How To Use LinkedIn Groups To Establish Authority In Any Market And Extract High Value Prospects Easily

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. 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.

Welcome back everybody. This is Brad, excited to bring you another epicizzle of bacon wrap business. And as the announcer said, this is all about sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every single week I try to dive into a topic that has to do with business marketing, business development, lead generation, e commerce, sales, you name it. No topic is really off the table. And we try to go in and give you what's working now for people like yourself or for people in totally different industries not doing what you're doing in the hopes that you may be able to apply some of the strategies and expertise or tactics that they bring to the table in your own business. In my business, I had a lot of success picking pieces out from all different types of industries and see what I can apply in my own. And it's this out of the box thinking that oftentimes creates the most dramatic results. And today is no different. Now we're going to be talking about something that I know just enough about. I guess you could say I know the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this topic, which is LinkedIn marketing or LinkedIn lead generation and selling using this social network that, you know, a lot of folks treat it like, okay, I've got LinkedIn, but I never use it. It's just something I have out there, but they're not really proactive with it. And today I've invited Josh Turner on the call to share the strategies that he and his clients use to really master the, you know, the underutilized LinkedIn ecosystem. A little bit about Josh is he's the founder of a company called Linked selling. It's a B2B marketing firm that specializes in fully outsourced LinkedIn generation campaigns or I'm sorry, LinkedIn lead generation campaigns. And that fully outsourced should make quite a few of you kind of perk up and listen because if there's somebody who can do it much better than you, then people you should be listening to. He's also the founder of a company called webinarly, that's webinarli.com we'll talk about that later on. Which specializes in webinar Lead Generations. If you're not using webinars in your business, you're probably missing out on a huge untapped opportunity. So Josh's company represents clients like Neil Patel from Quick Sprout and his Crazy Egg and the various companies that Neil owns and Microsoft, just to name a couple of in the U.S. canada, UK, Asia, Australia, you name it. He's in a wide variety of industries, and his company also operates linkeduniversity.com, an online training program for LinkedIn marketing. He's also been featured in the Huffington Post, Miami Herald, and many more national publications. So you can rest assured that I've got somebody who knows what they're talking about. Josh, are you with me, buddy?

I am, man, and I'm excited to hopefully live up to the hype that you've built up on this thing, man. But thank you for the kind words and the intro there.

Just bring the bacon. That's what they expect.

I was telling you this a little bit before the call. I was familiar. I've stumbled across your websites. We don't know each other that well right now, so a lot of the questions I'll be asking, these are going to be questions that I've personally got because in my business I sell to everybody from corporate to professionals, etc. And a lot of them are on LinkedIn. And like a lot of folks.

I've got a LinkedIn profile and I almost never go to it or use it unless I want to share a podcast episode or do something. And I really neglect it. And sometimes it's because I'm spinning so many plates. But tell me a little bit more about, about LinkedIn advertising. What should people know and why do you believe that this is a strategy or tactic that can be so effective?

Well, you know, there's over 330 million people on LinkedIn right now. A number of different market research firms have surveyed literally hundreds of thousands of C suite business senior decision makers across the globe and, and found that LinkedIn is the number one news or business website or just website period, that those kinds of people are visiting more than any other. And they measured all the big ones. You know.

I saw another study recently that actually came from one of LinkedIn's recent SEC filings because, you know, they're a public company now and they had released some stats showing that 40% of their users check LinkedIn daily. So when you kind of take some of these different facts and say, okay, well, the types of people we're trying to reach in businesses, the decision makers in the companies we're trying to Target, they're on LinkedIn more than any other place online. And on top of that, they're checking it fairly regularly. Now, not everybody checks it every day, but on average, a lot of them are. You know, it just says, you know, well, maybe this is something we need to pay attention to, you know, and so that's what my company's been. Been helping our clients do for a number of years now.

That's great. Now, there's multiple ways from, as I said, I know the tip of the iceberg, but there's multiple ways to use LinkedIn. So obviously one of them is just, you know, kind of your profile and creating it correctly, and then another one, you know, just so that when people do come across you, it doesn't. It's not one of the most boring profiles. Like, there's ways to create those. There's also, I know you can direct message people that you want to meet or ask to be introduced, and you can join groups and you can network with folks and you can. There's probably LinkedIn advertising, although I know nothing about that. I honestly don't even know how much LinkedIn advertising exists or if it's feasible.

It is.

Great. And then there's probably a number of other strategies that we can use, and I'd love to dive into all of them if we had enough time. But instead, I'll ask you, what's the top LinkedIn strategy that you suggest people look into in order to really supercharge the results? Because anybody can get the basics of what to do, but bacon and basics don't go together.

Sure, sure, absolutely. Well, to some extent, the right strategy for a particular business really depends on their situation. You know, like what kind of strategy they're going to put in place within LinkedIn depends a lot on, you know, what's going on in their business and what kind of marketing they're already doing and how they like to approach prospects in the market, so on and so forth. But I'll tell you that for most of our clients, the one strategy that consistently generates results over and over is utilizing LinkedIn groups to position our clients as leaders or experts in their space, and then leveraging that positioning to really get targeted prospects to open up to our clients when we approach them, which allows us to then generate leads through these content marketing and thought leadership strategies that we execute for our clients within LinkedIn.

Cool. So let's go through an example, and I know there's different ways to use LinkedIn groups, both as a Participant as well as a group owner. So which one are. Is there one of them that you're advocating more? So like to own the group?

Yeah, yeah. So with this specific strategy, I'll give you an example. We have a client, a company called SWIP Systems, and they're a software development company out of the Midwest, they're out of Illinois, actually. And.

They target a lot of different types of companies. But one of the niches that's really important for them and a big chunk of their business is manufacturing. So when they came to us and said, hey, we want to use LinkedIn to go after CEOs, CFO, COO, CTOs in, you know, mid size, let's say manufacturing companies, not tiny ones, but not like the Goliaths, but, you know, kind of the smaller end to midsize on up to just below large, let's say. And so we said, all right, well, what kinds of ideas do you guys have? We're going to create a group all about software development so we can really position our expertise in front of these people. And so the first thing we told them was that's not going to work.

Because they're not interested in software development, Right?

Yeah. The CEO, the CFO of a manufacturing company, they don't care about software development. They don't want to immerse themselves in that all day long, you know, so that's one of the biggest mistakes a lot of people make is that they create campaigns within LinkedIn, whether it's a group or whether it's the kind of content that you're sharing out there that are focused on what you do instead of focused on what your prospects care about.

Just to interject, and a great point about this. So one of my mentors and now business partner of mine named Bob Serling, I don't know if you know who Bob is, but he wrote a book not too long ago, I think it was called Fishing with Strawberry Shortcake. And it was all about like the thing that most people do. It's just, hey, I like the way strawberry shortcake tastes, so I'm gonna put that on the hook. And then they wonder why they're not catching fish. Because you don't fish. You don't put bait that you prefer, you put bait that the prospect prefers. So it's kind of right along those lines.

