YouX Podcast - Turn Your Rockstar Business into a

For creative entrepreneurs, there’s always a tension between the creative projects we want to undertake, and the need to make it easy for people to understand the niche we fit into.  It doesn’t make sense for us to be everything to everyone, but niching down is challenging because it feels like we’re giving up our creative fulfillment.  Can we niche down and still have room for creativity? How do we know we’re on the right track when it comes to finding the right niche?  In this episode, I’m joined by business and mindset coach, and the founder and CEO of The Ambitious Introvert, Emma-Louise Parkes. She shares how to shift the way we present ourselves in the market, and why it’s such a valuable exercise.  3 Things You’ll Learn From Emma-Louise Parkes; Why we have to accept pivoting and changing niches without self-judgment  The struggle creatives have with niching down  Why she deletes work-related apps off her phone every night Guest Bio Emma Louise-Parkes is a business and mindset coach, and the founder and CEO of The Ambitious Introvert. She helps high-level introverts, empaths and HSPs create the strategy & mindset for massive success. Emma-Louise is an 86% introverted INFJ-A who is passionate about helping ambitious introverts, empaths & HSPs build successful, sustainable businesses they love.  Listen to Emma-Louise’s podcast, The Ambitious Introvert here and join The Ambitious Introvert Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/introvertnetwork/.

Joe Rogan is the exception that proves the rule. For every 3 hour episode of Joe Rogan, there's a podcast that is shortening up their average episode. And rightfully so, I think. We're going on 10+ years of long-form interview podcasts, and the format itself is no longer rare and valuable. So either your topic must be incredibly rare and valuable, or it's time to shorten your average episode to deal with shrinking attention spans. Here are my 3 best tips to shorten your average episode, starting with Guest episodes. 1. Set Expectations before hitting Record. I let my guests know that my goal is to have a fun, fast-paced 30 minute chat that covers a few compelling topics.  We spend enough time before hitting Record that I know roughly what topics we'll start with, so I can tease those for the audience right away. Then as I spot juicier, more interesting topics, we might go off on a tangent. But I try not to cram too many topics in, that's where you get into 45 minute-plus conversations. I remember being on a podcast as a guest a couple years ago. We were recording within 5 minutes of jumping on the Zoom session. As a guest, it feels super weird and you have no idea where you stand. Am I taking too long to answer each question? Should this be relaxed and slow-paced, or should this be rapid fire? Am I giving the host what the audience will want? It was like flying blind, and you never want to make your guests feel like that. So set good expectations, and most guests will try to give you exactly what you ask for. 2. Open Strong.  One thing that keeps your average episode long is asking the guest about their background too soon. This invitation to share their background slows down the pace and tends to start at the very beginning of their story. We've all heard it. "Well, it started on a dark and stormy night at the hospital in 1957. I was a strapping 11 lb 4 oz baby boy, and I took my time coming. " No one wants that.  Think of a Bond movie like Casino Royale or Spectre.  You want to start with an action scene. Then you reset and slow down, go back to the beginning. Depending on what kind of podcast you're running, you can start strong in different ways. If you run a business podcast where people expect actionable tips and tactics, start with that. Invite the guest to share something actionable as soon as possible. If you run a podcast more focused on inspiring stories, start with a question about one specific anecdote from their life. Something that hooks the audience's attention, builds the guest's credibility and sets up the audience to be interested in hearing the rest of their story. Managing the guest's expectations and helping them start strong will go a long way toward producing fast-paced guest episodes that hold your audience's attention. That brings us to the last way to shorten up your average episode... 3. Publish solo episodes. Just you talking directly to your audience. I'm a big advocate of solo episodes, at one point this podcast was ALL solo episodes, nothing but me teaching and sharing. I'm mixing it up more now, but I encourage all my clients to include at least one or more solo episodes per month. That's part of my Weekly Podcast Formula.  Especially if you're in coaching or consulting, you are selling YOU. In order to sell access and proximity to you, your audience has to trust you and come around to the way you see the world. They can get some of that from the conversations you have with guests, but they'll get a lot more from solo episodes. Just you and the audience. The example I gave in the MicroFamous book is Barbara Walters. While she's a skilled interviewer and journalist, I don't know what she actually believes about the world. I have no idea whether she actually likes her guests. She's a vehicle for their story, and her job is to shine the spotlight on the guests and pull something out of them they didn't plan to share. If your ambition is to be a skilled interviewer, by all means do that. But being a skilled interviewer won't get people clamoring for your coaching, consulting, programs or courses.  That only comes when people get to know, like and trust you.  Getting back to the length of episodes... Solo episodes put you in complete control, where you can dictate the overall length. Some of my clients naturally do a solo episode in 12 minutes, others flow for around 25 minutes without even thinking about it.   I like to see solo episodes clock in at 12-15 minutes.  Almost long enough for a standard commute, short enough for a quick trip to the grocery store and back. To do this myself, when I prep for a solo episode I write no more than 3 bullet points. Couple minutes for intros and outros, 3-4 minutes per bullet point, and I'm out.  So that's my perspective on solo episodes.  As attention spans shorten, even long-form formats like podcasting aren't immune. We have to adjust with the times.  I'm seeing examples like Lewis Howe's mailbag episodes to Blinkist's Shortcast episodes at 15 minutes, to PFF's NFL daily at 10 minutes, to Seth Godin's Akimbo podcast which runs around 25 minutes. Speaking of Akimbo, I used to listen quite often.  Then it fell off my radar. Why? Cause my podcast listening time is limited, and his podcast episodes take too long to get to the point.  It may be a valuable point, but I don't have a 25 minute commute like most of his audience. I work from home, so my average time in the car is under 10 minutes around my little beach town part of San Diego.  If he shortened his episodes, speeding up the pacing especially, and maybe cut back on the content to just the most compelling parts of the stories he shares to make his points, I'd listen to every episode. So format matters, even for the biggest names out there.

As introverts, it often feels like other people can’t relate to our inner experience. We feel awkward in social situations, and work really hard not to convey that awkwardness to others. Our extrovert counterparts can perceive our behavior as stuck up and antisocial, and advice to just “be ourselves” feels rich coming from naturally gregarious people.  But what if more people share this experience than we believe, and what if there was a way to change our mindset and create the motivation to put ourselves out there?  In today’s episode, I’m joined by Monica Parkin, the author of "Overcoming Awkward, an Introvert's Guide to Networking, Marketing and Sales." She shares why putting ourselves out there as introverts is a lot easier than we think. Things You’ll Learn from Monica Parkin;  The surprising feedback she got from extroverts about the book  How to take part in speaking engagements without taxing yourself  The introvert super power we don’t tap into enough  The interesting science-backed distinction between introverts and extroverts  Guest Bio Monica Parkin is an international speaker, podcast host, mortgage broker and author of "Overcoming Awkward, an Introvert's Guide to Networking, Marketing and Sales." The book is written to free introverts from the crippling social constraints that come with launching and growing their businesses and careers. For more information and to buy the book, head over to https://www.monicaparkin.ca/. 

