Lisa Buyer - How To Use Social Media For Branding And PR

I feel like a lot of people have this time to reset and kind of reevaluate maybe what's missing in their strategy for marketing, for digital marketing and going back and looking at the value of organic in general. Public relations is on the organic side for the most part, and the paid side is great too, but once you stop the paid, it's done. You're not getting those leads every day. But organic traffic is the way I describe it, is priceless. It's actually a great time to do ads because ads are less expensive. So combining the powers, you know, I call them the superpowers of public relations, SEO and social. If you can optimize each part of that, you're going to get the most reach and most visibility and, you know, every. All eyeballs are on digital right now.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flow Chart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear Yellow.

Hi there. Oh, hello.

Hello.

Hi.

How are you?

How are you doing? Well.

Very well.

Very well.

Talking to. We just finished a great conversation.

No, we're just about to start a great conversation.

Well, okay. We're about to start a great conversation that we know exactly how the conversation is going to happen. Take that.

Yeah. We are psychics podcast folks. Today we're talking about pr. Not press releases, but public relations and using social media to get more pr.

Yes. With, with, with, with.

Who's our guest?

Oh, Lisa Byer. She's awesome. And I am absolutely serious. She is so damn awesome. Like I. All right, so she, like, showers us with books.

Her books.

And they're all extremely helpful. One of them. We talk a lot about social PR secrets that you can actually get for Digital version@thebuyergroup.com hustle thebuyergroup.com hustle and also digital Detox Secrets is another of her books. And then she showered us with some cbd which was like, oh, high energetic snacks. I think she's an advisor partner or something of that company. But holy moly. And we'll have the founder on that of that on the show in the future. Sometimes. But.

Yes, but in this episode we, yeah, we dove into like the various social media platforms and using them to get press, how to get your. The, you know, content that you created or content you've been featured in in front of the right media people, in front of the right groups, how to use the various social media platforms. We even talked about TikTok a little bit on this episode. We talked about Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Twitter, all of the social Media platforms are kind of covered and how to. How to leverage them to get more media representation for your brand.

Yeah, I mean, it's.

I can put it.

That's pretty good. That's pretty good. And her social PR Secrets book, like, definitely, I urge you, get it, because it's basically like a PR manual that walks through very specific ways. Like, she was saying, you can literally flip to any chapter. And, like, I just had the table of contents open. I guess I have the book next to me, but, like, there's like, whole news jacking kind of thing. Like, get yourself into the news, which we kind of talk a lot, a little bit about. There's, like, specific platforms. There's, you know, chatbot stuff. There's. Futurist, There's. Let's see, a bunch of social. She's all about SEO and, I mean, visual reporting. Actually didn't ask her what that is. There's podcasting. I mean, there's the new types of press releases, so that's part of it.

I'm pretty sure we'll do a round two with her at some point, because I actually have a notepad in front of me of things I wanted to chat about, and I think we got to about 50% of them.

So, yeah.

Yeah, we have quite a bit more that we can probably bring her back on and do around two with.

Yeah, man. So Lisa is amazing. And so just strap yourself in. You're going to. I would say this is a power. This is more the approach we're taking in our business is the, you know, the outreach, the communication with other publications that can help spread our message for us, but also us helping them spread theirs. And. And then there's a lot of repurposing that happens, which we'll talk about that as well. So I think everyone listening to this episode, you, you, Susan, Jim, Jeffrey, whoever.

Jim Jeffries.

Jim Jeffries. You like that? He's probably listening. Probably not.

Yes, sir.

So is Rogan of the Joe category? Not Joe. Rogan, though, is listening. But think about all the content that we all create without us thinking. Thinking about it. A lot of times someone will share that or feature a quote or something or a podcast you've been on or something you've written for another blog.

This is all opportunities for you to basically build up this library. And Lisa basically tells you how to take advantage of that and do it in a clever way.

Yes.

There's a lot of stuff we're gonna do there.

All right, let's definitely get the notes.

Yes, get the notes. How do we get the notes, Matt.

So there's two ways to get the notes. You can go to hustleandflowchart.com computer and do it from your computer. I guess you could do it from your cell phone as well if you want. But if you have a cell phone and you'd rather do it from a cell phone, it might be easier to text the word comp to 38470. Either way, you'll get the step by step breakdown of this episode. The Cliffs Notes version of this episode completely free. If you do it within two weeks of this episode going live. We've recently had some people contact us going, hey, I opted in and the episode I was just listening to isn't available. That's because they didn't opt in within two weeks of this episode going live. And we warn you on every episode.

Listen to the episode.

You gotta go within of this episode going live. If you want to get the notes for free.

Hustleandflowchart.com comp or hustleandflowchart.com Comp or text.

The word comp to 38470.

And if you're really. You could do it with your mind. You don't have to type it at all. You're like.

Got the comp.

That's just something that Joe does that nobody can figure out how he does. So don't listen to that advice.

Really cool. What else we got, Matt?

We got some great support from a company that we love called Ahrefs. A H r e f s.com and I was actually using Etrefs just yesterday.

What were you using it for yesterday? Why would you do that?

Why would I do that? Well, yesterday I was creating some YouTube ads and they actually. Yeah, they actually have a section inside of Ahrefs where you can search for keywords on YouTube and find out what keywords you should go after. I think it's more designed for organic, but I was using it for actually, it probably doesn't matter, but I was using it for finding keywords and content that we should put our YouTube in stream ads in front of. We're promoting a specific product. So I was trying to find, you know, competitors of that product. I was trying to find people who were doing reviews of that product, but left monetization turned on like dumb dumbs. So I can advertise in front of their review with our review of the same product. Little affiliate marketing secret there.

But yeah. So we're using Ahrefs to sort of discover that kind of content on YouTube. Like if somebody wrote a review for a product that we're promoting. And you leave monetization on, we can advertise for that same exact product as an affiliate in front of your review. Monetization off. If you're going to be making product reviews on YouTube, that's my little tip for you.

That's good. Yeah. So just leave a monetization on and you'll start to see our faces everywhere.

So ahrefs.com, they've got a $7 trial for seven days. A bucket day over at a h r e f s dot com.

All right, so get the notes. Get the book that Lisa's, all that. It's all in the show notes. If you don't remember any of these URLs, go to the show notes and we'll hook you up there.

Yes, sir.

Let's go chat with Ms. Byer. Lisa, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. How about you guys?

Doing the best we can. Still in lockdown, at least.

Working. Working from home.

Yeah. What's new, though? I mean, not much has changed in the work side of things other than it's freaking busy. I feel like. Yeah, like, we've been doing more.

Have you been outside of our podcast days? I feel like my day to day feels pretty much the same because I'm just kind of a hermit at home anyway. But podcast days are like the one day that feels different because we're not together.

Yeah. I mean, not that much has changed for me as I work remote. Like, my whole team is remote. So it doesn't feel, like, feel that different. I actually feel busier and. But it is different for, like, my daughter is now working, you know, doing her school from home. So having her home all day is a little bit different. And she doesn't love it, but for me, it's okay, you know?

Yeah, I know. She's in high school too, right?

So it's like, yeah, a senior. The seniors got robbed.

