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Master Marketer Armand Morin with Success Leaves Traces Wisdom!
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Michael Stewart
Good morning. Good morning. I am so glad you’re here or good afternoon no matter where you are. I am really excited about today’s show guys. One of my heroes, one of my best friends in the world, and one of the top internet marketers in the world is my guest today. So I hope you guys are getting in your seats right now. But let me tell you a little bit about this guy right here. This is my good friend, Armand Morin, and you need to check him out. If you’ve never heard of him go to Armand morin.com. Check him out. He’s the best. But let me tell you a little bit of history between about me and Armen. Number one I’m very indebted to Arman. years ago, he had a seminar called the big seminar. And I met him at a mastermind meeting in Florida. And I was just blown away with the information that he shared. And I realized that after getting to know him that he was hosting the seminar called the big seminar. And I went up to him and I said, I have a presentation on audio and video. And he graciously said, Yeah, sure, you can speak at my seminar. And it really launched a whole huge opportunity for me, of being able to speak and you can see there, he and I have been friends. For many years, we’ve been on cruises, we’ve done things our family actually, you know, spent time with his family. I mean, this guy is just, not only was he an amazing influence and mentor to me, you know, he helped me launch a whole new career in a second half of my life. And then there’s another little story that you know, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, because of my passion for the music business. And I blame Armand, because of this thing right here. Michael Lee Austin. This is I can’t believe has been over 1415 years ago, when Arman said to me he says, you know a little bit about the music industry, I said, Yeah, he says, uh, let’s prove to the music industry that we can take a record or an artist to number one in Billboard magazine with nothing more than the internet. And I said, Oh, my gosh, I know all kinds of artists in Nashville, maybe he said, No, I want to do it with me. And I said, Really, I said, Okay. So at the end of the day, he did a video. Now, remember, this was 15 years ago, this is before YouTube. This is before, um, you know, video was really that well known on the internet. And I remember the day we were in a hotel room, and he shot on a green screen and did a video with himself as Michael Lee Austin, and as himself as a marketer. And then, as a result of that, you can see that that album, because of the internet marketing strategies that he knew 15 years ago, we had the number one country album in Billboard magazine in the world. You know, what we did here in Nashville 15 years ago, is they didn’t get it, we just made a mad. But we had a, we had a great time proven and it got me back in the music business. And now, even 15 years later, we’re doing seminars together. But we’re because of the pandemic, we’re doing virtual seminars. And in fact, in two weeks, Armand is going to be a presenter at click seminars dot live, which I am the kind of the Ed McMahon and the host. So I’ve got a great relationship with this guy, I’ve learned so much I have to attribute probably 99% of my success online is from learning from this guy. So enough about me, I want Armand to come on here and talk about what he’s got going on. So I’m going to welcome to the virtual stage, my friend, my basically my family, my son, my brother, what’s going on in your life these days? What’s new? What What is new for the internet? What would you say? This is an opportunity for you to share with what’s going on in Armand morin.com. In fact, I’m gonna put the website up there, folks, if you if you’re watching this replay, I hope you’re here live. So you can and I want people to ask questions. But what’s going on new in the internet more, because when I met you, and 15 plus years ago, yeah. You guys were talking about banner ads. Right?
Armand Morin
What’s new today? Well, banner ads.
You know, it’s kind of funny how everything comes full circle. And I’ve been doing this long enough now that I’ve seen cycles kind of come and go. And just to kind of clarify something again, many people know you probably set it but I’ve been online since 1996. And, and every five or six years, everything kind of comes around in cycles. Except this time, it’s a little bit different. And as we all know, that we you know, we’ve The world has changed in the last six, seven months. And so the things that we were doing, as Mike showed you some pictures of a special Speaking at different events all over the place, and it’s been crazy, but, but now we’ve all gotten more virtual. Right? So there’s a lot of things that are happening number one with advertising number two with doing presentations online, and number three, with your marketing itself and how you need to, to do it and do it well. So I think there’s, you know, several different things we can talk about, let’s start off with kind of like the, like the speaking idea, how’s that? Um, because I spent, you know, a couple, two years ago, I spent literally a third of the Year in in England, you know, you and I’ve been to England bunches of times. And I spent a third of the year when I co totaled it all up, I spent a third of the Year in England, doing seminars and events, and all kinds of things, because I look at it as the primary three places that I really promote my business as the US, the UK, and Australia. And so England is just for me being on the East Coast, I live in North Carolina, it’s just a short flight, it’s like seven hours, seven, eight hours, I, I jumped on a plane at 630, I wake up and it’s eight o’clock in the morning in England. So it works out great. But in saying that, you know, we had an event scheduled for the UK a couple months ago. And so what we did was we started looking at the idea of doing a virtual event, a virtual seminar, if you will. And you know, I’ve been doing, you know, streaming seminars for a long time. But this one was a little bit different. And the reason is because I started looking into the idea of virtual platforms. And we’ve all seen a lot of people doing a lot of different kind of events. And so I started looking around how I can kind of create an event experience in a, you know, an online type of scenario, I wanted people to be able to network, I want people to be able to connect with one another. I want people to do this. And it was actually kind of funny, because for a week, me and my whole team, we jumped on call after call after call with these just different companies that were doing these streaming events and virtual platforms. And they all wanted like five or $10,000 just to have this platform. And some of that was just for one event. So that was kind of crazy. So I decided, hey, why can’t I build my own? And I actually built my own platform inside of WordPress. As you know, Mike, I’m kind of a WordPress geek.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. When it comes to
Michael Stewart
it. I remember the day I was doing Microsoft front page back in the day and you said, Yeah, dude, do WordPress. Yeah.
Armand Morin
I bet that 15 years ago. I mean, I mean, I was doing the same thing I was using front page. You know, it’s kind of funny, because my I was downstairs just a couple days ago, and I was talking to Mariana, my wife. And she, and I looked at the shelf, and there was my first seminars binder there. And I remember having to go to Kinko’s at the time, and use their computer to use Microsoft Publisher, God, to have them printed out the way I wanted it to. And it was really just one color.
Unknown Speaker
It was kind of crazy. But yeah,
Armand Morin
I mean, back then it was front page. I mean, I did the same thing. And I eventually moved to WordPress and I, at first I thought it was complicated. And now I’m doing all kinds of crazy stuff with WordPress, that’s not really meant to do, because what I’ve learned and this is kind of a secret for everyone is I’ve learned that WordPress is actually not a blogging platform. And and this was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. And what I mean by that is that WordPress is actually like a membership site software. Now forget plugins for a second just just for a moment, because this is what was my big breakthrough us. Yeah, we can get plugins like you know, wishlist plugin and all kinds of these other plugins to create a membership site. But WordPress, by itself allows people to sign up for it. And it allows you to basically not let anyone in unless they’re a member. So you don’t really need anything else if you’re doing a free membership type site. So there’s two things I want to explain. First of all, we did we just use WordPress, in order to register people for this event. And and once they got inside as a member of WordPress, then we can we put in like chat rooms, we put in forums, we put in all kinds of different things. And then we we streamed the event during that time and on our breaks, we sent people into the chat rooms, on our breaks, we send people into the forums and so it was really kind of an interesting scenario. But what was most important though, was after the event, and after the event, I was immediately started working on my next event, which is going to be coming up in I think at the the first weekend in November, actually October 31. That weekend, Apollo Wayne. So that’s where my next event is and our events called the complete seminar. That’s what it’s called complete seminar. But But here’s the thing is that on our next event, I learned one valuable piece. And this is the, this is the biggest breakthrough for everybody. So, I want you to think about installing, let’s just say installing basic WordPress. And I want you to think about making like your giveaway. Let’s just say that you were doing an opt in page and you were doing a giveaway. But the giveaway was only for people that were a member of that WordPress site. Okay, You with me? So far, Mike, huh?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, like, Okay, I’m here.
Armand Morin
I just want to make sure you follow me.
Michael Stewart
I’m trying to put up some some links here for the good folks so they can find this stuff after the fact. And you know, this live streaming dot live streaming strategy that I’m doing. I’ve got questions about how your stream your virtual. Yeah, we’ll talk about that in a second. But he’s laying that the replays and the people watching this afterwards. I like I like to, you know, I didn’t know you had complete seminar.com. That’s that’s news to me. That Yeah,
Armand Morin
yeah. We’re getting ready to launch the next one in just a probably next. Well, next couple days, actually. We’ll be able to start our next promotion next week, give ourselves about a month promoted. But here’s the thing. So I want you to think everyone to think about the strategy. So you let’s say you have you want to get your giveaway. Okay, I’m going to show you the most incredible thing that I found over the time I’ve been online, you want to do a giveaway. So you go to WordPress, you install a brand new version of WordPress, you make an opt in page, however you want to make, it doesn’t really matter what you use. But here’s the thing, instead of having people connect it directly to your autoresponder, okay, what you do is the, the way that they get the giveaway that you’re doing is by signing up into your WordPress site, okay, which is dedicated for this giveaway. But we’re going to add one more thing. We’re going to add a social login to WordPress. Now, what is a social login, it’s where people can click a button and sign in login automatically with Google or login automatically with Facebook. And honestly, there’s a lot of plugins that you can get for free, that will actually do this. So now imagine coming to an opt in page. And either a, they can fill in their name and email address and create an account in order to get their opt in. Or the other option is they can click one button, and it automatically logs them in such as Google or Facebook or LinkedIn. And doing it that way. Now, here’s the key. The key is is that no one wants to fill in their name, their email address. So what you do is that the majority of people will use their Gmail, their Facebook or their LinkedIn in order to login and the benefit for you is that you’re guaranteed to have a correct email address. So number one more people will opt in number two, is that you’re guaranteed to get the opt in. So the question now is, well, how do I connect it to my autoresponder? Well, what I do is I install a simple plugin from Zapier. So if you go to zapier.com, I think it’s like a minimum of like $5 a month, I think it is something like that I can’t remember, but just go there and check it out. And you can connect what’s called a zap that says, Take the people from my WordPress account from this WordPress site, and automatically add them to whatever autoresponder that you have. So now it’s automatically connected. But again, like I said, the advantage is that whether they opt in with their email address, and you know, their name and email address, or they just click a button, such as their, their, you know, their Google Google account, or their Facebook or their LinkedIn. And so again, you’re guaranteed to actually get the correct email address. And so that was a huge breakthrough for me. So on my next event, of course, I have two options, I have one, fill in your name and email address or a number to simply click one button. And then it will click that button for Google Facebook or LinkedIn, or whatever else I want to I could add Twitter, whatever else for but why, but
Michael Stewart
yeah, brain runs at a million miles an hour. And if my brain is slowing down, the older I get, but let me recap here and I’ve heard you correctly. Sure. Now with WordPress, you can implement social media registration. I know a lot of software companies, a lot of sasses Software as a Service. They always say in fact, more and more things, say, you know, put your name and your email address like Canva is an example. Yeah. And but you had to put your name and email address but now it says login with Gmail login with Facebook. Sure. WordPress will do this. Is that what you’re saying?
Armand Morin
Yep, you can get there’s plenty of different plugins if you just look for the free plugins and say social media login. In your back end plugin lists when it says Add New. Just look for social media login and you’ll find a note have different ones that do it. And so
Michael Stewart
so when people have that quick one click option. Yep. Then you’re guaranteed because they’re going to have the correct contact information and their social media, correct. Knows everybody’s hooked to that stuff. So they’re gonna make
Armand Morin
that right. And that’s one that’s going to be the one that the email address that they actually check.
Michael Stewart
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, one. So you’re using the data that the social media sites, you’re using the leverage of them having the right data? Mm hmm. Then this zapier.com will let you hook it up to other stuff is what you’re saying?
Armand Morin
Correct. Zapier is nothing more than a connector. So it can connect into whatever it is that you want. And there’s hundreds if not thousands, of different connections that you can make. And so for every major autoresponder that exists out there, it will say, Okay, I want to go from WordPress to this autoresponder whether it be Active Campaign AWeber, get response, you name it, it works.
Michael Stewart
And so well, that see right there. I mean, right there, the folks, that one thing that this genius buddy saw, we got to tell the story, how I call you, you call me dad, and I call you son, that’s a fun. And I’m probably old enough to be your dad. So that’s that’s another story. But But, folks, that’s huge. Using power of WordPress to use social media logins to build, I would rather have 100 real people than 1000. What I call looky loos retire kickers.
Armand Morin
Yeah, I mean, when you when you I mean, think of I want everyone to think about this for a second. I mean, I want you to think about your email that you if you have a list right now and you’ve sent emails out to your list, I want you to think about how many opens you got last time. So
Unknown Speaker
low low?
Armand Morin
Yeah, it’s low, right? And depending on how good your list is, I mean, if you’re, if you’re like a god, you’re at, like 20 25%, right? Yeah, but many people are like at five or 10%. So that still means that like 90 to 95% of the people aren’t even seeing their emails that go out. But now imagine if you had all the correct email addresses of the people that have the emails that they actually read. Now imagine what your open rate is, and how much higher your conversion. So you could have a list that was before maybe 25,000 people, but now you’ve got a list of maybe 2000 people, and that’s going to be 10 times more effective than that other list that you had.
Michael Stewart
Well, that’s gold, that’s gold. So
Armand Morin
So this process of doing the seminars, that was one of the major breakthroughs that I had, and like I said, I had an after, after my last event, so that was that was pretty intriguing. But you know, one of the questions that you had was, what am I doing? How am I streaming the event?
Michael Stewart
Yeah. Okay. I’ll tell you what, let’s have a word from our sponsor. Yeah, no, go back. And I want to tell you, I want you to share with me because audio and video has been my wheelhouse forever. That’s why Yeah, I’m using a live streaming strategy here that’s available to everybody, but I want to hear what you’re doing with your virtual seminars. And, you know, I know that you’re always on top of these things. You know, we’re getting a lot of comments here. We’re gonna take some questions. I mean, this is you know, arm I’m gonna have to have you back on some other shows. We could talk about 1000 subjects. But okay, so now you’re using social media to get people to register your to your virtual seminar. Virtual seminars are becoming the norm because Apple can’t auto hotels. They don’t they don’t go anywhere. We’re, you know, we’re 14. So what do you what are you doing? How are you? Obviously, you’ve got a video studio there. Yeah. With your professional background, another monitor, right?
Armand Morin
Yeah, this is actually an 86 inch television and bakmi.
Michael Stewart
Right, so you’re running a video background.
Armand Morin
Yeah, I put a real loop going that I, I found a picture of Raleigh, North Carolina that I liked. And then I just put a little loop down at the bottom kind of like a lot of the new shows, just with my name going across. And so that’s kind of have that I’ve got like two big lights, which I’ll have to show you. It’s kind of interesting, because initially when I set this up, in order to avoid the glare off the background, I had like nine different lights I had set up, you know, like, you know, like the box lights, the cowboy lights that we always buy. Well, I switched that out and I been wanting to get these parabolic dome lights. And it’s like those big bubble lights, you know, you’ve seen them right. And so I bought two of those and got rid of nine lights. It was amazing. The most amazing, this what’s called like an egg crate. So it focuses the light in one direction as opposed to so it doesn’t get it on on my screen and back. What can
Michael Stewart
you can’t show them, can you but
Armand Morin
i can i think i think if i Switch over to like, let me see if I if I take like a if I switch my camera.
Unknown Speaker
Okay.
Michael Stewart
You know I try to keep Okay, there you go. All right. Look at that down. Uh huh.
Armand Morin
Yeah. So you can see see that grid up there?
Yeah. And what is that called? That’s like a parrot. It’s a parabolic dome light. And then that’s just basically called an egg crate.
Michael Stewart
Where did Where did you get? Did you get these on Amazon? Or go from?
Armand Morin
Amazon? I got them on Amazon, the light cost me, I think that is 36 or 38 inches from top to bottom. And it’s about probably about almost the same length thick on it. And then. So that’s like the umbrella, if you will, and then the light inside. So the umbrella cost me I think about $60. Okay, the light on the other end of this that shoots inside of it is a 60 watt light that cost about $135 I believe it is. Right. And and because it waits I had to get like a little bit better stand than what we would normally have. bent my stand as I so I had to get the Chrome. It’s like a chrome steel stand. And that’s how that’s how he did it. Um,
Michael Stewart
so there’s your monitor with your background? Yeah. And then of course, you’ve got that light.
Unknown Speaker
I already
Michael Stewart
got a shotgun mic some I’ve got
Armand Morin
a shotgun mic set up in front of me.
Michael Stewart
Really? Okay. I kind of see the edge of there on the screen. right there in front of the line. Oh, I mean, the audio is excellent.
Armand Morin
Yeah, the mic. I’ve got this. It’s a NTG. I can’t remember the brand. It’s an NTG. Three. That’s the name of it. That’s the model. So I think it’s I forget which brand that is road. I think it’s a road.
Michael Stewart
Yeah, road. Okay. All right. So we got the technology. And of course, you’re using a good DSLR is that a DSLR? camera or a webcam? Yeah,
Armand Morin
I’m using what it’s like your first level. Basically, it’s your first level Cinema Camera on and what this what this is, okay, so let me explain something. So I at first, when I started streaming years ago, we were using a DSLR camera, okay, your whatever camera that you want, you name it, but it will use a Canon DSLR camera. And the reason is, was the lens is I could get that really look that I wanted to and the lens was an interchangeable lens was crucial for me to do this. Now, again, I don’t know anything about cameras. Now, I do know a little bit more than I did. But then what I discovered was that there was this next level up in in this one, this is a, this is an older, this is about three or four years old. So it’s in eosc 100. That’s the name of the camera. So I think when we bought it, it was about 2000 maybe $3,000. Okay, but now this one as opposed to a DSLR camera, there’s see a DSLR camera, you get to do a couple different things to it, so it doesn’t shut off every 30 minutes. And the reason why DSLR camera has a shut off every 30 minutes is because it’s taxed different if it’s not classified as a video camera. So they put an automatic shutoff on it, and so you can get software to kind of bypass that. So I’ve used that. And then I have another camera that I use sometimes. And it’s a Canon m 50, which is a really tiny camera. But it has an interchangeable lens and I can put whatever lenses that I use for this camera on it. And that’s what I’m videotaping with. But this one this cameras coming in, I’m running into. In this particular case, I have two different computer setup. So like today, I have my normal laptop over here. That’s to just to the left of me. But on the other side of the room, I actually have an iMac that set up for streaming. And so normally if I’m doing like a training I have bill who’s my brother in law that runs everything for me for from video, typically, he’s over there live switching between me my camera me my camera, and one of your questions was what do I use?
Michael Stewart
Well, right. Okay. So you’ve got good cameras, good audio, good lighting. Yeah, nice background, you build a virtual stage. And of course, I got to put a little disclaimer in here. One of the things that I’ve been teaching, Arman is you know, the cheap way of doing it. So people will get started because if Yeah, Hey, you got to get used to looking at a camera. And, and being you know, it doesn’t matter if it’s a $3,000 camera. I’m using $150 or $100. Camera, a Logitech webcam. Yeah, just for the record. This is a $35 light panel.
Armand Morin
So you’re using like, let’s see, 920 is that what I say? 920. Absolutely. So let me just tell you that I mean, I have on One of my other computers I had like the the Logitech Brio, which is like their 4k. Uh huh. And I’m going to tell you the C, the C 920 is much better.
Michael Stewart
Well, you know, for for people to at least get in the process of live streaming, which I believe there’s we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible. Um, you know, this is this is low entry, you know, a USB microphone. These lights are $35. I mean, you’re, if you look like network news,
Armand Morin
yeah, I had, I had this vision about what I want. And this wasn’t an overnight process. This is been like probably like a seven year process to slowly find out the things that I wanted to get what I needed, like. So right now, again, obviously, I’m looking into the camera, but to the left of me, just out of camera range is a monitor so I could look at that. And then I have my computer over here. And this side, I actually have another monitor that I can actually see things that are going on typically as well, too. So I’m not constantly looking to my left over here. Like right now I’m looking into my camera so I can actually see Mike. But at this point here, I don’t even I don’t even look this way. And I know what Mike looks like. So I’m just talking into the camera like Mike like the camera is Mike. And so that’s like you said one of the hardest things. But now honestly, a lot of software that’s come out in the last three or four months have been designed to use your, your iPhone or whatever phone that you have to connect it into your computer as a webcam. And I think that that is probably the biggest game changer for people that just want to get started is using like your phone, putting it on a little tiny tripod at the end of your desk. And then using that as your as your streaming camera because it’s it’s 10 times better for example, on if you when we switched over, and we looked at this side view to see one of my lights that was the built in I have a Mac computer. And that was the built in camera on the Mac. And I’m going to tell you it sucks. It’s horrible. And and I’m like Mac can do so many different things that are great, but their camera on the computer is the worst ever. Wow. And but the camera on their iPhone now?
