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Show Summary

In Episode 191 Rob Cairns talks about all things marketing with Jan Koch.

Show Highlights:

1. How Jan changed his marketing strategy.
2. The Marketing Journey.
3. Why email marketing matters.
4. Marketing on Linkedin.

Show Notes

 

Hey everybody, Rob Cairns here.

I’m here with my good friend Jan Koch today from Germany.

How are you today Jan?

Hey Rob, I’m doing amazing how are you?

Doing well and thanks for joining me.

It’s been a long time before we went to record we were just doing a bit of a a life catch.

Up as I call.

It weren’t we.

Yeah, so it’s all good.

So today what I wanted to talk about is really marketing and you’ve changed the way you’re marketing and let’s dive right into it and dive into email lists.

Uhm, what have you found with email marketing?

Email marketing is such a beast to set the stage for everybody who’s listening.

I’ve bought a business that came with an email list this year and that email is hadn’t been nurtured properly for the past year and a half.

I would say so.

It was pretty much.

Dead when I sent the first few newsletters.

Introducing myself explaining the the business take over blah blah blah I had.

5% open rate.

And I was like I might as well scrap the entire list.

And start over and I thought it can’t be was at that time was around 10,000 people on the list in total and I had a 5% open rate which was the most frustrating thing.

I would much rather have 100 people with 50% open rate, then then 10,000 with 5%, so I spent.

Trying to warm up that list, sending emails that nobody was opening.

Nobody was clicking on them, not producing any ROI from that email list whatsoever.

No matter what I tried, what types of topics I send in the emails?

If there were educational ever was announcing a webinar life training.

Doing some affiliate stuff promoting the cause of virtual summit mastery.

It was pretty much feeling like I was talking to a wall.

But over time what I realize is there are so many different things to email marketing all all those technicalities.

DCM CVE blah blah blah IP whitelisting, IP blacklisting and at the time I was using active campaign for the email list.

And I was really hesitant to switching because I also had over 100 automations that came with the business so.

When I found out that my emails were coming from an activecampaign IP address that was blacklisted at the time on one of those are blacklists.

I was quite lost for what to do to be honest, because obviously I’m not saying active campaign is a bad email provider, but it is a.

Extremely powerful platform.

But for me it wasn’t working.

That’s what I’m saying.

I’m not trying to shine a bad light on active campaign for all what they do, they do amazing.

But for the for the account I had, it was sending through a blacklisted IP address.

I reached out to their support.

Couldn’t really get anywhere to be honest.

And I stuck with it and I thought maybe they fixed it eventually and out of magic.

I was expecting the open rates to increase and of course what doesn’t happen when when you are an entrepreneur.

And you you just hold your breath and pray.

Obviously you don’t get the results.

So true, so true, and I’ll tell you I’ve spent extensive work in active campaign and one of the biggest issues I have with it is the interfaces.

So 20 years ago, kind of.

I think they could do.

I mean, it’s a really good product.

But you know, and I I was doing a a long term contract for a organization that they actually had used MailChimp.

They’d used uh convertkit and they managed to believe or not get blacklisted off both those two platforms, so we all know being blacklisted.

Their IP is like the death of email marketers.

It is yeah, and you’re right about that.

Email and about that interface with active campaign.

But then the automations.

What you can do with when they’re so damn powerful and for for the virtual summit automations I had.

People would sign up, they get a custom field with the summit start date and then everything happening in that automation was triggered by that custom field that included the summit start date, which was brilliant logic but then doesn’t help and the emails don’t get delivered right so.

So so true.

And and I think honestly.

The only way to.

To make active campaign a little more viable these days is to go get out.

Go get a product like newsletter Glue, shout out to Leslie SIM, the co-founder newsletter group and and do something like that and build it in the WordPress dashboard.

That makes it a little easier than using that interface.

But I agree with automations.

I mean, you need to be automating your email list.

Yeah, yeah 100% and we we can talk about it.

A bit about email automations I use today and then essentially what happened is I wasted month in active campaign and I should have pulled the plug way way sooner.

But eventually I moved over to Convertkit Big shout out to Nathan Barry and team the team at Convertkit handed the entire migration.

They migrated all the automations. I think 700 plus tags, 10,000 people and.

Immediately the first newsletter is sent to the exact same list, but through convert kit instead of Activecampaign had a 15% open rate.

So 3 eggs.

Just by moving the provider.

Yeah, and now I have switched back to my daily newsletter schedule rather than sending weekly for the past couple of weeks.

It’s it’s in, let’s say, almost Daily News that.

And I see open rates in specific segments with up to 45% open rate from 5%. So in the end, in hindsight, I’m really glad I didn’t scrap the email list.

Yeah, so and.

For those listening 40% open rates are.

Unheard of like and I.

I think we’re taught.

Not not for you, Rob, but industry standard. It’s like what eighteen? 1920 something like that?

Yeah, I I was going to go there so my my rates over the last for a while. I run an average of about 60% and people say how?

And the reality is.

A good short content but B.

You gotta take care of your email list and you have to give them what they want, not what you want.

And that’s a big deal.

