Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
If you are an entrepreneur, CEO of a private company, or leader of a professional firm, you need your daily dose of Inside Business Secrets.
Each day we address an issue that is top of mind for the entrepreneurial business leader. We discuss revenue growth, community building, succession planning, exit strategy, hiring top talent, over-regulation, and thorny legal issues. Our "secret sauce" is that we make you a part of the conversation.
The show is hosted by attorney/entrepreneur Nicola Gelormino (Nicki G) and author/consultant Dave Lorenzo (The Godfather of Growth).
They interview and share valuable insights daily with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business leaders.
A new episode drops daily at 6 AM.
To connect with Dave Lorenzo, call - (305) 692-5531
To connect with Nicola Gelormino, call - (305) 423-1994
Welcome to part three in our persuasive communication series. This part of our presentation is all about delivery systems. And this is the part of the presentation that everybody thinks of when they think of marketing.
When you think about how to grow your business, these are the things that you think of. And I have to make sure that I stress that the first two parts in our series about message and audience are equally as important as the delivery systems. But today's presentation is what everyone talks about when they ask me about marketing.
So what I've done is I've taken the delivery systems that we normally think of from a marketing perspective, and I really broken them down into a granular level. I'm going to go through them in a little bit of detail with you, and I'm going to do this in two different segments. So we have a live audience watching today on Zoom from my community, and I'm going to take questions as they come up.
I'm also going to finish this presentation tomorrow in front of a live audience and take questions as they come up. If you're watching this and you're not part of the live audience, you're watching it on the video. If there's any continuity issues, you know that this was delivered over two separate presentations because I didn't want to spend three hours going through this in one sitting, frankly, because I don't know if people can stand to sit for three hours and watch this.
And candidly, I don't know if I can stand to sit here for three hours and present this. So before we get into all of the marketing delivery systems that you could potentially use in your business, let's go over some logistical items. You guys will recognize these if you've watched any of my presentations previously.
Use the chat feature to send me your questions. If you have questions and you want to ask them live, just hit me up on chat and say, I have a question I want to ask live and I'll make sure that you're unmuted so that you can ask it. The presentation today will be approximately 35 to 45 minutes long.
The questions, I will take whatever questions you have for as long as you'd like to ask them. There's no dumb question because other people have the same questions. So I need you to be bold enough to ask me your questions so that we can cover this in enough detail.
If you want to follow up directly with me, there's my email address right there, dlorenzo at dlorenzo.com. You can also go to the community website where we're posting all of these videos, or you can call me and there's my phone number. All right. So today we're talking about delivery systems to get your message to your audience.
But there are two critical things that each delivery system must have. Okay. It must be effective and it must be efficient.
And as I show you the overview of these delivery systems, okay, these forms of media, you're going to immediately recognize that some of them are more efficient than others. So let's take a look at them in just one moment. You're going to get an overview today of all of the systems, and I'm going to share with you my current thinking.
Now, why do I stress that I'm sharing with you my current thinking? Well, because this stuff is evolving. Social media changes every single day. We're in the middle of a global pandemic right now.
And the way we do presentations has changed. You're not doing an in-person presentation these days. You're doing presentations over Zoom.
So this is my best thinking as of right now. The more you stay in touch with me, the more likely you'll be to get my current thinking as things evolve. But I will tell you, my philosophy over the years hasn't changed one bit.
So before we get into the presentation itself, let me make sure that I do what I need to do to make sure we have a clean recording. And I'm going to mute you all right now. All right, here are the different systems that we're going to cover today.
And you'll notice that these are 12 different forms of media. Okay. These are 12 different ways you can get your message in front of the exact target audience and motivate them to take action.
Number one is one-to-one message delivery. So think of that as face-to-face or belly-to-belly selling, face-to-face or belly-to-belly presentation delivery. Number two is the website, your website, your personal website, your company's website, your firm's website.
Number three is presentations, group presentations, which those of you who know me know I love, which are probably paused at least temporarily while we're in the middle of this pandemic. Publishing. We're going to talk about all the different methods of publishing and how you can use publishing to get your message in front of your audience.
Email. Different ways to use email to get your message in front of an audience. Direct mail.
Believe it or not, there are different ways to get direct mail in front of your audience. And there are efficient ways and cost-effective ways to use direct mail. Video.
You're familiar with how I use video. I'm going to show you how you can use video. Audio.
Podcasts. Those of you who know me know I love the podcast. And I will share with you what I'm currently doing and my current thinking on podcasts.
Earned media. And earned media is just another name for PR, public relations. This can get you elected president, believe it or not.
And I'm going to show you how to use earned media. Advertising. Some of you may want to experiment with some advertising.
There are some good cost-effective ways to use advertising. We'll talk a little bit about them. Networking.
Face-to-face. In-person. Groups.
That sort of thing. We'll talk about that. And social media.
We're going to spend some time talking about social media. I received some questions about social media over the last couple of days. So we're going to talk about those in detail.
So for the first half of our presentation today, we will probably cover numbers one through six. The second half of our presentation will cover numbers seven through 12. And if you're watching on the video, you won't know the difference between today and tomorrow because it will all be edited together.
My goal is to give you a comprehensive overview of all of these forms of media and help you understand how they're used these days. Share my philosophy, my current thinking on them and help you make decisions on how to cost effectively and efficiently use them. All right.
Let us look at one-to-one message delivery first. The first way you can deliver a message in a person-to-person setting or an in-person setting is in a meeting, right? You schedule a meeting and you go in and you talk to someone. That's belly-to-belly sales.
Now these days, April 9th, 2020, we are quarantined. We're stuck in our homes. So your opportunity to get belly-to-belly with someone in person is probably limited.
But those of you who are lawyers or Carlos is on with us, he's in real estate. This is the way you're going to do a lot of your business. So communicating your message to people in person is critical.
And most people don't think of this as a form of media. You don't think of the in-person meeting as a form of media. But I challenge you to change your thinking.
Why? Because you're getting together with someone and you're sharing a message. That person is in your target audience. You're hoping they're going to become a client and the delivery system is you.
So if you think of yourself as a message delivery system, all of a sudden it changes perhaps the way you share that message. It changes the way you package the delivery. For example, the way you look, the way you dress, the words you choose all have an impact on whether or not your message is effectively received.
So I want you to think of yourself as a vehicle for delivering an effective message to an audience from now on, because that may change your approach to these meetings in the future. Additionally, you may choose to deliver your message via phone call. Okay.
We do a lot of work. All of us who are here today do a lot of work on the phone and we tend to be more casual on the phone when we're delivering our message. And perhaps we shouldn't be.
Perhaps our selection of words, perhaps our message should be more fine-tuned even when we're talking about delivering it over the phone. Just because people can't see us doesn't mean we shouldn't be on point. So the next time you take a phone call with someone, think about your message and think about how you're delivering that message and think about whether or not you've prepared appropriately.
Video conference right now here, I'm delivering a message to you in a way that I hope is effective and efficient. Now it's obvious, pardon me, it's obvious that I've taken some time and prepared how I'm going to deliver this message to you today. How often do we get in front of people and we just wing it? And that's not necessarily the best way to go.
Your message preparation should be as detailed for an in-person meeting, a phone call or a video conference, even if it's one-to-one as it is if it's one-to-many. The second message delivery system that we're going to talk about today is your website, your website. Now those of you who work for large companies or those of you who work for firms, my contention has always been that you need to have your own personal website.
And the reason is because your personal message, your personal focus may be different than the overall focus of your firm. The example that I give to people on a regular basis is I worked with a gentleman who was part of a large insurance defense firm and his firm only took insurance defense cases and they advertised on their website that they took insurance defense cases and all of the information that they posted on their website was about insurance defense cases. But my client's practice was first party personal injury cases.
And the firm was not interested in putting that on their website because it was incongruent with their messaging. So this gentleman had to develop his own website. And even though it was his own website, he still put down that he was a member of that firm, but there was no firm logo on his personal website.
The articles he wrote and posted on his personal website were all about personal injury cases. And he didn't try and hide the fact that he worked at that firm, but the website messaging was very different than his firm's overall messaging. And he didn't want them to be an incongruence when people from big companies went to his firm's website.
And when people who were hiring him to do the PI work went to his website, he didn't want them to be all confused. He would disclose to them that he was part of a firm that handled insurance defense and he always would get a waiver if there was any sort of conflict, but he had his personal website to make sure his messaging was clean and appropriate. So if you're working at a big firm, I want you to always have your own personal website and you probably need to get permission from some places in order to do this.
But the second reason this is good is if you decide you no longer want to work at the big firm and you want to have your own independent messaging that lives well beyond your time at the firm. So having your own personal website is always going to be effective and efficient on your website. Your messaging should be informational.
So in other words, it should provide information about you and what you do. So who you are, what you do, how you do it. Your website has to be informational.
It also has to provide you with some credibility. Now remember credibility is receiver based. So what you think gives you credibility is not necessarily what gives you credibility in the eyes of the client.
I see websites from attorneys, from CPAs, from other professionals that say that they have 35 years of experience or my favorite is when a firm of a 20 something or 30 something people get together, they say they have over 150 years of combined experience, right? Yeah. That does not give you any credibility. What gives you credibility is number one, information that's educational that you produce and you post on your website.
But number two, if you can and if you can get it vetted by the bar and the bar will allow you information that your clients provide about the ability for them to work with you in an easy and effective way. So in other words, testimonials, if you don't want to do testimonials, we'll talk about interviews that you can post on your website. You interviewing people, asking smart questions gives you a lot of credibility on your website and that's the second critical element that a website should deliver credibility for you.
Number three is differentiation. What makes you different from everybody else who does what you do with your website has to differentiate you. So you should be posting things on your website that enable people to clearly understand why you're different.
Steve Klitzner is with us today. He's on the call and he's on the, he's on the video presentation. And Steve's different from everybody else because he only handles IRS issues.
There are other people out there who are tax attorneys that will do tax planning and they also do IRS controversy work. I'll tell you, those people don't have the kinds of relationships with IRS revenue officers that Steve Klitzner has. The fact that Steve only handles IRS controversy work is a huge differentiator for him.
When you talk to other people who do IRS controversy work, what makes Steve different? He's a lawyer. You go to Steve and you tell him about your tax problems. He can't disclose anything to anyone because you have attorney client confidentiality.
You go to some of these other Yahoos that advertise on the radio for IRS problem resolution. They don't have confidentiality with you. They're not bound by attorney client privilege.
The other thing is, as a lawyer, Steve carries malpractice insurance. So you know he's going to be careful with your case. You go to JG, they're not going to be careful with your case necessarily.
They don't have to be careful with your case. They got no insurance when it comes to malpractice. They can be willy nilly or carefree with your case and most of them are.
So Steve has a number of different ways he can differentiate himself and he posts those messages on his website. So when people are searching for IRS problem resolution in Florida, particularly in Miami, they see all these things on the website. That message is clearly delivered and it's effective and it's efficient.
Your website is also used for lead generation purposes. You can ask people to subscribe to your newsletter on your website. You can offer white papers or free reports on your website.
People will opt in and that makes them a prospect. That's a lead generation tool for you and that's the other way a website can be helpful, effective, and efficient. Presentations.
You guys know that presentations are one of my favorite ways, one of my favorite media forms of media to deliver your message to the ideal audience. We are in a place right now where there are no presentations in front of people. So you can't get up and really showcase your personality.