This might be an odd thing for me to talk about. I spend all my time helping entrepreneurs and experts become MicroFamous. So what do I know? Yet there are some really critical lessons we can all take from Rogan’s history. There is no original reporting or investigative journalism or exclusive interview here. But I am going to tie together the 4 big cultural waves that propelled Joe Rogan to being mega-famous. That way we can be on the lookout for similar opportunities in our own world, big or small. Let’s start with a rough timeline. You’ve got Rogan’s childhood scattered, where among other things, he picks up tae kwon do and ends up winning a US Open Championship and doing some martial arts teaching. He gets started in stand up comedy in the late 80s going into the 90s.  He moves to LA, gets picked up by Disney on a development deal and ends up on a sitcom called Newsradio. You might remember that as the last thing Phil Hartman did before his unfortunate death. Newsradio runs from 1995-99.  This whole time he’s followed the UFC from almost the very first event. The live event UFC 5 takes place about a month after the first episode of Newsradio airs. In 1997, while Newsradio is still on TV, Rogan starts doing backstage and post-fight interviews, does that for a couple years but leaves and doesn’t reconnect with UFC till after 2001. So Newsradio ends in 99, Rogan is working on a sitcom loosely based on him, when the opportunity comes to host Fear Factor instead. Fear Factor was NBC’s answer to Survivor, which launched earlier in 2001. Fear Factor does really well for a few years before it starts to lose steam. By this time Rogan is working with the UFC again, now partially under Dana White, and is doing color commentary. UFC starts to explode in the mid-2000s, that’s when even I was paying attention. All the UFC names I remember were active around this time. Georges St Pierre, Anderson Silva, Frank Mir, Rich Franklin, Ken Shamrock, BJ Penn, Tito Ortiz.  Around the time Fear Factor is on the way out, the UFC launches its own reality TV show, The Ultimate Fighter. It went a long way toward helping the UFC hit a mainstream audience. I remember talking over the fighters with guys in the office I worked in at the time. So Rogan is doing color commentary for UFC as it’s exploding in popularity, this is mid-2000s. This is the period where Chuck Liddell hits the cover of ESPN magazine. UFC goes mainstream and Rogan is there for that ride. Then we come to 2009 when Rogan launches his podcast, and by August 2010 it hits the iTunes Top 100, and the rest is history. Now, let’s dive into what happened and all the things that had to come together for Rogan to become mega-famous. 1. Rogan got into stand up comedy at the tail end of the 80s stand up boom. That boom turned to bust by the mid-90s, which is when Rogan pivoted to Newsradio. 2. Newsradio catches the 90s sitcom boom, launching less than a year after Friends. In fact, the lead in show for Newsradio when it launched was Wings, to give you an idea of how good of a head start it was given. 3. Meanwhile, a few years later as Newsradio is losing steam, reality TV is starting its boom. The Real World was well known, but reality TV as we think of it today started more with shows like American Idol and Survivor. That’s when Fear Factor comes along, and Rogan is able to ride the wave of reality TV in the early 2000s. 4. The UFC wave really gets going in the mid-2000s with Rogan doing color commentary and cracking jokes in front of millions of pay-per-view subscribers.  5. While riding the UFC wave, Rogan parlays that into more stand up gigs and then launches the podcast in ’09.  To give you an idea of timing, Adam Carolla launched his podcast about 8 months before Rogan, and everyone thought he was crazy for doing a podcast. That’s how new it was. The podcast capitalizes on his stand up career by featuring all his comedian friends, and catches the podcasting wave in its earliest stage.  So that’s a total of 4 distinct, massive cultural waves.  Rogan caught all of them at various stages. Stand up comedy Reality TV UFC Podcasting Plus he catches smaller waves along the way, from the 90’s sitcom boom to live-streaming on YouTube and Justin.tv, the forerunner of Twitch.  Now, I don’t think Rogan did any of this intentionally or through any special foresight. He’s genuinely been interested in mixed martial arts since he was a teenager. The fact that UFC happened to hit its massive cultural wave right in the lull of Rogan’s post-reality TV career was a very, very lucky break. If not for that, Rogan might just be a touring comedian with a small podcast that maybe your brother-in-law listens to. Now, what are the lessons I think anyone can take away? 1. Find a wave in the culture that can carry you. Not a wave you have to create yourself. Just like it’s easier to invest in stocks when the whole market is going up, it’s a lot easier to get famous when you ride a wave that’s already moving in the culture. Trying to create a cultural wave on your own is like trying to make the stock market go up by buying a bunch of stock yourself. Odds are, you’re going to waste a lot of time and money. 2. Catch one massive cultural wave as early as possible.  Rogan was late to the party on the stand up wave, but he pivoted to sitcoms and caught the reality TV wave at just the right time. Then he caught the UFC wave relatively early and podcasting super early.  You don’t have to hit every wave early, but if you want to be mega-famous, you’ve got to hit a massive wave early. Building the #1 comedy podcast as the entire podcast wave was exploding was a huge part of Rogan’s success. 3. As one wave loses steam, start looking for the next wave. Once you have attention and fame, you can never rest. The wave that made you famous might lose steam or even dash you against the rocks. Just like a surfer, you’ve got to get out of a wave that’s losing steam, regroup, and start looking for the next wave.  Here’s the key: The next wave will never be about you and what you want. This is the hardest thing to understand once you’ve already achieved a certain level of fame. Maybe you’ve achieved a lot. Maybe you’ve set big goals for growth. None of that makes a difference to the market. People don’t care about your big goals.  People care about themselves. So the next wave that comes along won’t be about you and what you want. That next wave will require you to adapt.  Joe Rogan didn’t get mega-famous because another wave of stand up comedy came along.  He adapted. He shifted. He experimented. Hosting UFC events, livestreaming on early platforms, blogging, a video web series.  He kept iterating. Trying new technologies and new formats, until finally he hit the podcasting wave. That’s what we all have to do. To catch the latest wave, we have to adapt and change and shift. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. So those are the 3 lessons anyone can take away, and we can apply them at any level, Big, small and anywhere in between. Find a wave in the culture that can carry you. Catch that wave as early as possible.  As one wave loses steam, start looking for the next one. That’s how Rogan did it, that’s how Tony Robbins did it, that’s how Oprah did it. That’s how everyone in the public eye did it. And the savvier you get at spotting waves in the culture as they build and break out, the more successful you’ll be.

In today’s media landscape, it’s no surprise that all roads lead to video. It’s what we consume. It’s the beating drum of content marketing, and its platform agnostic because it applies to every industry including coaching and consulting.  What is surprising though, is the kind of video content people are consuming and what drives them to take action. In lieu of advertising, organic, value-driven content has made a real comeback, and it’s centered around stories more than ever before. This even applies to people whose services exist to solve a particular, niche problem.  The question is: how do we make our content more magnetic in this landscape? In this episode, I’m joined by a special guest, the founder of FeedStories, Bob Regnerus. He talks about what’s happening in video marketing, and how we can implement it in our own businesses.  3 Things We Learned From Bob Regnerus  The current state of paid online advertising  Why there’s more demand for solutions-based organic content right now  How to back up ideals and big ideas with magnetic stories Guest Bio Bob Regnerus is the founder of FeedStories and the author of 5 books, including The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads, which sold out on its first day. His gift and passion is to help you promote yourself and your business. Throughout his career and working with clients in over 105 markets since 1998, he helps clients promote a powerful message to the marketplace, and target specific customers to deliver that message through Paid Advertising. Bob gets results for his clients through Facebook Advertising Management and Consulting. Bob has had the opportunity to work with a number of remarkable individuals and companies over the years, and spoken to crowds from 20 to 2000 all over the country. For more information, and to find out more about Bob’s work, visit https://feedstories.com/. 

One of my friends in the coaching space forwarded me Sam Ovens’ video on how he’s spent the last 2 years breaking down and rebuilding his business. If you don’t know, Ovens started a business that became Consulting.com, which helped beginner experts and course creators turn their expertise into courses and productizable consulting. At one point he was doing $30 million a year in revenue. However, in remaking the business he decided to discontinue Consulting Accelerator, their signature program for beginners. Turns out it was more headache than it was worth, at least for Ovens. And I can completely relate.  In our podcast agency, I’d rather work with those with genuine and deep expertise in their space. They may be new to the coaching or consulting space, but they already have skills and expertise, the only question is how to best position them for ideal clients. So all this got me thinking of the question I see lots of my friends and clients wrestling with, “Should I sell to beginners?” I think we all struggle with this question at some point because that’s where the biggest businesses are. There’s simply more beginners than intermediate or experts. So there’s more people to buy from us if we make something for beginners. Think about ClickFunnels. If Russell Brunson only sold that software to advanced course creators, there wouldn’t be enough customers to make a profit, therefore the product could never get better. So we need brands who sell to beginners, and brands who cater to the more advanced. The big question for any coach or consultant is, Which will you be? Putting it in terms we can better relate to, will you be the Mercedes-Benz of your market, or the Toyota Corolla?  If you want big sales numbers and a huge brand, get ready to sell to beginners. That’s where you’ll find big markets and big opportunities.  Yet beginners come with a lot of frustration, and I wanted to flesh out *why* and what can be done about it. So first let’s get into the 3 things that hold beginners back from getting results and creates headaches for those who sell to them. Foundation of Performance Beginners often lack a basic foundation of methodical, consistent action in their lives.  So when you try to help them take action, there’s no foundation of consistent action to build on. There’s no ongoing action for you to tweak and improve. They have no history of successfully building new habits or making uncomfortable changes. As a personal trainer, it’s much easier to work with someone who is active and has already made some basic diet changes, than to work with someone who’s never hit the gym in their life. I asked a mentor one time if I should go to a Tony Robbins event. He said I might get something out of it, because I had the foundation of performance to handle it.  But he had seen many who didn’t have that foundation, and once they came back from a transformative experience, and they couldn’t translate that experience into action, it actually had a terrible, negative effect. Some even slipped into a major depression after they came home, and he had to help them pick up the emotional pieces and get back on track. So working with beginners often means working with folks who don’t know how to break old habits and build new ones, which makes coaching them extremely difficult. Clarity It’s impossible to take bold, confident action when you’re unclear on what you want. Yet beginners are looking for programs and courses to give them the clarity they can’t get on their own. They simply don’t know what they don’t know. If they knew exactly what they wanted, they’d probably be well on their way to having it. The dirty secret of selling coaching programs to beginners is that often, the testimonials you’ll get will be based on clarity.  “This program helped me decide to _____! Now I know exactly where I’m going and how to get there”  If you sell programs for beginners, don’t expect them to just take your word and run with it.  If they don’t feel clarity, they probably won’t take confident action. So plan your program accordingly. Good Decision-Making Process Many of my friends in coaching or consulting aren’t the first experts that people find online. Often many of their clients and buyers have come through other programs first and not had success, or were disappointed by the low level of content in those other programs. That’s because beginners don’t have a good decision-making process. They’re scattered, chaotic, and go from one shiny object to another. Today it’s a program about Instagram, tomorrow it’s a group coaching program about Clubhouse, the day after it will be a full website redesign, after that a LinkedIn messaging system. Beginners typically find the biggest brands first, the ones who spend the most on ads. Then they get excited about those programs and sign up for emotional reasons. Coming to terms with this process will save you a lot of frustration. And in today’s online climate, whoever is willing to outspend everyone else on ads will probably continue to reach the beginner market first.  So if you’re not willing to outspend everyone else on ads, accept that beginners will often come to you after going through several other programs, and might even leave your program because they get shiny object syndrome for another program. It’s all a natural part of selling to the beginner market. Maybe that makes me sound cynical, but I actually don’t look at any of that negatively. We need brands and experts who bring in beginners. And we need brands and experts that serve the more advanced. So this episode is about helping you make good decisions for yourself on who you serve and why. Because you can either sell to beginners, or sell to the intermediate and up. It’s nearly impossible to sell to both.

