Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Jerry Potter, social media marketing expert and founder of Five Minute Social Media.
While employed at a marketing agency, Jerry faced a crucial decision: either discover ways to achieve significant social media outcomes with minimal effort or risk termination.
Thankfully, he managed to retain his job and began disseminating his insights on YouTube, establishing Five Minute Social Media.
Today, boasting a subscriber base of over 150,000, Jerry has successfully empowered nearly a million individuals globally to undertake their own social media marketing endeavors, emphasizing simplicity and efficiency.
Jerry's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UC5i1U95Udd4RYblltKRV9-A
Jerry's Website: https://fiveminutesocialmedia.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Jerry Potter, social media marketing expert and founder of Five Minute Social Media.
While employed at a marketing agency, Jerry faced a crucial decision: either discover ways to achieve significant social media outcomes with minimal effort or risk termination.
Thankfully, he managed to retain his job and began disseminating his insights on YouTube, establishing Five Minute Social Media.
Today, boasting a subscriber base of over 150,000, Jerry has successfully empowered nearly a million individuals globally to undertake their own social media marketing endeavors, emphasizing simplicity and efficiency.
Jerry's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UC5i1U95Udd4RYblltKRV9-A
Jerry's Website: https://fiveminutesocialmedia.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Underrated social media hack. Focus on one social media network. By simply focusing on one, you will drive more people to go from being a stranger to a buyer.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We are here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Jerry Potter. Now, while working at a marketing agency, jerry had two choices he could figure out how to get big social media results with less work. Will get fired.
Speaker 2:Now, fortunately, he didn't lose his job and he started sharing what worked for him on YouTube, and he founded five minutes social media. Now it's got over a hundred thousand subscribers now and he's empowered over a million people around the world to do their own social media marketing, all with a focus on simplicity and efficiency. He lives out in Arizona, spends time with his wife and his two tiny humans, and he's on a quest to prove that Diet Coke is actually good for him. Now, today we're going to be talking about how you can grow your social media, following what platforms to focus on, pros and cons of different platforms, mistakes that people make and strategies that you can use.
Speaker 2:Before we dive into our interview today, yosip is our funnel strategy lead and over the last several years, he has developed all these tactics for our clients and help them to make Millions and millions of dollars it's somewhere in the region of about 25 million dollars and what we did is we took recordings of every coaching call he's ever done and used it to train our own AI Like a chat Yosip, yosip, gpt, whatever you might want to call it. So if you want to access that totally for free, go to data driven marketing dot AI. Data driven marketing dot AI, and you can access that totally for free. Jerry, welcome to the show man.
Speaker 1:Thank you, excited to be here. I'm excited to check out the, the virtual Yosip to. Yeah, I'm like a powerful tool.
Speaker 2:I want to just get right into it as soon as we can. What is an underrated social media hack?
Speaker 1:And underrated social media hack.
Speaker 2:Yeah, is it the right question? Is it a bad question? Tell me what you know I.
Speaker 1:I love answering questions.
Speaker 1:I've never been asked before because it forces my brain to think in new ways, and so, off the top of my head, an underrated social media hack is what I see a lot of people doing is they are trying to do all the things in all the places, and social media is mostly free to use Right, and so it's very tempting to do, but so is holding a sign on the side of the road.
Speaker 1:That's free to do too, but that's not how we usually go out and market our businesses or our courses or our memberships, and so the Underrated hack, I would say is to focus on one social media network. So many people are out there trying to again be in all of the places, and by simply focusing on one, you will drive more people to go from being a stranger to a buyer. If you're selling a course and it's $500, a thousand dollars, anything like that, I mean nobody's gonna go from you know. Hey, I don't know you, like you trust you, but I'm going to give you a thousand dollars right now. And so when we focus on one thing, one platform, and we take them all the way through, magical things happen, because we can actually take the time to nurture them, and that's the main thing that I focus on now is helping people go from stranger to buyer much, much faster using social media, but when you scatter it across platforms, everything slows way down, so that I think is a highly underrated.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's a hack, because nobody wants to hear that Basics long term well, I mean, what happens is, if you, if you're on all of these different places, then you end up focusing all these different things and I know we have these amazing tools that will take our content and put it in More than one place. But what happens is, on that buyer journey, you end up with a massive canyon that your buyer can't get across Because, instead of focusing on taking them from stranger to buyer, you're focusing on trying to get the most reach on different platforms and then trying to hard sell somewhere else and and there's this big Gaping hole in the middle. And so, honestly, if I, if somebody said, tell me one thing to do, that that's where I would start. I say pick one platform and really go all in on it. I guarantee you will be more successful if you spend the same amount of time. Then you will trying to be all of the different places.
