Push Button Influence: Broadcast Your Brilliance w

Mike Dillard is the Founder of The Elevation Group and the author of Magnetic Sponsoring. He built a newsletter list of over 400k and generated $50 million in sales! Mike started his first list 2005, teaching entrepreneurs how to use attraction marketing strategies to build their businesses. Within 18 months he went from dead-broke and waiting tables to making his first million dollars. He was 27. Within the next two years, that first list would grow to more than 200,000 people, which generated an average monthly revenue stream of more than $500,000 per month or $6 Million per year. Tune in to this episode as we chat with Mike about how his business acquired over 8,600 new customers, made over $3.2 million it it’s first 7 days, ALL without spending a single dime on advertising!   Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play

Mike Koenigs is a ten-time #1 bestselling author, interactive online TV producer and host of the “Mike Koenigs Show”, winner of the “Marketer of the Year” award, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, filmmaker, international speaker and patented inventor. He’s also the “Chief Disruptasaurus” of the MiXiV Media Network. Mike built and sold his last two businesses to publicly-traded companies, his most recent exit was selling Traffic Geyser and Instant Customer in October, 2014. His first company, started in 1991, Digital Cafe Agency was sold to the publicly-traded Interpublic Group in 1999. A recent stage 3 cancer survivor, Mike completed 9 months of chemotherapy and 33 radiation treatments. His doctors say he’s healthy and cancer-free. Also a philanthropist, he has raised over $2.3mm for the “Just Like My Child” foundation. Tune in to this episode as we chat with Mike about his experiences creating multiple successful businesses, how cancer has been his greatest mentor and teacher and explains the power of having a WebTV Show (even if you have a face for radio).   Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play

Leaving the safety of a $300k a year job? James Schramko did – to start his online career – with just one affiliate product earning $49.25 commission per sale. James’ determination turned that business model into a six figure per year online business, then quickly developed his business well past the million dollar mark by starting and growing an online coaching community, a top level Mastermind, a website development business and traffic businesses. Tune in as we chat with James about how he took offline business profit ideas and turned them into a powerful, highly successful online business!   Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play Read Full Transcript Announcer: This is Push Button Influence, where the world's leading influencers candidly share their exact strategies for maximizing reach, accelerating growth and generating massive exposure, all by leveraging the power of new media. You can become the next Larry King, Oprah or Howard Stern. All you need to do is broadcast your brilliance. Push Button Influence teaches you how. Here are your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher. Steve: All right. All right, all right, all right. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to another addition here of Push Button Influence. I am Steve Olsher, along with my co-host extraordinaire Alex Mandossian. Today we are joined by the extraordinary James Schramko, who is, well, you're down under, man. But I guess internet land here, as we're locked on Blab as we are darn near every Wednesday at 4 PM specific, it doesn't really matter where you are. That's the beauty of the internet. You said it was the morning there, so it's actually the next day, so it's Thursday and it's like, what is it, 10 AM there? James: Exactly. Steve: 10 AM. All right, there we go. James: If you want any stock tips or horse race results, let me know. Steve: I always wondered about that. All right, so just to kind of familiarize you, sir, with how we do this show here, we always start out with a word. Alex and I both have a word. Alex, why don't you share what your word is for today? Alex: Okay, our guest today, although this is my first physical meeting, which we acknowledge prior to coming on live, I've known his work for quite some time. He's familiar with the work I've done and he never really talks about this, he just does it. Many teachers talk about this word, but the really, really good ones, the ones where you don't see the moving parts and the wheels kind of moving in the foreground ... It's always in the background. This word always comes up and without it, you can't make sales, you can't get opt-ins, you can't move the needle. That's the word "persuasion". When you're really good at it, you don't talk about it. You just do it. It flows and melts right out of you. James, you're good at it with the spoken word, you're good at it with the visual word, and you're good at it with the written word. Let's take a step back and just look at the moving parts. Why is persuasion such an important part of your business, even if you don't talk about it outright like an influencer would, let's say, in sales training? James: So I answer this? Alex: Yes. James: I think because we are a pile of choices, as my friend Seth Ellsworth says. We're basically a pile of the choices that we've made for ourselves and that other people have made on our behalf. If you accept that point of view, then we need to be good at persuasion. Probably the most important person that we could ever persuade is ourself because there's a lot of inner gain, a lot of self-talk. That's what gets us over obstacles and helps us develop and learn and grow. Of course we need to be armed against the persuasion of others who want to influence our life, whether that's our parents when they bring us up ... Either knowingly or unknowingly they influence and persuade our choices. Of course people around us, whether it's customers, team members, family members, they're all going to have an impact on our life. I think it's a really good thing to understand and research and study and I think using persuasion on yourself is one of the secret things. I'm a huge advocate of mindset and I've done a lot of research around that because until you get that bit, not much else will follow. Your outside world will be a reflection of your inside world. Whatever's up here will manifest. You take someone who's constantly focusing on how little money they have and how desperate things are, they tend to perpetuate that situation. Conversely, if someone is very aware of the tools they can use to influence their own thinking, then they can actually move forward in a better way. Alex: What I'm hearing you say is all persuasion that's effective is first self-persuasion and then, as a starting point, it becomes easier to persuade others, to paraphrase? Is that close? James: I think it's the most important level of persuasion is to be able to persuade yourself. Good salespeople tend to be able to do that. They could justify just about anything. We have to use our force for good, not become consumers so to speak. I think self-awareness would be very closely associated with that. To be able to persuade, you not only have to know yourself but then the next level is to able to step outside yourself and to walk in someone else's shoes. I think if I look back into my career where I was heavily involved in sales and persuasion and influence for a job, then the results I was able to get was when I was really able to walk in someone else's shoes and to understand their situation and to not just understand their problems, but to help them solve them properly. That fits with my whole definition of selling. Persuasion might have a negative connotation, especially if you think about cults or associated things, like religions and wars and stuff, but I think from a positive point of view, if you could persuade someone, if you're educated them, you might be able to show them a way that they can't see themselves and help them move towards a result. A great example of that would be the instant influence framework they use in hospitals to help people receive treatments that they need when they're not in the resourceful state to accept that without some persuasion. Steve: Nice, nice. Awesome. All right, so James, I'm not trying to date you here in terms of how long you've been in the game, but you've been online, like I have, like Alex has, for enough time to have seen folks do things very, very right and very, very wrong. It's always interesting to me how we can learn from the mistakes of others and make sure that ... That's the nice thing about not being the pioneer, right? You don't end up with the arrows in your backs and you can follow right behind them and take that path. My word actually is "mistakes". I'd like for you to talk about at least one of the mistakes that you were personally a part of and then maybe one or two mistakes that you see people making now in the online arena. James: The first mistake that I was involved with that I think a lot of people do is focusing on the wrong things. The example of that is when I started ... By the way, when I started online, I think I registered my first domain in 2005 and I thought I might have been a bit late to the market. I think by that time Alex was already crushing it with automated software programs, like way ahead of his time. The stuff that would now be still like new stuff back then. Thanks for all the commission checks, by the way. I could never figure out where they came from because the company name had nothing to do with the product. That aside, I learned how to build a website. That was my struggle. From the time I bought a laptop in 2005 using money that I got from the first sales training workshop that I ran, I reinvested that in a laptop and I was stretching out this cable to the telephone socket, dialing in, and trying to teach myself how to build a website. It took a long time until I got to the point where I actually had an offer that I could make someone that they could actually buy where I could earn money. The mistake that I think people make is spending time and energy on the wrong thing and to counter that, what would be the right thing, I would say focus on making an offer that could actually result in giving a reward. Work on your first offer and don't worry so much about the website or the font or the template or the layout or the latest ten tools that automate stuff. You don't have anything to scale until you can present your offer. These days it's so easy to put up an offer page without even having to build a website or even to own a domain name. You can use hosted solutions these days to put up a lead page or something like that. I think focusing on the wrong things. If we think about mistakes people make currently, I'd say a really common one is people focus on far too short a time frame and they're not thinking long enough. It's really easy for me to sit here after more than a decade and say that I've been thinking for the long haul, but I was thinking ten years out when I started online. I've taken a lifetime customer approach. I've ended up with a business that is more than ninety percent recurring income where I'm dealing with the same people forever and then adding people on top. That means I don't have to make the mistake that most people make of a profit formula, and if we were to step it out, it would be where you have traffic times conversions equals customers, times the dollar amount of the transaction times the frequency of the transaction times your margin equals profit. That's the profit formula. Where does everyone spend all of their time? On traffic. Traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic. Maybe a little bit on conversions and sometimes the dollar price. Maybe they put their price up. Where they don't spend the time and where I've spent most of my time is on frequency because that little frequency thing, that tiny little number, if you can take that from one to fifty or a hundred, then you have recurring business and that's what I think I've done well. I think that's where most people are not focusing enough. They're just focusing on that next sale that they desperately need today. It's at a very short focal point. Just thinking about today or tomorrow or next week. If everyone thought, "How could I have the same customer in five or ten years from now?" they would be promoting the type of junk that we see out in the marketplace and they wouldn't be cluttering up our feed with spamming tactics and short-term technical things instead of a long-term strategic business. Steve: Great. Alex? Alex: Yeah, I want to focus on inner gain, just to move from what you said before about self-persuasion because as marketers, as fathers and mothers, as grandparents if that's the realm that you're in, if you're watching right now, if you're not convinced yet and you try to convince someone else, then it looks like manipulation because you're out of alignment, right? What James said, just to edify, is so, so insightful, that it starts with self-persuasion. There's one thing I want to call to your attention and it's going to sound controversial and to some people, they're going to not know what it means, but I've been speaking in Australia since 2004. I went there early on. I consider you ... I know Frank Kern from the early days, and you're kind of Frank from Australia in my mind. Your ideas that come out and ... You don't drop the "F" bomb nearly as much as he does. I've never heard you drop it, but you're kind of like the Frank of Australia. I don't know if that is a compliment or if that's offensive, but he's a super smart guy and he comes up with creative stuff. The fact that you're Aussie, my issues with Aussies and I have thousands of students there, is they do have a little bit of what Tony Robbins calls the tall poppy syndrome. In a field of poppies, when a poppy grows tall, the rest of the poppies bring them down. I'm saying it, so you can hold my feet the fire, everyone else who's watching, but I actually teach this from stage. It's unnecessary. In an area in this continent that really has less than the population of California, you have stepped out and you've been certain of yourself and you can out-market any American and you don't have that head trash that a lot of Aussies, my students, that we have to overcome in the inner gain part. The question is, and I don't know if it's uncomfortable or not to talk about, but how have you overcome it and how have you persuaded yourself that you are as good as you are and it's okay to teach people outside of the continent because I don't see that that often in Australia where people just step up. There are plenty of examples, but you're definitely the primary example I can think of. Is that a fair question? James: It's a great observation. We definitely have that as a cultural thing. On the flip side of that, we don't celebrate ... We don't hold celebrities up to high accolade here either. That's something I observe about the North American market that is truly bizarre. You can have celebrities running for head office in political roles or if someone's a celebrity and they like a certain griller or whatever, that's going to be a good griller because a celebrity likes it. We don't understand that one. You're right about the tall poppy syndrome. They like to cut us down. How do I counter that? I bank little confidence wins. If I reflect back ... Early on I didn't have a great schooling. I was bullied a fair bit. I was smaller and younger than the other kids and I was a late developer, so I didn't really shine until after school. Actually in my first few jobs I found that I was quite good at them. I worked with my grandfather for a while as a timber broker and he was pretty much blind, but he used to work the phones. He'd buy and sell timber for builders. He taught me stuff I didn't know I was learning at the time about listening to the customer and understanding through their tone whether they're telling the truth or not. I ended up somehow, in the recession in the early nineties I ended up in a debt collection role in an office where I was phoning up people asking for payments. It's kind of like reverse selling where they've already got the goods or the service. It's long gone in many cases. Now you have to get the money. It's like a tough sale. I just performed well in that. I got such good results that I started to believe in my ability because I was benchmarking against other people. There was four telephone operators and I was busting all the records. Then I could let myself think for a minute, "Well, maybe I'm good at this." Then I went out into the field and I had to do repossessions. The KPI was three collections a day, so that was fifteen per week. One day I did twenty-seven collections in a day. I broke every record in this company and it was a big company like General Motors. A finance company, GMAC. They had long-standing records from the sixties. After that I ended up in the telco industry and then after that I ended up in sales. When I hit sales I was twenty-three years old, I was about to have my first kid. We're talking about 1995 and through the mentoring I got in the telco industry where they'd recruited the best of the best salespeople, I hit the ground as a complete rookie but within a year I was the number one salesperson in BMW. It might sound weird, but it took me a while to sort of absorb that and to actually accept it. Once I accepted that, then I was able to move on. Just to make sure that I was on the right thing, I switched to Mercedes Benz. Within one year, I was the number one Mercedes Benz salesperson in Australia. Now I'm starting to think, "Well, that's a little more validation." I could be a bit more comfortable in my abilities. Then within a couple of years I got promoted to management and then my salespeople who I was training started winning the competitions. I'm thinking, "There's something to this." Then I sort of rewrote the training program for Mercedes Benz in Australia, with a friend of mine Sean, and I started winning sales manager of the year. Then I got to be the guy that Mercedes Benz would put in a dealership and fix it up if it wasn't going so well. They did that twice. They basically went out to a franchise and said, "You have to hire this guy or we don't know if we can still have a franchise." I went into those roles and again, I was able to turn these businesses around. Using that stepping stone I was then able to start my own business. After two and half years of starting that, doing the whole stretching the cable to the telephone wall socket, I got that to the point where I could replace my income and step off that. Of course, a rich nutrient of reading material from legends like Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy and anything I could get my hands on, literally thousands of books. I just kept banking the wins and building on that. Now after selling about ten million dollars’ worth of my own products online and being on there for eleven years, I now feel comfortable teaching others. I think that's validated me enough to feel I can add value for others. That's why I'm now attracting high caliber coaching clients. Guys like your friend Ryan Levesque and Andre Chaperon and the guys who are really good come in and by just focusing on getting results for them, then I can bank some confidence from that. I've always measured my abilities either by benchmarking against others or trying to improve the results that I get for the people who I'm a custodian of getting results for. I have this weird thing with my coaching community. I've really created a performance-oriented scenario where if people don't get results, they don't have to stick around. I'm always on the hook and I think having worked in a commission environment for so long, I'm really comfortable with that, always having to perform and get a result rather than building too much comfort or hook people into long-term commitments without having to deliver. There's never been that risk for me. I still feel like I'm in my crater ship and I've got a long way to go. Steve: Yeah, terrific. For those who are just joining us live here on Blab, welcome. We are talking to the one and only James Schramko of SuperFast Business. As we're looking at a lot of the things that you do really, really well James and you talk about recurring income on a very consistent basis, you mentioned it earlier ... For those who don't really know what that looks like in tangible form, what do you do to create recurring income and how do you do it? First, maybe what are a couple examples of the ways in which you can create recurring income and then specifically how can they get into that space? James: There's a lot of examples. Most people probably pay an internet service provider every month. They probably have a Netflix subscription, maybe an Amazon Prime renewal each year. We're all consuming things on a recurring basis. There's a lot of advantages for the consumer and the person who's selling the recurring subscription, some of which are stable, predictable cash flow, which means you have a low cost of supply, you can ... I can pay my team every single fortnight. Sorry, every two weeks for the last six years without worrying about where next month's income will come from. It's very good for the product donor, which means they're not desperate. A desperate product donor is going to make terrible decisions and often gouge customers. By not being desperate, you can provide good product. What does it look like for me? I've done it in a few ways. A good example and the biggest sales revenue for my business came through my SEO service, which over the last six years got to a peak of seven figures per year in sales revenue just for that business unit. Those are a source where it's kind of never finished. It's kind of like mowing the lawn. If you rank a website, then you can now focus on ranking more of that website or maintaining that ranking. That's been a good service where you find a need or a demand that will continually be required. That's why Netflix is good. People want to keep watching the news series as they come out. You keep subscribing. I would say this, and this is what I teach people who are setting out for subscription business: the golden rule is that your customer should miss it if they can no longer have it. That's the golden rule. Kind of like a kid who drops an ice cream. They'll be sad, they'll cry. It's gone. The sense of loss and pain of not being able to have it anymore is what holds someone to a subscription program. It should be because they're getting great value. When I look at my recurring subscriptions, they're things that I enjoy and that I want to maintain. I provide those services for customers. In the education market where I'm coaching people how to make more profit for their business, especially online, they're not going to be sort of done. They're not going to be finished and say, "Well, now I know everything there is to know about making money online and growing my business or becoming more profitable." I've got a lot of stuff to teach and it'll take me a while to get through that and everyone's at a different stage, but by combining people in a community, which is probably something I've specialized in, which we might know by the name of forum marketing or membership, that's where I've really found my sweet spot because I'm part parent, part educator, part facilitator, part coach, part mentor, part content provider. That's been the right vehicle for me and that's where I'm focusing most of my energy now in two formats, like a general accessible one at Super Fast Business and then there's high level one which I call Silver Circle and that's where I have a really good group of high level people and by attracting like, using that mastermind style philosophy that was sort of made famous in "Think and Grow Rich". Steve: Great. Alex? Alex: In Sydney I was on stage and Aussies are known to be skeptics, so they're really fun to work with generally. I make the declaration, "Everyone in this room is going to make a million dollars." They all cross their arms, right? The next sentence is, "Some of you, it'll take fifty years. Others, forty. Some thirty, twenty, ten. The trick is to do it in one year and if you're fortunate, do it in less than a day, maybe an hour." The goal is speed. That's where a lot of what you teach comes in, but you have a knack, I think a blessing, of using speed without being reckless. The Superfast Business brand, speak to that a little bit. Most people who speak speed in the internet marketing space are reckless. There's a lot of potholes along the way, which in America means little holes in the road and then the tire goes in and it ruins the vehicle. How do you create that level of performance and speed like you've mentioned with coaching without being reckless? What kind of mindset and handset, like outer gain provisions do you have to put in order for that to happen? It's really hard. It's very difficult. James: There's plenty of metaphors you could apply to that. I immediately think about Incenta, who was fast but also reckless. If he was ten laps ahead in a race he would still race to the absolutely maximum of his ability and he would spin off and sometimes lose because he would go past the edge. One of my mentors taught me the word "brinkmanship" which means taking something right to the edge but not so far that you lose the grip. If you ever look at a motor-racing metaphor, tire grip is like that. There's this chart of stress where it goes up and the grip's at maximum and then it falls off quickly and that would cause a spin-out. If we look at ... I used to compete in sports. It's sort of side story, but I used to race sailing boats at a high level. I came second in the world titles once. I learned that pushing things too far, you can ruin the whole race. Elective rally driving, same. To finish first, first you have to finish. There's a lot of opportunities to spin of the track in a rally driving. I learned when I was helping these motor dealerships, which were quite large ... One was a hundred million dollars a year and the other was fifty million dollars a year in revenue. They had a lot of moving parts, they were very complex businesses. People think of motor dealerships as really simple. You buy cars and then you sell them again, but they're not. You're buying stock and selling it, but you're also selling time in the service department so you learn about throughput and effective hourly rates. Then you're selling money in the finance department. You're actually financing and re-financing. There are very complicated CRM cycles and interrelated departments and of course I learned a lot through that. I've seen a lot of things that can break and go wrong. Of course when you work with a lot of people, you have a huge data set. By working with let's say around eight hundred members on a daily basis for the last seven years, I've seen a lot of things. I have a bigger data sample t observe. Of course when I'm working with let's say thirty high level guys, seven and eight figure income bracket guys and girls each week, I'm simultaneously running about thirty business in my head so I'm getting a match fit for all the different scenarios and I get to recognize patents. I think the reason some people get reckless is they just know they're heading for a cliff. They haven't got it on their guidance system and that's why I think it's really important to get help from someone who's been where you want to go. In my case, I took up the sport of surfing a couple of years ago, two years ago, and I hired a surfing instructor when I got fit enough to actually paddle around for more than half an hour. I hired him for ten lessons to teach me what I'm about to be reckless with. Where should I be looking? How should I be putting my feet? Which way should I select? Which board do I take under certain conditions? To knock out a lot of the potential reckless decisions I could make has really upped my game and improved me. Not to the level where I'm a Kelly Slater, even though I'm about the same age. I'm surfing way better than someone who started two years ago should be because I've sought the advice of someone who knows what they're doing. Steve: Reckless is a choice. I look at it that way. If you find a mentor then you're removing some choices that you normally would default just because you don't know. Would you agree? James: Some of the most successful people that I know, also extremely good at slipping into a beginner's mind where they can set aside their ego and said, "You know what, I don't know everything there is to know about this. I can't answer I know to everything. I'm not a smart ass. Just show me what to do." This one guy that comes to mind in particular, he's so good at asking what might appear to be basic questions, but he just sets himself back to zero and doesn't assume anything. He removes a lot of errors and he quickly gets to a rapid success rate with anything that he tries and he tries very different things because he's so good at stepping into that humble spot that a lot of entrepreneurs are unwilling to be in and I've observed through coaching some people that the more powerful and influential some people get, the more likely they are to slip into arrogance and even belligerence and they feel less and less the rules apply for them. Often they have a reckless slip-up. Steve: Yeah. You know, in one of the things here that we were talking about in the green room ... By the way, ladies and gents, if you join is live here on Push Button Influence when we broadcast on Blab.im, and yes, that is an actual URL, Blab.im ... Wednesdays at 4 PM Pacific you can join us in the green room before the show just to kind of hang out and talk to our guests. Then after we end the podcast version, well, our guests then hang around. They're going to answer your questions. For those that are here with us live in the chat row and have live chat row, use /Q at the beginning and then your question. We're going to start putting those into the queue so that James can answer your questions directly here when we end the podcast version. Before we got started, so the pre-show green room, James, we were talking about influence, right? This show is called Push Button Influence. Obviously today more than ever people have the ability and the power to be influential in ways that frankly they couldn't before. That's got a lot to do with technology and breaking down the barriers to entry and basically just pushing off to the side the gatekeepers that used to really control what got distributed, when it got distributed, who would be featured, et cetera. You were talking about your influence on your customers. You did a little exercise to try to figure out how they found you. It was pretty interesting. Do you want to run through that list? I think this might open up some ideas for people in terms of ways that they're not perhaps being as influential as they could and maybe some blind spots around how to attract people to their sites, to their business, et cetera. James: Sure can. The main point here is I'm not guessing. I'm asking my customers. I've got a very clear path. Some of them, like a lot of the sales and marketing would suggest, had multiple encounters before they became a customer. I'm only talking about customers here and not prospects. These are the people that actually became a member. Of the list, it really took my back to some of the more creative things that happened. One of them, for example, was when I started doing what Alex was talking about and speaking from platforms for a while, but then I considered it's not super leveraged because there's a lot of travel cost and time and energy burn, unless you want to go somewhere, which it's totally understandable why you'd want to come to Australia for a holiday. It can sometimes be a bit of a drain. If you listen to someone like Seth Godin, he might speak outside of New York, but if he does it was like triple the rates to go to Los Angeles. I wanted to leverage that a little more than me having to turn up, so what I did is I pretty much licensed my speaking slot to someone else and I did a split where he would show up, use my slide deck that I helped him with and sell my program, and we'd take a split on the sales. Some of the people in my community saw him speak at an event. I liked that one because I didn't have to turn up to make that work. They got exposed to me material through an advocate of mine and I still rewarded on the way in. That was one sort of creative way that I'm sure not many people utilize. The other ones that were interesting was when I bought products. Some of my best relationships were when I was a customer, specifically Lead Player. When I bought that I built a relationship with Clay Collins and through that relationship I've ended up being able to interview him many, many times on my podcast and document the trajectory of Lead Player turning into Lead Pages and where they got funded and all of the stepping stones along the way. It's turned into a great serialized podcast. Of course, podcasting is a huge medium and for me it's definitely the single best source of traffic and authority building. As you said, there's no barrier to starting a podcast. You need a microphone and something to record with and you can publish on the Apple platform. By having that relationship with Clay they often re-promote my product information. I gave them permission to use my template, which was constantly the highest converting webinar registration template in their entire marketplace and it had my head stuck on the top of it, so it's good positioning. Part of that technique, which might not be obvious, is getting in early on something that's going to be big. You find out more about that from guys like Richard Koch who talks about the star principle. It's finding a hyper-growth market and getting in early. Even if it's not that great, it's still the best in class and it's going to go well, so that's what I did. The back story to that is what most people don't know, is that I sort of found James Dyson at the very beginning when he was a kid making templates in the warrior forum, selling them for seventeen dollars. I helped him developed Optimize Press, which was the first version of where that Lead Pages market came from. I've now had two winners in that market that have scaled big, both multi-million dollar projects. They're both friends on mine and I've got a lot of experience in that market now, but I also end up on their sales pages. I end up on the sales page for Optimize Press. I end up on the sales page for Lead Pages. I think that really helped build my presence and it really came from either buying their product or helping them invent and develop the product. I sent Clay a lot of feedback for the product, constantly saying what my customers are asking or wishing it had. Getting somewhere in the R&D on an up and coming product would be a good creative strategy to get some love back. You love first and then the love with come back, right? Alex: Yeah. James: On a similar thing, another super bizarre creative one, was entering a competition. When I went to my first internet marketing conference in America, like the first time I traveled over to Los Angeles since I was a twelve year-old kid, was to Underground Four. This was quite some time ago now, probably eight or nine years ago. I entered a competition to ... Something to do with a hundred dollars. You had to invest a hundred dollars and get a leverage payoff. I went back to my hotel room and thought about that and I went out to dinner. I was starving because I just couldn't find food anywhere. I had a couple of drinks at the bar, wrote on the back of the menu my plan and went back to my room and all might I registered the domain, built a website, promoted it on social media, built videos, and then I documented the whole process as a case study and then mended it and saved it. Then at nine in the morning, I didn't sleep, didn't go to bed, handed it in to the coordinator and I won this competition, which was to ... I thought I was entering a competition to win Evan Pagan's program, some DVDs of his conference that he'd had, the ten thousand dollar one. Instead I won a prize that I didn't need or want, which was to join Mavericks for a year, which was as ten thousand dollar mastermind, and I had to go back to Las Vegas six weeks later, which really didn't suit me when I had four kids, a job, and all my cash on this trip to Los Angeles where I was a complete stranger. I won this thing and I got up on stage in front of the five hundred people and talked about how I won the competition. I did go to Las Vegas, which I really didn't think I could, but I just decided that I had to. There I met guys like Brad Fallon and Mike Filsaime and Underground affiliate markets and within six weeks of that I quit my job because I was able to apply the strategies and start promoting products that I'd got exposed to. Through Brad Fallon in particular, that really just opened up my network. That just took me by storm into the world of Dane Jackson, John Carlton, Ed Dale and so on. Then through them I became friends with the Halibuts. This all came from entering a competition and from me getting on the plane and heading off to a foreign country, not knowing a single person, and taking that risk knowing that I had to get closer to the cold face of information. I had to invest in myself. Despite all the naggers and doubters and the hangers-on who tell you it's a bad idea, sometimes you've just got to do what you've got to do and not even have to worry about justifying. I just had this idea that this was what I needed to do. Alex: Yeah. James: That isn't the only place that I've sort of progressed. There's plenty of others. I can give you more if you want. Steve: Believe me, we wish we could have you forever because Lord know that you ... You've got just an encyclopedia of knowledge and creative ways that you can teach folks. Probably let's do this at this juncture, which is go to SuperFastBusiness.com, folks, if you want to find out more information about what James is up to. That's the best site for folks to go to, correct? Yeah. James: Yes. Steve: Okay, so SuperFastBusiness.com and then of course you've got a podcast of your own. Somebody was just on that podcast pretty recently. Oh wait, me. Yeah. Thanks for that again. That was very cool, appreciate that. James: Your pretty face is on the homepage right now. Steve: Yeah, I saw that. Thank you for that. It's pretty interesting. I've got a few more questions but I know Alex does as well and we're running out of time here, so Alex I'm going to turn it over to you and then we'll pop back in. Again, ladies and gents, if you've got questions, /Q and then your question and it'll get into the queue and you'll be able to ask James your questions here on Push Button Influence in the green room. All right. James: Here we go. Yay! I'm unmuted. Alex: What comes to mind is I have these actions cards because for the video, people can see it versus a talking head. You strike me as someone who loves arbitrage. You may not call it that, but you're not a one-off guy, even though many internet marketers are. I was going to say, let's talk about marketing arbitrage and recurring income and how you do that because many people can't, but then it just occurs to me that you're a father. I didn't know you had four kids. I thought you had fewer. You're all the way in another continent, so there's a lot of activity happening away from that continent. How do you create this lifestyle arbitrage so that you can be a present father and play these other roles in your life and be a coach and mentor to a lot of smart people, who you mentioned in the green room, and then still have this recurrent income coming into your business super fast? What would be useful, you can give me an answer that you think is going to hit the mark, but I'm interested in your daily rituals, if there is a recurring ritual that has a rhythm for you so that other people can maybe model that. That habit ends up becoming the winning process. James: Yeah. It's really important. Hopefully some of the stories that I've just mentioned give context to how I have the life I have now. Some people get confused and they see me now and they think, "I just want to go straight to that." There's probably going to be some crawling over broken glass to get there or eating beans out of a can. I'll answer both your questions about arbitrage. Firstly, it's about doing the right things. It's constantly thinking, "What is the right thing." That's where most people get off track. I've got at least a hundred episodes around topics like this, but most people never get out of their inbox. Their mindset's not quite right to start with, so I would start there. Start with your own thoughts about yourself and what you're trying to do, what results you want, what is a logical path there. It's really not going to involve eight hours of Facebook a day. It means you have to take over control of your inbox. I'm really passionate about that. I even created a course on it because it's where I noticed everyone I start working with is spending fifteen or eighteen hours a week in their inbox and I'll get them down to about five and then I'll get them out of their inbox building things like communications via Slack. That allows you turn of Skype, email, and Facebook. If you want to develop geo arbitrage then you go to the market you want to develop. I went to America a lot. I've been there probably sixty times. One year I went every month for a year. I go there at least three or four times a year. I developed a market. I've spoken at the biggest conferences like Traffic and Conversion and Underground. I'm good friends with a lot of people that invite me to their private events, like the John Carltons and John Bensons. That's the key to developing a market. You go to the market you want to develop. I did the exact same thing in the UK. What we're seeing now is with the strength of the US dollar my income has all gone up by about thirty percent because I'm a dot-com company that charges in US dollars. The bulk of my customers are in the North American market, followed by Australia, followed by the UK. In terms of geographic arbitrage, I've split my risk across three different markets. I visit the markets I want to develop. I retain those customers through retention strategies and reducing turn and providing a hub membership. I hire labor in a lower price market, the Philippines, where I've built a team of up to sixty people to run the service businesses. I visit that market too to develop my time. I've visited the Philippines fifteen times now over the last six years and I've put a lot of energy and effort into building the right time who are amazing. My team of managers run the business. I just run the managers with a fifteen minute per week call, group call to seven managers. I just interact with them on Slack. There's a few tactical things there. There's a few overview strategy things. If we go back to daily routine, I use partitioning. I resisted this for the longest time, but by having a scheduler I'm able to say, "You know what, I want to work on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday where I'll do outside activities," like this Blab or speaking to a high level customer or doing a podcast creation of my own. "These are the days I want to do it. The rest of the time is my time." It's only when you say this time's available for other people that you actually put a barrier between what's available for you. A lot of entrepreneurs are still running the "I'll do whatever I want whenever I want with whomever I want" mantra, and unfortunately that means you're available all the time. I've also done a lot of work on getting off devices, switching off alerts, not being near my phone, not even being near my computer. I don't want to do more than twenty-five hours’ time on a computer per week. I surf every single day and honestly that's changed my life. I love surfing, I love the sport. It's the most soulful, natural, physical thing. I'm genuinely tired when I hit the pillow because I've had a good surf, I've done mental activity, I've done physical activity. I've set up a very leveraged publishing and content system where in one hour I can record three episodes that will provide one week's worth of content. I do probably three episodes a week on average and that takes about one hour to record using frameworks. Probably the magic word here of all the things I just said is "frameworks". You can have frameworks for everything and I have a framework for everything. I've even got a framework for frameworks. That's the secret. I don't want to get on airplane where they're not using a framework and I don't want to be in a hospital where they're not using a framework. That is the secret and that's what I learned running those dealerships way back, is by building systems and checklists, that allowed me to get repeat results of the same type, just like baking a cake. Steve: All right, well, look James, we could go on and on. Lord knows I want to. As a matter of fact, what is the name of that course that gets you out of your inbox and all of that framework stuff? You just described this guy without a shadow of a doubt. Alex knows that. James: I'll send it to you, don't worry DJ. A totally must, relief. I created it because it was the number one thing that people were struggling with. Basically people are trapped in consumption mode and not creation mode. Because companies like Facebook and Apple are sitting around working out ways to distract you and engage you, you don't really stand a chance and that's why it's so important to understand persuasion, right Alex? Until you're aware of that you're basically caught up in someone else's plan and it takes a lot of discipline I think to confront that. I've literally interviewed people when they're applying for coaching and in the background alerts and dings and stuff. I'm like, "What is that?" They go, "That's my phone." "We're going to stop there. Let's turn off all the alerts." Do you need to know someone just tagged you in a picture right now or is it okay to go? My rule with stuff like that is we'll go there. Let's not let them come to us. We don't need them coming to us. For other things, like your daily numbers from the business, they should come to you. You shouldn't have to go and get them. Most people have it all around the wrong way. They've got to go and get the things they really need and they're having things come to them they don't need. Your inbox is a to do list that other people add things to. You've got to ruthlessly prune back your inbox and set rules and behaviors that in the future will serve you. It's not enough to just declare bankruptcy today. You have to be at whole metabolism around your inbox consumption. Steve: Yeah. It's absolutely brilliant, James. Thanks for that. All right Alex, any last words for Mr. Schramko before we drop into the green room and allow those who are live with us here on Blab to ask their questions? Alex: I think James, you just had reminded me and I think everyone else watching and listening, that it's important if we're going to make and create value for the rest of the world, we have to take our agenda back. Unless we do that, it's impossible to deliver value to someone else. You've done it better than anyone else whom I know and you do it where most people follow excuse. "Hey, I'm so far away from the mainstream," and you figure out how to do it. I'm most interested in looking at your habits and the inner gain that's been working and you've been divulging that on this interview, which I think has been very useful for everyone. Thank you for the level of vulnerability and also the transparency. James: My pleasure. I created a class called "Own the Race" course. It was really the key message drummed into me by this crazy mentor that I had at one point. That's been a very popular course. The whole idea is taking back control. There's a lot of things we can't control and we shouldn't waste any energy on that, but we really can control our marketing presence. We can own our own reputation and we can take a position. It's not easy. It's much easier to just put stuff on Facebook. It's much harder to put it on your own website, but if you do that extra discipline and harness the other sites, you can build up your own and keep your footprint. If you're interested in that mindset stuff, Alex, I'll happily send you a little product I did called "Lunatic Millionaire" which is kind of counter-intuitive and contrarian viewpoints that were taught to me by this guy mostly through me experiencing it as ... In some cases even being bullied by him. Yeah, I wouldn't hold him up as someone who'd go and join and mentoring program, but some people go a bit wild when they're running a hundred million dollar business. I learned a lot of valuable things that I think caused me to be different to a lot of other people. I'm happy to send that over to you. Alex: I'm happy to receive it. "Owning the Race" course is where I got the marketing arbitrage idea. James: Right. Alex: All of you who are ... If you're right now watching or listening, simply go to SuperFastBusiness.com, click on the "About" page, and you'll see it as one of two links. There's two links at the bottom. I'd click both, but "Own the Race" course. You have more of a chance to win. It's like owning a casino, right? Alex: I'd rather go with this one. James: There will be an update coming out soon. We're doing some new stuff there, so yeah. It's actually had a lot of life, that course. From the time it was put out it's typically still mostly relevant. The new version will be even more tuned. Alex: Awesome. James: [crosstalk 00:50:27] when I published that course. Steve: All right. Wow, James. Really, really, really good stuff and as I said, we're going to drop into the post-interview green room to answer some questions so hopefully you can stick around for those and we'll rapid-fire those out to get all those questions answered. Again, as Alex said, check out SuperFastBusiness.com where Mr. James Schramko has his presence there. Wow, good stuff man. Really, really good stuff. On behalf of my co-host extraordinaire, Alex Mandossian, and for James Schramko, I am Steve Olsher. We're going to drop into the green room on Push Button Influence right after this. Announcer: You just learned how you broadcast your brilliance. Tune in live to Blab.im Wednesdays at 4 PM Pacific as the world's leading influencers share their proven strategies for leveraging the power of new media. For more information about your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher, to claim your free surprise gift, and to access every episode of Push Button Influence, visit PushButtonInfluence.com. ###END###