A lot of people write, write for themselves and and the third thing is consistency.

I run my list usually once.

Or twice a week I could always put one out on a Wednesday, UM?

And and I’m moving consistently to twice a week and it’s just about doing the right thing and giving people what they want, right?

I mean, there’s not rocket science to it.

So so true.

And I had an interview for this building school before we had this conversation.

And it was with an email copywriting expert called Summer.

Always I should over her Twitter link afterwards.

Or please put it in the show notes because she’s really.

Good show off.

And uhm.

What she said was really interesting in that we we talked about how to structure emails so that you get an ROI from them, but but so that you don’t just pitch all the time in your emails because you need to sell, that’s cool.

We all have a business, but the point of an email should be to have a conversation.

With your subscribers, it should be an opportunity.

I think for them to get to know you.

To to follow your journey and to then decide whether they want to do business with you as a human, rather than just focusing on business all the time.

I think that this connection that you can build with somebody via email is really strong and really powerful and what they what she said.

Is when we talked about subject lines.

For example, I told her that I was experimenting with all sorts, long subject lines, short ones, funny ones, emojis.

Uh, invoking fear or anxiety or fear of missing out or invoking positive emotions.

All these things that you can do with copywriting.

And she said.

Well, I simplify this.

I just envision talking to my best friend and I write the open the subject line in the way that I would send an email to my best friend.

I write that subject line.

Then I write the body of the of the email and eventually I catch myself going in a different angle and then I re write the subject line afterwards.

Yeah I would.

I would agree with that I’m I’m not a big fan of click baity subject lines.

I know copywriters will try and marketers will try it.

I I personally think if you make your subject going quick, baby you actually hurt the trust factor of your email list long term so I don’t like.

To do that, I typically.

Uhm, the way my list is, my email structured is I always have a big story in the marketing space at the top, and so I always highlight whatever the big story is in the subject line.

And then I have like business tips and podcast recordings and things like that and.

You can imagine what the big story was this past week was the big.

The big website hack problem that’s going on worldwide right now, so that I mean, it’s hard to ignore that one, but my my people read my list, know exactly what they expect. They know exactly what the format’s gonna be. They know exactly what the layout’s gonna be.

And, uh.

Yeah, it’s so so crucial.

And that’s hard.

And and being consistent.

And I don’t mean just the date you put it out, how you lay it out, how you put the format out because the reality of it all is.

Yeah, the information is everywhere you can go to Google and find anything you want.

It’s the people the way they write and that you like that you read and listen to.

Right?

Yeah, yeah 100% and for me I try to keep my newsletters very simple so I don’t. I don’t have that fancy structure that you just outlined, but our audiences are different so.

You have to be mindful of who you are sending that email to when you’re working on the email strategy, but for me it’s just writing about something that I experienced in the last week.

I try to batch create my emails.

So one week I write all the emails for the next week and schedule them so that I’m consistent as consistent.

And then I just think about what did I experience.

What did I learn that my audience finds interesting?

And then I shared that?

And what was not natural for me in the beginning?

Was selling via email.

Selling in those personal stories, and Samar had a really good point in in the interview.

We did and that was.

When you have a launch.

I I find this term interesting.

She has a pre PS that goes at the top of the email for those people who just want to go straight to the meat of the content you’re putting out and in that pre PS you would say something like hey I’m launching XYZ Boot camp or XYZ course.

You can enroll here.

This is what you get out of it.

Costs 997 something like that so people get that message without reading the entire email, which saves some time. So you’re doing them a favor.

Then she will transition into the email body where she tells a personal story.

No pitching in that section, and then she has a footer in the email that stays the same for every email listing her products, who the products are found and what results people can expect from.

From purchasing their courses and something like that.

And I found that really interesting, because then.

What do people do when we open emails? We skim through them. At first we don’t read them, so we look at the top of the email which is the pre PS.

We look at the footer, which is the PS or something else that can stay there in every email. You can just hard code it to the template if.

Needed and then if we find it.

If we find the headline or the subject line interesting, we might eventually read the entire email body and I found it very cool that some mark gets really good results from the structure where you tell the story without selling, so you don’t feel like you’re pitching all the time yet.

You have your offers, including there in every newsletter.

Yeah, and let’s jump into automation.

For email, because we know that screw up, I learned a lot of the way I do automation in this system I use from a gentleman by the name of Paul to be and for those who don’t know, Paul is the father of Adrian to be who developed Groundhog.

Paul runs a a digital agency in Toronto code training business pros and back about six or seven years ago I did a couple Infusionsoft courses.

And it’s not so much about Infusionsoft, it’s about to system that Paul teaches, and one of the problems I have with automation is most people, clients I look at, I look at their sequences and say, OK, so where are people in their sequence and they look at me and say.

I don’t.

What are your thoughts on automation?

It’s such a good point, I agree, and there are a few things that you have to be aware.

I think everybody who runs and who builds a list should leverage automation, but there are a few things that you should automate in any case, and that is for one the nurture sequence.

So when.

Somebody signs up.