Yeah, that's tough. I see these little signs around here, like my neighborhood when I'm walking around, and they're all like, about the class of 2020 and da, da, da. I'm like. And they're just like, yeah, cheer them on because no one else is.

Yeah, it's very, very sad. And, you know, no prom, no graduation, and, you know, we don't even know if they're starting school in the fall. Hopefully they do.

Yeah, that's true.

My son's in kindergarten. This was actually his first year full time in school. And so this is his experience, like for his first full time school year. So it's kind of a bummer.

Whole new world. Who knows what's gonna happen? But at least with you, Lisa, I mean, it seems like you would stay nice and busy throughout this thing too, doing PR type stuff. Your agency and I mean, it just seems like that's more in demand, at least from our perspective. That's. We see a lot of, like we're doing a lot of that. Our peers are doing a lot of it. The smart people are investing in it.

I feel like, I feel like a lot, a lot of people have this time to reset and kind of reevaluate maybe what's missing in their strategy for marketing, for digital marketing and going back and looking at the value of, you know, organic in general. Public relations is on the organic side for the most part. And, you know, the paid side is great too, but once you stop the paid, it's done. You know, you're not getting those leads every day, but organic traffic is like, the way I describe it is like priceless.

Yeah, yeah. A lot of, A lot of what we've been hearing right now and seeing for ourselves is now is a good time to be focusing on, you know, personal brand or your company brand because, you know, some people have sort of tightened up the wallets a little bit. So now is a good time to just kind of put your face out there and be noticed. Even if people aren't spending as much money with you right now. Are you kind of seeing that since you sort of operate in that world?

I am seeing that. And everybody's more online than ever right now. I mean, so now is the time. And so with. It's actually a great time to do ads because ads are less expensive. So combining the powers, I call them the superpowers of public relations, SEO and social media, if you can optimize each part of that, you're going to get the most reach and most visibility. And all eyeballs are on digital right now.

I'm excited to dive into that stuff. Before we do, though, let's talk about your story a little bit. How did you get into doing the public relations and the agency you have now? What were you doing before this and how did you decide to get into this field?

I feel like I've been doing this all my life. It really started in high school. I was in the yearbook class and that's where I got into journalism and editing and design and layout. So when I got to college, I was just like, okay, what's the closest thing I can do to yearbook. And it ended up being public relations in the college of Journalism at University of Florida. And so I just kind of just rolled into it and I started my agency just a couple years out of college. So I pretty much had my own business since right out of college. Actually, in college, I had a little side gig hand painting T shirts for extra money.

Sweet. So you've been an entrepreneur for a long time and you just told us like 10 minutes ago a prior day chat. You like, you never saw yourself as an entrepreneur?

What the heck? No, I actually never did. I mean, even, you know, I had a partner when I started my first agency. We would have business cards made. Like, I was like, embarrassed, not embarrassed. I don't know. Like, I just felt weird putting president, CEO. So like I just made up an like, account manager or something, or senior account manager. Yeah. And I. We own the company, so you probably.

Get less people hassling you. You're like, ah, it's not the owner. I'm not gonna bug her with this pitch or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I think I didn't realize that I was an entrepreneur and I really had been for a long time.

Wow.

So it got you. What was it?

Yearbook?

Or was there something that just got you interested back in high school and college that did this whole here, this PR and everything else you developed into.

To be honest, I didn't really understand truly what PR was until even after I graduated from college, even though I specialized in it, because PR is such a vague word. Like, it means so many different things to different people. So, like what I. My definition of public relations is getting editorial coverage, third party, you know, credibility type of thing. So I think when I was. The whole yearbook thing was just like the journalistic side of it, like writing and not just writing like an essay. And I also love design. Like, I'm kind of a visual freak, you know, underground artist type thing.

So.

Yeah. So, like, when I started my agency, what was really cool was that my partner was a commercial artist. And this was back, you know, traditional pr, pre Google. And that was how we really differentiate ourselves. You know, we weren't just a traditional PR agency getting media coverage. We also added that branding, visual aspect to make things stand out and break out of the clutter and, you know, the old school print days.

Yeah. Now, before we hit record, you mentioned that you never really felt like an entrepreneur. You always kind of had the imposter syndrome thing kind of going on until you discovered masterminds. So let's talk about both the imposter syndrome and masterminds, because I know they both kind of group together with your storyline. So why do you think, first of all, you didn't feel like an entrepreneur, even though you were sort of selling services and making money off of them? And then let's talk about the evolution and of how you sort of realized I am doing this entrepreneur thing.

I mean, I don't know. I think that it's also like, you know, some insecurities. You know, you don't really have the confidence that you deserve that title. Like, did you really do enough? Are you there yet to call yourself an entrepreneur? Like, did you make that mark? And you comparing yourself to other people? And, you know, I took this pivot from traditional PR to more getting into the Internet marketing space, because when everything was going digital, I just. I had my clients asking me questions, questions that I didn't know the answer to, like, about ppc, things out of my. My scope at the time. And so I was like, okay, I have to learn this because I don't want to not know the answer. So I started going to Internet marketing conferences, and I was like, okay. I felt like I just received my master's degree in public relations by going to. And, you know, diving into Internet marketing and SEO. And around that time, I was just going to these conferences. I started. I got asked to speak at a conference, and I wasn't a speaker at the time, and I was just like, like, looking over my shoulder like, you want me to speak? I'm not an expert. And, you know, I started getting on this speaking circuit of being an expert in how to combine public relations, SEO and social. So, I mean, doing that, like, kind of gave me a little bit more confidence that I was. I could call myself an expert now. I wasn't an entrepreneur yet.

You're an expert level now. You're growing it.

Yeah.

And this is to yourself, obviously, from the outside, people are like, oh, at least to myself.

Yeah. Yeah, I was. I did not think that at all. And, you know, then I was like, okay, I have to write a book. You know, because I was saying the same thing over. When I was in the early days of combining PR with SEO and social media, you know, businesses were like, what? Like, why would I do that? I just want media outreach. So it was like, you know, just this education process that I just said, let me just put it all into a book and call it Social PR Secrets and just say, here, see if you want to work with me. This is what I'm talking about. You Know, you can, you know, so it was more of an educational piece, but it was almost like, okay, I have to write a book to call myself, you know, an authoritative source. Like, I have to have that credential. And it's just like, it goes on and on and on, you know.

Well, these are like. It's really interesting that you're saying this because it's like layers of your optimization. I mean, I know that's your thing is like. But you're optimizing yourself and this was you becoming your own, you know.

Yeah, definitely. And you know the word imposter syndrome, I didn't know that. I really didn't know that phrase. And like, for the past 10 years or, you know, 15 years, when I'm going on, you know, speaking of, you know, webinars and events, like, I would get this, like, I, like, who am I fooling? Like, I'm not the person that should, you know, I don't really know enough to be standing here. You know, all that goes in your head and like. Yeah. And then I. I was invited to Baby Bathwater, which is a mastermind, a few years ago, and I started feeling like I could relate to these people and these people could relate to me. And I'm not in this alone. This is what other entrepreneurs feel. And it's okay and it's part of growth.

And so that really was kind of a life changing point, I think, in my entrepreneur.

