Influencer Series: Social Media Strategy

Hey, my friends, it's Brendan. And welcome to another special episode in this new series for influencers. It's a sort of behind the scenes look into my career as an author, speaker, coach, seminar leader, online trainer, social media, thought leader, what we just call now the influencer industry. It's how I run my influencer career and I like to share some tactical things with you here in this episode that I know you'll love. Now, this audio is actually pulled from our Influencer business program. If you haven't heard what that is, that's where I go live every single month and I teach you. How do you build a personal brand? How do you get a bigger audience following you? How do you make money from that? How do you build community and impact? How do you launch podcasts and grow courses and do email marketing and everything you see us doing? If you love that kind of thing, then man, I would love for you to join us at the Influencer 2019 event in San Diego. It's October 10th through 12th again in San Diego, California. And that's where you're going to come to learn from some of the best influencers in the world about how do you start and how do you really grow. How did we start? From scratch and we grow our brand and monetize content and reach more people and build a community of followers around the world and scale an actual business doing it. Just go to influencertickets.com again, that's influencertickets.com to join us in San Diego October 10th through 12th, where I say join us because it's a real community of people teaching you exactly how we started from scratch. It's people like Rachel Hollis, who, you know, has had two back to back number one New York Times bestsellers. One of the most successful authors in the world today, Dean Graziosi, who he and Tony Robbins just did a $30 million online launch. Louis Howes podcast, extraordinary at the school of greatness. Trent Shelton, one of the absolute best viral video makers in the world and inspiration to so much of our youth. Tom Bilyeu, who built a billion dollar brand and now runs the Impact Theory show, which I love so much and so many more real influencers teaching you.

How did we do it?

I mean, listen, there's no question, if you listen to me, you've been impacted, I hope, by what I do. And I'm just here to say, why can't you do that? You know, why can't you have a similar career? It's not like I'm some magician or have Some magical abilities I had to learn to identify what topic and passions I wanted to follow. Just like we'll teach you. I had to learn how to build a personal brand and audience, just like will teach you. And I had to learn ultimately, how do you actually earn an income and earn revenue from it, Building a business, doing it that you love to run. If you're in that game, my friend, go to influencertickets.com join us October 10th through 12th in San Diego. I'm sure by the time you're hearing this, our tickets, there's probably only maybe a couple hundred left, I'm guessing. So please make sure you go check it out. Influencertickets.com it will give you all the dates, details and limitations because you gotta get there. If you're totally new to the industry, it's okay. This is especially where you want to come so you can meet new people in the industry, but also see how the best of the best do it and just follow our plans. You guys know I'm always saying, you know, coming from Montana, we always say the time to have the map is before you enter the woods. So if you're really into building a personal brand and a major audience, even if you're just starting, this is when you need to learn. Don't go. Try to figure it out yourself. Follow the strategies that work. We're teaching them at Influencer 2019 October 10th through 12th in San Diego. Again, go to influencertickets.com without further ado, please enjoy this training that I did live for our influencer community. Please realize that I might reference something visual that maybe you can't see, but. But we've edited it in such a way that you can definitely follow these strategies, understand and learn a lot of the behind the scenes of how the influencer space works, what you can be doing in marketing, and how to grow a real business doing it. With that, my friends, no further ado. Let's jump into this episode.