So what you can do when times improve is you could do a large group of people group keynote presentation. You can get in front of groups of people of 300, 200, 150 or more and you're the only speaker and they come there to see you. That's a great way to deliver your message to an audience.
You can do small group keynote presentations. So most of you on here are familiar with me in person delivering a presentation to small groups, 25, 35, 45, 55 people. Those are also really effective and efficient ways to get your message in front of audiences.
Educational presentations in person are fantastic ways to develop business because there you have enormous credibility because you're teaching people about what you do. You're giving them industry specific information. The folks who are part of our community here who work for Conference Direct, who are business leaders at Conference Direct, they educate people on how to have effective meetings, efficient meetings, and how to develop conferences in an effective, efficient and cost effective way.
Those educational perspectives that they deliver give them enormous credibility and they make them the go to people for anything conference related. So educational presentations are powerful. Facilitating meetings can also be an effective way for you to use your presentation skills to deliver your message to the audience.
So what is the difference between facilitation and education? In an educational presentation, you're sharing content with a group or an audience. When you facilitate, you are pulling the information out of the attendees. Now how is facilitation as valuable, if not more valuable sometimes than education? I'll give you an example.
One of my favorite things to do when I want to enter a new market is to get the business leaders from that market together for a breakfast session. What I do in the breakfast session is I'm the host, I'm the MC if you will, and I go around the table and I ask people what's working in their business and what's not. What I've done is I've prepared a handful of questions on some index cards and I keep the index cards in my pocket and then I ask the group the questions and we go around the room and the business leaders in the room will answer the questions.
What that does is two things. By asking the right questions, I've steered the conversation to an area where I can provide value and I then use my knowledge to extract the value from the people in the room. When people speak, they automatically think that you are a great conversationalist, the person who facilitates the discussion.
And they also think you have enormous credibility. If you want to really see this hammered home, think about Alex Trebek, the host of Jeopardy. Everybody thinks he's one of the smartest people on earth and really all he's doing is reading a bunch of questions that a bunch of writers have written for him.
That's all he's doing. He doesn't know the answers to those questions. If he didn't have that information in front of him, he wouldn't be able to answer those questions himself.
But people think he's smart because he's the host of a question and answer session every single night. You can do the same thing with facilitation. So with these breakfast presentations, what I do is I will invite, I do this with law firms all the time.
When I started working in Baltimore a great deal, I took all the law firms in Baltimore. I looked up who their managing partners were and I invited them all to a breakfast. I then hosted the breakfast at the Four Seasons.
Excuse me. I hosted the breakfast at the Four Seasons, invited a hundred of them there. 18 showed up and I facilitated by asking them, I think in an hour and a half I got in maybe a dozen questions and I, and I facilitated the discussion that resulted in three pieces of business for me immediately and 12 relationships that I'm still cultivating to this day.
That facilitation opportunity required only a little preparation for the day of. It required research into who to put into the room and how to get them into the room. But the facilitation itself only required me asking good questions and preparing a little bit in advance, but it worked really, really well.
And I do this in a lot of different markets all over the country when I'm preparing to travel there. You can do this on an industry basis. If you want to meet with doctors, you can do this with doctors.
You can do this geographically. You can do it with whatever point of commonality people have. All you need is the opportunity to figure out what people have in common and do some research in advance on who they are and how you can get them in the room.
The fifth type of presentation is the interview. This is also something that I enjoy very much. It requires a significant amount of preparation.
You can get someone up on stage with you and you can sit next to them and ask them questions. Now, the way I like to structure these is I like to use the Inside the Actors Studio format. So if you want to really learn how to do a really good interview, go back and watch the late James Lipton interview an actor on old episodes of Inside the Actors Studio.
That is a masterclass on how to conduct a really good interview and it makes you as the interviewer look smart. This requires significant preparation but it really brings out some great information. Your audience will love it and the person you're interviewing will love it as well.
One of my favorite techniques is to interview someone I want to be a client, to interview a future client. It's flattering to them. You get in front of an audience and you put them in front of an audience.
You give them the opportunity to showcase their information, their talent, and in return they believe that you are incredibly smart. You're credible because number one, you put the audience in the room, but number two, you ask them really smart questions and you made them look good. Then the audience thinks you're incredibly smart.
They think you're incredibly talented because you've asked good questions. Interviews are great and if you don't like doing presentations, doing an interview is a fantastic way to get in front of a group of people and make yourself look good while you make someone else look good. And here's an extra special super tip for you.
If you're just starting out doing interviews and you're nervous about how they're going to go, interview somebody who's really good on their feet. Interview somebody who's a really good speaker. So for example, you could interview, Oh, I don't know me.
And I would be a great person for you to put in front of your audience because I'll help nurture you through the interview process. And even if you ask me a question that may not be relevant to the audience, I can steer it back to what the audience wants to know because I'll do some research on the audience in advance. Klitzner is also a great person for you to interview because Klitzner is very good on his feet.
He's very quick on his feet. He can, uh, he can really help you get through an interview if you're, if you're struggling or if you're concerned about it. Also another member of our community, Brad Gross is a great person to interview because he's really good in front of an audience.
He's very funny and he's good on his feet. I mean, there are a number of people that I can refer you to who would be great interview subjects. The deal is for you to do sort of a pre interview with the person so that you've built up some rapport first.
And then when you get in front of the audience, your relationship is warm. It's warmed up a little bit. Asking them a couple of questions on the phone in advance, take a 15 minute phone call and do it in advance.
It'll go a long way for you to develop that rapport and that will come through when you get them in front of an audience. Panels are another presentation type that you guys love. And I say you guys because professionals, lawyers, CPAs, architects, you all love these panels and you think that having like four experts up there is great.
I got to tell you as somebody who's, who speaks professionally, I hate panels. Why? Because if I'm a member of a panel, I can never get enough time to showcase my expertise or my talent. The moderator, if they're not an expert, loses control frequently of those things.
Somebody always does too much talking. One of those people up there is going to be a knucklehead and you just don't know which one. So it's like Russian roulette.
Panels just flat out suck. So if somebody invites you to be on a panel and you want a relationship with the person who's making the invitation, you can agree to do it. That's the reason to do it.
Or if you want a relationship with a moderator, that's a good reason to do a panel. Otherwise, stay away from panels. You don't need to do them.
You're never going to get any business as a result of being on a panel. The only two reasons to do a panel is if you want a relationship with a person who's the host, or you want a relationship with a moderator, or maybe there's a third. If you want a relationship with somebody who's a part of the panel, you can commiserate about how much it sucked being on that panel.
And that may be a good opportunity for you, but I'm not a big fan of panels. I see we have the thing is lighting up. So I see we have a question in the chat.
So let me see what people have to say. Ah, very good point. Steve Siegel brings up an excellent point.
Thank you, Steve. And Steve says, if you're going to be on a panel, make sure you have a pre-meeting with your panelists first. Absolutely.
Steve, couldn't agree with you more. Getting everybody on the same page is critical. If you're going to do a panel, make sure you have a pre-meeting first.
And as the moderator or the host, you need to do this because you need to figure out who the knucklehead is. And in the pre-meeting, you can often figure out who the knucklehead is going to be on the panel and figure out a way to minimize their tendency to get everybody sidetracked. In addition, you want to make sure that everybody's on the same page.
You never want people to hijack the panel. And that pre-meeting is critical. Thank you, Steve, for making that point.
I agree 110%. The seventh type of presentation is the pitch, right? You go in and you have to talk about who you are, what you do, and what's in it for your client. This type of presentation is inevitable.
You need to develop this presentation in a different way than a keynote, than an educational presentation, than facilitating a meeting or than doing an interview or a panel. The pitch is all about winning people over to your point of view, winning people over to what you want to get them to take action. So developing this type of presentation requires a lot of forethought.
It requires a lot of research and it requires a ton of customization. We all have to do these from time to time. So I encourage you if you're delivering a pitch to connect with me and you and I will work together on what your pitch is.
It doesn't matter what your presentation skills are. I can help you adapt a pitch to enhance what your strengths are and to deliver your presentation, leveraging your strengths so that you can connect with people in a way that will help you win them over. Publishing.
This is the last form of media that we're going to talk about today, but all of you, regardless of your ability to write, have the opportunity to use publishing successfully. The first way to use publishing successfully is by writing a book. Those of you who know me know I've written three books.
I love writing books. The key to writing a book is making sure that you have a way to get the book in the hands of the right people. Okay? Distribution is critical.
So you may be thinking to yourself, well, Dave, I don't have a way to get a book to a publisher. I don't have a way to get a book to an agent. I'm not sure that I can even, you know, market a book to an agent or a publisher.
So I don't know that that's going to be something that I want to do. I'll tell you, these days agents and publishers are overrated. Take it from me.
I self published one of my three books. I had a very small publisher do the second one in a niche market, a niche market, which is lawyers. And then the third one I went with the largest business publisher in the world, John Wiley and Sons.
There are benefits to doing all three. If you wanted to self publish a book, I could help you self publish a book tomorrow through Amazon. Amazon can take it from start to finish.
Your book could be available on Amazon. You would have the same level of credibility as an author who's published by a major publishing house. And it may be just as effective depending on who the target audience is for your book.
So self publishing is a totally legitimate way to go. All you need to do is hire really good content editor, a really good copy editor and hire a really good cover designer and Amazon will do all the work for you. And it's really not that expensive.
So publishing a book yourself, completely doable, completely acceptable. If you wanted to go with a niche market or niche for you fancy people, a niche market publisher, you could go with the ABA, the American Bar Association. They have a publishing arm.
Every trade industry has their own publishing arm. You could pitch your book to them without an agent and you may be, it may be easy for you to get accepted. I marketed my second book, James Publishing, James Legal Publishing came to me and they asked me if I would do a book for them and they said, you could even take some blog posts and cobble them together.
And that's how I didn't just cobble them together. I customized them, but we put them together and it formed the book. And the book was Client Attraction Secrets for Lawyers and James Publishing put the whole book together in like three months and got it out to market.
I didn't even need an agent to do that. They came to me. You could go to niche market publishers and do the same thing.
John Wiley and Sons did my third book. I got an agent. I put together a book outline.
My agent helped me refine it. My agent helped me pitch the book to a number of different publishers. I got rejected by dozens of publishers.
Wiley finally agreed to publish the book and their book distribution was better than I would have gotten anywhere else. And I had the credibility of having the Wiley imprint on my book. The idea is that publishing a book provides you with credibility.
It gives you some additional visibility, but it also gives you elevated status among your peers. So it's a great way to differentiate you from everyone else who does what you do. You can do this regardless of who you are, regardless of the industry that you're in.
So if you're interested in doing a book and you're a decent writer, you don't have to be a great writer. You just have to be a decent writer. And you have the financial resources to hire a content editor and it's not expensive to hire a content editor.
You can also hire a copy editor. It's not expensive to hire a copy editor. It's, you know, pennies per word to have your, to have your work copy edited.
You can then pitch that to an agent. Better yet, let's do a book outline together and you can pitch it to an agent and the agent will help you pitch it to a publisher. The second way to use publishing is with articles.
I love to have people pitch articles to trade journals. You can do it yourself. You write the article, you send it to the editor.