Speaker 2:So I got two follow-up questions from that. Then, which Platforms? How do people figure out which platform to focus on, like if someone's already got started and they've already got a big Instagram following and they haven't got much from following anywhere else? It sounds like from your advice, probably just keep focusing on Instagram. But if someone's starting, or they're relatively Small or they've got any kind of an equal number on each of these different platforms, how that? How do they decide which one to double down on?
Speaker 1:So I used to teach an hour-long workshop on choosing the right social media network for your business, if you can believe that, but because there are a lot of things to factor in. But here's a couple things. I believe. One you can be successful on any social media network right for you and I and others.
Speaker 1:None of us are McDonald's or Nike, where we have to be all the places and we need a million customers, and so the first thing people always ask is okay, well, where are my people hanging out? And that's obviously something that you should consider. But there's a lot of stereotypes out there, right, like well, I need young people, so I better go to TikTok, or I don't want, my audience is young, so I can't use Facebook. But the truth is, when you look into the data as I know you love to do, john there are old people on TikTok my dad sends me three TikTok videos a week without fail and there are young people still on Facebook. And so first thing we have to do is kind of ignore the stereotypes, but do factor in where the people are.
Speaker 1:The second thing I think to consider with this is Do you want to go to a platform because everyone else in your industry is there, because sometimes that's where people end up being led, and everybody may be on Instagram because that's the platform that makes the most sense. Or everybody may be on Instagram because that was the one that was popular Early on for your industry, so everybody went there, and so sometimes you can make a decision Do I want to be the big fish in the small pond and go somewhere that most of my you know Competitors are not, or do I need to be in that crowded space, whether that's Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever it might be? So that's another thing to consider. And then the last thing, too which one do you like? I mean?
Speaker 1:it is so much easier to do well and be consistent on a platform that you actually enjoy than on one that you have no idea what to do or you hate it. I mean LinkedIn. For me, I have a very much a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn. For years, linkedin was the platform where I would sign into 25 spam messages every time.
Speaker 2:I was like yes, oh wow, sure love being here, right and so so if you actually like a platform, that Gary, did you know that we can help you with your business?
Speaker 1:Would you like to have a chat? Let me insult you and then let me tell you how we can improve things for you, and so LinkedIn has been the worst for that for a long time. They're actually really innovative in AI and some of these other things that they're doing, so it's very much a love-hate relationship, but I don't focus on LinkedIn because it drives me crazy, and so if you actually enjoy being on a platform, I truly believe you're gonna perform better by focusing on that platform.
Speaker 2:We used to do a bunch of work around SEO and we're trying to get like more SEO traffic to our site and I was so unengaged with it and I was getting people in the team to work on it and it kind of didn't really have a lot of energy and life behind it and not a lot of urgency, and we weren't great at it. And then I had a good think about it and I was like what I really like is being on video. I like being. I just I enjoy it. I like presenting on stage. I like doing stuff in person.
Speaker 2:I'm quite animated and it's like I started working with a couple of videographers on doing more YouTube content. It's like probably only about four or five months ago, but I was like, oh my God, this is so much better. Oh, this is so much more fun. I'm so much more engaged. We're actually doing all the work. We're doing it to a good level instead of like just here's a half-assed version of it, let's hope it works, kind of thing, and oh, it's so much, so much better for it it's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm the same way. I mean, I have a blog on my website, but it's mostly embedded videos and embedded podcast episodes and things like that, because I'm a video person. That's another thing to consider too if you are choosing a platform. Now they're kind of all video right, but in a sense, which platform does the type of content you wanna make perform well on?
