What I Learned from 100 Podcast Episodes – @therichbrooks

Rich-Brooks-100th-Pinterest-bCan you believe it’s been 100 episodes already? For the past 2 years Rich Brooks has brought you experts covering all aspects of search, social and mobile marketing and asked them the tough questions you need the answers to, so that small businesses can get a leg up on their future success.

Rich reflects back on some particular topics and guests that he found insightful and helpful, and shares some of the tips that he personally has implemented in his own business practices. And as a special “twist”, the tables get turned on our fearless leader when he becomes the interviewee and one of his podcast listeners gets to grill him and put him in the hot seat for a change.

Debbie Rosemont is a professional organizer and the owner of Simply Placed. She has heard Rich speak at her organization’s annual conferences and is a regular listener to The Marketing Agents Podcast.

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Your Blogging Questions Answered – @therichbrooks

The-Rich-Brooks-PinterestWhether you’re a veteran blogger or new to the world of blogging, the same goals apply: find, reach and engage your readers, and turn them into eventual customers. You achieve this success by building your readership and email lists, for starters. But how exactly do we do that?

The Marketing Agents Podcast host, Rich Brooks, reaches into the mailbag to discuss vital aspects of blogging including; creating value for your audience, keyword research, consistency, guest blogging, promotion using various social media platforms, as well as weighing in on how much value we should really be putting on blog comments.

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How to Run a Successful Podcast – @sheagunther

Shea-Gunther-PinterestPodcasting has been a steadily growing way of connecting with your audience. Especially since these podcast audiences have changed over the years and now more closely resemble mainstream media consumers.

So now that you’ve finally decided to start a podcast, what comes next? How do you plan to monetize it? Should you seek out sponsors to help fund the program? What kind of advertising will you use to promote the podcast? Will you need to spend a fortune on equipment in order to launch a successful podcast?

Shea Gunther is one of the creative minds behind the Marijuana Today podcast. He has dealt with all of these issues and more when launching his podcast. He shares with us his tips, ideas, knowledge and first hand experience at starting a podcast from conception to launch.

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How to Unleash Your Business Avatar – John Lee Dumas

John Lee DumasHow many times have you hit that fork in the road when trying to solve a business decision? Are you worried you’re not reaching the precise audience that’s right for your business? Have you ever envisioned what your one, ideal audience member would look like if you put a face and backstory to them?

Creating an avatar of your one, perfect listener allows you to narrow your niche to the most precise audience member that you’re trying to reach. Your avatar is your targeted demographic that allows you to focus exactly on the people that benefit most from your message. Once you know who that person is, it allows your business to find its direction and become a magnet that people are drawn to.

John Lee Dumas is the Entrepreneur On Fire, whose podcast was recognized as Best Of iTunes in 2013. John’s podcasts aim to teach upcoming entrepreneurs to take their leap towards success by hearing the stories of failures and lessons learned from other well-known entrepreneurs.

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How the Right Mindset Leads to Maximum Success – Jeremy Frandsen

Jeremy-Frandsen-Pinterest

Sometimes you can have everything in place: you’ve got a website, your active on Facebook and other social media platforms, you’ve got an email list, but things still aren’t clicking.

Is your mindset to blame?

This week, we bring in Jeremy Frandsen from Internet Business Mastery to talk about the importance of mindset to your success.

Jeremy’s been wildly successful helping entrepreneurs create the life they want to live, and he’s here to share some of his best secrets with you.

Big Ideas:

