Mike Koenigs Discusses How To Go Viral with The Power Of Your Platform

Welcome to Bacon wrap Business. I'm your host, Brad Costanzo, where we bring you sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. I am sitting here in the digital cafe with my friend Mike Koenigs. I'd like to introduce Mike to you here in just a second, but I wanted to let you know how important today's episode is. First of all, if you're listening to this on itunes, or stitcher or on the website and the audio only version, I I want to let you know that this is also available on video. You can get this@baconwrappedbusiness.com Mike K. Mike is the founder of Traffic Geyser Instant Customer, several powerful softwares that a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners and digital marketers use to explode their business. Mike has been around the scene of online digital offline marketing for decades and he is a wealth of knowledge. If there's anybody who is going to bring some bacon wrapped strategies to you, it's this guy right over here. So without any further ado, welcome to.

Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo. Check out the big brain on Brad.

Oh, Mike, thanks for joining me today in your digital cafe.

That's right. Nice to be here in my studio with you.

It's a pleasure for you to have me.

Yeah, that's right.

It's actually we are in a digital cafe. Where's the bacon? Flo?

Where is the bacon?

Where's Flo? Where is Flo? Bring us a place, Flo.

Flo's over there.

So, Mike, let me tell you, one of the reasons that I'm really honored to be here with you is that years ago, I think it was 2008, 2009, I was at one of my. I had just gotten into the world of digital and Internet marketing and I was at an event in Dallas, Texas, where I used to live. And I remember seeing you speak on stage for the first time about product that you had then and you still have now called Traffic Geyser. And we met during the show and I told you how much I liked it. I became a customer immediately. I had a business at the time selling celebrity voice impersonations for GPS called Pigtones. And we used your software extensively to distribute our message out and it worked so tremendously. The videos are still out there all over the place. And I've been a big fan and follower of your Work over the course of, I guess, the past however many years has that been.

We're going on almost a decade.

Wow, that is crazy. But one of the things I've noticed about you, and I've always really liked, is that you went way beyond just entrepreneurial or business education. And you seem to have a real knack for spotting trends, especially trends of digital trends, what's going on and where the puck is going. You built the tools and software and systems so that folks like myself and other business owners out there can take advantage of this and capitalize. And it's always worked for me when I followed you. So I was really happy to get a chance to sit down in the digital cafe where quite a few entrepreneurial legends and folks, I think if I'm not mistaken, Tony Robbins has sat probably right where I'm sitting and quite a few other people that I like, respect and admire and just really want to thank you for having me. But tell me, one of the reasons I wanted to have you here today is because you're so on the cutting edge of everything and because you're so such a trend caster, I guess. What do you think is really working today that the folks out there can take advantage of and then we'll kind of dive into some of the. The rationale behind that.

Sure. Well, I think right now, here are the big trends. So the answer to the question lies in where the world is right now and what's going on. So the answer to the question is you everywhere now. And that's why I wrote my last book, to Be youe Everywhere Now. Yeah, it's right here and it's actually right behind your head here. There we go, the fashion shot. But the big important things are at this moment, There are roughly 220 million Internet connected to televisions. There's a billion and a half regular TVs in use worldwide. That number is expected to be 300 million by the end of this year. So on the surface, it's like who cares about a few hundred million of anything except the next thing that's happening and has already happened. There's between 2 and 3 billion Internet connected desktop and laptop computers. There's about 2 billion tablets. So between iPads, Android tablets, Kindle devices, and then Microsoft Surface, for example, and then you have on the cusp of 3 billion, ish, 2 to 3 billion smartphones. And at any given time, about 73% of the human race is engaged with social media on a monthly basis. And then if you look at Google's reach at the moment between YouTube and Google, about 2 billion people use Google per month. You've got Apple that has 1.8 billion registered user accounts. You've got Amazon that has between 2 and 300 million credit cards on file as well. So if you combine that with say Facebook, which has 800 million active users per month, 1.4 billion user accounts that have been created, and the hundreds of millions for the other services between LinkedIn and Twitter, the bottom line is if you know how to create engaging content and distribute it, you can get underneath virtually any audience in the world and communicate with the entire connected planet. For free. Yeah, for free. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

We're going to have to explain that a little bit more.

For folks who think that this is.

Crazy expensive, there's no way they could have afforded it.

