Creating Social Influence & Authority Online (Even Before Building A List)

We often hear Dan Kennedy talk about the importance of having a list and of building your business so that way it frees you. But today's guests have a very different angle, and it actually aligns in a strange way with exactly what Dan Kennedy has been teaching for years. Today we get to listen to Dave D and Alex Mendoza as they talk about how to build social influence. This is the grand unification theory of social influence, how you can triple your time off to let the business run itself while at the same time growing without needing a list first. These are all the secrets you've been looking for in order to claim the momentum in your business and build a well and not a pond. What's the difference? Let's listen in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons. They're kind of laws.

Laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Well, hello everybody, this is Dave D., Chief Marketing Officer of GKIC, and welcome to your Gold Member CD titled No List The Marketing Secrets with my very, very special guest, Alex Mandozian. Now since 1991, Alex has generated, now get this, over $300 million in sales and profits for his clients and partners via electronic marketing media such as TV infomercials, online catalogs, 24-hour recorded messages, voice and fax broadcasting, teleseminars, webinars, podcasts, internet marketing, and on and on and on and on. He's also hosted teleseminars with many of the world's top thought leaders such as Mark Victor Hansen, Stephen Covey, Les Brown, Brian Tracy, and again on and on and on and on. He's done literally hundreds of incredible, incredible interviews. And in addition to that, he's trained over 15,000— that's right, 15,000— teleseminar students since 2002 and claims that practically any entrepreneur can transform their annual income into a weekly income once they apply his principle-centered electronic marketing strategies. Here's how can he say that? Because in 2001, Alex's annual income became an hourly income by 2006. The guy knows his stuff. He's the real deal, and I'm super excited to have him on the call with me. Alex, thanks so much for joining us.

Dave, I can't wait. This is our first time doing this, so I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it too. And you'll notice that Alex is now a contributor to the No BS Newsletter. He's also going to be one of our featured speakers at the Superheroes of Info Marketing in November. So Alex, we got you working, man. We've got you working.

Well, you got to work with the right crowd. And I remember at the last event I knocked over your coffee and it stained your notebook, and it's a memento that I think I've anointed. So hopefully this time I'll walk away from the table and it won't happen again.

Yes, that is correct. And you were mortified.

I was mortified.

You were mortified, and of course being the nice guy that I am, I didn't keep mentioning it to you. As I say, tongue firmly planted in cheek. Let's get started here. This topic is extremely important, and quite frankly I'm going to grill you on this because I don't believe you. You're saying that no list marketing secrets, you don't need a list to grow, as Dan Kennedy would call a herd, or some other people would call a tribe. Why is this so important for our listeners?

Well, why is it so important and relevant? I'll tell you why. Because you can't have a business without a list, but you can't have a list until you have a business. It's a paradox. It's a chicken or egg scenario. The thing that gets in everyone's way, either diving into a new niche, starting up a new business, or deciding to be an info marketer, is how do I build my list? And so if we take that out of the equation and look at new universal truths. So one universal truth is the attention span is splintered now because of social media. So email doesn't work like it used to. Another universal truth is interruption is the default that we're constantly being hammered with almost every day. Think about it. It's like whether it's the phone or your Facebook account or tweeting on Twitter or emailing a list or blogging or writing. I mean, you're being interrupted constantly. The third is there's really no grand unification theory of how to use social media and the internet to build your offline or online business. There's no unified theory, kind of like the way Einstein wanted to create a unification theory. And then the final truth is email is obsolete. I think email is dead. It's not something to rely on. Anyone who says otherwise is lying because I have a very loyal list and I don't get the response rates I got a year ago. And a year ago I didn't get the response rates a year before that, and I didn't get response rates, you know, 2 years ago that I got 3 years ago. So email is slowly dying, and it's because we have this splintered attention span. I think that's where it begins. And, you know, the AIDA formula, A-I-D-A, A, attention, interest, desire, action. It's a 100-year-old formula that's still viable and alive and well. The first A is attention, and if you don't have that, you have nothing. So the reason this is such an important topic to at least discuss and explore, because I don't want you to believe me. In fact, don't believe me. Just go based on what I'm saying, because I've earned the right, because I've made more mistakes than anyone listening to this, than you. Included. I've made more mistakes and I've spent more money on those mistakes, and by making those mistakes, I know what not to do in this area. So imagine creating and growing your herd, your tribe, without requiring a list. That is what the topic— and that is why it's so relevant, because everyone should be popping up in their seats or listening more intently if you're in your car at home. Because if you don't have a list or if you have one, imagine growing your reach and becoming an authority and a social influencer online and offline without starting with a list. I think that's like going to heaven without the inconvenience of dying. Does that answer your question?