Hey, everybody, we got a big month's training for you on content proliferation. Y' all have been asking for this for, like, ever, which is, you know, Brendan, how do you kind of come up with your content, but more importantly, how do you release it so it catches a little of that magical circular viralosity. So this is an awesome session for you. I'm here to share. Like, hey, this is what we actually do. You know, when you see all those fans that we have across our brands online, it's not by accident. It's that we really made concerted efforts over the Years of where to focus on which platform, where we wanted to monetize, where we didn't care about monetizing, and how we released content on a pretty consistent basis to build the community and the newsletters that we have. And most of you know, all that marketing for 10 years was just me. So I know we have a lot of you who. It's just you, too. It's you every day going, what do I put on this thing? And what do I talk about here? And this is how, for me, I never had anyone helping me with marketing until we hit, like, I think it was like 3 or 4 million fans because it was by myself. I had to figure out this idea of how do you take content and really proliferate it? Because I had to make my content look like I had a social media team. I had to make it look like I was everywhere at once. And it took a while to figure that out. So I'll share with you what I was doing for that. But you could take these same strategies. Cause I know a lot of you also have team now, and I have team now. And this is the same thing I share with them, like, hey, let's make what we're doing appear bigger and reach more people than ever. And it's following these ideas that I think you're gonna like today. Number one idea, pick your revenue platforms. Pick your revenue platforms. Especially if you're just getting started today, it's super intimidating to start doing any content online today, right? You could do an email newsletter, you could do a podcast. You can do Facebook. You could do a personal Facebook page, a business Facebook page. You can do Facebook groups. You can do Instagram. You can say, oh, you know what? I really want to be on Pinterest. Oh, you know what? LinkedIn makes me seem professional. You know what? Twitter is fun to get mad at people. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, my go. There's like 10, 11 different places that you can be. And if you're like me and you were doing it by yourself, or you are doing it by yourself, you gotta pick where you're gonna focus. It's hugely important. Because what most people do is they go, I gotta be everywhere. And they spend all this time trying to be everywhere, but they don't make any money. And so if you're gonna do this long term as a career, you have to think about money. And people don't like when I say that. But I'm like, listen, if you don't make the money, you can't sustain the message, like, if I didn't think about the revenue drivers from day one, which I had to because I was bankrupt and living in my girlfriend's apartment, she's buying groceries, and I wanted to change our life. So I had to immediately start thinking, like, where I can do all these things, but I got to focus on something that's going to make me money. And you need to make that determination at some point, because I know some of you, you're just influencers. You're on Instagram, you heard that I do this, and you hopp over. You're like, this is awesome. Some of you are like hardcore online Internet marketers, but you're also in this place where you haven't really proliferated your content as much, so no one knows who you are. The only critical question is, which platforms do you want to make money on or from? And you got to zero in on that. I'll give you some examples for picking my platforms. I said, I'm going to choose two. My platforms. Number one, Facebook. Number two, email newsletter to funnel that sells courses, tickets, books, and the rest of my stuff that you guys know I have. That was it. I'm gonna choose to, like, go deep and go strong on Facebook, and Facebook's gonna be my lead. And that was a decision I made because Facebook was like this. If I had to make the decision again today, September 2018, I would focus on Instagram and I'd go, okay, I'm gonna go just hard and super focused on Instagram. I'm gonna build that and that's it. One platform. I'd really focus on building one platform incredibly well. And everybody else gets scraps and pieces and once in a whiles. But Instagram, you live there. I did that with Facebook. I said, I'm gonna live here. So I did four posts per day, Facebook for seven years. Never missed four posts a day. Seven years. About 70% of original content that I created every single morning, the other 30% was recycled from my previous content for seven years. And that's how you take something from a million to 5 million, right? It was just like on it constantly, every. I shouldn't say a million to 5 million. I mean, from 1 to 5 million, that's it. It was there. I was there every day, four times a day. And I responded to all the comments, all the DMs, everything for seven years. That's the kind of intention and discipline and consistency that I said was going to be important. Now, of course, the question is, well, what do you mean revenue platform? How did you use it, Brennan? Well, what I used it is I would just do all that free content all the time. But maybe twice a week, I do two or three posts twice a week where I linked over to one of my opt in pages, where people would opt in from either my newsletter or for some kind of free thing from me, where then it dropped them into a funnel where it said, here's some value, here's some value, here's some value, here's an offer. So if you've been with Experts Academy, you all know and you're tired of me saying it, that's called the ovo. I gotta do a dance for that. Like, oh, okay. No, someday, not ever. Okay, you gotta do the ovo, you gotta get it down. Because if you don't understand ovo, you're never gonna make money in our industry. You've gotta take people off of social media, pull them into a page that you control, get them to opt in, enter their name and email, then hit them with the V. That's value, value, value, value. Then make an offer. And that's going to be how you're going to start that whole process. I know most of you know this. I'm not going to dig up too deep in it, but you've got to choose where that main revenue platform is going to come from. I chose Facebook because it was not only growing crazy, but they'd also rolled out ads that were really intelligent and I could use the ads to really target who I wanted to reach and how many I wanted to reach. So Facebook into newsletter or OVO for offering. You might do the same thing with Instagram today, and you would just go live on Instagram as much as you could. You do stories every single day, direct to the story, like talk to it. Obviously, Instagram isn't mine, so you don't see me there pushing as hard as I push over on Facebook. But you got to choose yours and really go all in. Really go all in and think about the content that really works there. Obviously, Instagram, your content really works. What's your timing on Instagram? How long is the content that you're creating? Most people think, well, Instagram's 60 seconds. But most people also don't know that the real power of Instagram is those 15 second stories. Stories are way more powerful than posts. People love Instagram stories. So you're really thinking about those 15 second long conversations where you just go in 15 seconds, go in 15 seconds, go in fifteen seconds. Showing, telling and just documenting on Instagram. If that's what you're doing. And then in the story, you're linking over to your opt in value offer sequence. In this story you're telling maybe to go to a website to buy something, but you're going to focus on one or two platforms. Now, people always say, but Brent, I want to be everywhere you can be. But I'm telling you, if you'll go all in on one or two, you'll make more money than if you try to be everywhere and win everywhere, especially if you don't have a team. So that's pick your revenue platforms.