Yeah. So what I like to say is if both of us have a mobile television studio in our pocket in the form of our, our phones. And I did a test recently when we did a product launch where I had a $4,000 camera with a thousand dollar lens shooting video, and then I held my own iPhone. This is a 5S in front of me, which will end up dating this video. But the quality was so good that the untrained eye probably couldn't tell the difference between a high end DSLR with a high quality lens and your video camera. Exactly. Your phone. So at this moment, anyone, practically anyone in the world can create almost movie quality or for sure television quality video with something that they most likely have in their pocket. And then right now we could just take our laptop, open it up, turn on Google Hangouts, or start a YouTube live, and we could be broadcasting all these cameras simultaneously or just one single webcam. And whether we'd have one person watching or Google will give you the ability to broadcast to millions of people simultaneously for free. So if you think about it, in my opinion, we live in the greatest moment in human history when it's possible to have an idea, press a button and be broadcasting live to almost, I mean an almost limitless audience, either in real time and have a conversation with them at the same time, or in the form of this podcast we're doing right now. Could either be audio, it can be video, it can even be transcribed and turned into a book and distributed by Amazon. So if you think of the new way of thinking is to think of your business and to think of you as being in show business, which means you're responsible for showing your prospects and your customers that you're sharp as attack. That's a Jordan Dolphin phrase, sharp as attack. And you're the go to person and the expert authority in your industry. It's up to you to show that your products and services work, to show real people getting results with your products and services. And so in doing that, you can build a tribe of followers. And once you start building that momentum behind you, there's almost nothing you can do to make it go away. So when you're talking about your old videos that you made 2008. Right. So they're still out there. They still are probably driving traffic to a page or a site. Absolutely. And I get that all the time. So what I like to tell people is there's a really easy to follow, easy to understand formula that you can rapidly create content that can be presented in the form of a live show, a recorded podcast, and you can be seen, heard, found, read and noticed in any device, anywhere, anytime. So whether that's on your tablet, on your phone, in your car, on your television set, not to mention the fact that what I believe is about to occur is Apple will most likely be the company that does it. I think they're going to completely disrupt cable.

Apple tv.

Yeah. And they're going to unbundle all the channels. You'll be able to say, hey, I only want, like, if I got it, I'd get HBO Showtime. And I don't even know if I'd get anything else. I have HBO Go, which is awesome, and it's on all my devices. So in a way I already have that. I just don't care about cable. I would pay half as much as my cable bill today for just four channels instead of twice as much for a bunch of junk I never watched. That's just a lot of noise.

You want it your way.

Exactly. And I want to read it, view it, see it anytime, anywhere, any device. So to the average young person today, they gather their information, their knowledge, they get entertained from their mobile phone, and they don't differentiate between what they saw on YouTube or on broadcast television. It has the same value. So I really took a long way of answering your question, but I think that the future of you, everywhere now, and of being in show business is a way to frame the business you're in. And when I ask someone, I say, so what business are you in? And they'll say, well, I'm a chiropractor. I'm like, no, you're actually in show business.

And then they go, what are you talking about?

I'm a chiropractor. Starts a conversation. So I'll say, hey, I've got an idea about how you can grow your business.

Anyway, I was going to bring that up, by the way.

All right, go for it.

We were sitting down together not too long ago, and you were telling the story about how you, I believe you met Richard Dreyfuss. Yeah, is that right? And how a simple conversation with pretty much exactly what you said and what you phrased. And I really want you to rephrase that and I want all of you to listen closely because what he's about to say can have a dramatic effect on your business, especially if you do any kind of consulting or client work or work with anybody else. This is really remarkable. And I noticed it was also in the book. So if anybody hasn't picked this up on Amazon, go grab it. But go ahead and let's revisit that.

Well, here's the way the story went. As I was on my way to south by Southwest and I was flying and I noticed there were some people in front of me and they're talking and they're whispering. And one of them says, and starts pointing, says, do you see that over there? The guy goes, what? And he goes, that's Richard Dreyfuss. You know, the guy from Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And they're kind of like. And so I saw him over there and he was just, you know, chit chatting with his seatmate. And I grew up around Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star wars, and like, I loved those movies. And I think, like, Mr. Holland's opus was such a great story. And I had been following Dreyfus for a while because he's really opinionated and he knows how to hold court. And I found out a little bit later why as I got to know him a little bit better. But he has really fun personality and he's interested in everything. It's because he comes from a family of lawyers, of attorneys, and he thinks like one. But he's also a great historian and he loves American history. That's. He knows everything about American history, going back from the earliest days until modern times, and also how our legal system works. And what he did a few years ago is he dropped out of acting. He went to Oxford, studied there, and he's interested in civics, civic mindedness. In other words, how can you participate in your society, in your city, in your town, and have a massive impact and do the right thing? It's not a popular topic. It's not very interesting until you learn about how important it really is in the sense that a lot of young people and most people these days feel completely powerless in their government and also apathetic. And he has a vision for life and liberty and justice and what the founding fathers originally created. But he's also developed a curriculum for teaching some of these ideas and also teaching what he considers media responsibility. He's not a big fan of lobbies, lobbyists, or politicians for that matter. But gaining traction with a nonprofit is incredibly difficult. So he has this thing called the Dreyfus Initiative. So here's what happened. I heard that conversation and I knew I'd been kind of paying attention to him. And years ago he's on Bill Maher show and I love Bill Maher. I think he's really interesting. He loves to stir things up and I appreciate that mindset.