The first thing you do is you put A tag on them that says do not disturb or in promotion or something like that so that when you send your regular newsletters you exclude everybody who has the tag that they are in the sequence.

So that you don’t flood them with emails you don’t want to have somebody who’s just signed up going through the nurture sequence to get to know you.

You don’t want to confuse them with your weekly or daily newsletter.

Uhm, then I asked Samar today how she would structure a nurture sequence that is supposed to sell so that it is supposed to drive our why, and she had a brilliant answer to that that I never thought about, which is.

Why not break down the sales page of whatever you offer and turn that into emails?

And I, I thought I thought that was such an interesting perspective because you have usually some framework on your sales page.

Like the PS problem, agitate solution framework, or you have a DE attention.

Interest, desire and action in some way or form the sales page usually restructures these copywriting frameworks.

Why not break the content on your sales page down?

Rewrite it as emails and then obviously for more affordable products you can get away with cheaper with with fewer emails.

And then when you sell a calls for like 2 grand or something, you would probably need 789 ten emails or get them.

On the phone, in the first three or four emails so that you can sell them via the phone, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that robot.

What do you think about that process?

I think it’s a really good process.

It’s one that a lot of people don’t think about, and I think that’s really important.

Uhm, I think you have to do what works for you.

As a business owner.

So if you’re finding that process works well, I would just kind of keep going on that to be honest with you.

The other thing I would do in automation and I’ll give you an example.

I’ve got a a client who sells courses and he sends out.

An email every day, so on day one his people get one package.

On day two they get another package.

On day three they get another.

He sends out five emails for five days.

And one of the things he likes to know is where people are in that sequence.

So I’ll give you an example and the way we established that it was a trick I learned from Paul long time ago is you put tags in the place.

And then you remove them.

So in day one there’s A tag that says I’m in week one day one.

I can tell you exactly where somebody.

So if I look at the client’s executive dashboard.

I can say, OK, you’ve got this many people at day one.

Here you got this.

Many people here got this many people here and to me one of the most valuable things in email marketing is the tagging system.

If it’s used properly, yeah.

Yep, I 100% agree. That is a fantastic use case. I do something similar when I set up the summit automations. They get A tag for every day that they are at in the summit.

Yep and.

This is super important because it lets you identify who you can already follow up with the knowledge that they already have about your business and brand, and then you can have very pointed conversations and another automation.

I think that is really often overlooked is what happens post purchase.

So every everybody sells something via email, so why stop?

When somebody purchased from you, why not nurture them afterwards?

And if you’re selling a course, for example, and I’m guilty of that, I need to build this automation.

I have to have or. You should have an automation that keeps people engaged in going through the course because the one thing that is for certain is that 99 people who buy the cause.

Myself included, they won’t finish it.

That’s true.

Then this.

Azab, that’s absolutely true, so use automation to say hey, did you miss yesterday’s course?

Maybe it should go here and in email marketing then that’s easy to do because you can set automation based on did they click on the link in the email?

It’s it’s not UN difficult.

At all and.

I think you, I think post purchase.

We need to follow up because if they don’t finish the course.

Then they’re not seeing the value that they paid for, and frankly, they’re less likely to buy from you again, in my opinion.

Yeah, or they might, even if you don’t give them a quick win in the first few days after signing up, they might even ask for a refund and then they just don’t prioritize it.

But what you could do within follow up sequence for a course specific.

Quickly is you very likely have the schedule in your head.

In that module, one is for the first week, module 2 is for the second week.

Maybe you even dripfeed them the course contents instead of making it all available.

One email per week.

Here’s what you should be working on.

How did the last week go?

Do you wanna catch a call to?

To work through what you’ve been, what you’ve worked on or something like that, keep them engaged, and then you can also upsell them on on one to one mentoring or group mentoring or whatever you have in your business.

I think it’s, uh, an often overlooked opportunity to leverage email marketing.

Yeah, and the other place people don’t leverage email marketing is we know in the web space, a lot of people including me have made a really good business on selling security care plans.

Yeah, the problem with a lot of people.

Agencies that sell security care plans.

It’s how decide out of mind they do your WordPress updates every week they sell you.

They never emailed their clients and and I’ve.

I emailed my client list.

Not every week, but every couple weeks to say hey, by the way, this is what I’ve done for my care plans this week.

This is what the trends we’re seeing. This is what’s going on in this space, because if people see out of sight out of mind, they get a bill at the end of the year saying, here’s your $2000 bill for next year and they say, but I’ve heard nothing.

From Rob, why am I going to bother even though you’ve done all that work?

So you need to leverage email marketing to stay.

In touch with existing clients, because we know the the cost per acquisition, the CPA is less for an existing client than for new client.

Yeah, this is such a good point and it comes down to the the essence of email marketing that we spoke about earlier.

Is the the connecting with people and what what many forget is that there are human beings reading your emails and that even if you have.

Let’s say 200 people on your email list. You can help 200 people, yeah?

And 20 years ago.

So reaching 200 people was very, very expensive.

Yep, it’s true.

And now now you can just write an email and people get it.

And and let’s go to one more thing.

I saw a tweet from you a couple of days ago, maybe a week ago.