Michael Stewart
Well, the newer ones, especially, I mean, yeah,
Armand Morin
and any of those iPhone cameras or whatever phone that you use, whatever those cameras are, those are 10 times better than anything that you’ll actually have on your computer, or even the webcams. So I would definitely try to look into that about connecting your that and you with a quick Google search. Whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, you’ll find some software that will allow you to automatically do it. And many times it’s actually free software. So you don’t have
Michael Stewart
anywhere for your computer to make your computer think your phone as a webcam. Is that correct? Yeah, you need an app on the phone or just you know,
Armand Morin
someone will have an app on the phone like I’ve used the one that connected in via, you know, a beaut, I believe it was either Wi Fi or Bluetooth. And that’s one way connected. And then another one, as long as your phone was plugged into your computer, it connected in and you didn’t need an app, it just recognized your phone as an external, external monitor. So for example, like, if I’m like sometimes I’m doing a demo with an app for a phone, I’ll plug in my phone into my computer, and I can actually record with like iMovie on iMovie, but QuickTime to demonstrate it live in real time. What’s on my phone? Yeah, yeah,
Unknown Speaker
yeah. So
Armand Morin
I, but now it will actually use it as a webcam. That’s, again, a big game changer, especially if you’re traveling remotely or anything like that.
Michael Stewart
That’s the thing is keeping up with all this technology. So here’s my question. And I know we’re gonna take a few questions. Can we get questions coming in from edge, and I try to keep this to a half an hour show. And I know me and you, we could go all day and we’re not gonna go as long as you want. So well. I don’t want to I want to abuse your time. And I like to keep this keep the show. So will you come back and talk some more about other marketing stuff? Because Yeah, I mean, yeah, Harmon is an expert at copywriting. It’s public speaking seminar production. Yeah. The sun to talk about we could be here all day. Yeah, the things that question. Yeah. What are you streaming with? You got the signal come into the computer. Yeah. How going out to your audience.
Armand Morin
Yep. So we’re using, depending on what we’re doing that day will determine what we’re using. So for example, I do a monthly stream to my membership site. And typically I connect in with OBS, and then connect OBS directly to YouTube prior to a private YouTube stream. So I’ll do that. That’s sometimes and the reason I do that is because I can now they changed it with YouTube that you can put the chat box on the right hand side. You never you if the stream was private. You previously up until like a month A month or two ago, you couldn’t put the chat box on your embedded page that you’re having it. So that was a big game changer. So that was huge. But also what we’ve been using lately is for a Mac, there’s the software that I’m using right now. And it’s it’s basically called, you know, what is this thing I’m using? I need to, I need to think about it for a second, he can live. So he can live for a Mac is like amazing. And I’m looking over here, because I can add, like layovers, I can adjust my screen, I can do green screen, I can do anything that I want. And it’s so simple. But it’s also one of the most professional ones out there. And you can use what’s called a virtual cam from E cam. So for example, I’m using e cam right now. But I’m using a virtual camera from there to allow me to display it inside of Mike system with stream yard and things of that nature.
Michael Stewart
Right. So and, and I saw he cam, I’ll be honest with you a couple years ago, I worked with OBS. Yeah. And for my students, it just it had a lot of it there, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong with OBS for
Armand Morin
it. So it can be a little complicated. But once you get by, if you like remove all of the things that you don’t need, then the than that works out great, I look good. And it gives you a little bit more control sometimes. But it’s e cam software, what I love about it is I can put layers on top of it that’s built into it. So if I want to put my name down the bottom, if I want to put a countdown timer, if I want to put different scenarios. So we have like on the other computer, we have it split. So you know just like we’re in one side of the page, and on the other, I can bring you in via actually with Skype, I would have you call into Skype, and then bring you into any cam actually, right now is going into beta test to do exactly what we’re doing right now. They’re actually building they built their own back end. So you could actually bring in a guest for interviews as well, too. So I’m really, really happy with it. It’s they do what I’m excited about about software is that they they’re updating it constantly. Yeah, and I’m you know, that’s to me for software that’s very, very important that they stay up to date on the latest, I don’t always agree with what they’re doing. But it gives me the flexibility that if I want to keep it simple, I can or if I want to make it extremely complicated, and adding all kinds of visual elements and, and graphics and things of that nature to make me look maybe a little bit different I can. And also I have to say that the green screen that it has on it is probably one of the best green screen systems out there. Let me just show you guys something, right. So.
So I’m just going to lean over here.
I obviously don’t do this this part a lot. But
Unknown Speaker
we’re going to
Armand Morin
take in we’re going to I just happen to have a green screen up on the other side. And we’re going to exit out of this. And we’re going to drag this
Unknown Speaker
kind of over into the screen here.
Michael Stewart
Folks, I got to do a disclaimer, Arman is advanced at everything he does. And one little disclaimer to E cam live. Uh, wow, that look at that. That is really cool.
Unknown Speaker
Is that pretty amazing?
Michael Stewart
Pretty amazing. II cam lab is Mac users only. That’s why I’m a fan of stream yard. Because it’s PC and Mac. Um, you know, but if you’re going to go nuts with this and you’re a Mac user, he can live his life an amazing uh, you know, I wanted I wanted OBS to work for for beginners and OBS I felt was too buggy and complicated two years ago. And stream yard is the PC solution that is as close to eat can live as I’ve ever seen, but I just couldn’t get behind something that was just Mac because a lot there’s a lot of people out there with PCs and at least stream yard you can go to join stream yard.com and you can try it out for free. If you’re lucky guy he can live you know, I tried to I wanted to try out ECAM live and he said no it’s it’s Mac only
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. So
Armand Morin
those little disclaimers here but yeah, the look see look at the professionalism mean Armand you’re just you go nuts with all this stuff. But watch this Mike. So So first of all, I can take this and I can remove the blur in the background, so that’s independent. So I can make that really blurry, or I can remove it altogether, just put enough to make it look somewhat realistic. But again, I want everyone to see that. Notice that that’s blue, and I’m kind of sticking out so it’s not really believing. trouble. So what you can do is you can come down to the picture settings, and I can adjust just my brightness and maybe bring me down a little bit. And then maybe take me and make me a little bit cooler to make me look like I, I fit in the scene. And then maybe take that down, kind of like this. And, and then then we’re, it’s like, I’m here. I’m live, live doing this.
What is that? Is this E cam live doing? Live. And then you can just bring in like other
other photos that you that you want, or things that like this was just one that was downloaded for free that was online. Like I was looking for different versions in the background to give me some different options. And so I look for, you know, just different, just different photos, right? I did one from my book, right? And I put my book in the background. And I moved over to this way. I have my book in the background and every quarter inch television
Michael Stewart
this is this is why live streaming is what you know, live streaming, to me is the future of building relationships and communication. It’s just let me get this clarity. So I get this documented. You are using YouTube as the streaming backbone to private event, because that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m embedding YouTube on a WordPress website. And then of course, are you doing unlisted? Are you doing private videos or private? I’m doing private on this. Okay. So power of YouTube live to make sure that unlimited audience can view your content that you’re broadcasting correct? Right, right. Well, you know what, Cali? We got some questions here. Carlin asks, What software put that green screen behind you? Was it just a green image that you put up on the screen?
Armand Morin
Yeah, it’s this fancy software I use called Google Chrome.
Unknown Speaker
I actually found a grim picture.
Armand Morin
And I I was dragged in Google Chrome and I just made that image go fullscreen. That’s all it was.
Michael Stewart
You were just projecting instead of putting up a green screen, you were projecting the green graphic image behind you on your auditor, which allows you to take e cam software and bring your backgrounds in. Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah. So
Armand Morin
it’s very simplistic.
Michael Stewart
Yeah. Okay. And and so we’re getting a couple other questions here, and we’re gonna have to wind this up, because the next thing you know, it’s going to be an hour of Mr. Cavanaugh is here watching us. He’s wishing us all well. Dave. So Dave’s here. God knows. I guess he’s over in Thailand. Yeah. And you were you remember when you went to barefoot Jerry. Good old wine mall, barefoot, jury’s watching the show. In fact, one of the things in music, Arman is we’re going to be doing live from Cinderella. And we’re working on that. And, you know,
Armand Morin
you know, I tell people all the time about going wait by going to Wayne’s house with you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, it was amazing. Just to see you know, the studio and and everything. It was just, you know, den, one of the highlights.
Well, you know, to know the man that that played the beginning of Pretty Woman.
Michael Stewart
Listen, I’ll tell you Wayne’s the best and he just means the world to me. And since I’ve been here in Nashville, we’ve gotten to do a lot of really fun things. And we’re, we’re working on there’s just so much amazing music that people don’t know, that came out of Cinderella. And, and of course, when I when I talk to people in Nashville, and I show them this right, yeah. Yeah, they go You did what? And you’re the knucklehead that made that happen.
Armand Morin
Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s really interesting about that as we have a whole second album that I never released yet. And the second albums better than the first so as really, really excited about that.
Michael Stewart
Well, you want to go on a rocky road and here’s the other thing is crazy because of this pandemic. And every artist I don’t care whether you’re up and coming Yeah, the big star or you’re a big star now they’re all home.
Armand Morin
They want to you know, I have to tell you something you’re speaking about that I’m working on the system. I’m almost done almost finished with it. Right. And and what it is I you know, I don’t even have a name for it yet. But it’s what it does is it’s for like artists you know, you know, many people probably know who Luke Bryan is. And Luke Bryan means big country music star, one of the top people out there right now. And you know what? One of the things that he’s done extremely well was that he put people into a membership site millions of people into a membership site. And, you know, and so I believe that right now is one of those things where people need to be able to monetize their content in different ways. So one of the, this platform that I built is completely done. And we’re just focusing on the name actually today. And what it is that allows you to people to charge people for exclusive content. So it’s a it’s a, like a, it’s like a Facebook, if you will, that you can privatized and charge people like 499, or 999, or whatever you want a month, and basically, you just post content via your phone, whatever you want to do. And it could be for anything, whether you’re an author or a musician or whatever. But I believe that that is like the, the, the direction that we’re going is that we got to think about how to monetize our content on a micro basis. Right, so, so people may not want to pay 67 or $97 a month, maybe or more something like that. But on a micro basis. I mean, Mike, I mean, you had a membership site for years, I think it was like, what, $10 a month or something?
Michael Stewart
Oh, the people are still paying? Yeah, people have been paying me $10 a month. I mean, that’s what supported me for years. And and I have, you know, because of you, you know, one of the things that the reason I’m here in Nashville, I’m trying to get the music community that I so love. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I’ve built you can see guitars here. I don’t know. Yes. So this is my new music studio. Yeah. And, and I’m doing more and more sessions and, and, and so many music people in Nashville, for some reason have this wall of disconnect. Yeah, about that, that the digital world is, is not fair. Maybe that’s a nice way of saying it, you know, they’re there. They’re not receptive just to the digital world. And you and I are living examples that if you embrace the digital world, and a different mindset, and a different approach, it’s, you know, I, one of the things I recognize from the seminars, the seminars we did were like concerts, and we were like the acts, yeah, we built relationships. And so the, the audience, things that supported us and yousician, and artists are having a tough time. The only thing they knew was ticket sales, merchandise sales. That’s where,
Armand Morin
but that’s where they don’t understand is that Yeah, they could travel. I mean, I you know, I remember years ago, I said years ago, 20 years ago, I was I went to I went I used to go to this local country bar, here in Raleigh, right is before I get married, actually, right after I get married, were during the time I got married, in the in the beginning, right. And I went down there and Blake Shelton was playing. And so I saw Blake and, and there was maybe 500, maybe 600 people in that room at that night. You know, and so I would imagine at that time, every place he played was probably at the same or maybe even less, right, right? Well, now, I mean, if Blake Shelton went live online, he could have not just like a stadium that led just 10,000 or 20,000 people, he could have 100,000 or more people on there watching him. I mean, probably one of the, you know, people in Nashville that does take technology, and does well with it as Brad Paisley as an example. Right. You know, Brad Paisley understands technology, he understands he likes playing with it. And, you know, some of the streams that he’s done has just been amazing with him doing duets with people, even with a delay in some cases, right, has been absolutely incredible. And and that’s what I think people need to understand, especially from the music industry, or really any industry for that matter, is that the power now is that we can turn on a phone, we can turn on a computer, we can not just be in a few hundred people. We can be in 1000, for example. Yeah, I could speak any and when I was traveling, yeah, I could speak anywhere in the world for 200 300 400 500 people. But the times that I spoke in front of 1000 people plus were very few. And but now online, I mean, I can do a promotion on Facebook, drive people to an opt in page, do a webinar with 1000 people on it, and over the course of a week and never leave my home and honestly never really only have to dress up from the waist up.
Michael Stewart
Yeah, you know, I enjoyed. I enjoy traveling. I mean, it was very akin to being on a concert tour. I mean, we’ve had a lot of fun doing it, and it got to see a lot of things. In fact, I got to tell folks never heard the story. Yeah. When in 2004 Armand and my wife Susan and his wife Mariana, we were at a hotel and they decided to go to a US. What is it, Westin?
Armand Morin
Yeah, we went to a Broadway show and on the west end in London,
Michael Stewart
right, we went to see the producers, which was great play. Yeah. So we get in the, the little, you know, that London cab, you know, there, everybody’s facing each other and sit down, and I get in there. And, and the British cabbie looks at me and all of his nieces, a son and daughter in law.
Armand Morin
He said, Is this a mom and dad, mom, dad and daughter and son in law?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. And
Michael Stewart
oh, and the first thing out of his mouth was dad. My son ever since that was probably 1516 years ago. Yeah. I mean, it
Armand Morin
was it was actually just kind of funny. And it was just, it was just hilarious.
Michael Stewart
It he right. You know, we were talking about audio and video. back then. And remember,
Armand Morin
you remember Mike, I mean, think about this. I mean, this was even prior to you and I meeting my big seminar number two, I actually put three video testimonials that were this big. Yeah. So they were like a postage stamp. It took me three weeks to do that, okay, three weeks to get the files small enough that it would play
Unknown Speaker
work. And if three
Armand Morin
weeks, three weeks, and and I was working at night and day for three weeks to get that to work, and in for a testimonial for that, for that matter. And now, you know, I can do it in two seconds. And, you know, audio, I mean, when you and I first met one of the, you know, you were doing audio buttons for Alex mandossian. And that’s how I first heard of you. And, and the audio button thing was like, I’m like, oh, man, you know, audio, but you put audio, you can put a button, you press the button and
Michael Stewart
leaves it strings. Yeah. You know, I recognized in 96, that the internet was radio and television. I mean, always been radio and television to me, and
Armand Morin
I think it’s more so today.
Michael Stewart
Well, yeah. Because, you know, my kids don’t have cable TV. They watch streaming on their phones and on their devices that I bought a smart TV this weekend for the houseboat. Yeah, $108. And it’s built, it’s built in, everything is built in. You don’t even need a an external firestick or anything anywhere else. Crazy how the internet is ready on television. And of course, one of the things that I say here is every business owner has a way to live stream, you know,
Armand Morin
okay, let me let me give everyone a tip. This is a strategy on by accident. So I was on Facebook, I was messing around with some of my previous videos, uploads and stuff like that. And as I was editing them or doing something with them, it said, Would you like to add this video to a series? And I’m like, What? A series? Why Yes, I would. So now this is a video thing that I did a year ago, it was a 90 day video challenge. And so I did a video like every day, well, I can’t say for 90 days, it was almost 90 days. But I had all these videos. And so I created this 90 day video challenge. And sure enough, it took all of them. It put them in this not really a playlist, but it created its own page on the Facebook watch. And yeah, so now people can actually watch that on the watch system on Facebook. And so it was it was very, very amazing. So I can’t I couldn’t tell you exactly how I did it. All I know as went into look at the videos that I had, and it might have been in Facebook’s creator.
That’s what it is because Facebook has a system called creator.
Michael Stewart
Now, you know what we need to do? We need to schedule another show. Yeah, Facebook video strategies because we’re calling up the hour mark here. And I try to tell people that the half an hour show.
Armand Morin
Hey, let me just want just one more thing, right. I just want to share one thing in next time. Next time I come back I can talk to talk about this is because literally last week, Okay, last week. Well, two weeks ago, I had this idea for a video, and I created this what I would call a viral video. Okay, I want I’ve always wanted to do or make my attempt at a viral video and motivational video and I strung together a bunch of royalty free video scenes and did a voiceover on it and put some epic music to it. And I put it out there. And so again, a viral video is only as good as the number of people that see it. So I advertised it of course. So I spent I believe that no numbers were about 200, about roughly $190 I believe it was in videos and advertising. And I ended up having 168,000 views in 48 hours. Wow. So now Wait, but now again, I paid for only a third of those views. So that means all the other views that I got, were free, those viral views, right? Gosh, so then I, I want to teach my membership students, right, exactly what I did. So I told him everything that I did, and I explained it, you know, and I thought, and these are my thoughts what we should do. And during the class that I was teaching, I created another viral video. And all I did was, you know, created this video said things that we could do to change the world. And here’s like, 10, or 12, different things that I thought if you did this, you could, you know, kind of make a change. And I didn’t even this time, I didn’t even do a voiceover. I just put some nice music to it. And I just put each one each little words up on top of the screen. And it was a very short video, like two minutes long. And I promoted that one. And I did the exact same strategy, spent a little bit more this time because I retargeted all the people that watch the other video now. And so I again, did my normal promotion, retarget people, so I spent a little bit more money around almost $300 I believe it was, but this time, I believe my numbers at this particular point, are like 380,000 video views, I believe it is. But it was and that was by the way, in 48 hours.
Michael Stewart
You know, the reason that that? You know, I started doing this little live show, and I and I’m supposed to be semi retired here. So that’s why I was talking to I had Tom Antion as a guest. He is doing 12 shows a month commitment regular one out 12 hour shows a month. And and I only committed two shows a month because I don’t want to say I’m I won’t say lazy. I’m just saying that. You know, I’ve got so many things I want to do that I got an interest in that. I just don’t want to I don’t want to make a commitment. I think one of the biggest problems people think is they never make a commitment and stick to it.
Armand Morin
Yeah, I mean, so here’s my stats. Check this out.
Michael Stewart
Right? Can you share your screen?
Armand Morin
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m sure I can hear let’s uh, how do we do this? Okay, so let’s, uh oh, share screen. There we go. share screen. So, um, and so here’s the video here. You can see it’s 349 point 9000 views. We don’t 5,000.5 point 3000 likes on this one.
Michael Stewart
Now, we’re not seeing your screen if you’re trying to send us Oh, there you
Unknown Speaker
go. Here I can do it. Can now can you?
Michael Stewart
Now we can. Okay,
Armand Morin
so, so here’s the video right here. 340 point 9000 views. Five, a file that you can see, it’s literally a week ago. 5.3 thousand likes. And this is what I was talking about this Creator Studio. Uh huh.
We can actually go in.
And if we look at our insights, we can see you know, how much videos let’s just say on the month of this month. Now, 180 187 point 1000 viewed minutes. Now, I want to I want to I want to just show everyone what that actually means. Because it’s actually kind of funny, if you truly think about this. So. So if we look at the number of minutes, that’s 187,001, eight 7.1 I’m sorry. 187 point one a minute. So let’s go 1871 Geez, um, I can’t type 187100 right. All right. So that’s minutes. So we know that we have to divide that by 60 to get hours. Okay, so that’s 3118 hours, and then we divide that by 24 to give us the number of days, so we did 100 and almost 130 days worth of watch time in just this month alone.
Michael Stewart
What you know what you need, you need to come back and let’s really go in depth with this because I think revolutionary.
Armand Morin
Yeah, cuz here’s the, here’s the short version of this, Mike is that what I figured out was that this is you have to advertise. You have to advertise in order to get people to watch. So if I, if I’m creating a video on YouTube, yeah, I can SEO that the heck out of that video, but no one’s gonna see it right? And if no one’s looking for those keywords that I chose, no one’s still gonna see it. So and that’s great. And but if you have a following Yeah, that’s going to spread that way and they’ll like you and other people will like it. But what I learned is that what if you don’t have any of that? What if you don’t have people following you? What if you don’t have this? How can you make your video go viral? And how can you get 300,000, you know, you know, plus views, you know, my video, my website, this this month, this month alone, has had 1.4 million people view something on my website. I mean, on my I’m sorry, on my Facebook page. And those are videos might By the way, they weren’t my content or anything like that. Now, I did get some followers, but wasn’t a huge amount. But that the whole idea was that I create a viral video, in order to push it viral. I advertise it. And then by advertising it, other people will see it, other people will like it. And then I’ll do it. So whatever the number that I came up with is that whatever money I spend in advertising, I’m going to get two times what would be two thirds more views. So for example, if I had a million views, my paid advertising would have accounted for like 300,000 of that, the 700,000 of that would be four would have been my free viral views. And it’s worked out that on both campaigns that I’ve done so far. So and again, literally, this is brand new, when I say brand new, I’m talking about I just did this last week.
