Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Unscripted SEO podcast. Today we have Kaveh, the inspiration engineer here with us where we're going to be talking about different things like how to create content and stand out from the crowd and how to leverage that content to become a category king. So welcome, Kaveh. I really appreciate you being here today.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Hey, I appreciate it, Keith. I'm super excited, grateful, and ready to jump in.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Cool beans. All right, so in the world of.
I'm going to just lump it all into the word of content marketing, what do you see working right now?
[00:00:41] Speaker B: It's a great question, I think, right now, what's hot?
Beehive, because they're not as big as Substack, and Substack is hot, meaning that if you have a community, want to build, build a community, want to have a tribe, and you are a writer first, Substack is for you. So imagine for those of you that haven't been on there, it's like Twitter combined with Medium. If you've ever been on Medium, it's like all internal. But what's great is Substack actually gives you the emails of all your subscribers, so you're actually able to build real leads. Which most platforms, as, you know, Facebook, Instagram, and all the different social media we're on, they don't normally give you the email address, and that's super powerful. So I think if you want to continue building that SEO keyword empire, it's only wise to be also on Substat.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Totally. So.
So those are two platforms, obviously, that you see working in regards to strategy.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Or.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Just the content side of things. What sort of.
And this is very vague, so answer it however you want. But what sort of stuff you working in the content side of things as well, on Beehive and. Or Substack?
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Well, content specifically.
I think you as a writer, as a brand, as a person, need to decide where you stand.
That's the first thing. Am I going to latch on to trendy topics or. Or am I going to focus on what I'm passionate about and build a market for that? Okay, so I'll give you an example. AI is hot. I never really thought I was going to start positioning myself as an AI expert. And compared to someone who only does AI, I wouldn't say that it's Apple and Orange, you know, comparison, but from a standpoint of, I know it's a hot topic and we use it internally. So I said, why don't I start creating some content around that, because we can Help people with our tool stack, with our strategies, things of that nature. So the first thing that a person would want to do is decide, do I want to attach my brand to trendy topics? Okay. If that answer is no, whether or not you're following trends or creating them mentally, we've got to get in the mindset that this is a marathon and not a sprint.
All right? So if you're newer, like I don't write, this is something really interesting. Keith. I'm not a writer, right? I'm an auditory guy, I'm an energy guy, I'm a video guy, I'm a musician. So I leverage the things that I'm strong with and at and include that into my content. Right. And being quite transparent, we utilize AI copywriting and different other tools and strategies to write blogs and do things that I don't like, like research and some of the long form things that you want to do in your newsletter and data and case studies. And I don't like that. Like, that's not, that's not where my jam is. Right? So you want to figure out what is your jam. And once you find out your style, once you find your category, then continue writing every single day and make sure that your SEO tags and everything that goes into metadata and for those of you that might be new, that may or may not be your space. That's why you're listening to Keith, right? But everything that goes into the back end side, you want to use those same keywords over and over. And that's how you position yourself as a category king and a category queen over time. The last thing I'll say is make sure that you're always giving value. Because if you're always giving value in your content, then that's the lead generation mechanism to get people to want to subscribe, to get people to want to follow, to get people to want to join. If you want to have different call to actions within your content that make people be like, oh, okay, I got something that I'm going to benefit from this and that's what you want to do in the long game.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Couple. Couple thoughts to a couple points. You made my very like literally very first client 13, 14 years ago. 14 years, maybe 15 is Brian.
I know, right? It was Brian Harris of then Video Fruit, now Growth Tools, Amazing dude. And I was helping him with the launch of, of his first flagship product, not his first product.
And he had, I want to say it was somewhere between 12 and 15,000 total emails, a chunk, but not a, you know, a huge amount and he did an open door, closed door launch and did 225,000 in five, six, seven days, something like that. Maybe 10 short time frame crushed it. It was life changing for him and his family.
But when we were looking back at all of the.
We had a survey for all the people that bought it and it was a 10k subs was the product getting you to 10,000 emails on your list. And we had a survey and a common question.
A common answer to the question of why did you buy was like. When I say a common question, I mean like it was over 40%. It was a huge percent.
All these people were saying because Brian helped me so much with his content in his blog. Granted, this is 15 years ago and this is a dude, you know, writing and giving like detailed case studies about what's working and what he sees working. And all these people were just like, I bought it because he helped me already.
It was just like, like 40% of. If you. If that was assuming that was all true.
40% up 225,000.
That's a big number for just giving. And he just put out badass content all the time. That was it.
Um, so yeah, to your point of giving the.
The Law of Reciprocity is.
Is one of my personal favorites to leverage because even if I like I always.
One of my favorite books.
One of my favorite authors and people is I just happen to have this on my desk. It's called Rich Relationships Create a Million Dollar Network for your Business by Selena Sue. It just came out and this is blurry.
Anyway, I read it and of course the blur thing because I didn't finish setting up my studio in time in before moving. Anyway, that's what it's called.
And I just did a big give this last week and like it was a big give and I gave without expecting anything in return.
And I didn't ask for anything. I didn't pitch.
And that has already turned into.
Over $50,000 in value of like in contracts.
And that was just one of all the leads that came from this one big give.
So Law of Reciprocity is huge.
One of my.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: I think, I think you have to.
Well, let's first off talk about what you don't want to do. What I see people doing, a lot of brands is they'll be in one subject, like some of the ladies out there, they'll start a brand in like makeup. Okay. And then want to transition into coaching.
That is very hard and difficult to do. Meaning that if you didn't systemize all of that content around makeup to where that continued to make you money even though you're making that brand transition and now you're doing something totally different. If you didn't systemize it and automate it to where it can run without you, you done created all that content all for now. No reason. Because you're making this pivot. So I think that yes, getting clarity around what you're going to do within the marathon is crucial. Okay. And I also think that your fans and the consumers of your content can evolve and adapt with you.