When I hear coaches and consultants talk about partnering, my ears perk up. Not because I’m a big believer in partnerships (as you’re about to see). It’s because I’m listening for the real reasons they want to a partner. Most of the time I hear things like: We would have a lot of fun building something together We have complimentary skillsets We have similar audiences Then in podcasting, there’s this one, We want to start a podcast together, so we need a way to monetize it. And there’s nothing wrong with any of those impulses. I started my first podcast with a partner, and we weren’t sure how we would monetize it. Now it makes us 6 figures a year. However, partnerships are tough to sustain over the long run. It’s really hard for two partners to put in the same amount of effort, energy and focus into a project for years and years. At some point, one partner will feel like they’re putting in more than the other partner. Sometimes even both partners feel this way. That’s why in partnerships like law firms, profit goes into a pie and the pie gets split along the lines of seniority or billable hours. Dividing the pie “fairly” is really hard - even for firms who have decades of experience. In one of my favorite books of all time, Managing the Professional Service Firm, consulting legend David Maister devotes 50 pages of the book to partnership issues. It’s all the nitty gritty stuff people don’t think about until they’re already in a partnership, like… Partner performance counseling (year end appraisals, self-evaluations & feedback) Partner compensation (billable hours, seniority, rainmaker vs operations activities) Strategic decision making, goal setting and aligning incentives with strategy Partner relationships (partner archetypes, managing partners, division of powers) In other words, making a partnership work is complicated. In fact, Maister said that it was fairly common for a firm to bring him in for consulting, and the result was one or more partners leaving. One of my clients says having a business partner is like getting married (except you don’t get to make out with them). So there’s a lot of potential for friction. So here are 3 questions to help you make good decisions on partnerships… 1. Do I really have to give up equity to build this business? Look for ways to hire people, and where you can’t hire a skillset, create joint ventures, revshare or commission agreements with pre-agreed caps, all in writing. 2. Could I pay for the skills and expertise instead of partnering up? Partners are permanent, so make sure their skills are permanently needed. Chances are, you only need a certain skillset for a short time. Think about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. One was visionary marketing genius, the other was the tech genius actually made stuff work in real life. They needed each other. But even the tech genius was a skill that could be hired out. Steve Wozniak was crucial in the early days, but it was Jobs’ drive and vision that made Apple a trillion-dollar company. 3. Could I create a sense of mission and camaraderie within my team, instead of with partners? Entrepreneurship is lonely. Part of the draw of partnership is the sense of community and shared mission. The good news is, you can still have that without giving up equity. Look for ways to create that sense of community and shared mission by building a team of contractors or employees. Get them fired up about your mission and their role in creating a new future for themselves and others. Everything that is truly valuable to others takes energy, effort and focus to succeed. In some cases, partnership can be greater than sum of its parts and produce amazing things with less effort. Yet I’ve noticed that a major allure of partnership is the assumption that it will take less effort, energy and focus to succeed. And that’s a dangerous assumption to start with. So when a partnership opportunity presents itself, just take a minute, step back and ask these few questions. It might help you stay focused on the areas where you can make the most impact and reap the most rewards.

On a consultation recently I found myself explaining something that I hadn’t quite articulated before. So I wanted to lay it out here in writing.  Writing helps to get my thinking clear and integrates new concepts into my whole Point of View. I was speaking to a coach who is in a growing niche, with a good (yet limited) sphere of influence.  They have a big decision to make, where do they choose to reach new people? Put another way, what ecosystem will they invest time and energy into to attract new clients? Before we get to that, let’s set the scene for why this question is so important. I have a key belief from experience and observing lots of coaches and consultants, and it’s controversial but hear me out. Sales come easiest from your sphere of influence. Now you’re probably thinking “Yeah, no kidding, we all knew that.” Yet in the world of coaches and consultants, we forget that all the time. I see experts make major decisions on program launches or where they invest their time and energy, based on the sales numbers that come from their sphere of influence. They expect those same sales numbers and percentages to hold true even as they sell more and more programs. It’s easy to forget that once we have sold to our sphere of influence, we have to start selling to new people.  People who don’t yet know, like or trust us. So the sales don’t come as easy. (I did a whole episode about this concept, so if you want to dive deeper, check out this episode) But if you’re with me so far, we’re setting the scene with this basic principle: Sales come easiest from your sphere of influence, therefore once you’ve exhausted your sphere of influence, sales will start to get harder. Most coaches and consultants find this out the hard way. When the sales start to get harder, they look for solutions, which leads them to look for ways to grow and reach new people. This leads them to the question we started with. What ecosystem will they invest time and energy into to attract new clients? So we have the big 3 right now, social media, podcasting and traditional thought leadership. Social media is where most of the attention goes because it’s sexy. On the other hand, you can still go the traditional route, get a book publisher, do a TED talk, get booked on stages, get on the Today Show, hire a PR agency.  Some of it works, most of it’s a complete crapshoot these days. Which brings us to the world of online content and more specifically podcasting. Podcasting is where most coaches and consultants who are drawn to the MicroFamous approach will fit in the best. It’s definitely where introverts will fit the best. Why? Because social media has become mostly a playground for extroverts. And traditional thought leadership relies heavily on public speaking, which is incredibly draining for true introverts because of all the obligations and travel that goes along with speaking. On top of that, traditional thought leadership has high barriers to entry. It’s expensive, high-risk and high-reward.  You can drop $20k on a PR agency and get nothing, or they might get you on national TV three times a week. Total crapshoot. To me, podcasting is the sweet spot where coaches and consultants can thrive by dominating a very focused, fast-growing niche. A niche where there is buzz, maybe a counter-cultural trend, or there’s just a group of people who feel overlooked and underserved by the content that’s already out there. Either way, podcasting is a very unique ecosystem that has relatively low barriers to entry (unlike traditional thought leadership), which can also be massively successful with very little time required (unlike social media).  So let’s sum up. If you have something to sell, like a program or a service, the sales will come easiest from your sphere of influence. But don’t be misled by those early, easy sales. If you want to keep selling more and keep growing, you’ll have to go out beyond your sphere of influence and pull new people in. Otherwise the sales you have now will start to taper down and down as you exhaust your existing sphere of influence. So choose your ecosystem with intention and thought, and then go all in.

We don’t often feature guests on the show, but when we do, it’s to spotlight authors, coaches and leaders who dive into introversion and why it’s not a deviation from the norm or a handicap - even in the world of coaching.  There are many natural advantages to being an introvert, but they often get lost in the misconceptions, misidentifications and baggage people have about the word. How do we break out of the misconceptions and embrace the strengths of being an introvert? How do we build our schedules and priorities around how we are, instead of how we wish we were or think we need to be?  In this episode, creator of QuietandStrong.com and author of “Minding Your Time: Time Management, Productivity, and Success, Especially for Introverts”, David Hall shares how we can understand our introversion and use it to our advantage.  Three things we learned from David Hall;  Why an introvert’s natural ability to think deeply helps us as leaders and experts The huge misconception about introverts and podcasting  How to manage our time, schedules and energy according to our personalities  Guest Bio-  David Hall, M.Ed., is the creator of QuietandStrong.com. He is an author, blogger, podcaster and speaker on a mission to help introverts find success by discovering their strengths and honoring their needs. David has also spent 20+ years working in higher education, and has given many workshops, trainings, and presentations on personality, strengths, and introversion/extroversion. His book, “Minding Your Time: Time Management, Productivity, and Success, Especially for Introverts”, helps readers understand themselves and their introversion to be more successful in managing their time and productivity. For more information, and to listen to the podcast head over to http://quietandstrong.com/. 

