UX Marketing

on the podcast today, I've got Ryan Garrow with us who is going to help us determine our side hustle, talk about goals, figure out that whole stage. So this is going to be really valuable, especially if you're just getting started and looking for some advice before we get too much into it. Ryan, how are you doing today? Have him do an awesome Blake. I'm excited to be here. Ryan just started his own podcast that we'll get to at the end as well. So we're, we're going to learn a lot here. I want to get some quick context on you before we dive into the technical subject matter of side hustling. So if you could just run, walk us through really briefly the story of your career from how you got started to where you got or how you, how you got to where you are now. Okay. I don't think our podcast is long enough to cover all of it, but we'll touch on some high points. I've, been in the digital marketing space for about a decade, was CEO of a company that got acquired. I'm now working with the company that acquired us. And so my focus is primarily in the eCommerce space. most of my days advising businesses on how they can grow their e-commerce, what they can do in strategically. well how they can compete better. But I also have five businesses with my wife outside of that. So I do have the side hustle game going where I have a brand selling direct to consumer. I also have a wholesale division on that. My wife has a retail store that also sells online. I have a wine and beer retailer. I have a marketing company that tests new products into markets. And then we have a, an investment organization for e-commerce technology. So I am literally all over the place. I have so many questions, but I, I can't dive in just yet cause I have one more contextual question I ask everybody there. So I'm curious what you would say is your professional superpower. Strategy. Seeing where something can or can't work. I love it. I can already tell. We're going to get along great. You're so, so simple. Direct, straight forward. It's going to be fantastic. My first question, because I do this every bit as much for me to learn as for the audience to learn so. You've mentioned you've already got several side hustles, especially some e-commerce stuff. I'm really curious. First off, we can go into how you get the ideas for that, but then I also want to bring up, before I forget, how do you actually get the system in place to like get, somebody to manufacture it if you need that or how, like how do you build those relationships as well? So let's tackle the idea first, then we can get into the more technical side. for me, the ideas are generally easy. And the problem for me is, is refining. And figuring out which ones are bad and which ones may have potential. so my wife is usually my best filter. She, she shoots down most of my ideas and tells me they're dumb. And so that's my step one. Like, all right, what do you think of this? Oh, I think it's bad. Okay, let's maybe table that and I'll try to refine that. But I usually, when I'm advising, cause we have 800 employees here, I'm advising on a lot of side hustles internally for people under 30 but what I like to tell people too is if you're going to make a side hustle work, you've got to be passionate about it or have some interest. Otherwise it's just going to become another job or a grind and you're not going to keep going and pushing when you're not making money. Cause most side hustles in the eCommerce space. You're grinding now and hoping for pay late, or whether you're working to become an influencer or whether you're working to set up an econ business for success and to scale and pay for generations of wealth type thing. So I think passionate interest is one of the biggest things I would filter an idea through. And then I think secondary below that is. What kind of con connections do you have or what kind of opportunities do you have to meet...

Welcome to the podcast. Today we have Peter Schroeder who is the head of growth at Onna, and we are going to discuss growth. Maybe it's maybe some other things as well, but first and foremost, let's just get some context on you. It's kind of a weird time that we're living in. So, Peter, how are you holding up with all this Corona virus stuff going on? Hey Blake, thanks for having me and thanks for checking in. it's a crazy time, in tech. I say to my team and I say to everyone every day, we're very fortunate to still be working, and I think that we get the lighter end of everything that's happening. So yeah, just staying positive, saying grateful every day. and I think we should, we should all do the same on a daily basis. yeah, definitely. hats off to everybody out there, all the nurses and doctors and everything. Obviously right now, a weird time we're living in. Yeah. The show must go on and let's. Let's give some people some ammo that they can take right now is a great opportunity for side hustlers and people working online to either start a project or continue building it and having a little bit more time at home to do that. So let's help them grow a little bit. But, but before we get into the details and getting ahead of myself a little bit of context on your career, if you could just give us a snapshot of your career so far, where you've been, where you're going, and where you are, how you got to where you are now. Basically. Yeah, absolutely. So, coming out of college, I very much so had that entrepreneurial spirit where, I was inspired by startups. I was inspired by tech companies. and I started, I tried starting a company that was essentially a messaging unification platform that brought all your text messages, your emails, your social media DMS into one place. and it really gave me that startup feeling that startup hustle and kind of grounded me on what it takes to get a company off the ground. So did that for about a year. didn't end up getting the traction that I wanted. but I used that time and experience. owning a project and trying to build a company to, make my way into the tech world. So ever since then been at a couple of tech startups, which has brought me to my current role at Oana where I'm heading up growth. And essentially what we do at Oana is where the central information layer for most tech companies. So if you think about the average tech worker and how many different enterprise applications they use on a daily basis, there's just. Tons of data getting created, especially at this time as we work from home. All this data that lives in Slack, Microsoft teams are emails, a sauna. It's just data getting created everywhere. So Ono helps you bring all that data together, right? and do a couple of different things. We help people do, like eat discovery compliance. So that's like GDPR, CCPA, enterprise search, knowledge management. So just really taking control and understanding your data. . What would you consider to be your professional super power yourself? Yeah, so am I professional superpower, at least to this point in my career, has been. Building and standing up and moving on to the next, repeatable, growth engine that companies, so just going into new channels, building repeatable processes that's driving leads, driving pipeline, driving repeatable revenue, and just moving on to the next thing. And I think that's very much. A growth mindset that a lot of growth marketers and people who work in marketing should have is everything needs to be built up to be repeatable and scalable. and then after you work on one thing, and it's very much like a testing. Framework that you should have with everything that you're standing up, but come into it with a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, and also have a definition of done. So, in most experiments, actually, every experiment you need, like what that definition of done is to be able to...

All right. On the podcast today, I have Stapho Thienpont who is here to talk LinkedIn with us. Somebody that is not only a consultant about this thing, but he's, he actually acts on his own advice. You can go check them out on LinkedIn and we'll get to that later on. First off, Stapho, how are you doing today? Ah, I'm doing great. I just came off my own show and you know, I'm just enjoying talking so much on the nice thing like this. Nice to be like here in Europe.  Do you like hearing your own voice?  Not really, but I do enjoy talking.  I'm the same way. Hearing my own voice on on microphone. It's kind of weird, but you get over it cause it's  fun to talk to people. Yeah. 100%. Awesome.  Well, before we get into the details of LinkedIn, I know you're going to give us a ton of advice on how to grow on LinkedIn, but first and foremost, I want some quick context on you so that the audience knows who they're dealing with here. So first and foremost, just curious about the story of your career so far, where you got started and how you ended up where you are now, as briefly as you can. As briefly as I can. Okay. So I lived in issue to Jim and Stockholm, even though I'm originally from Belgium, which is the other side of Europe. one day I realized, you know what, by beating up my friends all day, I'm not really providing much value to the world. I figured I have a knack for both language and systems. And then. What I figured out was that, marketing is right on the edge of that. I started a Facebook group, got to start working with my favorite author, all this kind of stuff. and before I knew it, I got started with LinkedIn cause I wanted to learn a new platform. I somehow got into a super secret group of people that were basically the best to ever do it on LinkedIn. And I just started picking their brains and I started learning all this kind of LinkedIn stuff. I did it for myself, and then I figured, you know what? this is so helpful for myself to generate leads and also generate awareness and build connections and network. I'm going to do this as a service for other people. And since then we've been turning our people into LinkedIn thought leaders and generating leads for them. some highlights were when the multibillion dollar multimedia Titans started reaching out to our clients purely based on the content, but also getting some of our call bites on sales calls with Microsoft Lyme and the like. So, yeah, it's been a, that's my journey so far, I guess.  And you're still going, okay. Yeah, the beginning right.  Definitely, definitely. I don't know if I'm going to limit myself to LinkedIn forever, but I'm definitely still growing strong every day. Awesome.  And if I were to ask you what you think your professional super power is, what would you say. That's a really good, a really good question. I'm actually a really good networker. I would say, even though I don't spend much time, I'm really good at building relationships fast and somehow I don't know what it is, but it's when I talk to people, they walk away with the idea that I really know what I'm talking about with makes, it makes it easy for me to sell, but also to get buy in when I'm working with people, which ultimately lasts me to get good results. But the networking of personal impact is for sure the key, I would say. Well  that's, that's good because that's what LinkedIn is all about. So let's dive into that and just start talking about how this group of of listeners that are bootstrappers and micro-influencers can actually grow on LinkedIn. My first question really would be, if you are starting out with zero, you're a micro influencer, you are an entrepreneur that's just starting out. How can you actually get anybody to take your thought leadership seriously?  Well, first and foremost, you gotta have at least some skill and some