Yep, absolutely. So in our initial conversations with the team at SWIP Systems, we basically said we need to create a group that is really focused on manufacturing and the kinds of topics and content that the leaders of manufacturing companies care About. So the group we created is called Midwest Manufacturing Leaders. The content that's in the group is balanced all across the board, all sorts of different topics that the people running manufacturing companies care about all the way from, you know, plant safety to improving operations to lean to, you know, sales strategies. All just broad, every once in a while something related to it. But it's far from the focus of the group. And because our client is the one running the group, the founder of that group, the leader of that group, he's really looked at as a peer in this space. And so I think as of today, there's something like 5,000 plus members. I think we recently crossed the 5,000 member threshold in that group and for very high value targets to swipe systems. 5,000 of them in a group that they control, that they're the leader of, is.

Really a gold mine for them and what it allows us to do because they view our client as really more of a peer than just somebody that's trying to sell them some software all the time. When we reach out to them systematically over the course of months throughout the campaign, they're very open to a conversation either directly with our client or one of his sales guys. And so it really just boils down to that we've found when you first take care of the relationship before you just try and go for the kill right away, that your, your hit rate goes way up, you know, and that's if you, if you go to our site, you'll see one of our taglines is systematically building relationships to convert cold prospects into warm leads. And basically what that means is just, hey, when you connect with somebody, don't just go for the kill right away. Give it some time, you know, date.

Them before you ask him to marry you or sleep with you.

Yeah, that, that whole thing, you know, and so, you know, we help our do that.

So let me ask you this. Let's get into a little more nitty gritty and take it deeper. So, you know, they developed software and they're creating a LinkedIn group about manufacturing. Right. So.

There'S two big, I guess, pillars, or in my mind, there's two big pillars to making this work. Number one is, okay, I create the group. Now I've got to recruit people into the group and get them to join. So I'd like you to talk a little bit about a, just the initial strategy of, okay, how do you start to fill it up with people? And the second one is, I guess, the content marketing strategy there and building the relationships. So if these folks are.

Software developers. And yeah, they understand their prospect a little bit, but maybe I'm just thinking that as a business owner I might be like, I don't really know what these people value content wise or how to give them what they want. How do you suggest people start to populate that with the right content, that builds the right relationship. So, recruitment pillar, content marketing pillar.

Sure, sure, yeah. And those are definitely two important things to tackle. So on the first one, how do you fill up the group? You know, there's a number of different ways to grow a LinkedIn group, but when you're literally starting from ground zero, typically the first thing we do before we launch the group is we get our client directly connected to a large number of targeted prospects. You know, so we'll have a campaign that starts before the group is even launched to build up their first degree connections with really relevant targeted prospects.

Okay, and give me a real basic example of how you would do that.

Manual personalized connection requests.

Gotcha.

Many man hours.

Okay, yeah, cool. Yeah, yeah, so there's the manual aspect. I got you.

Absolutely, yeah. And so what we'll typically find is when we go to launch the group, we wait till we've got usually 500 to 700 first degree connections that are really targeted prospects. And so then when we invite all those people to join the group, we're going to usually get a couple hundred to join immediately, you know, and so it's, it's a bit of a numbers game. You know, you invite 500 people to join, 150, 200, 250, something like that will end up joining if the group really, really resonates with them, you know. So here's another trick though. Don't invite them to a ghost town. Start building out the content in the group so that they get a flavor for what it's going to be like before you invite them to it, you know, because if people go look at it and see, well, there's nothing here, why would I want to join this? You know, your results are going to suffer there. So you really got to put your best foot forward. So that's one of the key strategies to initially launching the group and getting some people in it right away. But then on an ongoing basis, the group growth, I mean, you can work that same process with new connections that you're bringing into your funnel, letting them.

Know, yeah, to join this.

And yeah, typically, you know, one of the things that, you know, we recommend to anybody that's, that's actively using LinkedIn is that you're going to be reaching out to new prospects on an ongoing basis that are outside of your current universe, if you will. They're not currently connected to you, they're not currently in your group. So then when you, when you are proactively doing that on a regular basis, then you're going to have lots of new people that you're connecting to that don't know about your group yet. So you want to structure kind of your post connection campaign, if you will. So once you connect with people, you're going to want to work the right prospects through some sort of a campaign to try and funnel them toward whatever your call to action is. If it's setting up a phone call or telling them about a webinar or whatever you really want these people to do, at some point you're going to want to work into that campaign somewhere to share information about the group with them. So that'll continue to get really targeted prospects. Join in your group. Another strategy is just reaching out to people in other LinkedIn groups. So in the manufacturing example, you can, you know, go into other manufacturing groups and invite people you know, because you know how you can message anybody that you share a group with on LinkedIn, right. You know, just go into groups and search the membership for people that look like the kind of people you want to get in your group. I mean, that can be either people that look like good prospects for your business, or it could be complimentary type businesses in the market that you think would be good contributors in the group and just reach out to them and say, hey, I started this new group. There's a lot of great stuff going on in it. Xyz. Here's the kind of stuff you'll get out of it if you join. And here's a link if you want to check it out. Love to have you come join us. And again, that's a numbers game. You send enough of those messages, you'll have the constant stream of new people joining your group. And those are kind of the primary mechanisms, if you will, for getting a group from like zero to a few thousand people in a relatively short amount of time.

Cool, I like that. So let's now take the next step. So you've got a couple thousand people in the group or, you know, five hundred to a thousand people, and you've got a little bit of that momentum. How do you.

What'S the strategy? What's the content strategy inside in order to make it a highly engaged group so that not only are they gauging inside, you're building thought Leadership. And then when you email them, they actually don't just ignore it or delete it.

Yeah, yeah. So the question that you asked a little bit earlier about like, you know, what if you don't know much about the manufacturing industry and what these people care about? Well, it just comes down to doing some research.

And if you are selling to those people, you should know.

Absolutely, you're gonna know to some extent. And then with, with the vast majority of our clients, it doesn't take much research to figure out like, what kinds of things, the people in different industries and different types of positions and different types of companies, what they care about, you know, and that's, it's usually, that's usually a pretty easy hurdle to jump over there. And then from there though, like, what kinds of things do you do on an ongoing basis to keep the group kind of engaged and keep the content going and keep it active? You know, there's a few key things. One, we recommend post something once a day. When you're just getting started, you might be the only person sharing things into the group. And that's okay, that's the way it's going to be in the short term, in the beginning. All right. But one thing you can do is actively seek out people that you can go find in other LinkedIn groups that look like active contributors and then invite them to join your group. And so then you're going to have those people, some percentage of them, come join your group and then they're gonna start sharing things in your group. And then you've got a bit more balance going on. It's not just you, it's some other people too. And as the group grows, you know, you'll have more and more people like that, so you'll have a more balanced mix of contributors and different kinds of content coming into the group. And, and then the really, the only missing piece is getting people to start commenting and getting discussions going in the group. You know, and that's easy when you have a massive group and typically we find that that kind of starts to go on Autopilot around the 2000-3000 member mark. If you've got a really small group that's highly engaged, it can kind of start happening on its own. But typically a couple thousand members and that kind of, you know, starts happening on its own. But in the meantime, one of the most effective strategies is just to invite people to comment. So post a discussion in the group, ask a question, and then reach out to a handful of group members and invite them to share their Thoughts, you know, and that's a. That's a good way in the early days to get people kind of commenting on things so that the group feels really alive.