There are two ways to find easy sales. One is a good long-term strategy, the other is a trap. Now we know from Richard Koch's work on the 80/20 Principle and his book the Star Principle... that the most likely way to build a sustainable, profitable business is to identify a niche with 10% yearly growth potential... Then build the #1 business in that niche. Just about every successful business can be boiled down to those two elements. NOW, if we start from there, that reveals a couple very interesting things about what's really going on when sales come easy. There are two ways initial sales come easy: 1. You sell something easy to understand in an established niche.  You might call this the Fast Follower Strategy. I see this a lot in the real estate space, where even new, inexperienced agents can generate sales because consumers' expectations are low and competition is mostly part-timers who don't treat it like a business. However, I also see this in real estate COACHING, where the same lack of seriousness makes it easy for a successful high-achievers to get 5 or 10 coaching clients if they speak at a few events or go on a few podcasts. The market is established, agents know what a real estate coach is, they may have people even telling them to hire a coach. So initial sales can come easy if you have good content and you're likable and trustworthy. Now let's look at the 2nd case where sales can come easy... 2. You sell something new and different to early adopters who are looking for something new and different. You might call this the Trailblazer Strategy.  That's what almost all big businesses do in the early days. The early adopters are looking for something new and different, so when we come along and give that to them, they're at least open to hearing it. If you're likable and trustworthy, you can pick up some easy sales in the beginning, even with something new and different as long as you're going to the early adopters.  The problem is there aren't enough early adopters in most niches to build a long-term business. So when we look for easy sales, it can be misleading. Let's take the scenario where you sell something in an established space. When you're a fast follower, most of the time the best case scenario is you become Pepsi to someone else's Coke. The Samsung Galaxy to the iPhone. Amazon Fire to the iPad.  That's why looking for easy sales can be a trap. They can lead you right into a position where you get stuck behind a leader you can never overtake. They are already #1 in that niche, so you're mostly hoping they make a mistake or give up their position. Building a business that takes off and gets popular, whether it's online or not, comes down to creating something remarkable. Something that raises people's social status when they buy it and especially when they talk about it. And that rarely happens when we're the Fast Follower.  So when we seek easy sales, remember that one path leads to dominating your niche, the other is a trap that leads to 2nd place.  The harder road of selling something new and different, creating a new niche, and going from early adopters to the mainstream, that's the path to a REAL sustainable, profitable business. And that takes leadership. Stepping up and claiming a leadership position in a niche that doesn't exist yet. It takes courage and a lot of hard thinking and interacting with the market to give them something new and different they are willing to try. Steve Jobs and the iPad is a great example. The category of tablet computers basically didn't exist until he created it. The tech was getting close, but he had the vision and Apple had the team that executed that idea. And they created a new niche that Apple continues to dominate. So here's the big takeaway.  Easy sales can be an indicator that we've created something new and remarkable, so early adopters are jumping on it. Or it can indicate that we've actually just created something that is capitalizing on someone else's leadership, and we're following.  Being a follower, no matter how fast you follow, is a losing strategy in the long run. Better to do the work up front to create something remarkable, compelling and memorable.  That makes sales easy to early adopters while also setting to dominate a new niche that really matters.

Let's start with a little thought experiment: What is draining your time and energy right now? Not all tasks are equally draining. That leads us into our first big idea. 1) Go after the things that drain the most energy first, not necessarily the most time. Chances are, your business only needs a few key skills from you. And of all the other things in your business that you do, some of those things aren't a big deal, and some drain your energy. If you're like me and it hurts your soul to check your email, create a simple system and hire someone to handle your email immediately. A few years ago I realized that my podcast agency only needed 3 things from me, and they were the things I was highly skilled at and enjoyed doing. Everything else I ruthlessly started to get off my plate. So how do you get everything else off your plate? 2) Systems first, People second. We're living in a massive labor shortage. A-players are hard to come by. A-Salespeople and high-level integrators always have been hard to come by and always will be. If you focus on rockstar systems, you don't need A players all the time to have a great business. The better your systems, the better your baseline level of performance in your business. Rockstar systems means you can hire good, smart, capable people, and still get rockstar results. So what happens when you have an A player? Squeeze them for everything their worth by having them upgrade your systems while they're with you. Plan on them to outgrow the role and probably leave. I hired an A-player in the middle of last year, and together we built a great system inside my agency. He even documented the whole system step-by-step and helped hire and train the 2 people it took to replace him. So when he got an opportunity with an awesome startup, he was able to turn over the keys of the system to the people he'd trained and I wasn't left scrambling. I was actually better off for him being with me for a year. So I don't plan on retaining rockstar people for my business to work. If you're building a lifestyle team, at some point you're going to hit a business sweet spot, where you're not looking to just grow for its own sake. And at that point you have to be honest with yourself and the people on your team. You may not be able to retain all your A people by giving them a vision within your team. Their vision may take them out of your team, so you may as well plan for it. McKinsey Consulting is the best example. They've known for decades that they'll retain 1 out of every 5 people they hire, because they only keep the best of the best. That creates the famous "Up-or-Out'' structure McKinsey is known for, and creates an international fraternity of former McKinsey types who weren't retained but ended up at other companies. They then turn around and recommend their companies hire McKinsey, so often the candidates that didn't make the cut end up being McKinsey's best clients. And McKinsey gets the best out of all their people while they're there. We can all do the same thing by having an informal "Up-or-Out" policy. You only retain the best, those who can make you a lot of money or save you a lot of money. Everyone else will "outgrow" their role and move out of your team at some point, and you support them in that journey. That brings us to one of the biggest challenges in building a team: Losing too many good people, especially A players. Rainmakers and founders tend to burn through good people, and some do it over and over again for years. I have a client who made 1.3 million last year in billings all by himself. That means he is worth $650 an hour, every single working hour a week for 50 weeks a year. If he paid a VA $650 a week, all they'd have to save him is one hour of work to be worth it. Yet he's the classic rainmaker. He's burned through so many people over the years that now he shies away even from hiring a part-time assistant. And so he continues to do a bunch of energy draining activities, like checking his own email, setting his own calendar appointments, sending follow ups, etc. And it's a shame because it's all fixable, and it starts with building systems first and adding people second. So once you have rockstar systems run by good people, how do you keep those people and get great performance out of them? 3) Manage people by metrics, not by your feelings. One of my mentors is a very high-level performance coach. He's built these incredible spreadsheets full of formulas and data tracking and visualization to help his clients track and raise their performance level. What's the problem? People couldn't handle it. Even the highest sales performers, routinely billing 7 figures year after year, have trouble caring deeply about more than 3 metrics. The people on our teams are definitely no different. We need to give the people on our team a definite and secure way to know they're doing a good job. I've been in both positions, working for the founder and being the founder. And it's HARD to work for a founder. You never quite know where you stand, what's expected of you, when you're doing a good job and when you're not. The best thing you can do is when you hire someone, narrow everything down to numbers, and base their performance goals on no more than 3 numbers. No more. If they hit those numbers, they're doing a good job. If they don't hit those numbers, they're not doing a good job. If our people hit their numbers and we're still not getting the results we want in our business, who's fault is that? Our fault for not knowing our numbers:) When our people know exactly what we expect, and that we take responsibility for setting the numbers to get the outcomes we want, it gives people exactly what they want. Security. Stability. Support. If you create that culture, that extreme ownership type of culture, your people will not only want to reach those numbers, but when something goes wrong, they'll want to roll up their sleeves and help you fix it. They won't mentally check out and say, "Not my problem." I'll leave you with this. In our agency we have a weekly meeting, it's run by my head of content who's based in South Africa. And she runs that meeting, not me. She asks all the key questions that everyone knows in advance. Everyone reports in their key numbers. She interrogates and tracks those numbers. I offer suggestions and little tweaks, so I'm valuable in that meeting, but I'm not necessary. That meeting happens whether I'm there or not. So I could leave the business for weeks, even months, and we'd continue to perform at a high level for a good long time. And as the founder of a lifestyle business, that gives me the security, stability and support I want. So to sum up, here are the 3 big ideas we covered: 1) Go after the things that drain the most energy first, not necessarily the most time. 2) Systems first, People second. 3) Manage people by metrics, not by feelings. That's how you free up time and energy while your team is in high-growth mode.

I spotted a question from an expert in a mastermind group and wanted to address it because it's a common one. Mostly I get this question from folks who've been on a few podcasts, know they enjoy being a guest, and can see the potential for their own show. Ultimately, I want coaches and consultants doing both. Guesting and hosting podcasts work together for best results. Guesting on other podcasts is the #1 way to get more podcast listeners. And hosting your own podcast is your best lead conversion tool, and it's the place where you have 100% control of the message. So in no particular order, here are 3 key questions that will help you make this critical decision. #Question 1: How many podcasts have you been on? If the answer is fewer than 5, I'd recommend spending more time being a guest. By all means, start working on your podcast idea behind the scenes. Yet I recommend spending more time interacting with the audience, attracting people to you, and testing your Point of View and Bold Opinions. Even though our agency produces podcasts, I advise folks to guest on podcasts first. Do as many shows as possible and get a feel for what you like and don't like. That lays the foundation and starts putting your Point of View into the world, attracting people to you and building an audience who can help you refine your podcast idea before it even launches. That's the real secret to launching a great podcast - finding a fast growth niche where people are seeking content, conversation, connection and community.  A group of people who feel neglected, passed over or overlooked by the content that's already out there.  #Question 2: Have you identified a fast-growing niche where you can become the first or only expert? Emphasis on 'first or only.' When I say a fast-growing niche, you might not know. But if I asked you, Where is all the *buzz* and energy in your space right now, that might spur some thoughts. The best way to grow anything, from a podcast to your entire business, is to position yourself where the buzz and energy and growth already are, and then become the "first or only" in that space.  Many coaches and consultants I see are not operating in fast-growing niches, and yet they're beating themselves up for slow growth. I also see this a lot in coaches and consultants who've become well known in one niche and then want to keep growing, but they've essentially outgrown their original niche and haven't chosen a good strategy for their next niche. I've been heavily influenced by the work of Richard Koch, who wrote the 80/20 Principle. What you might not know is that he also wrote a book called the Star Principle, in which he shared the secret of a "star" business, which goes back to Bruce Henderson's work at Boston Consulting. A "star" business is the #1 brand in a niche that's growing 10% a year or more. If the niche you're in isn't growing at 10% a year or more, then even dominating in that niche won't lead to big growth. As coaches and consultants we tend to compare ourselves to other experts and influencers without taking the niche into consideration. When I work with clients especially on their podcast launches, that's one of the key things I'm looking to identify. What's the niche, and is that (or could it become) a fast-growing niche? That was the big secret of the Team Building Podcast that I launched with Jeff Cohn. Within the residential real estate space, team building was the new hot trend. We positioned the podcast as the "first and only" podcast in that space, and he's maintained that position for the last 5 years, getting 10k downloads a month in a space where there's maybe 15k potential clients in a given year. So look around at the niche you're in and be brutally honest, is the niche actually growing? Or are you trying to grow in a niche where growth is sideways at best. #Question 3: Do you have a Clear & Compelling Idea that grabs attention from your ideal clients and compels them to learn more? If you don't have that yet, guesting on podcasts is your best bet while you work that out. If you want help with that, reach out and maybe there's an opportunity for us to work together one-on-one.  Whether we work together or not, the goal of guesting on podcasts should be more than reaching new people. In my opinion, podcast guesting gives you repeated opportunities to try out tweaks to your messaging.  You can tweak small things like the language of how you describe yourself and your offer, or you might play around with different Bold Opinions and see what grabs people's attention. You might even play around with your Clear & Compelling Idea, trying different ideas entirely, or tweaking the exact language. But how do you know when you've hit it, and have a Clear & Compelling Idea? You know you've got something when either the host reacts strongly, or you get feedback from listeners saying, "Holy cow, I've never heard that before! How do I learn more?!" The best time to work out your Clear & Compelling Idea is prior to launching a podcast. The best podcasts we've launched for clients are basically a delivery vehicle for a single, powerful idea.  An idea that is simple and easy to communicate, so it's razor-sharp clear to the right people, while also being unique and powerful enough that people respond strongly and are compelled to learn more. That's a Clear & Compelling Idea.  So there are your 3 questions to make a better strategic choice on guesting versus hosting.  Ultimately, the goal is to be guesting and releasing episodes of your own podcast consistently, then grabbing clips of each to put into email and social media systems while building strategic relationships with the people you meet through podcasting. That's the MicroFamous system in a nutshell. 