 it's just me as usual on a Friday, and the subject today that we're going to be covering is headlines, bios, titles, whatever, across social media. Okay. On LinkedIn, it's your headline on Twitter, Instagram, it's your bio on Facebook. It's your whole profile. Basically. You don't really have a title on Facebook, so. Let's talk about how to optimize that. Um, I have a couple of tactical tips that you can implement. Ultimately, I think it goes without saying that there is. No perfect formula for everybody, but there's a general universal formula that will usually work and do better than what you at least have. Tweak it over time. This is the kind of thing you want to AB test, so don't just do something about it right now and then forget about it forever. Constantly be AB testing things. There's no penalty for doing that. It's not going to hurt you in any way. You're just going to learn more and more about what drives clicks on your profile. And in the case of LinkedIn, which unique because you actually see your headline across the entire platform in the feed and everywhere. So that's really a conversion tool for you across the board. That one's particularly impactful. So here is my number one tip for you that I want you to go and try right now. This is very easy to do. So whatever you're in right now, whether in LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, go into the search bar and type in conversion copywriter or copywriter search. Any copywriters that are in your network already or that you're following or that are following you, check them out. See what their bio looks like. Now, keep in mind that these are people that for a living to make money, to support their families. Right copy that converts people to take action and into customers. So I think it goes without saying that the, of all the groups of people that you could probably trust to write a good bio, this is the most likely, I'm not telling you that every copywriter has a great bio. Okay? You're still gonna come across people on LinkedIn that don't use it enough. And then their title just says copywriter at, you know, Acme org. So. There are going to be people like that, but for the most part, as a whole, more than any other group, these people are going to give you great patterns to follow. So whether you're on Twitter with, with your bias, so let's use that as an example. Look up. Conversion copywriters look up copywriters for B2B, for B to C, whatever is unique to you. If you're in an eCommerce store, look for B to C conversion copywriters, or if you do SAS technology, look that up. B2B copywriters look at these people and try to compile a list. Of all the elements that you notice from this search, you're going to start noticing like they're more descriptive. They don't use a lot of fluff. They're straight to the point, but in a way that's really fun to read. So it's not just like I do marketing for businesses, it's, it's not necessarily always clever or. Punny or anything like that. But it conveys the point in a little bit more of a story and it makes it a little bit more exciting, but there's no fluff. So there's a really good balance. Usually when you, you'll find with, with these people's bios, so write down a huge list and almost like a math equation, like add them all up in terms of their patterns. Take the average of those patterns and what does that usually look like? So what I've found for LinkedIn, for example, when I do this exercise, aside from the elements of using your personality and things like that, just a general universal formula. If I took the averages of conversion copywriters, headlines, it would usually be, I help. X group of people accomplish Y task using Z tool or for Z purpose. That's usually the general formula. And you've heard that before, right? You can add onto this a little bit to add a little bar and then you know, you can still state your actual job title. You could still state if you

Blake: [00:00:00] today on the podcast you have Stef Caldwell, who is going to tackle a bunch of different subjects with us. Today we're going to be discussing things like side hustles and authenticity and customer experience, kind of the, the whole gamut. [00:00:11] But I'm really excited about this one. But Stef, before we get into it, I do want to give you a chance to give some context about yourself. Basically, if you could just tell us, first and foremost what your career path has been to this point, where you got started and how you got to where you are now. [00:00:28] Stef: [00:00:28] Happy to do that and thanks for having me on the show. So my career path, if you just looked at it on LinkedIn, might be confusing to somebody who doesn't know kind of where I'm headed. So I started, , my first internship was in recruiting, right? I worked at a staffing firm where I was recruiting people and, and helping place them in jobs. [00:00:48] In my professional career, I moved from being a business analyst to working in a sales and marketing role, to then working in a product management role and a channel development role to now where I sit, which is in customer success. And so again, , any person would look at that experience and be like, huh, this girl's really, , been all over the place in terms of her variances. [00:01:08] But the way that I look at it is I'm collecting the experiences necessary to make me the most ultimate general manager or CEO of a business. And I think that, okay, really, really incredible leaders can empathize with their people in any department. And so I really navigated my career path. Bye bye. [00:01:28] Creating opportunities to have those experiences so that when I do become, you're the leader and I am, , and my side hustle that I can really emphasize and create good experiences across departments.  [00:01:39] Blake: [00:01:39] Oh, that's a, that's a pretty unique. Viewpoint, I guess because most people when they go into a side hustle are basically just looking to make money. [00:01:47] That's, I mean, that's the facts of the matter, and I love that you're really more like people focus your  people customer centric. That's going to bode really well for you down the road, and it's gonna be great for our audience as well, because I think it's a really important message to hear. And before we dive too much more in detail, I do ask everybody, what do you consider to be your professional superpower? [00:02:13] Stef: [00:02:13] I think adaptability and tenacity. So whatever the baby is, of those two words, that's me.  [00:02:20] Blake: [00:02:20] It's a necessity.  [00:02:21] Stef: [00:02:21] Untapped tenacity. Yes. it's, . I believe and truly like live out every day that everything is figureoutable and having that mentality and then also having the willingness to get up everyday and take one step forward, even if that step is very uncertain, I think is what sets me apart in my professional career as well as in my side hustle. [00:02:44] Awesome.  [00:02:44] Blake: [00:02:44] Well. I know that you do work full time at narrative science. Correct. So you've, you've already got the full time job. Now you also have the side hustle thing going on.  obviously the word side hustle itself is self explanatory. Do you understand that it's something you're doing on the side? You already have a full time job, but it's another thing to actually help people understand how you can do that. [00:03:06] And so you're in a unique position where you can discuss that a little bit with us. I'm curious right now, what does your day to day look like? I mean that, that may be a bad question because right now we're going through all this coronavirus stuff and everybody's normal is completely out of whack, but normally how are you balancing having a full time job that's, that's demanding where you're trying to learn skills and grow and you're doing a side hustle at the same time....