What are you doing? Well, you were saying that like, yeah, like going into these Mastermind, because, like, Matt and I have experienced this as well. Not with Baby Bathwater, but just any mastermind. It seems like we're all kind of in the same boat. Maybe not the same boat together, but the same kind of scenarios, riding this thing out in our own way. But at the underlying thing, there's. It's like imposter syndrome is almost like healthy, I feel like from the conversations we've had with a lot of folks, because it's. It makes you want to evolve and optimize yourself.

Yeah.

Kind of experience that.

Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean, once I kind of realized that, that that was an okay way to be and it's actually part of growth. You embrace it, you know, and you feel like you're not embarrassed and like, you know, everybody actually gets anxious before little and big things and it's just, you know, it's normal. It's just part of the journey. So that has been, you know, huge. And I went to your. You guys had your mastermind at PodFest and I mean, that was super insightful and, like, very. It helped me have like an aha moment. That if you're not like, huddled up, you know, like, we were huddled up for the day, you know, that was.

Like seven hours in a room. Yeah, yeah.

You know, you build relationships, like, you know, that continue on. And we're all in a Facebook group together now. And it's just. You have community. I think that's like a key word, is that you develop these, like, micro communities that, you know, like, certain things I know I could reach out to you guys for professionally and, like, and it's like, no worries, you know, like, I got you type thing. And, you know, that's what the whole, you know, if you're in the right mastermind, you know, I have. It's not like I'm a mastermind junkie. Some people are.

Some people are.

Yeah. I mean, when I hear the number of masterminds some of my friends are part of, I'm like, okay, yeah, you.

Actually have to get some work done.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Are you getting anything out of any of them or are you just like, it's like a seminar junkie? Same idea.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, you want to be able to give too. And if you're part of too many communities or mastermind groups, how can you keep up and really be able to get and give? You know, the ask and give thing, you know, it just becomes too, too fractured or, you know, too fragmented that you can't really be, you know, able to give as much as you're able to if you're more focused.

I mean. Yeah, And I, like, Matt and I are actively trimming the different commitments that, you know, we're putting out there. It's very simple. Right now in lockdown, where everyone's like, hey, we should do a Zoom meetup, like a mastermind together here. We should do a happy hour here. And then you, like, it's very simple to, I mean, especially now, like your calendar, to just like fill up with these things, which is great. But at the same time, it's like, okay, are you having thinking time in there? Are you doing. Are you working? Are you actually, like, pursuing the goal? Are you just talking about it all day long?

Oh, yeah. When the whole lockdown thing started, I think we sort of over committed thinking. Oh, it's just a Zoom call, you know, so we were getting on all sorts of masterminds and doing all sorts of stuff on Zoom, and we had to sort of back out because we realized, you know, it's easy during lockdown to think, let's just jump on this Zoom call. It's just an hour here, an hour there. Next thing we know, we're looking at our calendar, and it's like, we spent nine hours in Zoom calls last week, you know?

Yeah. And I mean, it's all about creating space and, like, making sure that you have, like, that blank space, that white space in your day or in your week or month or in your, you know, your business life or personal life. Because if you're just booked and scheduled, which I feel like before this lockdown, you know, we. Everybody didn't realize how over scheduled they were. There's not one person that I've talked to, like, you know, mostly like, entrepreneur, but everybody I talk to is actually happy to have a reset. You know, it's, it's, it's. It's unfortunate. Like, there's a lot of people that are. Have lost their jobs, and it's not a good thing. But you really, you do realize, like, how over scheduled we all were. And, you know, it's kind of like, prioritizing now is a little bit easier.

Well, I'm getting curious, actually about that because I've. If you looked at my board over here, you think I look like a madman because there's, like, writing everywhere. But it was me yesterday. I just took, like, a big chunk of time. And, you know, my wife's really good at, like, time management. I'm just not, because I feel like I can be everywhere and be everyone's best friend. But like, every. Like, I have so many tasks, and then, like, the time commitments, I'm like, holy crap, I gotta cut, like, more than half of it or at least optimize more than half of what I'm doing. And so I'm curious, like, what are you doing to optimize during this time? Because I'm sure I don't know if you were overbooked or lumped in this whole thing that you just said, but.

Yeah, well, from like, a. On a personal side, like, what I'm doing to optimize, like, productivity wise. Like, I like a big, huge fan of Brain fm. I know Dan was one of your guests, and I actually just talked to him today, and I was using Brain fm, like, way before I knew Dan. And then I'm like, oh, my God, now I know Dan, but I use it mainly for focus. So I just get a lot done and I'm able to take out the distraction. So, yeah, that's like, one way.

You have your Bose Headphones on that. I do. And I know they're noise cancel. Is that what you use as well?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, same thing. Yeah, I mean, it's like I can't work without it. And so that's like, you know. And then I do a lot of yoga. I have my yoga certification, but it's hard now those yoga studios are closed. So, you know, you. I can't really get what I thought I needed, but now I subscribe to these YouTube channels and you know, there's this one boho beautiful that I didn't even know about before we were in this lockdown. And I would have never really considered doing yoga with YouTube. You know, I just, I want to be at a studio, I want to be outside of my house. And you do the.

You gotta like get in a room and put like three heaters around you and like maybe a steam and do the whole beak room thing.

Yeah, I wish I could do that, but.

Well, you're in Florida, you just go outside.

Yeah, yeah, right, right, Good point. Right, right.

Your backyard.

But I discovered like the whole screen mirroring thing with your phone, like I never did that where you can mirror your.

Oh yeah.

Or you could use your, your TV like with your app. So I put on YouTube on my big screen TV and like, I feel like I'm in, you know, in Vietnam in the coffee fields, you know, or she's coming from all these places that you like, it takes you away. Yeah, yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it sounds like you're just, you're almost extending what you were doing prior to, but during this lockdown you're just modifying it for, you know, other ways.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.

And for like on the work side of things, we were talking about this before. So the reason I went to your mastermind was I had started my podcast, Digital Detox Secrets, and then I had like this aha. Moment. And your mastermind is like, what is. How is this podcast serving me? Like, is it really like, you know, like, talk about optimizing, like, you know, if the time I'm putting in, is it really coming back to me? And what I realized is that Social PR Secrets, the book, the fourth edition that we, you know, is really, you know, going to serve me from a business standpoint, because that is where my expertise is. So I just came up with the idea of doing. Okay, I started the wrong podcast.

No, but it's good though. You're able to pivot and yeah, it's not like that dies, but you're Lumping them together.

Right, Exactly. It just was. That was the part of the journey of, you know, where I should be now. But it. So now I've started the podcast Social PR Secrets and Digital Detox Secrets is kind of the encore show. People want to talk about work life balance. They can talk about it and I'll put it as part of that show. But like, at the beginning, I'm like, oh, no, I'm starting at episode one. And I realized that. Which, okay, everybody has to have an episode one. So it's not. It's not a bad thing.

It's probably going to be ugly.

Not super smooth.