I've sent hundreds of articles to hundreds of editors and been rejected hundreds of times. You only need to be successful once. And that gives you credibility.
It gives you visibility. And it also differentiates you. Writing articles, getting them published is fantastic.
The way to structure the articles so that you can market them to publishers is an easily learned art as well as a science. I can teach you that. I'll help you with that.
In fact, I'll probably do a webinar on exactly that thing so that you can learn how to do it. Getting your articles published in trade journals is fantastic. Once you've done a couple of articles for trade journals, then you can go to business publications like Forbes or Fast Company.
They might even be interested if you're a decent writer. You know, articles are similar to books in that you can hire editors to help you. You don't necessarily need a content editor as much as you need a copy editor to check your grammar and your spelling.
I never submit an article to a trade journal or a publication that hasn't been copy edited because my propensity for typos is massive. So I always want to double check it. Um, but this is a, this is a fantastic way to get credibility and visibility.
And then you get the reprints of it and you send them around for marketing purposes. I love doing articles. Digital articles for websites are similar to trade publication articles.
Digital articles should always be copy edited. You can find out how to submit these or find out who to submit them to by looking at the masthead of the publication. What's the masthead? It tells you who the publisher of the website is.
Just scroll down to the bottom of the website and you can see where the article, where the articles should be sent to. You'd be amazed at how many trade publications have websites that are looking for you to submit articles. You should be, you're in quarantine right now.
As I'm talking to you, we're in Corona virus quarantine. You can easily write one article a week, do some research on trade publication websites and submit those articles. You should all be doing this right now.
You should be submitting articles today to trade journal publications. Okay. White papers.
We talk about white papers all the time. If you're familiar with my work, you're familiar with a honeypot, which is essentially a white paper you offer in exchange for someone's contact information. You can write a white paper in a weekend.
You can write a white paper in two or three hours if you've done the research. I love white papers because they enable you to offer people white papers at a speaking engagement in an article on your website in exchange for their contact information. White papers are structured in a very specific way.
I will do a webinar in the future on how to develop a white paper, but all of you as professionals should be writing white papers. Now I see we have a question from the audience. I love that.
I get this little flashing light when there's a question. Let's see what the question is. Carlos asks, would you suggest turning your book into a white paper to tease the rest of the book? Ah, great question, Carlos.
Thank you. Here's what I do. I do an outline for my book in advance, right? And when I do the outline for the book, you always in the outline need to include a sample chapter.
The sample chapter I write is easily used as a white paper. So the example I'll give you is the latest book I wrote, the 60 second sale, the ultimate system for developing lifelong client relationships in the blink of an eye. There's a chapter in there called how to be great at networking, even if you hate people.
That was the sample chapter I included in the outline. And what I did with that outline was I sent it to my agent who then sent it to publishers, but I took that chapter and made it a white paper. And then whenever I did a talk on networking, I offered that white paper to people as a talk.
So to answer your question, Carlos, you know, you can use it as a teaser, but what I, what I do all the time is I will take those chapters, some of them and break them down into individual white papers, depending on the talk. There's another chapter in there, uh, in the, in the book about finding a target audience and making sure you're in front of the ideal target audience. And that's the IDT, uh, 21, the ideal target audience, 21.
I use that also as a honeypot. So I take that chapter and I use it as a checklist, but I also include the content from the chapter as a honeypot to give out when I'm doing presentations, I make that offer. So yes, I take the book content and break it up in different ways and use it as a white paper.
You will also notice that several of the chapters of that particular book are also presentations that I deliver. So I repurpose the content that I publish in a number of different ways. Great question.
Absolutely. When you write something, so much effort goes into it that you never just use it the one time only for publishing. You repurpose it for multiple things, website content, presentations, articles, white papers, digital articles, absolutely use it over and over again.
The only time you can't do that is if somebody pays you to write an exclusive article or somebody says to you, we will only publish this if we have the exclusive. If that's the case, then you cannot use that content. You cannot repurpose that content over and over again without an agreement from that person.
Carlos, thanks for the question. It was great. I really appreciate it.
Checklists. I just talked about the ideal relationship targeting IRT 21, the ideal relationship targeting 21 checklist that I give out to people as a honeypot all the time. I use that.
I published that in my book. I use it all the time. You'll also be familiar with my relationship report card.
I use that all the time. I hand that out as a honeypot at presentations and that's in the book too. Checklists are fantastic.
All of you should be developing checklists for your clients to use and you should publish them. Why? Because it's easy to do. People love checklists.
They absolutely love them. I can do a whole webinar on how to develop checklists and use them as honeypots as well. Guides, free guides to give out.
My labor and employment lawyers give out guides all the time to how to hire people without getting in trouble, how to fire people without getting in trouble. Guides are fantastic ways to publish content and leverage publishing for growing your business. You probably don't think that writing is effective and efficient, but I have to tell you that writing something is one of the most effective and efficient ways to market your business or professional practice because you can use that writing over and over and over again.
I wrote the book, Career Intensity, Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs in 2006. That seems like a lifetime ago and actually it is both of my kids lifetimes ago because my son was born in 2008, but I still use that book for marketing purposes today and it's still valuable. They never go out of style.
Books, articles, digital articles, white papers, checklists, guides, fantastic tools for you to use to grow your business. I can't encourage you enough. The time you invest in publishing is some of the most valuable time you will ever invest.
One of the most important reasons to write and publish is because the way you write is the way you think. So if you want to structure something and use it as a presentation, I encourage you write an article on that topic first and then build your presentation afterwards. Your thinking will be so much clearer.
You should be writing every day and by writing every day you will really focus your thought process on how you can market to your ideal client audience. All right, I'm going to pause us right here and the reason I'm going to pause us right here is because let me get to the main screen. Hold on.
And let's look at our agenda and see how far we got. All right, we got to publishing and I noticed that we're about 45 minutes into our presentation. So I'm going to stop us here today because I don't want to give you too much.
Tomorrow we're going to pick up with email, direct mail, and we'll go through some of these others. If I have to break this down into three different presentations, I will because this is so powerful and it's so important. So we got through the first four today.
Tomorrow we'll pick it up with email and we'll get into email, direct mail, video and audio, and then we may need to break up earned media, advertising, networking and social into even yet a third presentation. So yesterday we covered the first four, one-to-one communication, using your website, how to do a presentation so that you deliver your message effectively and publishing. If you missed any part of the first part, there will be a comprehensive video with all three parts blended together.
So you don't know the difference and you can pick up right where you left off. Today we're going to cover email, direct mail, video and audio. And then on Tuesday we will wrap it up with earned media, advertising, networking and social media.
So we'll cover all 12 and we're going to do it in a little bit of detail going over my current thinking. And then my thought process is I will cover each one of these in at least one webinar during the course of the next, however long for the over the course of the rest of my life. I'll do, I will promise you I will do at least one presentation on each of these areas sometime in the near future.
And the reasoning is because they're just, there's just too much to cover in each of these. Today is just to give you an overview. So since we already did the first four, allow me to fast forward to number five, which is email and away we go.
Um, all right. So the way you use email as a delivery system for your message, there are a number of different ways to do this. And the way, one of the first ways that I want to talk to you about is personal communication, one-to-one communication.
This is when I send an email to you and I, and you know, I say to you, Steve, I think it would be a good idea if you join me on this webinar. I think you'd like the information we're going to cover. I think it will be valuable to you and I think you will grow your business as a result of connecting with me on the webinar.
So I reach out to you via email to get you to take some sort of action. There's a call to action in the email and that's a personal email that I've sent to Steve. Another example of a personal email that you could use for one-on-one communication for marketing delivery or for marketing message delivery would be if you're reaching out to invite an individual to a specific event.
So I'm hosting a breakfast and I'd like you to come because I think you have a valuable opinion to share. Please join me and come to the breakfast and share your opinion with this esteemed group of colleagues. So personal communication, one-to-one email, crafting your message in a specific and personal way is valuable.
The second way is the email newsletter. You guys are all familiar. The three of you are familiar with me and my advocacy for the weekly email newsletter.
Some of you probably have struggled with the weekly frequency. I've told you in the past that the more frequently you communicate with your audience, the more powerfully your message will resonate. Frequency of communication builds trust.
In a webinar, I think it was earlier this week, I gave you the example of how Bill Hanson is now doing a daily email and I'm fascinated by that and he seems to be getting good results by that. I love frequent newsletter type communication. So weekly is ideal.
If you want to do it even more frequently than weekly, I encourage you to experiment with that. The minimum I would say would be monthly, but email newsletters, the structure of them. Again, I will do a comprehensive webinar on this probably sooner rather than later because you're all interested in this topic.
The structure of them, my preference has always been, and Steve Fuller and I have had numerous conversations about this. My preference has always been white letters or black letters on a white page. I like it to read just like a newsletter.
And the reason I like it to read just like a newsletter is because I want people to think it's a personalized type of communication. I want them to think it's almost a personal email coming from me going to them. I've seen people use fancy, really fancy and very graphic intense newsletters and still have success with emails.
So the style, I'm less rigid on the style than I have been in the past. The style can be customized to fit your personal style. You don't need to do what I advocate just because I advocate it.
I get great results with mine. The people who've done theirs the same way I do mine get good results or great results. But if you want to do a more graphically intensive newsletter, more power to you, go for it.
I see Steve Siegel has sent in a question. Is there a minimum number of recipients? Good question. No, Steve, there's no minimum number of recipients.
My goal for you is to constantly be growing your list. My goal for myself is to always grow my list. So I would like to grow my list by 20% or more every year.
And then as your list gets big, you know, growing at 10% or more is a bit of a challenge. But I would like to grow my list by 20% or more every year. But I'll tell you if you, you know, if you've got 10 people, that's enough people to send out a weekly email newsletter.
Because the thing is, if you're sending it to a lower number of people, you tend to get a higher percentage of opens, a higher open rate, and a higher, a higher rate of actually taking the call to action. What's the reason why? The smaller your list, the more frequently you probably communicate with them on a, on an individualized real time basis. So if I sent my weekly email newsletter to my 10 best friends, and they knew they were going to talk to me on the phone once a month, they would probably read most of the newsletters because they'd be worried that I'd ask them if they read it, or they'd be worried that I included something in there that I want to talk to them about.
So no, there's no minimum number of recipients. Um, you know, think about it this way. It's a, it's a good way for you to communicate with people who you know, who you know, you like, and you trust, and who know, like, and trust you.
So, uh, 10 people or 10,000 people, the size of the list is unimportant for, for purposes of starting your newsletter. The idea is to continue to grow it over time. The third type of email is a pitch.
I'm not a big fan of pitching stuff in email. Um, I believe that the only thing you can pitch in an email, sell something like one call, sell something in an email. The only thing you can sell in an email is a product or a service that is either inexpensive or a commodity or something that people need to buy anyway.
So the example that I'll give you is we use here at our house, a service to deliver water in five gallon jugs. We have a water cooler in our kitchen. My wife and kids are completely spoiled.
I grew up drinking tap water. I still drink tap water. My wife and kids are completely spoiled and they refuse to drink the tap water from our house.
They forced me to pay for someone else's tap water that comes in a jug delivered to my house. So that came to me via an email pitch. And I said, you know what? I'm going to buy these damn jugs of tap water.