As Head Product Educator at LeadPages. Jeff oversees the positioning and marketing of new product features and releases for LeadPages. Over the past 2.5 years Jeff and his team have produced over 375 videos about LeadPages features, generated MILLIONS of leads, and MILLIONS of $$ in revenue to help build LeadPages into one of the leading digital marketing platforms! Tune in to learn as Jeff talks about how he builds a visual story in his videos, while engaging viewers AND driving conversions, PLUS how people are getting a 98% CONVERSION rate from email marketing! Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play Read Full Transcript Announcer: This is Push Button Influence where the world's leading influencers candidly share their exact strategies for maximizing reach, accelerating growth, and generating massive exposure all by leveraging the power of new media. You can become the next Larry King, Oprah, or Howard Stern. All you need to do is broadcast your brilliance. Push Button Influence teaches you how. Here are your hosts Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher. Steve Olsher: All right, all right, all right. Welcome, welcome, welcome to another edition here of Push Button Influence. It is a beautiful Wednesday at 4:00 PM Pacific, which is the day that we always broadcast live. Joining me from down under, literally down under my co-host extraordinaire Alex Mandossian. It is actually Alex's birthday. Maybe Jeff later will do a little singing there because you showed us the guitars in the background, man. Now you're going to have to break out a happy birthday rendition for my man Alex Mandossian. Again, welcome everybody to Push Button Influence. I am Steve Olsher. Today we are joined, Alex and I are joined by Jeff Wenberg. Am I pronouncing that right or did I butcher it? Jeff Wenberg: No, that's actually spot on. Steve Olsher: Yay. Okay good. Good, good, good. Jeff, I'll let you define a little bit more about who you are in a little bit here, but what Alex and I do every week here on Push Button Influence when we start out the show is we each begin with a word. Alex because you are in Australia right now, and man, you're not even backwards or anything like that, but is your word going to show up backwards? That's what I'm wondering. Let's see what your word is for the day. Alex Mandossian: I'm ahead of both of you guys by 16 hours, and I've had two birthdays, one yesterday and one today. It's literally the 10th here. It is 11:00 AM Pacific time in Sydney. Jeff, you and I have never met personally. This is the first physical and virtual meeting, but what you've done with Lead Pages and what your partners have done have really changed the landscape. You're best known because there are a few different platforms that do kind of what you guys do, but you've brought the definition of this three part word, "Do it yourself," to the new media and online marketing landscape. How does, "Do it yourself," fit into Lead Pages, and why is it so important to have a do it yourself platform for newbies, tech dummies, tech challenged, and even people who think they're too smart for marketing, but they have pretested landed pages like you guys? How does that all fit? Jeff Wenberg: Where it comes into play is just being able to empower, whether it's you or a team member to be able to get results quick. The basis of Lead Pages was breaking down the barrier for people to be able to create effective landing pages without having to go off and hire a designer or hire a developer to be able to make a simple landing page. It's basically about empowerment. That kind of comes off as do it yourself. Basically, everything is built around empowerment. That's how it all ties in. Steve Olsher: Nice. My word for the day here Mr. Wenberg is this word, which might actually have complex ... Boy I don't usually use words with that many syllables, but that word is complexity. I have a question for you around how the Internet has evolved to the point where ... I've been online since 1993. Alex since 1995. We've both been online for a very long time, and we can both recall the days of bringing about 17 people to try to get up a three word website. It was this whole process. Can you speak a little bit about how we have really just leveled the barriers to entry and really removed the complexity of putting up an online presence that really looks good and converts? Jeff Wenberg: Yeah. I think with a lot of products that are out there, not specifically just with Lead Pages, but a lot of new marketing products that are out there, they've really helped to let the people that maybe do have a better product, but don't have a huge marketing budget, they've leveled that playing field. They can get those effective pages or email service providers or whatever it is, and they can have as much of an impact as an enterprise company where they have 500 employees and a multimillion dollar budget. You can get the same effect. Obviously, there's still the money on their side, but it helps to level it a little bit, and then remove that complexity. You can actually achieve things without having that huge, huge budget like an enterprise level business would. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Makes total sense. Alex? Alex Mandossian: I'm going to shamelessly talk about myself since it's my birthday, and then I'm going to tell you why Lead Pages is annoying because it's so much better than what we did in the past. In 2007 Jeff, I don't even know if you know these guys because I feel like I'm a decrepit grandpa, but Rick Radish who used to work right under Bill Gates and Armand Warren who's still around, we were running around doing the big seminar together. We were partners, and we came up with Audio Generator, Instant Video Generator, before YouTube, but I had my first million dollar hour with something called Marketing Makeover Generator. What it did was it was an A/B split tester. It put up squeeze pages and thank you pages, and based on that one concept in 2007, I haven't made a million bucks in half an hour since. We did it in 28 minutes actually. It's a great story, but it was the concept that was so amazing. Here's where it's annoying for me because Lead Pages is 3.0 version of Marketing Makeover Generator, which is not around anymore, but you guys not only bring ease of use and do it yourself, but you bring Proven. You work with Proven. You're poaching Jeff Walker landing pages. You're poaching, even from your competitors co-options, why is it so important to work with Proven Pages? It may be a rhetorical question, but I don't think people really appreciate how Proven no longer has to cost other people money besides being do it yourself. Will you speak on that? Jeff Wenberg: Yeah. It becomes important to use those Proven templates and everything to, speaking back to your do it yourself thing, it empowers you to start out on the right foot. Whereas if you come into any webpage generator, whatever it may be, and you have to create it from scratch it's like, "Well, how do I know what to do? How do I know what's going to work?" It's really hard to put it all together in a way that's going to work without having to test it all. Where at Lead Pages, what we do is we always bake in conversion that we learn from our clients and our colleagues and that sort of thing. Speaking of Jeff Walker, we work with his team to develop the pages for his product launch formula. We talk with Jeff, "Okay. What do you want to see in this version of the page," and build that in and then roll it into the Lead Pages product. Then everybody that uses Lead Pages can benefit from that proven testing. Alex Mandossian: Here's the thing, you guys just ... I don't think people really appreciate the value of it because ... At least I know that my students don't, but you're actually crowd sourcing marketing intelligence. You're actually undoing, you're unwrapping the curtain, or unwrapping the package of what actually works, and what it does is it prevents losing money. That's what Lead Pages has. Speak to the proven templates that are there. They're not just there, and you're pulling out of your head or heart or other parts that we talk about, but the bottom line is these are actually tested templates. Jeff Wenberg: Yup. A really cool thing for people that maybe aren't familiar with Lead Pages, we have an option that lets you sort the pages by their average conversion rate across all of our users. At any given time, it keeps them rated by what's converting the highest at any given moment. That way if you're building a webinar registration page, you can click that button, and it will give you the highest rated one at that time, then you can choose that page. Again, try and start out a little bit ahead of the game so you don't have to test your way to success. It's like, "Okay, maybe I can start with this base, and then test from a proven base." It helps with speed of implementation as well to just get to those results quicker, and that's kind of one of the most important things with any business is seeing results fast. I feel like ... Specifically with lead generation, that's one thing that Lead Pages shines at. Steve Olsher: Let me ask you this because first and foremost for those who are just joining us here live on Blab, we've got Jeff Wenberg on from Lead Pages. Let me give you an opportunity to really explain to people what you do there because I don't think I gave you ample opportunity to do that yet. What's your role at Lead Pages. Jeff Wenberg: I'm the Head Product Educator at Lead Pages. Basically, that means a few different things. What it meant when I first became that was I made a lot of videos about our products, features, and promotions to introduce our audience to those. In the last few months I've rolled into moving a little bit higher level where we're talking about how to position this product, or what's the messaging going to be for this feature and how are we going to launch it, and that sort of thing. Right now, I focus a lot on more of the promotion and launch strategy, and less on let's make a video about it. Steve Olsher: Nice. Thanks for clarifying that. Let me ask you this because I've been using Lead Pages for a number of years already. Gosh, I think it may even be three or four years. When did Lead Pages first come out? Jeff Wenberg: I want to say it's been ... It's probably close to three years. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Okay. Yeah it was right around that time. Obviously, like the Internet, Lead Pages has evolved quite a bit. One of the interesting things that you guys just did, and I mean just did is you introduced drag and drop features. This is something that people have been asking for for quite some time, but can you explain what exactly that is? What it empowers people to do, and why it's so important for Lead Pages and your customers? Jeff Wenberg: Yeah. Basically what Steve is talking about is we just released a brand new drag and drop builder. You can take Lead Pages' proven templates, and tweak them to whatever it is that you want to see on that page. A lot of times our users would be like, "Man, I love these pages. I just wish I could add a video to it," or, "I just wish I could add one more image," or anything like that, or maybe a countdown timer. Now, our new drag and drop builder has all these different kinds of widgets where you can add a countdown timer, an image, you can move sections of the pages and everything. Basically, it lets you take our base of proven templates, and then customize those for your specific applications. Steve Olsher: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Nice. Let me ask a quick follow up question here, and then I know you've got a bunch of questions as well. Jeff, let me just follow up to that with is this in response to the popularity of the drag and drop type features that you're seeing elsewhere? We can name names, obviously Click Funnels and there are others that have those features. Was this in response to that, or were you guys already working on these features? How did that come about? Jeff Wenberg: Yeah. It's been a really long haul for the company for product roadmap and that sort of thing. I can't get into super specifics, but it was just like, not necessarily a response, but more of a response to where we saw the future of landing page generators and all that kind of stuff going. Plus what our base of 40,000 plus users were like, "Man, I just really, really need this." Weighing out the pros and cons of how much flexibility is a good thing, and how much ... At what point does it cross over to you're going to shoot yourself in the foot, but ultimately we weighed the options, and it was like, "Well I think we could do this in a way where we keep our tested and proven pages, and having things just work like Lead Pages is known for, but then also giving that flexibility to tweak pages to do whatever a user wants." Steve Olsher: Awesome. Alex? Alex Mandossian: Next question is I think what makes you as good as you are, and what makes you different from anything else, and that is the video tutorial. I've watched so many tutorials of yours, and one of the great gifts I think, and blessings frankly, is to do a tutorial in three minutes that could have taken 30 minutes. It's difficult to do. Sometimes it takes six or seven versions just to pair it down. How critical is the video tutorial to Lead Pages? For me, it's right up there with the do it yourself concept. Jeff Wenberg: First off, thank you very much. That's a huge honor, and thanks for watching all the videos. I would say it's ... I would agree. It's almost as important just because it lets people envision what they could do with any given template or product. It lets them see the end goal, and envision themselves achieving that. If that's all they need to get started, that's cool, but if they want to have a ... "Okay, now I actually want to see what I need to do to achieve that goal," here's the tutorial that goes through it. It's kind of funny that you talk about it could be done in 30 minutes, and it's ... It really is crazy how often a video that we'll do ... We were doing a video every two days at the height of ... We're pumping these things out. It got to the point where it's like, "Man, I feel like there's a simple formula here." It's kind of like knowledge bomb, benefit, and then go back, show how to do what they did, and then whatever you want to finish out the video with like a call to action of some sort. That formula really seems to help get all the information that you need across in a really short period of time. For anybody that is making tutorial videos that's a really awesome formula to follow. Alex Mandossian: Steve, I want to hog this one. Let's talk about mobile Facebook redirects. That's my favorite video of yours, and Amy Porterfield you've given acknowledgement to and a few others, there's a huge pain with Facebook. They don't know how to make responsive headers, for the world's largest social network they're failing in that regard. You guys did come up with a solution. You really are a great in between. Speak to that, give the tip as if it were the video. Jeff Wenberg: I've got to be honest. That was so long ago that I'm kind of drawing a blank. I feel so embarrassed to admit that. Are you just referring to the redirect- Alex Mandossian: I'll tell you what it was. Lead Pages [inaudible 00:16:43] new landing pages with Facebook redirect. For example, let's say a launch has expired, let's say a webinar has expired, right? Jeff Wenberg: Yup. Alex Mandossian: Is that a good memory jar? Jeff Wenberg: Yeah. Basically, what you can easily do is you can redirect all those pages to wherever you need it to go. It's as simple as turning it on and putting the URL in where you want it to be forwarded to. Again, it kind of puts the power in the user's hand so they don't have to go to their web master or whoever they're using to manage all that stuff. You can do it right inside the app. It makes it super easy to transfer all that traffic that you've generated and all that buzz from those pages if they're still out there. If somebody goes to them, then you can forward that traffic onto whatever, that new thing that you want it to be transferred to. Alex Mandossian: I put the link for everybody inside of Blab if they want to check it out. It's a really good video Jeff. That was an A+. Thank you. Jeff Wenberg: Thank you. If I remember correctly, that was really, really, really early on in my career at Lead Pages. Since then I think we've produced something like, probably around close to 400 videos. I so apologize for the fuzziness there. Steve Olsher: It's all good man. I barely remember yesterday. I totally get it. Let me ask you this, and actually it's a great segway into, we like to introduce folks to good tools and resources that can really help their business and help really flatten that learning curve and get them to their destination faster. Talk about the tools that you used when you first started creating these videos, and the tools that you use now to create these video tutorials. Specifically, what did you use when you started and what are you using now? Specifically. Jeff Wenberg: When I first came on board at Lead Pages, it was just me and Clay on the marketing team. It was super bare bones and very simple. That setup was I would record all my audio with Pro Tools, which is a recording software. Then all my screen stuff, it would be with Screen Flow. I would use Keynote Slides and a browser. That was it. Steve Olsher: Now? Jeff Wenberg: Now, it's gotten quite, quite advanced where they're using ... Now there's a video team where it's two full-time dedicated guys. They're using Screen Flow, Adobe After Effect for motion graphics, Adobe Premier to compile everything, Photoshop, let's see- Steve Olsher: It's quite the process. Jeff Wenberg: I think that's about it at this point. Steve Olsher: Yeah. For those who ... Audio files, what were you using for mics back then, and what are you using for mics now? Jeff Wenberg: I actually have my mic right here that I used to use. Steve Olsher: Was that what your cat was playing with before we got started? That was- Jeff Wenberg: No. Steve Olsher: No. Jeff Wenberg: This is a little Studio Electrics USB mic that I got when I bought the tools. I used this for years. Once it got to the point where it was like I just really want to up-level, I got this EV RE 20. Steve Olsher: EV is which company? Jeff Wenberg: Electro Voice. Steve Olsher: Thank you. All right awesome. For those who don't know Clay because the question was asked, who is Clay? Jeff Wenberg: Clay is Clay Collins. He's the CEO of Lead Pages. Just like the reason I am here because I heard of him and was just like, "Dang, that guy does it right. Totally, not scammy, it was very," I felt like I could put my energy and get behind this guy, and then low and behold here we are. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Alex? Alex Mandossian: Two part question. First, is the importance of improvements when you come out with a big deal technology? Improvements are a big deal. I have a Mastermind partner, his name is Kyle Graham, Ten Minute Funnels, you probably know him. Jeff Wenberg: Oh sure. Yup. Alex Mandossian: He's really big on improvements, and his software does drag and drop. That leads me to how does co-option come into play because there's a few competitors out there, and some overlap, some don't. How do you deal with improvements? You see a competitor improving and then you guys then may poach or copy what they do. How does that work in the real landscape? Jeff Wenberg: What we're ... We don't try to copy or poach or anything. The main thing that we focus on is setting our own pace, and just ... What are the things as a marketing team or as a company, what are things that we want to use this for? A lot of times that correlates into what a lot of our users are going to use it for. That is more like what sets the pace, less like, "Oh, well this company's doing this and that company's doing that so we have to do that." What we really try and focus on is setting our own pace, and if that means that our users are demanding a certain thing, we want to listen to them and give them the best version of what they're asking for. I would say improvement are super important, but doing improvements that make sense and are the most important from a strategy and a product standpoint; where those two meet is probably the improvements you want to focus on. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Let me ask you this, Jeff it's interesting because you guys typically make landing pages. Let's call them what they are, it's not a full blown website. What's really interesting is when I hear Tim Page do a lot of his teaching, he always talks about having multiple opt-ins on a page. That's a homepage. It's still a page, but he talks about having multiple opt ... We're talking 28 opt-ins on one page, but most of the pages that seem to do really well is from a conversion standpoint, as you rank them through Lead Pages have one call to action. Can you speak to why Tim is talking about multiple calls to action or opt-in opportunities versus how almost every page that's available through Lead Pages only has that one box? Jeff Wenberg: Yeah. Absolutely. That's a good question and a good clarification to make. A lot of times what Tim's talking about there is when people are using blogs or websites. You want to have, on those blogs or websites you want to have as many conversion opportunities as possible. Basically, the thinking behind it is the more opportunities you give somebody to opt-in, the more likely they are to opt-in. Whereas if you only give them one opportunity, if that doesn't connect with them they might not opt-in. Then you might not ever add them to your email list. That's what he's talking about there. Kind of moving over to what you were talking about with each landing page in Lead Pages having a single call to action is that those are standalone pages. If somebody's coming here, they're coming for this main purpose of this page. You want it to be super clear, and be a single do this. It's abundantly obvious what the visitor is supposed to do. Basically, that's kind of optimizing both. On a blog or a website, you want to have all those opt-ins all over the place so there's entry points all over. If they're coming to a single purpose landing page where there's one topic and one point, you want it to be super clear like, "This is what I want you to do on this page, which is click this button." Does that make sense? Steve Olsher: Awesome. Alex? Totally. Alex Mandossian: Let's talk about crowd sourcing because when you come up with new product features you're actually asking your JV partners and customers. Let's talk about the rituals that you're involved in in launching new products or features because there's not guess work with you guys. Obviously, you guys have been funded, now you're kind of like a fish bowl so people are looking from the outside. You're responsible to investors. How do you come up with new features? You're just not guessing, you're coming up based on hard tested facts and research. Jeff Wenberg: Yup. I'll speak to this on the best of my ability. Like I had kind of mentioned previously, a lot of it is what are our most requested features, and we have a forum where our users can actually go request certain features. We keep an eye on what our customers are wanting plus what we need to up-level our product just from a marketing standpoint. What would be cool if we could do, and then basically bounce all of those together to find out which ones fall in the middle of all three of these circles, and then let's focus on those. Then bounce those off of a subset of users to find out what the response would be. It's almost like testing success, if you will, but basically- Alex Mandossian: Do you release it to a few users, or do you release it to the whole group? Jeff Wenberg: It's not necessarily ... When we get to that point, the research proves that this is a viable product, so this is what we're going to do. It's not like we make it and then put it out to a few users to find out. It's like, once we do the research, we find those things that kind of correlate with all three of the different areas that we look at, it gets put into production. Basically, how it gets rolled out is a small group of early adopters will get access to it, or depending on what kind of product it is it could be just current users. It's kind of like a soft launch where we just let people find it, and then keep the port from getting a barrage of, "Whoa what's going on? I don't know how to use this." So do a little bit of a trickle in, let them discover it, start using it so we can get that feedback, fix bugs that are found that we missed or that come up after people start using it, and then improve that. Do an early adopter launch, and then do a full on public launch. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Really good stuff. The advantage of joining us here live on Blab.AM every Wednesday at 4:00 PM Pacific is that you can be a part of the action here and ask questions. That's where we've got a lot of fun stuff going on. Cat has just been crushing it here on the questions. We're going to have a lot of questions from Cat when we get to Q&A, but a lot of really, really great points there Cat. One of the things that Cat just brought up that I don't even want to wait for the Q&A to get to is that you've got these, let's just call them the core pages if you will or the four most important lead pages that you have, what are those because there are so many different ways to go, what do you define as the most important pages that somebody should have? Jeff Wenberg: Basically, you should have some sort of opt-in page where people can opt-in to continue some sort of communication with you. That's kind of like the landing page/marketing 101. Have that opt-in page. From there, a lot of times what will happen is when you opt-in, you'll just get the, "Cool thanks." The conversation ends there. A second page would be a thank you page. From there what you can do, since people are super excited about communicating with you and getting your lead magnet, what we often recommend is doing some sort of thank you page where they can continue the action. Steve Olsher: What does that look like and sound like and feel like? Jeff Wenberg: What we recommend a lot is either doing a webinar registration thank you page if you do webinars, or doing a social share page where they can share the original offer on their social media because chances are if they're into something, they're probably going to know other people that are also into it. It kind if leverages their audience to get you more email subscribers. Steve Olsher: What are the other pages? Jeff Wenberg: Another really huge page, it's a completely missed opportunity, is the 404 page. Basically, what that is when somebody goes to your website and the URL is broken, or maybe it was shared on social media and the URL was typed in wrong, they go to your website and they see a page where it's just like something's broken. Uh oh. That's actually a huge conversion opportunity and let's you catch all that traffic that's probably going to call off your website because typically when that happens, unless they really want what you're offering, they're probably just going to be like, "Well, whatever," and move onto the next thing. What you can do on that page is you can offer some sort of lead magnet, whether it's a video course, eBook, free report, whatever it may be. You can offer something of value of that page and capture some portion of that traffic that's probably just going to disappear. It lets you plug that hole a little bit. Let's see. I'm trying to think of the fourth page. Pretty it's webinar registration pages. Basically, that entails doing webinars. Webinars have actually been one of the things that has seen our business grow, and contributed to the growth of Lead Pages. A lot of people, they hear, "Oh, doing webinars," it's so much work and it's so crazy and everything, but a lot of times you can start out with Q&A stuff and record those, practice, get to interact with your audience like we're doing tonight with all the questions and everything. Kind of figure out what they want to know about, and then you can build a webinar off of that, and then start doing that webinar with the webinar registration page. Steve Olsher: Awesome. Alex? Alex Mandossian: I want to pick a fight, all right. This is martial arts marketing. There we go. Squeeze page versus thank you page. There's so much focus on the squeeze page, and a thank you page can be after an order, after a squeeze page, just after taking action. My opinion is the thank you page is far more important because 100% of the people have taken action, whereas a squeeze page or landing page, if you're really good 50% are about to take action. I want to go to both of you guys. First Jeff, what's more important and why? If you had to choose 51% is more important, just a little bit, what would you say and why? Don't let me influence you. Jeff Wenberg: Can I ask a follow up question? Alex Mandossian: Yeah of course, it's your show. Jeff Wenberg: Would we be specifically saying one landing page versus one thank you page, or are we talking if you have a blog and other stuff that's outside of this one landing page. Alex Mandossian: No, what we're talking about ... Most people here watching are thinking, "How do I get more leads?" Right? Jeff Wenberg: Yeah. Alex Mandossian: They'll focus their entire week on creating the squeeze page and getting every pixel right, and then it will say thank you on the thank you page. Right? Jeff Wenberg: Yeah. Yeah. That's ... I feel like if I had to pick one, I would pick creating ten landing pages. Not just one. Basically, the reason I say that is if you can't get anyone to you thank you page, what good is a thank you page? That said, when you do get them there, like you said, you want to have a really, really good thank you page to engage with them since like you said 100% of people did take action to get there. Alex Mandossian: Here's another question. What's worse, a shitty landing page or a shitty thank you page? What's worse? Jeff Wenberg: I would say if the shitty landing page is working, then cool. The shitty thank you page would be worse. Basically, if you could take anything away, it would be give your audience something more to do on your thank you page than just saying, "Hey cool, thanks. Peace out." Alex Mandossian: That's the purpose of the question, so thank you. Steve what do you think? Steve Olsher: You know what? I don't even want to touch that because that's an MMA fight I don't want to be in the middle of. Thank you pages versus squeeze pages versus all that fun stuff, but it kind of leads towards this question which is talking about conversion rates because you do sort by conversion rates. Ladies and gentlemen, this isn't meant to be an infomercial for Lead Pages. Obviously Lead Pages has insight that we can all leverage, and that's why we're going down this path here. Talk about conversion rates in terms of ... You've seen, obviously, some really high percentage rates. I'd love to hear some of those amazing examples of conversion rates, but I'd also like to kind of follow up on Alex's point and question, which is interestingly enough some of the ugliest pages on God's green earth seem to do fairly well from a conversion standpoint. Here you guys are, you're spending all of this money, you're investing all of this time and energy and resources to make it so that it's super pretty for the folks who use your products, and yet some of the ugliest pages in the world do really, really well. First speak to ugly versus beautiful, and then give us something to aspire to as far as what you've seen on the conversion rate percentage front. Jeff Wenberg: First part of the question, ugly versus beautiful, it's kind of like one of those things where if you find an ugly page works. I would say use that page over a beautiful page because ultimately it's all about getting people into your funnel and getting them interacting with you. Whatever works, go for it. The beauty kind of comes into it is from a branding point. If you ... Clay has a lot of times talked about how design is the new copyrighting. It's almost like a branding play too. If you have a really good looking page that you can get to convert well, it's always going to be perceived better than some "Eww, this kind of looks a little iffy here, I don't know if I want to enter my email." Even though they might still enter their email to get whatever you're offering, there is a tad bit of, "Wow this looks legit. I want to get what they're offering, so I'm going to enter it in there." It's kind of like ... I do think you just got to find for your particular business what works for that business to convert the most people. If it's ugly, use it. If it's beautiful use it. Whatever works. What was the second part of the question? Steve Olsher: What's possible? What can people aspire to? What have you seen out there in terms of percentage rates? Jeff Wenberg: It's kind of crazy. I don't have specific numbers right off the top of my head, but I do remember on a lot of our webinar registration pages people are getting 70% to 80% conversion rates. Steve Olsher: What's that ... Let's do this, what's the baseline? What's the over, under? If you're doing not a really good job, then you're going to be on this side, and if you're doing a pretty good job and a great job, then you're on that side. What's the over, under that people should be thinking about so that when they're testing their pages they know this is good or this is not good. Jeff Wenberg: I think it kind of depends on your traffic source. There's a few different ones. If they know you, and they've been exposed to your content, and they have some relationship with you, you can expect a higher conversion rate just because of that fact. Steve Olsher: What does that look like, sound like? Is that 80% if it's your own warm traffic? Jeff Wenberg: I'm trying to think. We were just chatting about this the other day. Let me circle back around to that. The cold traffic, I do remember just from straight cold traffic, something decent is anywhere 10% or lower where it's just kind of like you're doing well if that's the case. Basically, I'll say the more engaged or the more they know you, the more you can expect in a conversion rate. I know that doesn't give you a specific number- Steve Olsher: It doesn't. Jeff Wenberg: Yeah, but I don't have a specific number right off the top of my head unfortunately. Steve Olsher: No worries. We'll do a followup eBook. We'll expect you guys to produce that and send it to use for Push Button Influences soul use. Jeff Wenberg: Just as some numbers that I have seen, these aren't, "This is the usual. This is what to expect." Like I've said, we've seen some webinar registration pages converting at 70% to 80%, and that's not crazy unheard of for these pages. We hear about that a lot of time, but there again, that's not taking into account any sort of traffic source or anything like that. That's just one number that I do remember. A lot times for any given page, just when I've been dinking around the back end of ... Helping customers figure stuff out, I've seen average for any given page 40% to 50%. That's kind of taking a peak at their account while I'm trying to figure out some stuff on the back end for them. Steve Olsher: I'm sorry I put you on the spot there man. I'm not trying to throw you under the bus, and I recognize you're on one part of the Lead Pages world. Access to those numbers, not trying to make you look bad here man. Jeff Wenberg: No worries. Steve Olsher: Absolutely. Alex, I think because I've done a really good job of not helping our guest out here, why don't you take this to another level with him. Alex Mandossian: All right. I want to go to inner game because you guys have had massive success. [inaudible 00:40:17] in your marketing years, and 21 years in physical years. As a result of wild success, sometimes it creates massive wildfires of destruction without having that intention. Just so people who are starting or thinking about creating an app or Software as a Service some kind of a SaaS play, which everyone watching right now has an aspiration to do, speak to something that you guys had to overcome that looked like a disaster, but with some moral fiber and leadership, you overcame it. Get as personal as you can because some people watching right now really need to hear stories like this because they're right in the middle of the muck, and their drudgery of trying to overcome this. We're about to do a launch, it's like the calm before the storm, and I'm warning Steve. We just need to hear it. Give us a juicy story that is [inaudible 00:41:16]. Jeff Wenberg: One that comes to mind, and this is probably a year and a half maybe two years ago when we were a much smaller team, the marketing team was actually on a retreat in North Minnesota up on Lake Superior. We were up there hanging out, and Clay got an email that was like, "Send us $100,000 or we're going to attack your website." He was just like, “pfft”, thinking it was some joke. The next day we had a DDoS attack, which basically. I don't really know the technical aspect behind that, but basically somebody somewhere in the world did something to the Lead Pages domain that basically caused it to crash. It was like, "Oh God, what are we going to do?" Luckily, our engineering team is so awesome. They were in ... I think that was on a Sunday. They were in overnight, basically, got it back up. We were only down for maybe eight hours, which that sounds like a long time, but actually it was fixed fairly quick. That was the first thing where it was just like this was the first time anything major like this has happened. It was like, "Okay, everybody," ... Everybody was like, "I don't care. What needs to be done? I'm going to go do that to make it happen." What we did was, I loved this when the idea came up, is we ended up doing a promotion around it, where we announced that it happened, we did go down, but because we wanted to make it up to everybody that might have wanted to get in while that was happening, we had a promotion where ... I can't remember what the exact promotion was, but we made it a benefit instead of having it be like, "Ugh, somebody just attacked our website and it went down and we lost all these sales," and all these negatives, we flipped it and made it a positive. I think the moral of the story, if you will is always see if you can flip somehow, and take something that's a negative and find the positive in it because not only will your audience probably appreciate it more, and it will make you a little more human, which people respond to that a lot more than being a faceless corporation, but that can also be a building block for some new direction of your company. Alex Mandossian: In other words, if you got the attention, sell something. Jeff Wenberg: Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. Steve Olsher: Alex, it's hard to believe man, but we're at a quarter 'til now, and this is usually the time where we go into the green room on the back end here, and allow those who have joined us live to ask our guest their questions. We have a lot of questions, and we definitely want to give people ample opportunity there to have them answered. Alex, anything else you want to add before we drop into the green room? Alex Mandossian: Yeah Jeff, an unreasonable question, but what's the future look like for the Lead Pages category of software? Jeff Wenberg: You're going to laugh, but it looks awesome. Specifically, it's going to be mind blowing. I think it's going to be game changing. With the new drag and drop builder, plus center that's coming out. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's the command center that sits on top of all of your marketing stack. You can control it all from one spot, and it's going to be a game changer. Like I said, I think it looks awesome. Steve Olsher: Terrific. All right Jeff, here's what we do on Push Button Influence, is we sing Alex happy birthday. Go get your guitar man, right now. Jeff Wenberg: I have to admit, I never learned to play Happy Birthday on guitar. Steve Olsher: You sing when you play your guitar right? Jeff Wenberg: Yes. Steve Olsher: All right. Here we go. You got to do it. All right. Ready. All right. Here we go. You going to do it? Yeah. There we go. If I do it, it's going to be really bad. Jeff's going to go grab his guitar. Look at this, whatever cords you play man, as far as I'm concerned ... Whatever I was just saying while you put your head buds back in there, whatever cords you play, it's going to sound good to me. Lead us through here on the Happy Birthday for Mr. Alex Mandossian who turned 28 today. Jeff Wenberg: 28, all right. Looking good. Steve Olsher: 28. Jeff Wenberg: All right. Steve Olsher: All right. Here we go. Ready? Jeff Wenberg: 1, 2, 3. Happy Birthday to you. Steve Olsher: Happy Birthday to you. Jeff Wenberg: Happy Birthday to you. Steve Olsher: Happy Birthday to you. Jeff Wenberg: Happy Birthday dear Alex. Steve Olsher: Happy Birthday Mr. Mandossian. Jeff Wenberg: Unplug those ears. Steve Olsher: Happy Birthday to you. Yeah! All right. Thanks for the guitar. Thanks leaving me out to dry there man, appreciate that. Jeff Wenberg: That was an air guitar. Steve Olsher: I don't even know why you got the guitar. Jeff Wenberg: He needed a [inaudible 00:46:12]. Steve Olsher: Really, really, really good props there. Thank you for that. Jeff Wenberg: If you ever forget what you're doing, just make it look cool. I was trying. Steve Olsher: Nice, all right awesome. Jeff Wenberg from Lead Pages, the Head Educator extraordinaire. Thank you very much for joining Alex Mandossian and myself, Steve Olsher here on this week's episode of Push Button Influence. Next week we're going to have James Schramko on. That should be a lot of fun. We've got other interesting guests coming up as well including the rescheduling of Peter Shankman. We're going to have him back on and others as well. Remember join us every Wednesday at 4:00 PM Pacific live so you can ask our amazing guests your questions, and we are going to drop into the green room here so that we can answer those for the folks that are here with us live. Again, Jeff thank you so much for joining us. Alex Mandossian, Happy Birthday, and it's been a pleasure spending this hour with you here on your birthday. Jeff Wenberg: Thank you so much everybody. Steve Olsher: We're going to play some fancy exit music here. I'm Steve Olsher, we'll talk to you next time on Push Button Influence. Announcer: You just learned how to broadcast your brilliance. Tune in live to Blab.IM Wednesdays at 4:00 PM Pacific as the world's leading influencers share their proven strategies for leveraging the power of new media. For more information about your hosts Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher, to claim your free surprise gift, and to access every episode of Push Button Influence visit pushbuttoninfluence.com. ###END###  