Exactly, exactly. But what I realized is that I remembered. Okay, so I taught a class at University of Florida for about two or three years on social media management. And each week I would have a guest speaker that I would interview on YouTube for the class. And it was like Peter Shankman, Guy Kawasaki a couple times, David Merman Scott like, three times. So these like, you know, big names in the PR industry and marketing industry, Dennis Yu was like, you know, every semester. And so I'm like, okay, this is all still valuable information. So I went back and I had my assistant go through all my private Facebook groups that I did these interviews in YouTube. And it ended up I had 65.

Interviews with people like Guy Kiyosaki, which I saw, or Kawasaki Jesus. I always blend it. And I saw he did the forward for your social PR secrets as well.

Yeah, yeah, I'm super fortunate. Yeah. I worked with him on. He's the Canva evangelist. And so I was like one of the first ones on Canva and like a big power user. So I helped them with content and things like that.

I mean, he did Apple and all that stuff. He was doing evangelist stuff there prior to even that. So it's like, huge name.

Yeah, yeah, it was. And so, yeah, I took those episodes and I took those interviews. And after slicing and dicing, I'm starting. I'm going to have like 50. 50 episodes from the past from the archives from the Lisa Byer vault, we'll call it.

Yeah.

And, you know, then I've been interviewing in the past month new episodes, new interviews, so that, you know, it gonna, you know, have like 65 episodes. And I thought I was starting at one. So people don't. My point is people don't realize how much content they might have to repurpose into, let's say, a podcast or some sort of marketing content.

Yeah. So I think there's a handful of things. So I Have your social PR Secrets book in front of me. People can't see it, so I just wanted to give you a quick shout out, because how many pages are in this thing? There's over 375. It's close to 400 pages. You said you want to give this away for free too, at thebuyergroup.com hustle. I just wanted to throw that out there since we're throwing the name of the book out so much. If someone wanted to grab it, go get it. It's like literally a bible, a manual of pr, but mixed in with social SEO and all this cool stuff. I just wanted to say that I didn't want to distract from everything.

Thank you. Yeah. The feedback that I get from social PR secrets is that literally, it's so actionable, you can just pick a chapter that might be the best chapter that's the best match for you, and. And you'll be able to immediately start implementing something.

Yeah, maybe we should start digging into some of the PR Secrets kind of stuff. I'm not actually sure the best place to start with it because I know it covers so much. I know your book. You talk about Snapchat and Instagram and LinkedIn and Pinterest and live streaming and podcasting and Facebook and Twitter, and you kind of COVID all the bases when it comes to social media and the various online platforms out there. So maybe, maybe the best place to start is if somebody is trying to sort of start to build their online brand. Where do you think is the best place to start? Like maybe one specific social media platform or should they sort of go wide on all the social media platforms? How does somebody start going down the road of building their brand online?

That's a great question. So I'm looking at it, remember, through the eyes of a public relations professional and combining social and also the optimization part. So it really depends, number one, on where your audience is. And if your audience is on Instagram, then put 85% of your efforts into Instagram and then make sure you have some sort of a presence on the rest of the channels that matter.

How would you know? So how do you determine which platform your audience might be on?

I mean, a lot of times, I mean, you have to develop your Personas, number one, and that's. We could do a whole talk on Personas and how. Most brands don't have their Personas built out. They don't know who they are. They don't have a name for them. So without that, you're not able to create content that matches Your different Personas.

So doing that Persona exercise, you'll find out what the best channel for you might be. But, but I mean, regardless, like, every brand will be different. One of the Personas every brand has to remember is the journalists, the media, the bloggers, the influencers.

That is going to be a category that you're trying to ideally get in front of so that you can reach a wider audience and get, you know, you're not, you're the brand journalist, you're the host, but you also want to be the guest and the expert source on a podcast or on, you know, an online publication or in a Facebook group that might have.

A million members.

Gotcha. So are you using the various social media platforms as a tool to grow your brand amongst people that follow you on social media, or are you using the social media platform to get yourself in front of these various medias? Are you using social media to get in front of podcasters, bloggers, TV show personalities, things like that? Or, or is it kind of a combo of both?

It's a combo of both. I mean.

There'S one way where you're using social media to basically as a media relations tool so you're interacting with, finding out where the journalists that you're targeting are most active. Is it LinkedIn or is it Twitter or usually it's not Facebook, but making sure that that is your media relations tool. The days of picking up the phone and pitching for a story are pretty much gone. Everything happens in the DM or building relationships through that. And you know, so having that, that strategy as part of your social media strategy is super important. It is the media outreach of today. But media outreach from a traditional standpoint still has its place. So I don't want to insinuate that there's not a place for traditional media outreach, but it's just now a blend and kind of taking it like one step further. If you did get coverage in by a podcast or any type of media coverage, taking that and repackaging it and repurposing it and like using that as, you know, third party credibility for your audience to see that you are interviewed by XYZ and that.

It gives you the opportunity to sell without selling. So we'll take media coverage for clients and we'll completely repackage it, repurpose it as a blog post, make sure that.

That their customers and prospects know that they were featured on this.

By Hustle and Flowchart or whatever the medium is.

Yeah, well, do you have kind of like a process? Because I know you mentioned the whole repurposing before. So let's say if someone gets coverage somewhere, maybe on a podcast, tv, a blog or something like that, do you kind of have the standard process that you go down or recommend to repurpose?

Yeah, I mean, so typically, I mean, one thing is to make sure that you know when you're going to be. When you might be in the news and not realize it. You might be quoted from. If you were a speaker at a conference or did a webinar, somebody might use one of your quotes. And, you know, if you didn't know they were doing that, then you have to have something like brand alerts or Google Alerts or Talk Walker is another way to monitor your brand name and make sure that you're. You're able to monitor and know when you're actually getting the coverage and when, when things come out. So, you know, that's the first step is making sure you're not missing anything and then taking what makes sense. And I mean, we do all different types of ways to repurpose it where we'll do. I don't know if you've seen like taking. If it's an article online, like taking a screen recording of it, like scrolling and then using that as an Instagram story or. That's a good story.

Yeah, I haven't thought about that. Oh, my God, we could do that all day long. So much content. That's cool. Okay, so that's a good example right there. Just screen record a blog post or some feature that you might have received. Even if it's. I bet you could do that of just like other, I don't know, mentions about your stuff on Instagram. It's like Instagram and Instagram.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, just making sure that like the visual is there. Okay. This person was quoted in Vogue, let's just say, or People magazine. And you know, then you can put the link in the bio to the actual article or we like to recommend like, you know, to actually repurpose it as a blog post. You know, XYZ was featured in People magazine, or as you know, Ohio Energetics was featured in CBD today.

And then turning that into just like a summary and then linking back out to the original content so that your drive. It's also, you know, a way to get optimized content on your site that's, that's connecting you with that, that publication name, optimizing it with the keywords of the publication or the host name, along with maybe the CEO that was interviewed. And so you're able to optimize when people are searching, they'll go to your website maybe before they actually go to the actual publication, maybe not. At least you're showing up in search results.

Yeah, well, it's almost like, at least from what we found, it's a little bit more powerful when someone else is talking about you and let them kind of do all that publishing you. And ideally in a big place, maybe they're well SEO'd or they have a lot of viewers, but then it's up to you to pass your people that way or get them to find you. I don't know. It's kind of nice. That's why we're proponents of going on other shows all the time and getting featured. But then the key is to highlight those features for sure.