A client asked me the other day about hiring a social media agency.  An agency promising to get far more engagement on her content. The idea is for them to push out content across multiple pages and platforms. Lots of pushing. It’s a very appealing idea, too. Your content…everywhere.  Who doesn’t want to be everywhere? Yet I think the days of pushing content on people are over, at least for the time being. And agencies are still selling the dream, mostly based on success stories from 3+ years ago. Why does this matter? Because it affects everything about how you approach growing your podcast or marketing your business. Here’s the big idea for today: There was a sweet spot in social media where you could “push” your content out to people. That sweet spot is over. For organic content, that sweet spot lasted around 10 years.  The front end of that period was roughly marked by the launch of Gary Vee’s book “Crush It” in 2009 and Grant Cardone’s book “10X” in 2011. Those books are now 10+ years old. Since then, social media companies have continued to tweak their algorithm.  Their mission is to keep eyes on the platform which they can monetize with ads. So we saw things start to change with organic social content.  Anything that sent people off-platform or got “low engagement” was downplayed or even punished. YouTube videos stopped playing natively inside Facebook.  When you tried to post a YouTube video or podcast episode to Facebook, you got these boring looking posts that got low engagement. The post basically guaranteed you had no shot at going viral. Facebook devalued their Business pages with algorithm changes. Guaranteeing that most people don’t see business page content. It just wasn’t as engaging as Facebook wanted. Inside of Facebook Groups, we saw opinion posts do far better, while teaching posts get buried by the algorithm. So now, organic content has to get instant engagement…or your post dies.  I saw one coach online talking about how they loved their podcast agency because they put up these “beautiful clips of their podcast” on places like Instagram. When I went to her Instagram profile, I found that those “beautiful posts” averaged under 100 views and had minimal engagement compared to posts that were more authentic and off-the-cuff. (Of course, there’s a role for an agency to post for you, but that role has changed over the years. More on that below.) Social media companies like Facebook have set the standard for the type of content they want.  Content that is…  created by you in real-time on their platform using in-app tools exclusively and custom tailored to their platform that generates instant engagement (which skews toward negative emotions) So the landscape has shifted away from the “10X” approach. Creating one piece of content and pushing it out to every platform doesn’t work the way it used to. Those posts didn’t get the right kind of engagement, so those posts now are mostly seen by you - the account owner - along with the 150 people you engage with the most. Those are probably people you already know. So to you, you might see all this content going out everywhere.  But most of your followers never see that content, because the social media companies bury it with the algorithm.  Now what does all this have to do with push and pull? The challenge in growing a podcast or even your company has shifted. It’s no longer about pushing out content in an attempt to be “everywhere” on social media.That approach simply doesn’t work, because the social media companies changed their algorithm to guarantee it doesn’t work. So the marketing challenge has shifted to, How do we create content that people pull toward them?  Because if someone isn’t on the other end, pulling our content toward them, the game is rigged. We’ve already lost. That’s why it’s so critical to choose the right niche - a fast growing niche - for your business and especially your podcast. When there’s a growing buzz and excitement around a newer niche, people are seeking out content. They’re pulling content toward them. Looking for podcasts or videos or articles. They can’t get enough. Your goal is to simply position yourself in the places where people are looking for content, and give them something Clear & Compelling. That’s a strategy that works in an era when pushing content no longer does. Now I mentioned earlier that you can have these beautiful clips of your podcast go out on social media and they get very little engagement.  So how has that affected our done-for-your podcast service? The answer is that we recommended against those types of audiogram posts years ago, and shifted as many clients as possible to video highlight clips, natively uploaded wherever we can. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. It’s not a perfect solution, yet highlight clips give you the best chance of having something reach more than 150 of your followers, or be discovered on a platform like YouTube with good headlines and good SEO. We also post 1-3 quote graphics to support each new episode launch, but with the understanding that these are just little billboards that scroll past people’s feeds. We don’t expect or promise that those posts get a ton of engagement. The real work of promoting individual episodes comes down to email (which we also take care of for our clients), word of mouth from your fans, and guests promoting their episode, again mostly through email.  If you want to explore what it looks like for us to do literally everything for you in your podcast, from guest booking to email marketing and video highlight clips for social media, just grab a Brainstorm call. We’ll chat about your podcast idea, your potential to reach a fast-growing niche, and see if a podcast can bring a 10X return on your investment.  I’ll leave you with this.  The game has changed. And it’s not just affecting how podcasts are marketed. These are massive changes in the social media landscape that have a ton of implications for how marketing will be done over the next 5-10 years.  If you have this insight, you can turn your attention away from the social media rat race and toward things that actually grow your business, put money in your pocket and impact people around the world. And do it all with calm, confidence and clarity. 

Inside our podcast production agency, one of my big pushes over the last couple years was to convert to Scrum-style project management so that we could be working on 2-3 service improvement projects at any given time.   So I wanted to give you a glimpse into that system and the projects we’ve run this year to improve our podcast service. If you’re a current client you’ll recognize some or all of these projects (not all applies to every client) and if you’re looking to launch a podcast this gives you insight into what it takes to keep up in the world of podcasting.   Here are the bigger service improvement projects we’ve run just in 2021.   Headline and subject line optimization   We started using a headline optimizer first (we use this one) and then added the email subject line optimizer later.   The goal was to raise the quality of our average episode title, and this site helped us gamify the process by scoring each title.   Not only did we find ourselves writing better episode titles, but we also shared and celebrated when we wrote high-scoring titles.   Milestone Episode Notifications    Milestone episodes are your 50th, 100th episode, or hitting a milestone in download numbers like 100,000.    Watching for milestone episodes has helped us to get clients thinking early about special episodes, new ideas or ways to get more promotional juice out of that milestone.   That led to special strategy calls, creative episode ideas, and even me guest hosting on Lars Hedenborg’s 450th episode.      Client Update Email improvements    We wanted to make the email more useful for gauging audience growth and decision making on topics.   So we added a new Weekly Stats Graph that’s more readable and actionable than other graphs (in my opinion) and gives a better sense of where audience growth is going.   We also changed up one of the stats included in our email to include top episodes of the last 90 days, rather than all-time. That gives you a better sense of what the best topics are and removes the all-time episodes which change less frequently.   Leveraging opportunities to put clients on podcasts we produce   For clients in real estate that meant looking for ways to put them on Real Estate Uncensored. So it’s now part of our weekly meeting to ask the question, “What client should be putting on other shows we produce?”   We also added certain clients into our BusDev system to specifically look for ways to introduce them to podcasters we connect with.   Since we don’t offer podcast booking as part of our service (with good reason), this gives us a way to systematically get our clients more exposure. I always want to look beyond having good intentions, and build things into our systems to solve problems once and for all. Weekly questions are a good way to ensure that things stay on your radar.   Highlight Clips going out the same day as an episode release    We used to have Highlight Clips go out the following week to point back to the episode and drive new traffic to it. Nothing wrong with that, but as our production process got even better and we got raw episodes from clients further in advance, we were able to move this up.    This one is a little subjective, as I can see a case for Highlight Clips going out at various times, but all the feedback we got from clients on this change was positive.    Better feedback to clients on great episodes or areas for improvement   Most of our clients are experienced public speakers and frequent podcast guests, so I don’t believe they need micro-managing and intensive coaching on how to become better podcasters.   However, some clients wanted more feedback from us, and I felt like we needed to give more encouragement when clients were naturally getting better from repetition.   So we started building in ways to get feedback from team members (like writers and audio editors) all the way back to clients. So if your microphone sounded particularly good in a certain location, or an episode was particularly good because you had a great vibe with the guest and asked great questions, we’re getting better at passing that on to you and celebrating improvement.   More personal email templates    One of the changes over the years has been the drop in email deliverability, and how aggressive email services like Gmail have become about screening.   So as an agency we’ve nudged clients away from heavily branded email templates (even though they make our agency look really good). We’re nudging everyone toward extremely personal emails that look like they could have been sent by our clients off the cuff, at least at first glance.   We’re basically trying to do 2 things: avoid triggering filters that send your emails into Spam, Social and Promotion folders, and also avoid triggering people’s real defenses that come up when they get a corporate looking email. Most of our client’s sell extremely personal services like coaching, so personal emails not only avoid filters but I think do a better job of building the relationship.   Those are just some of the improvements that we’ve implemented that affect most or all of our clients. That doesn’t count the improvements that affected specific clients, or projects that turned out to not move the needle or weren’t scalable.    So if you’re running a podcast, these might spur some new ideas for experiments you can run.   Yet I want to point out the bigger lesson: It’s great to build a system. But as soon as you build a system, you must also build in a system to improve and fine-tune the original system.   That’s what we do with our Service Improvement Projects, and by running several at one time we can experiment, find things that move the needle for clients, then roll them out to other clients.   That’s what keeps our systems improving over time.