That answers the question beautifully, actually. It's really exciting. As you mentioned that, I got excited because that is everyone's stumbling block. I just want to make sure that we're all on the same page here. With exactly what the definition is of what this is. You're saying, and I just want to paraphrase you, and if I'm wrong please correct me, you're saying that I can start a business and I can market it without having to build a list, or are you going to be talking about how to build a list if I don't have a list?

You can become a social influencer, an SI, an authority. That's where author is an authority, so everyone has a book in their heart. You can become an authority on your topic in your niche. If you do done-for-you products, you know, in your area of expertise, you can become one without having a list from the start. If you have a list, obviously it seems like it would be a lot faster, but you can become an authority without a list. And the strategic byproduct of using these no-list marketing strategies, kind of like No BS, you know, this is no list. You don't need a list because it's the paradox of you can't have a business without a list, but you can't have a list without a business. So how do you grow this thing? It's always been this ethereal thing. You don't need it. The strategic byproduct of this process is when you employ, execute, and start living into these strategies you will build your list. In fact, it's how many people are building their lists right now, not just my students, but some of the great online marketers can grow their list this way. So that is the result, is you get to build a list without having one, and you become an authority before your list has grown to 50, 60, or 100,000 people strong. So it's exciting and it works. That's what I love about it. It is.

So let's dig right into it then, because I want to get some real details, some real nuggets that people can take and use. And you're a master of doing that, by the way. That's one of Alex's greatest talents, is breaking down complex— not even theories, but complex things you need to do and makes it really step-by-step. So let's— and you've got thousands of students, so let's talk about step-by-step.