Blake: [00:00:00] on the podcast today, I have Brian Bosche who is here to talk all things tick tock. He's the first person to come on here and strictly discuss this with us about tech. So Brian, how are you doing today?  [00:00:10] Brian: [00:00:10] Doing well, Blake, thanks for having me. I am  [00:00:12] Blake: [00:00:12] super excited selfishly because I need to learn more about tick tock. [00:00:16] My, my fan ship is really, really low and I do not get a lot of views, so I'm excited to learn how I can flip that around and I'm sure that the audience is going to do just the same, but before we get into it, I do want to get a little bit of context on you. Just basically your background. If you could give us a snapshot of your career so far, where you got started and how you got to where you are  [00:00:36] Brian: [00:00:36] now. [00:00:37] Sure. So right now I'm on the product team at Smartsheet, which is a collaborative work management tool. it's a public company used by tens of thousands of different companies to help them manage their workflows and really managed our work as a team. And my company, my startup actually was acquired by Smartsheet last year. [00:00:54] So I was previously the CEO and co founder of a company called slope, and we really made it easy for creative teams to manage their work. So we largely focused on content review and approval, so images, videos, photography, design, and that's really where I got to know more about the creative field, where I worked with lots of different marketing creative teams or trying out. [00:01:15] Any new channel that would come up that we're trying to, you know, deploy their social media strategies at scale. So that's what really got me interested in tech talk when it first launched, is a lot of the customers that I work with and help build products for. I started asking questions about tick talk and how do we do this vertical video and how do we take advantage of this new channel. [00:01:32]so I've always really been interested in the marketing creative world. I'd even run a video production company previous to, to slope. so yeah, this is a really exciting space for me. And if  [00:01:41] Blake: [00:01:41] I were to ask you what you think professional superpower is, what would you say?  [00:01:45] Brian: [00:01:45] creative workflows. so, you know, for the last eight years, I have. [00:01:51] Worked really deep with marketing creative teams, helping them manage, you know, anything from, how do you request a project to planning it out to assigning. So going through the entire feedback and review and approval process all the way to getting something published. So, really the expertise on how companies, teams, people should, Build out their creative workflows. Well,  [00:02:13] Blake: [00:02:13] let's, let's dive into it as it pertains to tick tock then. So for anyone that's not using it currently, can you give an idea of what makes it different from what's already out there. Sure.  [00:02:23] Brian: [00:02:23] So tech talk is really powerful for brands and also for individuals or really anyone that's trying it out, because it gives you so much engagement and reach with no following. [00:02:33] So I'm sure many of you have been on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter for years, and engagement's really tough. You know, I've had a Twitter for the last 10 years at 10,000 followers. I'm lucky to get a few likes, you know, they engagement is pretty low. And then once you actually. A tweet, something, it's gone, you know, within hours. [00:02:50]so it's really hard to get that engagement and really hard, you know, on Instagram to get hundreds of thousands of likes. If you have 500 followers, we're on, tick-tock, you can literally have your first video published, get to a million views. So it really a, is a powerful channel because it gives you that engagement and reach without having to establish that following and really rewards...

Hi there, welcome to the Micro Influencer podcast / video series now every Friday this is going to be on video as well. Hopefully this is going to be helpful for some people. This is new for me. I've got a new set up very excited. So today I want to get right to the point. I want to talk about why the worst advice you're ever going to get is to create quality content. That sounds counterintuitive. I get that hear me out before you get out your pitchforks and try to burn down the house. Let me explain what I'm talking about. So. If you think about it, you hire a consultant you want to start growing on social media Instagram Twitter LinkedIn wherever it is you hire a consultant. Okay, they can give you technical tricks. They can tell you what works and what doesn't how to please the algorithm they can give you practical things that you can Implement that will make your content perform better most likely but usually the number one piece of advice are going to have for you is to create quality content. They're always going to say that it's not wrong. I'm not saying that this advice is incorrect advice I'm saying it's bad advice. And the reason for that is just think about how absurdly obvious. That is everybody knows that you shouldn't be creating terrible content. Everybody knows that if you want to succeed at blogging with your websites copy with video with podcasting with social media, whatever your medium is even graphic. Design, that's a way of communicating as well. Anyway, you're trying to communicate everybody knows that you're not supposed to be terrible at it. If you want to attract attention and grow a following. It's blatantly obvious anything that is that obvious is not advice. And if you have ever paid anybody to hear those words, you should try to get your money back because it's such bad advice. Of course, we should be creating quality content, but Never give that out as advice because it's not helping anybody advice by definition is trying to teach somebody something they didn't already know that they can actually Implement. So I want to try to give you some things you can actually Implement instead of telling you create good stuff, which is true. I'm going to tell you what you can do to prepare yourself. So that what you create is inherently going to be good. It doesn't take a mastermind to create good cause good content online. It just doesn't all it takes is your own unique personality and try to be helpful. Try to add some kind of value. Now what I want to say add value that's another one of those things like weld, of course, I want to be valuable to somebody I'll let me explain a little bit of what that means. It doesn't just mean that you are breaking news and that you're telling people something that they've never thought of before. It's really rare that you're ever going to communicate with thought that somebody else hasn't already. Not that you're stealing that idea. It's just that there are so many people on this planet. So many people that have already existed that have had really good ideas. You're not the first person that's ever thought of your idea. I guarantee it. So with that said, how can you actually create good content? If all the good ideas are quote unquote taken. Well, it's not just about coming up with brand new ideas. It's almost impossible. You can add value by being funny. You can add value by being a little bit obnoxious of people are into that you could add value by expanding on ideas that already exist or yeah, you can try to come up with new ideas and expand on those as well. Definitely don't I'm not recommending against that it's just you're always going to have some kind of idea that's similar out there already. So instead try to find ways you can add your own personal LD to it. That's the best way to go about it. So that's number one for prepping yourself to create good stuff online. Number two. You need to be...

Jason Vana Blake: [00:00:00] All right. On the podcast today, I have Jason Vanna, who we're going to talk about branding and side hustles and how you can actually create content that leads to gigs. But before we get into that, let's get a little bit of context on Jason. So first off, Jason, how are you doing today?  [00:00:20] Jason: [00:00:20] I'm great, man. How are you doing? [00:00:22] Blake: [00:00:22] I am fantastic. I'm ready to get this going. And I'm curious if we could just get a little bit of the history  [00:00:28] Jason: [00:00:28] of your career so far, just so we  [00:00:29] Blake: [00:00:29] know, where are you being and how you can help out?  [00:00:33] Jason: [00:00:33] Yeah, so I actually started out in sales doing, advertising sales for a local newspaper. and I like to tease all my, salespeople friends that I upgraded to marketing after that. [00:00:45]they don't like that so much, but I like to say it. but yeah, so I've been in marketing for roughly about 13 years, if you don't count the five years, where I focused on advertising. And so basically done everything from designing ads to helping small local businesses, no how to market it.  their company. [00:01:06] Two, I'm marketing for a community college marketing for a church marketing for now. A food processing equipment, the manufacturer. and then I have my own side hustle where I help, personal brands. And. More small businesses really understand their branding and, developing marketing strategy. So basically I break the rule of find a niche and focus on it because I've done, I've basically done it all. [00:01:37] So yeah, that's, that's kind of a, my career in a nutshell, I would say.  [00:01:43] Blake: [00:01:43] And if you had to pinpoint like one professional superpower that you feel like you encapsulate, what would that be?  [00:01:50] Jason: [00:01:50] Oh man. I would say the biggest thing, and this is why a lot of people will, will hire me, is the, the ability to really help, A business helping individual understands their identity as a, as a brand or as a company. and be able then to communicate that quickly and communicate that well. and so really what I've done at the current job where I work. Is taking a brand that no one knew in the industry and turned it into a globally recognized, Globally recognized and really desired brand, to work with. And so that's kind of the, I can do a lot, but that's my super power is, here's the messaging. Here's what we need to focus on. Now let's do this. So yeah, that's, that I would say is my super power. And  [00:02:40] Blake: [00:02:40] that. So that's, that's on a bigger scale. [00:02:42] And then, and if we take it down, I'm sure that we have a lot of principles that we can cover for side hustlers and people that are trying to do something, build something that's meaningful to them, but they're kind of starting from scratch. So let's, let's just dive into that, because if I'm early on in my side project, I kind of know my, I know my product, I know my audience a little bit. [00:03:02] How early on should I actually be worried about branding?  [00:03:06] Jason: [00:03:06] So actually a lot of my side hustle, my personal side, hustle cuts clients are personal branding and kind of that very small business. I have an idea, I have a product and I want to move forward. And really what I, I advise them is, you really need to start working on your brand right away. [00:03:25] And the reason I say that is. A brand is not just a logo and colors and fonts and all that. Those are brand elements. But really what a brand is, is understanding your identity as whether that's an individual or a company. so it's your identity and how you communicate that and get people to understand that very quickly. [00:03:48] So psychologists say that we have seven seconds. To make a first impression that within seven seconds you will make a judgment on any person,...