Okay, it's Brendan. And yeah, I'm gonna serve you up a quick little promotion right here to make sure you learn a little bit more with us. If you're enjoying this, let's dive deep. And there's two ways that you can do that. One, obviously I told you about at the beginning of this episode where you can join us@influencer 2019, October 10th through 12th in San Diego. Because if you love this kind of stuff, come learn how 10 other people do it just like I do it. But also, if for whatever reason, you can't make San Diego, October 10th through 12th, then join our Influencer business program. That's where I go live, just like you've been hearing. And I teach every month how to build your personal brand, how to do better marketing and make it really, really specific so that there's tactical things you can do. And I teach really the world's influencers. Every single month. I go live. I do Q and A, I give a new strategy. I try to teach something that has earned at least six figures and I try to teach that every single month. So make sure you join that Influencer business program. If you can't join us live in San Diego, how do you do both? Well, just go to influencer magazine.com that's influencer magazine.com and choose your adventure. Do you want to come to the live event or would you like to join the Influencer business program? The online training component, you get to choose multiple levels. So just go to influencermagazine.com and choose your own adventure with us. Would you like to join us at the live event or would you like to join the online program? And hint, hint, hint, the online program does come with some tickets to the live event as well because it's an ongoing subscription. And Influencer, the live event is an annual event. So are you confused? Are you ready? Are you excited to start? Would you like to share your passions, your wisdom with the world and achieve Financial freedom, lifestyle freedom, and most importantly, real impact. Y' all go to influencer magazine.com right now. All right, with that, let's jump right back into the episode.

Number two. You've got to set your daily and your weekly and your monthly rhythm for your content, for how you're going to create it. It's not like I go into each week unsure of how or when I'm going to be filming High Performance Academy. My whole team is kind of focused on making that event happen. But we're already talking. Okay, when I come back on that Wednesday, I shoot a bunch of ads. On that Thursday, I shoot a bunch of YouTube videos. For the next eight weeks, I've got a schedule in my mind or my calendar or with my team of when I'm going to be shooting. And that calendar has to be real for you. And it's the hardest thing to teach somebody new in the influencer space. They just go randomly and create stuff sometimes. But you can't create enough to proliferate a real brand these days randomly. I mean, it's got to be scheduled. I mean, and you got to be there. All of our major influencer clients have a content calendar. They know when they're going to shoot. They know what they're going to release. They know their approach to it. All of them do. And it's super hard. Maybe your team doesn't always know the content. My team doesn't always know what where I'm at. Sometimes we're last minute, who's shooting what, shooting everything. But I know when I'm creating, especially again for my revenue platform. So, for example, for Facebook, I do Facebook every morning. So I get myself. I do my morning routine. Some of, you know, after my morning routine, one of the first things I do just as a discipline is sit down and I knock out or schedule my four posts for Facebook. It's just done. It's the first thing. Cause that's a revenue platform. I'm going to make sure that for me, those four are done. That's a daily thing. And most people way over complicate this. You're telling yourself this story. It's going to take me four hours to get ready. It's going to take me four hours to shoot content. And you've conned yourself into believing you can't do content every day. One of my favorite influencers right now has become a really good friend is Rachel Hollis. Her daily rhythm. Her or her and her husband go live on Instagram and Facebook every day, 8am Central Time. It's built into. They have like a thousand children and they have busy days, but when they wake up, and I'm going to tell you, it's not always pretty. Rachel gets up and her hair's over here and so is Dave, so his hat's down like this.

