Evan Carmichael shares three ways to land endorsements: involve potential endorsers in creating your product so they feel ownership, send free samples only to influencers who genuinely fit, and build a movement around your brand's mission. He used this approach with his trading-card project, enlisting Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin, and Guy Kawasaki to help select subjects.
Chapters
How to get endorsements for your company. If you're just starting up and you have a new product or new service, a great way to help establish credibility and get the word out there is to get people who are well known to endorse your product. But how do you get in front of them? How do you get on their radar? It's a question that came in from one of my readers, Lana, who has an educational product. And wrote this huge long email, but basically wants to figure out how do I get people to endorse my educational product. So I've got 3 strategies for you that I've used to different degrees that hopefully can help you with your business. The first is involve them in the creation. The more people feel like they're a part of something, the more likely they're gonna promote it. So here's a quick example of what I've done recently. I created a line of famous entrepreneur trading cards. I loved baseball cards growing up. I was a big fan of collecting baseball cards, and I had— that was my first business really, was like buying and selling, trading baseball cards. You know, as you get older, you kind of want to relive your youth. Not that I'm that old, but I loved, I don't know, I was thinking fondly of my baseball card trading days and thought, I want to make my own line of baseball cards. How cool would that be? But instead make it for entrepreneurs. And what I did was I wrote to some of the top bloggers who were in the entrepreneur circle. So guys like Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, those kind of guys. And I told them about my project and I wanted them to pick who's gonna be on the front. So Seth Godin picks Duncan Hines and Guy Kawasaki picks Steve Jobs. And so we put them on the cards. So we have— I have my Steve Jobs card. It's, you know, all great information, motivational stuff about Steve Jobs. And on the back there's a little a picture of Guy Kawasaki and why he loves Steve Jobs. So I'm involving him in the product. And we created this line, and once I launched, I just had to write to all the bloggers and give them their card. So I just, you know, direct mail, sent them the actual physical card, and most of them wrote about it, 'cause they were part of it, they were happy with it, they took pictures with it. And so involving them in the process helped make sure that they would promote it when it was finished. So I don't know if there's a way you can do that with your educational game or not. The second is more product placement, and that's reaching out to people who would find it interesting and offering a free sample or free demo. And a lot of bloggers, a lot of people in the media too, are sharing the stuff that they like and use, whether they're getting paid for it, whether they bought the product, whether it was given for free or not. And the most successful ones are the ones who do it with authenticity. So I'll, I'll turn down promoting things if I don't use it or I don't like it. I only hopefully share the stuff that, you know, you guys will find interesting because I find it interesting. And I'll do videos of me, you know, using my new Roomba or buying new, you know, bottle openers. I do that because I use those and I like them. I want to share that with you. I get pitched a lot by companies who want me to do to videos for them, do reviews for them, and I only take on the ones that I actually like. So here's an example. I've got— I'm reading this book now, okay? King Years. It's a great book. It's by Taylor Branch. So I'll put that in a little closer. And what it's about is Martin Luther King. So I'm all about movement now. The stuff I'm reading is about how to build movement because I want to build an entrepreneurship movement. And everything I'm consuming is around movement. So this book is really interesting for me. I'm loving it, I'm tearing through it. I've got— let me open this up, let me show you, okay? I open this up, so he signed it, so this is great. To Evan Carmichael, with best wishes, Taylor Branch. And as I flip through it, get to the start, that preface, okay? I've got like— I'm highlighting, I've got notes in I'm taking notes on everything that, that you like. I'm loving this book, right? And so this is great, and I'm going to talk about it, and I talked about it in this video. I'm tweeting about it, and, and at the same time, I turned down most of the books that get pitched to me because it just— I'm not feeling that connection to it. So what I encourage you to do is really take your time to find people who have a strong connection somehow with your mission, with your product, and would be a good candidate to actually use it. Those people would be really happy. If you've written a book on creating a movement, I wanna hear about it. Send it to me, I wanna read it. And if I like it, you might be in my next video. Okay, it's— that's how it works. And most people are pretty accessible. Email, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you can find people. But do your homework to really find the right people because The busier they are, the bigger they are, the more they're bombarded with this stuff. Like, I get this stuff all the time with people wanting me to do reviews for them, and I'm really selective because I have a limited amount of time. So hone your pitch really well. The third thing you can do, and this is if you're really committed to it, if you stand for something with your business, then you can help create your own movement around that, right? So I don't know what it is about your educational toys, what you believe for child's education. Like, maybe the school system is broken and kids need to learn by doing, and, you know, I don't know what it is. Like, what do you believe? What does your company stand for? You can start to create content, educational content that you can involve these bloggers in, powerful content that they will want to help be a part of because they believe in the same thing. So now it's not just about selling a toy, it's something much bigger, right? And, and I believe that you have that in you. It's do you want to do the work? Because getting all these guys on board, they will if they really believe that you stand strongly for this cause. If I'm pitching my guides, if I'm pitching my trading cards, whatever it is, it's not just pitching that. It's much bigger. I can create a community around entrepreneurship because everything I do oozes entrepreneurship. And the people who come Your customers, your bloggers, the media, all those people are coming because of the movement you're creating. And they'll end up buying your product because that's a part of it. Why do people buy my guides, okay? So I launched the guides, they're called Zuga. Why do people buy the guides? It's not because I'm hard selling them, right? You won't see a video of me saying, "You really need to go buy my guide now, it's like 30% off, last minute sale, go buy, buy, buy, buy, buy." That's not— I'm not ramming it down your throat. Because that's not attractive and that's not what I stand for. But people end up buying them because they're coming to me for entrepreneur information, motivation, wisdom, guidance, and this is just the next step of that. So it can be the same thing with your product. If you create a community and a movement around what your company stands for, people will naturally want to know what's next and will buy your product and all your other products, if that helps. I can go on and on and on about creative movements. I learned a lot from Martin Luther King and a few others. Thank you, Taylor Branch, for the book. Anyway, a few ideas on how to get your promo products out there, and it's, uh, it can be really powerful because if the right person endorses your product and sends it out to their audience, they could help put you on the map. So it's definitely worth checking out. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. Subscribe if you want to see more videos like this, and leave a comment. Let me know what you think. Let me know, leave something below to let me know that you are human and you like watching these videos. And if you have a question, you can leave it below too. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