The “Queen of Sales Conversion”, Lisa Sasevich, teaches experts who are making a difference how to get their message out and enjoy massive results, without being “salesy”. A recognized sales expert by Success Magazine, Lisa delivers high-impact sales-closing strategies for turbo-charging entrepreneurs and small business owners to great profits. Find out How To Never Hear “Let Me Think About It” Again! Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play Read Full Transcript Announcer: This is Push button Influence, where the world's leading influencers candidly share their exact strategies for maximizing reach, accelerating growth, and generating massive exposure, all by leveraging the power of new media. You can become the next Larry King, Oprah, or Howard Stern. All you need to do is broadcast your brilliance. Push button Influence teaches you how. Here are your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher. Steve Olsher: Welcome to another edition here of Push Button Influence! How are we doing? It's been one of those days, and it's an awesome day because we've got Lisa Sasevich here with us. You stepped in at the last minute to help us, and it's so cool, because we know how incredibly busy you are, and so for you to spend this time with us and share your brilliance with our audience is so incredibly appreciated. Welcome to Push Button Influence, everybody. We've got the one and only Alex Mandossian with us, along with Lisa Sasevich. Lisa, as we do at the beginning of every episode here on Push Button Influence, we start with a word. Alex, what is your word of the day? Alex Mandossian: Okay, well, I started with one because I've read everything I can get my hands on what Lisa has written. She is known to tell people, "Hey, if there's an opening for me to speak, I'm over here, don't worry about it, I'll jump on stage." She didn't even do that. It's almost like the universe did it for her. My word was going to be "adapt," because I think she's the most adaptive marketer I know, but that is not Lisa. For me, Lisa and I come from similar lineage with experiential training and accelerated learning, and she is the best whom I know. This is not just for you, Lisa, I say this even when you're not here. The word is "enroll." Now, whether you're a parent enrolling your child to eat protein or going to bed on time, if you're enrolling your current or former spouse to do something that they don't want to do, or if you're enrolling students to run to the back of the room and continue education with me, enrolling makes a different. It turns someone from good to great. What does enroll mean to you? Because you are the best I've seen, men or women. You know how to enroll. What does that mean? what does that word mean to you? Lisa Sasevich: Well, I'm assuming you're asking me, Alex. There's three of us here, so I just want to make sure, because Steve could probably say a lot of really cool things about what enroll means, too. I think we've got three masters of enrollment here, so this is really fun. For me, and I got this definition years ago. I was, I think, 19 years old when I stumbled on to personal development work, and in one of the many courses that I did, but really, I think the one that was such a core for me was Landmark Education, the creators of a course many years ago called Landmark Forum. They used to talk about the word "enroll" in a way that I really got it, which is really opening a new possibility for somebody that they didn't see before, and inviting them to step into it. I think as marketers, that's what we're doing all the time, whether we're doing it online or a live stage, or through any kind of medium, is we see a possibility for people. We see something far beyond what they might be able to see, or maybe different. Maybe a nuance that they can't see for themselves or haven't seen yet. Even the most successful person on the planet, there's also possibilities beyond where we are. I think that what we do for each other is we enroll each other in ideas, in strategies, in fun, in growth, all the time. I was telling my kids, who are downstairs ... I forgot they had a short day, Wednesday is a shortened day, so they're up here wanting to play, and I'm like, "I didn't get a shortened day today!" Steve Olsher: My daughter has a short day too on Wednesdays from her school. Lisa Sasevich: I mean, here I am. We're playing, right? We're playing. I feel like even as a parent, I grew my business since they were a newborn and a three year old up to now, where they're nine and 12, always from home, with them right there participating. I feel like enrollment is not only something that's critical to my business, but it's the difference between strong-arming your kids, the people in your life, versus enrolling them in your new ideas, your possibilities, your mission, your vision for yourself and for them. There's the long answer. Steve Olsher: Good answer. Lisa Sasevich: Yeah! Steve Olsher: That's awesome. Kind of plays into my word for you, which is this word, which says, "confidence," if you can read my chicken scratch there. Alex has much better penmanship than I do, no doubt about that. The question that I have for you is, do you remember when you were able to shift into your confidence in terms of, let's say, specifically because people know you as the queen of sales conversion, and you just talked about the enrollment conversations. You've got to be really confident to be able to say, "Hey, I have something that I know can help you, and I'm asking you to invest in it." Do you remember when you shifted from having that fear of asking people to enroll in your products or services to obviously where you are now and feeling 100% confident about it and being one of the best in the world? Lisa Sasevich: Thank you, thank you, and thank you. Yes, I do. In fact ... I started really confident in the corporate space. They teach you how to sell, you go out. I worked for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. I was a rep. It happened at great timing. I was on the Viagra launch team. The other drug in my bag as a drug rep was Zithromax, which is, like, he antibiotic that doctors are calling you to get samples. When you have Zithromax and Viagra in your bag, you do not wait in lobbies. I was told I was going into this job where I was going to get to wait in lobbies and read magazines, but not when you have Zithromax and Viagra. I had a lot of confidence, because they basically gave you the pitch, you went in, everybody wanted what I had. I was hitting it out of the park in the corporate space. Lo and behold, the day comes, and I know many people that are here with us today have crossed this line where you say, "Well, I'm so awesome, I want to do it for myself! I've made millions of dollars through other people," and we go out on our own and we try to do our own thing, right? We cross the line. Let me tell you, I had a rude awakening. I was so confident when I was handed all the tools and handed the clients and the corporate car and the pitch book and winning big, but the day that I got out there to talk about my own thing, what was it that I had, that gift, that had me be able to do that for company after company that I worked for, it was a whole different ball game. I was like, all that confidence that I had when I was provided the container and all the space and the structure was ... I couldn't find it. This is going to be hard to believe, but I was actually tongue tied. I was trying to talk about what I do, and I had sweat rings that you could see. Even if I kept my arms down, they were showing. My hands were visibly shaking. I came to realize really fast a couple of things. Number one, when you're talking about something that you created and that you care about, it is a whole different ball game than talking about something for somebody else. That was the first thing. Then, the second thing is, when it's an intangible ... It's one thing to say, "Here's a sample pack of Viagra," they sign on the line, you're out the door, versus, "Let me tell you about this service that's going to change your life that you can't see, you can't touch, you basically have to take my word for it." When it's intangible, you can't see it, you care about it, and then add on that you created it, if it's your work, I mean, that is just stacking the odds for lack of confidence. To be able to articulate that and package that. I think moving from there ... And, I remember the first time I went out, and I didn't really know exactly what I was going to do. I figured I'd just get out there and make presentations on what I did know about how I helped so many companies. I started talking about the thing I still talk about now, which is packaging irresistible offers. I started going out and talking to small groups of entrepreneurs and business owners about that. The talk would come out different every time, and sometimes they loved me and sometimes they didn't get it at all. Over time, continuing to do that, the thing that has me stand here in confidence now. I love you said that word, because it really is what we sell. It is what we offer, is confidence. It's structure. It is the structure of knowing what are the key markers that I need to get across the line, that I need to give, that I need to include, to give that other person enough confidence themselves in what I'm saying, to trust me, to be able to see the vision, for me to articulate it in a way that they get it. The big one is that they get it enough that they want it right now, that it's not just an inspirational thing, that it's actually transformational. They can step into it, they can say yes, and it makes a difference. That's what my work has become all about, and what gives me confidence, and it's the thing that, more than anything else, I want to transfer to heart-centered entrepreneurs that are doing their own thing, is let me give you confidence by giving you a structure. Now I can call it a proven structure, because we've done over $30 million of sales with these structures and we have clients in 134 countries. Now I can say, "Let me give you a proven structure where you can pour your work, your expertise, into our structure and you don't really have to worry about becoming a salesperson or becoming a speaker. You can just be out there being yourself." You hit the markers in this structure, and guess what? You're going to be back to your word, confident and ready in any situation. That's what gives me confidence, is that just using the structure over and over. It's a practice. You're both great at this, so I know you're picking up what I'm putting down, and I'd love to hear what you think about structure when it comes to confidence, really. Steve Olsher: Sure. Alex? Alex Mandossian: Well, confidence transference is enrollment. That's when it happens. I'm going to acknowledge you on structure on something you taught me at an NSA event in the back of the room while I'm wearing my purple shirt. Lisa Sasevich: This is how I picked up on Alex Mandossian. In the audience, I held up a sign saying, "Lunch at 12?" Alex Mandossian: Right. We went to lunch- Lisa Sasevich: We had a crowd, you know, ten feet thick, all the time. Alex Mandossian: Yeah. We went with my then-wife, right, as you talk about. I'm going to talk about this in a moment. I'm going to open a loop on the three PS's. That's where I've learned from you there. I want to talk about lineage. My mother's a teacher, my sister's a teacher, my father was a teacher, and I am a teacher and a trainer. I teach other teachers. Your father was an entertainer, and there's a distinction, I think, that you talk about a lot. He taught you, in structure, that really simplifies the transference of confidence, because rather than giving different speeches, which many people do, you don't. Let everyone know the story about your father, what he did, and how he had an impact on you. Lisa Sasevich: Awesome! I love talking about my dad. May he rest in peace, as he's been gone for a couple of years, but the lessons that he learned from his life, he did a really good job transferring that confidence to me. I think for a lot of us, if you pay attention to your aging parents, I've asked a lot of friends about this, you'll see this pattern where they start to say the same thing over and over, the same stories. I think what it is, it's their attempt. They don't have all the systems we have to do this. They have those five or six things, if it's the only thing they say between now and their dying day, if they can just insert it into your brain. My dad was in that state. He was pretty healthy until his last day. He was a world famous ventriloquist. I've got to put that out there. I wish I had a picture to show you, but I'll give you some resources where you'll get to see a picture of my dad before we finish up. He was a world famous ventriloquist, and what's really cool about his story is he was actually in the band. He started out as the guy in the band behind the comedian, and then at the end of the week, when they'd get their paycheck, they'd all get $100 for the week, the band, they'd pass out the checks. The comedian would get $1,000. Then they would all go on the same tour to the next hotel, spend the same amount of time, do the act, and my dad said to himself, "I don't want to get $100, I want to get $1,000. I need to come up with an act." He lived in Miami Beach where I was born, and if you know two things about Miami Beach, is there's a lot of Latinos and a lot of Jews. My dad decided to be a ventriloquist and he created a dummy named Chico - Chico who basically spoke with broken Latino English but cracked Yiddish Jewish jokes. My dad tried to get an agent. He knew everyone in the business from being in the band. They were all like, "No one's ever done anything but an Irish dummy, so if it's not a McCarthy, forget it." My dad said, "Well, I think this is going to fly," and he got himself seen by Xavier Cugat who was big in the Latin craze and ended up touring with him around the world, and ended up touring three times around the world, including being on the Ed Sullivan show twice, and playing Radio City Music Hall in New York solo on that big stage. He had this conga drum. He'd go "Bobaloo," and then something would start talking from within the drum, and out would come the dummy. Then he'd sit on the drum and that would be the act. My dad, the thing that happened for me is, I had an instance early on in trying to do my own thing, where I would go out and speak. Really, it didn't have the structure that I can just hand to people now. I was in my experiment phase. People would want to take advantage of my offer at the end. They would want something. I figured out I'd better have something for them. The cool news for anybody listening that's starting is, I didn't have a list of product, I couldn't take credit cards. I had an AOL account and my advice. That's it. That's all you really need to follow our models. Maybe a Gmail instead of AOL today, but AOL account and my advice. I would get out there and I would just give. I would just give what I knew, and people would say, "I want more," and I'd go, "Great! For $297," I'll do a 90 minute call with you, and we'll figure out how to make your offer irresistible." They would buy that, and I had two little kids at home, so I'd do lunchtime speaking. Usually about an audience of 30 people, maybe six people would say yes, so I'd walk out of there with $1800 at 2:00, go grocery shopping, pay the late rent, and then go get my kids and go home. That was really it. That sort of built as I was trying to support my then-husband who was going through medical school, raise the kids. It sort of built over time until one day, I was asked to speak at a traveling gig. I had to go from Tucson, where I was living -- I didn't know anyone there, we were there in residency for Michael -- travel to Santa Barbara, travel to speak. I got, for the very first time, an overnight nanny who watched my kids, I went there, and I got to this 60 person gig up in the mountains called Master Trainer Camp where I was scheduled to speak. Little did I know when I got there that they were going to put me in a breakout room. Now, just to give you guys some terminology, breakout room means they're going to take that 60 person audience and break it into three or four rooms, which means I'd be lucky, unknown, to have 10 or 15 people, and I flew there. I let the host know right when I got there and I realized -- I was just novice, I didn't know to ask -- "Hey, I'm ready." This is part of this confidence thing. "I'm ready. I know this talk is great, people are going to love it. If anyone doesn't show up," -- they had a lot of speakers coming, it's a treacherous hill to get up to this retreat center -- "If anyone doesn't show up, just put me on. I'm just going to be sitting here, ready." Well, guess what. You go in with that kind of confidence, it happens. I got on the main stage after dinner on the second night, I like to say I was dessert, and it worked out really well. I did my talk that I had been doing locally for these 60 people, and this time, in just 90 minutes, just from sharing what I know and then making an offer for my advice, I made $10,000. In 90 minutes. In an audience of 60 people. For a stay at home mommy that was trying to figure out, "What am I going to do, because I'm one-on-one coaching..." You all know, if you're coaching, it's about an $80,000 cap and then you can't take any more clients, even if you're charging a lot. Maybe $120,000 if you're a top, charging the most coach and you're fully booked and you don't work out and you don't spend time with your kids. I was at that ceiling. When this happened, I was shaking. I felt energy coming out of my hands. I just knew it was my lifechanging moment, a defining moment, and it was. Little did I know, back to my dad, I finally got back to my speaker cabin. You know those metal bunks at the YMCA Boy Scout camp? I had a speaker on the bottom bunk, and I was on the top bunk, so just to get in the damn thing, I was waking her up trying to get in there. I was shaking with excitement. I made $10,000 in 90 minutes. I am just laying there, eyes wide open, thinking, "What am I going to do? How am I going to get to sleep," but so excited. It was right at that moment that my dad -- it was like the Ghost of Christmas Past, and I'm Jewish, so you know that's a big deal -- my dad really visited me spiritually and I heard that thing that he had been saying over and over, that I finally heard it and it really changed everything for me. I'll give it to you, maybe you're in the space to hear it. This is from Eddie Garson, the ventriloquist, and what he said to me that I had heard so many times but finally got it, finally took it in, is he said, "Lisa, don't change your act. Change your audience." I got it! It was like, "O. M. G." All there is for me to do now is take that act that I had been practicing locally in Tucson, now I did it over here in Santa Barbara. All my job is now is just to get that act, I call it now my Speak to Sell Signature Talk, just to take that act and get it in front of as many audiences of my ideal clients as possible. He wasn't saying change who your ideal client is, it's just take that same presentation, which I have now been doing since 2010, and your job is just to find places to share that act or the elements of it. I'm kind of a one trick pony. I've been sharing this everywhere from a Get Motivated stadium event with 13,000 people, talking next to Karl Rove and Dan Rather and that lineup to down the street here in San Diego in La Jolla, I had a mastermind member have a little retreat with 15 people who asked me to come in and teach. It's the same act. The beauty, for those of you that get this, is that we spend -- and I was, I was guilty myself -- so much time creating a new offer, a new presentation. I got the text from Steve at 6:00 AM or 7:00 AM this morning. Steve Olsher: Seven. Lisa Sasevich: "Hey, our 4:00 didn't make it, so is there any chance?" I didn't have to go figure out what I'm going to talk about, or, "Sorry, I need to stay up all night and create my presentation." I know the gift that I am here to give, and now we've been able to give it to so many people. This is really my message, is that if you get this and you're willing to just discipline yourself a little bit, pour your work into ... I'd like to say our structure, it's now called the Speak to Sell Bootcamp, you will be ready. The beautiful thing is, it's not just for a stage. What I've come to learn over the last seven years is I'm ready for teleseminars. I'm ready for webinars. I just did a four video launch that is just one of our biggest promotions of the year, the best videos I've ever done. Guess what? It was my Speak to Sell signature talk, broken into this video sequence. Interviews, podcasts, standing up for three minutes at a networking event unexpectedly. You will always be able to pluck the pieces from that structure and you will know where to go. Steve Olsher: Yeah. That's awesome. Let's do this. For those that are just joining us, welcome to Push Button Influence here with Alex Mandossian and myself, Steve Olsher, and Lisa Sasevich, who, as you just said, came to our rescue here today. We do this show live every Wednesday at 4:00 PM Pacific here on Blab, and yes, at 7:00 AM I texted you, and not shortly thereafter, you texted me back. You're an early one, just like the rest of us here. Awesome. Lisa Sasevich: I still have kids. They're nine and 12 now. I started when they were a newborn and a three year old. I'm proud to say that focusing like that, like what we're talking about, I take them to school, I pick them up. Not every day, but I'm in there with them, which is why I created this whole lifestyle business in the first place. Steve Olsher: How do you help people reconcile being able to charge money for doing something that comes as naturally to them as breathing? A lot of people feel like, "There's no effort here, I can do this in my sleep," and they don't feel as though they are entitled to charge for what is really effortless for them. Can you talk to that a little bit? Lisa Sasevich: Well, I think that sometimes the best way to learn a lesson is just checking in with your own experience. If you have been out there with your well-meaning heart wanting to contribute to someone, and we see this a lot with people in the health profession, we see it with people trying to help people in their financials, maybe financial services or estate planning, diet, exercise, spiritually, personal development. We see it in all these different spaces, that you want to help someone. You have a good heart. You know you've either got some hard-earned talent or some God-given gifts, and you know your mission is to give. You've tried to go out there and give what you know, maybe because it's been successful for you or you've helped other people. If you've tried it, if I were a betting woman, I would say I bet that you have really laid it out there more than once and given to someone and really knew that what you gave them was gold. You could see the transformation happening for them as it came out of your mouth. You turn around, and a day, a week, a month goes by, and as excited as they were while you were inspiring them, when you check back in, there may have been inspiration but no transformation. They didn't do anything with it. I don't know about you guys, maybe you could speak to this too, but when I was coaching people -- I'm not a certified coach, so what I mean is giving my advice -- I would give advice that I had tried for other companies. I knew if you just did what I'm saying, you wouldn't have to worry about finding clients, your clients would value you, all the stuff about how to charge what you're worth would be solved. They'd sit there, head nodding, and so excited, and do nothing. Once I actually started to make the connection that people value what they pay for, and they'll pay for what they value, then I had to sort of go, "Okay, well, then how do I have them see the value enough so that they'll pay for it?" Really what we've come to see in our business, and I'm sure that you two would wholeheartedly agree, that the higher ticket our client is, the more committed, the more they've invested themselves with time, energy, money, the more they take action. That causes this really beautiful cycle, because when they take action, guess what? They get results. When they get results, they talk really great about what we do, they're proud, confidence shows up, enrollment shows up, all the things we've been talking about. This is what we call an upward spiral effect. Unfortunately, I think most funnel models, most of what's being taught out there, to kind of start at the low end, and then when you're known, you'll pop up your prices, it's setting people up to become known as the low cost leader, and the low cost leader get people that are not that committed, so they're not taking much action, thus not getting great results, and instead of an upward spiral, they end up with a downward spiral. I like to say, "Look. Do you want to enter the market as Walmart or Nordstrom?" If you think you're going to enter as Walmart and once they get to know you as Walmart, then you'll surprise them and tell them that you're actually Nordstrom? It doesn't work that way, right? Steve Olsher: Great point. Lisa Sasevich: I think that, giving your work away, you've had that experience. For us, as heart-centered entrepreneurs, as mentors, as coaches, just giving that gift that we want to share, there's nothing more endeadening to our soul than to give, give, give like that and not have the transformation show up on the other side. I knew I had to protect my soul, too, because I want to keep giving for a long time and really make sure that I learn how to follow the structure, hit the marker, so that people see the value enough that they will part with their hard earned time, money, energy, and give themselves the gift of, in our case, the work that we do, really for any of us. Steve Olsher: Yep. Awesome. Alex? Alex Mandossian: Well, going to structure, I know how to structure a speech that's like, runway level, I know how to structure an event that's 30,000 foot view. About three years ago, you taught me how to structure from a satellite view, the back end. I'm just going to talk about content, because it really had a huge impact, because when Steve approached me to do Push Button Influence, I said, "It's only under these conditions that we do this." Lisa taught me the three PS's. Lisa Sasevich: I love it. Alex Mandossian: The reason I'm bringing it up is because you and my other good friend, Harv Ecker, you guys are probably the most ripped off teachers in the business. They don't give you credit. I'm giving you public credit. I learned this from [inaudible]. Lisa Sasevich: [laughing] Alex Mandossian: Check this out. This is a three year campaign. We have a launch coming up. Lisa has a launch happening now. We're going to give you information on how to have Lisa train you how to change your mindset in just a moment. The first PS was Push Button Influence, because people need more exposure, they need more influence. What's the problem? I got influence, how do I make money from that? Lisa Sasevich: I think, Alex, really quick, they need to know that PS stands for "Problem, Solution," to make all this make sense. The PS, each one is problem solution, problem solution, problem solution. Alex Mandossian: Right. Lisa Sasevich: Now what you pour into that, I think will- The first problem solution. Alex Mandossian: Yeah, I was going to open that loop. It's problem solution, problem solution, problem solution. Lisa Sasevich: Okay, sorry if you were doing it a different way and I blew this point. Alex Mandossian: No problem! Lisa Sasevich: Okay. Alex Mandossian: I learned from you. The first problem is, how do we get more influence to get more exposure? That's the problem. The solution is our training. Then, in June, when I'm on stage, we're going to be selling, enrolling, seating how to make money, because once you've got exposure, then how do we monetize it? That's the second solution to the second problem. A year after that, on stage, we're going to enroll, and we're seating this from right now. We're going to enroll you into Push Button Empire which is, at a scale, Push Button Monetization. Lisa gave us a three year plan four years ago, so thank you for that. The big question is, with the PSPS model, PS problem, solution, then a problem, solution, then a problem, solution, that kind of gives a big picture for the back end, which most people don't think about. That structure is one that isn't talked about. Why is it so important for your business, because you've just exploded? Lisa Sasevich: Yeah. I'll talk about it in the context of what we started down the path on, being ready with your act or your Speak to Sell talk, and your irresistible offer. They go hand in hand. As we shared earlier, when you're ready, then there's really anything you get asked to you. Teleseminars, webinars, videos, stages. I love this example. I was called at 7:00 AM, here I am. You can have that kind of ease about your business and that kind of efficiency. As a busy Mom, kind of like necessity is the mother of invention. A lot of what I created was like, survival, right? I want to get it out there, and I need the straightest line between two points to make my difference in the world. To put the PSPS into the context of what we're talking about, let's look at it in the context of a Speak to Sell signature talk. Here's really what we're teaching in that course, the Speak to Sell Virtual Bootcamp. We're teaching you how to identify what is a problem that your ideal client has, and your talk, your free talk ... I'm not talking about getting paid to speak or having to polish yourself up or be a speaker. I'm talking about just using, opening your mouth, using speaking to grow your business and attract awesome clients. The talk itself is really just figuring out that equation, which is really what we help you do. What's the problem your ideal clients have, and your talk is actually giving them a solution. This is contrary to most things out there that are teaching you how to build a teleseminar or webinar or a talk, because they're mostly telling you, "Don't give the solution! Talk about what, talk about why, but never give the how!" We sort of take a contrary approach to that. We're saying, "No, we are heart-centered entrepreneurs. We're going to give the how, so let's not try to change our stripes." What if we knew exactly what how to give? What problem to solve? My signature talk that I referred to earlier, "Boost Sales Using Irresistible Offers," it solves the problem of just what the title is, how do you boost sales using irresistible offers. When I talk, I teach how to structure an irresistible offer. Literally, whether you buy from me or not, you walk out of there knowing how to look at your offers and create them so that they're irresistible. I give that away. That's the first PS, and that's what your signature talk should be. You know the problem, your people want to opt in for it, they want to come to your talk. You solve the problem. What most people are missing is the second PS, and that is, okay, great. I just taught you all how to make an offer and how to make it irresistible. You can run with that today, it's going to make a huge difference for you, but here's the problem that you still have. What, are you going to stand on a street corner and say, "Here's my offer!"? Are you going to walk into a networking event and say, "Hello! Would you like to hear my offer?" You kind of have to have the presentation that leads up to it. That second problem, I didn't make it up. It's not contrived. I'm not trying to manipulate people. Every solution brings new problems. It's just our job to have the foresight, as the ones who went first in our area of expertise, to show people what it is. When I show people, "Hey, your offer's great, I gave you all this, and look," really what moves the needle here is having the presentation to lead to it. I can say things like, "Look. You want to automate your income?" Everyone wants to make money while they sleep. What are you going to automate? You don't have a presentation that leads to an offering, you don't have a webinar. You don't have a teleseminar. You don't have ... It's even your sales pitch. You don't have something to automate. For me, this is the core. This is the core. The solution, the second S, PSPS, is your offer. The talk solves the problem, gives the solution in full, you point out the second P, the problem they still have, and then your offer is simply the solution to that problem that you pointed out. If it makes sense to people, you don't need to be a used car salesman or a Ginsu knife salesman. You can continue to be the teacher, the educator, that you are, and if it makes sense to people, they're going to say yes. Steve Olsher: It's really, really powerful. One of the things that I've thought just going through in the questions here, and we'll jump to this, is Lee is actually asking the question which would have been very much my follow up question, Lee, as well ... Which is, let's take people through it, because, again, theoretically ... In theory, it makes sense. You spell it out, this is what you're supposed to do. Most people then get stuck with like, "If you give me all of that and you're showing me exactly what I need to do, there's nothing for me to sell." Lisa Sasevich: Right. Steve Olsher: That's where I think a lot of people get stuck, is, "Okay, I'm showing you the how, and so now you can go out and you can do it. Then, why is anybody inspired to buy?" Lisa Sasevich: Right. Steve Olsher: Do you mind sharing- Lisa Sasevich: Not at all. Steve Olsher: I mean, obviously you ... Can you give us an example of that bridge and where it leads to? Lisa Sasevich: Let's do double duty here, okay? First of all, I talked a lot about that my usual talk teaches you how to make irresistible offers. I want to go down this other path. Just to give everybody that piece, too, if you guys go to pushbuttoninfluence.com/lisa -- I set this up with these guys in advance -- pushbuttoninfluence.com/lisa, you'll actually get to download my bestselling book and a video series that'll teach you exactly how to make your offer irresistible. You'll get that whole piece of what we're talking about. We're not necessarily diving into the how of it at this moment, but there's that. Then, on the presentation that leads to the offer side, which is really where we are diving in, based on this great question that, is it Leah, I think, asked- Steve Olsher: Leah, yeah. Lisa Sasevich: "Can you give an example of what how to give?" I love that you're a health coach, because I'll tell you ... I mean, J. J. Virgin's a client. She uses our stuff on PBS to be a top show. Daniel Aman, the brain doctor, and his wife Tana. Again, topselling PBS show, studied all of our work. The top, top people in health use our work, so I love that you happened to ask, no accidents here, because your industry happens to be one of the most resistant to anything that sounds like selling. This is a wonderful solution because it's a structure. You guys, you get structure. That's one thing you really shine at. This is a way to integrate those. The how, what we do in our Speak to Sell Virtual Bootcamp, is show you exactly how to pick what part of your how to give. This is a problem that most of us, we're heart-centered, we back up the truck and we give it all. We have a little "Let me pick your brain" Starbucks lunch with someone, and we just give too much. You can see that moment where their eyes are rolling back in their head and they're so full and they thank you as they skulk away with their notebook full of notes, close it, and never do anything. You know in your heart at that moment that you overwhelmed them, that you got so excited that you gave too much. It's one of those times where you have that realization that more is not better when it comes to helping people. The thing that you need to pick out is, you need to pick out a piece of your how that they can immediately run with. It should be something that you love talking about, and it should plug in to this PSPS idea so that when you give that piece of the how, like when I teach and just give away Module One of my Speak to Sell Virtual Bootcamp, I give away how to make your offer irresistible, I can easily, when I'm transitioning into my offer, the second PS, show you that I gave you Module One. This came from my Speak to Sell Virtual Bootcamp. I taught you how to make irresistible offers. I gave you the how on one slice, and if you'd like to work with me further, right? Then I can show you the rest of the how that I did not have time to give you in 60 to 90 minutes. I'm able to say, "If you'd like to work with me further, we're going to show you not just how to make your offer, but we're going to go back to the beginning, show you how to position yourself. We're going to show you exactly what to put in the body of the talk in the next module. We're going to show you how to seed, to create hunger and desire in your prospective clients without needing to be pushy or sales-y, and we're going to show you exactly how to structure the transition, the invitation." Right now, I've walked through the modules of our course. Wasn't able to obviously teach all that in a 60 to 90 minute talk, but I gave deeply out of one piece, and then it really allows me to create the gap and show all that there still is if you'd like to come this way and let me hold your hand. Steve Olsher: Lisa, hold on for one second. Just in terms of the talk- Lisa Sasevich: I'm at 1,093, by the way. Steve Olsher: You got over a thousand. Yay! Lisa Sasevich: That's the goal. Steve Olsher: So that we can really help people get clear on this, at the beginning of your presentation, would you list all seven things and then say, "I'm going to go deep into one thing, and then at the end talk about the six things you didn't go into? Lisa Sasevich: No, we actually really want to ... it's a huge part of our course, is figuring out which piece. We have formulas to figure out which is the piece you should go deep in. Then, we want to name the presentation around the transformation of that piece. The theory being ... Like you guys show people how to create the right opt-in, the right lead magnet, the right trip wire, all those kind of things. The theory being, if you pluck that bait from your core course, it's going to attract the right fish. We want to take that how out of our core training, whatever system that it is that we're going into, and I learned that one of my biggest leaps in my financial life and my getting known life in this business was when I finally realized that all the coaching I was doing, that I had a system. I mean, I didn't know I had a system. I was just coaching people one on one, like many people are. A lot of people listening, you guys have a one on one practice, and you're thinking, "I'm a chiropractor, I'm helping one person at a time." We actually, when people enroll in our course, we don't start them on their talk or their offer. What we start them on is a pre-course accelerator, which is about identifying their system. We actually help people to see that you have a method to your madness, that there are steps ... If you're getting results with people, and I don't care if it's finding the relationship of their dreams or creating their financial investment profile, or how to talk to their animals. If you are getting results with people over and over, you have a system. You don't even need to create anything. When you follow our system to find your system, it's just looking at what's there. We just help you see what's there. Once you can find your system and we help you name your system, then it becomes easy to plug into any of our systems. All of our systems are designed to take that and show you ... We have another thing that helps. The biggest three day events that you go to, where people are upselling into masterminds and stuff, it's a system for how to plug your system into a three day event and upsell your mastermind, mentorship, or coaching program. That's called Event Profit Secrets. All of our systems are really how to take your system and plug it into a structure that will have clients saying yes to your next thing. Did that make sense? I know I got a little wrapped up in the system word there. I will promise you, everybody watching here, whether you realize it or not, if you are helping people and you're getting results for people, you have a system already. I'll give you one tip on how you can start to see it so you can just leave from here today, keep doing what you're doing and just start the consciousness about it, is, if you've ever been helping someone in your office or on the phone, and you've done three or four or five clients in a row, and you suddenly have this moment where you're like, "Did I say that part?" You know? Have you ever done that, where you're coaching people over and over, and you have that thought, like, "Did I cover that part?" That's really hot that you think that, because that means that's a piece of your system. If there's a "that part" that you can't remember if you covered, write it down. You have just identified a piece of the system. We give you a lot of tools like that to go in and see your system, and once you see your system, then it's easy to plug yourself in and really, back to confidence, give your potential clients confidence that you will get the results because you're not winging it, you're not just channeling from the heavens and hoping the connection will be there at this moment. You can do all those things, they're important, but you also have a proven structure, a proven system. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Let's do this, Alex, since we're getting ... Hard to believe, but getting kind of close here to the top of the hour. I know we want to get folks the opportunity to have their questions answered by Lisa herself. Now would be a great time, guys. Use /Q and then enter your question there in the message area or the chat row, whatever you want to call it. /Q, and then your question in the chat row and we'll get it up here into the queue. Lisa Sasevich: I wanted to actually say, I'm in my standing desk. Isn't this awesome? I just lift up this thing on my desk and- Alex Mandossian: Awesome! Lisa Sasevich: You can't see all the piles on the floor. Alex Mandossian: No! Steve Olsher: Right. Lisa Sasevich: It really eliminated having to clean anything up. Alex Mandossian: That's the best. Lisa Sasevich: I love it. Steve Olsher: Nice. See? That's the advantage of checking out the video podcast or joining us live on blab.im every Wednesday at 4:00 PM Pacific so you can see things like Lisa Sasevich's standing desk thing. Lisa Sasevich: Standing desk, yes. Steve Olsher: All right. Alex, I'm going to let you bring this home, my man, and why don't we ask one more question and then go into the green room for a private Q and A? Alex Mandossian: Okay. Once again, Lisa gave you a webpage: pushbuttoninfluence, which is influence at the push of a button. Pushbuttoninfluence.com/lisa. If you go there, imagine, you never have to ever hear, "Let me think about it" again, because when you hear, "Let me think about it," you can't put bread on the table. When you hear "Let me think about it," you can't pay the bills. If you can do it in such a way so it's structured and you don't feel like you're manipulating and you don't hear, "Let me think about it," they just run and say, "Yes," then you get a cheat sheet. She's offering you a cheat sheet. It's like taking off the blindfold paying Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and it's cheating, but she's already plowed the ground, so go check it out. Pushbuttoninfluence.com/lisa. I'll type it into the Blab. Lisa Sasevich: Thank you. Awesome. Alex Mandossian: Lisa, talk about seeding versus selling. Most people confuse the two, and they don't feel good about selling because it's like pouring cold water on people. What's the difference between the two? Lisa Sasevich: Yeah. You know, I love seeding. It's the fourth module in our Speak to Sell Virtual Bootcamp, which was a seed. I just seeded the Speak to Sell Virtual Bootcamp. That's an example. Seeding is, the definition I created around it is, it's creating hunger and desire in your prospective client without being pushy or sales-y. That's seeding: creating hunger and desire in your prospective client without being pushy or sales-y. Unfortunately, a lot of people hear the word "seeding," and their definition is, "pushing and plugging my product at every opportunity to the point of ad nauseam," and that's really not what we're talking about. We have a lot of different ways to seed, and what we've done is we've built them all into the formula so that you do twofold. You learn the nine ways to seed, so you know them and you can use them anywhere, but then, if you follow the structure, they're built in. We don't ever want to give you something that you don't understand why you're doing it, because if you never stand on the stage with your 90 minute talk, you will still use all the elements that you learned in building it in different places in your business, whether it's your sales page or a networking event. An example of seeding ... I just want to show you how ridiculously simple it is and how there are people stepping over thousands of dollars every time they open their mouth because they don't know this one skill. Here's an example. I went to a breakfast meeting. Really knowledgeable, probably 60-plus year old estate planning attorney talked about some stuff that just really grabbed my attention. Never mentioned, in an hour talk, that he had a client. Never gave an example of a client. For an hour, I took copious notes, clapped at the end, was super inspired, but I never got that "ping" like, "Oh! He takes clients. Oh! He specializes in entrepreneurs. Oh! I could learn this online from anywhere. Oh! There's a complimentary in-office consult." None of it. One of the easiest ways to start seeding consciously is mention clients. It doesn't even have to be a big testimonial or a case study, just, you know, "I had this client who was a Ink 500 winning female entrepreneur, and she was really struggling with the estate plan, how do you progress a business like that after your life. What do you do with a personality-based business?" That's why we need structures, number one. He didn't seed. When you do simple things, that's the tip I'll give you today, mention your clients, you're letting those people that are kind of turned on to what you're saying know, "I take clients, by the way," and you don't have to shove it down anybody's throat. There's lots of ways to do that. We build them in to all your structures and we also teach you independently how to do that. There's a microphone coming out of your left side, there. Right side. Is there another person, or are you moving that yourself? Alex Mandossian: Oh, tricky, tricky. Lisa Sasevich: Very interesting going on there. Alex Mandossian: Right? Lisa Sasevich: Yeah. Are you seeding? Are you seeding something? Alex Mandossian: I'm seeding a microphone right now. Lisa Sasevich: You're seeding a microphone. Yeah, I see that. That's what seeding is. Does that make sense? Alex Mandossian: Yeah, totally and completely. Lisa Sasevich: I mean, you guys are both masters at seeding, but I think defining it is really important. The difference, what it does, is it changes the dynamic from you pursuing business to business pursuing you. When you seed well and you do create that hunger and desire, you know because people are looking you up. They're coming after you. They want to know more about how do you work with clients. That's how you know. Steve Olsher: Lisa, when you mention it again, it sounds familiar to them, they don't even know why, because you've seeded it. It's taken root, and all of a sudden, you've got fruit. It's brilliant. Lisa Sasevich: Yeah. I mean, is there any question in anybody's mind that I want all of you to come have the benefit of working with me in the Speak to Sell Virtual Bootcamp? Everything that I taught today was plucked right out of that course. It's really, I think, a disservice. If you saw a good movie, you would go tell your friends, "I saw this movie and it happens to be playing at the local AMC, the one with the nice red puffy seats." Why do we think twice about saying, "You know, I just taught you some really amazing stuff on offers, it's going to make a huge difference, and it came right out of my Speak to Sell Virtual Bootcamp. Go kill it with it, and then come back, and let's do more." Steve Olsher: Awesome. All right, let's do this. First and foremost, let's give you a big thank you, thank you, thank you for making time in your schedule because you accommodated us today, and knowing how busy you are, that is super, super appreciated. If people want to find out more information about you, Lisa, where's the best place for them to go? Lisa Sasevich: I really think that coming through you guys, we set something extra-special up, if they'd go to pushbuttoninfluence.com/lisa, you're going to get our hot new video series about how to never hear, "Let me think about it," again, but you're also going to get my bestselling book, which is called Boost Your Sales: How to Use Irresistible Offers Without being Sales-y. It'll really take you through exactly how to structure that offer. You'll get to see a picture of my dad. I'd love if you connect with me on Facebook. We have a rocking, rocking party going on at lisasasevichfan.com. You just go to that URL, it'll take you right into our fan page. Just a great community of people who care about sales conversion, selling without being sales-y. That's kind of where we move. Steve Olsher: Perfect. Lisa Sasevich: Yeah! Steve Olsher: Yeah. Perfect. All right, for those of you who are listening to the podcast, this is where we say goodbye to you. For those that are joining us live on blab.im, stick around, because this is going to be your opportunity to ask Lisa your questions. On behalf of my cohost extraordinaire, Alex Mandossian, and the lovely Lisa Sasevich, I am Steve Olsher, and hold tight, because we will come right back to answer your questions here on Push Button Influence after this. Announcer: You just learned how to broadcast your brilliance. Tune in live to blab.im Wednesdays at 4:00 PM Pacific as the world's leading influencers share their proven strategies for leveraging the power of new media. For more information about your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher, to claim your free surprise gift, and to access every episode of Push Button Influence, visit pushbuttoninfluence.com. ###END###