Yeah. And I think one thing that most, most public relations professionals or agencies don't have this in their wheelhouse, which I highly recommend if you're listening to this either, make sure that your PR agency understands optimization and what that means. And it just means optimizing any content that you're doing with the keywords. Keyword phrases in links out and links internally. Hashtags. I mean, I can't even tell you how many. I see brands not fully using hashtags. I mean, you can use up to 30 in Instagram and maybe they use one or two and they're one. They're made up ones that just has their brand name and like, you know, it just doesn't make sense. So if you're not optimizing fully and you don't have that education of what optimization means for writing, it's just like the basic SEO writing that I know you guys know. But you know, if you're writing content and it's public relations content, make sure that you're writing. So think about the journalist is searching for keyword phrases that they're writing about. And they're also searching the same way in not just Google, but in possibly Facebook or even Instagram. So that's how journalists are finding their sources, is searching. There's a couple reports by tech group. They do it every year. They interview journalists and find out different what's their biggest pet peeve or what's the biggest miss for for brands. And one of the statistics is that 100% of journalists said that they either start or end their research using Google and using keyword phrases.

Oh, wow. So it's all about SEO and just showing up and social as well.

I mean, not in a spammy way, but I mean, if you're gonna write content, might as well have it optimized.

Taking that extra step.

Yeah.

The other big myth that the study by Tech Group found is that most brands don't have a newsroom or don't really think through a newsroom that hosts their press releases and bios and media coverage and maybe their blog and their social media all in one hub. A lot of brands don't even have one, but the ones that do. And journalists, when they go to a website, that's the first place they're looking for. They're looking for the newsroom to find out, you know, easy ways for them to write their story without having to actually contact anybody. But if they have to contact somebody, their biggest complaint is that most websites, newsrooms don't. Brand newsrooms don't have immediate contact information on it. So if they want to interview, let's just say, you know, Matt and Joe, if you want to be interviewed, do you have on your website, like, you know, media contact and maybe it's, you know, somebody else on your team, but at least it's a real person that's going to get that email. And the journalist has faith that they can send that email. They can send that email. And it's not like info or PR at a real person is behind that. And maybe even have.

A mobile number where they can just text.

Definitely something we need to do.

When you say newsroom, I just want to clarify. So when you say newsroom, that's kind of like a page on your site that shows articles you've been featured on, podcasts you've been on, and that kind of thing. Is that sort of what that means?

Yeah. So it's the hub of any press releases that you've done. Media coverage, maybe the top three blog posts, articles, research, easy access to your bio, both of your bios, and easy access to a headshot. Easy access to the about or fact sheet on the company so that you're doing a lot of. You're providing the journalist.

Access to all of the tools they need to write a story that you know, then by the time if they want to interview you, they've already. They have a decent amount of background where it's not redundant.

Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. And it's something that has been on our sort of to do list for a couple years now and has never made it to the top of the priority list. But I think after this episode, we're probably gonna. Oh, yeah, we're probably gonna bump it because we've been featured in some cool Places, we never really talk about them that much.

Oh, we don't publish. I mean, it's crazy. I just made a note. I'm like, okay, listen, back to this epis. Read the notes once they're out, because you just lined out all these different elements that we should put on the newsroom page or the press page, whatever we call it, and then the media contact. I mean, that makes sense because we just think, oh, we have a contact form, and this is, like, what most people do. People will just fill that out. But like you said, it's not really a confidence thing.

Yeah.

Where does that go?

I mean, in general, I don't believe a contact form has a lot of confidence. Like, I never fill them out, but I think marketers are more skeptical of things. But for journalists, from their point of view, they. I would say 99% would not ever fill out a contact form to get to interview somebody. They would just skip over and, like, find somebody that's easier to access or somebody that is more top of mind.

Yeah.

There's a whole chapter in Social PR Secrets about the elements of an online newsroom. And, you know, kind of a checklist.

Chapter six.

Yeah, yeah, A checklist of what you need. But one kind of, like, innovative thing, that feature you could use for an online newsroom is Messenger. You know, you can have, like, part of your sequence be. You know, are you looking to. You know, are you. Is this a media intermed media request? And then the next sequence could be, you know, do you want to download our media kit or a fact sheet? Do you want our headshots like that? And just make it super easy in real time?

And that's really cool.

That makes a lot of sense. I mean, this is all like. And even just. Even just our about page is horrible. And, like, we'll be the first to say that does not reflect us at all. I mean, kind of, but.

Well, it reflected our business of five years ago, is what it is.

Well, that just shows you. I mean, how. I mean, there are definitely these pages that I think a lot of us neglect or just don't think they're so powerful. But, yeah, once you get attention, when you get published places, when you speak, you get books, podcasts. I mean, people are clicking around on these things, and I don't know why. It's just been like this black hole that we just don't look into.

Well, when it comes to the media room, and Lisa, you may have some better insights on this than I do. I've always been a little worried about Creating a page like that because I thought there would be like, negative SEO implications. Like, I figured if I had a site or a page that linked out to maybe 50 or 60 different other resources, then isn't that sort of like SEO leakage? I'm not like an SEO expert. I just sort of do the bare minimum when it comes to SEO. But I've heard stuff like that in the past, that if you have a page like that that links off to all the places that feature you, then it sort of may negatively impact SEO. Is that something you've ever heard before or am I just like, making that up in my own head?

Well, you have to follow the best practices of SEO for 2020 or whatever. So what we recommend is not to have one page that just links out to everything in one page. It would be one page per media coverage so that you have a page dedicated to it with a summary. So that page would just have the balance of external links, links, and then internal links. So you would.

So it's basically like a page and then links to blog posts that feature whatever that mention was, and then that links out.

Yeah, and I mean, you know, it has to be worth the, you know, the amount of resources that it would take to create that page if, you know, the media coverage is worth that mention. But if it's. It might not be a big name, but if it has a high domain authority, you know, you just have to think of these things like, you know, not everything is for.

Not everybody's going to recognize every publication name or every outlet has different meanings to different people. So I just think you have to evaluate the media coverage and make sure it's worth creating a page for it or creating that. But at the very least, you could also just create social content.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking there's so much content we're sitting on. I mean, everyone. You just think about all the podcasts, the listeners that. That have been on shows, been featured. I mean, you could just do Google searches. Hopefully you're tracking them. We track everything in an airtable as best we possibly can. Of all the links were mentioned and published because like you said, most people are not telling you they publish. Google Alerts don't always catch things. At least in my case, the settings are wrong.

My issue with Google Alerts is that there's 175,000 Matt Wolfs out there. So I just get Google Alerts for everybody named Matt Wolf.

But that's fun.

Yeah, that definitely makes it a little bit hard to track, for sure.

Yeah.

Shoot. I was gonna say something around. This is. Oh, that was the thing. So, yeah, these are people coming out to us, like a journalist or something. What are some strategies that you just find effective for outreach to get some publish, some pressure?

I mean, the number one is just. It's called news hacking. So that's David Meerman Scott's term. I didn't make that up. But making sure that you're appropriately watching trends. And the example could be Facebook makes an algorithm announcement, and you're somebody that might have an opinion on it. That. Here's my opinion on Facebook's recent algorithm change. But that has to be right away.