So this is like hot off the press type of stuff. That’s just really, really exciting. Because now, you know, you might, I did this on purpose to do like a very generic topic, like save the world and feel good about yourself. But now take that on a smaller scale. And maybe it’s about your topic, maybe you’re a coach, or maybe you’re an author, or maybe you’re an expert on whatever topic that it may be. That is where it all kind of comes together, where we don’t have maybe millions of views, but we can go viral in our own market our own niche. And that’s where I believe the power is. Well, you know, when we first met, we talked about the power of audio and video online, and it’ll get better and better. And the power of music online is why I’m in Nashville. Yeah. And and the reason I’m, you know, I’m doing these shows is I just want to make good content. I mean, I’m doing the television concept art and creating content that people are going to get value out of, and it’s brought to you by me, I’m the sponsor, and yeah, it’s work this is working. So this is the whole reason I mean, you know, this is the whole reason I’ve got this this setup was because I believe the exact same thing is that I believe that it is a television type concept that in my my, my bigger plan is to have X number of shows, right? Maybe one topic is going to be on marketing, maybe one topic is going to be on speaking maybe another one’s going to be on webinars, but have a certain number of shows where I only talk about that topic. And and then you know, we change the background accordingly to whatever show that we want to do. But it’s the same type of idea. And and I think that this concept with what you’re doing and treating it like a television show, but now imagine, just imagine this for a moment, though. Imagine if you spent four, you know, let’s say every show that you did, you paid nothing, not this not talking about major money, let’s just say $5 for the next three days after every show. Okay. $5, for video views over the next three days for every show doesn’t sound like a lot, and it’s not. But if you just did that alone, you would see the number of people that your show gets exposed to raise dramatically, because you will slowly find the people that are attracted to the show, and then they’ll naturally share that show for you. So just something small, like that is something that anyone can do and it doesn’t have to be a lot of money. You know, what it really opened my eyes was that I know this marketer in the way that they’ve been promoting their webinars and everything is through $5 ads. And I’m like, You got to be kidding me. And it was just amazing. They just ran $5 ads every time they were doing webinars and it just kind of kept building and building and building so so you can do a lot with $5 But every show that you do you have a specific advertising plan to expose it because the one thing that most people do is that they, they put out a show. And then they’re expecting the people that are following them to, to kind of extend it for them or for SEO rankings to kind of take over or over. Honestly, something magical to happen.
Michael Stewart
The magic is I want you to come back and let’s spend a whole show on Facebook video marketing strategies.
Armand Morin
Yeah, absolutely. Crazy strategy.
Michael Stewart
You tell you’re telling me this is something new, this was something I know that you’re going to, you probably know it inside out right now. But you’re going to probably know a whole lot more in the next month or so. Definitely. Please come back and be a guest on my show regularly because I’ll tell you something. I this is the biggest turnout I’ve had for live. So you you were Thank you, my son. But more importantly, um, there’s going to be a lot of people that you know, the binge, I call it the binge watching phenomenon. Pete. Oh, they can watch it later. And so, folks, if you don’t know Armand Morin, go to Arman more.com, you should become a part of his community. You should subscribe to everything he offers, you should attend his things, you should join his membership sites. All you got to remember is Armand morin.com. And Armin we can keep on going but we’re going to have to call it it’s time to call it quits. Because I think it’s it let’s let people absorb this and promise you’ll come back.
Armand Morin
I will definitely come back anytime you want me to.
Michael Stewart
All right, buddy. Well, you mean the world, folks don’t know how much you mean to me. But I’m telling you right now you’re just very special and dear to me. And your mom, who’s in the other room? Probably selling junk on eBay. But we’re gonna we’re gonna call it quits here and folks, subscribe to the channel. Subscribe to the podcast. Remember that? It’s if you want to get in touch with me. It’s Mike Stewart dot live has everything you need no fat. There’s my cell phone number. Here’s my cell phone. You can download it right now and I’ll answer it. And I want to work with folks that want to learn how to use the internet with audio and video. Thanks again. Armin. Have a great day and we’ll see you here on Mike Stewart dot live
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Tom Antion, My Mentor On Podcasting and More!
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Michael Stewart
Hello, everybody, welcome. Welcome. Welcome to Mike Stewart dot live. The online TV show that’s all about q&a and, and discussions about online marketing was especially focused on audio and video. And I am so excited today to have my mentor, the guy that I have to give credit to got me started, I’ll never forget. I don’t remember how many years ago it was, it’s probably been 17 or 18 years ago, I got in touch with this guy. And he got me started in more ways than one and we’ll probably talk about that throughout the show. So I’m gonna bring him on here in a second. But his name is Tom Antion. And what’s what’s so amazing about Tom, he’s one of the most giving knowledgeable people I’ve ever met in my life. And I remember the day he said, Mike, you need to get an email list together and I go, I don’t know what to do. He says put an ebook together. And I’ll send people over to it to sign up. And it was because of Tom I got my first 50 people on my email list, and I have never forgotten man, of course. I can sit here and probably take up the whole hour telling you all the great things that Tom’s done for me, but I’m not going to do that. More importantly, I’m going to bring on my mentor, my friend, the man himself. Here is Tom Antion.
Tom Antion
Hey, Mike, how you doing?
Michael Stewart
Oh, you know what, I’m just so tickled to having you here. And I’m so tickled to talk about some things that are Audio Video Marketing. I know one of the things that you’re doing is podcasting. And I’m going to throw up
Tom Antion
throw up, man. I’m going to start talking yet
Michael Stewart
Oh, always the comedian. Oh
Tom Antion
wow, slow I am.
Folks, listen, listen. Oh, no, he’s I don’t know where his mind is at. But it’s been more than 17 years since we’ve known each other so. So he was the one that got me doing quality audio. So I’m Not gonna talk about any quality audio today. He’s the one that got me to do it but 20 years ago, he said, Tom, you got to get a compressor limiter. Well, two years ago I got a compressor limiter there 18 years. He says Tommy, you got to get an interface for your condenser mic to go into your computer. Alright, so there it is. says you got to get phantom power Okay, there’s phantom power after 18 years. Can they gotta get a condenser mic that mic you guys crappy Okay, there it is. After
all that stuff. I’m just slow. That’s all.
Michael Stewart
No, no, no, I and the thing that you did for me that was so dumb about AI and whatever year it was, I’m sorry, my memory fails me. But you said I told you and I rattled off like an audio engineer. I said you need a compressor limiter. You need some sort of USB audio mixer. You need to be sure you have some EQ, you need to be sure you have You know, a software that will make mp3 and you said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, dumb it down my. That’s not all I was dumbing it down. And you said no, I tell you what, go give me what I need and ship it to me. I said, Okay, and he says And I’ll never forget this folks, this is how generous this guy is and it just floored me. I’d never heard of people doing CES tech a couple hundred dollars on the credit card bill for yourself. And I said well, why would you pay me to just help you? He said because what your information has value I’ll never forget he said that your don’t ever devalue your information. Enemy and to me, you know, I’m a guy who back in those days was happy to get $75 playing a game for four hours to make $200 just to go shop at the music store for a buddy was like, I’m never I don’t know if you remember this. I said Are there any more people out there like the guy there You know how many years ago it was? Tom Antion. You are You are an inspiration. And that’s why I am glad to have you here on my little streaming TV show that I’m trying to build some momentum. Obviously, if you can watch this over and over again, it’ll be archived for life at Mike Stewart dot live got a whole strategy on that. But you know, a few years ago, you called me and you said you’re going to get into podcasting. Which, you know, I have been a proponent of podcasting for a long, long time, because it’s an internet audio strategy,
Tom Antion
let’s say and I poo pooed it for a long time because now that doesn’t mean I poo pooed audio. I’ve got hundreds of audio products that are good because of you and what you taught me, but I was poopoo in podcasting because it appeared to me that nobody was making any money. It was all a big ego trip. But guess what, that has changed significantly and I’ll get into that then in a minute, but
Michael Stewart
I couldn’t agree more and I think one of the problems with podcasting and I want to hear your your spin on it is that most people feel like well, I got to do like radio I got to get advertisers advertisers supported. And and and the truth is, is there are some podcasters out there that have millions of listeners. But you the the advertiser the model like traditional radio that is build a big audience and sell advertising to advertisers. It just is almost impossible with a podcast in my opinion. But
Tom Antion
here’s the problem with that. First of all, and these figures are rough, but they’re pretty accurate. A sponsor and this isn’t a sponsor, like a big brand sponsor. We’re Pepsi sponsors. This is the sponsor as it applies to podcasting. The sponsors pay between $12 and $25 per thousand downloads per episode 25 is for the big kahuna is big well known that they’re begging to get on there for you start now, it’s your lucky if you get $12 per thousand downloads, but guess what? It’s hard to get 1000 downloads per episode. So you’re gonna go months and months and months with zero income. That’s just ridiculous. So the method I teach is you are your own sponsor. You are the sponsor for each episode. So my podcast, the first episode made money because in the podcast I talked about products that I have. Now, some of you might say, Well, I don’t have any products yet and don’t get dirty here. But if you got a mouth, you got a product. Okay. You could consult and coach for topics right off the bat on something that you know if you have enough expertise to do a podcast you got an enough expertise to coach on it. So be your own sponsor is my take on it. So you can start making money right off the bat. If you do happen to hit a Grand Slam and start getting millions of downloads, then you could tap in as an extra 30 seconds, you get an extra eight or hundred or thousand dollars. Take it all right, but that ain’t gonna happen in the beginning until you really build up to enormous numbers of listeners. But you don’t have to do that if you’re your own sponsor for each episode.
Michael Stewart
All right, well, let me ask you some things about your podcast because because that was a revelation that I you know, I love podcasting because it was the use of a microphone. It was the use of music. It is radio, it is a form of on demand radio, but the radio model was broadcasting this is narrow casting. So what have been the things you’ve done, I remember when you said I’m going to create the screw the commute podcast at screw the commute.com you can You’re everywhere podcasts are the podcasts are now in Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google podcasts. And And nowadays, I don’t know, I’m sure you saw it. Amazon, Alexa, audible and amazon music are adding all podcasts 55 million new potential listeners worldwide. So the reach is there, the content has got to be, this is why I’m doing this today. You need great content, you need to consistently make great content. So tell me, I remember the day you said I’m going to start a podcast. I said, Well, good for you. And you’re going to you’re gonna laugh at my mic. I’m going to buy a good microphone and a compressor and all those things you told me years ago, I’m getting them and I’m gonna I’m gonna make a high quality high. And I’m going to be consistent now you’re tell me all the episodes you’ve done. And what’s been some of the results. What is the dedication, you know, it’s not the technical, it’s the dedication that you’ve made to a commitment to never stop doing it even when no one was listening.
Tom Antion
Yeah. All right. So a couple things. First of all, the figures on like Amazon’s echo that you just held up there is over 100 million of those now. So and there’s another 55 million Google assistance in people’s homes. These are some of the decisions of why I started the podcast. The other really big one is that new cars are being set up. So you can just talk to the dashboard and say play screw the commute podcast and it starts playing out of your dashboard. So it’s the listenership has exceeded XM Radio which you have to pay for. And people are just going crazy listening to the podcast. So that was one of the reasons why I started. And then the name of the podcast I think, is pretty important. Mine is very clear. It’s not cutesy. Where because there’s so many people starting podcasts, they can’t, you know, you don’t want to be slumped over because they couldn’t tell what it was about. They can go look at 300 other ones. So screw the commute is pretty clear. Basically In fact, I never had a job and it’s entrepreneurial. So get out of you know, get out of your job and get a start a business kind of thing. So that’s the naming is important of it. But from the results, see, you know, I have an enormous product mix, I have anything from $17 up to $58,000 of products and services that I sell. So in my school, one person joined my school and they were military. So they got a 50% scholarship that was 90 $500 just for one person. So I could go for months and months and have nobody buy anything that’s still be ahead that most most podcasters but it’s not that way pretty much every episode brings in some kind of sales, and then occasionally a really big sale and my mentor program or my school. So that’s why I just hard for people to be their own sponsor and and learn product. Creation of digital product creation is so low risk because it’s 97% profit. So you’re kind of crazy not to get your stuff into digital formats where people can buy them and download them instantly money goes into your checking account. And but it’s stimulated, the markets are stimulated through the podcast. So you have young people are listening to podcasts, male and female. You got middle aged people listening, you got elderly people, listen this, are you reaching a market way bigger than you probably have in the past?
Michael Stewart
Well, you know, this is where I think a lot of people have got to be honest with themselves. And I and a lot of people I work with, I say you’ve got to have I call a digital backhand. On other words, one of the things that you’ve always taught me You taught me and I jumped back in was digital. I could take off a few electrons.
Well, what a back end to me was a litany of things that make money online. And, and most people, you know, the only thing they have if they’re lucky, maybe is a book, you know, and a book to me has always been such a low ticket item, you got to sell a lot of books to make any significant money. But But when you have information products, and affiliate products, I mean one of my most profit generating things, and in fact, I’m gonna throw the domain name up here and I’ll tell you about it. I had I sell domains and hosting at domains, you control.com and basically, I’m just a representative for GoDaddy, but we’ve we’ve sold thousands of domains have over 11 I think about 1020 customers in there. And that’s just residual income. And because a lot of my courses require people to set up we’re either WordPress or a hosting account. So you know, everything feeds everything else, but the lead generator for me and all my businesses, is this content marketing. podcasting is a word For what Gary Vaynerchuk I don’t know if you like or follow Gary, but I think he’s pretty, pretty smart. He says, you need pillar content and then you break that pillar content into micro content and be everywhere. And you just it’s it’s not something that happens instantly. But if you you build this big audience, and you don’t have a back end of things to sell them like you do, I mean, you’ve got probably 100 things to my one but I’m still making a wonderful comfortable residual income off of what I have. And I meet with people I go, what do you what are you selling? I don’t know. Well, I don’t know. Not a good answer. Right. So so the podcast is generating leads for all the things you sales what I’m hearing, right, exactly, exactly. And
Tom Antion
and some of the things are even giveaways. Like for instance, you talk about ebooks. I wrote an ebook in four hours at on a layover at McCarran airport in Las Vegas. I vividly remember it. It’s brought in 3.6 million dollars so far. And it’s a free giveaway. And people say, Oh, that sounds like BS. Well, let me explain to you what what this is. And when Mike talked about a book being you have to sell a lot of books. Well, a book should is the is the biggest hassle, least profitable thing you’ll ever do in your life. But a book should always lead to something else that is much higher profit. So if somebody reads this book, they learn how to do something, but they can’t do it unless they purchased the tool that’s in the book. And I get a $600 a year commission, and some of them have had it 1516 years, say so that’s how the 3.6 million and it still keeps coming in anywhere from six to $15,000 a month from that for our investment. So yeah, my whole thing is work get paid pay, pay, pay pay.
Michael Stewart
Well, where do you get that book? Let’s let’s give that book away to my list.
Tom Antion
You just email me at orders at Antion calm and I’ll send you a copy.
Michael Stewart
Let me roll that up on the screen
Tom Antion
orders. I’m pretty accessible folks.
Michael Stewart
That the E book on shopping carts,
Tom Antion
yes on shopping carts, so it teaches you all the things you should know about a shopping cart and a checklist. And I know I’m pushing my shopping cart, but it gives you a checklist to see what you should have in a shopping cart. Because when I first started Mike in 1994, it was 2000 bucks for a shopping cart. It would if if it actually took the order, we’d have an office party. It was just crazy. And then I bought an affiliate module 1100 dollars from another company to mess with it so I could have an affiliate program. It never worked and each company blamed the other one that why wouldn’t work so so I had 32 dollars 30 $100 tied up inside there wouldn’t even work nowadays. Your shopping is the lifeblood of my whole system. It’s it’s selling things right now while I’m talking to you, and autoresponders and all that stuff. We could do that on another episode. I mean, we,
Michael Stewart
you, you are such a library of marketing information. So let’s get back. Let’s get back to podcasting. Your podcasting is how often do you do your podcast?
Tom Antion
I have three a week. So we’re around Episode 340. Right now
Michael Stewart
you’re doing 12 shows a month 12
Tom Antion
shows a month. Usually a Monday is what you know, I don’t do anything half baked. If I tell you how to do it, I do it. And by the way, I’ve got some killer killer killer marketing tips for people on their podcast. In fact, Mike and and everybody knows you probably trust you greatly that I’m going to tell you something that the Last thing I say today is going to be one of the best marketing tips I’ve ever given out in my 44 years of business 26 on the internet it’s gonna blow people away and you know me I don’t hype stuff and then not come through no standby for that one but but yeah, I got tons of good marketing says But yeah, I do 12 episodes usually a Monday is an in depth training session on something that’s either made me a lot of money or save me a lot of money. And then Wednesdays and Fridays are normally interviews of other great entrepreneurs and you’ve been on twice and you’re gonna be on again next month. So So telling all the new stuff you’ve been doing so so that’s been I only missed one week in in the past since June of 2018. Where I was just swamped with moving my school. So I said instead of half baked now i’m gonna i’m going to you know, just take a week hiatus week off but, but anyway, it’s been continuous since then.
Michael Stewart
Well, so So here’s what I’m hearing. You made a commitment to three shows a week. The first week, you probably were just getting a ripple, you had an email list you could send and get people to, but it’s the consistency and the you know, and one of the things that people don’t think about, but it’s I call it the Netflix phenomenon. People make discover your podcast today. And they can binge listen 300 other amazing episodes,
Tom Antion
a lot of them go back to number one and start and go go straight forward. But you know what, I when I first started my I plan, here’s what’s my plan. And then here’s what actually happened. I planned on getting 20 episodes done are in the can before I launched, and I ended up with 50. So I did 50 episodes before I launched and then people said, Well, why in the heck would you do that? Well, here’s the reason. One of the best ways to market your podcast is to Be on other people’s podcast. Right? So because you know the people on the podcast listening to you know how to listen to podcasts and they like podcasts. So it’s a great way to get on. So I wanted with those 50 in the can, it gave me four months, where I could not have to worry about recording the darn thing. And I could totally concentrate on being on other people’s podcasts. And that’s what besides my email list, that’s what kicked off a lot of my early subscribers was being on other people. And today I got another tip for you. Oh, man, on how to get you’ve heard of a podcast agency, right where people pay them to get them booked on podcast.
Michael Stewart
Yeah, right.
Tom Antion
So I have a method for your listeners to get that service for free. You want to hear it?
Michael Stewart
Yeah. You better
Tom Antion
Alright. So as a podcast, producer, these agencies take you out and start pitching their clients to you, their clients have paid them a load of money to get them on podcast, right? That’s the way it works. Right? So I started, I have a little thing I cut and paste as soon as they pitch me somebody, a new agency, I send them this email back that says, We’re currently only accepting reciprocal appearances. So if one of your clients has a podcast, and it makes sense for me to be on it, we’ll make a deal and that person can be on my podcast and I get to be on their podcast. Right? That agency is now working for me for free.
Unknown Speaker
I love
Tom Antion
it. See that? So I’ve been doing that mostly lately is as soon as they pitch me, I pitch I say, Okay, here’s my credentials. If we trade that’s great. And so they go out and hustle to get me on for free.
Michael Stewart
Well, I want to recap here and then we’re going to have a word from my sponsor. Okay, but you got good equipment. That was one of the things you did. Yep. You made a dedication to do six times more shows a month and I’m and and that’s my choice. But the thing is consistency is the message there. And if Tom, who is a busy entrepreneur, he’s not a guy just sitting around twiddling his thumbs going, Oh, I got nothing to do, or do and he can shake a stick at. But he, you know, like he said, when he goes in, he goes all in. So he made a commitment to X amount of shows a month. That’s another thing people do. I’ve seen people say I want a podcast. They do two shows. And they get the hit wall and they stop. And then they say, well, it didn’t work. Yeah. You know, you were 50 shows in before if you knew anything works, right. So there’s a lesson there. So good equipment, good content. You needed somebody to get you a theme interest. took his keyboard right here and and wrote you some music, which I think you’re still running you should play the into when you get a chance to play the
Tom Antion
opening to one of my episodes. I have to
Michael Stewart
hook up all this music so we’ll have a whole music jingle search term live show and I’ll have you on it
Tom Antion
was just go to the web and play went off my website
Michael Stewart
and stream yard I should have uploaded the theme and I don’t know if I’ve got it but you want to hear the theme go to screw the commute.com go to Apple. You need to subscribe to Tom’s podcast. I’m telling you. It is a what’s that big place in Washington. In fact, fact that’s a great picture to show here. We need to show some of these pictures and we need to
Tom Antion
and that’s the last tip I show you got me invited to the White House and it’s all podcast related.
Michael Stewart
Well I want to hear that story. But but anyway Let me keep the recap going here. You consistent and now you don’t regret doing it at all. Do you
Tom Antion
know hell? No, no. When episodes making money, you know, it makes you want to do more.