  • How did your podcast start?
    • It started because I moved from LA, after quitting my corporate job, to Salt Lake city to lower my expenses and start a real estate business.
    • Started going to a local real estate group I realized I didn’t like real estate.
    • One of the guys that started the group also taught internet business and information marketing.
    • I got completely into it. I originally had started an ebay business.
    • All I knew was ebay – there was no Facebook and Twitter.
    • I was selling information on ebay from a home office.
    • What happened was I realized that I didn’t know anyone else that did this.
    • I started looking to find someone to network with.
    • This young guy, Jason – who’s now my partner – ran a seminar and told me he was selling an information product that was a seminar video.
    • We started getting together and talking about internet business and internet marketing.
    • Jason told me that he was going to do a podcast – this was 2005 – I was excited to do it, so we started the Internet Business Mastery podcast.
    • We wanted to record information on what we were learning.
    • Jason wanted to become a podcast expert so he started 3 or 4 podcasts just to learn about podcasting.
  • When you got started, you didn’t have a roadmap for success. Did you have any fears since nobody had ever done that? How did you overcome that?
    • Yeah. I was terrified most of the time.
    • I had a home, wife, kids, car, and that normal stuff. There was no direct roadmap.
    • I was not from a tech background.
    • I pieced it all together. I kept trying things.
    • Jason and I would go to conferences and hire people to teach us.
    • We paid a lot of people for courses. We’d learn a little bit more and a little bit more.
    • I worked as much as possible trying to make it to work.
    • I’d talk to as many people as possible to learn everything I could.
    • If there had been a step-by-step system, I would’ve done that, but there wasn’t.
    • A lot of it is so easy now, but back then you couldn’t do that stuff.
    • I wanted any sort of course I could get. I’d buy ebooks on how to start a business.
    • I’d try anything I could to get the knowledge from somebody who’d done that.


      The idea of freedom was so huge for me that I was willing to do whatever it took to have that happen.

    • I wanted freedom of time, freedom of location, freedom of finance.
  • Do you feel that a desire for financial gain is required for success? Is that all you need to succeed?
    • Absolutely not. It completely depends on how you’re doing this and what you want to do it for.
    • One of the things we do is help people design their lifestyle. We don’t even talk about business right away.
    • Some people love their jobs, but even those people can learn how to make money doing podcasts and other things on the side.
    • If you DO want financial freedom, we do talk about that.
    • It’s about fulfillment. It’s a humongous thing for us. We weren’t talking about this when we started because we thought we had to make money from this.
    • We were seeing all the people, about 5000+ folks, some weren’t making it.
    • It was the people who were JUST trying to make money that were failing.
    • They weren’t picking stuff from a fulfillment point of view.
    • When you’re working a job just for the money, it’s a grind.


      Of course most of us want to make more money, but when we make that the sole focus we forget about all the other important things.

    • When I was working more and making a ton of money, it took over my life and I hated it.
    • It can’t just be making one product and focusing only on selling it. That’s not what we teach at all.
  • So it sounds like we should start by envisioning the life we want to live?
    • Yes. It starts with lifestyle design and then we have to work on you.
    • What is it YOU are passionate about.
    • What’s your “single motivating purpose.”
    • What will make you fulfilled?
    • Then we find your audience and market and finding value for other people.
  • It sounds easy to find your passion, but is it so easy? Do most people really have an easy time finding their passions? Or does it take deeper digging?
    • We’re taught early on how to get rid of our intrinsic motivation.
    • Intrinsic motivation is what YOU are interested in and not what others tell you to be focused on.
    • My learning was about me, it was about getting a good grade and not what I was interested in. That’s extrinsic motivation.
    • We have to teach you to go back and learn how to focus on your intrinsic motivations.


      Finding your intrinsic motivation leads to your single motivating purpose which is a statement that describes how you can have the greatest impact in the world by doing what you love.