And they're like surviving on the copy.

Like, but they're there and they're live and they're gonna be fun and they're gonna have a great time. No matter what they look like, no matter what they're dressed like, no matter what town they're in, no matter what hotel they're in, they're gonna knock out a 30 minute live every day. And that's how they became huge. It's that dedication and consistency. When most people, they've told themselves a lie. Well, I gotta, first I gotta do my hair and makeup and then I gotta get the perfect lighting. And we just tell ourselves this. Because you watch something like this and this looks produced and it is right. I can produce like this. I've got the time and the time and the team and the videography. Like, I can do it. But really my sticking point is I'm just not grabbing this often enough randomly. But what I love is the real creators, they're not doing it randomly. They're just grabbing and they're making sure it doesn't matter what they look like or what they feel like. They're logging the time. Rachel and Dave, 30 minutes every day don't matter. And that's setting that rhythm. They became phenomenons. A million copies. That consistency is what's going to really build your brand and your business today. And I know some of you all know this, but some of you who are new, you got to gut check yourself. Are you doing it? Do you know what you are creating every day versus what you're creating every week versus what you're creating every month? Geez. Because they didn't dig deep. And part of the reason you set up your weekly and your daily and your monthly rhythm is it forces you to master the content. You can put me in a room with literally any psychologist in the world, and I can hold my own for hours. Why? Because I do the research and I'm always on top of it. Any performance coach in the world, super bowl winning coach, brand new high school coach, or some new nutrition coach put me in the room hold my own for hours. And I don't say that to brag about it. It's because I did the hours and hours and hours of a rhythm every day, week and month. For a decade. And I want you, wherever you're at in your career, some of you guys have way more experience than me. Some of you are just starting. And so wherever you're at, I don't even want you to think about content proliferation until you've got a daily, weekly, and monthly rhythm that you've dedicated yourself for, because that's gonna create the good stuff, right? Lots of people can pick a revenue platform and post four times a day, but it's those who are doing good stuff that people actually share and like or find their tribe in that makes all the difference in the world. Okay, number three, big one, Repurpose and boost. This is a big thing. So you created all this stuff, right? Every day you're creating something, or every week or every month, you've got your four posts. Now it's like, repurpose that stuff and boost it. And here's what I mean by repurpose it. I don't mean, like, repurpose to sell. We'll talk about that later. I mean, take pieces of what you've already created and chop that stuff up so that it can live in other places or individually. So I gave you the example, and I shared this with my team the other day, of our strategy, right? I'll do a YouTube video. I'll come in the office, we'll knock out a YouTube video, and then once we're in the office and we knock out the YouTube video, let's say I do a video, say, on how to be more productive. I'll usually teach three to five points in that. Let's just say I teach four. Let's say I teach five. So I'm gonna teach five points about how to be more productive. Okay? That's one video. And that one video goes up on YouTube. And that's what most people do. They do that and they're done. But what we'll do is we'll say, okay, Brennan just taught five points. Did I just use myself in third person? I did. That was weird. I just taught five points. So I'll tell my team to grab each of those five points. I say, listen, I just taught five points in that video. Here's what I want you to do. Video team, grab each of those five points, okay? Take those five points, cut them separately, give that to the Facebook team. Facebook, Each of those. That's five posts. That's five separate posts now, right? Go over on Instagram. That's five separate stories. Or that's five separate posts on Instagram. Hey, that's five separate posts on LinkedIn for the week. That's five separate posts and summaries on medium. That's, you know, let's use that in different ways also. Go ahead and take that same thing. Now go grab graphics. Go grab any great quote I said in there and make great quote cards. I must have said at least five great things. If I taught five points. I must have said five. Something good in there. Go make five quote cards from that. There's five more quote texts. Then grab the whole thing, pull the audio, repurpose it, add a bumper at the beginning of the audio and a bumper at the end. That's the podcast. And now that one action that I did is now able to proliferate across multiple platforms. But not just multiple platforms as multiple posts across multiple platforms. That's what we mean by content proliferation. It's not just take it here and also put it here. It's take it here. Yes, Also put it there. That's once. But then take it and cut it and then put it all those places, too. And that's how it looks like. You are just so prolific, because all week this stuff is just dropping everywhere. And now also think about, you've got all those little pieces out there, and if you're smart, you're putting them in Dropbox folders or some other online storage, the cloud, and it's on your phone. So for me, let's say it's a week. I didn't have time to create something really new. Or it's a day, and I wake up and I'm sitting there and the cat's looking at me like I'm dumb because I'm not doing anything. I'm looking at the cat, I'm like, I'm as dumb as you. I can't come up with anything new. Guess what? I might be dumb today, but Dropbox isn't dumb. So I open up, I pull off some old content, and I schedule that to post and go out. So the nice thing is, once you get in that weekly, daily, and monthly rhythm we've been talking about all that, you just put it in an archive, and now it's an archive. You put that archive on your phone so you can access it any given time and punch out. And even if you're, like, not wanting to post the same thing, change the image, make a new quote card from it, you know, listen to it, get inspired by it. Knock out a new audio on your phone. Yes, you can knock out audios on your phone for your podcasts. You don't have to Have a big production, you don't have to do it from your laptop, you can just knock out it from your phone. So don't over complicate it. Get consistent. Right? Don't over complicate it. Get consistent. That is the ultimate thing today. It's so much more about how consistent than you are, than how good it looks or how fancy produced it is. Trust me, unless you've got high paying clients or there's the expectation you've set for that, but that's really up to you.