Well, whether you agree with him or disagree with him, you can't not pay attention.

He knows how to stir stuff up. So anyway, while we were on the plane, thank God for Internet access. I did a little bit of research. I found a podcast and I listened to it and then I looked at his website and I could tell that it had been hacked together. Needed some help. And I thought to myself, alright, well, it turns out my wife has a foundation. I've raised quite a bit of money for her. She builds schools and hospitals in Africa. And I thought to myself, okay, what does Richard Dreyfuss and his foundation need more than anything? And he needs money, right? And just because you're an actor, remember, there's a difference. And he told me this too. He says, the difference between a movie star and an actor is about $15 million a movie.

Yeah, exactly. He says, I'm an actor.

He goes, it's worked for me, it's a job. He goes, I don't get paid like Brad Pitt. I'm not Brad Pitt. He goes, I'm an old guy. So anyway, what wound up happening is as the flight was ending, I walked up to him And I said, Mr. Dreyfuss, my name is Mike Koenigs and I love what you're doing with the Dreyfus Initiative. I have an 11 year old son. And teaching civic mindedness and what this country is about is something that I'm very passionate about sharing with him. And my wife has a foundation, I've raised a lot of money for her and I have an idea about how to raise money for your foundation. So it's a variation on the theme. I have an idea about how you can grow your business, which instead I have an idea about how you can raise money for your foundation or how you can lose weight or how you.

Can get what you really want.

Exactly.

And I really commend you for. I mean, your knowledge and background in business has probably lent to this, but a lot of folks might not have been so keen on this, but you did a little research. You paid attention prior to this. Fortunately, you did a little research. You found out what was important to them, and then you led with that. And so often in business, people lead.

With me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

Yeah. Hey, can I get your autograph? Or what can you do for me? And it's the easiest way to turn somebody off.

Well, that and you don't stand out. You're just another scrounge looking for a free thing.

Absolutely.

And so here's what happened. So I got to answering the question in a roundabout way. So this happened very, very quickly, where I just walked up to him. Hi, Mr. Dreyfuss. My name's Mike Koenigs. I love what you're doing with your foundation. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have an idea about how to raise money for your foundation. He stopped. He looked at me, he says, call me, Rick. I need you. Best words you could hear. Yeah. And he says, why don't you come over here and sit down with me? And I said, well, where are you heading next? He goes, well, I gotta check. I've got another flight I'm taking. I'm heading to Austin. I go, well, as a matter of fact, I am, too. What's your flight time? And he goes, I go, I'm on the same flight. So here's what we can do. We can sit down now, we can chat for a couple minutes, and I'll make sure that we get seated next to each other. I'll talk to the. I said, I'll bribe. I'll bribe the.

I'll do what I gotta do.

Exactly. I said, we'll figure out a way. So anyway, he says, great. So we sat down, and for about 10 minutes, I literally told him the you everywhere now story, the exact same story. I said, what's your biggest struggle right now? And he said, well, I had back surgery. He says, that's why I put on this weight. He had put on some weight. He goes, it's horrible for me to travel. He says, I need to get in front of these senators and these people and these people and get the message out and get the word out. But it's, like, hard to travel. He says, I've lent this foundation my name and some startup Capital, but I can't be responsible for all the money, so I got to find a more effective way to raise money. And I said, well, have you written a book? And he goes, I've been working on a book for three years and I'm about a third of the way through. And I go, look, I said, here's my book. And I pulled it out. I had multicast marketing, which is before you, everywhere now. And it was kind of about some of these ideas before they gelled. And I pulled it out and I signed it for him. And I said, I wrote this book in 17 days.

I love the fact that you signed the book.

Yeah.