I like that. You know, and the other thing you can do, like, much like what I'm doing here, like, let's say I had a group on, you know, lead generation for salespeople. Right?

Yeah, whatever.

I could, I could interview somebody like, oh, I don't know you, and provide this as content to the people in the group so you can reach out, interview experts, ask them, and especially if that expert is active on LinkedIn, if they've got some influence. So the more people you can influence that are already influencers, the better. And sharing that with your people. So that's another way to create great content. And you could even create a podcast out of it as well. Just.

Use the content in multiple ways.

I want to clarify one thing I said about that, because that's a great thought. Using interviews and basically leveraging other people's brain power to come up with new content. So when I said daily content in the group, at least when you're starting that we recommend people post something once a day, that doesn't have to be your own stuff. Okay. So I don't want that to intimidate people. Exactly. We have a lot of clients that do very well with these strategies that aren't creating any of their own content. It's just all curated. So find the industry websites that your prospects are really tuned into and the leading blogs in the space, and then set up some Google alerts for some related keywords and pile all these things into something like Feedly or some other RSS aggregator. And just, hey, once a week or once a month, go in and scan all these feeds to find really the best of the best stuff that stands out to you, and then compile it all, and then you'll have all your content for the month kind of ready to go.

And there's a couple other strategies that you may either be using or I highly recommend it because I've done this in various other areas. And it's also just good practice. But if, you know, you probably don't have the only type of group serving people in manufacturing or whatever. So if you are in other groups, just pay attention to the stuff that gets the most shares, likes, comments, or engagement and share either that exact same post or even better, share something very similar to that. So if the topic is, oh, I don't know, something about how to. In manufacturing, there's a million things how to better source importing. Let's just call it importing raw materials. That's a hot topic in that group. Well, it's probably going to be a hot topic in the other group, so take notes on that. There's other. Have you ever used, I believe it is called buzzsumo.com.

Heard of it? Yeah, we don't use it, but I've heard of it.

Yeah. So what's cool about Buzzsumo? And I've only started to play with it. A friend of mine turned me onto it. So, like, if you go to buzzsumo.com, you'll see Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. So you can enter either a website in or a topic like real estate investing, and you will see across the web what types of.

Things. Got like a ton of shares. So an example, it already defaults to content marketing, or at least it does here. If you search for that, it's going to give you a handful of the free ones before it goes big. And it says, well, entrepreneur.com has one called 10 Words, the Cut from youm Writing that has 29,000 Facebook shares. Right. 3,000 LinkedIn shares.

Sure.

7,000 Twitter shares. So 10 words to cut from your writing on entrepreneur.com you may, because that's already been proven highly engaging across the Internet in general. Grab that and post it into your. Into your group, if it's appropriate. Right. I mean, things like this are very easy to do.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, and I think that no matter which kind of path you take to finding content that you think your prospects are going to be into.

You can do it in a way that's efficient and doesn't have to take a bunch of time, you know, and you don't have to be an expert in the industry that you're serving to be able to do this. You know, even though our clients, they're an expert in software development, that's for damn sure. But they're not necessarily manufacturing experts. And that's okay. They're facilitating the conversation. The content in the group is really solid. And we know that because of all the comments and the engagement happening. And they don't have to be manufacturing experts.

Yep. Okay, so now. So we covered a little bit about recruitment and the connection and, you know, just share valuable information and connect with people and build those relationships. Is there another step that you tell people that really works well in order? Because at the end of the day, the reason people are doing this is to get clients. So what do you recommend they do? When it comes to capitalizing on their LinkedIn group.

Yeah. So I mean, at the end of the day, the strategy is all about positioning our client as a leader in their market in the eyes of their prospects, so that they're seen as more of a peer than just somebody that's going to try and sell them something. And when we can achieve that kind of positioning, then when we reach out to a prospect and say, you know, hey, it's been great having you in the group and we've been keeping, you know, keeping in touch over the last few months a little bit. Jim in my office saw that you and I were connected and mentioned that he was planning on reaching out to you. I thought I'd do a warm introduction and you know, I think it'd be a beneficial, beneficial meeting for both of you. So that kind of a handoff, if you will, or introduction is very effective or if you're just reaching out at some point and saying, hey, we've been, you know, keeping in touch and you've been a part of the group for a few months. And I just, I came across your profile again and thought it wouldn't hurt to reach out. I'd love to jump on a call sometime and learn more about your business. How's next Thursday work? You know, it's very effective and what you've achieved there is that you'll get people to agree to speak with you that wouldn't have otherwise given you the time of day.

Yep.

Because you have authority right now.

What about.

I don't want to segue into webinarly yet, but what about hosting just content rich webinars off of LinkedIn so you can say, hey guys, I'm doing a great webinar on how to do XYZ and invite you guys over here for free.

Is that also a very effective strategy or is that a little over? Does it look too salesy?

No, I mean, as part of a campaign, if a client of ours has a webinar that, that they've got coming up or just one that's just, you know, in the can. Automated webinar, let's say that we can use on an ongoing basis, we'll definitely promote those in a few different ways within LinkedIn campaigns through, you know, personal messaging that happens behind the scenes through an announcement to all the LinkedIn group members which, you know, as you know, Brad, is just like an email blast that goes to all the members of the group. And you know, other strategies like LinkedIn ads can be really effective at driving people to webinars so, yeah, I mean, you know, especially B2B. If you've got webinars, LinkedIn's a great place to promote them.

Okay, perfect. Now I want to ask you, number one, if you knew about. I want to take this and kind of take a new strategy that I recently learned and try to bring my own bacon to this. Maybe if you're not familiar with this. I love this strategy, especially for things like this. So you're familiar with retargeting, Right. Cool. And for anybody else who's not, retargeting is simply when. Typically the way it works is if you come visit my website. I've got a little script on my site that just puts a harmless little cookie on your browser, and it allows my ads to follow you around the Internet, whether you're on Facebook or whether you're on Google searching for something. Like, you may have noticed that when.

You go to a webpage once and you start to see stuff all over the place like, are these guys following me? Well, yes, we are if we're using retargeting. And it's extremely effective. However, in the past.