Speaker 1:Because if you are a writer, tiktok is not the way to go, right, and if you are a? But if you're a writer, linkedin could be great, facebook could be great. There are lots of different platforms. Instagram can even be great for writers. So that's another thing to keep in mind because, as you being a video person, twitter is probably not or X as it is now. It's not the right place for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. What is your recommended content strategy for TikTok, then? Because people talk about TikTok a lot, that seems to be growing really fast. I'm seeing with our clients that it doesn't seem to convert very well to sales. Like, we've got clients, you've got over a million followers on TikTok and they're just not getting sales from it. Luckily, they've got an audience somewhere else as well. So what's your kind of recommendations? What's your strategy for TikTok?
Speaker 1:So earlier I mentioned the big canyon in the buyer journey that your potential buyers can't get across, and that is the inherent flaw with TikTok TikTok is amazing for reaching lots of new people and them finding out about you, but there's just not a good way to move them along, and it's getting better.
Speaker 1:So, overall, what I teach and what I set up for people in their businesses, no matter what platform they're on, is a framework I developed about 18 months ago. I've taught this to thousands of people since then. It's called the date framework, date, and it's kind of about dating your followers, but it's essentially the stages of the buyer journey applied to social media. So date stands for discovery. That's when somebody first finds you. We have to remember at that point they have no idea who you are, they don't know you, they don't like you, they don't trust you. We have to talk to that person differently, right? Second is acquaintance. Acquaintance I consider somebody that they kind of know, maybe what industry you're in and they know who you are. For me, if I'm picking up the kids at school and I see another parent across the parking lot, I'm like, oh hey, and maybe I know they're in real estate, right, but I have no idea if they specialize in anything. I don't know much more about them. They're in acquaintance. Then the T in date is talking. That is the phase where people are actually starting to engage with you, talk to you, or maybe they're just watching or consuming your content and responding in their own head, but in their head at least, they have engaged in a conversation with you. And this is when people are starting to look to solve their problem. They're starting to consider making a purchase and then the E in date is enchanted. This is when somebody is so enchanted and endeared by you that they're gonna buy your thing at some point, and it might be because their problem gets bad enough to solve. It might be because you have a launch and the doors are closing, might be because of a discount. You know different types of things with scarcity, urgency, personal urgency, things like that. So they go through discovery, acquaintance, talking, enchanted.
Speaker 1:The problem with TikTok is it's awful at the acquaintance phase. There is not a good way to kind of get people there and then moved into conversations other than just duration of time. I guess right, if you put up all these videos and somebody watches 15 of them, then maybe they're gonna go to your website and try and join your email list. But that's not the way the behavior works on TikTok, because TikTok just serves us video after video after video. We don't have to follow anybody, so it's just much harder to get people to move forward in that way.
Speaker 1:Now I will tell you I have a friend that runs a TikTok agency and what he does with his clients he's grown them to followings of hundreds of thousands of people, millions of views, just like you described for some of your clients. And what he does is, once a month he'll put up a specific TikTok video and it just basically says you know, hey, if you've enjoyed our videos on this topic, they mostly post about one strong topic. We've got this coming up and you can join the wait list right here, and sometimes he'll offer a discount if you're on the wait list, or something like that. That video might reach 10% of what his other videos do, but it's just enough to at least move somebody to the email list, which in my framework would be the talking phase.
Speaker 2:Gotcha, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's totally what we find. We find that the email is where the sales happen. So you've got to, first of all, you get someone to watch something from you and then offer them a great lead magnet, get them onto your email list, and then you send out lots of great content over a long period of time and get them engaging back and forth with you, and then you're more likely to get into that enchanted or what was it the word you used? Endeared stage.
Speaker 1:Enchanted yeah so, discovery, acquaintance, talking enchanted and it doesn't have to take a long time. I mean, I have people discover me on YouTube and then later that day and they don't know me, they don't like me, they don't trust me. They discover me on YouTube and then later that day, there's $1,000 in my account because they bought my signature course or they bought an annual membership, and so it can happen fast. It's just about laying the groundwork and the path for them to do that. I mean, I had a woman a couple of months ago. Her name was Jade.