But if you don't know where you're going and you don't think about strategically how I'm going to map out this content over, let's say five to 10 years, I think that's where you can get yourself in a. In a problem versus with me and AI. It was an add on to personal branding, edutainment and motivation music. Whereas for some they just totally switch. And now you've done messed up all that content that you don't release prior. So I wanted to share that is it's not just giving value, it's making sure that you're thinking about what is it. And if it is makeup, in this instance, maybe that attaches to self confidence. Right. And a part of your coaching. And now you're using it to make you feel good. I want to make you look good and that was where I started. And that's how you position that within your story. And storytelling, as we both know is huge. Right. So I'm saying these things like it overlooking the strategy can be detrimental if you're not thinking about how your SEO is going to scale with you as you continue to evolve and you continue to grow.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Totally. There's a on the line of, of working yourself out of the business so you can work on the business. There's a one of my favorite books on the topic by Dan Martell and it's called buy back your time.
Phenomenal book. Phenomenal book on the topic. That's the whole thing is what it's about. Buying back your time.
Okay.
So.
So what I love about this so far is that branding over branding or putting out content and putting out content regularly in such a way that when people think of you, they associate X. You know, when I wear my Oakleys I associate with being a Southern California surfing and skating. Yeah, I'm from Southern California so that's why I wear Oakley's. I love Oakley's because I love what they stand for and that's has come through because of their Branding, Right. And so branding has been a big piece of, an ever growing piece of, of, of SEO and showing up with, whether it's AI or Google, which Google has always been in AI for like 10 years, ever since Rank Brain effectively.
But so with that, how do you.
Let's say I am that makeup chick who is trying to make that transition or I'm just anybody else and I'm, as it stands, not a category king or I'm not the. I'm not.
I don't have the influence I want.
I don't have the email list, I don't have the social following that I want to be able to justify prices or be able to get enough clients or sell enough products or whatever. I don't have enough influence.
And to do that, I need to regularly put out content.
How do you reverse work backwards from that? If that's the goal?
Words just left me. How do I work backwards from that? And that way I can have a blueprint so I know what content to put out daily or however often.
So I'm very clear on the content that I'm putting out.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: How do you question the first thing that I would instruct someone to do, let's say you're my client, is we're going to reverse engineer. And I always tell my clients we're going to start with the end in mind. Now, when you've been doing this for a while, whether it's sales, marketing, it's all a numbers game. You got to know your numbers, but. But you also got to know the market. And if you're new to the industry, you're not going to know the market. So here's a tool to get you going in the right direction. Go to answerthepublic.com, google Trends, and you can start looking up search terms within your primary category as to how many searches are happening just solely for that one topic every month in whatever country you want to search that in and in what language. Okay.
Once you have those numbers, that gives you an idea as not only a product that you can build for that audience based on like, for example, Keith, people might use a primary category of podcasting, which is what we're doing right now. Well, it's going to tell you a subset of that same search term, such as how to build a podcast. Then it might show you people that are searching for what equipment do I need to build a podcast? This is going to be with pretty much every industry where you're going to have your primary category or topic and then you're going to have your subsets thereof.
So having that data and doing that research and understanding what's going on in the market is going to be super helpful. Second thing that you do when you're building a business plan is you do competitor analysis, right? And you start looking at what is actually called a SWOT analysis, which is your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities and your threats, right? And so you're going to look at other competitors and see what is it that I'm going to bring to the table that's going to be strong or different. Where am I weak in this case? You would be new. You have no assets, you have no knowledge. You got to start from somewhere. Good news, everybody does. Everybody has to start from some from scratch at some point. So welcome to the club and congratulations on making that decision. Right.
Then you're going to see what opportunities are available. Once you start understanding what is happening in the market, you're going to start to find gaps. Like for example, within education, when it comes to people that are like me there, this is no arrogance and no ego. This is me giving you a live example of what I'm talking about. There is no other inspiration engineer. I am the only one. Okay, but who was doing something similar? Eric taught. Actually it was Peter Vuuch first. Peter Boog had Vuk had book called I was slipping my mind right now. But it was like six months to six figures or something like this. I have to pull it up, something like that. But he was the first one to put his speeches on hip hop beats. Okay. Shortly thereafter, Eric Thomas did this. Okay. And a lot more people know Eric Thomas than no Peter Vuk. There's another guy named Suku Andrews who is a, you could say inspirational poet, Right. But he does it at the highest level for Barack Obama, BET and large brands, enterprise brands, things of that nature. Okay. So what I started to see was, and this was just my own vision 2016. I was that person. Didn't know anything, didn't know what I was building, had no idea, had no assets, just had this idea. And I was like, all right.
I like this entrepreneur world, even though that's not where I started. I came from the music world and the rap world, but I'm not going to sell drugs to get capital. I'm not going to do like the Jay Z and the Lil Waynes and all these guys. Like, I don't respect that bullshit. Can I cuss on here by the way? Yeah. Or is this okay? I was like, are we pg? Wait a minute, I forgot to answer But I was like, I come from this hip hop world, and I understand events, I understand the assets that I bring to the table now. I understand this entrepreneur world, and I'm going to create a unique hybrid. And that's all I know. And so when people would ask me what I was building, I would say, you know who Tony Robbins is? They say, yeah. I said, you know who Drake is? They said, yeah. I said, well, imagine if they made a baby. Like, that's what I'm building, right? And so I just started with that and I just kept building. As I kept building, I started to see within the market what people weren't creating. So beats on speeches was normal. But you don't have people making what we now make motivational music, which is a new topic, new category that we are now the category king of, and we will continue to be the category king because we got 500 songs to get into the marketplace before everybody else does, to where we own the domain, create a new genre. Now, this is SEO in its. In its essence, because before we launch it and really launch it, we want to make sure that we have enough content in the marketplace to where somebody can't catch me, because it would be really quick or easy for a Jay Z or Drake or somebody like that to go ahead and capture that idea. Okay. Does that make sense? So what is the opportunity that you're going to bring now with what I just said about Jay Z and Drake? In this analogy, there's the threat if I launch it too early, they could beat me to market. So I'm very select around how we market that message. And so right now, you'll see if you Google it or you look it up, you'll start seeing music for entrepreneurs around Kave. But that whole brand is not established because we're working on the app. So I'm saying that all to say, so that you guys get the main points of what I'm sharing with you. You want to understand the your market. You want to then understand from a competitive or a comparison analysis standpoint, what is going to make you different once you find that gap.