Michael Stewart
Well, you know, that’s one of the things about Nashville, I have been trying to get the music community here in Nashville. That’s one of the reason I moved to Nashville. And I mean, I’ve actually had music people. So just what is a podcast? And the next objection was, well, why would I do it? And then we don’t have time. You know, you made the time. That’s the lesson here. Here’s a busy, successful, multi millionaire entrepreneur friend of mine, who I respect and trust completely, and he said, Okay, I get it. I see the path. And I’m consistent and that’s the lesson you folks need to really pay attention about. You know, if Tom Antion made this a priority, you don’t have to learn all the nuts and bolts. Have it the nuts and bolts of making this happen. That’s the easy part. The hard part is fitment and all the things that you did so we’ll be back here. We’ve got some images here that I want you to give us some information. And then if you can stay long enough, um, we I want you to the tips for you So, okay, and I got some people here some questions, and I and Tom This is let’s let’s give a shout out here. This is Wayne moss. Hey, Wayne. Wayne, let me chase him he’s a Nashville hero to me. This is the guy that played guitar on more hits. If you Google this guy you’re gonna be blown away he played lead guitar on pretty woman and oh my god. I mean this this guy is my buddy and he’s a sweetheart. And hopefully he’s feeling better. He’s had a little little bit of unweathered things going on. But when you comment let us know you’re doing okay but thanks Wayne for you know you got a you’re a legend in internet marketing Wayne. Deal. He’s one of the national played on Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan played guitar. So anyway, so nice to have you here. And oh, hey, there’s somebody in the other room.
Tom Antion
I can hear you. Okay, so
Michael Stewart
here’s a word from our sponsor. We’ll be right back, Tom. So good to have you on the show today. This is just, I don’t want you to go golly, this is just too much fun anywhere. I hope you can get that jingle out of your hand. I
Tom Antion
can’t. It’s stuck in there right now.
Michael Stewart
Do you want to talk about some of these pictures? You got some other things you want to talk about first?
Tom Antion
Yes. So yes, I want to I got some hardcore tips for people more than what we’ve talked about now. So show the podcast app.
Yeah, no, that’s not the one.
That’s the one. Yeah. So
that app would have cost me if I just developed it from scratch anywhere from two to $5,000. This is my podcast app. Now, I know Mike kinda likes blueberry as a hosting service now right Mike?
Michael Stewart
Now I use the blueberry plugin. with Amazon s3, there’s a way. Okay. Are you using libsyn
Tom Antion
Lipson? And Lipson is one of the oldest biggest, and it’s so cost effective. I mean, for 12 episodes a month, I only pay 20 bucks a month for his high quality very, you know, and it distributes it to all the other major places, you know that you can hear podcasts. But anyway, they have a service where for $99 a year, they created this podcast app for me. All I had to do was provide the graphics. So I’m sure it’s a it’s a boilerplate podcast app, but nobody knows because your graphics would look different than mine. So I have this killer podcast app. You can get it at screw the commute comm slash app and we have instructions on how to use it and everything. And you know, like if somebody calls you on the phone It’ll pause your podcast and then when the phone call hangs up, it’ll start right back up where it was and you can save your favorite episodes and it really brands you as being serious. And now what I have paid two to 5000 bucks to do it Nope. But for like 10 bucks a month you’d be crazy not to brand yourself and have this you know something this high quality and you can start with lips and I think as little as $5 a month or so for podcast hosting so so that’s that’s what I wanted to talk about a podcast app. And and your experience has been that having the podcast app is is helped you build more audience build more audience and make them more loyal and it’s, you know, the the episodes are shoved to them. I mean, there’s probably other ways that they could get to do it but but now they’re kind of tied to me with you know, there’s right on their phone every day is the screw the commute podcast. Yeah.
Michael Stewart
Well, I’m telling you right now I’m going to investigate a way to implement that with mine. Because at the time when I was teaching people to put up podcasts, I mean, you know, they were lucky that they would, you know, get a URL a domain name, right? You know, but like I said, I these I’m learning here too. So you want to show the other
Tom Antion
image here, let’s say so yeah, show the one with the speakpipe. Yeah, so this is just a little portion of the homepage of screw the commute calm. And at the bottom, you see a little thing I’ve got an expanded there with those you know, too big. It says send voicemail. This is a program called our widget called speak, pipe, SP aka p IP. And it allows people and I invite anybody listening to click on it and just send me a voice message. And I get an email that says, hey, you got a voicemail on your website. And then I can click my cell phone and send you one back. Say Hey, thanks for checking in. The screw the community Yeah, you can you can do this and the other I can answer your question all right there they have a free version. So this is totally free. So you know, you know, it’s just crazy not to do it. And it’s cool. And you know they have paid versions that give longer messages and so forth and then what you can use this for on your podcast, besides just having it on your website, it’s great. But what you can use it for on your podcast is to request that people that like your podcast to leave a testimonial on your voicemail and also they can give themselves a shout out with their website and everything. And then you can edit that into your podcast as social proof and a voice testimonial. So this is perfect for podcasters and everybody else
Michael Stewart
You know, I told you you don’t have to come back.
Tom Antion
We get into the good ones yet. We in a hurry.
Michael Stewart
You know, I tried to keep this a half an hour show, but I’m not going to do that today. We still got a good amount of people here live and I want you to use your time.
Tom Antion
No, I this is you know me I give more than I bargained for. So let me get into some of the other tips I want to tell people about. One is I already told you about being your own sponsor. Next thing is, is if you’re selling any kind of products, giving a shout out on your podcast can be used as a bonus to help sell your main product. So I might say, among the middle of my podcast, hey, I want to give a shout out to my buddy Mike Stewart. He’s responsible for teaching me all this great audio stuff. He’s the internet audio guy. You gotta check his stuff out. Hey, if you heard my opening, he’s the one that did the music for my opening. You got to check Mike out at the Internet audio guy calm So there’s that’s a shout out, okay. And so that can be used as a bonus for other products that you’re selling because it’s got great value to put you in front of thousands of people. So that’s another great, great tip to use when you’re doing podcasts. Okay, any questions on that one?
Michael Stewart
Well, you know, we’re gonna put up here in the comments. We’re getting people making. In fact, I want you to see guesses here. One of your buddies.
Tom Antion
You got a mouth you got a product.
Michael Stewart
This is a good coaching client of mine have
Tom Antion
a brilliant read him around. Yeah,
Michael Stewart
yeah, he’s, he I met him at NSA probably 25 years ago, is still doing coaching with me and he is a brilliant marketer and he’s just a PhD of speaking. I mean, it’s so he’s here. And then we get I’m putting comments but I want people. Here’s Ian, he said He just showing you that we got people here live this is this is one of my marketing buddies and he’s also a bug fella bug marketer I love this Tom that jingle will be with me till next week’s show this is my sweetheart coaching client out in Sedona Arizona yeah and and and she has a podcast and she is brilliant you got to you got to check her first name no roof
Tom Antion
the roof I almost bought there’s a geodesic or not a geodesic there’s a concrete dome on the way into Sedona I almost bought that as a place to live I’m sure she knows it’s a it’s like a tourist attraction on it.
Michael Stewart
So if people know this is a chance you know Tom’s charges a lot of money. So if you if you got a question, don’t be bashful, answer a question. Otherwise, Tom’s got plenty information. In fact, to quote this other gentleman up here, I like what he said, Tom. He said, this is William Singleton. But William here has a lot of always worth the listen. Well, you better believe it. You better appreciate it. All right.
Tom Antion
So what do you want to talk about? So the next thing, a tip for podcasting is to highlight certain groups for maybe a week or a month like right now as I’m talking to you. It’s vetra pinares month on screw the commute podcast. So everybody I interview is a veteran because we love our veterans. We couldn’t be doing what we do now if they hadn’t been keeping us safe. And there’s too many idiots out there ragging on him. So it’s veteran runners month so that so besides me loving my veterans. They will take their recording and put it out and their social media and spread the word to Marcus that I would have never reached in a million years. say so. highlight certain groups each week or every month or you know once in a while and that will really expand your market to lots of other places. Okay. Now, most of the people at my level make the bulk of their money with email. So anything you can do to build your list is a good thing. I mean, people could hear you on Apple podcast but you don’t have their emails no way to reach them again. So you want to give things away and I’m going to give something away to your crowd right now. It’s my automation ebook we sell it for 27 bucks, but you get it free for listening to Mikey live and you go to screw the commute comm slash automate free screw the commute.com slash automate free and just one of the tips in this ebook saved me seven and a half million keystrokes. No kidding we figured it out ruff ruff did out and It allows me to handle up to 150,000 subscribers and 40,000 customers without pulling my hair out. And so you’re crazy if you don’t implement this stuff in this book so there’s a thing but you’re gonna go opt in to get it say so this is a list building device. Now another list building device is the transcriptions and show notes. You can require an opt in for people to get the transcription of your podcast so that’s a list building device to so so there’s a bunch of tips so you’re ready for my big finale tip.
Michael Stewart
I can hear it I am.
Tom Antion
Come on bring up the picture of the White House up there again.
Michael Stewart
Okay. Your wish is my command, sir.
Tom Antion
This tip got me invited to the White House to speak to the office of the second lady whose platform is military spouse employment. See I live in the Norfolk, Virginia in your area of Virginia Beach, and all the military spouses around here have to take lousy jobs because everybody knows they’re going to move. Yeah, you can get rid of the picture now. And so then they move to a new station, and then they got to take another crappy jobs. So this my school is really great. Because it’s portable. In fact, we’re covered by the Department of Defense, to give military spouse scholarships so that they don’t have to just suffer with pitiful jobs all the time. Alright, so that’s kind of the setup here. So I wanted to get in with more military spouses. And in the in the past,
I would have taught you to go to a Facebook group. Hey, how you doing very nice to see you. I would have taught you this is what I would would have taught you in the past and then I’m going to give you the modern method that’s gonna blow you away. So in the past, I’d have said you find a Facebook group that you want to, I don’t want to be mean and say infiltrate, but you want to get in there and get your message across. Well, you can’t go in there and just start advertising yourself, they’ll kick you out really fast, say, so you have to go in there. Get known make nice comments and, and over time people start maybe going and checking out your profile to see what you have. Well, this is a long, drawn out process that maybe they would come maybe get some business but you’d spend months doing this. All right. All right, wipe that off the plate like that out of here. If you have a podcast, you go to the admin of the group and sometimes there’s multiple admins, and you interview them on your podcast. Guess what they’re going to do with that interview? Once it’s done, they’re gonna share it. Where are they going to share it you The girl in the group that you want to get into. So you just went to the top of the list, like, oh, like that. So let me tell you what this meant for me. I don’t know if this is making too much noise. So, I did this with this veteran printers group, I interviewed the admin. He’s a Bronze Star recipients, we hit it off like crazy. We’re in the guns, self defense, and we just hit it off. So then from that, he put it in his group, and then he invited me to do a series of events for his group. He even made me an admin of this veterans group, so we have to deal with it. I do this series of events. I don’t charge him anything because I love our veterans and I just do it for free. Well, I met a military spouse, military spouse of the year at Fort Bragg. Also, she is a marine veteran. So she’s both a veteran and military. spouse, we hit it off. I had her on the podcast, she had a direct connection to the White House, the second lady’s office and got me invited there. So she took me up there and walk me right into the White House to talk to the second lady. And also, I spoke at a big military conference in DC, all within one month of interviewing the admin of that group. That’s your marketing tip that should if you know if you’re thinking person should blow you away.
Michael Stewart
Okay, I got a quick question. All right. Facebook, how did you What did you do to find that group to know you hit the search button for whatever your topic is? You just searched Facebook groups for something and you felt that
Tom Antion
connection when you do when you do a search in Facebook? You’ll get a list of stuff and if it says like that somebody is in Individual business page if it says join, that’s a group. Ryan, I just looked for groups and I said, look at that 14,000 military entrepreneurs, so not only does entrepreneur fit me, they all got, you know, spouses, many of them military spouses. And so that’s, I just hit that one and, and bam, and then I interviewed the other admin, and they promote me and put it on their social media. So that tip is one of the best ways to to reach enormous numbers of people with a warm introduction. And so that got me invited to the White House.
Michael Stewart
Well, you know, that’s kind of what I call virtual networking. Probably the most important thing for me building my business over the years is is you just can’t be a secret in your room. You have to, you have to be proactively, you can do things like to call out your old buddy, Tom Antion, and getting to be on your TV Show. Today I can do what you did with a drink. You didn’t know these people in this Facebook group. You befriended them you had you found some common ground, and you didn’t. I don’t know if you had an expectation you just knew that I just
Tom Antion
knew I could do a lot. Well, first of all, if I never made a nickel, I owe these people you owe him everybody owes them for what they sacrifice. If you saw some of the stories I’m here and adventure printers month of what they went through, and what they’re suffering with when they come home. I mean, you should live in gratitude that they’re out there sacrifice in their life, so you can have a nice life. So
Michael Stewart
I thank you for your service on many a time.
Tom Antion
Yeah, absolutely. And I even found out that sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I was asking this lady she says, Don’t expect everybody to hug you when you say that because it memories, some of it Yeah, but she said do it. But don’t expect the some of them just it’s hard for the expectations. exam. So I went and did it with no expectations at all other than, hey, I’m paying back for my ability to sit here safely. I mean, so far nobody’s writing outside yet, but I’m watching for. But, but yeah, so but anyway great things can happen to it and then you can replicate it group after group after group and another spin off of that is I asked like I did did an insurance podcast one time on business insurance so I went to major insurance groups. This is another good sidebar tip. I guess I lied about being my last word here, but, but this is another great one. So I used my speakpipe and I said, Hey, I went to the admin of a big Insurance Group. I said, Hey, I need a comment for my podcast on business insurance and you can promote yourself and your website and everything. And so I got two major insurance. Exactly. Give leaders of these groups to leave business tips on my podcast. Well guess who guess where those podcasts ended up on those groups in their Facebook groups. And they didn’t even do a whole episode. They just left like a three minute con comment with a tip on business insurance promoting themselves and then they put it in their group.
Michael Stewart
Tom, you’ve been all you’re just here the Energizer Bunny. That’s what you are. You know, my good friend here. Bill laughed and had to say this, this is what this is his comment. You can take that testimonial what an info pack show I taking careful notes and I will listen again with pannon and
Tom Antion
Good, good,
Michael Stewart
valuable folks. Go to antion.com see what this man has created. See how you can get get in his world because you know if you want to screw the commute, if you want Business. This is the guy who kick started me when I’m going, you know, I’m just a musician. I’m a guitar player, keyboard player. And and I thought I was doing good if I can make 50 bucks a night. And he taught me so much so we come back and do some more with me.
Tom Antion
Yeah, I got I got I’m just getting warmed up, man. I mean, jeez, yeah, let’s roll.
Michael Stewart
You know, I folks, do you have any burning questions? Yeah. Because I like to respect people’s time. This is just a service to my community. And I’m using the model of television. It’s brought to you by dot live secrets calm. It’s brought to you by Antion calm. The way we’re able to continue doing this is when you learn what we have. And you see that there’s a fit, then you know act upon it. But you know, givers get his thing I’ve heard for you. You No we give and when you give you receive and more importantly you need to you know you need to take action you know you can’t you can I used to we used to call it shelf help you know people wouldn’t shelf help they put it on the shelf and never you if you know the tools are there and the mentors are there and the teacher will appear when you’re ready, but you’ve got to make a commitment. And that’s why I want to keep doing these live shows to build this will live on youtube and facebook forever. It’ll live at Mike Stewart dot live forever. It’ll be distributed to all the podcast channels. So I want people that if you don’t know Tom Antion hopefully you will go check him out@antioch.com how he has been your email address and your
Tom Antion
yeah just use screw the commute that’ll lead him to everything. Yes. Now
Michael Stewart
both of them you know the screwed me so newer Antion calm A and T IO n has been around since I met you so yeah, that
Tom Antion
was 94 when I started Yeah. Oh my goodness.
Michael Stewart
I guess people don’t have any burning questions. I guess they’re just so busy writing things down. Oh, you have any any closing comments before we close?
Tom Antion
Yeah, I just, I just, you know, I live and breathe this. I’m a fanatic at this. And you know you you get a lot of tips if you’ve been doing this day and night for seven days a week for 20 What is it 26 years online, not counting those in business before that. So. So it’s a great lifestyle business. I do even talk about my school where it would be a great legacy gift for your kids or grandchildren. I really get sick of these people spending a fortune on four year colleges and the kids are learning how to protest and they get out there work, you know, competing for jobs at Starbucks so so we have a school that puts these hard school hard core skills into practice that every business needs so, so we have anybody who wants to talk about it for their kids or grandchildren, nephews or nieces get in touch with me or if you have any questions on anything that I’m qualified, I’ll be happy to do it. As a friend of mine, that’s for sure.
Michael Stewart
Well, Tom, I am definitely going to have you back. I think people really enjoyed the show today. So this is a Tom Antion from screw the commute.com and antion.com. I’m Mike Stewart and I you you hopefully are at Mike Stewart dot live. There is my cell phone 770-826-3662 I do answer my phone. And if you are serious about doing things on the internet, especially when it comes to audio and video marketing, I hope you’ll reach out to me I hope you reach out to Tom. What an amazing show. I’m gonna go back and watch this show again today. This was amazing. So into for two weeks, four days, the second Monday, first, second Monday and fourth Monday of the month is when I do Mike Stewart dot live. And we’ll have another guest in two weeks. So thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
YouTube Marketing With Ray Lane the Video Guy
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Michael Stewart
Hello, hello everybody it’s Mike Stewart here at Mike Stewart dot live. I am so happy to be here. I’m really excited about today’s show. I’m going to tell you I have been calling myself the video guy since 1998. In fact, I bought the domain name internet video guy.com back then, by one of my mentors, a guy named Alex Mendoza and said, Mike, you’re the audio guy and I thought well, I’ll buy the video guy maybe maybe someday video being online thing. Well, you know, video is here video is here to stay. Well, unbeknownst to me, there was a guy in America named Ray lane, who was also a A video guy, a great one, by the way, he’s a colleague, he and I have done a lot of business over the years. I trust Ray. And you know, I’ll tell you what he knows better than me. He knows YouTube better than me. You know, a lot of the things I’ve learned about YouTube, I’ve learned from Ray, and I just can’t give him a higher recommendation. So rather than me rambling about, you know what I know I’m going to bring on an expert and I’m going to grill him because I need to know these things, just like you need to know. So welcome to the virtual stage, my good friend, Ray lane, the video guy.
Ray Lane
All right now that is an introduction. And you know, it’s funny you you mentioned Alex, I haven’t I haven’t heard of or talked to Alex in a long time, but I used to do a lot of stuff with him as well. We used to, I used to produce his videos where he would sell his his products where he would, he was kind of the the guy that talked about, Hey, you got to take and reproduce everything that you have. If you got videos, turn it into audios, turn it into books, turn it into courses, get it all out there. Good to hear that name haven’t really said haven’t heard a lot from Alex lately. So, hope he’s doing well.
Michael Stewart
You know, Now see, I didn’t know that about you, brother. I knew I met you through the jvzoo world. Yep. And then of course, we went to Derral Eve’s event together, which Darryl is, is a monster when it comes to YouTube. I mean, he, his video channel is just so full of great stuff. It’s like I said here, and I’m overwhelmed at my age. But I didn’t know you knew Alex. I mean, the quick story for those that don’t know. Um, I was on a recording studio for 20 years in Atlanta, and in 98, I got rid of my studio 99 and I started building websites I built my company’s called sound pages, audio video websites back in 99. It was very primitive back then. And I met Alex through the internet. And I said, Why don’t you guys make audio buttons on your websites. Cuz I said audio streams with flash. And I use it with all my local business customers we used to play I used to call it I had a website called sound testimonials.com where I would produce audio buttons for my local business clients. And Alex said, you need to go to the seminar called the system seminar. Come as my guest, and I’ll never forget, Alex said, you know, you’re the internet audio guy. He says you need to go buy that domain name. And I’ll never forget, it was September 11 2001. I bought internet audio guy and I bought internet video guy, not knowing what I would do with it really hadn’t done a whole lot with it. But I got known as the audio guy and I tried to be known as a video guy and I know enough video to be dangerous but but I’m an audio engineer here. In fact, I’ll give people a little quick tour. I am doing more and more music now that I’m in here in Nashville. This is my new studio setup, which now basically that’s What recording studios, they’re all virtual, crazy. But Ray, I just I want to talk to you about YouTube. And what’s new. And and I’ll tell you, there’s two things that I got to do for me personally. So I want to hear what you have to say is number one, two people forget that. YouTube is a search engine. And people are constantly let me turn this off here because it’s gonna cause a problem. Yeah, there you go. Um, YouTube is a search engine, and you can get a tremendous amount of traffic, tremendous mal relationships. And it is a huge part of content marketing. So what is new things that we need to be aware about with YouTube today? And then, of course, you know, the two biggest things how do you build your YouTube channel up? I’m not so much interested in the making money from the advertising chair. I know a lot of YouTubers love making money from the ads that Google Shares revenue. I’m more interested in about building relationships but talk about it all what’s new, what do we pay attention to is, is video people. Yeah and
Ray Lane
and and I’m in the same boat with you by the way, I don’t really mess with, you know, YouTube paying me one penny for every thousand views or anything like that it’s just in the industry that I’m in, there’s not enough people that would care enough to ever make me any money doing that. So for me, it is much more about the traffic, it is much more about getting people to see products to learn about products and to purchase products that we offer through YouTube. And of course, we do a lot of YouTube with with other businesses, local businesses, most especially. And the biggest thing to me, and this is not a new thing. This is actually an old thing. But it’s something that everybody has to pay attention to. And that is just like you said, it’s a search engine, just like Google is just like, you know, iTunes is a search engine, just like Amazon is a search engine. This is one of the biggest search engines in the world and you need to be able to be to create content that can be found. And I see so many people that there, they do web marketing. And they’ll spend a ton of time doing SEO on their websites and making sure that they’ve got backlinks, and they’ve got the headlines and they get the keywords and they go, and then they’ll go, and they’ll use video and they’ll just throw a video up there. And it’ll say, you know, migrate video dot 01. And why are you wasting all that time? You know, you if you know how to do SEO on your website, why aren’t you doing that with your videos, you know, videos need to be treated just like you would have website, you need a good title. You need good content in the in the text area, you need to start backlinking to it you need to do all the things that you would do to a website to that YouTube video. Because not only are you going to be able to rank it in youtube so that people find it when they search there. But you get the opportunity to rank in the biggest search engines in the world, you know, especially Google and And of course, Bing is out there and some of the other ones. But if you can rank on both YouTube and Google, the traffic is going to be huge. And no matter how great your website is, you’re probably not going to have your website show up when people search on YouTube. just just just guessing that that’s not going to happen. But you can have your stuff show up on both if you do YouTube videos, and you do them properly, and you SEO them. And you can get a lot of traffic from that. And it’s not always even about the video itself. You know, this is one thing that that people need to think about here is we’ve we’ve used YouTube videos as a way to rank on Google, where half the time people don’t even watch the video. You know, it shows up on page one of Google they see who it is, they see the phone number and they call right then in there, they don’t even watch the video and they and they give a phone call. So you’ve got a lot of opportunity. Now that doesn’t mean you know, you just throw garbage up on YouTube so it shows up on Google but you can have great Rate content, and you can have it show up on you on YouTube. And you can have it show up on Google. And even if people don’t watch the video, you have an opportunity for them to call you on the phone to click to your website, etc, and get some of that traffic. And to me, that’s the biggest part of YouTube is getting that traffic to know you, to like you to trust you so that they will come back, they’ll purchase your products, or they’ll join your courses, or they’ll listen to your podcast or whatever it is that you want them to do. But it all starts with making sure that you’re doing your SEO work on your videos, just like you would with a website.