Maybe in the last couple ’cause I actually do read your tweets.

Right?

And and you know, you and I are both friends of a mutual friend by the name of Jason Reza Reza on Twitter, Jason’s been on the show and.

Jason is really as passionate about this stuff as we are and I was joking how I screenshot Jason tweets.

I’m just gonna write this book for him and be done with it.

And make him write that book ’cause he’s he’s such good at it and you had posted a tweet and you said.

I keep, uhm, it was something along the lines of I take my unopen’s of my email list and I resend to them and why do you do that? ’cause I do the same thing so what’s your take on that?

Yeah it is.

For me it is a way to increase the open rates and frankly what happens with my email is is when I send to.

I have like 8000 people on my list right now when I send to all 8000 I have an open rate of let’s say 1718%.

I resend to the unopened.

On the next day, if I don’t have a news that are going out.

Already that would add another, let’s say 6 to 10% to the open rate, so another another 50% roughly in overall.

What I when I do that with my engaged subscribers and convertkit you have this.

This automated segment called Cold subscribers.

When you exclude everybody in that segment, the reverse logic is you have your engaged subscribers.

And when you send to that data set to that segment, I get an open rate on the 1st email of around 35%. So way way better.

And then I send to the UN opens in that segment I add another 10%. So on average when I do this for the engaged subscribers, I get over 40% open rates.

And what you have to be careful with this, though, is first of all you have to change the subject line, otherwise it won’t do any good because people ignore the first subject line.

Why should they click on it when they see it again in their?

Email inbox.

Yep, Yep.

You don’t have to update the email body because they’ve never read that, so they won’t know that you’ve sent them the same email twice and then.

I had a conversation about that, I think on Facebook a while ago where somebody told me that it wasn’t a good practice because it was annoying paraphrasing here and she.

She said that one should wait at least three to five.

Days before sending to the UN opens and I said, well, I do it after 24 hours because of the tight schedule that I have for my newsletter and I.

Think it is something that comes back to what you earlier said.

Do what works for you and do what works for your market.

So if your market tolerates that, you send them a daily newsletter and I was surprised to see the open rates go up when I increase the frequency.

Why stop doing it?

I would agree I come, I resend mine. So on my Wednesday newsletters I resend on Friday. So I I wait 24 hours and.

You know, it’s funny.

There’s a reason I send out on Wednesdays.

One of the things I always include in my newsletter is the the the link to the ithemes security bug with all the security vulnerabilities so people can understand what’s going on in the wild so I can guarantee that my email.

Will never go out till that is published on Wednesday morning, ’cause it’s all ready to go.

I just have to insert the link in the number.

And I I make that change on the fly, but I find for me Wednesday works well.

So I think somebody telling you you need to wait three to five days.

I think what you gotta look at is if you resend after a day or you refund after two days, are your unsubscribes going up?

And mine actually don’t go up.

And frankly, if somebody wants to unsubscribe, let them, because they’re probably not reading it anyway, and they’re probably not going to buy anyway.

So at the end they doesn’t know.

That is such a good point.

I’m glad you’re bringing this up.

I was obsessed with not having unsubscribes and then I had the exact same.

Piphany that you just laid down here so you have to have the right people on your email list. It doesn’t matter if you have 100,200 thousand or 500 on your email list.

As long as those are the right people and some are had coming back to that interview because it’s so fresh she had a really good example where she had 250 people on her email list and she was pitching a copywriting bootcamp and she made 15 grand from a 250 person email.

And then she pitched the boot camp again later when she had 800 people on the list and she made 60 grand.

And and what?

I’ll tell people is my email list.

Is frankly the vocal where my business comes from now, so you know I’ve I’m running about 8000. I pick up new clients every month.

We all know the bulk of my business is security care plans and we all know what security is doing in the wild right now so.

So I just keep educating people and keep helping them and as I would say to people you know if you want to know more.

Don’t go to a fancy landing page, just hit reply. We need to get people out of the mode where they use email send address is like do not reply at abc.com and retail stores. Love to do that but you know what to tell us.

Right?

They don’t want to hear from us, and that’s exactly what you don’t want.

We we want to hear from our subscribers.

I want subscribers to send me a note and said I like this.

I didn’t like this.

I’d like you to talk about this.

I I want that I don’t want to hear silence.

Your thoughts on that?

100% online with you come. One caveat though is that you have to be careful that it stays manageable.

I agree that we have to have to have conversations on on email and I think we are both at a stage where we can somewhat comfortably handle that ourselves.

However, I already have a VA full time that sorts through the emails and cleans up everything that I don’t need to respond to.

All that I don’t need to know about. She’s in the Philippines so she’s a few hours ahead of me and I wake up to an email inbox that’s down from let’s say 200 to 50 emails that is.

A luxury that I decided to invest in.

Uhm, it’s a good luxury.

I have a VA 2.

To manage exactly that.

And yeah, it’s a game changer.

And the other way to manage your email box if you’re using either a Gmail account or Google Workspaces.