Attack. And when I say attack, this is where you're going to start creating content.
I would also encourage you to do batching, okay. Where you're going to batch a lot of content that you're going to schedule over time. Okay. Because majority of people, they'll write, not necessarily have all the ideas or just go through like a.
A gap where they're posting or they're publishing. And now that's negatively Impacting your followers and the people who are watching you, listen, you reading your content, so on and so forth. So these are just a couple of nuggets that I give people that are in that beginning stage and just understand it's a. It's a journey. It's not going to happen overnight. But if you reverse engineer, like first off, what's going on and then the numbers of the market, that number, you can start working it backwards as to how many products do I need to sell in order to hit whatever the objective or the goal is and get started.
[00:19:03] Speaker A: I used to touch on a couple points there. I used to play Magic the Gathering.
I was trying to go pro and playing with cardboard and anytime because, like, there's different pools of cards to play with. I can play with these cards or those cards, right?
And when you're playing with this set of cards, you know, I can't just jump in there and build my deck and just go, I have to look at what everyone else is doing, what's winning, find, oh, these cards at the top, or these decks are the top decks that are crushing it. Okay, well, I'm going to craft my deck specifically to annihilate those. And then you go in and so you got to know the metagame is just a totally nerdy. When you were talking about that, the competitive analysis, that's where my brain went because I'm, you know, we're nerds.
So totally resonate with that.
Another thing that you mentioned, would you say this is accurate? So when we work with whoever, we always look for something very similar, but we use different, different verbiage or a different language.
Instead of trying to find that gap, we're always just looking for a way that we can logistically plant our flag. And this goes back into the trending thing. So, like whether you're Ford versus Chevy or Dodge or whatever, what's something more polarizing? Trump versus Kamala or Biden, you know, very polarizing topic. Right? And it's like if you look at the influencers on both sides, at the very top, on the political sides, you know, it's.
They're. In the last handful of years, especially as politics has become a more pol. It's always been polarizing, but it just seems like in the last hell, since Trump almost started running, however many years ago, it seems like politics has become even more of a polarizing topic.
And these different people on both sides have been able to effectively scale their brand and their influence because they've planted their flag, they stuck to it, and they stayed consistent with it.
Is that in line with the sort of thinking with the way that you guys have approached content marketing?
[00:21:37] Speaker B: For us, two topics that we don't touch on.
For me, again, this is a personal choice. Politics and religion. Say now on Sundays I might post a spiritual post for like a daily devotional. I'm very public with my faith. I'm not afraid to share my beliefs as a Christian or what have you.
From a standpoint of why majority of people choose to subscribe to what we do is the content that we talk about with which is within edutainment, which is our main category, followed by the personal branding and the things that I mentioned before. So to answer your question, if you want to piggyback onto content that's already high, by all means, yes.
Just keep in mind that if you don't have a great approach to be seen against that content, that content may be also lost. Right? Your big publications, your Forbes and all these people, they're going to publish that content which is by domain authority. And all these things that happen on the back end based on ranking, they're going to outrank you. Now here's one other thing. If you got a budget, buy your visibility. There's a lot of people that hate on that. But it's all those people you just mentioned, Trump and Kamala and Biden, all these people. Did the president have to run marketing ads?
Yes.
Does everybody know who Coca Cola is? But don't they still riot run marketing ads so you could create sponsored ads around your organic content. You can't do that. Which is going to rank it. You can buy PR pieces which is something that our company does is help get people placed on high authority sites to where you can get that content and then drip to other organic content that you've created. There are smart ways to do it. But if you're solely trend, you're like a trend jump. You're just jumping on trends just to jump on the trend.
I wouldn't recommend that unless you're like a magazine, right? If you're a magazine that covers a lot of different topics and you are like you're building out the next like gossip, I don't even know, like L A Tribune, not L A Tribune, but like just all these sites that keep connected to pop culture, celebrity culture, gossip culture, all those things. Unless you're building that. I wouldn't recommend to attach specifically to any category unless it's going to be something that you're going to do for the long term. AI ain't going nowhere soon it's going to be humanoids. Then it's going to be where we hologram into each other's rooms. Right. But the future is going to be crazy. But that falls under what category? Future of work. Right. That falls into emerging tech. Right. So there's things that we could still. As AI continues to change and it becomes more diluted. Even though we're using that right now, we can still going back to what you're saying piggyback within the. The architect arch. What is it? What's the word I'm looking for? The overall architecture of the conversation within emerging or future of work is what they call it if you're an investor and you're looking for these types of ideas or. So that's what my advice would be. Would to someone that's thinking about jumping on trends.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Love it. So three things real quick. One, I wasn't necessarily suggesting, just for clarity's sake, jumping into politics. I was just. That was where my mind went with something very polarizing. So I was using it as an example. I agree. Don't touch politics unless you want to go into politics.
Not me.
Right.
So I see your. Your2 comma Club Awards back there. So obviously you know Russell, congrats on those, by the way. I know that's not easy.
You mean touching on buying stuff real quick. So one of my earlier mentors worked very, very closely with Russell for a while and for a long while and like almost a decade or something. It was nuts. And when Russell was announced that he was putting out traffic secrets, my mentor at the time wasn't working with clickfunnels slash Russell at the time, but he was working on the brand where we met.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: And.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: And he text Russell and he said, he. All he said was, are you putting it in the book?
And no context of the conversation, just brand new conversation.
