first on .

At least once on our lives we’ve all found ourselves in a forum or other type of online group in an effort to search for other like minded business owners hoping to share ideas and experiences that you can use to grow your own business. But have you ever considered starting your own group?

The idea may seem daunting. There are so many platform choices to consider – Facebook, LinkedIn, a straight up forum, just to name a few. And how do you ensure you have enough interested people to make up an audience? How can you continue to engage and keep your members interested? Do you need a moderator for the group?

Kate Erickson is the content and community leader for Entrepreneur On Fire. Her passion and talent for creating engagement and participation within the community has helped make their forums and business pages wildly popular and successful in their niche.

Rich: Kate Erickson is the content and community leader over at Entrepreneur On Fire, a 7 day a week podcast that interviews today’s most inspiring and successful entrepreneurs. She is the host of, Kate’s Take, the Entrepreneur On Fire audio blog, and author of The Fire Path, a step by step guide creating and growing your dream business – which I’m in the middle of listening to right now.

Kate is passionate about helping entrepreneurs create systems and processes to promote efficiency and bring clarity to their journey. She’s also an amazing hostess. Kate, welcome to the show.

Kate: Rich, thank you so much, I’m super stoked to be here.

Rich: Great. Well let’s get into it because I know you and I were talking at Social Media Marketing World and I got super excited about what you were doing and I had some questions. So that’s what led us to this point.

So you describe yourself as a content and community leader. What do you do exactly?

Kate: That’s such a big question but I love taking it on because I always enjoy myself kind of thinking about the stuff that I work on, because I’m super passionate about everything that I work on. Ok, that’s a lie. Not everything. But I am kind of the “catchall” at Entrepreneur On Fire and I manage our VA’s as well, so some of the stuff is not my favorite.

So, content and community leader. Basically on the content side I author our blog so I create all the content that you see on the website. And blurbs or things that you see on different pages like our resources page or our about page, I helped craft that. I do a lot of our email campaigns, so any email marketing that we’re doing, I’m typically the one writing those emails.

And then as community leader, I’m really the one that’s managing the engagement and participation in our community. So Podcaster’s Paradise, Webinar On Fire and Fire Nation Elite. It was so awesome spending some time with you and Fire Nation Elite this past couple weeks.

I’m basically the head of engagement. We have Facebook groups for each one of our communities and then we also have membership sites, so I’m really the one creating the content and putting those memberships together as well.

Rich: Alright, so you mentioned 3 different products, or services, that Entrepreneur offers. One was Podcaster’s Paradise, another was Fire Nation Elite, and what was the third one?

Kate: Webinar On Fire.

Rich: Webinar On Fire. Ok, so you’ve created a Facebook group for each one of these, correct?

Kate: Yes.

Rich: So why did you choose Facebook group as opposed to any other type of group or creating your own platform or whatever you might do?

Kate: We actually did try to do a forum and we thought it would be pretty cool to keep everything in one space. So on our membership site we actually did a forum and we just found that everybody ended up in the Facebook groups. So as hard as we were trying to get people to engage and to participate in the forum, everybody ended up on Facebook anyways.

So we kind of took a poll and we thought instead of kind of segmenting these groups of people – those who like to hang out on the forum versus those that like to hang out on Facebook – let’s take a vote, majority rules, and we’re going to get rid of one of them. We’re either going to get rid of the forum or we’re going to get rid of the Facebook group. Overwhelming votes for Facebook because everybody’s already there, it’s so much easier for people to just be on Facebook. They were used to it, it was familiar to them, they’re already there for personal reasons, so why not just have our group there as well.

Now, when we started Podcaster’s Paradise, we thought Facebook can be kind of beastly because you get in a group and you start posting and that feed moves really fast. So if you’re in a group and you post a question and nobody answers it and there are other posts being posted, you’re going to get pushed down pretty fast and so that was a huge vote for a lot of people to stick with a forum. You know exactly where to go to pick up that question or get that information that you had requested.

So when we launched Podcaster’s Paradise, we actually only did a forum, we did not open a Facebook group. We thought if people only had one option we wouldn’t have this trouble that we had with Fire Nation Elite, where people were being segmented.

Well, soon enough, people were like, “Why don’t you have a Facebook group? I just want to communicate with the community here on Facebook.” So kind of the same thing happened over again. We listened to our community and let the community rule on that and we created a Facebook group and we got rid of the forum.

Rich: Wow, alright. So you listened to your audience and you created it. And do you think that it was because of the audience you had that they opted for a Facebook group over a LinkedIn group, or did you not even give them the option and just said it’s either the forum or the Facebook group?

Kate: Yeah, we never really asked people about LinkedIn just because nobody ever mentioned it and we have an Entrepreneur On Fire page group on LinkedIn but we’ve never really seen it catch fire – so to speak – and so it was never really a thought that maybe we would have a group on LinkedIn. I can certainly see if that’s where your audience hangs out at that that might be a really great option for you, but in my experience I’ve never really got a group on LinkedIn to really take off.

Rich: Alright, so that’s good to know. And maybe certain industries might find that that’s different for them. But it sounds like, for you, that Facebook is really where people are communicating – they’re used to communicating there – so it’s easier to be on the Facebook group. Are there any features in the Facebook group that you think are very powerful for communities, and is there anything missing that would help you do your job better as a community leader?

Kate: What’s really great about Facebook groups is you can choose the privacy level of it, so you can just create a group for your community. Like, Rich, you could have a flyte Facebook group and it could be anybody and everyone who follows flyte. Or you could have a Facebook community for The Marketing Agents and anybody who listens to your podcast can be a part of that group. So that would just be an open group where anybody and anyone who is interested in your content is welcome.

Then you can also have a closed group which gives you a little bit more privacy to where you are in charge of who gets let into that group. So that’s pretty powerful that you can segment it in open and closed. And there’s even a whole other level called “secret groups”, where people can’t even search you. They can’t even search your group on Facebook, so if you had a really high level Mastermind or paid community where people are really sensitive about the group being seen or their names being seen as associated with the group, then that secret group will do that for you.

So what we’ve done with all of our Facebook groups for all 3 communities is we do closed.So it is searchable, people can find it in Facebook, but they have to request to join. So that allows us to only let in members who are actual paying members of our communities. So that’s been huge just in managing that side of it.

Another thing that’s great that I think a lot of people don’t know about Facebook groups – and it’s almost the #1 thing I hear all the time – is people wish they could more easily find information in the Facebook group. If you went into one of our groups you might notice that somebody might post a question one day, and then 2 days later somebody will be asking that exact same question. What I don’t think a lot of people know about Facebook groups is they’re a really powerful search function. It’s just in the upper right corner, you can search keywords, you can search certain users to see which users are either really engaged or not engaged at all. So I think that’s a really powerful function as well.