  • So we start with a vision of our life, discover our motivating purpose, what’s next? Is audience the next step?
    • Then the audience is going to come from that lifestyle design.
    • How big do you want that business? Does that fit your lifestyle?
    • With our purpose in mind, and type of lifestyle in mind, we can start looking for a business and audience that fits that.
    • Who are you going to be creating value for?
  • Let’s say we now have discovered our audience and how big we want our business. How do we create a product or service these people?
    • The great part about this is it’s not gonna cost you anything.
    • Some people we just start with Twitter.
    • You can find people, and we simply ask our audience what they want.
    • We started doing surveys – what do you want, need, what is your goal?
    • We created a coaching course based on that feedback. Then we asked them what they wanted to be coached on and we did that.
    • The key is to start creating value for your audience and getting a big enough audience to offer a product.
    • Even if you share other people’s material, you can start to create value.
  • How about someone that is already running a business? Can they apply these techniques to grow?
    • To be honest, that makes it even easier because you already have a product and an audience.
    • It’s a matter of taking it to the internet, so to speak.
    • One client wanted to market more but ended creating an information product that served his audience better.
    • We’ve got a membership site that has money coming in every month and that passive income helps us have freedom.
  • You need to have the right mindset. What are some things that keep entrepreneurs from succeeding and how might we overcome them?
    • In the beginning some of the fears I had were that I wasn’t an expert.
    • If you don’t feel like an expert, then get the knowledge. Immerse yourself in knowledge and very quickly you get to that level.
    • Most people don’t realize that that’s the case.
    • We talk about different things about what it takes to be an expert. It’s very quick if you immerse yourself. Also, you’ll always be ahead of the beginner.
    • There will always be people in your industry that will know more than you, but you have a unique voice on that dataset.
    • Two other fears are, “why would anyone care what I have to say?” and “someone is saying it better.”
    • The interesting counterpoint about those statements is point of view.
  • Tell us more about the point of view thing.
    • The really cool thing is that we have 7 billion people on the planet and a couple billion are on the internet so far. With all those people, your point of view will resonate with a group of people, and it doesn’t even have to be a big group of people.
    • We don’t even have a huge email list. Ours is really small compared to others.
    • We have a specific group of people that we resonate with. Our point of view speaks perfectly to this group of people that ends up being our audience.
    • There’s no such thing as competition in our business. There’s only possible collaborators. We all go on each others’ shows and write for each other but we have different points of view and focuses.
    • We have this different point of view and different personality.
    • People like our show and how we are.
    • That’s the thing that makes us unique so were not all selling widgets.
    • It took me a couple of years to realize this when I started.
    • Point of view and trust are key.
    • Our angle wasn’t that we were not millionaires or big gurus standing in front of our Ferraris. We said we were regular guys that made our living online.
    • This resonated with people. “I wan’t to learn from someone like me.”
    • Creating a high level of trust with our people was a way to break through that fear of there are other bigger guys doing it better than me.
    • People loved that. They loved that transparency.
  • So, you have a unique perspective, words, passion, and intonation that resonates better with your people than the big guys.
    • Absolutely. We see it time and time again.
    • One of the upsides of us being around so long is that we see the cycles of what resonates with people.
    • The world is bigger than you realize. There are always going to be people that have never heard the big guys but might hear you and your point of view.
    • A lot of your perceived competitors are just offering different angles and points of view rather than competing with you.
    • There’s no such thing as competition.
  • Are there any other things that are holding back small businesses and entrepreneurs as far as mindset stuff goes?
    • One of the things we deal with more than anything else is the “it has to be perfect” scenario.
    • Even if you already have a business or want to start a business you get stalled by this whole concept of perfectionism.
    • One of the things we talk about is progress not perfection. The goal is to be continuously moving forward and go ahead and try things instead of waiting for it to be perfect.
    • People kept telling us to start a course but we didn’t do it for a while because we wanted it to be perfect.
    • I had a mentor that told me to just launch a course now. Do it as you go. It was one of those progress not perfection things. He said to just take action. That really redefined how I thought about business in general.
    • If we hadn’t gotten over that perfectionism issue, we wouldn’t be where we are not and we wouldn’t have helped all those people.
    • We could’ve failed or quit since we couldn’t get it perfect.
  • If there was one thing you could tell yourself back when you and Jason were first getting together, what do you think it would be?
    • This is such a weird one, but it’s at the core of stuff that Jason and I still to this day we still wrestle with being okay with being ourselves.
    • Since we are our business. We are talking. Our audience buys our courses, but they’re buying us teaching it.
    • I used to really hold back on who I was and am.
    • That’s a lot of mindset stuff. I said a couple years ago to myself, “I can’t NOT do this anymore.” This is really who I am. Now that I see this that if anyone that isn’t making it happen is all mindset stuff.
    • If I could go back and I’d tell myself “be you.”
    • That IS the key behind it.
    • You have to break through that issue to be able to succeed. It’s okay to be you and the single motivating purpose is part of that.

     

    Juicy Links:

    Rich Brooks
    It’s all in your mindset.