Speaker 1:She was looking for I think it was the difference between Instagram and Instagram reels and stories, and she found my video on YouTube came up really high. She watched that and at the end there was another suggestive video. So she watched that and at the end of that video it said, hey, I've got this free masterclass. Do you wanna come take it? And then she signed up for that. And then later that day she watched the Evergreen webinar and then, literally within a few hours, she went from not knowing who I was to becoming a customer. And that's what happens when you set this up right where you have the I know, you teach and set up funnels and I was a client of yours too, john where it's like getting a lot on the front end there too, and it can work in that way too. But with organic content it can really work quickly. It doesn't have to happen over weeks and weeks, assuming you have the product they need available the day that they find you.
Speaker 2:And what is a big mistake that you see people making on social media?
Speaker 1:A big mistake I see people making, probably more than anything else, is talking to everybody in the same way, and so the date framework was actually born out of a couple things. In 2022. That's when, you know, tiktok really revolutionized the social media industry, because they came out and they were like we don't care if you have followers, we're just going to show you stuff you like, right? And our brains went okay, we love this. And so, you know, facebook and Instagram copied with Reels, and YouTube copied with shorts, and all of a sudden, there was this format where we could reach people that had never heard of us before using social media, and so everyone celebrated oh my gosh, look, we have all this reach. We have all this reach. But they were doing this, you know, putting out these videos, and they were trying to sell their course or their membership to somebody who had never heard of them before. And so the date framework is all about talking to people for the phase they're in, and so what I discovered through a lot of experimentation and testing is Reels, TikTok videos and shorts are seen by people who generally don't know, like or trust you yet.
Speaker 1:So they're strangers, right? So you talk to them in one way, feed posts on most of the platforms, and especially Facebook and Instagram. The odds of somebody seeing a feed post that hasn't followed you yet is very low, so mostly it's going to be people that have followed you, and so that's where you can talk to those people that are new to you. They kind of know who you are, but they're certainly not enchanted yet and they're not asking questions. They're not talking yet. They're not talking yet.
Speaker 1:Then, from there, stories on Facebook, instagram and TikTok are kind of that talking phase if you want to keep it on social media. So you know, I don't go watch Instagram stories of people that I would consider an acquaintance. Right, I'm not like, let me see what they're up to. Like you're leaning in at that point. And then DMs is kind of where you can close if you're doing it all on social media. And so now on social media you can talk to each person in each phase by posting that specific stuff on those platforms. And so the biggest mistake I see is somebody putting out a reel saying buy my high ticket product, because they have no idea who you are right.
Speaker 1:Or yeah, or somebody who is completely enchanted, and you're like, hey, want my freebie, and like, no, I'm getting ready to sign up for your $500 course, your $5,000 program, you know.
Speaker 1:And so what this does is, you know, if you think of them in those phases and with those parts of each platform, that's where the magic can happen, and it doesn't have to all be on social media. As I mentioned, I have email, I have Evergreen webinar. So in my business, the primary path people take is maybe seeing a YouTube short and then watching a longer video on YouTube, or maybe, because I've built up my YouTube channel, seeing a YouTube video, by the end of that YouTube video they go watch another one and now they're you know. Then in that video it's like, hey, come get my, you know, sign up for my email or come watch this Evergreen webinar. So they move into talking and then email does the job. You know the power of email, obviously for selling. Email does the job from there. Another way that I do it I have a podcast and podcasts are not great for discoverability, right, there's only a very small percentage.
Speaker 2:Well, there they are.
Speaker 1:There's only a small percentage of podcasts that are going to come up in search for people, right.
Speaker 1:Or recommended by Apple. But what I do with my podcast is it's set up so that I can. I have guests on every week and we do the content together and then I create YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and Facebook reels with the guest and then I release it as a collaboration. Now you can only do this on Facebook and Instagram, but essentially it goes out to their audience and my audience and other people if it's good content. So that becomes the discovery. Where it's a collaboration with somebody else on Facebook or Instagram, Then they find come, listen to the podcast, move into talking and my podcast.