Michael Stewart
Well, you know, I’m guilty of exactly what you’re talking about on neglect. I mean, I know how I knew how to make video content. I knew, you know, the basic structure of trying to build you know, it’s all about building relationships. But, you know, let’s, let’s review what you said here. really pay attention to titling the setup of your YouTube channel. I’d like you to talk a little bit about that. Yeah, see so many business YouTube channels of marketers or local businesses, whatever. And, you know, there’s no header graphic, there’s no, they haven’t gone through the steps, you know, kind of give us a little checklist of what we need to do to get that channel right. But you like you said, the description says another video. I mean, that’s crazy, right? successful people have multiple what I call backlinks to things that make them money. So you know, every time you put up another piece of content in YouTube is an opportunity to get links to the things that make you money. And, and of course, there are some internal things that I got some questions about, but, but number one, give us a little checklist about what is optimized YouTube channel and the links to things that make you money opportunities. Sure.
Ray Lane
So the biggest thing you’ve got to do with your channel is you’ve got to, for lack of a better word, turn it into a channel. When you get a YouTube account, you can upload a video And not have a an actual channel yet, you need to go into the back end you need to turn that channel on. Let YouTube know that, hey, I’m creating a channel, you got to give that channel a name, you got to put that nice graphic in the background, fill out the About Us section, make sure that it’s got enough information so that people and Google know exactly what your business is about. You can add links to Facebook, you can add links to to Google My Business, which we do with a lot of local businesses. You can add links to Twitter, and your website, anywhere where you can get more information out there, you need to do it, fill out that ABOUT SECTION fill out those links. There’s an area to put in an email even if you have a business email. And you’re not afraid of people contacting you which way that 50 sometimes but you can put a YouTube an email in there so that people can contact you directly from your YouTube channel. So All of these things can make a major impact in how your videos do, making sure that that about section is keyword rich and really tells people about your business is going to be a big help, it’s going to help Google to know more about your business, so that they can actually promote your videos and promote your channel. You want to make sure that once you get that channel up, you’ve got some videos in there, that you actually use the channel and you can see Mike just pulled up my channel which which by the way I call the most neglected channel on the internet because I tend to you know, start working on everybody else’s except my own like the carpenter without the
Michael Stewart
other all the
Ray Lane
time. Yeah, here you can see and Mike, if you want to look at the top there, you can see we’ve got a banner at the top there, which is very easy to create. There are templates out there. If you use Canva, which is a free software, you can create your channel background very quickly and easily. And as you can see, you know, my channel background that’s not the greatest, most artistic, most beautiful background in the world, but it’s there and you can see See, on the on the right hand side at the bottom of the banner, a link to different websites. So we link to my website, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. And the last one. I’m not even sure which one The last one is off the top of my head, but it’s got a logo of me so it might be get free music for your video music for your video. There you go. So you can actually get some free music. And if you scroll down, you can see that this is set up like a channel. And what I mean by that is right up front there’s a trailer video that’s right there that’s got information. And this by the way, you know when you’re getting started the trailer video that you put on here, there’s a couple of different things you can do for new visitors. So the first time that they come to your channel, you have what’s called a trailer, the trailer video is what they see right up front. It’ll play right there for you. This is your opportunity to really introduce yourself, tell people what they can expect. Now a lot of people will just throw a video in the trailer and do that if that’s what your options are. Right now but think about doing one that really is a trailer and what’s a trailer for a trailer is to show people what’s going to be coming soon. You know whether it’s a, you know a trailer for the next Star Wars movie, it’s going to tell you what that movie is basically going to be about get you excited to come and watch Star Wars. In this case here. This trailer video is about the channel itself. What are we going to have on this channel? What are you going to see in this channel? How often are we going to make videos? What are our videos about what are you going to learn? What are you going to get? That’s the type of thing you want to put in this trailer. Now if you’re a local business, you might want to modify that a little bit. If you’re a plumber, you might want to talk about your plumbing business a little bit more in a very general sense an overview of the channel. And hey, you know, this is this is Mike’s plumbing and on this channel we give you tips on how to make sure that your drains don’t get stopped up. We give you tips on this. We put out videos showing you common causes of X, Y and Z. And of course you know we give you information about hiring us as a plumber. That That type of thing you want in that trailer give people information of exactly what to expect. And you’ll notice Mike opened up that video there. The structure of the video itself is a little bit different. And you can see veg Mike, if you want to even just hit read more there for a second. And that’ll that’ll kind of show some of that scroll on down past the video. So and then hit the Show More button sorry. Make might make my dance here. So you can see the structure of this video is very, very different. I just talked about how videos should have a lot of text and a lot of you know a nice title. In this case here. The goal is slightly different with the trailer video. The trailer video is to give people more information, which is why right up front, you see all those different links. And you know that’s going to drive our traffic. Use the videos to give information. This is your trailer This is your pitch. This is your opportunity to say hey, this is who I am. This is what we do. Take a look at all of our stuff. So the the structure of that video I did very differently, it doesn’t have giant paragraphs of information it has where to go for more stuff. It’s very direct. And the reason for that is when we go back to the channel, like you see here, in that little preview area to the right of the screen, it has all those links so they can get to my website, they can follow me, they can see what it’s about right there with, you know, without just a ton of information that gets cut off, because it’s going to cut off very quickly. So the fact that we’ve just got links there, boom, people can jump in, they can click those links, and they can get right into it. So that’s your trailer video. Now, in addition to a trailer video, you also have an opportunity to put some featured content. So if you come to my website or my channel the first time you’re going to get that trailer video. The next time you come to my my channel, you’re not going to see that trailer video you’re going to see featured content. And you can give a couple of pieces of content that you want people to see next. And that’s going to be what you want to do next is after they see the trailer. And Mike’s not signed in. So he’s, it’s gonna keep showing the trailer each time. But
once you once you get there the second time, you want to put some content that is going to give people more information, and really help them to take the next step. Now this is where it could be, you know, if you’re the plumber, you could immediately have the next thing be you know why we’re the best service in the world. Or it could be you know how to five steps to make sure that you do, you know, do well with your plumbing, or what have you get that featured content in there. And that’s what they’re going to see the next time. And then once you have all of that you got to use the whole entire channel. And what I mean by that is if you go to just randomly pick a channel out there, especially one that’s not, you know, a big popular channel, and what you’re going to see is you’re going to see that maybe they have the banner at the top, maybe they even have a trailer and then below that they’ve got you know, uploaded videos and a string of videos and that’s it. Well, there’s so much more that you can do and the more that you do The more YouTube is going to take notice and say, Okay, you know what, this is a legitimate channel, they’re taking the time they’re taking the effort, we’re going to help them out by promoting their videos more, by sending people there more by having them show up in search more. And, you know, nowadays, even that banner up at the top, if you don’t have that banner, and you don’t have your little icon with your logo in it, they’re not even going to open up some of the features of the channel until you do, they’re just going to lock you out. So until you do these things, they’re not going to give you access to everything that you can use to promote your videos and your business. So you want to make sure that you do these. Now down below that trailer, there’s an area called sections. And what sections are are featured types of videos. These are almost like categories basically. And so you could have you know, if we go back to our plumber, you could have a category called you know, plumbing tips, and have all the videos that are plumbing tips. It could be the next one could be how tos and how to fix this, how to do this, how to make this how to do it. Install this. And then your next category could be simple solutions and have solutions to problems people are having. And if you scroll down my page here, you’ll see going down there, we’ve got the free market, free video marketing giveaways is the first of the categories that we have in there or the sections as they call it. And as we go down the page, you see you got YouTube tips and tricks. And we keep going down there, you’re going to see YouTube marketing support, and you’re going to see free stuff Friday, and then you’re going to see video production tips. And all of this is going to allow you to categorize your information so people can find it quickly and easily and get exactly what they’re looking for. But there’s a much greater thing going on here too. And that is, well, at least in the way that I do most of these is those sections are usually playlists. Okay? If you don’t know what a playlist is a playlist is a collection of videos. So you go into playlist and you create a playlist for your plumbing tips. And you put in all of your videos that are plumbing tips into that playlist. Now you’ve got a playlist for those. And you can make a section for those in your playlist, you can fill out all that information again. So everything that you would put in a video to get it noticed, you can put in the playlist. And if you notice, where it says free marketing, video giveaways, there’s a little bit of a paragraph directly underneath that. That little paragraph there. Under under YouTube tips and tricks, it says video marketing for all means blah, blah, blah, that that actually is a full complete description, you know, multiple paragraphs with links and everything else they truncated on here. But if you went to the playlist, it actually is a big long description. And that information is still on that video on on that section there. It just you don’t see it. But Google does YouTube does. It’s there on the page. And each one of those, you know, at least the more popular ones. We actually do that within this probably playlist on here that are just playlists. But when we’re going to feature a playlist we make sure that that is optimized Just like a video, full text, links and everything else.
Michael Stewart
So I got a quick question. So the short featured content on the homepage of your channel. Those are playlists that you cherry pick
Ray Lane
correct? No just individual videos you just choose a couple of videos about featured videos is different than a playlist. featured videos is different than playlist Yeah, featured videos is literally it’s just I want to feature this video in this video. That’s it
Michael Stewart
got multiple videos that you can do.
Ray Lane
Yeah, so if you scroll back up when you’re when you’re logged into your return instead of the trailer, you would see the next featured video in there in these these the free market giveaways on YouTube trips. Are those playlists are those playlists that have been turned into categories? Yeah.
Michael Stewart
So here’s, here’s what I’m the takeaway, and then we’re gonna have a little station break and we’re gonna come back and I got a couple more questions and we’re gonna take some questions. My gosh, you know, I’m gonna have to have you a second time because I try to keep the show to a half an hour and we’ve already got 20 minutes. That’s it. So let me let you know titling multiple links, trailer video featured video for your channel, building playlist, grouping videos together. And then when you get these playlists on the homepage, those are called categories. So these are all things that most people never pay attention to. And, you know, if you really want to have an optimized YouTube channel, you got to do all these things. The banner graphic thinks back you got to go through some hoops I can tell you I know for a fact, you got to associate your channel there’s been some new rules that I want to ask you some questions back, but we’re gonna take a little word from today’s show is brought to you by the mike Stewart everything club. So let’s hear about that for a moment and we’ll be right back with Ray lane the video guy. Hey Mike Stewart here with the mike Stewart everything club today’s sponsor, you know, it’s a way for you to own all of my products for one low monthly subscription price. You know, I looked at that Netflix model they charge you a monthly fee and it gets you access to all they do from now on as long as you stay a paying member so you can go to the website Mike Stewart everything club calm and watch the video to learn more about it. But basically for 1997 a month, you’re gonna have access to podcast install, mastering mobile video, instant video blogger, easy follow up video, tablet video membership sites, to both things over 500 tracks of legal music using YouTube videos, sales videos and podcasts, local domain reseller how to make money every month selling domains of hosting through GoDaddy and marketing wisdom from my partner how Coleman and myself with the next level marketing workshop plus coming real soon, I’m going to be selling dot live secrets for 497. And as a current member of paid member, you’re going to have access to that as well. Plus a whole lot more in the works. And it’s all included with your monthly subscription to my store to everything clubs, so be sure to check us out at Mike Stewart everything clubs.com
Hey everybody, we’re back. Thanks for listening. Hey, I’m gonna go a little bonus going right now for people that watch this video. If you go to Mike Stewart everything club calm for a limited time. I’ve got $1 dollar trial that you can try it out for a month. And then of course it’s 1997 a month. But basically the my everything club is everything I ever create. You get access, if you’re it’s kind of like the Netflix of my trainings. So anyway, I hope you’ll consider checking that out. And then of course you want to hear more from from our good buddy here, Ray lane. Um, so right. These are the things that I have had some questions about, talk a little bit about in cards, and talk a little bit about I cards. Sure. And you know, one of the things that I’ve seen happen I will was given the opportunity to do the I cards, which are basically links that pop up in the middle of your video at a specific program time. And Google and YouTube took that away from me, because I didn’t have enough subscribers. And of course, nowadays, you know, talk about this challenge getting a like, I see that you have Ray, the video guy is the name of your channel, and that’s your URL. They won’t let me have one yet until I get enough subscribers. Yeah, so talk about things that you got to do to make it better, you know, better URL, I cards in cards, and other things that you can do to help make your you know, one of the things about in cards is keeping people you know, like one of the biggest problems I had, I’ve had people ask, you know, how do I get all these other non related videos popping up at the end of my video. And so just talk about those things and then I don’t want to Don’t let me forget What you did for Pac Man, I’m you can see my gold record here but behind me, I was in a band called Buckner Garcia and Ray helped us with a video we did like five years ago. And I want you to talk about what you did I think you spent $50 and that was the catalyst to get that thing up to about 12 million views as of now that’s not earth shattering compared to Justin Bieber and some of these people who just get billions of views. But for Oh, rockers like us, that little $50 What can we do just so talk about everything we can do to make it better in cards, I cards, avoiding getting a better channel, what are the new YouTube rules? Hey, there you go. I just bombarded you with a whole bunch of stuff to talk about.
Ray Lane
That’s That’s good. And and there is a lot you know, and in the old days, YouTube had gotten a little bit lacks with things they allowed us to do anything we could go and we could get our, our, you know, youtube.com slash whatever. Anytime we want it. They just allowed us to do that they allowed us to do connect our website, they allowed us to have all these features. People abused them, of course. And that caused a lot of issues. And one of the things that YouTube wanted to do was they wanted to stop the average everyday person from coming in and getting youtube.com, slash whatever, locking that up, and then never doing anything with it. You know, now, you know, if you think about it this way, and obviously, this would never happen. But imagine if it did Imagine if I went on and I got youtube.com slash Walmart. And then I just, yeah, I didn’t do anything with it, and it just sat there. Well, now Walmart can’t use that when it’s their business name, because it’s already taken. But nobody’s doing anything with it. Somebody just took it. So they wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen. Now, obviously, you know, in the case of Walmart, they just turn around and sue you for using their name. But in the case of Mike Stewart, if somebody went and said, got YouTube comm slash Mike Stewart because their name was Mike Stewart, and they posted a picture of their, you know, child’s sixth birthday and that was the only thing they have posted Well, now, they’ve got that locked up. And Mike Stewart, who’s doing all this stuff with YouTube doesn’t have access to that. So they wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen. So now, in order to get that you have to do a lot of different things. This is where it comes back to what I talked about earlier, you need to first and foremost have that graphic in the background, you need to have that icon. If you don’t have those things, they’re not even going to give you things like I think the thumbnails, they won’t give you the custom thumbnails until you have that. So that feature will be taken away, you get that done, you verify your account with your phone, they’re going to give you longer videos, they’re going to give you the custom thumbnails. And now you’ll have access to that which by the way, that’s a huge thing that needs to be talked about too is thumbnails, you need to do thumbnails, and you need to do good thumbnails, YouTube actually goes out and they pick videos to feature and they’ll put it on the front page or it’ll be you know, when somebody’s watching a video and they feature videos on the side. A lot of that stuff is hand chosen. And it’s done through the title, and the thumbnail. So those are the two most important things that don’t forget the thumbnails. But you need to make sure that you’ve got that channel set up, or you’re not even gonna have access to those. Now, the next step of that is when we’re talking about the AI cards. And when we’re talking about the end screens, now, I’m surprised to hear they actually took the the feature away from you, Mike, that that’s kind of surprising. I hadn’t really heard of a lot of people getting it taken away. But one of the most powerful things that you can do is to have those icons or the end screens where you can have people link back to your website. You won’t be able to do that until you have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time in a 12 month period. That’s a lot of watching. So you think about that, if you have a one One Hour Video, it has to be watched 4000 times or take that math and break it down by minutes and you’re going to see that you Gotta have a lot of views. And it all has to be in a 12 month period. So if you do it in that first 12 months, but then the next six months, you do nothing, they can take that away, because that rolling 12 months, you’re not keeping up with that 4000 hours of viewing, so they can take that stuff away. But you want to be able to connect your website now. In the meantime, you can get access to the end screens and you can get access to the I cards. And I’m not sure I don’t recall off the top of my head, what the what the the threshold is for those particular items. But once you have access to that, you can use those without linking back to your website. So you can literally have icons that link to another video you want people to watch or link to your channel or LinkedIn, you know something internally, you can have an end screen that shows your other videos that shows you know a subscribe button for instance. So even if you don’t have access to send people to your website quite yet, you can send them to different videos and you can send them to your channel. And you can get them to subscribe, and all of that fun stuff inside of there as well. So they can be very, very powerful. I will be the first to admit, however, and Mike I don’t know, you know what your experiences with it, but I found that the cards
hit or miss, you know, they tend to do okay if the video in the video you go, hey by the way, if you hit the icon up here and you click on that you can learn more about this. If they’re they’re just there by themselves, they don’t tend to do all that well. YouTube used to have a much better, much better system for that. Unfortunately, they took it away from us and that was they used to have the annotations that you could put on the screen. So you could put graphics on the screen and boxes and text and things like that right on the screen. And people could click on them and whatnot. They didn’t work on mobile, and which is probably part of the reason they took it away but they took away the whole thing and you know a tear for that because we used to get just tons and tons and tons Tons of clicks, because of that stuff. But nowadays, we’re stuck with the cards and the end screens. So that means two things. One, you got to educate people on using the cards, which means in your videos, you really want to make people pay attention to that card that’s up there in the corner. Number two, in your end screens, you know, you need to get people to the end, they’re not going to see that in screen if they cut off your video halfway. So you need to create content that gets people to the end screen to be able to see that. And how do we do that? Well, you got to, you know, use a lot of your best marketing practices with that, you know, hooking people at the beginning and not delivering that until the end. So they have to stick around, you know, hey, In this video, we’re gonna give you you know, a PDF that tells you the five things you need to do to make a million dollars. And then you go into your video and remind them and at the end, we’re going to get to that PDF and then at the end, you finally give them that PDF. There’s your end screen so you kind of hook them into staying to listen to your content to get all the way to the end which is not easy to do. You know if you’re a local plumber, if you’re a dentist it’s just To get people to watch your entire video all the way through. And so end screens can be great. If you can get people there. My recommendation honestly is that people are still used to the description, the link in the description still seems to be the most powerful tool. I’ve had people watching the video, and you know, they’ll scroll past to leave a comment. And by the way, this is another tip to put your best link and your best call to action as your first comment. So go into your video, create a comment and say, Hey, if you want to download our free PDF on 20 ways to become a millionaire, click this link here, put the link in there, pin that to the top and I’ll tell you why. Because even though the link in the description is powerful, even though the the icon in the top could be powerful, even though the end screen can be powerful, I literally still to this day on a consistent basis. Have people that will watch the video that’ll have the icon and the icon in the corner, it’ll have the in screen it’ll have the little banner that pops up on the icon tells people what to do. And then in the description, I’ll say, hey, click here to get the 20. Whatever’s they will still scroll past all of that, go to the comments and say, How do I get that PDF on the 20? What, you know, it’s everywhere. How did you miss it, you had to scroll past it three times in order to even write this message. But people will do that. So make sure you put that in your comments. They’ll still do it even when even if the comment is right there at the top, they’ll still do it. But make sure you put that in there. And there’s a there’s a good reason for that. Not only from the standpoint of getting people to click, but it’s also a good YouTube SEO trick is to have your your comment on there, like your own comment, pin the comment to the top, give it a heart, all that kind of stuff, and that’s going to help you with SEO as well. But if you can do if you can do cards, do them, you know, do they always get a lot of clicks not not as much as the old stuff did. I don’t think unless really sit there and tell people to do it. But don’t be afraid to tell people to do it. You know, watch a lot of videos, you’ll see people will do that, they’ll be in the middle of the thing and say, and if you want to know more about how to unstop that drain in your kitchen, well, we’ve got a video, you can click the icon right here. And that’s going to take you to that video. So you can do things like that. And don’t be afraid to do that. It does help, it will get more people to click, because people just YouTube has not done a great job of training people to use that icon. And that that’s the big problem. You know, even though some people use it, people aren’t trained to click on it, they don’t know what it is. And and that’s the biggest problem right now. And I think they need to work on that. That would be a big thing. YouTube is paying attention to that. You know, Facebook has done a great job lately of doing TV commercials, on features, you know, join Facebook groups. Well, I think YouTube needs to go you know, the power of the icon or something and, and get that out.