Uhm, is to set up rules to manage your box. So no, you haven’t seen mine in a while, but believe it or not, I have a convoluted set of rules that’s got 222 rules in there and it.

Spends its time.

I’m not surprised by that by any any.

Bit it spends its time managing my inbox and the problem is in the spaces.

You and I are in.

We all subscribe to too much stuff, so it kind of moves everything around for me and makes my VA job a little bit on the easy side.

So yeah, yeah, yeah that.

That is important and I I think that.

It’s also important when you encourage these conversations with subscribers.

You have to be comfortable with that idea that you are opening yourself up as a person to some degree, especially if you’re selling courses people want to know the person behind the course and my best performing email by far was a story I won’t get into this topic because we’re all sick of it.

It’s a story about the virus that’s going on.

And I held that back for six months.

Because there is so much noise and negativity and clutter and what have you, and I wasn’t really sure if I should send that email because it didn’t fit like a real call to action for my business.

Frankly, but I, I thought it it is so.

Important to me that I eventually set the time aside to write that email.

It took me like an hour.

Usually I crank out an email in 15 minutes.

It’s took me an hour to write that email to so that I had a good spin on it.

It was the best performing email I had the most conversations with people after that email and I had good conversations.

Not like you are wrong.

I am right and bashing against against each other, but really open conversations.

And I think that is what you have to be comfortable with, but then also you need a system to follow up with people.

And to to document the feedback that you receive so that you can pick it up in in marketing or that you can study it to improve your messaging and that it’s not just UN waste, not just wasted potential that is at some point just buried.

Below other emails.

No, I agree.

And one of the things you said that’s the key to this is follow up.

The reason most online businesses don’t do well is they don’t do follow up and marketing email automation would help you do that in a big way and.

People don’t realize that’s that’s a big issue, so let’s move onto Twitter.

You’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter lately.

I read a tweet.

Yes, it’s got to be four or five months ago.

That said, you were re energized with Twitter, right?

And and I and I feel the same.

By the way, how’s that working out for you and why did you go there?

Twitter is becoming my favorite platform and the reason is that.

I am managing to find and follow people that share very good information and I have conversations on Twitter that level that rival the quality that I had on Facebook before Facebook has been.

Coming saturated is, for me at least.

It’s becoming a pitch fest and I just go there for specific Facebook groups that I run or that I’m a part of.

With Twitter it is a fantastic platform to build new relationships and originally Dennis you got me into Twitter and he had.

Very good process that I started but but at some point I fell off the wagon where you record short videos.

1015 seconds sharing one lesson. You post them onto Tik T.O.K they go into Instagram and Facebook stories directly with Tik T.O.K.

And then you can repost those videos with the Tik T.O.K branding which ideally is the same handle as your Twitter.

And then you post it on Twitter and Boom, you have 15 seconds video distributed to four platforms within like 2 minutes.

It’s so it’s so is and videos kind of the way to go right now too as well.

I mean, people underestimate the power of video or even audio or podcasts they do.

They still do.

They still do, but for me I I’ve stopped doing those videos recently because I just come.

I am so much on video these days because we are recording this on December 16th and I’m wrapping up for Christmas.

I I’m on calls 24/7. Currently what it feels like, so I’m sick of being in front of a cow.

Oh, I understand.

I understand that I I made a decision.

It’s funny about three years ago now last month and you know, I haven’t written one long form broad one long form.

A blog post from my own site in three years.

It’s all video and and podcasts.

Now it’s all.

Video and podcast.

Site so you.

Gotta do what works for you.

I I think a lot of people don’t understand that the best way to manage Twitter is Twitter lists, and I think that’s so key.

Thoughts on that?

It is.

Twit Twitter lists are key.

That is what what I found for myself too, and then what?

What I’m currently building up as a habit, and I I probably will get to it seriously between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, where when the business is shutting down and I’m working on the business more than in it.

Uhm, I want to set myself a habit of commenting on at least 10 to 15 threads or posts on Twitter, following maybe 5 new people and trying to build relationships with them and then posting at least twice on Twitter.

I think that will compound quite a bit, and with those lists what I found.

Works really well is you just engage in conversations that are already happening and if you have something to say, people come to your profile and people start following you.

And then what I also see happening a lot is Twitter threads.

Yes and then.

Those are beast in themselves, and I haven’t yet cracked the code of writing good Twitter threads that get get proper engagement.

Talking about fifty 6000 retweets or something but I have less than 2000 followers on Twitter so maybe that that doesn’t help and then.

It takes it takes time to build that and you know it’s it’s funny. I I always laugh when people say you had to buy followers ’cause I think the last I looked I’m just shy is 17,000 and.

And I said no, you just have to have conversations.

They don’t all have to be serious conversations like some of those conversations are really fun conversations.

And yeah, and I.

I kind of go that way.

What tool do you use to manage Twitter or your Twitter posts?

Mostly the Twitter website.

OK.

Not not so much.

I tried Tweetdeck.

Last week, but we take Tree tag was very frustrating in that the first thing that happened was a message from somebody who wasn’t following me.

So it came up for some reason as a message request rather than a message, and Twitter didn’t or Tweetdeck didn’t show it was a request and it just showed an error in loading the message.