Aaron Patton Blake: [00:00:00] Perfect. We are live on the podcast today with Erin Patton, where we're going to be talking about prospecting and networking, but through some different channels that maybe we haven't discussed here on the podcast before. Before we get into that, Erin, how's your day going?  [00:00:15] Aaron: [00:00:15] Fantastic. Blake, thanks for having me on and hello everyone. [00:00:18] Blake: [00:00:18] Super excited. I would love to get some context on you as a person, as a professional. Before we dive into the details here. So just to give the audience an idea of who they're, who they're working with here, could you just give us the story of your career so far, briefly as to where you started to, how you got where you are now. [00:00:35] Aaron: [00:00:35] Sure. Absolutely. So myself and just a regular guy, I, I went through life just a regular path like most of us do. I was just accepted to go to high school, try to get good grades, go to college, get a job, right. The normal path that we're all used to and accustomed to. And I, my parents, had done that. [00:00:52] They were. Good students. And that was the just accepted way. So I didn't really have any thoughts to do anything else like entrepreneurship wise or, or any other path that was, that was my journey. So went to college, got a job in sales, and worked at about four or five different companies in sales and software, software's a service companies, and then really just hit a wall in my later twenties, and decided that I don't want to do this long term. [00:01:16] So I essentially started over. I quit my job. I did a little traveling, was playing a little poker. That was a serious hobby of mine. So, trying to chase the dream of not really waking up and go into an office every day, like someone you have a dream about. And, I quickly realized that I don't want to spend all my time at a casino. [00:01:37] So I decided that I wanted to take some of the reasons why I did love that game. And parlay it into a more productive and business oriented manner. so I came up with podcasting, content creation, first and foremost just to learn how to do online business, but also to be creating content at the same time. [00:01:56] So kind of learning with the audience. And then it's been about 15 months now, and I feel like I'm in a place where I can. You know, actually launched something decent on my own and help people in their endeavors for what they want to do online. So that's the route that I'm going for this year, and I'm putting a hard focus on building up a little community and membership group to enable people to do just that. [00:02:18] Blake: [00:02:18] And what would you say your professional superpower  [00:02:20] Aaron: [00:02:20] is. Professional superpower for me is definitely prospecting. It's, getting in touch with the right people, excuse me, the right people, the decision makers, people that, are actually going to be able to either purchase a product or service, like in my sales job or in this case for podcasting, be a guest on the show. [00:02:41] And part of my show for new age influencers is to try to get people that are really living a true online. You know, dream based lifestyle, and sometimes it's really hard to get in touch with these people, but I felt like it was my duty to, to try as hard as I can to get as high quality guests as possible so that they can give back advice and lessons that they've used in their lives to attain success and give it back to the audience. [00:03:07] So that's what I try to do every single week, week in and week out. Well,  [00:03:10] Blake: [00:03:10] let's dive into your superpower then and start with the very foundation. I'm curious how you would recommend going about starting to establish herself. So if first off, how you can identify the proper niche for you and then beyond that, just establishing yourself as somebody that anybody should listen  [00:03:29] Aaron:...

Blake: [00:00:00] All right. On the podcast today, I have Cecil cross who's going to help us understand the ins and outs of a imposter syndrome. We're going to go into this in detail, but before Cecil, how are you doing?  [00:00:16] Cecil: [00:00:16] I'm doing great.  [00:00:19] Blake: [00:00:19] Yeah, so it's almost the weekend. I'm excited.  [00:00:22] Cecil: [00:00:22] That's right. And,  [00:00:23] Blake: [00:00:23] and I would love to get just a little bit of context on you before we dive into the topic at hand. [00:00:29] So if you wouldn't mind just giving the audience an idea of, w just a brief history of your career so far, where you got started, how you got to where you are now, and everything in between.  [00:00:39] Cecil: [00:00:39] Sure. I'm a graphic designer slash creative director. And, I currently work for a software company, Around the Dallas, Texas area. [00:00:49]but I was born in Michigan  and I came up drawing like a lot of, a lot of young people, and I've been a designer for about, huh, almost 20 years, about between 18 and 19 years at this point. And I've had different roles where I've served as the designer and art director, one for school districts. That was my first major job. [00:01:11] And, after that, a, a direct mail marketing company that was right around the time of the recession. And so that became a difficult time. And that was around the time that I really started kicking my fire of a up in third year because I had to provide for my family. After that, I worked for the Fox affiliates, from my hometown. [00:01:34] And, just a few years ago, I moved out to Dallas and up in here. working in different positions, as increased responsibilities, touched a little bit of everything in the graph, buying industry from retail education, government technology. So that's kind of where I am now. And, and I also run a freelance brand consultant, brand consultancy and that creative direction. [00:01:58] Okay.  [00:01:59] Blake: [00:01:59] So I think it's safe to say with all the different areas that you've worked that you've probably dealt with imposter syndrome before.  [00:02:05] Cecil: [00:02:05] Absolutely.  [00:02:06] Blake: [00:02:06] Yeah, we'll definitely get into that, but before that, one final context question, what would you consider to be your professional superpower? Connecting with  [00:02:18] Cecil: [00:02:18] people. [00:02:19] Just connecting with people. Everything that I do from a creative standpoint, I try to find the human element. There's so many. Acronyms and businessy terms and jargon that can get in the way of that last scene it happened. But once you find that human connection, it's easier to tell a story no matter what, no matter what the industry is. [00:02:42] So I think it's finding that human connection and treating people accordingly. This is my simple palette.  [00:02:47] Blake: [00:02:47] I love it. All right, well let's, let's talk about imposter syndrome and let's get into it because the audience is going to skew more toward people like, like me, where. Just trying to do side hustles cause that's what I like to do more at the beginning. [00:03:01] That the end of my journey trying to build things that that means something to me. Yeah. Kind of starting from zero. So with that in mind, I think most of us at some point are going to feel imposter syndrome. I think it. When we think of that, it's often more of like a Silicon Valley kind of term where these big founders of big companies have imposter syndrome because they don't, I think that they're up to that task. [00:03:22] But do you think it applies to a much smaller scale when you're like freelancing and things like that?  [00:03:28] Cecil: [00:03:28] Absolutely. from my perspective, imposter syndrome, has, has come up in the form of, I think I belong here, but for whatever reason, I feel like. I don't know, really belong here. Like I...