Are you putting it in the book or in the new book, of course, referring to traffic secrets.
And Russell just responded with no and what that was.
And then this is how.
Okay, I'll say this. You know, manscaped the brand.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: Okay. So this is me and him. This is where we met.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: And.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: This was one of the early secrets to manscape's scale. And back to your topic of where you touched on buying topic.
The topic of where you touched on buying traffic.
And you probably know this strategy. It's relatively simple, but it is like the strategy that everything revolved around early on. And that is you get your content on a bridge, you create bridge content, meaning it's the bridge between someone Else and you.
So whether it's Forbes or someone influencer marketing is the easiest. You get set influencer to share your stuff where that content is somehow coming back to you or your landing page or something. And then you run ads to their content.
But the thing that makes it work is when that person links to something of yours or mentions it, ideally they mention it on their website in some form or fashion.
And ideally you have an agreement where you're able to get a pixel. So that way they might be getting. They're creating a pixel base for you even if you don't get a lead or a sale and then you come in. So your value there is, yeah, sure, influence eyeballs. But what you really want is for their audience to click onto that piece of content that you don't own that media property to, but you're able to get a pixel on there and then you retarget that pixel.
Something super simple, like ridiculously simple. But when, when he was teaching me about the bridge content in that capacity and it was just like.
And he kept pointing out, do you see it here? Do you see it here in. In all these bigger brands? And he's like, everything Russell does, especially with other people, there's that bridge sort of element in there.
And you can do it with your own content too. But it was just like mind blowing for me.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: Russell, Russell Brunson's all big on that Dream 100, right?
[00:29:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: Now, yes. Your Dream 100. Think of it guys like a large team of joint venture partners and. Or collaborators.
Right? And that's what you're talking about now really is like being able to attach your content to a JV that's got content and you guys both ride the waves.
Now I will tell everybody this though. The bigger the person, the bigger the brand, the bigger the following, the more strategic you're going to be with setting up that relationship.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: Because you got to remember these people are very sought after and majority of people are not trying to bring them value, they are trying to pitch them. Yeah, that's the majority. I'll tell you a funny story, which is unfortunate, but we made a song called she Called a Writer and it was about you go like this. It's about like having a person which in this case a woman that is in there with you through the thick and thin. Right. And it was like, I'm going to go ahead and provide it if you like, you want me perform it just a little bit, give you, your listeners just a little taste how it goes.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: Hell yeah.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: Because she's a rider down for the dream She's a ride up Built for a king yes, She's a rider Knows what I need She's a rider down for the dream so we pitched that to Layla Hermosi, right?
Now when Layla looked at Kave, just in full transparency, that's like, hey, that's a great idea. Alex Hormozy doesn't have no motivation. Music content on his content, right? We now give you something different and get to kind of ride along the coattail. And this is with Layla and Alex, right? And we love their story. If you've read his books, then you know that story that they've gone through, that song is a perfect match, right? But for whatever reason, that the way that my team and I went about it, Layla instantly declined, instantly unfriended from LinkedIn and we lost that contact. Okay? Now, we didn't do anything that was unethical or anything like that. Like, this is just the nature of the game. Whenever you're dealing with very high level influencers, if you don't take, I would say, more of a long drip approach and that long trip, I'm gonna give you guys a strategy right now. When I want to network with venture capitalists and angel investors or people that are slightly outside of my scope, got to find an angle. And that's ultimately what it comes down to with building jv. Now, if you build with people that are on the same plateau as you, right, Totally. You now need more quantity because more than likely their following is as big as yours. If you're going to go get a. A shark or a great white that's got, you know, mass following, or you're going to be able to do exactly what Keith is talking about. I just want to set you up for the expectation that you got to have a great strategy or you've got to really nurture that relationship over time and continue to give it value so that that person trusts you. One other way that you can do it is you can buy it.
You can buy pretty much everything. But if this person has a book, buy a thousand of their books to where you show up on the radar. And now they're gonna be like, who is this Kave person that just bought a thousand of our books, right? And let them know, hey, I bought a thousand of your books and no ask make no ask. But then gradually over time, make that ass three, four, five months later. You know, whatever it takes to nurture that relationship and you gotta do it that way so you can do it. It's Just not as touch and go or as quick to execute as some other strategies.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: And that's why I brought up that book Rich Relationships. Because like, like all of my big clients, every big client I've ever had and I've had a dozen client clients that are in the multi billions or like I've had the world's biggest microchip producer as a client, the world's biggest healthcare company, the world's biggest real estate brokerage, all clients.
The reason I got them as clients is I played the long game and I was able to physically shake their hand and add value. One of them, I showed up to his big ass mansion and I showed up with the McAllen 21 and. And the most expensive box of Cubans I could find.
And it was like a two hour call, two hour hangout. And none of it was talking business. In fact most of it was. Was talking about our life stories, our families, spiritual slash. He was a Christian, I have a Christian background, so religion. And it wasn't maybe three minutes. The final piece of our conversation as I'm walking out the door. Oh, by the way, we didn't talk about SEO.
I'll get you in touch with Adam, he's our CMO and we'll make things happen. Awesome. Sounds great. Shake hands, peace out. Like rich relationships. Like that's that. And I learned so much of this from Selena, funny enough, from her first course called influence, which talks about all of this, building those relationships. So I am a big proponent of playing the long game just for people listening because I always. Because whether you're trying to get a backlink, an influencer, having that dream 100 is hard, especially if they're one or two or even 100 steps above you. Like, you know me trying to get Tony Robbins to share my stuff.
Probably not going to happen this year.
But you know, for the people that are more reachable, there's a.
I read a lot 48 laws of power.
[00:34:51] Speaker B: You know the book? Yeah, I do. I haven't read it yet though.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Dude. So good.
Okay. So in there he talks about.
And the way he talks about the stories and the principles are so good because he gives the why you should do it, why you should not, in what scenarios you should do it and what you should not and where the consequences are doing it wrong. All backed by empirical data, which is history, stories, real history.