And I had to go back to the Twitter website.

I’m mostly using the main website and the main.

I’ve came across, uh, an app called Thread Reader app and I’ve shared this with you on Twitter just now and it is a brilliant tool to turn the thread into a into a website into a single page website without all the ads and stuff like that so that you can properly.

OK.

Read it, that’s really cool.

I’ve been using.

I use couple things I prefer my mobile phone to Twitter native app.

It works really well I I often use the website to have it open now.

And I’ll use Tweetdeck typically if I’m working at lists, I find it can be a little easier sometimes, but really, the problem with all these third party apps like Hoot suite and stuff is they do not.

They’re not allowed to share the Twitter API for DMS anymore, so.

The only way to get DMS in an app is the Tweetdeck.

The Tweetdeck app, which Twitter owns or the main Twitter website.

You’re not getting DMS through a third party app anymore, so that becomes.

A bit of an issue.

Less amuse us.

Yeah it.

It renders it useless as far as I’m.

Uhm, so let’s move on.

And the other place you’ve been spending all their time is going thin lately, and you’ve got a new LinkedIn strategy.

How is that working out?

Because we all know the problem with LinkedIn and I’ve been spending more time there.

We’re talking before ’cause I’m now the COVID main with Courtney.

Robertson of the new WordPress product community on LinkedIn.

So I’ve actually ramped up my LinkedIn game.

The big concern about LinkedIn is it can be spammy.

So do you have any thoughts on LinkedIn and where people should go?

Yeah, LinkedIn for me has become a powerhouse and I’ve built quite a bit of my business through sales Navigator, which is the premium platform.

Yep, falling then, and what you can do there is you can send up to 800 in mails, so messages to people you you are not connected.

And it works really well for me.

What I do is I have my VA send messages 2 profiles that come up from a search that I’ve defined for my target audience and I just try to get them on the phone.

I just try to.

Boeker called send them a calendar link of mine and then we we talk for 15 minutes.

Sometimes we talk for two minutes because it’s not a good fit.

Sometimes we talk for an hour because it was a really good fit and I’ve driven a bit of business via LinkedIn.

I would say if I if I had an agency model right now that I wanted to scale.

LinkedIn would be my go to platform.

I think it’s rather easy if you have a good offer to sell high ticket via LinkedIn.

These days the go ahead, sorry.

That’s OK, I was just waiting.

I would agree with you and if anybody wants to learn.

A little bit about LinkedIn.

Uhm, I have a a really good friend of mine.

He’s been on the podcast.

His name is Adam Franklin and he’s out of Australia and check out Adams Facebook group or check him out Arlington.

He’s such a good source of what to do and what not to do.

I think that works really well.

Uhm, but I agree, if LinkedIn is used properly, it can be like gold and one of the things you can do on LinkedIn and I’ve done this is you can target ads based on a person’s occupation.

And there is no other platform that allows you to do that that I know of.

And what you’re gonna find is you’re gonna pay more per lead doing it that way.

But honestly, you get better leads out of it, so I I, I think people dismissing LinkedIn and not figuring out how to use it.

Is is a big mistake honestly.

I agree 100% and also what I would say is.

LinkedIn is at least from my experience, over the past three to four months.

It is the best platform to get in touch with the big players.

Talking like Fortune 500 companies and the people that work there, you can build so many epic relationships on LinkedIn.

That it is not even funny anymore and I I haven’t seen that on Twitter because the the big players like.

Directors, managers, the the people that decide about big budgets.

They don’t spend time on Twitter.

They are on LinkedIn and what you’ll see is over the next few years I believe.

It’s that those people who run the departments and who build up these partner networks in channel industries between manufacturers, distributors, resellers, they all understand the power of LinkedIn and of building relationships.

And what happens is I I’m working on a virtual summit in this industry.

That that’s what I’m talking.

I think with LinkedIn and the increased engagement that we’ll see.

The is that the the overall results on LinkedIn will diminish eventually, same as it did with Facebook.

The early movers always get the advantages, so I would say if your audience is B to B.

Get on LinkedIn yesterday.

Yeah, yeah, and don’t don’t get yourself involved in the the standard.

So you didn’t one.

Of practice is sending people messages saying buy my product.

And then you wonder why you get told to go away?

Take the time to actually build those relationships, because that’s what’s going to make is successful, and it’s a long term game.

It’s not a short term game.

By any means.

And it’s really easy to do if if we’re honest.

All I’m saying in my cold outreach on LinkedIn is.

I I think you have an interesting profile. I would love to connect. That’s the first message and that gets me from 100.

I would say I I get around 20 connection acceptances so that that is not too bad for a LinkedIn, I think.

And then you follow up with them, tell them what you do, they tell them what they do.

And then eventually you book a call and you see if you get along well and if there is synergy to be explored and if not, at least you had a fun conversation.

Yeah, and and it might not lead to anything directly, but what people don’t realize is person A might know person B who might know person C, and you know where that conversation goes, right?

So I think what people gotta realize is.

They gotta stop getting out of this.

