Powered By Nanacast.com

SBBM Podcast #125: Content Marketing with Joe Pulizzi

Tim:  Let’s talk Joe Pulizzi, content marketing guy who started the Content Marketing Institute a number of years ago and boy, boy was he ahead of his time. Content marketing this year, 2013, I recon it’s hitting its scraps. We are starting to see a massive, massive attention going to content marketing versus other forms of traditional marketing. What is content marketing? You’re going to find that out in the discussion I have with Joe but you are listening to a form of content marketing right now with my podcast and I’ve been doing that for three and a half years and basically it’s a way of sharing your knowledge and pulling people towards you as opposed to pushing big advertising or direct marketing messages on them, sales messages on them. Joe is a content marketing event and he’s passionate about the colour orange. You’ll hear why in a minute and he’s one of the leading thought leaders behind the content marketing in social media movement of the last few years. I was so excited to be able to speak to him because he does explain it in beautifully simple terms. He’s actually in Sydney next week so it might be better to attend that event but he’s in Sydney with commencing March 4 and riding a three day content marketing event which is going to run again next year and I hope to be speaking at. Enough with that, let’s hear what Joe and I had to say about the new phenomenon that is content marketing. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, welcome to small business big marketing.

Joe:  Tim, I’m happy to be on. Thanks for having me.

Tim:  Now Joe, quick question up front. On your Skype messages, he’s thinking of the colour orange, what’s that all about?

Joe:  Oh man, I started wearing orange when I launched the business in 2007 and I’ll tell you a quick story because it’s interesting and there’s actually a business point behind it. I did, I was a bum, my fifth key note speech and the person that organized the event said “Joe I’ll have you come and do the speech but you have to wear black” I’m like “that’s fine. You’re paying me to come. I’m happy to wear black. I’ll do that, wear black” and there were video tape and there were a number of people in that event. This was actually in Brussels, Belgium.

Tim:  Nice

Joe:  And then I got a bunch of response after, everybody was going “Joe where is the orange? Why didn’t you wear the orange?” and I never noticed that I sort of branded myself in this orange attire and from that point on I said boy this could be a business advantage because you get noticed for – I mean nobody buzz about orange, nobody still wears orange.

Tim:  Yeah, yeah

 

Joe:    From that moment on, I kind of went over the psychotic edge on orange and everything we had in the business and in my own personal wardrobe is orange and I really feel that it helps our business and our brand.

Tim:    Funny story but also quite serious. I mean every business should own a colour. That’s what the big guys do. You look to any big brand, McDonalds own red and yellow, banks in Australia owns a particular blue, it just makes sense and it’s just appealing to one of the many senses that we have in terms of building our brand.

Joe:    so orange is the colour we try to own

Tim:    Yeah my colour?

Joe:    of everyday, what’s yours?

Tim:    Well six foot four, big guy…pink, aye?

Joe:    That’s the perfect colour for you, not for me.

Tim:    I’m a tough guy. I’m a tough guy. No one will look at me and go hey Tim, what are your wearing pink for?

Joe:    They’re not going to mess with you

Tim:    No, no

Joe:    I’m 5’9, I’m not wearing pink anywhere, I’m sorry.

Tim:    Well pink and orange, that would never be seen together. That would be a crime, a fashion crime. Now Joe, how do you define content marketing?

Joe:    I think for somebody that is new and never heard of it before, it’s acting like a publisher, acting like a media company so what that means is instead of creating advertisements and display and what I would call interruptive type of marketing around somebody else’s content or event, what we want to do is create our own compelling, relevant, valuable content to attract people to come to us so that at some point we become sort of that trusted adviser to them and when they’re ready to buy, they buy from us because we’ve been giving them all these fantastic information for so long.

Tim:    Yeah I love that. I love that. I feel that. I’ve been doing that for a while with podcast. Well what then to that point, what’s the opposite of content marketing?

Joe:    You know, I don’t even know if there’s an opposite. I don’t know if there’s a kryptonite. I mean I guess if you say that pure display advertising would be but I think content marketing gets along with everything. It’s like peanut butter and jelly, it makes everything a little bit better if you use it. Some people say “Joe does that mean I need to stop advertising?” I’m like “no” but the fact is if you want to be found in Google for search engine optimization, if you want to drive leads in any kind of significant way online and if you want to have anything of interest to say in social media, that has to start with what your content strategy is. It has to start with compelling and interesting stories and because the consumer buys so differently than the way they did in the past and they have a million options to get their information, if you don’t have something compelling for them, they’re going to ignore you.

Tim:    It’s like a conversation – when you got nothing to say, then no one, who wants to talk to you?

Joe:    It’s so interesting when Twitter was big; I mean I started on Twitter in whatever, 07, 08 and still Twitter is new to a lot of people but people said “Joe tell me, explain to me about Twitter” I said “well go into a cocktail reception, go into a cocktail reception and you get on a table and start screaming at the top of your voice how awesome you are” that’s advertising thinking, that’s old way of thinking. Hey I’m great, I’m awesome. The real way that we need to think is, our customers don’t care about us, they don’t care about our products, they don’t care about our services, they care about themselves so you need to give information that’s going to help them help you so if you’re on Twitter, you want to create interesting information so they follow you and you’re not going to put your press release on Twitter because nobody is going to care.

Tim:    Good analogy. Can I just take you back? The opposite of content marketing, you said content marketing gets along with everything and I agree with that. When I talk about content marketing, I do say that I always talk push versus pull and if content marketing is pull, pulling people towards you by having interesting things to share and showing that you’re an opinion leader in your industry, then the opposite of that is push and push to me is pure advertising. Now I love when I see an ad in the magazine that has some content marketing integrated into it, for example “Call to action. Go and visit and YouTube channel for review of this product” but pure advertising I would say would be the opposite of content marketing?

Joe:    I think that’s a good way to put it. I would also kind of expand on that and say look at the content that you create. I mean, I guess you could say pure promotional content versus educational and entertaining content. I mean those are quite opposite and if you’re a company of any size, the most of the content assets that you have, most of the stories, most of the assets are about you or about your products and services and the fact is that those are fine by the way, we need those but what are you going to do the 99% of the time when your customers aren’t ready to buy? That’s only for a very small portion of the buying cycle and everything else you need to help educate your customers. Take them to the next level, find out what their paying points are, answer their questions – those are the types of things that content marketing is for. I love, I think you’re right, you’re exactly right if you look at interruption versus non-interruption marketing. I think that’s what you’re saying but I would take a step deeper because people are saying “oh I do content marketing” I said “you do? What do you have? What kind of content?” they say “we got this fantastic brochure, all about the good stuff we’re doing” and I’m like that’s not really content marketing; that’s just more like shoving in somebody’s face and like “are you ready to buy? Would you buy this for me?” that’s not going to help your, I was trying to think of “what’s going to help your customers get better jobs, live better lives, that’s the type of content we want to talk.

Tim:    it’s a bit like, I’m not one for drawing sexual analogy Joe, but it’s a bit like foreplay content marketing isn’t it?

Joe:    Hey you brought it up

Tim:    Well is it?

Joe:    It is, I mean even with social media, I love to talk to companies that says “hey this social media thing is not working for me. I haven’t sold anything” I said “well do you expect to get the sale right away?” and that’s really what, that’s really where you see that analogy work really well because it’s about engaging them and giving them stuff over a long period of time and you know what, when they are ready to have “sex” from your stand point.

Tim:    God, don’t be disgusting

Joe:    I have to go with you because of the fact that you’ve been turning them on to that with that.

Tim:    Here we go, that’s not going to leave the rest of this interview is it? At this point, our listeners are going “give me examples of content marketing” that’s easily answered. Content marketing is to sure that you’ve got a fantastic, It’s called the content marketing playbook – 42 ways to connect with customers but examples are, well you’re listening to a form of content marketing right now which is podcasting. We got blogs, we got books, there’s forums, there’s webinars, give me three more Joe.

Joe:    Oh boy, white papers, you can do print magazine, print newsletter and could you do a customer event or a prospect event, I mean all the social media channels are forms of content and even if you look at offsite content like guess blogging is very, very popular to make sure that you look like experts not only on your own sites but on other people’s sites but I guess what I would do Tim is I like to take people a step back from the channels itself because I think people get the channels but when we talk with most companies they jump right to the channels, like they’ll say “Joe I want to do a blog” or “I want to have fantastic Twitter content” or “I want to do this thing on Facebook” or “I want to watch a video series on YouTube” all tactical forms of content marketing but we want to take them a step back and ask the question “why” not “what”, before we jump to “what” let’s figure out “why”. Why are we creating this content in the first place? I always talk about something called the content marketing mission statement and the whole idea is “why are you creating, what are you doing for the customer to help them in their job, in their life, in some way, what is that content about?” Just like a media company, if you are let’s say the leading trade magazine in your industry, what would be your editorial mission? I want you to come up first with what that editorial mission is and then once you have that and you tie it, by the way this is content marketing, you have to tie it with your business objective, what you’re trying to do and that’s sort of the secret sauce – editorial mission combined with your business objectives, then you can say “where would this type of story be told best? How do we tell that story in a blog? How do we tell it in a content platform? How do we tell it in a webinar? How do we tell it in an eBook?” Those types of things…

Tim:    You are singing from the same songbook because one of the things I talk about a lot is yup, you might need to be in Twitter, you might need a website, you might need a podcast but let’s just put that aside and figure out – you talk about the “why” I just talk about the message, what have you got to say and let’s figure out your through line – my through line for this show is small business marketing tips and tricks. So, every bit of content I create has to come back to that.

Joe:    I mean that’s your mission statement

Tim:    That’s my editorial, what did you call it, editorial mission?

Joe:    I talked to a CMO the other day of a fairly large company and said “Joe we have forty thousand fans in Facebook and we sort of plateau, how do we get more fans?” and my first question which seem like an obvious question was “why are you on Facebook?” and she didn’t have the answer to that.

Tim:    It’s amazing, isn’t it?

Joe:    You know what; you may not even need fans. You might not need followers on Twitter; those might be indicators that don’t help you drive your business in any way. We need to figure out what the message to your client, why it’s going to help our business and how we’re going to help the customers win their buying process, ultimately get to that point where they’re going to become a customer or become a better customer for you.

Tim:    Gosh that’s true, exactly some of these businesses just launch into that medium and forget about why, why, why. When you know about the “why”, when you know why you’re on Facebook, it actually makes it easy. For example, it makes it easy to decide what to put on your Facebook.

Joe:    That’s exactly right. Here’s a good exercise and we’re all about tips and tricks, so we got to give people some tips. I would say make a list of all the channels that you’re in right now, so every channel that you use, all social media channels, all print channels, all the online channels, everything, make a list of them and then simply put and answer the question “why are you on those channel?” I will guarantee you that you’ve never done that, that you’re using channels that you don’t know why you’re using them and then you make a decision about whether to continue to use it, to adapt that, maybe you’re doing just fine with it or maybe you need to redirect some of those resources doing something else.

Tim:    I love it! Joe, content marketing is a bit like, business owners have been writing books for years. In that sense, content marketing is not new, so what’s changed this last, I don’t want to say months in Australia but what’s changed these last few years for content – for you to start a business called the Content Marketing institute?

Joe:    There are a couple things; first of all it starts with the consumer. The consumer, take it back in the dawn of the web right, 97, 98, 99, 2000, before social media. That’s when we really started to get all these new channels. Before that, there were like 7 major channels that you have and now, if you look at all the channels that people can engage in content and let alone just look at television today, there’s like thousands, literally thousands online, offline, network of different channels, topics that they could get to then multiply that by radio and podcast and social media and everything, it’s like you almost become overwhelmed by the number of choices. What’s happened then is that consumers, they’re not tuning out content because they’re engaging in more content than ever before but they’re being very selective. It’s harder than ever before to get our message of that display billboard type message in front of somebody because they’re going to tune you out if it’s not helpful to them right then and there. That is the biggest thing that we’ve seen and that means that the book you created years ago has to be fantastic book today and you have to build relationships with people online and offline and throughout, at least be able to look up when that message and content comes their way. It’s just a lot more difficult to go forward with it and that’s why we were talking before, content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. If you need a reaction to your marketing in the next couple of days, please for the love of God don’t invest in content marketing. Go buy yourself a paid campaign, get reaction right away, flood the market with messages, it’s going to cost you a lot of money to do it but go with it however you can but if you have the time and you want to build relationships over time with those people and you can do it the right way and then become their, I guess get on their selected channel list of the type of content they engage with. Let’s say you’re going to do an eNews letter. There’s a million spam eNews letters that your customers are going to delete a day or not even pay attention to, how do you become the one that they actually open? It’s got to be pretty darn good stuff. That’s the difference there.

Tim:    I’m seeing, what I’ve observed doing this podcast now for three and a half years, just in the last six months, the amount of colleagues and friends of friends who are starting to get podcast out there, the amount of people I know who are now publishing a book, like a real book, hard copy book, hard cover book, the amount of blogs that are starting, the amount of people opening up forums, whatever it might be. It’s increasing in a rapid rate hence clearly content marketing it’s the new blank Joe and what I’m noticing is that the quality just isn’t there.

Joe:    No, to that point you’re exactly right and we can probably talk about quality forever but there are two things – one is this whole thing that’s going on with the consumer but the other thing is there are no barriers to entry in publishing anymore. I mean I’ve been in publishing for 13 years, when I started in the business in 2000; it was still quite pricey to figure out your circulation development, if you’re going to publish with let’s say print and all the production that goes in to that, the editorial and the design and the distribution and everything, it’s very, very costly. Well today, it costs literally nothing to produce a piece on content and get that publicize in some way. To your point, that means that we don’t necessarily book companies, don’t put the time and energy to make sure that it’s an epic piece of content and it just trash, it’s stuff that’s not going to get through, it’s not going to help your business, it’s not going to help the customer and so we got a lot of horrible content out there and it’s getting in the way of the good content trying to get through.

Tim:    Yeah big time. One of the things I say to clients and listeners Joe is that I’m going back a step, one of the observations I make of small businesses in regards to content is that they think it’s going to be a Hollywood production. If I’m going to do a video, it’s got to be a Hollywood production, if I’m going to do a podcast, what’s the best mic to get? If I’m going to write a book, it’s like “I don’t want to do that” and they get caught up in what I call the Hollywood production syndrome versus the quality of the content, I think there’s a balance, do you agree? If so, where do you see that balance living between production and quality content?

Joe:    I think it actually depends on the medium in my opinion. First of all, it’s almost a no-brainer, it has to be good and interesting and helpful content. I mean a lot, so you have to start there. If you have good content then just look at how good the quality has to be and I think if you look at what’s popular on YouTube, I think what we found is that actually sub-standard video passes in a lot of cases. What doesn’t pass has to be good audio.

Tim:    Correct

Joe:    They become frustrated if they can’t hear something so if you’re going to invest in something, well I say make sure that your audio first because video is secondary even when it comes to a video. People don’t understand kind of how that works. If you’re looking at book production, you can say “maybe create space on amazon is okay and I don’t have to take a step up which might be lighting source or something or actually producing it with the traditional book publisher” which is actually an option but not taken up by as many as it used to in the past. I guess the first thing is figure out what that story is, what that message is and then you can figure out and you can always test and go. Once you start with your content strategy, you can evolve it everyday, every second of the day once you get that feedback. Put something out there, doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s never going to be perfect, get that feedback and then figure out where you need to adapt.

Tim:    So true, now at this point in time and by the way listeners, I’m speaking to Joe Pulizzi who is the founder of the contentmarketinginstitute.com, go and have a look at it because it is a very, very good source of content if you’re looking at content marketing. Joe, listeners at this point in time are going, even before this interview if they’re a long time listening to this show they’re probably going “I got to get a blog, I got to get a podcast. I’m going to get a podcast and I’m an accountant and I’m going to interview people and express my opinions via podcast about creating financial wealth for people who earn over $100,000 and that’s my editorial mission and I’m right there” and then they go “but what if I give all my knowledge away, all my IP away” can you give too much away Joe?

Joe:    Some people will disagree with me but I haven’t talked to too many companies that would give the fire, you know, it’s not that I don’t believe it’s an issue. Obviously if you have some things that are illegal in your company, however your big your company is, please for the love of God don’t share this. Hey I get this, don’t share it but it’s usually not a legal issue. This is mutually we think that we have a process that is so unique, we have a product that’s so unique and I think the truth is that no you don’t. You don’t have anything that’s more special than anyone else. I mean I’m a big fan of Don Schultz; Don Schultz is the author of Integrated Marketing Communications, I’ve always been a great fan of his and he’s been saying this for 20 years – a competitor can literally copy every thing that we have and you know what, they probably know all about us. They already know our secrets so all the things that we think are secrets, they already now it. The only way that we can differentiate ourselves is on the way we communicate and I completely by into that. So, how we communicate can be the competitive difference and I’ll throw this out as well because I just did a speech for a bunch of consultants, who were the worst by the way. They think in the consulting business, they always think they have some proprietary process and when I always say this “look, if you don’t give this thing away, somebody else is going to and they’re going to get all that attention” so let’s say that you do it. You start getting more attention, more people start following you, and you really start positioning yourself well and oh my goodness, one of those people actually takes that tip and uses it for themselves and you know what you say? You say thank you because that’s business you don’t want.

Tim:    Yup, yup!

Joe:    What kind of business, you don’t want to do it yourself. What you want is somebody that comes to you and says “oh my goodness, this is an amazing answer. I want to follow this expert wherever they go and I can’t do this or I don’t want to do this myself because I’m not good at it and I’m going to hire them to do it.” That’s the way to do it.

Tim:    I completely agree with what you said there Joe and I think it comes down to the end of the day, people buy from people. I said it before, if you listen to everyone of my podcast, if you listen to everyone of my blogs and if you’ve been to a few of my keynotes, you don’t need me but people still employ me, you know?

Joe:    That’s very true, well I think that’s one good thing that we’ve seen that’s happened with social media too is because you’ve gotten closer to people than ever before. We can actually respond and talk to literally everyone and if you’ve got LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter or whatever, it’s pretty incredible and we have that opportunity to build that expertise and if you don’t give away really helpful content…

 

Tim:    We lost you there for a minute, Joe are you there?

Joe:    Yeah I’m still here

Tim:    Oh it must be me. Joe this is a kind of a general question because clearly the listeners of my show are from all sorts of industries but I’m really keen for them to get an understanding what are some of the easiest forms of content marketing and what are some of the more popular forms of content marketing? General question I know but what do you got there?

Joe:    I wouldn’t say the easiest, maybe you can make a case for I think for a small business, the most effective tool to use in my opinion would be the blog. I mean a blog is just a tool, it’s not a strategy but it integrates really well with search, it integrates really well with social media. There’s all kinds of templates out there to help you today, doesn’t cost a lot to get going and you can integrate video, slide share, podcast, anything into the blog. So, you really need a platform or you need a magnet sometimes, a lot of people call it the hub and spoke model where your hub is the blog and you have all these spokes going out, bringing people into your podcast and different social media distribution channels that you have and could be your eNews letter or your print news letter but they all funnel back into that blog and a blog is, at least according to our research, is used by 75% of the businesses out there in one way or another. Now here is the issue Tim, you look at most of those blogs, let’s say 3 out of 4 companies have a blog. If you look at IBM research they’ll say that 85% of corporate blogs have five or less post so what that means is we’re all really, really good at starting blogs but we’re horrible at continuing on. Content  marketing, the success of content marketing has most to do with consistency than almost anything else.

Tim:    Marathon not a sprint, well it’s like social media, you know how many times you go to someone’s Facebook page or Twitter and wow the last update was three months ago. Again, content marketing; let’s talk about money versus time. Content marketing is not expensive from a dollar point of view marketing strategy but there isn’t a thing as a free lunch, so what are you trading? You’re trading money for time and if you’re going to go down the path of a blog or a podcast or writing a book or an eNews letter, you’re really got to commit to it and make it part of what you do each week. You got to diarize it.

Joe:    That’s exactly right and another thing is a lot of people listening to this might say “Joe and Tim, I’m not a good story teller, I’m not a good writer, I’m not a good podcaster, whatever the case is” but I don’t want to throw out to them that it has to be you. There are a lot of very successful small businesses out there that hire in journalist, editors and other experts that help them tell that story better. That’s been done forever. People have been outsourcing like this forever. Now personally, I think you should do it yourself if you can do it because you’ll learn so much more and you can understand kind of your story especially as a business owner but if you can’t do it and you want to do an interview, let’s say Q and A email back and forth or get somebody on the phone that can help you shape that story, I’m not going to have a problem with that at all. You figure out what’s the best use of your time and resources and that makes the most sense.

Tim:    You look at some of these celebrity chef guys, do you know Jamie Oliver over at the states?

Joe:    Sure, the naked chef

Tim:    Yeah, the naked chef, now even he, for me he’s right up there. I put him right up on the top shelf. In terms of content marketing, there he is in the kitchen in front of the camera. There is someone behind the camera that he is talking to and she or he is leading the conversation with him. Even those guys, not even those guys, those guys have people who help them create content. You don’t have to do it yourself. One of the things that I suggest to my clients Joe and often when I’m giving a keynote is I suggest to people to go and print this playbook of the content marketing institute – 42 different ways of creating content marketing. Literally flick through it and stop at a page or two, every page is a different form of content marketing listeners; just choose one that resonates with you. If you see the video page and go “oh, I hate staring down the barrel of a camera” then keep flicking and you might get to another page that requires you to write or to record into a microphone or something and just choose one that resonates with you.

Joe:    That’s right; I mean you’re not going to do all of them, right?

Tim:    Not exactly

Joe:    Hopefully you put most of your time into one of them and you can integrate a lot of the other ones. Maybe the blog is your base and you can leverage social media off of that, I mean that’s, look at Gary Vaynerchuk, I mean he did the whole thing on his video shows. He didn’t do, I mean he wasn’t typing a lot. He was just getting in front of that camera and doing his thing. You’re doing a podcast, I tend to like doing a blog but then we integrate a lot into that blog like I love slide share, I love integrating video into the blog but the blog becomes a centrepiece. Figure out where you feel the most comfortable because what’s great about today is there are so many choices and there are no barriers to entry. You can pick your poison as long as you understand what your strategy is first.

Tim:    Give me an example Joe, you’ve mentioned slide share a few times, it’s on the social media radar in Australia and I know my audience is global, let’s go through an example – you write a blog post, call it 300-400 word blog post, do you then have someone turn that into a slide that can PowerPoint and upload to slide share and embed that into the blog?

Joe:    Actually I’ll give you an example because it just happens so we have one of our guest writers, Roger Parker wrote a fantastic post on the 12 months of slide share and it was an incredibly successful, shared all over the internet and we’re like “wow this would actually be a really good slide share post for that” so what we’re doing is we take those 12 months and we create a highly visual, cut that blog post down into more bullet point type scenarios with headlines and really heavy calls to action for what they need to do. 12 slides, we’re working on it now. It will be up in a couple of days and then we’ll put that on slide share for additional distribution and link that back again to the blog post. For those people that don’t know, slide share is the YouTube for PowerPoint presentations. It’s the easiest way to think about it but what’s amazing is there are 80-85 million people every month going to slide share. People are actively looking for slide shows; I know you people are like “are you kidding me?” yes absolutely. The other thing is slide share gets a lot of traction and a lot of ranking with Google. If you don’t have a lot of credibility in Google, you could actually put something on slide share and I call it backdoor search results so if you can’t get them yourself, you can actually put a slide show, slide presentation, something educational or helpful on slide share and then you could actually get found that way and then backdoor that into your website.

Tim:    It’s funny, the slide share thing, part of me loves it and I’ve got a lot of slide sitting on my Macbook and drop box but those slides of mine are really, they rely on me to be speaking to them, you know, because a lot of my slides are either a picture or one word, two words, three words so how do you flip that? Do you have to then design the slides so that they live and die by their own swords?

Joe:    Look I’m like you too. When I go out and do a presentation, if somebody says “Joe can I have your presentation?” I’ll put that on my personal slide share so they can get that presentation and now you’re absolutely right. Half of my slides are picture only, it makes no sense to anyone but on our CMI, our corporate slide share page, we’re very deliberate about how we’re going to put that up there. We got to make sure that every slide that’s up there tells a story in and of itself. So, if I’m you, I’m going to say “look, this 40 slide presentation that I gave at the university, that’s not going to work. I’m going to cut this down to 15-20 and I’m going to tell a story around that” so it might take an extra hour to two hours of work but it’s all worth it because that all then tell the story for you and they don’t necessarily have to have you there.

Tim:    Right, so you’re actually, all of a sudden you’re not creating a slide deck for a key note. You’re creating a slide deck for slide share that tells the story within the boundaries of each slide.

Joe:    Exactly and I would probably separate it. I would probably say that the presentations that you do with PowerPoint or keynote had nothing to do with slide share. I would look at slide share more like YouTube, more like you’re going to tell a story in this channel, think about it that way and it’s driven home a ton of business for us directly and I think slide share is a sleeping giant. It’s owned by LinkedIn so if you’re looking at what’s the next, what’s the new channel that I need to be driving into, I would look at slide share now.

 

Tim:    Yeah I agree. It’s been around a while and it’s kind of on that secondary ride for me but it is a good one. Joe, question on the spot, does any small business come to mind for you right now? When I say small, bricks and mortar type business, a vet, a dentist, a chiropractor who is just using content marketing so beautifully

Joe:    Well I mean, I can give you a couple of different kinds of it. If you go to conditionedair.com – conditionedair.com, very simply this is nothing outlandish. She started a blog back in 2010, Theo Axel is the owner of that, I’m sorry it’s a heating and air conditioning company, they install heating and air conditioning units for their businesses and consumers and was doing a really good job branding and everything else and said “look what’s this whole social media thing?” and we talked about the idea that you really need to have a message, a story. What Theo did is twice a week, created a helpful post about how you can save energy in South of Florida, when you need to change your filters and why, what’s a programmable thermostat and did all of that and you know, about 6-9 months because when you first start a blog you get radio silence, it takes a while but once you get going and now she sees thousands of people that are coming to her site that never would have been there before. He gets thousands of people saying “hey I want more input from you” they filled in their contact forms and they’re getting there because they’re typing in things in Google and they’re seeing content on social media about helpful tips around HVAC and if they weren’t creating that original blog content, they’d never get to that site at all.

Tim:    Just digging deeper on that because I get that, that’s just a smart example of a small business, heating and air-conditioning business, creating really useful content for their prospects to find and if they find it they consume it then they go “aha! These guys know a lot about heating and air-conditioning, I trust them. I’m going to inquire, I’m going to ring them, I’m going to email them, I’m going to walk into their shop” I get that, are they doing anything below that in terms of search engine optimization, getting the meta data right, getting the page description, the URL because at that point, that’s where I could see a lot of small business owners “okay that is now too hard”

Joe:    Well I think yes and no, but I mean from that example I would use us. Let me give you an example with just my business because I think it has a good story. 2007 it was just me. It was just me blogging everyday, blogging about what I thought was important around our business objectives and around what the customer wanted and I was proofing, I was doing the whole thing myself. Now today, when I do a blog post which is I don’t blog everyday. Now I blog once a week because you can change your velocity once you get to a certain point so I blog once a week and that blog goes to our editorial manager. She reads it over, she edits that, that goes to a proof reader and they make sure that is looking good on WordPress then we have an SEO person that looks at that and makes sure is that title is the right title, is the meta data all right, all those things and by the way, those are all outsourced functions. There are people that don’t necessarily work for us but they all do their part and we’re a small business. There are not many businesses out there that couldn’t afford kind of what we’re looking at. It’s just that if you look at the process in what you’re good in and what you’re not good at, fill in the gaps with talent that’s available right now that you can find and it’s really, really worked for us. Our search engine traction right now is up about 20% every month, month in and month out just because we’re doing those little things with content now.

Tim:    I love that. It plays into my whole concept I talked about with surrounding yourself with a virtual marketing team and the world of outsourcing, anyone listening to this, it’s not about finding someone in the same suburb, the same city, the same state, even the same country. It’s about finding A-players somewhere around the world and that process that you just described plays into that Joe. That leads into my almost my last question, you’ve got this whole, at the moment listeners are going “yeah I get it, I love it, I’m excited, I want to become a content marketer, I want to stop some of my advertising down and put it into content marketing but time, time is just…” to me it’s an excuse, you got to find either you do it or you don’t but any tips on how you make content marketing a comfortable part of what is already a busy week for small business owner?

Joe:    I, you know, you and I we both run into this question all the time and unfortunately I can talk until I’m blue in the face and somebody doesn’t get it until they see something positive happen. They actually need to see it working and the problem is a lot of people get into it and two or three moths they’ll say “we haven’t seen anything” and they’re done, they’re like “I don’t know, this doesn’t work for me” they just didn’t give it an ample amount of time. I always say you got to start a little pilot program. You got to commit to the program for at least 6 months. Just like a television show has a pilot, you need to do a pilot too. You have to say “here’s our goals, here’s what we’re going to do, here’s the strategy and we’re going to consistently do this over 6 months and here’s the matrix we’re going to follow” and if you do that, you will see results but the problem is most people don’t get to that 6-month mark. They actually stop. From that standpoint Tim, I would just say you don’t see it coming. You might have been in an industry that maybe isn’t social media savvy or maybe you think your customers are different. This thing is coming like a freight train and you better out of fear alone be paying attention because if you’re not on this, you are going to get passed, you are not going to get found or you’re going to have to spend a ton of money doing things you don’t want to do to get attention that are not going to pay off for you in the long run. I mean I’ve never seen anything move as fast as this industry in moving. We’re about 2 years ahead of where I thought I was going to be and then moves faster every day. I just, now that more than 50% of the world has a smart phone in their pocket now. They’ve got a content device with them at all times. They have a world of answers at their hands and if you’re not there, they’re going to go somewhere else. You don’t have a choice to that.

Tim:    I so agree, I so agree. I get excited and nervous and scared when you talk like that but it’s so true and don’t miss the boat listeners and when you put in the criteria together, when you do commit to that 3-6 month content marketing strategy and when you do put that mission criteria together, it might me search engine rankings, it might be calls, whatever it is, I think one of the things I love about creating content is the fact that I can get a phone call from a prospect Joe and they might be asking me about a particular, they might be asking me about whatever form of small business marketing it is and generally I’ve now got a piece of content, whether it be a blog or a white paper or an interview or whatever it is or a video, I’ll  say “you know what, can I send you a link on an interview I did on that exact topic?” and that alone is so powerful.

Joe:    I love that, what you’ve done is you built into the nature of your organization and that’s what we’ll, I mean if you think about the way that we’re headed, this is what companies will be doing when most of what – I mean that’s why brands over here in the states, they’re hiring tons of journalist and editors, they understand that we need to be telling better stories and this is new right now but in a couple of years this wont be new anymore and it will be like “oh my gosh what the heck is happening” and I think that you’re taking the story telling mentality, the sharing mentality into your organization and we got to figure out a way to get that in there so if you are a CEO that’s listening, if you’re a CEO, if you’re an owner, you can do something about it. It starts from the top down but if you’re not, if you’re a marketing manager in a small company, then you need to focus on small wins that you can show matrix to and take them up and say “look what we’ve did”

Tim:    Yeah, this is a bit of a self centred question to finish Joe; I don’t normally do this but let’s talk podcasting. Do you like podcasting? I don’t think you guys’ podcast, why not?

Joe:    No, actually you know what, we don’t, we leverage a lot of partners that do and you know it’s funny, it’s kind of one of those things where we’ve got Andrew Davis, good friend of mine, partner with CMI, he does a lot of blogging. We have a number of other bloggers that we work with, I like to partner with, we get our expertise on their. I do a lot of blogging, not podcast like this but I think what it proves is you can be successful and you don’t need to be into everything. We don’t do a lot of videos by the way, we do very few of them. My goal right now is to make sure that our content is accessible in mobile format wherever our customers are at and that’s a lot of small business don’t think about how your content is being engaged in a mobile device but I love podcast, I think that iOS change that’s happened recently, that’s amazing what’s happened and we’ve seen this rebirth of podcast. It seems like everybody is starting to podcast. I’m sure you’ve seen it all the time.

Tim:    Big time, big time and you know I think its such a reassuring point that you’ve made which is here you are, you got the content marketing institute. It’s getting great traction in the world of content marketing and you focus on blogging with a secondary into slide share. Me, I got the number one marketing show in the country and I focus on podcasting. I’m not out there trying to do video marketing and blogging and book writing, you know, I slowly do. I mean a do blog every now and then. I do a video every now and then but it’s about doing one thing really well and not ten things poorly. Joe it has been an absolute pleasure to have you. Now you guys are coming to Australia, that’s exciting. I’m hoping to make, you’re going to have a content marketing institute is holding an event in Sydney, now podcasting is one of those kind of – people could be listening to this show in a years time but I will put in the show notes the dates and I will make comment after this interview is over unless you know the dates off the top of your head Joe that you’re going to be in Sydney.

Joe:    Well we’re going to be in Sydney March 4th, 5th and 6th and the other thing is you listen to this, after the fact we’re going to be back every March hopefully and we’re going to do it again and again because there’s a big need for content marketing in Australia.

Tim:    Absolutely and my aim is just a little goal, I wanted to be invited to speak at next years content marketing institute in Sydney.

Joe:    I think we’re going to need a session on podcasting

Tim:    I hear it! I could feel it! Absolutely, in fact we’re going to do a podcast live from stage. If you haven’t gotten one by then already, then we’re going to do the first episode of the content marketing institute’s podcast live on stage in Sydney in 2014.

Joe:    I love it. I do, put it on paper, let’s do it.

Tim:    I love it Joe. Thanks so much for sharing. It was absolute gold and contentmarketinginstitute.com is Joe’s business and he’s a good guy. Thanks Joe

Joe:    Tim I appreciate it.

Tim:    Marketing gold right there. Gosh Joe had lots to share. There are times when I just felt, I think I might have said it during the interview, I was talking to myself because there’s a lot of stuff, I’ve been sharing on my deep guide mastermind or have been talking about it in my keynotes or just thinking about it generally from the marketing of my own business. We live in exciting times, small business owners out there. We really do. There has never ever been a better time to market a small business and you just heard why. Some learning’s from Joe’s, the far side chat I had with Joe, number 1: content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’re looking for results tomorrow, don’t worry about content marketing. Go run an ad, but commit to content marketing and you will see results just like I am having been a content producer now for a number of years with my podcast and my blog. Pull not push, number 2, learning take away, pull not push means pull people towards you by showing that you know a lot of things about the industry in which you operate and you do! That’s why you’re in there. Push meaning run advertising sales-based messages. There’s a role for both but content marketing is I think a magnet, it pulls people towards you. Number 3 learning, act like a publisher – I love that. You know, take on that publisher’s mindset. What do publishers do? They publish useful, sometimes entertaining, sometimes challenging, sometimes opinionated information – again to pull people towards them. Number 4 takeaway, what’s your editorial mission? What a great question. What is your editorial mission? If you can identify that, as I said mine is small business marketing tips and tricks, that’s my editorial mission. Everything I create is all about helping you build a better marketing strategy to grow your business. So what’s your editorial mission? Whack in the show notes if you know what it is. I’d love to hear it and number 5 takeaway, looks like slide share is a bit of a sleeping giant – one of those social media channels that’s just kind of on my secondary level. I upload some of my slide decks there but I don’t spent a lot of time on slide share. I think I should. It’s a bit like pinterest, sleeping giants we need to be there guys. More kind of time, I know, maybe it’s time you got a VA but you need, we need to be aware of these things, that’s why small business big marketing is here to draw them to your attention. We don’t need to be on all social media channels, don’t get me wrong but it’s good to be aware of them. So, there are five key takeaways from my chat with Joe, what are yours? I’d live to hear them. Go to the show notes at smallbusinessbigmarketing.com and look for episode 125 and leave me your thoughts. I would love to know them.

 

 

 

 

 

#123 Funny Business 5 – Goofing Off, Doing Business in Cafes and How to Overcome Setbacks

Tim:                Today on the show, episode 123 of Small Business Big Marketing, I go head-to-head with my old buddy, our old buddy, Andrew Griffiths, the most published small business author in Australia, mind you, with 11 books under his belt, soon to be 12, although, he won’t tell us what that 12^th book is. I kind of have a little bit of inside information but I’m not going to share it with you because it’s a secret. He’s going to launch it soon. But on Funny Business, we always get together sort of once every four or five weeks or so and belt out a few wishes that we feel are relevant to you and your business in order to make business a little bit more fun. That is the intent. After the episode of Funny Business, which I am just about to roll, I am going to comment on an email I received from listener, Gino, long-time listener, Gino, in which he comments on last week’s episode 122 in which I interviewed Jonathan Krywicki from Pitch and Woo, a start-up that is going to go places. Amongst other comments Gino makes in his email, he says, “At times, I feel there’s a lot of talking about the individual which has very little to do with marketing.” Hmmm. Well, I’ll make comment on that and the rest of Gino’s email after this episode of Funny Business. So let’s wander down the passageway and into the Funny Business studio where Griffo is waiting. See you on the other side.