Blake: [00:00:00] Okay. And on the podcast today, we have Jonathan  who is from growth hackers, and we are going to be discussing a lot of different things from funnel building to building an ecosystem for your branding and not just having to pay for ads, but actually building something sustainable. But before we get into it, Jonathan, how are you doing  [00:00:24] Jon: [00:00:24] today? [00:00:25] Hey Blake, I'm very good to this. Thanks for having me here.  [00:00:29] Blake: [00:00:29] What we'd love to get a little bit of context on you as a person. Before we dive into all of the details, I'm curious if you could just give us a quick story about your career so far, how you got started and how you got to where you are now. [00:00:44] Jon: [00:00:44] Okay. So first maybe I should tell you a, your listeners that I'm French, so that's why the Exxon's is maybe a bit weird for people. One that's used to, so I'm originally from France, but, I live in Taiwan for eight years. So I go there, like I used to study marketing international business in Dublin in Ireland. [00:01:03] And then I used, I traveled a lot like doing small jobs in England, in the U S in Spain and in Australia. And then you just walk in like, yeah, like a video, like a farming that way toasts. They're pretty small jobs. And then as I started to do a bit of marketing for small businesses, which was more the time, it was more like international service because I could speak English, French and Spanish. [00:01:30] It was more international sales and marketing. So then when I moved to Taiwan eight years ago, I was working in international marketing. So, creating a website, creating marketing strategies. It mostly in English, French, and Spanish at work. I did this for a few companies in Taiwan for like three or four years. [00:01:48] As then about five years ago, I joined a startup and I kind of move from, digital marketing to go cycling, where it will be more a gross focus was, it will be more, would be more kind of tactics. So as it would be. So for one year, I did just try marketing goals. I came for one startup, and the thing is, during that time I was, we were in an incubator in Taiwan, and then we got funded by an English, accelerate or, so we moved to England for a few months. [00:02:24] And the thing is, why, why Lynn's incubator in Taiwan?  in England, right? We work with many startups and all of them are, there were more like mostly tech founders as a needed app with, with a user acquisition. gross revenue says regeneration and everything. So I was working more as like, as a concert for many startups as the same time. [00:02:48] And so seeing his idea that much time to work on my own startups, so I decided to quit. Yeah. And kind of through LaunchCode. Psychos was a good, was many startups as the same time or many companies 10 times, same time with marketing, was liking new generation. And so I've created course, I guess with my cofounder who is American and shit, I think invites from, it's from Hawaii, so that's pretty, I never been there. [00:03:13] We should have wished I could go there. So, yeah, we created go psychos of four years ago and now, you know, we work with many companies from, which machine, if we were a us, Canada. was the Western Europe, Asia, not too much, I would say not too much since America or Africa yet.  [00:03:32] Blake: [00:03:32] Awesome. And it's funny how life will just take you one direction, right? [00:03:37] You think you're going to go some way and then you end up a completely different path.  [00:03:40] Jon: [00:03:40] Exactly. It's a lot. So people you meet, in a way it's like a, I remember when I used to live in iTunes and Metro, the Spanish, so that's why I went to spans and Spain, a metal of Australian. So I went to Australia in Australia. [00:03:53] I met my wife. We started it. So we did. I want to kind of, yeah, it's like you, you move, you don't decide where to go. It's...

Blake: [00:00:00] on the podcast today, we have Kyle Coleman from Clari. Kyle is somebody that I follow closely on LinkedIn, not necessarily with the same job description as me, but I watch what he does with his LinkedIn content, and it's a really good example that we can all follow. [00:00:15] So we're going to dive into a lot of those principles today. But first off, Kyle, how are you doing? How are you feeling today? [00:00:21] Kyle: [00:00:21] I am doing so great. Thanks for having me. On. [00:00:25] Blake: [00:00:25] I'm excited for this. I always like to start with context about you so that people know that it's not just a crazy person on the other end talking nonsense, but that you're actually credible. [00:00:34] So let's get some context on Kyle. What's the story of your career so far? How'd you get started? How'd you get to where you are now? [00:00:42] Kyle: [00:00:42] Yeah. Good question. So I started in B2B tech. In about 2012 I got a job at an advertising agency in San Francisco, B to B tech advertising agency. And from there I was introduced to, actually one of our clients was a VP of marketing at some other ad tech company in San Francisco. He left his company to go join Looker. [00:01:05] A, Looker was a seed funded, actually, I think at that time it was an angel funded company. I had never heard of it. I had a little bit of exposure to the business intelligence and the analytics space and opted to jump ship from my not so cushy advertising job over, over to, I was a sixth employee at Looker. [00:01:24]stayed at Looker for about six years. Grew the SDR team from just myself to a team of about 60, as the company itself. Went from six employees to about 800 or so. And I left and helped scale the, the revenue at Looker from about a hundred K in RR when I started to about a hundred million in ARR when I left. [00:01:44] And they were, Looker was by Google in the summer of 2019 for, two and a half billion dollars. So that went pretty well. And, I joined Clary as the head of sales development and sales enablement back in April of last year. one thing led to another over the course of the summer and early fall, and I ended up taking on an expanded purview on the marketing side. [00:02:06] So I, we have this newly created department that we call our growth department that encapsulates a lot of top of funnel sort of teams from demand generation to field marketing to SDR and enablement. All in our little growth team here. [00:02:21] Blake: [00:02:21] Awesome. Yeah, I've, I've heard more and more companies doing that, trying to combine sales and marketing, not necessarily combined the departments, so just get them to collaborate more. I think that's [00:02:29] Kyle: [00:02:29] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you know, Clary itself as a revenue operations platform, so we're trying to drink our own champagne here to a certain extent and make sure that all the teams will as aligned as possible. [00:02:39] Blake: [00:02:39] Yeah, no, for sure. Okay. And then my second question of context here before we really get into the actionable advice is if you had to. Yes. Or, or just tell us what your professional super power is. What would you say? Yeah. [00:02:53] Kyle: [00:02:53] Hmm. Good question. [00:02:56] [00:02:56] Oh, this is a tough one. I feel like I am able to. I, I feel like I'm able to communicate with people really well by understanding their success criteria. So for what I mean by that is when I'm speaking to a sales person, I'm not speaking to them about MQL or leads or website visitors. [00:03:16] I'm talking to them about pipeline. And then conversely, when I'm talking to my marketing person, I'm able to kind of switch gears and talk more about the metrics that matter to them, and so I can help bridge the gap between the two. that's one of the beauties of the beautiful things of coming up as an SDR and, and sort of staying in that orbit that's right between sales and marketing for the last seven or...

Hey there, and welcome to the micro-influencer podcast on this beautiful Friday. Once again, if you are new to the show, this started out with just interviews every single Tuesday, which has kind of been my day for sending out the newsletter, putting out the podcast, doing all that good stuff, and then I decided. With the longer form interviews, which are still pretty short, they're usually 20 to 30 minutes, not, not too long, easily digestible, but I wanted to give something that was a little bit more digestible so that if you had like a five minute drive, you could listen to something, learn something new. So every Friday, I'm just doing this alone. Five, 10 minutes snippets max of. Just advice. Okay. My week to week, as you know, I report on the podcast stats every single Tuesday on a LinkedIn live. So feel free to join that. You can see exactly how many people are downloading this podcast and how it's growing. And this can help you with your own endeavor. And today I want to talk about building a community. This is something that whether you are building a personal brand, obviously that's directly related to this, or even if you're building a product, if you want to see any modicum of success, you have to have some kind of community behind it. But I think that the idea of a community is flawed because typically that suggests that there's a community leader and then the rest of the people are followers in that community. Aye. Don't think that, yeah. Should be the reality for any successful community. And that is not the goal for this. So I, I put out a post recently on LinkedIn and I want to just go through the points of this. I don't want a massive community for this. If it happened, then you know, whatever. But I really don't want that because I want everybody to be able to lead in their own way within this community. I don't view myself as the leader of the community. I just see somebody that. Organized it and had the idea to start getting other leaders together.  I don't think that I'm the ringleader by any means. I'm still learning alongside every single other person listening to this. So that may sound unambitious to some, but for me, I think it's a great way two grow. And the reason for that, it's because it's based on building real relationships. And the reason that I came to this conclusion it is because I've gone the complete opposite direction in the past. I used to care a whole lot about follower counts and I thought that that was something that really mattered. I also cared about the perception of being the leader of the community. I wanted people to see me as the captain and I wanted the glory for that community and guess where that got me pretty much nowhere. The, none of those podcasts, communities, videos that I tried to build around that concept ever produced results for me. They never worked and I never really got any meaningful relationships out of them. So this time around as I've matured and started to grow from my experience and learned that that doesn't, no, not only does that not work, but it's not enjoyable. I started realizing it's way cooler if I could be a part of my own community that's actually led by every single person in it. I don't want to be selfish or illogical or pointless anymore with with trying to be the ringleader and the sole leader of a community. I really want to adjust to this new reality that I'm going to put in hard work, consistency and meet great people, and that's what's going to lead to success. And everybody in the community is doing that together. So I don't want followers, I want peers, I want friendships, I want relationships. And I know that sounds a little bit corny, but. I really think that if I can take this a little bit more, one to one over time, this is going to be much more impactful for people and have greater success than if I just try to reach everybody, which I've definitely been guilty of. That's advice that you're going to get from...