Years ago I caught an Uber and it was a nice newer black Infiniti sedan.  Along the way, the driver explains that his day job is a financial advisor and he drives for Uber on the side for extra cash because he’s newer in the business. Now ask yourself, In that moment, was he an influential financial advisor to me? No, because I had already put him in the category of Uber driver. He couldn’t market and sell himself to me as both an Uber driver AND a financial advisor. In my mind, there’s only room for him in one category. But we’re making this same mistake every day, and that’s the topic of this episode. One of the missions of the podcast is to break down things that are confusing and frustrating so we can be less critical of ourselves and move forward with more calm, confidence and clarity.    So I want to dive into a common frustration we have with branding and marketing, which is how do we market ourselves when we sell more than one thing? In my opinion anyone can become MicroFamous, yet we have to be strategic, focused and consistent to get there. To reach the level of being famously influential. It’s hard to be strategic, focused and consistent when our energy is pulled in a bunch of different directions.  Not to mention the fact that people automatically put us into one category. “Jeff is a business coach, Linda is a consultant, Jay is an author, etc.” Because people have a really hard time putting us into more than one category, it’s hard to become famously influential for more than one thing to the same people. And when we’re talking about different offers and services to the same people, that’s basically what we’re doing. We end up confusing people. And if you think everyone but you has their s#%t together, think again.  Even big companies who know better do this kind of thing all the time. The best example I’ve seen lately are the hilariously terrible Bud Light Seltzer ads. Have you seen these? So here’s the backstory. Bud Light’s parent company tries to get into the hard seltzer space with a new brand and it flops. So they come back with a brilliant idea to market hard seltzer under the Bud Light brand. You can see how screwed up this idea is in their own commercials. One of their TV ads starts this way: “The Bud Light logo makes people think our seltzer is a beer, so we hired recruited retired NFL players Nick Mangold to Block It Out! Now it’s a mildly amusing commercial, but it’s less funny when we realize we’re doing the same thing when we’re selling a bunch of different things.  We basically have to go around saying, “Hey I know you think I sell ABC, but I actually do XYZ! Surprise!” Of course, we know we’re confusing people, we just don’t know what to do about it. So we start asking ourselves questions like: How can I be more clear with my brand and my message? Could I put everything under the same brand?  Can I find one brand that allows me to do all the things I want to do under the same brand? I call that the Search for the Magic Umbrella. A Magic Umbrella is a brand or an idea that acts as an umbrella we can put over just about anything we want to do or create or sell. And I see people twisting themselves into pretzels trying to find it.  It’s a very noisy, cluttered world out there. Especially online. One of the core principles of the MicroFamous system is that in order to cut through the noise, we have to deliver a Clear & Compelling Idea. An idea that is so razor-sharp clear that people understand it very quickly, and so compelling that it grabs their attention and makes them say, “Holy cow, I didn’t know that thing existed. How can I learn more!?” Unfortunately, searching for a Magic Umbrella where we can market and talk about several different offers and services leads us away from a Clear & Compelling Idea. Instead of a powerful idea that cuts through the noise and brand that gets attention from the right people, we end up with watered-down ideas and boring brands that say nothing compelling. And we just keep confusing people, like Bud Light Seltzer. My own music is a perfect example. I mostly set aside the whole musician side of myself for the first few years of building the agency.  I had it in the back of my head that I’d love to incorporate music into my daily life and maybe even my business life, but wasn’t sure how. At one point I thought I had hit on it, a way to bring my music under my business brand.  Yet the more I looked at it and played with that idea, the more I realized I was doing both a disservice by trying to combine them. So I set the music aside again until I developed its own brand. You can check out the YouTube channel for instrumental music, just search for “Prayer Prompts.” And because I don’t need to fit my music under any business brand or integrate with a bunch of other offers and projects, I can be super clear and focused with the music brand. I’m also not trying to promote my music to the same people, I put it into its own silo where the music lives in a different place from my business stuff and speaks to different people. In other words, my business is in one Silo and my music is in another Silo. When I think about marketing and selling more than one thing, that’s my best advice.  Put everything in Silos, don’t look for Magic Umbrellas. We need more Silos and fewer Magic Umbrellas. So let’s get back to the question, What do we do if we sell more than one thing? My best advice is this: Pick one thing to focus on and work toward becoming MicroFamous for that one thing first.  Derek Sivers made a point years ago that hit me hard and helped me set aside my music for a while. He said you can get a lot done in 10 years. So think about your life in 10 year blocks.  You could focus on something for the next 10 year block, master it, and still have time to do 3, 4 or even 5 other things for 10 years each. Still haven’t written that book or launched that app or released that album or started that side project you’ve been thinking about?  Maybe that’s OK. You don’t have to do everything right now. That helped relieve some of the guilt and inner turmoil I had over putting my music on the back burner. Not all of it, but enough that I was able to focus on establishing the agency. But while you’re working to become MicroFamous in one niche, what do you do with those other offers, those other projects, those other sides of yourself? I think there have a few good options: Option 1: Put everything else completely on the back burner and come back to them later. “Strike a deal with yourself about your music.” That was one of the best pieces of advice I got from a mentor years ago. Set other things aside for now until certain milestones are hit, then you’ll pick them up again. The deal is to not judge yourself in the meantime. Option 2: Put everything in Silos and split time equally between the most important brands, offers and projects. Now if you haven’t established yourself in one space, I wouldn’t recommend this approach.  Trying to grab attention and build influence in multiple spaces makes it less likely that you’ll become famously influential in any of those spaces. It’s a big risk to take, even though it keeps the fantasy going that you can do it all at the same time. But if you have an established brand or level of influence, and you want to work on something new, you may be able to split time equally if you keep things in separate silos. Option 3: Spend 80% of your time on your primary focus, and 20% of your time on one side project.  That’s the phase I moved into with music this year. I devote a few hours a week to making music, but it doesn’t have to pay the bills or be my whole identity, so I’m less attached to the outcome.  I’m already known as the MicroFamous guy. So when people in the business world come across the music side of me, it adds dimension and builds more of a personal connection but it doesn’t confuse them.  It also doesn’t dilute the MicroFamous brand because I’m not constantly looking for a way to bring the music under the same umbrella as my agency.  So if you’re struggling with your brand, think about what it would look like to each offer, each project into its own silo. My guess is that it answers all the questions you’ve been asking yourself about your brand. So it’s not really a question of marketing, it’s a decision that needs to be made.  What is the one thing you’ll put your focus into now? Make that decision, and it will free you up to become famously influential for one thing. 