Covid is another example that. That every single angle is Covid right now in the media, whatever.

So where do you state those opinions? So let's say we've got an opinion on a latest algorithm update in Facebook or something. Where would I go and sort of make that opinion known so that it actually gets picked up by any sort of media sources?

Yeah. So the first step is just creating just a very short list of journalists that would be a good match for you that you.

Your brand matches with. I always recommend starting with like a. Just very, very small five to 10, you know, number of lists, list of media. And that way it's easy to control. And then you can start following them on social and just maybe start sharing their content so they recognize you. That's one big thing. Like, all journalists want to do is, you know, they're. They're being measured on their engagement that they're getting and their exposure that they're getting when they publish a story. So, I mean, I don't know if you've heard this before, but, like, even in, like, the TV newsrooms, the anchors, you know, they have boards up that show, you know, how many. You know, how much engagement each one of them gets, the reporters get. And it's like a leader. Yeah, it's crazy.

I didn't know that. Yeah, because I know they all have their own Twitter accounts and Instagrams now, like, that are within the news. So I'm sure that probably plays into it all as well.

Yeah, it's super competitive. So, you know, not just the TV stations encourage that and require that. But, you know, they want. They want their reporters and their writers to have a following so that they can take advantage of that following and get engagement. So it's hard, you know, imagine you're, you know, a young journalist starting out on social media right now. Like, it's hard to get followers regardless. So if you're sharing their content that is just, you know, content that they're writing about. They're probably going to recognize you because they're not. They're just trying to grow their audience, too.

So that's the first step in that, creating that relationship. And then once you kind of had some sort of a, you know, built a relationship, maybe they followed you back. Maybe now you can DM them. You know, when something of their interest does something you think they might be interested in, you could just send them, hey, this report just came out and, you know, you might want to write about it like it has nothing to do with you. If you want my opinion, I can give you my opinion. But you're being more just helpful. Like, this is what's happening.

Yeah, like, hey, I thought you should be aware of this if you haven't seen it already. And hey, I happen to have a lot of experience and some perspectives on this. I'm happy to share them.

Yeah, I mean, it's. It all starts. It's like the giving tree. You know, it starts with giving. And, you know, that is what this most successful media outreach will. Will come from that. And yeah, everybody will be like, oh, but do you have the relationships? You know, that's the biggest, hottest question is, do you. Do you have contacts with whatever the outlet is? And it's impossible right now, today to have relationships with every single media contact on a brand's wish list. But it's not hard to develop a relationship with somebody. As long as you can show them that there's a match, you're adding value to them. And that's where it all starts. So, yeah, it is about relationships, but it's also about building those relationships. And you can build a relationship on social a lot easier than you could before we had social.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, it seems it's really important to just kind of understand the motivations behind these various reporters and these various media agencies. If you understand their motives and what they're trying to accomplish, which is sort of getting more visibility on their stuff, you can sort of lean into what's in it for them. And. And I guess that's another reason that it's important to also focus on building kind of your own social media following. Right. Like, if a media platform sees like, oh, this person has 100,000 Twitter followers. If I write about them, there's a chance they might share this article with these hundred thousand Twitter followers. So it seems like there's something to be said for actually growing that social media presence for yourself as well. In order to get featured by the media. Am I on the right track there a little bit too?

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It definitely matters. I mean, it definitely. That's why it's hard today if you're just starting out because you're judged. So, you know, you're judged by the number of your followers. In a lot of cases, it's becoming a little bit, I would say, less. Less of a syndrome or a stigma. I mean, to not have a huge following because there's, you know, the whole term micro influencers. Like, if your following is small but powerful, that's really all that matters. You know, if you have a tribe that. That is, you know, a quality tribe, and that's number one today. I mean, when Twitter first came out, it was really easy to get followers. And so if you were, you know, just starting out with Twitter, like, you probably have, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers because they're easier to get. But that doesn't really mean anything, you know, like, it doesn't LinkedIn followers, in.

A way, it's like, geez, I get like, like 10 a day or more. I don't know. And I'm just like, who are these people?

Yeah, I mean, like, we've had people on the podcast that have like a hundred thousand Twitter followers. They tweet about the episode and drive two clicks, you know, so it doesn't really mean a whole lot.

Yeah, I mean, when we're. We. We also help our clients with influencer programs for pr. So when we're researching and vetting influencers, you know, it's more about the engagement than about the quantity of followers, you know, that, that we look at when we're identifying. So it's the whole quantity thing and number of likes thing can get out of control.

Yeah. Do you have any social media platforms that you really sort of dig right now that you're kind of excited about seeing some good results? For clients with as far as channels.

Or just platforms to the social media.

Platform, is there any platform that maybe is not too talked about right now that, that you're seeing some good results with? I know. So, for example, on this podcast, we've interviewed a handful of people that have said LinkedIn is just really, really working well for them right now for driving brand attention and even driving traffic to their website. And so Joe and I have been experimenting more and more with LinkedIn. So I'm curious if there's any social media platforms where you're seeing some decent traction with that maybe isn't sort of mainstream yet.

I mean, LinkedIn, I think, in my opinion, does have the most opportunity right now organically. And, you know, I'm all about like the organic side because of PR. So I do believe that LinkedIn, like, there's still probably another six months to a year to really, really hack the hell out of LinkedIn in a good way. You know, a year ago, year and a half ago, it was Instagram. You know, Instagram was a lot easier organically to get results. And I mean, I want to say two or three years ago, when I was teaching my workshops for. I used to teach the full day social media workshops for pubcon, which is an Internet marketing conference.

One year it was on Instagram, like, okay, who should be on Instagram? So if you're a photographer, a model, retail, jewelry, those are the obvious brands to be on Instagram. Then the following year it was like all brands on board. No matter what brand, what type of industry you're in, everybody's on Instagram, you know, and that's when things started getting not as easy because everybody's on Instagram.

But, well, they wanted money. Yeah. The platform is like, hey, exactly.

And I mean, basically like Instagram is like the new website in a lot of ways. Like, you sure, you can just tell your story and report your news and communicate with your community, all on Instagram. Facebook also in some ways. But it's just not as simple.

Right?

I mean, with Facebook right now, what Joe and I are seeing is groups specifically are. You can tell Facebook is really sort of making their algorithms favor the groups quite a bit. Because when we do stuff with our group, we get good interaction. When we do stuff with our fan page.

Crickets, kind of crickets. With our personal profile, you know, we still get some good engagement on our personal profiles, but from a business perspective, the Facebook group seems to have the most traction for us on Facebook.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree and I participate more in groups than pages just from being on the consumer side of things.

But I do agree with Molly's advice about starting on your Facebook page because that's public to everybody, and then sharing that to the group. Because if you start on your group and then it kind of like dies there.

We've been doing that more. A little better at that now. Yeah, I was thinking, okay, you could start on the layer outside on the page, but then distribute that to the.

Group or other groups maybe you also, if you post something to the page and it works well, you can always advertise to that where if you put it into the group and it Gets a lot of engagement. You can't get any additional traction through paying for advertising 100%.