Michael Stewart
You know, the biggest problem is that, that there’s a lot of things People leave blank, all the way from the titles to the header graphics, to you know, everything. And they they forget how powerful a search engine YouTube is they forget how powerful a content marketing opportunity is. And my, my thought process is don’t leave anything blank. And if the if the confusion is you don’t know what to fill out or what’s important. I mean, you know, I remember when the annotations were replaced with the cards and I believe the cell phone was the reason
Unknown Speaker
it’s certainly one.
Michael Stewart
Oh, that man, anything you had annotation was that all went away. Now, you know, if you got 1000 videos in your channel, you got 1000 things to configure that I don’t think there’s a piece of software out there that will that will automate 1000 videos. They got to be done one at a time. So it’s a lot of work to get this thing optimized. We got a lot of great questions. I don’t want to get long today, folks, but I don’t care because I got right here. He may never come back after I’ve grilled him so much. So I better capturing while I still got his attention Number Number one, you know, I have a question about his own here. Here’s the senior moment competent. I know one of them is was paid promotion of videos. You know, I know that you paid money to help us kick start I remember we found a great channel to run a pre roll ad on our Pac Man video. And that just kicked it into high gear and then it just started snowballing. So do you recommend that for small starting out channels to buy some some views?
Ray Lane
Yeah, definitely. And and you know, you have to look at it in different ways. Now, typically, if you if you think of promoting a video, you think of a YouTube ad. Okay. Most people think of an ad as what you would normally think of an ad on TV or whatever, it’s to sell a product. Well, that’s not always the case in YouTube. You can look at a YouTube ad in a totally different way. In the old days, going back, we used to spend quite a bit of money on a video that we wanted to do well. And what we would do with that video is we would put that video on YouTube, we make sure it’s optimized. And then we would go to like, Fiverr and we pay some guy $5 to give us like, 10,000 views of that video, and we pay another guy in Fiverr you know, $5 to do a whole bunch of backlinks and social bookmarking and things like that. So now we’ve spent 1020, sometimes $50 on one video to get it to work its way up. And you know, I’m a slow learner probably is probably part of the issue. Not the smartest way to do things and back Back in the day, it was a smart thing to do it worked. Was it the best thing to do? Maybe not, but it worked and you could do it. But YouTube, of course, got smart and and caught on to all these tricks that people were doing well. I sat there one day and I thought, Wait a minute. If I’m To pay this guy $5 to give me 10,000 views that really don’t matter, they’re garbage views, they’re robots, they’re this and that, why not just pay YouTube directly $5 to promote that video and get my views directly through YouTube, you’re going to get better views, they’re gonna like that you’re giving them money. And of course, you know, you still get the opportunity that if you’ve got a product that is selling something, if you got a video that’s selling a product, and you’re targeting it, by running these ads on YouTube, you’re not only going to get views, but you’re going to get views of people that are actually interested in what you’re doing. Which means you could get sales off of that, you know, we’ve done things where, you know, we we spent the $5 or the $10 to get YouTube to give us views that were somewhat targeted with the purpose of just getting views so that you know, more people could find it, but people bought the product, and so we made back way more than the five or 10 dollars that we spent, does that happen every time? No. But if you go into it not thinking of it as an ad where you’re going to get somebody to buy something, but you go into it as in, I’m paying to get more views so that more people will find the video, then you can be very, very happy with what you get out of that. And again, you know, if you’re, you’re doing this for a local business, a plumbing business, a dentist business, chances are, if that’s a targeted group that watches your video, they don’t need a dentist today. They don’t need a plumber today, so that you’re not going to get a return on that day. But a couple months down the road. They may remember Oh, wait, John’s plumbing was the one that you know had that video, let’s call John’s plumbing. And they’ll look it up and they’ll give them a call. So you got to go into it looking at it as you’re spending money to get views so that your video does better. But you could at the same time, get something back from that depending upon what you’ve got in the video. But yeah, I highly recommend you do that put money that way instead of doing so The scams that are out there, you know, because you’re gonna catch
Michael Stewart
on black hat and black hat always gets banned by Google. So So let me ask you this, and then we got to get some of these great questions, you’re gonna love these questions. Um, do those target to those paid views count towards your hours? hours, and you can, or you will, not only are you getting legitimate views by paying for them targeted views, but you’re also getting credit of building up your hours. Because like a, we’ve been doing some local business advertising and, you know, some of these videos are getting 100,000 views, wow, locally, and, you know, over time, so as long as those views so that that time calculation and those views do count towards your channel, you have no paying YouTube to distribute your video,
Ray Lane
or there are some things that they don’t count and some things that they do but when when you run an ad and somebody watches your video, yeah, that’s still abuse. So,
Michael Stewart
okay, what’s your opinion on what I’m doing right now? One of the reasons I do live streaming twice a month, um, and I could, you know, I Gary Vaynerchuk probably says you should do it, you know, every 15 minutes, you know, and that’s just not realistic for me. Actually, he
Ray Lane
doesn’t The funny thing is, is he says the biggest mistake he made was having people expect him to do something every day. So
Michael Stewart
well, you know, I you know, I’m making consistent because one, this is fun. I get together with old friends here. And we get to talk about my favorite thing of marketing and video. But, but this live streaming is forcing me to make relevant content, which I repurpose as a podcast, I repurpose it as a transcription. I repurpose it as a blog. But in other words, I put it to quote him be everywhere with this content. So it’s a you know, I mean, look at here We’re at 41 minutes, and it’s because there’s just too much call. There’s so much I want to talk about but anything new, exciting, good, bad positive about going live on YouTube.
Ray Lane
Live is great. And there’s a lot of different things that have happened with live, you know, they’ve added stuff like, and we’re talking about YouTube Live. I also highly recommend Facebook Live. I love Facebook Live. So that’s another great opportunity. But with YouTube Live, they’ve added things like the ability for people to pay you to get their question to show up longer. So in other words, if you’re doing a live on youtube, and somebody is watching live and and they’re on YouTube, and they go, Oh, yeah, hey, should I use the color blue or the color red? That’s just going to scroll through with all the other comments in there. But you have the opportunity to pay money to the Creator, content creator, to have that question pop up and stay there so that they see it. So it’ll stay for 10 seconds or 20 seconds and depending on how much you pay, it’ll stay longer. You can tip people while they’re doing live videos, so somebody can just send you $1 as a tip says A lot of really cool things they’re doing with that where you can actually make extra money just by doing lives but lives of course, they rank well. You know, it used to be the conventional wisdom was that if you did a live video, it would rank a lot better than a regular video. I, I don’t know if that’s truly the case, I’ve seen where regular videos do just as well, there’s probably a bit of an edge, but it’s a bit like two videos that have a good title. You know, maybe one’s got a slightly better title than the other. So it’s going to get a little bit of an edge, but realistically, it’s probably only going to be a small amount, it’s not going to be a huge advantage. But it is an advantage. So if you can do it, if you do a live video, it’s definitely going to be at least a little bit of a help. And of course everything is it’s like a big soup. You got to put it all in there. You got to have proper titles, you got to have proper descriptions, you gotta have keywords, you got to have backlinks you gotta have, you know, if you go live you that throws in there, I mean just all these different things. helped to build a channel and to get videos to rank better, but it’s a it is a lot of work. There’s no doubt about it. There was a lot of work involved and I don’t think much,
Michael Stewart
and I don’t know many people out there as skilled as you or Derral Eve’s or that will do it for people. It’s just, you know, it’s it’s clerical work that is just filling in the blanks and answering the questions. Well, speaking of which are answering questions where I want to answer a few questions, and we’re gonna have to wrap it up here, but, but people have stuck with us. That’s awesome. Jean said, What are the current number of views required to unlock features on your channel? Kind of give us a rundown? I want to hear that, you know, I heard that have 1000 subscribers and you said 4000 hours or thousand
Ray Lane
hours? Yeah, so that’s, that’s the big number is 4000 hours, that’s where you’re gonna get You’re really good. You know, that’s when you can associate your website and get all the real powerful tools. For me. I think that’s a lot. That to me, just seems like too much and I’m hoping that they’ll adjust that is some point in time, you know, before they left the door wide open now they’ve really shut the door on most people and I think they need to go somewhere in between that, you know, 4000 hours of view time and that’s a lot. But unfortunately, that’s what it is. Now you have a whole year to do that. So the more you can do it, the better. So can you see these questions? Okay, I can I can see them.
Michael Stewart
And I got to tell you a little bit my good friend here Carolyn bunting. Carlin was one of my video clients from I bet 15 I guess it was 2005 or six I can’t even remember it’s been so long. But he owns a you’re not going to believe the URL. He has Grand Canyon calm and video marketing. tickle the Carlin’s here but answer his question for in there.
Ray Lane
Yeah. Okay. So the question is about the centering of the graphics on the channel. And yes, YouTube has this thing and what they call it is they call it one channel. Okay, and so you create one traffic that works on TVs that works on websites that works on mobile that works on iPads, and the iPads and the phones are different. But what you do is you actually create a, a, an image that’s 2560 by 1440. So that’s a huge image. And you put your content right in the center of that image. So you got a bunch of space on the top and bottom, and you want to leave space on the left and right, you put your content in a banner in the center of that. And then when you upload it to YouTube, the good thing is that they actually show you what it looks like on each of the devices. So you can look at it and go, Oh, you know what? That center graphic is a little too much. It gets cut off on mobile. Go back into Photoshop, make that a little smaller, give it a little more space. But yeah, you do. You center it right in the middle of that and there are templates out there. Like I said, Canva will give you templates like that if you search YouTube channel art, you’ll find a graphic That you can bring into Photoshop and you can mark off, you know where things should fit. So that it’s not
Michael Stewart
I was really impressed with Canva has a template already built in. And as long as you stay within their template, you know, and you adjust it, you make it work. Jane wanted to give Jane another question here, say why pay for YouTube property abuse? How did you do that?
Ray Lane
Okay, so the targeted views, if you’ve ever run any sort of Google ad, and if you haven’t, I’ll explain it a little bit here. YouTube used to kind of run a separate marketing and advertising program inside of Google ads or what used to be AdWords. Now they kind of mix it together. But what you need to do is you need to go into you need to have a Google Ads account. So make sure you go create that it only takes a couple of minutes to do it. It’s not hard. Once you have an ads account, then you can create campaigns and bring in videos so when you go into go Google ads and you say, new campaign, it’ll ask you what kind of campaign you want, you can choose video. And you can just bring in your video, give it you know, an ad title and whatnot, you can choose the type of ad that you want. So you can have a pre roll ad, you can have a search ad. And then you just put a little bit of money towards it, and you keep it simple, $5 a day, $3 a day, run it for three days at $5 and spend $15, you’re gonna get some views out of that. It does have to be approved. So make sure you’re not doing anything too sketchy. But I will say YouTube is a lot more lenient, or at least it seems to be or used to be. Then traditional Google Ads now that they’ve kind of merged and that’s not quite as much the case. But the way the way that they kind of see it is if you’ve got a video on YouTube already, and they haven’t banned it, then they’re probably going to give you an ad for it. They’re not gonna have an issue. But you do have to do that through AdWords to open up an ad account. It doesn’t take long to create a nice ad that they used to have and And forgive me, they probably still do. I just haven’t used it in so long. And now that they changed the entire back end of YouTube who knows where anything is anymore, but they used to actually have a promote button on every video, which made it very simple to just throw $5 towards the video or $10 towards video, but I don’t even know if they have that anymore if you just have to go into AdWords, which is what I do anyway. So
Michael Stewart
yeah, yeah, yeah, if you don’t have an AdWords account, get an AdWords account today and learn your way around it. Well, we’re gonna take one more question, but I cannot believe it right. Just for two guys getting together talking about what they love. Time just flies by and I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of it. So we get any comments you want to have right back on another show? Put it in the comments. We’d love to have him. In fact, answer. Tom is a good client, good buddy of mine old radio guy does a lot with local business. Tom, I think Tom even mentioned earlier that he’s a customer of yours, right? I don’t even know there were hat. What? What do you mean by hashtags? Okay?
Ray Lane
Yeah, just like with Twitter and Facebook, YouTube does have hashtags.
I use them their effectiveness, it’s questionable. Some people don’t like them. And I’ll tell you why. So, let’s say that you make a video about, you know, your selling cans of spinach. And so you create a video about your spinach. And at the bottom of your description, you put hashtag spinach. Now, the good thing about that is potentially anybody who is, you know, looking for spinach might put in that hashtag and they might find your video. The other side of the coin is and this is where a lot of people don’t like it is. When that hashtag shows up on your video. A lot of times, they think, well, people are going to click that hashtag and they’re going to go away from your video. So you kind of have to weigh you know whether you want to give the opportunity for people to click away But measure it with Will people come to your video from hashtags. And what’s cool about the hashtags. And this is something by the way, I don’t recall ever YouTube ever announcing these, I don’t recall anybody ever talking about them for and then all of a sudden they would just there one day. And what it is, is when you put a hashtag and by the way, I discovered this by accident, and I’ll tell you how. So if you put a hashtag in your video, somewhere in your description of your video, you put hashtag spinach. What happens is at the top of that video right under the actual video player, before the description, it’ll show up to three hashtags right there under the video. And the way that I found those was we had a client who was, you know, like 123, Fourth Street suite number 500. And because we put lB 500 it turned it into a hashtag and showed up at the top and I’m like, What the heck is this? Why is this like pound 500 showing up here? And I realized, oh, they’re putting hash tags up there now. And so we started to do the hash tag thing. So what’s great about hash tags, and what I do is on mine, I put hashtag Ray, the video guy. So if they’re watching one of my videos, it’s not like, you know, other people have hashtag Ray, the video guy in their videos. So they’re going to click that hashtag and see only my videos potentially. And then we could do hashtag you know, video marketing. Now you do video marketing, now you’re gonna see stuff from everybody. So you know, you have to weigh that out. Now, the one other consideration with hashtags too, is another thing that YouTube will put at the top underneath your video is location. And so if you’re a local business, you can put in the address of that location and it’ll put a map pin underneath that video. So if that’s more useful to you, because it’s a local business, then you may want to stick with that instead of hashtags for that particular purpose. But if you want to be getting people into your content, I certainly do the hashtags. There are a lot of fun. Like I said, I discovered them by accident be using them ever since I think they’re cool. Um, one other thing with hashtags that I started doing before, hashtags were actually a useful thing in YouTube, is I used to put hashtags in and still do to an extent in my tags as well. And the reason I did that is if I put a tag of hashtag Ray, the video guy or hashtag this, nobody else is going to put that in there. So now what happens is on the side of your video, this side, I’m married here on this side of your video where it says those suggested videos on the side of your video, because you put unique tags into your tag area, and, and maybe even in the content itself. It’s going to find those other videos that have those unique tags. And you’re more likely to have your videos show up in the suggested side than other people’s videos. So that’s one of the thing that I’ve discovered that, you know, it’s not 100% it’s not like a Your stuffs gonna show up. But I did find that more of your stuff showed up when you did
Michael Stewart
that. So it improves things. So So just to recap real quick hashtags is just basically getting a key word with the little Tic Tac Toe sign. I remember David Letterman thought you just typed out the word hashtag No, no hashtag is putting the little numbers on a noun, symbol number symbol, whatever you want to call it, key phrase, and you’re putting the hashtag in the description. And also in the tags area of YouTube videos. Each video can have its own unique tags, its own unique hashtags, and is in pet three,
Ray Lane
three, well, you can have as many as you want, but if you want them to show up at the top underneath the video itself, only, only the first three are going to show up there. So you could put 20 of them in your description, but only the first three are going to show up at the very top.
Michael Stewart
Okay, great, great. Well, listen, I could talk all day but we I try to keep this to a half an hour and we’re almost the whole hour. But this is Ray folks are wanting you back. This is what Carlin said. You know, that’s the whole purpose of Mike store dot live. I tell you I’ve been doing webinars for years and the reason we did all did webinars was is to teach people things. And then we would, you know, pitch something, you know, and say, Okay, I’m gonna stay here for another hour until you buy something. And I’m actually in my retirement years here my slowing down, I would just rather create good content with good people. If you want to know how to support me. Subscribe to my YouTube channel, subscribe to Ray’s YouTube channel, go visit our website, Mike Stewart dot live links to everything that makes me money. dot live secrets is my new course here. I’m not pitching these things. I’m just telling you. I’m living and breathing what I recommend everybody do and I’m going to try to keep bringing people of the caliber here of Ray, but ray is one of the best and he and I said he is The video guy that I look to and I’m so glad you were here today so
Unknown Speaker
me too.
Michael Stewart
So let’s uh this was just a ton of fun and I would love to do it again but right now just folks do this for right go to Ray the video guy comm check it out, subscribe to this things, share this livestream. Share this with everybody subscribe to everything. And I want to build this into something that helps a lot of people. And then I figure that the sponsorships will help me stay white haired in my old age. Right thanks again, buddy. Any final copy before we we call it a day.
Ray Lane
And you know, the only thing I would say is the biggest part of all this is getting out there and doing it you know, you may not know all 30 steps that need to be done. But if you can take step number one, you can always add the others later. So get out there and start making content and then start building upon.
Michael Stewart
Well with that railing Have a great week. And I hope to talk to you soon. And thanks, everybody for all the great questions. And yes, I hope to catch all of you again soon. So, Mike Stewart with Mike Stewart law dot live, saying Good, good. Good day, good week. In two weeks, I’m the second and fourth Monday of every month. And between now and then I’ll figure out what the next show. So subscribe to my email list and know what the next show is. And be sure to check out right with all the things he’s doing. So have a great day.
Fighting Camera Fright (Stage Fright) When Speaking Publicly Online or Offline With Communication Expert Dr. Bill Lampton Ph.D
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https://mikestewart.live episode #3 talking about better communication in business and online with communication expert Dr. Bill Lampton Ph.D
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More info on Bill at http://bizcommunicationguy.com
Good morning, everybody. It’s Mike Stewart with Mike Stewart dot live. So glad you’re here. Hopefully people are getting in their seats on Facebook and YouTube and more importantly at the website, Mike 
Stewart dot live. I’m excited about the show today I want to tell you a little bit about who I’ve got as a guest, Dr. Bill Lampton, one of my dear friends met him at the Georgia speaker Association, probably over, Oh, geez, probably 25 years ago or more. Okay, Bill may know the better date. That’s how my memory is going these days. But, you know, when I started building websites back in the 90s, I was focusing on making audio and video work on websites. I had a company called sound pages, I used to make webpages with sound. And that’s how bill I went up to build it the speaker’s Association, and I said, Do you have a website? He says, Yes, I do. I have a website. I said, but does your website have sound because you know, if you’re a speaker, if you’re a professional keynote speaker, or coach or trainer, and your website, nobody can hear you, that kinda is a disconnect. For me, um, you know, people should be able to hear you. He says you can you can be heard on your website. That’s it. Absolutely. I specialize in making websites with audio and video. Now this is 1996 97, somewhere in there.
That’s when I started Soundpages.com, I got out of my studio business and started doing audio and 
video web pages. And so, with all that being said, Bill became a customer. And then of course, more importantly, he became a local neighbor. I lived in Gainesville, Georgia, he lives in Gainesville, Georgia to this day, and we just became very endeared to one another. I mean, he’s just one of those special people. He’s so brilliant. I’m not gonna tell you his age, but he, he’s much younger than his real age. That’s all I’ll tell you. He’s a whole lot younger than that. He’s, he’s willing and open to learn things that maybe were did come natural to him. They were not part of his generation. Um, you know, I mean, he made a comment to me that when he was a professor at a university, he delegated things that now he has to embrace himself, you know, you know, email didn’t exist back in those days, webpages, the internet, there’s so many things that didn’t exist back in those days.