And gave it to the guy. As opposed to the opposite.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really funny. And to make. Here's the best part of the story is after I told him about this, he says, so when can we get started? And I said, well, I'm going to be back on XYZ date. And he opened up his calendar. He got his assistant on the phone, he says, jocelyn is her name. Jocelyn. I just met this young man at. Look at that. I'm 48 years old, I'm a young man. But I met this guy, this Whipper staffer here at the airport and he's got an idea about how to raise money for the foundation. Is da da da da day working okay for you? And here's what ended up happening nine days later. He was sitting exactly where you are and I was interviewing him for his first podcast episode. And we literally just got a call yesterday and he wants to come back and do some more stuff. And of course I'm gonna say, absolutely not. I'd hate to have an Academy Award winning actor sitting.

No, absolutely not.

But I love what he's doing. That's the more important thing. None of this would have happened and. And I wouldn't have pursued him if A, I didn't think this worked and B, if I didn't genuinely love what he's doing. But there's another really, really important part of the lesson in this, and that's number one, you can find and make your way into and connect with virtually anyone when you've got a couple resources at your disposal, the first one of which is when you do your research on a prospect, you know who they are, what they're passionate about is and what their pain is. And the wedge that can get in there is, I have an idea about how you can blank get what you want, which is grow your business, get more viewers, be seen, heard, found. It could Be whatever it is, whatever the pain is. Lose weight, gain confidence, meet women, start your own business. The other strategy, and this is what I tell a lot of people, is right now with what you're doing. So you've got this podcast, and we're in a mastermind together, and we've obviously known each other for a little while, but you just said, hey, would you like to be on my show? And if you just walk up to someone and say, hey, would you mind? Can I pick your brain?

Can I get an hour of your time?

Yeah, I'll be like, no, you can't. For 15,000 bucks, you can. That's what I'm not gonna give away my. And it's like, what? But if someone is essentially saying, look, I'm going to give you an opportunity to become more rich and famous than you already are. Build your visibility, gain additional access to more people, I would like to introduce you to someone who can grow your business. That's effectively what it is. So the next most powerful thing is start a podcast and identify all the people you'd ever want to connect with, who could be actually your perfect customers. Figure out who they are and contact and say, I'd like to interview so and so the CEO of a corporation to be on my show to talk about management or growth or whatever it is. You could literally introduce yourself and be brought into someone's professional world by interviewing them.

Right?

Okay.

That's what's so cool.

And then when you're done with the interview, you can say, by the way, I've got an idea about how you can grow your business.

Exactly.

We've just spent an hour together.

It's the foot in the door strategy that's been so integral to my business. So I've done everything from building and selling businesses to a lot of consulting in the past couple years. I really love the consulting part because I get to be the marketing geek in other people's businesses and get in there and really move the needle. But one of the ways that I've done that, number one, and this is another thing that you've taught extensively in your career with, what was it? Author Expert marketing machines. And I did this as well, which is I created a small publishing company, a private publishing company that I worked, started off with people that I knew was successful at it. I used my marketing knowledge to push their books, to get their books published on Amazon. And right now, guys, if you've listened to me ever before, I've always espoused the benefits of jumping on Amazon, Amazon, and Using the tools that exist for people to.

We'll do that next because I got a great nugget on that. Oh, we'll keep on.

We'll definitely jump on that. But in the past you never had the ability to publish yourself. If you were self published, you were a pariah of the publishing world and you had to go get the blessing of a Main street publisher. Well, now the tools are out there. Not only can you do it, but you can do it literally for free. If you have a 25 page PDF, you literally could upload it to Amazon. It may not be any good, people may not read it, but that's right.

That could be awesome. It might be 25 pages, could be just the perfect length.

You know, a good friend of mine, and this is a, you know, we're sidetracking, but I love this. A good friend of mine wrote a book, I believe it was about 25 pages. Took him about a day to just kind of write it down. And he submitted it to Amazon, Kindle only. And he just, he called it a report. In the sales copy for the description, he goes, this 25 page report will teach you how to do XYZ.

So he's totally transparent.

Yeah. Six figure earner. Absolutely. I mean, he's a world class marketer, he knows how to do things. But he also was able to in one day get something out there and he put very little attention on it. Because once you get a little momentum in some of these areas like Amazon, like podcasts, iTunes, YouTube and piggybacking off of their, off of their built in audience, which I know you talk a lot about, success becomes sticky because the more people that find you, the more people that find you, then the more people that find you, the more people.

That find you, you build that beautiful guaranteed momentum. And it's hard to shut down.