Anyway, I think I can buy the jugs of tap water, have them delivered to the house. So I don't have to lug these damn things in from the car from Publix a couple of times a month. Let me just have them delivered.
So that was an email pitch. The guy closed me just by sending me an email and saying that the Nestle purified water could be delivered to my house for the same price that I'm paying to buy it at pub by, to buy the, whatever it is, the Zephyr Hills from Publix. And I was like, you know what? That makes a lot of sense.
So I just subscribed to it through the email pitch. If you're selling something more complex than that, if you're selling something that is not a commodity, if you're selling services, professional services, or you're selling a relationship with you, you're not going to be able to pitch something in an email. The tone of the email is very different in a pitch and it tends to turn more people off than it does actually be effective in selling stuff.
So not one of my favorite things. The next one is the email autoresponder. And this is a very interesting use of email and an autoresponder.
For those of you who don't know is an automatic email that simply replies to an action taken by someone that you've already set up in advance. The the example I'll give you is if you sign up for an email newsletter, you can set up autoresponders for just about anything. If somebody, you know, if you were selling books on your website and somebody purchases a book, you can have them receive their receipt via an autoresponder.
You can have someone receive tickets to one of your events via an autoresponder. If you subscribe to an email service like Constant Contact or like MailChimp or Aweber or CC to Many, any of these services, they have an autoresponder feature where you can set up automatic emails to go out when people take specific actions. So I put that in there just so that I've informed you about it and we can set that up in a, in a little box on your website, or we can have a dedicated landing page that's set up or we can we can specifically have the autoresponder take action when someone emails a specific address and the reply will come back and it'll be an autoresponder that that sends that reply.
The next message delivery method I'd like to talk about today is my favorite. I, you know, many people will say, I sound like the president now. Many people say that my favorite message delivery system is presentations.
That's partially true. What I really love and what has helped me launch my business candidly is direct mail. Direct mail is beautiful and you can do direct mail piece by piece like one letter at a time or you can do direct mail in the thousands of pieces.
I've worked with Steve Klitzner on several, maybe dozens of direct mail campaigns. My wife and I enjoy doing direct mail campaigns for my business simply because it's just fascinating to me how you can write someone a letter, take a little postage stamp, put it on the letter, address the letter, drop it in the mail, and people will pay you money as a result of just receiving a letter. And even in this day and age when we've got electric cars and phones that don't need wires, the fact that the U S postal service can still help you make money is just so comforting in a way that I loved or it's just romantic to me.
I absolutely love it. So the first type of direct mail delivery system I want to talk about is a sequence. And what you need to know about this is sequenced mail isn't necessarily a type of mail as much as it is a rule when it comes to direct mail campaigns.
You can't just send one letter to a list of people and expect to get a decent response rate. You have to send out your piece of direct mail until you don't get any responses at all. Let me clarify that statement.
If we had a list of 100 people and in your case, you guys on the, on the call today with me are all lawyers. So if we had a list of 100 people that you guys already had relationships with, we'd be fine with direct mailing them. So we have a list of a hundred.
We're going to send out a, uh, an email sequence to that list of a hundred people and what we're going to, I'm sorry, a direct mail sequence to that list of a hundred people. And what we're going to do is we're going to send these letters two weeks apart. And the first letter is going to be a little bit of a narrative with a call to action at the end.
So a story with a call to action at the end, the second letter is going to change slightly and it's going to say, um, second chance and the story will be a little bit different and there'll be the same call to action at the end, but we'll change the postscript. We'll change the PS to say, if you don't, uh, if you don't act on this now, you may miss out. And then the third one will say final notice.
And the PS will say, if you don't take action on this now, this deal will be gone forever. But the body of the letter for the most part will remain the same. And if we're emailing people who've never done business with us before, the offer may be something as simple as subscribe to, uh, receive my free white paper or invest $5 to receive a copy of my book, which normally retails for 30, simply pay the shipping.
Um, you want to make a very compelling, very simple offer, but the key is you're going to send this sequence out as a sequence. You're not going to send just one piece of direct mail in isolation. And what I've found over the years, uh, particularly when I was younger and I was doing direct mail is people would tell me, Oh, I tried direct mail and it didn't work for me.
And I would say, well, how many times do you mail out the letter? And they would say once. And I would say, well, that's why it didn't work. David Ogilvie who, uh, founded Ogilvie and Mather, uh, at the time when he founded it, it became the largest advertising agency in the world said that people need to see an advertisement on average 18 to 19 times before they take action on it.
And I'll tell you that direct mail, I'm not sending out something 18 or 19 times unless I'm still getting positive responses, but I will send out a direct mail letter three times even if nobody's replied to the first one. And the power of the sequence in direct mail is absolutely critical because here's what happens. Someone will open the first letter and they'll read it, but they won't take action on it.
They may set it aside and they may say to themselves, I really do want to do this, but I just don't have time right now. And then they get the second letter and they're like, Oh shoot, I forgot to take action on this. I need to do that and they'll look at it and they'll, and they'll say, I'm going to do this first thing in the morning.
And then they'll leave their office. And what happens first thing in the morning, their dog got sick. So instead of going straight to the office, they had to take them to the vet and they come into the office and they're busy.
Things are absolutely crazy. So they don't act on the letter. And then they get the final notice and they're so compelled because they've seen the other two that finally they take action on the final notice.
So the sequence is important because it builds momentum. And then sometimes people flat out miss the first two and they see the third. So one of the most valuable things that I ever learned about direct mail was this concept of sending things out in a sequence and you never send them out in isolation.
The second thing I'll tell you about direct mail, that is, that there was a huge lesson. I didn't put it here. I will cover it with you when we do a whole webinar on direct mail is direct mail also must be tested on a small scale before you ever invest in doing things on a large scale.
So oftentimes people will come to me, criminal defense lawyers are famous for this and they'll have a bar approved letter that they want to send to everyone who's gotten arrested for a felony possession, let's say. And they can invest in the list of those people and they want to mail to them offering to represent them. And again, it's bar approved.
And what they'll say to me is I got a list of a thousand people. Let's send this letter out. And I'll say, no, no, we're not going to do that.
What we're going to do is we're going to send the letter to a hundred people first. And if we get a positive return on that investment, then we'll send it to a thousand people. And then if you get a positive and vet return on investment from the thousand people, we'll send it to 1500 or 2000 people.
The deal is with direct mail because there's an investment in printing and postage, you test on a small but measurable scale first before you roll it out to a large audience. And a good rule of thumb is if you get a response in your first mailing of a hundred people, that is a positive return on investment, then you can feel comfortable increasing the size that you're going to mail it out to. So sequencing is critical.
Testing is critical. Lumpy mail is my favorite thing in the whole world. If direct mail is my favorite thing, lumpy mail is my favorite.
I got a $10 million contract from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals after working with them for a year and a half. But I originated that relationship by sending Jeff Kindler, the CEO of Pfizer, lumpy mail every week for 28 weeks. For over half a year, I sent this guy a package every single week.
I started with a dollar, a dollar bill attached to a letter. Steve is familiar with this. I'm sure Steve Klitzner is familiar with this.
He's seen it before. The dollar letter works phenomenally well. I'll teach you guys about that one day.
I sent him donuts to his office for his staff with a letter. The letter that got me into his office was a two letter sequence. One week I sent him a package in a brown wrapper with an old shoe in it that I had purchased at the Salvation Army.
I purchased a pair of shoes and I sent him a size 10 shoe, a wingtip shoe, old beat up, and stuffed the letter in the shoe. And I hand addressed it and I said, personal to be opened only by Jeff Kindler. And I sent the letter and he got the shoe and his assistant called me and she said he was irate and I was to stop mailing them immediately.
They were aware that I had been mailing them. I had been sending them stuff for 27 weeks and it's all junk and we don't want it. You got to stop doing this.
And I just listened. And I said, I promise if you get me a meeting with Mr. Kindler, I will stop sending letters. What happened next was she said, you will never meet with Mr. Kindler.
And she hung up the phone on me. The next week I sent the other shoe. And I said, since you decided you won't let me get my foot in the door and meet with you, I wanted to make sure you had the pair of shoes.
And the day after I, and, and these, the, the second shoe I had delivered by messenger, I didn't send it in the mail. I actually had a messenger deliver the second shoe. And the day after I did that, I, uh, one of his assistants assistants called and said, Jeff wants to schedule a 15 minute appointment with you because anybody that has that kind of sense of humor is somebody he wants to get to know a little bit better.
That's how I got in and we ended up doing $250,000 with them for a first engagement. And a year and a half, two years later, we had a $10 million engagement because I sent them direct mail every week for 28 weeks and I mailed them two old stinky shoes I got at the Salvation Army store. So lumpy mail is my absolute favorite.
I've sent all sorts of crap to people in the mail and I will tell you it works like a charm. If you go right now on the community website, you will see a letter that I wrote in crayon that I then formatted with a font that looks like crayon from my son when he was a baby. And I sent out to a bunch of people that works phenomenally well.
If any of you guys are interested in direct mail, it would be my absolute pleasure to do a lumpy mail campaign with you, uh, to help you guys connect with people. A physical print newsletter is also one of my favorite things to do. People bristle when I talk about a physical print newsletter because there's an expense associated with it, but it gets people's attention.
Um, I got, uh, I got a bunch of really good appointments in November and December from, uh, senior people at big law firms, Amlaw 250 law firms because we started sending them a print newsletter designed specifically for senior executives of, uh, of big law firms. And these are people who I had been soliciting for a long time and they got the newsletter and they said that it was, you know, it was very well done. It was very classy.
I profiled other people who are just like them in the newsletter. I had a profile column in there and they really liked that. And four of them called me out of the blue and two others responded to calls that I made to them to set up the appointments.
The newsletter, the print newsletter is a, is a bifold four page. You know, it's a big sheet of paper folded in half. It's a four page front and back.
Uh, those of you who know Steve Klitzner will get his, uh, print newsletter. It's similar to mine except Steve has very scary articles about how the IRS has taken people's lives and flushed them down the toilet. Um, mine is not as scary, but newsletters work.
Print newsletters work. You can have them printed by a local printer if you're doing them in small volume. And by small volume, I mean less than a thousand per print run.
And you can stuff them and mail them yourself. Um, and I would recommend that if you're doing two or 300, you stuff them and mail them yourself. It's more cost efficient.
It'll take you 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes to do it over a couple of nights while you're watching a Seinfeld episode. Um, it is really effective now that I do. Uh, I'm not, I'm not doing print newsletters for the next two months because this is not the time to be sending that kind of mail.
It's just going to get thrown in the garbage because people aren't in their offices and I have office addresses for everybody. But now that I do a larger print runs of newsletters, I actually have a newsletter service, uh, print them and send them out for me because it's just more, it's more cost efficient and the return on investment makes it worthwhile. So those are the three types of direct mail that I wanted to highlight for you guys.
I think those are, uh, I think those are worthwhile for you. But, um, direct mail, you can't, you really can't beat it. Given the fact that you could write one letter to someone and drop it in the post office mailbox and it could get to them and they could call you.
I love direct mail. I think it is an underused form of media today because everybody gets email spam. People are actually reading and opening their direct mail.
Video, another one of my favorites. I use it all the time. Private video is, uh, is, has really caught fire these days.