A rare opportunity to dive deep into the mind of the New Media Influencer who inspires & mobiles other young visionaries worldwide — Ocean Robbins. Ocean’s mini-book, Building Healing Bridges Across Historic Divides … is a seminal work that shares insights and inspirations from his 20+ years of working to build authentic partnerships. Ocean also co-authored Voices of the Food Revolution and is CEO of the 250,000 member Food Revolution Network. Join us as Ocean shares: How he created summits that reached over 400,000 people How he mobilized 250,000 people for healthy sustainable, humane and delicious food Empowering individuals and building community Creating sustained positive impact in the world Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play Read Full Transcript Announcer: This is Push Button Influence where the world's leading influencers candidly share their exact strategies for maximizing reach, accelerating growth and generating massive exposure, all by leveraging the power of new media. You can become the next Larry King, Oprah or Howard Stern, all you need to do is broadcast your brilliance. Push Button Influence teaches you how. Here are your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher. Steve Olsher: All right, all right, all right. Welcome to another edition of ... No I almost said it, Push Button Influence. It had to happen at some point and now it did, but here we are on Push Button Influence, with the one and only Alex Mandossian and myself, Steve Olsher and Ocean Robbins. How cool is that? Knowing how busy you are, because you actually have a pretty big thing in the works right around the corner, so for you to take the time to be with us here on PBI is greatly appreciated. Let's do this, which is, Ocean, we start every show with a word, and both Alex and I have a word, and let me turn it over to the one, the only, Alex Mandossian, what is your word of the day for Mr. Ocean Robbins? Alex Mandossian: All right, well there are 2 aha's for today, first of all it's the first time Ocean is on Blab, according to Blab, I don't know if that's true or not, and secondly he and I have never crossed paths on a virtual event, although we've done tons of gigs like this, or on stage. My word was going to be, because of his lineage and because of what he stands for, it was going to be food. One of my mentors taught me 20 years ago, when I was a sophomore in college, 1984, when the family moved to California, according to your website, Ocean, I was at UC Irvine, that food is the most powerful drug on earth and I thought, wow what a great topic. To me what you represent is movement. Steve Olsher: I've got to change my word. Alex Mandossian: Nothing happens because something moves. This is movement as the noun and not the verb. It's one of the only words where when used as a noun it has more power than as a verb. Let's talk about the specific incident, where you were, who surrounded if you can remember, I'm putting you on the spot, but it's my job, it's your first time on Blab and first time we're interviewing each other. When did you decide that you could be a movement builder, because that is something that you are? Ocean Robbins: I decided that when I was 7 years old, honestly I was in elementary school in second grade and the movie The Day After came out, which was about nuclear holocaust and it was a television special and all my friends were talking about it. I was thinking are we just going to stand by and allow this possibility that weapons of unimaginable destructive power could actually be used some day by human beings? I organized a peace rally in my elementary school at lunch time. Got a bunch of my friends out there, we made little signs. We were just screaming to each other, everyone in the school agreed, we don't want nuclear war, that's not a very controversial topic, but I saw right then that I could speak out and organize and people could follow and we could have a voice. Steve Olsher: Awesome, it is so funny, and I have to admit that this was also my word. Great minds thing alike there and if you're on Blab, you see that my word was also movement, but I have quickly changed it because I can adapt quickly like that. Let's move to this word which is community, and you, Ocean, obviously, geez, you started at a super young age in terms of trying to create community around what you were really just ... Let's put it as bluntly as we can, you were just fired up about that at that moment; you're fired up about this at this moment. Does it become your life's calling in that particular period of time to then enroll people in whatever it is that you just absolutely feel so passionate about? Ocean Robbins: To me leadership is about standing for something. It's not about having a bunch of followers. It's about being willing to step outside the herd to do something different than the norm or the status quo because you were born for something other than to repeat the patterns of what you see going on around you. In the world in which we live, in which it is considered normal to, for example in the food world, to eat food that is full of pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, that's been stripped of fiber, that is full of added sugars and chemicals and flavoring and additives, in which it's considered normal to eat food that is quite frankly toxic, that is causing epidemic rates of diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease. In that world, I think leadership is the only sane option. If we follow the status quo, we will follow it right to our hospital beds and our graves. If we're willing to take a stand for what is possible, we can radically extend our lifespan, our health span, our vibrancy, our joy, improve our sex lives, have more fulfilling lives on this planet. To me, when I stand for a food revolution, which is what my work is all about right now, I'm standing for something that to me is very basic, it's about sanity and yet it's also radical. That's what leadership is about to me. When we think about what it means to have your life stand for something. What is the saying, if you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything? I think all of us in this world are faced with the reality that the status quo isn't fulfilling. We're surrounded by norms, not just with food, but with so many other kinds of life choices that are just quite frankly not fulfilling. The idea of a typical corporate job, working crazy hours for somebody else to make a bunch of money doing something you don't believe in, doing something that doesn't fundamentally matter to the world just so that you can survive, that's not fulfilling to very many people anymore. More and more people are saying, "How do I get out of this? How do I find something that matters to me so that my life means something to the people that I love, to the planet and expresses something of my signature?" Steve Olsher: Really and that in itself is really a community of people who want to move beyond the working norms, if you will, that really have been a part of our society now for at least a good century if not more. In and of itself that is a community of people who believe what you believe and you have been enrolling them now for years, obviously into visions. At this point it's obviously the food revolution vision. Ocean Robbins: Yeah absolutely. Here is the awesome thing. If you want healthy food, if you want a healthy planet, if you want government policy that actually supports healthy food instead of subsidizing junk food, you're not alone. In fact there are many, many, many people like you who are completely fed up with toxic food, who are sick of being sick, who are hungry for change and who are doing something about it. People are willing to spend more for organic food. Organic food consumption has quadrupled in the last decade in the United States, it's just growing so fast. Non-GMO certified food has gone from nothing to over a $7 billion in sales in the last 4 years. 90% of the North American public supports labeling of GMO's. These are not little tiny voices in the wilderness, this is the norm right now that more and more people want change. Unfortunately government policy and corporate food industry policy are lagging behind but that's not going to last for long. McDonald's closed 700 restaurants last year in North America. We are part of epic changes that are taking place right now. Farmer's markets, community supported agriculture are exploding. The food industry giants are all taking notice because they're realizing that what made them so successful in the last century is going to lead to their being destroyed this century if they don't make changes. Consumers don't want junk food anymore. Steve Olsher: Yeah, Alex? Alex Mandossian: I want to talk about core values. You hear integrity, commitment and all sorts of core values in the corporate structure, but I'm going to come back to this word again, food, because I have noticed that when fitness and health is gone, then all the other core values are in the trash can. What leads to fitness and washboard abs and good looks is, yeah, the gym, but really what goes in prior and after the gym. Have you worked with companies or organizations or any movements where food itself is part of the core value structure? Because I have yet to see corporations adopt that, other than Google having decent food in the cafeterias, etc. It's not a priority for most folks, and most people just roll their eyes and go, oh whatever. Ocean Robbins: Yeah, well there have been some forays into it, Whole Foods Markets is self-insured and they took their 50,000 employees and they started developing some pilot programs where they would take the form of some health training course emergence and see if they could ... And they did manage to arrest ... Their health insurance premiums were going up and up and up, like they were for everyone else and they managed to stop that and reverse that by focusing on health education with their employees. They discovered, as I think a lot of companies do, that it's actually harder than you might think to go against the stream of a norm in society. You might think Whole Foods Market employees are healthier than the norm, and they might be a little bit, but strikingly they're not that different than Safeway employees or any other major supermarket because they're just working a job, right. Yeah, they may shop at Whole Foods, but quite frankly if you think Whole Foods is only selling health food then you haven't really taken a serious look at it. The bottom line is that they were able to make some inroads. I think that what it's going to take to fundamentally help large sectors of the population move in healthier directions is going to be more than any one company can do by itself. You definitely need larger system policy shift. We need fundamentally a government that is accountable to the people, instead of just the moneyed interests that put our political leaders into power. In the food sector that looks like ceasing to spend tens of billions of dollars subsidizing commodities crops, which is basically high fructose corn syrup and factory farmed animal products. It means if we're going to subsidize anything we ought to be subsidizing health food. It means getting junk food advertising away from kids. It means recognizing that sugary sodas are an epidemic like cigarettes and we need to treat them similarly to how we treated cigarettes a generation ago, which is to tax them and to use that tax money for education and probably quite frankly to put some warning labels on those packages. The evidence is that clear. If we're serious about reversing diabetes and heart disease, about not spending 19% of our gross domestic product on disease treatments, if we're serious about looking out for the health and well-being of our population then these are no brainer choices we need to make. I'm excited about the opportunity that exists and there are definitely companies that are piloting making some shifts. I think it's critically important because if the company wants their employees to be healthy and productive and vibrant and smart and engaged for a long time then investing in health and wellness is just a no brainer. What I think Whole Foods saw is that if all of the costs of making that shift are borne by one company it can be a little tricky to make that cost effective. They're still trying to crack that nut and figure out how they actually make a positive ROI on their investment. They want to be able to do that so other companies can follow and they're still trying to figure it out. Steve Olsher: Yeah, and let's do this, man, because I think it's really important for those who don't know you to have an understanding of really what you said no to in order to say yes to creating this whole movement around food. Talk a little bit about ... Let’s put it on the table, man. Who is your grandfather? Ocean Robbins: Okay, so my grandfather was Irvine Robbins and he founded, with his brother-in-law Burt Baskin, and ice cream company called Baskin-Robbins, which became the world's largest ice cream company. My dad grew up with 31 flavors of ice cream in the freezer at all times and an ice cream cone shaped swimming pool in the back yard. He was groomed from early childhood to one day join in running the family company. When he was in his early 20s he was offered that chance and he said, "No." He walked away from fame and fortune and a path that was practically paved with gold as well as ice cream, to do as we jokingly say in our family, follow his own rocky road. At that time, his uncle, Burt Baskin was dying of heart disease. He was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in American history, he had a family he loved, but he didn't have his health, and so he didn't have his life. He left his wife a widow and his kids fatherless, my dad's cousins. I didn't know my dad's uncle Burt, I just know about him from family stories, but I feel sad that I never got to know him. My dad saw what was going down. He said I don't want to spend my life promoting a product that is going to lead to more kids losing their dads. I want to stand up for a healthy life. He ended up moving with my mom, to a little island off the coast of British Columbia Canada, where they built a one room log cabin, they grew most of their own food, they practiced yoga and meditation for several hours a day and they named their kid Ocean. That's me. I grew up monetarily poor, but feeling rich, because I had time with my mom and dad and quite frankly I had a family that believed in something more than the almighty dollar, which was integrity and values. My dad wound up becoming a bestselling author writing books about food and health. The media called him the rebel without a cone. My grandpa ended up being given a copy of my dad's book, Diet for New America, by his doctor, at a time when he was facing serious life threatening heart disease and diabetes and weight issues. He read it, he made big changes in his diet, gave up ice cream, lost 30 pounds, golf game improved 7 strokes, he added 20 years to his life. My dad and I at that time were marathon runners, I ran my first marathon when I was 10 years old. I remember visiting my grandpa and we were out for our morning run and he was out for his morning hike. He was well enough that he was now hiking 5 miles in the morning. The experience of us jogging by him and him cheering us on as we're out there, I was just thinking, how lucky are we to have our health? My grandpa's brother-in-law didn't get a second chance and he lost his life. My grandpa did get a second chance, thank goodness, thanks in part to the work my dad did. He took it and he regained his life and he had 20 healthy years. We've seen in our family what food means and the difference it can make. Now I'm working with my dad directly. I spent 20 years directing a non-profit and organizing young leaders around the planet and building community of change makers globally, and then I moved with my dad, 4 and a half years ago, to join forces. We launched the food revolution network and we now have over 250,000 members and now we're standing up for healthy, sustainable, humane and delicious food. There's not a day that goes by that I don't give such thanks that I get to now work directly to help change people's lives for the better. I get to work with my dad and participate in quite frankly a family story, a family lineage that I'm proud to be part of. I'm proud of my grandpa for his business achievements. I'm even more proud of him for having the courage to listen to his renegade son and make those changes, because I think if he can do it, if he can give up ice cream, for goodness sakes, there's hope for the rest of us too. Steve Olsher: Yeah, Alex? Alex Mandossian: Well, when there's differences in spiritual [inaudible] sometimes that breaks up a household but people don't think of food and dietary commitment as breaking up households and it has in my family. I come from an Armenian tradition and it's not always health conscious other than tabbouleh and some other foods. What is your sense, you have resoluted in your family, through the lineage between grandfather, father and you but there are many families that just literally break up because of differences in food and people don't ever ... Ocean Robbins: Right, absolutely. Well it's true, food is both a great uniter and a great divider. Through history breaking bread together, sharing a meal together has been an act of communion and connection between people and it still is today. I think one of the most powerful ways to advocate for health, even in social circles is to share food with people and to make food for people. When they discover that healthy food can be delicious and convenient, especially if you make it for them, then that's just an incredible generosity, and making someone a really good healthy meal, might be one of the greatest gifts you ever give them if it turns them on to what is possible and helps them nurture them on that path. I think that's a beautiful action. The same token, a lot of people are pulled off course by relatives and peers who, we celebrate birthdays, weddings, holidays, with junk food. With cake, with sugar, we reward our kids with candy. In that way we are saying, we are conditioning our psychology and our mind to say that junk food is a treat, that it's something you do to reward yourself, to celebrate life, to enjoy life. We don't sit down and say, "I've had a really stressful work week so I'm going to treat myself to a nice bowl of steamed broccoli." You know what, we can, it's possible that you can actually rewire your brain so that you ... You wouldn't say, "Oh I've had a stressful week, I'm going to treat myself to some sugar that is going to increase my odds of diabetes and cancer and heart disease and being a drain on my loved ones as I suffer from Alzheimer's in my senior years." You wouldn't say that. If you're really honest with yourself, that's where you are headed when you make certain food choices. Alex Mandossian: Yeah, have a bowl of death. Ocean Robbins: Yeah, right, who wants that, right? It is possible to actually literally recondition your minds so that you associate healthy food with life, with love, with joy, with purpose and meaning and values. That's what I want to stand for is helping people make those kinds of choices. It's true, if you're in a family that doesn't eat like you do and you're struggling with that, then obviously you want to educate, obviously you want to share, obviously you lead by example first and foremost. If you're happy, if you're fulfilled, if your health is improving, then you can represent and that's hard to argue with. If it's working for you who is going to argue. If people love you, if they care about you, then of course they should want you to be well more than they want to be reinforced for their own dogmas and beliefs and habits. I think that there comes a place sometimes in some families where you've got to agree to disagree and say, "Hey, you know what, what I'm doing is working for me and I'd like to ask your respect." Most people if they care about you are going to say yes to that. They may not agree with you, they may not want to eat like you but at least they can respect you. Maybe they'll go a step forward and give it a try, and just even when you're eating meals, they may not have to eat healthy all the time but maybe they can eat healthy with you. If you've suffered from a health ailment or you're recovering from one or you're afraid of one, you can say, "You know what, I have special needs and I'd like to ask for your support." You don't drink alcohol around recovering alcoholics. You don't smoke around someone who is trying to give up smoking, that is just basic decency. Not everyone observes it but we should. If you're struggling to make a change in your life and you are a little weak, you can be upfront about that and ask people for help. Steve Olsher: Let's do this because we obviously want to talk about, well a lot of things, not the least of which of course is the food revolution. You would think that ... Hearing you talk and everything that you say, literally everything that you say, I'm thinking, yeah, he's right, he's right, he's right. I don't even know how anybody could argue with the points that you're making because they're so on target. Talk a little bit about enrolling because you said you had 250,000 members in the Food Revolution community, shouldn't that be 25 million? How do you get from 250,000 to 25 million, which frankly doesn't seem like a stretch? Ocean Robbins: We've only been around 4 years, so we've gone from zero to 250 in 4 years, so hopefully we can multiply that many fold in the next 4 years. Here's the deal, I think that the Food Revolution is a lot bigger than one email list and one organization. I think that the Food Revolution is everybody who is saying no to toxic food, and yes to real food. Food that is not full of chemicals and pesticides and adulteration. More foods that comes from plants instead of being produced in plants. Quite frankly more food the way that God or nature intended and less of the processed junk that is making a few companies rich but making a lot of us sick. To me that's the Food Revolution and we are reaching so many people right now. I think that there are 10s of millions of people who are making changes and that's why corporate practices are shifting and it's why natural food sales are exploding. It's why organic food sales were over $50 billion last year in the United States and it's why agricultural practices are starting to shift. In the US we actually grow very little of our own organic food. Less than 1% of our acreage is organic, even though 5% of our food sales are organic. We're importing a lot of our organic food from China and Mexico and other countries, which is ridiculous because they're getting the benefit of having less pesticides in their environment and in their water and we're not getting those benefits. We've got to stop outsourcing that. Agricultural practice is shifting, in fact for 50 years, every year in the United States we've had less farms and less farmers because there was this consolidation happening and that trend is shifting in the last few years because we're starting to see more young people taking an interest in farming and more family farms again. I guess people want local food and they care where their food comes from. Fair trade is another place where we're seeing just epic growth because it turns out people don't want slavery in their chocolate. It turns out most people when given a choice would rather the people who grow their food actually have the ability and the means to feed their family and live if they work hard. We're seeing good changes and I think we'll see more transparency and the internet has helped make that happen, so now people understand more what is at stake and where their food is coming from. We're growing, we're growing fast, we're spreading the word and quite frankly I'd love to see the Food Revolution network grow too. Our particular model is we offer a lot of free resources, people can come on board, if they like what they're getting, they can upgrade and pay for something and that's what funds our work. We have affiliates that spread the word. They promote it, they promote the free events, and then they receive half the revenues when their referrals come on board with us and it's a real win-win. We apply high level, top notch internet marketing skills to help market healthy eating and healthy lifestyle and the programs that we offer. We're really passionate that people that come on board to our launches and our events are going to have a fantastic life changing experience, if they don't spend a dime, and that we're really going to make the benefits clear of what is possible if they get some of the upgrade packages, and in that way we help fund all the work and make it appealing for the affiliates. Steve Olsher: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Alex? Alex Mandossian: What age range in your experience is the least resistant to eating more healthy, Robbin? My dad is 82 today, February 24th and he turned 82 today. He looks better at 82 than he did at 72 and 2 things are responsible, a heart attack at American Airlines and it was the safest place to have one because they had defibrillators. Every year there is an American Airlines and I think other airlines have people they've revived at the airport. It's the safest place to have a heart attack, is in an airport if anyone doesn't realize that. Because of that heart attack he's eating better and he's doing yoga, so food and yoga have changed his lifestyle. His age range and baby boomers, I'm on the tail end of the baby boom, I'm 1964, there's resistance, but where have you found the least amount of resistance based on your experience where people are willing to make shifts or just are naturally [inaudible]? Ocean Robbins: To be honest with you we're seeing change at every sector of society. We're seeing change with all political stripes and all ethnicities. In general, so far, the food movement, the benefits of the food movement have been most reaped by the more affluent sectors of society. That is where you see the most whole foods shopping, that's where you see the most organic foods consumption, so a lot of times it's the poorest communities that are suffering the most from toxic food. There is also big change happening. It's absolutely true that indigenous people, African Americans, Latino people have the lowest life expectancy and the highest rates of lifestyle related illness and the worst diet, typically because of poverty. That is starting to change, our school lunches have improved significantly, they have a long way to go, but they have improved significant ... Steve Olsher: The joys right. Alex Mandossian: I thought that was going to happen after we lost him but I was going to ask him about Scotland because they have a very high death rate because of food and fried Mars bars so I couldn't get to that question, but we have to get him back here. Steve Olsher: We will, that's the joy of live streaming. Ocean, conspiracy, that’s funny. Go ahead and just hit your refresh on your browser and then you'll just have to call back in. Alex Mandossian: That was totally the Mars company getting him out or something. Steve Olsher: That's funny. There he is, yay, so that's the beauty of doing a live show is anything can happen, which is part of the fun here. There we go. Ocean Robbins: I’m responsible for that. Steve Olsher: That's funny. Well let's do this, for those who are just joining the show, thanks for joining us here live on Blab where Push Button Influence every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific, we just bring in the most amazing people to share with you really what they're up to and their strategies for having push button influence. With, if you missed it earlier, Ocean, 250,000 members of the Food Revolution Network and also doing so many other amazing things. You certainly personify push button influence, it's just awesome to have you here, man. Let's just ask this, and I know we got cut off there, just a wee little bit. I want to talk about the future of food, because it's interesting you've got organic, you've got natural and all that and I'd love for just clarification on the difference between the 2 but Peter Shankman is actually going to be joining us next week on the show. He does a lot of interesting things, not the least of which is as an investor. One of the companies that he is an investor in is a company that creates food via 3D printing, which is way above here for me but clearly that is part of the future of food. Can you explain to those who don't know, including me how exactly you could even do food, if you know, through 3D printing and then what you see as the future of food. Ocean Robbins: I think ask him about that I don't know the scientific process. It's a little past my pay grade. What I will say is that clearly technology and science are powerful forces and they are an important part of the solution, just as data is an important part of the solution. We need to look at what works and what actually happens. It's very critically important that you measure the right things. For example, we tend to measure yield and we look at 70% of the world's food is actually grown by small scale farmers, most of them in their own back yards around the world. There is this push towards mega, corporate industrialized agriculture with lots of chemical inputs which can generate more yield per acre of whatever it is you're measuring. What we tend to forget is that traditional farmers in their own backyards grow a whole lot of things and it's that biodiversity that helps keep away pests. It also helps replenish the soil because different plants affect the soil in different ways. When you just grow one crop over and over and over again, it takes nutrients out of the soil and you don't replenish them, unless you're just putting chemical fertilizers in, but the soil gets really depleted. You end up chemical intensive agriculture is less able to absorb water, it is less of a sponge, it takes more water therefore and it's more prone to floods as well as droughts. Small scale farming with lots of biodiversity is a lot more responsive, especially in times of climate change and it can actually generate more total food. If you look at the whole basket of all the different things that people are growing and they eat it right there, there is more food security in that. Rather than one mono crop and then they're dependent on all these other foods that come from far away and you get this mass production food system. My point is, that what we measure matters and that sometimes science can think, oh we're getting more cotton in India for example. Right, cotton production in India has been growing rapidly but there were 250,000 farmer suicides in India in the last couple of decades. Farmers are literally taking their own lives because they're in so much debt they can't ever repay it so they drink their own pesticides and die by the 100s of 1000s. If there are 250,000 killing themselves, how many millions are feeling devastated and not actually taking their own lives. This is tied to debt and that debt is tied to economic forces that have pushed them into a system where they are dependent on more and more external inputs and they're less self-reliant and they're not actually able to feed their own families anymore. We have to be thoughtful about what we're measuring because on paper India's economy is booming but when you actually look at the rural poor, many people are dying. Similarly, I think we've got to be very thoughtful about the role of science and the more holistic we can be in looking at the whole picture, the more effective we'll be in actually appraising what works and what doesn't. There are huge breakthroughs in farming and agriculture and productivity but they're not always based on more test tubes. Sometimes they're based on better understanding of how ladybugs can eat aphids, and how we can replenish the soil and actually take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into the soil through rotational grazing, through practices where we're bringing in cover crops to no-till farming through other practices that can regenerate our soil and make it more vibrant and life giving. Steve Olsher: Interesting, Alex? Alex Mandossian: I want to make an announcement in going to Q and A in about 15 minutes, Steve and then to lighten things up, a pre-Oscar party. We have one of our guests coming in and the topic will probably be more in the cocktail range of food because there will be a bunch of celebs there and she will be chiming in in this channel. Stay tuned for that, it will be a complete shift. I want to go back to the seriousness of the matter and how you lighten things up, Ocean, because you strike me as someone who is just grounded and happy in general. That's how you've come across when I've seen you or when I've read your material. How do you make such serious issues, such as food and diet, how do you make light of it so that people are actually following along without getting to serious about it like global warming or any other political issue. Ocean Robbins: Right, well we have to because if we are bored, boring, cynical, apathetic, miserable people, who is going to follow us? Food should be fun, food should be nourishing, food should be beautiful. Quite frankly if your relationship to food is full of fear and dread and suffering, then what are you taking into your body? I remember ... Let me just ask you, have you ever had somebody that you love who tells you they love you and you're distracted and it doesn't really matter, you just don't notice really? Thanks so much, but it goes in one ear and out the other. Alex Mandossian: Yeah, that would be mom. Ocean Robbins: You also have the experience, this has happened before ... Alex Mandossian: Yeah, that would be mom, Carol. Ocean Robbins: Have you ever had the experience, maybe not with mom, maybe with mom, where somebody tells you they love you and it penetrates to the depths of your soul? Alex Mandossian: Yeah. Ocean Robbins: It just goes right into you. One of the differences is your state of consciousness; how present you are for that interaction. My suggestion is that in your relationship with food, you actually have the opportunity to partake of love or to partake of apathy and disconnection and that when ... Just a moment of saying grace, just a moment of smelling food, just a moment of feeling gratitude of being in relationship to it, can actually prepare you to take it into your body in a different way. We know scientifically that salivation is part of the digestive process, and that part of what triggers salivation is the anticipation of food and part of what helps us anticipate it is noticing it. In this, today's hyped up, busy world, we're so busy sometimes we don't even notice. One of my key things with food is let's celebrate, let's appreciate, let's bring magic and awe and beauty and reverence and wonder into our relationship with food. How awesome is it that we can eat at all and that we get to choose what we eat. Most human beings down through history haven't been able to do that and that we get to eat food that we love and that actually nourishes us and helps us thrive. I love bringing gratitude and joy and delight into my food. Alex Mandossian: One more question, Steve, aside from the actual food itself, the container where food is served, the family dinner has gone away. I had dinner with my family every single night and now I actually have to go out of my way, as a single dad, to have my kids and I sit together and eat dinner, so I'm not standing up shoveling food in my mouth while they're eating and going back to homework. Do you speak to that at all to the community and how to hold the container sacred so that regardless of the food that is being eaten, at least eat it together because families that do eat together do stay together. Ocean Robbins: That's true, it's true and so I think that a family that takes even a moment to express gratitude, that's one of the most beautiful things, just go around and everyone say something they're grateful for. It puts your physiology into a receptive state, a state of gratitude which actually helps you to absorb the food more effectively and of course it builds connection within a family. I think that the act of sharing a meal together, not just being in front of the TV set the entire time, actually taking time to talk, is unfortunately revolutionary in today's world but it's good for family values, it's good for connection, it builds more love and I think it helps to digest the food better as well. You may not be able to do that every meal or even every day, but if you can even have a couple of times a week where the family gets together and actually shares a meal, actually spends 45 minutes sitting at the table together and you put a little extra something into that meal and it's not just popped out of the microwave. People can connect around that and I think connection around food is one of the great losses of our times but also there's such richness and beauty in reclaiming it. Steve Olsher: For those who are here with us live, at about a quarter till we will drop back into the green room, end the podcast version, you will have a chance to ask Ocean your questions and then a special, special bonus for those who are with us live here in the green room is we are having a little, as Alex said, a little pre-Oscar celebration with some folks that will be joining us. That should be a lot of fun as well. When we first thought about, hey, what can Ocean really talk about, obviously you can talk about a lot of things. One of the topics that I know people have interest in, Ocean, is this whole idea around a summit, right. The Food Revolution, that is a summit, can you speak to what a summit actually is and why it is your preferred mechanism for marketing and sharing what you're doing with the Food Revolution and maybe how others can take advantage of that same concept. Ocean Robbins: Sure, absolutely, what we do in the Food Revolution summit, which you can find out about at foodrevolutionsummit.org. That is about the last summit that we held. You can join in there and you can be on our list and learn about the next summit when the time comes, that's foodrevolutionsummit.org. We take the opportunity to interview some of the top food experts on the planet, and my dad conducts those interviews personally and he's of course a bestselling author on food and health issues, John Robbins. Then we broadcast those, and the basic model of any tele summit is that the interviews are broadcast for free, people come out and listen to any or all of them. In our case we broadcast 3 per day for 8 days. They're on 24 hour replays so people can join in the broadcasts or they can listen on replay afterwards. What we love about that model is we're giving a ton away for free and if people want to own the MP3's and transcripts for life then they get that opportunity. It's awesome, unlimited, not just free samples, but free content. If you want the convenience of owning it any time, taking it on your iPod or iPhone or listening to it in the car, sharing it with friends and loved ones, if you want the transcripts, if you want a bunch of bonuses we put together then you can pay at a modest fee with a 60 day refund guaranteed and get the downloads of the whole content. That's what we put together. I think the beauty of it in that and any other form of internet marketing is if you can find ways to offer value for free that pull people in and all they're giving essentially is their name and email address and the opportunity to be connected to you and then you can offer them opportunities to go further for a fee, I just love that model. Steve Olsher: Just excuse me for 1 second, time out, as Alex would say, you have ... Let's not gloss over it, you're talking about 24 people ... It's not just 24 talking about food, talk about a couple of the people that you've had in the summit and who you're going to have in this year's summit, they're like rock star people. Ocean Robbins: Yeah, our faculty is people like Paul McCartney and Tony Robbins and anyhow just a few little folks like that, Woody Harrelson and Jane Goodall and this year we're also going to have [inaudible], Christinae Northrup, Bill Furman, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. David Perlmutter, a lot of pretty awesome folks. Obviously when you're first starting out, if you're organizing a tele summit, you might not be able to contact those kind of leaders, but everyone has a contact base and a few relationships and you're probably within 2 or 3 degrees of separation, if not less, from a lot of your greatest heroes. It's an opportunity to connect with them. We don't just do run of the mill tele summits where ... I think what sets ours apart is that my dad doesn't just ask the real questions, he spends 6 hours preparing for every single interview and he knows most of these people personally. He's read all of their books and so the conversation is at a level where we're really getting into some serious stuff. Our audience is people who are ... Some of them are new to food issues but a lot of people are fairly informed, they're eating better than the norm and they want to go further and they want to be spokespeople and advocates and they want to take care of the people they love. It gives them that opportunity. Yeah, the food revolution summit, the next one is April 30th to May 8th, we're totally stoked, we're actually expecting over 250,000 people this year in the summit and I'm excited about it. I think that the core model has worked so well for us because it's a really solid model. The tele summit industry is getting pretty saturated right now, there are so many people doing them but what I think we don't have too much of is really quality content, you can never have too much of that. We've got a lot of summit mills going on where people produce the summit and they just race through it and it's purely a list build. They're trying to get 1000, 2000 people on their list but they're not really offering content which pleases the world. I think in any niche, in any marketing, one of the key questions is, who are you for and who are you not for? What is unique about you? If you try to be everything to everybody you'll end up being nothing to nobody, so learning how to find your niche and clarify it and hone in on that is really critically important. Steve Olsher: Alex, if I may, just one more follow up question, are you willing to share some of the metrics just to give people an understanding of how it trickles down. If you have 250,000 people. Let's just take this year's ... Or last year's summit, maybe 100,000 people that participated. Of that, how does it trickle down in terms of ... What can somebody expect with, if they have great content on average what conversion rates were you seeing and can you just speak to revenue model behind it? Ocean Robbins: Sure, sure. Typical in tele summits is conversions out of the opt ins of I see anywhere from 1 to 10%. Steve Olsher: Wow that's a huge difference. Ocean Robbins: In the world broadly. In our launches we've seen anywhere from 2.4% to 6.6% of the opt ins who then end up becoming buyers. I would say, I'm just adjusting a little because I seem to be getting washed out with light here, I would say that in our particular case, our price point is $67 to $97 generally for the entire package that we're offering and then some people get an up sell. Our affiliates have done really well promoting it. They earned about $1.25 per clip last year for promoting free summits. Like I said we work hard to combine integrity and high quality products, high quality free resources and strong marketing. It helps people really understand the benefits of what we're offering. That's all in there and we've had tremendous results. It's helped to fuel our work and our staff and our ability to run campaigns. We're committed to GMO's being labeled, we want to get routine use of antibiotics out of factory farms. We want to see sugary soda taxed and the revenues used to fund health education and obesity prevention with low income communities. We think all of these goals are achievable and so we're an education and advocacy organization. All the revenues that come in from our summits and empowerment packages go first to our affiliates and then to help fuel our work. I feel so grateful to be in this model and to be having the success that we are. Steve Olsher: Yeah, it's hard to believe but we're already at quarter till here. Alex, do you want one more question and then we'll give Ocean one more chance to talk about the food revolution and where people can go to find out more information? Alex Mandossian: Yeah, just the future, Ocean, what is your prediction where we'll be 5 years from now? Online that is most likely 35 years in dog years usually, in my experience. Where will we be 5 years from today, let's say 2021, how will people have a different relationship with food given where the economy is going and socioeconomics? Ocean Robbins: The trends I see are that ... I think what we're going to see is I think we're going to see corporate food giants that are changing. Right now we've got the health brands and then we've got everything else, and everything else is the mother ship for a lot of companies that are actually buying up natural brands. 80% of the natural brands are owned by big corporate food giants. I think we're going to see more blurring of those lines. I think that we're going to see more healthy offerings from Kellogg's and General Mills and quite frankly, even McDonald's. They're piloting some experiments with kale and quinoa in the restaurants and even organic foods. They're trying to figure out what the heck works. I think we're going to start to see a corporate food industry that is more accountable to health conscious consumers, not just in their marketing but in their actual products. We're going to see a simplifying. We're going to see shorter ingredients lists on products as people don't want to have to eat 50 ingredients in one chip. Quite frankly I think we're going to see shorter supply chains. I think we're going to see more local. That's where I think we're headed. I think we're going to continue to see more organic. I think more and more people are going to become alarmed as data comes out about the impact of pesticides on our health, realizing that these are neurotoxins people are spraying on our food. I think people are going to say, "Hey, I actually don't want to eat that stuff." My sense is that's where we're headed, I think we're headed towards less, not more, GMO agriculture. I'm sure there will be some new GMO crops that try to get introduced, whether or not they will be introduced is anyone's guess. Whether or not we get GMO labeling is a hot issue right now but I think a lot of people want it. I think a lot of people are going to keep fighting for it until we do get it. These are some of the issues that I see going on. I think antibiotics are not going to be in such widespread use in factory farms. I think animals are going to be treated better not worse. I think that's where we're headed. When you look at the consumer interest in the issue, most people don't want to see animals tortured. I think people who eat meat especially have an interest in seeing animals treated decently before they are killed. I think that these are some of the places where basically what is happening is that the internet and the speed of information is creating more and more informed population. As we become more informed, we become more aware and conscious and that consciousness is making visible some of the ways that corporate practices are out of step with public interest. I think the companies are becoming more and more called to account on that and that is going to shift policies. Steve Olsher: Alex, I don't even dare to guess where food is going because that's why we bring people like Ocean on who can actually speak with knowledge and insight. I hope that all of the things that you're talking about certainly come to fruition because that would be amazing. Alex Mandossian: Me too. Ocean Robbins: It's what I'm standing for, obviously I could point out a Utopian future and I could point out a really, really dark one and many variations thereof but I personally like to stand for what is possible. If you're riding a bike and you look at a pothole and you're, don't hit that pothole, don't hit that pothole. There's a pretty darn good chance you're going to hit the pothole. You have to look where you want to go if you want to get there. That's what I try to apply to my vision for our society. Alex Mandossian: I'll tell you, Steve, my issue is not that it's not moving, it's not moving fast enough, but if you just look at McDonald's and a lot of the heat that they've gotten from movies and Super Size and all this stuff, okay we do have salad right. They are moving slowly in a direction and it's a far cry from where they've been. I just remember the fried apple pies, which were delicious when I used to eat them. Steve Olsher: Oh I miss those. Alex Mandossian: All that other stuff that they had, so they are moving in a direction and I've seen the same thing with Bob Evans and other fast food. I think pressure is, and eating habits has started it and quite frankly, I don't know what it's like in the Midwest but in California and parts of the East coast we do help because we're very health conscious. At my kid's school I have teachers who go to Whole Foods and take the stickers off the apples because they think that's toxic when the apples actually have stickers. There's all different grades, but I think there is a movement of going more health conscious and going more whole. People don't even know what a whole food is, they don't even know what that means and so it's interesting. Ocean Robbins: Yeah. Steve Olsher: Yeah, awesome. Ocean Robbins: Totally true, absolutely and I think that the exciting thing is that we're making change and the disturbing thing is that there is a lot of window dressing. Corporate food giants that are trying to appeal to health conscious consumers but they're doing so with their marketing departments, not with their actual product sourcing. McDonald's is a decent example, yes, they're doing salads, that means people who go there can get something green, that's awesome. Let's look at where the calories are actually coming from, most are coming from the dressing, which is full of genetically engineered fats and that's coming from the turkey which is from a factory farm and a bird that probably couldn't even lift a single wing its entire life and lived in abject misery. Yes it's nice that we're getting some vegetables in there but I'll be happy when we have some real vegetables without all the junk and they're organically grown. That will be a really nice vision. I don't know that I'm holding out for McDonald's because they're, let's face it, they're fundamentally a profit driven institution. What we need is ... I say food 1.0 is about survival and food 2.0 is a commodity, it's about commerce and food 3.0 is about health, making health the central organizing principle of our food system. That's what we need as consumers, that's what we need from government policy and quite frankly that's what we need from the food industry. Steve Olsher: Yeah, terrific. All right let's do this one more time which is give out the URL there of the Food Revolution summit, and then if people want more information about you personally where is the best place for them to go, Ocean? Ocean Robbins: Absolutely, well the foodrevolutionsummit.org is really the best place. You can also go to foodrevolution.org and check out our blog and see articles I've written and our team has put out and the work that we're doing. You can like us on Facebook if you go to foodrevolutionnetwork on Facebook, but foodrevolutionsummit.org is a great place to just check out what we're already up to and last year's summit and all the great speakers and then get on the list so you would be sure to be notified about next year. Steve Olsher: All right, terrific, well Ocean, really do appreciate you joining us here on Push Button Influence. We're going to end the podcast version, we're going to go into the green room to answer your questions and then for a special pre-Oscar party we're going to be doing some fun stuff around that as well, which is one of the reasons why you want to join us every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific for Push Button Influence because we are live on Blab. I'm going to do this, man, I've just got to give you a big thumbs up and thank you so much for being here and just keep up the amazing work. Alex, for you my man, and always a pleasure to share the screen with you, I think you were either that way or that way, but always a pleasure to share the screen with you here on Push Button Influence. For Alex Mandossian, for Ocean Robbins and for myself, Steve Olsher, this is Push Button Influence and we are going to go into the green room here where you can ask Ocean your questions right after this fancy little exit music. Announcer: You just learnt how to broadcast your brilliance. Tune in live, to Blab.im, Wednesdays at 4PM Pacific. As the world's leading influencers share their proven strategies for leveraging the power of new media. For more information about your hosts Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher, to claim your free surprise gift and to access every episode of Push Button Influence, visit pushbuttoninfluence.com. ###END###