Blake: [00:00:00] today we have Nick Stagge on to help us discern how we can be creating compelling content, unwrap what it means to actually create something that's worthwhile on social media and how to maximize that. [00:00:11] Nick, how are you doing today?  [00:00:13] Nick: [00:00:13] I'm good, Blake, how are you,  [00:00:13] Blake: [00:00:13] man? I am fantastic and I'm really excited about this one. I'm excited for me to learn a lot, so I'm sure the audiences as well. And let's, before we dive into it, I'd love to get a little bit of context on you. If you could just give us a brief snapshot of what your career has been like so far, how you got started, where you are now. [00:00:31] Nick: [00:00:31] Yeah, absolutely. I, it's been a long, it's been a long walk. I started in retail and spent a decade working in managing stores on the Western United States. And, and. I learned pretty quickly in that environment that at the time, brands weren't doing a whole lot to help drive the last moment of the sale. [00:00:52] They were totally reliant on, on the retail team. So I took that learning and I, I pounded on the door of Skullcandy and I convinced them that they should be better than that and they should create a retail sell through team. And they gave me. They said, look, you can come on for 90 days and prove that this will work, and if you're willing to do that, we'll take a risk. [00:01:16] So I did 10 years in retail for that, and after 90 days we kept running forward. We built a global program, and then I was recruited to go do a, an upleveled version of that at GoPro with a larger audience. And. I realized while I was at GoPro and Skullcandy that technology is just where, where it's at and where the future of interacting with one another really is. [00:01:47] So I left GoPro and I went to a, a tech company in Utah that's still focused on the same thing. So it was a nice, smooth transition. And I spent five years there and then just. Over the last eight or nine months, I have moved over and I as the COO of woolly a tech company that is putting digital rails around word of mouth marketing. [00:02:12] Blake: [00:02:12] Awesome. So you've made quite the climb from being in retail all the way up to being a CMO now at a tech company. So I think that establishes a little bit of of your credibility there. I would love to know what you would consider your PR, your professional super power is.  [00:02:27] Nick: [00:02:27] Oh, man, I have so many weaknesses. [00:02:30]I mean, so when I'll, I don't know about that. Some people who know me best would say, I, I probably, need a dose of humility. But, but I, I mean, I, look, I think because I, I recognize, I have so many weaknesses. I've found a way to. To team up with people who are truly spectacular and learn from them and learn the things that I need so I can be better. [00:03:01] And the things that I, I just can't learn or aren't my forte. I've learned to lean on those people and have those people help prop up whatever sort of initiative or goals we have in place. So to me, I think it's all about understanding. What you're good at and what you're not good at. So you can put a team around you or you can join a team that compliment you. [00:03:26] And I think if you do that, then you can become really successful.  [00:03:30] Blake: [00:03:30] I love it. So let, let's dive into the details here. We're here to talk about creating compelling content and maximizing your social media organically, getting more reach, reaching the right people for this whole thing. I'd love to just kind of be a thought experiment based specifically around LinkedIn, because I think that's where we're going to get the most out of it. [00:03:49] So given let's just say that I'm somebody that is just starting out zero followers on LinkedIn. I maybe I just graduated from college and I'm just starting to do my own project. Maybe I'm starting an eCommerce store or something....

Blake: [00:00:00] Welcome, welcome to the micro influencer podcast. Once a week, I wanted to do one of the shorter episodes where instead of just doing an interview, which I'll continue doing on Tuesdays, I think that's highly valuable to hear from experts and pros and other people in your position that have done it before. [00:00:17] This is going to be based on my journey, so that you can see some of that's actually building something currently, which is the podcast that you are listening to. So this will be a little meta, but, I think it's going to be valuable really for me to document what's happening on a weekly basis. Going over one, I'm actually trying what's working, what's failing, and sharing that with anybody that is trying to build something on their own. [00:00:40] Now, you may not be trying to build a podcast yourself. You might be trying to build a YouTube channel or an Instagram store or an Etsy shop. You might be trying to build something in software. It might be more advanced than that. So wherever, whatever stage you're at, I'm hoping that this will help you at least see what. [00:00:59] The production and the distribution and all of those steps that go into building something meaningful, what those are, how to decide what works for you and things like that. So I'll just start with where I'm at right now. There's no need for me to go. Back into the past I, because my recollection won't, won't serve me as well. [00:01:20] So I'll talk about this this week and what's been happening in terms of building out this podcast. And I hope you find value in this. So here we go. This week I. As you can tell, I lost my voice and it's just recovering. So it's been an interesting time for podcasts when I'm recording intros, nachos, and things like that. [00:01:42] Sometimes they might sound in the next couple episodes, a little raspy. Apologize for that. And especially right now, it probably doesn't sound great, but I'm at, I'm at the tail end of this thing. I feel like I'm recovering. And this past week I've been focusing so much on distribution because I have run podcasts before, so I have an idea of. [00:02:01] What sounds good, what makes for an engaging interview, how to find the right people and come up with great questions and things like that. So I feel like this time around, I was more prepared for the actual content of the podcast, but still really trying to figure out distribution and getting an audience out of it. [00:02:20]it, it's not easy. That's easily for me, the hardest part of this whole thing. I, I could talk for days, I could. Go into a studio and just record my own voice and I, I'd be fine. I could be able to create something, at least a value, hopefully, and in a short period of time, but I haven't been able to grow a podcast quickly, and I'm not looking for gimmicks or things that will. [00:02:47] You know, hack my growth right now and then kill me later. I'm looking for sustainable growth, but I'm trying to find ways that I can be more productive and efficient to expedite that growth realistically, and I have found some success. So I started sharing my numbers on LinkedIn last week and I'll share them more and more every single week. [00:03:07] Last week I was at 400 downloads. Of the podcast. And that was after the first nine days of the episodes being launched. So within nine days of the, of the podcast launching, I was at 400 downloads for context. In previous podcasts I had done in about six months, I had gone to a thousand so it took a much longer time. [00:03:27] This is almost a week, and I got the 400 so as of right now, I'm at about 620 so in the past week it's gone up 220 and I'm still really trying to figure things out so. I want to share some things that are working for me. First and foremost, I've been leveraging the audience that I already had. my biggest platform is LinkedIn. [00:03:47] So I've been leveraging that and trying to find ways to provide value. I've been...