And when I, when I say private video, I mean a one-on-one video where I look at the camera and I talk to an individual person and then I hit send and it goes to that individual person. I'm going to share with you next week some of these private video services and teach you how to use them. I think those are so important and so valuable that I want you to know about them sooner rather than later.
There's one that I use called BombBomb, which is fantastic. You record the video right from your web browser. You can send it right from your email.
All you have to do once you're finished is hit send and it goes and it's very impressive. People really like it. There's another one called Soapbox that does the same thing.
There are a few of them and they're exceptionally well produced and they're easy, easy to use. So private videos, one-to-one video is a thing of the future and I want you to know about it. So we're going to talk about this next week.
I'm going to share with you those services and I'll do a demo, a live demo of those services. You all know about YouTube. I do a YouTube video every day, five o'clock it comes out.
It's just my podcast. It's me now sitting in front of a microphone talking. I have 2,700 subscribers.
I gain about 75 to 100 subscribers a month. I've gotten direct business from YouTube videos off at Kerman, which is, which in 2019 was my largest client. I work with over 80 of their lawyers.
They came to me because they saw my YouTube videos and they were impressed and they asked me for a meeting as a result of my YouTube videos. It's easy to do. You can do a YouTube video sitting at your desk.
You can do a YouTube video on your phone. We will, we will talk in detail about how to make these. Uh, if you have an interest, YouTube is definitely the way to go.
Facebook videos. I take my daily YouTube video and I repurpose it and I put it on Facebook every day. Why do I do it? Because my wife shares it with her friends and she asks me to do it.
I haven't gotten a stick of business from Facebook. Facebook has been a huge waste of time for me, but on the off chance that somebody sees me, I put the video up there. Facebook is prioritizing video supposedly these days.
So I put the videos up there because it doesn't cost me anything. It takes maybe an additional five minutes. Why not do it? And it makes sense because then I don't have to listen to my wife telling me, you know, how I don't put the videos on Facebook.
Uh, IGTV Instagram TV is something relatively new. It's been around for about a year. I'm experimenting with it.
It goes into people's regular Instagram feed. You can make your videos on IGTV as long as you want. Um, so I take the video again and I pop it into Instagram and send it.
Uh, Twitter, the same thing. You can do it with Twitter. I don't put my videos on Twitter because I don't, you know, other than going to read what the media writes or see what the president posts, I don't really do a lot on Twitter anymore.
So I don't put my videos on Twitter, but IGTV is kind of like Twitter. Only the demographic is younger. Um, everybody in my local community, everybody in, uh, the afterschool activity community is on Instagram and people tend to communicate by using Instagram.
So for local people, the exposure is good. So I put my videos on Instagram TV. TikTok is brand new to us older folks.
Um, my kids use TikTok. My teenage nieces use TikTok. It started as a, uh, music video site.
It was originally called musically and you could make your own music video and sing along with stuff. Well, now people are making very short like 15, 20 second videos on TikTok, posting them and sending them out. There are some marketing gurus out there, particularly marketing gurus who target younger people who say that TikTok is the next big thing.
I have not personally invested any time in it. Um, I'm exposed to it because the younger folks in my house, my 21 and 24 year old nieces are really into it. My kids who are now nine and, uh, 10 are into it, but I don't know that it has any value for you.
I want it. I want to bring it to your consciousness because I want you to look at it. I want you to, I want you to explore it a little bit and I want you to talk to some of the younger people that you know who could potentially be your clients.
See if they're on TikTok. The one thing I find interesting about TikTok and it's been in the news lately, Wall Street Journal and I think USA Today had an article in the business section on this. TikTok is owned by a Chinese company and there are allegedly some security issues with it.
So that's something that you might want to keep an eye on as a, as we move forward. But these are some of the video, um, sites that can deliver your message for you. And we'll do, we're going to do a lot with video in the next couple of weeks, particularly with private video.
If you guys have any questions about YouTube videos or Facebook videos, um, you know, it would be, uh, it, it, I, I'd like to hear what you're, what you're interested in. And I can cover those in as much detail as possible. I've had really good success in getting larger firms to adopt video, like doing a Tuesday briefing or I have one firm that does a property management minute and people really like it.
I have another firm that does interviews with their best clients and they call it the CEO, uh, the CEO profile. They do half hour interviews on camera with their best clients and they post them on their website. They put them on YouTube and they get shared quite a bit because the person who's profiled shares that video.
You can do those videos via zoom like this, or you can do them live in the office. They were doing them live in the office. I guess that's not going to happen anymore.
They're probably going to switch to zoom, but you know, those are, those are powerful ways to share your message and to grow your audience at the same time. All right, audio will be the last one we cover today and then we'll have a little, a little fun and networking. Let's talk a little bit about audio.
So the first type of audio that I would encourage you to explore is a solo podcast. That's just you talking, right? Podcasts are super popular. A lot of people listen to podcasts these days and I listened to three or four of them regularly.
And then if somebody tells me about something that's interesting on a podcast, I will seek out that podcast and listen to it. So a solo podcast is just you talking. I'm currently doing a solo podcast every day.
It's 10 minutes or less in length. It's the do this, sell more show and it's distributed on all the podcast outlets, Google, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Audacity, you name it, all the podcast outlets. I've signed up for all of them.
I record it using my computer. I'm actually using zoom to record the video and the audio. Although I use a more sophisticated mixer for the audio so that the audio sounds like it's radio quality.
And then I make very few mistakes if I do say so myself. So I don't have to do a lot of editing of audio and I just upload it and it's gone. It takes me the entire podcast from writing the show notes, which you have to post to a shooting, editing and posting that takes me a grand total of about 90 minutes every day.
Now I'm going to start adding interviews in the interviews are going to take a little longer, but I want to vary the solo podcast with the podcast interview. Now, why is the podcast interview important? Okay. I don't care if anybody ever listens to my podcast interview.
I'm interviewing people. I want to become clients and that's why I'm reaching out to them. That's why I do a podcast interview.
So if you're concerned that you may not have enough content or you're concerned that you don't want to be solicitous of people, invite a prospect to be interviewed on your podcast. Do the whole thing on zoom. It's a great opportunity for you then to strip the audio out, upload it and you got yourself a podcast.
Do it once a week. You got a weekly show. Your potential client will be flattered that you asked him or her to be interviewed.
They will share the podcast with other people and you're off to the races. The third type is the podcast simulcast. What does this mean? Let's say you're doing a live event.
So let's say this webinar was live and I had a 50 or 60 prospects on it. I could then take the webinar, strip out the audio and post that as a podcast and invite people to listen to the audio version rather than sharing the video webinar version and then people would subscribe to my podcast. The other thing I like to do if my clients will give me permission is I will wear a lapel mic and connect to my phone and have that record, have a presentation that I've delivered to a large audience for a client recorded and I will post that as my podcast.
So in essence I've simulcasted that presentation as long as that client was not investing in my intellectual property and they were, if the client's paying me for it, I would never do that. But with the client's permission, I then take that and post it as my podcast and it is incredibly valuable. People who listen to the show love the simulcast.
In fact, I did a couple of those at my client's office in New York. Rosenberg and Estes had me do a session with all of their attorneys and what I did was I simulcast that on my podcast the day after and the attorneys who couldn't attend listened to the podcast as if they were in the room and took notes and it was valuable to them as well as valuable to my audience. The fourth is a podcast event and this is where you decide that you're going to actually do a whole event where you're going to interview five or six people and you're going to post all those on the same day.
So if you were going to host a day long event but coronavirus struck and people don't want to come to your day long event. So instead of having five presentations in a room with 500 people, you could have the five people do their presentation into a recording and then you post Klitzner's presentation at 9am, Brad Gross's presentation at 10, Steve Siegel's post presentation at 11, my presentation at noon. So you do a day long podcast event where you've posted five, six podcasts in a day.
People can download them at their leisure or they can download them all in the same day. It's just another way to market and hype up those five presentations in a row. You can advertise it in advance, get people to subscribe and they will stay subscribed beyond the podcast event.
It's really a neat way for you to gain some additional subscribers. It's very, very easy to do. You just have people talk into their phones and do their presentation into their phone and then you take that and schedule it to go out on a schedule that you set up for the same day.
All right, those are the four things that I promised you we would cover today and I did it in about 30 minutes, so I'm relatively impressed with myself. Here's what we looked at in part one of episode three here. We looked at one-to-one communication, websites, presentations, publishing.
Part two, we looked at email, direct mail, video and audio. And today we're looking at earned media, advertising, networking and social media. This is the third part of part three, earned media.
What is earned media? Essentially earned media is just public relations. That's all it is. It's just PR.
Let's take a look. The first form of earned media that we should think about is television. And you may be thinking to yourself, I can't get on TV.
It's really hard to get on TV. It's actually not difficult to get on television. Here's how you get on television.
Come up with a segment that's already in the news. Create a slide that is a graphic representation of the segment. Send the slide to a producer and make a quick pitch on the phone to the producer via voicemail.
Make a pitch of less than one minute. It works more often than not. Here's the thing.
Electronic media, television and radio follow print media. So if you read something in your local paper that's a story and you have an opinion on that story, you should build the slide that you're going to send to them, the graphic slide, like a list of things around that story and your opinion, and then pitch your opinion in a one minute voicemail message. And you can even do a video like this and send it to them.
They'll see you, they'll see the video, they'll see the slide and they'll agree to put you on. Now, if you're wondering, does this work? Yeah, it works. I did this myself with my first book, Career Intensity.
I created a segment called Five Things Your Boss Doesn't Want You to Know. And I made a list of those things, put them on a PowerPoint slide. I did a quick video at a time when video wasn't easy to do and I sent the video to all of the producers of the Today Show and I actually, somebody actually took me up on it.
I got on the Today Show, it was on the weekend, they needed to fill a hole. I had already done the graphic so they just copied my graphic and they asked me the questions that I answered in the video so they didn't even have to write the questions. The segment producer had to do no work.
That's the key to getting on television is making it so that the segment producer, the person who's going to pitch the show to the executive producer has to do absolutely no work. If you want to get in the media at all, do all the work for them. So what did I do? I wrote the questions.
The reporter had to ask me. I put a slide together on a PowerPoint slide and I sent it to them. They used that exact graphic.
They took it and put it in TV graphics, but they used the exact stuff that I had done, put it in television graphics and they pitched me the questions and I showed them that I was good on a camera and I answered the questions in a video. So you can get on television. All you need to do is step one, find a story that's in the news and have a controversial or different type of opinion on it.
Step two, give the reporter the questions they should ask you. Step three, put your own graphic together, put your own graphic that they can put on the screen together, like a list of things. And then step four, show them that you can appear on camera by shooting a video of yourself using your cell phone.
That's how you can make sure that you end up getting on camera. That's how you can make sure you end up getting yourself on television if you have the desire to do so. Let's look now at radio.
Radio is even easier than television. If you want to get on the radio, again, find a story that's in the news. So find a story that's been written about in a newspaper or find a national story and find a local angle on it and call your local radio station.
Ask who the producer is of the radio show you want to get on. Do a one minute voiceover pitch. You can record your one minute voiceover pitch on your phone.
You can record it right on your phone as a voice note and then send it to the producer at the radio station. The two most difficult things, coming up with a good story, coming up with either a national story that has a local angle or a story that's in the print news that you want to get on the radio and then making the pitch to the right producer. But finding the producer is the second hardest thing.