How do we get started with this? Okay, so the first thing is to smile. At the fact and be grateful that there is a grand unification theory of social influence. Grand unification theory of social influence. If you're listening and you're in a place where you can write some notes down, write that. Otherwise, wait and re-listen to this so that you write down GUTSI. G-U-T-S-I. SI is what we're after. SI is, um, the key to the kingdom. Not keys, the key is having social influence. Grand unification theory of social influence. There is one. It's the marketing principle. It's a principle. It, it, it's enduring. It's not going to be obsolete. That syndicates or unifies all the social media platforms that are online and will unify whatever you do offline to help building your influence. Syndication means that it unifies them so they're all working together rather than creating silos and working independently. So Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, if you are familiar with these patterns, most people work with them as individual silos. That are separated and are not connected thematically. They talk about different topics or different subtopics about their niche on all these platforms when you can have an editorial calendar for the next 3 months or even a year like I do, and it is unified. It's one big platform, and that is you. You create your own internet. It stops the confusion about how to market and monetize. Your topic. I'm going to ask you to think about this as a mental picture. I want you to think about it in the sense of a few circles. Imagine a circle in the middle of a page, and that's your blog. A blog is nothing more than a way to connect with the rest of the world online. That's your blog. Now, that's a circle in the middle. Now imagine 5 other circles on the outside of that circle. Those 5 other circles are circles that are going to generate traffic, and those are your social influencing platforms that already have juice with Google— nectar, not juice— but already have influence in the marketplace, and they are all in the top 10 most influential websites in the world. So we're borrowing influence from these folks, and I'm talking about— here are the other circles. So you have your blog in the middle, and then on the outside, remember, we're unifying. The big picture of GUTSI, G-U-T-S-I, is unifying all of the social media so it's one uniform act of building your social influence. And so you have Facebook, You have LinkedIn, so we'll call it FB, LI, LinkedIn. That's another circle on the outside. You have Twitter, you can put TW. You have YouTube. You've got to have your own YouTube channel. Put YT. And you have EzineArticles.com, which is an article directory. So it could be any article directory, but I like EzineArticles just because what Christopher Knight has done there, he's created the world's largest platform for articles, and you can join in on the conversation with existing categories, or if you're really good at what you do, you can create your own category like I did 8 years ago with the category of teleseminars, which didn't exist, and I started writing articles on that, and now that's a very not only useful but active and engaging category on teleseminars. So you have these 5 circles. Around the one in the middle, which is your blog. And so what I like to do is, uh, if you put a circle in the middle, and again you can do it in your mind's eye or you can do it on paper, and then I would do 5 circles around that with arrows pointing in and pointing out, because everything is connected. And if you're doing this with me, Dave, I would not go all the way around that middle circle. I would Leave some space at the bottom because the only one directional arrow that we're going to have is going to go to another circle. So you'll have a total of 7 circles. Now these 7 could be 16 or 20 or 30. I'm just making it very simple because there's so many other circles we could add. But these are the major— these are the big rocks in the jar, and it's important that you get the big picture so that you see how the information is going to flow. Because this has to do with your influence and not a list. You don't need a list to do this. Anyone can do it, starting— if you never touched a computer, you could start doing this today. In fact, we've had students who've never touched a laptop in their life. 55-year-old man, never touched a computer in his life, and within 3 months he's got a list of 4,000 people in his niche.

In 3 months?

In 3 months, yeah.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. He started with zero.

Zero. Not only zero, but no experience. I use him because he's like the extreme. No experience. He confessed to me that he'd never touched a computer, and the reason he didn't say that when we started is he was afraid that I wouldn't allow him to be a student. Can you imagine? I mean, it's crazy.

I just want everyone to really understand the impact of that. I mean, so he didn't spend money on buying email lists or anything like that?