We are only in control of our actions. So setting goals around things like podcast downloads are pointless because we don't have direct control over them. Let's set the scene with a couple stories to illustrate the core challenge when setting goals. A couple years ago a client of mine hired an outside marketing agency to run their whole marketing program. They came up with a social media strategy based on benchmarking and best practices, which is a corporate way of saying they'll copy what other companies in the space are doing. That led to this agency creating all these lovely Powerpoint slides with projections of how the client's podcast would grow now that this agency would be doing all this marketing "stuff" alongside the podcast. It all looked great on Powerpoint and my clients got really excited cause they love numbers and metrics. And who doesn't love a chart that just goes up and to the right? Unfortunately, the agency had no direct control over any of those metrics and their brilliant strategy of copying what everyone else was doing in the space did nothing for the client. After over a year of spinning wheels and lots of presentations, the client ended up firing the agency. I've seen that scenario play out enough over the years to see it coming, and it stems from the same root cause. Now let's look at a story that shows the other side of goal-setting. I have a good friend and mentor in the executive recruiting space, which is like hand-to-hand combat sales. Lots of phone calls, lots of hand-holding, lots of babysitting deals and last-second negotiation to get these deals to close. It's a very fascinating industry. So my mentor, who is obsessed with metrics and goal-setting, was sharing with me his approach to coaching someone on goal-setting. In his view, there were 10 different elements of goal-setting and each required care and dedication to master. I looked at that list and agreed that all those things were 100% correct, with one caveat. You had to be in an environment where the relationship between performance and result was a direct, straight line and all the numbers were already known. In other words, X number of phone calls produces X appointments which leads to X deals. If you're in an environment where those numbers are unknown or changing, you can't set goals in the same way. That led to a discussion to produce the key insight I want to share here on the show. There is a difference between Outcome Goals and Performance Goals. Outcome Goals are things we want to see happen, like more podcast downloads or more sales calls. But we can't control those things directly. No matter how much we focus our intention or energy, we can't simply produce more podcast downloads or sales calls. And no amount of putting them down as goals on paper or creating slick-looking Powerpoint slides will change that fact. That's where Performance Goals come in. Performance Goals are what we DO to produce the Outcome Goals we hope for. Performance Goals are the actions we take. Performance Goals are where we can focus our effort and energy to get better results. And in uncertain environments, where things are unknown or ever-changing, that's all we can focus on. So rather than setting Outcome Goals for things like downloads, subscribers or email opt-ins, focus on setting Performance Goals. What are the actions you believe will have a positive effect and lead to the outcomes you want? How do those actions translate into new commitments? And what kind of metric can you assign to those commitments? That's where you can focus on holding yourself accountable to the things you control rather than things you can't control. For example, let's say you want more podcast downloads this year. There are a few actions that will have a positive effect. 1 is consistency with your own content. Don't skip weeks. 2 is create the best content you can. Jump on strategy calls with us or your team, be more intentional about the guests you interview, plan out higher quality and more thoughtful solo episodes. Do the work. 3 is get interviewed on other podcasts regularly. If you don't have someone pitching you to new podcasts, reach out to us, the FastTrack has all those materials and a complete training program for one of your team or a VA. So you're consistently getting pitched and interviewed. If you missed the episode from a few weeks ago when I talked about how Tim Ferris grew his podcast, then you probably don't know that his most recommended podcast growth strategy is getting interviewed on other podcasts. That's something you can set goals around. Not to get on 50 podcasts this year, because that's an Outcome Goal. You can't control how many podcasters say Yes to you. But you can control the actions you and your team take. Like sending 10 pitch emails a week. That's a Performance Goal. So before going into this year, just ask yourself whether you have direct and complete control over the goals you've set. If not, take a step back. Ask what actions might produce the Outcome Goals you want. Put a number or metric to those actions and set that level of action as a Performance Goal. X number of this every week or every day. Then hold yourself accountable to that Performance Goal. Let the Outcome be a natural product of choosing good Performance Goals

As lead gen costs continue to go up, and social media algorithms are optimized for rapid rising, negative emotional responses, it gets more and more difficult to put any kind of a direct response call-to-action in front of people on social media. That goes for whether you pay to play or not. I'll give you an example. Let's rewind to February 2020, the MicroFamous book just launched, got great feedback and reviews. So my idea was to run the free+shipping offer to build the email list, and I built a whole 90-day email nurture system to follow up and convert those book buyers into true believers in the MicroFamous message. But the ads just were ridiculously expensive, despite us doing all the latest, greatest, micro-testing techniques. Then I found out why. The guy helping me with ads checked with his network around May of 2020 and heard that it was starting to cost $40-50 in ads to get one conversion on a $7 free+shipping book offer. What that told me is that the people doing it are spending a warchest to build their email list. They probably have a complex set of backend follow up and a mix of offers to try to recapture all that ad spend and hopefully make a profit. And who knows if it's working or how long they're waiting to actually profit. Just because people are doing things doesn't mean it's working or that it's sustainable. So I pulled back that offer. My observation is that over the long run, lead gen costs will continue going up, regardless of short-term issues like iOS14 or variations in the market or by niche. The more the big companies start shifting ad budgets away from TV and radio into social media, it just drives up everyone's cost. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. I've talked to some Facebook ad agency folks over the last year, and they're proud of getting their clients leads at $5-10. When they first start running ads, opt-ins can be $15, $20 or more. Now, you might say, what about the folks who are running ads and selling programs and courses in the millions? The Russell Brunsons, Russ Rufinos, Amy Porterfields, etc. I have no doubt that the top 1-5% of info-marketers are still making money. Whether that's with free+shipping funnels. Or running ads to webinars with a whole series of upsells and cross-sells and complicated, trigger-driven email campaigns. Or maybe they're running ads to call-funnels and hard-selling with a phone team. I'm sure it all still works to a degree. But to make the math work now, in an environment of $5-10 lead costs, the game has changed. Your backend has to be fine tuned. It reminds me of a story one of my mentors, Frank Klesitz, told on this podcast in the episode on puffery and copywriting. The story goes that he was at a Dan Kennedy event years ago, and one of the guest speakers was a top info-marketer. And to show his autoresponder campaign in all of its glory, he took a 6-foot tall roll of paper with his entire campaign sketched out. When the paper was rolled out, it ran across the width of the entire stage and needed several people just to hold it up. On seeing that, Frank decided that was not where he wanted to compete. So is the biggest challenge facing us just an issue of optimizing ads? In other words, if we just became better info-marketers, does that solve the problem? I don't think so. Let's say the top 5% of info-marketers can still scale up using social media ads and a complex backend of funnels and triggers and upsells and cross-sells. Do you WANT to put in the work to reach the top 5% of info-marketers? Do you have the rare set of skills and mentality and engineering ability to get there? Do you have the internal values that drive you to extract maximum value from someone regardless of whether it's in their best interest? I don't know that I do. I certainly don't have the values piece. I also don't have the passion to reverse engineer ads on social media...every day... looking for that slight tactical edge that will cut my ad cost another $.30 cents. I definitely don't have the passion to start over again every time something in the algorithm or the bidding system changes. And if you're listening to this podcast, odds are, you don't either. What I take from these stories and examples is this: The fundamentals we talk about in the MicroFamous book and on this podcast are becoming more crucial to success than they were 5 years ago when lead costs were lower. Fundamentals like word of mouth. Like having a Clear & Compelling Idea at the heart of your business. Or becoming famously influential to the right people, rather than going for a maximum number of eyeballs on your content. All of those fundamentals are more critical now than they were 5 years ago when you could just run ads and build your email list at break even without being in the top 5% of info-marketers. The game has changed. And for some, that's good news. For others, it means they will continue to struggle and not know why. Let's take word of mouth and the Clear & Compelling Idea, for example. If you can’t distill your Point of View, your belief system, down into a single powerful idea that grabs the attention of the right people, you will struggle to grow. If the core idea of your business isn’t worth talking about in the eyes of your ideal clients, no amount of ad spend will fix that. Regardless of the money you throw at the problem. If you don't have a razor-sharp Clear and Compelling Idea at the heart of your business, it's going to be hard to create eye-catching, unique content. It's going to be hard to grab people's attention even after they opt-in. It's going to be hard to keep their attention and convert them into clients. It's going to be hard to get word of mouth, so you have consistent referrals or champions out there telling everyone how awesome you are.It's going to be hard. And you might think the solution is to hire the ClickFunnels person or the Facebook ads person or the Tik Tok ads person or the mini-masterclass workshop person. And none of that will move the needle if at the most basic level, when your ideal client hears the core idea of your business, it's not razor-sharp, clear and compelling to them. So to me, that is still the greatest challenge for business coaches, consultants and any kind of expert trying to build a lifestyle business. Maybe it always will be. And that's good news if you're listening to this podcast. Because this is the place where I'm going to push you to get more clear and compelling with the core idea of your business. If you want some help finding your Clear & Compelling Idea, reach out and maybe I can help you work through that. Hit me on Facebook messenger, my handle is GetMicroFamous, or reach out to grab a time to chat, matt@pursuingresults.com.