And one of them, I don't remember which lot was but I remember it as courting the bishop. So this one person was trying to. Their. Their goal was to kill the Pope, So I wouldn't recommend having that as your initiative. But they wanted to get close to the Pope. And, you know, you can't just walk in and get an audience with the Pope.
So he courted or he became friends with a bishop, a gatekeeper. And over time like this took months. And then finally, the bishop invited him into the inner chambers, and from being in there in closer capacity, he was able to get in and assassinate the pope. Or tried to. I can't remember. I don't remember the details. But the point was, he courted the bishop.
So oftentimes, my first big client was Dr. Axe/ancient Nutrition. And I knew that I can't just walk in. And I. Very strategically, with this book in mind, because this is one of the first books of that type that I read, I was able to map in my social circle. Social circle. Okay. I don't know Dr. Josh Ax, but I know this guy, or I know how it worked out was I know this guy, and that guy knows the gatekeeper.
And so I gave, like, no joke.
[00:36:40] Speaker B: I.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: And I was broke. This is 15ish years ago. I had $120 in my bank account. One kid living at home with my mom and dad, with my wife, and no idea where my next check was coming from. And this photographer. I have a background in photography, said, hey, I need help.
And I went and I drove an hour every day. Didn't have money for lunch, so I wasn't eating. And this was from 8 until about 5.
So I'm in work traffic both ways through Nashville. And I helped him shoot his course.
[00:37:11] Speaker B: And.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: I was already done with college at that point, so I knew what I was doing in the studio, and it went great. And then finally, the last day, once he realized where I was in my life, he was like, hey, I haven't seen you eating all three of these days. Are you hungry? I'm like, yeah, yeah. I just.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: It's.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: It's fine. And then so finally he buys me lunch and we go out, right? Yeah. I didn't even know what intermittent fasting was then.
But he went out and we bought. He bought me lunch. And he's like, so, what are you working on? How can I help you? You've helped me. And it wasn't an unpaid gig.
And the person listen how.
Whether it's serendipity or the universe or God or whoever's listening, whatever you subscribe to, listen to this. I. So you have. I'm trying to get to Josh Axe. I'm trying to get that Intro I the only person I knew that was in that sphere of circles, I knew he knew this guy Mike David is the photographer that I went and helped. And I knew he knew Mike and Mike, I knew, knew the axe. Team David on that last day was like, oh, if that's what you're trying to do, I need to introduce you to my friend. Mike pulls out his phone. Text Mike, hey, I got someone I want you to meet. Are you free? I'm over here at this coffee shop in Franklin, Tennessee. Mike responds almost immediately. I'm about to pass that right now and I have about 10 minutes. He swings in like. And when I didn't know who he was, I didn't know who he was texting until the guy walked. Mike walked, excuse me, through the door. And I'm just like, no the fuck way. And I wasn't cussing at that point in my life. I was young and I grew up very sheltered and.
But I was like, no. The way he pulls him.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: I've noticed on that there's this rapper, his name's Toby N out of Houston. I'm going to share two examples and actual something that you guys can utilize and you can use.
I watched him go from 55,000 followers to over 2 million. And I'm going to tell you exactly what he did. Right?
So his first collaboration, he's out of Houston, Texas, was with Erica Badu. And Erica Badu is from Dallas, Texas. Right. That was his first collaboration. His next bigger collaboration was was with Chameleon.
Now those are two smaller name artists, but they are very niche based artists. Okay.
From there you watched him then continue positioned with Pharrell. Okay. Then he did a collaboration with Pharrell after the Pharrell collaboration. Guess what collaboration he recently did was with Justin Timberlake on Jim, Jimmy Fallon.
So he continued to level up his game. And whenever you start networking with people, majority of people that I found keep they want to connect with other like minds. Eagles don't fly with pigeons.
Birds of a feather fly higher together.
With that stated, you don't necessarily jump up to Tony Robbins as you're saying. You might be like, okay, well who knows someone that knows Tony Robbins? And maybe it's Dean Graziosi or Gi, however you say his last name, right. That might still be too big of a jump. Maybe I need to go below that and see who knows him. Right. And continue to do it. Deal it on down now with us. Kave. This is something specifically that we did and didn't mean to, but it worked out in Our favor. And I'm going to share this with everybody. LinkedIn is a powerful algorithm to suggest second degree connections that no of the. The person that you're connected to, they know who to share that you should be connected to based on the content and the things that you publish and who you connect with. So let me give an example. One of our. In the same example, one of our first we'll say names that is known but not as known, which is Beyonce's father was Matthew Knowles. We had him, Matthew Knowles on LinkedIn. Okay. Then it started sending us like people like Avery Bradley, which is an NBA basketball player. He's retired, he won the championship with the Lakers. Right. And we continue to leverage because it would suggest. Right. I'll be sure. Oh, I'll be sure. Okay. Connect. Right. Boom. And then fairly recently we published this publicly. Tom Billyu and the lead singer, Alex Paul of the Chain Smokers added me on LinkedIn. Okay. Now again, I'm not trying to go no arrogance, no ego.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: Right.
[00:41:51] Speaker B: I'm telling you, that was the same strategy that we did was as we built our network. You can go quantitative and you can go long.
Which if you're going to go long, same thing with SEO. It's a marathon. If you're going to go long, make sure that they're engaged. Don't just go long for numbers sake, vanity sake. Make sure that you're going long and deep. But if you want to go quality, understand it's a different strategy and you're going to have to level up like that. Unless you are good friends with this person or. Or unless you can get in the room with this person. If you go to mindvalley event or whatever event that's known like a big name event that brings out quality people. Right. You get a chance to, let's say go to what's. Lewis Howes is not School of Greatness but the. That's his podcast. But the event he does at Columbus once a year. Can't think of some of the greatness. Yeah, you go to some of the greatness and you get a chance to shake hands or maybe meet what's the Navy Brain. My brain is like fried on thinking of names. The Navy SEAL that got crazy story from Indiana always running with his shirt off.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Yes, I'm talking about he. He's really heavy.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: What'd you say?
[00:43:02] Speaker A: He used to be really heavy. Overweight.
[00:43:04] Speaker B: Ran.
[00:43:04] Speaker A: Yes, he was barefoot.
[00:43:06] Speaker B: He recently spoke at the summit of greatness and I can't even think of his name right now. It's on the tip of my tongue. I'll get in just a second.
But if you go to these events and you are able to interface with these people in person, again, everybody is seeking their time. Everybody usually wants something from them. You've got to create or think of a different angle. You cannot approach it as just like, hey, I'm a meet you. I'm a pitch you. Also, they're always getting told, you know, how much they. You inspired them and. Or they inspired you and so on and so forth. So all I'm getting at is you have to have a good strategy. It's not just, let me just reach out to this person because I can.
As I share with you guys, the Layla Hermozi story, and hopefully she hears this and she's like, oh, that did happen. Let me get a. Let me get that saw. Later, we do a documentary version of it. But my point of all that is that it takes a very precise strategy and time to build that. But if you can, then absolutely use that dream 100 to get people to share and you share their content and you just want to show up on people's radar, comment on their posts, comment on their blogs, comment on their newsletter. You know, just engage, engage, engage, engage, share, share, share and build. And as you continue, David Goggins. There we go. Goodness.
As you continue to navigate the levels of, we'll say popularity, if in this. In this sense, that's the way that you want to do it. And in that sense. And I would encourage you to use LinkedIn because it's phenomenal as to sending you more people that are just like the person you just.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: You just totally befriended.
Love that. Love that.
Yeah.
[00:44:41] Speaker B: The.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: The.
The up to Pharrell and Justin Timberlake. That's a perfect example of this or what we've been talking about. So I want to get a little bit more tactical here. In the last few minutes, I wrote my question down.
Okay, so how do we.
So we want to level up our influence. We want more people knowing about us. We want all these things, right?
How do we.
We see that gap back to what we're talking about. We did our content analysis or competitor analysis, and we see, oh, there's a gap.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Or.
[00:45:18] Speaker A: Or somehow I determined my heading, right? I know my heading on where I want to go with my content and the overall topic.
How do I craft a strategy that fills that gap or gets me to that point? So that way, when I am in the room with whoever or I'm working on those first couple layers of levels of influence with other people.
How do I craft content that helps build my brand?
[00:45:51] Speaker B: First, I tell people, you want to become a master hooks.
You kind of have to get a good hook.
And it's unfortunate, but it's the reality.
The hook is really going to draw people in.
Another word for this, we call it clickbait. Right.
You've got to have something that is going to bring people in. Okay, that would be the first thing that I would tell you. Second thing I would tell you is you need to master storytelling.
The person that could tell a better story is going to be the person that's going to win over time. Oh yeah, you can tell a good story and you can keep, you know, storytelling has been around since the beginning of human, you know, civilization period. Yeah, you've got to be great at being able to tell a story. And you want to know what? Well, I am not great at telling a story. I'm going to keep it 3,000. I, you know, maybe have a certain bucket of stories that I use, but then I have assistance. I use certain tools to give me assistance. Same thing with like SEO. We have certain prompts that we use for like SEO. Give us all the SEO things and you know, what have you. But I say that saying anything that you don't know how to do, AI AI thing, right? We, there's so many tools out there that can help you get better at that. You could say, you know, whether you're on Chat GPT, claw, whatever you like, whatever you use, right? Give me 20 titles that are like this, you know, and find a title that's hot. Oh, and start here. Look at, you know, you're. We're doing that competitor analysis that we talked about before, right? So the first thing that I might do is go find an article that's already hot and popping with great numbers, right? And then I might put that into chat GPT. I like chat GPT. And I might say give me 20 titles that are similar to this title, right? And then I'm gonna take that 20. I'm gonna narrow it down to five right now once I get to that point for me, depending on how big I want this to do. Like, is this a campaign article or is this just like a one off? If it's a campaign to where this article has multiple things or it's a series, it's like a long form, whatever.
I might take that and now do an A through D test of those four titles and see what the market says. Hey, vote on this with a poll. Which one do you guys like? Based on that data and that poll, now I know what my hook is going to be, right? Launch the hook, have a great story. There's different frameworks, and I've learned this over time. Again, I told you, I don't like writing. I don't like writing because of the rules. And there's two. There's so many frameworks right there. There really is. Just keep it 3,000.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: I get that.
[00:48:17] Speaker B: I've had it. ChatGPT take writers that I like, break down what their styles are, break down how their frameworks work, put in my original writing and then say, take this and put it into this new style and create a new style. I've also had it, create a brand new, totally new style that I'm excited to launch that nobody's doing. I can't even tell y' all what it is. I want to tell you, but I can't tell you, but it's totally new. And I was like, that could be really cool. I'm going to wait just a little bit before we launch it. But I say that, saying those would be the first steps. Get the hook, be great at the storytelling. And then I would tell people, understanding human psychology, because you wanted them to take an action.
Okay. And I'm still mastering this. What to put behind a paywall, what to put behind a subscribe wall, what to put at the highest premium, the medial tier, the free tier. And just mapping out all this content because it is a lot. So I'm saying this and I'm seasoned. So telling you that is that you're always learning like that never ends. You're always learning how to better your best and get better at what you're doing. So I'm sharing this to share with you ultimately, to keep it simple. Hooks, storytelling, understand human psychology and understand how to have a call to action to get people to take action on what the offer is.
[00:49:35] Speaker A: Love that.
So hooks.
So hooks, especially early on. I still am not. I would not say I'm great at hooks. I'm better at when I started. But I know for me personally, I struggled early on with how do I get people to, you know, how do I get that initial click or expand or engagement, whatever, on whatever platform.