No. Which is, by the way, a waste of money to buy email lists. It's not buying an offline mailing list. Email lists, you're giving yourself, you're anointing yourself to be a spammer if you buy email lists. We have that gentleman, we have an 81-year-old grandmother, we have an 8-year-old kid who has done this and has built his own list in reviewing video games, you know, from a standing start. So let's go back to that one-directional arrow. So you have your blog, we'll call that BL. I like, you know, two letters so that we just know what they are. We have in the middle, we have BL, then we have FB, LI, TW, YT for YouTube, and then EA for e-zine articles. We have those going around And there are arrows pointing to and from that middle circle. So you should have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 arrows. Mm-hmm. And then we're going to— and they're two-directional. The one-directional arrow is going to go from your blog, BL, to another circle, and the final circle for this interview, and that is your IO, irresistible offer. So from your blog, you're going to go to your irresistible offer. Now the irresistible offer can be an offer that helps you create suspects and transform them to prospects, which is building your list. So that could be a prospecting irresistible offer. You're ethically bribing people, so what's your outcome? So it could be doing that. It could be going from suspect to customer, which could also be patient if you're a chiropractor or client if you're a coach or student if you're a teacher like me or whatever else you want to call it. I'm going to use customer as the catch-all term. Ideally, I don't like to leapfrog from just being visible to trying to be profitable. I like to go visible to credible and then profitable. That's a model that Ivan Misner, founder of Business Network International, taught me. VCP, visibility. You're just being visible in their orbit for the first time. They see you on, let's say, Facebook. Then they come to your blog because that's what your Facebook post told them to do. They're not getting useful content on Facebook. What they're doing is they're being told to get the full story. You're giving them an hors d'oeuvre so they can get the meal on your blog because your Facebook page you don't own. You could be annihilated and dissolved for life. But they're coming to your blog or your main website. I like a blog because the content is constantly changing. So even if you have multiple tabs on your site, your blog should be the default page. Because Google and all the other search engines love fresh, relevant, and unique content. LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, EzineArticles, guess what? You're not having standalone articles or posts there or videos. What you're doing is you're talking about a theme for the week, or better yet, a sub-theme for the week for the monthly theme. Let's say my monthly theme for this month is outsourcing, which it is for my membership site, then I have sub-themes for that. I have that in advance. I plan it out. Then on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and YouTube and using articles, etc., I have little teasers that give useful but incomplete content so that they can get the full story on the blog. We're teasing them. We're putting drops of honey so that they can come back and feast on it, like Dale Carnegie would have said, on our blog.? Because that we can control. From our blog, we are going to lace and smuggle their ability of partaking in an irresistible offer, which I believe should go from just being visible to just being a suspect to a prospect. That is not a huge leap of faith. It's just becoming— it's actually the purpose of it is building your list, so going from visibility to credibility. And then profitability comes, I think, by default when they go, okay, sell me already, I'm in, I'm, you know, I'm a convert. And that's the direction you want to send them to. So from your blog, which could be just one tab or page of your general site, if you have a membership site you can still have a blog that's public as I do, you have a one-way arrow where you're going to be lacing your irresistible offer for the week or for the month, and that goes to a solo page, and that's all they are reading. So forget logistics right now. The— just the function of the GUTSY model: you have 5 circles around one, and then you have one more circle at the bottom, and all roads lead to Rome. Rome in this case is hopefully building your list or having an IO, an irresistible offer, to build your list that makes an ethical bribe of some kind that's valuable for your niche available to them so that they can say yes and you build your list to build the credibility process. That is the big picture. Does that make sense? I just want to make sure because it's hard.

I got it. I got it. I'm a believer. I totally got it. I've never heard an explanation like that of this. It is so clear. I just hope people— you have to take notes, guys. Listen to this again. There is also a transcript for you of this. Go through that, highlight it, make notes from that. What Alex just did is— Alex, you just gave so many nuggets of information wrapped up in the gigantic nugget that you gave, such as for example, I just want to make sure I point these things out, make your blog your default page. Google search engines like that. Alex, I just want to see if I have this right because I've got notes all over the place. Go ahead. As I always say, one of the reasons I like doing these interviews is I learn a lot of stuff from really smart people. What you do is, you've mentioned this this a couple times, so I just want to bring it up. You have an editorial calendar then that you put, uh, in a year in advance?