Oh, it is. And one of the, you know, I get asked all the time, why did I start a podcast? And you know, bacon wrap business was born for two reasons. Number one, I thought about it for years, I really have, but I was always too busy and I never just wanted to have a, a show, the Brad Costanzo show, the who Cares show. For me that was just maybe a limiting belief. But then I came up with the idea for the name bacon wrap business. I was like, that's fun. It gives me permission to just go have fun. So, okay, I had some ideas, I decided to do it. But the main reasons was to build my platform so that I can connect with other business owners, entrepreneurs, celebrities and other folks Because I realized the power of the. I guess the social proof that having a platform gives you, whether that's a book, a show, a podcast. And a lot of folks out there may not know how much my production costs are for the podcast, but it's amazingly small, and anybody can really do it if you have the most basic budget.

I mean, we could sit here, we literally could just take an iPhone, put it on a little portable stand, and have a conversation with one shot. It worked fine.

Absolutely. And most of my shows are. Some of them are just done, me talking into my computer microphone or calling up somebody on the phone. And some people will hear a little. It's not the perfect audio quality, but it doesn't matter because people out there, if they're your tribe, they tune in. They just want to hear quality information and connect with people they like. And so far, it's been tremendously successful. But that brings me to. You just said you had a golden nugget or a bacon bit.

A bacon bit. There we go. Bacon wrapped. Bacon wrapped scallop.

Believe me, I'm gonna try to this bacon wrap meme to the end.

Why not? I say just take it to its greasy finishing end. So I think we should squeal into the finish line. So here's the basic idea. I'll tell you one of the most powerful foot in the door strategies that I've been using. In fact, it blows people away how cheap it is. So if I said, I know how to get you into almost anyone's home and get better attention, it's like I'm trying to think of how to phrase this, because I've never pitched it quite this way before. But bottom line is, here's how you can get yourself into anyone's home and attract attention for under $10 without getting arrested. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There we go.

Yeah.

No one's gonna. Here's what it is. First of all, I have to frame this up and talk about how easy this is. One of the things that we've been teaching this you everywhere now philosophy is we can open up a laptop. We could be broadcasting this show live to one person, a million people or no people, just recording it. And it'd just be question and answer, some content. And that live show could be interactive. We could do interactive Q and A if we wanted to as well. That could be saved, turned into a podcast. Now you got a nice podcast episode, literally just answering questions. That's pretty cool. Or you could do it solo by just presenting and answering questions back and forth. That same content can be transcribed, turned into a book format, and from the time it's transcribed, edited, you can get a book cover made on fiverr.com for 5 bucks to 25 bucks, upload it to CreateSpace and not only make it available on kindle in about four to eight hours, where Amazon's going to pay you 70% of the give you an Amazon author page that will allow you to schedule events as well. So then next time you're doing your next live cast or you've got a live event or you're speaking or you're doing an online book report or whatever it is, you can schedule it. You can schedule digital events. By the way, the search engine value of an Amazon listing is extraordinary.

Proactive reputation management can't be better. Just to sidetrack there, I have a friend of mine who is in sales and he's looking for a sales job. He's had a hard time. It's just, you know, he's good, but it's tough out there. So I googled his name and it's unique enough to where it's not like John Smith, but nothing really pertinent comes up. His LinkedIn profile, nothing else. But he's been in sales for years. And I said, why don't we get a sales book written? Which I could literally interview you. And now it could be called attracting and closing customers, whatever.

By his name.

By his name. And it can be. You could literally pay somebody a few hundred dollars to ghostwrite it if you need. Otherwise you do it exactly like you said, ask questions. And you've got a wonderful formula that you've used for years. The 10 by 10 by 4 formula.

Right.

And I'll take the liberty to see if I can remember this exactly right for everybody else. But if you can answer, you can take the 10 most frequently asked questions that your customers ask you or your prospects ask you the 10 questions they should be asking you if they knew better. And then there's four other, I guess you would call them, maybe these are.

Not so much more going here. So it's what you put call to action videos, calls to action videos, each video, right?

But literally, if you just take those 10 questions, 10 most frequently asked questions, then the 10 one they should be asking if you answer those you've got, you could literally have a book or enough for it, even if it's Kindle. Because now in this day and age, if you get a resume across your desk and somebody's googling you, you want something like if they say, oh well, I wonder If I should hire John Smith or Bill Jones. Well, Bill Jones wrote a book on sales.

Yes, I'll bet.

I'm going to call it, he's the.