Andrew Griffiths, welcome back to Funny Business.

Andrew:         Good. I’m good. I was going to say good afternoon, good morning, good evening, all of the above, Timbo.

Tim:                Great. It is lovely to have you on board and fifth episode of Funny Business. We have quite a bit to cover. We are going to talk goofing off time. Are you allowed to do it as a small business owner? We are going to talk about … we’re going to ask ourselves the question, can you give away too much? We are going to talk about overcoming business setbacks of which you have had a couple of recent weeks; one which is particularly funny. How far go with that one, I don’t know, but we’ll see what Doris has to say. Now, we’ve got to dig ourselves out of that because people have no idea what we’re saying, but we’ll go with that. Griffo?

Andrew:         Yes?

Tim:                I’ve had a busy day today. I just came back from a two-hour meeting in a cafe and, I don’t know, I think we might have had a chat offline about this at some point in the last 12 months. But what do you think about doing business in cafes?

Andrew:         Oh, I love it. Personally, I’m a major addict of doing business in cafes. I think there’s something about it that you just … you think a little bit differently.

Tim:                You’re serious, huh? I thought you were as against it as I was.

Andrew:         No, not at all. I do most of my businesses done in cafes these days and it has been for about four or five years.

Tim:                Right. Because you are a bit of a road warrior, you are travelling all the time so it’s not as if you can say, “Come back to my mahogany tiled office.” Sometimes we’re forced to do business in cafes. Why do you love it?

Andrew:         Well, yes, it’s really because I’m a road warrior is number one. But the main reason, of course, is the fact that I’m too tight to pay for an office. (Laughs)

Tim:                <inaudible> *0:04:59

Andrew:         Well, I had the office. I’ve had lots of people. I’ve done all that kind of stuff. And I’ve got to say, I just love being in a really nice cafe, it’s nice and relaxed, people are on a different head space, you can have better conversations. I find doing business in a coffee shop is more enjoyable for me and I think it’s more enjoyable for people generally. I mean, there are things that I certainly wouldn’t talk about in a coffee shop and I have venues that I use when I need to if it’s a bit more confidential and I get all that kind of stuff. But, generally, when you’re catching up, when you’re doing updates, when you’re having your marketing meeting, whatever you’re doing, honestly, I think they’re the most wonderful venues. You don’t seem sold by the sound of things.

Tim:                Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. I’ll tell you why in a minute. Just tell me – do you then … are you happy to do business in any type of cafe or do you go, “Huh, we’re going to have a business meeting in a cafe. Choose wisely.

Andrew:         I always choose wisely and I always have a bit of a reason. I tend to have my favourites in a city. There’s a place where I will go back to, and I like the fact that there are certain coffee shops where you can have a bit more privacy and be a little bit quieter than have the music blaring, all those kind of things. Did I tell you about a coffee shop I went to in the states? We talked about this on the show.

Tim:                No.

Andrew:         Sorry. It was really interesting. Last time I was there, a mate of mine who I was doing some work with in Arizona said, “We’ll go hang all day at the coffee shop.” And I went, “All day?”

Tim:                All day? Is there a water slide there?

Andrew:         Even I’ve got my limits. We’ve gone to this enormous coffee shop. It really was a coffee factory I think is what you’d call it. But what was really interesting was in one part of this place, they’ve actually set it up for entrepreneurs and business people to work –

Tim:                There it is. That is exactly what I’m talking about. That’s what I want to see.

Andrew:         And you know what, mate? Okay, so what makes this unique, you have your own toilets, which was just – and it’s a little area that said this is for people who run their business, entrepreneurs, small business owners – I should have taken a photo – that work out here basically is what it said.

Tim:                The toilets have little platforms for your laptop?

Andrew:         (Laughs) Well, just about. Interesting. There were clocks in the toilets so you could keep track of time.

Tim:                You say clocks?

Andrew:         Yeah, clocks. A lot of people don’t wear watches. Keep it clean. There were – you’ve got free wifi. You got high speed wifi. If you’re an entrepreneur in there, they give you a different code. You get discounts. They gave you a card when you came in so if you’re there for the whole day, you get specials on meals. They have photocopying stuff that they can use, all of these extra bits and pieces that you didn’t pay for, they were just services that encourage people to go and spend the day there. You can plug in your laptop and all your gear at the table. It was fascinating. And we were there for 12 hours doing business. I got to tell you, it’s a gruelling day, and you just watch people come and go all day long.

Tim:                You would have knocked back a couple of … what are we talking … almond croissants, vanilla slice, a couple of burgers in there? It’s 12 hours.

Andrew:         That was the first day, and it’s America so it’s all low-cal and light.

Tim:                Yeah, yeah, yeah. Small serves.

Andrew:         I would have been like a Chihuahua with the amount of coffee that I drank at the end of the day. I was wired.

Tim:                Oh, god.

Andrew:         So many people are like that.

Tim:                Pick up Mr. Griffiths. Pick up Mr. Griffiths. Where do they put red horses next?

Andrew:         <inaudible> *0:08:27, mate.           Thank you. You’re filled with Levingtons. (Laughs) But how long ‘til we start to see places like that happening in Australia, which I know we’ve got some hubs and things like that which are fabulous. And I’ve been to the one in Melbourne which I just thought was fabulous. I forget the name of it now but, you know, there are central entrepreneurial kind of places but I think coffee shops are there catering for people that have … I mean, we’re just kind of getting coffee shops that are offering wifi, well, men, there are so much more you can do than that. And in this entrepreneurial place in this big coffee factory in America, it was chockers, absolutely chockers with people. Isn’t that interesting, hey? So –

Tim:                Well, there you go. That’s exactly … I would be convinced of doing business in a cafe like that as a good idea. I think I might have even talked about it on a Small Business Big Marketing episode previously where it’s kind of the idea is to have a Qantas club or, you know, like airline club that makes your home office, and it’s like then that works. But, you know, for me, doing business in a cafe, just any cafe like I’ve just done, I had the bloody sun shining in my eyes, there was music blaring, the tables were too close next to me, the chairs over the course of two hours got a bit of a sore buttock, the left cheek went to sleep. Man, it’s too much information, but it was the reality, you know. Have you tried to do business with pins and needles in your left buttock?

Andrew:         Well, you know, it’s a battle wound of the modern day office these days, you know, pins and needles in the left buttock, paper cuts, stress caused by flat batteries. It is a war zone out there. That’s all we can say.

Tim:                Anyway, enough of that. If there is an entrepreneurial cafe owner listening, then just set it up and Griff and I will be your first two customers. Make sure you got <inaudible> *0:10:16 at the front we can hold on as we walk in because we’ll be there for extended periods of time.

Andrew:         But it’s actually a good point you made, though. If someone’s going to come and do business in your cafe, you’d think, “Oh, well, they’re just going to take up space.” Who really wants that? But the reality is – and I have got a cafe in town here where I live, and I’ll often spend all day there seeing different people and I just run a tab all day. It’s nothing for me to spend $200 by the end of the day with various meetings <inaudible> *0:10:44. But I do think it’s so important that everyone has – that is quiet, that you’ve got wifi and that it’s comfortable. So you’ve got to have kind of comfy chairs for exactly the reason we spoke about. So we’ll see more of them, I think.

Tim:                And a couple of pinnies, a couple of pinning machines, pinball machines.

Andrew:         Great idea. Yeah, that’s just what we need for a trip down memory lane.

Tim:                Correct. (Laughs)  Griffo, let’s digress. Let’s talk about this idea of how … how do you overcome business setbacks? You have had, in the last, I’m thinking, two or three weeks, a natural disaster up in <inaudible> *0:11:22 where you live. You’ve had some floods. And then last week, when we were about to record Funny Business, you ring me and say, “Timbo, I’ve lost my bags. The taxi has driven off with my bags. I can’t record.”

Andrew:         And how strange was that? I mean, let’s be honest. That’s not the most significant of issues to have face on but I was simply swapping hotels, going from one hotel to another, and the hotel where I was leaving from said, “I will put your bags in a taxi, and when you get there, when you finish your business and get there, the bags will have arrived.” And, of course, what became a little disconcerting, though, was that eight hours later when I got to the hotel, my bags weren’t there.

Tim:                That’s incredibly trusting. I know you are a trusting fellow but I don’t know … I wouldn’t let my bags go in a taxi. I don’t trust them.

Andrew:         Well, I am a trusting … I mean, when’s a taxi driver ever been dishonest?

Tim:                Exactly. Exactly. Hello, all you taxi drivers.

Andrew:         It’s just – But it was quite interesting, that funny thing. But the flood were far more significant. I mean, <inaudible> *0:12:24 where I lived, we didn’t get flooded but we did have the ramifications of no Internet connection and no … nothing … no phone lines for about 36 hours. Now, that was quite phenomenal because, I mean, normally, we’re used to the power going out because there’s a cyclone, we’re used to Internet going down because there’s a cyclone. We’re used to those kinds of things. But something always worked. You can always kind of always ring someone or <inaudible> *0:12:47 for a few hours. To be without any connection to the outside world for a few hours, for that long, 36 hours, whatever it was, was quite phenomenal. I had a webinar booked and I couldn’t ring anyone to say I can’t do it because I couldn’t get on to a phone, I couldn’t get on to the Internet, I couldn’t do anything. So people just think, “Well, you just slept in” or whatever the case may be. But there were other things I think … natural disasters is such a part of Australia. Look at part of the world now, look at America, the snowstorms that are going, all these crazy things that are happening. But other setbacks in business to me are things like what do you do when you lose a big client? We’ve all experienced that. We’ve lost our biggest customer and it’s like, “Oh, god. What do we do?”

Tim:                I think this discussion – because we could talk about, well, what are the steps you take when you lose a client – this discussion is not about that. To me, it’s a mindset thing because you lose your bags last week in Sydney, that’s a reason to raise your hands up and go, “OMG!” And different people handle situations differently. Another person might have completely lost the plug and go on, you know, cancel all meetings. I’m going home, crawling to the corner, fetal position, sucking their thumb. But it’s like you’ve got to look … I guess it’s all about looking at … okay, where’s the positive in this? Where’s the positive in losing all my luggage?

Andrew:         It is, and it’s all a matter of perspective. I do believe that I think anyone who’s been in  business for any amount of time, you’ve had power ups and power downs and you’ve either learned to cope with that kind of stuff or you’ve had a nervous breakdown because that’s just the nature of doing business. I think that it is about choosing the way that we react to those things more than anything else. I mean, we lose a big client, well, the problem that I see is not so much someone losing a big client; it’s the fact that they almost slide into depression because they don’t do anything about it. Yeah, we got to be upset and we got to be even grumpy about it. We got to wonder around and kick the door and, you know, be whatever it is that we got to be grumpy, you know, however that looks for us as individuals. But the key is you just got to get on with it. It’s like overcoming a natural disaster or fire or flood or whatever. I think we have to be upset about it initially but then I think we’ve got to say, “Okay, now I just got to get on with it.” And I think my goal in life has always been to make the upset period last for the shortest possible amount of time I can make it last.

Tim:                Yeah, I agree. Also, when I hear conversations like the one we are having, there are people out there who do really take setbacks really hard, you know, like they’re real … even the smallest of setbacks. So it is a hard thing but you’ve almost got to – even before that happens – as small business owners, we’ve got to acknowledge that, “Hey, buck stops with me. It’s my business. Enjoy the good times and know that there will be tough times ahead.” And almost be prepared like an athlete would in a race.

Andrew:         Absolutely.

Tim:                Imagine it. What does it look like? What does it look like when I lose my biggest client? What does it look like when my luggage gets lost? I’m kind of getting a bit woo-woo on you but, like, feel that so that when it does happen, it’s not a new experience.

Andrew:         You have to use the force, Timbo. That’s the only way to respond.

Tim:                Ah, the force. Thanks, Yoda.

Andrew:         (Laughs) But you’re exactly right because I think, for me as a communications marketing kind of guy, if I have a new client coming aboard and I’m doing PR for them, for example, in the past, the first thing I do is sit down with them so what are all the worst things that could possibly happen to this business? Let’s start with the worst priority. It’s normally someone gets killed or – I’m working with a shipping company at the moment – a boat runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef would be the worst possible thing you can have happen. So you list all those things and we pre-empt, we’ve written all the press releases for all those scenarios. I mean, you can say doom and gloom but you’ve actually done exactly what you said. Okay, let’s imagine – no one would like to – but let’s imagine one of the vessels has ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef and some people have been killed and the reef is damaged. That’s the worst possible scenario. How are we going to manage that? What are we going to do? How are we going to survive as a company and have those discussions? Who are we going to call? What are we going to do? And it’s really interesting when you do that even at a smaller scale. Say, my little business, if I lost all my computers and everything, you got home and the place had been burgled and I’ve lost everything, it’d be horrible but what would I do? Okay, if you actually got a little bit of a plan of attack for all those worst case scenarios, somehow they’re not quite as scary because, well, okay, I got home and the place has been robbed. Well, I know what I’m going to do because I’ve got my plan of attack. I’ve thought it through. And I think when you think things through like that, it takes a lot of the fear of them happening away from you. And I believe it’s very powerful. I think it’s a very smart thing for business owners to do.

Tim:                Yeah, yeah. Do it before it happens. Absolutely, Griffo. Now, mate, you wrote an e-book, actually, on how to deal with natural disasters as you would, a common e-book. But well done for getting it out so quickly during the times of the floods in Australia and everything that was going on. I’m in the process of putting together an e-book on something. I’ve got a client putting one together. A client asked me the other day, “How much do I actually give away? Like, you know, there’s a lot of good content here.” And I hear this question a lot, particularly as content marketing, particularly is this ability for small business owners to put together a podcast, to write a book, to put together a forum, whatever it might be, do some videos. Okay, so you want me to share my knowledge but how much do you want me to share? When is too much? When is too much enough, you know? What are your thoughts on that? Is there a line or do you just keep giving?

Andrew:         I don’t know. For me, I think, everyone is different, Timbo. I know that you’re a very generous bloke. You give away a lot of your information. And I think, for many of us who has a little bit of gray hair, that’s also been the way that we’ve done business. I don’t know. My view is, personally, that I have always given away all of my information, whether be in books, whether be in presentations, whether be in articles, interviews, whatever. I don’t really hold back anything and I’ve never really worried about that because I kind of don’t look at knowledge or information as something that you have unlimited supplies. Personally, I look at it, well, that information I’ve given away, if other people used it, well, that’s great because there’ll be some more coming or there’ll be more stuff that I create. I mean, all my books, I’ve done 2,000 articles, which I don’t think my brain’s got any more information than that. It’s already out. There’s nothing left in there. It’s rattling around.

Tim:                You and I are similar. I mean, I actually say to people when I’m talking in the sense like, you know what? You wouldn’t really need me to speak here at your conference or where I am. All you need to do is listen to my podcast, read my blog and you pretty much know everything I know about marketing. But I think there’s an aspect of it – it’s just a human aspect – which is people want to deal with people. They don’t want to just listen to a podcast or just read a book.

Andrew:         Exactly. Well, if you take the example, Tim, that someone could learn how to podcast, they can go online, they can figure it out, they can do a Google search <inaudible> *0:20:12 or they can go to someone like you who teaches them how to do it from A to Z … a bit of Americanism. I’m just trying to –

Tim:                You are an international fellow, Griffo.

Andrew:         But if you look at it, that’s the same thing, isn’t it? I mean, I get asked all the time to present on topics where the easiest thing for me to do is exactly like yourself, say it in the book. Buy the freaking book and it’ll save you time. But that’s why a book is such a great marketing tool because, even when you wrote them, you still go to people that want you. And you’re right; it’s that human connection. So when you’re in that situation, you’re presenting and all the rest of it, you’ve got all this information, I personally find that if you’re kind of holding back, it sometimes can lack a little bit of integrity, a bit of alignment. My view is 100%  you give them as much as you’ve got and just be open to the fact that there’ll be more information coming and people will only use you more when you’re generous with the information that you give. Even sometimes if you’re not directly really going to make your return … I get freaking hundreds of emails, I’m sure like yourself, every week asking for information, can you give me some advice, can you teach me about whatever it might be, you try and get back to everyone as much as you can. There’s no money into this. No one’s paying you to do it but it’s just kind of people inquiring. But I think it’s a good thing to do. I think it’s a – dare I say – it’s good karma to share. That’s, again, my take.

Tim:                I think there’s a lot – I agree. Yeah, I agree. There’s probably a lot of business owners who aren’t even aware of this whole concept of sharing the knowledge and they’re still – you know, I say, there’s just a lot of them still pushing out information, running ads, doing letterbox drops, and it’s full of what I’d call advertising copy, you know, almost like, it’s kind of like just teasing, you know, like, “I know a lot about this. Here’s my services.” But why don’t you … I love that quote: “Don’t tell me you’re funny. Tell me a joke,” you know?

Andrew:         Yeah, I agree. I agree. That’s clever, very, very clever.

Tim:                Thank you for that. That’s clever. In fact, I was going to … if you don’t mind, I’ll use the headline for this actual episode, “Just Buy the Freaking Book!” <inaudible> *0:22:23 that was the main point from this episode. Love it.

Andrew:         If I can add one more thing to that, though –

Tim:                Why not?

Andrew:         I do think that any business that has a spirit of generosity, by that I mean whether you’re generous in business, whether you’re generous as a solo entrepreneur, generous with your time, generous with your information, I believe that does come back to you. And I’ve seen some examples of people that are generous on every level coming back to them. I’ve seen far more examples of many businesses that have gone broke because they’re just so mean. You’ve got poverty mentality, they don’t give away anything, they don’t treat staff well, they don’t treat their customers well. It’s all about every cent is a prisoner. And sometimes I understand, we all get into that mode, but we shouldn’t. I think one of the greatest ways to grow a really successful business is to be generous in whatever shape or form you can be. Some people will go, “Andrew, that’s a bit freaking <inaudible> *0:23:24 and a big kumbaya-ish.” But my experience over 30 years of doing business is exactly that.

Tim:                I wonder what the big guys’ take on that would be, you know, like – I was going to say Carrie Parker but he’s no longer with us – but, you know, like a Lindsey Fox or a Donald Trump. What would they respond to that, you know? They’re giving people.

Andrew:         Well, it’s a good question, but there are other ways of measuring success too, like, of course, you know, cliché, I think it was Henry Ford, wasn’t it, who said before your business makes its money, it’s not much of a business. I agree with that entirely as well, and you look at people, even Donald Trump, apart from spending a lot of money on hairdressers, the reality is he’s a very generous guy, amazingly generous guy.

Tim:                Is he?

Andrew:         Yeah, absolutely. But you wouldn’t ever know that. I think from the outward image that he portrays as this tough-ass kind of business guy, he’s a <inaudible> *0:24:22. You look at Warren Buffett. He’s got to be a prime example, Bill Gates, all those kind of folks. I’m not saying just giving is the answer to everything but I think it’s part of the answer.

Tim:                You don’t go to Trump’s hairdresser, do you?

Andrew:         (Laughs)

Tim:                It’s just something that occurred to me. I don’t know.

Andrew:         You’re funny, aren’t you? Hey, funny, big fella! Funny, funny, funny!

Tim:                Well, you’re not answering the question. You’re just kind of deflecting it so I’ll take it as a yes.

Andrew:         I go to America for secret business trips. That’s all I’m going to say. Next question.

Tim:                (Laughs)

Andrew:         Speaking of which, I’m going to lead into the next question here because I’m getting nervous now. As a small business owner, this is something that you’ve raised a number of times, and you’re just way too serious so I’ve got to ask you this question. Okay, as a small business owner, is it okay to allow yourself some goofing off time? What’s your view? What’s your take?

Tim:                Well, my answer is damn right, you should have goofing off time, but don’t look to me as an example of that because, it’s funny, you know, like I have ran my own business now for … could be going on eight years and, apart from that, I had about 20 years working in corporate Australia and, you know, 9:00 to 5:00 or 7:00 ‘til 8:00. But I have found it hard to lose that mentality. I love the fact that I can go and, you know, if I want to go for coffee or if I want to do … do want to goof off, there’s no one I have to tell. I don’t have to look behind my back and wonder whether they’re waiting for me when I get back, all that type of stuff. But even when I do goof off, in the back of my head, I’ve got, “Oh, what have I got on? What have I got on? I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do that.” But, yeah, damn right, I think everyone should have some down time.

Andrew:         And what does goofing off mean to you, though?

Tim:                It means not working.

Andrew:         Just not working. Is it like recharging? Is it kind of doing something completely – go for a ride on your bike?

Tim:                Do you know what I need as of today – because I had a very dear friend come around this morning, Griffo, and give me a bit of diary coaching, a bit of calendar coaching – and I have been stuffing around with calendars. At the start of this year, I went and bought a beautiful mole skin diary <inaudible> *0:26:55 going back to paper diaries. I’ve got the Google diary on my iPhone, I’ve got this and I just could not settle on one. Ben, my mate, Ben, calendar coach, came around this morning and I have got a colour-coded Google calendar now. And there is one calendar called Timbo time, and that is made up of might be going to the gym. It might be going out, grabbing a coffee. It might be picking the kids up from school and going out and grabbing a bit of afternoon tea. It’s just not work stuff. Now, what do you reckon, Griffo? Is it okay to goof off?

Andrew:         Absolutely. I think that’s one of the greatest joys of being in your own business is to … I think the secret, though – and you’ve touched on it without a doubt and we talked about it – is to be able to goof off without feeling guilty, and that’s the toughest part when we all feel like, oh, we should be this, we should be doing that, should be doing this, should … and these days, I don’t have any guilt at all. I’ve gone way beyond the guilt stage. If I’m going to goof off, that’s it. I’ve gone fishing. I’m by the pool. I’ve just made the call. That’s it. I’ve had enough today. And I just find that if I don’t do that – I don’t know about you but I find that when I’m sitting at my desk and I’ve done nothing for the last hour and I’m down to the Super Bowl commercials on YouTube and convincing myself that this is somehow something to do with work, that it’s time to go, “You know what? It’s time to have a break.” And I found that the more I have a break every hour, the more I take ten minutes off, 15 minutes off, whatever it might be, just stretch, go to the loo, have a drink, whatever, I get far more done anyway. I think you got to do it.

Tim:                I’m going to be the devil’s advocate again because, again, you and I aren’t necessarily representative of – well, we’re not representative of all small business owners. Okay, you and I, service-based businesses. We’ve got enough business to well and truly keep ourselves busy and we’re at a point where we can likely enough choose who to work with and who not to work with. We can say yes and no, right? But there are blokes and women listening to this show who are working in a shop or running a shop all day. So, first of all, 9:00 to 5:00, six days a week, Monday to Saturday, shop’s open. You got to do it. And business owners, good as it could be, yeah?

Andrew:         I hear you.

Tim:                Where’s Goofy? Where’s Goofy in that scenario?

Andrew:         Well, I mean, in my own experience, what I can say is that I’ve certainly had businesses like that in the past. I’ve certainly had businesses where I’ve had an office and I’ve worked ridiculous hours, ridiculous 14-, 15-, 16-hours a day, day in, day out, seven days a week. You know what? Did I run a good business? Absolutely not. Did I make any money? Absolutely not. Did I burn myself out? Absolutely. Did I enjoy it? No. Did it cost me a marriage? Absolutely, because I thought that that’s what you had to do to be successful in business. I had the old small business syndrome where you had to sit around with other small business owners and complain and get your code, your medal, saying, “I haven’t had a holiday for ten years.” And that was almost like the small business owner’s code. You’ve been in the trenches. And, to be honest, I think a lot of people still have that, and I get that times are tough but I think the way to be successful in what you’re doing in business is you’ve got to be fresh, your brain’s got to be working, you’ve got to be enthusiastic, you’ve got to be energized no matter how tough things are because, otherwise, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you slowly go broke. How many shops have you gone into where there’s someone miserable and forlorn behind the counter because times are tough and they’re tired and exhausted. You’re not going to buy anything from them. Chinese saying, “A man without a smile should never open a shop.”

Tim:                I must look that up. I have got a proverb book. If it’s not in there, I’d be disappointed.

Andrew:         It’s there. I guarantee it’s there. You know what I’m saying. That’s what we should do because we think we should do it. My view is that shut the shop. Have the shop shut earlier. Have time out, whatever. Don’t be open for as long. I know it’s easy for me to say that but I think that unless we’re in the right headspace and we’re feeling physically good, emotionally good, intellectually good, then I think everything else is far harder than it should be and we end up doing a lot of time but we’re not necessarily productive, we’re not necessarily getting things done.

Tim:                There’s a donut shop – and I do a little bit of research on donut shops. There’s a donut shop in Vancouver that operates on the marketing strategy of scarcity, and what they do is they say, “We make X donuts today, and once those bad boys are sold, we’re out of here.” I like that.

Andrew:         And what a great way. It’s like the old way of doing business – the old bakeries, the old shops where people just bought something and that’s it. When it’s gone, you move on.

Tim:                I sometimes wonder – and, look, I could be getting completely naive here and maybe shops need to be open eight hours a day, seven days a week – but what if in retail shops said, “You know what?  We’re going to …” I’ll give you an example. Dry cleaners. I don’t get why dry cleaners don’t close during the middle of the day and open early in the morning and open late at night for when people go into work and coming home from work. It’s almost like challenge the … the question is challenge the conventions of your category, you know? One of the conventions is shops are open all the time. Well, do we have to be or when do people need us the most?

Andrew:         Exactly. Exactly. I agree.

Tim:                And go and goof off in the other times.

Andrew:         I guess what that really means, Timbo, is that everyone’s got a bit of a different perspective but I think that we’re agreed at least that goofing off is a good thing. If we can do it, physically, emotionally, intellectually, we’ll end up running our business better and maybe some of the old myths and fallacies around what you’ve got to do to be successful should be replaced with things like allow at least an hour a day to goof off.

Tim:                An hour a day?

Andrew:         Well, you know, whatever you want to call goofing off. Maybe we need to define what goofing off is, but all this chilling out, relaxing, doing something a little bit different, throwing a stick to the dog, just doing something, it doesn’t have to be coffee, just letting your brain have a chance to catch up I think is what it’s all about.

Tim:                Correct.

Andrew:         Anyway, mate, we need to start thinking about what’s going on over the next couple of weeks. What’s in your calendar? What’s coming up, mate?

Tim:                Oh, Griffo, I’ve got a bit of travel. I’m off interstate tomorrow. I’m running a branding – I run these workshops, called Branding Workshops, where I help a business understand the key pillars of their brand in order to create great marketing communications. So we talk about – we’re helping to get the emotional answer to what do you do when … first, we identify the personality of the brand and do a whole lot of fun stuff around that. So I’m doing that on Sydney, and running a full day workshop on Friday for a bunch of financial type folks, financial adviser type folks. It’s a workshop all around content marketing so that whole concept of ‘can you give away too much’ is really top of mind. And the Small Business Big Marketing forum is getting very close to being open to people to join as members so pretty excited about that, just populating it with content and things at the moment. So what about you, mate? What do you got on?

Andrew:         Well, I’m just coming off the back of a very busy couple of weeks. I’ve been on the road for the last two, and I spoke to key people of influence events, one in Sydney and Melbourne –

Tim:                Key person of influence.

Andrew:         Key people, yeah, key person. Key people of influence, key person of influence. I’m being more of – I’m being <inaudible> *0:35:04 market stuff. But that was a great event down in Melbourne, a great event in Sydney. We had 700 and 800 people in the Sydney one. I did a keynote presentation in a big B&I gala award thing last Wednesday as well so a range of those things. So, for me, the next couple of weeks are really about a bit of regrouping. I’ve got to work on a book. I’ve got some keynote presentations and –

Tim:                Your book?

Andrew:         One of my books, yup, absolutely. I’ve got a new, little book that I’ve just about finished off now but I just need to go back and actually make it make sense?

Tim:                Got a name?

Andrew:         Not really. I’m keeping my cards really close to my chest on this one but you’ll be the second to know. That means after I know. And really the next couple of weeks, I’m going to have a little bit of goofing off time and really I think just a bit of planning about the year ahead. It’s got some great projects coming up and I think there’s a really nice air of positivity out there about doing business and people are feeling a little bit more enthused, a little bit more energized, a little bit more excited about the year ahead, and I think that’s what we all want to be honest.

Tim:                I love it, mate. Well, Griffo, it’s been a pleasure. Listeners, you’ve enjoyed another episode of Funny Business. We put one of these out as part of the Small Business Big Marketing show pretty much once a month, every four or so weeks. And if there are topics you want us to cover relevant to running a small business, don’t be shy. Send me an email tim@smallbusinessbigmarketing.com or write them in the show notes that form part of this episode at Small Business Big Marketing.com. Griffo, you’re a gentleman. I love you like a brother.

Andrew:         Take care, mate. I’ve got to go see my hairdresser now.

Tim:                (Laughs) See you, mate.

[End of Transcript - 0:36:53]

 

#122 The Big Question Episode (A Valentine’s Day Special Edition)

Tim:                This is the show of love, L-O-V-E, love, and I bring it to you on St. Valentine’s Day. Very timely because my guest today is Jonathan Krywicki of a brand new business that gets launched today called Pitch and Woo, an exclusive marriage proposal business. It is a fantastic, fantastic idea. Jonathan’s a great bloke. He’s highly, highly passionate about this business which he has been dreaming of for a few years now, having proposed to his beautiful wife in a very clever way which he explains up front. So without further ado, I wanted to get this interview to you on St. Valentine’s Day and just share the marketing love because that’s what we do on Small Business, Big Marketing. No other jibber-jabber. Let’s get straight in to Jonathan Krywicki of Pitch and Woo.

Jonathan Krywicki from Pitch and Woo, welcome to Small Business, Big Marketing.

Jonathan:      Tim, thanks very much and, before I begin, I just want to say thanks for having me on the show.

Tim:                Ah, you’re really trying to Pitch and Woo me.

Jonathan:      (Laughs) That was from the gentleman on public speaking, the podcast you had the other day.

Tim:                Yeah, yeah. He was good. Cam Barber. J.K., happy Valentine’s Day, mate.

Jonathan:      Thank you, and to you too.

Tim:                Yeah. I don’t know whether that’s appropriate. I just put an update on my Facebook, Small Business, Big Marketing’s Facebook, wishing my listeners a happy Valentine’s Day, and it’s kind of like, well, I don’t know. It’s just nice to share the love.

Jonathan:      Look, it is. It is. I find, from speaking to a lot of people, they’re a little bit anti-Valentine’s Day. They sort of think it’s a bit too commercial and, you know, in one respect, they’re right. You know, you shouldn’t have to be reminded that one day a year, it’s time to be romantic. It should be something that you really try and work in to your everyday life.

Tim:                Well, there’s enough bad stuff going on in the world so what’s wrong with having a happy lovey-dovey day. J.K. – and you don’t mind if I call you J.K., do you? – when you have initials like that, you kind of just, you know –

Jonathan:      It works. That was the initials and the nickname I had at school so, if I can call you T.I., you can call me J.K.

Tim:                Happy days. What is Pitch and Woo?

Jonathan:      Pitch and Woo is a very unique business. As you know, I’m launching it today. It’s really a business that’s designed to help guys create a unique and unforgettable marriage proposal with the aim being to literally leave their partner speechless.

Tim:                What a great pitch. Literally, what a great pitch. Mate, you got to then tell me clearly how did you do it? How did you propose to Mrs. Krywicki?

Jonathan:      Well, I’m just going to warn you, it is a long story. I’m not going to go the whole route, cut it down. But, you know, I was really sick of hearing about all the average proposal stories. You know, the first question every girl gets asked after she announces she’s –

Tim:                How did he do it?

Jonathan:      How did he do it? And everyone asks that question. So I decided, I made a mental note, I said, “When my time comes, I’m not going to be that guy who has a really average story. My wife’s embarrassed. No, no, that’s not going to happen.” So I really thought long and hard about it. I said, “I’m going to begin with the end in mind.” And this is something I go through with my clients. Begin with the end in mind. I said the outcome I want is for my wife to be absolutely blown off their feet. The response I wanted was for her to be speechless. Literally, I didn’t want her to be able to say a word. So I began crafting the proposals so –

Tim:                Hey, Jonathan, is she pretty high maintenance?

Jonathan:      No, not at all. Not at all.

Tim:                Okay, so there wasn’t pressure there.

Jonathan:      No pressure. Don’t get me wrong. She had had fairly tale. She wanted me to do something out there but she never sort of said, “You have to do this, you have to do that.” But you really have to pay attention. That’s my recommendation to guys. Understand what your partner’s expectations are. They’ve got it, you’ve got to get it out of them without being too obvious. So going down the path of a surprise proposal – because that’s what I decided to do – I didn’t want her to know that I was proposing so I couldn’t send a limousine to her work or do anything out of the ordinary that would give it away. So that really put a challenge in front of me because had to really think outside the square and come up with something really creative. So the idea I came up with was to create a fictitious competition that I would rig, so to speak, for her to win. Now, I didn’t want her to come first place because that’s a bit obvious so we organized for her to come second place. I registered a website, which I called Dream Getaway.com, I built a website, put up an image of the prize her name because I knew when it came time to sort of ringing her in, telling her she won this competition, the first thing she’d say is, “This is just a prank call. This is rubbish.” So I went away, built a website, but I realized that she’s not going to remember entering this competition, is she? So I went to great extent to really make everything as believable as possible so when we would go to a shopping centre or up and about, whenever there was an opportunity to fill in or enter your details for competition – I’m talking three to six months before – I would plant the seed. I’d say to her, “Karen, just fill in your details and fill in mine as well, and I’ll do the same. You never know what could happen. We might one day win.” And those little peckering of suggestions actually worked in my favour because when she got the telephone call from a lady called Jodie, who I organized to ring her, saying, “Karen, I’m just ringing to let you know that you’ve come second prize in our dream getaway competition.” And Karen is like, “I don’t remember entering it but my boyfriend probably did.” So it just worked brilliantly. I knew Karen would then say and then be, you know, suspicious. Jodie knew to say, “Karen, are you in front of a computer?” And we knew Karen was because she got the call at work. And she gets a go to the website Dream Getaway.com and instantly the validation had hit. Karen believed it hook, line and sinker. I’d set the stage for, so to speak, the magic to happen. So I had Karen thinking she won this competition, romantic getaway for two to the Japanese Mountain Retreat with <inaudible> *0:07:18 with a seven-course banquet, of course, she’s going to invite me away. Who else is she going to invite? Take her mother with her? And no suspicions so I really had everything under my control, very carefully planned but letting her think she was , seven-course banquet, of course, she’s going to invite me away. Who else is she going to invite? Take her mother with her? And no suspicions so I really had everything under my control, very carefully planned but letting her think she was really in control. So the next challenge was how do I actually propose? So I thought long and hard about it. I was actually going to get a masseur to give her a massage in the room and then <inaudible> *0:07:44 leave and I’d take over and continue massaging her, and then pop the ring onto the table. No, no, no. I need to stick to my guns here. I want her to be speechless. So I thought about the food and dessert. I thought maybe what I can do is get a fortune cookie. I can put a fortune cookie in a bowl with other fortune cookies and put a message in there that says ‘Marry Me.’ But I thought, well, how is she going to choose the right fortune cookie? I can’t just put one in there. It looks a bit <inaudible> *0:08:10. So, you know, this is where the days of what I used to do a bit of magic and illusion as a youngster helped me out. There’s something in magic called a force where I can give you a pack of cards and let you think you’re freely selecting any card but, in actual fact, you choose the card I want you to choose every time. And I essentially applied that theory with fortune cookie. I put a bowl of fortune cookies in front of her and every fortune cookie specifically contained exactly the same message. So I knew she’d choose the message I needed her to read. So, to cut a long story short, she opens the fortune cookie –

Tim:                You’re in the restaurant at this point in time?

Jonathan:      No, we’re in a room at the Japanese Mountain Retreat in the <inaudible> *0:08:47.

Tim:                Gotcha, yeah.

Jonathan:      So we’re having dinner, she opens the cover of the bowl, sees the fortune cookies and puts the cover back on. I was literally on edge because I could see my fate right in front of me and she just didn’t take it. But I couldn’t force the matter because I didn’t want it to be –

Tim:                Yeah. A bit awkward going, “Look. Here, can you just have a fortune cookie? They’re really nice.”

Jonathan:      I needed to go to the toilet. I couldn’t go to the toilet because what happens when she looks at the <inaudible> *0:09:15. Anyway, what she did do, which was very interesting – and the guy upstairs was on my side – she said, “Let’s go have a spa.” This was at the end of the dinner because there’s a beautiful spa overlooking a Japanese <inaudible> *0:09:26. I think, not a problem. She then says to me, “Get the champagne and bring the bowl of fortune cookies in case we get hungry later.” I’m thinking, “Oh, my god. This is perfect.” We’re sitting in the spa, drinking champagne, still no fortune cookies were touched so I had to push it a little bit. I said, “Karen, just pass me a fortune cookie, if you don’t mind. I’m getting a little bit hungry.” Now, of course, when you pick up a fortune cookie, you always want to see what the message is. And she cracked open the cookie, read the message and I thought she was going to faint. She went, “What?” I think it was at that moment that she realized that, “Hold on a minute. I didn’t win the competition and this isn’t on me.”

Tim:                You nailed it. She said ‘yes’ right there.

Jonathan:      No, she didn’t.

Tim:                No.

Jonathan:      I had to say, “Karen, is it a yes or a no?” She, what felt like a minute or two, she just couldn’t say anything, nothing. So I had achieved my objective and I created an amazing story for her to be proud of to retell. It’s a beautiful gift as well. It’s something that we always talk about, refer back to it.

Tim:                It’s given you a business.

Jonathan:      And, you’re right, Tim, it’s given me a business because what happened consequently is when I told my story, friends who were proposing came to me for advice, and then friends of friends, helped them. We created amazing stories for them and I realized that I’ve got a really vivid imagination, I’m creative. I’ve got skills in project management and event planning. It just makes sense. There’s a great opportunity in the market, and Pitch and Woo was born and the rest is history.

Tim:                So, really, it happened like that, just, naturally, people would come to you and you’ve gone, “It wasn’t just me trying to come up with beautiful ways of proposing. There’s a whole lot of other people.” And it just ticked so many boxes. Jonathan, you’ve mentioned these words in discussions you and I have had, it lights you up and “it allows you to express your creativity.” So did you feel trapped in whatever you were doing up until this idea of Pitch and Woo came along?

Jonathan:      Look, I have to be careful because I’m actually sitting in my current workplace at the moment. So I don’t want to say anything too loud. But, you know, I’ve been where I am for about seven years. I work for a technology company. We do these big installations in multi-million dollar homes but the problem is I don’t really get to express myself in the creative way I want to. And Pitch and Woo has become an avenue where I can tick all of these boxes, do things I’m really passionate about, which really, at the core, is about creating connected moments. Seeing people light up as a result of what I’m helping them do is just amazing, and I’ve now got the ability to do that. I’m an instrumental part in changing people’s lives and helping them start the next chapter of their life together. So I’m not full time on this yet. I’m potentially looking at a transition period but I’m really excited about the prospect of just launching into it and making it my full time gig.

Tim:                But you’ve launched it today. Okay, so what time frame are we talking from getting to today from having the idea of, you know what, Pitch and Woo is a business idea That’s going to be what I do at some point full time in the future. How long did it take you to get to today?

Jonathan:      Good question. Look, I’ve been married coming up seven years. About four years ago, I sort of jokingly thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if I helped men with their proposals?” I actually dismissed it. I thought no one’s going to be interested in this. You can’t make a business out of that. And it was thrown in the backburner. But I recently <inaudible> *0:12:54 where we actually met and, as part of this course, I really sort of introspectively thought about what it is I want to do with my life and what legacy I sort of want to leave and how I want to help people, and it sort of really took me back to that moment and I thought, “Well, this ticks all my boxes.” So it was about four months ago that I really started work on the business and –

Tim:                Just four months ago?

Jonathan:      Just four months ago. It’s very challenging. I work full time. We just had a little boy, Jake, who’s four months old so it’s a real juggle but I committed to launching on Valentine’s Day. I thought it was an appropriate time, and sometimes I think when you have a deadline, when you set a physical deadline and you know there’s going to be a pain associated with not delivering, you really step up a notch. And I did. I got a website up and running with the blog, the Facebook, the Pinterest, the Twitter, got a PR press release out there. And I’m out of production mode and I’m into what we call campaign mode now where I’m just drumming it.

Tim:                Yeah. Well, I want to talk about that in a minute because the press you had already today, putting aside being on Small Business, Big Marketing … hello – has been phenomenal, so we’ll come to that. I am interested in the name because I got to tell you, I don’t completely get it.

Jonathan:      Yeah. It’s a little bit of a … there a bit of a message behind the name. I was thinking about a name, you know, some of the early names I toyed with were Popping the Question, you know, and I thought I’m offering a very bespoke, gentlemanly service really for the modern day man. I’ve got to come up with a name befitting. So I had a coffee with a guy who’s in PR and I told him about my business idea. He goes, “You know what? You’re all about pitch and woo.” I thought, “What? I’ve never heard of that term.” He goes, “Yeah, pitch and woo.” And it’s actually a slang term from the ‘50s, and if you look it up and it’s in Wikipedia and a few of the other … it’s an idiom. I think it’s actually termed as an idiom. It means courtship, to flatter, to love and to chase. I thought what a perfect term. So I just tweaked it a little bit and I came up with Pitch and Woo because pitch is really you’re delivering a pitch from a business point of view, you’re saying something, you’re trying to get your message across. And woo is all about romance and excitement and sweeping someone off their feet. So I sort of thought clever pay of words, Pitch and Woo, catchy, and that’s how I came up with it.

Tim:                Yeah, okay. But I wonder where there’s a marketing played in at some point, you might want to tell that story. Well, not tell the story of how the name came to be but at least what the name means because, clearly as a definition of that, it’s interesting and it’s spot on. Tell me, like, it’s not for everyone. This is a bespoke marriage proposal service. And you’re a one-man show currently working full time but I’m guessing, you know, if we were to revisit this in 12 months time, you are Pitch and Wooing full time. What are we talking, five to ten clients a year, and how do you choose those clients?

Jonathan:      Yeah, great question, and this is the question I always get asked. People have sort of <inaudible> *0:16:02 many times a business like this. Well, I’ve split the business up into two products for want of a better word. The first is what I call the one-on-one, and this is where I work selectively with eight to ten clients a year who are looking to create a really big proposal. These are the guys with the big budgets who want to go all out and create an amazing, amazing proposal where you get video, photographed, we create a beautiful gift that we give to his bride-to-be and which she can share with friends. That package that I’ve got there is really – the way I charge is really based on how involved I need to be. So, you know, to say that I charge $3,000, it’s hard to put a figure on it. I really sit down with my clients. I interview them. I have a meeting with them to see if it’s the right fit. We figure out what they want to do. Do they want to go overseas? Do they want to have all these luxurious events and different things happening? And then I figure out my fee around it. So there’s a project management fee involved in it. So eight to ten clients a year, very high-end proposals, typically my fee would range from $2,000 to $3,000 roughly for those proposals. Once you figure everything out, there’s a lot of time involved in planning and putting it all together, plus I run the event for them. I just want them to focus on getting the ‘yes,’ that’s it.

Tim:                That feels cheap. Two to three grand for the full enchilada.

Jonathan:      Well, that’s where I’ve started, you know, and it’s a relevant point you raised but I have to test the market. I have to get a sense. I don’t want to scare them off. I don’t want to sort of say $10,000, and I’ve done a bit of research. Don’t get me wrong, Tim. I’ve looked in America to see what other people are charging because there are people in America who turn themselves proposal planners and that’s sort of what people are charging. But, again, I think the bigger the proposal we create, the more I can potentially charge. The other service I offer, which is more for budget-friendly offering –

Tim:                Before you tell us that second service, in terms of filtering the client because, okay, it’s not for everyone so budget’s going to be a filter that is going to win over people and go, “The full enchilada package is for me” or “it’s not for me.” But in terms of you, the guy helping them with the proposal, you’ll going to want people that you can work with. So how do you determine that he is going to be a good client, a great client?

Jonathan:      Look, it’s tough. I really have to meet the person, get a sense for who they are, the relationship they’re in, the moment they want to create. I really need to find there’s the right fit between the proposal they’re looking to create and how I want my brand to be represented because remember it’s these eight to ten proposals that will help drive the business because we will have these beautiful videos which are testimonials that people will watch. So I really want to go for the guys that want to create something really out there who’d give me the budget to play with so that I can be as creative as possible. So that’s sort of the screening process I have.

Tim:                And do you want them to come to you with like, “Ah, I’ve got this idea of doing it in Paris” or do you just want white canvas?

Jonathan:      No, I love when they come to me with the idea. One of the things I find is, you know, women are a bit sceptical. They’re thinking, “I don’t want my boyfriend to outsource the whole thing. That doesn’t really show he’s really that caring.” So I encourage guys, “Come to me with your idea and then I’ll help you bring out your creativity or add to it, we’ll tweak it, we’ll develop it.” But I want them to know they’ve got ownership of the idea because when their partner finds out – and they don’t always have to find out, but if they do – I want their partner to think, “You know what? I really respect that you went to that extra effort to make the moment that much more special and that you admitted that you weren’t good at planning and putting it all together. That really means something to me.” So, you know, that’s sort of why I’m moving forward with that part of the service.

Tim:                That’s your bespoke product. What do we call the other product, the product for others?

Jonathan:      The product for others, that’s a good name. I’ve called it the ‘I Do Do-It-Yourself Kit’ because there are a lot of guys out there who may not have the budget, which is fair enough. Not everyone can afford it. But they still recognize how important the moment is. After all, it’s his wife really expressing to his partner how much she means to him, how he is excited about spending the rest of his life with her, and your proposal is your way of doing that. So this kit really will contain video walk-throughs, tips, exercises, budget planning sheets, everything that guys need to create their own proposal. But, you know –

Tim:                To do their own way of proposal, yeah. This is not just like, oh, so what you do is you book a restaurant and, at some point in time, you look for the moment where you say, “Hey, will you marry me?” This is like this is how to create an idea around your proposal, yeah?

Jonathan:      Yeah. But the thing is they’re doing it themselves. They’re working through it with my guidance. But I’ve added in two telephone catch-up calls: one at the beginning, where I think it’s very important that I set them up, I go through all the content, the material and how I want them to approach the whole process. There are seven steps that we work through. And then we have a call at the end where I listen to their idea, I adjust it, tweak it and I help them bring it all together and just make sure they’re ready to create that unforgettable moment. So that I think is going to be a very much a widespread, very much a global product that I’m putting out there because a telephone call can happen around the world. It’s a digital product. So that’s really what’s going to drive the business, and eight to ten bespoke proposals will promote the business.

Tim:                Love it. Tell us about the ‘I Do’ pack delivered online by what? Some kind of WordPress member, wish list, password-protected backend or … how are you delivering that?

Jonathan:      Yeah, look, I haven’t figured out exactly it. I’m still looking at the different vehicles to get it out there. There will be videos that will be created, walk through the seven steps that men need to go through.

Tim:                I’ve got to tell you, mate, the best one I’ve seen – In fact, I’ve interviewed Jules Watkins from iVideo Hero, and that was a $97 information product that trains you on how to use your iPhone to create great marketing videos and he used WordPress site. I think WordPress wish list or member wish list was the plug-in. And, basically, you paid your $97, you got email and password, username and password, you log in and then, by chapter, it just went through all the different aspects of using your iPhone to create great videos, you know, audio, background, indoor, outdoor, etc., etc. You clicked on one of those chapters and it opened up a video, a PDF downloadable workbook and the audio.

Jonathan:      Well, that’s exactly what I’m after. I’m definitely going to be looking at that today because that –

Tim:                I think you’ll lead to it, mate.

Jonathan:      Yes, brilliant. Brilliant. So I’ve put it on my website that the product is under development and it’s going to be out there in May. Again, I’m a firm believer of putting fixed deadlines ahead of you so you’ve got something to work towards.

Tim:                You’re a highly organized man, J.K. I remember catching up at a recent key person of influence function and we both kind of ideas people, and I’m throwing stuff at you and you just got the iPhone out with every night I’ve been and “ I just <inaudible> *0:23:01 that link, and let me tag a photo of that and …” It’s like it’s a crazy conversation.

Jonathan:      There are gold nuggets when you speak to people like yourself. You get a wealth of knowledge and you’ve got to get that information. You can’t just rely on memory, you know. There’s good stuff there.

Tim:                Okay, so you’ve got the ‘I Do’ product. I love marketing so let’s talk. So you are now in campaign mode and you’re launching today, Valentine’s Day. I’m looking at your website. You’ve got a great 60-second video, you, the camera, talking about Pitch and Woo. I reckon that’s a no-brainer because you’re the guy who people are going to be working with. You’ve got the seven biggest proposal mistakes free e-book download. Love that.

Jonathan:      Thank you.

Tim:                That’s a simple thing to do for you. What are we talking like, is it seven pages, a hundred pages?

Jonathan:      No. I’ve got it in front of me now. It’s actually 34 pages. It’s like a little mini-booklet.

Tim:                Beautifully designed.

Jonathan:      Beautifully designed, lots of nice images, free. Good for any guy out there. I think it will give them a real big win in terms of not going down, you know, and doing the same mistakes other men make. The video was really important. People want to know if they’re dealing with you, the founder, the person that’s coming up with the ideas, so that got put up recently. And I’m going to continue to put video out there because people need to feel they’re connecting. You can’t get that from just reading so the video is a big thing. Also the branding, the look and feel of the website. There’s a very specific message I’m trying to convey. This is not a cheesy service, you know, very bespoke, very modern-day man, gentlemanly feel, and I’m trying to get that, even the colour schemes, when I worked through the colour schemes, I’m trying to get that to resonate through everything I do.

Tim:                Yeah, it’s very understated logo, got a bit of jeweller about it, you know –

Jonathan:      Yeah, yeah. The two rings combining, the union.

Tim:                I’ll give you this tip. A couple of things – here I am. I can’t help myself, you know, marketing advice on the go, mate. Your holding image on your video it defaults to the video frame, I would definitely grab an image from the video and make that full frame because it’s occupying such massive screen real estate on your website. Do you know what I mean by that?

Jonathan:      Yeah, definitely.

Tim:                And the other thing is, big no-no, mate, because we’re about to talk about the PR you’re generating, which is, you know, you’ve been on the biggest breakfast show in Australia this morning and one of the biggest current affairs shows has approached you, but your latest blog post is February 10, and you should have a February 14, Valentine’s Day, blog post if ever there was one.

Jonathan:      True, true. Well, what I’ve done is – and to answer your question, I’ve only committed to writing a blog post a week. I read in a blog somewhere that if you’re going to blog, you’ve got to be consistent, and I can’t do more than one a week just with my time schedule. So February 10 and the next one will be … now, let’s just have a look at the calendar … 17th, this Sunday will be my next blog post.

Tim:                I reckon you could. I’m going to be the devil’s advocate here. I reckon you could because you know so much about this category, and I’m going to email you 151 ways or stimulus ideas for writing a blog post, which I’m presenting tomorrow. That will live in the Small Business, Big Marketing forum too for listeners who are wondering how they can get their hands on that. Now, J.K., you sent out a press release. Tell us about that process and tell us what it has generated so far.

Jonathan:      Wow. Well, it’s been an amazing experience, a press release. You know, up until now, everything has been theoretical. We talk about sending out a press release but now I’m getting to experience it in real life. So I got someone to write a press release for me. It cost me $80. I got it done through Elance so not an expensive cost. I had a friend who works for a PR agency, Ellie, from 360 Focus, and she kindly agreed to send it out in her own time to her database. And it’s just like fishing. You put it out there, see what happens. You know, we did it about a week and a half before Valentine’s Day so a week and a half ago, and we got a few little nibbles, you know, <inaudible> *0:27:13 my bride, which is a great one, not a small nibble.

Tim:                No. I’d call that a large barracuda.

Jonathan:      It’s a barracuda. <inaudible> *0:27:22, another barracuda. But, you know, I really wanted to get a few radio gigs so nothing came out of that. But what I found was, as we got closer and closer to the date, the media interest really started picking up so much so that I got in touch with 3AW, which I had a stint on with Ross and John this morning on the breakfast show.

Tim:                You got in touch or they got in touch?

Jonathan:      No, a friend of mine, who actually helped me come up with the idea of Pitch and Woo, Ronnie Atlas, sent a message out. He knew the producer there and they obliged and said, “We’d love to have him on.” So I really –

Tim:                For overseas listeners, Ross and John, possibly the biggest breakfast show in Australia on a weekday?

Jonathan:      Yeah, definitely, absolutely.

Tim:                So you were on that this morning. How did that feel, mate? Did you have the sweaty armpit?

Jonathan:      Oh, I had sweaty everything. You know, what I’m doing with you now is my second ever interview, which is really exciting, but theirs was the first. I’ve done a lot of preparation. It was at 6:30 in the morning so I was still half-asleep, and you’ve really got to think on the spot because these are clever guys. They both got legal backgrounds. They’re very shrewd. They’re very witty, and I think I did well. You know, I’m very tough on myself, and only after when I re-listened to the interview did I feel that, yeah, yeah, I thought I did quite well under the circumstances.

Tim:                Well, it takes practice. And, you know, even coming on Small Business, Big Marketing, I know how much kind of prep and questions you had for me in the lead up and, you know, I think it’s great but also my advice, and one of the things I’m saying to my clients on the Deep Dive Mastermind, which is a Mastermind group I run every week, is go out and get interviews on podcasts because it’s great practice. It helps you hone your pitch, it hones your message, it hones the way you communicate what it is you do, and the more you can do it, the better. So my advice is to be natural. I mean, it’s sometimes hard when the interviewer is so kind of … they’re at you, the bang, bang, bang, and they’ve only got limited time. With the podcast, we can talk for as long as it remains interesting and not a second more. But you also got the opportunity to go on today on two Today Tonight. Tell us about that.

Jonathan:      Yeah, well I literally nearly fell of my chair. I got an email from the producer of Channel 7 Today Tonight, saying, “We love what you’re doing and we’d love to have you on Valentine’s Day.” So I was completely taken aback. I knew the press release had some success but this, to me, was the epitome of press releases getting media attention on TV. You can’t get bigger than that. So I actually had a chat with <inaudible> *0:30:04, who is sort of a mentor of mine. She’s coaching me and I said, “Sam, I don’t know what to do. I’m not sure I’m ready for TV. They got in touch with me. They want to get me on.” And I listened to her advice and I really thought about it, and I agreed that I shouldn’t do it yet because I’m probably not ready. You know, people are going to be going to the website, checking me out and, if I don’t have products to sell or video testimonials showcasing my work, then it’s not really going to be that great. So my response to the lady from Today Tonight was, “Thank you. I’m humbled. This is an amazing opportunity but give me three months and I’ll give you an even better story than you could possibly have.” So she wasn’t that happy. She offered to do Valentine’s Day and then, in three months time, to follow up, but I –

Tim:                Stood your ground.

Jonathan:      – stood my ground because it’s my brand at the end of the day, and the last thing I want is, you know, X amount of people going to the website and then just bouncing because there’s nothing for them there to engage in.

Tim:                Honorable, a round of applause, and brave and I get it. I just get it. I mean, Today Tonight too, you don’t know what the spin is going to be and I’m not sure they’re going to tell you even in three months time what the spin is going to be. You hope it’s good news. I’ve also had experience on a previous client’s business where we just got way too nervous when we asked, you know, would you avoid this, this and this, and I couldn’t give you a guarantee that they would. So, you know, well done on that. I think that’s good and, as I said to you at the start when we started talking about coming on this show, why we want you to come on this show because you’ve got a small business doing great marketing, and you’re great marketing is a unique product idea and there ain’t going to be a shortage of people wanting to talk to you about it. I’m convinced of that and I think that doesn’t mean sit back and wait for it to come. You’ve got to get the message out there. And, to that point, what marketing have you got planned because a guy like you, I’m guessing you have got a content or a social media calendar planned down within an inch of its life, J.K.

Jonathan:      Yeah, look, I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I’ll start by talking about partnerships. I think partnership is a really big part of marketing your business and I’m looking to the people to the left of me and to the right of me. And what I mean by that is who’s dealing with my potential customer before I get to them and who’s going to deal with them after? So the people that are going to deal with my customer before me are potentially dating agencies, specifically, the high-end dating agencies where people get together and they might be in their 30s or whatever may be and want to get married. They’re a prime candidate for me to work with. And high-end jewellers, like Tiffany’s. A guy comes in to buy an engagement ring, wouldn’t it be great if they can give them my tips book and then say, Jonathan’s going to … we’ve got … as a gift, Tiffany’s can offer as a gift a mastermind class for two or three guys at a time where we work together and develop their ideas. I’m also looking to build a community, you know. I know that men find it difficult, I think – this is just my <inaudible> *0:33:12 but I think men find it difficult to openly express how romantic they are and they’re a little bit … they want to keep it a bit under the radar. So I’m really trying to build that community. I’m going to look at doing pay-per-click on Google to sort of, you know, searches for marriage proposals, proposal ideas to bring them to me rather than just a website where they end up.

Tim:                <inaudible> *0:33:30 live events. Oh, my goodness.

Jonathan:      Live events.

Tim:                I just had this flood of marketing ideas for you, but live events would bring guys together and –

Jonathan:      Well, that’s where I want to go. The next thing is I want to create a new industry, called re-proposal, where anyone that didn’t nail it the first time can do it again or anyone that wants to renew their vows. Rather than renewing your vows, you can do that if you like, but why not re-propose? You don’t have to give her a ring again. Give her some jewellery or something that’s token but go through that whole experience again. It’s so fun. You can sometimes even rekindle a relationship if it’s not where it needs to be. There are so many benefits. But the big thing for me is I want to take this to live events TV. The big vision for me is to have a TV show where men audition. We choose five guys. I help them all with their proposals. The audience votes on who’s done the best proposal and then we get their wedding paid for by a sponsor. So the audience chooses the winner. That would be amazing, you know, just –

Tim:                Well, absolutely not out of the realm, and whether it has to be TV, it might be a YouTube channel. It might be … who knows, mate? But there are so many great ideas. Another one that comes to mind is when you do hear of a celebrity hooking up with a new girlfriend, the opportunity may be tapping them on the shoulder through their agent or something and saying, “Can I do something bespoke for the marriage proposal?” if and when he chooses to do that would be kind of cool as well.

Jonathan:      Yeah, absolutely.

Tim:                Any current plans now? I know you only launched today but have you got a client happening or one sort of that you’re working on?

Jonathan:      Yeah, yeah. I’ve got about half-a-dozen I’m working on at the moment all happening at different times. I’ve got one that’s really in the <inaudible> *0:35:16 at the moment. The proposal is happening later April and I’m just so excited. What we’ve come up with it’s just … I can’t wait to see the look on her face when the magic starts happening. It’s not going to be the surprise proposal. He’s decided that whatever we do, the first thing we do, she’s going to know today’s the day. She’s going to be really excited but she’s not going to know what or how. We’re getting it all videoed and we’re going to present her at the end with a beautiful video that not only shows the behind the scenes and the planning, but it documents the proposal. And this is a beautiful gift she can share with her friends and they can just relive the moment any time they want. So I’m really excited about that. I know there are a few other guys which I’ll be working with towards the end of the year. So there are a few clients and I’m just looking to continue growing the business and getting my name out there.

Tim:                Jonathan Krywicki, you are on to something with Pitch and Woo, and it’s a great idea. You’re doing something good out there in the world. The passion is palpable. It is absolutely palpable. It’s so right. I love it when I talk to someone who’s just chasing their dream, and that’s exactly what you’re doing and it’s going to work. So well done, mate. Thanks for being in Small Business, Big Marketing.

Jonathan:      Tim, thanks for having me on.

[End of Transcript - 0:36:29]

 

 

# 121 From Timber Yard Lackey to Six Figure Business Owner. Happy Days!

Tim:                Today’s guest – George Ryan. George approached me via email, which I’m going to share with you now, bits and pieces of that email, and give you a sense of how he came to getting on the Small Business, Big Marketing show, and then we’ll hop into the interview. But he really caught my attention. He says, “Hey, Timbo! My name is George Ryan. Big fan of Small Business, Big Marketing.” And he goes on to list a number of reasons why he is that, why he is a big fan. He also says he has some interesting insights to contribute and would love to be interviewed. Now, by way of a brief introduction, he says, “I’ve started and run several companies in the past few years, with the most recent one being Hatchwise.” This is a company we’re going to talk to George about today in this interview. It’s an Internet-based crowd sourcing community specializing in logo design. And I’m thinking at this point in time, there are a lot of businesses like that, starting with 99 Designs. But George challenges me on that as to why he entered that space. “Hatchwise has grown from nothing to over 13,000 designers that participate regularly, processes thousands of orders a year and presents clients with an average of 100 designs for an average cost of around $200. We also do not advertise at all.” So far, I’m interested. I’m loving it, George. He goes on to say … he gives me various reasons why I should interview him, and I like this one. “A few examples of the things I would love to be able to share with your listeners. Number one, tips on starting a business from nothing.” He would go, “Four years ago at age 22, I was working full time, 55 hours a week for a lumber yard, making $10 an hour and providing for my wife and daughter, and had no higher education whatsoever.” Hated his job and intentionally set out to start his own business. And four years later, he’s got a thriving six-figure business and on top of all that, his Hatchwise is featured in articles twice in some pretty high profile magazines. I reckon George is crushing it. I love that the story of young entrepreneurs having a crack and doing good. We’ve had a few one in the past. If you are one listening and you think you’ve got a story to tell, hit me up, tim@smallbusinessbigmarketing.com. I would love to hear from you. But let’s hear from George and let’s get stuck into the details of how George went about doing what he’s done. Here’s George.

George Ryan from Hatchwise, entrepreneur extraordinaire, welcome to Small Business, Big Marketing.

George:          Oh, thank you very much for having me, Tim.

Tim:                Well, thanks for approaching me in the first place, mate. It’s great. I love it. You know, I’m always chasing interview and it’s particularly fun when someone from overseas approaches to be on the show. Where are you, George?

George:          We’re located in New York.

Tim:                Right, okay. The hub of the world.

George:          Yeah. Sadly, we’re not quite in the city or a little more upstate. But we still got a lot of business going on here.

Tim:                Yeah, yeah. For sure, mate. Hey, listen now, George, a couple of things to cover with you. I think you got a really interesting story about entrepreneurism at its most raw from sort of working in that lumber yard, going through the starting a business that’s now generating a six-figure income for you and your family. So I want to really explore that and then I want to get stuck into some, you know, how you went about starting Hatchwise and what was involved in that from a marketing perspective. So why don’t you start by sharing your story at the age of 22, wife and daughter, full time at a lumber yard, earning $10 an hour?

George:          Okay. Well, like you said, I was working at a lumber yard, and it wasn’t the world’s worst job but, you know, it is a lumber yard. And I didn’t really enjoy it. It wasn’t bad work but I have always liked feeling like I was part of something bigger. I like sort of orchestrating things, seeing things happen, and it’s just driving a truck around delivering stuff. And it got to a point where I was like I need to be doing something more than this. And I remember going home to my wife and saying. “I’m not enjoying this. I’d like to start my own company.” And she said, “You know what? If that’s what you want to do, I’m behind you on that.” And so I started working in the evenings and the weekends while still working at the lumber yard, trying to get something off the ground. It took me about a year I think before it got to the point where I was actually able to start running my business, you know, quit the job at the lumber yard and run the business full time. And during that time, I was pretty much glued to the computer, trying to figure out a way to make money.

Tim:                So tell me … that’s interesting. So that’s just a classic story. It’s almost the cliché escape-the-cubicle story, except you’re escaping a bulldozer or a chainsaw or something. Is there a history of entrepreneurism, business ownership in your family or – because, you know, going from there to what you’ve done is pretty extreme.

George:          My father, he’s not an entrepreneur so to speak but he’s always been good with coming up with ways to make money, finding odd jobs and stuff. So when there’s a need, he finds a way to fill it, and that definitely is something he taught me growing up. But mostly it just came out of me not liking what I was doing. And I did run a bunch of little smaller businesses when I was a teenager, you know, stuff like catching bait down at the ocean and selling it to the local bait shops sort of stuff. So, you know, it’s something I had always done.

Tim:                Well, you know, one of the great business concepts is fish where the fish are, so clearly you’re doing that. So, tell me, just tell me about that point where you’re at the lumber yard and you’re – was there a point where you’re going, “No, this is it. I’m <inaudible> *0:09:47. I’m telling my wife I’m out of here.”

George:          Yeah, there definitely was, and I think that when I hit that point was, you know, for a while, you work at a job, you get paid hourly, you know, you get your pay check and then after while when you’re doing work for someone else and you realize that the work that you’re doing is worth far, far more than you’re getting paid. And I thought there has to be some way to be the guy that is hiring the person to do the work.

Tim:                You’re being paid $10 an hour and you’re making someone $100 an hour.

George:          Exactly. Yeah, you know, when you drive a delivery that’s worth $50,000 and you drop it off, and then you do the math and you’re like, “I made $80 delivering that.” Like there’s something wrong with this equation.

Tim:                Okay, George, so you’ve got no higher education. You’re racing home at night. You’ve gone, “I’m leaving here. I’m starting my own business. I’m going to make it big.” You race home at night. What did you start consuming? What informat— Did you have an idea of what kind of business you wanted to start? Where did you start?

George:          I’ve always had an interest in computers and web design and graphic design in general. It’s something I did when I was a teenager. I was always on the computer. What I initially started off with, I thought, “Hey, I’ll fix computers,” and I had never really fixed a computer before. I fooled around but I had never fixed anyone else’s but I thought I’ll figure it out as I go along. And so I stuck a couple of flyers at grocery stores around the area, little bulletin boards they had, and I said I’ll fix your computer for $50. Any problem, you pay for parts, I’ll take it home, you give me $50 if I fix it. If I don’t fix it, no cost. And I think I fixed two or three computers. And it wasn’t horrible work but where I actually got a start with that was I was designing business cards for my new computer repair business and I could not come up with a logo to save my life. And so I was looking online, trying to see what options there were as far as logo design went, and that got me really interested in logo design and it sort of grew over a few years into Hatchwise.

Tim:                Yeah, right. So, okay, in steps Hatchwise, so you’ve kind of – as so often is the case, you know, a business owner has experienced a problem and gone, “You know what? I’m going to find a solution for that.” And that’s where the business is born out of.

Hatchwise is interesting, George, because, as I was saying to you off the air, I got – let’s explain Hatchwise. It’s a logo competition site. Is that the best way of summarizing it?

George:          Yeah, that’s the best way to say it. We crowd source the designs and, you know, it’s basically run in contest format, say how much you want to spend on a design, you list your design brief and the designers will create, complete a design for you, and you pick the one you like the most, pay them whatever your budget was and you get the full rights to the design.

Tim:                Okay, so what really interests me about your story is that, well, you’ve chosen an industry that is pretty crowded and it’s dominated, certainly out of Australia, it’s dominated by 99 Designs. And I know there’s a whole lot of other logo competition sites, plus people can go to <inaudible> *0:13:05, plus people can go to freelancer in oDesk and, you know, the list goes on. And I love the courage you shown in entering such a crowded marketplace. You could argue the crowded marketplace is good to enter because there’s lots of money going around but did you ever at some point go, “You know what? It’s so busy.”

George:          Actually, when we launched, we launched … you know, 99 Designs was spun off of Site Point. They had a <inaudible> *0:13:30 for a while. We launched about three months after 99 Designs actually officially launched, and that was only because we’ve been in development for a while so it was definitely … we came in a couple of months after crowdSPRING and 99 Designs. And I did realize, you know, 99 Designs was going to be big. Site Point was fairly large <inaudible> *0:13:52 came out. But I’ve always –

Tim:                How did you feel when –? You obviously have been working almost alongside each other not knowing that both of you were about to launch, and then 99 Designs comes out. I mean, clearly it wasn’t the website it is now. It’s a very functional, incredibly useful website. Did you feel like giving up?

George:          No. No, it was actually encouraging because if you have competition, I mean, it is competition but it also means that there’s something to compete for. You know, if you’re starting a business and there’s absolutely no one else in the field doing it, maybe you’re going to be like Groupon or something and you actually have a homerun with it, but there are a lot of people that put all time and money into a project or a company that just doesn’t work out because there isn’t a market for it. When you have competition, you know that there’s something to compete over.

Tim:                Yeah, yeah. Fully, fully. So 99 Designs has rolled out. What was the other one you said that rolled out at the same time?

George:          CrowdSPRING.

Tim:                CrowdSPRING. A couple of big ones.

George:          Uh-huh, yes. And they both had – I mean, 99 Designs had Site Point behind it. CrowdSPRING had, I think, a couple of million dollars in funding. And I had a thousand dollars that I paid someone to develop the script for Hatchwise.

Tim:                Wow! Wow!

George:          First launch.

Tim:                So would I be right in saying – because I didn’t realize that you’d launched so closely to the 99 Designs launch – therefore, the idea of a logo competition website … Where did you get the idea from besides experiencing a problem? Did you yourself come up with the idea of having logo competitions or was it happening elsewhere?

George:          Actually, I was a member on a couple of forums. One of them was a domain name forum, you know, discuss domain names, and they had a little sub-forum on there where they would hold design contests for like $10 or $20. And that gave me the idea to try and make a business model out of that. Before I launched Hatchwise, for a little while and overlapping when I was running Hatchwise, I did run a logo design firm that I started online that I’ve since sold. And that had a very conventional front to it. You know, you get three logo concepts, number of revisions, you know, set price for it.  But I ran it like a logo contest in the backend. So I’d actually manage the project. I’d work with the designers and I paid the ones whose entries were selected by the client.

Tim:                Where were you getting those designers from?

George:          I got some of them from … I’ve worked with them on freelancer before. Some of them were on the domain name forum there. I mean, I ended up with maybe six or seven that did a lot of work. I think they’re probably working full time with us at the time.

Tim:                Okay, so, George, Hatchwise … it’s interesting because you’re kind of dealing with the chicken or the egg thing. It’s a bit like a directory, you know, like when you launched Hatchwise, you either needed clients but you weren’t going to get clients if you didn’t have designers and you weren’t going to get designers if you didn’t have clients wanting logos. So how did you manage that?

George:          Honestly, that pretty much just took care of itself. I had the emails of I think it was about 200 designers by that point that I had been working with on the logo design firm I was talking about, and I sent an email to them, said, “Hey, we have a new site we started. Feel free to sign up there.” I had a few of them sign up. And then I think I did an interview or two on a couple of podcasts when we launched and it pretty much took off from there.

Tim:                It’s pretty good, those podcasts.

George:          Mm-hmm, yeah. (Laughs)  Yeah, podcasts are awesome.

Tim:                Okay.

George:          It happened gradually. It wasn’t all that much at first but then it grew, and I think we had 700 or 800 designers within three or four months, and that was just all word-of-mouth. It’s just people, you know, designers telling other designers about it.

Tim:                Yeah, okay. Back then I can imagine that community quite easily growing pretty organically pretty quickly. What about getting clients? You actually said in your email to me you’ve never advertised. Advertising was one form of marketing but how did you start to get clients?

George:          Yeah, like I said in the email, there was virtually no advertising. I mean, my caveat there’s the word ‘virtually.’ I probably poured a couple of thousand dollars into advertising over four or five years.

Tim:                What are we talking … Adwords or what –?

George:          I did a little bit on Adwords. I can honestly say I’ve never tracked a dollar of advertising to actually any sales.

Tim:                No one has.

George:          <inaudible> *0:18:39 that much. But, yeah, I did a little bit in Adwords a little bit, you know, like under competitor’s names because they were doing that with me. And after a while, I was just going to focus on actually building up the reputation with the clients and asking people what they want from the site and doing our very best to give it to them. When I was running the logo design firm I was talking about, I advertised exclusively with Adwords with that a while back, and the problem with that you have low margins and your Adwords cost goes up even 4% or 5%, it can put you out of business overnight. Someone else comes in, they bid on the keyword that you’re buying, you know, you’re cost go up and you’re not making any money all of a sudden. So my goal with Hatchwise was to start a company that did not rely on advertising, that relied on word-of-mouth, and I had done that.

Tim:                Okay. Every time someone on my show mentions word-of-mouth, I have to say my view is word-of-mouth isn’t a marketing strategy; it’s an outcome of great marketing so, clearly, outcome of great marketing and, particularly, great product delivery, great service delivery. So in order to get word-of-mouth, what were you doing? Were you over delivering and how, if you were? How were you over delivering?

George:          I’ve always just focused on making sure that the customers are happy. Right now, we have a policy instituted a while back where we actually call and speak with customers. Most of our customers, once they wrap up a project, say were you happy with everything? Is there anything we can do to make you happier? Make sure they understand exactly what’s going to happen with the artwork once they get it, you know, monitoring projects, making sure they’re getting good results, working with the designers to feel that they’re being taken care of, that they’re happy with the way the site’s being run, you know, just running a company that I would want to be a customer of.

Tim:                The customers, they must fall off their chair. They say, “You’re calling me? I thought I was dealing with a website.”

George:          Well, actually, the customers love it, and I think especially in this day and age when you do deal with a lot of websites and it’s really easy to just think of a website as a static page with no face behind it. And you get a call from someone that say, “Hey, these are the people you’ve been designing a logo with for the past ten days.” People really like that.

Tim:                I think that’s incredibly refreshing because I think a lot of business owners who have an online business almost hide behind the online business and don’t reply to emails and don’t put their phone number in there, make their phone number available and don’t call their clients. And it’s really no excuse.

George:          Yeah, I completely agree. It is important to actually let them know there’s a real person there. It’s the same as if we were in your town and you could come in the store and talk to us. There’s no difference there just because it’s the Internet.

Tim:                George, I want to keep pushing on the marketing, mate. You say you’ve done minimal advertising. You’ve provided great customer service. You’re delivering a good product. What else have you done to get the Hatchwise name out there? You’ve been in a couple of podcasts but, come on, you know, I’m going to ask you rack some numbers around Hatchwise in a minute, and they’re big numbers. So what have you done?

George:          One thing that helped us out greatly, we’ve been growing pretty steadily, we were doing well and I’m confident we would have been very successful regardless, but one thing that definitely gave us a big boost was Inc. Magazine ran a story on logo design contests and they went and ran a bunch of projects on different websites, you know, different crowd sourcing companies, and one of them was on Hatchwise.

Tim:                Thank you. Thank you.

George:          No one knew that was happening, and we got a call from Inc. Magazine and they were like, “We just want to let you know you’re going to be in the next issue of Inc..” Is their information straight? I was like, “What, like Inc. Magazine, like the one I have here on my desk?” And they were like, “Yeah, that Inc. Magazine.” And so we waited and really weren’t sure what it was going to say about Hatchwise, what exactly the article was about. And when it came in the mail, we looked through it and what they’ve done was they’ve done sort of a taste test of four different logo design services, one of which was 99 Designs. And they had examples of the different logos they’d gotten from each company and they had like better, best, and –

Tim:                Don’t tell me Hatchwise won.

George:          Hatchwise won.

Tim:                Oh, man. That is gold!

George:          They said Hatchwise gave them the most entries and the best quality among the entries. It was a really cool experience actually seeing what I had been working on for a while there through someone else’s eyes and someone else saying, “This is a really cool company.”

Tim:                Man, you can’t buy that. I mean, what’s that worth? I mean, Inc. Magazine, for people who don’t know, I guess you compare it to a Fast Company type magazine, a Red Herring

George:          Well, yeah, I think Fast Company is owned or, at least, very closely affiliated with Inc., and they have well over a million readers. It was a big deal.

Tim:                Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So that is absolute gold, and as they say, you can’t buy. Now, that brings me – and, thankfully, the logos that were delivered in Inc. Magazine’s <inaudible> *0:24:15 of Hatchwise were great logos. Now, my experience, George, with logo competitions is that it can be a bit of a raffle and, in fact, while you may get 80, 100, 120 logos delivered on a competition that cost you $50, $100, $300, a lot of those logos are crap.

George:          Correct. Because it is open to just about anyone, you are going to get people that submit stuff, they’re just starting out, they’re figuring it out, they’ll submit stuff that is junk. That does happen. Those are in every contest. But in my experience, there are always really quality designs. We have designers that consistently win projects again and again and that’s because they’re really good at what they do.

Tim:                Yeah, and that’s my experience too. There’s always – and it’s a small number but every time I’ve ran a logo competition or outsource some kind of design, there are two, three, four that just save the day.

George:          Mm-hmm, yeah, definitely. And working with the designers, a lot of people make the mistake of just sitting back and watching the designs come in and then deciding what they want at the end, instead of going on a … when you get a logo that’s entered that you don’t like at all, respectfully telling the designer why you don’t like it. And at Hatchwise, we leave those comments open for all the other designers so they can see what you like, what you don’t like. And people start, they give us a call or they send us an email after two days and they’re like, “I don’t like anything that’s being submitted.” We’re like, “Tell the designers why you don’t like it, check back with us once the project ends in eight days and I promise you you’ll have something you’ll love.” It’s like 99% of the time, it happens.

Tim:                Communication. Hello? It’s pretty simple. George, four years ago, you’re working in a lumber yard. Four years on, you’ve got a business called Hatchwise that seems to be rocking it. Can you wrap some numbers around it for us please?

George:          Yeah, we have just a little over 13,000 designers registered on the site. We did close the site down to new designers for a while there. Otherwise, the number would be considerably higher just because we had a lot of really talented designers. There are the new designers you were talking about that bring the quality down a little bit sometimes so we focused on just working with our existing designers, getting the quality up. We have opened it up somewhat since. So that number is about 13,000. We’ve had over 600,000 designs submitted to the site. I think somewhere around 7,000 projects completed, and, again, that’s all with virtually no advertising, mostly all word-of-mouth. I don’t keep track of page views like I should or actual visitors to the site. I honestly find that distracts somewhat. You could be getting billions of page views, if you’re not getting any orders, what’s the … other than telling you you’re doing something wrong, how does that help? So I focus more on actually getting orders, talking to customers, talking to the designers, figuring out what people want and not worrying so much about page views. But from the tracking code that I stuck on the site, I think it’s somewhere … we have at least 27 million since we launched.

Tim:                <inaudible> *0:27:42 reps and dollars around. I know you don’t want to get specific but what are we talking? It’s a six-figure a year business?

George:          Yeah, definitely. We’ve probably done at least a couple of million dollars in gross sales since we launched, but I don’t have the exact numbers for that.  I have two employees that work in office and now full time with me.

Tim:                And what about – you do outsource besides the designers?

George:          We do outsource somewhat. We outsource coding projects and, if we need anything design-related, we generally use Hatchwise. It’s nice having a company that you’d like to use yourself. But, yeah, we outsource coding projects, outsource management of our server. That was something I did myself for a while and I learned the hard way that it’s something that I really need a professional to manage. That was after I took the site down for three days –

Tim:                You want to do that when you’ve got an online business.

George:          You got to know is not a very good three days there, but we made it through it. And then we have other stuff like outsourcing payroll service and that stuff. But we do do a lot of outsourcing the more complicated coding projects.

Tim:                George, you’ve got some pretty strong views on running a small business. You’ve been doing it now for four years. Give us a kind of your top three things if you imagine talking to one of the listeners who are either … I know there are a lot of listeners who are still trapped in the cubicle working for the man. I know there are a lot of listeners working for themselves with their own small businesses. What are these strong opinions all about?

George:          Well, I think we touched on a few of them, you know, just in our conversation so far. But I think number one is run a company that you’re proud of and a company that you would want to be a customer of. If there’s any element to your company that you would not like if you were buying your product or service, then you should change that. That’s extremely important to me. I like to be able to honestly say, I think my company is the best. I don’t think there’s any reason you should go to any of my competitors. That’s first and foremost. Secondly, I think that be honest about how large you are. Don’t inflate numbers. Don’t try to pretend that you have some massive office in the city if it’s three people on the suburbs, more like Hatchwise is right now. Especially, it seems to be late ‘90s, early 2000s, there seem to be this push for companies to appear larger than they are. You’ve got automated phone systems that make it sound like you have 75 <inaudible> *0:30:39, people talking about departments and giving themselves big titles. And, especially when you’re dealing with small businesses, people like it. People call and ask how many employees are working there, and I say, “I own the company. We’ve got two people working here with me,” and they like that. They like knowing that they’re dealing with real people, especially in an age when massive companies are getting a bad rap more and more. So just be honest. If it’s you working out of your garage, tell people, “It’s me working out of my garage.” There’s nothing wrong with that.

Tim:                What do you say to someone, George, who is thinking of starting a business and they keep coming up against their own personal block of “Oh, someone’s already done that” or it’s a crowded marketplace or, you know, what do you say to someone.

George:          I would tell people that if you don’t like what you’re doing, there are other options. You can do stuff. There are a lot of people out there that aren’t happy with companies or products that they’re currently using. There’s no reason you can’t be helping them out with that. And don’t be afraid to take the risk, to leave something secure and actually go and feel a little insecure for a while, feel like you’re living pay check to pay check. It is worth it in the end. But also don’t underestimate the amount of work that starting a business is. You don’t get to go home at the end of the day and kick your feet up and say, “I’m done till tomorrow.” Before I go to bed, I’m working. When I wake up, I am working. So that’s how it works but it is worth it in the end I think.

Tim:                Yeah, absolutely, it is. What keeps you up at night, George?

George:          There are so many different elements to running a business, so many different things to worry about, especially when you’re a small company like the one I have. You can’t afford to have a lawyer that’s on staff. You can’t afford a team of people managing your servers. You can’t afford five different programming guys. You sort of got to do all that yourself or work with people that are doing it with you and you take a lot of responsibility on. It is a lot of responsibility and make sure you’re okay with that before you attempt something like starting your own business.

Tim:                Yeah, totally. Yeah, great, absolutely, absolutely. Hey, George, thanks so much for coming on Small Business, Big Marketing. I admire what you’ve done. I think it’s a great story, inspirational, and may Hatchwise continue to bloom.

George:          Thanks so much, Tim. It was great talking to you.

Tim:                Thanks, mate.

[End of Transcript - 0:33:17]

#120 How to Use Pinterest to Market Your Business

Tim:                Now, let me tell you about Jason Miles because he is a smart cookie. Jason, I approached a couple of months ago to talk about Pinterest, right? New social media. Everyone, you might not have even heard of it. I’m amazed at how many people haven’t heard about it. It’s been around for a while now – a while in social media time, you know, months. But Jason is … he is a vice pres — first of all, he’s an academic and, second, he’s also a business owner. Jason is the vice president of advancement at Northwest University in Seattle in Washington. He’s got a Master’s degree in Business Administration. But he also – what I love about Jason, he co-founded Liberty Jane Clothing with his wife, and he continues … he’s the prime marketer at that business. So let me give you some numbers around Liberty Jane. It’s got 150,000 digital guidebooks downloaded from their website. It’s a six-figure online business, 48,000 Facebook likes, 7,600 subscribers on the YouTube channel with 1.2 million views and he has written the definitive guide on Pinterest, called “Pinterest Power.”  It is time we learn about Pinterest because, you know, it’s one of those social media channels – and I’m not one of the marketing guys who says, “Get on to all the social media channels.” I just think it’s quite daunting for any small business owner to have to consider, you know, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and now Pinterest. You know, that’s pressure. That’s cause for social media anxiety which is a condition in America for which they have clinics you can check into. I do want to interview someone at one of those clinics one day. I must get on to that. Suffice it to say that Pinterest is here and it would appear – having interviewed Jason now, I’m actually convinced that it’s actually a really good social media channel. What I love about it is it’s not an owner’s social media channel. You don’t have to sit there and think, “What am I going to write this time? What’s my post going to look like? What am I going to record? What am I going to tweet?” None of that. It’s just pinning pictures. I love that. It’s really low maintenance, a low-maintenance social media channel that can potentially get you a lot of traffic. And Jason, in this interview, explains exactly how that happens. So without further ado, let’s go over and have a listen to what Jason Miles, author of “Pinterest Power,” shared with me recently.

Jason Miles, marketing on Pinterest, author, welcome to Small Business, Big Marketing.

Jason:             Thank you, sir. Yeah, nice to be here.

Tim:                Absolute pleasure to have you all the way from Seattle.

Jason:             That’s right.

Tim:                Love it. Now, let’s get stuck into this because this is an interesting episode. It’s going to be a mix of like, you know, bird’s eye view of social media and Pinterest right through the kind of like the big question, “Why should we care and how the hell do we use Pinterest or why should we use Pinterest in our business?” So, Jason, if we can just have that discussion first about social media, what do you love about this social media phenomenon?

Jason:             Yeah, you know, I think there are pros and cons to it. One of the things that we found over time is that it’s a great way to drive traffic to our e-commerce site so I guess I’m pretty practical in that regard. And if it didn’t drive traffic and if it didn’t result in sales, I’m not sure we’d be doing it in our small business. So I love that aspect of it. I think that’s probably why we gravitated towards Pinterest.

Tim:                I’m going to pull you back a step over further before we get into Pinterest. What is it about social media that is kind of … that you think that you love?

Jason:             Yeah. I think each platform is different. We started on YouTube and love YouTube a lot. We’ve got over 9,000 subscribers, 1.6 million video views on YouTube. So that was our first social media platform that we really took the time to learn about and understand And it’s got its own unique attributes. And then we started on Facebook and then really Pinterest came along for us. We never got into Twitter. So we like to take each platform for what it offers and for the unique way in which you can engage with people.

Tim:                Now, when you say “we,” you’re talking about you and your wife’s business, Liberty Jane Clothing, yeah?

Jason:             Correct, yup, yup. It’s a business we started in 2008 as an eBay seller and it’s just grown and grown from there, yeah.

Tim:                So you’ve kind of also then branched out and become this kind of Pinterest specialist, written a book and, you know, sharing the Pinterest love as well.

Jason:             Yeah, that’s right. I mean, we started on eBay. We did that for 18 months, got totally burned out, and then developed a better business model. And it’s really – now, it’s almost primarily, completely a digital goods business model. My wife designs doll clothes patterns for the American Girl doll. It’s an 18-inch doll. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it or not.

Tim:                Nothing like a niche, Jason.

Jason:             I know. It is funny, but you know what? It’s a pretty big, tiny little niche. And so we started publishing digital patterns. We’ve had over 200,000 of them downloaded in the last few years. It’s turned into a six-figure business, a thriving six-figure business. So she designs stuff, we auction it on eBay and then we publish the patterns as digital downloads. That’s sort of the business model we’re stuck into.

Tim:                Listen, I was going to get stuck into the Pinterest discussion but you’ve – quite interesting. You’ve mentioned 1.6 million views on YouTube. I can’t let that go without asking how, and you then used Facebook and you ignored Twitter. So, man, there are so many questions there. Can we just, without going into too much detail, what’s the secret to 1.6 million YouTube views?

Jason:             Yeah. And maybe I’ll just mention kind of our social media strategy in general. Yeah, YouTube … we started with contests, and YouTube is a great platform for contests, so we do a design contest, and it was really a simple idea. My wife can literally make any kind of doll clothes, you know, anything that she kind of can see, she can make. And so we had this idea to do a contest on YouTube. People can submit their videos as a response to ours and she would pick a winner and make that design, that outfit. The first time we did it, we had several hundred responses, video responses. The last few times we’ve done it, I think the top number of responses was like 2,300 video responses. And we have other strategies that we use but our primary strategy is either the contest, which we do twice a year, or how-to videos which have been huge, and that’s a great way to engage. So, yeah, over 9,000 subscribers, 1.6 million video views and, you know, there are YouTube users who have much, much bigger footprints than that that are in craft spaces, you know, doing craft how-to’s, that kind of thing.

Tim:                Oh, wow.

Jason:             So that was YouTube.

Tim:                Do not leave YouTube. You do not want to leave YouTube. So I’m just trying to understand, and maybe you can send me a link to one of those contests so we can get a sense. I’ll put it in the show notes for this episode. But what are we talking, like, you to camera or you watch a camera saying, “Hey, send us your best design based on something and we’ll pick a winner, and then go into actually … we’ll actually take it to market.” Is that what you do?

Jason:             Except we don’t take it to market. We just make it for them and send it to them. So then they go crazy over that and, you know, it’s a lot of doll collectors, you know, girls a lot of times who are in the 13-year old, 14-year old age bracket who still kind of like dolls but they kind of want to be designers. And we’ve kind of given this use for their design ideas and, man, it’s gone crazy. It has just gone crazy.

Tim:                Great. Thank you for sharing that. Do send me an example. I’ll put it in the show notes. And you mentioned the how-to video, well, how to is the most searched prefix on the Internet, as we all know. So you are just out there, and you know, like I know this episode which we’re going to get into some how to around Pinterest will also … it gets stretchy. You know, whenever I do a how-to kind of episode, people enjoy it because they are … we’re all learning how to do something better when we cover a topic like that. Okay, so that’s YouTube.

Jason:             Can I mention Facebook?

Tim:                Yeah, go for it.

Jason:             Yeah, so Facebook we’ve got, I think, over 24,000 fans now for our Facebook fan page. We were into Facebook pretty early. We used to promote a post in a Facebook advertising platform so, you know, we bought our way into some of that. But we turned the advertising on and off and we try to engage. That’s really the conversational platform for us. We do the standard things like, you know, quiz on Tuesday and questions on Thursday and, you know, stuff like that where we try to engage systematically. But we also use it as really targeted quick traffic. So if we have an auction ending at 6:00 in eBay, you know, we’ll put it out on our Facebook fan page at 4:30 or 5:00 and say, “Hey, an hour left,” and it really helps with bursts of traffic.

Twitter we just honestly never got into. We’re loving Instagram, and I’m writing a book on that. But Twitter never worked for us because my wife would have had to do the tweeting and it’s just not her thing. I’m the writer. I’m the marketer. She’s the designer. And so it just didn’t work for us. And so we said, you know what, it doesn’t socially fit in with how we do our business, just personally, our interactions, and so we’re not going to use it.

Tim:                And even as a broadcast medium, you don’t see any value in it by simply, you know, okay, it’s not going to be a place to engage but, hey, what about if we do have stuff to say, which obviously you do. Why wouldn’t you just, you know, have a video or someone broadcasting updates around Liberty Jane Clothing?

Jason:             You know, I guess we just felt like it’s not what we’re doing and we’re fine with that. It’s just a platform we’re not going to engage on.

Tim:                Yeah, yeah. Well, there are only so many hours in the day.

Jason:             Exactly, yeah. And we’re going to be good at what we’re good at and we’re going to let the rest go, you know.

Tim:                Interesting discussion, Jason. As I said, I got you on the show because you’ve written this book marketing on Pinterest but have that kind of brought a social media discussion and take us inside your YouTube and Facebook strategies. Actually, Instagram, what’s your Instagram strategy?

Jason:             Yeah, we’re loving Instagram a lot. I’m writing a book on that right now. It’ll come out. “Pinterest Power” was the first book I did this last fall and then “Instagram Power” will come out with McGraw-Hill again this year. So our Instagram strategy – Actually, what we’re finding is that Instagram is a lot like Twitter, except for images, you know, and so we’re liking it a lot. Contests are really hot on Instagram. We’re using a strategy in Instagram that’s really working well and I’m writing about it for the book, but it’s basically like a product launch strategy, a visual product launch strategy, where we take pictures of the product as it’s being designed and then as it’s being made. And then we say, you know, the product’s going to be on our site on Friday at noon. Boom! It sells. And so it’s sort of like a visual, you know, classic product launch style strategy. So we’re just learning. You know, we’re learning Instagram but we’re liking it a lot.

Tim:                I’m struggling to see how Instagram differs between Pinterest in that sense so I look forward to kind of – I’ll put that question on hold but two visual social mediums there. So let’s just go. Here we go, jump off the cliff, Jason. Why should I care … why should we care about Pinterest as a marketing channel for our business?

Jason:             Yeah, two words – referral traffic. It is a referral engine and really just a referral machine. It’s doing things that are just so incredible in terms of the volume of traffic that it’s referring in and I’m just happy to just mention sort of our site stats and the website that we really first learned about Pinterest through our Google Analytics. We didn’t learn about it socially or anywhere else. We learned about it looking at our Google Analytics.

Tim:                All of a sudden, all this traffic’s coming from this thing called Pinterest, huh?

Jason:             Yeah, and you know, our site is pretty big. Just in the last 30 days, we had 509,000 page views, 50,000 unique visitors, 85,000 total visits. So we get a lot of referral links for a lot of places. You just don’t pay attention to the ones that are driving a little bit of traffic but, you know, a year-and-a-half ago, summer 2011, we started to see Pinterest. And we didn’t notice much traffic but, each month, it started to grow. So July, August, by September 2011, we were like, “What in the world is this?” We checked it out, we learned about it, we started to realize that this was a phenomenal opportunity for us. We weren’t on Pinterest. We had no profile. We didn’t even know what it was. But what was occurring was our customers or fans or followers were paying content from our e-commerce site – Liberty Jane Patterns.com is the site – and they were socially sharing it and driving traffic. So we’re not stupid so, by about September, October, we thought, “Man, we got to figure out how to do this.” So we decided we were going to set up a profile. I decided I was going to blog about it publicly so last December, 13 months ago, we decided to launch our profile in Pinterest and we will launch one for the business that my wife manages and then I would launch one personally. And we saw our traffic from Pinterest absolutely skyrocket. You know, last December, over a year ago now, we had total visits from Pinterest of 1,141 with 443 referral links, links inside Pinterest pointing to our website. Well, the next month, January, that’s a year ago, we had 652 referral links and 2,000 visits from Pinterest, and that was right when we set up our profile. Well, fast-forward a year, in the last 30 days, we had – looking at my stats now – 6,600 visits from Pinterest and we have over 9,100 referral links now in Pinterest pointing to our website.

Tim:                Isn’t one of those referral links considered a back link from an SEO point of view?

Jason:             Yeah. When it was set up originally, there was do follow and no follow, so originally it was do follow, now it’s not. So the question about how strong it’s weighted for search engines, I guess that’s up to Google and Bing and all that. But it is an extra referral link, and so that was mesmerizing to us. It’s still mesmerizing. I mean, I just looked to see how many Facebook referral links we have. It’s 104. So we’ve worked in Facebook for what, four-five years now, have 23,000-24,000 followers and have 103 referral links. And in Pinterest, we have 9,100.

Tim:                Can we just understand this referral link? So this is a link within someone’s Facebook or a link within someone else’s Pinterest back to your site.

Jason:             Correct. And so what’s occurring in Pinterest is – and this is really why Pinterest is so mesmerizing as a marketer – the primary social behaviour in Facebook is to like someone’s comment or to comment back, maybe to follow them, to be a liker of their fan page, right? None of those things include a referral link being created, a new link to the – but in Pinterest, the primary social behaviour is to re-pin the image that you’re looking at. And when you do that, you replicate the URL that’s associated with that.

Tim:                Yeah, right. So, by default, as soon as I grab an image from somewhere and put it on one of my Pinterest boards, bang! There’s a link back to that site where that image came from.

Jason:             That’s right. And every time someone re-pins that, which is the common social behaviour, it’s replicating those links.

Tim:                Okay. Let’s … we’ve just straight into why we should care … just for the <inaudible> *0:19:53 which will be many people listening, just explain Pinterest. I’m looking at the site now. The way they explain it, nice and simple. Pinterest is an online pin board. Organize and shared the things you love. Okay, so, Jason, exactly how does that work?

Jason:             Yeah, so it’s really designed as a curation tool. You know, the function in your browser where you have bookmarks, it’s really designed to replace that with a visual image to serve as a visual image to serve up the content for every one of those links. So as you’re looking at it, you know, a user looks at it and sees a picture. A marketer should look at it and see an image that links back to a website. And so what you do in Pinterest is you set up an account and you start following people, and your Pinterest experience is created by their images that they pin. So if you follow all realtors, you’ll have tons of realtor-related images that you see in your Pinterest experience. If you follow all food lovers, you’ll see tons of food stuff. And so as a user, that’s the experience you’re creating for yourself. So who you follow matters in terms of what you’re going to see and what you ultimately will like and re-pin and create your own collections around.

Tim:                So the idea is, first of all, do they call it a timeline? What do Pinterest call the –?

Jason:             Feed.

Tim:                A feed. Okay, so you’ve got your own personal feed and whoever you like on Pinterest, other Pinterest accounts that you like, your feed is populated with what they pin, and then the other part of it is that you then set up your own Pinterest boards. Is that the right terminology?

Jason:             Pin boards, yeah.

Tim:                Yeah. Okay, so and you can have as many boards as you like. So I’m going to use this show as an example. We had, literally, this week just started a Pinterest account. Am I embarrassed to say that? No, I’m not embarrassed to say that. There are so many hours in the day. But what we’ve got is we have … I don’t have a feed yet. I’m not even looking at the feed. I’m not following anyone. It’s in its very early days but we’ve got a Pinterest board for every guest that’s been on the show and that’s been, you know, you’re the 117th guest so a photo of every guest which we’ll link back to that interview. That makes a lot of sense to me. I should have done that earlier. The second board is one that we’re creating because I’ve just brought on to my virtual marketing team a girl by the name of Jess who is going to scribe not every episode but a lot of episodes that I do and effectively turn each interview into an infographic, right?

Jason:             Yeah.

Tim:                Okay, you like that?

Jason:             I do.

Tim:                So then there’s another board that has little infographics or scribes of the key interviews that I do, and once again, linking back to the show notes to that interview. So they are a couple of examples of boards, yeah?

Jason:             I like that. So I have a few best recommendations to give to people who are setting up their Pinterest account. We can use you as an example if you want and just rattle through a few ideas.

Tim:                Cool.

Jason:             Yeah. So the first one is it’s kind of funny but you don’t start on Pinterest. To really set up a good marketing strategy in Pinterest, you want to start on your own website, and what you’re looking to do is audit your website and ask the question on every page or post, “Is there an image that effectively represents the content?” And so if you go to Small Business, Big Marketing, and, you know, so I did this earlier today and you look at your last interview, right? So looking at that, and what you want to do is there’s a tool that you add to your browser tools called the Pinmarklet tool. And it’s a little button that is installed onto your browser and it allows you to pin images from any website on the Internet that you’re looking at. And you want to install that and use it almost like an audit tool so – and I have it right here and when I click the ‘Pin It’ button on my browser, I see four images associated with your last post.

Tim:                Okay. So let me just be really clear here. That is a – what’s it called? A Pin? What’s the button called?

Jason:             Marklet tool.

Tim:                Okay. So that sits on your browser and the level of your browser may be above your bookmarks bar or whatever it is. When you are on a page, you can hit that button and that will bring out any images that are pinnable. And then what do you do? You click one of those images and it heads over onto your Pinterest feed?

Jason:             That’s true if you’re a basic user. But if you’re the marketer and it’s your website, the first thing you want to do is ask the question, “Do any of these images tell the story of what’s on this post or this page?” And so that’s the first step is really audit your site and ask the question, “Am I going to be able to serve up my content that’s in a way that’s Pinterest-friendly to people who are interested in using Pinterest to curate or collect this interview, for example, with Mia and then, in Pinterest, what will it look like?” And so what a lot content marketers are doing are making little, I call them promo graphics. It’s almost like a little display ad where you say, you know, five important lessons for content marketing or, you know, <inaudible> *0:25:38. And it’s a graphic that you install in the post or the page. It will content and it’s a descriptive pinnable content that people would choose. They would choose that every time if they want to curate content from Small Business, Big Marketing. And I can guarantee you, if you do that, if you fix that one thing, you’ll start having all your visitors who are into Pinterest just do that for you

Tim:                Okay. So let’s just be … so the most recent interview is with Mia Freedman. What I should have – and one of the big points around that interview was how to target women in your marketing, right? And that was a big point. So what I should have done is gone and curated a nice little square postage stamp sized banner which said, “Listen in as Mia Freedman talks about how to target women or five ways to target women in your marketing.” And then embedded that image within the show notes of that post, yeah?

Jason:             Or your infographic that you’re going to make would also serve that purpose very, very well. Yeah, so either way.

Tim:                Cool. Cool. And then you’ve then got to make sure you got that Marklet installed onto your browser.

Jason:             Yeah, exactly. So the first step is start on your own website and audit it. Second step it gets really easy. Create a great profile that explains who you are, the company, you know, what you’re trying to collect or curate, any credibility indicators, you know, the basics of a good social media profile, a good head shot or image. So those are a couple of basics. And then the third thing you want to do is get back into your analytics on your website and look to see who is pinning content off your website. What will happen is you’ll have people who are really crazy about Pinterest, trying to pin stuff off your website, and you can see them in your analytics. You can see the pins and you go find them and you’ll be amazed at who is out there advocating, sharing your content. And all you want to do is like them, comment, follow them and affirm them in what they’re doing. Those are some basic steps. Fourth thing you want to do is a marketing plan. I’ve a very, very straightforward marketing plan. It’s a four-step plan. It’s on my website, and we can get into that if you want. Fifth thing, con—

Tim:                Can I just stop you on the marketing plan? Is that a marketing plan for Pinterest?

Jason:             Yup, yup.

Tim:                Give us the four steps.

Jason:             The four steps are these. Establish an authority profile. The first step would be an authority profile that really clarifies, for example, your own Pinterest profile. I was going to look for it but the question is, on face value, does it, say, you’re the host of the number one Australian podcast on marketing? The basic authority profile. The second thing you want to do that’s counter-intuitive is you want to take all of your current fans on Facebook in your newsletter and invite them to find you in Pinterest because what they’ll do is they’ll friend all their friends from Facebook and they’ll friend you and you will be one step removed from all their friends. And when they start re-pinning your content, they’re sharing it will all their friends. So inviting your existing social media fans and followers to follow you on Pinterest is the second step. Third step is to become what I call a visual Sherpa. So, you know, you have to identify what you’re trying to accomplish in Pinterest and it needs to be service to your target market. So you really want to think through what do they want to see. Do they want to see randomness? Do they want to see pictures of my backyard or my vacation or do they want to see infographics and images related to content marketing or small business marketing? And really what it is is what you’d be looking for is content that is an image that’s a place holder for articles, videos, webinars, things that you know they would like. That’s the third step. And then the fourth step is what I call <inaudible> *0:29:51. It kind of depends on the kind of business you’re in but it can be a behind the scenes look at your business. It can be contests. It can be giveaways. It can be ways to let the Pinterest users feel more closer connected to you. And so that depends on the kind of business you’re in how you would approach that step. But it’s not rocket science. But if you don’t understand the basic goals of what you’re doing in Pinterest, you’ll flounder.

Tim:                I’m just thinking one of the things that I do with … I’m pretty clear on the different roles the social media channels play in the small business, big marketing brand. The way I use Facebook at the moment, Jason, is that I – to me, it’s the way I share the lighter side of marketing. So if you go to the Small Business, Big Marketing Facebook, what you’re going to see is funny customer service experiences, funny headlines, funny ads, weird brochures, strange signage, you know, just the lighter side of small business marketing. And, you know, there would be hundreds and hundreds of examples that I’ve put there over the last couple of years. Would that be better suited to Pinterest?

Jason:             No, I think it’s the opposite. I think you leave that as your strategy on Facebook because that’s what people have come to appreciate. And I think in Pinterest maybe you have a new thing and maybe it’s a library of the very best of the Internet related to Small Business, Big Marketing or maybe it’s just you personally saying, “Here are my pin boards related to email marketing and mobile and, you know, SEO and whatever, whatever.” And you do collections like that and you serve as a resource for your audience, and I think Pinterest is a great tool for that. It’s really like a library site and one of the reasons it’s very different than the other social media sites.

Tim:                It’s like a library site. Okay.

Jason:             <inaudible> *0:31:40 a library, yeah.

Tim:                Tell me, I know there are a lot of people wanting to know in terms of who’s using Pinterest now. One of the things that, you know, when you’re telling me about the almost the instant success when you went into your Google Analytics 14 months ago and you saw this activity coming from Pinterest that you weren’t even … you didn’t even have an account at that point in time. I just wonder you’re selling Liberty Jane Clothing, you’re selling clothing designs. Your target audience is young girls, teenage girls. Is that right?

Jason:             It’s ideal for this use. Yeah, it’s really the girls and their moms.

Tim:                Okay, so girls, moms, women, and I know I’ve got a few listener questions actually that’s one of them. Is there a leaning towards women with Pinterest or why is there a lean towards women? You were in a category that Pinterest wasn’t made for, right? There’s a whole lot of small business owners listening to this who are dentists and chiropractors and carpenters, etc. Is it as relevant to them?

Jason:             You know, I think it is. That’s one of the primary questions people ask, you know, when I’m speaking and that kind of thing. I use my own blog as an example. You know, so marketing on Pinterest is a basic marketing blog, and so there’s no product associated with that. It’s just pure content. I’ve gotten for that blog 14.8% of my traffic from Pinterest.

Tim:                Yeah, but that’s a blog about Pinterest.

Jason:             It is but it could be a blog about Twitter or it could be a blog about SEO or it could be a blog about washing machines. So that’s my other example. And so the answer is I think it can serve people who are in the service industries and industries that aren’t products and <inaudible> *0:33:39 product photography-centric. And the way in which it would serve in those cases is similar what I was just talking to with you, which is figure out what your ideal prospect wants to see and what they want to learn about and what they need help with discovering and be that person who’s curating content for them. And if you’re an insurance salesman, man, there are a dozen or 20 topics that people would be interested in. If they know that’s what you’re thing is and they follow you on Pinterest, they’re going to appreciate you pointing out those kinds of pieces of information. Will it be as effective as it would be for a product-focused business like ours? You know, I don’t know but it’s definitely worth <inaudible> *0:34:27 through.

Tim:                One other thing is, you know, like I’ve just come off this speaking engagement with financial planners, financial advisers in the audience, and there was that social media discussion. And, you know, I’m not one of those marketing guys who – and I don’t think you are either – which, you know, you must be on all the social media channels or even any of them. It’s kind of person dependent. There are owners in terms of time and resource, and you’ve got to have stuff to say. One of the things that financial planners often fed back to me was, “But I don’t think my clients are on Twitter. I don’t think they’re on Facebook, you know.” And the same argument would come up for Pinterest, you know. So if your clients aren’t on Pinterest, is it still worth considering? I think I know the answer to it but what’s your view on that?

Jason:             Yeah. It’s a good question. I mean, you have to find where your audience is. Clearly, originally for us, YouTube was the place where we found a cohort of our ideal prospects. Maybe that’s not Pinterest for somebody, you know, and I already mentioned that we just have always avoided Twitter. So you have to decide how it fits in with your strategy. I’ll tell you why we like Pinterest so much, and here are just a few things to think about. It’s social media without words. You know, you don’t talk. You don’t type. It’s not the custom to do tons of commenting or answering questions on it, and I think that’s very refreshing to a lot of people because one of the biggest questions people ask is, “Can I really cram in another social media site? You know, I’m just overwhelmed already with it all.” So Pinterest is social media light in that regard.

Tim:                There are many social media in Nevada.

Jason:             Exactly. That’s why Instagram is so awesome. Very cool that way. The second thing that’s very cool about Pinterest is it is not about real-time sharing. You know, two years ago when it came out, that was the real big change. That’s why – no, not really understood at first. Everything was about real-time sharing two years ago. You know, I’m checking in at Burger King and I’m checking in at the movie theatre and whatever. It’s not based on real-time sharing. And the third thing that’s very, very cool about it is it’s grassroots, not pushed marketing messages, you know, like the story of our business experience was that it was a grassroots user community of fans and followers that got us into this. That’s very different than Facebook, where you have to say a message for it to be received. You don’t have anybody working really hard for you in Facebook. You know, you’ve got to push your message through it. The fourth thing that we love about it is the content has what you might call a long shelf-life or half-life. The Bitly people, bitly.com, did research and Hillary Mason is their chief scientist. She looked at the half-life of a socially shared item and so a tweet has a half-life, or half of all of the engagement it’ll ever get, occurs in 2.8 hours. After 2.8 hours, it’s basically half-done and, you know. A Facebook comment or post has got 3.1 hours as its half-life. A YouTube video has a half life of 7 hours. And they haven’t published data yet related to Pinterest but I would imagine it’s longer. I know for our personal business we frequently get the most traffic from Pinterest in any given day from pins that have been pinned 30 weeks ago, you know, or 20 weeks ago. And the coolest part is that when you look, we didn’t pin those items. We weren’t the ones that initiated into Pinterest. So it’s very, very cool that way. And, obviously, as a marketer and you’re struggling with how much time and energy you have, you know, that’s the nice part about Pinterest is if you put items into it, they have a much longer shelf life or if you set your site up so that your customers can put content into it, it’s really an investment that’s going to pay off for a long time.

Tim:                I think great point, and I think the fact that it’s got that longer shelf life means it’s going to have the opportunity for more people to find it and, if you are thinking, an additional answer to that last question is that, you know, when you are on a social media channel like Pinterest or Twitter or whatever it is, it’s kind of incumbent upon you, the business owner, to let people know because, at the end of the day, it’s a needle in a haystack. If you’re on Pinterest, cool. There will be people who will organically find you but unless you make it a call to action maybe on your business card or on your website, when you’re speaking to clients, saying, “Hey, you should check out my Pinterest board because there are a lot of good resources there.” That’s when, you know, you should get that additional action, traction.

Jason:             Yeah, for sure. And the last thing I’ll just mention is – this maybe has happened to you before. I don’t know. In fact, I think I remember you guys talking about it in one of your podcasts. But, you know, our Facebook fan page got shut down last August. It was the fourth of August, 2011. That’s a year-and-a-half ago. And the traffic was immediately vaporized. And we had to, you know, do a little petition thing and you confirm that you’re a real person. They were trying to clean up all their spam accounts and that kind of thing. But it took several days for it to get turned back on. The cool part about Pinterest is all those referral links, those 9,100, those are diffused across so many user profiles and so many pin board collections. There’s no way to unplug.

Tim:                Yeah, that’s nice. That’s reassuring. That’s reassuring. That would have been interesting moment when you found your Facebook <inaudible> *0:40:35.

Jason:             Yeah.

Tim:                Now, this is – I’m talking to Jason Miles who has a blog, Marketing on Pinterest. He has a book, “Pinterest Power.” Jason, I went out to my Facebook community, to my LinkedIn community and said, “Hey, I’m talking to Mr. Pinterest. What questions have you got?” And, as you expect, it piqued their interest.

Jason:             Yeah, yeah.

Tim:                So I thought if I could just hit you with those questions. I think we’ve answered a lot of them but if we just – there’s about … how many have I got here? There’s about … oh, well, there’s quite a lot out of the ones I have taken. I think all up, we’ve got about 30 questions but I’ve cut it down to about ten because there was a bit of <inaudible> *0:41:20. So let’s go through them. So I’ve got Kalana Gawkin asked, “Is it more important just to be active on Pinterest or should you try to promote your own products?”

Jason:             Both.

Tim:                Yeah, I would have thought so. You got to give and take, huh?

Jason:             And show the whole depth of who you are and your company, a robust approach to it, not just product image, product image, product image.

Tim:                Bianca Bollard asked, “How can a service-based small business benefit from Pinterest compared to an e-commerce business?”

Jason:             Yeah, I mean, I think we touched on that a little bit. To the extent that you have a customer base that you can serve in it, there’s clearly a strategy for doing that.

Tim:                Agreed. Guy Midson asked – which I think we’ve answered – how best to promote products? We’ve covered that. Here’s the next one from Mac Smirdon, “I have a personal Pinterest account but have neglected it as I’m sure what it’s all about … as I am sure …” I don’t understand that. “I would love to know how it can be beneficial to service business.” Okay, sorry. We’ve covered that. Okay, “Why do you think females have been such <inaudible> *0:42:33 of Pinterest?” asked Richard Hummerford.

Jason:             That’s an interesting question. Pinterest is the first large social network that didn’t start in Silicon Valley or in a tech community. I suppose Facebook started on a college campus but, quickly, the moved to Silicon Valley. Pinterest started in Des Moines, Iowa. The founder, Ben Silbermann, said that it was first received well by mid-Western moms and Mormons. That’s his quote. That was the first user community in mid-Western cities in the US, and it grew from city to city. That’s the basic user community that it started with but it’s been growing at such an enormous rate, it’s really transcending that demographic. It’s just like, you know, Facebook started on the college campus but, ultimately, as it grew, it transcended that. So over time, Pinterest will take on the user demographic info that’s probably most similar to Facebook, which I think is like 58% female. And so that will ultimately be the gender split I would guess. But it clearly started in that community. But in the UK, for example, it started in the more Silicon Valley type male demographic, and so that was the initial user community in the UK. But it’s transcending that group there as well.

Tim:                Yeah, okay. It’s always hard to generalize, isn’t it in terms of pro—there are a few questions here around profile, who’s using it, where are they, how long are they using for – it’s hard to generalize but I think it’s a fairly good summary that you’ve just given. Okay, so we’ve got Stewart Up with a … this is a comment. “I’ve mentioned Pinterest to clients and their response is, ‘What’s that?’ or ‘No, not another social media network.’” So, he said, “With Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, the people I’ve talked to are overwhelmed with what’s out there. My question is what are the benefits that Pinterest offers that differentiate it from other social networks?” Stewart, I reckon we have covered that in our – I love the fact that it’s less <inaudible> *0:44:41 so I think that’s a great way of looking at it. It’s like pin images. Bang! “Is it good for SEO?” Daniel Archer asks. Daniel’s a previous guest on the show. We’ve kind of covered that. You think Google factor in the referral links but you’re just not sure what weight they give it, yeah?

Jason:             Yeah. Maybe that’s a question for somebody smarter than me.

Tim:                Yeah, or for Google. Jillian Borg asks, “How do you make sales from it?” And I know that you’re marketing on Pinterest blog. Your tag line is ‘Make Money, Get Noticed, Expand Your Reach.’ So how do you make money from Pinterest?

Jason:             Yeah, well, the referral link is a huge part. You know, the stats are saying on Pinterest use and there’s a whole collection of stats that have kind of started to document this now that people are socially browsing and finding things to buy through Pinterest and that it’s growing at a staggering rate. So it’s being used by people to socially discover things to purchase. There’s a beautiful collection of stats and information around that but bottom line – product photography is the cornerstone of it if it’s a product based, you know, concept. And infographics are great for content marketers and for people who are selling services. So, ultimately, you’re attempting to serve people with information or with a visual display of the product and drive them to your e-commerce site.

Tim:                Jason, just kind of brainstorm here as you’re talking then, saying, okay, let’s just really be specific here so we can give an action to listeners as to what to go and do next. If you’re a product marketer, would it be a great idea to take a photo of every single one of your products and do a video review. Instead of just posting a photo of your product, actually posting an image of a video review that then links to that page on your site where that video lives. Likewise, if you’re a service marketer, there’s no reason why you can’t create some kind of graphic around every service you offer and, once again, turn that into a video of you talking to the camera about your service offerings. Is that a good start?

Jason:             It’s a great start, and I should mention that you can also pin videos and they’ll play straight in YouTube – sorry, they’ll play straight in Pinterest. You can pin sound, audio files, mp3 files. They’ll play straight in Pinterest. You can pin a slideshow, slide decks, and so it’s not just an image. So if you’re a service provider, your video can be viewed and you can have a collection of videos right on Pinterest. Sure.

Tim:                Well, that to me sounds like a really good start just to cover your entire product of service range with videos or slideshows or audios and take it from there. A little bit more work than just kind of pinning an image but I would imagine that richer content would pay off. Jason, is there anything I haven’t covered? Is there a question I should have asked that I haven’t?

Jason:             No, I think this is good. A lot of the fears and misconceptions we’ve talked through. You know, people are pretty overwhelmed by it, the idea of a new platform, but, no, I think we’ve covered it pretty well. You know, the only last thing I’ll mention is that some people who are real hardcore Twitter users try to apply Twitter tactics to Pinterest and, you know, follow a million people so you get 600,000 people following you. Those kinds of strategies, it doesn’t work. Pinterest is very, very different in terms of how you grow than any strategy that you would use in Twitter in particular. It’s more like YouTube marketing than anything else. So you just have to realize that it’s just a different animal. But there are people who have 1.6 million followers in Pinterest and they’re driving massive traffic to their sites. It’s a real opportunity so, yeah, I think we’ve covered –

Tim:                Jason Miles, “Pinterest Power” author, soon to be “Instagram Power.” <inaudible> *0:49:06 back when that book comes out. Thanks a million, mate, and I’ll put a link also to the book in the show notes so people can grab that off Amazon. Thanks, Jason.

Jason:             Thank you so much. It was a real honour. I really appreciate it.

 

[END OF TRANSCRIPT - 0:49:19]

Tim: Now let’s talk Cam Barber. Cam Barber has a business called The Vivid Method for public speaking. He is a public speaking coach to CEO’s, media personalities and sporting clubs including, including my beloved Hawks for those in Melbourne or who know Aussie rules. I got to love Cam for that. He’s going to share with us some absolute gold. Guys I so strongly so, I just know that getting up on stage and presenting is a great way of building your personal brand and your business and I really encourage you to do it. I can’t talk about it enough. I’ve spoken about it previously. It’s a great way of honing your message; it’s a great way of getting in front of more than one person at a time, great leverage, great personal branding and Cam shares some absolute gold with us. He’s also got a process that I’ll share with you afterwards, he shares it with you during this interview but I’ll direct you to a website where he has put together a fantastic product called speech outline in which he shows you how to put together speeches and presentation really easily. It’s all about removing the nervousness and you are about to learn and discover how to remove the nervousness so you can add presenting public speaking to your business’ marketing strategy. Here’s Cam Barber. Cam Barber from The Vivid Method, welcome to small business big marketing.

Cam: G’Day!

Tim: How are you mate?

Cam: I’m good, nice to talk to you Tim.

Tim: I hope you’re not nervous

Cam: No I’m not nervous. I was actually fidgeting again. I was getting something from my desk.

Tim: Because if you’re nervous then we’re all in trouble because what we are here to talk about today is public speaking
Cam: That’s right.

Tim: And if there ever was reason to having anxiety levels increase amongst many of my listeners, it’s those two words but Cam why is that?

Cam: Nerves are normal, this is a really important point and one of the biggest problems or challenges people have is that they think it’s not normal. They think “I’ve been doing this for years, I’m experienced or I’m a confident person and I shouldn’t be nervous” but there are reasons why you’re nervous and they’re observable and when you get comfortable with that, when you understand the nerves, you can manage them.

Tim: Like everything in life, it’s there for a reason.

Cam: It’s there for a reason so let’s talk about nerves then straight up. A simple principle that helps you process this is that all anxiety is the result of uncertainty. Behind all nerves or anxiety, there’s a sense that I feel uncertain about something. When you just understand that basic idea, instead of being lost in the nerves, instead of having your mind clouded with one word which is “cranky, I’m nervous. I wish I wasn’t” you can tell “what am I uncertain about? What can I get more certain about?” and a big part of that when it comes to presentations or public speaking is “what’s my message? How does it relate to my audience and am I clear on the structure and key ideas of my presentation?”

Tim: I love the fact that you’re looking for what is causing the nerves or the anxiety. I found I do a lot of public speaking and I know a number of years ago one of my aha moments was realizing that, and this is kind of obvious on reflection but if I know what I’m talking about then the idea of sharing with others is quite easy. If I didn’t know what I was talking about, I shouldn’t be up there on the first place and I have every right to be nervous.

Cam: Well that’s right. If you’re totally uncertain about why you’re there, there’s not much we can do. It’s like you can’t teach a drowning person to swim. We want to look at a few things beforehand and get really clear. One of the reasons I started this business, my background is in radio. I was with Fox FM in Melbourne, part of the Australia group many years ago as a sales manager and I did a course, a presentation skills course and I came away from this 2-day course more nervous and far more self conscious than before the course and the harder I try to follow the systems and the rules of what was taught in this course, the more frustrated I became. It was such a problem for me that I really started researching and ended up developing a method we call The Vivid Method for public speaking. The big problem and this is not uncommon today, the big problem if I can simplify it down is that this course is teaching us to be someone who we weren’t.

Tim: Yes!

Cam: They’re saying “look we got research that says 6 gestures a minute is the correct number of gestures. Cam, you’re doing 60 so you’re 10 times wrong” and this idea that there’s one right way of doing it is a really bad idea. It’s just isn’t right, we’re all different and what you want to do is get comfortable in your own skin, find a way to relax and breath and then focus your all attention on okay, who’s my audience? What’s my message? Let me get really clear about that.

Tim: Yeah, I love that and there’s so much truth to that. There’s so much power in being able to be yourself and once again, like not brain surgery is it Cam? Like the idea of actually going and say I’m just going to be me. I don’t have to worry about how many slides a minute. I don’t worry about how many gestures. I don’t worry about whether I have my hands in my pocket or out of my pocket or whatever. It’s like be me.

Cam: That’s true but in a way it’s not that simple to do.
Tim: I thought we were wrapping things up

Cam: Well look at what happens; I’ll give you a quick example. Let’s say you’re sitting down at a meeting and there are 10 people around the table and you’re all sitting and you take turns in speaking. Because you’re all sitting, you’re all part of the same group. Even though the spotlight is on you a little bit when it’s your turn to speak or you’re trying to get an idea across, you’re still part of the same group but if I say to you Tim, “okay mate, now it’s your turn to speak. Can you stand up, walk up to the front of the room and now tell us your idea” now what happens is you’re no longer part of the group. You’ve been separated and you’re looked at now. The spotlight on you is brighter and you feel disconnected and so that creates uncertainty. There’s a natural stress response that occurs and so you can’t just tell people “hey be yourself” because they’re up there going “well is this right? I’m not sure” what you need to do is there are 2-3 things you need to get certain about and it keeps coming back to do you know what your message is? Do you feel confident or certain about that? Have you structured it well? In other words do you know how you’re going to start and how you’re going to end or you’ll just keep on talking and hope there’ll be some sort of sign from heaven so you know when to stop.

Tim: Can I just challenge you on that? Part of that is like we’re sitting around the table, 10 people we’re all going around, we’re all sitting down, we’re all sharing ideas and someone says “Tim, get up, go to the front of the table and present.” If I was strong enough of mind, couldn’t I just go “okay I’ll change the location, I’ll stand and I’ll move to the top of the table but I’m going to be myself.”

Cam: Great mate, love it but what is strong enough of mind mean how do you get from, whenever you were in school, it’s normal to be nervous. The first time, if you’re a kid, if you’re a teenager, if you’re an adult, whatever it was, the first time or few times you’re exposed into the spotlight and you’re asked to speak, people are all looking at you differently. They’re all looking at you like “okay you’re in charge, guide us, entertain us somehow” you’ll be nervous. You can’t avoid that. You got to go through some experiences. The question then becomes and I love your question, “how do you get from I don’t know what to do and because I don’t know what to do I feel uncertain and therefore have anxiety to strengths of mind.” This is in fact fundamentally what I focused my attention over the last 15 years, how do you get from there to there.

Tim: As a big leap. It’s person dependent but there is a chiasm.

Cam: Everybody is different but there is a chiasm and you need to understand what’s there and what we’re given again. A lot of what we’re taught is you’re supposed to act this way. Once you do that you’re moving further into uncertainty because you’re thinking what were the steps? How many gestures are we supposed to do? I’ll give you a couple more of these myths, these absolute myths that send us in the wrong direction. How many gestures you’re supposed to have? Are you meant to have open gestures or closed gestures? If you put your hands in your pockets, have you heard of that one?

Tim: Oh yeah, well in fact I’ve just come, I’m literally been filming some videos today from my website and I had that whole discussion like “should I have my hands in my pocket? Shouldn’t I?” and I just keep coming back to be yourself.

Cam: Find a way to be comfortable. I like that better. Be yourself again is a little bit uncertain. Find a way to be comfortable allows for “am I or am I not” and I can process that. You might have heard of this other myth – the first eight seconds forms a lasting impression.

Tim: What a terrible pressure

Cam: What a ridiculous…haven’t you heard that? First impression…

Tim: Yeah, yeah imagine that. I mean when you get to the nine second mark and you go “I stuffed that up, might as well walk off now”

Cam: Correct and that’s absolutely what some people are thinking. They’re thinking “oh I stuffed this up, there’s no way I can recover but I got to stand here for another 20 minutes” and so that’s where people have this terrible experiences with nervousness where they really didn’t need to. If you just tell someone “you’re a pretty strong of mind sort of a guy or girl, why don’t you just stand up and go?” your mind’s spinning with “isn’t first impression everything? Should I have my hand, oh look my hands are in my pocket, is that good or bad?” you do need to process these things.

Tim: One of the things I do, Cam I’d love to kind of pull apart this vivid method that you’re created, one of the things that I do when speaking is – well there’s a number of things actually but I do just take the mindset that it’s a conversation with the audience and conversation is part of my I guess one of my personality traits that I want to get across. In fact, I actually look to Jamie Oliver as a guy who I kind of look to as someone who is just a wonderful presenter/speaker so I kind of often go “what would Jamie do?” and for me it takes a lot of pressure off and I found myself speaking last week, I arrived at the venue sure enough there’s the little raised platform with a lectern and I’m going “oh my God, I’m so not a lectern guy” what I found is when I got up on stage and started speaking, I kind of use the lectern in a different way. I kind of stood alongside it, I leant on it and it allowed me to once again just be more conversational than kind of a keynote presenter/lecturer.

Cam: Well you made two important points here. Be conversational which is where most people are most comfortable then not only will you think more clearly because you’re comfortable, you’ll connect with your audience. Jamie Oliver is a great example and if your personality style seems to fit with him, then simplifying it down to hey what would Jamie do is really a good way to go. It simplifies your process. The second thing though is the lectern. Put people behind a lectern and they’ll think “oh I have to act a certain way” and you don’t. This is a really important point that you the speaker have much more impact or choice about how you want to create the environment in the room then you might think. What a lot of speakers do is they walk into the room and they think “this is the mood, I have to match the mood” and the real problem with that is that most of the people sitting in the room waiting for someone to speak are relatively clog and stiff because they’re waiting for something to happen. If you take on that mood, clog and stiff, then it might really throw you whereas if you got the ability to go “hello” hey do you want a secret? We’ll jump ahead of the method but do you want to know one of the greatest secrets that I developed with a client?

Tim: Mate, bring it on more than one but let’s start with one.

Cam: Here’s a superpower secret – you can eliminate the start of your presentation. You might be wondering what I’m talking about. The start is where the most anxiety is. If you think about it, that starting point, just before and just as you speak is where there’s most uncertainty. You have no rhythm yet, you have no response. A lot of people throw themselves at the start whereas if you start off your presentation with these words, you will eliminate all of that pressure.

Tim: Here we go, insert drum roll, thank you Liam.

Cam: Is everyone listening? Are you sitting down? Start off “just before we get started”

Tim: There it is.

Cam: In other words, just before we get started, you might plan this “just before we get started I thought I’d say thank you to such and such” or “just before we get started, we’re going to be talking about this one idea here today, it might seem complicated but it’s as simple as it is.” It doesn’t matter what it is, when you say just before we get started, everybody takes on the perception that this is a conversation, this is relatively informal.

Tim: I love that. Tell me on that point Cam because what if you go “just before we get started, how’s everyone feeling?” or what if you add a question to the audience. I think it’s a bad thing because often the audience doesn’t want to respond and if you don’t get a response then that puts a real wash on it.

Cam: Great, what you’re doing is you’re opening up another thing which we call direct involvement with the audience. Direct involvement with the audience has some strengths and weaknesses. It has some risks associated with it and you just highlighted one of them. A lot of the time a speaker would do that because it takes the pressure off of them, they don’t like the spotlight and so they go “if I can quickly throw the spotlight to the audience, that will make me feel better” and you must have sit through one of these events where the speaker says “okay everyone get up and shake your hands and greet the person next to them”

Tim: Team hug

Cam: Team hug, now look in some situations that will change the mood of the room, will change the mood of the room but often when that happens to me, it still happens when I watch a lot of speakers, I think it’s a weak effort. I feel like you’re throwing the pressure into us, we don’t know what to do, I don’t know who this person is next to me, isn’t there a better way? You can do that, it depends on how it works and your style and what you got in mind but just simplifying it, taking out the risk and saying “just before we get started here is such and such” if you want to ask a question that’s not a bad idea. Just before we get started, what I thought I’d do today is focus on such and such but I know we got a diverse audience; we can focus more on this or this, what would you prefer?

Tim: I like that, just before we get started, I’ll be introducing that probably at the next keynote. Okay Cam, Vivid Method mate, I want to pull that apart and give my listeners really clear structure, step by step on how to nail public speaking but why the name The Vivid Method?

Cam: Good question, vivid is just a good word. If you think about vivid it means two things, clear and memorable and if you talk about any form of communication, they’re the outcome, they’re the goals. You want to be clear, you want to be memorable. Vivid communication, vivid presentations, vivid public speaking, vivid media skills, these are the branding that we used for all of our training courses and our coaching because we want it to be simple – is it clear? Do you know how to make it memorable?

Tim: Isn’t there a big word missing there, persuasive?

Cam: Yes, persuasiveness and selling ideas are important but it’s not always important, you’re not always trying to be persuasive. We used to push that word a bit harder but I speak a lot of people who were in finance or accounting or legal or they’re doing a presentation that’s an update on a project and they say “I don’t want to persuade them, I really just want to inform them and engage them” persuasion is great but we want to be clear and memorable and if your message is a persuasive message, if your goal is to get them to buy an idea or to take an action, then we got a persuasive focus but we’re still going to make that clear as to why they should take that action and make it memorable to engage them throughout.

Tim: Okay, okay but I would have thought that even a legal presentation or an architect updating on progress of a design, there’d still be a call to action of some sort like persuading people to agree with him or persuading people to let them move on to the next stage. You want someone to do something as a result of hearing you speak more often than not, is that true?

Cam: It is true and whether I’ll use the word persuasion or not is I find a sort of a personality style thing. I’ll give you another example, we also do messaging session so we help organizations and sporting clubs identify what their key messages are as a company or as a department. I was working with a large finance company and they said we want to have passion in there, half of the room basically said “if you’re not passionate, if you can’t say out loud I’m passionate to be here everyday working, why bother coming in?” and the other half of the room were going “what are you talking about? Calm down I don’t know that you need to pound the table and say passionate; what about belief? Can’t we have belief?” What I identified that day is that the extroverts to our personality style loves the word passion whereas the introvert style thinks it’s a bit over the top but they ultimately mean the same thing, belief or passion is the same commitment to coming to work. I think persuasion falls into the same category. People are saying “yeah I want to convince them to hear but I don’t want to trick them, they say persuasion is a bit too saucy” I’m just sort of stepping out of that argument and saying but you just identify and this is part two of The Vivid Method.

Tim: Part two?

Cam: Part two because why not, we got a structure that we can jump in randomly.

Tim: Go for it, let’s just be clear. Vivid method is a method of, it would be best to summarize it saying if you follow the vivid method of public speaking; it will make you a great public speaking who speaks from the heart, is that kind of too soft?

Cam: Again, some people will love that. Probably 50% of any audience will go “yeah speak from the heart” the other half are going to go “what do are you talking about? I’m trying to get them to understand the new strategy or focus” I love it, that’s great, speak from the heart. I wouldn’t use those words; I’d say The Vivid Method is going to help you plan and deliver a compelling presentation.

Tim: Love it, okay let’s get into it, how do we do that?

Cam: There are three parts and just for fun we’re jumping to part two. Part two we call credit speech outline or credit presentation outline and that has two parts to it; one is what’s your message? We’ve got a template that allows you to sort your thoughts, think about your audience and define your message and that’s where, coming back to something you said earlier, as part of that process you either want your audience to think something specific or do something specific. If you don’t want them to think something or do something, then yes why are they presenting? Why are they standing up? It does might be use this process or coming with more passion or whatever it might be, you want them to actually take an action. I think it’s probably more common and it’s where you literally state what you want them to think. For example, this is a fantastic process for preparing and delivering a compelling presentation. That’s what I want you to think. I’m going to define the message in those exact words.

Tim: Feel free to role-play here Cam; I don’t mind a bit of role-play, I’ll be your guinea pig.

Cam: Alright well what do you want your audience to think? We’ve got a great radio show, in just one tight sentence, what do you want them to think? This will save you time, this is going to be fun, this show will help you make more money, it might be all of those but if you’re going to have a message you’ve got to start with a core idea. You can add more later.

Tim: When you talked about a radio show, what are you talking about? How about we go on a presentation I gave last week; see whether it works for that. The presentation I gave last week was all about the power of content marketing.

Cam: Right, love it. What’s your message? Firstly, this is the process, who’s your audience?

Tim: Small business owners in the financial planning sector.

Cam: Great, what do you want them to think or do as a result of this presentation?

Tim: There are two things; I want them to agree with me that there’s never been a better time to market a small business. I want them to think that the way to go about that is through creating a great content that allows them to share the knowledge they have within the financial services industry.

Cam: They’re both really good messages but if I was your coach, as I am right now, I would say pick one. Pick the one you think is stronger and in listening to it, I think your focus is content marketing. There’s never been a better time we might save until later. In a sentence, I think this is a do.

Tim: Yeah I want them to get out there and start…

Cam: It’s a funny thing, most people and unfortunately most processes to plan a speech or presentation, don’t ask you to define the exact words you say. They say “I’ll write your objective statement down” well I want them to agree that I’m a fabulous bloke. No, give the exact words. The exact words would be something like “content marketing is the cheapest and most effective way for you to market your business” is that right? Is that good? Would you modify that?

Tim: Cheapest and most effective? Content marketing is the best way for you to get your thoughts and opinions across, which as a result would be the best way and cheapest way to market your business so I’ll go with what you said.

Cam: Let’s just make it best then, because I said cheapest is it?

Tim: Cheapest and most effective.

Cam: Content marketing is the best way to market your business. In my hand Tim, you can’t see this, I have a red ball. Some people would call it a stress ball, it’s a spongy ball, can you hear it being sponged? It’s not a stress ball; it’s a message ball because one of the principles we’re going to go back in a minute is message transfer is your message of success in a presentation. It’s not your gesture, not your conversational tone, not the pausing that you do- which is wonderful, not the slides that you might have. All of those things have an impact but message transfer is your measure of success. Here’s what we found – 95% of business presenters don’t know what they’re message is.

Tim: Nasty

Cam: I’ll say that again, message transferred is the measure of success but you don’t know what your message is. Guess what that does – fills you with uncertainty. We’re defining this message and what we just defined is half the message. I’m now holding this red ball up and covering the bottom half. You got a great half of a message which is content marketing is the best way to market your business. The next step in this process is to get the other half which is basically because…
Tim: Because?

Cam: Because.

Tim: Ah because, yeah I’m getting this. This is playing right into what happened last week. For example like I’m giving a whole lot of examples of content marketing to these financial planners right? Some of which were financial planning related, others of which are completely different industries but each time, I would always pull it back to the core message which is “it’s all about how good content marketing is as a way of promoting your business even though that wasn’t industry specific.”

Cam: that’s right. Once you got the message, it gives you such freedom to answer questions and keep coming back to the core message to find other examples but then link them to it so we really want to find this message but let’s complete it Tim because we haven’t quite finished yet so what we want to do now, we got the first half which is content marketing is the best way to market your business, what we need is the second half of that message which is the 2 or 3 or 5 reasons why that’s true. You just made a claim, you haven’t backed your claim up yet so what are the three reasons why content marketing is the best way to market your business?

Tim: Okay, it allows you to express that mountain of knowledge that you’re standing on.

Cam: Okay

Tim: It allows for an emotional engagement between you and your audience so it’s more of a pull than push marketing.

Cam: Great

Tim: It is inexpensive relative to advertising or direct marketing. There you go, that’s three.

Cam: Bang, I love it. It’s great! It’s a great message. If I was your coach, let’s say it first, here’s what we got and this is another tip, it’s a really good tip. In the planning stages of your speech or presentation, test your message out loud. When it’s written down and you go “that looks good” but you find that when you say it, it doesn’t flow or it doesn’t really represent the quality, test it out loud and see how it sounds and keep playing with it until you got something that you got to say because you are ultimately going to say it. It sounds something like this and also imagine that you’re wrapping up your presentation, here’s another tip – you should end your presentation with a message. Most presentation ends with a “looks like I’m out of slides, any questions?” One of the worse way to end your presentation. The best way is to end with your message. You go “just to wrap up, content marketing is the best way to market your business for three reasons: it allows you to express that massive knowledge that you have, secondly it creates emotional engagement with your readers and your customers and thirdly it’s inexpensive compared to normal advertisement. How’s that sound to you?

Tim: Spot on! I’m in!

Cam: Right, so that’s great, we have a really good message. If I was your coach though I’d say, having a go at content marketing, the biggest objection I’ve got to because I agree with all that is how long it takes. You’re going to write the articles, you’re going to publish the content so is there anything that you would say to address that concern?

Tim: If you just introduce that, is that an audience question or are you highlighting that as a potential something that people are thinking that I should overcome now before I close?

Cam: No, what we’re doing is we’re still sitting on our desk, planning our message and as part of that planning process; you’re going to go “well what are the thoughts, what are the objections that’s going to be on the mind of the audience?” this is how persuasion occurs by the way. We don’t have to say the word persuasion for this process to address it. If we can guess that there are some objections or concerns in the mind of our audience, we want our message to address those and we probably haven’t got time to do it but this is the process of planning, you get a message, you test it out loud and then you try and shoot holes in it and see if you can fortify it against. You might think it’s going to take you a lot of time, 30 minutes a week gets you started or something like that.

Tim: I love the speech outline Cam, I think it’s it a very powerful thing to be able to have. When you got structure, I mean structure is a structure; it’s something you can lean on.

Cam: Correct and gives you certainty. Now that’s the first part of this speech outline process. Now we’ve got a message. The second part is simply what we call the chunk structure. You want to know how you’re going to start and how you’re going to end. You’re going to start by saying “this presentation is about…” something like that, to keep it simple, you might do a little preamble like “just before we get started.” We talked about you’re going to end it with your message and so what’s in between? Simply, chunks – you’re going to have 2, 3 or 4 chunks. Now that’s a guideline, not a rule. One of the problems is when people tell you this is a rule, you must have 3. No, you might have 2. 2 is easy to remember. You might have 4, if you really want to, you got 5 but the reason we’re suggesting 2, 3 or 4 chunks or sections to your presentation is that 4 is that point where after that people will go “this is complicated” or I could remember two things as your audience, I could remember three things, I might and probably remember four, I probably cannot remember 5 if you ask me two hours after the presentation. Even if you are presenting on brain surgery or something really complicated, you still want to have this opening where you go “we’re going to be talking about content marketing and how you can market your business more effectively and we’re going to have a look at three areas.”

Tim: Got you, so these chunks are the areas?

Cam: Correct

Tim: Okay, and within each of those areas you want examples and stories I’m guessing?

Cam: Evidence, examples, stories, you need to prove your point or to persuade and then at the end of that, at the end of each one you should have optionally a wrap up. The point here is if you’re talking for 5 minutes on how to create content marketing, the key point is 30 minutes of work or something short and simple.

Tim: Yeah I love it, I love it mate

Cam: That’s part two, you want the other parts?

Tim: Yeah, how many parts are there?

Cam: There are three parts

Tim: Okay well give us that final one

Cam: I’ll give you the first one

Tim: Yeah that’s right; we did start at number 2. What’s the first one?

Cam: Very simply, the first part is what we call the clarity first principles. There are 5 principles to help you think clearly and control nerves and we’ve looked at a couple already. Very quickly, all anxiety is caused by uncertainty, secondly message transferred is your measure of success, thirdly we have the closest problem that is the closer you are to an idea or subject, the harder it is to send the perspective to somebody else that’s why we need a planning process in part two, four natural style unlocks your talent which we talked about and finally you can control anxiety by understanding it and in our training courses that’s what we’re going into – what exactly is happening with a stress response? It’s happening for a good reason, it’s trying to help you but it does release adrenalin, it does contract your muscles, it does affect your breathing and when you understand what’s going on, it’s much easier to release those physical symptoms.

Tim: I remember I’ve done few public speaking courses that you were talking about where you’re giving all the different formulae and it does kind of dig your head in. One thing to your point about natural style unlocking your talent, I do recall one of the beneficial things that I did was video myself speaking, or I video myself speaking and watching it back, as much as you kind of sit there and cringe and go “oh my God!” it is quite a powerful thing to see what you’re doing because the internal conversation you have in your head is often so very different to what’s actually being seen by everyone else.

Cam: Yeah, getting video feedback can be helpful in that it gives you objective feedback and you can make an assessment by seeing something objectively rather than guessing in your head but we don’t do as much video as we used to because even though you have that benefit with video, what we’ve noticed in training courses is that a lot of people worry too much then about how they look. They add a few gestures – they’re not perfect, no ones perfect, you don’t have to be perfect. Bill Gates says ‘um’, Richard Branson says ‘um’ when he speaks. Nobody cares; they’re really good at messaging. You don’t have to be perfect and the video for some people was a hindrance in that they wanted to improve 15-20 different things that they saw, we’re just trying to let them focus on the simple stuff, if it’s really simple – the process of planning and delivery and presentation is simple, you’ll use it. You will be happy to take on your presentations. If you think there were 15 or 20 things you want to get right, you put it off and it will be a hot drama.

Tim: Yeah I love that

Cam: Those are my thoughts on that.

Tim: Listeners I’m talking to Cam Barber who is the creator of The Vivid Method of Public Speaking. Cam I went out to my listeners, I whack it on Facebook. I said “listen guys I’m talking to Australia’s leading authority on public speaking” how about that?

Cam: I like that, you’re right

Tim: Alright, well you told me to say that. I’ve got some questions from Facebook followers and from some listeners via email. I’ll hit you with some, quick answers. Terry Delaney asks…

Cam: Sorry, sorry one thing, we didn’t give them the third part, they’ll kill us if we don’t, very quickly…

Tim: Wow I thought we did, there you go so we’ve got clarity, we’ve got speech principles.

Cam: Speech principles which we’ve gone through, credit speech outlines which is message and structure and thirdly is give great explanations.

Tim: I thought we’ve covered that but go on you expand on that.

Cam: We won’t go into much detail, we cover 9 things that you can do but you pretty much know these stuffs – metaphor, analogy, examples, visuals, there’s a bunch of things that you can do and we again suggest that you don’t try and go with all nine, pick one or two.

Tim: Yeah, nothing more. That’s all about story telling and just being able to “it’s all done, tell me you’re funny, tell me your joke”

Cam: Yeah well and it’s different. Some people do that automatically and some people will be more logical and that’s great; whatever works to convince your audience. Just to wrap up that process and go to those questions, what we found is that if you get steps one and two right – that is you can think clearly and you can control nerves and you know about message transfer and then you have a structure, the third part, giving great explanations tends to happen automatically because you’re clear.

Tim: Yeah I love that mate. Now listen, here are some questions. I reckoned we’ve knocked off a few of these. Terry Delaney asks how to control nerves, we’ve done that and she said “should I use beta-blockers?”

Cam: I just wrote an article on that, if you want to go to the website vividmethod.com and hit the blog, you’ll find “should I use beta-blocker for public speaking” and I’ll give you the answer and the answer is up to you but you don’t need to.

Tim: No, I think we’ll keep drugs out of the public speaking world. Amy Jacobson says “what’s the best opening you’ve ever seen?” Well you just shared the old “just before we get started” tip but is there an opening that stands above all else?

Cam: Well there’s so many ways to look at this. If you want to be creative and do something creative or dramatic at the start, do any thing you want but just be sure you tie it back to your message at the end. You don’t want to have this great opening where people go “that’s what I remember” but it’s got nothing to do with my message. Tom Peters is the funniest speaker that I know. I don’t know if you know Tom Peters but he wrote in the 80s In Search of Excellence. He’s written about ten or twelve management books and he’s regularly been ranked for 20-25 years in the top 10 public speakers in the world and he’s a nut. I love giving him as an example because if you try and follow the rules and do the perfect presentation…

Tim: He broke every one of them?

Cam: He breaks them all. I saw him speaking with a few people like Bill Clinton, the guy from the body shop and who’s the guy from General Electric, Jack Welsh and they all of course stood on the stage, many behind a lectern and spoke. When he came out, he took three steps off the stage, walk down the stairs and walk up and down the rows of the seats for the rest of his presentation.

Tim: I love that

Cam: And then he’s shouting “China!”

Tim: I love it, I have to Google him. Now Ted Gedinack, I think that’s how you pronounce this, how does he go about researching the needs of the audience he’s going to address? Well he being you, it should have been you give public talks anyway but how do you research the audience?

Cam: Great question but the question is the best part because a lot of people don’t do enough of this and there’s two you can do really, one is pick up the phone and ask somebody. I do like coaching with senior people and they’ll often ring me and say “I got this big even that’s coming up. I’m speaking with all my industry peers. Hundreds of people in the audience, I need some coaching, money is no object, I got to get it right” and I say things like “what’s the theme of the event? – don’t know. Who else is speaking? What are they speaking on? – Don’t know. I’ll send you an email” you can get on the phone and ask a couple of question to find out, that’s one. The second thing is if you got a process like what we’re suggesting you use, when you think about it, our process has the four views of any audience and if you can think about those you can make pretty good guesses and most of the time when we’re coaching, we’re guessing what our audience cares about but you can do a really good job about that.

Tim: I absolutely agree with that. One question that comes to my mind as you’re saying that and no one has asked this and that’s PowerPoint. What’s your view on PowerPoint?

Cam: That’s a very good question. PowerPoint is a tool. The fashion goes in and out of PowerPoint so to speak. Sometime we love it; sometimes we got to ban its use. PowerPoint is relatively neutral like money. Money can be spent on bad things or good things.

Tim: PowerPoint by itself is a good thing, its how it’s used.

Cam: PowerPoint in keynote on the mat, allow you to put up images or slides, that’s a fantastic thing. You want another super tip? This is a super tip. This is at the level of a super tip.

Tim: Wow the other one was a power tip, so this is higher.

Cam: It could be higher Tim

Tim: Cam, come on.

Cam: Or maybe it’s just that when I get pumped up the points of what I’m talking about seems higher. If you want a simple idea that changes our relationship with PowerPoint, there are a lot of really bad PowerPoint presentations. The problem is not the tool; the problem is our relationship to it. We stand in a one meter circle diameter next to the slides and we click and go “oh there’s some more here, I’ll now talk” I finish talking about what’s on the slide, click, I’ll talk some more and as I said before, the most common ending is “oh we’re out of slides, any questions?” What’s happening there is that the relationship with PowerPoint is its in-charge and you’re the monkey who stands next to it who bloats out some words from time to time. You just got to reverse that relationship. You can use PowerPoint to show one slide. If you want to, you can use PowerPoint to show one image that’s really helpful to your presentation. The super power tip is, the B-key. Do you know what the B-key Tim is?

Tim: As in the letter B?

Cam: It is the letter B

Tim: The B-key, no I don’t know.

Cam: Most people, even people who have done a full day PowerPoint course on all the 400 features don’t seem to know about the B-key. The B-key will blank the screen. If you’re in keynote or PowerPoint and you’re in slideshow mode and you hit the B-key in the keyboard, the whole thing will go blank, as though it’s not there are all and to get your screen back, what do you think you do?

Tim: B?

Cam: B again

Tim: I got a little remote that I use in all of my keynote and it’s got a button that blacks out the screen, I love it.

Cam: Correct, it’s the same thing. In fact, all that button is doing is remotely hitting the B-key and having that on the remote is really powerful because just think about the B-key what its doing, it’s helping you change the relationship. You’re now in control.

Tim: It’s the look at me key.

Cam: Well you can say that way but it’s in our relationship with PowerPoint. Basically PowerPoint has got you in a leash and it’s dragging you along. That’s the problem. When you start to think about the B-key and deciding when you want slides up and you don’t, you’re now in charge, it’s on a leash and you’re in control. For example, you might plan to hit the B-key when you want to tell a story. You want the structure on a slide, that’s a great tool to have the structure of the presentation up there on the slides but then you want to tell a story that you know pretty well, you don’t care about repeating it word for word, hit the B-key, get comfortable, put your hand back in your pocket or whatever and then you go “let me tell you a story that illustrates this point” finish the story and you bring the slides back.

Tim: I love that, that’s good. In fact I’m looking at these questions. Mick Dan did asked a question about PowerPoint. To paraphrase this, he said I’m curious what strategy you small business owners can use to avoid death by PowerPoint which I think we’ve answered that one now but it’s literally a whole discussion about PowerPoint which we wont go now and how to structure slides, I might do that in a future episode. Jorge Blundell says “what’s the best advice you can give someone starting out public speaking?”

Cam: The best advice is two things – clarify your message.

Tim: The Vivid Method

Cam: The Vivid Method, there you go that’s one thing. The second, if I’m speaking to, I’d say your natural style is the right style. You can have rough edges, you don’t have to be Brad Pitt, you don’t have to be an actor. Just find a way to be comfortable.

Tim: Good advice. Hey Cam, let’s bring it mate. Just to finish up, any particular funny public speaking stories come to mind? Giving you’ve been doing this quite a while, you probably have seen some absolutely crackers – I noticed on your website you got a view of none other than President Bill Clinton who’s one of the greats. Any stories where you can leave us just shaking our head?

Cam: No mate, I don’t want to do that. I discourage in every session for that.

Tim: I understand that, tell us why.

Cam: Just think about how troubling that will get me. I’ll tell you what; I’ll give you two stories about Bill Clinton if you want.

Tim: Here we go, Mick Jagger said never drop names to me, but off you go.

Cam: The last time I was chatting with Bill, I did meet him, I did speak to him for 2-3 minutes and I planned what I was going to say because I wanted to ask him a question. Al Gore, who was his vice president for 8 years, then ran for election for President of the United States against George Bush and he lost. It was a close race; it was the year 2000 election. On conceding defeat one evening, Al Gore conceded defeat one evening and the next morning he made a speech. He wrote that speech himself. He told all of his consultants and coaches to get lost and he made that speech the next morning and people said that is the best speech we’ve ever seen Al Gore made.

Tim: I know what you’re going to say

Cam: One of the best speeches we’ve seen on Capitol Hill for quite some time. Hang on, why weren’t you talking like this to us for the last 12 months during the election campaign? There have been a few books that have referred to this. There’s a great article from fortune magazine from a few years ago, you can Google this article, it’s called “first kill all the consultants”

Tim: Yup I get it.

Cam: And what he said was “I should have gone with my natural style. The consultants were telling me to be someone I wasn’t. Telling me to use words that rated well in the research but they weren’t words I would use.” Simply put, Al Gore is a relatively introvert style but when he rolls up his sleeves and tries to punch his fist and look like an extrovert, people look at him and say “he doesn’t look right” and what he’s done now is he’s throwing it all away. He just speaks as himself, he’s more famous, and he’s having more impact in the word than now than he did back then because he’s himself. Pursue your natural style.

Tim: Mate I love that story and that’s an excellent one to finish on. Cam, thanks for I think probably improving the public speaking skills of all the listeners of small business big marketing including myself. Listeners, I’ll put some links in the show notes to some of Cam’s stuffs, if he just stops playing with whatever is on his desk.

Cam: Mate you know what that is? The guy is on the window, cleaning the window.

Tim: You got to love podcasting. I will put links to the show notes because Cam’s got, he’s got a template for the content method that he’s speaking, is it called the content method?

Cam: Speech outline. It’s the planning process.

Tim: Go to speechoutline.com and have a look at that and I’ll put some links to Cam’s website as well. Thanks so much for being on small business big marketing, Cam.

Cam: It’s great talking to you Tim.

Tim: See you mate

Cam: Alright, see you

Tim: What about that folks? How good is it to get those kind of learning for something that’s so important like your public speaking strategy. I hope you learned a lot, I certainly did. I just suggest you go find a stage and it might be at the chamber of commerce, it might be at some sporting association or club you’re associated with. Wherever you can, go find a stage and start practicing what Cam shared with us then. You can also go to speechoutline.com and check out Cam’s great product for outlining speeches. I’ve tried it, I love it, I’m going to be using it going forward in my business and you know what I suggest you do? Record yourself. Turn on your camera, turn on your iPhone. Remember that product we talked about earlier, iVideo hero where you can go and use your iPhone. Just record yourself, it is a good thing to watch you. I know you can kind of cringe, I played back shows when I listen to myself and go “oh my God did I really sound like that?” but there is learning. There is learning in it. Go and record yourself speaking as well. We even have a video camera even just for audio, download iTalk worth 99 cents and save that to your iPhone and record yourself and hear yourself speak. That is a good thing to do.

Tim:                Now let’s talk Cam Barber. Cam Barber has a business called The Vivid Method for public speaking. He is a public speaking coach to CEO’s, media personalities and sporting clubs including, including my beloved Hawks for those in Melbourne or who know Aussie rules. I got to love Cam for that. He’s going to share with us some absolute gold. Guys I so strongly so, I just know that getting up on stage and presenting is a great way of building your personal brand and your business and I really encourage you to do it. I can’t talk about it enough. I’ve spoken about it previously. It’s a great way of honing your message; it’s a great way of getting in front of more than one person at a time, great leverage, great personal branding and Cam shares some absolute gold with us. He’s also got a process that I’ll share with you afterwards, he shares it with you during this interview but I’ll direct you to a website where he has put together a fantastic product called speech outline in which he shows you how to put together speeches and presentation really easily. It’s all about removing the nervousness and you are about to learn and discover how to remove the nervousness so you can add presenting public speaking to your business’ marketing strategy. Here’s Cam Barber. Cam Barber from The Vivid Method, welcome to small business big marketing.

Cam:                G’Day!

Tim:                How are you mate?

Cam:                I’m good, nice to talk to you Tim.

Tim:                I hope you’re not nervous.

Cam:                No I’m not nervous. I was actually fidgeting again. I was getting something from my desk.

Tim:                Because if you’re nervous then we’re all in trouble because what we are here to talk about today is public speaking

Cam:                That’s right.

Tim:                And if there ever was reason to having anxiety levels increase amongst many of my listeners, it’s those two words but Cam why is that?

Cam:                Nerves are normal, this is a really important point and one of the biggest problems or challenges people have is that they think it’s not normal. They think “I’ve been doing this for years, I’m experienced or I’m a confident person and I shouldn’t be nervous” but there are reasons why you’re nervous and they’re observable and when you get comfortable with that, when you understand the nerves, you can manage them.

Tim:                Like everything in life, it’s there for a reason.

Cam:                It’s there for a reason so let’s talk about nerves then straight up. A simple principle that helps you process this is that all anxiety is the result of uncertainty. Behind all nerves or anxiety, there’s a sense that I feel uncertain about something. When you just understand that basic idea, instead of being lost in the nerves, instead of having your mind clouded with one word which is “cranky, I’m nervous. I wish I wasn’t” you can tell “what am I uncertain about? What can I get more certain about?” and a big part of that when it comes to presentations or public speaking is “what’s my message? How does it relate to my audience and am I clear on the structure and key ideas of my presentation?”

Tim:                I love the fact that you’re looking for what is causing the nerves or the anxiety. I found I do a lot of public speaking and I know a number of years ago one of my aha moments was realizing that, and this is kind of obvious on reflection but if I know what I’m talking about then the idea of sharing with others is quite easy. If I didn’t know what I was talking about, I shouldn’t be up there on the first place and I have every right to be nervous.

Cam:                Well that’s right. If you’re totally uncertain about why you’re there, there’s not much we can do. It’s like you can’t teach a drowning person to swim. We want to look at a few things beforehand and get really clear. One of the reasons I started this business, my background is in radio. I was with Fox FM in Melbourne, part of the Australia group many years ago as a sales manager and I did a course, a presentation skills course and I came away from this 2-day course more nervous and far more self conscious than before the course and the harder I try to follow the systems and the rules of what was taught in this course, the more frustrated I became. It was such a problem for me that I really started researching and ended up developing a method we call The Vivid Method for public speaking. The big problem and this is not uncommon today, the big problem if I can simplify it down is that this course is teaching us to be someone who we weren’t.

Tim:                Yes!

Cam:                They’re saying “look we got research that says 6 gestures a minute is the correct number of gestures. Cam, you’re doing 60 so you’re 10 times wrong” and this idea that there’s one right way of doing it is a really bad idea. It’s just isn’t right, we’re all different and what you want to do is get comfortable in your own skin, find a way to relax and breath and then focus your all attention on okay, who’s my audience? What’s my message? Let me get really clear about that.

Tim:                Yeah, I love that and there’s so much truth to that. There’s so much power in being able to be yourself and once again, like not brain surgery is it Cam? Like the idea of actually going and say I’m just going to be me. I don’t have to worry about how many slides a minute. I don’t worry about how many gestures. I don’t worry about whether I have my hands in my pocket or out of my pocket or whatever. It’s like be me.

Cam:                That’s true but in a way it’s not that simple to do.

Tim:                I thought we were wrapping things up

Cam:                Well look at what happens; I’ll give you a quick example. Let’s say you’re sitting down at a meeting and there are 10 people around the table and you’re all sitting and you take turns in speaking. Because you’re all sitting, you’re all part of the same group. Even though the spotlight is on you a little bit when it’s your turn to speak or you’re trying to get an idea across, you’re still part of the same group but if I say to you Tim, “okay mate, now it’s your turn to speak. Can you stand up, walk up to the front of the room and now tell us your idea” now what happens is you’re no longer part of the group. You’ve been separated and you’re looked at now. The spotlight on you is brighter and you feel disconnected and so that creates uncertainty. There’s a natural stress response that occurs and so you can’t just tell people “hey be yourself” because they’re up there going “well is this right? I’m not sure” what you need to do is there are 2-3 things you need to get certain about and it keeps coming back to do you know what your message is? Do you feel confident or certain about that? Have you structured it well? In other words do you know how you’re going to start and how you’re going to end or you’ll just keep on talking and hope there’ll be some sort of sign from heaven so you know when to stop.

Tim:                Can I just challenge you on that? Part of that is like we’re sitting around the table, 10 people we’re all going around, we’re all sitting down, we’re all sharing ideas and someone says “Tim, get up, go to the front of the table and present.” If I was strong enough of mind, couldn’t I just go “okay I’ll change the location, I’ll stand and I’ll move to the top of the table but I’m going to be myself.”

Cam:                Great mate, love it but what is strong enough of mind mean how do you get from, whenever you were in school, it’s normal to be nervous. The first time, if you’re a kid, if you’re a teenager, if you’re an adult, whatever it was, the first time or few times you’re exposed into the spotlight and you’re asked to speak, people are all looking at you differently. They’re all looking at you like “okay you’re in charge, guide us, entertain us somehow” you’ll be nervous. You can’t avoid that. You got to go through some experiences. The question then becomes and I love your question, “how do you get from I don’t know what to do and because I don’t know what to do I feel uncertain and therefore have anxiety to strengths of mind.” This is in fact fundamentally what I focused my attention over the last 15 years, how do you get from there to there.

Tim:                As a big leap. It’s person dependent but there is a chiasm.

Cam:                Everybody is different but there is a chiasm and you need to understand what’s there and what we’re given again. A lot of what we’re taught is you’re supposed to act this way. Once you do that you’re moving further into uncertainty because you’re thinking what were the steps? How many gestures are we supposed to do? I’ll give you a couple more of these myths, these absolute myths that send us in the wrong direction. How many gestures you’re supposed to have? Are you meant to have open gestures or closed gestures? If you put your hands in your pockets, have you heard of that one?

Tim:                Oh yeah, well in fact I’ve just come, I’m literally been filming some videos today from my website and I had that whole discussion like “should I have my hands in my pocket? Shouldn’t I?” and I just keep coming back to be yourself.

Cam:                Find a way to be comfortable. I like that better. Be yourself again is a little bit uncertain. Find a way to be comfortable allows for “am I or am I not” and I can process that. You might have heard of this other myth – the first eight seconds forms a lasting impression.

Tim:                What a terrible pressure!

Cam:                What a ridiculous…haven’t you heard that? First impression…

Tim:                Yeah, yeah imagine that. I mean when you get to the nine second mark and you go “I stuffed that up, might as well walk off now”

Cam:                Correct and that’s absolutely what some people are thinking. They’re thinking “oh I stuffed this up, there’s no way I can recover but I got to stand here for another 20 minutes” and so that’s where people have this terrible experiences with nervousness where they really didn’t need to. If you just tell someone “you’re a pretty strong of mind sort of a guy or girl, why don’t you just stand up and go?” your mind’s spinning with “isn’t first impression everything? Should I have my hand, oh look my hands are in my pocket, is that good or bad?” you do need to process these things.

Tim:                One of the things I do, Cam I’d love to kind of pull apart this vivid method that you’re created, one of the things that I do when speaking is – well there’s a number of things actually but I do just take the mindset that it’s a conversation with the audience and conversation is part of my I guess one of my personality traits that I want to get across. In fact, I actually look to Jamie Oliver as a guy who I kind of look to as someone who is just a wonderful presenter/speaker so I kind of often go “what would Jamie do?” and for me it takes a lot of pressure off and I found myself speaking last week, I arrived at the venue sure enough there’s the little raised platform with a lectern and I’m going “oh my God, I’m so not a lectern guy” what I found is when I got up on stage and started speaking, I kind of use the lectern in a different way. I kind of stood alongside it, I leant on it and it allowed me to once again just be more conversational than kind of a keynote presenter/lecturer.

Cam:                Well you made two important points here. Be conversational which is where most people are most comfortable then not only will you think more clearly because you’re comfortable, you’ll connect with your audience. Jamie Oliver is a great example and if your personality style seems to fit with him, then simplifying it down to hey what would Jamie do is really a good way to go. It simplifies your process. The second thing though is the lectern. Put people behind a lectern and they’ll think “oh I have to act a certain way” and you don’t. This is a really important point that you the speaker have much more impact or choice about how you want to create the environment in the room then you might think. What a lot of speakers do is they walk into the room and they think “this is the mood, I have to match the mood” and the real problem with that is that most of the people sitting in the room waiting for someone to speak are relatively clog and stiff because they’re waiting for something to happen. If you take on that mood, clog and stiff, then it might really throw you whereas if you got the ability to go “hello” hey do you want a secret? We’ll jump ahead of the method but do you want to know one of the greatest secrets that I developed with a client?

Tim:                Mate, bring it on more than one but let’s start with one.

Cam:                Here’s a superpower secret – you can eliminate the start of your presentation. You might be wondering what I’m talking about. The start is where the most anxiety is. If you think about it, that starting point, just before and just as you speak is where there’s most uncertainty. You have no rhythm yet, you have no response. A lot of people throw themselves at the start whereas if you start off your presentation with these words, you will eliminate all of that pressure.

Tim:                Here we go, insert drum roll, thank you Liam.

Cam:                Is everyone listening? Are you sitting down? Start off “just before we get started

Tim:                There it is.

Cam:                In other words, just before we get started, you might plan this “just before we get started I thought I’d say thank you to such and such” or “just before we get started, we’re going to be talking about this one idea here today, it might seem complicated but it’s as simple as it is.” It doesn’t matter what it is, when you say just before we get started, everybody takes on the perception that this is a conversation, this is relatively informal.

Tim:                I love that. Tell me on that point Cam because what if you go “just before we get started, how’s everyone feeling?” or what if you add a question to the audience. I think it’s a bad thing because often the audience doesn’t want to respond and if you don’t get a response then that puts a real wash on it.

Cam:                Great, what you’re doing is you’re opening up another thing which we call direct involvement with the audience. Direct involvement with the audience has some strengths and weaknesses. It has some risks associated with it and you just highlighted one of them. A lot of the time a speaker would do that because it takes the pressure off of them, they don’t like the spotlight and so they go “if I can quickly throw the spotlight to the audience, that will make me feel better” and you must have sit through one of these events where the speaker says “okay everyone get up and shake your hands and greet the person next to them”

Tim:                Team hug

Cam:                Team hug, now look in some situations that will change the mood of the room, will change the mood of the room but often when that happens to me, it still happens when I watch a lot of speakers, I think it’s a weak effort. I feel like you’re throwing the pressure into us, we don’t know what to do, I don’t know who this person is next to me, isn’t there a better way? You can do that, it depends on how it works and your style and what you got in mind but just simplifying it, taking out the risk and saying “just before we get started here is such and such” if you want to ask a question that’s not a bad idea. Just before we get started, what I thought I’d do today is focus on such and such but I know we got a diverse audience; we can focus more on this or this, what would you prefer?

Tim:                I like that, just before we get started, I’ll be introducing that probably at the next keynote. Okay Cam, Vivid Method mate, I want to pull that apart and give my listeners really clear structure, step by step on how to nail public speaking but why the name The Vivid Method?

Cam:                Good question, vivid is just a good word. If you think about vivid it means two things, clear and memorable and if you talk about any form of communication, they’re the outcome, they’re the goals. You want to be clear, you want to be memorable. Vivid communication, vivid presentations, vivid public speaking, vivid media skills, these are the branding that we used for all of our training courses and our coaching because we want it to be simple – is it clear? Do you know how to make it memorable?

Tim:                Isn’t there a big word missing there, persuasive?

Cam:                Yes, persuasiveness and selling ideas are important but it’s not always important, you’re not always trying to be persuasive. We used to push that word a bit harder but I speak a lot of people who were in finance or accounting or legal or they’re doing a presentation that’s an update on a project and they say “I don’t want to persuade them, I really just want to inform them and engage them” persuasion is great but we want to be clear and memorable and if your message is a persuasive message, if your goal is to get them to buy an idea or to take an action, then we got a persuasive focus but we’re still going to make that clear as to why they should take that action and make it memorable to engage them throughout.

Tim:                Okay, okay but I would have thought that even a legal presentation or an architect updating on progress of a design, there’d still be a call to action of some sort like persuading people to agree with him or persuading people to let them move on to the next stage. You want someone to do something as a result of hearing you speak more often than not, is that true?

Cam:                It is true and whether I’ll use the word persuasion or not is I find a sort of a personality style thing. I’ll give you another example, we also do messaging session so we help organizations and sporting clubs identify what their key messages are as a company or as a department. I was working with a large finance company and they said we want to have passion in there, half of the room basically said “if you’re not passionate, if you can’t say out loud I’m passionate to be here everyday working, why bother coming in?” and the other half of the room were going “what are you talking about? Calm down I don’t know that you need to pound the table and say passionate; what about belief? Can’t we have belief?” What I identified that day is that the extroverts to our personality style loves the word passion whereas the introvert style thinks it’s a bit over the top but they ultimately mean the same thing, belief or passion is the same commitment to coming to work. I think persuasion falls into the same category. People are saying “yeah I want to convince them to hear but I don’t want to trick them, they say persuasion is a bit too saucy” I’m just sort of stepping out of that argument and saying but you just identify and this is part two of The Vivid Method.

Tim:                Part two?

Cam:                Part two because why not, we got a structure that we can jump in randomly.

Tim:                Go for it, let’s just be clear. Vivid method is a method of, it would be best to summarize it saying if you follow the vivid method of public speaking; it will make you a great public speaking who speaks from the heart, is that kind of too soft?

Cam:                Again, some people will love that. Probably 50% of any audience will go “yeah speak from the heart” the other half are going to go “what do are you talking about? I’m trying to get them to understand the new strategy or focus” I love it, that’s great, speak from the heart. I wouldn’t use those words; I’d say The Vivid Method is going to help you plan and deliver a compelling presentation.

Tim:                Love it, okay let’s get into it, how do we do that?

Cam:                There are three parts and just for fun we’re jumping to part two. Part two we call credit speech outline or credit presentation outline and that has two parts to it; one is what’s your message? We’ve got a template that allows you to sort your thoughts, think about your audience and define your message and that’s where, coming back to something you said earlier, as part of that process you either want your audience to think something specific or do something specific. If you don’t want them to think something or do something, then yes why are they presenting? Why are they standing up? It does might be use this process or coming with more passion or whatever it might be, you want them to actually take an action. I think it’s probably more common and it’s where you literally state what you want them to think. For example, this is a fantastic process for preparing and delivering a compelling presentation. That’s what I want you to think. I’m going to define the message in those exact words.

Tim:                Feel free to role-play here Cam; I don’t mind a bit of role-play, I’ll be your guinea pig.

Cam:                Alright well what do you want your audience to think? We’ve got a great radio show, in just one tight sentence, what do you want them to think? This will save you time, this is going to be fun, this show will help you make more money, it might be all of those but if you’re going to have a message you’ve got to start with a core idea. You can add more later.

Tim:                When you talked about a radio show, what are you talking about? How about we go on a presentation I gave last week; see whether it works for that. The presentation I gave last week was all about the power of content marketing.

Cam:                Right, love it. What’s your message? Firstly, this is the process, who’s your audience?

Tim:                Small business owners in the financial planning sector.

Cam:                Great, what do you want them to think or do as a result of this presentation?

Tim:                There are two things; I want them to agree with me that there’s never been a better time to market a small business. I want them to think that the way to go about that is through creating a great content that allows them to share the knowledge they have within the financial services industry.

Cam:                They’re both really good messages but if I was your coach, as I am right now, I would say pick one. Pick the one you think is stronger and in listening to it, I think your focus is content marketing. There’s never been a better time we might save until later. In a sentence, I think this is a do.

Tim:                Yeah I want them to get out there and start…

Cam:                It’s a funny thing, most people and unfortunately most processes to plan a speech or presentation, don’t ask you to define the exact words you say. They say “I’ll write your objective statement down” well I want them to agree that I’m a fabulous bloke. No, give the exact words. The exact words would be something like “content marketing is the cheapest and most effective way for you to market your business” is that right? Is that good? Would you modify that?

Tim:                Cheapest and most effective? Content marketing is the best way for you to get your thoughts and opinions across, which as a result would be the best way and cheapest way to market your business so I’ll go with what you said.

Cam:                Let’s just make it best then, because I said cheapest is it?

Tim:                Cheapest and most effective.

Cam:                Content marketing is the best way to market your business. In my hand Tim, you can’t see this, I have a red ball. Some people would call it a stress ball, it’s a spongy ball, can you hear it being sponged? It’s not a stress ball; it’s a message ball because one of the principles we’re going to go back in a minute is message transfer is your message of success in a presentation. It’s not your gesture, not your conversational tone, not the pausing that you do- which is wonderful, not the slides that you might have. All of those things have an impact but message transfer is your measure of success. Here’s what we found – 95% of business presenters don’t know what they’re message is

Tim:                Nasty

Cam:                I’ll say that again, message transferred is the measure of success but you don’t know what your message is. Guess what that does – fills you with uncertainty. We’re defining this message and what we just defined is half the message. I’m now holding this red ball up and covering the bottom half. You got a great half of a message which is content marketing is the best way to market your business. The next step in this process is to get the other half which is basically because…

Tim:                Because?

Cam:                Because.

Tim:                Ah because, yeah I’m getting this. This is playing right into what happened last week. For example like I’m giving a whole lot of examples of content marketing to these financial planners right? Some of which were financial planning related, others of which are completely different industries but each time, I would always pull it back to the core message which is “it’s all about how good content marketing is as a way of promoting your business even though that wasn’t industry specific.”

Cam:                that’s right. Once you got the message, it gives you such freedom to answer questions and keep coming back to the core message to find other examples but then link them to it so we really want to find this message but let’s complete it Tim because we haven’t quite finished yet so what we want to do now, we got the first half which is content marketing is the best way to market your business, what we need is the second half of that message which is the 2 or 3 or 5 reasons why that’s true. You just made a claim, you haven’t backed your claim up yet so what are the three reasons why content marketing is the best way to market your business.

Tim:                Okay, it allows you to express that mountain of knowledge that you’re standing on.

Cam:                Okay

Tim:                It allows for an emotional engagement between you and your audience so it’s more of a pull than push marketing.

Cam:                Great

Tim:                It is inexpensive relative to advertising or direct marketing. There you go, that’s three.

Cam:                Bang, I love it. It’s great! It’s a great message. If I was your coach, let’s say it first, here’s what we got and this is another tip, it’s a really good tip. In the planning stages of your speech or presentation, test your message out loud. When it’s written down and you go “that looks good” but you find that when you say it, it doesn’t flow or it doesn’t really represent the quality, test it out loud and see how it sounds and keep playing with it until you got something that you got to say because you are ultimately going to say it. It sounds something like this and also imagine that you’re wrapping up your presentation, here’s another tip – you should end your presentation with a message. Most presentation ends with a “looks like I’m out of slides, any questions?” One of the worse way to end your presentation. The best way is to end with your message. You go “just to wrap up, content marketing is the best way to market your business for three reasons: it allows you to express that massive knowledge that you have, secondly it creates emotional engagement with your readers and your customers and thirdly it’s inexpensive compared to normal advertisement. How’s that sound to you?

Tim:                Spot on! I’m in!

Cam:                Right, so that’s great, we have a really good message. If I was your coach though I’d say, having a go at content marketing, the biggest objection I’ve got to because I agree with all that is how long it takes. You’re going to write the articles, you’re going to publish the content so is there anything that you would say to address that concern?

Tim:                If you just introduce that, is that an audience question or are you highlighting that as a potential something that people are thinking that I should overcome now before I close?

Cam:                No, what we’re doing is we’re still sitting on our desk, planning our message and as part of that planning process; you’re going to go “well what are the thoughts, what are the objections that’s going to be on the mind of the audience?” this is how persuasion occurs by the way. We don’t have to say the word persuasion for this process to address it. If we can guess that there are some objections or concerns in the mind of our audience, we want our message to address those and we probably haven’t got time to do it but this is the process of planning, you get a message, you test it out loud and then you try and shoot holes in it and see if you can fortify it against. You might think it’s going to take you a lot of time, 30 minutes a week gets you started or something like that

Tim:                I love the speech outline Cam, I think it’s it a very powerful thing to be able to have. When you got structure, I mean structure is a structure; it’s something you can lean on.

Cam:                Correct and gives you certainty. Now that’s the first part of this speech outline process. Now we’ve got a message. The second part is simply what we call the chunk structure. You want to know how you’re going to start and how you’re going to end. You’re going to start by saying “this presentation is about…” something like that, to keep it simple, you might do a little preamble like “just before we get started.” We talked about you’re going to end it with your message and so what’s in between? Simply, chunks – you’re going to have 2, 3 or 4 chunks. Now that’s a guideline, not a rule. One of the problems is when people tell you this is a rule, you must have 3. No, you might have 2. 2 is easy to remember. You might have 4, if you really want to, you got 5 but the reason we’re suggesting 2, 3 or 4 chunks or sections to your presentation is that 4 is that point where after that people will go “this is complicated” or I could remember two things as your audience, I could remember three things, I might and probably remember four, I probably cannot remember 5 if you ask me two hours after the presentation. Even if you are presenting on brain surgery or something really complicated, you still want to have this opening where you go “we’re going to be talking about content marketing and how you can market your business more effectively and we’re going to have a look at three areas.”

Tim:                Got you, so these chunks are the areas.

Cam:                Correct

Tim:                Okay, and within each of those areas you want examples and stories I’m guessing?

Cam:                Evidence, examples, stories, you need to prove your point or to persuade and then at the end of that, at the end of each one you should have optionally a wrap up. The point here is if you’re talking for 5 minutes on how to create content marketing, the key point is 30 minutes of work or something short and simple.

Tim:                Yeah I love it, I love it mate

Cam:                That’s part two, you want the other parts?

Tim:                Yeah, how many parts are there?

Cam:                There are three parts

Tim:                Okay well give us that final one

Cam:                I’ll give you the first one

Tim:                Yeah that’s right; we did start at number 2. What’s the first one?

Cam:                Very simply, the first part is what we call the clarity first principles. There are 5 principles to help you think clearly and control nerves and we’ve looked at a couple already. Very quickly, all anxiety is caused by uncertainty, secondly message transferred is your measure of success, thirdly we have the closest problem that is the closer you are to an idea or subject, the harder it is to send the perspective to somebody else that’s why we need a planning process in part two, four natural style unlocks your talent which we talked about and finally you can control anxiety by understanding it and in our training courses that’s what we’re going into – what exactly is happening with a stress response? It’s happening for a good reason, it’s trying to help you but it does release adrenalin, it does contract your muscles, it does affect your breathing and when you understand what’s going on, it’s much easier to release those physical symptoms.

Tim:                I remember I’ve done few public speaking courses that you were talking about where you’re giving all the different formulae and it does kind of dig your head in. One thing to your point about natural style unlocking your talent, I do recall one of the beneficial things that I did was video myself speaking, or I video myself speaking and watching it back, as much as you kind of sit there and cringe and go “oh my God!” it is quite a powerful thing to see what you’re doing because the internal conversation you have in your head is often so very different to what’s actually being seen by everyone else.

Cam:                Yeah, getting video feedback can be helpful in that it gives you objective feedback and you can make an assessment by seeing something objectively rather than guessing in your head but we don’t do as much video as we used to because even though you have that benefit with video, what we’ve noticed in training courses is that a lot of people worry too much then about how they look. They add a few gestures – they’re not perfect, no ones perfect, you don’t have to be perfect. Bill Gates says ‘um’, Richard Branson says ‘um’ when he speaks. Nobody cares; they’re really good at messaging. You don’t have to be perfect and the video for some people was a hindrance in that they wanted to improve 15-20 different things that they saw, we’re just trying to let them focus on the simple stuff, if it’s really simple – the process of planning and delivery and presentation is simple, you’ll use it. You will be happy to take on your presentations. If you think there were 15 or 20 things you want to get right, you put it off and it will be a hot drama.

Tim:                Yeah I love that

Cam:                Those are my thoughts on that.

Tim:                Listeners I’m talking to Cam Barber who is the creator of The Vivid Method of Public Speaking. Cam I went out to my listeners, I whack it on Facebook. I said “listen guys I’m talking to Australia’s leading authority on public speaking” how about that?

Cam:                I like that, you’re righ

Tim:                Alright, well you told me to say that. I’ve got some questions from Facebook followers and from some listeners via email. I’ll hit you with some, quick answers. Terry Delaney asks…

Cam:                Sorry, sorry one thing, we didn’t give them the third part, they’ll kill us if we don’t, very quickly…

Tim:                Wow I thought we did, there you go so we’ve got clarity, we’ve got speech principles.

Cam:                Speech principles which we’ve gone through, credit speech outlines which is message and structure and thirdly is give great explanations.

Tim:                I thought we’ve covered that but go on you expand on that.

Cam:                We won’t go into much detail, we cover 9 things that you can do but you pretty much know these stuffs – metaphor, analogy, examples, visuals, there’s a bunch of things that you can do and we again suggest that you don’t try and go with all nine, pick one or two.

Tim:                Yeah, nothing more. That’s all about story telling and just being able to “it’s all done, tell me you’re funny, tell me your joke”

Cam:                Yeah well and it’s different. Some people do that automatically and some people will be more logical and that’s great; whatever works to convince your audience. Just to wrap up that process and go to those questions, what we found is that if you get steps one and two right – that is you can think clearly and you can control nerves and you know about message transfer and then you have a structure, the third part, giving great explanations tends to happen automatically because you’re clear.

Tim:                Yeah I love that mate. Now listen, here are some questions. I reckoned we’ve knocked off a few of these. Terry Delaney asks how to control nerves, we’ve done that and she said “should I use beta-blockers?”

Cam:                I just wrote an article on that, if you want to go to the website vividmethod.com and hit the blog, you’ll find “should I use beta-blocker for public speaking” and I’ll give you the answer and the answer is up to you but you don’t need to.

Tim:                No, I think we’ll keep drugs out of the public speaking world. Amy Jacobson says “what’s the best opening you’ve ever seen?” Well you just shared the old “just before we get started” tip but is there an opening that stands above all else?

Cam:                Well there’s so many ways to look at this. If you want to be creative and do something creative or dramatic at the start, do any thing you want but just be sure you tie it back to your message at the end. You don’t want to have this great opening where people go “that’s what I remember” but it’s got nothing to do with my message. Tom Peters is the funniest speaker that I know. I don’t know if you know Tom Peters but he wrote in the 80s In Search of Excellence. He’s written about ten or twelve management books and he’s regularly been ranked for 20-25 years in the top 10 public speakers in the world and he’s a nut. I love giving him as an example because if you try and follow the rules and do the perfect presentation…

Tim:                He broke every one of them?

Cam:                He breaks them all. I saw him speaking with a few people like Bill Clinton, the guy from the body shop and who’s the guy from General Electric, Jack Welsh and they all of course stood on the stage, many behind a lectern and spoke. When he came out, he took three steps off the stage, walk down the stairs and walk up and down the rows of the seats for the rest of his presentation.

Tim:                I love that

Cam:                And then he’s shouting “China!”

Tim:                I love it, I have to Google him. Now Ted Gedinack, I think that’s how you pronounce this, how does he go about researching the needs of the audience he’s going to address? Well he being you, it should have been you give public talks anyway but how do you research the audience?

Cam:                Great question but the question is the best part because a lot of people don’t do enough of this and there’s two you can do really, one is pick up the phone and ask somebody. I do like coaching with senior people and they’ll often ring me and say “I got this big even that’s coming up. I’m speaking with all my industry peers. Hundreds of people in the audience, I need some coaching, money is no object, I got to get it right” and I say things like “what’s the theme of the event? – don’t know. Who else is speaking? What are they speaking on? – Don’t know. I’ll send you an email” you can get on the phone and ask a couple of question to find out, that’s one. The second thing is if you got a process like what we’re suggesting you use, when you think about it, our process has the four views of any audience and if you can think about those you can make pretty good guesses and most of the time when we’re coaching, we’re guessing what our audience cares about but you can do a really good job about that.

Tim:                I absolutely agree with that. One question that comes to my mind as you’re saying that and no one has asked this and that’s PowerPoint. What’s your view on PowerPoint?

Cam:                That’s a very good question. PowerPoint is a tool. The fashion goes in and out of PowerPoint so to speak. Sometime we love it; sometimes we got to ban its use. PowerPoint is relatively neutral like money. Money can be spent on bad things or good things.

Tim:                PowerPoint by itself is a good thing, its how it’s used.

Cam:                PowerPoint in keynote on the mat, allow you to put up images or slides, that’s a fantastic thing. You want another super tip? This is a super tip. This is at the level of a super tip.

Tim:                Wow the other one was a power tip, so this is higher.

Cam:                It could be higher Tim.

Tim:                Cam, come on.

Cam:                Or maybe it’s just that when I get pumped up the points of what I’m talking about seems higher. If you want a simple idea that changes our relationship with PowerPoint, there are a lot of really bad PowerPoint presentations. The problem is not the tool; the problem is our relationship to it. We stand in a one meter circle diameter next to the slides and we click and go “oh there’s some more here, I’ll now talk” I finish talking about what’s on the slide, click, I’ll talk some more and as I said before, the most common ending is “oh we’re out of slides, any questions?” What’s happening there is that the relationship with PowerPoint is its in-charge and you’re the monkey who stands next to it who bloats out some words from time to time. You just got to reverse that relationship. You can use PowerPoint to show one slide. If you want to, you can use PowerPoint to show one image that’s really helpful to your presentation. The super power tip is, the B-key. Do you know what the B-key Tim is?

Tim:                As in the letter B?

Cam:                It is the letter B

Tim:                The B-key, no I don’t know.

Cam:                Most people, even people who have done a full day PowerPoint course on all the 400 features don’t seem to know about the B-key. The B-key will blank the screen. If you’re in keynote or PowerPoint and you’re in slideshow mode and you hit the B-key in the keyboard, the whole thing will go blank, as though it’s not there are all and to get your screen back, what do you think you do?

Tim:                B?

Cam:                B again

Tim:                I got a little remote that I use in all of my keynote and it’s got a button that blacks out the screen, I love it.

Cam:                Correct, it’s the same thing. In fact, all that button is doing is remotely hitting the B-key and having that on the remote is really powerful because just think about the B-key what its doing, it’s helping you change the relationship. You’re now in control.

Tim:                It’s the look at me key.

Cam:                Well you can say that way but it’s in our relationship with PowerPoint. Basically PowerPoint has got you in a leash and it’s dragging you along. That’s the problem. When you start to think about the B-key and deciding when you want slides up and you don’t, you’re now in charge, it’s on a leash and you’re in control. For example, you might plan to hit the B-key when you want to tell a story. You want the structure on a slide, that’s a great tool to have the structure of the presentation up there on the slides but then you want to tell a story that you know pretty well, you don’t care about repeating it word for word, hit the B-key, get comfortable, put your hand back in your pocket or whatever and then you go “let me tell you a story that illustrates this point” finish the story and you bring the slides back.

Tim:                I love that, that’s good. In fact I’m looking at these questions. Mick Dan did asked a question about PowerPoint. To paraphrase this, he said I’m curious what strategy you small business owners can use to avoid death by PowerPoint which I think we’ve answered that one now but it’s literally a whole discussion about PowerPoint which we wont go now and how to structure slides, I might do that in a future episode. Jorge Blundell says “what’s the best advice you can give someone starting out public speaking?”

Cam:                The best advice is two things – clarify your message.

Tim:                The Vivid Method

Cam:                The Vivid Method, there you go that’s one thing. The second, if I’m speaking to, I’d say your natural style is the right style. You can have rough edges, you don’t have to be Brad Pitt, you don’t have to be an actor. Just find a way to be comfortable.

Tim:                Good advice. Hey Cam, let’s bring it mate. Just to finish up, any particular funny public speaking stories come to mind? Giving you’ve been doing this quite a while, you probably have seen some absolutely crackers – I noticed on your website you got a view of none other than President Bill Clinton who’s one of the greats. Any stories where you can leave us just shaking our head?

Cam:                No mate, I don’t want to do that. I discourage in every session for that.

Tim:                I understand that, tell us why.

Cam:                Just think about how troubling that will get me. I’ll tell you what; I’ll give you two stories about Bill Clinton if you want.

Tim:                Here we go, Mick Jagger said never drop names to me, but off you go.

Cam:                The last time I was chatting with Bill, I did meet him, I did speak to him for 2-3 minutes and I planned what I was going to say because I wanted to ask him a question. Al Gore, who was his vice president for 8 years, then ran for election for President of the United States against George Bush and he lost. It was a close race; it was the year 2000 election. On conceding defeat one evening, Al Gore conceded defeat one evening and the next morning he made a speech. He wrote that speech himself. He told all of his consultants and coaches to get lost and he made that speech the next morning and people said that is the best speech we’ve ever seen Al Gore made.

Tim:                I know what you’re going to say

Cam:                One of the best speeches we’ve seen on Capitol Hill for quite some time. Hang on, why weren’t you talking like this to us for the last 12 months during the election campaign? There have been a few books that have referred to this. There’s a great article from fortune magazine from a few years ago, you can Google this article, it’s called “first kill all the consultants”

Tim:                Yup I get it.

Cam:                And what he said was “I should have gone with my natural style. The consultants were telling me to be someone I wasn’t. Telling me to use words that rated well in the research but they weren’t words I would use.” Simply put, Al Gore is a relatively introvert style but when he rolls up his sleeves and tries to punch his fist and look like an extrovert, people look at him and say “he doesn’t look right” and what he’s done now is he’s throwing it all away. He just speaks as himself, he’s more famous, and he’s having more impact in the word than now than he did back then because he’s himself. Pursue your natural style.

Tim:                Mate I love that story and that’s an excellent one to finish on. Cam, thanks for I think probably improving the public speaking skills of all the listeners of small business big marketing including myself. Listeners, I’ll put some links in the show notes to some of Cam’s stuffs, if he just stops playing with whatever is on his desk.

Cam:                Mate you know what that is? The guy is on the window, cleaning the window.

Tim:                You got to love podcasting. I will put links to the show notes because Cam’s got, he’s got a template for the content method that he’s speaking, is it called the content method?

Cam:                Speech outline. It’s the planning process.

Tim:                Go to speechoutline.com and have a look at that and I’ll put some links to Cam’s website as well. Thanks so much for being on small business big marketing, Cam.

Cam:                It’s great talking to you Tim.

Tim:                See you mate.

Cam:                Alright, see you.

Tim:                What about that folks? How good is it to get those kind of learning for something that’s so important like your public speaking strategy. I hope you learned a lot, I certainly did. I just suggest you go find a stage and it might be at the chamber of commerce, it might be at some sporting association or club you’re associated with. Wherever you can, go find a stage and start practicing what Cam shared with us then. You can also go to speechoutline.com and check out Cam’s great product for outlining speeches. I’ve tried it, I love it, I’m going to be using it going forward in my business and you know what I suggest you do? Record yourself. Turn on your camera, turn on your iPhone. Remember that product we talked about earlier, iVideo hero where you can go and use your iPhone. Just record yourself, it is a good thing to watch you. I know you can kind of cringe, I played back shows when I listen to myself and go “oh my God did I really sound like that?” but there is learning. There is learning in it. Go and record yourself speaking as well. We even have a video camera even just for audio, download iTalk worth 99 cents and save that to your iPhone and record yourself and hear yourself speak. That is a good thing to do.

 

 

Tim: Now let me read you Mia Freedman’s bio because it is astounding and I am excited to have Mia on the show. Mia is the editor and publisher of Australia’s fastest growing women’s website, right? Mamamia.com.au but prior to that she was the Editor of Cosmopolitan, Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan, Cleo and Dolly and she started Mamamia from a lounge room in 2007 and she is going to explain exactly how she did it and how she’s growing it to this huge empire it is today. She employs, well in her current bio that I’m reading it says that she’s employing 20 people and has 500,000 readers and twelve million page views per month. Those numbers have increased significantly and Mia is going to share the updated numbers with you. They are astounding. The number of page views per month that she will share with you in mind boggling. Give me 10 percent of them! She’s also got a national radio show off the back of Mamamia. She’s a newspaper columnist. She also presents on The Today’s Show and she’s written 3 books! Mia is a marketing machine and I got to tell you guys, Mia shares some marketing goal. There is one particular insight Mia shares in this interview called the emotional entry point and I got to tell you I love it. It’s one of the best marketing insights I’ve heard in recent times and she gives a great example of how she use that in order to create great messaging and you know how big I am on getting your message right before you worry where to put it. Guys, seriously, grab a cupper, grab the nearest comfy chair or of you’re jogging or walking or whatever you do keep doing that for the next half hour or 40 minutes or so. Pen and paper at the ready or ever note open, capture these ideas because they are dripping from the small business big marketing HQ’s ceiling in this interview. Here’s Mia – Mia welcome to small business big marketing.

Mia: Thanks for having me.

Tim: Absolute joy for having you at small business big marketing headquarters. Now in the spirit of honesty and transparency on this show, I got an email from your production manager early today saying can we push the interview back an hour? Because Mia “has an unexpected lunchtime meeting” Now Mia, lunchtime meeting or busy 1984 style lunch?

Mia: Oh my God, I didn’t even have a busy 1984 style lunch in 1984 because I was still at high school but no, I will be completely honest in saying I was grabbing a sandwich across the road with my brother which I haven’t seeing for quite some time.

Tim: Good on you! Family first, I say.

Mia: Family first. I wanted to catch up with him before our family Christmas thing.

Tim: Oh, wow okay well I think we should go there. Plotting and planning, is there some kind of lines in the sand being drawn and you’re getting some what to say and what not to say in place?

Mia: No I think that sometimes when it comes to your parents and your family dynamics, only a sibling can understand.

Tim: Oh yeah, coming from a family of six, I hear you.

Mia: Yes sure!

Tim: I hear you; I still don’t know whether we’re going to see each other on Christmas day anyway.

Mia: Family bunkers, there’s no person in the world that can quite understand how bunkers your family is and that’s your sibling I think.

Tim: Correct and that’s very important. Now Mia, this show, this small business big marketing show downloaded in 94 countries including Kazakhstan so there’s a few people listening…

Mia: Kazakhstan?

Tim: Yeah, correct, like what are they doing listening anyway in the first place, good on them.

Mia: I’m kind of used to and I know a little bit about Kazakhstan because when I was editing Cosmo, Cosmo was in something like 64 countries and in countries like Kazakhstan, there is a Kazakhstan Cosmo and every couple of years we all get together with all the editors from all the different countries would meet.

Tim: Tell me you’ve been there

Mia: It was a really interesting exercise in how you can take one brand and make it applicable in everyone from Muslim countries to America.

Tim: Have you been to Kazakhstan?

Mia: Never

Tim: Oh wow. I’ve interviewed Bryan Singer from Rip Curl and he’s got a store there.

Mia: Wow!

Tim: Yeah! Hello, what’s that about? Not even a wave, there’s not a wave in Kazakhstan as far as we know but the reason that I say that is because not everyone that’s listening will know of or understand this phenomenon called Mamamia. Can you explain it?

Mia: Someone will probably wonder why we’re talking about an Abba song. Basically when I’ve been involved in media my whole adult working life, I started in women’s magazine when I was 19 and work in women’s mag for 15 years and then briefly had a disastrous flirtation with TV and then really found myself moving as a content creator, which is what I consider myself and as a consumer, I found myself being increasingly drawn to online because that’s just seem to be where it’s happening. I was able to react quickly. I like the fact that it was very authentic. It wasn’t sort of glossy and packaged and Photoshop and I suppose as I risen up through the ranks in magazine and media over my 15 years in working for a big company, I’ve gotten further and further away from what I love to do which is communicate with an audience and create a community. I started in 2007, I started just a blog. The domain name Mamamia.com.au is available. It was never going to be a mommy blog or Mamamia didn’t refer to fact that it was going to be a parenting site. It was more of an in joke in an Abba song and I didn’t even know particularly what it was about. I knew I didn’t want to write a mommy blog, I knew that I didn’t just want to write a blog about myself, I didn’t want it to be a fashion blog because I was interested in so many different things. What it just became was whatever I was interested in that day and it went on to there from now thing, going to a personal sort of blog to a women’s website. We now have about 800,000 readers a month and we have something like 14 or 15 million page views a month and we also have a sister website called ivillage.com.au which is slightly different to Mamamia, more parenting focused. Together, they rate about 1.2 million women in Australia every month.

Tim: That’s insane. First of all, well done!

Mia: Thank you!

Tim: I guess coming from a magazine environment, even magazine is a single minded like I’ve come from an advertising background and kind of got drummed into me from an early age about single minded communication, so when I go to something like Mamamia.com.au and look at it, I go “wow there is so much there” and I guess the single mindedness of your site is that it’s targeting in women and everything women are interested in, yeah?

Mia: Exactly and it was for a long time because first it was just me and my husband would say “what’s your elevator pitch? What’s Mamamia about? What’s the tagline?” and as a way it sort of challenged me and I couldn’t answer him and for a long time I mistakenly and he mistakenly assumed that that’s its weakness, that you couldn’t say what it was about in 140 characters but I kind of realized and explained to him and understand myself that it was actually it’s strength because the way women talk is they talk about everything. They go talking about gun control to a celebrity who’s got divorced to talking about their pelvic floor after they have a baby, talking about feminism to talking about climate change and that would probably be in the first 5 minutes and it doesn’t matter whether they know each other or not and that’s very, very different to the way men communicate. It also was at that time and is still very different to the majority of websites out there that are directed at women because you have parenting sites, you have fashion sites, you have news sites which the news sites tend to be very male dominated and absolute fit-fights in terms of the level of commentary but I know as someone who’s a parent and someone who’s interested in fashion and into news, none of those or all of those sites are too specialist for me.

Tim: When you were content creating in the early days because now you got a staff of how many?

Mia: We’ve got a staff of about 25-30.

Tim: Okay, so you got 25-30 people who are creating…

Mia: They’re not all creating content, we have 6 or 7 of us creating content.

Tim: Okay so you got people creating content in specific areas but in the early days, where you the one farming the content? Where you creating it? Where you farming it, like getting it from other sources? Was it just you?

Mia: Yeah it was just me so I was posting 6 times a day and the way we work now and every post was from me so I was creating 100% of the content. Now we’ve got 6 full time journalist and staff, we got a couple that work part time and that accounts to probably 70% of our content, 75% of our content and the rest comes from contributions from everybody, from the prime minister to a mother who’s child have drowned and wants to write about that experience, the opposition leader to a celebrity, to anyone you can imagine who really want to access our platform and our community of engaged women.

Tim: I love it! You have the PM write for Mamamia?

Mia: Yes she’s came in a number of times. She’s written quite a few times for us. She’s came in to the office to live blog with our readers a number of times. Tony Abbot has written for the site quite a few times. He gets threatening to come in but I think he’s a little daunted and constantly we’ve got ministers, we got a post today by Tanya Plibersek calling out Tony Abbot about something. Increasingly, politicians are using Mamamia as a way of creating and not just talking to women but also as a way to listen to women. For example, Cayman blogged about the budget and Cayman answered readers question about the budget and Joe Hockey write a beautiful piece for us about how he really struggles with not being around for his kids as much as he’d like to.

Tim: Wow. Mia I want to talk further about how you actually go about targeting women, I hate that word targeting but creating marketing to women but before we do that, I think the idea of where this came from is interesting. In 2007, you’re the Editor in Chief of Cosmo, Cleo and Dolly magazines and then in some point you go “you know what, I’m going to go and work from my lounge room” you’ve gone from the corner office, mahogany? White tiled corner office to lounge room? Is that what happened?

Mia: Pretty much, I mean I took a bit of detour via channel 9 which is hellish for a whole bunch of reasons but that all came, I was done with magazines, I was looking for my next challenge. I probably should have gone straight from magazines to this but instead I sort of diverted.

Tim: With the channel 9 thing ego?

Mia: My ego?

Tim: Yeah like you go because you could go “I’ve been worded by a TV station, that’s really going to…”

Mia: That’s interesting, for sure there was part of that and also ICP wouldn’t let me out of my contract because I was still signed so they would let me move to channel 9 but I was still contracted to them. They were not keen for me to go. Everyone in senior management at ICP at that time from James Package and Alexander, they were all very supportive of me going to channel 9, they really encouraged me and I thought it could be fun. I’ve always thought TV was kind of interesting, maybe it will be interesting to be on this roller coaster and I know I’d be pushed out of my comfort zone and after 15 years of being in the warm bosom of women’s magazine, I was ready for something a bit different.

Tim: As an observer and consumer of media and the reason I say ego before, when I see radio people get to TV show, never works. Looking at you, your career, clearly you’re the magazine chick and that direct line straight into blogging made so much sense.

Mia: Fundamentally I’m a writer so I’m not that interested in being an executive and walking around and also the job I went to, I have to take responsibility for it. The job I went to didn’t really exists. It was a very amorphous job so I was stepping into a role that didn’t really exist and there were a lot of people who didn’t really want me there and fair enough because I have no TV experience. They say that you really have to have a bad relationship before you recognize the right one and I had to have this really bad job experience and career experience before I was forced to find the thing that was right for me. It wasn’t the trimmings and the lack of personal assistance and not being invited to things anymore because none of that I was interested in anyway. I always got my eye on coffee and sent my own email, that wasn’t a problem. It was more about what’s my identity because at first Mamamia wasn’t anything and I always worked for a big media company and I enjoyed that and I enjoyed working in a team and I didn’t know what I was doing and I was working all by myself and I was working at home alone so it was very isolating, I was very unsure of what I was doing. I like being good at things so having to start all over again and feeling that everything I’ve worked for in my career for 15 years had sort of gone up in smoke which is what it felt at that time. That was really tough.

Tim: You’re in the lounge room, it’s 2007, you got the creaky desk on, you’ve made this big career change. Tell us about, there must have been a moment where you had a meltdown and you’ve gone “what have I done?”

Mia: There were many but it wasn’t my choice. What I did next is I fell accidentally pregnant and had that not happen I think that I was finding it so tough, I would have probably just desperately jumped back on the media merry go around and gone back to being some senior executives just so I didn’t have to push through with this discomfort and reinvent myself but as it was I got pregnant so I had to push through and then ultimately ended up being a great thing. When I left ICP I had 75 staff and about 75 requested areas with magazine and I remember one point sitting at home pregnant and I done some and it was when I was starting to get commercial office for the website and I was giving away movie tickets or something like that and there’d been 10 readers who won movie tickets and I was sitting there with my at that time 3 year old daughter and she was helping me put stamps on envelope so I could post out the winning ticket to 10 readers. It was ultimately fantastic to get my hands completely dirty, building a small business as anyone knows. You just have to do everything yourself.

Tim: Yes, tell me then, at some point something must have something – the classic Malcolm Gladwell tipping point, what happened where you’ve gone “hang on, we’re on to something here”

Mia: Traffic had started to grow, about a year or two down the tracks, traffic had started to organically grow. I dip my toe into the world of social media, so Twitter and Facebook, I was starting to understand how to pull those social media leaders to drive traffic back to the site and to increase engagements. Comments were going really well. I was starting to get some approaches to people who wanted to advertise on the site but it was still a personal blog. I was still providing 100% of the content myself and I just didn’t have the time to explore anything. I was making no money; I was making like $5 a year on Google Ads or something like that. My husband, who at that time was looking for his next – he sold the business that he was in around the time that I left and started Mamamia. He spent a year or so doing a hard course and now he’s just looking around for investments and he one day just sort of twig to the fact that he’s looking at these other companies to invest in and maybe there was a business opportunity in his lounge room.

Tim: Oh wow!

Mia: He went well what if we give this a year and I try to monetize this business and if it doesn’t work after a year, maybe it’s time you move on to something else because I was working 16 hours a day, working my guts out for absolutely no tangible benefits. He came on and that was the tipping point for the business. I understand that when you’re running a small business you’re so consumed on the day to day and on the treadmill that you don’t have the time or the head space to be strategic or to work out how to get the business to the next level. That’s not my forte anyway; I’m a content provider, that’s what I love. I love content. The fastest way to get my eyes to close over is to say the word strategy.

Tim: Yeah I hear you

Mia: I just want to cry but he had those skills. He immediately took over the business side and the technical side and really spearheaded this transition from my personal blog to a women’s website that was edited and published by me and we’ve never looked back.

Tim: Where’d the money go? Into website development or bringing staff in to create content on top of what you’re creating? Where did the money that first 12 months of dough go?

Mia: He didn’t invest anything but his time. He didn’t put in any money, he just – ah we put in a little bit of money to rebuild the site, that’s not true, we did put in a little bit of money to rebuild the site but it was really just saying it was 2 people working on this full time and that meant that we could move forward and lay some grounds. He needs to monetize the site, we had to restructure it technically and we had to reposition it. He identified that when you have a personal blog you don’t have an asset that can never be sold.

Tim: So much, I need a hubby like yours. I’ve been doing this show for 3 years, it’s all mine like I am in my lounge room, not right now but you know I have done it in my lounge room. I do love creating content and I think so many of us are being held back by the fact that we’re not adding people to the team, whether it be our hubby’s or our wives or whoever it might be to do the stuff that we’re not good at.

Mia: It’s interesting I’ve always been very, very clear about what I’m not good and also just what I’m not interested in. I’m very clear and I tend to not be good at with stuff I’m not interested in. Having him spearhead that and we had to had some pretty tough conversations because it was things like “babe you’re the single point – you know business can have a single point of failure and you are the single point of failure of Mamamia” and I’m like yeah I can get that but when you’re that close to it and you’re that absorbed in the man you tie, it’s really, really hard to make those calls yourself.

Tim: Does your hubby call you babe in business meetings?

Mia: Through every new state of business.

Tim: Does your hubby call you babe in business meetings?

Mia: Yeah

Tim: I love that!

Mia: It was really funny; we went to a meeting with some people who were doing some consulting work for us and it was like a briefing meeting on the site and we sort of got to the end and they said “how did you two come to be working together?” and he said “we’re marrie”

Tim: I started sleeping with her

Mia: either our chemistry is really bad or we’re really professional.

Tim: That’s right, clearly. All those people that you met with just have no intuition at all.

Mia: Occasionally in a meeting I reach over to give his hand a little squeeze or something. I did that the other day and half the staff nearly vomited.

Tim: It must be testing, there must be times where that you got to have a strong relationship to also have a business relationship I’m sure.

Mia: Yeah you do and you got to have very, very clear boundaries about I know what he’s good at and where I completely relinquish control to him and vice versa. I think if we had the same skill set or we’re trying to do the same thing then we might clash. We do still occasionally clash but surprisingly infrequently like literally we come to work separately, we work in different ends of the office. We often wont even see each other during the day and we go home separately and then often he’ll come home and I’m like “how’s your day?” It does put pressure on your relationship but at the same time there’s a lot of pressure on running a small business anyway and I’ve got friends who have two small businesses running on the same family; she’s working on one and he’s working on another and that’s far tougher because then the businesses are competing with each other.

Tim: Hey Mia, when did those start coming in the doors then? You talked about $5 in Ad Words a year, that’s not going to get you reach. When did you realize that you figured out the way to monetize this bad boy?

Mia: That’s funny, I think probably within, again with the things that I don’t care about I just literally shut out. It’s the only way I can get through everything that I have to get through every day so I don’t have a good handle in figures or numbers because I’m just not interested but I figured – obviously everything that came in we reinvested into the business. We became profitable within 6 months of him starting. He turned it around.

Tim: What did he do? Did he go out and seeks sponsors? Did he up the Google AdWords presence? What did he do?

Mia: The first thing he did, at first he was quite daunted by not knowing a huge amount. He never worked in a media before. Obviously he’d done a bit of B to B, he’d been in a liquor industry before and he established a really good B to B website for his business but he was really daunted at first and it was really soon that he realised that because this in online, digital is an area that’s moving so fast, you just got to get on the train at whatever stop you’re on because everybody is learning. You just jump on whenever you jump on and everyone is learning as they go and so he picked up an enormous amount of knowledge in a really, really fast time and that left me to just refine and keep working on the content because I instinctively know how to create communities of women and I instinctively know how to engage women because I know how women like to communicate. The first thing he did was to restructure the site so it wasn’t just a blog; it was more of a website. The second thing he did was appoint an ad network, seller ad space which is something we did externally because we just weren’t set up to do it ourselves. We had to get our traffic to a certain point to be able to do that because the ad networks that sell on behalf of smaller websites, you have to have a baseline level of traffic to make it worth it but that was a good way for us to start. Obviously that was going to be intended because you want to be in control of your revenue and you don’t want to be sharing it so ultimately he knew that we need to get our traffic to a point and our revenue to a point where we could start building our own sales team which is something we started doing about a year or two ago. We just sort of gone from there and the other big turning point in our business was about 18 months ago, he became aware that our traffic was good and it was growing really well but if you look at the list of top ten women’s website in Australia, there were only 2 that were independent; not owned by fear facts or news limited or anonymous end or Yahoo and that was Mamamia and an American website called iVillage.com and that’s the biggest women’s lifestyle website in the world. They’re a little bit like The Women’s Weekly meets Cosmo. They’re kind of like the headlocks of like any women’s magazine – food and parenting and cooking and shopping and craft and relationship stories and career stories, all of that kind of stuff. He approached them and said we’d like to, in market, sell your Australian eyeballs which basically means that we would then be in market selling the Australian advertising for their site and then they said “that’s a coincidence that you called because we’re just about to come to Australia. We’ve decided we’re launching iVillage in Australia. We’ve already have iVillage in America and the UK and Canada. Australia is our next market that we want to come in to and we’re looking for a media partner to do it with us so we’ll put you on our list of interviews when we’re there” they came with all the big players – Channel 10, FearFacts news, anonymous end and etc and we were their last meeting and they said to us months later “we walked into that meeting with you guys going clearly we’re not launching in Australia because there was no one here that they’re prepared to do business with” and we just hit it off and they were really impressed with the way that we could demonstrate our level of engagement with the readers through comment numbers, through shares of post and through social media instructions and so we launched iVillage Australia about 6 months ago and what that did is that it meant we were then able to play with the big boys or rather girls. Big agencies, we were booking Toyota’s advertising or Nissan’s advertising or the government advertising. They won’t deal with 10 small independent publishers. They only want to deal with a few big ones and because we represent 1.2 million women in Australia in a month, we can now get on their schedules.

Tim: What a great story! Did you buy into iVillage or what’s the relationship?

Mia: We have a licensing agreement with them. We pay obviously for the license to publish iVillage in Australia and we work very closely with them.

Tim: You’ve spoken a lot about – by the way listeners, I am talking to Mia Freedman who’s the creator of the Mamamia.com.au phenomenon and also iVillage.com.au?

Mia: Yup!

Tim: Now Mia you have spoken about targeting to women and marketing to women and building communities of women and I know there are a lot of listeners who would love some insights into ways of marketing to women because it’s different to blokes.

Mia: Yeah it’s different to blokes. It’s really interesting. It’s something that I’ve had to step out of myself and try to put it to words because a lot of what we do is kind of just instinctive but the most important thing is authenticity and that was the reason that I was really moving away from magazines because I just that they weren’t authentic. I felt that they were – sorry that was just a boat.

Tim: In your office?

Mia: My yacht, no it was a ferry. Magazines and lots of forms of media don’t communicate with women in authentic ways and what Mamamia does is and the best thing when you’re trying to communicate with women is to try to find an emotional entry point into something. I’ll give you an example – there’s an ad at the moment for dishwashing tablet, a new dishwashing tablet, Finnish dishwashing tablet and they’re running an ad with a blogger for kids’ spot which is like a parenting website and its got her in her kitchen, standing in front of the dishwasher going “I’ve been using these Finnish dishwashing tablet and they are just so amazing and my dishes have never so shiny and look at the shine and I just cant believe it and I’m going to tell all my friends about it and they wont even believe how shiny my dishes are”

Tim: Is this an ad from 1953?

Mia: That’s exactly right! Look at it! Finnish approached us a little while ago about this new dishwashing and so we don’t just run display advertising although we do. Something that we do that’s incredibly popular is we offer this social media packages which is about integrating content and engaging – you can’t just flash an ad at a woman and expect her to engage with it. You got to embed it in a conversation and they came to us and they said “we’ve got this new dishwashing thing and it’s got this new ingredient and it’s going to do this one” okay well that’s all very interesting for you but there’s no emotional entry point to having shiny dishes. I don’t know anyone, if any friend of mine tried to tell about how shiny her dishes, I’d call an ambulance.

Tim: That isn’t a friend of mine.

Mia: What we said was “okay let’s talk about dishwashers. What’s the emotional entry point of dishwashers?” we worked out that in every household there is someone who is the dishwashing police. There’s someone who knows the perfect way to stuck a dishwasher

Tim: That’s me; by the way, you’re ringing my bell here

Mia: Immediately when I tell that story, everyone will go “that’s me, that’s my flatmate, that’s me husband” and what it does is it embeds this information about this new dishwashing thing in conversations about who’s the dishwashing police in your house and suddenly you have all these comments when people are engaged rather than just passively watching someone talk about their shiny dishes and some new ingredient. Who cares about a new ingredient in a dishwashing tablet? It’s how is this relevant to my life and how is this authentic. That’s what I love about online. It enables you to talk directly and authentically to women about anything.

Tim: I love the concept by the way Mia, emotional entry point so what’s the process at Mamamia HQ to find emotional entry points for brands? Do you sit around and talk about the product and then see where that conversation goes and in the conversation in the case of Finnish dishwashing liquid went to, the fact that stacking the dishwasher is that’s where it’s at, is this what you do?

Mia: Exactly. People also really like hearing real life stories. We had life insurance come talk to us and we were talking to life insurance company about “what do most people do when they hear about life insurance and those ads for wheels and funerals” the first thing you do is block your ears or change channel because it’s like “la la la la la” when you think about that, it’s too scary. We sort of started to talk about what are the issues around that? Income protection, what happens if someone in your life suddenly wasn’t there, what would happen? We then find someone who that’s happened to and we let them tell their story. We encourage people, people love talking about themselves more than anything. You really try to just talk. A client might come to us with a dishwashing tablet or life insurance or a new drink that they launch, whatever happens today and we will sort of once we understand what they want to achieve, we will then come up with options for social media packages which we then write in an editorial style but always disclosed and we then send that to our social media army which is over 120,000. That’s the other thing, you can expect, I see so many people think that social media is about “we’ll start a blog on our furniture store website” and it’s like “no one is going to come. It’s not a case of build it and they will come with online. You have to go to where the people are and that’s really the key.” I encourage people to see social media as like imagine if you have a small business, just imagine you’ve got a farm and you’re selling tomatoes and outside when you go for those drives in country rides and there will be a little stall outside someone’s farm and it will say “bag of tomatoes, leave $5 in this box” and the people that come to your house, your friends and relatives, they might but some tomatoes from you. You’ll get the occasional person that’s lost and driving past your farm and they might buy some tomatoes but if you’re not also selling your tomatoes and telling people about your farm down at the local market where everybody else is selling their wares and everyone in the community is going to buy their coffee and have their chat, then you don’t have a hope. You can’t rely on people just wondering past. If you look at that in terms of your website is that little stall outside your farm and social media is the grower’s market where you want to be luring people back to your farm to buy more of your product.

Tim: Fish where the fish are.

Mia: Exactly

Tim: Just to finish off that finish dishwashing liquid one, what you identified was the dishwasher stacking Nazi within the household. What did you do then? Did you go into Facebook and started discussion around that? Is that you? Who’s the dishwasher stacking Nazi in your house?

Mia: We wrote about that, we wrote about it along with talking about – we used two hooks actually because the first hook was around the time Master Chef when Master Chef was really big and we’re saying “it’s awesome in Master Chef but who does the washing up? Who stacks the dishwasher?” because can you imagine the dishwasher stacking after Master Chef? Four and half thousands samples to give away, not entire boxes but literally four and a half thousand individual dishwashing tablets and we were sort of full of provato and said to them “that’s fine we will give those away” thinking oh my God we were going to have boxes of them in the garage and in actual fact they were gone within 24 hours. There were dozens of comments; people were sharing things on their Facebook page and retweeting it.

Tim: What do they have to do? Do they have to retweet or like or leave a comment in order for them to receive a sample?

Mia: We were advanced at all. All they have to do is sign up and put in their details but people even if they didn’t get a free sample they wanted to engage in that post and to the dishwashers and it sounds hilarious but everyone wants to share the story of the dishwashing Nazi in their house and then there were threads that were going on about “this is the correct way to stack the dishes” there were facing up, facing down, what do we think about trays on top of dishwasher. It was really interesting and you should never underestimate the things that people are interested in talking about.

Tim: Absolutely not and coming from a magazine background like you have, I mean you’d known that. Some of the most superficial kind of conversations are the ones that get the most traction. The articles that talk about nothing in particular fill out days.

Mia: you wouldn’t know and advertisers wouldn’t know because it’s not a two way conversation, it’s just a monologue and that’s what traditional advertising is and that’s what old media is, it’s just monologue. It’s someone standing on the stage with a megaphone telling you stuff but what women not just expect but demand is a conversation. When we write a post, whether it’s a sponsor post for a product or something from the Prime Minister, that’s just the starting point – it’s not the end, finish or stop – it’s like what do you think? Women love to talk. They love to exchange information; they love to say what they think about things. Often it’s how they work out what they think about things by reading what other people think.

Tim: I met a man; he is the professor of marketing at a university Mia and he has identified a study that proves that women have 7,000 words to use everyday and men have 4,000.

Mia: I would have thought that numbers would be even further apart actually.

Tim: I agree, in fact I would have thought that women’s number would be higher and the men’s number would be lower because I don’t know whether a grunt is considered a word these days. Anyway, that’s interesting in itself.

Mia: Now I understand why women need so much information because you talk too much so you choose to.

Tim: Correct, correct. Mia, this is gold. I know you’re busy; I’ve got a couple of questions left but thank you so much for sharing what so far has been – there’s marketing gold dripping from the ceiling of small business big marketing HQ let me tell you. We talked about targeting women; I love that emotional entry point. Building community, I think it’s all part of it; is Mamamia always going to be just a written word or are you looking to – is content creation going into podcast, is there video, what else?

Mia: We were approached about a year and half ago by Sky News with the view of turning it into a weekly TV show which we did for about six months. I don’t want to set the world of fire but more to the point I didn’t really enjoy it. I didn’t feel that it was a natural extension of what we did because we had sort of people sitting around talking about things but again it was a little bit one way traffic and about six or nine months ago we got approached by Australia radio to do Mamamia as a radio show. They were looking for a new afternoon radio show targeted at women and that has been such an example of a perfect synergy. Radio has so much in common with what we do because it has no barrier between you and the audience. There’s a talk back which is the same as comments; its opinions so you throw things back and forth and what’s great is that we’ve been able to tackle the diversity of contents. You can have a really light-hearted conversation about Brazilians and men getting into practice and then you can have conversation about gun control or about a particular ad in whether it is racists or whatever it happens to be. I love that it can go that gamut, that light and shade because that’s really how women communicate and women like to feel things. That’s another thing you got to remember when you’re communicating with women. Women like to feel things.

Tim: What do you mean?

Mia: It’s interesting, when a woman is moved by something, she will say I’m crying or I am in tears. Even if she’s not, she will say that so that you’ll know that you’ve affected her with whatever it is that you said or whatever it is that you’ve written. We have that a lot. If someone writes a really moving post, a lot of the comments will be people just saying “I’m crying right now”

Tim: Right

Mia: And that’s not a bad thing, like I heard you go “what do you mean?”

Tim: What do you mean?!?

Mia: And I’m not saying you necessarily want that if you’re trying to sell a product but in terms of women feeling emotion, that’s positive and they’ll go “this is amazing” and I’ll share something that’s made them cry.

Tim: Yeah okay, often on this show we talk about branding, every visit. You earn a brand, you don’t just buy a brand but you earn a brand if you’re a marketer and it’s all about getting that emotional attachment between you and your audience.