Well, I, I do a year in advance. Yeah, 3 months is, is good. And so what I do is like a, like a magazine, any magazine does this, right? And so what I do is if I'm going to write an article for a magazine, I ask for their editorial calendar. I don't just say, I got this great article, you know, publish it. I want to fit into their editorial calendar because it They're editorializing months in advance. So what I do is I will have a theme for each month. I taught this to Jack Canfield. He has an Inner Circle, which is a membership site. He's got several thousand people on that. He has a theme every single month, so it makes life so easy. Sloppy success is better than perfect mediocrity. Even sloppily you can do a great job in having a theme for each month. For the next 3 months, you're coming up sloppily with a theme. Robert Shuler said, "Spectacular achievement is always preceded by unspectacular planning." This is the unspectacular, non-sexy planning that bore people, but frankly, this is what made Warren Buffett a billionaire. This is what made Bill Gates a billionaire. This is what made Oprah Winfrey a billionaire, is this planning that no one sees., but the results and the fruits of it are astounding. So you say, okay, next month I know my niche. Hopefully you got that. I can't help you if you don't know your niche. But I know my niche and within that I'm going to come up with 12 topics. And from the 12 topics for each month, I'm going to come up with 3 because I'm not really sure those 12 topics are relevant. I'm going to go to eBay.com, Dummies.com, Dummies is the Dummies books. I'm going to go to Amazon.com. I'm going to go to ClickBank.com. These are all buying platforms. Buyers go there. Browsers go to Google. Buyers go to the 4 sites I just gave you. Dummies.com, 1,600 topics right there, niches just for you. Is it a monetizable niche? You can find out. Dummies.com. John Kilcullen, who started that, you know, I know him as a dear friend. He's the dummy. He's the guy with the hair, you know, standing up. That's Dummies.com online. Check it out. The subthemes you can get a ton of ideas. eBay.com, that's a buying platform, the world's largest. ClickBank, that's a buying platform, $2 billion in commissions they've paid over the past 10 years. People buy there. Amazon.com, people buy. You've got bestseller list ideas and products that sell. It's the world's largest marketplace, okay, and they're a great fulfillment facility if you've ever worked with them. So you go to those 4 areas and and see within your niche, are there sub-niches or micro-niches or ideas that you could use as topics? And I hope you have competitors because if you don't, then I don't think that you have a niche. But whatever your competitors are doing, what topics come up? What are the FAQs they have? Have some ideas of what will be sub-topics for your master topic, whatever that may be. Let's say organizing. Let's say that's your topic. Okay, so organizing your garage, organizing your kitchen, organizing your desk, organizing your computer desktop— those are subtopics of the master topic, which is organizing, right? And so those subtopics are going to be the monthly themes. And if you can come up with 12 themes just as a brainstorm, because you know it's not going to be accurate because it's not crowdsourced, it's coming from your mind, but out of those 12 If you can pick 3, then for the next 3 months you're guessing, you're just guessing that these are 3 themes for the month. And if each month has a theme in advance that you know about, now your people who are part of your tribe or herd, if you have one, if you don't, then it's just you and your family, you know in advance, you're anticipating You know with absolute certainty what those monthly themes are going to be. Now you can start writing, recording audio and video, sub-sub themes. In other words, subtopics of the subtopics which are the weekly. Each week you're going to have a sub-theme of the monthly theme of organizing. Organizing your desk. Would be a sub-theme of organization, right? And so whatever the topic is going to be, you want to make sure that you have, you know, 3 months that have that theme, and then within that theme per month, you want to come up with content that you're going to be marketing and promoting, you know, for the month, week after week. And so I recommend that each week should be Not a brand new topic because there's not enough time for a week. People go on vacation for a week. What if they're not listening to you or watching you for a week? You lost them. But a month is long enough. If you can hold their attention, suspend their attention, create interest, elicit more desire and have them take action in becoming part of your tribe or herd, within a month is practical. Within a week, eh, not so much. You create this editorial calendar for 3 months. And then figure out, okay, what are 4 to 5 different sub-subtopics of that month of the general topic? If you look at it, a decision-making tree, you have your niche and then the 3 topics within your niche and then subtopics within those topics for each month. Now you have probably 12 weeks of content. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, easy articles. What you're submitting, hopefully you've written in advance. I, I certainly do, like a month in advance. You start posting, and you can do this automatically. There's software that can just do it for you. You now know, you now know what you'll be talking about in advance, and you have the power of anticipation, and you've unified all the social media to your favor. You've unified Facebook, Twitter, you're not reacting to people. You're saying, "Okay, this is my theme for the month and I'm going to be talking about it from many different angles week by week." All that content is going into your website, which I hope is your blog, and you have at least 1 to 2 posts a week on that category. Here's what's happening, Dave, and I know I'm dominating and bulldozing this conversation, but it's so, so important that people get this. Do you know the keyword and link juice that you're creating on the search engines like Google by focusing in on a month and you're doing it unified with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and EzineArticles and all roads are leading to your blog and your blog is having an irresistible offer to get them to do something. You've got to know your call to action, hopefully turning them from a suspect to a prospect. Right? If you do it each month with one theme, now you're organized. Now you're unified. Now you're no longer splintered. Now you're focused. People think you've got your act together, even if you're faking it. Now you don't have to guess what to tweet about, post about on Facebook, or say, "What is this LinkedIn thing?" or "What's YouTube?" You don't have to think about stuff like that. You know in advance. You can actually outsource this, which I do, once that outsourcing partner has captured your voice because all it is is recurring activities day after day. All that is leading to an irresistible offer which helps build your list and your social influence. That's why it's so powerful because you're no longer guessing what to post, like what do I do on Twitter? You're not doing that anymore. You're now managing the change that's happening there versus change managing you. People are just constantly in these icy waters and they have no idea what to tweet about. I know I'm supposed to be on Twitter, but what do I do? It's stupid. I don't understand. 140 characters? Now you know. Right. Yeah, absolutely. It's powerful because even in this short conversation, I think you get a sense of you've got to get your act together in identifying what your monthly themes are going to be at the very minimum. And somehow the universe has given you these social media platforms that are going to have you dominate your niche on Google and everywhere else because you're spending a full month writing on these subtopics, which are just going to be other ways of feeding your main website or blog. Wow.