Speaker 1:Obviously I have a call to action and then on they go to enchanted. So the path can go a lot of different ways. It doesn't have to all be on social media, but you have to know who you're talking to, because if you try and sell somebody who just followed you because they just were curious about you, or a friend recommended you and you're, the first post they see is you know, time's almost up for our $10,000 coaching program. Sign up now, right? They're not going to engage with that. They don't know what it is and you're going to lose them because they're not going to engage and once they stop engaging, they're not going to see your posts anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was laughing because you were saying about podcasts not being good for discoverability and I've run this podcast for probably two years, something like that, and it's a. If all you do is rely on the word of mouth of discovery, it's a slow growth. It's a slow growth of it. That's why that's part of the reason that we now use social media to promote clips from in the in the podcast. You know, we've got, I've got guys who are amazing, who go through this and they'll. They'll see this, but actually as well, they'll go through and they cut out all of the most interesting parts and they put everything together, as you know, as these little clips, and we share that on social media and that's that's working much better for um more people discovering the podcast Well and the beauty of that is now you're giving that.
Speaker 1:I've actually started as a content market. I've actually started consulting uh podcasters on the side too, because I love.
Speaker 1:I mean, I had my first podcast in 2005. I love podcasts, um, but the beauty of what you're describing is now what people used to do with their podcasts is they say, hey, I've got a new episode and, um, I guess it's John Ainsworth from data driven marketing and he's so great at at helping course creators, you know, and membership owners make more money, and so make sure you check out that episode and somebody would see that while they're watching an Instagram story or a Facebook reel or whatever and that's not nobody's going to stop and go listen to a 30 to 60 minute podcast in that moment. But this, what you're talking about now, is taking it and turning it into other content. Then they see that value and then, once they've gotten that value, then they might want more, and that's why this works so much better than what podcasters used to do all the time.
Speaker 2:One of the things I discovered the other day is that when I'm normally, when I'm listening to somebody while they're explaining something, like you have been I look very intensely and I I look a little bit like a psychopath, just staring down the camera lens, just like, oh my goodness. And I watched some of the content back the other day and it was pretty. It was pretty like, oh my goodness, that that that man looks a little scary. And I mentioned this to Jamal, who does the editing on it, and he's like yeah, normally what I do is I cut bits of you listening from somewhere else in the episode to make it more where, where you looked more like you know, human, nice, but that that whole podcast, that's how you looked the whole way through. So now I'm like okay, I need to. I need to like smile a little more often and not alone.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because and I think this applies for all content you know for for the long for since I started my podcast last year, it's always been switching back and forth right. We have these amazing tools that'll detect who's speaking and it'll switch back and forth between the guest or myself, depending on who's speaking. And I did a bunch of you know, before I started consulting people on their podcasts. I did a bunch of interviews and surveys with people learning about podcasts and things or like kind of a consumer side, and there were so many people that said I love seeing how the other person reacts when somebody says something, and so they like seeing both people on the screen.
Speaker 1:So, as the day that we're recording this, I'm in the process of reformatting how we edit my video podcast for that exact reason. But I saw that exact same thing when I first started playing with templates. It's just like the other person's talking and I'm just like staring at the camera, looking like you know, looking looking a little crazy. So I totally, totally get that. But I what I told myself is if the other person's talking, like right now, if somebody's watching this, they're probably focusing on me and so you can look however you want and then when you talk, they'll focus on you. But I love that your editor did that for you and found another clip to use. Yeah, when I used to do, I was doing a bunch of public speaking one year.
Speaker 2:I was giving this a little bit of a talk, and every time I would get someone to record me and I'd watch it back afterwards. And as I'd watch it back, I'd be like, oh no, this is horrible. Like little habit that I've got. You know, like, as I would finish saying each the, the, the, the evidence Stuff that went with each slide, I would be turning back and looking at the slide During as I finished speaking and it.
Speaker 2:I do it every time and it drove me crazy watching it and I was like that means that every single person who was watching me talk had to go through that. There's like whatever 200 people in the room. They all had to experience that. So then I would practice and practice and practice. So I didn't do that anymore and then I'd watch the next one and I'd find some new thing that drove me crazy, from you know, until eventually I started to get like quite good at doing it. I think I probably need to listen to my own podcast episodes more to find out what, what are my weird Habits that might be driving the audience crazy, and they're too polite.