You had to basically control the landing page so that you could put that cookie on somebody's browser. Josh, are you familiar with a company called Prime Loop?

No, I'm not.

Cool. So I love this. And I discovered this about a month ago, just started to deploy it. So I don't have a ton of results, except that here's a way it works. So as opposed to.

Having to own the page that has the cookie on it, Prime Loop is a link shortening service. And I can share a link. Like I could go into your YouTube, into your LinkedIn group, and I could say, hey, guys, I found this great video on manufacturing or whatever. You guys should go check it out on YouTube. And the link will look like it's like loop or l00p.com ab f, y, z 13. It's just a link shortener. A lot of people are used to seeing link shorteners, and I could share that. And it goes straight to YouTube. Well, as it goes through that link shortener, it drops my retargeting code. Like say perfect audience, which is a big retargeter on your browser. And I just send you somewhere it doesn't look salesy. I'm not sending you anywhere on my own. But now what that allows me to do is to follow you around with my ads. And if I shared a, you know, I'm able to add value without looking salesy. But I still get you in my ad network. So I love this. Like, I read about this on Prime Loop's blog and they said, look, if we were coming out with a competitor to GoPro cameras and we had, you know, the bacon cam, let's just say, well, I'm going up against an 800 pound gorilla. But you could go to these forums and you can go to people where people are really interested in GoPro footage and they share footage all the time and you could just start adding value. And whenever you say, hey, check out this cool video that I posted or check out this other video on YouTube, you simply use your Prime Loop shortener. And then all of a sudden these people who go check it out are seeing the bacon cam in their ads, like, hey, bacon cam. Better than GoPro.

I would highly recommend even just taking a look at that and whether. Working it into your consulting and coaching and strategies. But you can tell people, yeah, share all types of links, but if you share it through this, you at least get the benefit of retargeting if they want to do that. That's maybe more advanced than the average person's doing. But for groups, for social media, so powerful.

Yeah, I really like that a lot. I'm glad you shared that with me. I will be using that for some really specific things for sure, because we do a lot of retargeting. So anybody that goes to visit our website and learn more about what we do, you'll probably see an ad on Facebook pretty soon for one of our webinars, that kind of thing. But that's really smart. I mean, I can see a lot of benefits that. Another thing that we'll do is we'll retarget LinkedIn connections on Facebook so you can upload a custom audience from all the emails of your LinkedIn connections and then serve up ads to them on Facebook. So that's not.

Wait, let's back up. Let me make sure I understood that. So you can take your, your LinkedIn connections, you said yes. And then you can export those somehow and upload them into Facebook and then Facebook will allow you to create a custom audience based on that.

That's right.

Nice. Yeah, I'm familiar with doing that on like if I have my own email, you know, my own database of emails, I can do that. I didn't know you could actually export from LinkedIn. And that's great. I love that.

Yeah. And you know, just like with your, with your email list, Facebook won't find everybody, but it'll find a good, a good percentage of them. You know, so it's a really, it's a really good strategy for all sorts of different applications because, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, the more places you can reach your prospects, the better, you know, which is why, you know, people, I talk to a lot of people who just assume that we do nothing but LinkedIn. But you know, we're, we're almost anywhere you can be. You know, that's just the tip of.

Your, that's the tip of your spear.

But yeah, sure, because we know that our prospects are lots of different places, so we want to try and be in all the different places that they're at. And, you know, so yeah, I think that's pretty cool. Another one I'll mention that's kind of along the same lines it sounds like is Prime Loop. It's not for retargeting, but it's called Sniply. Oh yeah. And I don't know if you've heard of that.

Heard of it, you know, and I even looked into it. But remind me what it does because it's actually not on the tip of my tongue anymore. What it does.

Yeah. So essentially what it does is it allows you to share articles to third party sites and using a Sniply link and you have to have a Sniply account, you can basically put a little call to action in the bottom left corner.

That's right. I love that.

So you could be sending somebody to. I'm just going to use my business as an example. I could send somebody to an article@entrepreneur.com, you know, Richard Branson talking about the latest thing he did when he was on his island or something like that. And I can have in the bottom left a little call to action that's got my picture and a little message that says, hey, sign up for one of our upcoming LinkedIn webinars. Click here. Something like that.

You know, and I wonder, and I wonder on this, on strategy wise, because I've looked at that and it kind of made me think, because I've seen exactly what you just said is like if you're sharing a link and it goes entrepreneur, and then a little picture of you, Josh, who just shared the link pops up and says something. Well, I mean, maybe a majority of the population, it's going to be subliminal. They're not even going to notice. But I'm going to be like, all right, that's, that's just weird. Like what's going on Some people. Yeah, I'm just curious if not putting that on there and just Putting something, you know, really targeted to their interest, but not making it look like, oh, you just shared a tool that overlays your call to action. I was curious about it. I don't know if you tried one or the other split test that.

No, haven't done any split testing with it or anything like that. But has it been effective, though?

Has it worked? Has it driven some leads?

It can definitely work. I don't use it too extensively, so I'm not the poster child for Sniply or anything like that. But I would say the application for it specifically within LinkedIn isn't like, Hey, I wouldn't use it for messaging.

Prospects. I wouldn't send a prospect to link saying, hey, I found this article. I really thought you'd like it. And then links got your picture on the bottom left. That kind of, you know, you're spoiling things a little bit there. But for just pure content distribution. So sharing articles into LinkedIn groups that you're a part of, you know, you come across a great article and you think, wow, this would be great fit for these groups. I'm in on LinkedIn, you know, and you share it into 10 of your groups. Well, there's all sorts of people that you don't know from Adam that are going to end up clicking through to check out that content.

That's. Yeah, that's a great point. So that's where really, I think it's super effective. And then you get a lot of branding out of it.

Cool. And you know, the other thing you can hire if you. If you are outsourcing and you've got somebody managing your. And by the way, did I lose you or are you still there?

Nope, still here.

If you've got somebody managing, just say, posting for you, whether it's your Facebook group or whether it's your LinkedIn group, they don't even have to be posting for you. They could be posting for just themselves, just adding value. Just say, listen, go curate.

Articles on manufacturing, real estate, whatever they are, and just share them and share it with either my Prime Loop or share it with my Sniply account. So now it's Joe Schmo over here who's just kind of a person who's somewhat, you know, just in there posting with instructions and they're sharing your links. That's both, you know, got your call to action. Or it's dropping your retargeting link on there. It can get even more powerful because they're, like, working for you behind the scenes, right?

Yeah.

That's awesome.

I mean, that's a pretty effective strategy for people that can really put it all together. And then of course, you've got to have the power with.

With the retargeting happening behind that and have that set up to really take advantage of it. But even if you don't quite have that yet, you can still start doing it and building those audiences so that then a couple months from now, when you're ready to start running some ads to them, you've got a pretty decent audience built up to start marketing to.

You're absolutely right. So let's.