You remember at the top of the interview I said I didn't believe you? I'm a believer. Alex, it makes perfect logical sense. I just never heard anyone put it together like that, quite frankly. It's really more than just no list marketing. It's really how to structure your mind, isn't it? Structure your content and everything. It makes everything much, much easier this way as well..

So you increase your results in an easier way. It is. I mean, it's what you do as Chief Marketing Officer for Glazer Kennedy and in your own business. I mean, you can't say, "Okay, so what are we going to react to this week?" You can't do that. You're saying, "Okay, what's our editorial calendar for the next 90 days?" I mean, Lee Iacocca said it best, especially when he turned around Chrysler. He convinced the government to lend them some money. Bottom line is he said, "I like to organize my life in 90-day chunks." So I love 3 months because 3 months is really about 12 to 15 weeks. If you can organize your content with that structure 3 months at a time, you only got to do it 4 times a year and you're using the quarter process, the quarterly organization Then using the structure that LinkedIn and Facebook and all the other social media platforms have created for you, now you're using it to your advantage versus confusing your herd because your topics are disjointed and they're out of synchronicity. They're out of sequence. Now you get to control the process. I can go into all the detail of how to make sure that You have keyword density and you're using certain keywords and all this other stuff. But you know what, those are the little pebbles or little granules. The big rocks are really all about 7 Circles. 7.

You just want people to get started with this. I mean, there's obviously little details and things like that, but you really don't need to know it to get started. So let's say somebody started with this and what—

how would their business look?

What would their business look like? What would their life look like? Let's say 30 days, 90 days, so on and so forth. I mean, if they really just took what you just gave here, and you really gave step-by-step on how to do this. I mean, you couldn't have made it any easier.

What would their life look like? Well, they would be probably— what I've seen is, is from— it's not fair to say because, you know, the results we, we can't really control, but if they took the actions, the result is typically tripling their time off. You know, they'll have 3 times more time freedom. I'm, I'm conducting this interview from a room at the Ritz-Carlton, about 7,000 feet above sea level at Lake Tahoe Resort in California. And I'm in my room, my kids and my wife are downstairs signing up for ski lessons. I have the time freedom to do this as a result of making money at the same time. I'm making money as we speak, but I have the time freedom to conduct this interview to expand my reach thanks to the blessing of your request to do the interview. If you triple your time freedom, which is what we accumulate wealth in the first place for— I mean, I have a gardener because I want time freedom. I have a house cleaner because I want time freedom. I have a driver that takes me to and from the airport because I have time freedom. I have a tutor for my kids because I want time freedom. Wealth buys time and it's not a renewable resource, whereas money is renewable. I've lost millions of dollars to come up with these strategies. I think tripling time freedom, that is the holy grail of what we're after. I hope anyone listening agrees. If you don't, You will eventually, because it's true whether you want to believe it or not. That's, that's the end that's justified on what you do. You will triple your time off if you do this, because I have seen people who waste literally half their day, and I'm saying 12 hours, on Facebook, and they're aimlessly not only going in the wrong direction, but going in the wrong direction enthusiastically. Not only do they not have time freedom, they're getting more and more frustrated because what they're doing is they're hurting their business versus helping it. They're not becoming a social influencer. They're becoming socially impotent because they're not doing what's going to make their life effective. The end result, I have no idea how much, what percentage your list will grow because I've seen crazy numbers. I don't want to even mention them. But you will have a following, you will have a list, and you will triple your time off. In my case, in using this, I have a very good income that comes in passive residual income, and I doubled it. I more than doubled it, 2.5 times, and I have 3 times more time off where I can literally do other stuff and the business is running itself. Right now, people are posting on Facebook for me. Right now, people are putting up my repurposed content on YouTube for me. Right now, people are reading my posts on my blog and opting into my irresistible offer and going into my membership site, marketingonline.com. That's all being done for me because I set it up. How long does it take to set it up is the next question. It takes about 3 months to get this flywheel moving. And once it's moving, you can't stop it even if you want to.

What are some of the roadblocks that someone's going to face that your students have found that you've helped them through?

Not get started is the biggest roadblock. So you get excited and they come in with a mindset of a strategic entrepreneur and they end up as an opportunity seeker. Yes. Okay, that's what happens. Opportunity seekers have different internal dialogues than strategic entrepreneurs do. An opportunity seeker internal dialogue is transactions grow my business. The strategic entrepreneur mindset is relationships grow my business. Strategic entrepreneurs think about, okay, I'm ready, I'm aiming, and I'm going to fire, fire, fire, fire. That was Ross Perot's strategy in starting his businesses, and he's a billionaire. The opportunity seeker, even though you've heard this often, is they fire, ready, aim. They get excited and all of a sudden they're aiming at the end and they never get started in the first place. Strategic entrepreneur, they know they can have anything they want. An opportunity seeker thinks they can have everything they want. Well, you can't. You can have anything you want one at a time and that ends up becoming everything, almost like a sequence. As far as not getting started, one of the biggest enemies that are very— it's very, very seductive, but going after an ocean market, something that's deep and wide, but too deep and too wide for you to dominate, rather than an ocean or even a swamp, you know, that's wide and shallow. Definitely not a puddle that's narrow and shallow. What you want is something— you want deep and narrow, which is a well. A well, you know, the only of the four between a swamp, a pond, or puddle and an ocean, a well is where you have fresh drinking water. Think of yourself as building a well, drilling deep and narrow. If you go too wide, it's almost impossible to dominate an ocean. It is possible to dominate a well. When you've dominated the well, you go to the next one. Then the next and then the next. That's how you build your business. The biggest roadblocks are not getting started. Thinking like an opportunity seeker and chasing shiny pennies instead of being a strategic entrepreneur and cutting your teeth on nickels to make sure it's real money and coin. Then having eyes too big for your stomach, going after an ocean, something that's too wide and deep, try to dominate that. This is about dominance. Influence is about dominance, my friends. As you're listening, you want to be the dominating force, 1, 2, or 3. Just like, you know, Glaser Kennedy dominates info marketing and has that space just tied up for I don't know how many years. You want to dominate your niche and you can dominate a well. That's your well that you can dip your bucket in and get fresh water and build another one when you're ready. And if you don't like the well fresh water analogy, how about an oil well? That makes money, right? But you still got to refine the oil Sometimes you have to boil the water because it's not always drinkable. What that looks like is repurposing and resmuggling and reorganizing your material. We live, as Gary Vaynerchuk once said, we live in a Jetsons era, but we have to live more like the Flintstones. We have to connect more and engage more on the same topic again and again. For a longer period so people get us versus trying to come up with new content. We got plenty of content. We have to stop looking to create new content as information marketers and start dominating the subcategories of our overall topic and category. I like to do it a month at a time. Your whole year could be planned out 3 months at a time. Your months are planned out one week at a time and you are dispatching your content one post at a time by making sure Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, EzineArticles, just as 5 circles, are connected to your website, which I think should be defaulting on your blog so you have fresh content. People come and say, "Hey, there's something new." They're not looking at the same page. And then that goes to an irresistible offer. That's your call to action. Here's the worst mistake of all as a roadblock: no call to action. No call to action. So in other words, treading water, not moving. You've got to start with the end in mind. As Stephen Covey says, begin with the end in mind in his 7 Habits book. It's powerful. What's my call to action? What do I want them to do? What's point B? From there, reverse engineer what your posts are going to be and topics are because that's what I do. How do I get ideas to do that, Alex, may be the question. Well, great. Go to your competitors and see what they're writing about. You could do none other than commentary blogs as Joe Mercola does with 2 million people on his list. He's a good friend of mine. He owns a natural in the healing space, Mercola.com. He does commentary blogs. So he'll go to competitors who are number 2, 3, and 4 because he's number 1, and he comments on their posts, and that gets Google juice, and that ends up becoming his editorial calendar. So what you can do is you can just refinish finished content and become an authority because you're becoming the commenter versus the original person who posted it. If you're lazy, which I'm assuming you may be, you can start that way. It's the fastest and easiest way to start. All those are strategies to overcome the roadblocks. The call to action, how to get started, is get a 3-month editorial calendar written. What are your 3 themes for the next 3 months?