Number one best selling author. Or if you use the strategy that I'll share here. So let's just say you can do a livecast podcast, transcribe it. So now it's a bookcast, publish it on Amazon. It's literally up and running, available for sale, it's in 24 hours. Now you've got an Amazon listing as an author, which by the way, if you posted the same content as a podcast, Apple gives you a free website as well, which also ranks high. So all those work to your advantage for, as you would say, proactive reputation management. Here's how to get your foot in almost any door, find out that person's address. Pretty easy to do. You can find almost anyone's home address by searching online. Or you can, you can ask for it and say, hey, is it okay if I send you a package? So what I do is I go on Amazon and if you have Amazon Prime, I buy my own book from myself and I ship it as a gift and have it gift wrapped. So I would just present this. If you receive a package from Amazon to your home, do you open it.

Up 100% of the time?

Let's say you had a gatekeeper who opens your mail for you but then discovers that inside the Amazon package is a special gift wrapped.

She's not going to open that one exactly.

It's going to go to the intended recipient. So inside, what I've been doing is I'll sit down with my mobile phone, I'll record a video from me to you. So let's just say it's, you know, I'm going to use like fill in, I don't know what's a famous person that you'd like to get in touch with that you want to connect with, Maybe you want to interview or maybe your audience would be interested in meeting.

And knowing more about, we'll say one of the every entrepreneur's dreams, Richard Branson.

Richard Branson, great. So let's say you get Richard's address and I will just tell you that this may or may not work for Richard because I don't know about, let's say Mark Cuban. Okay, Mark Cuban. There we go.

Us.

Yes. So the way to get to Mark, and again, it might be, might work for Richard as well. But most people, okay, what you do is you'd make a video and it would be something like, hey, Mark, this is Brad. I just wanted to give you my number one best selling book. It's about blah blah, blah, blah blah. And I'd like to know if I can interview you for my show. We're going to talk about this, that and the other thing. I've also interviewed people like so and so, so and so and such and such. My email address is da da da da da da. I'll follow up in two days. Hope you enjoy the book. Okay, so all I do is in the gift card. I say hi, Mark, this is that book I promised you. I made a special video just for you. Check it out at www.shortdomain.com. mark total cost, the book, the shipping, the packaging, it's under 10 bucks. You talk to any business owner, getting someone's attention is almost impossible. And here's Amazon is a trusted brand. If you get something, it doesn't look fishy, it feels as real as real gets. And it's gift wrap. So it's an appreciation.

That's not just gift wrap, that's bacon wrap.

That's good. It's too bad Amazon doesn't have bacon gift wrap paper. You should work that in with your bacon wrap.

It might be. That's really amazing. And now would you suggest doing that to somebody that you have never met but you want to know? Because in your example there, you said this is the one that I promised you but you've never talked to them.

However, you come from an authentic place, obviously a reason why is always.

If anybody has ever read any of Influenced by Cialdini amazing book, they talk about having a reason why.

The reason why I'm sending you this book is because.

Because I wanted to. Because I wanted you to have it. You could literally say something like that and you're probably going to get somebody to open it. This actually kind of reminds me of another strategy. Although I love yours, yours is amazing. Especially because of the I get the from Amazon 100% open rate. 100%. I see Amazon, I get all happy. And it might be like toilet paper.

You deliver happiness. No, that's Zappos.

Zappos own by Amazon. But this has kind of triggered a tactic that I've used in the past. And I love this. So Facebook gives you the ability to send an ad to one person. Were you familiar with this strategy?

I didn't know it still worked. To tell you the truth, I tried.

It a few months. Unless they've just changed it. Tried it a few months ago and it worked. Where this is, I'll put A link to this, because this is way too long to kind of rabbit trail on how to do it. But if you just know somebody's Facebook profile, you don't need to know their email. You don't need to know anything else. There's a little code you can get, and you can upload it into Google Advertising Manager and just do what's called a custom audience of one person.

I didn't know you could do it with one person, but that's awesome.

So I did that. We have a mutual friend in the marketing business. I won't even go into it, but I did it to him as a test, and it was just a picture I'd had of him with his arm around me. And I uploaded it and I said, hey, give me a call. Better yet, click this link and I'll tell you what this is about. And it came to the page and it said, hey, I know you saw an ad on Facebook that looked like it was just for you. Well, it was. And this video is, by the way, just for you. Do me a favor and shoot me an email when you get this. And then I said, never mind. I'll know. Facebook will tell me. So what was great is I uploaded this ad. And once more, this is all the particulars. It didn't cost me anything. And I saw there's statistics. I saw that he viewed it three times before he clicked on it, because it says three views, one click. And then he emailed me and he's like, I saw that. How did you do that? But it was a way to, like, sniper in on one person. You don't even need to know their address. And you could do something like that. Deliver a video, a heartfelt, authentic video that says, hey, I've got this book. I'd love to deliver this to you. Maybe I need your physical address. Maybe I need something else. But I'd love to interview you on my show. I think you're amazing. But there's so many cool, out of the box ways that people can accomplish their. Their goals.