I mean, that whole strategy is really ridiculously, I believe, underused because most people don't want to put that much thought into it. But I see that as being the most powerful versus just the going and sniping one on one, just trying to individually send people email. Hey, can I help you? Hey, can I help you? There's no leverage in that. There's tremendous leverage in what you're doing. Tell me about this. May be against terms of service. I don't know. I know it's done maybe behind the scenes. Tell me about buying and selling groups. Like if I want to do jump to the head of the line and I wanted to purchase somebody's LinkedIn group and become the manager, they've got 20,000 people in their LinkedIn group. That is my ideal prospects.

Sure.

I mean, I could see myself reaching out and say, listen, I'd be interested in purchasing this. Do you have any experience in that? And is it against tos? Is it gray? Is it?

I don't know if it is or not, to be honest with you. And I haven't done it. We've always kind of taken the path of building them organically to get the people that we want in them. But then again, I know some really smart marketers that do buy LinkedIn groups and they prefer to not go through the effort of growing it. And like you said, they want to skip to the front of the line. What I would caution people against though, is buying too much into the hype that if you have the group blasting them with announcements will generate the same kind of results that you're used to with your email list. We see a far lower response rate from LinkedIn announcements than traditional email marketing.

Right. And you know what? I've. So I've heard the deliverability rate on LinkedIn emails is through the roof compared to somebody's AWeber account or traditional autoresponder because you're sending through LinkedIn's campaign. However, I would imagine that the open rate and engagement, I mean I get those all the time and I just, I ignore them because most of the time there's just like BS.

So I have not yet seen proven that a LinkedIn email is more effective than something else.

So there's a couple different things that we're talking about. So let me clarify. So what I'm speaking of is an announcement which as a group owner, you can send an announcement once a week to all the people in your group. Those, if you're relying on that as your strategy for monetizing a group, you better have a fairly high priced product or service because that in and of itself doesn't drive that much traffic as much as you might expect it to if you compare it against traditional email marketing metrics. All right, so that, that's really what I'm speaking of. So one of the other things though is just one on one personal messaging within LinkedIn, which gets a tremendous response rate if it's done the right way. All right, so if your goal for using LinkedIn is to drive traffic in clicks, then personal one on one messaging and outreach is not the best play. All right. If your goal is to generate qualified sales leads, right, to get prospects to open up to you and agree to a phone call with you or somebody on your sales team, then the LinkedIn inbox is a fantastic place to execute and get that done. And one of the things that we see over and over again is that people's LinkedIn inboxes are not as crowded as their email inboxes these days. And so you stand a better chance of standing out and people's, you know, the C level, the C suite, if you will, their gatekeepers, My contention is that their gatekeepers aren't managing their LinkedIn inbox the way they are email. So you just, you got a better chance of getting the right person to even look at your message in the first place, you know, and so, but, but there's, there's really two different things though. You know, the, the driving traffic part and the getting opt in side of things through LinkedIn group strategies and then utilizing LinkedIn messaging to reach out to prospects on, you know, in terms of lining up calls and sales meetings and such, really kind of two different things that require different approaches.

That makes a lot of sense. And it's, you know, for anybody out there and we could have an entire training on this. I actually could, I should create an entire podcast on just how to effectively cold email individuals. Whether it's, I'm not talking about spam I'm talking about reaching out to one on one because we all get these all the time that people just writing out a form letter and then immediately going for the sale right away in the email. And I'm like, ah, you gotta be kidding me. This is. At least ask me a question and get me to respond. Engage in any dialogue before you offer your services or before you do something.

Sure.

There's, you know, guys, don't, don't shoot your gun too quick. Let's you know, let the target come closer to you and yeah, come in the sight.

So I did a webinar last, last, I guess now it's last year with Chris Brogan and one of the things he said is that he came out right away and said, you know, I don't really like LinkedIn because it's just a bunch of leg humpers. That's so true. That's what he's referring to. You know, you connect with somebody and then they want to sell you something. Yep. Yeah.

And you have to be careful. And the nice part is if you not like that, if you're not humping their leg, you will probably get so much more credit because you're so refreshing and oh my God, they're not trying to hump my leg. They're not trying to sell me something right away. They're actually trying to build a relationship or add value to me. So that's really, that's really powerful. I love Chris Brogan's stuff. He's really good.

Yeah, for sure.

Okay, so we've talked about groups, we talked about one on one individually hitting them up. I want to talk real briefly just because I'm not real familiar with this, the LinkedIn advertising. A, is it a strategy you use a lot?

B.

What'S the overarching strategy on that?

Yeah, so LinkedIn ads are going to be best for driving traffic to content, getting opt ins. We're primarily utilizing LinkedIn ads to generate leads for webinars to get people to sign up for webinars. So a lot of people will start using LinkedIn ads and they'll say this is too expensive because maybe they're used to Facebook ads. LinkedIn ads on the surface in terms of if you just look at like cost per click of what you're going to end up spending is significantly more, excuse me, significantly more expensive than Facebook ads. But you're able to target.

A different type of person on LinkedIn than you can reach in Facebook. Certainly there's overlap and Facebook is getting more advanced in terms of how B2B marketers can use it. But there's just a whole different crowd on LinkedIn. So oftentimes, even though the cost per click is higher, your cost per lead is going to be potentially lower. Or even if it's the same, the quality of those leads can be a lot better. And that's really, at the end of the day, what it comes down to. You know, for our business, we see on average 4 to $8 cost per lead is typically what we're used to spending on LinkedIn ads. And that's for four to eight. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, generally speaking, we try and get campaigns dialed in to where we're getting clicks for between $1.50 and $3 each. And you know, if a landing page can convert 30 plus percent, then we're in business. You know, now I'm gonna, I'm gonna.

Really reveal my ignorance on LinkedIn advertising and how often or how rare I'm on LinkedIn. Where did these ads show up? Are they on the right hand side? Are they in the newsfeed? I'm on there right now. I'm just on the main home page and I'm looking for an ad ads you may be interested in. See, they're right in front of me. I didn't even see it.

So we find that those types of ads don't work very well.

Okay, sidebar ads are not as.

Yeah, so LinkedIn's got basically right now on their self serve ad platform, two types of ads that you can, you can purchase and set up for your business. You've got what they call ads and then you've got sponsored updates. All right, so what you're seeing are ads. All right, now, now the difference between that and sponsored updates. So sponsored updates is what you see in your feed on your homepage. So just like if you post a new article or you share this podcast out with all your connections on LinkedIn. Right. And then some, if they happen to be in LinkedIn when you share it or sometime around that time they might see that post. Right. Well, with sponsored updates you can, as an advertiser, put an ad in that place in front of any type of target that you want to go after, you know, and so it just shows up on their homepage feed. And we find those sponsored updates work far better than those sidebar ads on LinkedIn.