And nowadays they do exist. So one of the things I love about Dr. Bill Lampton is that he has just always had an open mind and I cannot believe this many years later, he still works with me every month, just wanting to learn more, and and that’s a lesson for us all. So his expertise, his communication, his expertise, is, you know, dealing with speaking, and you know, he actually is an expert when it comes to stage fright. Now, I want to tell a couple little stories and I’m gonna bring bill on but the stories were, you know, when I started building web pages using video, I never forgot I had this client, who was a genius when it came to computers. I mean, he owned a computer repair before You could ask him a question about a Windows computer I mean he knew the answer and I’ll never forget I said well let’s let’s get all this information on your website in a video and I said So tell me about you know windows and and what you do and viruses and installing software and hardware.
You know all this techno stuff and he’s like, going a mile a minute, just passionately and confident. And I held up a camera , you know, this is the camera we use today a cell phone back then it was a Kodak Z, if I recall. he froze. He I mean, he just went from expert to solidly frozen and could not we never got a video. We got nothing, because he was so scared of this device. So You know, they say that that death and public speaking are some of the biggest fears in the world, which I can understand being scared of dying. But public speaking Well, you know what video is you know what this webcam right here is. This is public speaking to an inanimate piece of plastic. And it’s amazing how if you want to do online video, it is the speaking world and you have not stage fright. You have camera fright. Well, I had to learn how to get over that. I remember back in 2002, my good friend Armand Morin, let me speak on his stage on audio and video marketing. It was the Big Seminar in San Francisco I think was 2004 or 2005 somewhere in there. And I’ll tell you, if you can see here in my studio here I got guitars and pianos because I’ve been a musician I have played in front of as many as 10,000 people one time I did a show years ago, and I was as comfortable as I could be behind those keyboards and behind the curtain But the thought of getting up on that stage and standing out center stage with nothing but a microphone or lapel microphone and looking at all those people and having to speak I was petrified. I mean, I started getting nervous just thinking about it. So you know what I did and this is this is just shows you have dominance and people who may remember that time I was at the big seminar. I came out with my guitar and I sing a Beatle song you can see here in the back, there’s pictures of the Beatles. I’m a huge fan of The Beatles. So I set a new lyrics to Yellow Submarine. “We all live in an audio world” singing Yellow Submarine with audio lyrics. everybody laughed. Everybody thought it was cute. I sat down my guitar. And I got through the speech. And in fact, I actually one speaker of the seminar, you know, and I had never done it before. Been in front of 100 or 1000 audiences playing music, but speaking I had stage fright. I was scared. to death, and when I turned it into my subconscious thinking that I was playing music. I just felt like I was talking for a long time to a music audience. So anyway, those are my stories. But here’s why it’s really important for you to listen to bill today. He is an expert at communication. He is an expert at stage fright. And so I’m without any more me rambling here. I want to bring on my good friend and communication expert, Bill Lampton.
Bill, are you there?
Good morning, Mike. I’m here and I refer to you as the guy who got me away from the number two pencil. Well, let’s see here. Here you go. They still make them there they are. There’s a number two pencil right there. But you’ve made an unnecessary for me and you were right on the year it was 1997. When you asked me if I had a website, and I thought I had a website until I started looking at other people’s websites and man did I give you a call quickly We’ve worked together, as you’ve said, ever since, well, you know, you you’re just one of those people who, who, you thirst for knowledge, and you’re brilliant. And, you know, I used to say people don’t know what they don’t know, it’s not a matter of education. It’s just that you got to pick and choose the things you want to know. Well, here’s what I think our folks want to know, in the probably asked us some questions. I’m actually seeing some comments coming in here, but we’ll save them to the end. Talk about stage fright and how it applies to online video and just just, I’m a dummy here, I want to make better online videos, I want to make better YouTube videos, I want to communicate better to a webcam or shooting videos with a cell phone. Give me your best, you know, I get a thrill out the goods here. I’m gonna go away. And the floor is your and if if I have a question, or I see some things we need to know. We’ll come back with that. Go for it. Well, thanks very much, Mike. I very much agree with the fact that what we’re saying applies to a lot more than when You’re just standing up before an audience because we got stage fright under a number of circumstances. A lot of us these days are going to be interviewing for jobs. That can be a mentally threatening experience. You have to conduct a meeting with your staff either online or if your company’s meeting in person. You have to do that. There.
You’re going to make a sales presentation that is on nerving as well. So making a video as Mike says, anytime that you’re making any kind of presentation online are before a live audience. That’s present stage fright control is important. And the major first point I want to make Mike is that I’m not saying stage fright cure. I’m saying stage fright control Why? Because stage fright control stage right at a certain level when we control It has advantages. And I’ll use an example I’ve used a lot of times. I counted one day I’ve been a University of Georgia football fan ever since I taught there on the faculty and speech communication accounted recently I’ve been to about 250 home games. And the illustration I like to make is suppose I go to a home game, and I see the team run out and come to their midfield. And suppose they all go and sit down on the bench and start yelling. Well, that’s bad. They’ve got no stage fright, they’re just saying ho hum to the situation. So you want to keep that edge. I never want to go into any kind of presentation, including this one. When I’m not maybe pacing the floor ahead of time. It’s good to be on edge control it. Okay, what are some of the steps in controlling it and Mike You can chime in anytime you’d like to. But one of the first ones I would give is that those symptoms that you and I and everybody else feels about stage fright. And I could name a dozen of them my hands are shaking, our hands are sweaty. We feel like we can’t get our words out where person perspiring from our brow, which is a problem. If you wear glasses, our knees are shaking, our stomach is churning.
Or Guess what? Nobody is aware of those physical symptoms, but us. So recognize that what we are feeling is not even visible. It’s not even audible. And the worst thing that we could do is to say to our audience, you know, I’m really scared but I’m sure you’ll put up with and what if your surgeon says you know, I’m really scared bill, but I’ve got this knife here and I think I know what to do with it, but you’ll excuse me if my hand shaking a little bit. So, first two points, then control your stage fright. Don’t try to get rid of it. Ignore all those online who say they’re going to get rid of it for you. And secondly, remember that the symptoms themselves are visible only to you. What would you add at this point, Mike and I certainly have some more points. Well, you know, we’re gonna get I’m seeing some good questions coming in. And I invite everybody to keep going to either YouTube or Facebook, especially Mike Stewart dot live, you’ll see a chat box there and I’ll be able to see those questions. Uh, you know, I mean, the thing is, is any tips you can give us, like one of the things that I was taught, I don’t know if you ever heard this bill. But you know, when you I had a friend years ago who say that when you’re talking to the camera, you know, you’ve got to make sure that you look at the lens, say like, if I look like this over to the side when I’m shooting video. That’s, I can’t I’m not making a connection with the viewer. So eye contact is important eye contact. So at I’m sure that’s true with with with interviews or, or live speaking, you know, in other words, you need to use eye contact as best you can. But when it comes to shooting videos, if you struggle with shooting videos, I was told years ago, hold a picture of your father, if you’re talking about something mechanical or technical, and how I put that picture, you know, it’s not where you’re not looking at the camera but but like you’re talking to your dad about, well, dad, let me explain to you how this phone works. You tap here, but if you’re talking about something emotional if you’re talking about something serious or something that has not so much a technical than show a picture of your mother and tell your mother and explain it to her and, and just practicing that in the mirror, and just getting used to presenting and, and being enthused, you know, that’s that’s one of the things that I used to do with video but what are what are some other things that you know, are little, little helpful tips that could help people communicate better, especially when it comes to the YouTube, the online LinkedIn, the places that you can put online video, what would you recommend?
I would say to your remember that your ideas about the audience probably need to be changed. We think that our audiences, whoever they are, whether it’s a video audience or an audience right there before us, we think they’re going to be so critical. They’re going to be so judgmental. But think of the times that you’re sitting in the audience, unless the speaker is somebody did you hold a grudge against you do not want that speaker to fail. It’s very uncomfortable for the audience when a speaker fails, and we’ve all seen that happen. That’s just as uncomfortable as it is for the speaker. So think about the fact that your audience instead of being your critic, your audience Is your cheerleader. And really what I like to tell people is, Mike, you’ve spoken very large audiences. And I’ve had the privilege of doing that too. And when I was speaking to an audience, I remember in Richmond, Virginia of 600 people, I remember that there was one common thought most of them had. And that thought was, you know, I’m glad it’s bill up there speaking and not me. audiences are sympathetic. They want you to succeed. And let’s go to some other situations. The person that you’re trying to sell something to when you’re making a sales presentation, that person wants you to succeed because they’d love it. If your service or your product works for them. The person that you’re interviewing with for a job, they’re not going to be condemning you right away. They would love it. If you solve their problem. Boom, there’s search, and you’re the one who is right for the position that they’re offering.
And Mike, you mentioned video. One of the best suggestions that are that I heard was from Scott willeford. from Atlanta, Scott owns a video company and what he advises people when they say, Gosh, I’m just afraid to do video. Scott says, Get over yourself. There’s, there’s some value in that recognize. And this is another point I like to make. There are three things that you can think about when you stand up to give a presentation or you sit down across the table from somebody, your audience, your message, or yourself. It’s great if you focus on the audience, because you are trying to meet their needs. You’re trying to connect with them and as Mike said, in a very conversational way. It’s wonderful if you concentrate on your message. This is what you’re passionate about. And you want to persuade them that this is significant in their life and in their profession. But the third choice, if you focus on yourself, you’re set up for failure. For example, you’re focusing on yourself, you’re wondering, gee, what impression Am I making, and you’re looking at here and somebody’s texting, and somebody else is nodding off and somebody else gets up and leaves the room and suddenly, all your self confidence is out the window. So change your view of audiences recognize that they are with you, they support you, and recognize too that focusing on the audience or the message is far more valuable and productive and spirit boosting for everybody. Then focusing on yourself.
I think that’s all great information, Bill. I mean, you know, you are the expert. I gotta, I gotta share one other little quick speaker story with you. And then we’re going to get a word from our sponsor. And then I want you to tell us everybody in the next segment about your book. But look at this thing here. I don’t know if you know what that is. You can’t see it in the podcast. But this is a clicker that was invented back before World War Two. And they used to give these things so that they could communicate, you know, during the war. And I had a speaker, you might know, I’m Chuck Reed, you remember Chuck? Yes. And I remember you giving me those speakers to do some recordings with those clickers. Well, we discovered a thing for digital editing with these clickers. But what I used to love is that Chuck had a problem saying too much. So he created a bunch of these clickers. And he gave them to everybody in the audience. And he says, anytime I say I want you to click it and of course After doing that a few times he never had to pass them out again because the minute he got up it was like people were listening but you know what it did it forced people to listen to him intently. Hopefully they were absorbing the information but I thought that was a fun speaker story.
So anyway, I’m going to be right back after this word from our sponsor, which happens to be my passion these days going live I it’s a mantra say, go live. Re-purpose and archive. We’ll be right back in 60 seconds. Well, thanks we’re back hope I hope that you consider you know in fact I’m living what I preach there in that ad I’m go live. I re-purpose and I archive and basically that I was told by a mentor bill years ago, that that when you want to be found more and more on the internet, which is called traffic, that content marketing and paid advertising is pretty much all there is left. You know, a lot of the SEO people in the world don’t like to hear that. Search Engine. optimization is, it’s not gone, but it’s not. It’s probably about 50% of what it was 10 years ago, and Seth Godin said, All that’s left is content marketing, if you want to be found for free, and you and I could across the years have seen so many things that were the thing for two to three to five years, and now nobody knows what they are. They’ve been. The one thing that’s constant is it will change that is the one constant.
Well, tell us about your book. Okay, I wrote this book, because I recognized that there were many people I could not get to in person, but I wanted them to have my 25 ways to control your stage fright, and become a highly confident speaker. This is a very brief book, I’ll tell you ahead of time, it’s only 24 pages. Don’t go far length, go for quality and and here I have the 25 best tips that I’ve learned I’ve used and I’ve taught since 1997, when I became a professional communication consultant. So this book is available on Amazon. It’s available in Kindle version or in this brief paperback version. And I can, I believe, guarantee that you will get tips in this book that you have not thought about before. And that will be very valuable in helping you control your stage fright. And my one of the tip I’d give now, which also is one of those included in the book, one of the mistakes we think we make about stage fright is thinking, Well, you know, I’ve just got to be perfect. I can’t make any mistakes. I can’t, I can’t goof up on some words. I can’t forget anything. I’ll be a terrible failure if I did. And one of the things I do when I’m coaching clients about speaking. I give them a list of tips. And when I come to the tip, don’t try to be perfect. I purposely misspelled the Word Perfect. I mean, I really butcher it, but they can still tell what it was. And our mistakes are okay. For example, if you run into somebody, a friend in the grocery store and you start chatting, and all of a sudden you have to restart, are you you have a word that doesn’t come out, right. Do you go home and beat yourself up about that? No. And those of you who watched Johnny Carson during his heyday on The Tonight Show will remember that Johnny Carson, you almost wondered if he planned his mistakes because he can make so much Adam Johnny Carson would say something that was was obviously mistaken and hit, tap the microphone and maybe do a little soft shooting. ants, which I don’t know how to do, but get over your mistakes. People don’t want a robot up there. And if you put the emphasis on the wrong syllable instead of emphasis on the wrong syllable, that’s okay. That’s great. Well, we got a few questions here. I swear. I’ve been doing these live shows here for about six weeks now. And I do it with my partner in pest control. So I’ve done about eight shows bill, and I’ll tell you what, there’s so much fun, and they go by so fast. I can’t believe we’re almost coming up to the close here. But we do have one question here from Tom Brooks, good customer friend of mine, great voiceover guy out out in Oregon says great see you Bill.
How do you use LinkedIn for communication? You got any suggestions for Tom on that? The main thing I do on LinkedIn is to try to post regularly try to post meaningful, helpful material, not much in the way of hard sell mostly information that people can use. And Tom, it is good to hear from you. You and I are connected on LinkedIn. And you’ve noticed, Tom that I not only publish my own material, including videos quite regularly, but I will post quality material from other people as well. The main thing I don’t do on LinkedIn is the minute somebody connects with me, try to pitch them, just tell them something I like to say on LinkedIn. If you connect and you pitch me you strike out all that that’s great advice, Bill. I’m just looking to see if any, folks this is your chance. We’ve had a couple of good questions here. We’re getting a lot of you know getting a lot of good comments. My good friend Karlin Bunting, he mentioned it. Here’s my good friend, a Canadian buddy in real estate Michael Creason. So I’m getting all kinds of good fact you know, Michael said I was interested in getting his multimedia career off. So so you know, we’ve been consulting and communicating with People for years and years, but like I said, one of the one of the things I love about going live here and having live people, it does two things bill, it makes you It holds you accountable. You know, in other words, I am I this is one of my old jokes. You know, it’s like, I’m gonna do that someday when I get around to it, you know, I said, I’m gonna start a podcast. You know, I know how to podcast, I know how to do YouTube, I know all these things. I teach all these things. And I’m gonna get to it when these days when I get around to it. Well, this is what I have. I have around to it. Hey, we all need that.
Yeah. And and so, you know, I think I think Dan Kennedy said, or somebody may, I don’t know maybe somebody else said that 99% or 95% of success is showing up. So that’s why I’m so thankful you showed up for this show. Is there any closing statements you want to say before we close the show out but this has been great information, the message I have is learn what holds you back and get over yourself. Just make yourself do it. Anything else that you could say about making better video because basically making video is speaking that’s what it is. And you have been a communication speaker coach for years and years and years with lots of success under your belt, folks go to biz communication guy.com check out bill join his email list. Look at his playlist, watch his YouTube channel. Get to know this man he is um, he’s just a gym that that more people need to know is out there doing things because you know what he doesn’t have to he’s doing it because he loves it. He loves helping people and hopefully that comes across from both those. So anything you want to say? And then we’re going to close this show out. The final two points. One is we’ve we haven’t mentioned preparation of course. I like to say preparation reduces your perspiration. So you do have to prepare but don’t over prepare. And then because you can get tired of it. And then the second thing I would say, and I think this is extremely important, and especially with video, forget that word delivery. We’ve been teaching it for so many years and talking about how to give a speech, leave delivery to FedEx, the post office, and other services. Think instead of having a conversation with your audience speak to them as though there were one person there, even if they’re thousands are if they’re an unknown number on the internet. Just speak to that individual in the audience with a conversation. They’ll love it. Alright, bill that that is great advice, folks. Share this website Mike store dot live. That’s where I archive the show. It’s in YouTube, subscribe to my YouTube channel, subscribe to my email list. Subscribe to my podcast in other words, there’s more multiple opportunities to get all this information.
My goal is to bring some of the stellar people of the world that can share insights, the things that maybe you need to know more about, maybe you struggle with. And that’s why I wanted to have my good friend Bill Lampton here say, So Bill, thank you so much. If you want to go live, the show is brought to you by dot live secrets calm. That’s where you learn to go live. Repurpose, and archive. You know, I suspect anybody who sells something they don’t do themselves. Very suspect of that. But I believe in this so much. That’s why I do the show. And I appreciate all of you people who make carve out a half an hour of your morning to spend it with me.
So share this with everybody. share it on social media, get to know Bill Lampton. And thanks so much, Bill. We’ll see you shortly. I promise.
Thanks, Mike. It’s great privilege to be with you and your viewers and listeners. I, thank you, my friend. Have a great day.
Kindle with Audio & Video with Publishing Expert Daniel Hall
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Michael Stewart
Hello, everybody, it’s Mike Stewart with Mike Stewart dot live. And I’m so glad that you’re here
Michael Stewart
watching me live because I believe in audio and video marketing and I believe that live streaming is a massive opportunity in future for all kinds of applications. So today I’m going to be talking about something that’s right over my shoulder over here right there. You can see I’m pointing my finger at it, something I’m very proud of something I’ve been working on in Nashville for the last year so it’s doing Kindle books. And and of course, my expert who’s in the green room, who I’ll bring on here in just a few moments, is my good friend Daniel Hall, who I consider to be the number one premier Kindle expert in the world. Now, kinda how does this fit in with audio and video? Well, number one, to me, ebooks, and especially Kindle books are like selling websites. In other words, one of the things that you can do inside of a Kindle book, and I’ll show you this overlay is you can have blue clickable links. In other words, you can link to video, you can link to audio, you can link to software. In other words, you can sell links inside of ebooks. We used to do PDF ebooks, Adobe Acrobat ebooks back in the day, and we would put links in it. And then one of the things that you can do in printed books and one of the things that that has really been a resurgence is QR code marketing. In fact, this is in the Kindle book that Daniel helped me put together. For this music project of mine, Pac Man fever, we have the ability, if you point your cell phone at a Kindle at a QR code, you don’t even need an app anymore, it just immediately goes to the link that program that QR code. So so you know when it comes to Kindle books when it comes to ebooks. Um, you’re basically if you think about it, in fact, my good friend years ago, Armand Morin, made $4 million selling links to things that people didn’t know, he just, that’s what he did. He put together, I don’t know, a couple hundred 200 popular links as early on in the internet. And he sold as an E book was just an E PDF file full of links. And those links were valuable. So, you know, that’s how video and audio can tie into Kindle. But there’s a whole lot more to kindle marketing than just that. But that’s one of the things that has happened because of my good friend Daniel Hall, who’s gonna be on the show here in just a second. He helped me build this livestream back in May, about my project of Pac Man fever. And what we witness from this video marketing strategy was, we sold Kindle books and in fact, this created a whole lot of PR we got a huge article in Yahoo music, and we just got a lot of press from doing this. So when you think about you know, being an author, but more importantly tying it back to audio and video marketing, there’s a whole lot of opportunity. So that’s kind of how I want to lay the foundation here. And so what I’m going to bring to the stage right now is my good friend, Daniel Hall. I see Daniel is there Can you hear me wave at me Daniel, if you can hear me? He can. So here we go. Daniel. So good to have you here on Mike Stewart dot live.
Daniel Hall
Hey, Mikey, how you doing? Hello, everyone.
Michael Stewart
Good to be here. All thank you for being a part of my you know, one of the things that I’ve gotten excited about and in fact, I believe that you are the person who really helped me see the missing links that I had. I got excited about live streaming probably three or four years ago, when Facebook Live came out. And then YouTube Live kind of was followed after that and we tried Periscope and all these other Difference situations. And one of the frustrations I had with it was to, you know, to multicast to multiple platforms, and then also encasing your live stream on a website. And when you told me about the software that we’re using right now, stream yard that was the missing link. But, but that’s not what today’s about, you know, my audience is interested in audio video marketing. But, you know, I want you to talk about Kindle marketing and your experience and what you do with with authors to help them be successful in Kindle. I mean, it’s, it’s, there’s never been a better opportunity in the world to be a publisher or to be self publishing. And of course, it’s it’s one thing to create a great piece of content or a great project and get it up on Amazon. It’s a whole lot more to make it successful. So why don’t you take the floor here for a minute and talk about some of the things that that that tie into audio and video kind of like what we did with the Pac Man project, but but you know, your perspective Things that folks need to know, when they’re creating these types of projects. And yeah, obviously, if we’re not successful with it, it’s a it’s a time consuming hobby and I’ve had lots of time consuming hobbies in my day but but it’s it’s one thing to make it successful with, with profitability. So, Daniel, just share a little bit of your wisdom here for a few moments.