Guests not sharing their episodes is one of the biggest frustrations of running a podcast. But is it the guest's fault? Not always. In this episode of MicroFamous we dive into 3 key mistakes podcasters are making right now that keep guests from even wanting to share their episode. And of course, we talk about how to avoid those mistakes and create an episode that guests are excited to share. Let's jump in! Mistake #1: We presented the guest in a way that adds nothing to their reputation or their level of influence. This could be in how we introduce them, how we phrase their accomplishments, how we describe or promote their offer, or even the picture we use in the graphics we create. There are SO many opportunities to screw this up. When my staff selects the headshot to use in our graphics, we're always looking for what the GUEST has already chosen as their primary headshot, from places like their website or LinkedIn profile. If we can't find something that is obviously their favorite, or all their stuff is low quality, we reach out to ask for a high-quality headshot.  Even something as simple as the wrong headshot can cause some folks to not share your episode. It could even rise to the level of a flat-out screw up, as I mentioned in the case of the podcaster who featured me on an episode which was released last week. They got the name of my company wrong, even right in the graphic they wanted me to share. I wanted to share their episode, I tried to share it, but I wasn't comfortable sending people to their Show Notes page because of how badly they screwed it up. And I couldn't even send folks to the episode using their graphic because even that was screwed up. Stick around to the end for my best quick tip on how to present someone in a powerful way. Mistake #2: We interview rather than having a conversation. When you've been a guest on a bunch of podcasts, you want a conversation, not an interrogation. That's why I refer to my guest episodes as conversation episodes, not interviews. I try to drill it into all my client's heads, These are not interviews. You are not an interviewer. You are an expert and influencer in your own right. No matter how big the guest is, this is a dialogue between two experts who each have their own perspective and value to bring to the episode. Remember to be thoughtful and respectful of your guest. I'm not talking going overboard and playing devil's advocate, trying to create Gotcha moments or running roughshod over them with your own opinions. We're talking about a real conversation between two experts who each have well thought out opinions on an interesting topic that is super important to a group of people. That's why people show up for business podcasts. Plus you get a nice bonus, since treating a guest episode as a conversation between two experts also puts you on a more even playing field and boosts your level of influence with your own audience. There's something about your audience hearing you have a smart, thoughtful conversation with someone they respect. It raises their level of respect for you. I've experienced that with my journey, and it's an incredible thing to feel. Mistake #3: We covered the same topics they share on every other podcast, we failed to draw anything unique and compelling out of them. Some podcasters ask roughly the same questions every time, and in the right setting that can work. But many big name guests have been on a bunch of podcasts and have shared on their signature topic many, many times. It's critical to draw something out of them that they haven't shared before. You can do this with well-researched questions, like Tim Ferris. You can do this by going down rabbit trails, chasing whatever sticks out to you in the moment. Christopher Lochhead Follow Your Different is a good example of this style. You can also do this by listening carefully for the most compelling, interesting, surprising idea and then digging into it. That's my favorite approach for myself because I'm good at identifying when I'm on the trail of something that is counterintuitive or counter-cultural. I've had this happen to me when a conversation on an episode happened to go into how I've built my business to accommodate the autoimmune issues I've dealt with since my teens. I even said yes to a relatively small podcast that was way out of my industry because they wanted to talk about my background as a homeschooled pastor's kid. So there's a lot of ways to encourage a guest to share something they rarely show on other podcasts, and that gives them a compelling reason to share their episode of your podcast. So let's sum up a bit and then I'll share my tip for presenting the guest in a powerful and compelling way. My favorite way to incentivize a guest to share their episode is to deliver a great conversation that; They genuinely enjoyed... Presented them in a way that builds their influence and enhances their reputation.... Chased some interesting new ideas or even produced some new insights for themselves on their own beliefs or opinions... Gave them an opportunity to share something they rarely talk about That's why I'm excited about a new podcast I've been working on behind the scenes. It's called One Book That Changed My Life. Virtually every expert, coach, consultant or thought leader I know is a voracious reader, either of physical books or audiobooks. And all of them have some favorite book, often a hidden gem or an overlooked classic, that changed their life. In each episode, the guest brings a book that changed their life in some way, and we dig into a couple big ideas from the book, how they put those ideas into action, and how those putting those ideas into action changed their life. So the conversations I'm having on this podcast are completely different from anything they've done before. The guests are loving it and are already asking, "Hey is the podcast launched yet cause I want to share this with people who need to read this book!" These are some of the most fun, interesting and unique conversations I've ever had. Hands down. It's been really, really amazing and I'm super excited to launch the show in December. Now as promised, here's my quick tip on presenting a guest in a powerful way. I'll sometimes ask a guest, "Is there something I can say when I introduce you that you can't say about yourself? Some sort of accolade or accomplishment that would sound super douchey if you mentioned it yourself?" Usually I'll get responses like, "I was on the Silicon Valley 40 under 40, or I'm in the top 1% of sales in my industry or we hit the INC5000 Fastest Growing Companies" and so forth. So I can hit those bullet points in my introduction rather than them having to say it. Then I can let them rephrase and shorten it by asking, "So when you run into an ideal client, how do you tell them what you do?" That sets the stage for them to explain exactly what they do and sell right now for the perfect person, without having to give a ton of background that might cause the audience to tune out. So there you have it! Avoid these 3 mistakes and you'll go from guests not sharing their episode to guests reaching out wondering WHEN they can share the episode!

A lot of the frustration I see in the expert/thought leader space has one root cause. So I want to give you some common examples of failure, and I'll build up the big reveal - the root cause and some potential cures for this horrible ailment. And if you think you're wrong in launching something that eventually failed, think again. Notice how many iterations of programs like Seth Godin's AltMBA, or Sam Ovens Consulting Accelerator, or Amy Porterfield's Courses That Convert. I've read various accounts that each of them are on their 4th, 5th, 6th or more MAJOR iteration of their program. And it's not just about continuous improvement. It's that they didn't get it right the first time. Either it didn't work the way they wanted it to, it didn't sell the way they wanted it to, or it didn't scale the way they wanted it to. So if those major players in those spaces didn't get it right the first time with their flagship programs, it shouldn't surprise us if we don't get something right the first time. Especially in the world of group coaching programs or online courses. Yet we have this weird expectation that we should get it right straight out of the gate, and this leads to the root cause I'll get into later. But first, let's get into the examples. Example 1: Going from individual client work directly to online products. Turns out it's fairly easy to create something that works when you're involved and hand-holding. But does the DIY version get people the results they want? It's also easy to create something you feel like people need, yet it's not the kind of thing they want to BUY. Or it just doesn't scale because it costs so much to bring in the right buyers to your world that at best you break even on the whole thing. All these failures become more likely when you go straight from individual client work to creating programs. Example 2: Offering a "harvest product" without building the foundation of demand to harvest. I went deeper on this in the episode on paid content and Substack, so I'll just give a quick overview of the idea. There’s a big difference between a program that helps you build demand for you, versus a program that harvests demand that already exists. Paid subscriptions, paid premium content, and even monthly memberships are all good examples of products and programs that "harvest" demand that already exists rather than helping you create new demand. In other words, they work great for people who already have an audience demanding more from them. Not so great for folks who are still in the audience and demand-building phase. The planting seeds phase. If you remember when Radiohead offered their album direct to fans at a pay-what-you-think-is-fair model. It was supposed to break the industry, but of course it hasn't. Because it only works for those with established audiences who are demanding more from the band than they already get. It took piles of record label money and years of touring and radio play to build that level of demand. Example 3: Building something that's scalable to deliver, but not scalable to market and sell. With the rise of ad costs and the fact that reaching people on social media organically is more time consuming than ever, it's not enough to build something that is scalable to deliver. Scalable marketing also has to be baked in for it to be truly scalable. Let's say you run a monthly membership for $19. But it costs you $50-100 or more to get a new member. That membership has to be amazing enough for them to stick around for 3-6 months. Not to make a profit off them...just to break even. That's why most of the folks offering membership programs, you find out their real offer is almost always some high-ticket offer on the backend. Coaching, events, masterminds, etc. That's where all the real profit is, and most of the other stuff they offer breaks even at best. So just because you've built something that's scalable for you to deliver in terms of showing up, delivering content one-to-many, or that it doesn't demand any more to serve 1000 buyers than it does to 100, that doesn't mean you actually have something scalable yet. It's only scalable if the marketing is scalable. If you can acquire new buyers at a sustainable cost. Now let's get to what I believe is the root cause of these failures. Skipping steps. Trying to run before we walk. Let me explain. We want to skip steps like experimenting, testing, gathering feedback, thinking ahead to the marketing, or planting the seeds of demand before we harvest. It's all skipping steps. Now that wouldn't be such a big deal if it comes with all the frustration and self-flagellation that we add to it. We get frustrated that things aren't working, because we somehow expect to get all these really hard things right - straight out of the gate - when we skipped steps all along the way. So we end up with products and programs that either don't work, don't sell or don't scale. I love the phrase: Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I've heard it used in every context from Navy SEALs to music teachers. The idea is that when you do something slow, you do it right, with good form and intention. And doing things right, with good form and intention, actually gets your better results faster. So the lesson here is that the more we try to skip steps, the more we raise our odds of failure. And failure leads to frustration. So save yourself some of the frustration of being a coach or expert - Don't try to constantly skip steps. Yes, think big. But be willing to start small and grow slow.

Coaches, consultants and thought leaders can get a lot out of building relationships with fellow experts whether you’re joining a formal mastermind, or starting your own informal peer advisory group.  The question is - how do we approach masterminds so that we get the most value out of them, and how do we contribute to these relationships so that we’re also making the engagement worthwhile for other members?  In today’s episode, I’m joined by the CEO of Profitable Relationships, Dov Gordon. Dov is also the founder of JVMM, a curated, high-caliber community of 100+ leaders in the world of small business, entrepreneurship, consulting, and coaching, and today he shares the thought process behind his mastermind.  Three things we learned from Dov Gordon; Why being an introvert has heavily informed his approach to building an expertise-based business.  The one rule that should govern how we approach our mastermind groups. How to prioritize mastermind groups without expecting an immediate payoff from them.  Guest Bio-  Dov Gordon is the CEO of Profitable Relationships. He helps consultants use “backwards” networking to reach their ideal clients, consistently. Experienced consultants know that the best clients come from referrals and relationships. But referrals are unpredictable.  And relationships take lots of time. Instead, Dov helps you become an “under-the-radar leader” in your industry. It gets better, because Dov shows you how to leverage the relationship marketing you’ve been doing for free - into a six figure revenue stream.  For more information visit https://www.profitablerelationships.com/ and email dov@profitablerelationships.com. To find out more about Dov’s JVMM mastermind, head over to https://www.profitablerelationships.com/jvmm.