Yes, my friends, I hope you enjoyed this special episode. Sort of behind the scenes look into my influencer career. If you enjoy this and you would like to learn more, just get yourself over to influencermagazine.com go ahead and select whether you'd like to come to the live event or to the online training called Influencer Business Program. Both options are there on the page@influencer magazine.com for those wondering what's up. You know, we've been working behind the scenes all year on launching Influencer magazine. It'll be launching late winter with an unbelievable episode. It's gonna be a digital magazine and we're really excited about it because honestly some of the biggest influencers in the world have just been freaking out once we announced this because our industry really hasn't had a voice and, and it really hasn't had best practices and honestly it hasn't had a lot of leadership. And for those of you who know my career over the last decade as I used to teach Experts Academy, you know, we had literally millions of people who learned online marketing from me. And as the world's transferred into this time of social media, but also a time in which so many people are on social media and so called influencers, they don't know best practices, they don't know the values of the industry, they don't know how to really build a business that scales. They're just after likes or following or narcissistic stuff instead of really making a difference. So I'm bringing that type of value ethic into the new influencer career by leading the magazine, leading the annual conference and leading the major online training all into the Influencer brand. And I'd love for you to take part of that but also get to experience the growth of this industry. You know, it's a billion dollar industry where I mean every single day, listen, people have the opportunity to follow you, to buy from you, to share your message. And so my question is, why aren't you there more heavily? You know, why don't you share your wisdom, your life experience, or even just your passions? Whether you're sharing your stuff or you're curating an experience or a community, there is a way for you to earn income at this build a real business and a real audience doing it. You just need the step by step instruction. So go to influencermagazine.com and either join us at the live annual conference again October 10th through 12th in San Diego, or join us in the online training program called Influencer Business Program. We call it that because if you're going to wade in this territory, you should have the ambition to build a real business that allows you to have your lifestyle freedom, that allows you to make your difference that you enjoy, that makes you the money that you need and really impacts people. That's the Influencer Business Program, which you can again access via going to influencer magazine.com all right, we'll continue this series. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, make sure you share it with four or five friends who are also trying to build their audience or make a difference in the world or who might be interested in these types of learnings that you just listened to. I appreciate you all. I'm so excited to bring you more, more and more insight into sort of behind the scenes of how my industry and my career has worked. I will continue here on these podcasts to share a lot of personal development. This series is just running while we're promoting Influencer 2019, so I hope you'll enjoy it and you'll share these episodes. Make sure you take a screenshot, share it with your friends, give them the link, but also share it and tag me so that I know that you're listening to these episodes and you're getting value from them. Share with me what you liked, what you really learned from so that we can not only recognize and reward you, but but that we can also invite you in. All right, go to influencer magazine.com until next time, my friends. Go out there every single day. Remember, you can live fully, you can love openly, and you can make a difference by sharing your voice with the world. Right now.