And then within those— Would you say that's the first step, Alex, that people should take? The message that's coming through loud and clear is take action. Don't think about this. Don't say, hey, 'Boy, Alex is smart and this is really good information.' Your message is to take action. So is that the first thing that someone should—

what is the first step someone should take? Well, let me of course correct you. Alex is dumb and he didn't quit even though he lost millions of dollars, and the 5% of what he tried worked. And so this is the 5%, right? So I didn't have enough sense to quit, thank God. The first course of action— the second thing you do is your editorial calendar. The first thing you do is ask yourself, what is my call to action? What do I want them to physically do to click that's going to engender word of mouth and word of mouse advertising? Word of mouth and word of mouse. What do I want them to physically do? Is it a special report? Is it a test trial for a piece of software? Is it a book? What are you going to either ethically bribe away or physically sell? I like to give away something for free so I build my list and the credibility process begins, but some people like to go straight to the sale. What is it that you want to get them to physically do? That's the call to action. That's the irresistible offer, and that goes from your website to the irresistible offer, which could be on your website but is very clear when they're getting to your blog. That's the first thing to do. Then the second thing is, what's my editorial calendar for the next 3 months? And then the third thing is to start writing the subtopics for month number 1. The fourth thing is start writing posts and create videos, which are nothing more than video manifestations of those posts, written posts, written word, visual word, audio word. Start doing that. For your social media platforms. And then, you know, I said something that wasn't really true. It wasn't a full truth, but in changing the truth, not only are those social media platforms linked to your blog or your website, but they're actually linked to each other. So they're actually referring to each other, which takes this little circle in the middle and makes it a huge circle So little you becomes big you and you start having social influence by unifying all the social media platforms. It's a giant circle. It's a giant intranet you're creating that's finally unified topic by topic, month by month, week by week. Hopefully that makes sense with the spoken word. If you read the transcript, it may make more sense. You have to physically see this in a presentation to actually get it. Because it's a lot easier, and I've just done my best to do it, you know, through the spoken word. But I hope you get it.

I hope you know. You made it super clear. I mean, if somebody takes notes, reads a transcript, I mean, you couldn't have made it any clearer. Okay, well, Alex, I just— again, like, I have pages of notes here. Just absolutely brilliant stuff. And I want to thank you so much for joining me on this call. It was great.

It was absolutely fantastic. Hey, thank you for letting me bulldoze the interview. It's my kind of interview.

Thank you so much. You're— those are the kind I like to do because I get the—

yeah. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.