Speaker 1:Well, they're probably driving you more crazy than they're driving anybody else this could be crazy Most things, but it's very uncomfortable, I think, for most people to watch their own content or listen to their own content, but it's a good exercise.
Speaker 2:So talk us through. What do you think will be the next social media growth trend?
Speaker 1:I, you know that this, this me leaning into podcasting, was not like completely accidental. I think that I kind of think that video podcasts are Going to be the next social media frontier, and for a couple of reasons and I really struggle with this and this is why I did all those surveys and interviews with people because I would never Watch a video podcast like I. Now I'll listen to this, right, I'll probably listen to this later, and then I'll probably pick myself apart, right. Oh my gosh, you can't like do that, but I, you know, I've got two young kids, I've got a business, I've got you know. But lifestyle design is important to me. I'm trying to be healthy and I go hiking, and so I don't have a lot of time to just sit down and watch a video podcast. And so I thought nobody's gonna watch something they could listen to you later. But then I interviewed a ton of people who said, oh, no, I, if there's a choice between audio and video, I choose video. Every time I love seeing faces, facial expressions, the reactions, all of that kind of stuff. So it's almost polarizing, is what I found with that. But podcast went from being this thing that Mostly somebody, would you know, record something audio only and then somebody would listen to it later. Right, there was not a lot of interaction.
Speaker 1:But then, in 2023, youtube said all right, we're doing podcasts now. They've kind of been like hinting at it for years, but they find I said we're doing it. You can put your podcast on YouTube. I don't know how much of this you've seen. They're shutting down the google podcast app completely. Youtube music is going to become the default podcasting app on android phones, as I understand, and in there you can literally switch back and forth between audio and video.
Speaker 1:Spotify last year audit added video. You can now go in and add video to your podcast. So that's the first part. But the second part is now on youtube music, you can comment on podcasts. On Spotify they have polls and, I think, like quizzes that you can do. Youtube has said they're bringing that as well. So they're taking podcasts and they're making them interactive. They're basically adding the social part of social media. So that's kind of where I see this stuff going.
Speaker 1:And the other part of this is that not only are they becoming more social, which of course helps convert better and, you know, nurture better and all of those things that we've talked about but, you know, going forward Now, because I think that's going to bring more people to the video side of podcasting. Our Podcast, like this one show you do Every week, can be all of your other content. And so, like my, my podcast is called the six ways, and my vision that I'm working toward is where I spend about an hour a week on it. Right now and that's still I'm right now I'm still only spending about an hour a week.
Speaker 1:It's a, it's an interview show, it counts booking, planning, recording and everything, and then I turn it over to my editor and then they turn it into all of this other content. And so I think for people that you know, like you and I, and course creators that, and subject matter experts, they could have one thing that becomes their podcast, their video podcast, their reels, their you know shorts, their you know shorter clips, seo optimized youtube videos, but it all comes from one place and that really excites me, and so that's why I don't know if that's really the answer to your question in terms of social media, but I do think video podcasts are kind of like the next social media frontier.
Speaker 2:That's super interesting. You look at some of the people who Are doing video podcasting really well. At Chris Williamson, I think it's doing a really good job with it on Modern wisdom, I think the name of his podcast.
Speaker 2:And he does the video side of that extremely well. Like he does it in person and spends a lot of money on really high quality Video and background and, you know, making sure the studio is beautiful and all of these kind of things. Or diary of a CEO, like he does the same thing, right? Um, stephen Bartlett's podcast. He's got something absolutely Beautiful not to watch. It's not just a podcast, it's also this gorgeous experience visually.
Speaker 2:And I've been thinking a lot about that, like what if we started doing the podcast in person and then all of a sudden that throws up all this other kind of stuff? Right, I couldn't interview you. You're in Arizona, right? It's like, okay, what am I doing? Am I flying to Arizona? Are you flying to London? Like, how is this happening in my head, you know? But the idea, like maybe it's every so often we do an episode with somebody who's a particularly big guest or who happens to be in London. I just do a days worth of filming with a few different gear. I'm not quite sure, but it's an interesting idea.