And it wasn't until I listened to that episode that it sounds so simple. But it, everybody I think, struggles. Like where do you publish first? Do you publish separately everywhere? Do you. But I mean just starting with the page and then going out to the groups if that, you know, it's just brilliant. But it's, it's those, you know, you have to kind of, you know, people look at Facebook and they're just like, oh, it's so complicated. It is complicated but like if you just follow some simple like processes it really isn't complicated. And you really can get a lot of return on investment organically and, and blending paid. I'm a big fan of taking the public relations into the paid side of Facebook and leveraging that.

Yeah.

Now do you ever recommend that people if, let's say they're featured on a third party publication. This is something that we used to do when we had more of an agency style business. We would find we had a client that had an article written about them on Huffington Post. So we went and took that article from Huffington Post, we put it on Facebook and we ran ads to it. And some of those ads were targeting like people that we knew worked at other media publications to show like, hey, we're getting featured in Huffington Post. So now we're advertising and making sure you're seeing like these other media publications are seeing the fact that this publication's publishing us. So maybe you should too. Is that kind of a piece of the strategy as well?

A hundred percent. I mean I would recommend doing that just you know that what we were talking about earlier where the journalist is trying to build their following, like if you, not that you're buying your way into it, but if after the fact, you know, once something is published you are like, hey, I'm going to put some paid behind it to help this get more exposure. You know, it's a win, win. The publication is getting basically, you know, free paid traffic that's very targeted. You know, the journalist is getting more exposure to their article and you know, you're getting that, that proof that third party credibility that you are, you know, this isn't, this is an ad from that you were, you know, quoted in a third party article or whatever the case may be. So yeah, I mean I think that that is, is.

Definitely a very smart modern day PR strategy.

I mean you mentioned Dennis Yu used to speak at your things. You could totally do a Dennis Yu dollar A day, Facebook strategy, ad strategy, and target a publication's following and the publication itself. Ideally, you want to show the reporters there, maybe the reporter themselves, like, hey, look at this. This is your article. Or these are other articles than just like, like just run those dollar a day.

I mean, 100%. And that's exactly when Dennis was. He was a guest at my class. I taught at uf, like probably every semester. And that was what we talked about is leveraging the dollar a day concept with, with public relations, specifically whether you're targeting the journalist, the publication. You know, there's different ways to slice it and dice it, but.

And you can do that on Instagram, you know, other platforms, not just Facebook. I know Dennis talks about you could take that to LinkedIn. And if that's where your people are, or if it's easier to target the folks at a journalist, a publication that you want to get featured in, do it.

Yeah. With LinkedIn, though, the dollar a day isn't really possible. I don't think it's so expensive to advertise on LinkedIn.

Gotcha.

Yeah. So, I mean, it could be a form of it, but LinkedIn is definitely more expensive. But.

Right now, the opportunity with LinkedIn is. I see it as like more in the organic side, and then the paid side is starting to get a little bit more user friendly and sophisticated where we could slice and dice things more. I'm talking more from a media outreach standpoint.

Nice. Okay, that's good to know.

Now I feel like probably the most talked about, sort of up and coming social media platform right now is TikTok. Have you, have you ventured down that avenue at all yet?

I. I mean, so my thing is like, I have to try out everything before I can really, like, talk about it or whatever. So right when TikTok came out, I signed up and I, you know, follow it. I don't have any clients that are. That it's a good match for their audience. I kind of see it as like the latest Snapchat type of thing, but I think it's very, very cool. And like, from a storytelling standpoint, I can't remember the guy's name. That's the comedian that, that I follow on TikTok. He's hilarious. He's like, like plays like the mom of a middle schooler and the m. The. The parent of the, of the, you know, the high schooler. He's so funny. So, I mean, it's like very entertaining. But yeah, from a PR perspective, the way that we're using TikTok for example, with clients is instead of having them start an account, we're looking at their influencers that are on TikTok and, and sharing content to, to, to their audience, to the influencer's audience on TikTok and let them do the hard work and heavy lifting and not have to manage the TikTok account and grow an audience.

So you're basically. Okay, so you're just sharing some creation with an influencer that's likely to publish it to their audience and then, yeah, share that.

Or they would just talk about, you know, if they're one of our official influencers for one of our clients, you know, they would just, you know, every month we have a theme and, you know, they'll just, they'll create content based on that theme and, you know, talk about the brand.

All right, now you got me thinking about influencers because on this like mad mess of writing that the mixture of me breaking down my time, but also like late last night I just started brain dumping all these ideas. I don't know, like it's always like midnight at 1:00am I'm like, Ah, I got an idea. But influencers, like, yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, one very cool thing I love about TikTok. Have you guys experienced squaremented on it? Are you on it?

I have a TikTok account. I've kind of gone down some rabbit holes and watched some Gary Vaynerchuk and some videos from the Rock and people like that, but I haven't done much with it.

Well, I kind of love it for the sense that I used to do this when Snapchat first came out and just using it to create content. There's so many cool filters and ways that you can create the videos. So you can create super, super creative content very easily just using the TikTok app and then take it and like republish it across different, you know, your main social channels. So if you're just, if you just look at it for that, like a really creative way to create content and then, then take it onto Twitter or, or Facebook, you know, it's still going to have the TikTok timestamp, but it's fine.

Yeah, no one cares.

I mean, you could, you can. I mean, it's the same size as like an Instagram story too, so I imagine you can like post it places like that as well and.

Yeah, clever.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, when Snapchat first came out, that's what I just loved about it. Just, I could just create like, it was so easy to use, like Stickers and filters and, you know, they just were so ahead of their game. Like I couldn't quite grasp at the time when Snapchat came out, like just how things, you know, it doesn't last because like, you know, you just, you just want to archive everything, you know, you want to save everything, you want to go back, be able to go back. But I mean, you know, now fast forward to today, like how brilliant it was. Snapchat and now we have Instagram stories and Facebook stories and you know, now.

YouTube has them too, I think. YouTube, I don't know if they're stories, but YouTube has the same thing now too.

Oh my God.

Yeah. And you know, the filters and the stickers and just, you know, everything that Snapchat was all about. I mean, just look at like, you know, TikTok is, TikTok is like another, you know, kind of, I don't know, evolution, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, really quick, I wanted to, you know, the thing I was going to mention is about influencers because I'm hearing more and more like, like influencers right now, you know, they're not getting paid what they're used to be paid with this whole shakeup in the economy and all that stuff. So there's really big opportunities to outreach to influencers for shout outs and maybe even bartering and things like that. Like, I know I want to keep this kind of short since we're running, running out of time. But like, are there any strategies to get an influencer, you know, get them to shout something of yours out and, and basically leverage their audience and figure out a win win for them as well.

If you just look at influencers the same way we were talking about creating the relationship with the media and they don't have to have a huge following if they have a great match of an audience. But it could be some of the scenarios that we work with clients on as part of the public relations strategy is the influencer using the influencers to get pr. And also they're also part of kind of our entourage of when we have an opportunity for a story. It's not necessarily the CEO of the brand that's being quoted. It might be one of the influencers so that there's a user or a customer third party thing.

Yeah.

That we're able to provide to the media. So we're just helping them do their homework. But with the influencer programs, I mean, definitely doing some sort of a trade. I mean, something that's of value to them, that doesn't have to be A dollar amount, you know, for X amount of deliverables a month, you know, maybe three shout outs a month and they'll get like, you know, your course for free or something like that.