Daniel Hall
Yeah, man. Well, first off, I really appreciate you taking the time to to bring me on and have me a part of what you know what it is you do. But before I actually launch off into any of that what I just wanted to kind of tip of the hat and acknowledge you Mike, because many people know me as somebody that does webinars relatively well. And the fact of the matter is, is that I’ve made a lot of money doing webinars. And the the the point that I want to make sure everyone understands is that Mike Stewart, the guy that’s presenting this, this Very live stream. He’s the guy that first taught me how to do a webinar back, I don’t know, a decade ago now. So, you know, the fact that you are listening to Mike Stewart is is a very, very wise thing on your part because and because I listened to Mike, literally I’ve generated millions of dollars in in revenues doing webinars first and then and then he kind of led me into doing podcasting, and then push me sort of into live streaming. And every time I’ve listened to Mike, I’ve made money and not only that, but I know that I’ve reached a whole new community, a whole new group of people and I’ve been able to help them. So thanks to you, Mike on on all that. Now, the one of the things that I love about this age that we live in, is the fact that you can have have an idea for a product or a solution. And you can get that solution to the marketplace in a variety of different ways. Now, Mike wanted me to share my wisdom on, you know what, what it really takes to to make something successful. And the very, very first thing is to make sure whatever it is that you are thinking about bringing to the marketplace actually has a demand. In other words, people actually want it it’s not that they need it, but they but they want it and and also that they have demonstrated a, a thirst a hunger for, for buying whatever that solution is, which is one of the reasons why I love to use amazon.com as a way to do some market research because if you have have an idea for something, a, you know, some some solution in your baileywick. Right and your core expertise, but you don’t know whether there’s a market for it? Well, you can go to Amazon, for example, and look to see if there are books on your subject or audio books on your subject or other products or courses that revolve around your subject matter your core solution. And you can tell by what people already in the marketplace are doing and how their products are doing and the number of those products, whether or not there is a demand. And how do we know that? Well, we know that because, number one, the number of people that may have a book, let’s say on a particular subject, or it was in addition to so it’s and
Daniel Hall
what the BSR or best seller rank of that particular product is so Mike want me to address this? Hey, you gotta you know, do you, if you’re going to bring something to the market, you know, to to ensure that it’s going to sell? Well, this is the very first step. Now I will just tell you here that nothing is 100% so this is this is both art and science, it’s it’s it’s metrics and, and a bit of, you know, inner guidance, creativity. So I just want you to understand that but it certainly is really, really helpful if you see four or five or 10 different competitors that are basically are selling similar solutions to whatever it is you’re trying to bring to the marketplace. And, and the bestseller rank on that particular book, for example or product is relatively low meaning that there are lots of people buying that product right Buying that particular solution that should inform you that Oh, okay. Other people are out here selling similar things, similar types of solutions. Of course, Yours may well be much better. But at least you know that the solutions that are being brought to the marketplace are being consumed, people are actually shelling out money, okay to get whatever it is these people have in exchange, and that’s really what it comes down to, you know, people could say, and that’s the other thing that that kind of gets me a little bit about market research is that, you know, you can have this, this market research and you could be asking survey questions to two people, but people will tell you one thing, and then do another when their money is involved, right? So they’ll say yes, yes, yes. But when you ask them to actually pony up Their their actions may be altogether different, which is one of the reasons why, again that I refer you back to a website, like amazon.com, which you should, you should think of in terms of it being essentially a buyers search engine. Because when you go to Amazon to buy something, or when people do go to Amazon, they understand that there they’re going to have to buy something, unlike Google, for example, to do market research. So that would be my first sort of big big tip for you is to make sure before you come to market with something that you are investigating how well that particular type of solution is doing. And it may or may not just be Amazon, okay? It can be other marketplaces as well. For example, perhaps your type of solution does well in Clickbank or Etsy, okay or any of the number of other Other places where that particular type of solution may well sell. Once again, it behooves you, it benefits you, in other words, to, to run down the whether there’s any demand for whatever it is you’re bringing to the marketplace. And this the key before you actually put out the project, okay, before you take the time, effort and energy to, to bring a project to the marketplace, even in minimal in minimal, minimal viable form, because, as you well know, and I know I’m I’m just like this as well, let me know in the chat if you can relate. But I only have a certain amount of bandwidth mental bandwidth that I can expend. It’s it’s like a it’s like a bank account. I don’t I don’t have just constant creativity and constant energy to put out on something that um, that that actually you know, I can I can do Over and over again. So I’ve got to be very selective and you have to be very, very selective in what you are bringing to market. And once again, knowing knowing this, knowing that there there may well be a aperture in the in the market is going to help you hit more baseballs, it’s going to hit you, it’s going to get you on base more often. We’re just coming into this really weird baseball season right now with the whole COVID thing. So yeah, it’s like, you know, hitting not hitting the ball and getting on base and, you know, moving along to you to actually get some runs scored in the form of money made with your projects. So yeah, that’s, that’s what I would say there, Mikey.
Michael Stewart
Well, you know, this is all great information. And the thing that you know, that you’ve taught me, is that you know, that I believe you were one of the first people to tell me that, you know, I ask people all the time, what is Amazon to you? And usually the general answer is it’s a store Well, yes, it is a store it’s an e commerce platform. But it is a search engine. And the the if people are searching it in Google, if they’re searching in Bing or whatever, search engine, they’re probably searching it in Amazon. But the difference is, and I and I’m living example, especially in these crazy days of COVID is that it’s really easy to pick up your cell phone, pull up the Amazon app and tap tap and something appears at your, at your doorstep. Amazing, you know, it’s amazing. So, so, the world has really become more search engine crazy with Amazon, in the last, you know, several months of of this pandemic, but more importantly, you as a marketer, you know, you have to ask yourself, are you leveraging the power of digital distribution through Amazon, if Amazon is a search engine, if Amazon is the ability to sell, you know, I’ve actually told people you know, a Kindle book is like selling a website membership, full of content. It has that potential. Amazon has the best delivery platform that people can consume Kindle content on their phones or tablets or computers. You don’t have to buy a Kindle device to it to consume this content but the thing is, you can link it to multimedia and of course that’s my wheelhouse is the creation and the marketing with audio and video content. And and and of course, that became the passion. You know, I was out in Austin with you. Just, I guess less than a year ago, I think was last summer that we were out on those beautiful lakes having a great time, masterminding. And I said can you know, can you embed and sell multimedia content and a Kindle hearing it here? I’ve been doing multimedia for almost 20 years. And I didn’t realize oh my gosh, what you can do? And of course, what we did was is we proved it works. And in fact, I’m going to put up the web address of one of mine and Daniel’s partnerships. It’s called digital music ebooks.com and You know, that’s one of the things in fact, we got one of my good Nashville friends here on the call or here on the call. Well, I’m going back to teleseminars or I’m dating myself there. On the live in our I’m calling these, it’s kind of like a webinar, but it’s live television. Jason deer with a national tribute band. And of course, one of the things that we’re trying to prove and we will prove Daniel, you are a Kindle expert, there’s a whole lot of cross marketing, you know, there’s a lot more to it than just throwing it up on Amazon and, and a wish and a prayer. There’s cross linking, there’s a resources for promotion. Um, and of course, one of the things I think every author in the world should be live streaming. You know, the the reason that on live streaming is I, I teach live streaming to my clients, but it’s also a content repurposing opportunity. When we get done with this particular livestream, it’s going to become a podcast. It’s going to become a YouTube video. Do it’s going to become a transcription, it’s going to become, you know, we have my good friend Jeff herring talks about medium calm. In other words, in 30 minutes time here, I’m gonna have a whole lot of content that I was guilty of not creating. And and so what I love the commitment to going live, makes a commitment to be creative. And then of course, when you have the ability to interact with folks, we’ve got people here live, which we’re going to take some questions. That’s my mantra for the world of everyone, and especially Kindle authors. Anybody who creates anything that that they try to build a business online with, is when you go live, you repurpose that content content and it becomes archived on the internet forever. And, you know, one of the things I’ve been teaching for years is making content. But my gosh, I was not archiving. I mean, I knew how to do YouTube channels, and I’m sitting here going, I don’t have any subscribers and I don’t have that many videos, and I’ll tell you what, It was Daniel is procrastination. Procrastination is that thing you know, I want to get I’ll get to this one day is when I get around to it. So I got myself around to it.
Unknown Speaker
There you go.
Michael Stewart
And I started going live. So let me let me ask, I’m gonna ask you a question and then we’re gonna take a few questions because I try to keep the show two half an hour, because I respect people’s time. If this is not meant to be a webinar, it’s meant to be a relationship building. Introduce folks to my friends and my expert guests, and then just kind of whet your whistle. I’m going to put up this URL. I’m going to leave it here for a bit. I did a little research if you go to Daniel Hall presents calm, you can pretty much find everything you need to know about this brilliant friend of mine. I mean, he’s a brother from another mother, but my gosh, brilliant, brilliant marketer, very, very successful. And you just if you don’t know Daniel, you need to go to Daniel Hall presents to see all the crazy things he does, but let me ask ask you this what do you do different with Kindle that most people who who put up put up Kindle books? What do you do to help people become more successful what just maybe give you four or five things that you did differently that most people don’t even know need to be done not asking how to do it what are they what are those things?
Daniel Hall
Yeah So the very first thing I would say is that most Kindle authors believe that the job is done when they hit Publish. When the when the point of the fact is that when you hit Publish is when your job begins. That’s when your job begins. Because as you well know, Mikey books that already product that just sits up on on Amazon or anywhere else, for example, they it’s not it’s not a Field of Dreams thing. It is not even even if even with the best market research. You have got to get out and let people know that Your solution exists in other words you have to market whatever it is that you are bringing to the market including books on Amazon or any anything else that you’re bringing. So one of the one of the things is to do basically what we’re doing, where we’re taking a time to chat. We’re letting folks know that we exist that we perhaps have different solutions that may that may help them we we’ve entered their consciousness, their awareness, which for some people are there it’s going to lead eventually to as sales people go to Daniel Hall presents calm and they can get any number of freebies for me and then get on my email list and eventually probably buy something from me. I mean thousands of people have so that’s that’s the very first thing I would say is no going in that the the creation of your solution and the publishing of that collusion is not enough. It is just the beginning, not the end.
Michael Stewart
When you build, you know, one of the things that I see I’ve gotten several Kindle books lately. And I noticed that in the Kindle books, they don’t do very much cross linking. In other words, they don’t even tell you that they have other books. And I was just just while you were talking there, I went to Amazon and I searched your name Daniel Hall, and a lot of stuff came up for that. So I mean, that’s that’s one thing that that you know, I would think you would need to tell people is just, you know, how, how to make it easy to find you. If I were to ask you, how can I find your library? Because I know you have a lot of Kindle books and a lot of print on demand books on Amazon. How would somebody search Amazon to find your books and see your catalog?
Daniel Hall
Yeah, so that this is another really important thing. First off, if this is one of the one of the main reasons to actually have a book because as A author on Amazon with a book on Amazon. Everyone has the eligibility to have what is called an author central account. And an author central account on Amazon essentially is valuable, because it gives you additional real estate on one of the largest, you know, most traffic site in the world. And that is your Amazon, your Amazon author central page. So for example, if you were to go to amazon.com, forward slash author forward slash Daniel Hall, I believe that’s the URL. Then you will see all of all of the books that that I’ve either published or co wrote, or otherwise written myself. So the key with this is Using the different platforms, and I’ll pull it up here, because because if I do, you’ll see what I’m talking about. Because what this is a super underutilized tool that that most authors don’t really ever, ever use or don’t use correctly. And that’s the other thing I wanted to just show you here is that with it, you have the ability to put stuff up on your author central page, that um, that that gets that gets noticed. So, if you if you allow me to have the screen here, I’ll just show you what I’m talking about. Um, and let’s see, can I share my screen? I think I can hear I think you can. Yeah, let me do that.
Daniel Hall
Alright, and hopefully, you all be will be able to see this
Daniel Hall
Right. Can you go? Cool. All right, so here’s the Amazon author central page and a couple things I just want to point out. So these are all books that I’ve either as I said, published or or, you know, have have had some hand in in some way. The first thing I’ll just show you sort of from the very top to bottom here is that you should if you are an author, you should in fact, have really good headshots, not just something you know, Polaroid or you know, something in the backyard, go get a professional headshot or preferably head shots. The next thing you should do is make sure it’s kind of coming down here. Make sure that you have a really well done thought out considered an interesting bio, right, the go that goes right down here, so you can see that that’s what’s going on there. The other thing so coming across here, here, here are all the books that you that I’ve published. And you’ll notice a couple things. Like there’s a lot of these, these books with sort of the same sort of motif, the same sort of branding. These are the get the real fast results. So this is the other thing about about Kindle that you can certainly do is I have a, I have a podcast called the real fast results. com podcast. And what I did that’s different than than just about anyone else that I know, I don’t know any other podcaster or for that matter marketer that does this, but I take and make Kindle short reads out of every single one of my Kindle podcasts. So that’s what you see here where there’s I think over 100 hundred plus on books here from and I think yours is in Hear to Mike if we look for it when you when you are on the podcast, but but they’re all out in working for me, that’s, that’s that’s the point. And after every 10 of them going back to your earlier point, I cross promote all the rest, I cross promote all the rest of those. And that’s a very, very cool thing as well. Right? Um, and so that’s the other thing you can use your, your Amazon author central to do is you know, create and publish books like this. And all of these make money, okay, they all make money and they do it pretty much all on autopilot which is kind of cool. Now the other thing I wanted to show you here it looks like I’ve not put my screen back up here. There we go. A couple other things I wanted to show you here is the author updates. So back here, these on Amazon author central you You can put up your RSS feed for anything from your, your YouTube channel, your blog, your podcasts, so that when you do a new piece of content, it auto updates here on Amazon author Central, which is very, very powerful because that way, if somebody is interested in you, they’re looking at one of your books and they click over to your, your Amazon author central page, they could see that you are active that you are that you are doing stuff today that that affects them, you’re keeping up with what’s going on. The other thing I wanted to just show you here
Daniel Hall
is, for example,
Daniel Hall
like like we were showing you right here, you could put up images, like if you were to take this image right here, um, and point your phone camera at it, it would actually take you over to my My YouTube channel, where By the way, you should definitely go subscribe because I’m making great you know, tutorial videos over there and it’s completely free to subscribe. But the point being is that people I can take people off of Amazon and bring them over into another platform where I can continue to build a relationship with them right. The other thing that you can do here and should do is like like Mikey put up a little commercial there for his dot live secrets you can do he can put that up as a video here as well and have and have people access it write directly from from Amazon author Central, so there and of course you can add all of your books here to to you know, that you’ve published and people can buy them directly from here, etc. So, um, yeah, that’s a little bit of a little bit of a lesson here on Amazon author central kind of going back to what you can do To cross promote, by all means you’ve got to you’ve got to build this out because this is this is one thing that gets a lot of traffic, people find you and if if you’ve got it looks like you’re active here, then you know what it’s it’s going to attract new attract new people over to you then may not have no not otherwise knowing that number one you exist. And number two, that you have a bunch of different solutions that can make their life better. And then that’s really what it’s all about.
Michael Stewart
Well, you know, I’ll tell you what, it’s amazing how fast these shows fly by. I mean, I try to keep them around a half an hour and we’re already past a half an hour. So I’d like to take a few questions before we close because I know your time is valuable and so is the listeners. Um, let’s see here.
Daniel Hall
A lot of people just making up given us some great here’s a microphone A Superman mentality was helpful, you know? So there you go. I mean, you’re just getting a lot of kudos here. This is your chance. You This is your chance to ask some questions. Here’s Carlin. I got to tell you about my good friend Carling Carling owns the URL Grand canyon.com. Right? And he Carlin has been a mike Stewart of customer and Fran for more years than I care to remember. In fact, because of Carl, I got to see the Grand Canyon. So I’m going to give him this afternoon. What are your top five things you do to promote your Kindle books once you got them published? Well, we kind of talked about a little bit they’re calling before we started questions. Maybe if you can give a quick five Daniel.
Daniel Hall
Sure. Get get on and get other influencers to promote your your books for you. And that that means getting them involved early in the process as as you’re writing them on and including, you know, promotion to some people that you You want later in two to promote your stuff. The second thing you certainly can do is write some guest blog post. Third thing you could do is do some live type of, you know, live stuff you can get on by the way, that’s another another cool thing that you could do is you could do a short serialized podcast series and I use Mike has another opinion on this but I like for that sort of thing. I like to use anchor.fm to to do that. And the and I’m glad that just hit me. The number one thing you can do and anyone, the very first thing that you can do to promote your Kindle books, focus on not marketing, but getting lots of reviews for the book. Get rid of For your book, get reviews for your book. Okay, that’s what’s going to sell more more of your books. Okay, I can just tell you that it is really, really helpful and you do that by finding people here on Amazon that that review books like yours. So look for other people. It’s I’ll show you what I mean or I don’t know we have we have time to show this Mikey here. Sure. Okay. So what what’s Carlin’s um his his his niche branding, obviously.
Michael Stewart
Well now his his niches is selling tours at the Grand Canyon.
Daniel Hall
Alright, so Grand Canyon, so let’s look at a Grand Canyon
Michael Stewart
tours. And he may do other things that he hadn’t told me about but
Daniel Hall
all right. So here’s some tour books right on on the Grand Canyon. So here’s what over the edge death in the Grand Canyon. So if I were to go Hear Carlin and look at this has 300 373 ratings you see this. And what I would do is I would actually start looking through these people, especially those that gave it a five stars, I would go here and I wouldn’t go look for PLP mo and go over if you just click their name, you’re going to see not all of them, but some of them will have ways to reach out and connect to that reviewer. So, um, I would just go through this list. And, in fact, and here you go. So here’s Deborah Porter and her site here is that breath off a breath of fresh air press dot dots, ce o m.au. And I would find her there and write her and say, I’ve got I noticed you You know that you did this book? right yet you did a review on this book. I have a book on on tour in the Grand Canyon, I would really appreciate it if you would consider reviewing my book as well. And there you go there you can find her here. Here’s your contact. That’s how that’s how you find people to review you. Okay? Yes, it is. It’s a numbers game. Not everyone is going to answer you and not everyone that answers you will actually do the review. But if you do enough of these and you can get 10 1520 100 reviews in this way, selling your Kindle books is so so much easier. So with that, I think that’s
Daniel Hall
about as much as I could say.
Michael Stewart
Hey, we I just have to mention we have a marketing hero and legend Mr. Willie coffered Crawford is here. Hey Willie. Willie. Willie years ago, I’m telling you folks, thank you. It’s an honor for you to be here sir. I hope hope that if you saying this is excellent food for thought. Appreciate you being here and saying those kind words. And my good friend wall Gifford wall is just what a supporter and a sweetheart of a man he’s been all these years 335 in New Zealand right now, but he’s up watching us live. Yeah, you know, you could have watched it on a replay brother, but I appreciate you being here. Well, you know, we’ve taken if there’s no other questions, you know, we’ve gone about seven minutes over. Daniel, have you got any final thoughts before we close the show out, but thank you for being a guest of this show will be archived for forever. At Mike Stewart dot live. It’ll be in social media and YouTube for as long as those people let it stay there. And the purpose like I said, the purpose of this is I just want to create and spotlight good people with good information at my television show and then of course, the way you can support us is check out Daniel Hall presents calm Daniel had I checked it today he has links to all his products. He has so many great solutions that you just need to if you don’t know about Daniel, go there and check it out. And of course at Mike Stewart dot live I’ll link to all the things that I do that help people. In fact, here’s Carlin cart, you know, fat Carlin just recently purchased dot live secrets. So, Carla, I think I think that’s going to be a great show that I’d like to see about the beauty of the Grand Canyon and all the things that he’s doing there. So thanks for being here, everybody. Any final words before we close out this show here, Daniel?
Daniel Hall
Yeah, man. First off, thank thank you so much for the opportunity to to chat with your community, Mikey. And just remember that if you stay at the core of actually trying to help people, then in like not hiding your life, in other words, marketing, that you have a way to help people that’s going to do you Really, really well because even though you may not be always perfect and you make people off sometimes what you do, most people are going that that resonate with you will continue to resonate with you and and you’ll get more people attracted to you that were meant that you were meant to to help. So just don’t don’t hide your light market and come from a hardest service. And that’s gonna, that’s gonna help you the most.
Michael Stewart
And just as a final thing here, there if it wasn’t for Daniel Hall, my dream of making the first ever music Kindle book, Pac Man favorite the story behind the unlikely ad set. It would have never happened without Daniel Hall who is the Kindle expert. And of course, he was the guy who told me to make these QR codes. So until two weeks from today, we’ll have our next Mike Stewart dot live