Joel Comm has been building online businesses since 1995. He is a New York Times best-selling author of 12 books, including The AdSense Code, Click Here to Order: Stories from the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs, KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays and Twitter Power 2.0, as well as authoring over 40 ebooks. Join us as Joel shares: What the Growth of Livestreaming Means for Your Marketing Social Media & Livestreaming Focus on Your Fan Base And much more Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play Read Full Transcript Announcer: This is Push Button Influence where the world's leading influencers candidly share their exact strategies for maximizing leads, accelerating growth and generating massive exposure all by leveraging the power of new media. You can become the next Larry King, Oprah or Howard Stern. All you need to do is broadcast your brilliance. Push Button Influence teaches you how. Here are your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher. Steve Olsher: All right. All right. All right. Welcome, everybody to another edition here of Push Button Influence. Man, I'm excited for this and super excited. If you're listening to the podcast version, you probably have no idea what the heck I'm going to talk about here, but Blab. We've got a little buggy on us but it's good now. Super awesome to have my co-host extraordinaire, Alex Mandossian sitting there on the other side. I think if I point that way, which is the opposite way of how I think I'm supposed to point, then on the recording, it goes the other way. There you go. That way, there. Exactly. Co-host extraordinaire, Alex Mandossian in the house along with the super unbelievable, incredible, Mr. Joel Comm. Thank you, gentlemen for being here. Joel, welcome to Push Button Influence. You know what? Wrinkly? Which one did you want? Yeah. Be more specific. Joel Comm: Perfect. Steve Olsher: You got to be more specific. All right. Joel, what we do here at Push Button Influence at the beginning of every show is we introduce a word. Alex and I both have words. I actually have 2 words today so I doubled up on it. Alex, what is your word of the day? Alex Mandossian: It's the word that I know what Joel is about. I've met Joel first on stage at a big seminar years and years and years ago. We've been mutual mentors with each other. We've laughed together. I will say we have done some we thing together about our own personal journeys and processes through our personal life. Also, I've always acknowledged and admired the way he has changed his personality. He's all about personality. His character remains the same but his personality changes in all different ways. He has sold software to big companies. He has had buttons that had the sound of farting or passing gas if you're overseas. Steve Olsher: Money. Alex Mandossian: He's also had buttons that cause money. He's very, very full of personality. Joel, let's go to that question. How does your personality fit in to your brand as its changed over the years? Joel Comm: That is a really great question. I love that you're asking me something that I haven't been asked in a hundred other podcasts. Thank you for that. I am my brand. We are a brand. I think a large part of who we are stems from our God-given passions, our talents and the skills and abilities that we develop throughout our experiences but our personality is the core. It's our soul. It's that thing that drives us and makes us a big part of who we are. For me, showing up in business and social media and all the things I do is really just about being true to myself and that personality. Not being afraid to accept that, "Hey. This is who I am. The good, the bad and the ugly. There's plenty of all of it." Accepting those things and not being afraid to take risks and put it out there and see where the dice fall. Steve Olsher: Yup. Having known you now for a few years, I know that there was more good than bad or ugly with you there, Mr. Joel Comm. Here is my word. I cheated a little bit here. I'm actually doing a double up on here, man. We've got 2 words. If you can read it here, the words are early and adopter which appropriately enough, that's exactly why we are here on this blab platform since it clearly still says beta. Now, you are someone who has been an early adopter of technology. You were literally on the front lines, man. If it was Normandy, you'd have holes in you. You've literally been on the front lines for God knows how long of technology. Can you talk to how do you see this stuff before anyone else? Talk a little bit about your intuition and how intuition plays into some of the technology success that you've had because you've gotten in pretty early on some things. Joel Comm: Yeah. Actually, if we're going to be accurate, the word is pioneer, which is the one that comes before the early adopter. The one that's not afraid to dip their toe in the water when nobody else has any idea that the thing even exists. We are moving. Right now, you're still pioneering Blab. You guys doing the show because most of the world has no idea this exists. We're still in the pioneer phase. I believe by the end of this year, we'll have moved into early adopter. For me, it's curiosity. I've always been a geek. I had a computer when I was 16 years old when the TRS-80 first came out. I'm really dating myself here. I was drawn to it. I've just followed that curiosity of what interests me because I think it's cool and because I want to play. I like to characterize myself as a guy with a pail and a shovel looking for a sandbox to play in. What can I build here? What can I make? How can I bring value? How can I inspire? How can I have fun? When I really, really get excited about something, that's an indicator to me that it's going to be a big thing which is how I feel about live video. Steve Olsher: Alex, let me add just one more thing to that if I can, which is, sometimes, when I have that feeling, it's a gut thing where you just get this nervousness and excitement, that sort of thing. Do you literally get that physiological response in that same way when you feel like, "Man, this is something I got to pursue?" Did I lose you? Alex Mandossian: Can you hear me? Steve Olsher: I can hear you, Mr. Mandossian. Joel Comm: That was the question, Alex. Steve Olsher: You haven't heard the question. All right. Let's try that again. That was actually to you, Joel. Joel Comm: I thought it was Alex. Steve Olsher: No. No. That was totally to you, Joel Comm. Do you need me to repeat the question? Forget it. Alex, go ahead, man. Joel Comm: I'd like to buy a vowel, please. Alex Mandossian: Okay. Here's what I want to talk about. Usually, we size that these folks like they don't exist but they're out there. Howard Stern has them. JK Rowling has them even Oprah has them. There's some folks who have more of them. If you polarize your audience, you'll have a lot of them but they're just as valuable as their opposing party. That what we're talking about are the haters, the people who just hate you. Now we can call them loathers. They're the opposite of the people who love you but they do have high value because they care so much about you. They are willing to offend you publicly and smear you publicly. They're going out of their way and wasting their time saying bad things about you. How do you view those haters when they show up? Because I know they've showed up many times for you. You've talked about it on stage. Joel Comm: Yeah. I'm trying to think of the last time I had an encounter with a hater. I think maybe I'm just so oblivious to them because I try to think the best of everybody until they give me a reason not to. If I've got some haters out there, then if I'm not aware of them, it's just because I'm oblivious. Look, Jay Bear says it and it's just quoted here in the chat room. "Hug your haters." People who come out against you, there's usually a need there. Why the hostility? Why the anger? What's going on there internally? Recognizing that it's really about them and not about you because most people, even the people that are your friends that think they know you. The acquaintances don't really know you. They know the perception of who they think you are or the mold that they want you to fit in. Our real true selves is only truly known to those that are closest to us that experience us on a daily basis. Through conflict, through the regular issues of life. Not from the stage, not from our books, not from our podcasts so we can be as transparent as we can from here to here but even then, there's only so much you can really see unless you're really it's known person. I look at that and I shrug it off and go, "Not my circus. Not my monkey." This is my monkey right here. Alex Mandossian: I see that. I see that. Steve Olsher: Please don't touch the other monkey, Joel, please. Joel Comm: That's actually my new word. Alex Mandossian: Great thank you. Just a little add on to that, when I look at what a hater would be, let's call them a problem child because sometimes, they are. We've had some technical issues with Blab on this episode leading into it. They are the evangelists. They could be raving fans of Blab. With one issue, when all this technology has to have so much to be working for it to even work, this is a miracle what we're doing right now. One thing goes wrong and all of a sudden, bam. They don't believe in Blab. Bam. They don't believe in Hangouts. Bam. They don't believe in someone because they fell from grace once. They were perfect up until that one point. Has that ever impacted the way you do business? Do you ever acknowledge those folks publicly? Joel Comm: If somebody has a legitimate gripe, legitimate question, legitimate issue then I try to address it. If I address it to the best of my ability and they still come back, and are antagonistic, I'm done. There's nothing else to say because now, you just want to fight with me and you want to argue. Guess what? I'm in control of me. I have healthy boundaries. You don't get to make me dance to your music. That frustrates me even more. Alex Mandossian: You're right. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Point well taken. Let's talk for a second about this platform and social media in general. First and foremost, do you consider live streaming to be a part of social media? Is it a separate animal altogether? Joel Comm: Live video, which is the term that we're now moving towards partially because Michael Stelzner insisted on it and it's actually sticking. We were calling it live mobile streaming video apps. There's all these different words for it and I'm going to settle on live video with it. I think that live video is the most social of the social medias. I think it takes the components of social, the online interaction engagement in bringing the real time, face to face to it, makes it the closest we can possibly get to being there. Unless I was in the same room with you guys and you're not even in the same room. You're in different locations somewhere in California. Yeah but he's right there. We're right here. We're face to face. We're having a conversation and that's what social was always intended to do was to create a venue to encourage and spark and enhance conversation. Now we're doing it. We're doing it in a way that hasn't been done before effectively. I like to look at Blab and I categorize it what Google Hangouts wanted to be but it didn't quite pull it together. Steve Olsher: Got you. To that end, you had Periscope. You had Meerkat come out right around the same time. You got on the Meerkat bandwagon as an evangelist originally. Correct? Joel Comm: Well, I was a user. I've actually been live streaming, doing live videos since 2008. When ustream.tv came out, I was doing the Joel Comm Show from our offices every week. We had a big monitor in front of our desk in the studio. People would chat just like they are here. We would engage with them and then there's been a couple apps before that. Apps like [hey with 00:13:07] have been out that lets you do live video for really almost 3 years now. What happened is, something happened in February of last year when Meerkat hit. It was the perfect storm of mobile being mass adopted where everybody had the devices and the bandwidth being big enough to allow live video and the apps being simple enough so that anybody can use them. Right before South by Southwest last year, I picked up on Meerkat. It was at South By that it really blew up. A couple of months later, we had Periscope and the rest is history. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Alex Mandossian: I want to talk about apps because that's one area we really are ready firing. We've done some mentoring around it. We've also talked about how to monetize it. When it comes down to apps, it's about progress not perfection. If you're going to be a perfectionist again out of the technology business altogether, it's just not going to work. You die of a nervous breakdown. Let's go back to developing an app and then I'm going to ask you what some of your favorite apps are. My favorite one that you've referred to me is WordSwag. Just love it. Love how it's just so simple and easy but if you're an app developer, what are some of the mindset or Inri game pieces that are necessary to make some money from it because you've been down that road. Just share a few apps that you really are excited about and people love hearing those because they go right away and get them. That way, it's not a commercial from us. It's just your recommendation. Joel Comm: Yes, WordSwag is still a favorite of mine. Right now, I'm going to talk about 2 apps in particular. One of them might surprise you. It's Snapchat. Snapchat has become in the last 3 months my go-to app and my go-to social network. It is the thing I use first thing in the morning and before I go to sleep, it is the last thing that I check. It took me a little bit to understand it. There's a little bit of a learning curve in getting what it really is because for the last year, year and a half, I thought it was all for kids and perverts. I'm sure that both of them are still there but I'm not encountering them. I'm having an incredible time creating content and interacting with others on Snapchat. That's number one. If anybody wants to follow me there, @joelcomm. The other one is one I just encountered yesterday. I don't know if it's going to stick or not. Bryant fans have talked about an app called Anchor. Have you guys heard of it yet? Steve Olsher: Negative. What is it? Joel Comm: Anchor is an IOS only app. I actually did a live stream about it today. You can find it in the app store. The easiest way for me to categorize it is micro podcasting. Twitter was micro blogging. You had 140 characters initially to share your thoughts. Anchor is micro audio. Really easy to use. Really easy to follow people to listen to audio clips of up to 2 minutes. You could record up to 2 minutes and you can reply. You can comment on them but it's all audio. It's really interesting. When you guys get a chance to get on it, jump on the Anchor. Follow myself and these fellows as well. I think that both of you being broadcasters, it's going to connect with you as well. Now, whether or not it's got legs, I'm not sure. There's some issues with it in terms of how much audio can you consume because we read much faster than we listen. There's some issues involving that but as a content creator, I looked at this and I thought, "What if I put music on at the same time that I'm doing my Anchor." They call it a Wave. "I put it in a format." I called it The Anchor Minute with Joel Comm. I put it out there. The response has been great. I'm like, "I could do that for a minute of the day." There's that. Steve Olsher: Very, very interesting. Yeah. Super cool, man. I think it brings up a really, really good point here, which is overwhelmed. There are just so many options. You are on Meerkat. I've seen you do Periscope. I've seen you do other things as well. You could spend all day long just trying to provide and fulfill content and request and whatnot on all of the different media. How do you suggest that someone pick a platform or platforms and run with it? How do people make that choice? Joel Comm: For me, I've got to be interested in it. I have to like it. If I don't like it, I'm not going to use it. Now, listen. Alex, you've been a huge proponent of Google Hangouts and have used it for many webinars. I totally get that. It connected with you and you were able to use it to connect with others. I never cared for it so I don't know that I ever put out a webinar. I think I did it with others but I stuck with Go-To Meeting. When I saw Blab, I felt like I'm home. I felt like they made this platform just for me. You guys can play here, too. I'm good with it. It's a big sandbox but when I saw it, I felt like for me, it really connected. For me, Periscope, Meerkat, really connected. It's just about personal interests and curiosity lies. It's not fun for you, then odds are, you're not going to create very compelling content or really connect with people, then it's not for you. Don't use it. Find out what is and invest your time and efforts in that. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Alex Mandossian: Yeah. Steve Olsher: Go ahead. Go ahead, Alex. Go ahead. Go ahead. Alex Mandossian: I like the speechless passing of the torch. Thank you. Give me a high five. All right. Thank you. Just as a disclaimer. Many people watching, our followers of mine, "They go, you mean Google Hangouts? They're not relevant anymore?" That was even a question that came in. Let me cut straight to the chase of my experience of what the preferred platform mitts to broadcast your brilliance because that's what Push Button Influence is all about, having a preferred platform. Now, I'll tell you why Blab is not my preferred. I use it every Wednesday but the reason why it's not my preferred is because this 4-up scenario doesn't allow me to repurpose exactly the way I want because there's no cameraman, because there's no lower third and I don't like a citizen reporter. Because its purpose is different than Google Hangouts. I could syndicate, I could simulcast, I can do all that stuff. I can repurpose. I can podcast off of it but it is missing a few things that I need as a virtual presenter that Google Hangouts has. Now, webinar, Go-To Meeting or Go-To Webinar, whatever, all of the other webinars, this, that, they're not connected to Social media or new media. They're a silo, a tele-seminar bridge line. That's why I choose Hangouts but it doesn't mean it's better or worse. Joel Comm: It's different. Alex Mandossian: It's different. You choose Blab. I remember when you said, "You got to try Blab. You got to try." My first response was, this was maybe 6 months ago. Joel Comm: It was several months ago, yeah. Alex Mandossian: My first response was, "You know, I'm up to my ears streaming and live cast and all that crap." Then I went back and when Steve and I started talking, what you said resonated more with me but my initial response was being firm. Google Hangouts not because it's the best but because it's my preferred. The number 1 thing I would reach out to all of you is don't let what we're saying sway you. What is your purpose? Joel's purpose, Blab is really, really good. For his purpose, WordSwag is really, really good. For my purpose, too. What is your purpose? From that intention, move on to the next decision. Now, buggy technology, it's annoying. We had it before we just started. We are going to make a decision. If we got disconnected, that was going to be it. So far, knock on plastic, knock on ice, we're doing good so far. You're in tech. You've been a pioneer. Not just an early adopter. How do you deal with bugs? It's a feature. It's just a feature of the technology. How do you deal with it without getting- Joel Comm: Yeah. I've been dealing with it my whole life. Whenever you're going to pioneer into new technologies, you have to expect it's not going to work perfectly. After it's been out there for some time, then yeah. We have expectations that it's going to work better. I'm 21 years into having websites now. I still have stuff go down. I still have hacks happen and things that aren't expected. I use to stress about it a lot more and panic. "Oh, my God. My site's down. I'm losing money." Now, I'm like, "Let me know when you get that fixed," because it's not worth it. It's just not. Understand that this is complicated stuff. The fact that we're able to do this right now, I have great admiration for Con and his team of developers over there that even can make this happen. I'm going to sit here and go, "What's wrong with you, guys? Fix this." No. I couldn't. You could give me centuries to figure out how to do this. The only way I'd figure it out is to pay somebody. I could never do this so I've just learned to be patient. Plus, the older I get, the less I sweat small stuff. It's pretty much all small stuff. Steve Olsher: There's a book, it's brilliant. It's real nice. Question here is as we look at these various platforms, one of the beautiful things of technology catching up with our desire to broadcast is that the barriers to entry have been pretty much eliminated. Anyone can have their own show, which is awesome for broadcasting your brilliance. It's a double-edged sword because now, anyone can broadcast whatever they want whenever they want it. Can you speak a little bit to how people can think about content so that they're creating content that people actually want to consume and engage in? Because Alex says, really to broadcast your brilliance, you need a mouth and a microphone. Most everybody's got the former. Most people now have the latter. Can you talk about content as it relates to everyone now being able to get in the game? Joel Comm: We need to get you one of these. They're $50 at Amazon. It's an ATR2100. There you go. I just saw your headset under ear buds that's why. Alex Mandossian: All good. Joel Comm: Sounds good, doesn't it? For me, content comes excellent. Content comes in 3 forms. There's always 3 things I aspire to do when I am speaking from the platform, on a podcast, writing, whatever. It could be any variation of these to educate, I want to teach people something. I want to drop some knowledge. Here's a thing you can use and apply. I want to inspire because I believe that you have to touch emotionally, you have to touch the heart before anybody's going to even remember what you put into their head. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I want to entertain. It's not like I want to get up my tap dancing shoes and do a magic trick. I just want to have fun doing what I'm doing because if I'm going to have fun, then I know that people are going to be engaged and consume the content. I think whatever it is you're going to do, for some people it's just entertainment. Yo Pickles runs a Blab, Blab's Got Talent. It's all about people coming on and singing and doing their talent cat. Pure entertainment. Pure fun. There's others that come on and they do inspirational, motivational blabs. There's others that come on and it's purely knowledge. Minus a mish mash but whatever your thing is, make sure you're delivering in one of those forms. It's unfortunate that the entertainment option lends itself also to the TMZ type of content. We've actually seen some of that here on Blab but I'm not going to name his name but somebody who shouldn't be getting attention is getting a crap ton of attention probably responsible for breaking Blab a lot of times because of the voyeuristic mentality that we have just in our culture. I think that's an answer to your question. Yeah? Alex Mandossian: Let's go to content, too. For me, content changes the way people think, feel and do things on the topic that we're speaking of. At TED speech, those great, jaw-dropping, inspiring speeches, they change the way people think and feel. The challenge I have with the TED speech and I was in the steering committee for here and TEDx in Marin, they don't change the way people do things. They don't have a call to action. Whereas in direct response and in internet marketing, we change the way people do certain things. The question to you, Joel because I've seen you do it a lot. How personal should you get with your tribe so that you get them to change the way they think, feel and do certain things just to get to their heart? I've seen you go all over. You've seen me do it as well but how personal is personal where there's a border and you're not willing to go any further? Joel Comm: Yeah. I think personal is real important. There's nothing to hide. I feel like when people see that you're transparent and you're authentic, and this is who you really are, they go, "Okay. This guy has done this, this, this, and this and yet he comes off like a family member or a neighbor that I can totally relate to." That gives them inspiration, motivation is basically my approach is, "Hey. I'm a goof. If I can do this, you can do this, too." However, I think personal boundaries are also very healthy. We have certain circles of relationship levels. The inner, inner circle, the people that are closest to you, your family, your spouse, your kids. They're going to know all the stuff. They get to come into places that others do not. Then you've got your close friends, then you've got your associates, then you've got the public. There's things about my personal life that you'll never see me posting on social media because I'm posting to an entire audience of all this group of people. I go public with my posts. I like to have a certain degree of control over saying, "This is mine." For example, last fall, I took 18 days offline. I unplugged completely. No email, except for an address that my VA forwarded only important emails, which is read between the lines, those that concern money. I unplugged from Facebook. I unplugged from Twitter. I did no live streams. I did nothing. I went somewhere by myself. I disappeared for 18 days, told nobody where I was going, only a few close friends. To this day, only a few people know where I went and what I did. To me, that's special because that's mine. You don't get that. I think everybody should have that space. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Awesome. All right. If you're just joining us here, live on Blab, welcome as we are talking to the one and only Joel Comm here on Push Button Influence. If you're listening to the podcast version, join us every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific because one of the beautiful things about joining us live on blab.im is that you get to ask your questions and get feedback on topics and things that are important to you. That is what we are going to encourage those that are here right now to begin thinking about their questions. You're going to use /Q before your question in the chat box there and then when you hit return, it will post in the queue for us. We will get to your questions in the green room, which is the bonus here of joining us live is you get to be in the green room with us before and in the green room with us after. Do try to join us live every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific. Joel, I had- Joel Comm: Like a light caramel color. It's not green. Steve Olsher: Yeah? All right. Mine is more Push Button Influence blue. I never actually noticed with Alex behind me there. Joel Comm: Alex though, Alex has a bamboo plant over there, or something that's greenish. Steve Olsher: Yeah, it is. That would be our green room right there. Okay. Let's ask this question which I know a lot of people have a concern about. I think you may have alluded to it earlier though I'm not bright enough to read between those lines. With new technology and getting it on the map in terms of the mainstream, when you can think back to the VHS and the DVD and so on, you know the industry have put those technologies on the map which begins with the P and there's an O and R and an N at the end, is that something we need to be concerned about? Both for just general live broadcast and then what about the gatekeeper in terms of what's going to happen on that front if kids can come on to Blab or Periscope or Meerkat and they start seeing things that they shouldn't see until they're much, much older? Joel Comm: That's already been happening for years. To me, it's really hard just like morality. As much as I am very much opposed to any child, even teenagers being exposed to that, the responsibility becomes the parents. I think we've got a real failure in the way many parents are incredibly permissive. Giving their kids devices when they're very young and allowing them to do whatever they want without setting boundaries. We set some really great boundaries with our kids. Now they're young adults, 24 and 21. They've grown up to be fantastic people. We monitored what they were doing. We monitor their time online and on the internet. Of course, they didn't have the apps when they were younger, which makes the job and the responsibility of parents even more important. Parents, you cannot be lazy. You have to know what your kids are doing. You have the responsibility of limiting what they're doing and determining which apps they can and cannot use and finding out what kind of trouble they could potentially get in. There's nothing that's going to stop the porn industry from doing what they're doing. They're going to be leading the way in the new technologies like virtual reality. It's going to get pretty crazy. Parents, do your jobs because your kids are only kids for a certain period of time. Once that innocence is gone, it's gone forever. Steve Olsher: Amen. Alex? Muted? There we go. Alex Mandossian: I'm unmuted. Joel Comm: Speechless. Alex Mandossian: Yeah. That happens often. What's the future? We have a lot of questions. This is a good prediction point in the Blab conversation. What's the future of live streaming? I like live streaming instead of video or audio or whatever else. Just assuming we call it live streaming. Right now, we're live. We're streaming. It's in either audio or video. Sometimes, it's both. Where do you see us ending up, Joel 3 years from now, which is 21 years in earth years? Joel Comm: This is it. We are arriving with Periscope, with Blab, with Facebook Live, with Periscope integration on Twitter. We are finally at that place where on demand video, we have been trained as consumers to consume via Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu what we want, when we want it. It was DVRs before. I don't know about you but I've canceled cable. I canceled a couple of years ago. The only cable I have running in here is a very thick internet pipe that gives me 100 megabytes per second. It's awesome. No TV. Don't need a network television here because we want to watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it. Here's what blows me away. That there is a room full of people that are here right now watching us live. There are I don't even know how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people around the world that are watching some stream on Periscope or some other live video platform. Choosing that as not only as opposed to network television or cable television but instead of Netflix, instead of Amazon, instead of Hulu, they're choosing this. People want to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it. The content is going to rise to the top. What you're doing, the value you're bringing, you guys have a show. There's going to be people that come and go and start launching a Periscope and they're not going to have content. Nobody's going to want to watch it but those that are creating are going to be the leaders. If you imagine getting into YouTube in 2006 and posting videos and then becoming a YouTube star by 2009 or 2010, this is where we are with live streaming is the stars are being created even as we speak. Tomorrow, somebody's going to come online and do live video for the first time. In a year or two, they're going to have built up this following and they're going to be known for whatever that content is that they're delivering. That is when mass adoption is going to start happening. If we are at pioneer phase right now, and I believe 2016 is where we make the transition to early adopter. That still gives us a couple more years even in internet years before we start seeing the masses come in. That's why I like to get in early and become ensconced position because when the masses come, who are they going to look to? The tribe that's here. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Alex Mandossian: Steve, let me ask you that question. What do you think? We got Joel and it's pretty accurate I think. Steve Olsher: Yeah. My opinion is there has to be a gamification piece. One of the things that I like about Periscope is the fact that at least there is some measurement. Now, we can say it's right. We can say it's wrong. It's an argument for another day but when you see someone who has X number of followers and X number of hearts, you can deduct. "Well, okay. This person probably has been on for a while. They must be pretty good." There's an expression [inaudible 00:37:17] so we don't have to get into a debate around that. If that many people are hearting what they're doing, then maybe they actually are pretty good. Here on Blab, it's interesting because like the props, that gives you all some props. Click on the screen. Get those hands going. You got the bar set pretty high here, man. We had Johnny Lee Dumas and we got 125,000 props. The bar is set real high right now but they don't go anywhere. It's not like it goes into your account so that Joel Comm on Blab has 28 million props or something so that there's a ranking. I guess, Alex, that answers your question. I believe that the future of this medium if you will is going to be largely dependent on figuring out how to separate the good from the bad. We talked about barrier to entry earlier. I think that is one of the ways to see if someone is good and legit or if they're not. Alex Mandossian: I think Joel remembers instant video generator. Before YouTube, we were on video through the net. Thanks for the genius of Rick Raddatz and of course Armand Morin was their partner. I think where it's going and nobody asked my opinion about it but I want to give it anyway. I think where it's going is we're going to get more aggregated platform base live stream. What does that mean? That's the best words I can think of, what Blab is and what Periscope is. See, Google doesn't really do it well with G+ and with Hangouts, but Blab, man. The people in this Blab can bring people on. That is massive. You can do it through Twitter and you can do it through Facebook. I think you're going to see a lot more of that. The reason that's so exciting is once someone has good content or strikes a nerve, then you can have instant notification where you have an instant celebrity like a Bieber or someone on YouTube that all of a sudden became a hit. It's not just going to be led to chance. That's the direction it's going. I think in the next 2 to 3 years, we're going to see more platforms like Blab where you have millions of people and you can pull them into the chat and to the streaming video or audio. Steve Olsher: Yeah. All right, Joel. A couple more questions here and then out of respect for your time, we're going to drop into the green room so that all of our wonderful people who are with us can ask you their questions. One more thing, I have to ask you here before we go into that green room is can you talk a little bit about this word, which is the word pivot because that is something that you have been able, yeah. Thank you for doing that. For those who are listening to the podcast, you have no idea what we're talking about but everybody's turning around here. Talk about pivoting because that's something that you have been able to do throughout your career. When do you know when it's time to pivot into something else? Joel Comm: Usually, the signs are there. God in his way says, "Stop that." Doors close on an opportunity. If I'm not half thick in the skull, I get the message. I've actually ... I've been looking for what is that next big thing. Since I came off my Sabbatical a couple of years ago after letting go of my entire staff of 38 people over the period of a year or so. I went out to 2-year Sabbatical, pulled away. Sold off some of my properties. Steve, your event was one of the first ones that I spoke at again when I came out of Sabbatical. I've been dabbling in a lot of different arenas. I've read books. I've been helping others write books. Put a couple of products out there but I had not found that thing that I was passionate about. I've got to tell you that when this live streaming and the app showed up, I got excited. When Blab showed up, I got excited. I started creating contents. The pivot happened naturally just by following my curiosity. I'll say this. I have not been this excited and so certain about the future of a technology since I developed my first iPhone app in 2008. I knew then that iPhone apps are going to be big. I'm telling you right now that live video, whether it's Blab, Periscope, Facebook Live or even Snapchat which I'm calling live because it feels live to me. The masses are going to come to it and I want to be there when they do. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Awesome. Alex, you want to wrap things up here on the podcast version? One more question? Alex Mandossian: Yeah. My question is, you've reinvented yourself several times, Joel. What direction are you physically going with business? What's going to be Joel's brand 2016 and beyond? Joel Comm: Yeah. Truly interesting because I tend to not think, "Okay. Where can I go and make some money?" I look at what I'm interested in and then one day, I wake up usually because a friend says, "You know, everybody wants to know how you're doing this. Can you share it with us?" It's what happened with AdSense. It's what happened with apps. It's what happened with selling websites. It's what happened with producing video. I got asked to do the opening keynote at Periscope Summit last month in San Francisco. I'm doing the keynote panel on live video and social media marketing world and that I'm immediately doing another session just on Blab. Live video is my thing. I'm actually launching a product because I finally got it through my thick skull, "This is what people want." In March 8th, we're going to be launching the Live Video Revolution, which is going to be training about all these platforms. How to create shows, how to get an audience, how to market and I'm super excited about it. Clearly, I'm going to be camping out here for some time. Steve Olsher: Terrific. Here's what we're going to do, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to give you, those who have joined us live here on blab.im an opportunity to ask Joel your questions so this would be the opportunity. Use /Q at the front of your question and then hit return there in the chat box. We will get to your questions in just a few moments. Don't go away after this fancy exit music that we are going to play here, but I can tell you that from my perspective, having seen you do what you've done now over the years, man, it's an honor and a privilege to have you here on the show knowing how busy you are. Join us every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific. Next week, we've got Ocean Robbins. If you don't know Ocean, check out The Food Revolution. He's doing some pretty amazing things there. We've got James Schramko coming up as well as many, many others here on Push Button Influence. Alex Mandossian, my co-host extraordinaire, awesome, awesome, awesome. I am Steve Olsher and for Joel Comm, we will talk to you guys next time on Push Button Influence. Announcer: You just learned how to broadcast your brilliance. Tune in live to blab.im, Wednesdays at 4PM Pacific as the world's leading influencers share their proven strategies for leveraging the power of new media. For more information about your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher, to claim your free surprise gift and to access every episode of Push Button Influence, visit pushbuttoninfluence.com. ###END###