Speaker 2:I went on an in person one the other day. It was fascinating. It was in a kind of industrial estate area, almost Okay. So there's these giant like Giant shops, the kind of things you get out of town, um, across the road from it and there's this office block and it's just Studio after studio, you know, like a people's individual rooms. There's no connection between them, there's no. Like it's not one company as each each individual room someone's rented and this guy got this room and it's like completely bare bones, apart from the, the bit where the podcast was filmed, you know, and it's just like it's got its gorgeous background to it and Three cameras going on all at the same time, one of them moving back and forth to stationary great microphones, gorgeous desk that's never used as a desk right, just because it's nice in the background.
Speaker 1:And it's like. It's like an anchor desk on tv. Yeah, that's where you know you can all of a sudden go All right, I'm gonna make a video podcast and all of a sudden you're trying to produce a tv show that you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can go too far, can't you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so that's where I've tried it. I'm trying to keep myself where it's kind of like, okay, how can we make it 80% as good as a tv show, but only have it take, you know, 20 of the time and budget and technology has gotten so good, you know, like we edit ours in in descript and it automatically senses the speakers, right, anybody can make beautiful, um, you know, graphics in canva and animated backgrounds and and things like that, and so that's that's kind of what I'm doing with my show right now. We've just had it going back and forth between the, you know, the guests and I, and then you know a banner on the screen occasionally. But I think there is a.
Speaker 1:I think there's a nice hybrid where it doesn't take a ton of work, it's really visually engaging for somebody who's watching it but at the same time it doesn't kill it for the audio listener, because if you are creating a podcast and you're constantly saying for our video listener or for, you know, for our viewers, you can obviously see this graph on the screen and for our, you know, it's kind of like listening to an audiobook sometimes and they'll reference a graph that you can't see and you have to go to some website and download a PDF to see it. It's a terrible experience From the consumer, and so I think there's a balance in there, and that's kind of where I'm focused. Different angle.
Speaker 2:What are three books that you think that everybody should read, and it doesn't have to be about social media?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I'll tell you I only have four books in my office and I usually will read. I usually get audio books or sometimes Kindle books, and then if I really love it, I will bring it to my. Then I'll buy a hard like a hardcover copy and it's just in my office and it's more about just being there to remind me about it. And so one of the biggest ones is this year has been 10x is easier than 2x or over the last year. This 10x is such a cliche hype in the online industry, right? This book turns it completely upside down and I, you know, I avoided it for the longest time, and then somebody in my mastermind group shared a picture of it. I was like, reading this now, and I saw who the authors were and they wrote one of my other favorite books. So they have 50% of the books in my office now. Oh, it's them, wow. So then I read it right away, and I've read it twice, you know, since then. But it is a totally different way to look at your life and your business, and so that's one for sure.
Speaker 1:Another one by the same authors is called the Gap and the Game. I have been accused of being relentlessly optimistic and I see that as a good thing, and I didn't really understand the science behind it until I read this book. So the Gap and the Game is another great one. And then the third one that I have that I'll mention, that I have here too, is it's a money mindset book and I, you know, we grew up without much and so I know I've got money mindset issues and things like that. But it's called you Are a Bad Asset, making Money. It's part of that series by Jensen Sherrow, but that's a that's been a really good one too.
Speaker 2:Nice. I'd love to dig in a little bit to your course business. So we've talked about some of the tactics and the stuff that you teach people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What? Just give us an overview quickly. What do you teach courses about Opposite? It's about social media, but just kind of give a summary of that and like, who are you helping with them?
Speaker 1:So I have a. I have a very broad niche and, you know, and it's something that I sometimes carry around with with guilt. You know, before I had my own business, I worked at an agency. Sometimes I would get invitations to go and become the chief marketing officer for like an individual company, but I was like I don't want to just market shoes or bottled water or anything like. I love the variety. So it's kind of the same thing in my business.
Speaker 1:I do tend to primarily work with online business owners, kind of in that coaches and consultants, and you know that industry and a lot of them that have courses and memberships as well, and I think that's partially because you know we attract who we are. But for most of my business, I basically taught people how to build a social media strategy in the same way that I did when we were at the agency, using a method that I created, but more recently, now that I created this date framework, that's what I focus on. So my signature course is called 29 days to endless free leads and it essentially shows people how to reach people in each of the four phases of the date the discovery, acquaintance, talking, enchanted, to speed up their sales, and it. It was a course I kind of created. I actually taught it live the first time because I was like I think I got something here. Let's see what happened. It was my biggest course launch ever and during the course people were saying what's next, what's next? And I'm like we still have three weeks of the course left.