All you need to do is make a phone call and say, I've got a great story. I want to pitch to so-and-so on the XYZ show. Who's the producer? Who can I send a voicemail message to? That's all it takes to get on the radio and radio spots, radio hits from an earned media perspective are super easy because they're filling a hole every day, just like TV is, except radio is more difficult because you don't have the visual aspect of it.
It's more difficult for the producer to fill time on the radio. It's easier for you to get on the radio. Articles.
How do you get an article you've written into a publication? Well, if you want to get an article you've written into a publication, trade publications are easy. Just write the article, send it to the editor. Five, six times out of 10, they're going to run the article as is.
If you want to have yourself quoted in an article in a print publication, the easiest thing for you to do is for you to write the article for the writer and send it to them and say, you can lift any part of this article as a quote. All you need to do is quote me as, and then put down how you want to be quoted. Also, you can send an email pitch to people who are writing articles.
And say, I'm happy to fill you in on background about things that are going on in my industry. So let's take a step back and let's talk about how you find the writers to go to pitch. Every writer is assigned to either a desk or a beat.
So for example, if you are focusing on the stock market, our writers will be assigned to cover certain industries related to the stock market, banking, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, oil and gas. You need to do your research on the publication, find who the writer is that's assigned to cover that specific beat. And then you can offer to provide them with background if you have experience in those areas.
Now, when it comes to the practice of law, you can offer to provide background for a reporter who's covering a specific case. So if you're a family law attorney and that reporter is covering a high profile divorce, you can offer to provide background information on the divorce laws in your state for that reporter so that they don't write something and look like a fool. This is very easy to do.
And when you're providing background information, they'll occasionally ask you for a quote and you can be quoted in the article. If you're providing information about business, you can offer to provide background information on the business laws governing a specific transaction. And the reporter will be happy for the information and they will use you as a source for something else in the future.
This is a great way to develop a relationship with a reporter. And what you will find is being quoted in print stories is a function of your relationship with the reporter. So if you offer to educate reporters and editors on your area of expertise related to their stories, you will find that they will use you for quotes in articles in the future.
Finally, digital. Everything is digital these days. There are certain stories that go up on digital media that don't appear anywhere else.
So for example, NBC News, CBS News, ABC News, CNN all have articles that appear online while their video also appears there, but the articles only appear online. The articles never appear anywhere else. They're online exclusives.
So they produce digital content. You can easily appear in digital content if you have an interesting, provocative, or dynamic angle to a story. You pitch these things the same way you would pitch a regular article or a TV spot, but you say, you can use this for digital content if you'd like.
And you know, they will cite you either as the author or they will quote you as a source. The way to figure out who the people are that you need to contact for digital publications is simply by looking for the masthead. And what the masthead is is it's in the about section of any digital publication.
And then if you scroll down to the bottom, you will find that it says who the online editor is. And it also will almost always offer you someone you can pitch when it comes to providing articles. All right, now let's look at advertising.
As you can see, there are 11 different types of advertising. I'm going to go through these really quickly because most of you will never use this advertising, but if you want to, we can certainly talk about it. Outdoor advertising is the first type.
I hate outdoor advertising. This is billboards, bus stop benches. And as I think about it, it is almost impossible to measure the effectiveness of outdoor advertising.
The way they do it is they'll put a specific phone number for you to call on a billboard. And if they get a call in on that line, it's tracked and they will have, you know, discovered whether or not outdoor advertising is effective. Most of the time, if you're taking out a billboard, they're not going to offer to do that because they don't want to measure the effectiveness because billboards, bus benches, stuff on the side of the bus, bus shelter, advertising, signs at stadiums, those things are highly, highly ineffective.
The only one that I would ever advocate doing because it's part of an overall sponsorship package is the sign at the stadium and they will usually throw in stadium signage for additional or other advertising opportunities. And the only reason I would like to see you do stadium signage, if you're doing it as part of a package, if you're a big business is because stadium signage gets, you know, 180 times exposure compared to a hundred and say, like in baseball, 160 times exposure compared to a billboard. So for those of you who watch a lot of baseball games, you'll notice WB Mason has signage on a lot of the stadium walls and they get significant exposure because anytime a ball is hit to right field in Yankee stadium, you see the WB Mason sign on the wall.
Or anytime Aaron judge is given a, given a spot shadow or they take a shot of Aaron judge because he's in right field, you see the WB Mason sign. So, you know, outdoor advertising for that purpose is gives you significant exposure, but they include that because WB Mason advertises dozens of times in each Yankee broadcast, both on the radio and television. So they throw in the outdoor advertising.
I hate outdoor advertising. I don't recommend it for professionals. I definitely don't recommend it for you guys, but just know that it's there.
And I have lawyers who come to me all the time, particularly criminal defense attorneys and personal injury attorneys who tell me that they want to do outdoor advertising. And after I banged my head against the desk several times, I try to help them track it and measure it. But the best advice I can give you is don't do outdoor advertising.
Television advertising. Television advertising will work well for you if your show is targeted. So if you're a real estate attorney and you have a way to help people buy and sell property and you can get local advertising on Property Brothers, which is a flip show or on one of these remodeling shows on like A&E, you can do local television advertising on that specific show.
I think it could be worthwhile. In addition, if you can do specific television advertising in exchange for an appearance on a show, for example, The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice used to offer television appearances along with paid advertising. I think that's fine.
You have to have a way to measure it. You have to have a way to track whether or not the stuff is actually working. I know that some of the business channels have experimented with this from time to time.
There are some quasi infomercial opportunities. You can host your own television show at like four o'clock in the morning on FX. That could be a good opportunity for you if you can leverage it in other ways.
The thing is the production cost is expensive. I work with my cousin. My cousin has a television production company.
I know exactly how much it costs because we have to use union guys or at least we have to pay union scale. Look, if you've got a budget and you're already doing all the other things that we talk about and you want to try television, I'll always help you with that. But it's not something you should do in place of any of the other opportunities.
Radio can be decent. I don't like the pay to host your own radio show opportunities. I would much rather see you start with a podcast and have somebody say to you, Hey, you're really good on the podcast.
Let us give you some time on the radio and you know they can sell the advertising opportunity and you would get 20% of the, of the radio spots. There's, there's a whole host of opportunities that are available for you to do that. Uh, I've been doing my podcast, the latest version for a very short period of time and voice America radio has already offered me a half hour show and I would get like 10 or 15% of the, of the ad revenue.
Um, you know, if you want to do something like that, it makes sense to do it if you're already doing other things like a podcast. So that's something we should definitely talk about. Digital advertising could be a highly productive for you.
If you can find someone who will manage it for you, I don't want you managing your own digital ads. Now when we talk about digital ads, we're talking about banner ads or pay per click ads. It can work out really well if it's targeted appropriately and you have someone who's good at managing it.
The challenge we face today is the minimum advertising dollar spend has gotten very, very high. My clients who I work with who do digital ads these days, the, the advertising agencies charge them a fee based on their ad spend and the minimum spend they'll want to work on is $10,000 a month. That's $120,000 a year.
Your return on investment in order to make it worthwhile for you to do that, you're talking about getting probably two, three, four matters a month, two or three or four clients a month as a result of that advertising. So my preference would be if you're going to do that type of advertising, we got to do it in a way that we're sure we're going to get a good return on our investment. We got to be able to test it first and it's very hard to find a digital agency that'll work with us under those conditions.
It can be done, but we really got to make it so that we can measure it and we know what the return on investment we're getting is. The fifth type of advertising is probably my favorite. It's an advertorial.
You just saw on the Fox news website, you saw me click on an advertorial. It was an article. It looked just like an article.
It had sponsored written on it and it had sponsored written on the top of it. I love those and I think you guys should do them whenever you can. If you're going to do any type of advertising at all, write it, make it look just like a, like an article, follow any bar compliance rules you need to.
If you're a lawyer or a law firm, follow any professional ethics guidelines you need to in your profession, make it look just like an article, put a call to action right in the text and give it to the publication and let them run it just like an article. It looks good. Even though it says advertising with a big slammer at the top that says advertising, it looks just like an article and it works really, really well.
Sponsorships I'm lukewarm on. I only advocate doing a sponsorship if you're looking to make nice with the person who's running the event or with the person who's, uh, you know, who's the ultimate host. So if you wanted to sponsor, for example, a golf hole at a tournament, you're never going to get anything from that.
I don't recommend you do it unless the person who's running the tournament is your client and you want to connect with that person. Sponsor the golf hole if you want to impress the person who's running the tournament. So if a St. Jude Children's Hospital is doing a tournament and you are very close with John Smith, the CEO of St. Jude Children's Hospital and you want to make sure John knows that you're supporting him, sponsor a hole or sponsor the dinner or sponsor the program.
Otherwise don't do a sponsorship expecting to get business from it. Now here's the exception. The only time I'm okay with you sponsoring something is if you're guaranteed to get business from it.
So for example, if they say to you, listen, Dave, if you sponsor this event, you will be the MC and you can do a 15 minute speech at the beginning of the event. You can introduce everyone and our CEO will do an endorsement of you on our website and we will refer you business, which sometimes this will happen. Then I'm okay with the sponsorship.
I don't like sponsorships that are pay to play speaking engagements because I don't want people to watch me just because I paid to be there. I get paid to speak places. You should get paid to speak places.
You shouldn't pay to speak anywhere. However, if they will let you do advertising in their program, they will let you be the MC of the event. The CEO will take pictures with you and the CEO will agree to let you, um, to give you an endorsement.
You're getting a whole package of things. That's a different story. But if somebody says to you, we've got five speaking slots, everybody's going to pay $5,000 in order to get a speaking slot.
Don't do it. You're blowing your credibility by doing that. I hope that's clear.
I hope, uh, I hope that makes sense to everyone. If not, you can hit me up on the chat and let me know. I don't like pay for play.
I will accept a sponsorship opportunity if it's a broad sponsorship that offers multiple, uh, exposure, Facebook advertising. This could be interesting if you're in a consumer driven, uh, business or a consumer driven, uh, professional practice, you might be able to target people with Facebook advertising. Again, this is not a do it yourself type of thing.
Facebook and Instagram, both let's take them both together. You need to work with an agency. You need to work with somebody who knows what they're doing when it comes to Facebook targeting.
But people who are on Facebook and Instagram have pretty much surrendered all privacy. So you can target very specific, very focused audience members on Facebook and Instagram. If that's something you're interested in, again, you need to get a professional, you need to go with an agency and use it to target either occupational groups, geographic groups, or on a more dicey basis psychographic targeting based targeting based on how people behave.
My preference is I like to target based on demographics with age and industry. I also like to target based on a profession or geography. Geography.
I don't like to use psychographics because I'm not convinced people behave the same way over and over again, unless it's specific purchase behavior. If you're talking about specific purchase behavior, we can use that for targeting purposes. Let's talk now about networking.
The first type of networking is one-on-one networking. This is where you meet somebody else face to face and you talk about how you can help each other. Until we get a vaccine for coronavirus, I don't know that there's going to be a lot of one-on-one networking done in person.
It may happen with two people who are interested in working together and both agree that they're not symptomatic or both agree they don't have the virus. In a one-on-one networking environment, the key to getting business from one-on-one networking, any networking really, but one-on-one networking in particular, the key to getting business in that scenario is through focusing on follow-up. So here's your follow-up after one-on-one networking.