Perry Marshall is an American online marketing strategist, entrepreneur, and author of several books, most notably the bestsellers Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords and Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising. Join us as Perry shares how to: Access 100 million people in 10 minutes Work less and make more with 80/20 sales and marketing strategies Leverage the power of Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising Transform your paradigm and approach to doing business   Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play Read Full Transcript Announcement: This is Push Button Influence. Where the world leading influencers candidly share their exact strategies for maximizing reach, accelerating growth, and generating massive exposure all by leveraging the power of new media. You can become the next Larry King, Oprah, or Howard Stern. All you need to do is broadcast your brilliance. Push Button Influence teaches you how. Here are your hosts Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher. Steve Olsher: All right, all right, all right. Welcome to another edition here of Push Button Influence. Really, really, really glad to have you with us. I am Steve Olsher along with Alex Mandossian and our super awesome, very cool, online veteran, extraordinaire Mr. Perry Marshall. By the way Alex, I learned something which is when we point, if I point at you like this on the video, I'm actually pointing the wrong way. I think I have to point like this if I'm pointing at Perry and then like this if I'm pointing at you. We learn something new every single day, just to cover all bases, right? All right, Perry, really, really cool to have you here. I know that you are a super busy dude so it's appreciated that you took the time out to join us here on Push Button Influence and share your wisdom. Now, Alex as we do every week here on the show, we start out with a word and I would defer to you to share what your word is first. Alex Mandossian: Well, Perry has changed his focus over the years, I've known him since I think 2002, but I think what he embodies for me most is not wasting time and to do little things that make a big difference. The word for me today is leverage. Leverage. Now, L-E-V-E-R, lever, right? Like the Archimedes lever, you can actually move the world with the right levers. You've partnered with someone who knows all about the 80/20 rule, he's worth over 200 million dollars. You know how to do little things that make a big impact. What does leverage mean to you, your business and to your family? Because you've leveraged yourself. I stopped at men on men with two kids, you have a lot more than I, you play zone defense. What's that all about? Perry Marshall: Well, the family, we have 4 regular kids and 2 adopted ones. They're both from China so one of them came here a year ago and the other one 4 years. One of the little secrets that most people don't know is that after you get above 4 kids it doesn't really make all much that difference. Most people aren't aware of that. The minivans keep getting more expensive, and the hotel rooms keep getting more expensive and the restaurants keep getting more expensive. The actual management of the kids part levels off. That's a very important useful thing to know. In fact, I even have a couple of friends they actually adopted because we adopted. I think it's viral, it's a great thing to do. You can just ... It's sort of like fasting or something. Once you've actually made up your mind like, "I'm not going to eat the rest of today." It's not that big of a deal. It's just when you're like not really sure, that's the hard part. Leverage, the biggest thing I'll say about leverage is, somebody put it to me this way ... This is a long time ago. He goes, "A good software programmer isn't like 3 times better than a bad one, he's 1000 times better than a bad one." That's true of almost anything. The good things that you should be doing aren't like ... They're not always a thousand, okay? Sometimes they're only 10 times better. Very often, they're 100 times better. The whole world is actually exponential. You know this if you have a garden. If you let the weeds go and you're gardening, it might only take 6 weeks, it's completely engulfed in weeds, and it's because of multiplication. I think the way most people receive their education, they're very unaware of this. Most people think inequality is ... Well, they got a 97 on the test and I got a 77 or vice versa and they think that the person who got the 97 is 20% better. If they're really better, they might actually be 20 times better not 20% better. Especially when it comes to actually accomplishing something and not just sitting down and taking a test. I don't know, maybe some people would need to be a numbers person to really get what I'm saying. I'll tell you, I got it. I got it in a big way, I remember when it happened, it happened when I was reading Richard Koch's book, The 80/20 Principle. It all said, all my world ... I live in exponential world. Like the Kennedy Express way in Chicago literally does get 10,000 times as much traffic as the street I live on, right. The world is so unequal, hugely, hugely unequal. Steve Olsher: Yeah, yeah. Great, great points there. All right, my word for you sir is evolve. What I would love for you to talk about is how you have evolved on a personal level over the years and also of course on a professional level. If you can speak specifically to how you see the internet evolving. How did it really evolve over the past few years to what it is today? If possible, can you talk about where you see this evolving to in so far as the online space is concerned. Perry Marshall: Can I talk about the personal first? One of my abiding beliefs is that I do not have the right to ignore any verifiable fact. If it's in front of me I need to acknowledge it. The context is that humans have an amazing capacity for denial. I'm sure it's probably a good thing because it helps us cope with stuff or whatever. Really, I think especially for an entrepreneur you really have to decide, "I am not going to give myself the luxury of being in denial." I think it starts with your personal life. Like if you've got an anger issue, or if you've got some emotional problem or you got some habit or some addiction or anything like that. Just bedrock, baseline truth, it's like you must deal with it, okay? We all go through phases on life, most people have some kind of mid-life crisis. I will just say that I got to a spot a few years ago, I was like, "Well, are you going to medicate yourself? Are you going to really deal with your crap?" We can go deeper on that if you guys really want to but I- Steve Olsher: Not necessary to go, too big. I really appreciate your sharing it but obviously you've evolved personally I think is where that goes. I think we all do, but awesome sharing it. Let's shift to ... This isn't like, we're not Barbara Walters here, we don't want you ... If you choose to cry, you can cry. We're not forcing you to cry here man. We can shift over to the professional side which is the evolution of the internet. I think you got that question pretty clear when I asked it the first time. Perry Marshall: Yeah. Professionally, I think there's this fine line a person has got to walk and it's being relevant to your market, your audience, whatever. Whether you wake up in the morning all excited about them or not. I think most careers, most markets, most customers they're like spouses. Sometimes you wake up and you're all excited to be next to him and other times it's like, "Who is this?" Right? You know, hey, you're in the game and you need to wake up every morning and you need to do your best. There really is a fine line between making sure that you're being useful to somebody, but at the same time finding a way to be true to yourself and to figure out where am I going next. I just had coffee with a longtime friend of mine from childhood and she's ... Her name is Tosca Lee. She's a fairly famous fictional author, makes a real good living writing fiction which not too many people doing that. She was talking about, well, you get into the market and your audience wants a certain thing, but then like, "Well, what do you want to write?" The truth is you can't just articulate to one or the other. If all you do is just cater to your audience, you'll get stale, and if all you do is do what you want you'll become irrelevant. There's really, you got to skate between those two things and I really believe you've got to make some time to go smell the roses. I think you need to have some ... You must, must, must create space in your life where like, I'm pretty religious about taking one day off of a week. I think people that work 7 days a week, they're making a big mistake. Internet, let's talk about internet for a second. Evolution in the popular culture is this kind of stereo academic kind of purposeless word. It has this biology overtone and I think that word is even misrepresented in biology. Make no mistake, evolution is a very, very intentional thing but you never know how it's going to turn out because there's always something that's going to be a surprise. Now, I wrote book called Evolution 2.0, breaking the deadlock between Darwin and his design. It literally is a science book. In my book I explained that there are 5 tools of the evolutionary process. 3 of the 5 are gradually incremental kaizen continuous improvement incremental changes, okay? Two of them are major quantum leap like new species and one generation type changes, okay? Both of the ones where you get quantum leap involve merging two different things together and making them work. Let me give you an example. This is the most successful merger acquisition in all of history. Every merger acquisition can be modeled after this, okay? Like direct from the science lab to the entrepreneurial word, like import new piece of knowledge, okay? Every green bladed grass you've ever seen in your life, every green leaf, or tree, or shrub or anything like that, the reason it's green is because ... Okay, in high school they told you it's got a chloroplast which converts sunlight into energy and it's green. Well, you know what a chloroplast actually is? It's a blue-green algae. It literally is a blue-green algae and it's living inside a plant cell, it's got its own DNA, it's got its own reproductive cycle. It's a cell inside a cell, okay? Now it's a great partnership. Why? Because the plant cell is a really nice, cozy safe place for an algae to live. It doesn't have to sit in the middle of a pond and try to defend itself or get eaten by a frog, okay? It's really great. It's really great if you're a plant cell, it's really great to have algae because it capture sunlight and it turns it into energy and it dumps buckets of energy into your cells so that you could do stuff, okay? Every major evolutionary leap is some resemblance, you're taking a completely new intact thing from the outside, and that's the importance. From the outside and you're bringing it in, okay? Now, if you were to look at all the major innovations that have happened in the history of internet marketing you could look at email, you could look at the invention of the web browser, you could look at the invention of the search engine, you could look at autoresponders, you could look at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of those things. What all of these things did was they took something that already existed and they brought it into a new context and said, "Hey, look what you can do if you jam these two things together." Okay? The new thing always comes from the outside. New systems never reinvent themselves, almost never. Like you will almost never see an innovation come on the inside of the industry, it's always an outsider who shows up. The Uber guy, was he from the taxi industry? Steve Olsher: He was not. No. Perry Marshall: No. No. There's a 100,000 cab drivers that could have started Uber, none of them did. Which is to say, you better find a way to be going outside your industry and good grief like I hope you're interested in something besides just your business. Could you please have a hobby, could you please have some friends. Steve Olsher: Yeah. The future of the internet- Perry Marshall: Evil. Steve Olsher: Is ... How about this, what do you like about the internet now? What are you digging on it? If like you take one of your private clients and you go and you say, "Hey, this is a strategy that we need to implement right now." What's one of the top strategies? Then, Alex, I know he's got a ton of questions as well. Let's say, what's the one strategy that you move all of your online clients? Those who want to obviously do really, really well online, what's that one core strategy right now that you're in favor of? Perry Marshall: The hot one right off the top of my head is the concept of other responders has to move out to more concentric circles from where it's been. If you're good at autoresponders, what you are doing is they're getting on your email list and then the content is self-adjusting based on what they clicked on and what they're interested in. If they go click on these things they get of more of these, and they go click on these things they get more of that. It's smart, and that's great. That gets you up to like 2010, okay? That same idea needs to also extend to people who are in your gravitational pull but not on your email list. This is because of the mobile and social media, right? I don't see email going away but it's very gradually declining in its overall impact, okay? Social media is going up, and with mobile especially, right? Social media, all that same kind of content needs to be showing up. Usually, you need to spend money to make that happen. Right now most people in the world aren't willing to spend that money and frankly they should be. It's exactly like search engines in 2006. In 2006, 10 years ago, most people they were sure that search is supposed to be free. The smart were people like, "I'm paying for this dude." Like, "Skip to the front of the line, pay your money and I'm going to put my Google ad right up front." Right? I think you need to be doing that with everybody that you can cookie and re-target on your site. Well, but then you need to take another step which is, you also need to be doing micro-brand advertising to the people that are in your general space that haven't even come to your website yet. You have to market before you market, then you have to market while you're marketing and then you have to market after the first kiss. I think people that are not doing that are rowing their little boat towards extinction. Steve Olsher: Alex? Alex Mandossian: All right. A couple of things Perry said, and in his hometown of Chicago or he lives nearby. A guy be the name of Henry Ford was visiting a meat packing plant and there were 2,100 car manufacturers, one of them happened to be in Detroit, his, and everyone brought their stuff to the car that was on the block. What he observed in the meat packing plant was, the meat going past the butchers, you know the cows ... If you're a vegetarian I apologize in advance, I'll probably get some hate mail for this. He found out, each butcher was taking little bits and pieces off and packing the meat, that's why they call it meat packing. That hadn't been new to meat packing, that had been there for almost 100 years but it was new to car manufacturing. He went back with that idea, it was lateral thinking and he got it from outside of his industry and he became ... Henry Ford built a middle class and all the cities were built out instead of being built up. That's a great example. The next word Perry is growth. Because what people don't know about you which I do, we spoke just recently, is you believe that it's a lot easier to go from million to billion. Often times it is going from zero to a million, and you're focusing on million dollar companies that can become billion dollar companies. Even if you haven't made your first million folks, listen to what this thinking is all about because this thinking is outside of your box of thinking. Because I don't think about billions as much, you know, adding that extra few zeros. Perry, in growth, what does it mean to have a billion dollar company? Zuckerberg knows it, Warren Buffet knows it, Oprah knows it, J. K. Rowling knows it, Steve Jobs knew it, of course Bill Gates knows it, Shaquille O'Neal now knows it, Magic Johnson knows it. This billionaire concept is not just being this dot com baby, it's a way of thinking and having certain types of products. I got a sneak peek into your brain, why don't you drain a little bit. Perry Marshall: I had a seminar in London in 2010 and this couple came, they rode train down from Scotland and they bought one of the hot seat, so we went through the hot seat and I did this whole thing called Swiss Army Knife with ... The guy was selling fantasy football and he had to explain to me what fantasy football was because I didn't know and I'm like ... I mean, I don't know, I'm about as much of a basketball guy as a calculator can make you. I didn't know. He's explaining fantasy football I'm like, "Okay." Once he did that I explained to him, "Oh, so here's why people buy from you and here's what is going on inside their heads." And all that, and it was all great, right? Then everybody went home. A year ago I get a message from one of my friends and he's like, "Hey, you remember when we were at that London seminar? Hey, look at these guys, they just raised 70 million dollars of funding. You know what the company was? It was FanDuel, the fantasy football guys, and they are worth a billion dollars now." I'm like, "Holy cow! That's great." Alex and I were talking about Infusionsoft, being in diapers when we started working with them. The first time I tried to click my Infusionsoft wasn't even like a fertilized ovum yet. It was like we'll write software for food, right? Now they're like a 100 million dollar company or something. I've had these little acorns turn into large oaks in my backyard. There's something really interesting that I think is the most common thread of these zero to a billion success stories. I learned this from Richard Koch, they are all one of two kinds of simplifiers. What FanDuel actually did was they took something that already had existed for like 30 years. That's how long fantasy of football had been around, since the, probably 60s. It was this very cumbersome thing and you had to gather all of the stats and you had to find the people and everything. What FanDuel actually did was they knew it would be really easy to do fantasy football with absolute minimum effort in one place. Nobody had really done that, what they did was they dramatically simplified it. They made it literally 10 times as simple as it had been before. Now, what do I mean by simple? Well, it's all relative. If you cut the number of steps to do something by 80%, you have simplified it. What most people do is they take a hundred steps and they shave 5 steps off and you're down to 95 and they go, "I got the USP, yeah." Then they shave a few more, "Oh, now we're down to 90, yeah." They're like in this incremental, almost like shaving pennies race with everybody else. You get a little simple, a little easier. No. If you take something that people really need to do and you shave it from a 100 steps down to 20, which is what FanDuel did, you have actually a very good chance of creating 100 million, or billion dollar company. You do not have to be a management genius, a corporate culture guru or like something like that for it to happen. The market will pull it from you. There's another kind of simplification and Alex alluded to it, and it's price simplification. What Henry Ford did was in the space of ... About 6 years he drove the price of an automobile down. He didn't get it down 80%. They did actually got it down by about 60%. He got the price of an automobile down from $1600 to $360. Now, guess what happened. The demand didn't go up like Forex, it went 700X. Getting the price of the automobile from $1500 down to$360 was a bitch, make no mistake. Building Infusionsoft, Alex would you agree that building Infusionsoft and holding all those customer's hands was a- Alex Mandossian: It was a huge bitch and that's what prevented them from growing. Yeah. Let's take, for example, Dropbox. Look how fast they grew because it was super, super simple. Let's take Southwest Airlines verses United which has a hub of course in Chicago. One is super simple, one kind of plane, you know viewer unions and one mechanic, one type of sitting, socialism, right? First come, first served. Then the other airline is super complicated. That's both simplification of process and price. Perry Marshall: Yes. If you really take this simplification process by the horns, you could turn a million company into a 50 million dollar company, or a 100 million dollar company. You don't have to be a superstar. I've got a round table member, Max Goodwin, and in Europe, he is in the Netherlands and they saw cards that you buy that will allow you to play video games. Like instead of being a member of somebody's video playing network, you can just buy a $20 dollar credit code and then enter it. You could be anonymous if you want to. This has turned into a huge business and it started with a guy who is going, "Well, I don't have a credit card, and I don't want to use a credit card, and I don't want to log in on their system so there's got to be some way to do this." It is essentially kind of like a gift card but most people aren't using them as gift cards. They use them as like, "Hey, I want to play some games, I'm going to buy $20 dollars of games." Now he's got the whole gaming industry eating out of his hands because he controls the currency that people use to play video games. The video manufacturers are lined up. Dramatic simplification. It's a company that almost anybody who is listening in today would be envious to have. Steve Olsher: Awesome. All right. Guys, if you're just joining us here live on Blab, welcome. We're talking to Perry Marshall and if you're just joining us here in the Podcast, then why did you fast forward? Because you must have missed a lot. Go back and listen to what you missed, because you shouldn't be here now if you're listening to the Podcast. Let me ask you this Perry, first and foremost, what is the project right now that's got you most excited in the online space specifically? Perry Marshall: Right now, it's my simplified project with Richard Koch, and if you want to see what we're doing go to simplified.fm. It's realizing that this model of simplification, whether you go the sophistication route or the reduce the price route, that both are radical evolutions. They're not just these incremental things. As I've observed this ticking process, we continue to do our business and create courses and do different programs and things. I'm just realizing kind of the low expectations that are traditional assumptions have kind of been saddled with. Really asking myself the question like, "Well, are we really simplifying the customer experience or are we doing what an awful lot of knowledge worker, knowledge vendors, information product kind of people do. Which is pile on like, in you get this, in you get this, in you get this in the kind of against you knife thing?" In the end you get this and this and this, it can and it does work but it doesn't make anything simple. Most businesses that sell that way don't get very big. Now, don't get me wrong, that's not 100% true, there's always exceptions. I'm just really realizing that there has never been a time when there was more companies going from zero to a billion faster. I realize, like talking about a billion dollars is just way over most people's heads. You're like, "Oh my goodness." Like, "What does this have to do with me?" Well, look, if you want to go from zero to a million, or zero to $100, 000 dollars, almost certainly, if you're going to do it without tons of pain and suffering, you're going to do it by making somebody's life a whole lot simpler. That's just the way it is. Whether you can simplify and the biggest thought you can think right now is $10,000 dollars, or if you can go all the way to 10 billion, simplification is the fastest way to go. Alex Mandossian: I'll edify and support that because when you ask a billionaire, and I've asked 5 billionaires in my interviews. Richard Branson, now it's Sir Richard Branson, I asked him this question, what's the difference between a billionaire and a millionaire? He said a billionaire is a millionaire who thinks more simply, right? He's a more simple thinker, he has more simple matrix. The CEO of RE/MAX only looked at one thing, how many new RE/MAX offices were being opened this month? That could determine as a critical driver, not as a KPI, Key Performance Indicator, that's looking in the reverse. That is looking into the future, how healthy is this company? Perry, I'm going to talk about this because 80/20 suggest this, it insinuates this. 20% of the things that you're doing should produce 80% of the volume. 20% of your clothes you're wearing 80% of the time. That means 80% of your clothes, you're wearing 20% of the time. 20% of your people are producing 80% of the profits with affiliate marketing, Steve and I are about to have a lunch. 5% of our JB partners will produce 100% of the sales. This question of where to focus, that really is what the 80/20 principle is all about. Focus on the few to generate more, verses focusing on the more that generate ... Perry Marshall: Okay. People have a chronic tendency ... I am the greatest of offenders by the way, okay? Look, preaching to my own choir here. Thinking more is more, okay? In the human brain, more equals more. That's what Howard Samson thinks every day when he gets out of bed. Well, less is more. Here is what i find myself doing, I find myself asking questions like, "All right, I got this thing. I got this product, I got this system, I got this process, I got this customer." New rule, for every one thing I add I have to take two things away. For every one thing I add in my to do list I have to take two things away. That's actually a really awesome criteria because first of all, it pushes back on adding the one thing, right? With the- Steve Olsher: Hang on, time out. In real terms, to make it concrete, what Perry is saying ... Jim Collins has said this over the years, he wrote Good to Great. For every one thing you add on your to do list, add two things to your don't do list. That was simply ... Perry Marshall: Yes. Okay. If you make a ... You got your to do list for this afternoon, right? Of course, you know the phone is going to ring, you know an email is going to come along, right? Now, if you have a rule like, "All right, I already made this list. I already thought about it, this is a good list. I don't get to add anything to this and I will say no to other things off." Right? That creates instant resistance to whatever the phone call was about, to whatever you were going to say yes to, right? It means that if it does make it in, your life just got simple. It's like totally win-win, right? Now, what if you also do that to ... Like how many men use the little doohickeys in your software that you're writing? Or what if it's, if I'm going to add another product in my product line I have to discontinue two other products. We slashed and banned like 4, 5, or 6 products that we had sold for years about a year ago. It really hurt because I have this personal attachment to it and I put so much of myself into it, all these other stuff. Yeah, I know, but look, this is not like state of the art latest, greatest, it's not wowing people any more. If it's not really great ... Yeah, I know it's making $5,000 a month. It's almost like this, I don't know, comic belief or something, that the fact that it's there, it's occupying space, it's ... I don't know, sorry if it sounds metaphysical, but I just believe like when you get rid of stuff it makes room for something better. Like when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Alex Mandossian: Pruning a tree, it give it more life, right? Perry Marshall: Right. We're going to make the tree bigger by cutting stuff off of it, right? It's really- Steve Olsher: Kind of intuitive. Perry Marshall: Yeah. Steve Olsher: Yap, very much so. All right. We're ... Believe it or not, we're just cruising through this. Thanks for sharing all of this knowledge here Perry. If you guys have questions, that's the benefit of joining us live every Wednesday at 4 pm Pacific, 7 pm Eastern. This is your opportunity to get your question in the queue and Perry will be answering those in just a wee little bit here. Use forward slash capital Q at the beginning of your sentence there on the chat roll and then ask your question, we'll get you into the queue. All right. Perry, question for you. Obviously, of you look at the growth from zero to a billion, right? The number of unicorns that have been coming, you know, jeez, it's like I don't know. It's over 100 now in just a little past few years, it is a ridiculous number. Isn't that a by-product of the growth of connectivity? Because we couldn't do that before in terms of being able to reach out in the way that we do now. You have all the citizen reporters, you have the social media, you have everything that is basically coming to this perfect storm of basically being able to be in front of these many people as possible at any one given time which never existed before. Do you think the zero to ability is a by-product of the connectivity? Perry Marshall: Yes. Here is what it's another by-product of, it's a by-product of the number of cycles of like call and response, right? It's the speed at which conversations can happen, it's the speed at which a product can be put out there and then get sold or get rejected, right? The internet has created the speed, now the speed has created something else. It has turned 80/20 into 90/10. I got my book, 80/20 Sales and Marketing and the Pareto's principal. 80% of the people but 20% of the money, and 20% of the people make 80% of the money. On the internet, almost everything is actually 10% of the people make 90% of the money, 10% of the products get 90% of the distribution. 10% of the emails get 90% of the clicks. Because everything is in dog ears. The only difference between 60/40 and 99/1 is time, right? If we're looking at all the companies that started yesterday and how many of them are still around today, it's 60/40. If we expand it to 100 years, it's 99/1. What the internet does is that it speeds things up. Now, you actually do business totally different in 90/10 world than you do in an 80/20 world. In a 90/10 world, there's only one winner, right? There's like 6 major auto manufacturers, there's one Google, there's one Facebook, there's one Amazon, there's one eBay, there's one Blab, there's one Uber, yeah, like Lyft. I had a conversation today with a billionaire by the way, and he was telling me about one of his companies. Well, it's a totally different market, it has nothing to do with cars but let’s say, for the sake of discussion he was Lyft. I said, "You're going to have niche this in your market that Uber is not in or shut it down." I did not want to tell him that, I like this guy, I like him as friend, I don't even quite think of him as a client and I wasn't charging for the phone call, like we were just getting to know each other. I said, "Dude, I'm really sorry." I'm not pronouncing doom and gloom, but based on this one hour conversation, like, "You're going to have to seriously tether this thing or it's never going to ... The other guy is already so far ahead of you, like 90/10. There's only going to be one." He's like, "Yeah, we've been wrestling with that already and what you're telling me I think I already knew." It's like fail fast, like [Gerry Hebert 00:40:56] told advise, like 10 times men, like fail really fast. Steve Olsher: Yap. Alex? Alex Mandossian: Well, rather than going to the future, I'm interested as a final question, is how do you choose the right partner? Because there's nothing like going in the wrong direction enthusiastically when you don't have the right partner. Steve and I have bettered each other, we have the right partnership. You have a partnership with Richard and that has continued, I know you've bettered him and you asked me about him. How do you choose the right partner? How do you ... Perry Marshall: Okay, several things. I'll refer to my buddy, John Paul Mendocha, who's been a colleague and mentor of mine for a long time. John has thing called the 3 meals rule. He says before you get into a serious engagement with anybody you need to eat 3 meals with them, and if they're fake by the third meal, the veneer is going to be wearing thin and you're going to be able to tell, okay? That's a real good starter. Interestingly, here's another Mendocha story, about 10 years ago I went on this little vacation with him and his wife. It was just like a little 2-day trip through Death Valley actually, it was really beautiful. I had never met his wife before. After the trip he tells me, he goes, "Well, I asked Becky, 'Becky, what did you think of Perry?'" He was terribly afraid that she was going to say, "I don't like him John." Every time this has ever happened the guys turned out bad. Every time his wife doesn't like the guy he's like ... She's like, "Oh, I liked Perry, he's good." He goes like, "Fyiux." I think the scout's test is super critical. I got into- Alex Mandossian: That's going to happen to me soon, probably within the next 24 hours with Steve's spouse. We'll see what happens. Perry Marshall: Seriously, it also ... I think your body and your stomach and your gut and your heart, no. Are you paying attention? Steve Olsher: Yap. Awesome. Now, I'm not sure if it's just on my end or if you guys are seeing this at home also? Right now I seem to be the lone survivor on video. Maybe I'm just seeing myself here. Alex and Perry if you can go ahead and refresh ... You see us all? Okay, then it's just me. All right I will refresh when we go into the Q & A. All right, cool. All right, that's the beauty of technology, you just never know what's going on the other side of the world. All right, one more question here and then we're going to actually move into the green room when we stop the Podcast version here and give those who've joined us live the opportunity to ask you questions. Now it's an awesome time to use the forward slash capital Q and put your question into the queue so Perry can answer your question personally. The question that I have for you is, can you talk about the ... You mentioned this earlier about email. I want to get your take on ... This is something that Alex and I have been discussing and really kind of killing the sacred cow, if you will here, whereby there seems to be ab increasing value of someone who joins you as an audience participant verses the decreasing value of someone who is an email subscriber. Can you talk about, at least in your opinion, the value between someone who participates as an audience member, like in this case here on Blab, verses someone who is a subscriber on your email list. Perry Marshall: If you think about what has happened to the internet, if you go back to 2000, 2003, 2005, the kinds of businesses that were thriving on the internet were businesses where the internet is actually a way to hide from people. That was what worked in like 2004, okay? We're going to take a business and we're going to stick it up on a website and there's going to be this whole machine. It dispenses these artificial pieces of me and then people come along and pick them up. There were a lot of people that could run a business like that for 2 or 3 years and they never have to talk to anybody. Well, the internet is now essentially a live 24/7 medium. The real value is in the live especially ... When somebody actually wants something that you've created, well, it goes both ways, okay. Everybody who is listening today is on the other end of a live performance. You bring value just like I do. Alex and I, we're all performing but so are you. The audience is the other half of the performance, right? In marketing and sales, the highest value place you can ever get a customer, just about, is a live seminar where somebody bought a plane ticket and they flew across the country and they paid the tuition and they showed up at the seminar. That's just about the best quality customer you can get. Well, a audience participate is the virtual equivalent of that. You can't fake it, it's in real time, it's not a synchronous. That's what's happened, right? That's where the value is. Most people's media is going to have to include a live broadcasting component. Steve Olsher: Got you. Alex, you want to take us home with the last question here? Alex Mandossian: Well, final question is, what's the first thing you have planned for tomorrow Perry? As a focus. I like rituals, like what's tomorrow, if we were to look over your shoulder and we're flying in the world, what's the first [inaudible 00:47:53]? Perry Marshall: Okay. This is what I do every day, 7 days a week. Been doing this for two and a half years, I get my notebook, I pray and journal for an hour, that's the first thing. Take a shower, cup of hot tea and my notebook for an hour and nobody is bugging me, and nothing is going on. It's 6:00 o'clock in the morning and it's the best thing I ever did, every day. Steve Olsher: Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, let's do this which is, we're going to end the Podcast version here of Push Button Influence. We're going to give people who have joined us live the opportunity now, Perry, to ask you their questions. What we want you guys to do is join us live every Wednesday at 4 pm Pacific, 7 pm Eastern, for Push Button Influencers we bring to you the world's leading influencers who share their strategies and tactics and tools and shortcuts that can help you broadcast your brilliance. Now, it is really exciting because I am ... As you know who is up next week, right? You know who we got? Yap. We got Joel Comm who we mentioned earlier there, Perry. Perry Marshall: All right. Steve Olsher: Then the week after that we've got Ocean Robbins, and if you don't know Ocean, that's a heck of a story and that guy is a Push Button Influencer to the hilt. We're going to end the Podcast version here, make sure you go to pushbuttoninfluence.com to access your free surprise gift, to access all of the Push Button influence episodes including shows with John Lee Dumas, Pat Flynn, Russell Branson and many, many others. All right, we're going to play some fancy exit music here and then we're going to go into the green room to answer your questions. On behalf of my co-host extraordinaire, Alex Mandossian, I am Steve Olsher, and for Perry Marshall, we're now ending the Podcast version here of Push Button Influence. Perry Marshall: Thank you Steve, thank you Alex. Announcement: You just learned how to broadcast your brilliance. Tune in live to blab.im, Wednesdays at 4 pm Pacific, as the world's leading influencers share their proven strategies for leveraging the power of new media. For more information about your host, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher, to try and win free surprise gifts and to access every episode of Push Button Influence, visit pushbuttoninfluence.com. ###END###

Josh Turner is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and the founder of Linked Selling, a marketing firm specializing in fully outsourced LinkedIn lead generation campaigns. Their firm represents hundreds of clients across the globe who turn to Josh and his team to help them secure more leads, more appointments and consistently generate more revenue. In this episode Josh shares: His key tactics for systematically building relationships How to get off of the cash flow roller coaster once and for all What it means to be an “Authority Leader” and why it’s paramount to the ultimate success of your business The power of automating lead generation and the step-by-step process you can immediately leverage to create an on-going stream of highly-qualified prospects The two things you can do right now to put LinkedIn to work for you Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play Read Full Transcript This is Push Button Influence where the world's leading influences candidly share their exact strategies for maximizing leads, accelerating growth and generating massive exposure all by leveraging the power of new media. You can become the next Larry King, Oprah or Howard Stern. All you need to do is broadcast your brilliance. Push Button Influence teaches you how. Here are your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher. Steve Olsher: All right. All right. All right. Welcome, welcome, welcome to another edition here of Push Button Influence. I am your host, Steve Olsher along with my co-host extraordinaire, Alex Mandossian. Today, we are joined by the one, the only Josh Turner. Man, knowing how busy you are and knowing all the things that you have on the docket, my brother, thank you so much for being here with us. Now, Alex as we like to do every week here on Push Button Influence, we'd like to start out with a word. I think you have a word that is pretty darn special that I know you were just jumping out of your chair to share. What is your word of the week? Alex Mandossian: It starts with the same letter of my first name starts with. It's a word that defines Josh Turner for me. I've masterminded with Josh. I've gotten to know him a lot better. In fact, we even changed our launch date for Josh. We're supporting him. He's about to go into a launch. He's here with us right now live. That word is automation. Automation. Now, whether it's generating appointments automatically or it's automating a business and scaling it and growing bigger, you're known for automation whether it's LinkedIn, Facebook. Let's say online influence, Josh. What does automation mean to you? What is it meant for growing your business because you're on a meteoric rise right now. Josh Turner: Yeah. That's interesting. I think that a lot of the times when I'm in masterminds where we were at or just hanging out with peers or colleagues in the industry, that's the thing that people ask me about a lot. One of the things asked to me about is do we do a lot of automated webinars. People always want to know. How do you get this evergreen [files 00:02:16] that convert like this? It didn't start out doing that. It's grown overtime but definitely for the last couple of years, automation has been a big part of my business. The things you said about video, it's huge these days. There's nothing more powerful than speaking from a stage. With webinars, it's like speaking from a stage but virtually. You can do it in your pajamas and with automated webinars, you can have them running multiple times a day, every day of the week while you're just managing the business. As the business grows, for me, I'm essentially the face of the company. I'm the one that does a lot of that kind of stuff. It's probably the majority of the people on this call are in the same boat. It reaches a point though where you can't do everything you want to do. Automation is one of the things that when you start growing your business, you have to look to it to be able to get past some of those blocks that are going to be in your way. Alex Mandossian: One of the things with automation, Steve, second quick question is people think they lose marketing intimacy. They think they lose personalization and authenticity and genuineness, but automation doesn't have to be disingenuous. You can have an automated recorded live webinar and still talk on the chat live. You haven't lost any of the authenticity with automation with your business. It's still up there. Josh Turner: Yeah. No. I would totally agree with that. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Awesome. All right. My word for you, Mr. Turner is this bad boy right here, which if you can read the chicken scratch, that says inbound. For those on the podcast, you're like, "We can't read it." Of course, you can't read it because you're on the podcast. That word is inbound. My question for you is when it comes to your expertise, obviously you've done so much with LinkedIn but if I can speak a little bit for you, I do believe that part of your success, if not a large part of your success can really be attributed directly to the amount of inbound inquiries that you've been able to garner over the years in terms of how to leverage your expertise and what you bring to the table that they want. I know there are a lot of folks who just have these brilliant gifts. They are that best kept secret out there. They could benefit from inbound inquiries, appointments, etc. How do you recommend that people leverage? Let's just start with the LinkedIn conversation before we go a little bit more general. How do you recommend that people leverage LinkedIn specifically for inbound consultations, inquiries, etc? Josh Turner: Yeah. That's where I really started having success when I first started my business. It was using LinkedIn and the strategies that we teach now and then I teach in my book that's coming out soon. Some of the things that worked on LinkedIn 5, 6 years ago, back then, LinkedIn's a totally different animal right now but if you're in the place of growing your business and you're looking to LinkedIn as a source of inbound leads. If we're going to define a lead, it could be somebody opting in for your e-book or lead magnet or webinar or it could be signing up for a strategy session and reaching out to you to just line up a call to talk business and learn more about what you do. There's a number of tactics you're going to want to use. The basic strategy we teach in the book is one way to do it. We have clients that would set up the system and leads just come in on auto pilot at this point because they've positioned themselves as leaders and experts in their industry. They're serving their prospects in providing value and resource to them instead of just always talking about themselves all the time. When you can build a community that is really centered around what your prospects care about and not just all about you, that is a fantastic way to not only build lots of relationships and lots of top of mind awareness with really targeted prospects, but then also, as you build momentum to get those kinds of inbound leads coming in. That's one of the strategies that we teach. There's a lot of other stuff on LinkedIn, too. LinkedIn Pulse for example, long formed post publishing on LinkedIn is a great way to drive opt ins for e-books, webinars and stuff like that or to drive people to a scheduling form for strategy sessions. LinkedIn advertising, a good way to generate inbound traffic. Although you have to have a budget to be able to throw some money at it. Those are a few things off the top of my head. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Awesome. Alex? Alex Mandossian: The blabbers now watching inside the blab and of course, outside the blab, there's about 10 times as many people watching outside currently. There's one thing that's overlooked when prospecting. They forget that it's dating and then getting engaged and then getting married. If you lose the client, it's like a divorce but you really focus on that first date, which is the appointment. That's been lost. The appointment has been lost. People try to sell too soon and they lose the appointment. Why don't you talk about how to generate that appointment and why saying too much is like a first date where you stick your foot in your mouth and you never get that date? Josh Turner: Yeah. To go back to the philosophy I talked about a second ago, building a community and providing value and resources for your prospect is different than talking about yourself all the time. When you're the kind of person that's always talking about yourself all the time, it turns people off after a while. It's like being the person in a networking meeting or an event that's just walking up to everybody and sticking your business card in their face and rattling off all about what you can do for them. You'd be like, "I just got your name, buddy." That's the kind of person people want to run away from. For some reason, a lot of people go online and use these awesome tools like LinkedIn and Facebook and such. That's how they're acting. I don't blame people. I think it comes from a good place because we've all been ... Before all these cool online tools came around, what did we have to learn from? We had big companies that we watched advertising to us on television and radio and all these. It was just push advertising all the time. Now that we as small business owners have these tools in our hands, a lot of people take these tools and they implement those kinds of push advertising tactics. Where they think, "Okay. I'm going to go on Facebook. I'm going to go on LinkedIn. I'm just going to pimp my business constantly. I'm just going to constantly push it out there." It doesn't get good results doing that. It really turns people off. Instead, if you can position yourself as a really trusted resource and leader and more of a peer in the industry that you're trying to serve and really focus on building the relationship first, when you do that, and then a little bit further down the road, ask to talk business, that's the best way to maximize the response rate when you're trying to use a tool like LinkedIn to get appointments. Steve Olsher: Got you. Very cool, man. At this juncture, I believe there are, what? A few hundred million people on Linked ... What's the last number that you saw? Do you remember the last number you saw? Josh Turner: 400. Steve Olsher: 400, yeah. Obviously, a lot of people. Do most people use it wrong in your opinion? What are you seeing are some of those core mistakes that people are making when it comes to it? Obviously, you touched on some of these but what are some of the other? Maybe profile specific. Josh Turner: Sure. Steve Olsher: Again, I don't want to throw you in this box here, because I know you're a lot more than just LinkedIn but that's a big part of- Josh Turner: That's' okay. Steve Olsher: I know it's a big part of who you are. Josh Turner: Yeah. Steve Olsher: A big part of what people know you for. Josh Turner: Right. Steve Olsher: Maybe just a couple of key thoughts around profiles and some of the things that you've seen people just do horribly wrong. Josh Turner: Sure. Yeah. Profile specifically. First thing, people use LinkedIn for all sorts of reasons but if you're using it to try and generate business, to market your business, to get in front of prospects, to try and generate some appointments, let's focus on that. The mistakes that people make there profile specifically is, the first thing people are going to look at is going to be your picture. Let's say you send somebody a connection request, which is often the first touch point or if they just stumble on your profile somehow. They're going to look at your picture. They're going to think, "Does this picture look like a little gremlin that I want to avoid? Does this look like a nice, professional person that I'm going to consider reading more about them?" For most people, you got a decent headshot, you're in good shape there. Then they move on to your headline. This is where a lot of people falter because they'll have something like owner at GKS LLC or something like that. When I see that, it makes me think those people don't care about getting any benefit out of using LinkedIn. When you have a headline like that, it doesn't tell anybody anything. Yeah. It tells them that you own a company but you're going to be much better off if you structure your headline to really speak to the kinds of companies you serve and the benefit you provide them. Maybe some unique value proposition that you can work in there, something to that effect. That way, when one of your ideal prospects stumbles on your profile, first thing they're going to read is that headline. They're going to think, "This is somebody that's speaking my language." They're going to be interested to read more and then from there, they're going to go down to the next thing which is usually going to be your summary section, which is a place where then you can really start bringing them in, tell a little bit of a story, maybe include a testimonial or a case study and then close with a call to action at the bottom that's going to get them to take some next step with your business. That's one of the keys, too, is you'll look at your LinkedIn profile as the landing page. What is the one thing that you want people to do when they visit your profile? Is it that you want them to go sign up for a strategy session? Is it that you want them to sign up for your webinar? Is it that you want them to send you a connection request? Structure your profile to guide people into doing that. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Alex? Alex Mandossian: Okay. Next word from me is what LinkedIn can do better than Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or any other platform. They want to be the world's number 1 publishing platform, but they pre-qualify for business anyway better than any other platform that I know because you can get so specific as long as people have inputted content and numbers that are not wise. You have to be extremely specific. For those watching who have no clue how specific you can get, why don't you share how well we can pre-qualify? We're not just talking between vegetarians and meat eaters. We're talking about micro, micro nichefying. You can do it locationally, geographically. You can do it by size of business. Go ahead. Josh Turner: Yeah. When I first started my business, the first things I started trying were Twitter, Facebook, a little bit of LinkedIn and just doing the stuff that you hear a lot of people talking about with just posting updates and trying to engage and just putting stuff out there. The spray and pray strategy you might call it. Really quickly, I found this is not going to work for me. At the time, I was working as an outsource CFO, so a small consultant basically. They work out of my house just trying to get a client in the door and pay the bills. All the fluffy social media stuff didn't work. I looked at LinkedIn, which I had been using for a few years for the company that I worked for and I thought, "You know, this is where I need to be focusing." I went on LinkedIn. I ditched all the other stuff. I said, "Okay. Who are the types of business owners that I need to be getting in front of in the St. Louis area?" I went on LinkedIn and I started sending connection requests to hundreds of them. In a really short amount of time, I've built up a really solid database, a little bunch of business owners running pretty decent sized companies in the St. Louis area. That is the power of it. No matter what the avatar is, or the person you're going after, that is one of LinkedIn's strong suits, absolutely you hit the nail on the head is it's very difficult to do now on Facebook. Certain niches, you're going to be better off marketing on Facebook. The systems that we teach I talked about in my new book can be applied on either LinkedIn or Facebook. For a lot of industries especially B2B, LinkedIn is so powerful because you just can't go on Facebook and search for business owners in St. Louis that have between 10 and 100 employees. You can't do a people search like that. Maybe in their advertising platform, you can target in that way in certain regards. You can't connect with them on a personal level like that like you can within LinkedIn. Steve Olsher: Yeah. That's really, really, really sage advice. Let me ask you this, Josh because there are a lot of people who are pretty good. If you remember, my word was inbound. There are some people who are pretty good on the inbound side of the equation but not so good on the closing side of the equation. Getting an appointment is one thing. Of course, somewhat argued that's more than half the battle. I think there are people who would actually argue that moving people to take positive action is more than half the battle because they may be really good on the front end but not so good on the back end. How do you recommend? How do you work with some of your folks to get them to move from that initial point of inquiry to actually signing on the dotted line and becoming a client? Maybe some strategies around converting the conversation to a commitment. Does that sound familiar, Alex? Conversation and commitment? Yeah. Josh Turner: Conversation and commitment. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Josh Turner: Admittedly, my company's focus is on helping people generate appointments and leads. We don't do a whole lot in the area of sales coaching or sales training and such. I'll tell you one story I like to share with people is a roofing contractor who I know who has people go around door to door and harass people to try and take a bid for repairing the roof or giving them some new windows or something. He was telling me a story about 2 of the sales people. One of them has a ridiculously high close rate. Another one that's pretty darn low. He was telling me that the person that has the lower close rate actually made more money last year. The reason is because she was more persistent and had more at best. She worked harder. She got herself in front of a lot of people. Even though she wasn't as good, when she got in front of people, she made it up with work ethic and tenacity. Now, our next step is got to be improving her close rates so she can have the best of both worlds. That's something I like to tell people even if they're worried that their close rates are not as good as they want it to be, all those kinds of things. To answer your question more directly though about what can people do to better close once they're on an appointment? I think a big part of it is making sure that you're on the phone with the right people in the first place. That they're aware of the problems. That it's a real issue. That they're willing to invest in solving. Some of that comes into the indoctrination or the minding that you do before you get on the phone in the first place. Some of it has to do with just the targeting. Making sure that the folks that you're getting on the phone with are the right fit. That they're in a position to buy from you. All those kinds of things are I think really important. From a sales conversation standpoint, we have 3 sales guys on our team. There's all sorts of tactics that they use or processes they follow. At the end of the day, the biggest thing for us is just building value, showing people the path and then asking them, "Hey. What would it be worth to you to get these kinds of results? Would you like our help with it?" A good percentage of people say, "Yeah. I would like your help with it." Steve Olsher: Awesome. Yeah. Alex Mandossian: Josh, you have an appointment generator process and a tool to get appointments. Josh Turner: Right. Alex Mandossian: When you're in front of enough people as you indicated, no matter what your betting average, the more people that are in front of you, you're going to eventually learn and you get to eat because you closed more sales. Let's take my process. About 43 to 45 times a year, I have a discovery session on Fridays when I'm around. When I get the appointment, what I do to indoctrinate them before the appointment, to orient them on what to expect is a formative video. Prior to that video, with that discovery session, my closing rate for $25,000 client was really low. The moment I put that video in, what to expect, my values, and really indoctrinate in doctrine of what I believe in, everything changed. What's your belief? What happens between getting the appointment and actually having the appointment? Is there any involvement with the potential client and prospects in that interim? Which I found to be very helpful but some people don't have any. They're really good at the close but I find that indoctrinating them before we talk makes it a lot easier. Josh Turner: I think that's absolutely the case. With a lot of our marketing that is happening all along the way for weeks before a conversation, because somebody might attend a webinar. They might end up getting a number of emails. By the time they decide that they want to chat with somebody on my team or one of our coaches, they've seen a lot of our stuff. They really understand our business and what we're all about at that point. I think it's absolutely critical. If you're just getting on the phone with cold people that don't really know much about you, it's going to be a much, much harder close. You're going to have to be much, much better at selling if you're in that boat or just have something that is so hot that people are going to jump on it. I love that idea that you just shared though. I actually just wrote that down. Send in the video. Do you send that video out the day before the call? Alex Mandossian: Yeah. Now that's really interesting. Here's my process. I get about one 25K client every 2 weeks and about two 5K clients, $5,000 clients once a week. It's very profitable. It's over a million dollar funnel. If I sent that video out 3 days before, 1 week before, 2 days before, it doesn't have the impact. When I send it out 1 day before and I even mention it and do a recap at the very beginning of the discovery session, bam. It has a huge impact. I've put that inside the tweets so people can see and nod at it but having an orientation video is critical. Steve and I, for our forthcoming launch, we have indoctrination, too. "Here's what to expect," and with curriculum, too. Before people go into a membership site, you got to have an orientation of big picture. Here's what to expect to set a context. Getting the appointment is really important but I think a lot is lost in between the appointment and then the actual discussion. Josh Turner: I think that's super powerful, man. I think those are great points. I've taken a couple notes myself. Steve Olsher: Awesome. Welcome, everybody. If you're just joining us here live on blab, this is Push Button Influence. We broadcast every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific. Today, we've got Josh Turner joining us. Now Josh, you've got a book coming out, man. Actually, you just prerelease on that. Ironically enough or appropriately enough, the book is called Booked. Awesome, man. Josh Turner: Yeah. Steve Olsher: Give us an overview really of what Booked is all about. You talked about earlier, you alluded to some of the systems that you're teaching in the book. Can you give us a high level overview of what the book is all about and some of those systems? Josh Turner: Sure. It's really one system. It's the primary system that we have been implementing for clients at a higher agency, linked selling over the last 4 or 5 years. It's really been our bread and butter. It's really to a point where in the past, close to the best that we've decided now, "You know what? Let's get this thing out there. I think it can help a lot of people." That's proven to be the case. The book is really the story of how I came to develop the system both with myself and with my team. Just the nuts and bolts of the entire thing from A to Z. Walking people through, how to set it up, what it's all about. At a high level, it teaches people how to really systematically position themselves as leaders or experts in their space and then how to leverage that kind of positioning through messaging processes that we've been refining over the years to generate qualified appointments pretty much not on auto pilot I would say. If you put the work in, if you do the work, that you're going to have a consistent stream of appointments that you can rely on. We did a study a few weeks ago of 1300 business owners. It wasn't a little quick 2-question survey. The average time it took somebody to fill it out was 18 minutes. I was really blown away that so many people took the time to do it. The data that we got back was really amazing. One of the things that came from it was that we found that there was a question we asked. We said, "Do you sometimes have cash flow problems in your business? Do you consistently have cash flow problems in your business? Do you never have cash flow problems in your business?" 88% of people fell in one of the buckets that said, "We have cash flow problems in our business." 12% of respondents said they never have cash flow problems in their business. We looked at that data and it said, "What can we correlate with this? What's causing that?" The most interesting thing we saw is that of the 12% of businesses that don't have cash flow problems and if profitability is one of the measures of business's success then those businesses are succeeding at a bit of a higher level. If these more successful businesses, one of the things they said was that they do have systems to generate leads and appointments. There was another question where we asked people, "Do you have systems to consistently generate leads and appointments?" Almost all of the businesses that don't have cash flow problems have those kinds of systems in place. Meanwhile, the businesses that are struggling to maintain consistent cash flow do not have those kinds of systems in place, the majority of them. That was really striking to me. It's just pretty clear conclusion that that is one of the indicators of succeeding is that businesses that have the right kinds of system in place to keep new prospects coming in, new leads coming in so that we can continually get new clients on the books just like Alex said, he's got a system set up to continually bring new clients in. That's a stable, successful, profitable business. Meanwhile, a lot of other people unfortunately are out there is on what we call the cash flow roller coaster where 1 month, you got some clients. You feel good. You're busy. Forget about marketing. The next month, you run out of clients. You're back on that, have some rerun and try to market real quick to get some clients. That's a tough place to be. I think we've all been there at one point or another. It's a beautiful thing when you get off that roller coaster. Our system, what we teach in Booked is one way to do it. Steve Olsher: Awesome. Alex? Alex Mandossian: I'm going to ask you a question about rock bottom. If you've ever been familiar with what rock bottom feels like, Josh and what was that like for you? Before I do, I want everyone to know that we already have $100 going to kiva.org as a result of Josh. If you go to pushbuttoninfluence.com/donate, 100%, not 99, not 95, not 50 but 100% goes to kiva.org. We have generated over $221,000 in the past 5 years as a result. We're continuing it here. The reason why we're doing it is because 100 bucks, now if you bet 105 bucks, then you would be the sponsor. Right now, we sponsor it because we generated 100 bucks. Now I'm hoping we add a zero in the next few months. Now the goal is 100 bucks for a Kiva entrepreneur is 100 days of financing. Most of these folks make $1 to $2 a day. By the way, that represents about 1.5 billion people on earth that make that kind of money. Third world, they pay their loans back. They're not Americans. They actually pay their loans back. They don't default. pushbuttoninfluence.com/donate if you want us to brag about you in the 4th square, which is something that we are innovating here. I've talked to the CEO of Blab. Thanks to Raven Blair. I love her. She hooked me up with Sean Urian. That 4th box that we have, that's a great spot to put sponsors and they do a lot more with that. I've just wrote a question. Steve wrote it. Today's Blab is sponsored by Push Button Influence. Imagine if that's your company and you put a .com there. You are there for 1 whole hour and we have lots of people. There are a lot more people right now than there were at the beginning of the show. This is unlike a tele-seminar or any other kind of virtual presentation. That's a technique as an interviewer. I gave Josh some time to think about his rock bottom story. Rock bottom is really bed rock. It's a good starting point. Josh Turner: I have 2 of them. Yeah. It's challenging for me to pick just one because I've witnessed a couple. I've been on one myself. I think that when I was 22, I was part of my dad's company. He had a small remodeling company. I talk about this in my book. One day, he brought me into the office and showed me a stack of payables, invoices, and said, "It's too much. We're not going to be able to keep going." That was super, super tough. It is eye opening for me to see him at rock bottom and the impact that then that had on our family, on him and the trajectory that took him on for the rest of his life. He ran out of work. He couldn't keep the lights on and the hole was just too big. Another situation that's somewhat similar to that, a company that I worked for from 2003 to 2009. I was with this company for 6 years. I started off as basically just a finance person and small business though, I was able to really rise up quickly. I ended up being the CFO of the company in a few years because I worked my ass off and did good stuff. That company went from 5 to 23 million in annual revenue. In 2008, the bottom just dropped out. Ran out of work by November 2009. The company's investors and the bank were unwilling to put any more money, good money after bad as people say. That company was forced to shut its doors. Lot and lot of good people out of a job. The owner of the company ended up committing suicide actually after that happened. The toll it can take when you, yourself and your ego is so closely associated with your business and I don't tell the story much because it's a personal story. I don't like feeling like I'm using his story as a platform for my business because he was a friend and a mentor of mine. It's been a lesson of mine to say like, "You know what? This stuff isn't so important that you need to tie your ego so directly to the success of your business." It's tough when you've built something for 25 years and then it goes away. That one there was the closest rock bottom for me that I've got. Alex Mandossian: Thanks for sharing that, man. I'm sure that impacted you. It's interesting. Just the subtle shift for those of you that have children like myself. It's like, "I have to be with my children. I have to take care of them," versus "I get to take." It's that subtle mindset shift. I'm sure now after having experienced what you've experienced, it's pretty evident that you look at every single day, man because I know you well enough to know that you really appreciate and you get to do the things that you do. It's not that you have to do them. It's definitely clear in the way that you run your business and the way that you treat your people. Let's talk about being a leader because ultimately, you have been ... As you said, you've been an employee. You've been a leader. You've been called even a leader. First and foremost, which do you like better and why? Second, for those that are at the helm of their own organization, what business leadership tips can you offer them? Josh Turner: I like working for myself and running the show more so than working for other people at this point. I couldn't see going back to it in the near future. That's for sure. Leadership tips. I think that one of the things is I just mentioned, I like running the show better. The truth of the matter is, is that the people running the show are the people that I serve on my team that work with me and that have helped us build this company and get us to where we're at. I get to have fun and come on these things and help spread the message. The real people running the show are people like Ryan who I think is on this call, who is our Director of Marketing and my right hand man, Ben and Alison, my assistant. All sorts of other people on our team that are working hard to continue pushing the rock up the hill every single day. I think that's one of the biggest things that I've learned going from a small company where we had a couple of people to a company now with about 30 people is that you have to get out of your own way. Your role as a leader absolutely changes when you have to realize that you can't just do it by brute force. You have to empower other people on your team to continue. Steve Olsher: Awesome. Alex? Alex Mandossian: Yeah. To add on to that question, Southwest Airlines is one of the only profitable airlines in the US. They hire for attitude and they train for skill. For many years, I hired for skill and trained for attitude and found that didn't work. What's your hiring philosophy? Many people use LinkedIn simply for hiring. It gets the bad rep of being a monster.com for hiring but it's much more than that. Josh Turner: Sure. Alex Mandossian: What's your hiring philosophy so that you don't have- Josh Turner: Right now, we're hiring in a position for an accounting manager. The process is essentially, the first step is that Alison who I just mentioned, she works them through an interview that's really all about culture. From there, there is an interview that is about skills then we work them through exercises to demonstrate whether they actually have those skills or not. Make sure that they're punctual and can do the basics of the job. Alex Mandossian: With culture, does that mean core values? Does that mean beliefs? How does culture- Josh Turner: Yeah. Yeah. It's really just our core values that we've identified as a company. Making sure that we ask questions to really bring out is this person aligned with these things? One of our core values is called the best, which basically means that we don't want to be good at what we do. We want to be the best at what we do. We're pushing to be great. We want to make sure that we have people on the team that are having very high standard for themselves and don't just think 75% is okay. We're looking for 100%, stuff like that. Alex Mandossian: Yeah. All right. Let's go back to LinkedIn for a second. There are folks here who are joining. I know you get all sorts of things around appointments and whatnot to talk about. Just watching the questions that go by here, there's definitely a lot of questions about LinkedIn so let me just bring it back to that for a second. Josh Turner: Sure. Alex Mandossian: LinkedIn is a lot more robust than people even realize. It's like shall we say layers of the onion. Just keep going and keep going and keep going. Just when you think you understand it, there's more to understand. What do you think is the single most underutilized tool or element or ability of LinkedIn that people are just missing out on? Josh Turner: It's a tough one because different businesses have different needs and reasons for using it. I think the main thing is just that most people are not using it proactively. They're sitting back and seeing what's happening. They're going on LinkedIn. They check their inbox. Maybe they go into some groups and try and comment on a post or two. That's really passive. That's just participating and playing a part in other people's games. I think the people that are getting the best results out of LinkedIn, the big success stories you hear, the people that are signing lots of clients on LinkedIn, they're proactively executing a plan. They're continually reaching out to new prospects and developing relationships and putting themselves at the forefront of the conversation. I think that at the end of the day, that's really the main recipe for success. Tactically, if they're looking for a specific area within LinkedIn that maybe is underutilized, I guess right now, I'll probably say LinkedIn sponsored updates and ads because you don't hear many people that are using them effectively. It can be an amazing tool for lead generation that I think most people just shy away from because they think that it's too expensive or something. It is really a powerful tool, LinkedIn ads. We do quite well for maybe a number of clients that do well. I know a lot of other folks in the industry that do. At the end of the day, that just comes down to understanding your numbers. People oftentimes say, "LinkedIn ads are a little expensive. We're going to stick with Facebook." The cost of the ad doesn't matter. It's what's the ROI? If a lead is going to cost you 10 bucks on LinkedIn and a lead is going to cost you $5 on Facebook, that doesn't matter to me. What is the overall lifetime value of that customer worth to you? Is it worth paying 10 bucks for a lead? Don't forget if you can get them for 5 bucks somewhere else, as you're growing your business, you have to have more channels to explore. In some niches, Facebook ads just don't work whereas LinkedIn ads do work really well. A lot of people just aren't doing that stuff. I think that's probably the most underutilized area. Alex Mandossian: We go to predictions. What do you say? Steve Olsher: It sounds like a plan. Alex Mandossian: I want to go back to old school because I think it's been lost but it works wonders for us. When someone signs up for a sale, an affiliate partner, that's something remarkable, being remarked about, we use the phone. We call them up. It seems to be a lot more intimate to get a phone call than to get an email. Of course, text is between there. How do you feel about the phone and connecting with folks that way? Are you pure email guy? Does phone come into the whole process of- Josh Turner: It absolutely does. These online tools, as far as I'm concerned they are tools to get people into real world conversations and to build real world relationships because that's where business happens. The things that we teach and the things that we do for our clients are all about getting these prospects off of LinkedIn, off of Facebook, off of email and getting them on the phone. That is usually the main priority with all the campaigns- Alex Mandossian: For an email campaign, we want to get them out of the inbox and go to our web page so that there's no competition for an appointment campaign we want to get them out of wherever they are and on the phone so they're listening to us. Josh Turner: Right. Alex Mandossian: Okay. Josh Turner: Yeah. Absolutely. Steve Olsher: All right. We're going to go into the green room here in just a couple of minutes here, which is one of the advantages of joining us live here on Push Button Influence every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific, 7PM, Eastern. We bring you the world's leading influencers. This is your time. This is your chance. This is your opportunity right now to use the chat room there. When you do a /Q at the beginning of the sentence and then type your question, it will then go into the queue and we'll be able to answer that after we end the podcast version here and go into this specific Q&A there with Josh. Now is the time to do it and use that. Josh, let me give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about first and foremost your launch. Second, talk about your book, Booked and where people can find out more information about both. Josh Turner: Yeah, absolutely. Basically, they're one and the same thing. We have a big book launch that starts on Monday. A new book that I have coming out called Booked. I touched on it earlier. It's the complete system for what we do for our clients all over the world and all sorts of industries. Companies like Microsoft have hired us to implement this system all the way down to very small mom and pop businesses and solo entrepreneurs. It really is fit for anybody. It just depends on if you're the kind of business that does business by getting clients and the way you get those clients is by getting on the phone with them or getting face to face, this is going to be a system that you're going to want to really look at. It's not the same old social media stuff that you've seen before. It's very specific in terms of lead generation. That's the goal, generating appointments. For anybody that wants to get a copy, I know you guys are going to be sharing some leads with folks later. You'll be emailing everybody your LinkedIn stuff but it's going to be coming out on Monday. Keep an eye out for that. I know that Steve and Alex will keep you guys posted when it comes out. Yeah. It's going to be awesome. I'd love to get a copy in everybody's hands. Steve Olsher: Awesome. Alex? Alex Mandossian: Let's talk about predictions. Where is the future killer tool for booking appointments? Where do you think it's going 3 years from now? On the internet, it's like dog years right? We talked about dog years before. It's like 7 years in real life for every year on the internet, at least that's what it feels like to me. 3 internet years, where will we be in generating appointments? Is it going to be virtual reality? That's coming out of ... Zuckerberg has dedicated over a billion dollars to it. What's going to happen? Josh Turner: I think that your guess is as good as mine. Bigger picture, I think that things are going to change so dramatically. You just alluded to this virtual reality. I think things are going to change so dramatically that the way that businesses right now can go on and market and get business may not work at all or maybe non-existent 3, 5, 10 years from now. We can't see it right now because we're here. Humans have a hard time seeing. How could this ever change? This is the way we do things. I think the change that we're going to see in the next 10 years is going to be so rapid that for businesses right now, I think it's really, really important to be taking advantage of all these things that we have at our disposal now to get in, to position yourself as an authority now and to really build a foundation now because a few years down the road, it might be a whole lot tougher. There's going to be barriers to entry that don't exist right now. I think the game is going to change in a major way. It's probably not going to be the best change for small business. Then again, there's always opportunities in every market. As long as the AI and the robots don't take over everything- Alex Mandossian: Steve, let me throw this question to you. What do you think? Steve Olsher: Specifically, as far as appointment generation and leads are concerned- Alex Mandossian: It's over communicated. It's over marketed. Steve Olsher: Yeah. I think actually it's really interesting in terms of the way that Josh started down this path in terms of let's just look at St. Louis. Let's go out. Let's nail our market. Let's be that big fish in the small pond. Frankly, I think it's all coming full circle again. I think you're going to see a lot of folks wanting that intimate relationship again where they actually know the person. They like the person. They want to do business with that person. I think for those who have been focusing on local marketing, local advertising and really servicing local clients, to me, that is where the future is. Believe it or not. I know was we go more grandiose, I think ultimately we come back to a much smaller, more granular level. Alex Mandossian: I tell you. Here's my very controversial prediction. I believe that email is not going to have the impact that it has. I don't think it has the impact right now anyway. 10% open rates, that's 105 impact. I believe audiences are going to have impact. We have 100% open rate. You subscribe to an iTunes podcast, 100% open rate, you're going to see it. You're a fan and you've seen a post. I believe a point in this will be generated from a transparent, public display going into a phone versus email out or private message. I see that happening right now with me. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Alex Mandossian: I think that trend may continue because we already live in a transparent space. It's really hard for a country to commit any kind of war crime these days because it's going to get tweeted out. That's been a positive impact of social media. We've seen that in different parts of the world but I think appointments and generating new interests and attention, Ada, 150-year old formula, the A, the first A is, the hardest A is getting attention. Steve Olsher: Yeah. Alex Mandossian: I think that's the direction that's coming up. I'm not really sure but it feels that way. Steve Olsher: All right. Josh, let's do this as we wrap up the podcast version here of Push Button Influence. If people want to get a hold of you, where is the best place for them to go? How do they find you? Josh Turner: You can look me up on LinkedIn, Josh Turner. I'd love to connect with anybody that's here tonight. Just let me know that Alex and Steve sent you so I know who you are. I would say other than that, just I would love for everybody to sign up to get a copy of my book that's coming out on Monday, February 8th. It's going to be free for a few days. I saw Alex put a link in the chat a minute ago but I don't know where it went. Should we let everyone know what that link was again? Steve Olsher: You are muted, Mr. Mandossian. Let's try one more time. There we go. You're still muted. Now, there we go. Much better. Josh Turner: There he is. Alex Mandossian: Your relatives during Thanksgiving time? Steve and I put up a web page to get a free copy. alexvideotips.com/booked. Go check that out. You can get a free copy. It's very generous of Josh. He's throwing money at it. It's costing him. No money to send it to you so go check that out and you can get it. All bets are off after this blab. Done. Steve Olsher: Awesome. All right. Josh, here's what we're going to do, man we're going to wrap up the podcast version. We're going to go into the green room, which means that after this fancy exit music here, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be answering your questions so that's the benefit of joining us live every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific so that you can ask our guest your questions. That's exactly what we are going to do. Alex Mandossian, once again my friend, my co-host extraordinaire, and it's been amazing. Josh Turner, we got to give you 2 big thumbs up there, man and thanks so much for joining us here on Push Button Influence. There we go, 10 full fingers field goal. Superbowl. Wait quick Superbowl prediction. Josh, who's going to win? Josh Turner: I am going to go with the Panthers. Steve Olsher: How many points? Josh Turner: I'm going to say 7. Steve Olsher: Alex, who's going to win? Josh Turner: Carolina by 6. Steve Olsher: I'm going to take Carolina by 21. Blow out. Blow out. There you have it. Josh Turner: Wow. Wow. Steve Olsher: Join us next week for Push Button Influence. I believe we've got a pretty amazing guy on next week, that we seem to do every week here. I think we got Perry Marshall on next week and then Joel Comm after that then Ocean Robins after that. Lots of really interesting characters here on Push Button Influence sharing their brilliance. We will talk to you guys next week after this fancy little exit music, we'll go into the green room. Speaker 1: You just learned how to broadcast your brilliance. Tune in live to blab.im. Wednesdays at 4PM Pacific. As the world's leading influencers share their proven strategies for leveraging the power of new media. For more information about your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher, to claim your free surprise gift and to access every episode of Push Button Influence, visit pushbuttoninfluence.com. ###END###

Pat Flynn is the founder of Smart Passive Income and a recognized thought leader in the areas of online entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and lifestyle businesses. His podcast, Smart Passive Income, is consistently one of the top 10 most popular podcasts in ALL of iTunes and his blog is read worldwide by tens of thousands of readers everyday. Pat was one of the first entrepreneurs to publicly display his monthly and annual income, expenses and net profit. This degree of transparent, authentic leadership has propelled him towards being recognized as one of today’s most celebrated new media influencers. In this episode Pat reveals: His proven process for identifying pending opportunities and what you must do to take full advantage of the potential upside. How being a new media influencer can massively impact the trajectory of your business and your life. What single initiative provides the highest ROI for you of ALL currently available marketing options. What most aspiring new media influencers get COMPLETELY wrong and how avoiding this one mistake can reap significant financial rewards for you. The most cost-effective and reliable hardware and software tools you ABSOLUTELY should be using in your business. Download Listen in a New Window iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Leave a Review Clammr It Subscribe via RSS Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Blab Google Play Read Full Transcript Announcer: This is Push Button Influence where the world's leading influencers candidly share their exact strategies for maximizing reach, accelerating growth and generating massive exposure, all by leveraging the power of new media. You can become the next Larry King, Oprah or Howard Stern. All you need to do is broadcast your brilliance. Push Button Influence teaches you how. Here are your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher. Steve: Welcome to another edition of Push Button Influence with the one and only Alex Mandossian, who would be on that side of me if you are live on Blab with us and Kaplan who will be on that side of me if you are on Blab live with us and I am Steve Olsher so welcome, welcome. Oh man, super excited today. Is that like your Egyptian little dance Mr. Mandossian? What exactly is it that you are doing there? Alex: You go Far East because we are a West Coast show and I want to go east. Steve: You are walking like an Egyptian already, nice. As we do every episode here on the Push Button Influenced, we start out with a word. I know Mr. Mandossian, you have a word for Pat Flynn, so what would your word of the day be and why? Alex: Well, I know Pat a lot less chronologically than you do and he was introduced to me by you and I thank you for that. Now studying up on him for the past week and a half, the word is absolutely, positively "transparency." One thing I realized is that came before some other folks who'd list their income. One of them happened to be on our show. He was our second guest. His name starts with a "J". I am wondering, Pat, what made you decide to list your income on your website and why that level of transparency? You talk about family. You talk about 2008 and being let go and your story is awesome. It's an inspiration for anyone not in a recession, but why list income? Because I think it's a … [Inaudible]. Pat Flynn: Sure, after I got laid off in LA and again, thanks guys for having me here. Thanks for everybody who is watching and on the replay, too, if there is a replay. Blab does replays, right? Steve: They do. Pat Flynn: This is my first time on Blab. It's awesome, loving it. Steve: Yes, we take full credit. I love that. Pat Flynn: Anyway, when I got laid off, I soon discovered this world of online business and when I got really excited about it, I started following every guru that I could find because I wanted to learn from the best. When I started doing that, I started subscribing to all their email lists. I think I was on 25-30 different email lists. I was constantly getting emails. I tried to connect what was working for them and I quickly found out what wasn't working for me. What made me feel disgusted of what I was reading and how I was being treated. I always felt like they wanted me to spend money with them before they wanted to get to know me first. Every time I had to ask them questions, I would always get these canned answers and on their sites I would only see what I knew was just the good parts because while I was building the business I knew it was very hard, but it wasn't always shown that way from these people. When I got into this space after I did really well with my Green Exam Academy website and helping people pass an exam in the architecture industry, that was my first foray into online business. When I wanted to share everything, I was just like, "You know what? Nobody is sharing everything. I am going to share everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, the wins, the failures. I think it will be kind of cool if for this first month only, October 2008, I share how much money I make. I just want to show everybody what happened, how this changed my life and that this is actually possible and you could do it in a legit way." Once I did that, the response to Sharing My Income Report was just so amazing that I just kept it going because it was apparent that was going to be something that was going to help me standout in this space and that has definitely been the case. Now, eight years later, it's still going strong and you could see the progression. I thought I was doing well at $8000 in October 2008 per month and now I am at $108,000 per month, which is awesome. People have been able to follow me along the way and they feel like they know who I am as a result of just being transparent through all the ups and the downs. Steve: Yes absolutely, all right my man, here is my word of the day and it is funny we both had the "TR," but we have a different "TR" going and if you can see that, my word of the day is "trolls." It's interesting because you just can't seem to avoid them damn trolls when you get a little bit of notoriety going on. My question for you, Pat, is how do you deal with those who are well, let's just say, not very nice to you in the online world? Pat Flynn: Trolls are interesting because I started to get real trolls in 2010 and there was a person in that year who had commented on one of my posts and it was a comment that was essentially a thousand words in length and it was ripping me apart. It was telling me how I was a scammer, how I was just this guy who was pretending to be somebody who I wasn't online and just point after point, all things untrue, but all things that really hurt. It hurt me that he posted this publicly. He didn't just send this to me via email, but it was obvious because he was posting it publicly he wanted to get some sort of reaction, which typically trolls want to do. Well, I decided to ignore this person, which is what we are taught. You don't spend any time with them, don't give them any energy because there's so many other people who do deserve your time. However, I left that comment up there and I just replied. I typically reply in a very honest, passive aggressive way, "I thank you for your honesty. I appreciate you and I have other people to spend time with your ..." But what really concerned me and what really made this particular troll standout was, and Richard here says, "Kill them with kindness." That's always been the case for me. I started getting emails from my friends who said, "Pat, who is this guy who left this comment that was a thousand words in length on my blog?" I was like, "What?" I would go there. He would copy and paste the same exact comment, ripping me apart anywhere on the web where I was featured as a guest on a show or mentioned in a guest post or where I guest posted. There was 40 or 50 copies of this comment and I was like, "Wow, OK. This is not fun." I reached out to this person because I was just like, "There is something going on here. This isn't normal. Maybe there is a misunderstanding. What did I ever do to you? Maybe I did something? I want to find out." I actually reached out to this person, asked to get on Skype with them. They denied the Skype call, but in an email conversation I found out that this person knew that because I had such a big audience that he was going to get traffic coming to his site as just from doing this strategy. Steve: He was hitchhiking. Pat Flynn: All I could do was just laugh. I was like, "That's your strategy? I am sorry because everybody is going to your site and they are just incredibly upset at you." It just didn't make any sense to me. That was one instance of a troll who went above and beyond. There was a number of instances where I did not know because nobody told me until I found out on clicks coming in from a Google Analytics that I was getting a high number of clicks from different forums where people talk about people who are potentially scammers. I have learned to stay out of them, but one time I went in and somebody called me scum of the earth. It was obvious in this person's description of me that there was a lot that this person didn't know about me that was just based off of a few things this person has heard and misjudgments. I