Nice. So those will just show up like, will it say like sponsored? Almost like Facebook. So it'll show up kind of like a Facebook ad will. Right. Where it says sponsors.

Exactly.

I'm going through mine. I guess nobody's really targeting me at the moment. That's quite alright.

Yeah, you keep scrolling down, you might find one. But yeah, that's exactly, you know, how it works. And LinkedIn's ad platform is becoming, you know, it's getting better, it's got room for improvement as of right now. But you know, these things change fast. So, you know, pretty soon it's probably going to be more evolved and robust, if you will. But the reason I say that is because it's. Right now it's actually fairly straightforward to set up LinkedIn AD or LinkedIn sponsored update campaigns, even if you really haven't ever set up ad campaigns before. So I would encourage anybody that's that thinks that if you've got some content that you want to get in front of certain types of prospects, especially if that content requires somebody to opt in and you know that a certain percentage of people that hit that landing page are going to opt in because it's a proven landing page. I would highly recommend testing out some LinkedIn ads and see how it works because, you know, for us it's pretty good.

I like that, I like that. This has definitely given me another plate that I want to get up there and start spinning because it's nice. I mean, it's an area that I definitely prospect in and some of my clients do as well. And it's so underutilized. It's not talked about a lot at Masterminds, it's not talked about a lot in other circles. So that's one of the reasons I'm so thrilled to have you here.

Nobody knows what to do with LinkedIn. There's just not that many people that are really getting any results out of it. And it seems like a lot of the people that do are just kind of keeping it to themselves.

And so that's why nobody's talking about it, because people have tried some ads on LinkedIn and they find them to be more expensive than Facebook so they stop doing it, you know, or they just don't know what to do with it, you know, so they go on.

To spin another plate. And there is, there's a lot of places spin out there. So there's, you know. Yeah, but at the end of the day, marketing and lead generation is all about finding the highest roi, source of leads. And you know, if the, if this is where the, if this is the center of the bullseye for some people, you know, if you're selling weight loss pills or whatever, this isn't where you want to do it. But if you're selling anything B2B or.

Anything to sales professionals, I would imagine sales professionals are on this thing all the time.

Oh yeah, yeah. If you've got something you sell to SalesPeople, sales managers, VPs of sales, you name it. Those people are all over LinkedIn, no doubt.

So I want to segue into something I mentioned earlier. You've got another company called Webinarly and I want to talk about that. So, big fan of webinars. They work tremendously well. But tell me, what does Webinarly do? What problems does it solve? How would somebody use Webinarly versus doing it themselves? And I'll preface it with if you want to do it yourself, you create the webinar, you host it, or you get it on Gotowebinar, you get something else and you send your emails and you write all your sequences and you handle every step of the process. I believe you probably make that a lot simpler. Tell me how it works.

Well, there's a lot of moving parts with webinars.

Yes.

So for our business, webinars have been the biggest driver of our business's growth and we've grown quite a bit over the last few years. And so it was roughly a year ago that we sat down and said, why don't we see if there's some other businesses out there that could use some help in this area doing what we've done for our business, for their company. So I went down the lean startup path and instead of just assuming I knew what the market wanted.

My team and I went out and interviewed potential clients and people that we thought were in the target market to find out really what are the problems that they have with webinars and, and where do they really need help. And what we found was that most people have the ability to create a webinar and set it up and host it, even though there's a lot of moving parts with that. And some people say, hey, I want you guys to help with all of it. But what we've heard from most people and what we see out in the market is that where people really struggle the most is getting the word out. It's the marketing of the webinar. It's promoting it and making sure that enough people sign up to make it worth doing and then on an ongoing basis, continuing to market it so that it's not just a one time event that took a lot of energy and now it's over, you know, but making that one webinar work for you for months or years down the road. And there's a number of different ways to go about doing that, but that's really where we earn our keep and where we help our clients. So we manage all the marketing and ad campaigns to continue driving prospects to their landing pages and getting them to sign up for their webinars.

Okay, so you guys drive the traffic to their landing pages.

Yep, exactly. And for most of our clients, we also will help them create landing pages because, you know, the conversion is that point, that point in the process where a prospect hits that registration page and decides if it's good enough to exchange their email address for this information. This webinar they're thinking about signing up for is critical. You know, so if a client has a landing page converting at 20% and we can improve it to 30%, it's a 50% increase in the number of leads generated. Massive. And so for most of our clients, we will also help out with landing page optimization, and we'll consult on really, the whole process. We'll help people set up the whole thing if they want. But really, where the bulk of our. Where we earn our keep is on the marketing side of things and generating the leads.

Okay, so let's use an example here.

Sure.

So I build the webinar on my side, and webinars are. There's moving parts, but it's not that hard. You can set it up on automated. You can do a live one, whatever. So you guys, number one, you get paid per lead. Is that typically how you monetize this, or is it paid?

We have a fee.

Okay.

Yeah. So we have a few different pricing tiers, and companies hire us, and our fee will include ad budget as well. And then we'll give people an estimated lead range based on kind of where we think things will fall.

Okay, so let's just say I come to you and I said, listen, I've got a $5,000 ad spend, and I want you to, you know, here's my market, here's who I Want to target, etc, go manage this and get the leads in door. So, in essence, you're kind of managing the ad spend. You're not doing that on with your own. The ad spend isn't coming out of your own pocket.

Right. Oftentimes it is. Okay.

Kind of depend on the client, the webinar and.

Sure, exactly. Yeah. Oftentimes the client just pays us, and then we're responsible for generating the results. We don't ask them to go set up an account with Facebook and set up an account with LinkedIn and set up an account with Twitter.

You've got that.

Yeah. So we just manage the process. So the ad spend comes out of our fee and we just make it happen.

Okay.

It's less moving parts that way.

Okay, so then your fee and you don't have to quote anything right now because it probably depends on. It may be a case by case basis, but in general.

Let'S say I've got a high converting webinar and this thing is good and it's seasoned, et cetera. And I don't want you to, you know, I don't want you to manage the. I'm not going to give you my ad spend budget, but I'm going to tell you that. Yeah, send me leads and I'll pay you. So am I paying you on a flat fee basis just for whatever happens, or is it a pay for a lead or is it pay per person who signs up for something else? Like how if I was a prospect, actually either myself or some of my clients may be. So that's one of the reasons I'm asking. And we'll publicize it here for anybody else who is like, oh, I kind of want that as well.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, no worries, man. Ask, ask anything you want. I'm an open book.

How much you cost, mofo?

Yeah. So as of right now, like the. Just to be totally transparent, the base level of service is 4,500amonth, and that includes a minimum of 33% of that will go towards ad spend. All right. And so typically what it comes down to is that we'll sit down with a client, figure out where are the best places that your prospects can be reached, and we will then go set up the campaigns to make it all happen. And you know, it could be a combination of Facebook ads, it could be LinkedIn ads, it could be organic strategies within LinkedIn. So a lot of our clients, that, that makes sense because we work with mostly B2B companies and, you know, it's just. The sky's the limit. I mean, we have a client who's in the real estate space.