So I know I want people to read my article on, on whatever topic, best coffee cups, whatever, right?
And I can have ChatGPT spit out a bunch of headlines that might. Might work, hopefully. But crafting a headline into a hook, I think is the hard part for a lot of people. I know it was for me still is the challenging Part for me. How do, how do you go about crafting, okay, here's the headline.
How do you get.
Structure the headline maybe, or create this headline so that way it is hooky.
Does that make sense?
[00:50:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it's hard to answer because I wish we had an example that we could do right here live. Right, right. And maybe that would be something that'll be super helpful. Maybe you can think of something really quick and we can do it before we end where I have a live example. But the first thing, like I said that I'm going to do is I'm going to look at the market. And first off, is this a new topic that nobody's talking about? The likelihood and probability of that is not very likely.
More than likely, I am chiming in on a conversation and bringing my angle, my perspective, my unique, you know, flavor into the sauce, into the recipe of this conversation. Okay, so things that I might do, like just right now on the fly, and there's different ways that I've done this over time. I might get on Grok. I like Grok for certain things. I like chat GPT for other things.
[00:51:33] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:51:34] Speaker B: So I might get on Grok and say, you know, deep search the 10 best hooks right now, best topics, you know, what have you on this platform, whatever platform I'm on that was written around these subjects, go. And then it's going to tell me, you know, the data and it's going to say, okay, these are, these are the topics. It looks like Keith just sent me the example here for us. Give me one moment. Let me pull that up.
Perfect hair product. Oh, this is good because I have. Not in makeup. Right.
Goodbye to bad hair days. Okay, cool. So let's, let's do this on the fly. So the thing he just sent me was the perfect hair product. Doesn't I think that's supposed to exist, say goodbye to bad hair days. All right, so ultimately we want to.
If our content is about making sure you no longer have any bad hair. Right. That's what I'm going to start on. Grok. I'm going to start with, okay, deep search.
What are the, you know, top, let's say 10 or maybe three. Whatever you want. Top three, top five, top 10. I like to have more data. So maybe top 10. What are the top 10 stories, articles around bad hair that published on this platform, whatever platform. Okay. Or we might even start general. What are the top 10 headlines on the Internet, period? It depends on how you want to do your research. Right. It's going to spit out the 10 things. I'm going to look at the commonalities of those 10 headlines. What are they? And I might put that into chat GPT.
Take these 10 headlines, five headlines, three headlines, whatever it is, what are the commonalities that these headlines are doing? And then have it break it down to me, what's happening? Psychology. If I don't understand the psychology within the headline. Okay, so now we started out with what are they then? What is making them be successful? So we understand that. And then I take this piece that I wrote, or in this case, which would be the one that Keith just gave us, and then I input that into chat GPT and I said, give me 10 headlines that are similar to this, make it be a hook and make it be catchy to make the user want to do X.
Right? Then it's going to spit to me those 10 things. So you with, with prompting, you got to be very specific on what you tell the AI to do. And if you don't give it, it's like the better information that you give it, the better output you're going to get. So that's me on the fly, doing that right now on the fly. That's how I'm going to do it. I'm going to break it down piece by piece by piece. And then once I have now things that I. Look, this is how, by the way, this is how Inspiration Engineer came to be Keith.
I didn't have a title, I didn't know what my title was going to be. I went to the market in the same. This wasn't a. This is Pre AI being as popular, but I was a multi skilled king of all trades, AKA Jack of all trades. I'm not a jack, I'm a king. I'm no jester, that's not what I do. So I had an actual problem. I said I'm a poet, I'm an audio engineer, I rap, I sing, I songwrite, I coach, I master sales, I'm a marketer, I create content.
And there's probably some other ones in there that I had and these are all things that I literally have mastered, okay? And I said, I don't know my identity. So I had 10 titles given to me and maybe it was AI. I can't remember. I'm trying to think this is like 2016. So I think this is pre AI. But anyway, I got 10 titles that I liked and I was like, man, I don't know which one that I am. I went to the community, I said, hey, out of these 10, which ones really? Do you guys see? They narrowed it down to five. Once we got down to the five, then we narrowed it down to two. This is all community.
They chose Inspiration Engineer. I didn't choose it. And that's how it came to be. So I've been doing this, you know, starting with like, your. Your larger list and then narrowing, refining it down to get to the actual answer. I do it the same principle and everything that I do when it comes to things like getting the right hook when it comes to writing the right story. Sometimes I'll have chat GPT now say, hey, give me a story that, you know, I'll have the article. I need a story that fits in here, that's going to tie it together, that boom. And then it will spit something out. It's like, oh, okay, cool. Right now I might do a little research to figure that out. Just to see, like, and learn something. You got to be curious about it. You got to be, you know, have fun with it and don't be so rigid. But also understand you've got to layer and level up your learning. And I don't want to oversaturate you with too many steps, but I want to give you some things that I'm currently doing that work that works really well. And that would be what I would tell somebody to do if they're not a great hook writer or they're not a great, you know, headline headline creator.
[00:56:11] Speaker A: One thing I, that probably most people didn't latch onto there, that you just said that is, I think really important is you don't have to be or you don't need to be too rigid. Let yourself have fun.
And too oftentimes, like, I, I personally know people who regularly hit me up because they keep getting stuck because they're trying to get it too perfect and they don't execute because it's not good enough. Or in their mind, perfect versus, you know, 80 done is better than perfect. Just get it like facts right, and just get it to where you can ship it.
And don't get stuck in your head because, like, I literally know people who have been in that loop for years, like, years just because it gets stuck in their head. So just have fun with it, put it out, and if it works, great. If it doesn't, rework it. If you want to keep on that, on that path that you're on with that piece of content or whatever, rework it until it does work or move on. But either way, it comes back to the whole fail fast, fail forward sort of thinking. But like you said, and I think it's really important. Don't be rigid. Just have fun.