You know short term stuff and I have to tell you ever since I took on this role of the of wonder code means is the word press product Community group on LinkedIn.

My LinkedIn messages have been off to chart lately so.

Uhm, the the advantage of that is I’ve got all kinds of people coming to me right now and that is blown it up I spent.

Last week in private message Hell, it’s my podcast so I can use that word.

My I did and I laugh about it, but it was to be expected and it’s just.

There was a lot of good conversation going on, but it’s just yeah you gotta manage it.

And to me the only way to manage LinkedIn is on the native platform or on the app not using the third party tool.

Yeah, I agree, just right now I had and I had a message coming back to me from a lead that I reached out two months ago.

I don’t think.

It works well.

And he he asked me for my email address because he wanted to send me follow up information that I needed for a proposal.

That’s awesome.

That’s absolutely awesome.

Two months later folks.

So there you go and then the last thing I wanted to touch on a little bit with you live stream and you and I both love to live stream.

I think you’re using stream yard at this point, correct?

I have been using playing with Malinak.

I should say I just bought the lifetime deal from Ellen App on that site called appsumo that we shall not talked about.

Right, but they both basically work the same way.

What to you is the biggest advantage of ice cream.

The direct engagement that you get I I just love live streaming for the.

Connectedness that you achieve with the people watching and on the same side it is very frustrating if you announce a live stream.

Nobody shows you, yeah, but that is also a learning experience that you just inevitably have to go through at some point.

It will happen and what you’ll see with live streaming.

Is you can have really good conversations and people appreciate it when somebody who is in a video directly responds to their question.

Yeah, it’s so true and the other thing about live streaming is it come it’s engaging with the chat.

If you choose to do that.

So we and the worst part about live stream and I’ll tell you this is having a bad Internet connection.

So we went through one.

A couple weeks ago where I sat down with Devender, Todd and Ryan and we did a WordPress year in review and I was hosting no, I stream.

Right when Rogers, in the middle of the day, decided to push out router updates so.

This is not funny.

I was good until we went to record and the 1st 20 minutes my video was good.

My audio was in and out and we know what that sounds like.

But the content was so good we just kind of rolled with it and testimony to Devender, Todd and Ryan.

They knew I was having an issue and they just rolled with it and then my audio for the last hour, the hour and a half stabilized.

And went from there, but those technical challenges unfortunately happen, and that’s the reason a lot of people don’t like to go live is they don’t want to deal with those technical challenges.

And I think you just gotta roll your dice and deal with them.

To be honest with.

You you know, yeah.

Yeah, so true and I I think when people say that they don’t want to deal with that.

Take it is their comfort zone speaking to young, so I don’t want to seem rude or harsh, but.

To me there is no excuse if if you want to do a live stream.

I if you know it, it would be good for your business or a brand to do a live stream.

And you you say that I don’t know how to handle it, it’s just saying I am afraid of being live in front of a camera with people watching me and.

Potentially see me screw up, which is totally fine.

It is something I I get nervous for every live stream and I’ve been doing them for years right now and I think this just never goes away and it’s part of the fun eventually.

Yeah, but the tech is so easy these days.

Yeah, I I would agree with that.

I I even get nervous for I do podcasts even with people like you who I know well.

I mean, it’s.

Some wanted to I had I had a debating coach back in high school like 40 years ago and we were having dinner a couple years ago before the pandemic.

He’s long since retired as a teacher, and he said to me, do you still get nervous every time you speak?

And I said, I do, and he said that’s good because it shows you care about what you’re doing, yeah?

You know, and and you know, one of the best resources out there, I think is our mutual friend, Ross Brand on Facebook.

His his I stream resources are like amazing and.

Live stream universe yeah.

You I stream universe and he’s written an amazing book which I have.

I I have it in both.

PDF and hardcopy so you know I’ve bought the book and if you want to learn like fall Rossi throws tips these tricks out there he throws.

Some how deduce product reviews, all kinds of things.

Uhm, the biggest thing with live streaming and it’s one of the things people don’t get.

They all concentrate on the video, the lighting.

And spend some time on your audio folks.

Audio matters more than people think.

Yeah, I had this conversation with imenti this morning.

He is I.

I’m really proud of him.

He’s a virtual summit mastery student and he is in Pakistan running a virtual summit in the bath textiles imports industry.

And this is as nice as it gets, and he had.

He doesn’t have good Internet, or at least not the Internet that that we are used to in Europe born in America.

And he still does the virtual summit. He still interviews experts that have, I think, two of two of the bigger names that he has on the summit have following of over 50,000 people on LinkedIn. Each OR or LinkedIn groups with over 50,000 members so.

By all means they they are big names and he is going after them knowing that he has a webcam.

You know he uses the webcam from his notebook, no dedicated webcam.

He has a simple rote laugh, Mike.

That he clips onto onto the collar.

He has the Internet that only lets him do the interviews in 720P. Otherwise the connection will go out but he goes after it because he knows that it is good for the business and that it also brings him forward as a human because he gets out of the comfort zone regularly and I’m just so proud of this because you you just have to work with.

What you have.