He's near and dear to my heart. So give me a more specific. Like real estate invest.

Yeah, he's targeting real estate agents.

Agents, yeah.

And it's kind of a business opportunity type angle. But he, you know, we're using Zillow to market his webinars, you know, and so it really just depends on, you know, who's a client, where can their prospects best be reached and is there a way we can leverage those platforms efficiently to, you know.

Drive some leads and get, get enough people over to the registration page to get enough people sign up for the webinar to, to make it all work, you know, and so that if you've got a webinar that converts and you know, how it, you know what your percentages are and all that stuff, it's pretty easy to look at, you know, working with us and crunch the numbers. And for most of our clients at that price point, they're looking at it. Just a lot of it depends on a lot of different factors. But on average, usually the cost per lead is going to end up somewhere between 30 and $90 apiece.

Okay, perfect. I'm just kind of writing that down. So if I pay you $4,500 a month, 33% of that is to going, going to ad spend. And if I get, let's say I get 30 leads versus 300 leads. Does the, does the amount that you like, do you take anything per lead as well?

We don't, you know, if it's more, you know, we don't charge you more.

You say if it's more than what.

If it's more than like the lead range that we quoted. If we tell you we think this is going to be somewhere around 100amonth, let's just ballpark it, you know, so you're looking at 45 bucks a lead if it, if it turns out a little less or a little more. There's, there's, we're not like reconciling the, the payment every month or anything like that. No, it really just comes down to that. Our clients are relying on us to deliver the results that we tell them we're going to deliver. And if we don't, they're not going to stay with us for very long.

Right.

You know.

Okay, so that makes sense.

Work hard to make sure that we're bringing on clients that we can get results for that are going to be a good long term fit, you know, both for both sides.

Right. And you just know from doing that 30 to 90 is a pretty, it's a wide enough range where it probably covers most people. I mean, you know, conversion percent opt in percentages are, you know, they don't vary that much. People aren't getting like 90% conversions on webinar registrations. But depends.

But there are some spaces where it can be difficult. You know, there's, there's some markets where if you get 5% of people to opt in, you know, you're going to be in good shape. And, but. And that's okay because, you know, those types of businesses might be willing to pay a lot for a lead.

And maybe the cost. Yeah, maybe the average customer value is really, really high and they can afford to spend that. Yeah, okay, so.

That makes a lot of sense, and I like that. So B2B focused. And.

What about other types of offers like B2C? Do you need B2C?

You know, I mean, at the end of the day, we're always marketing the people. And whether they work in a business or not.

You know, we're still marketing to people, you know. So one example is a client of ours that is a franchise consultant, and he's on the hunt for people that are interested and considering leaving the corporate world and doing their own thing, you know, and those people oftentimes are a good fit to have a conversation about the world of franchising. And, you know, that's kind of a B2C play, you know, but it's also kind of B2B, you know, so that's just. That's one example. But, you know, if somebody said, I've got a. I've got a business, you know, what's it. What's a good example? Like, the person that, you see it, like the BNI groups, who's selling makeup or something like that, you know, no, that's not. We don't do that kind of stuff. Not that that person couldn't maybe be effective with webinars. But, you know, sometimes it comes down to the cost per lead, too, you know, because frankly, if you're going to hire a company to manage the process for you, like, obviously we get compensated for the work that we do. So the cost per lead is going to be more than if you do it yourself. But you have to factor in what's your time worth? Are you even able to do it? Do you have the competencies and the resources to do it in the first place? Or if you're going to hire somebody, what's that person going to cost you? You know, and, you know, if the campaign goes well initially, we can scale up, you know, so the initial starting point is really just let's get this thing dialed in and then figure out how we can scale it up. And then the leads can really get even cheaper.

I like that. Well, I think it really comes down to just knowing your numbers. So, you know, if, you know, what if, you know, you get 100 people on a webinar and you're closing X, if you know, your average customer value is, say, $100 you can easily pay 30 to 90 CPO. Well, actually not. Not true. Yeah, no, if you know. If you know your math exactly.

Well, if you're. If you're.

If you know your average, you know your per lead value, what the value is, you know what the cost is, as long as your lead value is over $100 per lead, you can pay 90 all day long.

Sure, sure. Absolutely. I mean, I know in my business, I want to get. I want at least a 50% margin on the clients I'm bringing in. So if somebody came to me and said, I think I can make $10 on a customer by working with you, I'd say this is not the right thing.

We like to work with clients that have a relatively high price point and a recurring revenue model so that clients are worth a lot to them over the long haul.

Well, I love it. I think you're doing some really awesome work. And, you know, the webinarly, that's a model that I'm not. I wasn't really familiar with that model. I knew enough about.

LinkedIn stuff, but I really like what you do. I know all about webinars, but I like how, you know, you've kind of phrased this as a really good and different. I was expecting you to just be, you know, either charging per lead or.

You know, straight up, hey, we'll do this per lead or something else. But I like the way you've done that. Like, look, here's the numbers, and we'll adjust accordingly. And especially. And you stick to kind of the B2B stuff.

I'm going to cough here. One second. Go for it so that it doesn't blow everybody's ears out.

There we go. So.

Kind of wrapping up the hour mark. And this has been fantastic, but I want to ask you, what are there, besides what we've talked about, are there any other opportunities you see right now out there that you're either excited about or that you think other people are overlooking and what might they be? And if we've talked about them, that's cool. But are there any unexploited opportunities that you think.

You know, man, I think that the biggest driver of my business's growth has been, you know, webinars, fueled by LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, and organic strategies and email marketing. So, like, I'm just. I'm going hard as hell on those strategies.

But aside from that, I mean, the biggest thing for my business right now that I'm most excited about is, you know, meeting people like you and just developing new relationships. With people that are really doing lots of awesome things and.

You know, the relationship capital, all that kind of stuff, you know, is huge. And just over the last few months, you know, because of some of the relationships I've developed and some of the people that we've met and some of the people that we've had the opportunity to work with and partner with on certain things has just been amazing. And some of the things that we've got in store for the coming year are super, super exciting. So I would say to anybody that is doing all this kind of stuff that we're doing, like, you know, yep. Do webinars, you know, drive traffic, you know, generate leads, all that stuff, and then also take time to really develop relationships with really, really solid people. And you know, combining those two things can have a big impact.

Fantastic. So a couple rapid fire ones. What are you terrible at in your business?

Oh man, what am I terrible at? You know, I.

Or at least what do you hate doing? Like, so for personally, for me, when it comes to like the advertising, I have to hire people to manage all my ads. I hate sitting there and actually building and managing the minutiae of ads.

Right.

I hate SEO, I suck at it. These are some of the things that I'm terrible at. So in your business side, there's a.