The bottom line is not only are these strategies of live casting, podcasting, and bookcasting a great way of broadcasting your message and getting paid at the same time. Because I don't market these books right now, they're selling an average of between 25 and 50 copies a day and inside every single chapter. So you can see this. Hopefully you can see this on the camera I have. It says, register this book and get free updates and free videos. Okay, well, I'll hold it up here so I'VE got a QR code, a phone number or a short code to text or a page to go to. And then every single chapter of the book has a call to action.

Are they all different?

They're all a little bit different. They end up going to the same place. So this book is really intended to pre frame the viewer on this notion of being everywhere on every device, but also about how traffic guys are an instant customer can make that happen. So it's got really great content. So I explained the 10x10x4 how to pick your perfect audience, how to feel comfortable on camera. I've got an example in there where I talk about. You can actually see an example of the video that was shot between an iPhone and the $5,000 camera. So you can see it for yourself. But it's really driving people to the traffic geyser sales funnel, which then educates them on the our programs, our services, and then gives them an opportunity to try out service. So it's a sales letter, it's designed and engineered that way. Just as all these other books are. This one author, Expert Marketing Machines, which is the first one I wrote. I literally wrote it while I was recovering from cancer in my bed. I just answered questions in my phone, sent it out to be transcribed and edited, had the COVID made by a designer, and in less than 30 days it was published in a number one best seller in its category. In three categories, by the way.

I don't remember exactly what the statistic was or where I read it and I killed myself. I bet the Google machine could find it. But I believe the statistic was something like the lifetime customer value of a customer who comes in first through a book is like two, maybe three times higher. They're going to spend more with you over time because of the credibility that a little old book still provides you. Maybe more so than anything else. Because if this is the first thing they see, this is instant credibility. We're used to big publishing houses giving us their christening seal of approval benightiness. And we read this. And what's the first thing? If you read a book and you really like it, I want to know where I can get more information on this person.

And if you go search, I give you a chance. In every chapter, Absolutely every chapter is the call to action.

Right. And the big publishers, this is. I had a friend asking me if he should shop his book to big publishers or if he should do it himself. And obviously I said, you should do it yourself. If you think you can do it with a big Publisher, that's great. They do a lot less for you than you think they do. As in they don't market it for you unless you're one of the top people. But also, I've taken a look in some of the mainstream published books and there are, there is a call to action to sign up for a newsletter. It's the publisher's newsletter, it's not the author's newsletter.

They're using your platform to build their list.

Absmerfully, yeah. So it's a big advantage to do it on yourself, build it from the ground up like this.

Right. And these days what I can tell you is unless you have a substantial platform of your own, meaning about 40,000 in your email database and 20,000 or more followers on Twitter, Facebook and a substantial following on LinkedIn, no publisher is going to give you a deal that involves an advance. So the biggest advantage a publisher gives you is a certain degree of legitimacy and extended distribution. But beyond that, all five of these books I wrote over a period of about 18 months and I got two more coming out in the next 45 days and maybe there might even be three within the next three months. So the point of that isn't to show off, but it's like literally you can get up in the morning with an idea, come up with your 10, 10, 4, answer the questions and the meat and body of your book is done in a half a day. Beyond that, it's a few days to a couple weeks to have someone do your cover and edit for you. But all those are services that are very easy to find, very affordable. And where else can you have a company, a multi billion dollar company, promote market, you give you a free website and then pay you 70% of the revenue and do all that for you for free. It's crazy. And the thing that I forgot to mention is what we find is about 20 to 40% depending on the book of the readers. Because I can track how many people buy this book on Amazon. I get 20 to 40%. Actually do one of the calls to action in the book because you can.

Track that, you know where the color is.

Totally can. So I know that for every 100 books that get sold, I'm getting 20 to 40 leads and they are already buyers. They spent money on an idea on a topic, so they're willing to invest. So going from a 99 cent or a seven or $10 book to a hundred dollar or one thousand or two thousand dollars sale is just a matter of providing them with the right information to overcome objections, right? So that's why, again, I'm not. To be an author, you don't have to be a writer. Absolutely. Just be an expert on a topic, can answer questions, and you are willing and interested in helping people.