Yeah, it’s so true and like to me the platforms I would be live streaming to us.

I think he’s still got a live stream to Facebook no matter how much I hate Facebook, but that’s another story.

YouTube certainly worth it.

Uh, Twitter.

I’ve done.

Well, I streaming when I did my WordPress year in review show.

I did really well off Twitter and the other one to look at, and they’re starting to open up more.

Is going to LinkedIn and start to open up LinkedIn live streaming finely and that’s a big deal.

I got access.

A couple weeks ago.

But some of the apps are still a little buggy connecting to it, so it’s still taking a little bit of time.

So they’re they’re kind of the core networks.

I would concentrate on.

And then there’s you know things like Tik T.O.K for short videos and stuff like that.

So I think you gotta you gotta kind of realize that video is not going away.

And try and work video into your your marketing game just a little.

Bit yeah, and what what I would say is.

Use one format of content that works very well for you that comes natural and repurpose it into the other formats.

If video works well for you, record short videos, get them transcribed, read, turn them into emails, into blog posts into social media.

Into podcasts, if audio works well for you, start with a podcast.

If writing works well for you, start with blogs or email.

Yeah, I I.

Wholeheartedly agree when we did the WordPress room review show.

The first thing I did was I took the video, stripped out the video, took the audio and put it in a podcast feed with show notes and that was the first thing I did and I’m about to do that this weekend with the social media year in.

Review show I did on a live stream last week and that will come out next week.

Same idea.

I’m gonna reuse the content because people consume content in different ways.

And one of the things I’m actually experimenting with in the New year is taking little sound bites like audio grams out of the out of the podcast records in using notes and that will be even more interesting so.

You know there’s all kinds of ways to reuse content, and I think people think it has to be this whole new.

Work process instead of looking at what they’ve already made and and realize people consume it differently.

Yeah, yeah, repurposing is the key look. Look at everybody who’s crushing it with their brands. They create content bonds and they leverage across 1020 different content pieces.

Yeah, so true.

What’s your biggest?

Takeaway, if somebody wants to make a marketing splash on your business with everything you’ve done and we’ve talked about, what would you do first?

If I were to.

Make waves in an industry with my business.

I would run a virtual summit and that’s.

Not or not, not only because I sell a course on how to run virtual summits.

The point being is when you do a summit, everybody knows it is a boatload of work and it is, but with the right process it’s manageable.

But you bring together.

Well known and trusted experts and tap into their audiences.

You’re not starting from scratch if you run a virtual summit, you have people recommending you you have affiliates.

You can go to other podcasts and blogs and have them talk about the summit as affiliates and you just leverage.

The authority that people already have and assign assign yourself a bit of that authority.

By interviewing them and then if you interview one, that’s cool. If you interview five, that’s cool, but as soon as you get like 1020 thirty speakers on a virtual summit, even if you’ve never done interviews before, we all start somewhere.

But the first few interviews will suck.

That’s OK.

The fifth one will be OK.

The 10th one will be great.

Because you are used to doing them at that point and when you get over this mental hurdle of I don’t know where to start.

I don’t know how to do it.

Setting up a virtual summit can add 1000 people to your email list if you’re starting from zero.

And that that is by far the biggest way I’ve seen without trying to hit a viral piece of content and then doing that repeatedly.

To build up a big marketing audience.

Now, with virtual summits and the pandemic.

We’ve all heard.

People are virtual.

Submitted out.

What’s your thought on that?

Is it just they’re saying this content doesn’t?

Resonate with them so I can’t be bothered.

Or is it?

Or is there some truth to that?

Uhm, there is truth to that.

When you have virtual events that are badly done, then people have very low patience.

With those events, but it’s the same for a web.

And now when you have a web and on the host is an engaging, you drop out of the web and on it’s the same for a summit.

But if you have a summit that is relevant to the people that you want to reach, and you’re not trying to reach everybody.

People still see very very good results we had, for example, last year we had a few people in vitro salmon mastery that did multiple 6 figures from their events and they they had an established brand.

They were running events for a few years beforehand, but they still got an audience, even though everybody said.

I I’m fatigued off zoom and I don’t want to be on zoom calls anymore but they attend virtual summers if they are done the right way.

You know, and you’ve also written a book on virtual summits which you can get on Amazon, correct?

The Virtual Summit mastery method and you can actually get it cheaper on my website.

I I’ve got the book in my Kindle reader.

I’ve read it a couple times.

It’s well worth the region.

I think people should go get it if you want to learn a little bit.

Thank you.

It’s a good.

It’s a good one.

Virtualsummitmastery.com/book is the best place.

Slash book.

What is the best way for anybody to get ahold if they want to talk about virtual summits or what you’re doing?

To dip your feet into virtual summits, either get the book or download the free CHEAT SHEET that I have on virtualsummitmastery.com.

If you want to just banter with with summits and in crypto and other stuff then ping me on Twitter @iamjankoch

Yeah, and and harass him ’cause he seems to be always there lately, but.

Yeah, and thank you very much for joining me.

Have an amazing day.

Had a blast.

Robert thank you.

Thank you.

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