Lot of good examples of that. So we have an office administrator that handles a lot of our customer service and emails for me and answering the phone and some of that stuff that I just don't not have time for and thus oftentimes really get bad at it and can't get back to people. And so that's not a good thing. So having somebody like that to take those kinds of things off my plate, that. Yeah. Am I technically good enough to be able to, to do some of those things? Of course, you know, but is it the best use of my time? No. You know, we have a marketing manager in our office that runs a lot of our ad campaigns. You know, he is great at Facebook. So I kind of talk to him at a high level about, you know, what we want certain campaigns to achieve and generally speaking, what kind of people to go target. And then he goes out and really gets into the weeds and the nuts and bolts of really putting it together and making it happen, you know, so it's some of that really technical stuff that other people in my office because, you know, as we've grown, we've created some more specialized positions within the company. These guys are just, you know, pass me by, you know, and that's a, that's a good place to be. So there's some things that other people on my team are much better than me at, and it's awesome that they're in the right position. And then, you know, it allows me to work on some of the high level stuff and, you know, stay tapped in with our clients and talk to people like you.

Yeah, fantastic.

Last thing. What other nut are you trying to crack in your business that does not include just getting more sales or whatever? Okay, is there any one thing right now, and it may be nothing, you may be on a pretty good path, but is there any like one, either person, like a type of person you're trying to meet or resource you're trying to get, a challenge, you're trying to overcome something that you're pulling your hair out over.

You know, I mean, we're always on the lookout for news, new sources of traffic, you know, but. But that's kind of what you said not to focus on because that's basically, you know, leads to sales. But I would say, you know, one of the things that I spend a lot of time on is just the people side of the business right now and, you know, building, building our team and finding the right people in the first place.

Are you looking for any particular type of position?

You know, with our growth, we're adding new account managers on a somewhat regular basis. We've got a great team of people in the office here, all in St. Louis that manage our clients accounts. But, you know, we're projecting pretty, pretty decent growth this year. So we've got, you know, a few more seats to fill and get these people on board and ready to go enough time so that they're well versed in what we do and very skilled by the time we need them to start handling their business, you know. And so, you know, right now, you know, some of the challenges that come along with recruiting and things like that are things that I think about at night. Cool.

Well, if anybody's listening to this, especially if you live in St. Louis or you want to move to St. Louis and you think you fit those criteria, I'm sure you know, they can follow up with you. I'm gonna put all your contact information here in the show notes and maybe you can help solve those problems. Last two questions. Who do you turn to? Who's the most valuable business relationship or mentor that you have? Is there anybody out there that you turn to when you really need help?

Yeah, I mean, I've got, I've got a couple close friends here in St. Louis that I've known since high school who also happened to be now running their own businesses that, you know, for. For really serious, you know, or personal type challenges that I'm facing, like those guys I'll often go to. But I would say aside from that, you know, I'm a part of EO and their accelerator program here in St. Louis and have been a part of that for two years.

That's a good organization.

Yeah, yeah. And so, like, some of the friendships I've built through there have been key. Just being a part of, you know, the accountability group so has been huge. So things that I'm struggling with, every month I've got a forum to bounce my channel and my struggles off of other people so that, you know, I can get feedback from them. And oftentimes the solutions that people share with me and the ideas that they have are, you know, just huge for our business. So I would highly recommend not just eo, but, you know, any sort of organization like that, you know, whether it's a mastermind group that you can get a part of or something more informal even, or eo that's been a big part of what's allowed us to grow. I'll just say that.

Oh, that's great. I love that. Now, last question. Is there anybody else you think that I should ask about their bacon wrap strategies? Anybody you think could make a tremendous guest on the show, just like you've been?

Well, you talked about you wanted to do an episode on Cold Email. Yeah, There's a guy named Brian Kruseberger that probably is the leading expert in the world on that topic.

Do you know him?

Yeah.

Can you make the introduction? I would love it. I would absolutely love that. I think that'd be a tremendous topic. I know I'd get a lot out of it and other people would.

Yep, I'd be happy to. Brian's. He's a great guy and he's the real deal, and.

I'm sure that he'd be a great guy to have on your show.

That'd be perfect. Well, Josh, man, I can't tell you how much I appreciate this. I wish you could see, like, in my office here, I've got this entire whiteboard that I think out loud on, and I've got it. And the entire thing is filled up with notes from our conversation. And I can't wait to transcribe this, put the show notes up, share it with Bacon Nation as I'm starting to call them. Only because my friend John Dumas calls his. He's got his show entrepreneur on fire. He calls him Fire Nation. Bacon Nation is way cooler to be a part of than Fire Nation.

That's awesome, man. Count me in.

Cool.

For those guys listening, you know, we're wrapping up right now. However, your job is not over. You're gonna push. You're gonna push pause or stop on this, but I want you to share it, too. Share it on Facebook. If you haven't left a review on itunes, please do that. That's how I get paid for, figuratively speaking, for bringing people like Josh, picking his brain, giving it to you on a silver platter like this so that you can run out. I mean, you literally could go out and build your own LinkedIn group doing exactly what he said. Or if you're successful and busy like most successful people are, you can contact him at the resources I'll provide you and you can have him do everything for you. And you can probably supercharge your success, jump to the head of the line and, you know, quit trying to learn it all yourself. I was asked recently what I would do if I was starting all over, if I was talking to myself, I don't know, seven or eight years ago when I was first starting in this kind of business and what I would tell my younger self. And I said I would probably stop trying to learn everything and doing it all on my own and just learn the tip of the iceberg and then find the people who know it inside and out and just bite the bullet, hire them, get them to work, because I guarantee my success would have been 10 times faster. I'm the kind of guy who likes to get in and try to learn everything on my own just because I'm curious like that. But it has hampered my business growth and I tell all of my clients, find the best. You don't have to know everything. You just have to know the people who do. And by listening to bacon wrap business, you get exposed to the people who do. Just like Josh here on the call today. So you can thank me by sending in, review it, share this on Facebook, social media, Twitter, LinkedIn especially. And send me an email if you have any questions. If you'd like me to take a look at your overall business strategy. If you'd like to get my brain to wrap bacon around your business, give you a second opinion on what you're doing right or wrong, just shoot me an email to ask bradaconwrappedbusiness.com and if you're listening to this on itunes or on your podcast app, hit subscribe if you're not already subscribed. That way the shows already get downloaded and you can go over to baconritebusiness.com, sign up for my newsletter. You won't miss a thing. You get a lot of bonuses that I don't give out to everybody else just for my newsletter subscribers. That is all for today. Josh, one more time. Thank you very much for joining me and I look forward to talking to you offline about this. I've got some potential ways we can maybe do some business together, and I look forward to seeing where that goes.

Awesome, man. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me on. It's been fun.

My pleasure.

Thanks.

Take care and bye guys. See you next time.

Sam.