Absolutely. Or you could have an idea for a topic and hire experts to write it for you. It's old strategy called ghost writing, and you can very easily and cheaply do it. You can piece it together if you don't want to, and you get all the benefits of it because some people just feel as though they don't have the ability to write or to share the information, although it's stuck up in their head. There's so many ways to do it. That actually is a perfect segue. And you mentioned both of these tools that you have. So we've talked a little bit about Traffic Geyser, and you've just barely mentioned Instant Customer. Because going back to the beginning, your business has always been about distributing your message far and wide, whether it's how to build a product or how to promote the product. But it's really been about how to get massive distribution, at least from the outside looking in. And you've built these amazing tools. So can you kind of touch on what maybe the difference is and the benefits and who Traffic guys are an instant customer are most likely to help?

Well, first of all, I'll give a big shout out because while we're recording this, my programming team is here watching us right now. So we can say hi off camera to them. They're watching.

They're eating a bunch of bacon over there.

Yeah, they're eating bacon. We brought in some bacon. Bacon to go. So this is definitely a team effort and over time, evolving this platform. So Traffic Geyser and Instant Customer are now one platform. We actually integrated them. But Traffic Geyser is your tool for uploading your content. So, for example, if you made a video, your 10x10x4 video, or a marketing or promotional video, you can upload it and Traffic Geyser will distribute it to multiple video sites. Like YouTube. Yep, YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo. And then it'll grab the links to those and post those on all your social networks. So it would grab that video link and you can say, okay, immediately or one day later, one hour later, or however much later, post the link on my Facebook page, maybe multiple pages, then tweet it, then put it on LinkedIn, then post it on StumbleUpon or Tumblr, and it'll literally go out to over a dozen networks. It's you everywhere. Now, everywhere. That's right. So if you think for a moment that if you recorded three or five or ten videos and uploaded them, you can schedule your content to be delivered. A video, a day, a video or a week, and it literally can save you days or weeks of time of doing all this manually and setting up and spidering and creating that web. It makes your brain hurt. But the idea has always been one place to put all your stuff. Tell it where to distribute and when to distribute it. Click a button and schedule it, and it's going to get out there. But what happens then when someone reads, listens to, or watches your stuff? You have to have a means of capturing leads. And the thing that Instant Customer does, that no other platform in the world does, is it allows you to build mobile, responsive websites that work on any device. But someone, for example, in this book, one of the chapters will say, I'll try to find an example here. It'll say, if you want to watch and see more ideas and case studies about creating podcast shows and monetizing your knowledge, visit trafficgeyser.com bookbonus or text YEN to 58885 or text your email address to 858-866-8812. Now, I did this a little more extensively than most people would, but the whole point is Instant Customer captures leads with voice. You can actually call a number and say your email address. You can text, you can short code, you can capture with a QR code, but it literally builds all those systems for you by filling in a form, and it integrates with practically any system out there. So I probably gave too much information.

That's awesome. People's.

But it means that if someone saw. If you're a plumber, for example, you can have a QR code and a phone number on a vehicle. So people can actually see, oh, to get a plumber right now, they might see that. Or if it's your financial manager, for example, you had a trade show, it says, hey, text your email address to get the financial how to kit for free.

Right?

Well, the system not only captures the lead, but it follows up with email. With mobile text, it can follow up with a podcast. It has podcasting built in.

Really? I didn't know that part.

Yep. So now here's another one. Like every one of your podcast episodes, we should have talked about this before we got on. But every podcast episode, you can have what we call a trigger. So you can tell someone to text pound or hashtag mike, for example, to your show phone number. Let's say it's 5551212. It would trigger a message that would maybe be a behind the scenes tour of the studio. So every episode becomes a lead capture opportunity and every episode has its own hashtag so you can see and measure how effective every episode is.

That's amazing.

Right?

Anybody who's out there podcasting, take notes. I'm taking mental notes on that. That's.

And you didn't know, so I didn't do a good job of. Exactly. Wrap more bacon. Stacks of bacon. Yeah, that's really cool because.

Yeah, that's the. There's a lot of different tools and software that you can cobble and Frankenstein together if you want to do this.

But we do about five or six programs. You'd have to pay thousands of dollars a month. And we do it all in one place. Right. So it distributes your content, captures leads, follows up, and it'll integrate with practically anything you have. If you have Infusionsoft or AWeber or get response or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We integrate with all those.

That's amazing. So you've built these major platforms. Are there any ones coming down the pipe? Are there any big other trends that you see? Of course. I don't want to spill the beans on any top secret.

No, I'm not going to ruin our market share here. Exactly. No. Here's what I will tell you. So.