[00:57:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'll say one other thing. If I was to do it all over again today, and this is so factual. Just buy it.
Like buying it is. Is a lot of people I found that want to skip the line. They want to. They want to just get right to the success. And that's not how it works, unfortunately. But in the sense of eyeballs, buying it does work. That's what an ad is.
[00:57:50] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:57:51] Speaker B: So with that said, if you're looking for ways to be more efficient or to have more urgency with your content, buy it. Right. If you want to do it a way where it can be organic and it can scale over time, it's gonna get very expensive if you're gonna buy every single article that you're gonna publish.
[00:58:13] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:58:13] Speaker B: But I would tell people that that would be the way to skip the line, is to buy views. But if you haven't done the foundational work that I'm talking about now, as far as the research, the data, and all this, you're gonna spend. I had a client the other day, she told me she. She blew $18,000 on ads just not knowing what she was doing over three months. So she was trying. Okay, I applied that. But you didn't, obviously. First off, you should have hired me before you did those ads. But secondly, you didn't have the right framework or the right person and now you just blew through it. So you. There's. I want to make sure that people understand this game does require a level of patience. Okay. That's number one. But if you are looking for ways that you can expedite the timeline, I am encouraging you to buy it because that will get you bumped above the line. If you do a cost per click ad on something that you written that was organic and nobody's clicking that, we know that that headline don't work, we might need to switch it. Right. So things of this nature, that data doesn't lie, but do as much as you can on the front end to determine what's going to work. So that on the back end, on the testing. It's not really the back end, it's really on the testing. You can get more positive check marks on your test that things are working and you're not just wasting money and, or time. But overall, if you want to build a brand, yeah, it's a long game. And as I said, Coca Cola still markets. Everybody knows who in the world who Coca Cola is. So just Something to keep, keep in.
[00:59:40] Speaker A: Mind, a lot of this, just to your point, a lot of this pre execution stuff that you're talking about, the foundational research, all it is doing, one of the many things it's doing is, is it's mid. But when you do publish and when you do promote, whether that's on social or paid, the more research that you have up front and the more thorough you are in that, in that regard, the more you're mitigating the risk on the, on the execution side when it goes live, regardless if it's organic or paid. So I totally agree with that, a thousand percent.
[01:00:20] Speaker B: I think, I think. And going back to one of the things I said at the top of the show, you know, utilizing substack or markets there like that. I have no attachment to substack, by the way. I'm not a co founder or anything like that. Like it's not a, a plug. It's just something that I've found fairly recently and I was like, damn, like I wish I would know about this a lot sooner. Right. It already gives you a market and it gives you a market of readers. That's everybody on there is like looking for a hot article to read within different subject matter experts that a lot of the biggest names that you can think of aren't even on there. Yeah, all right. Not everybody's on there. So that's why I'm saying it's still low key. A plug as in like I'm getting you connected to something super dope. I think they got like 5 million subscribers right now, which is not that big for a platform.
So I say that to say is you've already got these categories that you can tap into and these communities that you can tap into to again do some of that initial work before you put money into a blog and that you're, you're running it. One other thing that I would tell you guys is on the monetization side, make sure that you have either some type of sponsor or some type of something that you can give for very, very low cost where people can sign up and actually, you know, purchase something or you've got some way to make money on that content so you're not just throwing money down the well and not getting nothing back or you know, something maybe an affiliate offer where they don't got to pay, or maybe they pay a little amount, but whatever it is, they click on the link, you get paid. Right. Just things that are subliminal within your content to where you can monetize it. Right, but that's. I'm saying that specifically if you're going to put money behind it and do ads and things that we're talking about now, but tap into communities. Tap. Build your as you're building your own community and use those communities as ways to A, B, C, D test before you hit that publish button and go live, you know, and then ultimately, as Keith said, you can always take it down. You can always rewrite it, you can always edit it, these types of things. It's not like you're locked into that for eternity. So make the adjustments where you need to.
[01:02:25] Speaker A: Yep. Totally agree.
All right, so I'll be respectful of your time because I'm sure we could probably be willing to bet we could talk for probably a couple more hours.
Right. All right, so it is here at the top of the hour, just about.
[01:02:40] Speaker B: Or a little over.
[01:02:41] Speaker A: So people, if they want to learn more about you, they want to buy some of your products, if you have something for sale that's a product, or they want to hire you and work with you, where can they go and follow you and engage with you in any of those capacities?
[01:02:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So make sure that you guys go to inspiration engineer.com inspiration engineer.
Doc. I will create a coupon code. By the time that this episode goes live for you guys, it'll be in the show notes where you'll get a actual download of our book. So I'm gonna give you guys our media book for free. And I'm also going to give you a personal brand guide. Okay. I'm super big on. No matter what you do, build a personal brand, because everything is an extension of. Of your personal brand. Whether it's a blog, whether it's a video blog, whether it's. You build a tech company, everything is an extension of you. So be the Steve Jobs, be the face, and then also have the Apple. Right. Or have the whatever the asset is that you have. So I will have two coupons for you guys, and it's only for the subscribers of your podcast. Keith, that's going to be my gift to you. I want to serve your audience. There'll be a personal brand guide, and then you guys will get access to the media book for free.
[01:03:57] Speaker A: Hell, yeah. Thank you. And so all those things like you mentioned will be in the show notes. But then in the meantime, if they just want to pull out their phone, everything that they will ever need to learn about you is on inspirationengineer.com inspirationengineer.com you got it.
[01:04:17] Speaker B: Boom.
[01:04:18] Speaker A: Love it.
Well, thank you so much for hopping on today.
[01:04:21] Speaker B: Hey, I appreciate you. I had a lot of fun. It's been a great jam, guys. Get prepared for motivation music. Make sure you download that book and let us know what. What you think about it, all right?
[01:04:32] Speaker A: Cool beans. Well, until next time, everyone. Live long and prosper.
[01:04:37] Speaker B: All right, Boost.