Rich: I’ve actually seen the same problem, however, even in forums. I’ve been moderator in forums and certainly a participant in forums, and somebody asks a question and 3 days later they ask almost the exact same question. Sometimes that just comes down to user error and we just want to get our questions asked rather than find out if the question has already been answered.

Kate: I definitely agree. What’s the answer to that? Because I’ve tried to encourage people so much to search first. And I’ve been on sites before, too, where the say, “Have a question,? Search our forum first.” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t want to search your forum, I just want an answer to my question.”

Rich: Exactly. Sometimes I’ve seen good forums will have tools that will move people or close one thread to link to another or something like that. So anyways, getting back to some of the Facebook groups. It’s interesting, I actually think there might be a benefit – I don’t know if this is intentional for you – but when I was in one of my groups actually, one for Maine Podcasters where we just talk about different topics over the course of the day, I happen to see Webinar On Fire which was recommended to me because of all of the people I know in the group. So I click on the link to join and I got an email from one of your VA’s saying, “I don’t see you actually are a member.” And I didn’t realize if there were maybe some quasi advertising opportunities for you as well, because you’re basically getting free publicity for one of your paid groups by keeping it closed and not secret..

Kate: That’s interesting. Yeah, definitely. It was certainly something that we thought about. If people can search and see that the group exists, especially for Webinar On Fire and Podcaster’s Paradise, there’s probably a lot of people searching webinars and podcasts in the search function in Facebook. If one of our groups happens to pop up and that’s the way that somebody learns about it, then yeah, absolutely that’s almost free advertising for us I suppose.

Rich: Absolutely. So I’ve seen a lot of groups start really strong out of the gate and then they falter. What have you done to keep the strong engagement going for your 3 Facebook groups?

Kate: I think setting expectations is a big thing. You don’t ever want to start a group and let your community come to expect that you’re the one running the conversation. I know that a lot of people do start groups and they do want to lead the conversation and manage the conversation, but that’s never how John (Lee Dumas) and I started any of our groups, it was always like this was a group for our community to help one another out and we expect from you guys that you’re going to be in here not only asking questions and getting support for yourself, but providing that to the other members here. Thats why we created this group.

We didn’t create this group so that you can come in and ask questions and then leave, we didn’t create this group so that you guys could directly ask John and I questions 24/7, we created this group to help support one another. One of our leading missions with Fire Nation Elite was 100% support, 100% of the time. So we really set strong expectations in all of our groups from the very beginning that this is a platform for all of us to be helping one another. So if you jump in the Facebook group and somebody has a question that you know the answer to, get on there and give them the advice or the experience that you’ve had, and they’re going to reciprocate that in the future when you have a question.

So I think that’s definitely been very powerful for us We also have strong guidelines, so people know that our groups are not a place for them to promote their own products or services. They’re not a place for them to just be takers and never be givers. We’re very, very up front with people that when you join one of our communities you will give back what you put in. And so if you’re not going to be participating then you’re not going to get a lot from our groups.

Also to continue the engagement we have had – and Webinar of Fire is our smallest group at about 300-400 – and sometimes the conversation does die down, so to really keep the engagement going and keep people involved, we’ll post questions like, “What’s really working for your webinar now?”, because people love to share what’s working for them or what they’ve learned. But not often are they just going to go out and just post that themselves as an update in the group. If you ask the question, then people are going to be more than happy to share. And that’s been a great conversation starter and an ongoing engagement piece for us.

Rich: So basically just to recap what you’re saying, if I’m looking to continue the engagement after the initial push, I want to be setting expectations about people’s behavior and what we expect out of them, give as much as you get. Also we want to get people to share some of their wins or struggles and sometimes that requires us asking them questions. And also it sounds like you’re taking advantage of the pinning tool and that you’re able to pin one of the questions up to the top as a way of starting a conversation or a thread.

Kate: Yeah, definitely. Great recap. You really hit everything that I said very well.

Rich: Good, I;m glad I got a plus. Now I’m going to get a minus because I realized that I kind of ask questions a little out of order in terms of how to do all this. Because we talked about setting up the groups and we talked about maybe choosing a privacy setting based on what your business or community goals might be. One thing you mentioned earlier and I just had one kind of quick question when you said, for example, that we could start a group around flyte new media or The Marketing Agents or Agents Of Change. One of the requests that I’ve gotten a lot more is, “Why do Agents Of Change happen once a year? I’d rather have this ongoing conversation around some of these topics.” And quite honestly I had been thinking more about a LinkedIn group than a Facebook group, but after talking to you I’m much more excited about making this a Facebook group.

My only question for whether it’s flyte or AOC is, am I diluting my brand by having a business page and a group? How do you manage those 2 separate things and not confuse people and not overwhelm yourself with all the things you have to do?

Kate: I kind of think there’s a boom on Facebook for groups right now because of how much Facebook has stripped away from you in terms of your business page. So I’m sure you’ve realized recently that your posts aren’t getting viewed as much, you’re not reaching as many people. So regardless of if you have 200 ’likes’ or 20,000 ‘likes’ on your business Facebook page, that’s not always equalling that you’re reaching more people with your posts there. So I think what people are finding out is if they start a group, you’re going to be able to reach every single member in there every single time you post. Whereas on your business page, Facebook is kind of determining who it is that you reach. Does that make sense?

Rich: It does. And also, Entrepreneur On Fire is basically the umbrella group and the podcast, and that is the business page, but it’s really these 3 membership groups that have the Facebook groups, so that;s a slightly different thing for you. And maybe that comes down to some of what we’re talking about too, is you need the business page but at the same time if you’re creating some sort of paid membership or just an assumed membership, is that Facebook groups may provide better value for you.

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. And to your point on managing both, I’m a big fan of having a moderator. So have somebody that’s at least in there kind of checking in for you. What John and I do in our community groups is we set aside a very specific time every single morning to hop into the group. It’s one of those things that John says is really easy to do, but also easy to not do. So if you set aside that time to just jump in a Facebook group for just 5 minutes, scroll the feed, answer any questions that you can and provide the support that you’ve promised your community. You’re in and out in 15 minutes, everybody has 15 minutes.

Rich: That’s a good point. So let’s say that we decide whether we’ve got our own Facebook business page or not, that we just don’t have the bandwidth to start our own group. Or maybe we’re concerned that we don’t have the audience right now to start our own group. Can we leverage other people’s groups as a way of building our own community?

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. I certainly think that you can leverage other people’s groups as a way to start building relationships with people who might want to be a part of your community, or who might already be a part of your community and would be really stoked to see you in a group engaging and participating. I mean, how cool would it be for you to be in a group and then have somebody that you look up to hop in that group and start engaging and participating? That would be really, really awesome. It would make me want to figure what they have going on so that I can jump into whatever group they’re managing.

So I definitely think that it’s a good starter if you don’t have the bandwidth or you’re not just feeling quite ready to start your own Facebook group. To start searching in Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever platform is best for you, start searching for those groups that are within your industry or your niche where you might start meeting your target audience or you might start meeting other industry leaders in your niche that you can start communicating with, building relationships with. I mean, it’s a great, great connector.

Rich: Well it sounds like we should join other groups whether it’s because we don’t have the bandwidth to run our own group or it’s because we run our own group so we’ve got a little extra time and this is a good way of building up an audience for our own. Not necessarily by going out and pitching people and trying to steal people away, but just by increasing our visibility – in this case on Facebook – we’re more likely to attract people who want to check out the other things we’re doing on Facebook.

Kate: Yeah, I think visibility is a perfect word for it. You’re putting yourself out there so that people know about you and if you don’t do that, then chances are they may never find out about you.

Rich: Now Kate, I know that your 3 groups are membership based. I know thaut at some time or another I’m guessing that you must have run into a bad apple or two or have just had to talk to somebody in the group about behavior that other people in the group see as negative. How have you dealt with that and what kind of actions did you need to take/

Kate: It’s definitely a tough situation because you hate to see that happen in any of your groups, of course, and it’s definitely not something that anybody would wish upon their group. But we have had people that talked not so favorably about some other products and services, or maybe they’ve just gotten a little out of control in the group. We contact them individually and we’ve actually asked people to leave the community as a result.

We’re very serious about protecting the other people, we’re very serious about the quality of support that we’re providing in there, and if someone is going to be in there just to badmouth people and to be negative and not be providing value or support in any way, shape or form, then our community isn’t right for them. So we’ve reached out to them, we’ve had individual conversations with them and it has before resulted in us asking somebody to leave the group.

Rich: Alright. Of course it is unfortunate to have to deal with those kinds of people and I wish we could all just get along. But lets now flip that question around. I know that I’ve seen you guys have – for lack of a better phrase – “super fans”. Do you have any kind of specific ways of identifying and elevating super fans within your groups?

Kate: We definitely love doing random pins of people. We talked about the pinning function in the group before, and I think people really appreciate being recognized in that way. So if we have super fans or just really great community members doing cool things in our group – if they post a win or an offer to help other people out – we’ll pin that to the top of the group. And we get really great feedback from that. People really appreciate being recognized in that way.

We also have a weekly digest that we send out via email for Podcaster’s Paradise. So if we see our members are doing cool things or they just had a big win, like a couple of our podcasters were nominated for the podcaster award at New Media Expo, so we feature them in our newsletters. So we’ll do stuff like that where they kind of feel like they’re being recognized for their achievements that they’re doing.

Rich: Very cool. So I guess the other question is, so this is all going on within Facebook groups and all of your groups are based on paid memberships, do you have anything different that you do or have done in the past if it’s not a paid membership and you’re just looking to build a group’s momentum?

Kate: I think just the idea that you really want to let people feel as though they’re a part of something. Thats what people want to have, they want to know that they’re around like minded people, they want to know that other people are going through the same struggles as them. They want to have a place where they can share their wins and get excited about stuff. A lot of people in the online space, they don’t have that kind of support with their family or with their friends, so you can create a group where you’re truly letting your members feel as though they’re a part of something or a part of a community, then I think that’s going to go along ways and people continue to engage and are continuing to market as something important for them to do every single day.

And with an open group, I just think it’s really, uber important to focus on those guidelines and really lay down the law and let people know you’re serious about the guidelines.

Rich: Alright. And are you doing any sort of cross promotion either on Facebook or on other social platforms to raise the awareness of these groups, or is it different for you because all 3 of these are attached to a paid membership?

Kate: Yeah, I think it’s a bit different for us since it’s paid. We definitely use that in our sales marketing for our communities, talking about the fact that we have a private Facebook group. I think that’s a huge plus in terms of you telling people what it is that your community has to offer. But if it wasn’t a paid group and it was just for our overarching community, I would definitely cross promote. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Catching people on different social platforms, certainly on your website if you have a link that says, “Come over and join us in our Facebook community.” I think that’s a great idea.

Rich: That is pretty cool. Actually, I was just wondering – and you may not know the answer to this – obviously there are Facebook ‘like’ boxes that you can include on your website. Do you know if there’s one for groups?

Kate: I’ve never seen that before. It would be pretty cool if there was though. Maybe there is.

Rich: Alright Mark Zuckerberg, I know you’re listening. Kate, this has been awesome. I know that a lot of people who have been listening to this who may not yet know about all your groups and all your services, where can we learn more about both the products and services that you guys offer, as well as you, yourself?

Kate: You can find out everything over on EOFire.com. Our products and services, our blog, our podcast, all the free courses that we offer, I’d love for you to check it.

Rich: Very cool. And of course as always we’ll have everything, all the links Kate showed and the full transcript for today’s show over at The Marketing Agents Podcast shownotes. Be sure to check them out

Kate, thank you so much for your time. It’s always awesome talking to you.

Kate: Rich, thank you, I had a blast.

Show Notes:

• Go to the Entrepreneur On Fire website to check out the blog, podcast, free online courses, products and services.
• Check out Kate’s audio blog.
• Read Kate’s book for a step by step guide to creating and growing your dream business.
• Entrepreneur On Fire also offers 3 online community groups to help you learn how to grow your business: Podcaster’s Paradise, Webinar On Fire and Fire Nation Elite.
• Are you a podcaster or an aspiring podcaster that lives in Maine? Check out Rich’s Facebook group to learn and share information and experiences with podcasting.
• Transcription for this podcast provided by Jennifer Scholz Transcription Services.

Other Stuff:

• Check out 1 Day Business Breakthrough with Pat Flynn & Chris Ducker
• Like what you heard and are desperate to know more about the host? Rich Brooks is the fearless leader of flyte new media, a web design and internet marketing agency in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder and brains behind the Agents Of Change Digital Marketing Conference. He also fancies himself a witty tweeter, follow him on Twitter at @therichbroooks.

The post How to Run a Successful Facebook Group – @katelerickson appeared first on .

Whether you’re a veteran blogger or new to the world of blogging, the same goals apply: find, reach and engage your readers, and turn them into eventual customers. You achieve this success by building your readership and email lists, for starters. But how exactly do we do that?

The Marketing Agents Podcast host, Rich Brooks, reaches into the mailbag to discuss vital aspects of blogging including; creating value for your audience, keyword research, consistency, guest blogging, promotion using various social media platforms, as well as weighing in on how much value we should really be putting on blog comments.

Howdy everyone! This is Rich Brooks and you’re listening to episode 92 of The Marketing Agents Podcast. We are less than 2 months away from episode 100 and we’re planning a doozie for the triple digits.

This episode is all about blogging, we’re going back to the mailbag and answering your questions about blogs. We’ve got questions about just getting started, about getting comments, about the importance of blogging if you’re a local company. If you have a blog or if you’ve been considering one, this is going to be a great episode for you.

So this episode is another mailbag episode where I answer your questions, so there’s no special guest star this week, no other expert that we’re going to be interviewing. It’s interesting, I was looking through my Libsyn stats the other day – Libsyn is the company that I use to host my podcast – and I was a little surprised that the mailbag episode that I did a couple months ago was one of the most downloaded episodes in that time period. And I guess I just found that surprising because the only person out there promoting these episodes is me.

I mean, if I’m interviewing somebody else, very often they’ll push out a few tweets for me or mention it to their audience and we pull in a few new people. And there’s more to promote when I’m talking to somebody else, it’s a little more exciting, and for the mailbag episodes I’m basically more or less talking to myself. I’m taking emails that I received from you guys and reading them on air and trying to answer them the best I can.

So I was surprised that so many of you actually downloaded that episode, so I figured I’d do it again. And if you have any questions, if you listen to this podcast that spurs some question that you have – and it doesn‘t even have to be about blogging – anything under the digital marketing umbrella, send me an email. You can ask me on Twitter, you can use the contact form, you can use the show notes, whatever it is just feel free to reach out.

Alright, let’s go to the first question of the day. This first email comes from “Sarah” who asks:

“I’ve never blogged before and I’m just getting started, what are some ways in which I can build my readership?”

That’s a great question and everybody has to start somewhere when it comes to blogging. Everybody started their first blog at some point with no readership, no built in audience, nothing. You’re in a place that a lot of us have been familiar with.

I guess the first thing that I would say is make sure that you’re providing value for your audience. Remember that if this is a business blog, you’re not blogging for yourself, you’re blogging for your audience. So when I talk about creating value for your audience, I’m also talking about knowing the kind of questions that your audience has and the problems that they struggle with. And this comes down to doing some keyword research.

Now I’ve said this before, long before I was a social media guy I was a search engine optimization guy. And I still am. I still think that it’s critically important to do some simple keyword or market research into what your audience is struggling with. Chances are you don’t mention here what your business is, but chances are you’ve been in business long enough that you know some of the problems that your customers are dealing with, they’ve asked you these things before.

I would recommend taking some of those keywords that are part of their questions and the words that keep on repeating and dropping them into a tool like Keyword Planner or Google Trends, both of those are free tools from Google. The first one is part of Google’s Adwords platform, but it is free once you register for it. And the other one is just a free, available tool at Google Trends.

I find that taking some of your best keyword phrases that you want to blog about, and trying different variations using both of those tools, with help you find out what are the real words that people are searching for and what has the highest search volume. And chances are, more often than not, you’re going to want to target those phrases that are appropriate and have a higher search volume. Because that’s going to bring a lot of traffic to your website. When you first start off, search engines may be one of your best referers for new traffic. So that’s something that you always want to keep in mind when you’re creating your blog post.

I also think that you should be consistent, and that having some sort of editorial calendar can help you. It doesn’t need to be anything too extreme, there are certainly some great programs out there. I just use a simple Excel spreadsheet. In fact, what I’ll do in the show notes is leave a link where you can download our editorial calendar template. It will be blank and you can just use this yourself and hopefully that will kind of help you plan out the weeks and months ahead. And what I find is nice about that is a lot of people feel they have to write so much, an editorial calendar tells you when things are due, but also gives you the freedom to blog or write on a certain day.

You should also be promoting any new blog posts you have through your personal social channels. So if you are just getting started with blogging, maybe you have a business page for Facebook or an audience on Twitter, or maybe you don’t and you’re just getting started with everything. This is where leveraging your own, personal profiles can be really helpful. I still do this to this day. So if I have a new blogpost for flyte or The Marketing Agents, I’m certainly going to promote it through any business pages I have on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, but I’m definitely going to promote it through my personal account as well, which tends to have a little more engagement level. So I would definitely leverage any social channels you’ve already built up.

Also, get people on your email list as soon as possible. As soon as they get to the website i would use things like create lead magnets, things they’ll want to download that require email registration so they get on your email list, using some sort of pop up box or light box where the screen goes gray and there’s a little box that says something like, “Get all this great advice for free delivered right to your inbox.” Those things can seem annoying but are hugely effective at building your list. Depending on what you’re doing, offering discounts in the store through email.

Just yesterday I was buying a book and they were obviously looking for people to join their email list as they were registering for an account. But the way that they phrased it with a little check box, “Yes, send me discounts on future books.” And I know what they’re doing, they’re just getting me on the list. But the way they phrased it was so gentle that of course why wouldn’t I want to get alerts about discounts on future books. So find a way of phrasing that in a similar way or a way that works for you to continually build your list.

The reason why you want to build your list is it’s tough enough to get people to visit your website or your blog once, it’s almost impossible that they’re going to find you time and time again. So you want to get access to the most valuable property on the internet, which is somebody’s inbox, and they’re giving you permission to let them know when a new blog post goes live.

I guess my last tip for you is guest blogging. Find blogs that have similar audiences and offer to guest blog there. There are a lot of different ways that you can find guest blogging opportunities. Once simple way is just Google the phrase “guest blog + (whatever your industry is)”. So if you are a juggler, you would say something like “guest blog + juggling”, and you’ll find all the juggling blogs out there that are looking for guest bloggers. They’ll be open to your type of content, you can create valuable content for them, and then link it back to your website or blog. You don’t want to create the same blog post, but what you can do is basically create a an inverse or mirror version of something. So if you had a blog post for “Five Things To Never Do During A Juggling Performance”, you might write a very similar post but just reverse it. Something like, “Five Ways To Keep Kids Entertained At Your Next Juggling Party”.

By using some of those techniques: providing value, being consistent, by promoting new blog posts through your personal social channels, by building your email list and by guest blogging you should quickly grow your readership and subscriberbase at your blog.

Ok, our second email today from the mailbag comes from James. James asks: “Is it a good idea for a local jeweler to have a blog?”

Yeah, I think it’s a great idea for a local jeweler to have a blog. And just to kind of expand this, I think most small businesses should consider a blog, even if you’re local. It’s an interesting thing that I hear time and again from people, “Well, I don’t know if I want people all over the world finding my website or blog. I’m really just focused on my local community.” I never really understood that.

I mean, yes, if you’re only selling to your local community that should be your priority. But I’ve never really been upset that people from other places over the world find my content interesting and might get some value out of it. Now let’s assume that most jewelers – that I know of, at least – tend to do all of their business locally. I know that there are some people that will ship anywhere in the world, but most of the business is local business for jewelers. So let’s focus on this question as if it was about the benefits of a blog for local, small business.

One of the things that having a blog does is offers you a lot of search engine optimization opportunities, and it also becomes a hub for your social media. So no matter what you’re doing out there in social media, you can always drive people back to your hub. Remember that with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you don’t own those platforms. You are basically building up an audience or building up a house on somebody else’s property. So ultimately you want to lead people back to your website, and since a blog tends to be more social than a static website, you definitely want to consider the blog as the hub of your social media activity.

Now you can also use your blog to increase both your online visibility and also your local credibility. ANd to do that you can create a lot of blog posts that are very geo-specific. So again, if I all of a sudden found myself owning a jewelry shop and I tried to promote it, one of the things that I might do is write a blog post called something like, “Five Romantic Places In Portland, Maine To Propose”. Because I want to find those people who are getting ready to pop the questions, these are the people who might be looking for a ring. I might also create more blog posts specific to what you need to know when you’re buying an engagement ring or how to choose a perfect ring for that person you love, or should you take your fiancee shopping with you. I’d have a lot of those kinds of things, but I would definitely try to create those very geo-specific questions in my blog post to help me with some of the local search issues that might be going on.

And then, of course, within the post I’d be taking words that were Portland, Maine (for this example) related to that and I’d be linking to specific pages on my website to help increase the search engine visibility and giving those search engines a little bit more of a hint that if someone’s looking for a local jeweler that they should be looking at my website as one of the contenders.

Another blog post I might write is think about different times in people’s lives when they’re likely to buy jewelry, so you might create something like, “The Best Restaurants In Portland, Maine For Anniversaries”, and just any of those kinds of content where I’m creating it and pulling people in who are looking for that kind of information and value, that they see this is a local jeweler who’s really trying to help them out whether or not they buy something from them. Of course, they’re already there at your website so they’re more likely to consider you and it just increases your value to them.

Now remember as you’re creating these blog posts – like any small business owner, you’re super busy – remember that these can be repurposed, repackaged and promoted through many of your social media channels. When you have a new blog post you can promote it through Facebook, you can promote it as a tweet, as a LinkedIn update, you can take a bunch of photos from your blog post and turn them into Instagram posts. There’s a lot of different ways in which you can repackage this, but also promote it at the different social channels to drive traffic back to that blog.

As I mentioned before in the previous answer, always be using your blog to build your email list. You want to get people on your email list. Now people may not want to hear from a jeweler every week with new content, but maybe every month. Or, if you do estate jewelry – like a lot of jewelers do – people are often looking for buys and so maybe one of the things you want to do is create some content around what you need to know to buy or sell estate jewelry.

And then for the people who are interested in that, chances are they would love to get on an email list where you tell people about what’s just come into your shop before you tell anyone else. So you could promote it somewhere on the blog – in a lightbox or side panel – maybe it’s a call to action from one of these estate jewelry blog posts that you’ve created. Something along the lines of, “If you’re looking to buy or sell estate jewelry and want to get a sneak preview of what’s coming to our store, make sure you join our mailing list. We let you know there a week before we make it available to the public so you’ll always have first dibs, just make sure that you sign up for our email newsletter.”

And as I’ve said before, email is the most important tool when it comes to your marketing, your sales, your conversion. So definitely be looking to get people onto your mailing list.

So is it a good idea for a local jeweler to have a blog? Absolutely. I know it takes time, I know it takes effort, but you’ve got some great product there and some great stories to tell. It doesn’t just have to be focused to local, you can tell “success stories”, maybe feature a bride and groom who came to your store or promote somebody’s anniversary or something. The more you can promote the fact that you are a part of the community, the more successful you’ll be.

Our last question of the day comes from Martin. Martin says: “I’ve been blogging for a while, while I have decent traffic, I’m not getting much in the way of comments. How can I get more comments at my blog?”

One of the things that I’ve realized over the years is that in certain industries certain blogs get more comments. If comments are your main concern, I would strongly recommend that you stop blogging about whatever you’re doing, and blog about celebrities or religion. I guarantee you that you will get a lot of comments at your blog. However, that’s probably not good business advice.

What I’ve told many other small business owners and marketers who have come to me over the years complaining that they don’t get a lot of comments, I say to them, “Comments aren’t clients. Comments aren’t customers. Comments don’t actually pay the bills.” So I would not make getting comments my #1 concern. In fact, it seems like more and more popular bloggers – at least in my industry – are moving away from having comments on their site.

Chris Brogan recently stopped allowing comments on his website, citing the fact that most conversations were going on in social media these days anyway. So for him, comments seemed redundant. I believe copyblogger stopped taking comments, and Seth Godin has never taken comments on his blog.

It used to be that comments were a requirement for a blog, but these days I’m just not convinced that is. My day job, flyte new media, when building websites with blogs for clients we now ask the clients if they want to have comments with their blogs. It used to just be a forgone conclusion that we would do this for them because of the additional work that a lot of people have because of comment spam or because they’re not getting the kind of comments they want or they don’t have the time or bandwidth to actually deal with them. Comments have become something that is optional when it comes to your blog.

Now if you say, “Ok Rich, that’s great, but I am still interested in having a robust, engaged community and having comments on my blog. So what do I do?” I can tell you some of the things that tend to work. One of those things is, just ask people. Ask people as you close out a blog post, “Hey, what do you think? What’s your experience? Tell me one specific thing about X that you’ve learned from Y.” Something along those lines can certainly help.

I also find that a lot of people don’t want to be the first person to comment. So it might be that you reach out to a friend/colleague/confident and ask if they’d mind leaving a comment just to get the ball started. I often find that you need to seed a forum to get things started, so that’s certainly a possibility. Of course I would never publicly recommend this, but in a pinch if there’s nobody you can ask, consider creating a second persona and going in and leave a comment as well.

You can also incentivize. I’ve seen people who give away a book or something for the best comment. I’ve seen people give away tickets to an event. That can work short term, it doesn’t always have a long term effect. But if you want to get a lot of comments around a certain blog post, you can certainly try that.

One of the things that you can do to build community is respond to commenters quickly. Be aware when people do leave a comment – this is something I learned from Social Media Examiner – when I’ve guest blogged for them, one of the things they request is that you’re around during the day and that you check back to make sure that when somebody leaves a comment that you’re responding and engaging the community. And that can have a really good effect.

What you may find is that you have some people who are commenting all the time. Sometimes it’s for good reason, sometimes it might be a little bit for ego or that they’re also trying to increase their own visibility online. These people should be embraced. So if you do have somebody who’s leaving intelligent or inquisitive comments on your blog, even if they seem to be leaving comments at every blog post, it’s not the end of the world. And certainly try to engage them. It’s certainly better than those people that leave comments like, “I really enjoy your blog post, I will be bookmarking it for later.”

Lastly, one of the things that I have not tried but John Goodman – who’s been interviewed on this podcast before – recommends, he really feels that all comments are terrible. So what he does is he just set of the Facebook comments tool. The reason he does this is since he’s really not too concerned with the comments in general but he’s looking for more visibility for his posts, in most cases when people leave a comment using the Facebook tool; a) hopefully they’re being more civil because it’s tied to their real Facebook account, but b) that’s also getting promoted and published through Facebook so it increases the visibility. And from what John was telling me, even for a blog post that has been dormant for quite some time, if somebody comments on it, all of a sudden it appears back in the feed and generates a lot more activity and visibility for that post. So he’s getting a lot of resurgent traffic for older posts by using the Facebook comments.

So hopefully if you are looking for comments, that gave you a great place to start and tactics to use. But again, I don’t know that comments are really what you need from a blog. It certainly feels good, but ask yourself if this is really helping grow your business.

Alright, that’s it for this weeks mailbag. If you have any questions about blogging, email, webinars, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, whatever questions you may have I would love to try and help you out or point you in the right direction. You can email them to me at rich@themarketingagents.com, you can go to the comments section of this blog post and leave your questions there. You can hit me up on Twitter, I’m @therichbrooks. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have, and hopefully I’ll be able to answer them in a future episode of The Marketing Agents Podcast.

Now for the full transcript of today’s show, as well as all the amazing show notes and juicy links, please head on over to themarketingagents.com/92. And if you’ve got a friend or a colleague who is a digital marketer whether they’re a small business owner or a dedicated marketer or they’re working in nonprofits and are looking to learn more, please feel free to share the shoe with them. Send them a link, send them over to the The Marketing Agents website, it’s definitely appreciated.

Alright, I’m going to go start packing for Vegas, hopefully I’ll see a bunch of you out there.

Show Notes:

• It’s not too late to attend New Media Expo 2015, where you can see Rich and other experts speak on content creation. Be sure to enter the discount code “rbrooks20” for 20% off!
• One option (and Rich’s personal choice) for a podcasting hosting company is Libsyn.
• Got a burning question for Rich? You can reach him via email, Twitter, his company (flyte new media) contact form, or this podcast (The Marketing Agents) contact form.
• Free keyword tools available to you that were discussed in this episode:
  • Keyword Planner
  • Google Trends
• Are you a podcaster or aspiring podcaster from Maine? The Marketing Agents Podcast host, Rich Brooks, has started a Facebook group for you, The Maine Podcasters Alliance! Feel free to join this informative group that is guaranteed to inspire and educate.
• Transcription for this podcast provided by Jennifer Scholz Transcription Services.

The post Your Blogging Questions Answered – @therichbrooks appeared first on .

Podcasting has been a steadily growing way of connecting with your audience. Especially since these podcast audiences have changed over the years and now more closely resemble mainstream media consumers.

So now that you’ve finally decided to start a podcast, what comes next? How do you plan to monetize it? Should you seek out sponsors to help fund the program? What kind of advertising will you use to promote the podcast? Will you need to spend a fortune on equipment in order to launch a successful podcast?

Shea Gunther is one of the creative minds behind the Marijuana Today podcast. He has dealt with all of these issues and more when launching his podcast. He shares with us his tips, ideas, knowledge and first hand experience at starting a podcast from conception to launch.

Rich: Shea Gunther is a longtime entrepreneur, writer and designer who recently jumped into the new (for him) world of podcasting with Marijuana Today, the nerdiest show in cannabis. He first started working in the world of technology when he raised $10 million as a 21 year old, in the dotcom 1.0 boom, to start a “YouTube too early”, and has kept himself busy with interesting projects ever since.

In 2001 Shea founded a wind power business that is one of the top companies in the industry. Following his interest in sustainability he now make a living as a writer for the Mother Nature Network, the top green news site on the web. Shea, welcome to the show.

Shea: Thanks, Rich. Yeah, happy to be talking to you today.

Rich: Well, I notice you didnt mention 2 things. One is, you were one of the first people in Maine on Twitter. You were like one of my first Twitter friends, back when there were, like, 20 of us.

Shea: Yeah, when I go on Twitter and I actually see “you joined on this date”, I have to double check because that was, what, 8 years ago. That’s forever ago in internet time.

Rich: And the other thing is, no mention of your role in the upcoming Night Of The Living Deb movie, the zombie romcom?

Shea: That’s true! No, I totally should have put that in there. I’m very proud of my role as a zombie, but I am jealous of your part.

Rich: Yeah, I don’t know how I finagled that. But for any of you who don’t know what we’re talking about – which is every single one of you listening, probably – we were both in a Portland-based zombie movie that I think is supposed to have it’s Maine premier in May 15th or somewhere around there.

Shea: I didn’t know it was coming up. I’ve seen the trailer and it actually looks like a good movie, which is awesome.

Rich: Yeah, that is awesome. Well, enough about zombies. You’ve been involved in the web and social media for awhile, what finally brought you around to podcasting?

Shea: I guess I have to credit my partner, Kris Lotliker. Kris is the guy I produce the show Marijuana Today with. He does the hosting and I kind of do all the other stuff. He’s a big podcast fan. He’s big into video games, Serial (everyone’s into that), but all the big podcasts and over the past year or two he’s just been talking about podcasts and the benefits that it has over some other forms of media. And he just wore me down.

Rich: So you’re the producer for the show, so what is your role there as producer?

Shea: Well we figured out very quickly that I do not do well as a panelist. We did 10 warm up shows before we launched our first public show and in the very first episode, even though I knew no one was actually going to listen to it, when Kris asked me a question I froze up and had a slight panic attack.

But luckily I kind of know how to do lots of other things that we need to get done. So I do all the editing, I basically do all the technical stuff. On top of that the social media stuff, the marketing stuff, the day to day stuff and whatever else needs to happen in between.

Rich: Ok, sounds good. So what‘s the format for the show? It’s guest-based, correct

Shea: Well, we basically have a stable of regular panelists and every week we assemble a show where we pull in 2 or 3 people, so we have kind of the same 10 or 12 regulars now. So it gives our listeners kind of a chance to know the people that we have on a regular basis, but it’s not the same exact voices every episode.

Rich: It’s kind of like Meet The Press for marijuana.

Shea: Yeah, exactly. Both in format and in tone. I don’t actually watch Meet The Press a lot, but we’re kind of nerdy.

Rich: Honestly I don’t know if I’ve ever watched it before, but it seems to be that show that’s still on the air forever. So what tips do you have? I know a lot of listeners to this show have podcasts or are thinking about it. Audio quality is always a concern or question. So you have any tips for them that you’ve learned form editing and producing the show that would enhance the quality of their own podcasts?

Shea: One of the things that we do with our show that has definitely been a really good thing, Kris hosts the show and I’m producing – so I’m on every show, I just don’t say anything – and all the panelists are all around the country. So what we have everyone do is we everyone records their own audio locally so they have a nice clean, crisp track that doesn’t have any internet connection interference. And then everyone uploads those files for me to download and then sync together in post.

So that was something that we figured out early on would allow us to get around when the internet goes bad. So I would say that was the biggest thing that we did right from the start.

Rich: That’s a great tip, and although I don’t have the benefit of always having the regular cast of characters like you do, I certainly interview enough people who are used to this that they might be able to record it, and I’m sure a lot of my listeners do as well.

So you mentioned also that you’re handling a lot of marketing for the show. So what do you do to build an audience for the show?

Shea: Well, I’m on social media. There’s like a hundred things you’ve got to do every day. So for us it’s being active on Twitter, responding to people who email us, having a website that‘s well constructed and has all the updated information. It’s really just touching lots of different things throughout the day, all the balls that you’ve just got to be on top of.

Rich: Have you found any one channel is especially good for engagement outside of the podcast itself, like Facebook or Twitter, or is it just a little bit of everything?

Shea: Yeah, for us it’s been a little bit of everything. We have a pretty good following on Twitter, I mean I think we’re approaching 3k followers. I think we’re lucky in that our subject matter people are pretty passionate and excited about it, so I think it translates to a more engaged community. We definitely have part of an active Twitter community.

We kind of got the show going and became popular and decided we needed to get a website going but we had no time. So it kind of took us forever to get a website, get our Facebook account going. So those things are actually just a month or two old.

The funny thing is, back in October/November, a very excited fan started a Facebook page for us. We didn’t really have the time to do anything with it and we checked back about a month ago when we started our official one and it had like, 2k ‘likes’. And no one had done anything with it. So we thought that boded well for us.

Rich: Do you have an email list that you let people know about the new podcast, or do you just hope that they’ve subscribed using some tool like iTunes?

Shea: We don’t actually have an email list right now. We got started on Twitter way earlier than any of our other channels, so that’s been kind of how we’ve been very active updating our listeners as far as when new shows are out. We talked about getting an email list going, it’s just really an issue of limited bandwidth. Both Kris and I have fulltime jobs and families so it’s kind of what happens in the margins of everything else.

Rich: Ok. A lot of people are interested in knowing how you make money off of this. I know you’ve got some sponsors, or at least a sponsor, for the show. How did you get that sponsor or how are you doing some outreach to try to get sponsors for the show?

Shea: Kind of like our website, our sponsorship outreach has been something we’ve been recently getting our wheels turning. We have 3 sponsors right now. you really just have to get your numbers together and be able to actually tell the potential sponsor who’s listening, who those listeners are and you have to be able to show the benefit of why someone wants to give you money to sponsor your show.

So for us it’s really just been pulling together the different stats that we have. We’ve recently been doing some listener surveys.

Rich: I saw that on your website.

Shea: Yeah, and just the numbers from that we really feel like we’ve gotten enough responses that we have a pretty good handle on our demographic. And it’s great to be able to, both for pitching new sponsors and making the existing sponsors feel good about their money.

Rich: Now do they pay you based on the shows that you’re putting out aor based on the number of downloads that you’re getting?

Shea: Oh we basically share all of our stats with them and then the way we structure it is we guarantee 4 shows a month. That just gives us some flex in that, like if there are five weeks in a month or one of us is sick or something.

So we don’t actually have our structures in setup with a certain number of PPC or CPC rate, we’re really just telling them it’s this much right now.

Rich: Ok. And then how are you promoting them within the show? Do you have a little blurb at the beginning, do you have a midway section, or how are you giving them their shoutout?

Shea: So we have a few different sponsorship categories and depending on what kind of sponsor you are, you get different mentions in the show. The top level “title” sponsor is a company called the ArcView Group. At the beginning of the show the first thing we lead into is “this show is sponsored by ArcView Group”, and then we talk a little bit about them and it actually goes into the intro music.

And then in addition to that, they also get about a 2 minute segment right before our first music break where Kris talks pretty in depth about ArcView and what they do. And then at the end of the show they also get thanked. So it’s pretty thick for the title sponsor.

And then underneath that we have segment sponsors so I try to do about a 2 minute news segment in the middle of the show, so we have a new sponsor that they get about a 30 second to a minute introduction and promo during that news section.

And then lastly we have our finishing moves segment, which is just at the very end of the show. All of our panelists get a minute or two to talk about whatever they want and our finishing sponsor gets about a 20 second introduction just saying, “Hey, here’s our finishing sponsor,” which is thehappycrate.com. Depending on how much money you give us, you get more time.

Rich: That makes a lot of sense. I also notice you have some creative ways of promoting people outside. I was over at your Facebook page and your Facebook profile pic was actually your lead sponsor.

Shea: Yeah. Well, I mean we live and die by our sponsors so we definitely want to make sure that they’re getting exposure that they should be.

Rich: One of my frustrations with the show – and I’m totally not ragging on my listeners right now – but I put my voice out there and I don’t always get that feedback that I might get when I post something on Facebook or Twitter or even my blog. Maybe it’s just the format, maybe it’s the channel, maybe it’s the fact that it’s more difficult to respond to somebody who’s on a podcast.

Do you get much engagement from your audience? I know your numbers are growing and getting better.Is there any other kind of two-way communication that you’ve experienced?

Shea: Our listeners are awesome with contacting us. We’ve been getting emails pretty much from the start and it’s been good because the same people have been writing to us about 9 months now and are becoming our friends.

So I think in that respect we’re lucky. I think it might just be our topic. People are really fired up about marijuana legalization and all the new markets that are opening up. There’s a lot of entrepreneurial energy around in our world, so it leads to a lot of people who are just really fired up about it.

Rich: When you’re getting these emails – or if they’re leaving comments on Facebook or tweeting to you – do you have any specific ways that you’re engaging people or are you just thanking them for their time? Do you answer their questions, do you do a mailbag episode every once in a while?

Shea: Yeah. We don’t do an entire episode, but every now and then we definitely will. Well, every show we answer emails, so after our second break we always have a couple emails that we answer. We did do a show a few episodes back where we kind of had a heavier segment and it was one of our more popular segments.

People definitely like hearing us just talk about what they want to hear about. With the emails we definitely try to hit everyone back. If they take the time to email us, they deserve a reply. Sometimes we’ll share our thoughts in the email, other times they’ll just say, “Hey, that’s something that we’re going to talk about on the show this week.” So yeah, just be human and genuine with people.

Rich: Good advice. So speaking of advice, if someone is listening here and they haven’t yet started their podcast or they’re just getting in, what tips or advice do you have, or what things should they avoid as they get into podcasting?

Shea: Good question. I would say one is to make sure your equipment is right. You don’t have to spend a million dollars but you do need good, quality audio.

Rich: And what do you usually recommend for your regular guests? What’s their setup?

Shea: Well, we’ve actually bought a lot of our regulars microphones. I think the Blue Yeti is the one that we use. I actually have a $20-25 Amazon mic that I’ve been using that I got a few years ago. Whatever you use, you just have to make sure that you’re not getting any crackling and you’re recording in a quiet space.

I will say that I definitely have a lot to learn about audio production and that’s definitely one of my goals for the next year is to learn more about that. But whatever it takes, you’ve just got to have clean audio.

Rich: Absolutely. Now you’ve built up the show and it’s been going for 9 months. Obviously this is a topic that albeit may be controversial in some areas, it’s certainly something that people are very passionate about. Have you thought of creating either a live event or taking things offline or building a community around the podcast?

Shea: Well we actually did a live event pretty early in our history back in October or November. Kris and I were involved in starting up Students For Sensible Drug Policy, which is one of the top drug forum organizations that’s fighting for drug policy. And we were at one of their big, international conferences and we actually did a live show in front of the audience. We basically had a panel discussion on the history of the organization and we recorded it live and put it up. We weren’t sure if it was going to work but it did and it’s actually one of our more popular shows.

So that’s definitely something we plan to do more of. In June we’re actually going out to Denver for the big marijuana business conference and we’re going to do the same thing and basically get our panelists up there in front of a few hundred people and record the show.

As far as community goes, that’s definitely something that we want to do and we know that we have to do. It’s really just doing it right and you don’t want to mess it up. So yeah, it’s on our radar.

Rich: You’ve got sponsorships, obviously that’s one way that you’re paying for the show and monetizing it. Do you have any other strategies right now that you’re using or planning on using to generate more money off the show?

Shea: Really we’re just going to grow our audience. We’ve kind of set and figured out our next sponsorship structure. We don’t want to add any more sponsors, we just want to get more listeners so that we can get more money for sponsors. Really for us its just focusing on growing our audience, investing money back into traffic and advertising and really just trying to get more listeners.

Rich: I just picked up on the fact that you said “advertising”, are you doing advertising to promote the show?

Shea: We have dipped our toes in the water just a little, tiny bit with some ads on Reddit. That’s definitely our next month plan is to start doing some Google advertising and thinking about maybe doing some Facebook ads. We just want to make sure that we do it right. And also again, Reddit is a good place to spend some targeted money.

Rich: So of all the places that you could have mentioned, Reddit was not even on my radar. Now of course my business and my clients don’t tend to hang out on Reddit, as far as I know, but I could see where it would be good for you.

Very briefly, how do you advertise on Reddit? Is it based on the newsgroups that you’re advertising in or are there different ways that you can target your ads?

Shea: So Reddit is just made up of thousands of subReddits. So anyone can start a subReddit on any topic. So the way that you advertise on is you find a subReddit that has people that you want to reach out to and you can actually buy ads to show up in that subReddit.

So for us, its one of Reddit’s most popular subReddits, but it’s a subReddit called “Trees” and it’s just all about marijuana. Anything from pictures of people smoking to people asking questions about drug testing and the whole gamut of the marijuana culture can be found in there.

And then there are smaller, more targeted subReddits that are a little smaller but a little more targeted in their niche. So yeah, we’re going to be spending some money there.

Rich: This is interesting. So when you’re doing all this, where are you sending them? I know you said your website is just a month old, but the show has been going on for 9 months. So where were you sending them before, and are you now sending them to the website?

Shea: We just launched our website, which is mjtodaypodcast.com. What we had up before there was we were sending people to Shout Engine, which is our podcast hosting company. So we have our profile page there which was kind of our stand-in website until we got our main site up.

Rich: Now can people also check you out at iTunes?

Shea: Yup. If you just go to iTunes and search for Marijuana Today or just marijuana, we come up pretty high.

Rich: Awesome. No pun intended. You just gave us a couple of links, but just curious, where else would you like us to send people to search for Marijuana Today or for your own bad self, Shea?

Shea: Definitely go to marijuanatoday.com. I always tell Kris that whenever he says an url he has to say it twice. So, mjtodaypodcast.com. You can also check us out on Twitter. And you can find us on Facebook, MJTodayPodcast.

Rich: Wherever you want to go, you guys are going to be there with MJ Today. And of course we will have links to all of those sites that Shea shared with us, a you can go check them out and give a listen to the show and see what you think.

Shea, I just want to thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate you stopping by.

Shea: Thank you, thank you.

Show Notes:

• Check out Shea’s podcast (potcast?) for yourself to learn more.
• Visit Marijuana Today’s website for all of their latest news and information.
• Check out Marijuana Today’s official Facebook page.
• Want to exchange tweets with Shea and his group? Follow them on Twitter.
• Are you a podcaster or aspiring podcaster from Maine? The Marketing Agents Podcast host, Rich Brooks, has started a Facebook group for you, The Maine Podcasters Alliance! Feel free to join this informative group that is guaranteed to inspire and educate.
• Transcription for this podcast provided by Jennifer Scholz Transcription Services.

Other Stuff:

• See Rich speak at NMX in April. (Discount code: AOCRich)
• Check out 1 Day Business Breakthrough with Pat Flynn & Chris Ducker
• Like what you heard and are desperate to know more about the host? Rich Brooks is the fearless leader of flyte new media, a web design and internet marketing agency in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder and brains behind the Agents Of Change Digital Marketing Conference. He also fancies himself a witty tweeter, follow him on Twitter at @therichbroooks.

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