actually reached out to this person, too, and we had a conversation. We got on Skype together. I showed this person my income reports, showed this person my accounts and to the back-ends of some of my affiliate products that I promote and this person has since become one of my biggest, raving fans. It's interesting, although we are told to stay away, it's hard. You have to navigate a little bit and depending on the situation you can sometimes, sometimes not always, but sometimes if there is a clear misunderstanding, if they finally understand truly who you are, then they can often turn around and become one of your biggest fans. If it's obvious they are just doing it to get traffic to their site, then you don't want to even the name of them, don't want to even give the site of day. That's my experience with trolls. Steve: Yes, thanks for sharing that, Alex? Alex: Well, I call them poachers when they do that and my first time that Carol Mandossian was online, you have met her Steve during New Year's, she still doesn't know what I do, Pat, my mom. She goes to a website that says "Don't buy from Alex Mandossian until you read this." I trademarked my name and now a cease and desist will go out so that my mom doesn't see that anymore. The first site she goes to, right? The one thing that spoke to me in just researching you because as I said, I am newer to your world than Steve is, it is 2500 years ago a guy by the name of Socrates, who mentored Plato, who mentored Aristotle, who mentored Alexander the Great, he came up with the whole Socratic method. I noticed the "Ask Pat" on your website and it has made me a lot of money over the years of utilizing that Socratic method. I am wondering how do you use it in podcasting and how successful has it become because I don't see anything easier and more profoundly powerful than curating through your tribe versus curating through other people? Pat Flynn: Yes, you are absolutely right. It's really easy just to ask your audience what they need help with. When you do it in a way where it collects their voicemail questions, for example, using Speak Pipe, which is the tool I use to do that and you have a podcast and you can put them all together and help even more people than that one person whose question you are asking or who is asking that question. It is massively powerful. I started this show because I actually started tacking on these voicemail questions at the end of my normal podcast. You imagine a 45 minutes to an hour-long podcast and I would add an additional question after that, which would often go between 10 and 20 minutes. It became quite a lengthy show and some people complained because the topic of the question was not always matching the topic of the show, so I stopped doing that. Then I met a guy named John Lee Dumas, who just happens to do a 45 minute podcast seven days a week and I got into a conversation with him at a coffee shop. We became good friends. We are still obviously, good friends. I was like, "Dude, how in the world do you do all that? You are a machine." He was like, "Batch processing assistants, boom and that's it." I was like, "Oh my gosh, that makes such complete sense." He does all of his recordings I think every Tuesday, knocks them out back to back to back. For me, for Ask Pat, I knock them all out Sunday evening. I can do an entire week's worth of episodes in one hour and 15 minutes on a Sunday. I get to deliver content to five specific people answering their questions, but not only that, thousands of people are listening to each of those individual shows. Plus, now I have sponsors on the show, so I am making between $300 and $400 per episode. For an hour of my time on the weekend, I can make $2000, serve my audience, have them stay connected to my brand and build a deeper relationship with me. Not only that, get more exposure to people who have not found me yet, who through sharing or iTunes are discovering me. You are right. The Socratic method in getting your audience involved, people who are listing you may feel like that's a representative of them. A lot of people have the same question and a lot of people actually play the game where they listen to the question and they pause. This is funny. I just found this out recently, but a number of people do this. They listen to the question. They pause. They come up with their own answer in their head and then they play to see if my answer matches theirs, which is really fun. I'm like, "Maybe there is a way to turn that into an app?" It's so fun. Ask Pat has done really, really well. We just passed I think six million downloads since about two years ago actually. It's been exactly for two years. Now I am seeing a lot of other Ask blank shows coming about. One of my favorites is Ask Gary V. I don't know if he got that idea from me or not, but whatever the case is he is doing awesome and I love his stuff, too. This Ask thing, this getting people into your brand by asking them and having them actually influence what you talk about is super important. Alex: Steve really quick, just future and fellow podcasters as John Lee always says, one thing that Pat just said those of you watching, assembly line content generation is super important because you are in the zone of creating. Whether it's a Sunday or Tuesday like John does, he does eight guests and some people don't show up so that's a good thing because he has an editorial calendar, if you have a content creation day and I know many of you are going to start your own podcast, please listen to what he just said because that's super important. It relieves a lot of stress from creating. Steve: Yes absolutely. Pat, does this look familiar? Pat Flynn: Yes it does. Steve: Do you remember that, remember that bad boy? Pat Flynn: That's when we first met. Steve: It is and I just have to read what you wrote it. You wrote "Steve, the way you execute on your ideas is awe-inspiring. Thank you for having me in your book and your event, Pat Flynn." I have to tell you man, that is so cool. I have been thinking about this all week when I … Come on, Alex. Now you are going to go grab your book aren't you? I have been thinking about this all week because there is a huge difference between … And yes, it's a shameless plug for the book. It's Internet Propatts, P-R-O-P-A-T-T-S, for those listing on the podcast, shameless plug. One of the things you have said and one of the things you are so good at is executing on ideas. Over the years I am sure there have been many an idea that you executed on that did not come to pass. Lots of people have lots of ideas. How does Pat Flynn know when it's time to cut the rope? Pat Flynn: That's the million-dollar question, right? How do you know when to stop? How do you know to keep going? It's all about confidence. It's all about having an understanding that this thing you are actually working on is going to work. I appreciate this lead up into what I am sure we are going to get into talking about, which is my upcoming book Will it Fly? which is all about validating your ideas so that you do have that confidence. Through Ask Pat, another byproduct of doing the show Ask Pat is I get these voicemail questions coming in every day, so I get to hear from the voice of my audience what it is their biggest struggles are. I never have to guess anymore. I can see based on the number of people who ask the same question which ones are most important and that by far was the number one question, how do I know if this thing I am working on is going to work or not? A lot of times you might think, "You just do it and if it works great, if not you start over." But a lot of us don't have that luxury of the time and the money to just try things blindly and if you do that and you build businesses based on assumptions or even if you build businesses based on when people say they are going to buy something from you … If you have a good idea, you share it with somebody and they are like, "Yes that's awesome," and you build a business off of that. It's still you are treading on dangerous grounds because what people say, what people do can be completely different. Tim Ferris was the first one to talk about business validation and micro-testing back in 2007 when the Four Hour Work Week came out. There is a chapter called "Testing the Muse" Chapter 10, Income Auto Pilot Part two, I think was the title. Anyway, I wrote the book just recently so it's very fresh in my mind. In it, he talks about the only way to know if customers are going to pay you for that idea is to actually ask your customers to pay you for that idea. That's how you know that the thing you are working on is actually worth pursuing. I have made many mistakes in the past of not following that validation process and just building first and then trying to force that product or that plug-in or that software on to people. You build the thing. You shout out of the rooftops and you are like, "Buy my thing," and then nobody buys it and you are left wondering why? If you take this validation iterative process, you have failure points along the way where if this didn't work, then you can figure out that part before you move on to the next and you can always figure out what's wrong. That's why validation is so important. There's many examples in the past where I have done this wrong. Back in 2010 I had built or I wanted to build a couple WordPress plug-ins because I had two friends who were building plug-ins at the exact same time, completely separate niches, but they both made six figures in the initial launch and they were making six figures a month from their plug-ins. I was like, the dollar signs were coming into my eyes. I'm like, "This is amazing. I need to get in on this." I soon found out that building software is much harder than it actually looks. I hired a designer and a developer. I paid this person over the course of the period of time I was working on this $15,000. Those plug-ins never saw the light of day because actually those ideas were (A) never fully fleshed out because I had rushed into them and I said, "Just build this thing. I want it to do this." But when it comes to software, you need to tell your developer exactly down to the button and where that button goes and wireframe the whole thing. Because this person was overseas, there was translation miscommunications and when you have that drawing, you can't not see that. Make sure you wireframe. That's the first thing. Second thing is I just rushed into it and because I didn't know exactly what I wanted, he was having trouble developing it. What was supposed to take four weeks to complete, actually ended up taking 16 weeks to complete and it was just a mess, a load of money spent and those plug-ins never saw the light of day. The most interesting part though was they finally finished after 16 weeks of what I wanted and I shared it with a couple of my colleagues and a couple friends and they were like, "Meh …" I was like, "Meh? This is great." They are like, "Yeah, you are not saving people that much time with this thing that I wanted to build." It crushed me because I had spent all this time, money and effort. If I had simply told people what those ideas were in the beginning, it would have been very clear to me what I was doing and that I wasn't supposed to go down that route or I could shape that thing into something that would be much better and actually useful. That's why when you come up with an idea one of the first things you should do is talk about it with other people. Steve: Yes awesome, Alex? Alex: Well, let's talk about Will It Fly? I am going to ask you this question in a moment, Pat, so just prepare for it. Where were you? Who surrounded you? When was it when you were first inspired in thinking, "I want to write this book." Will It Fly? The promise of the book typically if you are an author is always the subtitle. The subtitle is How to Test, a key word there, a four letter word, Test Your Next Business Idea so You Don't Waste Your Time and Money. Those of you watching right now, many of you are students, some of you are just of Pat's, between time and money, which one is more precious? Usually money comes up, but if you have a couple of days to live, it's usually time. The time waster that's the biggie of not going in the wrong direction enthusiastically. I am very curious about what this book is about? Launching a book is very difficult when you don't have a platform. You obviously do have one. Where were you? What inspired you to start writing this book and what are your hopes for it? Pat Flynn: Yes, thank you for allowing me to talk about it. I'm very excited because just before we got on the call here, I checked on Amazon and it's the top 100 Amazon bestsellers and it's still on pre-order right now. This is incredible. I'm excited for Monday when it comes out. The book is a validation book. How to test your business idea before you actually build it. There's actually two components to it. There's the obvious one, the product to market fit, so there's market research involved. How do you position yourself in that market amongst everybody else who is there? They say you have to stand out from the crowd to succeed. How do you know how to do that unless you know what the crowd is? There's a lot of exploration in determining what's already out there to serve that target audience related to your idea. Then it's getting into your customer's head to figure out truly what are the problems that you are solving? We could talk a little bit more about the exercises they go through in the book to help you determine what those problems are and how to find those right solutions and how they match up with your idea. The first part of the book, which is actually the most important, it's a different kind of validation. A lot of people who talk about the process of starting a business actually skip over and a lot of people who start a business skip over because it might not be that exciting as some of the other stuff, but it is so important. This is the validation in terms of how does this business idea, this thing you are so excited about, how does it fit to you? How does it validate your life, your goals, your strengths, where you want to go? The first part of the book, which is actually pretty short, it's very powerful. There's a number of exercises in there, three to be exact that walk you through the process of determining what is it that you are actually doing here? Why are you doing what you are doing and how does this business actually fit into it? A lot of times I have run these exercises through with a number of people and there's immediate red flags that pop up like, "Oh my gosh, I am so glad I am discovering this now instead of two years down the road when even if the business were to be successful, it's obvious that it wouldn't fit into the kind of lifestyle I want." That's really, really important. I know a lot of people I talk to who are incredibly successful entrepreneurs, but they are not fulfilled as spouses or they feel like they are failures as parents because they have gone up at the top of the ladder, but they are not up the right ladder. Alex: Something is missing. Pat Flynn: Right, right. It's important to think about this stuff initially and I do it in a fun way where it's more than just like, "Oh, what do you want five years from now?" which is a dull exercise. I put you into a situation using thought experiments to help you feel what it would be like to actually truly think about the future. Actually, there's another exercise called the history test, don't worry, there's no failure in it, but you are actually looking at the past. Looking at your previous jobs, your volunteer work, any clubs you have been a part of and determining what you liked and disliked about each of those things so that you can create this pattern of, "Whoa, I actually did well and flourished in these situations. I actually did poorly and hated all this stuff." You have to make sure you know those things before you move forward so that you can incorporate the things you like in what you are doing and make sure to not incorporate the things you don't like in what you are about to do. My other favorite one, I am just giving away the whole book right now by the way, which is fine. My favorite test is called the shark bait test. This is where you actually put yourself on the show Shark Tank. I would assume that most people who are here or who are listening have seen the show Shark Tank, where you are up there and you are pitching with the sharks, Mr. Wonderful and Damon Johnson and everybody is there. This thought experiment, you put yourself up there. You have done your pitch and then Mr. Wonderful is there in the middle. He has his fingers pressed together like this and he just looks up at you with his eyes, like laser beams and he says, "What's stopping me from hiring somebody to do exactly what you just said to do? What makes you so special? Why should I work with you?" This is a tough question. I have actually seen people just fall, crumple into pieces when he asks this question because it's difficult, but you need to know what your special abilities are, what your unique advantages … That's not necessarily a USP or a unique selling proposition. It's an unfair advantage. What's unique about you that nobody else can touch that you can bring to whatever is that you are doing? When you have those ingredients you can win at whatever idea you end up choosing to do as long as those fit into your goals. That's the first part of the book, really important, but actually really funny, too. I walk you through the process in the book, but not only that, there is a companion course that goes along with the book, completely free. Very much inspired by The Walking Dead actually. I haven't told very many people this. The Walking Dead, one of my favorite shows. My wife and I watch it all the time. Alex: My son's favorite show, Gabriel's favorite show. Pat Flynn: It's so good. We actually go to the conventions. It's insane. We don't get into Cosplay, just simply because we don't have access to a makeup artist. Although if we did that would be awesome. At the beginning of every episode of Walking Dead for those of you who watch it, you might remember that before the episode starts there is a voiceover guy who says, "Go to Walkingdeadstorysync.com to get some behind the scenes, some background information," stuff that you can see that is in addition to, a supplement to the episode you are watching live. I wanted to incorporate that into the book, too. You can actually go into the companion course, which is completely free like I said and chapter by chapter as you are reading, get all the things you need that I talk about. All the links are conveniently there. Videos that explain and walk you through the exercises, bonus interviews that are related to that particular piece of content, download the worksheets that you can get that I talk about in the book to make it easy and just enhance this reading experience. From a marketer's perspective because I tell it like it is. I'm transparent. Obviously, what I am doing is I am creating a high value proposition for people to leave me there email address, of course, and because I am using something like Teachable.com where I am housing this free course, that's a cool platform. It's almost like your own way to create your own you-to-me platform on your own site, where once people are in one course, they already have all the information in the system where they just simply need to one click purchase anything else you have to offer in the future. My idea here is from the book, collect people's email addresses, blow them away with the content, inspire them and in the future later this year I have courses coming out that are going to be on the same platform. They are going to use the exact same login information and it's going to be easy for me to upsell them into that particular course. It's just going to be a natural progression because that course is obviously going to be a perfect continual conversation that we are having. Steve: Let's do this, Pat. Alex: That was a mini-repurposing e-course, all within about six … Steve: Yes, very, very good. Pat, here's what I want to do because you are segueing almost perfectly into what I wanted to ask you because I know you have had … We talked about trolls earlier, but I know you have had some backlash over the years about actually trying to make money and make a living doing this stuff. It's like people come to you and you have all discrete content. You have all this great free stuff and then all of a sudden you are like, "Oh yes, by the way, I have a son, who I have to feed, so I might actually have to sell something." It's like you get all this backlash from people who are like, "What the hell, Pat? Come on man, you are giving us all this stuff and now you are in my pocket." How do you walk the line and how do you suggest people walk the line between free, premium and just straight up selling? Pat Flynn: That's a fantastic question and something that has been in my head for quite a long time. I was always that guy who … And things have been good. I have been making money through affiliate marketing, which is a win for everybody. People see how much money I am making in my income reports. Sometimes when I have sold things in the past, people are like, "Dude, Pat, you are squeezing the lemon way too hard here. You are already making a ton of money. Why do you need any more? Why do you need to sell us stuff?" There's a number of things that go along with that. First of all, if you are going to sell something and this is something I learned, you need to be 100% completely confident in what you are selling. If you are not, then maybe you should not be selling that thing and maybe those comments are coming in justified. You need to be completely confident with what you are selling, knowing that's actually worth what you are asking for that you are going to be providing even more value in exchange for that money that's coming through on that end. In addition to that, I have also learned that a lot of the things that have changed my life in terms of education, things I have learned and stuff I've learned from other people teaching, have been paid courses. Because I paid for those courses, I am more likely to follow through on those actions. It's similar to after I had my son, I started eating poorly, not sleeping very well. I started to gain some weight. I told my friends. I was like, "Guys, I am so tired. I need to start working out." My buddy was like, "Dude, Pat, P-90X, here is the DVD, just pop it in and there you go." I'm like, "Hey, if I really want to do this seriously and I really want to go through it, I need to purchase it myself because then I have skin in the game. I am going to be more likely to follow through," and I did. There's actually pictures up somewhere on my site of me without a shirt and the before and after. That's not important. Again, you need to understand. I know I was doing this. I was actually doing my audience a disservice by not being confident in what I knew I could sell that would actually help people. I learned this from a lot of people like Ramit Sethi and Derek Halpern, who don't sell very often, but I learned this from Derek. He says, "When he sells, he sells hard because he knows that if he doesn't, he might not actually help a person who needs it." Those are all the kinds of things that are on my mind. The other thing to understand is when I sold things in the past, some people have spoken up. Usually, it's just a very small percentage of people who do that, in which case you can talk to them privately or have a conversation about that. In most cases, there is 99% of the other people out there who do want to buy it from you. Who will get value from it. If you believe in what you are selling and if they can feel that and they know it's honest and true, then there's nothing to worry about. This is just a part of the process selling. You are going to get backlash. But the more, like you said Steve, the more you give away for free, the more people will expect you to always give away things for free and you just can't do that. Again, being honest with the fact that I have a family. I need to do things to keep us a roof over our heads and plus, I am doing a lot of philanthropy now, too. It's all going towards that, too. Again, just being honest and being real about everything is always the best way to go. Steve: Yes and let me just step in here for one quick second Alex before you ask your next question here, which is if you are joining us live on Blab, obviously if you are listening to the podcast please join us every Wednesday at 4pm Pacific as we bring to you the world's leading influencers like Pat Flynn and Russell Brunson, Johnny Dumas and others. If you are alive with us here on Blab, thank you for joining us. If you want to ask Pat a question, the way we do it and the bonus of being here with us is when we end the official podcast version of this and you will know it because you hear the exit music, we then go into the green room and after that is when we will answer all of your personal questions, so start cuing them up by using /Q at the beginning of your chat line and that it will pop up over on the left side as a question and we will speed and get to as many as we can, Alex? Alex: I want to mention that Pat is christening, inaugurating, indoctrinating, whichever word you wish, our first bidding auction. People have talked about Kiva.org. They are here in San Francisco. Bill Clinton came on about 10 years ago and talked about Kiva. We have donated over $220,000 to Kiva entrepreneurs. Today for the first time ever, because of Pat, $105 will go to Kiva thanks to the brothers at PushButtonInfluence.com. If you are in the future wanting to bid on a future guest, then please do. 100% of the proceeds go to Kiva.org. $105, just so you don't shrug your shoulders and say, "Ah, big deal." Pat just gave 105 days of income to the entrepreneurs who get micro loans from Kiva.org. There daily income is about one dollar-two dollars a day. Incidentally, about 1.5 billion people on earth make that much, so we are very fortunate here in the United States and I am sure if you are watching in other parts of the world. Thank you, 100% goes to Kiva. Pat, thank you. By proxy, it's because of you that Kiva is getting that and that show will keep going on. We are very proud of doing that. I want to do a quick test in honor of your book, Pat. Is that OK? Pat Flynn: Absolutely, before you go on the $105, can I match that so we can double it really quick? Alex: Sure. Steve: We will gladly accept. Just so folks are clear, it's going to be PushButtonInfluence.com/donate and you will be able basically to be the sponsor in perpetuity of each episode could look, you could have been the sponsor of this episode, which will live on in perpetuity for $105. Oh my God, are you kidding? Can you imagine a better return than that? Pat, thank you so much for that and Alex, we were try to figure out … Pat Flynn: Will people be able to continue that? It will climb? Alex: Yes. Pat Flynn: I will match it up to $1000 if we get up to $1000. Steve: Wow, very, very cool. Alex: Awesome, well I am going to give $900 right now, Pat. Steve: Awesome, Alex you had a question. Alex: Here we go. I want to test something in honor of your book because your book is about testing. How to test. That's a keyword. Most people talk about, but they don't do it. I am on stage and I always test these two words. It's the middle word of what you are known for. Is it OK if we do a quick test live? Pat Flynn: Sure. Alex: The word "passive." Everyone talks about passive income. Pat has slapped an adjective in front of that and it just owns it, dominates it, "smart passive income." We are in Blab right now. I want you guys to vote. There's two types of income that are usually misconstrued, may be confused (A) recurring income or (B) passive. Which one speaks to you more, please type in recurring or passive. Speak with your heart, vote with your head, type it in right now (A) or (B). (A) is recurring. (B) is passive and we will get an answer. Here is your question, Pat. I want to talk about this, family. When I am with my kids, I am unplugged. There's no phone connected to me. I am not connected to the Internet or anything. Why is family so important to you? Why do you make it such a big part of who you are? I go to your website About Pat, bam, there is everyone. Pat Flynn: My family is my why. I am here with my kids. The business I have and the way I have built it has allowed me to be with mine why at all times and everybody's why is different. For me my why is definitely my family. Family is very important to me. That's how I was raised. That's how I am raising my kids and my wife and I, we are truly blessed to have this lifestyle that allows us to be there at all times to raise them. We get to go to school to drop off the kids and pick them up. We get looks. Teachers are coming up to us and it's like, "How are you both able to do this? Did you win the lottery?" I'm like, "No, I have built my business in a way that allows me to live the lifestyle I want and I am not working around my business. My business is working for me." I also know that this is unique in the Internet marketing space, this person who talks about family more than cars or houses. When I got started in this space that's all that people were talking about. You are starting to see a lot more people inject their family and personal life into their sites now which is great because the more you can become a human being, the more likely people are going to connect with who you are and what you have to offer, even if it's the same as somebody else. That's a huge point. Again, I know this is who I have become online. This is what people see when they think of Pat Flynn is the family, so I want to make sure that's portrayed. Obviously, there is a line there when it comes to kids and family and I am careful to not overstep those boundaries. I am always in communication with my wife about what we are doing or what I plan to do. Some of you who might have seen the trailer for my book where I actually have my son actually acting in it, which is really cool and he is only six-years-old, so he did an awesome job. My wife and I talked about that because it is obviously going to be seen by a lot of people. What we were talking about we were both comfortable with and I was obviously going to help show that in terms of why this book is important. It's not just about validating ideas. It's about doing so, so you could live the life you want to live and for me it's about family. Also, on top of that I want people who come to my site to feel like they are a part of the family, too, so that's why I am not afraid to share on Instagram or on Snapchat now, thanks Gary V. and other places, just random stuff I do, hanging out with the kids at home just to show again that I am real. That's where the passive income comes from. That allows me to continually make money over time while I do other things. That doesn't mean I can sit and fly away forever from my business. There's no such thing as 100% passive income. I am very upfront about that on my site, but there are ways to utilize the tools and other people so that you can take yourself away from the business and have been income coming in continually. Steve: Would you define passive income as making money without working for it? Pat Flynn: Not in those terms because when people hear it that way they are like, "Oh, Push Button, I can make money tomorrow," which is impossible, of course. It's setting up systems, investing time up front in building a business that can then continually pay off later on to a point where you don't have to trade your time for money anymore. That's how I would define it. Steve: Alex, just before I go and I want to ask Pat a very specific question here, but before I go to that, were you asking about recurring versus passive because did you just want to get an understanding of Pat's take on it or was there another place you were going with it before I stepped in? Alex: Well, people are voting for passive over recurring. I just wanted to test something, so I could seed the book one more time shamelessly as a host. That's all. Steve: A question for you, people are always throwing stuff that you like Pat, check this out. Pat, and here is this for free. Pat, blah, blah, blah, they are coming at you from all angles. Talk to us about us some of the … You mentioned teachable earlier. Talk to us about some of the very cool tool and resources people might not know about that you are feeling like, "Man, this is definitely something folks should consider using." Pat Flynn: Yes, great question. I love tools and apps and things like that. Teachable is one I got involved with very recently because the CEO reached out to me, knowing I was going to be at this event. He took me out to lunch and then we talked about what he was offering. It was really cool because I was actually looking to create courses in the future and he knew that because he has been following along on the blog. It's a great way to get in front of an influencer is just follow them online, see what they are up to and if at any point in time you can provide value to them, reach out to them. This is exactly what they did and that's how he has been able to capture my attention because you are right. I am getting dozens of emails every day from people who are coming up with new stuff, who are coming out with books, who have opportunities for me to JV partner with them. For me to carry all that, it's difficult, so I typically just say no to all of them upfront, unless it's something that relates to something I am working on. That's just me specifically. In terms of other tools and things like that, there's one I haven't gotten to fall in love with very recently and it's called Rev. It's an app you can use to record your voice, which is always handy. This one in particular, you record your voice or whatever it is you are listening to and you press a button and a person on the other end, a human being actually transcribes that content you have just heard for you, which is huge. For me, I like to read so that helps, but more importantly, I like to write. When I am writing a book and this book in particular, when I created my first draft, here is how I did it. I'm brainstormed. I mind mapped. I used to post-it-notes. I use post-it-notes all the time for things, all different colors as you can see, blue, pink, orange and I use that to get all those ideas in my brain out and visually see them. You know what? Our brains do a good job of coming up with ideas, but our brains are terrible at organizing them, putting order to them and putting hierarchy to them right on the fly. You put all these ideas of what this book you want is or what your product is, your membership site or whatever it is you want to create, everything and everything in your brain, you put it out there. The cool thing about post-it-notes is you can move them around, so then you can begin to create clusters and organize them and create hierarchies and, "Oh, these all go together and these all go together." When you do this when you are writing a book, it begins to turn into an outline, which is really cool and you start to see the chapters forming and the sections. This is a cool way to come up with a first draft. Again, you can see how this would be applied to a course, for example, or your modules and your lessons and the videos. Anyway, then I take one of those post-it-notes about a particular topic, one idea I had and I click record on Rev and I just spill my brain on everything and everything about that one particular post-it-note. This is a mechanical way to focus on one thing at a time. I am literally holding up that post-it-note, so that is the only thing I am thinking about. I talk about stories, any case studies, any examples, anything that comes to mind related to that idea. Once I hit stop, then I click transcribe. It gets transcribed for me and then because everything is in order, I just put those things into the order once I get them back, usually five-six hours later into what then becomes the first draft of my book and boom, there you go. I will say I had about 100,000 words coming out of all the dictation of my first draft and what was actually useful was probably about 20,000 words. But those 20,000 words because I was talking about it, because I was in the creative mind mode, not edit mode, they were golden and those stayed in the book. That helped me determine what my second draft was and it formed the whole book. Rev, R-E-V, it's an app. It's also a web application. They also, I just found out, if you do any YouTube videos and you want to do transcribing for YouTube, it connects to your YouTube account. When you come out with a new video on YouTube, you just find that video in Rev and it will automatically transcribe it and placed the transcription or the captions in that YouTube video for you. Steve: Slick. Pat Flynn: Yes, it is slick. I used to do that manually and it would take a couple hours to strip the audio from the video and then uploaded to Rev. This just makes it really easy. That's one tool. Teachable is another good one. I also use Scrivner. A lot of these are writing-based ones because I have just been in that mode lately. It's been my one thing for the last year. Scrivner is a great writing tool. Steve: Can you spell that for folks here? Pat Flynn: Sure, S-C-R-I-V-N-E-R. Steve: Thank you, let me just double check that. Pat Flynn: Yes that's right, Scrivner 2.0 is the latest version. For those of you who are into social media and that's most of us, I am using a tool called Edgar. This is by Laura Rhoder and it's a tool that allows me to create a bank of tweets essentially in different categories and I can schedule when tweets from different categories go out. What this does is unlike other tools like Buffer, which is also a fantastic tool, this one allows me to recycle tweets, so they don't go away. The thing about tweets is people who see it are only seeing it when they are on and once that tweet is gone, if they are not on, they are never going to see it. I have found if I cycle between 20 different tweets in a particular category, nobody ever knows the difference that they have either seen it before or even if they did that's OK because there is a lot of time in between when I shared the same thing. Edgar has been a great tool for me for social media. There is one thing to be said with automating social media. You still need to be social. You can't just automate the whole process and unless you hire somebody else to do social media for you like a social media manager, you can't just let things go on autopilot. I use Edgar to promote things I know I am going to be promoting anyway and also start conversations. I ask questions sometimes and then I will go in there and see that Edgar posted a question and then I go in there and I just respond. It starts that for me and makes sure I am always consistent in my social media. It also connects with Facebook and I believe LinkedIn, Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages, all that sort of stuff. It's a really cool tool. Steve: Awesome. Alex, it's hard to believe, but it's time just absolutely flies. Do you want to ask Pat one more question before we go into the green room here? Alex: Well, a statement and then a question. Many people from our tribe, Steve, they are always wondering, "We want to have a show, but what do we do?" We have our own website just for that show. I am going to say this because I think it's a great example. If you go to smartpassiveincome.com, check out Pat's tabs. You have home, you have about, you have blog and then you have my favorite two words "start here," very few people do that. I go straight to the middle "start here," then you have podcasts and Ask Pat and resources. It's brilliant. What a great way to at least get a starting point. Check out his tools, but look at the way he has that website set up. It obviously works. He is making the money and it's a great way to figure out what the tabs at the top are where most people get stuck, so just take a look at that. Big question, what is the future of podcasting looking like? More and more people are coming to what used to be the third screen and now the first screen. Of course, I don't know if Web TV what's going to happen to that initial first screen, which is not a flatscreen TV, but what's the future of podcasting? Where are we going to end up do you think in five years? Pat Flynn: Wow, five years from now? That's a tough one. In this day and age five years almost seems like 100 years with how fast … Alex: It's at least 35 years. Pat Flynn: Honestly, if you want to talk five years later, here is what I envision. People are walking around the streets or in their homes with these giant, maybe not so giant because they will shrink them down of course, but these virtual reality or augmented reality consoles attached to their face, whereas content providers we could be there talking to people as if we were live there in the same room with them essentially and to have an even deeper connection with them, but still providing the same kind of content, obviously video and/or audio. I can see audio being even more integrated into our everyday lives like how people are listening to us when they are in their cars or on their walks. It's going to be even more present I feel in people's lives. In terms of podcasting tools, I feel podcasting is going to stick around for quite a while. A lot of people have tried to envision what the next level of podcasting is. The sense of a person recording and sharing something that is then on demand for people to listen to that's always going to stay around, but it's just how else can it be enhanced? That's why this VR augmented reality thing is really exciting to me and plus all the video games I can go with that. Man, I am jealous of my son that he is growing up in this age. One of my favorite books actually talks about this kind of world, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, a fantastic book that looks into the future of this. That's what I feel. Also, a lot of people have been trying to determine how to make podcasting a little more shareable and bite-sized. There's a lot of apps that have been trying. There's a lot of companies that have been trying to make it more shareable because obviously, when you are listening, you are not in front of a computer all the time and it's hard to just take a snippet of that audio content and share it. But I know a lot of people who have been working on things like that. I think there's going to be some good solutions that will become more commonplace that people will use. Maybe it will be integrated into existing social media platforms or something else, but I could see that becoming a lot more popular in both video and audio. How we could easily share texts via Twitter and other social media platforms as well. It's going to be the same way for audio and video. It's going to be more commonplace I feel. Alex: That's a great prediction. Steve, I want to hear yours. Here is mine. This happened in 2015. I agree with you on your prediction. I know Zuckerberg has already launched about $1 billion in virtual reality. He is investing in that's right now as we speak. But as far as the future of podcasting, I believe that those rolling university that Vic Conant, when I interviewed him 15 years ago, that's what made this business. His dad and Earl Nightingale. That was it. I believe there is not going to be radio stations in five years. I think there is only going to be podcast stations. Everything is going to be native to the car and you will be listening to podcasts because it's already happening right now. I could be wrong, but if I am wrong, I hope I am wrong in a big way because I can't imagine it's not happening, Steve? Steve: Man, I have to tell you I don't see radio going anywhere, FM-FM. The satellite I don't see that going anywhere, but I can tell you from my perspective that's what will happen and we have talked about this on Push Button Influence before is the Wi-Fi is a game changer. The Wi-Fi in the car is a game changer. As soon as that hits every vehicle on the road and more importantly, as soon as the autonomous car is in play and in five years, Pat, you know your kid's never going to drive. You have that Back to the Future thing, yes that damn Elon Musk, you have that Back to the Future with they and if you have your DeLorean still sitting out there … You know how it is. In five years, he is not even going to need to drive a DeLorean when he gets to be 16. When the autonomous car hits, people are going to be able to do whatever they want, wherever they want in the car, which is still going to be our most popular form of transportation. Of course, the hyper lube goes everywhere with that musk guy again. Reality for me is podcasting, it's getting to the point now, it's at that tipping point where it's becoming more mainstream and believe it or not, it has not been mainstream. I think the future of podcasting in really, really positive ways is still in front of us. If you are thinking about starting a podcast, do it. Reality is there are 285 whatever the number is. I heard 285,000 podcast, maybe it's 500,000, but there's 500 million blogs. If you are thinking about it, get into the game. Now is as good a time as any. Pat, let's do this as we wrap up the podcast version of Push Button Influence and then we play our fancy exit music that Alex loves so much. Let's do this, which is give you an opportunity to tell people about Will It Fly? Where is the best place for people to find you and where should people go if they want more Pat Flynn? Pat Flynn: Thank you for that and again, thank you guys for listening. Thank you, Steve and Alex, for having me here today. It's awesome. Will It Fly? is going to be available at Willitflybook.com. Pre-orders are available until February 1. If you get it before February 1, you get some bonuses that go along with it, even if you buy one. You could buy more you get more bonuses, but after February 1, it will be available on Willitflybook.com. Currently, it's sold through Amazon as both a paperback and a Kindle version. The audio version will be coming out likely in March and then perhaps you will see it in bookstores later this year, purely self-published. I am running some experiments with this and as I always do with all my experiments like any good crash test dummy guys, I report on what happens to make your lives easier and better and safer. Willitflybook.com and thank you guys again for allowing me to plug that. Steve: Here is what we are going to do. We are going to end the podcast version of Push Button Influence and today's show with Pat Flynn. We are going to stick around here. Pat, can you stick around a little bit and answer some questions in the green room, yes? Pat Flynn: Yes absolutely, I will be here until the hour. Steve: We have a few more minutes with you. Join us every Wednesday at 4pm Pacific for Push Button Influence. For Alex Mandossian, my co-host extraordinaire and myself, Steve Olsher, bringing you the world's leading influencers and we will talk to you next week with a very interesting show in Mr. Josh Turner and that should be a lot of fun as well. We are going to end this podcast version and then we are going to go right into the green room after this fancy exit music. Here we go. Announcer: You just learned how to broadcast your brilliance. Tune in live to Blab.im, Wednesdays at 4pm Pacific, as the world's leading influencers share their proven strategies for leveraging the power of new media. For more information about your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher, to claim your free surprise gift and to access every episode of Push Button Influence, visit Pushbuttoninfluence.com. ###END###

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