Speaker 1:So then I started a membership on the back end of that called social media leads lab. And it's called leads lab because, one, it's lead focus, but two, because if you don't approach social media like a person, you're going to be depressed all the time. You're going to put stuff up, you're going to put so much time into this and it didn't work Like you have to look at everything as an experiment. So we have kind of a science theme. I have a you know $7 lab coat off of Amazon that I work sometimes and things like that and so. So that's the core of what it is and it's just showing people how to reach strangers and then turn them into buyers all the way through.
Speaker 1:And I I didn't plan the membership on the back end. It just kind of came, you know, out of the course and because of that I think it's been a lot more enjoyable. I had a previous membership and a previous course that I was kind of like forcing. It's really nice when people ask for things and and you create it based on what they need. So the membership was like you've said this is hard, so we're going to have this. You've said this is hard, so I'm going to do this. And it's been a really enjoyable way to run a course membership business.
Speaker 2:Nice, okay, brilliant. And when you're doing that, how much of the promotion for that is directly on social media and how much of it is? You get everybody onto the email list and then that's where you're doing the promotion.
Speaker 1:All I do on social media now is pretty much seed. I never sell, I don't do live launches anymore, and so you know, as we've talked about you, somebody has to be ready. I think it's really nice to at least be in that talking or the enchanted phase for them to even consider when you ask to buy something. So for me, I try and get people to my email list as fast as I can. That's what I consider, that that talking phase, and then in there I sell both the course and the membership a few different ways. That's worked out really well.
Speaker 1:But the best part as a business owner is that the heavy lifting is gone. The email does it. I have an evergreen webinar that does it, and so it's nice to just have new people, you know, hopping in. I do still play with different offers and things like that, obviously to kind of see what's working, and if you're going to keep hitting the same part of your email list with the same thing, it's good to obviously change it up a little bit, and how often do you tend to do any of those kind of promotions on the email list?
Speaker 1:The way I'm set up right now is when somebody joins my list, they go through a series of different campaigns. They don't know this on their set, on their end, for all they know they're just signing up to get emails from me, but they go through a series of different campaigns. That kind of attacks it in different ways. And I have to credit Robin Kennedy I don't know if you know them, but they teach email marketing yeah the email marketing heroes.
Speaker 1:They completely changed how I look at email. So somebody joins my list, they go into a welcome sequence, then they go into a really soft sales sequence, Then they might go into a sequence about inviting them to the evergreen webinar, Then they might go into a sequence that offers them a special bonus if they sign up. So in my mind it's like for me it's never happening, but for somebody who goes into my email list it's happening all the time, but in a very non aggressive way. It's not like a live launch where you sign up and then you get 15 emails in six days. It's a little bit different than that where we everybody buys for different reasons. Some people buy in emotions, people buy in logic, and so we attack it through different angles, through these different opportunities and different offers.
Speaker 2:Beautiful. Now, if someone's heard this and they're thinking man, I need to get some more wisdom from this dude. Where should they go? How do they get onto your email list? How do they get to hear about all of this?
Speaker 1:Well, so I send out daily emails now, monday through Friday, and I know that that sounds like a lot of email for some people, but I for a year about 15 months I offered the chance for people to cut back from getting them daily to weekly, and even after a year it was only, it was less than 1% of my list that did that. So so there must be something in there so you can go to daily social media. Tipscom and I share stories and inspiration around social media and entrepreneurship in. There are lots of value and that's how people can the best way to jump into my world, for sure.
Speaker 2:Nice, so daily social media tipscom and then you can get daily tips. Is that Monday through Friday, did you say?
Speaker 1:Monday through Friday and if it is, you know, obviously, if they ever become unhelpful, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of any email.
Speaker 2:Perfect, Amazing. Jerry, Thanks so much for coming on today and sharing all your wisdom. Really really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my pleasure, John. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:If you want to get future episodes, then please subscribe wherever you listened. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening.