132: Influence with a Heart: Find Your Secret Sauce and Purpose with Ben Gioia

Ben Gioia, author of Influence with a Heart and Marketing with a Heart, tells us how to use trust marketing for greater income, influence, and impact.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: We're here with Ben Gioia, who is a speaker, coach, trainer, and author of the number 1 bestseller, Marketing With A Heart. He's the president of influencewithaheart.com.

Ben has helped AARP launch one of the world's biggest magazines with 32 million circulation, and he's a trained, or he's trained top business leaders at Stanford University, and supported the ALS Association in improving healthcare and quality of life for thousands of people with Lou Gehrig's Disease after almost dying 4 times in 72 hours on a hike in India. We're going to have to talk about that for sure. Ben received a gift, a fire inside to make a bigger impact. Today, he teaches entrepreneurs, visionaries, organizations, and leaders how to communicate with more influence by using more empathy, story, and thought leadership. Lots of cool stuff. Welcome to the show, Ben.

Ben Gioia: Thank you so much, Robert. It's a pleasure to be here, thank you for asking me.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I mean, yeah, I'm glad you stopped by. Can you kind of tell us, I mean, there's that little bit of bio there, but can you kind of tell us in your own words what it is you do, what's kind of driving you right now, and what makes you special?

Ben Gioia: Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much. Gosh. Yeah, I'm going to, I guess, start this off, kick this off with a little bit about that story in India. Basically, I had this incredible hike, 72 hours, where I almost died 4 times, and it was ... My bus going, almost going off the road as we're going up a windy mountain curve. I mean, literally, the back of the bus was like skittering the edge and almost sliding off. The second time was running from a fire. It hadn't rained where we were in about 4 months, and literally, my guide turned to me at one point because he heard some agitated yelling, I couldn't understand it in English, off in the distance, and he said over his shoulder, "Run," and I said, "Run?" He went running off down the path.

Third time, we came upon a poisonous snake that I wouldn't have seen at all, just right in the path, tiny snake. My guide fortunately stopped me, and then ... The last time was running into a mountain lion, kind of stumbling upon a mountain lion. I think we were surprised, he or she was surprised, and fortunately, the mountain lion ran away; so, that was a wake-up call or a series of wake-up calls that just made me realize, "What an amazing gift this life is, my life. If I'm here on this Earth, and I'm functional and capable, I'm going to do good in the world;" so I started thinking about, "How could I do that?"

I pulled together talents, experience, all that kind of stuff, and that was the thing that brought Marketing With A Heart to the light; because I realized that there's so many people and good in the world, there's the whole idea of conscious business and transparency and ethical communication, all that stuff, and I realized that that needed to come into the marketing space as well. People felt good about their marketing, really would lead with value, be transparent, and really resonate and connect with the right audiences, so they could stop focusing so much on competition; and really focus on creativity and collaboration, and magnetizing the right people by speaking truthfully and honestly about themselves, who they served, what they do, and their secret sauce, and how that all makes it happen, so ...

Yeah, so did that for a bunch of years, and then Marketing With A Heart kind of morphed into Influence With A Heart, which is what that is today. I launched that just a few months ago, and it's been a rocket ship since I changed that. Influence With A Heart was what, I realized, made so much more sense for who I am and what I want to do in the world. Right after that happened, I got this 2-day training at Stanford. I wrote my second book, and I actually just got asked by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company to create content for a customer ... Like a front-line customer service program that would basically help the employees be more mindful, use more empathy, and they want to roll that out to 15,000 people, so ... Really, really excited about that possibility. I literally heard that, about that 2 days ago.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I mean, lots of cool things happening. As far as what it is that you do, I mean, you have the book, you have this writing ... I mean, what is your business exactly that you have? Coaching clients, do you have products, like what are the pieces to it?

Ben Gioia: Yeah. Yeah. I do have coaching clients, and I'm doing speaking gigs and then a couple of consulting gigs as well. The essence of what I do is really help people articulate their purpose much more excitingly and effectively than they ever have before, both in terms of what they're displaying to the world and in terms of themselves. Because when people get really, really clear on their purpose and are able to articulate it and get behind it, and get behind themselves, that it just, it changes the whole game. Articulating that purpose on a much higher level and then weaving that energy and even the direct articulation into their messaging, into how they're delivering their products, into how they're presenting themselves. When you're operating from a place of purpose, people really resonate with that. That comes through your face-to-face energy. It comes through your writing. It comes through you on video, through how you're presenting on video, so help get really super articulate with their message and then really also articulate their secret sauce, right?

We all have amazing history, amazing experience. Sure, not all of us died 4, all died 4 times in India, but that's not even the point, right? It's our story that ... It's the stories that we choose that we know are going to connect with other people, and that our great expressions are for. I help people also connect to that story, bring that out through their writing, through their communication, and kind of getting clear on that purpose and getting clear on that story. That's the articulation to the secret sauce. When you can get that together, your positioning as a thought leader just becomes so much more powerful, because you're not just an expert, but you're this unique expert with this unique offering, with this unique story or set of stories, and that's the stuff that really, really makes you, can make you resonate with the right audience and the right kind of people.

Robert Plank: Along those lines, could you share with us a little bit of maybe like a case study or something where you had one of these coaching clients, or maybe they had some good things to say, maybe they were onto something, and then you kind of ran them through your system and you were able to reposition them and articulate them better and share their secret sauce? Do you mind sharing a little bit of like a before-and-after with someone that you've gone through?

Ben Gioia: Yeah, I would be delighted to do that. Yeah, I have a couple of quick examples. One is, excuse me, have been working with a high-end boutique technology company here in the area that does customized apps, web apps, and websites also, but their apps are probably functioning things for hospitals, serving people with AIDS, all sorts of deep impact. What the CEO of this company really wanted to do was to do many more projects that were exciting to him, not only exciting, but really connected to his sense of purpose. We dug and dug and talked about stuff, and we realized something very, very simple and yet profound, that this person, what his secret sauce is that he speaks the language of tech and non-tech, so he can speak just as easily to a non-technical person as he's getting a contract together, or he can talk to programmers down in the trenches and really get the things done. While it sounds like such a simple articulation, so straightforward, it has really shifted both his energy around his business, and the people he's starting to attract.

Then another quick example is a health coach that I work with also here in the Bay Area. She does some, they have straightforward nutrition and health and mindfulness kind of things, and she also does a little bit more of what some people might consider some woo-woo healing techniques. I mean, she's legit, don't get me wrong, but a lot of people don't, are still learning about alternative non-Western ways to do stuff.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah.

Ben Gioia: It took her years to figure out ... Thank you. It took her years to figure out how to express that. When we started working together, she still wasn't there, and what we realized was that she helps stressed out professionals and urbanites in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley be happier, healthier, and more aligned with their purpose. That was a huge, huge thing, because it wasn't just, "Oh, I'm a health coach," but it was, really gave her the ability to do the thing that she loves, that she's excellent at, and position that around the people that she wants to attract most.

Robert Plank: Along those lines, is there a little bit of a method to the madness? Like when you look at these businesses to help, do you eyeball it, or do you list out hundreds of things, or do you ask any deep probing questions? What goes to your head? What's the process between going from, you hear about their business, into what they should be doing instead?

Ben Gioia: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. I will check out their website, of course, and kind of do, I think, what many marketers would do when they were looking at somebody's content. Just basically go, "Okay, are they talking to one particular audience, or are they are connecting with the pains and emotions and fears and dreams and desires and all that stuff?" I look at that and get a sense of what it is, and then what I do is, I give them a questionnaire. I have a customized questionnaire that I use, and I ask them kind of like, "What's your purpose? What's your secret sauce?" I ask them in a more kind of one-to-one way to answer all of those questions, and those questions are geared toward the information that they should ostensibly be sharing through their marketing, through their communications, etc. What I often find, like 9 out of 10 times, is that what people say in that questionnaire to me is radically different than what they say on their websites and what they say on LinkedIn about themselves.

I think the reason for that is because there's the whole notion of what I should say, quote-unquote should say and how I should present myself, and how I should look to the public. Then those things are fine, but this is a human-to-human interaction all the time, even when we're on the web, right? The stuff that needs to come through is the human stuff, and my questionnaire helps people really, really get to that human stuff. After they do that and I review that, the questionnaire, I get back on the phone and I say, "Hey, your website says this, but you say this, and this sounds true, and you sound excited over here, so why don't we look at bringing more of you, your story, your amazing background, your secret sauce, into the mix, and really put you, or at least put your energy right out front?"

Robert Plank: Do you think there's a reason why the public-facing bio, I guess, and the public-facing stuff doesn't match up with the questionnaire? Is it a matter of people being too careful and afraid to look stupid, or was there more time to kind of think through their message between when they first put up the webpage versus when they came to you? What do you think is the reason for that kind of disconnect there?

Ben Gioia: Yeah, thank you. That's a great question, and I think it's a few things, different people, but the things that I see most often is because somebody put up a website a long time ago, didn't update it as their thinking and perspective changed. For some people, it's that putting themselves, putting their face out in the world, that there's still some hesitation around putting themselves out there, bringing their best and most badass self, whatever that looks like to them, out front. Because there's so much messaging, I think, that so many of us were raised with, around, "Be quiet. Don't make too much noise. Behave. Do things like everybody else is doing," or even the worst kind of messaging of like, "Oh, you won't be able to do that because you don't have the looks, the skills, the grades," all of that kind of stuff. I think there's so much embedded learning probably from when we were about 3, 3 to 5, that gets stuck in there. Then the other part of it, too, I think, is people spend so much time looking at what other people are doing, which is important, of course.

You want to see who else is in your market and outside of your market to have a comparison, but at the end of the day, you have to be yourself and you have to really put yourself and your best foot forward. I think the last part of it, and this comes up with some people, is that they're not super clear on their purpose, on their core purpose, and then when they're bringing that, or attempting to bring that out through their business and what they're offering, then messaging is a little behind because they're not totally aligned internally.

Robert Plank: I mean, that makes a lot of sense. What I'm hearing a lot of what you mention is, when you're looking at anyone's business, it sounds almost like the things you're looking for are like the emotional hot buttons, and a lot of people are missing the emotion in their websites, it sounds like.

Ben Gioia: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, that's true. They're not speaking to the experience of their ideal client or their audience. Right? I mean, it's so funny, because in a lot of ways it's like marketing and communications 101. Communicate to people in and around the things that they care deeply about, and show them that you have something for them in that context, a solution, a next step, whatever the case may be, and a lot of people end up talking about themselves, like, "I can do this. My product does this," but it's not customer, client or prospect-focused.

Robert Plank: It's not focused on, "What's in it for me?" Right?

Ben Gioia: Exactly. Exactly. Thank you, yeah.

Robert Plank: Would you say that if you were to look at, or think back about, the different clients and people you've worked with, is there a huge number 1 mistake, and would you say like maybe, is that the mistake that people are talking about themselves and not their clients, or is there an even bigger mistake, even bigger common thread you're seeing with all these people that you help out?

Ben Gioia: Yeah, yeah. Great question. I think a huge, huge one is talking too much about themselves, and another one, huge one, is not talking enough about themselves. The reason why I say that is because one of big things I teach is this idea of story, storytelling. I mean, storytelling is the oldest ... It's as old as human history. Before we had any kind of written communication, before people were drawing on walls and caves, they were telling each other stories. It was oral tradition, and that was the way to cultivate all that stuff around trust and connection to community, connection to tribe, and to safety, right? To have that circle be safe, and a lot of people today, they don't go enough into their story, right? They might talk a little bit about it, "I was CEO of such-and-such a company," but they don't actually say, okay, what did they do there? Not just the actions did they take, but what results did they bring, who did they bring it for, how did that create a transformation for the organization for an entire population of people? Whatever the case may be, right?

There's this funny balance of, yeah, absolutely you have to talk about your customer, their experience, etc., and, says me, and this is, I've proven this with a whole bunch of clients now, you have to talk about yourself, tell your story, and ask people to tell you stories. Right? Like you want to create empathy, and empathy that's going in both directions. Right? You want to see the world through this other person's eyes, and you want to give this other person the opportunity to see the world through your eyes.

Robert Plank: I mean, that sounds like some pretty interesting stuff there.

Ben Gioia: Yeah.

Robert Plank: I mean, with all this ... I mean, all these little things I think about here and there is, there ... I don't know, is there something kind of interesting you've been working on lately? I don't mean necessarily in terms of like, I know like you mentioned that, you had your new opportunities, like published stuff to different audiences, but just as far as like some kind of marketing technique or tool or just something like that. What's just the latest kind of cutting-edge thing you've been playing around with?

Ben Gioia: That's a great question. Yeah, gosh, it's ... One really interesting thing, and this is circumstantial, is getting ready to do a talk and actually a training. This training is going to be with an international audience, most of whom don't speak English, so I'm actually doing it with a translator. This is a really, really interesting exercise for me, because it's, how do I get super ultra crystal clear in everything that I'm saying, and chunk it down into really, really discreet packages of ideas, so I can say something, say a few sentences, pause, and allow the translator to understand what I say, translate it in her head, and then say it out to the audience in a way that they understand. Right? I'm looking at my language being really, really spare with the things that I'm saying, taking out colloquialisms, taking out jokes, all of those kinds of things. It's an interesting exercise in this really crystal clear communication, and it's also a really interesting exercise in being a presenter in this situation.

How do I maintain that energy, that high level of engaged energy in myself, when I have to pause and wait for the person to translate? Right? I have to be like, "Ya-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta," and then wait and hold that energy in myself, so the next thing I say is, "Ya-ta-ta-ta-ta."

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Ben Gioia: Yeah.

Robert Plank: I mean, yeah, it seems like kind of like a new adventure to kind of push you outside your comfort zone, because like you said, you need to kind of strip a lot away and use simple language, but also seem smart and have something good to say, but then the rhythm and the pacing's going to be weird, but then maybe you can use that to your advantage to kind of let things land, or pause to think, I guess.

Ben Gioia: Yeah, and thank you for saying that. It's interesting, too, because the audience is a whole bunch of super, super successful business people, six-figure kind of earners. This is not an audience of beginners. These are people who have been doing their thing for a whole bunch of years now, so there's that added dimension, for me, of, "Wow, I have to make this potent and insightful," and all of that stuff, and do all the things that I just mentioned before about keeping it super clear and spare.

Robert Plank: Right. I mean, yeah, sounds like a lot of stuff to kind of keep straight in your head, but once you figure it out, sounds like a lot of fun.

Ben Gioia: Yeah. I think so. I'm really, really, really looking forward to it.

Robert Plank: Well, cool. If anyone wants to know about you, Ben, no matter what language they speak, what country they're in, if they're newbies, they're advanced, where should they go to find out about you and your stuff that you sell, and your books, and everything like that?

Ben Gioia: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, so my website is influencewithaheart.com. Basically all the stuff is there, and you can also find my books on Amazon. Again, the beauty of Amazon is that it's also worldwide. I have 2 books now, Influence With A Heart, which is the new one, and the first one, which was the bestseller Marketing With A Heart, as well. I'd be delighted for anybody who's listening to this podcast to come check out my stuff. I think you'll get a whole lot out of it, and it'll really serve you and your business in a great way.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I think so too. That's Ben Gioia, influencewithaheart.com. Thanks for stopping by the show.

Ben Gioia: Thank you so much, Robert, and appreciate all the things you do. Like I said, the audience doesn't know this, but you and I met several years ago, and I really learned a ton of things from you back then, and was really inspired by the way you do your things, so thank you so much. It's nice to come full circle and be on your show.[/showhide]

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130: Fix Your Process and Goals to Undo the Past and Create the Future with Personal Growth Innovator Matt Powell

Entrepreneur and martial arts teacher Matt Powell from the Pramek organization tells us why we fail, how to stop being "right" all the time, gain focus, break the cycle, set goals, and so much more. He's also the author of the book UNDO: Get Past The Past and Manage Your Future, which tells us how to cut ties to the past.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: After over two decades of teaching thousands around the world, Matt Powell know how to teach and motivate, think better under the stress of every day life, improve and grow, and create success. He has his latest book out called Undo: How to undo the past and plan your future. He has a website as well called pastless.net. Matt welcome to the show. I'm glad to have you here.

Matt Powell: Hey I'm glad to be on. I appreciate it Robert.

Robert Plank: Heck yeah. I understand that you have a lot of things to say and you have a lot of hobbies and you have this martial arts stuff, so can you kind of tell me a little bit about who is Matt Powell and what it is that you do, and what makes you unique and special?

Matt Powell: I know what makes me unique and special. My mom might say something different. About 20 years ago, I started learning this strange martial art no one had ever heard of, and that lead me to spending time in Russia training at their schools in martial arts in the early 2000's, and then coming back over here and teaching over here. Over time, we built our own organization called Pramek. That's P-R-A-M-E-K. We have a website, pramek.com. That started off as just guys in a garage, and I built it online and then in real world into an international organization with teachers all over the world.

The whole time I was doing that, I was also working my way up the corporate ladder into the corporate board room. I was starting online businesses. I was doing everything that I could possibly do. I'm not one of those people that sit still for very long. Over time I've published five books that are on Amazon, hundreds of videos on youtube, two dozen instructional videos for sale in the martial art world, as well as teaching seminars around the world. I learned a lot from that side of teaching, and teaching all those people in the system that we developed and the way that it developed. There was also the lessons learned of being in the corporate world and being an entrepreneur.

I decided about a year ago that I would start to take these and combine them into more of a, kind of do what Pramek did for martial art, pastless and Undo what do for the personal growth sector. I started to focus on taking the concept that worked so well for teaching people, everybody from the special forces to soccer mom, and starting applying it to personal growth. It's a very methodically laid out system based on what we saw work teaching people under the most stressful situations that they could apply towards personal growth, personal success, and the happiness side of the world, you might say.

Robert Plank: That's kind of interesting. Can you kind of tell me about this whole undo book and just basically, what are the steps, what's it about, how it all relates to the martial arts, the success and all that kind of stuff?

Matt Powell: We developed this learning system in martial art that we called the CLM. I developed it with a couple of PhDs that had PhDs in adult learning and psychology, because we found that the way that we were taught didn't translate to the way that people learned very well if they were learning mental and physical skills. We developed over time this learning system that now all these other schools and systems have adopted as their learning system. We found that people were learning skills faster than they were learning in other skills by using this.

I said okay. Let me look at ... It's all about the human brain. It's all about how the brain works, it's all about how the brain processes memories, how the brain forms habits. Let me take that over to the success side because whether you're learning to punch or whether you're learning to operate as an entrepreneur, you're going to develop physical and psychological habits to go along with success or failure. Life is a little like quicksand day to day. You can't unstick yourself until you stop moving and take stock of the situation around you. What Undo the book is is that Undo is ... We're undoing the past. It means that we're recognizing the why we fail, not what we fail at. A lot of people confuse that. They focus on the what they're failing at. People set goals, but then they don't consider if they're setting the right goals. They end up with a decent process to achieve goals, but they've set the wrong goals that weren't attainable. They kind of circle for a while.

What we do with Undo, is we try to break these cycles. We break that cycle. Then you're set up to where you can start setting goals because you've taken care of the underlying reasons why you're failing. Now you're able to start setting goals. What we do is then we have a workbook that goes along with Undo. It's a 40 page workbook that take you step-by-step through the whole process. It starts you at the goals that you had last year, the failures that you had last year, looking at those underlying reasons to why and not what, then setting up a process to fix that day to day so that you break that cycle of failure that's been going on, but there's the habits that you've picked up over time.

Then we do this long process of setting attainable goals all the way from the very beginning of free-writing out your goals to how you set your life on auto pilot using the book, to basically make goal achievement a habit. It's really about the book is kind of a, I don't want to say colloquial, but it's a very ... My editors hated it because I wrote it like I was speaking to somebody. I didn't write it like I was writing a book. Then the workbook follows along with it. Page by page, as you go through the book, you're going through the workbook at the same time. It's a very interesting process to kind of develop habits for people, to get out there and achieve the goals that they want to achiever.

Robert Plank: I love that. I think that ... Yeah, I know that over the years if I'm ever trying to get out of a funk or I'm always trying to switch to some kind of time management system, it's always like if the underlying foundation or whatever you want to call it, if that's still messed up, it doesn't even matter what I'm building towards, or what kind of system I'm using. It's like if the insides aren't right, then what's the point of anything. I like that. I like the Tim Ferris or the Matt Furey kind of stuff where it's like ... I don't know a thing about martial arts or any of that stuff, but I like the idea of breaking yourself down and then building yourself back up and having the discipline and the habits and the repetitions and all that kind of stuff. I like how, kind of like you mentioned there, that people kind of learn the stuff, but they also go through the work books so that way it kind of avoids the foo foo, hippy sort of feel good stuff. Is that right?

Matt Powell: Yeah. What we found ... Matt Furey. God I haven't talked to Matt in probably a decade. I used to talk to him back in the day, in martial art, I guess back in the mid 2000's. Tim has done some great systematic methodology to kind of exposing people methods so that other people can pick them up. I think ... I differ a little bit when you ask what makes you different is that you can have the best process in the world, but if you don't have the right goals, you're going to consistently get into a funk. You're going to go after 2016 with a 2015 mindset. A lot of times people have all these processes. That's why I did Undo because I saw that was happening in the martial art world. I traveled and taught thousands. Personally laying hands on what they were doing. I was seeing that these people, they've got this process but what they're trying to do, they never really thought through what they were trying to do at the end.

Steven Covey says, "I'm going to begin with the end in mind." Look at the goal and work backwards. Page by page and when you look at the reviews on Amazon, everybody says the same thing, like "Wow. This book actually works."

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. I'm kind of looking through the reviews and things here. Could you kind of tell us about how this all happened for you? Was there a point where ... Was there a period of time before you discovered all this martial arts stuff, was there a period of time when there were specific things that were really wrong in your life and then kind of stumbling on this made you the person you are now? Does that kind of thing happen?

Matt Powell: There's nothing ever really ... I know a lot of times people have some epic moment or they have some type of challenge in their life or obstacles that they can't over come, and then they overcome it and it becomes inspirational. I love those stories ... A friend of mine that is a martial art instructor. He was born with half a heart, and he had steel rods in his back, and he's out there doing incredible karate stuff. I never had anything like that. I learned through kind of trial by fire between the martial arts and doing executive protection and law enforcement, and being under extremely stressful situations and then teaching other people extremely stressful situations.

What made me switch from martial art and move in this direction was that I did have a situation that really ... It's still tough to talk about a little bit. I had a childhood friend of mine, and over the years he and my brother stayed in contact, but I hadn't stayed in contact with him. My brother called me up one day and he said, "You know, he's got cancer, and he loves what you're doing with martial art, you really ought to give him a call." I didn't realize that he had stage four rare cancer and he was dying. We spent hours upon hours on the phone just talking. He was a business owner, he was an entrepreneur. We would talk at night and he would pass out for 30 minutes because he was under so many medications. He would come back to and we would talk and talk.

He passed away one day, and a few years later I was driving to Florida to the beach house and I've done it successful at what I've done. I just kind of said, "Man, I'm tired of teaching people how to punch somebody in the nose. There's got to be more." I remember those conversations with Barry because he would say, "You know Matt, I feel like you could do more. If you just took these processes and taught somebody about business, or maybe you talk to a new college graduate and give them some processes, that way they're not learning this 10-15 years into their career, when they could have done better at the beginning." I got down to Florida and I just started ... I pulled out all the notes and pulled out the Glenfiddich and really had a heart to heart with myself.

One of the things that one of my teachers told me one time was, "Only you look in your mirror." I looked in the mirror and I thought, "You know, I can do more than this, and I can help more than just teaching people this over here." A bunch of books were started. That was a couple of years ago. Out of the books that were started, Undo was a bit of a composite of the different books that I'd started at the time. I never really had anything that was a big challenge or obstacle.

I put myself into a lot of challenging situation through the decisions I made in my career. But the biggest obstacle that I really ever overcame was to take what was 20 years of an identity as a world class martial art instructor and developer and teacher, and to have to make that internal switch to saying, "I'm going to do something different. I'm going to do 2016 or 2015 with that year's mindset. Not try to do it with 2010's mindset."

Robert Plank: It's kind of interesting. Could you kind of tell us about, aside from the book, what is it that you do now? Do you have products? Do you have a blog? Do you have a podcast? What are you up to these days?

Matt Powell: A couple of different things. I do security consulting as a day job. I've always kept a day job. I remember my primary teacher a long time ago said, "Always have a day job, because if you have to do your hobby to food on the table, you'll end up hating it, and you'll sell it out and you'll water it down." I've always kept a day job, and I've worked my way up the corporate ladder. Day job I do that. It allows me to go wherever I want. Live how I want. I really built my life around what my goals were, which was to have a very free life to be able to explore and do things. Then you have pastless and you have Pramek.

Pastless.net is the home of Undo. Yeah, you can go to pastless.net. We have the free eBook over at pastless. It's called Open In Case of Life. It's a concept that I've learned over 20 years traveling the world learning from different teachers. It's eight things that people said that really stuck with me. I put them in format that you can just, here it is. In case of you feel like you're not communicating correctly, in case you feel labeled, in case you're feeling anxious about the future, and here's the wisdom behind it. Then you can also pick up Undo over at amazon.com if you just type in Undo, I think it's like the second thing that pops up on amazon.

Then over at Pramek, that's a whole different animal because Pramek is ... It has four books that I've written about it. It has, I think we're at 201 videos on youtube, two dozen for sale instructional, and that's very martial arts, fitness, movement. Yeah, there's movement videos. How to increase your movement, get your range of motion. There's combat intimate videos. There's videos on how to develop habits. We've done a lot of different things with Pramek. That's pramek.com. P-R-A-M-E-K.COM.

Robert Plank: Cool. Do you ... I mean in all your writings and your adventures and talking ... What do you think is the place where everyone is going wrong? Is it that people aren't awake or they're not disciplined or they're not self aware or they're backsliding? What do you see where everyone is going wrong it seems?

Matt Powell: I think, if you're talking about people in general, I think everyone focuses on the what and not the why. That is one of the most ... There's two things that most people do wrong when it comes to achieving success for their life.

The first thing is you have to stop being right. If every time you interact with somebody, you're making assumptions on the way that the interactions going to go, then you're living in the past. Everything that's ever happened in the past is the way that your brain is designed. It's catching up. You want to be right. You want to show them that you're right. You don't really find out what they offer for your future, what they can bring you, how you can work with them ... That if you just stop being right and you start being in the moment and really taking a look at it and thinking about it and changing your anchor point for your thoughts to your future instead of right now or the past, you're going to start viewing people and situations and obstacles or whatever it is as moving you towards somewhere in the future. Then you're going to see how you can use that interaction to get there.

I think the second thing is is that we live in a transactional world. Physically, mentally, spiritually, it's right now, right now, right now. People focus on the what. The what is the thing that you can go and tell your spouse about. The what is the thing that you can go the bar and complain about. But if you focus on the what, then you're just kind of in this linear timeline of a bunch of whats that you failed at. If people take a book like Undo and go through the process to find their failure theme, they're going to find that most of their whats, they never even ... They are forced through a way that they develop their habits over time to consistently fail. You have to start looking at that why. Why did that happen? Why did that happen? Then you can really start to stop the whats from happening.

If you stop being right and look at the interactions that you have as how can they get me somewhere instead of how can I make sure that I'm the person that's coming ahead in this. Also to look at the why you failed through, like I said, a book like Undo instead of what you fail at, you're about 90% of the way to getting more successful than you've ever been.

Robert Plank: I love that message. Not only to stop being right, but to kind of live in the moment. I think that maybe 5-6 years ago someone quoted Dr. Phil to me. There was a situation where I was just kind of, I needed to change my thinking. He quoted Dr. Phil and said, "Would you rather be right or be happy?" Kind of along those lines, with these days with all the ... It's so easy to get distracted. The latest Facebook pop up, the phones blowing up, and even ...

Maybe 14 years ago or so, when I transitioned from high school to college, when there was the orientation day, they kind of had to ... There was something that they said that was along the lines of, "Well, when you're in high school mode, when you're in the high school mindset, you're only really paying attention about 30-30%." And he's like, "Well when you're trying to actually be an adult, being a grown up, you kind of have to be 80% there or higher." That was just kind of like all the things you've been talking about today. All these really simple concepts, but it's so simple and yet it seems like a lot of people are missing the boat and kind of need to readjust, right?

Matt Powell: I think that there's so many options out there, there's so many things that people ... I'm going to try Tony Robbins stuff for a little while. Oh, I didn't get to where I wanted to go, I'm going to go visit Zigler. Oh, didn't get there. I'm going to go to Tim Ferris. Oh, I didn't get it there ... That people are just constantly moving. I tell people if you really want to live in the now, and find out how far off you are from being in the now, take 30 minutes a day, get a book, and read it aloud.

What you'll find is that your brain is so all over the place, that you can barely read aloud. If you go to a zoo, if you go to a museum, you'll find that you don't even read the placards. You kind of skip around real quick and then you look back up because we just don't have attention spans anymore. We're taking in too much information and if you start to ...

That's what we found in martial art is that if I want to something, if I have one thing and that's the only thing that I'm going to try to do, and you have ten things that you're going to try to do, I'm going to win 90% of the time because I'm always focused on one thing. A lot of it is just kind of bringing it back to these useful skills of picking up a book and reading aloud. If you're in your office at work, and you need to read a report, close the door and read it aloud. Train your mind.

Meditation is great. I've been doing meditation for 20 years. I've done it all over the world. You can't sit in the office and meditate all day. What you can do is is you can focus the brain on things like reading aloud. You'll find that you start to, okay there's a whole lot going on in my mind right now. Let me just focus on this. Your communication skills get better. Your memory retention gets better. Your voice annunciation gets better. All by reading aloud. These are the types of little things that we found in the martial arts that we bring over. Then we teach people how to work under stress and duress, but reading aloud is one of them.

If I take somebody and I make you go out and I make you run and sprint and do everything as hard as you can, and I bring you back and your heart rate is really elevated and I make you read aloud, you'll be amazed how much that duplicates what happens in public speaking. You can train yourself for public speaking by reading aloud when you exercise. It's all about just focusing the mind, focusing on the why, not the what. Focusing on being in the moment, not trying to get ahead and assume the conversation. It's just that little bit of focus that ... Just something as simple ... Getting Undo and reading the whole book aloud and you'll find after a little bit of time, you've changed in a lot of ways.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. I love that messaged I think that I'm going to be doing that today. I'll read aloud. I hereby promise to you, Matt Powell, that at some point today I will read aloud 30 minutes to find out what all the fuss is about and to regain my focus and kind of reset and stuff.

Great. I like all the things that you have to share today. Not only just the ideas, but also just kind of these little exercises, these little step by step things. I think I mentioned earlier that there's a lot of self help mindset stuff out there that's just ideas, right? Just clutter, just more stuff to kind of gum up the gears, right? Kind of like you were saying a few minutes ago that a lot of people just kind of dabble and sample and just kind of get a little taste of all these little things, but they're kind of become a jack of all trades, master of none.

I really like all the stuff that you had to share with us today, and I think that as you were talking, I was kind of thinking to myself, "Well, all these ideas but how do I get more focused," so perfect. Little 30 minutes of reading something aloud. Could you tell us one more time to make sure that everyone knows where to find out about you, where to find your book, where to find your website, just one more time for us.

Matt Powell: You can go over to pastless.net. There you can get a free book, you can also get the link over to amazon. If you're on amazon once a day like everybody else is and you're a prime member, then just type in Undo. You'll find the book. If you're amazon prime, you can pick it up for $2.99. If you're not amazon prime, you can get the paperback or the ecopy. Both of them are under $10.

You can always hit me up if you're on Facebook. It's Facebook.com/iammattpowell. Instagram is the same thing. On Instagram it's iammattpowell. And twitter, iammattpowell. All of them are the same. Just remember iammattpowell for social media. I do my best to communicate through email or whatever. If people have questions about the book, if people have general questions about anything they want to contact me about, you can go to pastless.net or you can go to social media, and I'm definitely there to help out anybody that needs a little bit of a boost.

Robert Plank: It seems like we all need that. Maybe not everyday, but we all get to the point where we need a little bit of help. Cool. Thanks, Matt, for stopping by the show and sharing what it is you have to share. I appreciate you and I appreciate everything that you have to say. Thanks again for stopping by.

Matt Powell: Hey I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. You've got a great show.[/showhide]

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128: Differentiate, Entertain and Educate with Authority Marketer Jeff Beale

Mr. Marketology Jeff Beale can teach you to become an authority using the four C's: Content, Contacts, Communication, and Consistency. He tells us how to identify and understand our audience, optimize for social media, sell based on emotional triggers, and differentiate yourself from the crowd.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Our guest today is best-selling author and marketing strategist, Jeff Beale. He helps businesses leverage their knowledge to gain authority status in their industry, and then he uses authority marketing to generate even higher converting leads. Hey, Jeff. I'm Robert. How are things today?

Jeff Beale: Things are going well. Thanks for having me on the show, Robert.

Robert Plank: I'm really glad that you're on. The stuff that you do, you help people gain authority status and do authority marketing, so what does that entail exactly?

Jeff Beale: Marketing basically in a layman's term is to become the go-to person in any product or service. Authority marketing is when somebody's hungry right on the street, they think of McDonald's, because, hey, McDonald's is an authority. When you're thirsty, you think of Coca-Cola, because Coca-Cola is an authority. Things of that nature. Becoming that authority no matter which industry it's in helps you leverage your credibility. It also helps you generate business based off the fact that whenever people think of what you offer or that industry, they think of you.

It's just the process of building that credibility, building that brand awareness so whenever they think of that, you're the first person that comes to mind, and usually the first person that comes to mind will be the one that gets the business unless you do something to mess it up.

Robert Plank: How does someone become an authority? Is it a matter of having a book or a blog, traffic, or social media or some combination? What does someone have to do exactly?

Jeff Beale: It's a combination. Actually, the first thing you would need to do is to first identify your audience. Know exactly who your audience is and then their needs, and then the last piece would be to find out where do they go to get information. Identify, let's say your audience. A lot of people like to identify their audience such as, well, they are this age, this gender, this ethnic group. I'm talking more of the psychological. For instance, let's go back to McDonald's. McDonald's serve people that are hungry. Coca-Cola serve people that are thirsty. It can get as basic as that, but you need to really know your audience, then understand their needs.

What is it that pains them, keeps them up at night, makes them pull the action trigger to do business with somebody? Once you understand that, then you can find out where do they go most often to find out who they want to do business with? What's the authority? Is it a magazine? A lot of people used to do the old traditional marketing, push marketing, on television and radio or a magazine. Nowadays, like you said, there's social media, there's bloggers, there's sites like Yo. There's tons of places that they go to to find out who is the best choice for what they are looking for.

Once you find that out, then it's all about quality content. It's all about putting out the best quality information for them to make an informed decision. That can be several ways. That can be social media posts. That can be blog posts. That can be what we're doing right now, podcasting is a great way of doing that. It can be videos. It can be many different things that you could put out as far as content, the type of content, but you find out what resonates the most around your audience and you deliver your actual content in a way that they easily digest it, they can get the information, they can make an informed decision, and they feel comfortable doing so.

Robert Plank: That all sounds like a pretty good plan, and that makes a lot of sense to me. How does this relate to what it is that you do? Is this a service you provide to others?

Jeff Beale: I do. Actually, I provide marketing strategies. With marketing strategies, my goal is to make you the authority in the industry, to make the brand awareness resonate amongst your audience. What I do is I look at putting together a strategy that makes sense for your company and finding out your audience, the need, your benefits, what's a good message for the audience and how to deliver it, what mediums and channels and platforms make the most sense, and then of course piecing it all together, putting it into a strategy that gets you in front of them in a way that they desire to see you, and help you deliver a message that they actually want to hear.

A lot of times, that's something that the business or business owners have difficulty doing because they're so close to the business that they assume a lot. First thing I tell companies, I tell the executives, "You are not your customer," because in most cases, you're not. In most cases, you don't buy what you're selling, and you're so informed because you started the company or you've been working in the business for so long, you have little things that you assume that you don't even think is a challenge or think is a point of decision that really is.

You might, for instance, for you doing podcasts, one thing that you may think of is, well, "Everybody uses Skype to record," but that's not true. To someone else, that might be something very, very difficult to understand. "How do I record? I understand how to sign up for Skype, but how do I actually record?" To you, it's easy. If you were selling, let's say, a course on how to podcast, you would just assume they knew, and you wouldn't even put that in your message, which that might be one of the biggest selling points of, "Let me show you a way that you can record with Skype in 5 minutes." That might be something that will make somebody pull the trigger, because they're like, "Oh wow. I can just 1, 2, 3, and do it. Great. I'm on," versus, "Let me show you the best way and I've been doing this for a hundred years."

"Yeah, okay, but I haven't, and I don't know what I'm doing. I just want it easy," and easy is the selling point, not the technology. It's just the ease of use.

Robert Plank: Right, and it seems like if you position it as ease of use, that's more relatable as opposed to if you just show, "Well, look how cool I am," then you're just showing off. You mention that little example about the podcasting and Skype. Even with that kind of thinking, some people don't even know how to install Skype or where to install Skype, even how to install the iTunes program to check on their podcast. They don't know what hardware they use to record. Yeah, that's huge and I totally agree with all that.

Kind of along those lines, I know you mentioned a lot of the things that you do when you're looking to improve someone else's business, do you have like a story or an example of a case study where you had a client and there were some things in their business that could use improving, and you kind of put them through your process, you went through and you found the best market, you figured out their customer, and you figured out what kind of things they should be doing?

Jeff Beale: Sure. One example that I found was a client that sold jewelry. They thought their audience was one thing, and come to find out, the audience was totally different based off of buyers, based off of research on who interacted with them. The interesting thing is, offline their audience was one thing, on-line their audience was totally different. They were taking the offline approach to an on-line audience, and that doesn't work.

Offline, you don't have things such as comments, likes, shares. Offline, you see it on TV, radio, and you are at the mercy of the television or radio. On-line, you can make choices and you can change and you can share your opinion, and that makes a big difference. After looking at it and finding out that you might even want to look at a different way of approaching it, more of an interactive approach was developed to help them.

Same thing with a client that I worked with that did media. One of the things that they did were, they were looking for how can they have more people engage with their shows? The key factor was they were looking at the old way to where ... Remember when you used to come in in prime time and you had to wait for prime time to watch a show?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Jeff Beale: You would actually schedule your day around it. Well, that's not the audience of today. Today everybody's on demand, and most people aren't watching it on television, they're watching it on a mobile device, and they may cast it to a larger monitor, which is the television, but they're looking on the go when they want to watch the shows. Nowadays, shows are even coming out before they're supposed to air. Like a show may be airing tonight, but if you subscribe to a cable provider, you can watch it midnight the night of, or you can watch it even a day before, and Hulu and Netflix have shown you how people love the fact that they can watch any show whenever they feel like watching it.

Looking at that and changing the approach on how to deliver these shows helped them change from a linear to a digital age, and it really helped improve them all the way across the board: viewership, search engine optimization, to search engine ranking, lowered their spend, and it helped because now that you know your audience, you're not fighting to find as many new audience as you are retaining old audience and having them evangelize the experience. Then that gets you new audience.

That's one of the challenges I found with many companies. They're so focused on finding new audience that they neglect the current audience, and then they spend additional money in reputation management, damage control. You have a cellphone, I'm assuming.

Robert Plank: Yes.

Jeff Beale: Like everyone. I use it as a cellphone theory. How many times have you seen commercials or heard of people that have plans that aren't available to you as a loyal customer? Then you call them and they say, "Well, that doesn't apply to you because you're already in a contract," or "You're already a customer." You're like, "Well, I'm a loyal customer. Why can't I get the discount that the new people get?" Well, that's the challenge is, they're always fighting to find new, new, new, and not trying to retain who they have. The interesting part about retaining current customers, first of all, they're easier, because they're already experiencing your brand and your product or service.

Second of all, they are, if happy, ready to tell somebody, if they're happy. They're ready to tell somebody if they're not, but you can leverage that to not only have them share the message but also get feedback from them to help improve what you have already. Improve either the marketing message, either the product or service, the customer service.

You can improve things because they're already dealing with you, and if you just look at your last, let's say, 5, 6 customers if you're smaller, or if you look at your last 2, 3 months of customers and you look at what their actions are, what their engagements are, what are their questions? What are the things they complain about? What are the things that they share? What are the things that they like? Then compile that information and make some marketing decisions based off of that, it's easier to find like-minded people than to just spend a lot of money on campaigns, and you're spending all this money on campaigns, throwing it out, seeing what sticks.

Once it sticks, if you're still not doing this type of backend research, you still don't know what to do next because you're still just throwing out stuff because you're not figuring out what worked, how can we now duplicate what worked and keep that going on and on?

That's one of the things that I always say. When you're doing authority marketing, it's all about being the 4 C's. It's all about having good content, making good contacts, have good communication, and then be consistent. That's the 4 C's. If you do those 4 C's, you will win when it comes to authority marketing.

Robert Plank: That's really cool. I think that's one of those things where it took me a while to kind of get it, especially seeing what a lot of these companies were doing, especially like the ones on social media where ... At first I thought, "Okay, well it's like this company, and they're just posting stuff on social media every now and then," but then when I've seen ... There's like a cupcake ... I don't know what you'd call it, the kind of person that bakes and sells cupcakes, there's this cupcake lady in our town, and she'll post pictures, and she'll do contests, and even the local news, they'll put full-on clips of their show just right there on Facebook, and I'm thinking, kind of like a little bit as you were describing what you were describing, I'm thinking, "Man, why would they put like a clip of their show right there on Facebook when ... ?"

I'm thinking, "Well, wouldn't them posting a clip take away from me watching their show?" And kind of the way you were explaining it, it's like, "Well, hardly anyone's watching on the TV live anyway, so it's kind of like a trade-off. They're giving away some of their best stuff in exchange, not only are they hoping it'll go viral or get some shares but, as you said, now they can look at the most popular content, or they can look at all of their audience, their likes, their fan page insights, all that stuff and figure out exactly who they're talking to, when it sounds like this out-of-date model that a lot of these companies are still hanging onto was just guessing. It was just let's just put out some stuff. Maybe the ad money worked, maybe not. Now you can go back and after running your experiments, go back and see how they did. Is that right?

Jeff Beale: That's correct. Also, with them putting the show on-line, it helps them separate themselves from their competitors because, think about this. If you had 2 cupcake bakers, I guess you would call it, or 2 cupcake stores in the same area, 1 has a show and 1 doesn't, how much advantage do you have when you say, "Well, you know, they may bake cupcakes and they may be good, I don't know, but we have a show, and you can see us bake our cupcakes, and people like our show."

Now you seem as if you are really an expert. Even if you're not, even if you have quick mix or something, you just seem, because people are like, "Well, they have to be good. They have a show." That gives you an advantage. Also, within the show, you can let them get to know you a little bit, and that's the beauty nowadays with social media, with Facebook Live and You Tube Live and all these other streaming, they can get to know you now.

You know the old saying in sales: People buy from who they know, like, and trust. They get to now know you. They get to see you enough to like you, and because you're up there in a credible source, they get to trust you versus an advertisement, which is cold. I don't know the last time you fell in love with a banner ad where you're like, "That banner ad made me feel all warm inside."

Robert Plank: Never.

Jeff Beale: Exactly. Now with the personality being displayed, you can have that feeling. So you say, "I really like that person." That's how it works.

Robert Plank: What you're saying is there's hope for the rest of us. We don't have to be super polished and rehearsed. We can just be ourselves and they'll fall in love with us as us.

Jeff Beale: That's the key, being yourself. The interesting thing with on-line especially, offline is still more polished and better, but on-line is the more authentic you are, the better. People don't mind the mistakes. It should be as good of quality as you can get it, but it doesn't have to be polished, because sometimes when it's too polished, they think it's paid actors and they don't think it's real. They think, "Oh well, they paid for that. It's advertisement. Of course, they're going to say it's great because they were paid to say it's great." When it's a person and it seems authentic and it seems as if you're just everyday Joe, now it's something that's relatable.

If you noticed over the past few years, what's the biggest craze on television? Reality TV. Reality TV is because it makes you feel as if you know somebody, even though working in that industry, I can tell you it's scripted, and it's all planned and so forth, and they know what to say next, so forth and so on, but you think it's real, and it feels real even though it's not. They do that to make it more personal. That's the beauty of now on-line, you can do things and it doesn't have to be 100% professionally polished, and people will resonate.

That's why You Tube videos can go into the millions, and it's some little kid dancing. Of course, I don't know if you can be able to sell anything with it unless it's a choreography or something of that nature, but people are like, "I just like it. It was so cool," and they share it, but when's the last time they've shared a polished commercial? They don't.

Robert Plank: Never, unless it's really funny.

Jeff Beale: Unless it's really funny. Yeah. I think the only ... The one I remember, the latest one I remember that was shared that was viral was the Van Damme when he was straddling those 2 tractor trailers.

Robert Plank: I think like every now and then there's something like a Dollar Shave Club commercial or something, but very rarely.

Jeff Beale: See, but they've figured it out, though. They figured out that men ... They don't really key in on the quality of the razor, if you think about it. They figured out that the humor will get people to share it. The mass volume of numbers will get in front of enough men, and those men will look at the deal and say, "You know what? That's a good deal, because I'm already spending X amount of dollars," and it stays in your head because you think of the entertainment of the actual commercial.

Those type of things do work, but most companies don't execute it in that way. Most companies execute it in the same way that they would a television advertisement, and it doesn't go viral because people are like, "Oh, it's another commercial." That's the reason the Internet has been so successful when it comes to video, and you look at any other type of source like Sirius Radio, any type of streaming source, what is the biggest thing that they harp on? "We don't show commercials." People don't want to see commercials. That's why.

Robert Plank: That's a pretty big insight right there. I think that that's why people need you to kind of clean up the marketing efforts, right?

Jeff Beale: Yeah, and the best thing about a commercial, people love a commercial that they don't even know is a commercial. Like I said, the Dollar Shaving Club, yeah, we know it's a commercial, but they don't say how great their razors are. They don't say anything about that. They don't say anything about, "We have been in the business with titanium and platinum," they just have fun, and people like that in the entertainment. If your commercial can entertain and educate, then you can win. You just figure out how can your commercial entertain and educate?

I was telling one client about floors. Well, when a person is looking to buy new flooring, the biggest thing on their mind besides cost, and they'll be willing to pay more if you can get the other values in line. They want it to be fast with installation, they want it to be painless with dealing with your business, and they want other people to say, "Wow! You've got the best floors ever!" Of course, resale value helps, if they can improve the resale value.

Most people don't really care about the type of quality of the wood, and they don't care about this is cherry oak versus ... They don't know and they really don't care. They just want when people walk in the door saying, "That is beautiful." Now, what I told them is, a lot of things they'll have questions about, you can put into some sort of advertisement or social post in which you're explaining to them some of the myths of floors. For instance, they may say your floor is water resistant. Being water resistant doesn't mean it's waterproof. If enough water gets on it, it's still going to damage the floor, and that's not what's told when it's sold to you, but that's what it is. It's not waterproof, just water resistant.

You could spill a glass of water and don't worry about it, but if you have a water leak, you'll still have to replace that floor. Those type of things make a person feel as if you know what you're talking about, because a lot of other people aren't going to tell them that. They may also know what's the difference between hardwood and laminate. Your knowing that difference and the difference of how you lay it to make your house look larger, and you have examples to show them, now make you a very credible source when it comes to dealing with somebody with the floor.

The last thing, most people when they get floors, especially when it comes to floor damage, they go through their insurance company. What are the 5 things you need to know when you talk to your insurance company? Because most people want the best value for what they're going to claim, so they're not going to want to be cheap, but they're not going to want to have to come out-of-pocket either. That's why they have insurance. You letting them know how to deal with your insurance company, the right answers to the right questions, this type of thing makes it easier to deal with you than other flooring companies that might just come in and give an estimate and say, "All right, this is how much we charge," and they maybe try to haggle with you to lower their rates.

People will pay more if they feel there's more quality. Think about this. When's the last time you went to a Bentley dealership and argued about how much a Bentley cost? You don't. You don't even know how much a Bentley costs half the time. Yeah, because you just know that they're said to be the top-of-the-line car. If you really did research on a Bentley, you find out they only get 12 miles to the gallon, you always have to take them in for service and everything at 5,000 miles, so they're really ... I talked to a guy that sold Bentleys, and he told me it's not affording owning one as far as like purchasing, it's actually the upkeep that most people can't afford.

Most of the time, these cars come back within a year because the upkeep is so much, people buy them and they can't afford them. They have to bring them back. Knowing that, the value has been put up so high with that quality of car. If you can do that with your business, to put up the value so high that people don't even want to ask how much do you charge, you'll win every time, because they've already made the decision that if this is not extremely out of my means, I am going to do business with them, they're not going to bark about the price.

That's the whole goal of authority marketing is to become an authority so much, now I'm not saying that you escalate your price because of it, but so much that that isn't even a concern when you get to the actual closing of the business, because they've already decided they're going to purchase. It's sort of like ... Think about it. How many times have you met people that say that they don't have any money, but then they show up with something that you know costs some money, and you're like, "I thought you didn't have any money?"

Robert Plank: They have priorities.

Jeff Beale: People buy what they want. Exactly. They'll go out and buy some Jordans for $200, but they might not pay their light bill, so you're like, "I thought you were broke." No, they were broke for that. That wasn't of value.

Robert Plank: That's funny, and it sounds like all the things that you're mentioning here today, it seems like you're going after like the emotion of some kind, whatever the hot button is there, like in the case of the Bentley thing it's like, well, who cares about all these little facts and figures when how cool for you to be driving it, and drive it off the lot, and drive it home, people see it. Even like with the floor case study you said there, the number 1 reason to get a new floor is to show it off so everything thinks, "Dang! How'd you get that?" Sure there's like a few little objections or common things there, but it seems like that combination you said there about how you kind of have the wow factor, I guess, have the big raw feeling from using it, and then you kind of have these objections that you know they already have but you explain them away quickly, and that way people can tell that you know what you're doing because you already have their questions in their mind before they even ask them.

Jeff Beale: Exactly. Exactly. It's all about emotions. It's all about understanding what drives a person to make a decision. To be honest, a lot of it doesn't include price. Truly, if you can tap into what makes them work, you can understand that. For instance, people that buy security systems, they don't buy security systems for all the features. They buy to be secure. You can have it to where your mobile phone connects and this and that but it never sets off an alarm ever, people aren't going to buy your security system, because they're like, "Well, that's nice, nice features, but if somebody breaks in, it's not going to help."

You find out what the emotional triggers are. That's why you can't just base it on demographics and geographics. You just can't say "Just because you're this age, this gender, this ethnic group, this income level, you will buy what I'm selling." It's really finding out what keeps them up at night?

Volvo did a great job when they went after the soccer moms. What did Volvo hang their hat on the most? "We are the safest car you'll ever buy." That's what they hung their hat on. They would show the mom with the kids. Moms were like, "I like BMW's, but if I ever was in an accident, I'd be safer in a Volvo," so they bought Volvos. For many years, they thought Volvos were the safest cars out. You look at, let's use televisions. We all love 4K, right?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Jeff Beale: The funny thing is when you ask the sales guy, which if you get an honest one who'll tell you, most of the time you'll never see 4K, because first of all you have to have the right cables, you have to have the right television station, you have to have the right cable box. You have all these things have to be in order for you to even see 4K. They can't sell you a 4K and say, "Well, you probably will see 4K once in a blue moon."

Same thing with cameras. They show you these pictures. It was funny. We was watching a commercial last night. My wife was telling me ... She has an iPhone, actually, and she was like, they were showing a commercial with all these pictures of great photos, and they said taken with the iPhone. My wife was like, "My iPhone pictures don't ever look like that." I said, "Yeah, because it's not Photoshopped." They never said it wasn't edited. They just said "taken with an iPhone."

What you're seeing is after it has been taken, put to production, post production has been done, Photoshop has been done and, yeah, now it looks beautiful, but they're not lying, but they know that most people buy these phones and they take selfies and they want to take pictures, and that's a driving force. People will buy a phone, and I'm guilty, because I just bought my last phone because of that, because I want to make sure my pictures are high quality. I want to make sure my videos are high quality, because I do videos for my marketing, so I want the clearest videos I can get from my phone.

What I found in my research of going through phones, here's the secret with that. Your cameras mostly have ... Most of them have the same megapixel rate. The key is the lighting. That's the key. You can have the highest pixel rate, but if you don't have a lot of light, you're not going to get those great pictures, so that's the secret to it, but they don't tell you that, because if that's the case, you wouldn't buy another phone, you would just go buy some professional lights.

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Jeff Beale: And they sell phones.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. Lots of good stuff today, and you had lots of cool stories and little lessons here and there. Where can people find out more about Mr. Jeff Beale? Where can they find out about your book, your blog, and all that cool stuff?

Jeff Beale: Sure. They can actually go to MrMarketology.com. That has everything about me, but even more important, actually the all about me funny is 1 paragraph. You can only find 1 paragraph, but what you will find are marketing strategies such as this, and I'll be talking with other experts and sharing my point of view as well, and you'll find that on the site. Also, my social, all of them: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, not LinkedIn, Google Plus, are all Mr. Marketology, so if you go to those platforms, look up Mr. Marketology or put Mr. Marketology at the end, you'll find me.

Then you can even find me easily at JeffBeale.com. I try to make myself very accessible, so hopefully if I'm doing my job correctly, you can find me easily.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Thanks for all that stuff and, yeah, I really liked all the marketing nuggets you dropped on us today, and I think that ... The big thing other than the stuff like the 4 C's of marketing and differentiating and course correcting and stuff, I think that, especially that little Apple lesson about how ... That was pretty dang powerful for me. You want a camera that takes good pictures, and they kind of get you with this thing that's true, but also really dang cool, and even showing all these pictures taken with the iPhone, man, it kind of messes you up a little bit, doesn't it? Because you think, "Okay, I want to take good pictures for myself but, man, imagine the possibilities if I could use this same device to take all these awesome photos." Thanks for that lesson there.

Jeff Beale: Oh, you're welcome, man. If there's 1 takeaway that I would like the listeners to know is that understand your audience. Find out exactly who that is, what their needs are, and then find out how can you benefit them? If you can do that and put that into a compelling message, you won't have any problems becoming an authority in your market.

Robert Plank: Perfect. Well said. MrMarketology.com. Thanks so much for being on the show, Jeff.[/showhide]

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124: Discover Your Own Passion, Knowledge and Advantage with Agency Consultant Jason Swenk

Jason Swenk talks to us about creating the resource you "wish you had" that satisfies the criteria of: 1. something you're passionate about, 2. something you're knowledgeable in, 3. an area where you have a unique advantage, and 4. something that is helpful and educates people.

He tells us how he started, grew, and sold an agency, and shares some cutting edge techniques including the early bird list and progressive profiling with thank you pages.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Today's expert guest is Jason Swenk. Have you ever asked yourself how can I start an agency? How can I scale my agency? How can I generate more leads? How can I find time to do work on the business and not in the business, and what systems do I need in place, or even how do I position myself to sell my agency?

We're in the right place. We're talking to the right guide. We're talking to Mr. Jason Swenk. How are things today Jason?

Jason Swenk: A man. How's it going?

Robert Plank: Super fantastic. This whole agency thing, or web agency, I've got to be honest. I've heard it thrown around. I've heard this term being used at live events. I've been to events where it's like these talks offer agencies only, but I have to admit after seeing it thrown around and seeing a few different, I guess, agencies, I'm still at a loss as to what an agency is. Could you fill us in a little bit?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. It's basically a professional service firm that does marketing or technology for their clients. There's so many forms of a digital agency. The traditional agency everybody thinks of Mad Men, right? I create the Super Bowl ads, commercials, that kind of stuff, but on the digital side there's so many agencies that actually creates websites or do just social media, or mobile apps, or email marketing, or whatever it is. That's what a digital agency is.

Robert Plank: Does it have to be a team?

Jason Swenk: Yes, because if it's just one person you're a freelancer.

Robert Plank: Oh, okay. You could have a 2 person agency technically.

Jason Swenk: Exactly.

Robert Plank: Well, cool. Now that were on the same page with that could you tell us about yourself and about your agency, and what it is that you do?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Back in 1999, back when Al Gore invented the Internet, thank you Al, I worked for a company called Arthur Anderson who was the paper shredding company of Enron, and worked for them for about 6 months. At that time I was a computer programmer and I really hated what I was doing but I didn't know what I could do next. I was just lucky my friend looked like Justin Timberlake so I created a website making fun of of NSYNC back in the day when they were popular, and it was called NSHIT. It got really popular and started designing websites for people because people were like, "Hey, can you design me a website?" I was like, "Yeah, sure." I was like, "Five hundred dollars," and they were like, "Yes." I was like, "Oh. Cool," and then the next person comes along and I was like, "a thousdand dollars," and I just kept going up until someone said no, and just started doing websites for a lot of cool people.

I struggled for a couple years just because, we were always profitable, but for the first couple years I didn't know even what an invoice was. I didn't know how to run a business or really how to get it off the ground. I didn't have that clarity of where we were going, and then when I started focusing on that that's when we started making, crossing over the 7 figure mark and crossing over that mark, and all this kind of stuff going forward.

Robert Plank: How much of this do you do yourself? Do you just manage a team or how hands-on are you personally?

Jason Swenk: I sold my agency in 2012, so I ran it for 12 years and sold it. Now what I do, and I'll explain what I did in the past. In the very beginning I was doing everything myself. I was doing project management. I was doing design. I was doing development, hosting, everything, clean the toilets, wash the sinks, feed the birds, whatever it was. When I started getting smart I started hiring people for the things I didn't want to do, or hiring for the things that I wasn't good at, and just started expanding, and grew an amazing agency from that.

Since I've sold, that's why I work with digital agencies now, it's just to show them how I started, how I grew, how I sold, and just walk them through the path that I did, and create a resource that I wish I had.

Robert Plank: Is that what you do mostly is you get these agencies to the position where they can be sold, or do you also look at these agencies and maybe refine their system and figure out where they could be doing better?

Jason Swenk: It depends on what they ultimately want. Some people, they envision, they think that in order to be successful I have to get to a point to sell my business one day. I'll tell you that is farthest from the truth because if you truly love what you're doing, why would you sell it? Even after, when I sold my agency, great. I got a great big check. I thought cool, I'll go buy an island or whatever stupid people do, but you're so unfulfilled now because you had all the significance with all your employees that you had, all the contribution that you were helping them out, helping their clients out. That all goes away after you're sold.

If you're just looking for success then that's the perfect scenario but if you're looking for more, which everybody wants more, everybody needs to feel needed. I always tell people, "Look. If you don't like doing the particular business you're doing now you can sell it if you want, but you can also create it as an incubator and build other stuff, and you put the right people into place to do the stuff that you don't want to do," which probably leads you to the next question is, why did you sell it, because I loved what I did.

I had a business partner and we did it for 12 years. I knew I wanted to do something different. I just didn't know what it was. We had a 50-50 partner split and a bunch of companies wanted to buy us and we were like let's do it. We don't know what's next. We don't know what is through that door, but it was the best thing I've ever done as well.

Robert Plank: Did you know that void would be there? Like you said, you were glad to have the big payday but did you, even at that point, did you plan on just taking a break forever or for a year? What was happening at that time?

Jason Swenk: No. I'm a creator so I always got to be building something or creating something, like my wife sees a cool furniture piece and she'll be like, "Man, that's kind of cool," I'll be like, "I can build that. I'll go do it." I have to be building something so I couldn't just sit there. I mean yes, I could've. I guess I could've just do nothing but then I think that's when people die, when you just sit around. You know?

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah.

Jason Swenk: I don't truly believe in retiring. My dad tried to retire many, many years ago, played a year of golf and was just bored, went back to work. For a couple of years I struggled because I couldn't find my purpose of what I wanted to do, what I was really good at, what I was passionate about. You take outside the money. You're like I don't care if it makes money or not, I just want to enjoy it. That's why so many people get into philanthropy and all that kind of stuff, but I just couldn't figure it out until I was lucky to fall into it like I fall into everything else.

Robert Plank: What happened? You had the agency going and then you sold it off, and then at that point then you decided that you were going to build back up just some kind of training or some kind of coaching for other agencies?

Jason Swenk: Well, no. I thought the grass was greener on the other side because I wanted to build a product. I was always in the service-based business, right? I'd sell something. I'd have to deliver something. I would look at people building these technology products and getting huge accolades. I was like, all right, and that was at a time when Instagram just sold for a billion dollars. I was like, maybe I need to create an app.

I literally created a phone app on the iPhone where it takes pictures of everything that you ate, gives you a visualization, shares it out with your friends. It was going really well but I just didn't want to take pictures of my damn food anymore. I was like if I'm not doing it I can't be the hypocrite, and I didn't enjoy it. At that time I was just lucky enough that, I think I did that for about a year, and at that time I had a couple of my old competition reach out and say, "How'd you get clients like AFLAC, and AT&T, and Lotus Cars? How'd you get the best placed to work, and how'd you do this?"

I just started helping them out for free and truly loved it. From there I was like, well, what if I create this podcast and just interview other friends of mine at the time, and just tell war stories about running a business, and an agency, and that kind of stuff, and then it just took off from there. Now I just provide a resource where I help people get to the next level of wherever they're going within their business.

Robert Plank: That's cool. Could you unpack a little bit about that? You say some of your friends asked you how you booked a lot of these clients or, I see that on your speaking topics and things like that you talk about how to generate 25 leads every day, so could you give us a little bit of a taste of the agency, I guess, wizardry that you have? Even just a couple of little things you can do maybe for even any agency to help them out.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. The biggest thing that agencies are doing wrong is they're looking at the bigger guys and they're trying to be a me too agency. The biggest thing you need to do is pick your specialization. You can't be a jack of all trades. You got to pick down to one, do that extremely well, and put out amazing content for that particular audience in order for them to build up trust, and authority, and all that kind of stuff.

By doing that you can start eliminating your competition. I tell people there's other people that help out agency owners, but I don't have any competition. My competition is procrastination and cat videos because no one can be me. No one can produce the stuff or have the style behind my style, and I can be anybody else. It's all about picking that particular market that you want to serve, understanding their biggest challenges and desires, and obsessing over it, and creating valuable information that they can go to without you. That's the most important. Stop doing damn videos about your portfolio and how cool your people are, and your culture, and all that kind of stuff. No one cares other than the people working for you. Focus on them.

The other thing I'll tell you, and this works with any kind of business and my website's a good example of this, stop focusing on yourself. Going to your website rather than saying, "Hey, I've done this and look at all my accolades," and all that kind of BS, ask a question right off the bat. If you go to my website, and it depends on when this airs, there should be a question. Always there's a question and it should say, "Hey. Do you want to know how I started, grew, had fun, and sold an agency?" Then I say, "Hey. Start here." Even on my about page that intro that you read was all questions because that focuses on the person coming to your site and changes the conversation. That's probably one of the biggest things, if you don't take away from anything on this, think about what are the right questions to ask and how do I ask questions in order to focus on them?

Robert Plank: When you focus on them how do you reconcile between making fun videos or making podcast episodes where you help them out, how do you decide between what's just something that I'm going to give away for free, like what did you say? You said to make something that's valuable that they could do without you. How do you decide between that and something that's trade secret that you probably shouldn't give away?

Jason Swenk: I basically tell people everything. The cool thing about this particular market is people are lazy. They want to know how to do it but they don't want to do it themselves, right? You want to separate yourself from everybody else so why would you give away your worst tip? Then everybody's going to think that your best tip. If you put out the typical BS e-book saying, "Do you want to know how to get more customers? Download my boring e-book." That's not going to work but if I put out a video that said, "Hey. Do you want to know how I converted 80% of my marketing proposals from AT&T, LegalZoom, and Hitachi? I'm going to walk you through the 8 steps, the 8 strategies that we use so you can do that, and you can learn the number 1 tip for closing, and not having a prospect go completely silent after you send the proposal."

That's going to be valuable. They're going to watch that video. They're going to take away a lot of stuff. They're going to go execute it. It will work and then they're going to be like, "All right. What's next?" I'm in it for the long run, right? I want to help them out in the long run, which they'll come back to me.

Robert Plank: You give them a little bit of a taste you're saying.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. The cool thing about this particular market and this strategy, you got to know what you're actually doing. There's so many people out there that they're 15 years old, or 20 years old, and they've never run a business. They took a course and they figured out how to do Facebook marketing. Now they want to do their own Facebook marketing course. People are going to see through that so when people tell me, they go, "I don't want to give away my best stuff," it's because that's the only stuff they have, so that might be the wrong business to get into.

That's why I do what I do and it makes a huge difference. I mean this business now, it's taken me, I ran the agency for 12 years so factor this in, but in 11 months I built this particular business selling information and consulting to over 7 figure business in 11 months.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Jason Swenk: By doing this strategy.

Robert Plank: That's cool. I'm looking at some of the things that you have for sale like I see one thing that's a collection of documents that agencies could have. I see you have a course on how to generate some leads. Can you tell us about those products, and how they came into being and what they do?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. I really started out consulting first and I think that's where you need to go before you actually start developing information products or that kind of stuff because you really got to get a pulse and make sure that your assumptions were right. I was just lucky enough that I was my audience, right? The materials I was creating and the lessons I was walking my one-on-one clients through, I wanted to scale that up because coaching and consulting is just not scalable. You can only take on so many people and I didn't want to work all the time. I wanted to work less than 100 powers a month at that time. I work a lot more now because of love what I do, but that was the goal. That was what I wanted to prove to everybody that you don't have to work all the time.

By doing that I was able to take what I was using for my one-on-one clients and replicate that, so I started looking at what made our agencies successful, reverse engineering it, and then breaking out into systems. The only difference between where people are at now and where they want to go is the systems that they have, and systems outperform talent all day long. I just literally started thinking, all right. What systems do I need to put in place or walk my one-on-one clients through in order to get them to understand and be able to implement how to generate more leads? That's how I created the Generate Leads Every Day program where it's basically 5 systems and walks you through all that. It's not just Facebook and that kind of stuff. Yes, that's part of it but there's a lot of other stuff in there for agencies.

What I also started doing is looking at, all right, what are all the other stuff that people are struggling with? You mentioned the agency documents. I look back at all the documents we've created over the 12 years, there's some key ones that I wish I had in the very beginning, and so I was like, okay, how do I build this service ladder, or this offering latter, and saying I don't want to maybe possibly offer the top-of-the-line product right off the bat. Maybe I need to offer the proposal template, or the agency documents, to show them that I actually did run an agency, own an agency, and I was successful at it. You go use this and then you'll come back to me for all the other programs that we have.

Over time, I think this is almost the second year, or I think maybe I crossed over just a little over 2 years now, I just keep adding on based on what people need and how the market changes, and I just keep updating stuff. That's how I created those programs. Does that help?

Robert Plank: Yeah. It does. Looking at the things you have for sale and hearing the way that you position a lot of these things, I know that you had something where you said you're positioning this as you changed up to 80% of your lead generation. and stuff like that. All the things that you were talking about and selling, and even sharing for free, they all seem to be things that they all have a real case study, kind of like you said, you use the coaching to get the pulse of these people and uncover the questions and their problems, then you figure out what kind of solutions you personally ended up applying over and over again, so there's the case study, and the steps, and the proof.

I think that, like you said, the difference between taking a Facebook course and just watching some generic videos and making your own even more genericer videos is that with you, you go back and look at, well, reverse engineer you said, you go back and look at all the things that have worked and just put it into not just a step-by-step system but also things that have actually worked. There's something to that, right? There's something to not just, well this is it been proven to work or I've used this, but you say, "Okay, I use this for Lotus cars, or I use this for LegalZoom." I say, "Okay, eill not only do I have the real stuff to find the theory but I also have the belief, I guess, that it's worked for you, so now I'm going to go at it full speed as far as implementing it."

Jason Swenk: Yeah. You just look at yourself and say what am I passionate about? What do I have knowledge in that other people may not have, and what's my competitive advantage, and then how can I help? That's really the step I follow and the formula that I follow. I had to figure out, I could go after and do consulting for any kind of business, any kind of service company business, but I wanted to drill down, and so I drilled down into a particular market that I knew. Then I wanted to say in this particular market, how do I separate myself from all the other jokers out there and be my own joker, and say, "Well, all these other jokers ran business and to the ground or never worked for an agency before." Cool. Separator.

Then I also wanted to think how can I educate them? That's the reason why I put a cat video on my homepage and I do these goofy Darth Vader videos, or whatever. I'm trying to separate myself from everybody else to break that pattern that everybody's used to in their regular educational videos, and then by doing that, and then them actually getting value from it before they even give you anything, that's the secret sauce.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. That way it's almost like they feel that they owe you.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. I literally have a Facebook ad running right now that's been running for the past 8 months. I haven't really touched it. I literally recorded it on my iPad because I wanted it to look kind of raw. I didn't want it professional and I just waving my arms. I'm like, "Hey look at me. If you're an agency owner, and you struggle with sending out the proposal, and the client goes dark, let me tell you how to stop it," and I told them how to stop it right on the video, and then I said, "Cool. If you like this video you're probably struggling with getting the budget from people. If you want to know how to get the budget click the button below. I will ask you for your email so I can spam you later, and then do that." You're having fun with them.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. None of this old stuff where one step is left out, or no click baiting, or any of that. It's here's this little problem you have. I'm going to fix your little problem. Not here's problem number 2.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Exactly. If you're using click bait Facebook's going to destroy you, and all these other media companies are going to destroy you.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. I've seen that. They're setting all the stuff down.

Jason Swenk: Which I'm glad. Yeah.

Robert Plank: Yeah. It cleans it up for the rest of us. It's one of those little fads I guess but now it's time to actually help people. I like that you broke it down right there into, once again, steps, right? Step number 1 is the thing that you're going after with your passion, and it sounded like with your app photographing your food, that was something you were like, okay, that was cool but not really your passion, and then number 2, something where you have knowledge. You had this previous knowledge from doing all of the agency stuff. Number 3, where you can get a unique advantage, and the number 4, be helpful and educate people instead of just showing off.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Exactly, and then the other thing too, and this is really important, especially when you start out, you're going to have one thing. If it's not right for someone don't force it. The reason why I've created so many things is because there's so many different stages people are at. If someone's stuck in their business the agency playbook's good for them. If someone's trying to generate leads, it's perfect like that. Make recommendations on what's actually right for them, not what you want to sell them. When you actually start coming at it with that, and you literally tell someone, "Hey. This program is not right for you if you're trying to get," one of my friends, Frank, is really good at this. He's like, "If you're get rich person this is not the right program for you, but if you're willing to put in the hard work this is an amazing program."

It's like try to push more people away in order to attract more.

Robert Plank: Nice. Along those lines a little bit, do you have any plans with all the products that you have for sale? Do you have any plans for a bundle, maybe with all or some, or do you think that the strategy of just making a pick and choose kind of thing, is that what you're going to continue to do?

Jason Swenk: Oh, yeah. I'm always putting stuff together. The thing is is as you create these programs you've got to create urgency. It doesn't matter what the price is. People don't make a decision on price alone. They make a decision on urgency, and let me prove that point. If I'm about to have a heart attack and I'm going into the surgery, am I going to ask how much it is to save my life? Hell no. Urgency.

It's the same thing about when you're selling your products. You have to educate them enough and show them the value, but then also create urgency so you can use this based on, hey, the price is going up, but then you're selling on price. I usually do it by having people jump on an early bird list. All my programs, when they get on my list, look like an auto launch. It's basically everybody does these Jeff Walker launches and they say, "Hey. I just revised the program. Jump on the program and you'll also get my generate leads program for free," or whatever it is.

What I have found is when you actually do that you're going to increase your conversion dramatically. You'll see the playbook advertised for a certain amount. If you get on my list and you interact with the campaign a certain way, then you may get an early bird offer which comes with everything. Everything's a test and every market is different, so you just got to test it out, and you got to figure out ... Selling my products is just a gateway for me, for them to gain my knowledge, but then come to my live events, or work with me one on one, or join the live event mastermind that we have traveling around the country. You just got to think about what's the end goal. Where do we want to position people? Where are we trying to funnel people to?

Robert Plank: You're playing the long game it sounds like.

Jason Swenk: Big time. I am so happy at what I'm doing, I don't see myself doing anything different to the day I die. I absolutely truly never had a cooler job in the world, not even close enough to this. I'm definitely in it for the long haul because I know I can outlast and outwork anybody out there.

Robert Plank: That sounds like a perfect place to be. As were starting to wind down this called do you have any, aside from all the stuff that you already have set up, do you have any cool upcoming project or idea, or something that you are currently working on?

Jason Swenk: One of the things I'll tell you, especially that can help you out, especially when you're building your campaigns, it's a framework that I've developed on the thank you page. A lot of people talked about there's no dead thank you page. I truly believe in that but what I do on the thank you page is different from everybody else, and it's called progressive profiling thank you pages.

A lot of times when people get on your list, and you're just happy someone's on your list, and you treat them the same way, eventually you'll send them an email saying, "Hey, just tell me a little bit more about yourself so I can send you more relevant stuff." It's always like everybody else. I do the typical BS stuff and I get maybe like a 5 to 10% response rate on it, so literally there was 90% of my list that I didn't know who the hell they were or what I should be sending them.

What I started doing is immediately on the thank you page I'd asked him one question, and I'd say, "Tell me. Are you an agency owner, freelancer, entrepreneur, or agency employee?" Radio button. As soon as they do that I pass them to one other page. I'd ask them to save their revenue. Are you 300,000 and below, 500 to a million, a million and above, and so on.

Then based on their answers I would show them the appropriate thank you page for the offer because I'm not going to offer a marketing professional my proposal template. They could care less about that, and then also, they're not going to go into certain campaigns that I have. If they're under 300,000 in revenue they're not going to be able to get on the phone with me, so I'm not going to offer them my blueprint session, or they're not going to be able to jump to my live events until they're over 500,000. If they're a marketing professional I'm not going to push them into an agency campaign, so now I can deliver a lot more effective content, and the cool thing, you're probably thinking would be like, well what was your response rate of people going all the way through? 94%. It blew me away.

Robert Plank: Geez.

Jason Swenk: By doing that, and I started doing that maybe 8 months ago, my revenues gone up by 75%. My open rate and engagement on email has gone up, it used to be like, the open rate was the typical BS 20%, maybe 4% will click through. Now it's close to 50% open rate and I think the click through, or the clicks, is like 20% or something like that. Something sick, because now I'm serving more relevant content to that audience, and then a lot of people actually put in the survey with the lead magnet or the opt in. That's going to hurt your conversion because you are asking more. Do it after.

No one does this other than my clients and they're just crushing it from it.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool and an easy way to get people to segment themselves a little bit, but like you said, if they opt in first they don't fill out a big long, page long survey as part of opting in, so if they don't want to fill that out they don't have to. You don't lose them but just over time you get them to slowly fill that in, that's pretty cool.

Jason Swenk: Yeah, and when I was measuring this over the month, I use confusion soft, I mean Infusionsoft, so their thank you pages were not responsive. That was 94%, and most of my opt-ins come from a mobile device, so that was 94% on a non responsive landing page. Now they're all responsive so if I measure it again it's probably almost at 98% I would think.

Robert Plank: Nice. That's pretty powerful stuff. I liked everything that you had to share with us today, not only just your story, but also the little tidbits of advice anyone can pick up and use right away. Can you tell everyone where they can find out all about you, what you do, and what you have coming out?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Just go to JasonSwenk.com/wahoo and I have something special for you. It's links to all the shows and some cool special things for you.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I can't wait to check that link out for myself. Thanks for being on the show on everything Jason and have a good one.[/showhide]

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123: Setup Websites, Get Clients, and Create Funnels That Convert for Any Business with Damir Butkovic

Damir Butkovic tells us the amazing story of how he brought in 4 new recurring clients in 14 days just by sending a simple four sentence email to 20 prospects. He is an implementer for small business, quickly creating websites with WordPress, email marketing campaigns with Aweber and ActiveCampaign, payment solutions with PayPal and Stripe, as well as landing pages using ClickFunnels.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Damir Butkovic is talking to us today about internet marketing strategy and he's the creator of the magic calendar partnership program. He publishes daily marketing tips on his website at DamirButkovic.com.au and his clients have included clients from start-ups on a minimal budgets to consulting high end fashion realtors. Damir, glad to have you on the show. Welcome to the podcast.

Damir Butkovic: Thank you. I'm glad to be here and of course thank you for the opportunity.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I think we're going to talk about a lot of fun stuff, have a good old time on the show. Could you tell us what it is that you do and what makes you special and different than everyone else out there?

Damir Butkovic: I realized kind of some years ago that I have this rare ability which I thought it's kind of a downfall. I have kind of, call it an analytical mind but what I can see when I talk to someone like the big picture, you know like people say oh I want to, I don't know sell stuff online, so I can see what they want, but I can also see all the moving parts and that's the part where people get confused so I can see, you know, I don't know from Facebook or I don't know website or landing page, or whatever, I can see all those parts which is usually, I can put them together and it makes sense to me. How to connect it all together while most people are too analytical they can't see, we call it, the big idea or they have the idea and they don't know how, it doesn't really exist and it's very complex for them.

For me it's just normal and logical and this is why I love internet marketing of course, is, you know, already it's a lot of moving parts. I say they're not hard but there is a lot of little things. If you go on, for example, and create a Facebook ad, you've got to worry about targeting, you've got to worry about headline, about copy, got to worry about images, and it can be I don't know 20 percent text and the image so little things like that, not hard, for some other people, for them it's already a problem so I can see that part in the targeting and there is PR blasts and partners and SEO and all these things so I can see it all together, put it all together and obviously make it work.

Basically from that part I can see the whole strategy and I can implement the strategy. A lot of people I guess have seen that. They see the strategy and their good at it but they don't even know how to implement it so I kind of have the tech background. I'm not the best quality in tech but I'm very good at it so I'll even know the best tools, which tools to use, to make it all work, or the budget or the easiest, I call it the easiest, and the simplest way so I kind of combine two things together so I would say that's the rare thing that a lot of guys and gals don't really have.

Robert Plank: Cool. I like that way of thinking and that's kind of the way that I think as well where it's frustrating to see, kind of like you said, a lot of people they'll have a lot of ideas or they'll be really philosophical about the marketing but it's one thing to say well you should have some Facebook ads, you should have a high converting landing page, and I'm thinking okay it's great that you said that but wouldn't it be more helpful if you showed it to me. Wouldn't it be helpful if you broke down the pieces and why things are in a certain way. Wouldn't it be more helpful to see someone go from scratch to creating something that's fully working and how it's all the pieces put together? Would you say, Damir, do you have any products or software or are you only a service provider?

Damir Butkovic: In terms of products I have my couple of products that I've done. One is called magic counter partnership program, where I actually teach people about online marketing. Actually give a free funnel with it which of course you've got to go in and do your own branding, put your own copy, but funnel is done. That's one product. I must say like that one a lot because it's kind of from A to Z. Everything's done for them, you know research marketing, copy, funnel tech part, and I do basic stuff on Facebook.

I have that program and the latest one I have is called how to get consulting clients in 14 days or less by sending out one call e-mail and that came out purely from experience. I was in a situation where I had no consulting clients and I need to get them fast and there was no advertising budget so I went, got educated, and I figured out one simple e-mail that you can send out and got a lot of response and I still have those consulting clients that I got. The best part is I learned the strategy from people who actually make millions of dollars. I have that.

I have these two things online but I do provide a service where we do websites, funnels, and all that stuff for other people online but I think maybe you were asking do I have something proprietary, unique software or something like that. No I don't. We actually like to use other people's knowledge. Like for example we would use the tools that are simple to use but done by other people simply because I don't think it's worth it to do my own thing because there are teams, for example, that's support let's say a webber, and there's a whole team that have the support there and their really good at it. So I use a tool that has really good 24-hour, whatever, support, and then plug it into whatever I'm doing so not everything depends on me. It shouldn't. When I'm not around any of my clients can get support. It's one of the things I don't like to do, well we don't like to do, me and my partner, that everything depends on us then I don't have a life.

Robert Plank: Right.

Damir Butkovic: If we depend on others. For example a lot of, call it web designers out there, they'll do the website and they'll complicate the whole thing while we would do it on the WordPress and say look if you want to change the date, change the date, it's not a big problem or whatever, put a blog post. While a lot people will put in a contract oh it's all coded and now you have to pay me $170 just to change your date and all that. That's exactly the thing that we don't do.

We'll actually use simple tools because obviously we share. If you like. That's not a problem. To make it work and that basically 99 percent of people, even without technology, can quickly learn and do themselves or outsource because even if they don't want to learn because of millions of other people know, for example, how to use WordPress, it's easy to outsource. It's not a big problem. You don't need a senior web developer, coder, which are hard to get and expensive. It's very easy to hire someone for a few bucks an hour to maintain your site, for example. If they have WordPress, it's not that hard to do little updates and all that.

I hope that answers your question.

Robert Plank: Yeah, Yeah it does. What you're saying is that a lot of other people who either set up websites or maintain websites or do these things like for traffic to help other businesses, a lot of other people will, maybe, complicate the process either on accident or on purpose and the client will end up getting locked into something that maybe is not as good as a webber or is not as good as WordPress and what you do is, you instead just make it simple. You just say well there's already this infrastructure in place, I'm not going to use some weird otter responder, I'm not going to build my own otter responder, I'll just use the one that I know works.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. You said it perfectly. For example, we have a client, my partner, let's say my client, she was locked into a deal where her domain reseller was buying her domain and charging her $200 a year for her domain name and we took it off and said basically it should cost you $10, so we transferred the domain name, right? I don't want to, for example, I consider myself a marketer, so yes please call me for strategy for funnels, for making complex stuff simple. For example, I don't see a value in putting people in such a contract and resell them something that's cheap and make money there and then they call me for minuscule things, that's not my thing and I've learned that a lot of people in this business, that I don't like, just simply overcharge clients for the things that shouldn't be overcharged.

I would say, for example, to anyone who's building a website, build it on WordPress, use active campaign as in e-mail marketing, which is I think by far the best out right now and most affordable for what it can do or a Webber, or I don't care, use Mail Chimp, use anything you like, right? Use the services that are already easy. Use a PayPal or Stripe for your payments. Use clip funnels for landing pages and funnels and whatever. Use the systems that are already there. They're all free or very cheap and very easy to use and everyone's happy. That's what my advice would always be. Use something that's already been built and has much better support. As I said, this is not my core business. I'll support them, that's why I don't like to complicate.

Also, we figure out where we fit in this business. We are not the cheapest, but we are also not the agency, right? We don't do websites that need to be coded from scratch and they cost $35,000 or something and they are very complex. I don't want that. You depend too much on the client or to bare a headache. We fit just in between where we can charge $1,000 to $5,000 or maybe $10,000 but still use all those systems and they are very simple. I would say whatever you're doing, simplified because you don't want to be spending time, losing time, while you can be making money. You don't want to be spending time on minuscule things like let's change an image and God knows what and then that takes two days just to contact your webmaster or something. I'd say take something simple you can do or a lot of other people can do for you.

Robert Plank: I like that and I like that way of thinking. Like you said, it's almost like you found the gap in the marketplace, right? A lot of people are priced too low where you're like I don't know why we'd price that low because it wouldn't be worth my while and other people are priced so high, which you said gets kind of scary or becomes very hands on if it's almost a full-time job or a team of programmers trying to make all this stuff, so you're just kind of somewhere in the middle where you use all these tools and you have somewhat of a machine where you can just kind of really quickly set up a site, like you said, plug them into the active campaign, plug them into Stripe, you just kind of have your process and I guess there's a little bit of thinking but not so much where you have to go back and forth with the client for a year or something.

Damir Butkovic: Exactly. Our, for example, we have a lot of clients now in fashion industry and we always offer two choices. We say look we'll build the whole thing for you, build a system, we can teach you how to maintain it or we can do it for you. That said. That's exactly how I want it. You know what I'm saying? I really don't want them to be calling me for little things, you know what I'm saying?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Damir Butkovic: So, I'll simplify the whole thing and make it easy. It's just based on the end of day, the logic conduit, do it we'll find you someone and I'll help you with that. I'll find you the right person to maintain the system. That's how we like to do it. I think it's easy, well for us, it's easy of course. Not for everyone. As I said, I'm not that techy for some techy people other stuff is probably easier and things like that.

For example, I had a client who said I'll actually use infusion soft or should I use active campaign? I said, I had infusion soft for three years and it's called confusion soft for a reason. It's a great system but I said you'll need a person 24/7 to work on it. People who know how to use it are very expensive and the whole system is actually complex. It's not user friendly, like I lost my mind with it and it was either myself, really good with tech, and then move to active campaign and it's the best decision I've done recently. I'm saying, so why complicate. If you don't have to complicate that's always my rule.

Robert Plank: Right. I mean, if one effective campaign gets you a website online or gets the system that your client wants in place and infusion soft my have more features but it's such a mess that you can't even get a site in that same amount of time then what's the point? I'd rather have the one that gets the site in place, right?

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. At the end of the day most clients, if you look at it, and I believe you know that they just want actually their newsletter to go out. Infuse of these, for example, an awesome system, you can have a whole bunch of clients and complex funnels and sales people and all that, it's really great. You don't do it justice if you just send out a newsletter and it costs a lot of money. So I said well go with active campaign, it's much easier to do anything with it and it's much easier to maintain it, like it actually teach whoever you want real quickly, how to do that. Again, why spend money?

Active campaign so far, to be quite honest, I don't know what's happening. I think someone from infusion soft went to active campaign or that's their other thing because they have a lot of similar functions but much simpler. Things like tagging, right? What you can do right now, what we do for our clients, you can put a piece of code on the website and then that code it does a thing called side track, so anyone from, let's say Robert from your list, goes to your site, then the system will tell you hey this person was on product A 10 times and it will slap a tag, very interested, right?

You can go to system everyday or every week, or once a month and say hey who's very interested in this product and then call them up and say hey I've seen you've been interested in this how can I help you make the decision? Or you can actually automate a campaign automatically to go and ask them that. Or, for example, we can send out an e-mail, a newsletter call it, so called newsletter and put your product there and put the piece of content which it says get it at 20 percent discount for the next 48 hours and it's called a conditional content. It will only be shown to people who have very interested tag. It's a perfect automation that you can set up and you don't really have to think. All that, for example, I don't know if it was a little bit too complex or not, but all that you can do with the active campaign, which of course you can do in infusion soft, but it's much easier to do it in active campaign and it costs you like I don't know $9 a month or $50 if you have extra advanced features there.

For very little money you can automate so much of your marketing and it's easy to use, it's really easy to comprehend, which I haven't found yet, e-mail marketing provider that have it. Actually they do, but they don't slap tags, they do the go themes and whatever. I found it a little bit more complex to use.

Robert Plank: You're saying that this tool use active campaign it has all, or maybe most, of the features that you want but it's also simple enough where you can actually get it done?

Damir Butkovic: Yes. Yes. Very simple. Where a lot of people, just to tell you and your peeps, why infusion soft was really popular was this tag, right? If people click on a link you get a tag, clicked on a link, or you do whatever action, you get a tag, right? So when you go to your item, 8,000 people you know at least you click whatever tag you want and you can filter the people and then you can do with them whatever you want. That's exactly what active campaign does, right? Active campaign even has leads corning, meaning if you send out four newsletters out, you can give I don't know anyone that clicks on the link a score of either a 10. Anyone who scores a 40 will be considered as your fan, anyone who's your fan you can send them specific special offers and you know they'll buy your stuff.

Instead of inventing the offers and sending people out to 8,000 people and pray to God that someone will buy, with this you'll filter out and maybe get 150 super warm people and you know they'll be warm because the system just told you where you can send a better campaign out. That's why, for example, well me personally, I love the system active campaign because of little things like that. They're kind of little but they're mega and I can talk about some results but when it comes to, I can give you a real example, when it comes to fashion sites or any retail store online if you have let's say 200 products, when you set up a system which is not that hard if you can wrap your head around it then the system will automatically start to do all these up-sells which will result in a lot more sales because it's sending all these special offers to people that are hot. That's why I love it and it's simple enough to setup.

Robert Plank: That's cool. I like little things like that where it's like it's one of those things where before they found you, I mean, there were probably a lot of things missing in their business, right? Like, maybe they probably weren't doing e-mail marketing at all but now because of what you set up and what you connect for them, now they can send out e-mails but not just blind e-mails to the whole list but super targeted things because you use the right tool for the job it sounds like.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. Like one client we have and I always say to my friend, he's a marketer also, I said yo these guys are not segmenting the list, and then the list and then he's like that's why they have you. They wouldn't need you. Anyway, it took me like four months. They would send the same e-mail to people on a newsletter list and buyers and I was like guys you can't, I mean you can do that, but I said you got to separate buyers. For example, if you look at open rates with buyers are 30, 35 percent. With non-buyers it's like 20, not bad but hey a lot more.

Anyway, so I was begging them, basically guys segment the list, segment the list, segment the list. Just to put it in perspective, before we started working, their good month would be I don't know $3,000, right? Then obviously they start to work with us then it went to $16,000, $18,000, $20,000, then last month was $30,000. Now, first 12 days they made $30,000, right? Just to give you some perspective from where they started to where they are now.

Anyway, point being is when they did one segmentation to just say hello guys, are you still with us on the list? We were kind of like reactivating people who are not that active. They saw, with one e-mail, $3,400. So with one e-mail they made $3,400 in one day that usually they do in a month. To make only because they segmented the list. I'm like guys do this every week.

Robert Plank: Right but now that you showed them the result, now that you showed them the little boost from doing it one time, now their going to repeat it because you showed them the way to do it. You didn't just talk some theory, you actually proved it.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah, exactly and you know how it is with clients is that it's mumble jumble for them and they don't believe it and some things take time but yeah, exactly, you said now it's easier. When you show someone the money everyone is listening like yeah yeah no problems. Now every suggestion I say is like yeah no problems, no problems, whatever, we'll do it.

Robert Plank: Right. If you say this is an extra $3,400 everyone understand more money. They might not understand segmenting or deliverability but more money, everyone in the world understands that.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah, of course, and there is, I don't know if you do any Facebook ads or any ads you'll have your dashboard and you can actually see the money you put in and get back out.

Let's scale this thing. Obviously you're in profits and the other thing where I teach obviously is like do not care about first sales, like 7 out of 10 people, and that's research done by Shoppingfly, right, and their a billion dollar company, so I take this advise seriously. 7 out of 10 people will buy again when they buy with you so I always say make a first sale, do not worry even if you lost money because 7 out of 10 of them will buy again and that's free money because their only a list. You'll spend no money to market to them. Just send them e-mails on a regular basis. Keep the relationship going. If we are breaking even and making a profit in start, that's great, of course awesome, but I'm more worried keeping contact because that's your real money.

It actually happened with this client. I said you'll get a critical mass and you'll start to sell more, which actually it happened in the last five months, it did happen.

Robert Plank: So, playing the long game, right?

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. Like you I guess, you constantly learn marketing and you probably got educated but you know the heavy weights, they can tell you any results they want but it didn't happen overnight. Maybe their latest campaign happened overnight but it's slowly scaling up because you want to be careful. If you put $20 you earn $40, then you put $40 you earn $80, and it takes time to get to the whatever, a million or I don't know how much they make, it doesn't really matter. There is no overnight call it. I mean, yes there are some campaigns that made really a lot of money real quickly but let's say in the normal world you want to take it slower.

Robert Plank: Right. Along those lines, I don't want to keep you too long.

Damir Butkovic: Oh, that's all right.

Robert Plank: Along the lines of starting a business from zero, I understand, and you mentioned this pretty early on in our discussion but you mentioned that in order to get your coaching clients or to get a bunch of coaching clients in a short amount of time, you send out this four-sentence e-mail to get all your coaching clients. Can you tell us about that?

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. I'll tell you the back story so you get how it all happened. I moved to Bali recently, well a year ago, and then things were well and I hired a guy and he said oh I'll do your campaign for whatever websites and all that, don't worry, I'll do it legit and I was like great I can pay him and all that. I said I'll do my stuff and that was a mistake because I came here three months after, I found myself no clients, he did nothing and what not so I was like okay great, how do I get new clients? I went and listened to some people. I listened to Dan Meredith and then he also mentioned the book from Chet Holmes, it's called the ultimate sales machine and he said what I do, he said I send out, of course you pick who you want to work with, right?

Let's say I want to work with John from I don't know veterinarian or some from whatever, you profile the person, you learn a little bit about them, and you send them something like this. It's a very simple e-mail, right, you said hey, hi John, I was poking around your website so I thought I'd drop you a line and then you put in some kind of a flattery or a compliment. You said I really love your site or I really love what you do, hey I've seen you've been to Hong Kong, I've been there too, something, find some commonality, and then I would actually see hey me and my partner, we specialize in online marketing and developing strategy that builds our clients brand awareness and helps them to sell more stuff online. Very simple, I call this non pitch. Keep it simple. I didn't say hey we specialize in strategy and brought our clients $37,000 while in less than $3,000, no, very simple introduction. Then I said this is the takeaway and I'll tell you why it works, the strategy. Then I say if you'll need anything in this particular niche please give me a shout out, I'll be happy to help. Cheers, Damir.

That's what I would send out. Actually, that's what I did send out and I got four paying clients in two weeks and $5,000 in my bank account. Not a lot of money but that was easily scalable but we had other stuff so I was like we can't have that many consulting clients but point being is it's just an e-mail, you don't need a website, you don't need a business card, you don't need to go out and talking, you don't need advertising budgets, you don't need funnels, you don't need world class call people, you don't need anything as long as you can deliver whatever you are selling.

Now, just to tell you this strategy, why it works, normal e-mail, which you probably get everyday, we all do, hey my name is Damir and I'm a marketer, online marketer, how about we do some work together and I'll do your campaign and let's do some business and make money, you know what I'm saying? You don't know me already, you're pitching to me, there's no connection, it sounds like bull shit. Sorry.

Robert Plank: That's okay.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. It sounds too much. You want to do business, you don't really want to do business right now, so it's too pitchy I would say. With this e-mail it's literally, it's the opposite, it's like hey I was around, thought I'd introduce myself. You keep it cool and then you say a little bit of what you do and then you take it away. You said hey you tell me if you want help with it. I'm happy to help. Usually when people say hey let's meet, my name is Damir I help people make money online, let's meet next Tuesday, let's talk, let's go on skype, so I'm chasing them, right?

If we got back thousands of years we are actually used to chase food so naturally we will chase what's running away from us. With this e-mail then you say if you need something in this particular niche, it can be literally anything, please give me a shout out, I'll be happy to help. You move away so their human instinct will want to chase you. How can this? So this is what's happening in their mind, strike their ego, like I'm such a big business person and everyone pitches to me and who the hell is this guy, comes, introduces himself and just goes. It bothers them. How can he be so cool? Doesn't he know who I am, right? Then they realize this was actually so cool. This is the first person in a week that didn't really want anything from me or pitched anything to me, let's work. It was just a simple introduction and that's where you get, this is where you say hey why not or what do you got or let's have coffee or meet? Does this make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah, it does. There's a lot of cool things about that strategy that you just mentioned and that technique there because first of all I like that ... Okay, how about this, you said you got four clients. How many e-mails did you send to get those four clients?

Damir Butkovic: I've sent around 20 e-mails.

Robert Plank: Even less than I thought. That's a pretty good close rate.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah.

Robert Plank: I was almost imaging that maybe he had to send 50, had to send 100, so wow, so only 20 e-mails and that probably took, what an hour, maybe two at the most?

Damir Butkovic: Two, three hours. I have no idea, I forgot.

Robert Plank: Cool, so not even an afternoon, but I what I like about what you mentioned about that is you didn't have to cold call, you didn't have to show up at their business, you just sent out one e-mail after another and what I like about that is, well first of all, aside from the fact that it was an e-mail, but you personalized it to the person, like in the stage where you kind of complimented them and stuff like that and found some common ground, and it didn't even take that long. You just customize one sentence out of the four sentences, just kind of making it where okay like I am writing this to this person, it's not just some spam e-mail going out to a hundred thousand people.

Then I liked also the part where you positioned it as I want to help you, right? You didn't say here's my site, here's where you can buy from me, here's all these packages, you just said where are you stuck and I want to help you so talk to me and then I'll customize what I can do for you. Lots of good stuff there and I'm blown away that it only took 20 e-mails to get those four clients. About that, how did you know who to contact? Did you just look up?

Damir Butkovic: I'll give you the full strategy. What I didn't do because I was such a lazy bum, before strategy would be that you actually follow back with actually letter, the same letter saying look I wrote you an e-mail a couple weeks ago and I don't know if you got it. People get very few letters these days so I didn't even do that. What I'm saying is for anyone who is listening this show, if you follow this strategy, send out the letter, you don't have full practice real quick, and also to mention I tried a couple niches and some niches didn't work out. Okay, I'm an internet marketing so you obviously can work with a lot of people but if it doesn't work out I found out two things. Ordination is not ready or good or I'm pitching too hard. If I don't get the response it's a pitch.

Just to give you an example, for example I was attacking speakers industry in Australia, what e-mail does, why I love it, even if people say no, they still replied, so I've sent out 10 e-mails and I got four responses no thanks we are good at it, which means I've started that relationship somehow. Anyway, remember that. So how it works, I would sit online and let's say you're a copywriter or whatever, pick a name, it doesn't really matter. Let's say you're a copywriter and you need copy writing clients so I would pick, again, some kind of a niche, let's say a copywriter in a weight loss nation, the easiest I could think of, then I would say who would be my ideal client? Who would I like to work for and always reach higher.

I always say if you think you're not good enough, give yourself that. Don't pitch to small business owners, mostly they won't have cash. Go higher, for someone you think they will never give you an answer, they probably will. I would find a company, or a person, or whatever online so I would check their website, I would check their Instagram, I would check their Facebook, and all I'm doing, LinkedIn, and all I'm doing there is two things. I'm looking for an e-mail.

Like if I would be checking you Robert, I would be looking where is an e-mail that it's not an info@ I don't know RobertPlank.com. I would look where is the e-mail of Robert@, you know what I'm saying? I would look to get an e-mail that's personalized if I can. The other thing I would look, what do I really love about them? What do I like? Where is that similarity that I can put in an e-mail that's genuine. You want to put something genuine otherwise it's just energetic, not good. So I would look just for two things and many times if you don't find an e-mail on a website, you go on Facebook, or some social media there will be that e-mail. Sometimes it won't be. Doesn't really matter, right, but if that happens I would even say attention to the business owner or attention to marketing manager, or something, you know? Please forward to person who can make decisions online and then I would just literally take that e-mail, save it perfectly, I would just change that complimentary sentence, and I would shoot off an e-mail. That's the only thing I would do.

If you're I don't know looking for clients, if you're business to business I would definitely attack LinkedIn and what not. I think there are even tools that will give you people's e-mails and what not. I didn't even go that deep into some tools and what not. I really took it easily with internet and everyone has one simple e-mail and it worked, and it still works. For example, I have a guy I know who, he's running Craigsbook ads, like automation, Facebook ads, I said bro you would kill it. If I were you I would just be doing that. I would go to companies, I would say hey man this is what I do, I run traffic through Facebook ads, you know if you need any help with it, which everyone basically does, give me a shout out, happy to help. I think people like that with some kind of services that you know you can do or whatever product, you can kill it real quick and it does matter.

Look, I did this Australian, Indonesia based, the guy I learned it from, he's in the UK. The guy he learned it from that's making gazillions of dollars, is in states. It doesn't really matter where you live. My English is shabby, as you can hear, I make grammar mistakes all the time, and it worked.

Robert Plank: Yes.

Damir Butkovic: You know, whatever you do, just follow the strategy and the strategy's simple. Give them a reason where sending an e-mail always get away with the sentence, I was poking around your website, or I was poking around your page, or I was poking your shop, it doesn't really matter, compliment them, introduce what you do, do not hard pitch, like man I help people sell more stuff online. I help people lose weight. Not I help people lose weight in 30 days and all that. No, no, no. I help people live healthy, something like that and then the take away's, if you need help with it please let me know, happy to help. Cheers, bye.

That's what I would do and that's what anyone can do is listening and I guarantee you you'll get some kind of a result. I say if you sent out 20 e-mails, you don't get the response, you're pitching too hard or the niche is not good, just move away to another niche. You don't have to send 50 e-mails, send 20. Tweak something. It's very easy. It's free, you know?

Robert Plank: Right.

Damir Butkovic: That's what I would do. Simple as that. You can literally in the next half an hour, an hour, if you follow that, you can send out some stuff and I would say you'll get the response, right? Then of course you've got to meet with people, whether it's in person or online, you got to sell them your stuff, obviously.

Robert Plank: Right.

Damir Butkovic: That's the selling part. This is the lead generation part. Yeah, that's how it works and anyone that's listening I urge you go and try it out. It works. I actually did not believe it when I heard. I said it can't be that simple. You got to put more. You got to put my USB and God was not, that's exactly what you don't put. Simple as that.

Robert Plank: That's pretty interesting. I like that not only does it work no matter who you are but it also works no matter where you are in the world and it works no matter what kind of service you provide. Like you said, it might be that you provide a certain service and it's not a good fit for some businesses but then change the kind of business that you're going at, right?

Damir Butkovic: Exactly. Look, it's really good I must say for people who are offering services, it's really good business to business. Where I got questions hey but I'm like I don't know a health coach, how do I do it? If I would be a health coach I would not be targeting, let's say you Robert, directly because it's just simply too many people. I would be targeting people who ... If I was targeting you I would be targeting you to say hey I've seen, I know you're an entrepreneur, I can see entrepreneurial, you probably have a group of people that are working hard and I'm a health coach or whatever, I'm happy to help, happy to share some tips, how to work from home and still stay healthy and not drink gallons of coffee and eating McDonald's or whatever, so if you need any help with that, please let me know, I'd be happy to help.

What I'm doing there I would target leaders in their own niches or industries because they have my group of people, right? Don't get stuck. What I'm trying to say oh I'm doing one to one or whatever, yeah target those people, like target entrepreneurs or someone who has a group of people you want. It works both ways. Business to business or I would say one to one, you just have to not go after each person individually, you go after someone who has a group of those people.

Robert Plank: Right. So they can plug into their network.

Damir Butkovic: Exactly.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool and I like all the stuff that you've shared with us so far today. I would like to send people your way and if they like what they heard about all of your adventures and your thinking and your advise, where can people go to find out all about Damir and all about the things you do and your websites and all that good stuff?

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. Very simple. I'll spell out my name. I have a Facebook page. I wasn't there for awhile but you can contact me through Facebook or I have a website. Website is DamirButkovic.com.au. It's simple to shoot me an e-mail or whatever. There's something that's not working. I was actually making it look better yesterday and then I made some mistakes, it doesn't look that good anymore. Anyway, you can contact me there or just search me on Facebook or like my page, something, anyway you want to connect and I'm happy to share, answer questions and things like that. It's all there basically.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Well I'm really glad that you were on the show today and I mean, heck I got a lot of really cool stuff out of that and I'm glad that you were able to share all of your stories and your adventures and all the little tid bits that have helped you to get to where you are now. Thanks so much for that.

Damir Butkovic: Thanks. Glad to help. Please use this. I went to one boot camp, paid $10,000 and the guy said on the end of it, Todd Brown, he's awesome. Awesome, brilliant, marketer, he said looks it's worthless if you don't apply it. So it's like great advice. Go and apply it and you'll see how awesome it is.[/showhide]

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