See, that's cool. Yeah. And that was, I didn't think about course I was like, yeah, you could feature them on the podcast or you can feature them anywhere else. And yeah. And there's just so many cool barter opportunities we got. I have this in my head from Jay Abraham when we spoke with him a few weeks ago. He's just like, it's barter country. Like go crazy right now. Like there's so much opportunity.

Yeah, definitely influencers and also just the whole, I mean I'm just starting to get into the whole affiliate marketing space but you know, combining influencers with affiliate programs is huge.

And it's like you're reading my whiteboard.

That was one of the things and I don't know why, but it's very hard for. It was very hard for me to wrap my brain and I'm still, you know, I'm still learning every day about influencer. I mean, about affiliate marketing. But if you're not, if you're not in the space and I know we've talked about this before and you don't really get how the programs work, the legit side of affiliate marketing and you kind of just like hear out from the Internet marketing world. I was always under the impression that affiliate marketing was spammy and there is that side to it. But there's also this very legitimate, very entrepreneurial, very smart side of it that you guys are doing and a lot of entrepreneurs are doing and influencers are doing as well where they're an affiliate and you know, they have, you know, a link and you know, whatever, you know, the more exposure they get with that, you know what, whatever it is the link, then they're going to also make more money. So it gives them incentive.

That's right. I mean there's, there's so many opportunities for affiliate marketing done right. Yeah, yeah. Being. And we're always talking about. It's a great addition. I don't want to call it always a bolt on but it's a great extra revenue stream if done correctly and paired up with the right audience. I mean it's solving problems with something you just don't have to create yourself.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's not black hat. I think a lot of, you know, PR agencies would be hesitant to, to get into embrace. Not they definitely embrace influencer marketing but Then like to add the layer of affiliate marketing on top of it. I think that that is, I mean, that's the direction of, of where things are going, especially in this economy. So, you know, you're not just going to pay somebody for a post or pay somebody for a shout out. You know, they're also going to be incentivized to.

Share your.

Brand, whether it's a product or service and make something.

Yeah, one of the. We found a stat on LinkedIn. I think it was published at the beginning of this year. Not sure if it's true anymore since COVID and all that, but it said one of the. I think it was a hard skill. Is that what it was? There were soft skills and hard skills that LinkedIn published and it said affiliate marketing was like in their top 10. It was the seventh most important thing that you should have.

And what was something that companies were looking for? Like business owners were looking for people with these skills and affiliate marketing was in their top 10. I don't remember what number it fell under, but it was up there, though.

Yeah, it's definitely bigger stream.

Yeah, I just hired an assistant in January and you know, one of them trying to grow in that area of affiliate marketing and, you know, anybody that would come to you that would have that experience would be considered are more valuable. You know what I mean? That, that's like a valuable skill to have and bring to whether you're, you know, a service company or product company.

Yeah, well, ask us any questions out there. You're in our group and all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, we'll make sure. Yeah, I'm definitely learning a lot just from observing your podcast and your show notes and, you know, definitely going to your, your mastermind and. But I think like that's, that's also like, you know, maybe that's a social PR secret, is just observing and like, like, you know, getting, you know, saying, okay, these three podcasts or these three brands, they don't have to be in, in your same industry are doing great things. What exactly are they doing? What can you see from the outside looking in?

Yeah, that's good. Yeah, you can take. I mean, definitely, it's probably better. And if it's not in your space, I mean, it's like, then you could pluck things from other spaces and totally take them off. Take your, yeah, the, the competitors, quote unquote, competitors in your space off guard. You're like, holy crap, what's Lisa doing in the. Like, she's doing all, you know.

Exactly, Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, let's wrap it up. I want to give a shout out to your book again, social PR secrets for people to get that for free. That's thebuyergroup.com hustle buyergroup.com hustle the buyer group.

Yes, yes, definitely. Check it out. And it's a big, thick book, so it's giving everybody a heads up. But like I said, you could just pick a chapter and read one chapter or read the whole thing or read it in different order.

Perfect. Very cool. Yeah, it's a manual. Go ahead.

Now, is there anywhere else that you'd want to send somebody after listening to this episode or is that just the best place to go? They'll kind of hear from you after that.

Well, if they want the, you know, that download, it's thebuyergroup.com hustle my podcast, the extension of Social PR Secrets. The book is now the podcast. So it's socialprsecrets.com if you want to subscribe to that. And I would be really happy to have you subscribe to it.

Nice. And digital Detox Secrets as well. I've read that book. You were very nice to send it to Matt and I both, and that's a great one to check out. It's not pr, but it's definitely getting your mind right. Just your work in general.

That might be our follow up episode. We'll dig deeper into that.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's kind of the encore, I think, everybody, the struggle is real when it comes to living in a digital world. And now it's like we are connected through our ears, eyes, hands, more than ever to digital. We're like robots. You know, I was talking with my friend this morning, Ava, and she said that I'm like, we are, we're like robots. But we can have digital use us or we could use digital in a. In a healthy way. So that's what that book is all about. And it's really kind of. It's a passion project and turned into a podcast, so we have some episodes on that too.

Cool. All right, Lisa, we'll get you out of here. Thank you so much for your time. This has been great.

Oh, no problem. Thank you for having me, guys.

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Thanks so much for tuning into that episode. I hope you dug it. I know Joe and I dug it. I actually kicked Joe out of the room. He's not here right now. Because I wanted to tell you about a tool that I really, really dig. We use it in our business. We recommend all the time. It's called Easy Webinar. And it's a tool that lets you do live webinars, automated webinars, hybrid webinars, and, you know, pretty much any other kind of webinar, if there are other kinds of webinars. But anyway, this tool is kind of like your all in one, do it all tool for anything webinar related. It's Easy Webinar. It's put out by a dude named Casey Zman. He's been on the podcast. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's a killer episode. He's a good, really, really smart dude, but his software is amazing. It does everything. It's, you know, the title tells you exactly what it does. It's an easy webinar platform. And we use this in our business to run automated webinars all the time. We don't do a lot of live webinars these days. We like to do the kind of automated webinars where somebody can register and then it, you know, they can either watch it like 15 minutes later or they can watch it the next day, but it's just kind of always running. And it's a system that helps us make, make autopilot sales off of our webinars. Super cool tool. If you haven't tried it yet, you know, it's, it's, it's an amazing tool. And Casey is actually hooking you up. He said for listeners of Hustle and Flowchart, I can't believe he's doing this, but he said for listeners of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, he's giving 25% off of the membership to use Easy Webinar. It's already super, super inexpensive for what it does and all the cool features it has. But he's hooking you up with 25% off because you're a listener of Hustle and flowchart. Go to easywebinar.com hustle. That's where you can get that 25 off discount. That's easywebinar.com hustole. It's a awesome tool. You're gonna dig it, so just go grab it. Check it out. Easywebinar.com hustle See ya. No, not see ya. You'll hear me in the next show. I don't know. I don't know how to close these things. Go get easy Webinar. Talk to you later. Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart Chart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to Evergreen Profits, find this episode that you just listened to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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