Blake: [00:00:00] Awesome. On the podcast today, I've got an old friend, Mike Carroll, who was on a previous podcast that I hosted, and we're running it back today. Mike, how are you doing?  [00:00:12] Mike: [00:00:12] I'm good, buddy. How are you?  [00:00:13] Blake: [00:00:13] I've been fantastic and I'm excited to have you on. Mike knows a ton about sales and marketing and blending them together and growth and all that good stuff. [00:00:21] So we're going to talk about bootstrapping and growth in general when you're just starting out. But before we get into all the details, I want to give the audience a little bit of context as to who you are and what you're doing. So if you wouldn't mind just giving us a brief history of your career so far. [00:00:36] Mike: [00:00:36] Yeah, sure. That's a, well, I'll, I'll try to give you the, like the TLDR version. it's been short. So I graduated from, from college and went to grad school and got a master's degree in journalism. I worked in politics and ran political campaigns from like, you know, aldermen all the way up to the, to the U S Senate for about six years. [00:00:52] Then I freelanced for a while, jumped into an agency, did that for six years. And now I'm at nutshell, as the head of growth. And actually in the very near future, I'll be going back to the agency side.  be the VP of growth at marketing supply co, which is a digital growth agency in Detroit.  [00:01:07] Blake: [00:01:07] That was, that was pretty brief. [00:01:08] That was a much more brief than a, than we usually  [00:01:11] Mike: [00:01:11] get resected who does  [00:01:13] Blake: [00:01:13] the short episode. I figured  [00:01:14] Mike: [00:01:14] I'd keep it through it. If you want to dive into any part of that career,  [00:01:17] Blake: [00:01:17] yeah. Be a little crappy. Oh, you only got like 20 minutes here, so let's, yeah. yeah. So I'm curious, if I were to ask you what you think professional superpower is, what would you say? [00:01:27] Mike: [00:01:27] Problem solving? Without a doubt. You know? And that sounds like a really weird, like, nebulous, thing to say like, Oh, I solve problems, but, but my superpower for sure is I think my ability to take any situation, any challenge that you're facing, break it apart into its, its requisite components. Figure out which of those components needs to be fixed first and then draw on a really kind of strange and diverse background and skillset to figure out what to attack, how to attack it, and then, you know, and solve that problem. [00:01:56] Well, that's a business problem, a marketing problem, a sales problem, political problem. You've been, that's, that's definitely my superpower. That's thing it's served me well. Just the ability to kind of like take a 30,000 foot view of any type of problem and then dive into it and bust it up and figure it out. [00:02:10] Blake: [00:02:10] Well, let's solve some problems today then.  [00:02:12] Mike: [00:02:12] All right,  [00:02:13] Blake: [00:02:13] let's do this. So one of the problems that we see often when you're a side hustler, you're just starting out on a project. I don't really know where to start in terms of the growth. You maybe you have an idea, you kind of have a game plan of what you want to accomplish, but then you feel overwhelmed by all the things you need to do on social media to grow it and all the sales side of things and, and you might feel tempted to immerse yourself in buying all kinds of different tools. [00:02:39] I'm curious what your thought process is that early on actually having tools or if you even need them.   [00:02:46] Mike: [00:02:46] personally, I don't think you need them. I think the only thing that you need to start any type of side hustle or project as a whiteboard. So, yeah, and what I mean by that is that whatever you're going to do up front, whatever your side hustle is, the most important thing is...

Blake: [00:00:00] On the podcast today, we have Colin Campbell, who's here to talk to us a little bit about marketing and how to make it feel like a gift, not so much a, a burden or an interruption. Colin, how are you doing  [00:00:15] Colin: [00:00:15] today? I'm great, Blake, thanks for having me on. [00:00:18] Blake: [00:00:18] Really appreciate this and I'm excited. This is somebody that I follow closely on LinkedIn, so really, really excited, but I want to get some context on you for the audience first so they know who they're dealing with here. if you could just give us a quick story about your career so far, how you got started and how you got to where you are now. [00:00:34] Yeah,  [00:00:35] Colin: [00:00:35] sure. So the short version is I graduated from college with a degree in global studies, which turned out to be not so useful for helping me get a first job. I was lucky that my parents had a small business, so I helped them with customer service, sales and marketing. I taught myself some content marketing. [00:00:53]got a job at a content marketing agency doing strategy for all kinds of clients in all kinds of industries. And then I ended up, six years later leading. That account management department in the Boston office of that agency. and then through sort of a serendipitous connection to somebody who worked at sales hacker, I got the job running sales hacker after that. [00:01:13] So I've been doing that running sales hacker for about two years.  [00:01:17] Blake: [00:01:17] Awesome. And if you don't follow sales hacker, go look it up, but we'll, we'll talk about this at the end, but it's, it's great. so. Let's, let's dive into this. I'm curious, first of all, what, what would you consider your professional superpower? [00:01:31] Colin: [00:01:31] Oh, yeah. I think I'm kind of the guy who just asks why a lot, you know, like, I, I try to do things with a purpose. Which is kind of a strange superpower to have cause it's not a tactic. Like, you know, you hear people talk about the T shaped marketer. my, I guess, you know, I, I'm not, my superpower is an SEO or content. [00:01:50] I'm pretty good at those two things. My superpower is really like, let's figure out why we're doing these things and then prioritizing and trying to give teams focus so that we can go big. In one area and, really make a difference for the people who we need to make a difference for. Well,  [00:02:07] Blake: [00:02:07] let, let's dive into just that. [00:02:09] And so making marketing field feel like a gift. That's definitely not how most people feel about marketing. It's usually perceived as kind of slimy interrupted. so I'm curious, first off, generally, what do you mean by that? Cause you say that a lot. That's one of your core messages.  [00:02:29] Colin: [00:02:29] Yeah. I, you know, this started out I think is me trying to like assuage my own adjunct about my profession. [00:02:37]cause I do love marketing, but, but I am pretty conscious of the fact that I don't love being marketed to or being sold to. And I think most people feel that way. So I really just tried to start doing things in marketing roles. For our audiences without the catch involved, you know? and, and like, the reason I gravitated in early in my career towards content marketing is because it felt like that, it felt like, Oh, this is a nice thing I can do for the people I hope will one day become my customers. [00:03:06] And if I teach them. Some stuff that's useful for them, you know, maybe it'll come back around, but then we all got really good at attaching forms to things and, you know, basically adding a catch, and I didn't like that. Yep. Yeah.  [00:03:23] Blake: [00:03:23] Well. So let's, let's dive into it a little bit more and start here by, I mean, so you're, you, you're at sales hacker, so you're thinking w a lot of people are gonna think, Oh, this is a sales person. [00:03:32] But you're, you're a marketer.

Want to learn how to grow on platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok that are currently content-deficient? Listen in! Blake: [00:00:00] Awesome. On the podcast today, I have Courtney Johnson, who is a fellow Austinite. Why more of a passer-by but Courtney, how are you doing today? [00:00:11] Courtney: [00:00:11] I'm doing good. Excited to chat with you, Blake. [00:00:15] Blake: [00:00:15] Yeah, this is going to be fun. Courtney is super active on LinkedIn, so that's where I've originally met with her and and decided to do this podcast episode, and it's going to be really helpful because if you go onto her feed, you will see all kinds of cool content, really great actionable ideas. It's not fluffy like a lot of other people's stuff, which I. [00:00:34] Thoroughly enjoy you. You get a lot of meat in the, in the posts and a lot of specifics. So that's great. And hopefully I'm going to extract that for the audience today and we'll be talking about LinkedIn and then also take talk a little bit. The theme really is content deficient platforms, so platforms where there are more consumers than creators. [00:00:53] And so we'll dive into that. But first I like to get context on you. So that we know kind of what your background is and who we're dealing with. So if you wouldn't mind just taking us through a brief history of your career so far. [00:01:05] Courtney: [00:01:05] Love it. Well, I'm Courtney, as you all know. I actually started my career in sports marketing, worked for a lot of teams over in Dallas. then went to a few agencies, started getting hired on to build out agencies. and companies. Social media departments, you know, make them profitable, create service lines around them. [00:01:24] And then I was hired on at scaled about a year ago to create the digital presence department, which is kind of the bridge between, digital marketing and sales through digital. So we do a lot on LinkedIn where, you know, building out sales teams, LinkedIn and personal brands. So it's been a lot of fun. [00:01:41] It's been a wild ride so far. Working in social media is pretty crazy, but, I absolutely love it. [00:01:48] Blake: [00:01:48] And then for for even further context, if you could just give us an idea of what you would consider your professional super power is. [00:01:56] Courtney: [00:01:56] My professional super. It's definitely connection and audience building on social. So I think a lot of people, and a lot of agencies, brands focus so much on the content where they forget about the audience. You can have the best content in the world, but if the right audience isn't seat seeing it and it's not formatted in a way for that specific platform that's going to resonate with that audience, it's a waste of time. [00:02:21] So I really try to focus on that audience and engagement element. Social media. [00:02:27] Blake: [00:02:27] Well, I think that's going to fit in really well because the audience here, we've got a bunch of listeners that are side hustlers and a lot of people getting started out, not necessarily well on their way in their journey. So this is going to be helpful to give us ideas as to how to get going and how to start engaging properly. [00:02:43] So let's, let's just start there. Like specifically with tech talk right now. It's so unknown for a lot of people. It's businesses like sign hustlers, everybody. Nobody knows what to do on tech talk except for gen Z people. So like for the rest of us, where should we actually start with TechTalk [00:03:01] Courtney: [00:03:01] Yeah. So first place to start is just people . Brands are trying to do, just copy what they're doing on other platforms and put that on tick talk. But it's really about the people. So if you work for, you know, some sort of, whether it's a fun, like a fun, easy brand, like a B to C brand, or a little bit more difficult to B to B brand, you need to pick people out. [00:03:23] That can be the representatives and beyond tick tock instead of...