Mia: Absolutely.

Tim: In fact Sam Cavanagh who introduced you and I, he is one of the producers of Austereo. He’s coming up on a future episode of small business big marketing and he’s talking about this concept of taking, turning your listeners into fans or actually not turning them but treating your listeners as fans which once again is all about emotion, isn’t it?

Mia: Yeah

Tim: Mia, tell me Mamamia it’s a phenomenon, what are you most proud of? Everything you’ve done since 2007, what’s that one thing where every now and then you get to look back at it and cross your arms and go “I love that”

Mia: Small business owners will tell you there’s not a lot of back patting to be done when you’re running a small business. In fact that actually almost never happens because you’re always aware of the 8 million things that you haven’t done compared to the 2 or 3 ones that you’re proud of. I suppose if I’m forced to sort of step back and look at it from the outside, having the Prime Minister come here twice in two months was pretty awesome. I got quite over-excited and I invited all of my family to meet her like it was my weeding or something, including my kids’ friends and everyone came in and met the PM. That was pretty awesome and I’m pretty proud of the sort of advocacy and activism work that we do in terms of agitating around against there’s an organization that works actively to not have children immunized. We do a lot of pro-immunization stuff, pro vaccination stuff. What I’m most proud of is giving the platform that enables people who would otherwise never reach the audience that we provide and just letting them tell their stories. That’s not the Prime Minister, that might be someone who’s had a still born baby or someone who’s partner had a chronic illness or someone who recovered from an eating disorder, whatever it happens to be or who’s triumphed over bullies or whatever it happens to be – to just allow them to tell their story…

Tim: How do you allow them? Do they approach you and say “hey I’d like to write a guest post” or how do you allow them?

Mia: Yeah they do know, occasionally we approach someone and say “do you want to write?” but we get hundreds of contributions a week but we can’t use them all of course but we had a family that approached us. This woman had a brother who is a missing person and he’s been missing for a long time, a number of years. They wrote a post about him in the fact that he was missing, we published it on Mamamia and it was shared hundreds and thousands of time over Facebook and it resulted in a confirmed sighting of him somewhere. That was the first sort of bit of hope they’ve had in years. We had someone else who wrote a letter on her sister on what should have been her 26th birthday but she died the year before. Just watching people, because writing can be very cathartic and for women sharing stories and talking can be very cathartic. To write and then to have all the comments and people really either saying “I know what you’ve been through or I’ve been through something similar or you’ve really touched me or thank you so much for helping me to feel that I know that little boy a little bit better that you lost” that to me is what I’m most proud of.

Tim: Well done, well done. I got nothing more to add to that, you got any questions? That’s wonderful, you should be very proud of that. Pat on the back of Mia Freedman.

Mia: That’s great. For us to be able to give people the opportunity, it sounds really perfect doesn’t it?

Tim: It’s awesome. Mia Freedman thanks so much for sharing the marketing love on small business big marketing.

Mia: I can’t wait to get a bit of marketing love back, I’m going to be listening and taking notes.

Tim: We come in through loud and clear, thanks so much Mia, see you!

Mia: Thank you also, see you later, bye!

#116 Fourteen million monthly page views – Mamamia’s Mia Freedman explains exactly how she does it

Tim:                Now let me read you Mia Freedman’s bio because it is astounding and I am excited to have Mia on the show. Mia is the editor and publisher of Australia’s fastest growing women’s website, right? Mamamia.com.au but prior to that she was the Editor of Cosmopolitan, Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan, Cleo and Dolly and she started Mamamia from a lounge room in 2007 and she is going to explain exactly how she did it and how she’s growing it to this huge empire it is today. She employs, well in her current bio that I’m reading it says that she’s employing 20 people and has 500,000 readers and twelve million page views per month. Those numbers have increased significantly and Mia is going to share the updated numbers with you. They are astounding. The number of page views per month that she will share with you in mind boggling. Give me 10 percent of them! She’s also got a national radio show off the back of Mamamia. She’s a newspaper columnist. She also presents on The Today’s Show and she’s written 3 books! Mia is a marketing machine and I got to tell you guys, Mia shares some marketing goal. There is one particular insight Mia shares in this interview called the emotional entry point and I got to tell you I love it. It’s one of the best marketing insights I’ve heard in recent times and she gives a great example of how she use that in order to create great messaging and you know how big I am on getting your message right before you worry where to put it. Guys, seriously, grab a cupper, grab the nearest comfy chair or of you’re jogging or walking or whatever you do keep doing that for the next half hour or 40 minutes or so. Pen and paper at the ready or ever note open, capture these ideas because they are dripping from the small business big marketing HQ’s ceiling in this interview. Here’s Mia – Mia welcome to small business big marketing.

Mia:                Thanks for having me.

Tim:                Absolute joy for having you at small business big marketing headquarters. Now in the spirit of honesty and transparency on this show, I got an email from your production manager early today saying can we push the interview back an hour? Because Mia “has an unexpected lunchtime meeting” Now Mia, lunchtime meeting or busy 1984 style lunch?

Mia:                Oh my God, I didn’t even have a busy 1984 style lunch in 1984 because I was still at high school but no, I will be completely honest in saying I was grabbing a sandwich across the road with my brother which I haven’t seeing for quite some time.

Tim:                Good on you! Family first, I say.

Mia:                Family first. I wanted to catch up with him before our family Christmas thing.

Tim:                Oh, wow okay well I think we should go there. Plotting and planning, is there some kind of lines in the sand being drawn and you’re getting some what to say and what not to say in place?

Mia:                No I think that sometimes when it comes to your parents and your family dynamics, only a sibling can understand.

Tim:                Oh yeah, coming from a family of six, I hear you.

Mia:                Yes sure!

Tim:                I hear you; I still don’t know whether we’re going to see each other on Christmas day anyway.

Mia:                Family bunkers, there’s no person in the world that can quite understand how bunkers your family is and that’s your sibling I think.

Tim:                Correct and that’s very important. Now Mia, this show, this small business big marketing show downloaded in 94 countries including Kazakhstan so there’s a few people listening…

Mia:                Kazakhstan?

Tim:                Yeah, correct, like what are they doing listening anyway in the first place, good on them.

Mia:                I’m kind of used to and I know a little bit about Kazakhstan because when I was editing Cosmo, Cosmo was in something like 64 countries and in countries like Kazakhstan, there is a Kazakhstan Cosmo and every couple of years we all get together with all the editors from all the different countries would meet.

Tim:                Tell me you’ve been there

Mia:                It was a really interesting exercise in how you can take one brand and make it applicable in everyone from Muslim countries to America.

Tim:                Have you been to Kazakhstan?

Mia:                Never

Tim:                Oh wow. I’ve interviewed Bryan Singer from Rip Curl and he’s got a store there.

Mia:                Wow!

Tim:                Yeah! Hello, what’s that about? Not even a wave, there’s not a wave in Kazakhstan as far as we know but the reason that I say that is because not everyone that’s listening will know of or understand this phenomenon called Mamamia. Can you explain it?

Mia:                Someone will probably wonder why we’re talking about an Abba song. Basically when I’ve been involved in media my whole adult working life, I started in women’s magazine when I was 19 and work in women’s mag for 15 years and then briefly had a disastrous flirtation with TV and then really found myself moving as a content creator, which is what I consider myself and as a consumer, I found myself being increasingly drawn to online because that’s just seem to be where it’s happening. I was able to react quickly. I like the fact that it was very authentic. It wasn’t sort of glossy and packaged and Photoshop and I suppose as I risen up through the ranks in magazine and media over my 15 years in working for a big company, I’ve gotten further and further away from what I love to do which is communicate with an audience and create a community. I started in 2007, I started just a blog. The domain name Mamamia.com.au is available. It was never going to be a mommy blog or Mamamia didn’t refer to fact that it was going to be a parenting site. It was more of an in joke in an Abba song and I didn’t even know particularly what it was about. I knew I didn’t want to write a mommy blog, I knew that I didn’t just want to write a blog about myself, I didn’t want it to be a fashion blog because I was interested in so many different things. What it just became was whatever I was interested in that day and it went on to there from now thing, going to a personal sort of blog to a women’s website. We now have about 800,000 readers a month and we have something like 14 or 15 million page views a month and we also have a sister website called ivillage.com.au which is slightly different to Mamamia, more parenting focused. Together, they rate about 1.2 million women in Australia every month.

Tim:                That’s insane. First of all, well done!

Mia:                Thank you!

Tim:                I guess coming from a magazine environment, even magazine is a single minded like I’ve come from an advertising background and kind of got drummed into me from an early age about single minded communication, so when I go to something like Mamamia.com.au and look at it, I go “wow there is so much there” and I guess the single mindedness of your site is that it’s targeting in women and everything women are interested in, yeah?

Mia:                Exactly and it was for a long time because first it was just me and my husband would say “what’s your elevator pitch? What’s Mamamia about? What’s the tagline?” and as a way it sort of challenged me and I couldn’t answer him and for a long time I mistakenly and he mistakenly assumed that that’s its weakness, that you couldn’t say what it was about in 140 characters but I kind of realized and explained to him and understand myself that it was actually it’s strength because the way women talk is they talk about everything. They go talking about gun control to a celebrity who’s got divorced to talking about their pelvic floor after they have a baby, talking about feminism to talking about climate change and that would probably be in the first 5 minutes and it doesn’t matter whether they know each other or not and that’s very, very different to the way men communicate. It also was at that time and is still very different to the majority of websites out there that are directed at women because you have parenting sites, you have fashion sites, you have news sites which the news sites tend to be very male dominated and absolute fit-fights in terms of the level of commentary but I know as someone who’s a parent and someone who’s interested in fashion and into news, none of those or all of those sites are too specialist for me.

Tim:                When you were content creating in the early days because now you got a staff of how many?

Mia:                We’ve got a staff of about 25-30.

Tim:                Okay, so you got 25-30 people who are creating…

Mia:                They’re not all creating content, we have 6 or 7 of us creating content.

Tim:                Okay so you got people creating content in specific areas but in the early days, where you the one farming the content? Where you creating it? Where you farming it, like getting it from other sources? Was it just you?

Mia:                Yeah it was just me so I was posting 6 times a day and the way we work now and every post was from me so I was creating 100% of the content. Now we’ve got 6 full time journalist and staff, we got a couple that work part time and that accounts to probably 70% of our content, 75% of our content and the rest comes from contributions from everybody, from the prime minister to a mother who’s child have drowned and wants to write about that experience, the opposition leader to a celebrity, to anyone you can imagine who really want to access our platform and our community of engaged women.

Tim:                I love it! You have the PM write for Mamamia?

Mia:                Yes she’s came in a number of times. She’s written quite a few times for us. She’s came in to the office to live blog with our readers a number of times. Tony Abbot has written for the site quite a few times. He gets threatening to come in but I think he’s a little daunted and constantly we’ve got ministers, we got a post today by Tanya Plibersek calling out Tony Abbot about something. Increasingly, politicians are using Mamamia as a way of creating and not just talking to women but also as a way to listen to women. For example, Cayman blogged about the budget and Cayman answered readers question about the budget and Joe Hockey write a beautiful piece for us about how he really struggles with not being around for his kids as much as he’d like to.

Tim:                Wow. Mia I want to talk further about how you actually go about targeting women, I hate that word targeting but creating marketing to women but before we do that, I think the idea of where this came from is interesting. In 2007, you’re the Editor in Chief of Cosmo, Cleo and Dolly magazines and then in some point you go “you know what, I’m going to go and work from my lounge room” you’ve gone from the corner office, mahogany? White tiled corner office to lounge room? Is that what happened?

Mia:                Pretty much, I mean I took a bit of detour via channel 9 which is hellish for a whole bunch of reasons but that all came, I was done with magazines, I was looking for my next challenge. I probably should have gone straight from magazines to this but instead I sort of diverted.

Tim:                With the channel 9 thing ego?

Mia:                My ego?

Tim:                Yeah like you go because you could go “I’ve been worded by a TV station, that’s really going to…”

Mia:                That’s interesting, for sure there was part of that and also ICP wouldn’t let me out of my contract because I was still signed so they would let me move to channel 9 but I was still contracted to them. They were not keen for me to go. Everyone in senior management at ICP at that time from James Package and Alexander, they were all very supportive of me going to channel 9, they really encouraged me and I thought it could be fun. I’ve always thought TV was kind of interesting, maybe it will be interesting to be on this roller coaster and I know I’d be pushed out of my comfort zone and after 15 years of being in the warm bosom of women’s magazine, I was ready for something a bit different.

Tim:                As an observer and consumer of media and the reason I say ego before, when I see radio people get to TV show, never works. Looking at you, your career, clearly you’re the magazine chick and that direct line straight into blogging made so much sense.

Mia:                Fundamentally I’m a writer so I’m not that interested in being an executive and walking around and also the job I went to, I have to take responsibility for it. The job I went to didn’t really exists. It was a very amorphous job so I was stepping into a role that didn’t really exist and there were a lot of people who didn’t really want me there and fair enough because I have no TV experience. They say that you really have to have a bad relationship before you recognize the right one and I had to have this really bad job experience and career experience before I was forced to find the thing that was right for me. It wasn’t the trimmings and the lack of personal assistance and not being invited to things anymore because none of that I was interested in anyway. I always got my eye on coffee and sent my own email, that wasn’t a problem. It was more about what’s my identity because at first Mamamia wasn’t anything and I always worked for a big media company and I enjoyed that and I enjoyed working in a team and I didn’t know what I was doing and I was working all by myself and I was working at home alone so it was very isolating, I was very unsure of what I was doing. I like being good at things so having to start all over again and feeling that everything I’ve worked for in my career for 15 years had sort of gone up in smoke which is what it felt at that time. That was really tough.

Tim:                You’re in the lounge room, it’s 2007, you got the creaky desk on, you’ve made this big career change. Tell us about, there must have been a moment where you had a meltdown and you’ve gone “what have I done?”

Mia:                There were many but it wasn’t my choice. What I did next is I fell accidentally pregnant and had that not happen I think that I was finding it so tough, I would have probably just desperately jumped back on the media merry go around and gone back to being some senior executives just so I didn’t have to push through with this discomfort and reinvent myself but as it was I got pregnant so I had to push through and then ultimately ended up being a great thing. When I left ICP I had 75 staff and about 75 requested areas with magazine and I remember one point sitting at home pregnant and I done some and it was when I was starting to get commercial office for the website and I was giving away movie tickets or something like that and there’d been 10 readers who won movie tickets and I was sitting there with my at that time 3 year old daughter and she was helping me put stamps on envelope so I could post out the winning ticket to 10 readers. It was ultimately fantastic to get my hands completely dirty, building a small business as anyone knows. You just have to do everything yourself.

Tim:                Yes, tell me then, at some point something must have something – the classic Malcolm Gladwell tipping point, what happened where you’ve gone “hang on, we’re on to something here”

Mia:                Traffic had started to grow, about a year or two down the tracks, traffic had started to organically grow. I dip my toe into the world of social media, so Twitter and Facebook, I was starting to understand how to pull those social media leaders to drive traffic back to the site and to increase engagements. Comments were going really well. I was starting to get some approaches to people who wanted to advertise on the site but it was still a personal blog. I was still providing 100% of the content myself and I just didn’t have the time to explore anything. I was making no money; I was making like $5 a year on Google Ads or something like that. My husband, who at that time was looking for his next – he sold the business that he was in around the time that I left and started Mamamia. He spent a year or so doing a hard course and now he’s just looking around for investments and he one day just sort of twig to the fact that he’s looking at these other companies to invest in and maybe there was a business opportunity in his lounge room.

Tim:                Oh wow!

Mia:                He went well what if we give this a year and I try to monetize this business and if it doesn’t work after a year, maybe it’s time you move on to something else because I was working 16 hours a day, working my guts out for absolutely no tangible benefits. He came on and that was the tipping point for the business. I understand that when you’re running a small business you’re so consumed on the day to day and on the treadmill that you don’t have the time or the head space to be strategic or to work out how to get the business to the next level. That’s not my forte anyway; I’m a content provider, that’s what I love. I love content. The fastest way to get my eyes to close over is to say the word strategy.

Tim:                Yeah I hear you

Mia:                I just want to cry but he had those skills. He immediately took over the business side and the technical side and really spearheaded this transition from my personal blog to a women’s website that was edited and published by me and we’ve never looked back.

Tim:                Where’d the money go? Into website development or bringing staff in to create content on top of what you’re creating? Where did the money that first 12 months of dough go?

Mia:                He didn’t invest anything but his time. He didn’t put in any money, he just – ah we put in a little bit of money to rebuild the site, that’s not true, we did put in a little bit of money to rebuild the site but it was really just saying it was 2 people working on this full time and that meant that we could move forward and lay some grounds. He needs to monetize the site, we had to restructure it technically and we had to reposition it. He identified that when you have a personal blog you don’t have an asset that can never be sold.

Tim:                So much, I need a hubby like yours. I’ve been doing this show for 3 years, it’s all mine like I am in my lounge room, not right now but you know I have done it in my lounge room. I do love creating content and I think so many of us are being held back by the fact that we’re not adding people to the team, whether it be our hubby’s or our wives or whoever it might be to do the stuff that we’re not good at.

Mia:                It’s interesting I’ve always been very, very clear about what I’m not good and also just what I’m not interested in. I’m very clear and I tend to not be good at with stuff I’m not interested in. Having him spearhead that and we had to had some pretty tough conversations because it was things like “babe you’re the single point – you know business can have a single point of failure and you are the single point of failure of Mamamia” and I’m like yeah I can get that but when you’re that close to it and you’re that absorbed in the man you tie, it’s really, really hard to make those calls yourself.

Tim:                Does your hubby call you babe in business meetings?

Mia:                Through every new state of business

Tim:                Does your hubby call you babe in business meetings?

Mia:                Yeah.

Tim:                I love that!

Mia:                It was really funny; we went to a meeting with some people who were doing some consulting work for us and it was like a briefing meeting on the site and we sort of got to the end and they said “how did you two come to be working together?” and he said “we’re married”.

Tim:                I started sleeping with her.

Mia:                Either our chemistry is really bad or we’re really professional.

Tim:                That’s right, clearly. All those people that you met with just have no intuition at all.

Mia:                Occasionally in a meeting I reach over to give his hand a little squeeze or something. I did that the other day and half the staff nearly vomited.

Tim:                It must be testing, there must be times where that you got to have a strong relationship to also have a business relationship I’m sure.

Mia:                Yeah you do and you got to have very, very clear boundaries about I know what he’s good at and where I completely relinquish control to him and vice versa. I think if we had the same skill set or we’re trying to do the same thing then we might clash. We do still occasionally clash but surprisingly infrequently like literally we come to work separately, we work in different ends of the office. We often wont even see each other during the day and we go home separately and then often he’ll come home and I’m like “how’s your day?” It does put pressure on your relationship but at the same time there’s a lot of pressure on running a small business anyway and I’ve got friends who have two small businesses running on the same family; she’s working on one and he’s working on another and that’s far tougher because then the businesses are competing with each other.

Tim:                Hey Mia, when did those start coming in the doors then? You talked about $5 in Ad Words a year, that’s not going to get you reach. When did you realize that you figured out the way to monetize this bad boy?

Mia:                That’s funny, I think probably within, again with the things that I don’t care about I just literally shut out. It’s the only way I can get through everything that I have to get through every day so I don’t have a good handle in figures or numbers because I’m just not interested but I figured – obviously everything that came in we reinvested into the business. We became profitable within 6 months of him starting. He turned it around.

Tim:                What did he do? Did he go out and seeks sponsors? Did he up the Google AdWords presence? What did he do?

Mia:                The first thing he did, at first he was quite daunted by not knowing a huge amount. He never worked in a media before. Obviously he’d done a bit of B to B, he’d been in a liquor industry before and he established a really good B to B website for his business but he was really daunted at first and it was really soon that he realised that because this in online, digital is an area that’s moving so fast, you just got to get on the train at whatever stop you’re on because everybody is learning. You just jump on whenever you jump on and everyone is learning as they go and so he picked up an enormous amount of knowledge in a really, really fast time and that left me to just refine and keep working on the content because I instinctively know how to create communities of women and I instinctively know how to engage women because I know how women like to communicate. The first thing he did was to restructure the site so it wasn’t just a blog; it was more of a website. The second thing he did was appoint an ad network, seller ad space which is something we did externally because we just weren’t set up to do it ourselves. We had to get our traffic to a certain point to be able to do that because the ad networks that sell on behalf of smaller websites, you have to have a baseline level of traffic to make it worth it but that was a good way for us to start. Obviously that was going to be intended because you want to be in control of your revenue and you don’t want to be sharing it so ultimately he knew that we need to get our traffic to a point and our revenue to a point where we could start building our own sales team which is something we started doing about a year or two ago. We just sort of gone from there and the other big turning point in our business was about 18 months ago, he became aware that our traffic was good and it was growing really well but if you look at the list of top ten women’s website in Australia, there were only 2 that were independent; not owned by fear facts or news limited or anonymous end or Yahoo and that was Mamamia and an American website called iVillage.com and that’s the biggest women’s lifestyle website in the world. They’re a little bit like The Women’s Weekly meets Cosmo. They’re kind of like the headlocks of like any women’s magazine – food and parenting and cooking and shopping and craft and relationship stories and career stories, all of that kind of stuff. He approached them and said we’d like to, in market, sell your Australian eyeballs which basically means that we would then be in market selling the Australian advertising for their site and then they said “that’s a coincidence that you called because we’re just about to come to Australia. We’ve decided we’re launching iVillage in Australia. We’ve already have iVillage in America and the UK and Canada. Australia is our next market that we want to come in to and we’re looking for a media partner to do it with us so we’ll put you on our list of interviews when we’re there” they came with all the big players – Channel 10, FearFacts news, anonymous end and etc and we were their last meeting and they said to us months later “we walked into that meeting with you guys going clearly we’re not launching in Australia because there was no one here that they’re prepared to do business with” and we just hit it off and they were really impressed with the way that we could demonstrate our level of engagement with the readers through comment numbers, through shares of post and through social media instructions and so we launched iVillage Australia about 6 months ago and what that did is that it meant we were then able to play with the big boys or rather girls. Big agencies, we were booking Toyota’s advertising or Nissan’s advertising or the government advertising. They won’t deal with 10 small independent publishers. They only want to deal with a few big ones and because we represent 1.2 million women in Australia in a month, we can now get on their schedules.

Tim:                What a great story! Did you buy into iVillage or what’s the relationship?

Mia:                We have a licensing agreement with them. We pay obviously for the license to publish iVillage in Australia and we work very closely with them.

Tim:                You’ve spoken a lot about – by the way listeners, I am talking to Mia Freedman who’s the creator of the Mamamia.com.au phenomenon and also iVillage.com.au?

Mia:                Yup!

Tim:                Now Mia you have spoken about targeting to women and marketing to women and building communities of women and I know there are a lot of listeners who would love some insights into ways of marketing to women because it’s different to blokes.

Mia:                Yeah it’s different to blokes. It’s really interesting. It’s something that I’ve had to step out of myself and try to put it to words because a lot of what we do is kind of just instinctive but the most important thing is authenticity and that was the reason that I was really moving away from magazines because I just that they weren’t authentic. I felt that they were – sorry that was just a boat.

Tim:                In your office?

Mia:                My yacht, no it was a ferry. Magazines and lots of forms of media don’t communicate with women in authentic ways and what Mamamia does is and the best thing when you’re trying to communicate with women is to try to find an emotional entry point into something. I’ll give you an example – there’s an ad at the moment for dishwashing tablet, a new dishwashing tablet, Finnish dishwashing tablet and they’re running an ad with a blogger for kids’ spot which is like a parenting website and its got her in her kitchen, standing in front of the dishwasher going “I’ve been using these Finnish dishwashing tablet and they are just so amazing and my dishes have never so shiny and look at the shine and I just cant believe it and I’m going to tell all my friends about it and they wont even believe how shiny my dishes are”

Tim:                Is this an ad from 1953?

Mia:                That’s exactly right! Look at it! Finnish approached us a little while ago about this new dishwashing and so we don’t just run display advertising although we do. Something that we do that’s incredibly popular is we offer this social media packages which is about integrating content and engaging – you can’t just flash an ad at a woman and expect her to engage with it. You got to embed it in a conversation and they came to us and they said “we’ve got this new dishwashing thing and it’s got this new ingredient and it’s going to do this one” okay well that’s all very interesting for you but there’s no emotional entry point to having shiny dishes. I don’t know anyone, if any friend of mine tried to tell about how shiny her dishes, I’d call an ambulance.

Tim:                That isn’t a friend of mine.

Mia:                What we said was “okay let’s talk about dishwashers. What’s the emotional entry point of dishwashers?” we worked out that in every household there is someone who is the dishwashing police. There’s someone who knows the perfect way to stuck a dishwasher.

Tim:                That’s me; by the way, you’re ringing my bell here.

Mia:                Immediately when I tell that story, everyone will go “that’s me, that’s my flatmate, that’s me husband” and what it does is it embeds this information about this new dishwashing thing in conversations about who’s the dishwashing police in your house and suddenly you have all these comments when people are engaged rather than just passively watching someone talk about their shiny dishes and some new ingredient. Who cares about a new ingredient in a dishwashing tablet? It’s how is this relevant to my life and how is this authentic. That’s what I love about online. It enables you to talk directly and authentically to women about anything.

Tim:                I love the concept by the way Mia, emotional entry point so what’s the process at Mamamia HQ to find emotional entry points for brands? Do you sit around and talk about the product and then see where that conversation goes and in the conversation in the case of Finnish dishwashing liquid went to, the fact that stacking the dishwasher is that’s where it’s at, is this what you do?

Mia:                Exactly. People also really like hearing real life stories. We had life insurance come talk to us and we were talking to life insurance company about “what do most people do when they hear about life insurance and those ads for wheels and funerals” the first thing you do is block your ears or change channel because it’s like “la la la la la” when you think about that, it’s too scary. We sort of started to talk about what are the issues around that? Income protection, what happens if someone in your life suddenly wasn’t there, what would happen? We then find someone who that’s happened to and we let them tell their story. We encourage people, people love talking about themselves more than anything. You really try to just talk. A client might come to us with a dishwashing tablet or life insurance or a new drink that they launch, whatever happens today and we will sort of once we understand what they want to achieve, we will then come up with options for social media packages which we then write in an editorial style but always disclosed and we then send that to our social media army which is over 120,000. That’s the other thing, you can expect, I see so many people think that social media is about “we’ll start a blog on our furniture store website” and it’s like “no one is going to come. It’s not a case of build it and they will come with online. You have to go to where the people are and that’s really the key.” I encourage people to see social media as like imagine if you have a small business, just imagine you’ve got a farm and you’re selling tomatoes and outside when you go for those drives in country rides and there will be a little stall outside someone’s farm and it will say “bag of tomatoes, leave $5 in this box” and the people that come to your house, your friends and relatives, they might but some tomatoes from you. You’ll get the occasional person that’s lost and driving past your farm and they might buy some tomatoes but if you’re not also selling your tomatoes and telling people about your farm down at the local market where everybody else is selling their wares and everyone in the community is going to buy their coffee and have their chat, then you don’t have a hope. You can’t rely on people just wondering past. If you look at that in terms of your website is that little stall outside your farm and social media is the grower’s market where you want to be luring people back to your farm to buy more of your product.

Tim:                Fish where the fish are.

Mia:                Exactly.

Tim:                Just to finish off that finish dishwashing liquid one, what you identified was the dishwasher stacking Nazi within the household. What did you do then? Did you go into Facebook and started discussion around that? Is that you? Who’s the dishwasher stacking Nazi in your house?

Mia:                We wrote about that, we wrote about it along with talking about – we used two hooks actually because the first hook was around the time Master Chef when Master Chef was really big and we’re saying “it’s awesome in Master Chef but who does the washing up? Who stacks the dishwasher?” because can you imagine the dishwasher stacking after Master Chef? Four and half thousands samples to give away, not entire boxes but literally four and a half thousand individual dishwashing tablets and we were sort of full of provato and said to them “that’s fine we will give those away” thinking oh my God we were going to have boxes of them in the garage and in actual fact they were gone within 24 hours. There were dozens of comments; people were sharing things on their Facebook page and retweeting it.

Tim:                What do they have to do? Do they have to retweet or like or leave a comment in order for them to receive a sample?

Mia:                We were advanced at all. All they have to do is sign up and put in their details but people even if they didn’t get a free sample they wanted to engage in that post and to the dishwashers and it sounds hilarious but everyone wants to share the story of the dishwashing Nazi in their house and then there were threads that were going on about “this is the correct way to stack the dishes” there were facing up, facing down, what do we think about trays on top of dishwasher. It was really interesting and you should never underestimate the things that people are interested in talking about.

Tim:                Absolutely not and coming from a magazine background like you have, I mean you’d known that. Some of the most superficial kind of conversations are the ones that get the most traction. The articles that talk about nothing in particular fill out days.

Mia:                you wouldn’t know and advertisers wouldn’t know because it’s not a two way conversation, it’s just a monologue and that’s what traditional advertising is and that’s what old media is, it’s just monologue. It’s someone standing on the stage with a megaphone telling you stuff but what women not just expect but demand is a conversation. When we write a post, whether it’s a sponsor post for a product or something from the Prime Minister, that’s just the starting point – it’s not the end, finish or stop – it’s like what do you think? Women love to talk. They love to exchange information; they love to say what they think about things. Often it’s how they work out what they think about things by reading what other people think.

Tim:                I met a man; he is the professor of marketing at a university Mia and he has identified a study that proves that women have 7,000 words to use everyday and men have 4,000.

Mia:                I would have thought that numbers would be even further apart actually.

Tim:                I agree, in fact I would have thought that women’s number would be higher and the men’s number would be lower because I don’t know whether a grunt is considered a word these days. Anyway, that’s interesting in itself.

Mia:                Now I understand why women need so much information because you talk too much so you choose to.

Tim:                Correct, correct. Mia, this is gold. I know you’re busy; I’ve got a couple of questions left but thank you so much for sharing what so far has been – there’s marketing gold dripping from the ceiling of small business big marketing HQ let me tell you. We talked about targeting women; I love that emotional entry point. Building community, I think it’s all part of it; is Mamamia always going to be just a written word or are you looking to – is content creation going into podcast, is there video, what else?

Mia:                We were approached about a year and half ago by Sky News with the view of turning it into a weekly TV show which we did for about six months. I don’t want to set the world of fire but more to the point I didn’t really enjoy it. I didn’t feel that it was a natural extension of what we did because we had sort of people sitting around talking about things but again it was a little bit one way traffic and about six or nine months ago we got approached by Australia radio to do Mamamia as a radio show. They were looking for a new afternoon radio show targeted at women and that has been such an example of a perfect synergy. Radio has so much in common with what we do because it has no barrier between you and the audience. There’s a talk back which is the same as comments; its opinions so you throw things back and forth and what’s great is that we’ve been able to tackle the diversity of contents. You can have a really light-hearted conversation about Brazilians and men getting into practice and then you can have conversation about gun control or about a particular ad in whether it is racists or whatever it happens to be. I love that it can go that gamut, that light and shade because that’s really how women communicate and women like to feel things. That’s another thing you got to remember when you’re communicating with women. Women like to feel things.

Tim:                What do you mean?

Mia:                It’s interesting, when a woman is moved by something, she will say I’m crying or I am in tears. Even if she’s not, she will say that so that you’ll know that you’ve affected her with whatever it is that you said or whatever it is that you’ve written. We have that a lot. If someone writes a really moving post, a lot of the comments will be people just saying “I’m crying right now”

Tim:                Right.

Mia:                And that’s not a bad thing, like I heard you go “what do you mean?”

Tim:                What do you mean?!?

Mia:                And I’m not saying you necessarily want that if you’re trying to sell a product but in terms of women feeling emotion, that’s positive and they’ll go “this is amazing” and I’ll share something that’s made them cry.

Tim:                Yeah okay, often on this show we talk about branding, every visit. You earn a brand, you don’t just buy a brand but you earn a brand if you’re a marketer and it’s all about getting that emotional attachment between you and your audience.

Mia:                Absolutely.

Tim:                In fact Sam Cavanagh who introduced you and I, he is one of the producers of Austereo. He’s coming up on a future episode of small business big marketing and he’s talking about this concept of taking, turning your listeners into fans or actually not turning them but treating your listeners as fans which once again is all about emotion, isn’t it?

Mia:                Yeah.

Tim:                Mia, tell me Mamamia it’s a phenomenon, what are you most proud of? Everything you’ve done since 2007, what’s that one thing where every now and then you get to look back at it and cross your arms and go “I love that”.

Mia:                Small business owners will tell you there’s not a lot of back patting to be done when you’re running a small business. In fact that actually almost never happens because you’re always aware of the 8 million things that you haven’t done compared to the 2 or 3 ones that you’re proud of. I suppose if I’m forced to sort of step back and look at it from the outside, having the Prime Minister come here twice in two months was pretty awesome. I got quite over-excited and I invited all of my family to meet her like it was my weeding or something, including my kids’ friends and everyone came in and met the PM. That was pretty awesome and I’m pretty proud of the sort of advocacy and activism work that we do in terms of agitating around against there’s an organization that works actively to not have children immunized. We do a lot of pro-immunization stuff, pro vaccination stuff. What I’m most proud of is giving the platform that enables people who would otherwise never reach the audience that we provide and just letting them tell their stories. That’s not the Prime Minister, that might be someone who’s had a still born baby or someone who’s partner had a chronic illness or someone who recovered from an eating disorder, whatever it happens to be or who’s triumphed over bullies or whatever it happens to be – to just allow them to tell their story…

Tim:                How do you allow them? Do they approach you and say “hey I’d like to write a guest post” or how do you allow them?

Mia:                Yeah they do know, occasionally we approach someone and say “do you want to write?” but we get hundreds of contributions a week but we can’t use them all of course but we had a family that approached us. This woman had a brother who is a missing person and he’s been missing for a long time, a number of years. They wrote a post about him in the fact that he was missing, we published it on Mamamia and it was shared hundreds and thousands of time over Facebook and it resulted in a confirmed sighting of him somewhere. That was the first sort of bit of hope they’ve had in years. We had someone else who wrote a letter on her sister on what should have been her 26^th birthday but she died the year before. Just watching people, because writing can be very cathartic and for women sharing stories and talking can be very cathartic. To write and then to have all the comments and people really either saying “I know what you’ve been through or I’ve been through something similar or you’ve really touched me or thank you so much for helping me to feel that I know that little boy a little bit better that you lost” that to me is what I’m most proud of.

Tim:                Well done, well done. I got nothing more to add to that, you got any questions? That’s wonderful, you should be very proud of that. Pat on the back of Mia Freedman.

Mia:                That’s great. For us to be able to give people the opportunity, it sounds really perfect doesn’t it?

Tim:                It’s awesome. Mia Freedman thanks so much for sharing the marketing love on small business big marketing.

Mia:                I can’t wait to get a bit of marketing love back, I’m going to be listening and taking notes.

Tim:                We come in through loud and clear, thanks so much Mia, see you!

Mia:                Thank you also, see you later, bye!

His innovations didn’t stop with one success. As an inventor, Tom’s drive to simplify people’s lives led him to design the Mix and Blend: an all-in-one kitchen machine with a mixer and a blender built-in. This machine can mix four times as much dough as its nearest competitor. Because the blender on the Mix and Blend outperformed most commercial blenders of the time, Tom further improved on this platform to create one of his finest inventions to date: The Total Blender. Since the early 90s when there was a need for high-power blenders in smoothie shops, Tom has continued to improve on  his invention.

I also have a rant about the importance of creating a memorable customer experience.

  

• Answer a listener question from Dylan in Canada, who wants to know how to approach being a salesman without coming across as corny and inexperienced (is he sure he’s asking the right blokes?!).
• Talk about the importance of not losing a customer over a petty problem and how us small biz owners need to step up and rise above the small issues.
• Debate whether testimonials are still a good marketing strategy… and, if they are, then how nest to get good ones (besides, of course, doing good work!).
• Dig deep on one of the biggest issues facing small business owners today – the issue of isolation.

PLUS in this episode I go off on another content creation rant – mainly because my own content creation strategy just landed me the biggest speaking gig of my career so far …. plus I answer a great listener question from Mike Mayers at Benefit Houdini about how to generate awareness on a shoestring budget – tune in for my top 5 on exactly how to do this.

I so enjoyed this interview. I know you will too.

Plus I tackle a listener question about B2B versus B2C marketing … and how they differ. Or do they??