You meet with someone in person. The first thing you need to do is you need to fill out and send in a handwritten note card. So let me show you what I mean.
I think I have one here. All right. Through the magic of screen share.
Let's see. All right. So I have one of these.
I had this made up myself. Okay. It's like the, it's the cover of my book.
Inside is a blank card. Okay. The back of it has my contact information on it.
And I think just about all of you have gotten one of these from me at some point. And what I do is after I meet with somebody, I just write inside here, Hey, it was great meeting you. Great seeing you.
Great talking to you. Look forward to seeing you again. I throw my business card in there, put it in a regular envelope.
My return address is on the back and I drop it in the U S postal service mail. That's step one for followup after networking. The same day that I mail that card out, I send electronic contact information.
I send them an email and I just have my signature at the bottom with my phone number and my email address. And I say, here's my contact information. Please add me to your email address book.
Okay. So that's follow up. Step two, one and two are done the same day.
I do the handwritten note. When I get back to the office, I send them the email and I tell them how great it was to speak with them. Step one and two, follow up from networking, email, contact info and regular card contact info with a business card inside.
Step three, a week later, give or take. I mean, it could be a week. It might be 10 days, depending on when you remember.
I put it in my calendar. I call them and I ask them a question about what they do for a living, about what they do for work. Okay.
I find something to ask them about. And why do I do that? Because number one, it's flattering to them. I have a question about what they do.
It shows them that I remembered who they were and what they did, right? The other reason I do it is because I want to make contact with them again. So it's a week later. I call them up.
Hey, Bob, I was thinking about you because I was in New York city and I bought a watch and it's a Rolex. I think it's counterfeit. How do they get those things in there? What, how does that, how does that happen? How does a, how does somebody get a counterfeit Rolex into the country? And do they ever confiscate those things? And then Bob, you know, Bob does customs and, uh, and, uh, trade law.
And he's going to be like, Oh yeah, Dave happens all the time. In fact, one of my clients just had this the other day. They, they wanted my, one of my clients is Rolex and they wanted to get them confiscated and here's what they do.
And so Bob is going to be flattered that I called him and I asked him the question and he's going to think to himself, wow, this guy's really interested. That's another reason for me to get in touch with them. So that's contact number three, right? You reach out to them in a week.
You ask them a question, contact number four. I would wait probably another two weeks and then I would find somebody to connect them with. So I would reach out to Bob and I would say, Hey, Bob, you know, uh, I would, I've been thinking about it and you talked a lot about, uh, getting, getting stuff confiscated for your clients.
That was counterfeit. I have somebody who's a, an intellectual property attorney, and I want to connect you with the IP attorney because he does a lot of work with people who are patenting stuff and their patents get knocked off all the time and they get shipped into the country. Would that be somebody value? I'm just making this up by the way.
Would that be somebody valuable for you to meet and Bob would say, sure, Dave, I'll meet with them. And then I would set up the meeting between Bob and the other person. Okay.
So that's the fourth thing. I would try to go to that meeting. If Bob was valuable to me and the other guy was valuable to me, I would try to go to that meeting because I want to be there.
I want to, you know, I want to have that connection, but I don't count that. When I actually set up the meeting, I don't count the meeting. I count the setup as, as four and then five.
I would then add them to my newsletter list, whether it's my weekly email newsletter or my print newsletter or both. I would add them to my newsletter list. Why do I do that? Well, all of those other followups are so that when they get the email newsletter, they go, Dave Lorenzo, he's a good guy.
He tried to hook me up with a referral. He tried to connect me. He asked me a question.
I'm going to read his email, or at least I'm not going to delete the email. And then one day he's going to stumble on something that I write that's valuable. And lo and behold, the next thing you know, we'll do business together.
So that's your followup system after networking. My point in all of this, when it comes to one-on-one networking is if you're going to invest the time and going to a one-on-one meeting with someone, you owe it to yourself to invest the time in the followup. Otherwise the one-on-one meeting time is just wasted because you know, you'll have a nice lunch, but nobody's ever going to remember you.
The followup is where the money is. So I would encourage you to do this. When things end, when you can go to meetings with people again, go to half the one-on-one meetings, but invest in the followup and make sure that when you go to the one-on-one meetings, you're meeting with people who get it.
You're meeting with people who understand what this is all about. So how do you vet those people? You call them on the phone and you say, Hey, we're going to have lunch on Tuesday. What's on the agenda? And the, you know, the amateur is going to say, what's on the agenda? I don't know.
I just thought you'd be a good guy to meet. Oh boy. You don't want to meet that person, right? You're going to, when you say what's on the agenda, they're going to say, well, Bob, I'll tell you, you know, I was looking over your bio and I saw that you're the president of the international trade section of the bar.
And I'm really interested in that area of the law. Here's why three of my best cases have come from lawyers who work in that area. And because you're the president, I know you must have some knowledge in that area.
I want to kind of see if there's something we can do to work together where I can refer you business and you can refer me. That's a lunch you want to go to because that guy gets it. That person is really into it.
Right? And if they don't say it, you say it. So if they say what, if you, so if you say, Hey Bob, what's on the agenda? And Bob goes, I don't know, what were you thinking? You would say, well, listen, I looked over your bio. You seem like a really interesting person.
I love to meet interesting people, but more importantly, I think we can do business. Here's why I've got five or six people that I think I can refer to you. I'm hoping that after we meet, you feel the same way.
And they're going to go, yeah, I'll take that meeting. Of course, who wouldn't? Right. But then you go to the lunch knowing that the whole purpose of the lunch is to figure out how we can work together.
You don't go to the lunch and go, Oh, you know, I'll have the Caesar salad. You like to eat salad? I mean, that's, you know, nobody likes that, that nobody wants to waste that kind of time. Right? So just be upfront, call them and say, here's the agenda.
Here's what we're going to do from a networking perspective. I want to make sure we're both on the same page. So that's how you make one-on-one networking payoff.
Let's look at groups. All right. So let's take a civic group like a chamber of commerce.
You have to be ruthless about selecting people in that chamber of commerce organization that you want to meet. And then you have to hold the people who are on the membership committee or the membership director or the executive director accountable for introducing you to that person. I don't join these groups anymore, but when I first moved to Miami, I joined all of them.
And what I learned to do is I learned to go to the person who I wrote the check to and handed the check to, I would hand them the check and I would say, here's the check and here's a list of people I want to meet. Can you make this happen? When you do that, that's the best thing that ever happened to that person. Because the person who's the executive director of that organization knows if they introduce you to Joe Smith from Apollo bank and you have a good relationship with them and you end up doing business, they know you're going to renew your membership.
That's their whole job. The person who's the membership director of a chamber of commerce organization or a local regional group, their whole job is to make this membership pay off for you. So my advice to you is give them a list of people you want to meet and then hold them accountable for introducing you.
They'll be thrilled. They love doing that stuff. The final one is structured networking groups.
Those of you who know me for a long time know that for years I was part of BNI. I look, if you're getting into a new area or a new geographic area, a new market segment, or you're just new to a community and you want to meet some decent people, structured networking groups like BNI or let tip or I forget Steve, I can't remember the one that, uh, that you guys belong to now, uh, that meets every other week. Those are great if you're in a very narrow niche market and people in your narrow niche, uh, will refer you business.
So like Steve Klitzner does really well in these groups because he's got a very narrow niche. So a prime time. Thank you, Steve.
Steve Klitzner told me, it's prime time. So Steve does really well in these groups because they're the only person that he's the only person they've ever met who does what he does. Nobody's ever met anybody who likes to deal with the IRS.
Steve walks in to those groups and every one of those people can refer Steve because every one of them knows somebody who's got an IRS issue and Steve's the only person they ever met who, who, you know, worked in that way or who had that job. You know, if you're like Nancy and you're an intellectual property attorney or you're a litigator, it's much harder to make those groups work. And the reason it's much harder is because people know other people who do that job.
And then you've got to prove that you're different. You got to break up those alliances. So my advice to you is join the structured networking group, uh, because it's a lot of work.
You got to really make sure you get a good return on investment. My first couple of years I did okay. When I entered BNI, my main reason for doing it is I just didn't know anybody in the community.
I made a lot of good friends as a result. I left BNI after eight years and my last two years I did my last year I did like 200,000 in revenue from BNI. But the year before that I did over 300,000, because I volunteered for a lot of stuff and I did regional training for them and that sort of thing.
I really made it work. The reason why I ended up leaving BNI as a structured networking group candidly is because I started getting clients that required me to travel and the revenue from their client relationships that needed, that required me to travel was greater than the revenue that I got from BNI, which required me to be here every week. So in the end it was, uh, it was a financial decision.
I have to tell you too that some of the relationships got to be a bit stale and some of the people got on my nerves. But from a financial perspective, I generally wouldn't give something up that was financially profitable if I didn't have an alternative. So if you're interested in networking once this whole coronavirus thing is over, a structured networking group is a decent thing to do if you can number one, differentiate yourself from everybody who does what you do.
And number two, find the right group to join. If you don't get the right group, structured networking is just like anything else. It's, it can be a very big waste of time, a very big time suck.
And it's not for everybody. You're going to see the same people over and over again. You have to be really willing to put in the work.
Um, you can't go to those meetings in a bad mood because you're going to damage your, the perception that other people have of you. If you show up and you're aggravating people left and right. So I would recommend that you check it out.
If it's something that interests you, think long and hard before you invest your time in it. It can work. It can pay off of these three things.
One-on-one group networking and structured networking. You're probably always going to do some one-on-one networking. So, you know, knowing how to do that right is, is beneficial.
I even view sometimes some of the school stuff I go to for my kids as one-on-one networking or networking opportunity to meet someone who I would work with one-on-one or network with one-on-one. So having a system for that is important. My least favorite is the chamber of commerce and structured networking situationally can work for you.
All right. Let's talk about social media, Facebook. Nancy mentioned on a call we had last week that groups work for her.
I think that's probably a highly valuable opportunity. So that's probably the most valuable thing you can do on Facebook is find people, find groups of people that could use your services and see if you can join them. Don't pitch people from the groups.
Just add value to the conversation in those groups. Other than that, be careful with Facebook. It can be a big waste of time.
Instagram. If you target consumers, if you target individuals, Instagram can be something that will be that will be beneficial to you. If it's, if you have a low barrier to entry you'll hear me tell a story all the time about how I recruited 12 kids to play baseball with my son and we formed a baseball team.
I did it all on Instagram. Very popular in local communities. Very popular if you have a locally focused business.
If you're not locally focused, Facebook and Instagram might not be all that valuable to you. Snapchat. Forget about it.
Avoid it. Don't do it. It's a waste of your time.
I don't even know if it's going to be around three or four years from now. LinkedIn. LinkedIn is very interesting.
I have a lot of people I work with who swear by LinkedIn. They post articles. They spend hours on LinkedIn connecting to people.
They post links to articles they've read. They write their own articles and post them. They take pictures of them with their clients and they post them.
If that works and people are interested in you and you can get an appointment to connect with them, then I say, go for it. But if you try LinkedIn and you do everything that I've just outlined, you take pictures of yourself and you post it with pictures of yourself with clients, right? I don't want any racy pictures of yourself. Don't ever do that.