You can check out Jason's site over at fixmarketer.com. The free book and 1-page marketing plan template is found at: fixmarketer.com/bonus And finally, the conversion calculator mentioned is located at: fixmarketer.com/conversion-calculator Now here's the interview! Blake: [00:00:00] on the podcast today, I've got Jason Weaver here to discuss something that most of us probably aren't doing, or at least doing very well, which is creating a marketing plan, specifically a one pager. So Jason, let's start off with how you're doing, and then we'll get into the specifics. [00:00:20] Jason: [00:00:20] I'm doing great. I live in the great state of Idaho and it's been freezing cold and snowy all the time, and it just basically stopped. I don't know if it's going to continue or not, but I am very grateful not to be shoveling every day. [00:00:36] Blake: [00:00:36] I'm a, I'm from Utah originally, so I get a little bit of that, but Idaho is definitely worse for the weather. [00:00:42] Jason: [00:00:42] Yes, most definitely. [00:00:46] Blake: [00:00:46] All right, so let's, let's get some quick context on you first, just so people know who they're dealing with. I want to start out with your story, just a brief story on where your career started to where you are now. [00:00:57] Jason: [00:00:57] Well, I was going to college and there was this class called internet marketing, and so I was lucky to be in one of the few colleges that actually cared about that 10 years ago. And, I took the class, had to build a website and a, the infrastructure to sell product and everything from scratch within less than three months and advertise it. [00:01:16] So of course, Google ads was the gold standard back then, and still is pretty good right now. And, so I started selling HCMI cables for $5. Including free shipping. And I broke even during that class. And little did I know if I just kept selling them more stuff, I'd be a millionaire by now. But I got scared. [00:01:35] It's all like, how do I spend other people's money to learn this thing called Google ad words and websites. And so I went and got with the hotel company that did online bookings. And you know, I got to spend $15,000 a month in other people's advertising on Google. And I learned a lot and it just went from there. [00:01:52] So the last 10 years have been. What's called traditionally in house, where you're inside the business, working for that business, doing the marketing, running it. And then for a little over a year now, I am now doing my own internet marketing agency, more specialized on those, you know, newer upstarts, smaller companies, especially local small business, which the book I wrote is all about small business because you can apply just about everything, even to the big eCommerce company that, that's in my one page marketing plan as well. [00:02:20] But. I have a passion for local small business, and that really started back when I worked for a company called monkey bars. I, they've rebranded now. It's a gorgeous garage. A monkey bars is one of their lines, but they actually go in and organize your garage for you, if you can believe that. And they had 120 dealers throughout the United States and Canada. [00:02:39] And I got from the ground up, spend five years building their internet marketing, building the team, helping students, which is a huge passion of mine, helping them get internships. And, that's where I really, weren't a lot and started and then it, it grew from there. I've been with big eCommerce companies now, 20 million a year in sales, and, you know, but like I said, the small businesses still where my heart is at. [00:03:03] Blake: [00:03:03] And that you're, you're addressing an audience of the smallest businesses, which is a, the micro-influencer side hustler genre of people. So this is going to be super helpful for a bunch of people, and I want to dive into the marketing plan, but first, before we get into that one final context...

Blake: [00:00:00] today on the podcast I have  and we're going to talk a little bit about building your personal brand, which I know is going to be huge for a lot of people listening in. So Basant, how are you doing today? [00:00:16] Basant: [00:00:16] I'm good. How are you doing? [00:00:18] Blake: [00:00:18] I am fantastic. Where? I mean, you're in, you're in Berlin, right? So it's completely different time than, than where I'm at. [00:00:24] It's early [00:00:25] Basant: [00:00:25] the afternoon. [00:00:26] Blake: [00:00:26] Yeah. Yeah. So, I just, just woke up, rolled out of bed and, excited to do this. Yeah. cool. Well, let's dive right into it. Usually I, I want to get more context about you first so that people can come to know who you are, why, why they should trust you, where this advice is coming from, and then we can get into actual tips that people can implement for their own brands. [00:00:49] But just some quick context on you. First and foremost, what's, what's the story of your career so far? How you got started until where you are now. [00:00:58] Basant: [00:00:58] Right? So I grew up in Saudi Arabia and I'm originally from Egypt, and about five years ago I moved to Germany to pursue my education. And I think that kind of established me as someone who's a bit more resourceful and constantly trying to get out of her comfort zone. And I think that's why I'm always trying to find ways to really. [00:01:22] Like be out there and like spotlight myself. And since then, a few, like two years ago, I started posting on LinkedIn about my journey, into finding a job specifically. But essentially it's turned into more of me sharing everything I'm learning. And how, How I've gotten so far in my career and since then I was able to get a job at LinkedIn through doing this. [00:01:49] So I'm going to be starting as a sales associate this summer, and also because of the thought leadership that I've put out as content. I'm recently launched my. career consulting, like side hustle, called Basant blast. And because I put myself out there and established myself and spotlighted myself, I was able to create my career and also like start e-school projects, get to help people every day. [00:02:18] So I'm really happy with that. [00:02:20] Blake: [00:02:20] Awesome. Yeah, that's an interesting twist as well on it because usually when we hear about people posting content on LinkedIn, it's, you know, whether it's to build their own business or their personal brand, but you've actually leveraged it to do both of those things, but also get a job at LinkedIn. So that's really cool. [00:02:35] And we'll dive into that a little bit more, that kind of the process that you took to get there. But I'm curious if, if I were to ask you what you think your professional super power is, what would you say. [00:02:46] Basant: [00:02:46] Ooh, that's a good question. I think story telling that's so generic, but I think in general, I'm really good at telling stories and really using my story in a way that will help other people. and I think that's why I love sales so much, is that's essentially helping people through telling stories and also recruitments like that. [00:03:09] I think so many, so much of business is telling stories, to help others. and I think that's my professional superpower. [00:03:17] Blake: [00:03:17] well, that that's certainly very relevant to building a brand, and we'll talk about that. I guess let's, let's just start in with that because there are a lot of things that we could cover with building a brand, but first and foremost, stories may be at the forefront of, of doing that. How, how have you, and I guess, how can other people use stories to effectively grow a personal brand. [00:03:38]Basant: [00:03:38] I would say it's really about. Hmm. It's about using your experiences in a way that will help others. I think that's like the best story you can tell. So when I was looking for a job, that's the kind of...