Pictures of yourself with your clients and you post them on LinkedIn and you write up a little blurb talking about how great your client is. You do that. You write articles and post them on LinkedIn.
You link to articles of value to your audience on LinkedIn. Try it for three months. If you get a half dozen to a dozen appointments and two pieces of business or three pieces of business as a result, stick with it.
If you try doing that, all that engagement for two or three months and nothing happens, don't waste your time on LinkedIn anymore. What you should do with LinkedIn at a minimum is when you write an article, post it on LinkedIn. If you shoot a video, post it on LinkedIn.
When you do a new podcast, post a link on it. I post a link to it on LinkedIn. That's the minimum you should do on LinkedIn.
I am not one of these people that will tell you that you can build a million dollar business by connecting with people on LinkedIn. All I get on LinkedIn is spam all day long. I occasionally will be able to use LinkedIn to do research on people with whom I want to meet and that to me makes LinkedIn worth it.
In fact, it's worth it to get the premium membership just to be able to do the in-depth research that you can do on LinkedIn. Otherwise I don't consider LinkedIn a good lead generation tool. I consider it a good research and development tool.
I consider it a good passive interest tool, like almost like your website. LinkedIn is like having a secondary website where people will check you out from a credibility standpoint. So make sure your profile's up to date.
Make sure that you've written some articles and posted them on there. Make sure that there's a couple of links to your podcasts or your videos on there. If you read an interesting article and you want to post a little summary of it along with a link up there, that's great too.
But use it as a secondary source of credibility. Use it to do research. Any business you get is a bonus.
Public groups. Now, when we talk about public groups, we're talking about, groups, for example, like, oh, I don't know, like some of the, some of the LinkedIn groups or some of the groups that are, that are online that allow you to answer questions like in AVO, for example, that allow you to answer questions for people. I think AVO you may have to pay to do that or NOLO.
One of those two, you can answer questions for free. You know, is that valuable? I don't know. I mean, if you've got a couple of minutes and you want to answer one question a week, think of Quora.
If you've ever seen Quora, that's a social media site where people write articles and they answer other people's questions for free. You can put a little byline in there with a link to your website and people will sometimes discover you that way. Is that valuable? Maybe.
But if that's something that you're doing as a primary way to grow and develop business, I wouldn't do it. Public groups, you know, I would use them as an adjunct. You can post an article there that you've already posted on LinkedIn.
Let's say private networks, like a listserv, for example, I think for business to business referrals, these can be really valuable. I encourage you to participate in private networks, our private network, our community, get on there, post some stuff, ask some questions, connect with other people. I encourage you to do that.
And the reason I encourage you to do that is because you all have something in common and you can refer people, you can refer to one another, you can refer business back and forth to each other. So private networks, yes, are valuable. We talked about direct sales, one-to-one sales.
We talked about your website. We talked about presentations. We talked about publishing.
We talked about using email. We talked about using direct mail. We talked about using video, talked about using audio podcasts.
We talked about earned media, talked about advertising, networking, and social media. We covered a lot of ground. If you have any questions, I will unmute you in one moment.
You can chat me if you want, or when I unmute you, you can ask your questions. I'm going to compile this into a really nice tight video for you so you can review it again. If you want to ask me questions in private, you're certainly welcome to do so.
Hold on. Let me unmute everybody. And then you can ask me any questions you want.
Okay. There you go. Nancy's unmuted.
Doug is unmuted. Bob, Steve. I will tell you that, you know, when you talked about LinkedIn, I've gotten so many more requests for LinkedIn in the last few weeks than I usually do.
And I get LinkedIn with what people are doing, but it almost sounds desperate when, you know, when they send you out that request to connect with you personally in the phone call. And it's usually from financial advisors. So I think LinkedIn is good.
I mean, it's a numbers game. I can't imagine a lot of people call them back. You know, one of the things that I've used LinkedIn for spotty success, that's for me.
I've used it for getting speaking gigs. And what I do is this and it's, it's a lot easier for me because I'm looking to connect with lawyers. So I'll take, for example, in Florida, I can go on the Florida bar website and look at voluntary bar organizations, right? The Florida bar has an amazing collection of all the voluntary bar organizations.
And then they have the president's name right there. So I'll take the president's name and I'll go onto LinkedIn and click on the, and put in the president's name on LinkedIn. Right.
And then I'll do a connection request and send a message and say, I'd love to speak to your organization for free. You know, here's a video of me speaking and that's worked about 10, 15% of the time. I do it in conjunction with sending an email and a regular letter too.
So I use it as another way to reach out and contact them. That's how, that's how I've used LinkedIn kind of aggressively to, to reach out to people. Um, you know, it's, it seems to work, Bob, what do you got? Yeah, I agree with you there, there, Dave.
I mean, you get all these invites from LinkedIn and it's just somebody that you've never heard of just wants to connect. That to me is totally useless, totally useless. You either got to be somebody that I know who you are and I just, Oh, look, you have a LinkedIn profile.
I'm going to connect with you. Or you got to do what you do. You got to be very specific in your invite saying why you want to connect with me and why I should want to connect with you.
But 99 times out of a hundred, it's just somebody I've never heard of wants to connect with me. And, and, and unless really I know who you are, that that's no, this is what I, what I do. So, I mean, that, that's like a very hard, very, very inefficient way to use LinkedIn.
You know, I've, I've gone to LinkedIn is like, uh, I use it as an adjunct to my other, to my other stuff. So if I'm, if I'm sending you an email and I'm sending you direct mail, I might as well try and reach out to you on LinkedIn too. Cause the chances are we're going to get the letter, you open up the letter and you'll go, wait a minute, this guy, that's him.
And you, and you know, it makes, it makes sense. It's not like just out of the cold. I mean, this is like, you know, I mean the invite I'm getting from, from these people, that's the one and only contact I'm getting.
And it's like, boy, what a bad way to contact with somebody. It's like opening up on Facebook when some, you know, like some 15 year old from Russia wants to be your friend. It's like, no, no.
Now that's that, that's, that's never gonna, that's never going to work out. The 15 year old from Russia. Well, it's, it's usually Latvia.
It's usually a 15 year old from Latvia. That's what it is. That's never going to work out.
Well, you know, uh, the other thing that I'll say about, um, about LinkedIn, uh, and this is, this is controversial, you know, uh, Doug, Doug K is on with us. And there's a lot of people in his firm that use LinkedIn. And one of the things that they do is they like to connect with people.
Um, and the feeling is, listen, the connection is not necessarily a bad thing because then people will see the content that you post. And that is, Hey, Doug, that is a, that is a valid, um, that is a valid thing to do. Okay.
But what I've done with the people in Doug's firm in particular is I tried to get them away from connecting with everyone. And here's the reason why. I want to go on your LinkedIn profile and I want to say to you, Hey, Bob, I'm looking through your LinkedIn profile and I see, you know, Steve Klitzner.
I've been trying to meet that guy for two years. Would you mind reaching out to him and setting up a lunch or setting up a phone call so we can connect? Now, if you're just willy nilly making connection requests to people at random, and I ask you to do that, I put you in a bad spot, right? Because you, you don't know the person. And then I feel like an idiot because what are you going to avoid me? Because you don't want to tell me you don't really know that guy.
Right? So what I've done in, in working with people in big firms, like at Offit Kerman where Doug K works, I tell them all the time, look, don't just connect with anybody because here's the thing I get. You want them to see your content. That's why you're connecting with them.
But it's much more valuable when you open your contacts up to everybody and say, look through my contacts, tell me who you want to meet. I will set you up with that person. So now I had, and the reason why I did this, I reduced my contact.
I had like the maximum you could have. I forget if it's 30,000 or 40,000. And, um, and the reason I had that many to begin with was honestly my agent told me that publishers would, uh, would think that number was great because they would think some of those people would buy my book.
Right? So I really pumped it up that high. But then I realized that all I was getting in that feed was junk all day long. Like, you know, I don't care why some guy in India is forwarding me an article on vacuum cleaners.
Right. So like that to me was, it was no value to it. So I spent time taking my contacts from 40,000 down to, I think I have less than 3000 in there now, but anybody in there I can point to and I can say, if you want to talk to that person, I can get them on the phone because I've actually had a conversation with those people.
They will recognize my name if I call them. So if you want to meet somebody in my contacts, I can open my contacts to you with confidence that I can get those people on the phone as long as they're not sick or out of the country or something. And to me, that that's a lot more valuable for me to say to you guys, look, go through my contacts.
Let me, I'll introduce you to anybody as long as you give me a valuable reason to make that introduction. I'll do it. I think that's a better use of LinkedIn than accepting everybody and just posting articles, hoping that they see it.
That's just me, you know, and Doug, for your, for your benefit, this was, uh, Brian Lawson and I used to, we used to do a little thing with the groups where we would go back and forth and he would do the benefits of posting a lot of articles, having a lot of connections. And I would do the benefit of having few connections and, you know, opening your contacts up to people. There's no right answer for me in the way, you know, the way that I prefer to do it.
I want a narrow number of people who know me, like me and trust me. Brian's approach was more of a, listen, you're going to post three articles a week. We want the maximum audience to see it.
So I get where he's coming from. I just, I advocate a different approach, uh, because I want to be able to use those contacts for something valuable. All right, guys, I've, uh, I've kept you a little bit over.
So thank you for joining me today. Um, Thursday, listen, I'm going to, uh, I'm going to do something a little, uh, a little different for Thursday. I don't want to, I have another series that I want to do next week, but on Thursday I'm going to do, uh, what Dan Kennedy used to call a look over my shoulder.
I'm going to show you on Thursday, I'm pitching a book to a publisher, and I'm going to show you how I put the, uh, the outline together for the book and how I'm pitching it to the publisher through, uh, I'm using, I'm using my agent to do it, but I have to actually make the pitch. So I'm going to show you guys how I put that outline together. The benefit to you is you can use this same approach if you wanted to pitch an article to somebody, or maybe you have a book in you that you want to write.
I'm going to show you how to do, uh, how to write a really tight outline that publishers will, uh, will actually look at. Um, I don't have the outline completely done yet, but I have enough of it together so that I can show you what I'm doing. So we're going to spend 45 minutes.
You'll look over my shoulder at the outline. Um, my goal is to have, uh, to have the, the outline tight and, and start pitching it by the time this, uh, this whole, uh, Corona virus thing ends. In fact, I probably will have the whole book written by the time, by the time this, this thing ends, but you'll get to see kind of a behind the scenes, how it works.
And then on Friday by special request, I'm going to show you how to use a MailChimp constant contact, the email marketing system. Uh, Steve asked me to do a quick demo on that. So Friday afternoon, I'm going to do a 20 minute, half hour demo on that.
And then we'll, uh, and then we'll do some online networking as well. Okay. So thanks for joining me today, guys.
Enjoy. Enjoy the rest of your day. I will see you on Thursday.
And Nancy, it's good to see you're still traveling around. So that's nice. It's a different background.
You get hotel rooms with the best views. I really do. Don't I? Yeah.
Steve Klitzner. Let me ask you in the, in the corner there, was that Gucci or Fendi in the corner? Oh, on the other side over there. Oh, where's Fendi? Oh, Fendi.
The next time we do this, I'm going to have Nancy bring her cats on screen and you bring what happens. All right. I'll bring the girls.
I will bring whoever's here. All right. Take care guys.
Be well. Bye. Bye.